You're conflating the woke with the DNC. There's nothing to the idea that e.g. the Biden administration is responsible for "the decline of discussion culture and free speech".
Woke capital is also backpeddling out of their own accord.
I am confused why so many people conflate pointless and toothless culture wars issues with the presidency. First of all, Kamala has never been woke. Second, letting Republicans into power will make "woke" stronger, since there is always a backlash to the incumbent party. Woke peaked under Trump, with MeToo and BLM riots. It has been losing relevancy under Biden because it is no longer countercultural.
Also, are Americans so spoiled now that this is what we are focused on? Do they think their democracy is 100% foolproof from a guy that tried to steal the last election? Who tried to destroy the department of education and the NIH? Do they think they are immune to the religious extremism talking over the government like what happened in Iran and Afghanistan, after Trump appointed Barrett to the Supreme Court? After a third of American women just lost the right to not be forced to give birth against their will? It is genuinely baffling to me that anyone would vote based on BS issues like DEI rather than things that affect real people. I really hate to say this because it is so over-used, but you are really sitting at the height of privilege and self-absorption if you think woke is the highest issue in the country. Woke people can maybe get you banned off a private social media platform. In some cases, maybe get you fired from a private company. There has never been a threat to the first amendment or any censorship from the govt under a Dem president. While on the right, Trump is literally talking about the media being the enemy of the people. He just sued CBS this week trying to punish the news for not taking his side! You know Trump has no morals and no respect for the Constitution. People that think like this make me want to rip my hair out.
<i>Second, letting Republicans into power will make "woke" stronger, since there is always a backlash to the incumbent party. Woke peaked under Trump, with MeToo and BLM riots. It has been losing relevancy under Biden because it is no longer countercultural.</i>
Wokeness, as we all know it, began under Obama, in part because of his actions and policies. And the idea that wokeness has been losing relevancy over the past few years is contrary to my personal experience.
<i>I really hate to say this because it is so over-used, but you are really sitting at the height of privilege and self-absorption if you think woke is the highest issue in the country.</i>
I think it's the other way around, actually. If you're poor, you rely more on having a good ambient culture, because you don't have the resources to insulate yourself from the effects of living in a bad one.
<i>Do they think they are immune to the religious extremism talking over the government like what happened in Iran and Afghanistan, after Trump appointed Barrett to the Supreme Court?</i>
1) Which policies of Obama's caused woke? As I understand, it happened over decades as a backlash to the severe oppression of certain groups throughout American history. The word "woke" started in the 1940s. The term "African-American" instead of black started in the 80s. The extreme feminist activism of the 2010s (Slutwalk, FreeTheNipple, etc.) is just another wave of the same brand of bra-burning activist stuff from the 1970s. The stuff coming out of Buzzfeed and Vox today is so unbelievably tame compared to the "woke" books back then. I believe that the social justice movement has been bubbling under for decades, but exploded in the Obama era because the internet first became accessible for teens. And I cannot argue with your personal experience, but I feel like woke reached its peak during Trump and has been dying down. The only "woke" stuff I see now is right wing grifters complaining online about the odd latina actress in a Disney movie. I don't believe there has been any new "woke" protests or movements? I would not count Gaza because it is a war, not a trivial issue.
2. Huh? How is a poor person harmed by woke? Why would they need resources to insulate themselves from it?
3. Everyone thinks a dictator is absurd until it happens in their country. It is weird how people are so mad about woke but not mad that SIX of the nine supreme court justices are Catholic, and use the court to impose their religion on the entire country. Isn't all the extreme religious stuff worse than some occasional, misguided attempts at equity that sometimes goes too far?
<i>I would not count Gaza because it is a war, not a trivial issue.</i>
No true Scotsman thinks Gaza is a woke issue.
<i>And I cannot argue with your personal experience, but I feel like woke reached its peak during Trump and has been dying down.</i>
Anti-white rhetoric is as normalised as ever, for one example.
<i>Huh? How is a poor person harmed by woke? Why would they need resources to insulate themselves from it??</i>
Letting criminals off because systemic racism is absolutely a policy that harms poor people.
<i>It is weird how people are so mad about woke but not mad that SIX of the nine supreme court justices are Catholic, and use the court to impose their religion on the entire country.</i>
Not as weird as people who can't see the difference between "States can decide what they want their abortion laws to be" and "The Taliban".
From ABC news: "Woke is defined by the DeSantis administration as "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them." Gaza is not just a systemic injustice. It is not about harmful language or representation or any of that. It is a literal war that has killed tens of thousands. It is fundamentally different from "woke" issues. Is that hard to see how protesting a war should be in a different category than using the right pronouns?
Where is this anti-white rhetoric? On Twitter? Be honest, does this actually affect your life if you don't go searching for it?
About the criminals, are you talking about Prop 47? What a fluke:
I don't know enough about California politics to know if Prop 47 was good or bad. But I live in a woke state with one of the lowest crime rates in the country. Why don't you blame conservatism for states like Alabama and Louisiana, which have way, way worse crime than California? Do you think Alabama has turned woke too?
It's also funny how you hate the woke agenda but are a-ok with the Catholic agenda imposing their religion onto everybody. Makes it hard to believe you actually care about the things you say you care about.
<i>Where is this anti-white rhetoric? On Twitter?</i>
Just read any mainstream media publication or academic journal, and count the number of times "white" is used in a negative sense vs. the number of times it's used in a neutral or positive sense.
<i>Be honest, does this actually affect your life if you don't go searching for it?</i>
Being constantly told that my race is responsible for all the bad things in the world does affect my life, yes.
<i>About the criminals, are you talking about Prop 47?</i>
No, I'm talking about the general woke reluctance to do anything about crime, because that would disproportionately involve locking up underprivileged people, and therefore be racist.
<i>It's also funny how you hate the woke agenda but are a-ok with the Catholic agenda imposing their religion onto everybody.</i>
Be specific. What tenet of Catholic belief has the Supreme Court imposed, and how?
The treatment of Gaza in the years leading up to 10/7/23, is very much considered a "systemic injustice" by the woke left (among others). 10/7, and the ongoing violence by Hamas and Hezbollah, are considered by these people to be side an act of heroic resistance to systemic injustice (see e.g. BLM or Antifa). Israel's assaults, are considered to be brutal genocidal violence meant to perpetuate systemic injustice.
To the woke, Gaza is absolutely a woke issue. I don't know whether it is a good thing or a bad thing that it has distracted so many of them from their other issues.
It's not certain Trump is going to be the next Chavez. I frankly don't expect a Democrat-counterreaction feedback loop--I just expect the acceptable level of corruption to rise to the point where we look more like Argentina or Brazil and less like Canada than we do now. But the risk is high enough I'm concerned, because it could cause significant negative effects to the country downstream over the next few decades. Further than that, I have no predictive ability whatsoever.
With Kamala in charge, if woke makes a comeback, I'll just come out as bi.
I can and have politically maneuvered against a too-woke office and can tune out a DEI session if it makes no sense. I make my worth very apparent in a workplace. Things move downstream from there. I'm fine. I make $155k a year. So is Elon, he's worth over 100 billion.
I can't maneuver against or tune out a true autocrat like Orban, Putin or Chavez. Most people who live in the democratic West can't even comprehend what that is like. Venezuela is ruined, and Russia is a social trainwreck that sent hundreds of thousands of young men to die as cannon fodder.
Things might be fine if Trump becomes president. Don't come back to me if he gets elected and it is in 2029. But the small but real risk things might not be fine is a small risk of catastrophe. A freedom X-risk if you will. The US, with all it's power and might, has always had a check on the president and an easy way to remove the governing party on a national level.
Left vs right in the US is like that coughing baby vs nuclear bomb meme to me.
In principle I’d be willing to bet a hundred bucks. In practice, I don’t know how one would operationalize a bet on a 4 year timeframe between two pseudonymous internet strangers.
$100? At 90% confidence? It's basically free money! At an even bet, your expected value is 80% of what you are betting! You should bet half your savings or something!
...you should, if you seriously believed what your were saying, that is.
Martha Stewart went to prison,. Jeff Skilling went to prison. Martin Shkreli went to prison. Samuel Bankman-Fried went to prison. Just off the top of my head. I'm not sure all four of those were literal billionaires, but they were certainly in the 1% of the 1%, and they went to prison.
Yes, it's newsworthy when a billionaire goes to prison. It's newsworthy when a billionaire does pretty much anything. But being very very rich, does not endow people with get-out-of-jail-free cards, or anything remotely close to that. It does mean that prosecutors have to bring their A game, and they may not bother if that means giving up five easy convictions of ordinary criminals. But rich + controversial + widely hated, yeah, if there's provable fraud and if it won't get them in trouble with their bosses, it can happen.
Or not, because often billionaires don't commit serious crimes. One thing money is good for, is hiring lawyers who can advise you on how to accomplish your goals legally, and where the line is. That, plus a legal team that can fight against bogus prosecutions based on false accusation, is a pretty good way to be confident you're not going to go to prison. But it only works if you listen to your lawyers, and this is Elon Musk we're talking about.
I wouldn't go to 9:1 odds on Musk without a specifically alleged crime for him to go to prison for. And I wouldn't expect him to actually be incarcerated in four years, because see e.g. the criminal cases against Donald Trump. But if Harris is elected, he is I think at significant risk.
It's true that famous people are more at risk than non-famous rich people so that prosecutors can make a name for themselves, so I cheated a little bit by pointing out that the prison population is 0.01% from the top 10 percentile, but I figured it was worth pointing out. And with Elon's gazillions I think he's as insulated as your average fellow with just 30 mil to rely on.
The fact that America's economic-legal system matches that of Sodom and Gomorra ought to be brought up every once in a while.
I had hoped that the Democrats would lay off that a bit to distinguish themselves from Trump who would absolutely arrest rich and powerful people on trumped-up charges (sorry that pun is so bad it wasn't meant to be a pun). What's with Vote Harris, get someone who respects the law?
(Though somehow Hilary Clinton stayed out of jail during Trump 1.0, so maybe presidents can't do everything they want.)
This seems like a weak bet because Elon Musk has a very long track record of breaking actual laws and getting into trouble over it. Nothing jail-worthy yet I'd say of course, but the idea that he would step over the line and get a ~6 month sentence seems perfectly possible, particularly in the world where his Trump Gambit failed.
So bet wise I don't think you can really get around that. I ofc would take 95% odds that the Harris administration will not invent charges to jail a political opponent because that is something the Dems don't do, but then you have to decide "is he actually guilty" for the bet - not a good resolution criteria!
(I guess you could just roll "odds Elon Musk will commit an actual crime" into the bet, seems rough though)
The beauty of `3 felonies a day' is that almost everyone is `actually guilty' of an `actual crime.' So you don't need to invent charges, all you need to do (once you've decided that you want to put X in jail) is to figure out which actual (but seldom prosecuted) crime X is guilty of.
So yeah, I'm not predicting that the Harris administration will invent charges either. I'm just predicting that if Harris ends up in the white house, then Musk will be convicted of an actual crime, for which he is actually guilty, but for which there is a ~0% chance he would have been actually prosecuted if he didn't have a political target on his back.
But the "3 felonies a day" thing just isn't true? Like it is a combination of "completely made up" and conflating wildly different things. You could probably find a fine for a improperly filed permit application on most people's backlog, sure, but you absolutely could not find a jailable offense on 95% of people. The bar for criminal offenses is actually very high!
Which you can know because if the majority of politicians had such a record, *their enemies would be jailing them over it!* That hasn't happened to Harris or Romney because they haven't committed crimes. It is happening to Trump because he *has* committed crimes. And Musk has previously committed way-more-than-average levels of "big fines" that have had explicit warnings that repeat offenses could result in criminal prosecution. Bayesian odds made this pretty easy.
This goes back to your question from last open thread about what Trump can actually do — a Presidency is an incredibly contingent thing. You run on one agenda and then in office spend most of your time and energy dealing with the crises of the moment and they either defeat you or empower you. It’s like trying to create a weather report for October 31, 2025.
>"why should we vaccinate against measles when measles is so rare?"
Trump saying he'd put the anti-vaxxer RFK in charge of "health" was just the most recent outrageous thing he's said. By this point I've lost track. There are many things I'd like to change about the Democrats, but a second Trump presidency would be a mistake for America.
"Vaccines are good" is like "plastic is recycleable". Not all plastic is recycleable, and historically some vaccines have hurt people, or not been very effective. Blindly trusting everything labeled a vaccine because you "believe in science" is... not good actually.
Why must one be antivax or non-antivax? I'm against COVID vaccines, but for "real" vaccines, defined (by me) as vaccines that work for longer than a year.
Antivaxxers that are against vaccines on general principles that don't have a better alternative for fighting diseases have a poor position.
I object to your "nonsense" classification, as my point stands that COVID mutates too fast for vaccine strategy to work well, as mRNA viruses do. Get vaccinated against the common cold; it's certainly possible to develop one, and also certainly not worth the effort, useful though a workable one would be. The point stands that one can be in favor of some vaccines and against others.
What does it mean for a vaccine to “work for longer than a year”? Covid vaccines seem to (in that they reduce infection rates even in people who haven’t been vaccinated in a year) though like many other vaccines, they do lose some effectiveness, and like some other viruses, covid mutates quickly.
Do they not know how long a vaccine "works" by detecting antibodies, or some such combination, against the disease for which the vaccine was developed? I have every confidence a COVID vaccine would work...until COVID mutates again. In that case, you would still have antibodies that are effective against the original strain, but less so against current (and future) ones.
It's hard to tell whether, as you suggest, the vaccine reduces infection rates past, say, three months. You would need a control group, and need to be careful of lots of biases in both the test and control groups.
I got COVID in April of 2021, and again in April of 2022. I did not get any vaccines, as I considered myself to be "naturally vaccinated". What would the artificial vaccine do that the actual disease didn't do? Both involve exposure to proteins to train your immune system.
Yeah it’s very hard to test effectiveness in real-world contexts, given how many confounders there are once vaccines are available and different types of people are choosing whether and when to get them.
There are ways to test blood for the presence of antibodies. My understanding is that most vaccines and infections produce an initial burst of antibodies that gradually fades - but there are some differences (e.g., syphilis antibodies never fade to zero, but many other infections do). And perhaps more importantly, a lot of the protection is provided not by antibodies that are constantly detectable, but by memory cells (B cells?) that can re-emerge when they detect the thing they are remembering.
I think when you get an infection, your body tries to train on everything present at the time of the infection, which includes various proteins on various parts of the virus, and possibly some things not associated with the virus. When you get the COVID vaccines, you only get the spike proteins, so your body especially focuses on learning that. Since the spike protein is the part that is on the outside, it might be more relevant for protection against initial infection, but I don’t know what they’ve actually found about that.
All viruses are constantly mutating, but if the mutation hasn’t changed it too much, then a lot of the antibodies against the old one will still work equally effectively, or perhaps slightly less effectively. Some viruses have more mutation in some parts than others.
Kurzgesagt has had a really interesting series of videos about the immune system (starting several years pre-pandemic), which is much weirder and more complex than we often think. I sometimes wonder if there might even be a second consciousness in our bodies, run by the immune system, which is as complex as the nervous system, but quite separate from it.
There is no point of no return for almost anything. Still, what happens during any cycle matters. Even if we will eventually get to a good place, it’s better if there is less suffering along the way.
> If antivaxers win, disease noticeably goes up... then support for vaccines comes back and antivaxers lose support?
Not necessarily. The first thing the antivaxers would say is that the diseases are actually a result of vaccination, therefore we should have even less of it.
Michelle Obama pushed for healthier school lunches. RFK Jr. pushes for not vaccinating people and bringing back the eras where generations were decimated by (now-preventable) diseases, in addition to at least a dozen other inane and insane ideas. Trying to improve Americans' health is good, but RFK Jr. would do the polar opposite.
This is a blog dedicated to ideas of rationality and RFK Jr. is an excellent example of anti-rationality and anti-intellectualism.
If the country stopped judging politicians on their stated goals, and started judging them based on results produced by their policies, we'd never see another Democrat elected for the next 20 years.
Could not agree more. It would be awesome to put together a dashboard of different metrics to view correlations as different policies are adopted.
A bit like a success rate graph at SaaS companies (products like data dog or grafana). You see when the code changed and look for errors or bad performance as a potential result.
Desired result: stabilize relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors.
Achieved result: When war broke out between Israel and various Iranian groups, not only did Israel's Arab neighbors, for the first time ever, decline to pile on, they actively came to Israel's defense.
Remain In Mexico policy.
Desired result: Decrease illegal immigraiton.
Achieved result: Net negative illegal immigration. (More illegals leaving the country — often voluntarily! — than entering.)
If you want to understand why people support Trump look at cases like the above. Despite his many, obvious flaws, he got good results. He got *astoundingly* good results.
And Republican emphasis on lower deficits? Trump's promises to restore coal & manufacturing?
Saying a politician got some results they like risks cherry-picking. Do I give Obama credit for the post-recession recovery and expanding healthcare coverage?
I'm afraid Trump's idea was worse than injecting disinfectant - he wanted to get the covid in their lungs not their blood stream. The idea he proposed in that press conference was to fill their lungs with disinfectant. Since doing this with just water is fatal I'm glad he accepted his advisors' recommendations against this one.
Many Thanks! Ye gods, I hadn't known he suggested _that_. ( Were there two press conferences involved? One that I watched included Trump saying "injected" and "disinfectant" in a suggestion of his. In the same press conference, he was also suggesting using UV... I have no idea how he was thinking of administering _that_ to the inside of someone's lungs... )
Many Thanks! If he somehow turned recommendations for external use of disinfectants into suggesting looking into injecting them, that is pretty severe garbling. Most people learn, prior to adulthood, that disinfectants are for _external_ use. Now, Harris is bad enough ( speech censorship proposal, illegal immigration spike, Woke in general ) that Trump may be the lesser evil, but I'd prefer a GOP candidate with better common sense.
Yes, of course it does Kenny, because the people responsible for America’s bad health and nutrition are meanie assholes, and so are the people responsible
Not sure. Vaccine policy is a footnote for rfk jr at this point.
Ending the revolving door between pharmaceutical companies and the FDA seems much more promising to me. Ending advertisements for pharma seems like a good idea too.
Ending pharmaceutical advertisements sounds like a good idea. Has someone proposed that law? (Would an executive like RFK be able to unilaterally impose it without a congressional law?)
Perhaps more importantly, would the current Supreme Court (which has the most expansive view of the first amendment of any court to date) actually allow such a restriction? I know that traditionally commercial speech is held to an intermediate scrutiny standard (instead of strict), but A) the legal reasoning for that distinction is kinda weak and B) even if they maintain intermediate scrutiny as the test, it's a notoriously flexible test to judge prejudices. The common saying on standards of scrutiny is:
That sounds plausible. As far as I know, the restriction on tobacco advertising is entirely the result of a voluntary legal settlement that avoided even larger financial penalties, rather than an actual law.
Can you not take a look at the man and ask yourself, "could he, just maybe, have a good grasp on what being healthy looks like"? And just maybe, with his legal and environmental background he might be a good fit?
Or do you, like many Americans, take health advice from obese people who aren't required to take nutrition classes (44% of doctors are overweight according to Google)?
Why are 44% of physicians overweight?! At this point I don't care about the vaccine element of Bobby's policy, I care that he cares about figuring out the root causes of our chronic disease epidemic.
Which theories specifically are you referring to? Top 1 or 2 worst offenders would be adequate in my opinion.
I'll do the same but highlight one I happen to agree with him on: the FDA is overwhelmingly run by the pharmaceutical industry which has outsized influence due to the revolving door.
I'll lean on Scott Gottlieb and Stephen Hahn as example cases. The best rebuttle being that the idiot who put them in charge is the same idiot I'm advocating for.
I actually don't think being in good shape is all that good a proxy for being able to make sensible policies wrt drug safety, recommended vaccine schedules, and the like.
It shouldn't be the sole qualification, but it is a factor in my opinion.
Unhealthy, overweight people have the position RFK is vying for. Excellent personal health should be the *minimum standard* to be considered for the position.
I too heard Trump say RFK would be out in charge of health!! Completely insane.
Joe Rogan, who interviewed Trump, is entertaining and intelligent but he's not educated deeply on things like vaccines about which he has strong opinions! He and Trump seemed to share opinions about many things.
He’s not antivax. This is another liberal media hoax
If you listen to what RFK actually says, instead of what they report about him, you’d quickly realise this. Look, he has expressed some skepticism about the intensity of the current childhood vaccine schedule and whether that could be related to the dramatic rise in chronic disease among children. Maybe studies will prove that he’s wrong to be skeptical, but the point is that you’re allowed to ask these questions when trying to understand the root causes of the decline in health and the rise in chronic disease, mental illness and obesity over the past decades.
Most of his actual policies are about taking on the powerful lobbying companies who (for example) allow pesticides to be present in the American food supply at levels that are banned in Europe. Or the influence of Big Pharma over medical education.
Make America Healthy Again shouldn’t be controversial.
Besides the fact that Tulsi Gabbard is in a cult and is a grifter, RFK Jr. is insane and Vance support Curtis Yarvin, if there was a billionaire supporting Kamala Harris who would get a spot in her cabinet if she won I'm sure you would be very happy too lmao. Elon Musk might be a successful CEO but he obviously has no place trimming down the government, especially because he would obviously benefit himself
That's... not a very charitable article. First off, I note it tries to imply/claim the Thiel (a libertarian) and Yarvin (an authoritarian monarchist) are aligned (citing a proposition that you could also get the Constitutional Convention to agree with!), and then only details Yarvin's views otherwise. That's a blatant smear vs Thiel.
Next, he does the exact same thing with Vance; Vance claimed that Trump needed to fire the entire federal government (and indeed, cited Yarvin as to why that extreme measure was justified.) But then he drops Vance/Trump entirely, and describes Yarvin's preferred replacement for the bureaucracy (authoritarian monarchy), implying that this was also Vance's goal... while ignoring that it's entirely in opposition to everything Trump and Vance have said about their goals for a WEAKER administrative state.
I do, sincerely, appreciate you replying with a source, but I find that source really unpersuasive of the claim it's trying to make, and generally pretty scuzzy.
>Make America Healthy Again shouldn’t be controversial.
"The *slogan* for my policy sounds uncontroversial, therefore the actual policy shouldn't be controversial either, right?"
If someone advertised defunding the police as "Make America Safe Again," I expect you'd find that controversial even though the slogan sounds reasonable. That's how I feel about RFK saying "Make America Healthy Again."
RFK also said Trump was a grave threat to democracy before changing his tune and endorsing him for President. Posting a politician's own propaganda tweet when they have a history of going against what they've publicly said and they've issued far more irresponsible sayings on the specific subject is hilariously epistemically irresponsible.
>In July, Kennedy said in a podcast interview that “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” and told FOX News that he still believes in the long-ago debunked idea that vaccines can cause autism. In a 2021 podcast he urged people to “resist” CDC guidelines on when kids should get vaccines.
He said the Democrats were a worse threat to democracy, on CNN. This was all prior to endorsing Trump and it was based on them systemically shutting him out of the primaries and giving him zero media coverage and attacking his campaign via lawfare. Why do you think he changed his tune?
Nah, what’s “hilariously epistemically irresponsible” is posting left wing propaganda on a politician and insisting it better represents their views than actual things that they say.
I’m sure all of your scare quotes are correct, he did say these things at some point, but so what? You’re allowed to express skepticism about the intensity of the vaccine schedule for children, you’re allowed to wonder if it might be linked to the rise in chronic disease such as autism, as long as you acknowledge that you might be wrong and more study is needed.
That’s RFK Jr’s position. It’s pretty reasonable, and maybe you need to think why these mainstream media outlets keep selectively quoting him and misrepresenting him. What else are they doing that with?
I've seen RFkj speaking to both friendly and adversarial audiences. Generally, when I see him speaking to adversarial audiences, he's saying the kind of thing Turtle is talking about and I think, "Yeah, that's a great description of some of the problems with the system I also see. This guy is smart and understands what he's talking about!" When he's speaking to friendly audiences he starts going off on how vaccines cause autism and nobody in their right mind should give one to their children, and I think, "Why did I ever think this guy was anything but an ideologue, again?"
What do I expect from an RFKj-influenced NIH/CDC/etc.? He'd be walking into an adversarial environment, so I would expect him to do things like preside over updating the vaccine schedule* to something more rational, or allow legal action against vaccine manufacturers who hide adverse effects or otherwise try to cheat the system, or implement more stringent testing of adverse effects of pesticides and fertilizers. I don't see him able to do something like banning vaccines, or getting the CDC to declare that they cause autism or anything like that.
In general, I don't expect a big change, since moving the US government system is generally a slow-run thing. I expect a few 'big splash' ideas to punch through, but probably nothing of dramatic consequence. As with any politician, some good, some bad, but nothing dramatic.
So it's a wash? Maybe not. Focusing on improving the public health agencies could significantly improve trust in US heath-related government agencies, which is NEEDED after the last few years. Trust is earned. After COVID, trust was lost for a reason. That needs to be built back up, or it doesn't matter what your vaccine policy is, people won't listen to it. As someone who thinks vaccines are a huge good and who recommends them way more than RFKj would be comfortable with, I suspect RFKj could actually increase uptake in the long run (or at least preside over a decrease in the fall in vaccinations).
*"Like what changes, exactly?" Nearly everyone I know who's anti-vax cites early neonatal vaccination as the thing first piqued their skepticism. In other words: Hep B. But why give any neonatal vaccines, since kids don't develop T-cells for 6-12 months, and maternal antibodies are protective? First, childhood vaccinations don't usually provide much in circulating protective antibodies and most adults don't get boosters. (We should really focus on getting updated vaccinations for WOCBP, but whatever.) Meanwhile, there's some evidence that early neonatal doses of hep B can prevent maternal transmission of hep B (but it's not a 100% thing, and really you should be giving them hep B IG if the baby is in danger of contracting hepatitis from their mother - something we only do if we test mom and discover an active infection).
What's the potential benefit to universal hep B vaccination? Okay, there are approximately 5.8 cases of hep B per 100,000 people in the US. Assuming that rate for pregnant women, of the 3.6 million babies born every year around 209 should have mothers with hep B, of which maybe a hundred might go on to contract it (transmission rate varies based on mother's hep B titers).
Now, I don't know how many mothers are refusing all vaccinations because of the hep B vaccine, but I have personally met at least a dozen and I don't go around asking, so I'm going to say that number is probably pretty big. Large enough to bring equipoise into the discussion: is it overall beneficial to have a policy that might help a hundred kids in exchange for putting millions more at risk?
And more importantly, could there be a BETTER policy that still protects that 100 kids, while improving trust in recommendations by health authorities? For example, by testing women for hepatitis B ahead of time, then only recommending the vaccine if they test positive (at which point we'd also give the hep B IG and monitor infection).
"But the vaccine isn't harmful! We don't have any evidence demonstrating adverse effects of the hepatitis vaccine, so why not just give it to everyone?" Um ... the vaccine *recommendation* appears to be harmful in that it leads to vaccine skepticism, even if the vaccine itself isn't directly harmful. It's not even a choice between fewer kids dying of hep B over more kids dying of not getting MMR/DTaP/etc. We can improve this system, and while RFKj isn't a perfect vessel for doing that, it's certainly better than screaming "trust the science!" while more and more people stop trusting good medical evidence.
I just want to re-iterate a key point about RFK Jr, because the vaccine stuff is controversial and tends to suck all the oxygen out of the room.
The reason why I support him has nothing to do with his opinions on vaccines, and everything to do with him promising to take on Big Pharma, Big Ag and the profit motive in corporate medicine.
He says stuff that many doctors have known for a long time about how the system cares more about profits for the few than health for the many.
He talks about the prevention of chronic disease for pennies, rather than treating it for millions.
He talks about really looking into the causes of why our health has worsened so much in past decades. What’s going on? These are questions that the establishment has not thought to ask - or rather, prefers not to think about because it might threaten their campaign contributions from the big players in “healthcare.”
I’m really excited about RFK Jr in the administration.
I'm uncertain about his short term efficacy, but encouraged that health policy (and not just health insurance or costs) is becoming a national issue. If this is what it takes to get us there, hopefully we see both parties take an interest in the next election. If so, the long run effect will dramatically outstrip whatever he can do in an administration.
Personally I have no qualms with them all being approved, I'd just like to remove the liability shield. The government should not be in the business of protecting drug lords from the people. Bad drugs should not be protected. That isn't how free markets are supposed to work.
So I got curious and checked out the guy's campaign website which spends an entirety of 180 words on his healthcare plans (always the sign of a deep thinker). It vaguely suggests banning some food additives, banning (or taxing or whatever, unspecified) ultra-processed food, and ban toxic chemicals "from our air, water, and soil". I.e., regulation, regulation, and more regulation. Great fit for the Trump/GOP agenda of deregulation and kneecapping agencies like the EPA.
One can debate whether the current US regulations strike the right balance between caution and growth, but a pretty clear and consistent pattern is Democratic governments erring more on the side of caution and Republican governments erring more on the side of growth, and everything Trump did before as a president and says now as a presidential candidate fits into that pattern. Health advocates putting their faith in Trump are tied in level of idiocy with the muslims who think Trump is going to stop the war in Palestine.
I think that's an absolutely horrible idea. The dose makes the poison, and there are very few things that aren't toxic at some level. Oxygen, for example, is literally toxic, and I would be amused to see someone banning oxygen from the air in our schools, because Think Of The Children!
*Placing reasonable limits* on toxic chemicals, is a good idea. But you need to establish the limits you're talking about, so the rest of us can decide whether they are reasonable. If your proposal is being described as "banning toxic chemicals", the smart money is on the proposed limits being very unreasonable.
I understand your point now. But it seems to rest on the idea that banning toxic chemicals can’t reasonably be interpreted as banning toxic levels of chemicals.
He is not an anti-vaxxer afaik and I have researched his statements for myself. He thinks too many untested vaccines are in use, and that vaccines are used on the very young in excessive amounts. The dose of vaccines given to US children is actually considered quite excessive in much of the rest of the world.
I think the analysis of who is more evil (Trump) is spot on. That said i think I’m still going Trump because his brand of authoritarianism is hated by the media and a majority of the public. Also his brain is jelly and Ivanka and Jared will be running the show and they are standard chamber of commerce neoliberals which is why Trump didn’t do anything authoritarian last time.
See how little power he has when he moves against popular will - ie republicans have been on the back foot on abortion since Dobbs because abortion is deeply popular and when a ban will be enforced, suddenly a lot of republicans decide to be pro choice. Trump will lose congress in the midterm if he tried and it will be gridlock before that.
If Harris wins, the media and most power centers will back her bid for authoritarianism and things start getting bad real fast.
That’s generally true but Roberts hates Trump, and Kavanaugh and Gorsuch don’t like him either. They won’t bend the law to help him, the immunity decision was restrained in scope - they remanded it to the trial courts to develop facts and explained what kind of acts would and wouldn’t be immune based on the nature of the constitutional power he was exercising. If they wanted to protect him they would have just granted him absolute immunity and spared him from years of litigation.
Roberts also thinks Alito and ACB are hacks - if you read his concurrence in Dobbs it’s him calling them idiots for repealing Casey v PP when they could just boil the frog slowly and roll back abortion window as fetuses become medically viable sooner.
So this court will go right in culture war issues, checking Harris more than Trump, but they also won’t carry any water for Trump personally - even if you’re cynical, Roberts, Gorsucch, Kavanaugh all want to keep getting sweet speaking gigs and teaching boondoggles from moderate never Trump conservatives
"they could just boil the frog slowly and roll back abortion window as fetuses become medically viable sooner"
Yes, and there would still be the clamour for exceptions and heart-rending cases of "rape, incest, threat to life of mother" as to why there should be legal ability to carry out an abortion at twenty weeks even though that's the new viability limit.
'Late-term' (or however you want to define them, the matter is of course controversial) abortions are rare, but do happen:
The inherent limits of medical knowledge and the infeasibility of ensuring early pregnancy recognition in all cases illustrate the impossibility of eliminating the need for third‐trimester abortion. The similarities between respondents' experiences and that of people seeking abortion at other gestations, particularly regarding the impact of barriers to abortion, point to the value of a social conceptualization of need for abortion that eschews a trimester or gestation‐based framework and instead conceptualizes abortion as an option throughout pregnancy."
Another paper thinks "viability" is useless as a legal definition:
"In this paper, I explore how viability, meaning the ability of the fetus to survive post-delivery, features in the law regulating abortion provision in England and Wales and the USA. I demonstrate that viability is formalized differently in the criminal law in England and Wales and the USA, such that it is quantified and defined differently. I consider how the law might be applied to the examples of artificial womb technology and anencephalic fetuses. I conclude that there is incoherence in the meaning of viability and argue that it is thus a conceptually illegitimate basis on which to ground abortion regulation. This is both because of the fluidity of the concept and because how it has been thus far understood in the law is unsupported by medical realities. Furthermore, it has the effect of heavily diluting pregnant people’s rights with overly moralistic limitations on access to healthcare."
You may think your proposal will boil the frog, but there are plenty of people waiting to scoop the frog out of the pot on the plea of necessity.
Including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists:
"Viability is just one factor that patients and health care professionals use when considering whether to proceed with or end a pregnancy, and gestational age is only one factor considered when estimating viability. Legislative bans on abortion care often overlook unique patient needs, medical evidence, individual facts in a given case, and the inherent uncertainty of outcomes in favor of defining viability solely by gestational ages. Therefore, ACOG strongly opposes policy makers defining viability or using viability as a basis to limit access to evidence-based care."
I think you're trusting the exact guardrails that authoritarianism tries to subvert. I agree that the guardrails will probably hold this time, but I think attacking them does a little bit of long-term damage each time.
And I think it's pretty hilarious to accuse the GOP of being more in violation of "brightline norms" when close to half of democrats favour internment camps for anti-vaxxers and the BLM/Antifa riots were orders of magnitude worse than Jan 6 along every measurable dimension, along with the minor detail of trying to storm the White House.
We are long past the point of any realistic expectation that the Blue Egregore is going to spontaneously reform itself without putting a lot of their institutions to the torch. I think it's unlikely Trump will turn out to be a literal dictator, but in the worst case scenario I'll take Pinochet over Maduro any day of the week. I'll even take a Hitler over a Mao.
Perhaps, but depends on how. If it's a singular event, democracy likely holds in this situation, as the succession of power would still be maintained and not subverted.... you are only removing from office, you are not installing into office.
What do you actually think happens when a mob storms the white house? Because I'm guessing it's a big pile of dead rioters while the president and his family are in a secure room with several locked doors and armed guards between them and danger.
Why are you treating this as if it were a hypothetical? Trump was, in fact, escorted to a security bunker although so far as I can tell zero rioters were mowed down with assault rifles, and I'd be surprised if many of them were even prosecuted.
And what is the point of this argument? An attempt at overthrowing the government doesn't count if you could reasonably predict it would be futile? How does this not apply to Jan 6?
What do you think actually happens when rioters storm Congress, attempting to overturn the election results? Congress bugs out for a couple of hours, a guy in a Viking costume sits in the big chair for a couple minutes, and then Congress certifies the election later in the day.
Implicit in all the hysteria about January Sixth is that had the rioters managed to get their hands on some paperwork in the House chamber, they could have ticked a few boxes and Donald Trump would be president again... And everyone would just agree to it. Nothing we can do, the rioters got the Magic Paperwork.
I don't know if you knew, but "killing the president" is a pretty popular pastime in the USA. It's just about the most deadly job you can hold, with 4 out of 45 killed and many more attempted. And yet, the *institution* of democracy hasn't taken any damage, which is the whole point of the excercise - democracy holds even if you kill the guy in charge, because there is an agreed-upon, non-violent system of succession.
The only fundamental danger to democracy can come from the top, if the separation of power breaks down for any reason and is exploited by the executive branch to keep it broken down.
This never made any sense to me. How exactly does a mob rampaging through the capitol building constitute a coup? It’s not like if you capture the flag in the basement you become president automatically. Even if they take some congressmen hostage, so what? BLM riots killed a lot more people and broke a lot more things while insisting they were peaceful.
I should acknowledge that Trump did ask his staff if he could have a little coup, as a treat. Trump totally would if he could. But he can’t. His staff ignored him. The same thing will happen this time - the military and security state would put a bullet in Trump before letting him illegally stay in power. The scary antidemocratic move is for republican statehouses to change how electors are chosen - either by legislative vote or by county or congressional district. That could let them engineer lots of EV victories with a minority of the population.
I think Trump would be a little more careful about choosing his staff this time. I liked Tillerson and Mattis, for example, because they were successful in their respective domains and I respected that and was somewhat impressed by Trump choosing them, and dismayed by how the media reported on them. And Pence was... fine... I guess, and establishment. Those are the sorts of people who would ignore Trump and not try to give him his little coup. But they were all pushed out in various ways and are now openly against him.
This time around, he wouldn't pick people like that. Vance, for example, scares me, and strikes me as someone who's intelligent and calculating enough to do damage, and not rein in or ignore Trump.
> How exactly does a mob rampaging through the capitol building constitute a coup?
I think you're missing the context. The "mob rampaging through the capitol building" happened during the usually pro-forma electoral vote count. At least some of the rioters intended to intimidate enough officials -- Pence and/or Representatives/Senators -- to refuse to certify a majority of electoral votes for the Biden/Harris ticket. They could have then either declared an outright Trump/Pence victory or thrown the race to the one-vote-per-state tiebreaker mechanism, to the same result.
That's how it constitutes a coup: it is a threat of violence directed at officials precisely when they are taking (nominally ceremonial, but still important) actions to transfer power. Had the intimidation worked, it would have caused a constitutional crisis -- it's not clear that the courts have the authority to intervene in the legislature's duty here, even if they've performed that duty corruptly or incorrectly.
>Even if they take some congressmen hostage, so what?
Trumpers are braindead. To be clear. He intended to force Mike Pence to accept an alternative slate of electors and declare him president. All of this is clear as day if you did the intellectual work of reading something.
I think you may be conflating the Democratic Party and the Blue Tribe. When you say "half of democrats favour internment camps for anti-vaxxers" I'm assuming you mean democratic voters, not politicians. Well, this is an interesting fact about american civics, you actually don't vote for the voters, you vote for the politicians. If you and I vote for the same candidate, and that candidate wins, I don't get to hold any sort of government office out of the deal.
This is relevant because of the massive gap between how much the GOP has been taken over by its most extreme elements, and how much the Democratic party has. If you hate left-wing populists and right-wing populists the same amount, then obviously you should prefer the Democratic Party by a huge margin.
I don't hate them by an equal amount, since the extremists on the left getting their way would literally destroy civilisation, and given that Blue Tribe elites kept much of the planet under borderline house arrest for 18 months I don't see much daylight between them and the 'extremists'.
The rest of us understand that India did not shut down due to "Blue Tribe elites". Other governments did lockdowns because they thought it was a good idea.
Plenty of people disagree with that. But saying it was because a US political faction had enough power to force most of the globe to act against their interests, and burned that overwhelming international influence on... forcing Italians stay at home for 18 months? That's pretty ridiculous.
India shut down for about two months. I don't think anyone is actually all that upset about shutdowns of four weeks to eight weeks, even a bit longer. It was not clear what was going on. It was what followed, a virtual dictatorship of unreason, that was so odious.
Seems worse with the Democrats. I know a lot of Democrat voters and they are reasonable people. None of them believe that thieves should go unpunished, or that schools should be dumbed down for "equality," or that transgenders should be allowed to play in women's sports. A solid majority of Democrat voters are like this. And yet when Democrats get into office, we get those insane policies.
The Republicans seem to have the same general structure with a reasonable electorate and crazy ideas on top, but when they get elected, for whatever reason, we don't get those crazy policies actually in effect (with some notable exceptions in FL).
Depends what you define as crazy, really. I'm pretty liberal, but I would consider it crazy to try to ban IVF or to ban abortions with no exception provided for rape, incest, or nonviable fetuses.
I would consider an iVF ban to be crazy. AFAIK that has not happened anywhere.
I am pro-choice myself, but I do not consider abortion bans crazy. I can see how reasonable people could consider that murder. Lack of exception for non-viable, I consider crazy.
I consider any exceptions for rape and incest to be crazy. Whatever our law about abortion is, it should not take these factors into account. Any such exception creates a situation where we have an entity whose right to live is removed based on the crimes of its parents. Now that's crazy!
I was fairly skeptical on that one, but I think it's coming from this Rasmussen poll in 01/2022: https://bit.ly/3YKoGRP . They ask the question, 'Would you strongly favor, somewhat favor, somewhat oppose or strongly oppose a proposal to limit the spread of the coronavirus by having federal or state governments require that citizens temporarily live in designated facilities or locations if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine?'; 45% of Democrats said yes (29% of all voters, 22% of Republicans).
That said, I question whether this is representative of overall Democrat sentiment, given that:
- Rasmussen is as far as I know widely considered a low-quality and strongly right-leaning pollster; Wikipedia mentions that 538 dropped it for being low-quality (https://bit.ly/40sQJ9K) and cites a study that rated it 24th of 28 pollsters in accuracy (https://bit.ly/4hrUORq).
- This was at the height of the Omicron spike, when cases were going through the roof and people were panicking (Our World In Data: https://bit.ly/40qF3Er ).
I also think that "favour internment camps for anti-vaxxers" isn't the best summary of the question asked (as shown above).
But it's certainly a real finding from a real poll.
Rasmussen's low quality might shift the needle on what we should believe is the accurate percentage of Democrats want to throw unvaccinated people in internment camps, but it doesn't entirely negate that some people want this. What is an acceptable level of democrat desire for camps? 40%? 30%?
People panicking isn't an excuse for desiring internment camps, because an awful lot of wickedness is preceded by panic including most historic cases of people being thrown in internment camps.
*Democratic, please. EDIT: Either I misread your comment, in which case sorry, or else you yourself edited what I objected to, in which case thanks.
Issue-based (as opposed to candidate-based) polling is notoriously unreliable at determining preferences, because the phrasing of the question (or just the fact that the question is being asked) can mislead people about what the policy is and how reasonable it is. During the height of COVID panic did any influential Democrats call for unvaccinated people to be interned anywhere? If not, it’s hard to see how this poll is relevant to anything.
> People panicking isn't an excuse for desiring internment camps
No, absolutely not. I don't mean to imply that it is, only that I think this poll would have gotten pretty different results at almost any other time (and MA_browsing says 'close to half of democrats favour internment camps', suggesting that it's true currently).
> What is an acceptable level of democrat desire for camps? 40%? 30%?
Reasonable point! I don't feel great about *anyone* advocating for this, although again, I don't think any Democrat I know would endorse this.
But if it's (by assumption of the poll question) temporary, and in the middle of a pandemic that appears to be growing exponentially (and which had had a much higher rate of mortality at the time the poll was taken than it does now)? Sure, I guess somewhere between 30 and 40% I'd stop feeling alarmed by the possibility of that actually happening. There are all *kinds* of terrible things endorsed by at least 30% of each party (not, of course, typically the *same* terrible things across parties). And in this case note that 29% of voters overall were in favor of this at the time.
For candidates. That doesn't necessarily reflect on their polls on issues, which as I said in another comment is known to be unreliable in general. Arguably them just asking the question—about a policy which to my knowledge no Democratic politician or health official had proposed—is itself a form of bias.
Thanks! Although I don't have a strong opinion on Rasmussen myself (I haven't paid a ton of attention to their quality or accuracy, I don't see their polls enough to care), I did notice that the same Wikipedia page I cited above says that
'An analysis by Nate Silver on FiveThirtyEight ranked Rasmussen 20th out of 23 pollsters for accuracy in the 2012 elections, with an average error of 4.2 points.'
and
'Nate Silver described Rasmussen as "biased and inaccurate", saying Rasmussen "badly missed the margin in many states, and also exhibited a considerable bias toward Republican candidates."'
That said, those are from 10 - 15 years ago; possibly they've improved or he's changed his views for other reasons. Although I agree with Tom Hitchner that it's not clear that their accuracy on candidate polls can be treated as a good representation of their accuracy on issue polling.
Rasmussen and Atlas have been the most accurate pollsters in recent presidential elections although they did not call recent midterms accurately. This is a matter of historical record. They are right wing.
Thanks! Can you point to some evidence of their accuracy over time in presidential elections? I treat Wikipedia as a reasonable first-pass source -- it's certainly wrong sometimes, but I think the burden of proof falls on the person claiming it's wrong.
We now have data on Rasmussen's latest polling, and their polls on the 2024 presidential race were pretty much exactly accurate, unlike almost all of the "mainstream" polls. They called the national election and the states.
That does not make it accurate in general, but I think that the same thing happened in 2020 and 2016.
I note the shift- how is it relevant what 50% of democrats believe in? Are the survey participants getting elected? Did politicians suddenly swear they'll all obey their voters' every whim when I wasn't looking? If so, why do we suddenly believe them?
Jan 6 was organized by Trump with the intent of intimidating Congress and Pence into refusing to certify. For comparison, even if the BLM riot in front of the White house had a plan to breach the perimeter (instead of... throwing trash at Secret Service and yelling about racism, as all serious assassins do), this would still be a nonsensical comparison because it was organized by randos, not politicians. Torching political institutions would have approximately no effect on such mobs' ability to act like unserious mobs.
These guardrails have held up for so long, it's easy to forget that they were not given by God.
"The guardrails of liberty must be refreshed from time to time (every four years) by the votes of patriots."
That did not turn out as elegantly as I hoped, but I think it's true. If you vote for the guy who is more overtly trying to bash the guardrails, you won't be able to rely on those guardrails for very long.
Partially because it sets a precedent: Trump winning creates more Trumpists in the future. If Trumpism succeeds, it will create more Trumpists.
*While I am not for Trump*, I am amused that the original quote is arguing for the opposite of what you're arguing for. Here, in all its context:
"""
We have had 13. states independant 11. years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure. Our Convention has been too much impressed by the insurrection of Massachusets: and in the spur of the moment they are setting up a kite to keep the hen yard in order. I hope in god this article will be rectified before the new constitution is accepted.
"""
[Typos are just the way they wrote at the time, or the site I grabbed it from]
Hey Scott, I have a younger sister who was in her early 30s during Covid. She was a social worker assisting teens just out of Juvenile Detention. During Covid she worked completely remote. Her assessment of the vaccine was that it was risky due to the unprecedented low levels of testing. Between her age, the fact she worked remote, and her risk assessment, she decided not to get the vaccine. Despite having stellar performance reviews, she was fired for this.
I struggle to take your authoritarian claims seriously. The guardrails have effectively prevented the right from becoming authoritarian. They have not done so with the left.
I hate that both parties are walking down this road, but only one seems to be actually effective.
I'm confused. Would it be more authoritarian for a government to enforce certain kinds of employment policy, or the opposite? Does it matter what level of government is doing the enforcement? Does it matter if the employer is themselves a (different level?) government agency? Does authoritarianism have no need for government at all, and can just describes a form of free association between individuals???
IMO one of the predominant political successes of the 20th century was federal recognition of individual rights as a tool to constrain state power, in a result that presently codes as left-wing. I don't think a one-dimensional definition is going to cut it here.
I feel like both candidates attack the guardrails and it's irresponsible to only highlight attacks from one side. It's like standing inside the gates of a besieged city with two rival armies vying for the right to sack your home, and pointing out that you don't like Red armor, so let's let the Blue soldiers be the ones to do pillaging.
How can you affirmatively recommend a vote for Harris without having an honest discussion of how she was instrumental in hiding Biden's decline? As the VP, most of her job is to take over in the event the president is incapacitated. She took over Biden's campaign when he was incapacitated, but not the WH? Indeed, she still insists he's sharp as a tack. How long did she hide Biden's decline, and what role did she play in his ouster after it was too late to hold a real nomination? How did she secure delegates pledged to Biden without ever going to the voters?
Everything about her campaign seems like a corrupt backroom deal to engineer an appointment, as opposed to respect for democratic electoral norms. Indeed, the last 3 Democratic 'nominees' were engineered placements of one type or another (freezing out Sanders in 2016 and 2020, giving Clinton access to party funds during the primaries, etc). A vote for Harris is a vote to perpetuate this corruption of one of the two major parties. There will never be popular input into the Democratic party's nomination process until there are consequences for ignoring the will of Democratic party voters within the party. If party officials perceive that their voters will "vote blue no matter who", they'll eventually jettison party principles to the point where they're willing to campaign with their ideological opponents of yesteryear, like George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, or Dick Cheney.
Meanwhile, there was Crossfire Hurricane, which seems like completely bulldozing the guardrails of American democracy. I guess you could argue that Trump will ALSO weaponize the government. Maybe he will continue/escalate prosecution of his political opponents, control/censorship of media, etc. After all, didn't he team up with Musk and Twitter? Maybe next he'll go after Facebook, Apple, Google, etc. That could be catastrophic, since the censorship apparatus for those companies is already in place. But wait ... who put that dangerous censorship apparatus in place to begin with? And is it responsible to vote in favor of that candidate if the potential to exploit it is an argument against Trump?
When one other party continues something that was started under the other party it becomes Standard Operating Procedure in American politics. But how is that an argument in FAVOR of the initial offending party?
Indeed, if the Harris regime is rewarded with a win, they might conclude that part of the winning strategy was branding her opponent as a felon and proceed to prosecute her next opponent, too. Maybe the next step really is to put them in jail, and then do we really have a different system than a banana republic? There's a possibility that the Trump team will see the prosecutions as having helped him, in which case maybe they'll demur after the election, similar to how they moved on from the "lock her up" chants in 2016.
Or maybe they'll go for revenge. If you believe Trump will prosecute his political opponents, don't vote for him. (He said he would, then suggested later he wouldn't. But he talks a lot about "prosecuting cheaters", whatever that means. With Trump it comes down to who you choose to believe: Trump or Trump.) But if the potential for prosecuting your political opponents is a reason NOT to vote for Trump, how could you also justify a vote for Harris?
Let's talk about what a real authoritarian regime looks like. First-generation regimes are centered around the revolutionary leader who overthrew the last government. They tend to be strongman types who have a close tie to the military that put them in power. Late-generation authoritarianism often goes the opposite direction, setting up some emperor/monarch/dictator in the Sacred City and not allowing him/her contact with the outside world. Then a bunch of bureaucrats fight over the Dear Leader for influence, controlling the country by proxy. Not sure how much that describes a Biden, Trump, or Harris presidency. Probably all of them to some extent.
Let's not be blind to half the argument because we made up our minds already. Arguments that "sure this side is bad, but the other side is worse because of X" don't hold water. You have to earn my vote, you don't get it as a way to prevent the other side from getting in - swing state or no.
While Trump has some alarming rhetoric around authoritarianism, I'm curious as to your take on some of the actions by the Biden administration. For example, do you see the weaponization of the justice department against Trump and Elon as justified? Do you agree with the policy that it should be illegal to spread misinformation? That creating AI-generated parodies of a political figure should be illegal?
Justice system: The question isn't whether a law can, somehow, be used to gain a conviction, but whether it is fairly applied. If large numbers of black people get pulled over and given tickets for infractions like going 5mph over, having a taillight out or whatever that's fine so long as the police are aggressively going after everyone else who's going 5 over. If there's a racial disparity, it could be because of a difference in offending rates or a difference in enforcement. Democrats have been arguing for decades that enforcement in the justice system is unfairly slammed against unfavored groups. Republicans refuse to see it, though, insisting that the problem is a difference in offending rates.
Trump's case looks like an enforcement difference, especially given campaign promises (now fulfilled) to aggressively pursue some kind of legal action against him.
Also, sometimes the process is the punishment. If you're a minority business owner who doesn't trust banks and works only in cash, civil asset forfeiture can seem extremely unfair, especially when you have no recourse to a justice system that effectively assume your a drug dealer because you were carrying cash around. For years, Republicans dismissed concerns like these when it was about minorities. Now they see the Carroll case looking like it may get reduced or overturned, and they're beginning to understand that the point wasn't to take Trump's money permanently, but to ensure he was unable to self-finance. It's legal to self-finance, but if the people in power don't like what you're doing or how you're doing it, they'll find a way to use the justice system against you. This is nothing new, but it's new for Republicans to realize it. (They just think it's limited to Trump , or maybe J6 protesters). Meanwhile, it's disappointing to see Democrats suddenly insist that the justice system is fair. Since when?
(I will say I think Elon has almost certainly done something illegal with his million dollar giveaways. He'll likely get away with it, since the punishment will be some kind of fine and the giveaway will have the desired effect on the election before it's reversed. It's a price he's willing to pay. Meanwhile, if government contacts and launch approvals hadn't been leveraged against him, I think Elon would have stuck to tweets against 'the libs'. He's on a tight deadline to get Starship ready for the next window to Mars. That's the thing he cares about most in the world, and going after it is what clearly activated him - something I think is bad, since Elon is clearly effective in tech development and him getting sucked into politics. The Musk golden goose almost certainly has a few more eggs to lay, and it'd be a shame to lose out on that. However, blowback from powerful people like Elon is why government usually only weaponizes against powerless people.)
Misinformation: I think the worst culprits of misinformation never get censured by the government because they're doing the government's work. Misinformation has been a problem for decades, but when it's combined with government power it allows significantly worse excesses than when it runs rampant on its own. Compare the effects of the demonic preschool scare in the 90's to the WMDs in Iraq lie, or the supposed link between Saddam and Al Qaeda - who hated each other in reality. The government claiming that Russia blew up their own pipeline, that the US was winning in Vietnam, that the Biden laptop was a forgery after they'd internally confirmed its authenticity, that they weren't spying on American citizens, and on and on. Intelligence agencies have executed many misinformation operations against the American people to get things to go their way, but there is never any suggestion of taking corrective actions against them, despite the fact that it's clearly worse when they do it than when it arises organically.
I think a good case study of the problem of misinformation is COVID-19. There was plenty of misinformation circulating during the pandemic, and it took both the organic form and the government-sponsored/supported form. We've now learned the government did a huge amount to crack down on natural misinformation, but that they also clearly eliminated a lot of true information specifically because it cut against their own misinformation they were trying to spread. The government's threshold isn't about whether information is "true" or "false", but whether it advances their interests or not. They are not a disinterested third party, and as such cannot be relied upon as an arbiter of truth.
As an expert in this field, it wasn't difficult for me to spot which was which during the pandemic, but many people I knew weren't able to do the same. They were usually credulous in favor or opposed to the government line. So for my anti-government friends, they would agree when I pointed out obvious government misinformation about COVID-19, but then they'd start talking about some other misinformation and I'd have to correct them. They were generally less responsive to correction when it was something the government had called out, since their experience was that the government wasn't credible (which it wasn't). My friends who were credulous of the government line refused to believe corrections to government misinformation, even after it was proved, until the government came out and explicitly acknowledged wrongdoing, or it became generally acceptable to admit the government line was no longer tenable.
Is misinformation a problem? Yes. Is it a good idea to give the government control over what should be labelled 'misinformation'? No. Sad experience demonstrates that this will only serve to amplify the spread of misinformation - and in particular dangerous misinformation.
AI generated parodies: I feel like we've been hearing the deepfake scare for a long time, without seeing much come from it. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it doesn't seem to have materialized in a meaningful way. I remember the claim Republicans made a few months ago that Harris's campaign had faked a photo at an airport to add to her crowd size, but then it turned out there were a bunch of other photos of the event from hundreds of cell phone cameras, so nothing ever came of it because it wasn't faked.
Except, I don't care about crowd sizes to begin with, so the whole discussion seemed dumb. I'm not sure where the line crosses from parody to fraud, but this is not a question that began with AI-generated images. The best satire is the kind that's as close as possible to believability. I remember Republicans getting really angry in the early 2000's when Onion articles would get circulated as truth by Republican lawmakers and pundits, because the parody was close enough to things they actually believed that they bought it. Back then, they wanted to shut down parody for the same reason Democrats went after the fake Harris campaign video - except the Onion never explicitly labelled its content as parody and the AI-Harris video did.
I know outlets like the Onion and the Babylon Bee have legal departments that review all their content to make sure it doesn't cross the line from parody to fraud. If you're setting up a fundraising website based on fake content and calling it parody, you're potentially fooling people into contributing money to something they believe is real when it isn't. That seems like outright fraud to me. But we have a long tradition in the US of allowing parody to mock people's beliefs without explicitly coming out and telling them they're being mocked. When you start going after the satirists, you know you've lost the argument.
I'm a libertarianish-conservativish person who basically feels the same way about this election that Scott Alexander does. Can you tell me more about what you mean by Kamala's "bid for authoritarianism"?
Fairly liberal and voting for Kamala here; I think a lot of the concern about this is based on Joe Biden's administration pressuring private companies to self-censor and the various legal actions against Trump, especially the hush money trial which is pretty clearly politically motivated IMO.
I don't think "critical" is quite the right word. Yes, the media questioned many of the Trump administration's claims when he was in power, but it also credulously hyped a lot of stories that turned out to be false. It didn't seem to me that it was doing its job so much as just trying to help the opposition.
Isn't Trump's (and his most avid followers) bid for authoritarianism, if you will, depend on a circulation of elites, such that the very elite class that you seem to assume will rise up against him will be cut off at the knees and effectively replaced?
Replacing the existing "resistance" elite would be impossible, but it is also unnecessary. It is only important to replace a subset of the elite who effectively leverage power over a larger swathe of the elite class and/or control how funding is distributed to universities, states, cities, etc.
This one reason why he wants to use the impoundment powers of the President (whether it is lawful or not is another question) so that he can distribute favors to those who fall in line and cut off contracts to corporations, grant moneys to universities, funding to local entities. Most of these entities will effectively cave if it means their funding streams dry up.
Or, for example, it is also why he wants to eliminate protections for civil servants. He is not going to fire all of them, he just has to fire a few and ensure that everyone else knows that he has the ability to do the same with them. Most people will fall into line at that point.
Just look at the way big tech (Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, etc.) are already bending the knee. If he can effectively "control" them, middle management won't matter and the "resistance" will be little more than an aesthetic.
" it'll provoke the media into being critical again"
Until their guy wins the election after the bad Republican, and now everything is gas and gaiters. Remember how Covid was so deadly, even the chance of spreading it by attending your local church was too great a risk, so please don't hold religious services - but protest marches are a-okay because racism is a bigger threat than the Most Deadly Disease Ever.
If we're going to have things imposed on us by fiat, at least placate the plebs by being evenhanded about it?
This doesn't make sense to me. If one brand is less popular but it manages to win next week, doesn't that make it significantly more likely to succeed?
Let's say there's a two-step process to bulldozing the guardrails against authoritarianism: gaining sufficient popular support, and gaining support from elites. Whichever party wins the election next time would de facto have crossed the "popular support" pillar. Then we would want to be concerned with preventing whichever party has also completed institutional capture from instituting authoritarian policies, since the guard against less popular authoritarian movements is elections.
I mean, being motivated by spite implies that you're doing something less because you think it's "good" and more because it will "make your enemies mad". You see a lot of "liberal tears" stuff, not so much "conservative tears". I think this is because conservatives in general kind of care less about "good things" as much as they care about "no good things for people I don't like".
No, sorry to convey that. I’m saying Trump’s authoritarianism is loathed by me, the media, 60-70% of the public, 80% of congress, the military, and the security state. There’s no base of power for him to launch a coup from or more slowly erode our freedoms. We had 4 years of Trump and zero authoritarianism bc of this. Meanwhile the FBI has succeeded in eroding our privacy rights under Clinton/Reno as Bush/Ashcroft. Bush normalized torture when Obama refused to prosecute it. Obama pioneered drone-murdering US citizens overseas without due process. Trump refused to get us entangled with Syria and his strike against Soleimani was the perfect deterrent to Iran, bc it deftly avoided collateral damage or escalation.
That said, I still think this is a wrong way to think, and doesn't result in any good. I think that "Trump is so offensive he won't get anything done" was 65% "true" in 2016 but is closer to 30 or 40% "true" now. Do I think he'll bang his executive gavel and put everyone trans in camps? No. But like... the GOP is obviously a party of Trump now. They tried to replace him with a technically more competent DeSantis and thankfully failed, but even DeSantis couldn't bring himself to seriously criticize Trump *while* actively running against him.
I think the GOP is filled with way more yes-men than it was before, and I think that Trump's influence on their culture will extend past his death. I think him having been elected at all is kind of disastrous long-term in this sense. After he dies, he's going to be replaced by a guy who expresses basically the same opinions, but also isn't so impulsive and narcissistic that he hamstrings himself every time he tries to get something done that takes longer than a week.
This is why I said it's "thankful" DeSantis lost, lol. I think "the guy whose campaign staffers were putting Black Suns in his Twitter videos" combined with "presentationally being a professionalish politician" is far more dangerous than "Trump", and this kind of politician is something enabled by Trump having been elected.
I'm trying to read this in a way that doesn't sound like "my political opponents getting elected is a bad thing."
Could you frame any of this in a way that Trump voters, even hesitant Trump voters, would agree with?
Almost all of the Trump hesitancy (as opposed to fully supportive or opposing) I see is about his temperament, so getting his policies without the temperament would be seen as a good thing.
I get that, for instance, many people oppose his immigration stances. But, like, the majority of the US population actually supports it. What does it mean to live in a democracy? It can't mean that a minority who hold the reigns of power get to block the will of the majority just on their own preferences. The Constitution can stop the majority, but not a self-selected minority. Claims that Trump is undermining democracy rang very hollow in such conversations.
> I'm trying to read this in a way that doesn't sound like "my political opponents getting elected is a bad thing."
I mean... this seems kind of tautological, doesn't it, lol? I'm not sure why you're trying to read it in a way that doesn't imply this - that is what I'm implying. I don't want Republicans to win offices.
> What does it mean to live in a democracy?
I believe that there are certain things that supersede democratic concerns, democracy itself ironically being one of them. If everyone voted to have an absolute monarch, I'd still say we shouldn't allow that! Putin was arguably legitimately democratically elected at some point. He definitely isn't *now*. There should be systems to prevent this kind of thing from happening.
Anyways, I don't think it's possible to convince the average Trump voter. I think it's possible to convince some people on the margins whose opinions seem kind of flippant and random (this is true for most people in general, they just consistently have random opinions within the window of partisanship). But like... anecdotally, a lot of Trump supporters are just kind of stupid and emotional, and the ones I know who are *really* into it just seem mentally ill. The most success I have in converting Trump members (largely through family) comes not from argument but rather "acting like they're being embarrassing" or "refusing to talk to them" or "saying something really pithy and vaguely religious because a lot of people have huge biases towards someone saying a belief is spiritual".
You are, of course, welcome to have an opinion. I thought you were making a case that might try to appeal to general principals or would be convincing to others so that more people would want to choose your stance.
Naked partisanship isn't exactly new. I would prefer a world where there is less of that, such that we may be able to convince one another of important differences in positions. I think that would also make transitions between administrations less jarring and concerning.
>What does it mean to live in a democracy? It can't mean that a minority who hold the reigns of power get to block the will of the majority just on their own preferences.
This is one of the reasons why a lot of ancient authors (notably Thucydides) were so critical of pure democracy. Democracy without any additional protections leads to the domination of demagogues and the tyranny of the majority. That's why we're a constitutional republic and not a pure democracy. The Bill of Rights most definitely says that minorities can block the will of the majority, if the will of the majority is to take your guns, to censor your speech, to keep slaves, etc etc etc. I don't think most conservative policies are bad enough that they violate our rights in this way, but some of the more extreme ones (bans on abortion that don't make clear exceptions for rape, incest, or the safety of the mother, various free speech infringements meant to curtail wokeness and crossdressing, throwing someone in prison for using the wrong bathroom) seem to qualify.
It sounds like you have already determined which issues matter to you more than the ability of others to have an opinion. How do you think your opponents should reconcile *their* list of non-negotiable items when they differ from yours?
My arguments against the zero authoritarianism view is that the Roe v Wade court stacking, his draconian treatreatment of migrants, the overall election effort, both the legal maneuvering and the big lie, were authoritarian. Not categorically denying QAnon was authoritarian. They're as modern authoritarian vs traditional as the quasi-theological social elite oligarchs that Scott is still looking to work against in the long term. But they all had greater negative short term impact. And his support and admiration of authoritarians worldwide builds strength for the growing influence of strong man style politics worldwide.
Would Democratic politicians not "categorically denying" BLM riots be authoritarianism? If so, what makes Republicans/Trump worse on this metric? I'm trying to figure out your definition, and it seems to just run along partisan lines. That's fine for your opinion and your vote, but doesn't seem very convincing.
My comment was directed at there being zero actual authoritarianism during Trump’s presidency, with examples to show where I think there was. I’m saying, for instance, that helping fuel an entire mythology around satanic pedophiles having taken over the government, which people I know actually believe, were as least as modern authoritarian as those done on the left (see sentence 3 - really seems like you skimmed over that, though if you can explain how my describing the left as “quasi-theological social elite oligarchs” is a neutral description, let me know and I’ll try to work harder to make it more negative in the future). So no denials or counterarguments against the existence of left authoritarianism. The fact that left authoritarianism exists doesn’t have any relation to whether or not Trump’s authoritarianism (and I do mean specifcally his, rather than the right as a whole) exists beyond mere rhetoric. Beyond that, the debate’s about relative impact, and yes, there I’m partisan, I believe for the right reasons, but sure I have biases. Those biases do not include believing my side - such that it is, I’m pretty moderate - has absolutely zero authoritarian impulses or impacts. As to my metric, it’s immediacy. Not denying that the right should exist as an opposition party to the left. The “which is worse?” question is a long-term minimization & optimization project. I think individuals should be voting their interests through parties, not letting parties enact party interests through individuals’ votes. By all means, vote straight ticket GOP. I just think if you’re not in the upper echeolons of the Trump’s circle, Trump being back in the Whitehouse will not be in your best interests.
That's fair. I wouldn't classify most of the things you did as authoritarian in the first place, so I was double-checking to see if we were even using the same language. It appears that we are, but you generally include more things as authoritarian than I do, which is fine.
I think this analysis is wrong in a subtle way. It's true that all those institutions dislike Trump and will scrutinize everything he does - but how often does the media's criticism of Trump make you think "yeah, they nailed it! Spot on!"? The media and commentariat haven't prosecuted the case against Trump very well even after 10 years, so Trump being in power again will just enable more caterwauling and less cogent analysis. There's a sense in which he breaks people's brains (not just his supporters'), so the combination of "evil president + bad arguments for why he's evil" just means you're going to get an evil president without effectively persuading people that he's evil, not to mention a very exhausting four years.
Also, respectfully, your Iran comments are a bit off-base. I write about Iran constantly and wouldn't be able to do justice to everything wrong above, but it's unclear if Iran even *can* escalate and what real escalation by them would look like at this point (notably, they did and continue to respond to Soleimani's killing, which led a bunch of symbolic retaliations and 176 passengers of Flight PS752 being pointlessly murdered). It's further unclear whether Trump did anything particularly unique by taking out Soleimani (I think the Obama foreign policy establishment might have done the same). Characterizing this as "the perfect deterrent to Iran" is really misleading - a year later they elected a crazy hardliner!
See, I agree with what you're saying, but to me, that's another reason not to vote for Trump. If he wins, it will absolutely accelerate the bad tendencies in "the media and most power centers" due to backlash. Left wing people got way crazier 2016 -> 2020, and moderated 2020 -> 2024.
Kind of, yeah? We have a democracy with millions of people. That a candidate (and I include Trump, Hillary Clinton and anyone else with ridiculously high disapproval ratings) is absolutely straight up hated by ~30 million of them, and we absolutely have evidence that "hatred of specific other side candidate" leads to extremism and violence in "our" side, then I am fine with biasing my vote on avoiding that backlash.
I might rephrase it as "when you nominate a hated candidate, it gives the other side license to adopt more extreme policies because the relative cost for doing so goes down, so I want to disincentivize parties from doing that."
I don't know a perfect way to measure it, because normally I would use previous elections and long-running disapproval ratings, and there's less of that info available for Harris (though for similar reasons I would have suggested the Dems running a candidate who actually had been thru those things, so as to avoid backlash-y behavior from their own party members), but I feel pretty confident that the former is less than the latter.
The Democrats cut the rod for their own backs, and they're stuck with Harris because of the denial around Biden until the bitter end. After that, they couldn't pick anyone else, but the impression the 'party of democracy' gives by putting up a candidate without even a pretence of having a convention to choose from a selection, that the party in general could vote for, instead of the elites saying "this is who you have to approve and it doesn't really matter either if you don't approve because we've already decided" isn't too great.
This is exceptional circumstance, but the idea that Kamala is the people's choice is really bending reality.
Yeah, but the hatred for Clinton was explained as "sexism! hate for strong women! anti-reproductive rights!" (and race got pulled in when the black women feminist voters were angry with the white women feminist voters for not coming out and voting enough for Hillary). It wasn't "gosh, maybe we shouldn't have picked the most unpopular choice possible" reflection, it was "the people are wrong and we have to double down on educating them to be better".
I'm astounded that Trump has been as successful as he has been, but he's resonating with *someone* on *some* issues, and just beating that away with "Fascism! Racism! Sexism! Homophobia! Transphobia! Christofascists!" is not going to fix the problem of "what is he getting right that we aren't? what candidate can we put forward that appeals to the deplorables/garbage?" (and that's part of the problem right there: the deplorables and garbage attitude to something like a quarter of the country, if I'm being generous to Hillary in her division of Trump voters into 'half of them are sincere but too stupid to know what's good for them, the other half are evil').
Harris is pretty historically underwater, at least compared to pre Trump/Clinton candidates. Long term I hope both parties start nominating candidates that are at least 50% popular. In the meantime, how does this help us determine who to vote for now? Someone (whether it were Trump or Harris) being slightly less unpopular is not a convincing argument.
The heckler’s veto plus threats of violence is what got so many Republicans to capitulate.
Lindsey Graham and Mitt Romney were harassed at the airport.
Adam Kinziger and Liz Cheney have both said they talked to several Republicans who wanted to vote for impeachment but feared violence against their families.
A Republican legislator in Michigan was hounded out of the party after his exhaustive investigation found no evidence of election fraud. Same for the former Arizona speaker of the house.
Not just "threats" of violence. I notice that two attempted assassination attempts - including one that almost worked - against Trump didn't merit even a mention in ACX's spiel about "threats to democracy".
Not to mention that, like...it wasn't the Democrats behind those assassinations? The constant equivocation between Democrats, anyone who hates Trump, and left-wingers more generally is getting old, as someone who would be considered a left-wing extremist by 80% of the commenters here, it seems.
Genuinely, Democrats are almost all neoliberal corporate shills. It's just that they're not actively trying to roll back civil rights and make life actively harder for myself and my loved ones. Deepest hope of this election would be that the Republican party shatters and the Democratic party splits in half with the most centrist/center-right elements linking up with the remnants of what was once the GOP to have a new paradigm with a genuine progressive party as an option for once.
Neither of the failed assassins was a Democrat/on the left. One was a depressed teen who wanted to go out with a bang via suicide by cop. The other one a guy with some meth problems who became crazy in Ukraine, and said he voted Trump in 2016.
Perhaps it is time to consider whether democracy is in a ratchet death spiral, everywhere in the world. Perhaps now that we have the society, prosperity, and technology we have, there is no way to prevent each side's strong incentive to be worse tomorrow than they were today.
What do *you* do if democracy is irretrievably broken? I hope the answer isn't "lay down and die", because historically a ton of people have been very happy living in not-democracies.
I'm utterly sick of this claim that wokeness and left-wing extremism was in any way caused by a backlash to Trump. It's completely and demonstrably false.
The first recognisable instance of cancel culture I know of was in February 2013, a campaign to get Orson Scott Card removed from co-writing a Marvel comic storyline because he opposed gay marriage. (It succeeded IIRC by convincing his co-writer to drop out, killing the storyline). The two canonical and famous defining examples were Justine Sacco (December 2013) and Brendan Eich (April 2014). By mid 2015 there had been dozens of such cases, the realignment of society towards these unprecedented new norms of "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom to dissent from the progressive orthodoxy" was well underway, and the only reason it didn't have a clear name yet was because there was so little pushback to this among the elite institutions that it wasn't thought to need a name other than "basic decency" or "correct opinions". And all this was before Trump had even announced an intention to run for president.
So I think three things are undeniable. (1) This was not at all caused by Trump's election but by Obama's re-election. Far from being a fearful reaction to losing power it was a triumphant "now we can freely hurt the people we hate" reaction to winning. (2) Two of those three defining cases were based around the issue that the left was most clearly and overwhelming winning on (homosexuality/gay marriage), further proof that cancel culture had nothing to do with desperately resisting the powerful and everything to do with sadistically crushing the losers. (3) Trump was a backlash to (among other things) wokeness and cancel culture, and the narrative that it was the other way around is unbelievable memory-holing and past-rewriting. Kind of like the Nazis/Bolsheviks justifying their seizure of power as justified by the Allied wars against them!
The more proximate thing was the end of Occupy Wall Street after it had gotten infested by the woke and subsequently petered out. These terms see a sharp uptick starting in 2011-2014, depending on term and publication:
I am sick and tired of people claiming the Dixie Chicks are an example of right-wing cancel culture. They were "cancelled" for things they said in public, as part of their public performance and deliberately made in front of an audience.
What actually got them into trouble was trying to say one thing in front of one audience that another audience would be angered by. Honest people shouldn't be doing this, and dishonest people shouldn't be surprised if they're caught at it.
Also, notice that this is pretty much the only right-wing example anyone can ever find?
I did not see Justine Sacco as a triumph of liberal or left-wing cancel culture; the position that she was stupidly claimed to hold by people who didn't or didn't want to understand irony was one that no conservative with a brain would actually consciously hold (white people don't get AIDS). Rather, I saw it as an example of an online mob, and how easily it could form in social media. That did predate Trump's election, but it does not seem to be inherently political, let alone in the narrow sense of having one particular political coloring. Rather, it is a phenomenon that fed into online wokedom later, and not only there; it would be silly to claim that right-wing online mobs can't form - it's just that we associate "mobs of righteousness" with the woke.
It is clear to me that wokeness has helped Trump and is helping him now, though it's unclear by how much. But Trump I was not somehow a reaction to the Justine Sacco case. How much Trump was a reaction to then-incipient woke - that's an open question to me, though I have much stronger doubts than I would now. The wave of woke had only barely lapped the shores of most people's consciousness during Trump's ascent, even if it was already a thing in some circles.
I don't think that's an accurate description of the Justine Sacco mob. I think it consisted of tweets like "this bitch just insulted Africa" and "welcome to black twitter" and endless accusations of her being privileged and flaunting her privilege. In other words, these were woke people (not apolitical or centrist), and their anger was not thinking she wasn't joking, but thinking it wasn't an acceptable thing to joke about. (And not because of a concern for the feelings of AIDS victims specifically, but for much more general woke reasons of racism and marginalisation and privilege).
As for wokeness barely lapping the shores, I think that's clearly wrong as well. Look at the comments on Scott's 2016 version of this post. There's heaps and heaps of references to voting for Trump to fight against wokeness (or "social justice", "political correctness" or "SJWs" as it was known then). It was a widely recognised phenomenon that had been taking over society for several years, among anyone who was paying attention, by that point. The main change during the Trump administration was giving it a clear name--the terms "woke" and "cancel culture" were popularised 2018-2019 or so. But this is an example of rising *resistance* to wokeness: naming it means acknowledging it as something that can be criticised and opposed and as something that certainly isn't remotely equivalent to "kindness" or even to "progressivism" in any way.
Ok fine, but I maintain that it was far more widely known. Brendan Eich was a household name in conservative media regarding the excesses of the left. So were people like the British scientist (I forget his name) who joked about falling in love with female co-workers. BLM started in 2013 I believe, and by late 2015 was a household name, doing things like aggressively shutting down a Bernie Sanders speech and shutting down the dedication of a Christmas tree (!), and other things that had nothing to do with Trump but were left-extremist attacks on centrists, fellow leftists, and apolitical people. And Hillary Clinton ran her campaign on extremely heavy and blatant identity politics, as well as using woke language in her speeches.
I think if you look at archived online discussions from 2016 from many sources you'll see many references to wokeness in numerous forms.
Very astute analysis, thank you for giving me some context to consider. I lean more heavily to the idea that Obama's reelection started it all. The smugness with which he approached Romney and his other opponents publicly (and, yes, the winking at the IRS to punish enemies privately) created more threat to democracy than Trump did in his actual presidency.
Kind of infuriating to watch Obama drift back into the picture now with the same progressiver-than-thou rhetoric that marked his presidency (e.g., telling black men that they're not voting for Harris solely because they're afraid of women). There's probably a good book to be written about all the cultural things that soured in and after his presidency.
I don’t it caused it, I think it’s a repeated game of escalation/arms race. The extremists on both sides empower each other, and becoming more extreme increases the likelihood of the other side doing so as well. Their true enemies are the moderates.
Who fired the first shot in this latest, ongoing culture war? I could be convinced that the left started it, but partisan extremists on both sides have been gleefully making the vicious cycle turn faster.
I think that a lot of the guardrails against Trump have eroded since last time. For instance, previously Mike Pence refused to put Trump above the constitution (and Pence has now stated that Trump should never be president again). Now J.D. Vance has explicitly said that he *would* overturn the election in Trump’s favor if it happened again. Similarly, Trump now has a Supreme Court that will support him to the degree of offering presidential immunity. Trump has explicitly been trying to attract followers who will be personally loyal to him and support his bids for power, and it seems like he has been succeeding even with his endless parade of scandals.
Contrast that with the supporters Harris has, who initially supported Biden and then (reasonably) decided that they wanted him replaced when he seemed too old and addled. Compared with Trump, Harris’s support is more fragile, and we should expect that it would pivot to favoring some other generic Democrat for reelection if Harris did anything too egregious.
I have a different take on the facts but your position is well thought out and if i agreed with you on the facts I’d be voting for Harris for the same reasons.
Thank you! Out of curiosity, what facts do you disagree with? It can definitely be tricky to say *for sure* how dangerous Trump would be with the people around him trying to keep him in check, but it seems to me that some of the people in the best position to know those facts would be the people who have been in those positions before.
And it’s not just Pence, but also Kelly (Trump’s former chief of staff), Grisham (his former press secretary), Scaramucci (his former communications director), and at least 10 other notable officials that worked under Trump who are standing against him. These include people with largely conservative values, who are presumably aware of the problems with the Democratic Party, who still think Trump is more dangerous. Same thing with Dick Cheney and Mitt Romney (to my knowledge, McCain was also not a fan of Trump).
That’s a pretty big update for me. Whenever I see people acting in opposition to the way they would normally be biased, I take those views a lot more seriously.
>Now J.D. Vance has explicitly said that he *would* overturn the election in Trump’s favor if it happened again.
I'm not entirely sure how this is supposed to operationalise. I mean, if there's an election in 2028 and Vance is VP that means Trump got elected now, which means Trump would be indisputably ineligible due to term limit and Vance couldn't "overturn the election in Trump's favour" (since the SCOTUS and/or military would step in at that point).
>Similarly, Trump now has a Supreme Court that will support him to the degree of offering presidential immunity.
I will note that while the scope of presidential immunity is debatable, the *existence* of a "things that are illegal for private citizens aren't always illegal for government agents performing official business" rule is kind of inherent in society. Protection money vs. taxes. Kidnapping vs. arrests/imprisonment. Murder vs. death sentence. Piracy/freebooting vs. warfare.
Ivanka has been missing from action and reportedly wants nothing to do with politics any more.
His other sons like Don Jr are ascendant, recommended Vance, and are in charge of purging the party and administration from people willing to stand up to Trump.
I agree, I also find it absurd that Trump will easily turn the entire country into a fascist state when literally most of the elite is against him, whereas it is much more feasible for Kamala Harris to enact terrible left-wing economic policies that will harm capitalism and make everyone miserable.
What is 'the elite'? Academics have near-zero hard power, and their soft power has been much damaged by overzealous sophomores (in the literal or general sense: people whose intellectual development stopped in their sophomore year) who cherry-picked some terms here and there and ran away with them.
Yes, I also found this part of the comment strange. Usually when people refer to the 'elite' they either mean academics, policymakers, or rich people. It's definitely not academics, who as you say have little sway, policymakers, who the Trump admin would be putting into or taking out of power, or rich people, who... I mean, just look at the WaPo nonendorsement scandal. At the very least there are plenty of extremely powerful 'elites' who do not want a Harris presidency.
> Ivanka and Jared will be running the show and they are standard chamber of commerce neoliberals which is why Trump didn’t do anything authoritarian last time
>That said i think I’m still going Trump because his brand of authoritarianism is hated by the media and a majority of the public.
"No one goes to that bar, it's too crowded."
If Trump wins, can you really claim that his brand is less popular?
>If Harris wins, the media and most power centers will back her bid for authoritarianism and things start getting bad real fast.
I'm not totally sure what authoritarianism you're referring to, aside from Harris saying platforms like X should have more restrictions. Given that the Supreme Court is dominated by conservatives, I don't expect Kamala to be successful in challenging freedom of speech.
They don't need to actually get a ruling in their favor. They can just suppress whatever speech they want, the 9th Circuit rules for them, and then, much later, the Supreme Court overturns it. Then they do it over again.
The same slow authoritarianism (both a combo of gov policies and elite non-gov policies) that has been turning people towards trump for 8 years.
Examples being: affirmative action, speech restrictions at schools/workplaces, COVID mandates, nation’s capital “black lives matter” painted on the street, etc.
I am definitely looking forward to the "mostly peaceful" Dem protests and attempts to overturn the election/s when Trump is elected and inaugured, just like last time. Maybe people won't forget the second time?
The guardrails that held last time were name Bill Barr and Mike Pence. The fact that he replaced Pence with Vance shows that the guardrails will not be nearly as strong next time
I would argue the right's SCOTUS control is one of the more concerning authoritarianism issues at the moment, particularly if they get more control than they currently have and so no relatively reasonable justice/s can swing a verdict. I am also concerned that popular will does not support policies that will keep this country stable and properly running, and may support really awful things, and that a right-wing administration will ignore this issue even when the Constitution would normally protect people. Probably one of the more obvious points here is related to free speech; most people on the left and on the right want to censor their political opponents, and a party that doesn't respect the rule of law is more likely to fully and directly subvert that (and specifically, more likely to use the government to severely persecute private individuals who disagree with them) than a party that at least allegedly does.
But I'm also a single-issue voter on whether I'll be able to keep my passport, so take my words with a grain of salt.
There are thousands of quotes, articles, and interviews with members of Trump's staff from the first term talking about how they had to constantly distract and delay him in order to avoid doing the insane things he asked for, and instead just do their job normally in spite of him. That's why he couldn't cause too much damage the first time (this is what he and supporters call the 'deep state', career bureaucrats just doing their job normally and resisting bad orders from on high).
The last 4 years has been Trump and his closest allies vowing to correct this injustice, and building a huge network of cronies plus loyalty tests and plans for who to fire and replace on day one. Vance was chosen on the back of a long campaign of arguing that democracy was violated during Trump's first term by bureaucrats ignoring Trump's demands, and vowing to implement anything Trump wants including not certifying electors.
'Trump didn't accomplish many crazy things in the first term so he won't in the second term' is a good outside-view prior on how the world probably works. But the inside view contains mountains of specific evidence on why that's not likely to be actually true in this one case.
"It went fine last time" isn't a totally reassuring argument when Trump and all the yes-men around him have been talking for the last four years about how much better they're going to vet executive branch appointments for yes-men and prevent the internal resistance that kept his previous administration in check.
Countless members of his former administration have openly admitted to ignoring Trump's requests, distracting and delaying him, and functionally treating his whims like that of a grumpy toddler. Most of them have said he's not fit to be president, and have endorsed Harris. Those people aren't going to be in the White House this time around. The guard rails will be weaker.
Thank you for the psychodrama angle and the analogue to New Atheism. It’s a pretty powerful metaphor for me personally as well and I felt that pang of recognition as you elaborated on why you tend to react more viscerally to left-leaning malpractice than the reverse. You’re not alone.
But what "opposite side" means depends on where you're standing. I think most ACX readers wouldn't necessarily consider a Trump fan their direct opposite, politically.
> I would feel like a total hypocrite with no ground to stand on if I claimed to be pro-freedom, pro-liberalism, and pro-democracy, but didn’t really take a stand against somebody trying to attack enemy politicians and rig an election.
Oddly, this is one of the main reasons I will be voting for Trump despite being in a Blue Safe State. I guess everybody has their own take on events.
Yeah. My brain started composing a top level response to this one, but it was just going to be a list of "Hey, this bad thing that you said that Republicans did, here's a place where Democrats did something comparable or worse!"
But what happens then? There'e be a massive tree of replies going "But actually that thing is not as bad, the Republican thing is worse!" with replies going "No way, actually the Democrat thing is way worse". It seems like a boring discussion.
What depresses me is that someone as smart as Scott and someone as smart as I can see the world so differently, and see it as something so obvious it hardly even needs to be argued. I mourn for my nation.
Most contemporary thinkers do believe in truth too. And plenty of thinkers in the 1700s didn’t. It’s just that the direction of movement was different. We are still in a much more truth oriented academic world than we were for most of history (and certainly for the general public).
Things were beyond repair long, long ago. As for this essay, it's not his fault, and obviously raw intelligence is no more a protection against drowning in misinformation than it is against drowning in water. It's just not the right tool. I hope none of us are here on ACX because we think Scott is right about everything, or even most things.
When propaganda was more centralized, things certainly had the appearance of working better, and I suspect that plenty of people are nostalgic for those simpler times.
I'm using the wrong word because you're hallucinating my opinion? That's not how language works - I used an old phrase correctly and to express what I wanted to express, mind your business.
>someone as smart as Scott and someone as smart as I can see the world so differently
Convergence from updates from evidence is _hard_ . Did you follow the lab leak/zoonosis debate, and see how far apart even the judges were at the end, a factor of 50? And that was with everyone doing their best to present all of the evidence they had. Depressing, but I think unavoidable. ( And politics is worse - much that we want to know is not "What _did_ happen?", but "What will this person do in the future?" )
So, if you see the situation as an escalating tit-for-tat, with each side becoming terrible in response to the other, then surely it's incredibly important that we break that cycle. It's not a conflict that one side can win in way that doesn't leave us an economically broken one-party state, so we're going to have to deescalate- which means political norm-breaking, fewer power grabs, less fighting of cultural battles with governmental force, and so on, even when these things feel like justified responses to provocation.
A liberal democracy is like a nuclear reactor containing and running on the dangerous fuel of political competition. When that competition leaks outside of democratic norms, it becomes something deadly rather than useful.
It may be the case that neither party is willing to fully commit to keeping their competition contained, in which case the question becomes: which side is more likely to escalate? Which is willing to go further to "win"?
Okay, but the question is how to vote in this election. Is there any choice that breaks the cycle in this election?
If Harris wins, Trump's federal prosecutions go forward. Now I'll say that I think the Florida documents case is legitimate. But the other three contain various levels of bullshit, and I'm not even a Trump partisan. And 1/3 of the country views the whole thing as illegitimate lawfare. So electing Harris doesn't break the cycle; that 1/3 will be in power eventually and looking for revenge.
What's it's going to take to start breaking the cycle now is for the Democrats to decide that the prosecutions of Trump must stop. They would have to decide, to borrow Scott's example, that these were crimes but maybe they didn't actually harm anyone the way that shoplifting really doesn't do much harm.
Trump got Presidential immunity for most of his actions he took as President and the Jack Smith indictment had to be refiled. Why would he need Democrats to stop prosecuting him?
I agree that Trump may not *need* for a Biden and/or Harris administration (along with Georgia and New York) to drop his prosecutions. He may yet avoid legal punishments by a combination of appellate decisions and acquittals. But my response was to concerns about escalating tit-for-tat lawfare and weaponization of political power, and what those could do to the country. I want to live in high-trust society and those things work against it. To the extent that these persecutions are political, the only way out that doesn't leave somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of the country feeling angry and defeated is a political compromise.
No, my comment was rhetorical. Trump obviously needs a federal pardon because he not only committed crimes as official acts of the President but as a private citizen seeking reelection. I also think the best resolution to uniting the country would be trying Trump for treason and everybody who intended to vote to decertify the results of the 2020 election. Also, borrowing on Trump's plan to delicense news media, we should probably delicense Fox News, OAN, and Newsmax for their peddling of election fraud lies that they either have admitted to lying about or are in the process of losing their multiple defamation suits in court. Ideally this would bring back normalcy to the conspiracy laden right wing in our country and show that there are consequences for trying to sow this much division in the country, especially through illegal means.
What specifically is the claim that Kamala Harris tried to attack enemy politicians and rig an election? I genuinely haven't heard this allegation but I don't follow American politics closely.
Regarding rigging an election: the concerted suppression of information harmful to Biden in the last election, the "fortification" of that election by Zuckerberg et al. in ways that (surprise) only helped Democrats, the unConstitutional changes to state election rules by people other than the state legislatures, the mysterious and unprecedented suspension of vote-counting in precincts of swing states, the videos of mishandled ballots and testimony of whistle-blowers, and the endless fraud that Trump was a Russian agent, which the FBI knew from Day One was bogus. In this election, attempts to disqualify Trump from the ballot on grounds of insurrection when neither he nor *anybody else* has been even charged with insurrection.
Regarding attacking an enemy politician: Denying RFK Secret Service protection; constant equation of Trump with Hitler, doubtless contributing to three different assassination attempts; and the invention of historically unprecedented accusations of bogus felonies in the hopes of jailing him before the election.
Trump has been threatening his opponents generally with jail time.
No Democrat has done that, even though Trump personally has been prosecuted for various credibly-alleged crimes.
If Democrats were threatening their opponents generally, we would have seen a lot of investigations of Ron DeSantis and Milo Yiannopoulos and Joe Rogan and Kristi Noem. Instead, when we look past our Trump-focused-syndrome, we see that the investigations of politicians are basically a mix of various corrupt types of all parties (Eric Adams, Bob Menendez, Hunter Biden, locally in Southern California Andrew Do, etc.)
Trump threatens to throw people in jail, but he's just bloviating. He never actually tried, even when he had the power. Democrats have an actual track record of wielding the legal system to try to imprison their defeated opposition.
There were at least a dozen lawsuits trying to prove voter frtaud and overturning the election. Mostly by that Krakedn lady who I've forgotten the name of, and Giuliani. All failed.
When you run for attorney general or prosecutor on a platform of "I will find something I can charge Donald Trump with and then prosecute the heck out of him," that is pretty close to threatening your opponent with jail time.
You can hardly compare private owners of social media companies slowing the spread of new, potentially bad information right before an election to Donald Trump (the guy I assume you're voting for!) literally manufacturing false slates of electors to try and get Mike Pence to overthrow the results of the election.
Have you read the Twitter Files? The “private owners” of social media companies were leaned on *very* heavily by government entities.
I acknowledge that “overthrow the election” is the Leftist way of describing what went down when it came time to count the votes. You must know that your opponents describe it differently, as the last legal and Constitutional opportunity to correct what they saw as fraudulent votes.
I saw the messages rather melodramatically so named. I saw nothing except suggestions which could be freely ignored. Social media companies have $ for lots of lawyers.
Seriously. It's just beyond belief that we're now both-sides-ing as disingenously as _that_.
One thing I've learned during this past decade is how few Americans actually take seriously the central importance of protecting our Constitutional system. I already knew that about some, mostly on far left. I had no idea, and would not have believed if it told, just how wide a swath of people to the right of me have zero actual respect for our Constitutional structure and norms.
Turns out to be _far_ more people than to my left. It's an example of something that Donald Trump had intuited by the time he came down that golden elevator, and he was right about it and I was way wrong.
The left wing in the United States of America has benefitted from Constitutional protections far, far more often than it has been stymied by them. Free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press? These are all things that favor iconoclasts and boundary-pushers, and regardless of which side one might think today's iconoclasts are one, historically, it's mostly been the left, and we remember our history. We actually fully give up on respecting some constitutional protection, collectively and legally? Next time the pendulum swings it'll be the latest strain of McCarthyism, complete with life-ruining prison sentences. That's the whole reason so-called "cancel culture" became a thing: it's vigilante social consequences to try to force behavior change through non-governmental avenues.
The leftists who don't give a shit about constitutional norms and protections are often just straight up tankies. Fuck tankies.
There's too much wrong in your understanding of the history to even begin on, but I agree with your closing statement and always have.
Doesn't change the shock of learning how many _more_ Americans to my right bluntly consider our Constitution worthwhile only to the degree that it supports their particular priors and wishes. If a leftie 20 or 30 years ago had predicted the extent of that I'd have dismissed it as the usual tankie bullshit...in fact I'm pretty sure that happened given where I was residing during that period. On that point, sadly, they were right and I was wrong.
It's amazing and a credit to the Democrat propaganda machine (corporate news) that people believe this. Appointing a set of alternate electors is what state law prescribes, generally, when challenging election results. This allows you to have people ready if your challenge is successful. They actually discuss this in the recorded phone call, if you bother to listen.
It's true that states decide themselves if they want to issue alternate electors, like Hawaii in 1960. Now which state legislature, governor, attorney general, or any other higherup authorized Trump's alternate electors? None of them, that's why they're fradulent. Not a single state representative authorized Trump's electors, despite him lying about all the supposed states rescinding their certified electors during the Raffensperger call.
Do you count all campaign advertisement as "rigging an election"?
I think the attempts to disqualify Trump from the ballot on grounds of insurrection involved attempting to charge him with insurrection - which the courts struck down.
Your only allegation of election rigging was about someone spreading or not spreading information. That’s what advertising is. Even if you think these informational maneuvers are violations of law, they really don’t seem like “rigging”. They’re comparable to what Russia did on behalf of Trump during the 2016 election, not to what Trump tried to do after the 2020 election.
Because one is free speech and the other is treason? Free speech isn't required to be good, but at least you can counter it with other speech (or in this case, other platforms). You can't really reverse in the same way someone overturning an election like Trump tried to do.
>Free speech isn't required to be good, but at least you can counter it with other speech (or in this case, other platforms).
Well...
1) I don't think it's accurate to refer to "government actors leaned on platform operators to censor other people saying X" as "free speech".
2) In practice, no, you can't actually counter such censorship with "other platforms" if all of the big platforms are in lockstep, because 90% of people are not actually *on* other platforms to hear you. See Scott's article (https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centralized-web/). Elon Musk buying Twitter ended this regime for real because Twitter already is a big platform... except that Biden's been harassing him ever since and Harris/Walz seem if anything less moderate.
This was more believable before a group of tech companies colluded in broad daylight to kill the fastest growing app/social media company (Parler). The claim that people used it to coordinator January 6 was a barest fig leaf for that effort, considering how Twitter had been effectively used by the likes of active terrorists including ISIS/Daesh for years.
With respect, Scott's saying Trump is a uniquely bad individual to vote for president and he'd make a stand to vote against him because he personally tried to "attack enemy politicians and rig an election."
Coming back and saying Democrats 'in general' have done the same and therefore not vote for Harris seems quite different and is a much more sweeping claim. I mean, you could use this as an argument to always vote Republican in every election in the USA. At that point are you really 'taking a stand'?
Also just to nitpick one item on your list, uhh, what's especially bad about 'attempts to disqualify Trump from the ballot on grounds of insurrection'. Seems perfectly legal to me, certainly doesn't seem to have anything to do with rigging.
Like, back in the day, didn't Trump, among others, attempt to disqualify Obama on the grounds that he wasn't born in the USA, despite Obama never having been charged with immigration fraud? Was that somehow rigging too?
Oh yeah, I had forgotten about the fortification thing.
"Our shadow campaign fortified the election so the right candidate would win" doesn't sound like something you should be boasting about, but of course since it was against Literal Hitler all methods are legitimate, right?
"In February 2021, Molly Ball of Time magazine published an article titled “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election” that took both sides of the aisle by storm. Depending on the reader’s perspective, the story was a tell-all confession or a story of epic heroism about a massive, multi-faceted, and secret campaign to “save” the 2020 election by helping President Joseph Biden win and defend his win from legal challenges by President Donald Trump and his allies. Now, as the 2024 election seems destined to be something like a rematch, it’s time to revisit the old article and see what the conspirators—or heroes, depending on one’s view—are doing now.
... Ms. Ball, undoubtedly aware of the opposite ways readers might interpret her article, concluded the introduction with the following lines:
That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream—a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures."
Wow, you Americans are so lucky the secret cabal is only out there to do good! They only work behind the scenes to change the bad laws that would prevent a clean sweep by the right candidate!
I don't understand how your epistemology is so fucked that you think somebody writing a flowery article about a "secret cabal" is in any way shape or form strong evidence that Democrats tried to steal an election, but Trump falsifying electoral votes and directing his AG to confiscate voting machines isn't. What is a single alleged crime that took place from that Time magazine piece?
No, it's to say that you have no object level facts that any fraud took place on behalf of the Democrats, and are instead so ideologically poisoned that you're reading tea leaves on the meta level by accusing Democrats of fraud because somebody wrote a Time piece using spooky language to characterize legal coordination between Democrat operatives during and mostly after election time.
You seem to be equating "literally called up the governor of a state and asked him to find more votes" with "said mean things about your opponent." As Scott put it, there are different levels to this sort of thing, and punishing open, blatantly illegal attempts to subvert democracy is much more important than punishing attempts to get an advantage legally-but-scummily.
(Also, all 2-3 assassination attempts (the third one it's debatable if he was actually an assassin or just a sovereign citizen who didn't understand gun laws) came from right-wingers, inasmuch as crazy assassins have coherent politics. It's hard to explain that as a product of comparing Trump to Hitler.)
I am equating no such things; I disagree with both characterizations of the events in question.
And I am astonished to hear somebody claim that the first two assassins were right-wingers. Crazy I’ll grant, but if everything they had read or heard for eight years told them that Biden was the Antichrist, do you really think Biden would not have been their target?
I could grudgingly forgive the Democrats if after the first attempt they had moderated their rhetoric, but no, they doubled down. That tells me it had the desired effect.
I don’t know. But it would have been a service to the country to actually resolve these questions one way or the other, rather than sidestep them. We might not be having this argument if they had.
Well it was resolved. Trump supporters brought cases before Conservative judges and almost every single one was shot down due to lack of evidence.
If there really is evidence of significant voter fraud out there, you should be mad at the Trump faction for not being able to bring the required evidence in front of fairly friendly judges.
Or consider that maybe this evidence did not exist after all.
I believe there were still cases pending that were deemed moot after Congress met, and appeals for those dismissed for lack of standing. But that’s not germane to my main point, which is that the merits should have been resolved rather than sidestepped.
Propaganda is there everywhere, all the time. Yes, it's there with the Hunter Biden laptop story just like it was there with the Russians leaking DNC emails.
What makes Trump special is that he took steps to decertify actual election results.
Unfairly fighting in the information war isn't good but it simply doesn't measure up to what Trump tried.
I know that’s the description of events that the left prefers. Your opponents do not believe he was attempting to decertify actual election results, but rather attempting to use the last legal, Constitutional means to correct improprieties.
Your flat phraseology settles the matter for you, but will not convert somebody not already on your side.
The Constitution states that Congress counts the Electoral Votes. It puts that responsibility on the members of Congress rather than on some clerk with an adding machine because it is a vitally important operation. They are expected not only to do arithmetic but to certify to the nation that the numbers they are adding up were validly obtained and correctly reported.
Most of the time this certification process is trivial. Sometimes it is obviously contentious. During the years of and following the Civil War there were bona fide arguments about what the actual results of some state elections were, and the Congress stepped up to resolve them.
There were a number of discrepancies, as I have described, in the 2020 elections -- changes in the election rules that were made by minor officials rather than (as mandated by the Constitution) the state legislatures; weird and unprecedented suspensions in vote-counting in some swing districts, and resumption after Republican poll-watchers had left; bales of ballots that showed up with shaky provenances. Some of these led to litigation that was pending right up until January 6, and Republicans very properly put together slates of Electors who would cast their votes if the litigation went their way. Many of these problems are unsurprising considering the challenges of holding an election in the depths of a global pandemic, so it's also unsurprising that Congress in 2021 faced an unusually contentious task.
If the Congress had decided that it was necessary to wait a short time for these cases to be resolved, or that the issues in question merited recognizing the alternate slates outright, that is their job. They chose not to, and that too is their job. Because the Congress made the choice they did, Joe Biden won the election and was peacefully inaugurated on January 20. Had they made a different choice, Donald Trump would have won and would have been peacefully inaugurated. That's the way it works.
I'm not one of those that say Trump "really" won in 2020. But I don't see any impropriety in his attempts to plead his case, any more than I see impropriety in Gore's gamesmanship about recounts in 2000.
Neither of these posts even tries to link specific actions to Kamala Harris. Like you even say "maybe the Democratic Party was just better at taking advantage of the absentee voting rules"
Honestly of lot of stuff here just comes accross as conspiratorial to me.
"Despite nobody much liking Biden as a candidate, he received a record number of votes nationwide. There were 19 bellwether counties that voted for the winner in every presidential election from 1980 through 2016, but in 2020, 18 of the 19 voted for Trump. In all but one election since 1964, the candidate who won the Presidency saw his party gain seats in the House of Representatives. Not so in 2020: the Democrats lost House seats. Biden came up with just the votes he needed at just the right time. Republicans wondered how."
Come on man, how are statistics like that supposed to be convincing evidence of rigging? I just looked up that New York voted for the winner every election but one between 1880 and 1944... But then they voted for Dewey in a tight election in 48, something fishy I say, fraud.
Right-- I have nothing on Harris personally, or Clinton for that matter. That does't alter the fact that the election looks rigged-- by somebody, and it wasn't Trump.
I find the voting pattern in 2020 odd, and I haven't seen a good explanation except the one you and I both mentioned: that the Dems were just really good at targeting in that year. I am on the lookout for an explanation. I haven't seen one. Some professor ought to write an article on it-- it really is an interesting question as to what happened.
> One’s belief in whether Biden really won is rather like one’s belief in God: the evidence is insufficient for proof or disproof
This is uh, refreshingly frank, I guess. Usually if there's no evidence of a crime and no suspects, you do not assume a crime has taken place, but there's a certain logic to a religious person having *faith* in such a thing. It's also fair to think that if security was poor enough, the election should be repeated, but I wonder whether Mr. Rasmusen (Edit: just noticed that he is you) was outraged about the Supreme Court halting the recount in 2000 and declaring Bush the winner.
While he acts like it's easy to commit voting fraud (both in person and absentee, just with more fraud possible for absentee) I expect this to be untrue and therefore expect evidence of the claim. Surely election officials would notice that the same person voted twice, let alone 1000 times? You need a name on the ballot, and the name is checked against voter rolls, right? How is large-scale fraud supposed to go unnoticed?
And then in the later article he says, well, it *was* detected for 329,614 ballots in the country. I wasn't sure where that number came from at first, but after plugging some numbers in my calculator I think he is saying that “Non-matching signature” (the most common case), “No voter signature” and “Voter already voted in person” all count as attempts at fraud.
By coincidence, we recently asked one of my few friends to sign documents on our passport applications (they required someone outside the household to sign it for some reason). But multiple signatures were required and we didn't notice that our friend used quite different signatures in different places, which almost derailed the process after the application was submitted. My friend then explained to us that she doesn't have a consistent signature. Mr. Rasmusen is saying that 0.26% of all ballots had mismatching signatures which is "fraud at first look", and essentially says "even if 90% of those aren't *really* fraud that would leave 0.047% in the three categories combined which is still a *lot* of fraud". Um, okay, but (1) why assume a minimum of 10% were real fraud attempts, or that a fraudster's technique would *ever* be to leave the signature line blank? (2) 0.047% countrywide surely wouldn't swing the election, (3) all of this was detected which means none of the alleged fraud attempts succeeded.
So then he's like ahh, but sometimes they don't bother to compare signatures at all, or are lenient about matching them". Okay, but still, why should you actually believe large-scale fraud really happened? I mean, take me through the process. You are a ne'er-do-well who wants to vote 1000 times.
(1) How do you actually pull if off without being detected?
(2) How do you know that most of these undetected fraudsters voted for Biden?
And then he's like "I’d guess more like a million [were fraudulent]" and justifies this by linking to the first article, which explains how it's faith-based.
The legal cases against Trump are the crimes he very obviously, blatantly, committed. He was convicted of the Stormy Daniels case and you can just read the indictments for the other cases. It's actually insane how you people mindfucked yourself into believing that the American court system can just be trivially suborned. I guess in that reading the most trustworthy person to take control of it is the guy who constantly talks about how he needs to crush the "enemy within" (his political opponents).
> He was convicted of the Stormy Daniels case and you can just read the indictments for the other cases.
You can. And if you don't know anything about the law, you might even end up coming away thinking that he did something wrong. But to anyone who knows what they're looking at, the entire thing is a joke.
The thing he was alleged to have done in the Stormy Daniels case *was not a crime.* It would have been laughed out of court had it not been a court run by a politicized judge, and it will never survive on appeal.
The Bragg persecution is even more laughable. Read the analyses by Andy McCarthy, a career prosecutor from SDNY (Southern District of New York, where the trial was held.) The trial was a farce from beginning to end, and contains at least half a dozen severe, obvious errors, any one of which is enough to completely overturn the case on appeal.
I actually believe in our court system. The thing he did was a crime, that's why he was convicted. You cannot convict people for things that aren't crimes.
If you don't believe in our court system, again, I don't understand why you want to put the guy who talks about locking up every single political opponent (or even people who didn't dicksuck him about his election denial claims) in charge of it.
They say that the average American commits three felonies a day. (Yes, I understand the median would be a better measure, but this is the famous stat.) Of course he has committed SOME crime. The problem is the selective (and this case, obviously politically motivated) enforcement.
I still don't understand what exactly the crime was, I took away from it that he was convicted of paying a bribe out of the wrong bank account? That he should have claimed it as a campaign expense? I don't know, but I do see that nobody seems to have gone after Stormy Daniels to return the stolen money that was the proceeds of crime, so colour me unconvinced that this was the Crime of the Century.
You look at your court system doing all sorts of outrageous nonsense against Trump and you think: well, I'm not a lawyer, the judges know better, our court system is respectable, I don't understand how or why, but my own lying eyes are deceiving me probably.
Another man looks at this and thinks: well, that's it, the court system has been subverted, we can no longer trust it.
An interesting thing is that there doesn't seem to be an object level disagreement even. You agree which way the evidence points in each individual case. If I asked about more of them, like for example the novel legal theory that you don't have to give a person the right to any legal representation to judge them a traitor if you're not going to impose any penalties, and then another court can cite that judgment to remove them from ballots, again without any representation because this time they are not doing any judgment, you'd probably agree that that too is outrageous nonsense.
The only disagreement is that you think that there's not enough evidence yet to stop trusting the court system. But if you agree that you will probably change your opinion in the future if things continue to go the way they are doing, then why not change your opinion now?
I tend to think of the classified documents case as having merit. Other politicians who retained classified documents returned them when asked, Trump, not so much.
The other three look essentially purely politically motivated to me:
Stormy Daniels - basically mislabelling a payment - when the statute of limitations had run out. The legal theory used is more twisted than a pretzel.
The real estate valuation estimate thing - basically accused of being a realtor.
The Jan 6th - Yeah, he used inflammatory language, as if Biden and Harris don't use similarly inflammatory language against him. If Jan 6th had _really_ been intended as a coup, he would have told the rioters to arm themselves.
I would recommend actually reading the January 6 indictment. He did not just "use inflammatory language," he knowingly spread lies, put together false slates of electors, and attempted to pressure Mike Pence into throwing out the results of the 2020 elections.
I think the Mike Pence thing is the most blatant attempt to overturn an election I've ever seen. He wanted the vice president, a single man, to unilaterally choose to overturn the election, despite having no authority to do so by his own admission. If that's not a coup attempt I don't know what else to call it.
> You can. And if you don't know anything about the law, you might even end up coming away thinking that he did something wrong. But to anyone who knows what they're looking at, the entire thing is a joke.
Not really. The facts there were pretty clear. The conviction is sketchy, because it relies on a questionable legal framework to bypass the statute of limitations on the misdemeanor version of the law, so I suspect it might get overturned on appeal.
But "can't be prosecuted for a crime he clearly committed and that a jury determined he committed because of a procedural bar" is not the same as saying he did nothing wrong. He did something wrong and didn't get caught until the statute of limitations ran out.
>It's actually insane how you people mindfucked yourself into believing that the American court system can just be trivially suborned.
Have you heard of all-white juries in the Jim Crow South? The peremptory-strike process in jury selection actually makes it very easy to wipe out a minority from a jury, because knocking out a juror who's part of the minority will probably result in replacement with a member of the majority, but the other side knocking out a juror who's part of the majority will probably result in replacement with another member of the majority - and both sides get equal numbers of peremptory strikes.
And, well, Manhattan is 85% Democrat, and Trump is so incredibly polarising that most jurors would vote their party.
I'm not saying I like Trump (I don't), and I'm not saying all the cases against him are baseless (there's a case to answer for some of them). I am saying that I treated the Stormy Daniels conviction as a null update regarding Trump's character because the circumstances rendered the verdict nearly a foregone conclusion regardless of the facts of the case.
If you believe that Trump (or any other person) raped somebody in the changing room of a department store and got away with it, I have a bridge to sell you.
I have actually read quite a lot about sexual assault - it was one of my hobbyist interests in college, having read cover-to-cover multiple books on the subject, regularly going through Google Scholar on it, etc. The idea that somebody raped somebody else in a private location that was otherwise "public" is so insanely banal that your comment suggests nothing but your own ignorance.
e: For example, from Anna Salter's Predators:
> An offender may molest a child in a room with the door open and the other parent in the next room. He may molest a child with other children present who are witnesses and can confirm the child’s testimony. He may meet friends who have moved far away in a motel halfway between their two towns, play cards in one room, and take breaks to “check” on the kids sleeping in the next room, but instead molest them with the door open but out of sight. He may take a break from watching a ball game at a friend’s house to go to the bathroom but walk, instead, into a child’s room to molest her.
>All these are real cases of offenders who have been caught because their detection apprehension was too low. Every once in a while a parent walks in on one of the above scenes and cannot be convinced they didn’t see what they saw. But the sad fact is that for detection apprehension to be that low, the offender has to be successful at molesting children for many years.
This sounds a hell of a lot more crazy to me than raping somebody in a bathroom, changing room, or other semi-public location.
Do you have Trump Derangement Syndrome? Because there are very, very many "enemy politicians" under *any* definition of "enemy politicians", and this list of enemy politicians has very little overlap with the list of politicians who are in the middle of prosecution for crimes right now.
How many Republican members of Congress, or Republican governors, or Republican mayors, are currently being prosecuted? How many Democratic members of Congress, or Democratic governors, or Democratic mayors, are currently being prosecuted?
There is literally one person who is an "enemy" of Joe Biden who is being prosecuted right now, and it's not Hunter Biden, or Bob Menendez, or Eric Adams, all of whom *are* being prosecuted.
I forgot there were a few others like them. But do you claim they weren’t guilty? Criminals should be prosecuted even if they have enemies who are in power.
Depends if the laws are sufficiently broad and vague that everyone is technically guilty of something. The offences on which Trump has been actually convicted seem to have this flavor.
The Giuliani damages bill was, frankly, insane, but is just part of the general US issue of juries setting insanely high figures for punitive/exemplary damages. Navarro could have showed up and pleaded the fifth, so that doesn't look like unfair treatment (sure, it was a witch-hunt-y house committee, but that's more of an Americanism than a Democrat thing). Eastman being disbarred looks like partisan targeting,* but I haven't gone through the California Bar Court proceedings.
*It all comes down to the general issue of whether "conspiracy to attempt to incite Mike Pence to do a thing" is a treasonous plot, or a bunch of morons larping at being hardball political operators. I can see the argument that if he'd actually done it successfully then it's in coup territory, but I just can't take it seriously as it's so obviously the least serious parts of the Trump circus clowning around.
I have no objection in principle to early voting and mail-in ballots. It is clear that they open the door to fraud in a way that must be guarded against, and it is far from clear that they were adequately guarded against in 2020: Several states eliminated the requirement of comparing the signature on the envelope to the signature on the registration, to give one trivial example, and there were several stories about boxes of ballots appearing with inadequate provenance. Those stories might all have been false, but the system gives us no way of knowing. My biggest objection is that many states started doing mail-ins without being ready for it, and the decision was made in ways that did not involve the state legislature, which is the one firm requirement stated in the Constitution. In the light of Covid neither is surprising, but given the fact that all the worst anomalies happened in swing states that (in the end) favored Biden, it's hard not to conclude that the Democrats made sure not to let the crisis go to waste.
Continuing with the spirit of my original question, is it fair for me to summarize your answer as, "yes, 'rigged elections' = 'early voting and mail-in ballots'?"
Putting aside the specific claims you are making, I agree with you that there is something deeply troubling about all of this. Democracy clearly does not lead to choosing perfect policies or amazing leaders. At a minimum, though, it should deliver legitimacy. IF US elections are clouded with a fog of illegitimacy, then they are not delivering the most important and only expected benefit from the process.
When a large enough group of people don't believe the election result is legitimate, it creates a pressure that threatens to be relieved through violence.
I don't think either major party sees this risk or has taken the necessary steps to address it.
I don’t agree that that is a fair summary. Equating early ballots and mail-in voting with rigged elections is pessimistic and simplistic. It may be that there is no way to have the former without the latter, but I don’t believe it.
But I think I do agree with everything else you said. I have read lots of people who see the risk you point to and who have described ways to address it. (Most of these do involve drastically cutting back on early voting and mail-ins, which I think is overkill.) But I don’t recall ever hearing anybody you’d call a party bigwig address it.
Sorry, I'm not trying to put words in your mouth. My original intention was to expand on your statement:
>this is one of the main reasons I will be voting for Trump
by working out what "this" meant. I grabbed the two specific items in the Scott comment that you quoted and assumed "this" was pointing at those. I think I've misunderstood, but not necessarily gotten closer to the "this."
My guess is that you've already clarified in response to other comments, but I'm not sure that I will have time to go through and find the answer. Sorry that this attempt to start bridging between alternative realities didn't bear fruit.
I don't think the election was rigged (beyond the usual amount of fraud or stupidity) but the way it was handled, I also don't think there is a way to stand over the process as "absolutely 100% secure, no possibility at all of something going wrong".
Very small changes in voting patterns in places like Maricopa County flipped the state to Biden, and that's the kind of thing that on first glance looks very suspicious - this county voted red all the other times, but *this* time it's blue? - until you dig into it. But most people are not going to dig into every single strange-looking result, so the perception can legitimately be "this was fraud" and not "this was a small number of swing voters who did change their minds from last time, just enough to tip over the line".
Also the flip-flopping about voting machines: 2016 - the Russians hacked them to give Trump the victory! 2020 - impossible to hack so the result is impeccable! 2024 - looks like revving up the hacking story again in case Trump wins/loses:
"Those discoveries come amid ongoing foreign and criminal targeting of U.S. elections. In 2016, Russian hackers both targeted the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and compromised voter registration databases in multiple U.S. states. It’s affecting this election cycle already, as POLITICO first reported Saturday that the presidential campaign of former President Donald Trump was hacked, a breach the campaign attributed to Iran.
While there’ve been no foreign cyberattacks taking wide swaths of voting machines offline on election day or evidence of hacks that affected results, the risk is always there."
> Also the flip-flopping about voting machines: 2016 - the Russians hacked them to give Trump the victory! 2020 - impossible to hack so the result is impeccable!
Do you have in mind any specific people who said both of those things explicitly? It's very easy to falsely perceive flipflopping just by not paying close attention to who said any specific thing and imagining everyone who disagrees with you as some sort of giant hivemind. And yes, I have been guilty of that as well - being careful is hard work. But that doesn't make it any less important.
I agree, we absolutely need elections we can trust. And, unfortunately, as a weird artifact of our two-party system, there's one party that has decided to officially oppose strengthening elections in basically every possible way. They've even decided it's a good idea to - uniquely among Western democracies - oppose _requiring an ID to vote_! I don't believe that Democrats are doing this because they're planning to commit systemic fraud, but I also suspect they think that any low-level fraud that occurs is likely to benefit them. (Otherwise, I don't understand why they would pay the political cost of loudly and proudly being against election integrity, rather than just having no official stance on matters like mail-in voting and voter ID.)
As a left-wing person? Because it's much easier to pass a requirement for voter ID than it is to simultaneously also pass a requirement to make acquiring that voter ID easy enough to ensure every citizen/voter who wants to get one can get one. The left is far more worried about voter disenfranchisement, a real historical thing that has happened to minority groups throughout our history quite often, than it is about voter fraud. And voter ID laws set by state legislatures are often one means of enacting voter disenfranchisement through careful selectivity of which methods of identification count and which don't. Do state university student IDs count? How expensive is the process to get an ID that counts? How much time does the process take? Are there readily available places within walking or bus distance of voters who may not own a car? We already have voter turnout manipulation with polling station placements and removals in many states. There are what we consider to be genuine and real threats to meaningful democracy already demonstrably occurring, and so we oppose the solution put forward to something which is not yet demonstrably a problem and could reinforce the problems we do see.
I would rather have an election where voter turnout in every state is improved by 100,000 voters and there end up being 10,000 fraudulent votes cast in every state than one in which we lose 100,000 voters in turnout and only prevent 10,000 fraudulent votes. The mathematics of which one is preferable seem patently obvious to me, personally, even in what I consider an egregiously extreme scenario that favors the idea of voter fraud being more of a problem to a degree I find farcical based on the evidence I have available to me.
I'm genuinely curious - what exactly would "demonstrate" to your satisfaction that it is a problem that _you do not have to prove who you are to vote_? To me this is at the level of needing a double-blind study to prove that parachutes save lives. As far as I know, no other democracy in the Western world is so weirdly stupid about this (sometimes they allow minor exceptions to ID requirements, but they're principled and limited).
I understand that disenfranchisement is the party line, but as you said yourself, the other solution to the problem is to make it easier to get ID. There was no reason Democrats had to hitch their wagon to the dumber solution.
I do appreciate your honesty about your fraud tolerance. I think I have a fundamental disagreement with you there. I would absolutely prefer a system with zero fraud, where sometimes people don't manage to vote because it's not as convenient as they'd like. When issues are truly important (ie, democracy is on the line because Trump is Hitler^WChavez), people will overcome minor inconveniences to vote, and the system still works. But if people can't trust that the results of an election are legitimate, everything starts to break down. All Trump's sore losing in 2020 would have convinced far fewer people, and caused much less trouble, if Democrats weren't actively taking the position that election security isn't "demonstrably a problem".
"Take an oath and have an elector who knows the voter vouch for them (both of whom must make a sworn statement). This person must have authorized identification and their name must appear on the list of electors in the same polling division as the voter. This person can only vouch for one person and the person who is vouched for cannot vouch for another elector."
As you can see, the exception is strict, and careful to avoid the potential for abuse. If you intended to make some point that Canada's voting security is just as lackadaisical as the non-voter-ID states, well, you're flatly wrong.
(0) It probably won't surprise you that some D's think working for better voting security would be repurposed to support criticism of the 2020 POTUS result
(1) I encourage you to read about the disparate impact of ID availability (as mentioned by another respondent)
(2) my understanding is that R's oppose a national ID solution (for reasons, but this helps illustrate that the issue has nuance that may lurk beneath the surface)
(3) a sincere effort from both parties to make voting accessible and secure seems like an extremely reasonable ask.
I'd note that I don't agree with the respondent below about the threshold of election fraud they would tolerate for the extra participation. That's because (a) I don't think we are nearly so close to the technical efficient frontier that those trade-offs are necessary and (b) many factors influence legitimacy and I think that amount of fraud would blow-up the system. Part of my reasoning for (b) is that the structure of POTUS elections already makes the vast majority of voters feel disenfranchised, so the baseline level of feeling legitimate is already low, and the overall result is sensitive to small numbers of votes in a small number of places.
Finally, on that point (a) about the efficient frontier. I originally left out the word "technical" and then realized that we might be at the efficient frontier on what is politically/practically achievable.
I'm curious: when you read that ID access and voter suppression is a concern, did you update your model of the world? Note: this is a sincere question and I'm not making an implied claim that you did not update.
> I'm curious: when you read that ID access and voter suppression is a concern, did you update your model of the world? Note: this is a sincere question and I'm not making an implied claim that you did not update.
Well, no. It wasn't new information, of course. It's basically impossible to navigate society without hearing each and every left-wing argument 100 times. I probably should have been clear that I knew the official party line about "disenfranchisement" and considered it at the level of most political tropes: silly, but virtuous-sounding enough to be yelled at rallies without thinking about it too hard. For one thing, it stretches the definition of "disenfranchisement" to an almost absurd extent - would it be "disenfranchisement" if I have to cross the street to vote, and I'm too lazy? Putting an absolutely _trivial_ step in front of voting, that has a _very good_ justification for existing, is not racism. There were real examples of disenfranchisement in the past, and they do not resemble modern voter ID laws.
I had thought that serious people were not serious about that justification. However, I'll say that I did update (slightly) because @Rolepgeek seems both smart and sincere about it.
> I have no objection in principle to early voting and mail-in ballots. It is clear that they open the door to fraud in a way that must be guarded against
Why is that, in and of itself, not sufficient grounds for objection-in-principle?
And if it's not, here's another clear objection: In addition to integrity/fraud problems, they open the door to vote-security problems as well. Just look at the multiple cases we've seen in the last few days of ballot drop boxes being firebombed by Antifa terrorists, destroying hundreds of ballots.
In my Substack I suggest a way to improve absentee ballot procedures to reduce the ease of cheating somewhat, but it's an intractable problem, because it makes vote-buying too easy. That's why most countries in the world don't allow it, or allow it only for citizens who are abroad. https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/cheating-with-absentee-ballots
In 2020, I rather liked the convenience of mail-in voting. But, AFAIK, it has one unsolvable problem. Since the vote is cast in a home, away from a voting booth with a poll worker observing who is in the voting booth, one can never know that the vote wasn't coerced.
>Those stories might all have been false, but the system gives us no way of knowing.
The system gives you plenty of ways of knowing. Georgia had two state recounts and an internal audit. There was video footage released the day of Rudy Giuliani lying about Ruby Freeman and Shay Moss running multiple ballots, bringing out hidden suitcases, being professional fraudsters, and dozens of news sources reporting on it. Pennsylvania had recounts in multiple contested counties. Any and every audit of Dominion and Smartmatic voting machines showed they were more accurate than hand counted ballots. There is an infinite amount of evidence that our elections are safe and secure and the leading proponents of the negation of that proposition are literally all liars, some of which like Giuliani admitted to lying in court or Powell saying she wasn't making statements of fact.
Chase Oliver supports none of that; libertarianism is liberalism taken to logical extreme. A vote for Trump in a solidly Dem state has no effect, so why not make a truly pro-freedom statement?
I am pretty confused by this, assuming "attacking enemy politicians and rigging an election" is mostly around January 6th.
I am not American but would have voted for Trump in 2016 - like explained in this post I strongly subscribed to the "furniture must be smashed in the Capital" view so I just wanted to vote for whoever was anti-establishment (naive "fuck the system" and all that).
But any and all support I could possibly have had for Trump completely died on January 6th. What is the take on these events that someone smart can take that is pro-Trump? I have tried as a mental exercise and I just cant find it. Maybe my Overton window needs expanding but the more reasonable answer just seems to be you cant be pro-democracy, pro-freedom, and pro-liberalism if you also believe January 6th happened the way that virtually all evidence seems to suggest it happened.
Look around this thread. There are multiple explanations.
If you want a more concentrated take, there's a thread on DataSecretsLox titled "Change Your Mind: Trump's Behaviors on Jan 6 are Sufficient Reason to Vote for Kamala", where someone makes a college effort to present the other side, and gets a lot of counter-responses. There's not much one can do to summarize it, unfortunately, given the number of charges made against Trump, but my attempt at a gist is that many of the accusations against Trump are for things he didn't actually do, or are theoretically possible but incompatible with what we know of his public face; there are a few irregularities that were conspicuously not investigated by the other side; and while there are some things one could lay at Trump's feet, they're relatively minor and also the sort of thing one could lay at the feet of anyone else.
I doubt I agree with all of the counter responses (or the OP), but it's a pretty long thread, so anything you have a question about is likely to have been mentioned there by now, including a general counternarrative.
I appreciate the response and the pointer on where to learn more, but if I go to https://www.datasecretslox.com/ I cannot find "Change Your Mind: Trump's Behaviors on Jan 6 are Sufficient Reason to Vote for Kamala"
"Many of the accusations against Trump are for things he didn't actually do... and while there are some things one could lay at Trump's feet, they're relatively minor and also the sort of thing one could lay at the feet of anyone else. "
Ok, well which are false/minor from this list below - that as far as I can tell actually happened? Surely there has to be some go-to pro-republican article/website or something somewhere that open-minded intellectually rigorous people tend to be recommended to read if these are all demonstrably false/minor?
1. Trump had knowledge that he lost the 2020 election but spread misinformation to the American public and made false statements claiming significant voter fraud led to his defeat;
2. Trump planned to remove and replace the Attorney General and Justice Department officials in an effort to force the DOJ to support false allegations of election fraud;
3. Trump pressured Vice President Pence to refuse certified electoral votes in the official count on January 6, in violation of the U.S. Constitution;
4. Trump pressured state lawmakers and election officials to alter election results in his favor;
5. Trump's legal team and associates directed Republicans in seven states to produce and send fake "alternate" electoral slates to Congress and the National Archives;
6. Trump summoned and assembled a destructive mob in Washington and sent them to march on the U.S. Capitol; and
7. Trump ignored multiple requests to speak out in real time against the mob violence, refused to instruct his supporters to disband, and failed to take any immediate actions to halt attacks on the Capitol.
Despite the fact that this thread in general seems to generate more heat than light and I'm sorry I started it, I was about to take you seriously and put together a summary. This list makes me think you are trolling; each item is phrased in such a way as to put it in the worst possible light. The link Paul Brinkley cites is https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,12502.0.html.
But for the record:
1. Trump believed that he had won the election and publicized that belief in an effort to correct for what he saw as fraud. Which statement is correct? Neither you nor I can read his mind.
2. "Planned to remove and replace"; "false allegations". Did he in fact remove and replace? What if the allegations were true? Do you know? Complaining about "planned to" is pretty weak sauce.
3. Trump argued strongly for Pence to take actions that Trump and Trump's lawyers believed were unusual, but nevertheless both legal and arguably Constitutional. That was his right. Pence chose not to take those actions. That was *his* right. I discussed this at greater length earlier in this thread (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-endorses-harris-oliver-or-stein/comment/74940194)
4. Trump believed there had been counting errors or perhaps even malfeasance in Georgia, and he requested officials there to investigate. What "pressure" was he even in a position to apply? Do you imagine he was about to send troops, or a cruise missile?
5. Alternate slates of electors is the normal way to deal with contested votes.
6. Trump held a rally. At its end, he requested the attendees to "peacefully and patriotically" march to the Capitol to make their feelings known. He did not advocate violence. There were a few troublemakers like Ray Epps who were waiting there even before Trump started his speech, and directed the arriving protesters to enter the Capitol, after removing the signs and obstacles that would have made it clear this was impermissible; there are reasons to suspect that Epps and his compatriots were Feds trying to incite violence. They were remarkably unsuccessful; the protesters lined up and were admitted to the building by Capitol guards who held the door for them. Video of the event mostly shows people wandering around, sightseeing, while guards stood by to make sure nothing untoward happened.
Protests at the Capitol are not rare occurrences. This one got very slightly out of hand (or was pushed) but neither you nor I have any reason to believe Trump planned for it to do so.
7. Trump did speak out, urging people to remain peaceful. And why wouldn't he? His plan was to convince the Congress to act, in their Constitutional capacity as certifier of the vote counts. It would have been stupid to muddy the waters with violence. You may say he waited too long, but Monday morning quarterbacks are seldom convincing.
The list was simply copied verbatim from Wikipedia. Sorry, I wanted to change them to something that are more in line with what I actually believe. But I honestly got overwhelmed by the prospect and thought it was good enough to start a good faith discussion.
1. (point 1 is again verbatim from Wikipedia):
Many in Trump's inner circle informed the president he had lost and there was no evidence of widespread fraud. According to several video clips of prior testimony shown by the committee:
1.1 A senior adviser to the Trump campaign, Jason Miller, testified that Trump was internally advised he had lost the election. According to Miller, the campaign's top data aide, Matt Oczkowski, told Trump very shortly after the election "in pretty blunt terms, that he was going to lose".
1.2 Trump campaign lawyer Alex Cannon testified he had spoken to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in November 2020 soon after the election and told Meadows there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud. According to Cannon, Meadows replied: "So there's no there there."
1.3 According to his testimony, attorney general Bill Barr "said that Trump’s claims of voter fraud were 'bullshit'".
1.4 Ivanka Trump said she "accepted" Barr's assessment.
To me with all this you start with "he knows he lost" and if there is strong evidence to the contrary we update. It seems silly to be neutral "we cant read his mind." That's infantilizing. Trump isn't a child. He had all the evidence presented to him and so many in his circle telling him he had lost and he still decided to go against it all and spread "alternative facts" to his constituents.
There was no "I commit to a peaceful transfer of power but I must get to the bottom of what I believe are irregularities as is my right." No it was just "The election has been stolen! Rile up your emotions!" or to quote him directly "This is going to escalate dramatically. This is a very dangerous moment in our history. ... The fact that our country is being stolen. A coup is taking place in front of our eyes, and the public can't take this anymore."
Last I checked planning to overthrow the results of a democratic election is pretty fucking bad even if you didn't succeed. And worst when the president does it. I'm kinda like weirded out you don't think that's a big deal. Wouldn't you think it a big deal if you found out Kamala planned to overthrow the election results even if she didn't succeed? Would you tell anyone she only "planning to" is weak sauce?
- On December 14, two weeks after Barr stated there was no evidence of significant election fraud, Trump announced that Barr would be leaving as attorney general by Christmas.
I'm a "take people at their word" kinda guy.
Particulars on this point I am not interested in. I should not have copy-pasted this point. The main crux is just that he clearly pressured the hell out of so many lawmakers. If Harris had done the same - even if she *actually* believed her election was stolen - it would be just as appalling. Same goes for Trump. i.e. See points 3-4.
3.
- In late December, Pence called former vice president Dan Quayle for advice, and Quayle told him (according to reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa): "Mike, you have no flexibility on this. None. Zero. ... I do know the position you're in. I also know what the law is. ... You have no power."
- Although the fourth Wednesday had passed, Trump still believed that Pence had the authority to reject electoral votes, and kept asking him to do so; however, over lunch on January 5, Pence informed Trump that he did not believe he had any such authority.
- Attorney John Eastman incorrectly told Pence in a January 5 Oval Office meeting that Pence had the constitutional authority to block the certification, which Trump reportedly urged Pence to consider.
- By January 5, Trump was continuing to assert that Pence had unilateral power to throw out states' official electoral certificates on grounds of fraud.
- In March, when ABC News' Jonathan Karl asked Trump if he was worried about Pence while the crowd was chanting, Trump defended the crowd, saying they were "very angry" and that it was "common sense" that they would want to stop Congress from certifying the election result. (you know after the whole "hang Mike Pence" stuff)
- Trump released a statement asserting, falsely, that Pence did have such power: "Unfortunately, he didn't exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!" and "they now want to take that right away".
- Pence: "President Trump is wrong. ... Under the Constitution, I had no right to change the outcome of our election."
Your quote:
"""
I'm not one of those that say Trump "really" won in 2020. But I don't see any impropriety in his attempts to plead his case, any more than I see impropriety in Gore's gamesmanship about recounts in 2000.
"""
Maybe I just don't know what the 2000s were like. Did Gore really pressure anyone as hard as Trump clearly deliberately pressured Pence? Is there anyone like Pence in the Gore story that did a complete 180 and was appalled by Gore and no longer endorses him?
4. Same as with the disinformation he spreads. He knows how much power he has wielding his base. Here are a few republican remarks:
- She [Kim Ward] stated that Republican leaders were expected to support Trump's claims and if she had announced opposition to the letter, "I'd get my house bombed tonight"
- The day the suit was filed, Trump warned Georgia attorney general Chris Carr to not rally other Republican officials in opposition to the suit
- After Georgia had twice recounted and twice certified its results, Republican secretary of state Brad Raffensperger received death threats. He was pressured to resign by others in his party, including the state's two senators.
- Trump called the investigations chief in the Georgia Secretary of State's office, who was then investigating allegations of mail ballot fraud, and urged the official to "find the fraud"
- Trump blocked government officials from cooperating in the presidential transition to Joe Biden.
- He repeatedly urged Georgia Governor Brian Kemp to convene a special session of the legislature to overturn Biden's certified victory in the state, and he made a similar plea to the Pennsylvania Speaker of the House.
- In an early January 2021 phone call, he pressed the Georgia secretary of state to "find" the 11,780 votes needed to secure his victory in the state
That last one was a particular holy shit for me. Would help a lot if that one was debunked thoroughly...
Anyway, these are not the actions of a truthseeker whose goal is the truth regardless of whether the truth is there is or is not fraud. These are the actions of someone that has an end-goal goal regardless of the truth.
It's not like he was trying to talk to fellow republicans and have them explain to him how things can "look weird" but still be likely he lost.
5. Is it now? Again, Wikipedia:
"The intent of the scheme was to pass the fraudulent certificates to then-vice president Mike Pence in the hope he would count them, rather than the authentic certificates, and thus overturn Joe Biden's victory. This scheme was defended by a fringe legal theory developed by Trump attorneys Kenneth Chesebro and John Eastman, detailed in the Eastman memos, which claimed a vice president has the constitutional discretion to swap official electors with an alternate slate during the certification process, thus changing the outcome of the electoral college vote and the overall winner of the presidential race. The scheme came to be known as the Pence Card. By June 2024, dozens of Republican state officials and Trump associates had been indicted in four states for their alleged involvement... According to testimony Trump was aware of the fake electors scheme, and knew that Eastman's plan for Pence to obstruct the certification of electoral votes was a violation of the Electoral Count Act."
This doesn't seem like a "normal way to deal with contested votes." Granted there seem to be weird loopholes to make it legal, but seems pretty damn fringe and done in bad faith. i.e. this is not a tactic someone who believes the election was stolen would use. This is the tactic of someone who desperately wants to stay in power at all cost would use.
Also, this takes us back to "there was clearly a concerted plan" from point 2.
6.
"there are reasons to suspect that Epps and his compatriots were Feds trying to incite violence"
I presume you aren't going to drop a bombshell like that without evidence?
"""
the protesters lined up and were admitted to the building by Capitol guards who held the door for them. Video of the event mostly shows people wandering around, sightseeing, while guards stood by to make sure nothing untoward happened.
Police were fucking knocked out blood over their head. And if there is to be any conspiracy theorizing it should probably start with why there was so little police support at the Capital that day - something the current government in power during the riot (Trump) had a say over.
Haven't looked into this myself so don't mean to insinuate anything. But it seems a totally fair question to ask.
""""
Protests at the Capitol are not rare occurrences. This one got very *slightly* out of hand
"""
Can you point to any protest in the Capital that is similarly violent (at least at the level of police being knocked out and suicide-level trauma) that the media considers only considers getting "slightly" out of hand? Like if you can find something similar that was some pro-leftist riot at the Capital where police committed suicide after from the trauma sustained that would help your claim that this was a normal-level thing to happen in the American Capital.
If not, what I am left with is something that fully looks like a concerted effort by Trump to use a mob to pressure the government to get what he wants. I mean hell, he resisted sending in the National Guard and at the rally said he would *never* concede the election. On social media, Trump was suggesting that his supporters had the power to prevent Biden from taking office and One of his tweets, posted on January 6, 2021, at 5:43 a.m., was "Get smart Republicans. FIGHT."
Seriously, what has to be true about the events that unfolded that we must definitively conclude that Trump was using the mob to pressure Pence to overturn the election? What is missing or has to be different?
What about what happened *has* to be different that point 6 is a very reasonable conclusion given all the evidence we have? Tell me what we need to find that you would change your mind. And then commit to changing your mind if we do find it. I am happy to do the same for the reverse. I have already noted some cruxes earlier.
Some other quotes at his rally:
- As to counting Biden's electoral votes, Trump said, "We can't let that happen" and suggested Biden would be an "illegitimate president".
- 'Something's wrong here. Something's really wrong. [It] can't have happened.' And we fight. We fight like Hell and if you don't fight like Hell, you're not going to have a country anymore".
- "going to the Capitol and we're going to try and give [Republicans] the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country"
- "you'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated"
- He called upon his supporters to "fight much harder" against "bad people"; told the crowd that "you are allowed to go by very different rules"; said that his supporters were "not going to take it any longer"
Let's assume Trump has many lawyers on his side that can tell him what he can and cant say if he wanted to rile up a mob. Isn't everything he said and did consistent with what someone smart and careful would do to try and deliberately rile up a mob without getting caught?
7.
Yea but that was after a ton of pressure from his aides. It was only after being pressured by his cabinet, the threat of removal, and many resignations. I forgot which one but on the phone one of his aides even had to say "who do you think you are?" in disbelief when telling Trump he has to end the riot and things are getting out of hand. Because Trump's response was basically something like "well you have to find a way to make this work." I don't like this memory being tenuous so I'll be sure to link evidence to it if I can find the call again (otherwise I'll retract and point out if I find it was a lie)
He used the word "fight" 20 times and the word "peacefully" once in his entire rally.
For me the waiting too long to act isn't nearly as damning as how much damn pressure was needed to get him to talk down the rioters.
There was also the whole trying to seize voting machines thing. Which just by itself is damning.
I mean, I basically agree with this. I think it's a dumb situation to be in, but I blame the Republicans who nominated Trump. Yes, if you nominate a bad enough guy, you can force voters to vote for the other party's crappy candidate just to avoid him. That's not a criticism of the voters' decision algorithm, that's a criticism of the nomination process.
It's not easy for the Republicans, just the Democrats. Back in 2016, the propaganda press gave Trump lots and lots of free publicity, so he could win the primaries.
What's probably not intentional, but still true, is that in 2019 the Democrats, controlling various government units, started criminal cases and lawsuits against Trump, to his considerable benefit as far as getting the nomination went, because of the sympathy vote.
>Back in 2016, the propaganda press gave Trump lots and lots of free publicity, so he could win the primaries.
Was this a concerted effort or just failing businesses chasing ratings? If anything, their "mea culpa" from that situation made them intolerable during Trump's term.
Not a concerted effort, I think. Trump was getting big ratings for them and they followed that incentive gradient, which led in part to his election. They should have ignored him, should have went "huh, interesting, Trump's running again" and moved on, and maybe none of this would ever have happened.
Maybe. There are a lot of other factors for Trump's 2016 win.
I don't think a single democrat I know wouldn't instantly push a button to replace Trump with McCain, or Romney, or Liz Cheney. Trump running is a nightmare opponent for them.
That sounds plausible, but with enough time, you can probably Dutch book them: pick a candidate, let them call him a Nazi fascist racist etc., work themselves into a frenzy, and then offer them the option to replace him with someone else. Then they call HIM a Nazi fascist racist, and so on.
I don't think most of the "free publicity" in 2016 was intended to make Trump the candidate. It was mostly because he was often outrageous and controversial, which pulls in eyeballs. And I don't think liberals expected the unending torrent of negative coverage to help him. David Shor was on the rationally speaking podcast talking about this a while ago, and most Democrat campaigners were wildly wrong about what sort of ads would help persuade swing voters that year.
"The Democrats prosecuted Trump not because they wanted him to be punished but because they wanted to ensure he would be re-nominated in 2020" is an absolutely galaxy-brained take.
In 2016 Hillary preferred Trump, thinking he'd be easy to best. That doesn't make Trump their fault, but it is an irony.
It's like, if you will, Israel supporting Hamas way back because they figured they were so outrageous that they could be leveraged to work against the real, concrete villain, the PLO.
A better analogy might be the USA arming and supporting the Taliban against the Russians in Afghanistan, then in the end the Taliban became *their* problem to deal with.
I accepted this argument in 2016, and think it was largely (if not majority) true, but a lot of the "let's get the GOP to nominate Trump, then we'll win" doofus really learned a lesson.
I'm not sure I'm following the implied argument here.
Suppose your threat model is "Democrats can effectively choose the nominees of both the Democrats and the Republicans". Then the way you should act is...what? Vote for the Republican candidate (that the Democrats selected)?
Yang would have been nice, but we didn't get Yang, and I don't care for any of the jokers we did get. Between the two choices who have a chance, I vaguely prefer Trump, but that's mostly because I want the Democratic party to be a real political party again and so I want them to fail miserably, rather than having a legitimate preference for the man himself.
Also if Trump has his second term we never have to hear about him again.
The model isn't quite that, or you're right. Rather, it's: The Democrats can influence who the Republican nominee is, to be either someone they like more (Jeb Bush) or someone they like less (Trump), but not somebody ideal (Bernie Sanders). If they help Jeb, though, they lose in the general election, and Jeb is almost as bad as Trump (or maybe even worse, since Jeb would be mor effective in office).
I think the Democrats really dodged a bullet, twice, when Cruz and DeSantis lost the nomination. Their rhetoric is milder, but those two know how to fight a bureaucracy and win.
I remember very well Trump saying back then that yes, he didn't win the popular vote, but he didn't campaign for that; he could have won the popular vote if he'd had to, in fact, it would have been easier.
Since when was the Democratic Party line ever "Kamala Harris is absolutely useless"? Not to mention that there was a lot of dissent against Biden between the debate and him stepping down...
It's not a question of whether the Republicans would vote for one of them, but whether someone currently voting for Harris or another Democrat if the Democrats became "too authoritarian." If Democrats will not support any Republicans even if the Democrats are acting as authoritarians, then the argument that we should vote for Harris because "Trump is authoritarian" doesn't mean much.
Larry Hogan, Charlie Baker, Phil Scott, maybe Spencer Cox. I probably wouldn’t vote for Brian Kemp but if he won I wouldn’t be especially upset about it.
None of those would have won a Republican primary in 1980-today. None would have gotten even if you magicked away the winner. High probability of them failing even if you did it to the top 3. Significant even if you removed the top 5.
Kemp could win in some of the 3/5 scenarios. But you still said you wouldnt vote for him. So your opinion is kinda moot. Its like a Republican saying they wouldn't vote for Joe Manchin but wouldn't be terribly upset if he ended as president.
A *federal* primary, you mean? But that just brings us full circle - I'm willing to vote for a Republican and have in fact voted for one of the names listed - and he won! The Republican primary process is such that they'd never pass it to the presidential general, sure, but that doesn't make *me* more of a partisan.
As someone who would not have voted for a Republican presidential candidate in the last 30 years, McCain seemed kind of okay to me, just really hard to vote for because I hated Bush and Obama's speeches were so good. But ~last year I heard McCain talking off-the-cuff about the Ukraine war in 2014, and everything he said precisely matched my own understanding of Ukraine-in-2014 (which I mostly learned about in 2022) so I went away very impressed, especially after these many years of Orange Man, and I really wish he hadn't died.
Romney was more suspicious to me rather than clearly bad, and his vote to impeach Trump really does him credit. So I'd vote Romney if the Democrat was particularly bad. In a Romney-Hillary matchup, I think I could at least stay home on election day without remorse.
Since Schwarzenegger ran as Republican I would've been biased against at the time, but I recently saw he's actually the leader of a climate and environmental action group which makes me go "oh I guess I like you now", and I listened to one of his speeches for it and it was quite good―and pragmatic, a common virtue of Republicans. No native American invited to give a prayer, no irrational worries about all the places microplastics have been located, +1 Arnold.
You can also blame the 8 republicans who agreed he was to blame for Jan 6, but failed to vote to convict because they said “he was no longer president so it doesn’t matter.”
Those are the cowards who could have protected their own party from him but didn’t, who gave in to fears of death threats to their family and mob threats.
With those 8 votes you’d have hit the supermajority needed to convict at 66/100
I think this heuristic is basically a good analog to what most people are choosing this election. People either are voting:
1) on the bold platform of not being Donald Trump OR
2) on the bold platform of not being a democrat
People choose which heuristic to use based on whether they think democrats OR Trump has the highest chance of ending American civilization as we know it.
IMO one might as well flip a coin, but with a slight edge towards democrats edging the chance higher.
The options I see are trump turning USA into some authoritarian South American-like country, or democrats turning us into a slowly dying and useless EU.
Authoritarian countries are worse now, but I suspect EU-like ideals will lead to an eventual total decay of the west without USA to prop it up, eventually being worse.
At the end of the day this decision on the coin flip probably comes down to who one associates with. On the internet I associate with a combo of people, but IRL I associate with rural blue-collar people who I love and respect. Group-think leads to One Obvious Answer, so fuck it I’ll go with it.
I can’t wait to listen in to the results via satellite radio from my hunting camp in national forest where there’s no cell service/internet.
Yeah. Basically "the one pro-Trump argument that genuinely bothers me" from the post, right? I definitely agree with you, including that the worst case with the democrats is probably worse. I'm going with a simple cautious heuristic, though: avoid any short-term disasters. The democrats are just going to keep making things gradually worse. Trump could plausibly make things suddenly greatly worse.
Ah strategic voting, the quickest way to make your vote meaningless. If nothing Trump could do would keep you from voting for him, your vote doesn't matter ... to him. Same with Harris. This is why campaign promises get broken, because your revealed preference is that you don't care whether they actually govern after they get into office.
Contrast this with, say, a vote for Stein or Oliver in a suburb of Philadelphia (assuming Stein/Oliver earned your vote). If Harris wins, her staff will want to win the next election by shoring up support. They will notice that they can get XX,000 voters in certain suburbs of swing state cities if they pursue policies these voters care about. So in the next 4 years, they're going to start governing in a way that they hope will persuade these voters. If Trump wins, his team will make some of the same calculations, ensuring some policy proposals from persuadable voters are incorporated into the next administration to shore up support.
Meanwhile, if you're not a persuadable voter, but are going to vote for "the other candidate" no matter what, there's no reason for a politician to change the way they govern in order to earn your vote next time. They got it without having to earn it.
IMO this was one of Douglas Adams's worst takes. If a randomly chosen ordinary "non-lizard" American magically got a major party nomination, they would likely be crushed in the election, because they wouldn't have anywhere near the star quality of their opponent. Voters largely (and mostly correctly) prefer typical politicians, because they are more charismatic, more competent, and smarter than average people.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w23120 "[Swedish] politicians are on average significantly smarter and better leaders than the population they represent."
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4166034 "We document that electoral candidates nominated by political parties fare better than the office-eligible population in multi-dimensional tests of cognitive and non-cognitive ability conducted by the Finnish Defense Forces. The politicians elected by voters demonstrate even higher levels of ability."
It's also the case that politicians generally have much higher education than the average person, and educational attainment is strongly correlated with intelligence.
Does this apply to Swedish local politicians, or to national politicians only? Because I've seen local guys up close and I'm not convinced they are that much smarter, better, stronger, faster, we can rebuild him, we have the technology - sorry, where was I going?
Yeah, there's not a whole heap to choose between Local Politician and Average Citizen.
MPs do best but local politicians are also substantially better than the average population, especially mayors. See the figure in section 8 in the paper (p. 29 or 31).
Yes, but not all smart/competent/charismatic people are lizards!
Being smart/competent/charismatic is needed to succeed with general voters, sure. But the lizard analogy is also pointing at worse traits needed to succeed behind the scenes and get on the ballot in the first place, relating to being power-hungry, two-faced, open to power-brokering with special interests and party insiders, etc.
I think there are a lot of genuinely good people that voters would vote for, who can't make it through the gauntlet to get their party's support.
Listen, I very badly want Approval voting so that we can break teh two-party system. Any time you want to throw your weight behind that reform, you will be welcomed to the movement.
Until then, it's a two party system, and yes that means choosing the lesser of two evils.
If you don't like the opposing party, nominate someone less evil!
I mean sure if I agreed with you that Jan 6 was so terrible I might be against trump too. If you hurt someone, then yeah you should get prison but what I saw was people entering already open doors, with cops welcoming them in and chatting it up as they wandered the halls. Until Jan6 I actually had no idea that entering the capital was illegal - protesters do it all the time in state capitals and it's celebrated.
I am not a January-6-ologist in the way that some people are, but I predict that people will show up here with evidence that it was pretty hard for people to do January 6 by accident without realizing it was illegal.
I think the argument is that as far as riots go, it wasn't that bad*, and the extent to which the people who participated in it had the book thrown at them was unprecedented.
*people usually point generally to the BLM riots, but the specific example I always think of is CHAZ/CHOP, which was way closer to what I'd call an insurrection, and had a bunch of people end up murdered.
I agree that CHAZ was probably more violent and lawbreakingy than 1/6, but CHAZ was just futzing around with part of Seattle, whereas 1/6 was going against the US Capitol as they were trying to certify an election. Worst case scenario for CHAZ was approximately what happened, worst case scenario for 1/6 is they ... threaten? rough up? Pence into declaring the election for Trump, and then we have some kind of coup or civil war or something. So I think it's fair to classify CHAZ as "random criminality" and 1/6 as something sort of like "attempted coup" (coup is a strong word and I prefer "insurrection", but something along that pathway).
Also, AFAIK Kamala Harris wasn't personally responsible for CHAZ.
> Worst case scenario for CHAZ was approximately what happened, worst case scenario for 1/6 is they ... threaten? rough up? Pence into declaring the election for Trump, and then we have some kind of coup or civil war or something
I don't think the law works that way. You can't just force the Vice President to say some magic words and bam, the election is overturned. I don't know what happens exactly, I assume the Senate reconvenes later once the immediate physical danger was passed and passes a "well actually" resolution. And if that doesn't happen then I'm sure there's all sorts of Supreme Court challenges. There's
If anyone thought the "VP says magic words" theory really worked, then the legislature's top priority in 2021 should have been to change the procedure by which the nomination is confirmed, because it's currently ridiculously non-robust... not against a random group of protestors entering the Capitol but against a VP less scrupulous than Pence.
(I also don't think any of this is physically possible, not for an unarmed group of citizens. Capitol security was shit, apparently, but not close to being that shit.)
1. It wasn’t just “magic words.” The plan involved trying to get Mike Pence to accept fake electors along with the certified ones. They wanted him to announce there were competing electors and ultimately throw the election to the House. Ron Johnson and Mike Lee were both part of this scheme, as were a few House members.
2. The Electoral Count Act was updated last year to clarify that the VP’s role is strictly ministerial, and raised the objection threshold to 20% from the previous one each from the House and Senate.
You can force the Vice President to say some allegedly-magic words and then millions of idiot Trumpists will believe that Trump is so obviously and legitimately President that it's their duty to back his play with their AR-15s. Even the possibility of that, makes 1/6 far more dangerous than CHAZ.
Under the law as it existed four years ago, it basically explicitly said that the Vice President's magic words determined the President. They have now changed the law.
Fair enough, I stand corrected on that particular aspect.
(I still don't believe that the VP's magic words would have determined the President in practice, particularly not if uttered under duress, but it's good to hear that they changed the law to make it more explicit.)
My understanding is that, under the law as it existed four years ago, it was just about possible to argue with a straight face that the Vice President's words determined the President. It has now been explicitly foreclosed.
- There's some Plan B but it takes 66% of Congress and nobody can get 66% of Congress to do anything these days.
- There's some Plan C, but the guy in charge of the relevant Congressional committee is a Republican, plus he just saw Pence get beaten up for defying Trump and he's not that excited about tempting the same fate.
- Trump is inaugurated on January 20, this wasn't "legal" according to the best and smartest interpretation of the law, but who's gonna stop him?
In this specific example, the relevant law dictates that both chambers of Congress have to agree if dual slates of electors are submitted. Say the House backs Trump and the Senate backs Biden. Now the tie is split by which elector slate is certified by the relevant state government executive. None of the Trump alternate slates were certified, so Biden wins. Even if Trump somehow subverted that system, he still has to survive a court challenge. The only way his plan works is if he can convince the state legislatures to throw out the legitimate Biden electors. And all of the relevant statute was amended in 2022 precisely to prevent another incident like this from happening.
The law is not a magic contract enforced by invisible gods. It's a human construct whose enforcement rests on legitimacy and belief. Consider how many times in the past countries had a civil war over whether the dead King's brother or the dead King's bastard son was supposed to be the heir to the throne. Didn't they have a succession law? Sure, but it was muddy enough that both those people could say to have some legitimate claim, and then the fact that various prominent aristocrats had conflicting interests did the rest.
Similarly, there is no magic word that makes the President. But if comes to the point where one political body says that the president is A, and another says that's invalid for <reason>, the president is B, then you have a succession crisis. If roughly 50% of your army's generals are persuaded that their sworn duty is to A, and the rest that it's to B, then odds are you also have a civil war.
I think that's fair but also, maybe Jan 6 also went about as bad as it could've? Like, what if the protestors were not let in? What if there was an actual security detail in place? Even if they got there and threatened pence, would that actually do anything?
> whereas 1/6 was going against the US Capitol as they were trying to certify an election.
Hmm. I wouldn’t vote for Trump were I American, because he’s as mad as a box of frogs. Stability is what is needed now.
However, even insurrection is too big a word here. Coup is ridiculous.
Let’s say the protestors had entered the Capitol and had stopped the ratification. What then?
Is it essential that the vote take place in that building? At that hour? Could the politicians not reconvene in the Tennis Court? You will get the reference.
Does it have to be on Jan 6th? Would Trump have been dictator for ever if the protestors occupied the building until Jan 7th? Jan 8th?
If the vote isn’t timely, does the Supreme Court throw its hands up in the air and issue a judgement saying because the constitution is ambivalent here, and even though the election looks like it went to Biden, with there being no vote because of an illegal entry into Congress the presidency is now Trump’s for life. He can proclaim himself King if he cares, nothing can be done. Meanwhile we might as well disband the court and let’s have no more discussion of constitutions. It was a vote on 3pm Jan 6th or Tyranny.
The word insurrection sounds more formidable to me, I’d expect a tank or two.
> Is it essential that the vote take place in that building? At that hour? Could the politicians not reconvene in the Tennis Court? You will get the reference.
> Does it have to be on Jan 6th?
Legally speaking, yes it had to be in that place at that time, according to the law. Meeting in the tennis courts would technically be a constitutional revolution of sorts.
I believe they've now changed the law so that the event is a formality, rather than the actual determination.
The word "insurrection" is used specifically because it sounds formidable. My personal feeling is that it's like the word "racist". You don't need to microanalyze dog whistles to determine who's secretly racist - an actual racist is all too happy to tell you their racist ideas. (Since they're so rare in modern society, it's too easy to forget what real racists actually look and act like.) And you don't need to pick out whether 3 words in Trump's speech could be interpreted as maybe kinda leaning towards insurrection. An actual "insurrection" would require somebody - ANYBODY - involved to know that they were trying to commit an insurrection. The people merrily tromping through and taking selfies in a building that's mostly open to the public sure weren't thinking that.
Come on, there is no plausible scenario where that happens. Trump made a perfectly legal (though tasteless) challenge of the electors. That is in no way an attempted coup. I agree that he disrupted the perception of the normal transfer of power, but that's all he did. It was a superficial interference with the ceremony and nothing more. I agree that it was tasteless and a black mark on his character, but honestly not any more tasteless than we already knew he was. "Coup" and "Insurrection" are intellectually dishonest political framings. Frankly it's beneath you. It's like accusing Colin Kaepernick of treason because he knelt for the national anthem. Yes it's tasteless, yes it means he's kind of a terrible person, but he's perfectly entitled to do it.
It wasn’t a perfectly legal challenge. He tried to submit fake electors. Dozens of fake electors have been indicted in Michigan, Arizona, Nevada and Michigan, as were a few of Trump’s attorneys.
Fine, that's election fraud, or would have been had it gotten to the point where he was able to submit them. But it didn't. It wouldn't have worked anyway (the Senate wouldn't have voted for them) and it definitely wasn't an insurrection. I don't know the details there but at worst he's guilty of conspiracy to commit election fraud, which if you're honest with yourself you know probably happens on some level in every election. You don't think the Clintons ever did anything shady?
Alternate slates of electors are not "fake electors;" it's a standard practice that Republicans and Democrats have both participated in plenty of times throughout the nation's history. The fact that people got indicted over doing it this time is evidence of Democrat depravity and political persecution, not of those people having done anything wrong.
>CHAZ was just futzing around with part of Seattle
It obviously lacked the national significance of the attack on American democracy on Jan 6, but it should be noted that CHAZ involved multiple shootings, an unarmed Black teenager who was murdered by a lynch mob, and a warlord (who was repeatedly accused of sex trafficking) handing out rifles to random people, and assaulting people on camera, with a Seattle council member not only allowing the carnage to continue, but apologizing for their murders, and praising their occupation of the police station that precipitated the violence.
The aforementioned warlord was never charged for his atrocities and the city instead coordinated with him as a de facto leader.
Multiple city officials illegally destroyed evidence regarding the crimes there.
It was entirely possible that several members of Congress, and maybe Mike Pence, could have been taken hostage or killed. If Pence was killed and a state of emergency was declared, Trump might have tried to do other emergency actions justified by that.
The thing is, the foundational mythology for America *is* that kind of "private citizens rise up against a corrupt/unrepresentative government and take control of their own affairs and declare their own rulers". You have an entire day, 4th July, celebrating that! By force of arms, even!
So I think it's easier for Americans to believe that they are acting in the spirit of the Minutemen and the Founding Fathers by engaging in this sort of protest: of course the cronies of the illegitimate regime call us lawbreakers, but we are the true patriots.
" In 1767, tensions flared again following the British Parliament's passage of the Townshend Acts. In an effort to quell the mounting rebellion, King George III deployed troops to Boston. A local confrontation resulted in the troops killing protesters in the Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770. In 1772, anti-tax demonstrators in Rhode Island destroyed the Royal Navy customs schooner Gaspee. On December 16, 1773, activists disguised as Indians instigated the Boston Tea Party and dumped chests of tea owned by the British East India Company into Boston Harbor. London closed Boston Harbor and enacted a series of punitive laws, which effectively ended self-government in Massachusetts.
In late 1774, 12 of the Thirteen Colonies (Georgia joined in 1775) sent delegates to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia. It began coordinating Patriot resistance through underground networks of committees. In April 1775 British forces attempted to disarm local militias around Boston and engaged them."
'Underground networks of committees' can be construed as 'domestic terrorists'. It all depends who ends up writing the history.
By contrast, the Irish foundational myth is "they went forth to battle, but they always fell". Our successful rebellion succeeded by failing and having the response crushing us be so hard, it got other countries to put pressure on Britain (particularly America, due to the Irish-American campaigning).
If so, that's really bad. That was 250 years ago and what was appropriate and valor-worthy then is no longer now. That mythos needs to die because it is a dangerous one in the world and the country we have today, IMO.
It’s actually very hard to find out about the circumstances of CHAZ; the mayor and chief of police who presumably made the decisions to withdraw police from the area have been mum about it.
January 6, and especially the fake electors scheme, was organized by the sitting president. CHAZ and BLM were not. Biden condemned BLM violence from the very beginning and has made no effort to pardon anyone associated with it.
And even if the didn’t organize it, he did nothing to stop it for three hours despite please from his staff, daughter and various Fox News personalities.
Also, the day before, there was a strange announcement that Charles Grassley would preside instead of Mike Pence, but Pence shut that down. When that didn’t work they apparently were hoping to get Pence out during the chaos, something the Secret Service tried to do but which Pence resisted.
Then there’s the weird fact that all the Secret Service text massages were deleted.
I understand why the riot and other stuff gets conflated: it creates striking imagery and bolsters the coup rethoric. But it doesn't seem like a winning message: as an (admittedly somewhat unsympathetic) outside observer to the BLM riots, I could appreciate the left-wing approach on libertarian grounds, but after J6 I don't know jf I can reconcile it as anything but "I want my guys to go free and their guys to rot in jail forever".
Okay, then why have 4 times more people been prosecuted in connection with Jan 6 than in connection with BLM/Antifa violence during the summer of Floyd, despite the latter involving hundreds of times more violent actors over a span of months, not hours, and resulting in orders of magnitude more deaths and property damage?
I’m not here to defend to BLM rioters. I’ll just note that we’ve had thousands of riots in our history, many of them extremely bloody. But we’ve only had one president who wouldn’t commit to the peaceful transfer of power.
Fine, Trump is the first. How does this make him the greater evil, compared to an entire political party that is obviously far more willing and able to inflict politicised violence?
The worst case scenario for the BLM riots was that the rioters succeeded in storming the White House and killed Trump and/or his family. That's, uh... also another way to impact election outcomes, and probably more reliable than roughing up whoever was in the capitol that day.
> The worst case scenario for the BLM riots was that the rioters succeeded in storming the White House and killed Trump and/or his family
Or one or more Supreme Court justices. Remember, at least one actual assassination attempt was made, and only averted because the guy's sister (I think it was his sister, at least) talked him down at the last minute.
Also true. It amazes me that people somehow forget how Trump survived at least two assassination attempts, enabled by what can charitably be described as conspicuous ineptitude on the part of the secret service.
Only one of them was an attempt. The other was an attempt at making an attempt, but didn't actually rise to the level of an attempt. There are many other attempted attempts in history that no one pays attention to.
You also have to be pretty naive to say Trump had nothing to do with 1/6, he was just holding a rally a couple of blocks away from the capitol on the day of the certification after losing an election that he didn't admit on losing.
I was going to go to DC on Jan 6 to enjoy a laugh at the loons, but I can assure you that once the dumb mob and smart provocateurs broke through and the police were ushering people in an orderly fashion I would have entered as well. Judging the 700th guy to enter the capital building as having committed any kind of crime at all is quite sickening.
Jan 6 isn't principally about the riot per se. The trespassing, even the violence, is just what's most visibly striking, but it's not what makes it terrible. I would agree with you that it's not that big a deal if it was just a protest-turned-riot.
The real story of Jan 6 is the story of Trump's attempt to overturn the results of the election by every possible means. The riot was the last-ditch attempt in a long series of attempts that had been going on for months prior. The real story of Jan 6 is that it was part of an attempted coup. That's what makes it completely disqualifying, what makes it so terrible that this election isn't about politics-as-usual.
> The real story of Jan 6 is the story of Trump's attempt to overturn the results of the election by every possible means. ... The real story of Jan 6 is that it was part of an attempted coup.
No. It was not. Please don't go spreading around wild allegations so far removed from the facts that even the New York Times has debunked them.
The simple, undeniable fact of the matter is, while the Trump rally in which he allegedly incited the riot was still going on, the riot was already in full swing. Before he ever spoke the allegedly inciting words, the Capitol had already been breached. Unless you wish to submit evidence that President Trump or one of his surrogates *literally has a time machine,* it is physically impossible for this accusation to be true.
What I understood from Matt's comment is: the January 6 rioters were inspired by exactly the same election denial from Trump that underpinned his refusal to concede, his pressuring of swing state election officials, his endless frivolous litigation, his refusal to initiate the presidential transition, and his holding of the same day's rally in the first place.
The Trump campaign had been sowing the seeds of that riot literally for months before Jan 6. The plan to pressure Mike Pence to reject the Presidential Elector votes had been in swing since the results were known. The rally, the speeches by Trump's cronies (like Eastman and Giuliani), and the speech by Trump himself, were all part of this same plot. They were the last ditch effort to prevent the ordinary procedure from continuing.
None of what you said contradicts any of that. Again, the point isn't "Trump incited people to violence at the Capitol." The point is the whole series of events that led there. In other words, the deliberate, months-long attempt to coup the government in favor of Trump.
Your assertion that “the riot was in full swing” is misleading. Trump’s entire speech concluded at around 1:10 pm. The first barriers well outside the Capitol were breached at 12:50, 20 minutes prior. The actual Capitol Building wasn’t entered by force until around 2:10, a full hour after Trump’s speech. No one would reasonably consider the Capitol riot was in “full swing” until the rioters at least entered the Capitol Building. And by that time they’d certainly know of Trump’s remarks more than an hour prior.
Also, I can find no evidence that the NYT debunked the claim that Trump played a role on January 6th in inciting the Capitol riot. Can you link to it?
Yes it was. Why did the protestors say "Hang Mike Pence"? What did the protestors, and Donald Trump, want Pence to do? What did Pence mean when he later said that Trump asked him to "choose between Trump and the constitution"? January 6 was the final part of the "fake electors plot", which is well documented.
This is a deep misunderstanding of the issue. Even if Trump *hadn't even asked anyone to go to the Capitol during his speech at all*, he would still be responsible for most of what happened at the Capitol that day.
Does he bear full responsibility? No. Would he bear more responsibility if he had said "go there and break in and show those people who we are"? Yes. But these standards are absurd.
Yes it was. You are just uninformed or are trying to burry your head in the sand. Which is more likely. Trump absolutely did try to overturn the election. He was pretty incompetent about it, because he is not the smartest. But he absolutely did try. And it is obvious.
What's amazing is how nobody remembers the faithless electors and related efforts of 2016/17, and the rioting and attempts to disrupt the EC voting and inauguration.
I think you are focusing on a single tree that is wrong about what Trump did and missing the forest of all the stuff Trump seems to have actually done.
It is possible both that the liberal media spread misinformation about Trump's allegedly inciting words AND for him to have spent over a month of concerted effort to attempt a coup.
It is a Motte and Bailey fallacy. Your Motte is that Trump never spoke the alleged inciting words. Your Bailey is that Trump never actually tried to overturn the election through over a month of concerted effort that resembles a coup.
Also... this even seems besides the point because event your Motte isn't that strong. I watched it all live. I only thought "holy shit that is not a protest that is a now a riot" after Trump was done speaking. As someone further down posted:
> The first barriers well outside the Capitol were breached at 12:50, 20 minutes prior. The actual Capitol Building wasn’t entered by force until around 2:10, a full hour after Trump’s speech. No one would reasonably consider the Capitol riot was in “full swing” until the rioters at least entered the Capitol Building. And by that time they’d certainly know of Trump’s remarks more than an hour prior.
Where's this NYT debunking you are referencing btw?
I think that if "the forest of all the stuff Trump seems to have actually done" is on the table, then so must be the forest of things Clinton, Biden, Harris, and the DNC have done, which puts us close enough to square one that you might want to rethink that.
Rethink what? Square one what? Did you even read the article this is a comment section to? The 4 counterarguments Scott brings up I think argue convincingly that the leftist monoculture can be very bad but it is still better to support right now than Trump.
Also if you pointed out something bad Harris did and my response was "well if that's on the table we need to consider the bad things Trump did and you might want to rethink that" I would look avoidant at best and like I am simply conceding that it doesn't matter and Harris is that bad at worst.
It doesn't counter-argue the claim that Harris is bad at all. Same goes for you simply pointing at Clinton, Biden, Harris. I don't care about these politicians nor particularly support them anyway.
This is some of the info about Trump that makes a difference for me. They didn’t necessarily succeed in making obvious any ties to Russian organized crime per se, but he’s been swimming in “organized crime” water for a long time due to the old school NY crime families and his business deals.
His “normal” is this tradition of dominance at any cost. It’s fundamentally contrary to literal democracy. He didn’t do a good enough job last time partly because he incorrectly assessed the people around him. That problem has no doubt been addressed and he has different people visible around him now, plus all the old connections.
The quasi-tourist riot didn’t work because most of the rest of the system did their jobs. People think the ones they like will win the revolution. I am not looking forward to the mangled monstrosity of a gutted government I think Trump would usher in. I don’t see “satisfying, seamless conservatism” coming, I see a big mess with plenty more opportunities for organized crime and other outside infiltration. Jan 6 had volunteers and a Hollywood quality but his Act II would be weirder and worse. I think.
Tell me if you think those people were welcomed in by police, and that they would not have reasonably known they were violating the law.
The point of January 6 was to coerce Mike Pence into throwing out the electoral votes of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, New Mexico, Georgia, and Arizona. As part of his plot to get these EVs thrown out - representing tens of millions of voters - Donald Trump engaged in a criminal conspiracy to create seven false slates of electors. Loraine Pellegrino, one of these false electors for Arizona, has already plead guilty; many others are in the process of being charged for falsely representing themselves as the legitimate electors. The riot is just the cherry on top of an attempted coup.
I'm not sure if you're interested in changing your mind, but on the off chance that you are, you should read the Eastman memos (https://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2021/images/09/20/eastman.memo.pdf). They detail exactly what Trump's plan was on J6. It's a very short document, but a quick summary is:
- Manufacture claims of fraud
- Use those claims as a justification to throw out electoral votes from blue swing states
- Claim that with the remaining electoral votes, Trump won
It's a really dangerous idea, one that is about as close to 'only counting the votes with my name on it and discarding the rest'. I would focus less on the riots, they are a bit of a distraction, and instead focus on the legal play that almost would have worked if Pence was a weaker man.
There were extensive violent clashes between the rioters and capitol police on January 6, including one police officer who was beaten to death by Trump's supporters.
This is a blatant lie. The autopsy of Brian Sicknick is publicly available, anyone can read it. He died of multiple strokes that were ruled natural causes; there was no evidence of blunt trauma or allergic reaction to the chemical (pepper spray) the rioters used on him.
Hey, just wanted to say thanx for posting this comment. I believed for a long time the death was a direct result of the rioters and never rechecked on the news later. I just did a double-take and you are indeed correct. I believed an untruth.
This does interestingly mean the rioters didn't actually directly kill a single person. This is an important update for me.
No problem. I think the culture war nature of this thread drew in a lot of low quality posts. Stuff that was just wrong, and could be verified as wrong with a cursory effort.
Yea kinda embarrassing how quickly it is verifiable. Up until recently also didn't believe how many Isrealis the IDF's helicopters killed after October 7th. The Hannibal Directive I knew existed, but I read some debunking article of it at the time and concluded it was Hamas propaganda. Had a friend point out actually they were used so did a double-take like I did with your comment and... sure enough. Same story as the fire extinguisher. The debunking article I read closer to October 7th was just lies.
If I am any evidence - I think it is just too useful to lie when something crucially damning is happening for implicated parties. Because even truth-seeking people cannot properly fact check so close to the event (or it is very difficult). Then they believe the wrong thing and don't self-correct until only months later when the lie can no longer be propped up and it becomes easily verifiable it was a lie all along.
This is laughably bad faith. We all watched it, the video and photos are readily available. Police were being bashed with fire extinguishers. Police were defending barriers with water cannons. It was abundantly obvious you can't storm the capitol. Congress people were fleeing for their lives and hiding in closets. Quite honestly, you should be ashamed to be either this ignorant or this apologist of terrorism on US soil.
Ok, so I believed the exact same thing as you. Except if you look on say the wikipedia page now it says this about his death:
"Multiple media outlets reported Sicknick's death was due to injuries he sustained, but months later the Washington, D.C. medical examiner reported there were no injuries to Sicknick... The media, however, continued to incorrectly report for weeks that Sicknick had died after being struck in the head with a fire extinguisher during the unrest, citing two "anonymous law enforcement officials" as their source"
And NONE of the reddit photos you linked show police being bashed by fire extinguishers.
I've changed my mind. It does look like it was a lie from from the leftist side to get more clicks. The left lies as well unfortunately.
I won't be following your endorsement but I appreciate how balanced this article was, without resorting to 'Trump is a Nazi dictator' histrionics. One of the best election articles I've seen this cycle.
One thing you did not mention at all was Trump's age and VP choice - I like Vance and would be happy for him to step up a leadership role within the party, if not take over the Presidency, and his career would obviously be benefited substantially by a Trump win.
I did find this bit quite remarkable after yesterday's post on Prop 36, which seemed totally fine with shoplifters and drug addicts violating norms: "A single shoplifter or paint-thrower does very little damage, but this is true only because we jealously protect the norms against these kinds of people. If we truly gave up on punishing shoplifters, everyone would steal from everyone else and civilization would collapse. Asking “why should we punish shoplifters when they do so little damage?” is like asking “why should we vaccinate against measles when measles is so rare?”
Clara included a slightly different set of caveats than I would have. If I'd written that article, it would have stressed that current law mandates six months in jail for shoplifting, the new law mandates three years in jail, and [long collection of studies that I would have rounded up] shows us that criminals aren't especially moved by the difference between six months and three years of jail time when "deciding" whether to commit crimes.
I definitely don't think "don't punish shoplifters at all" is a good strategy.
If we want to get all game-theory about it, the punishment should be set at the equilibrium between where the resulting people sitting in prison are more of a loss to society than the negative externalities from the shoplifting feedback loop.
Ideally though you'd be able to think up cheaper alternatives than prison for disincentivizing shoplifting. Maybe some combination of good surveillance + high policing and better economic/welfare policies such as zoning reform, better transit, an LVT, and a minimal UBI?
Fresh off of jury duty, I decided that we should stop worrying so much about deterrence and incapacitation and such.
Punishments should be set no more harshly than the jury pool can bear. They won’t convict if they feel it’s too harsh, or they’ll want an unreasonably high standard of proof.
My impression is that probability of punishment matters more to deterrence than severity of punishment. I'm also under the impression that CCTV security tapes _potentially_ make a lot of shoplifting straightforward to prosecute, but that stores don't find it worthwhile. Maybe, instead of changing the sentence, the change should be to give the stores more of an incentive to prosecute? It is tricky to avoid incentivizing perverse outcomes, but maybe subsidize prosecution in cases leading to a conviction? ( but not so much that stores start faking evidence... )
Yeah, I'm thinking if there's like a way to easily catch and civily fine shoplifters, even for minimal sums, that might be ideal at discouraging people at the start from taking more. No one starts out shoplifting hundreds of dollars of merchandise after all. Maybe big box stores should be empowered to hire employees that follow shoplifters home, report the addresses they find to the police so the police can verify that the person caught on video shoplifting lives at the address. If so, write them a ticket (like a traffic ticket), put their face, address, and name in a database, and leave.
Many Thanks! Yes, something like that might work. I'm not sure if civil fines will work (a shoplifter with zero assets can't be effectively fined), but something that costs them even minimal amounts of time, _if_ it has a high probability of happening, might be enough to discourage them.
"Maybe some combination of good surveillance + high policing and better economic/welfare policies such as zoning reform, better transit, an LVT, and a minimal UBI?"
According to this law firm's website, it's not a blanket six months in jail, it's *up to* six month. And there are ways to avoid that, if you (or your lawyers) can wangle your way onto a 'diversion program':
Shoplifting in California is normally a misdemeanor offense that carries a maximum potential penalty of:
- up to six months in the county jail, and
- a fine of up to $1,000.
If someone is accused of stealing or attempting to steal items valued at more than $950, then that individual can be charged with Penal Code 487 PC grand theft.
Grand theft can be charged as a felony that carries up to three years in state prison.
There are situations where a defendant can face felony charges punishable by up to 3 years in jail and a $10,000 fine.
Felony penalties apply if defendant has a prior conviction for any of the following crimes:
- a sex crime that requires registration as a sex offender,
- any sex crime on a minor under 14 years old,
- any sex crime committed by using force, violence, or threats,
- gross vehicular manslaughter under Penal Code 191.5 PC,
- murder, attempted murder, or solicitation under Penal Code 187 PC,
- any serious or violent felony punishable by life in prison or death
Civil demand letter
Business owners that shoplifters victimize will also often make civil demands under California Penal Code 490.5 PC.
A civil demand requires the shoplifter to pay restitution to repay the business owner for the items stolen or damaged by the alleged shoplifter.
These letters are sent by law firms representing the business owners and can demand up to $500 to recover costs incurred by the alleged shoplifting.
Proposition 47
Before Proposition 47 was passed in 2014, you could face Penal Code 459 burglary charges with felony penalties, but now you must be charged with misdemeanor PC 459.5 shoplifting.
Anyone convicted of burglary prior to the new [law] who actually committed shoplifting, are eligible to apply for resentencing.
What Are Some Defenses to Shoplifting?
The crime of shoplifting requires a specific criminal intent to steal the items from a store prior to entry.
Thus, perhaps we can make an argument you developed the intent to steal after you entered the business.
While this defense still can result in a conviction for petty theft, it may help avoid a conviction of shoplifting in certain cases.
If an individual forgot to pay for an item or was planning to pay for an item they were carrying in a bag or pocket while inside the store, then a mistake defense can be raised.
Prosecutors will look to every fact and circumstance in a shoplifting case to prove an individual's criminal intent as it is often the key element that needs to be proven in a shoplifting case.
While not technically defenses, there are other ways that you may be able to resolve your shoplifting case without ending up with a criminal conviction. These methods include:
Diversion program: if accepted into a diversion program, you will have to agree to abide by a number of conditions set by the court, such as community service or restitution. If you complete these conditions successfully, your case will be dismissed, and you will not end up with a criminal record.
Civil compromise: this is an agreement between a shoplifter and the business where the items were alleged to have been stolen. In a civil compromise, the shoplifter agrees to repay the costs incurred because of the theft or attempted theft, and the business agrees not to prosecute the shoplifter.
Further, through prefiling intervention, we might be able to negotiate with the prosecutor to avoid filing criminal charges before court.
If you have questions about a criminal case, then it is important that you speak to an experienced criminal defense attorney."
Increasing jail sentences for petty crimes is prosocial even if it doesn't a priori disincentivize the crimes, because it reduces both time available for recidivism and the birth rate of petty criminals
The current law doesn't mandate six months in prison though. That's a huge misrepresentation of how our justice system actually works in practice. The maximum allowable sentence is 6 months under Prop 47. Nobody actually serves 6 months. I'm not an expert but probably judges give out an average sentence of 2-3 months after a trial. But 95+% of cases end in a plea bargain, and a plea bargain is less, maybe 2-3 weeks of jail time. And that's before we even start talking about progressive DAs giving offenders 1 week or less. So the comparison should be more like 2 weeks in jail vs 12 weeks in prison, which is much more significant.
I'd be interested to learn more if any commentors can post more info about the average sentence, maximum observed sentence, plea bargain process, etc. for shoplifting . I'd be impressed if someone could find a case of anyone serving more than 3 months for shoplifting in the whole state, or 1 month for shoplifting in SF specifically. Also the plea bargain negotiation seems interesting. The criminal has no leverage because they're poor and they only have a public defender. But the DA has no leverage because they don't want to spend an exorbitant amount paying a judge, prosecutor, court secretary, etc. for a trial about shoplifting less than $950, and then some progressive jury member who doesn't want to prosecute non-violent crime causes a hung jury.
+1 on this take. I support Trump but I appreciate Scott’s good faith attempt to articulate positions for both sides. His fair-mindedness, which spills over into his commenters, is the reason I hang out in this corner of the Internet.
Many of them can, especially around here. But reasonableness is anticorrelated with popularity these days, so I don't blame you if you haven't noticed.
When did Trump say "let's decapitate that reporter"? I'm pretty sure if that were a thing, Google could've found it when I searched for it. I remember he "urged the military to handle 'radical left lunatics' on Election Day", but for Trump that kind of rhetoric just seems like an average Tuesday, and his actual conduct as president suggests the kinds of things he'll do in a second term, which is to say: he'll do a wide variety of bad things, divide the country even more, weaken democracy even more, maybe cause some economic problems that benefit at least some of the wealthiest, suck up to dictators and seem overly approving of them...
but probably not decapitate any reporters, commit any genocides, or become a genuine dictator even if he wants to. I think 'Trump is a Nazi dictator' histrionics are counterproductive.
Good piece! I particularly like the point about how nearly all the bad things that Harris advocates like price controls are also things Trump advocates and the comparison to Chavez. I think it's worth emphasizing the J6 stuff: like, he attempted to pull off a coup. The day of January 6 where the mob stormed the capitol is a much less big deal than the months long conspiracy to get fake electors to unilaterally declare him president in violation of the law.
I have no idea if he was, but I am not particularly sure why pointing out that someone was wrong on a single issue 15 years ago indicates something wrong with their judgement now. It would be different if you could point to a consistent record of errors or point out a continuing systematic error that has lasted well over a decade but in their absence it provides little illumination.
My once liking Chavez, who ended up becoming a dictator, contributes to me now shunning politicians with strong authoritarian tendencies, which is why I supported neither Trump nor Sanders eight years ago.
They weren't "fake" electors, alternate elector slates are part of the process of legal challenges to elections. The electoral college results have a submission deadline in mid December, and if they aren't submitted they can't be used in any circumstance. So if Trump won an election lawsuit after Dec 14 2020, but didn't have alternate electors submitted, there would be no remedy and Trump would still lose even though he proved in court there was election fraud. Alternate electors were used in the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy election, in Hawaii, because there was a recount underway at the time of the deadline. You can find op-eds arguing that Al Gore should have used an alternate elector slate in Florida if he wanted to drag out his election challenge, or the Democrats should have used them in Pennsylvania in 2020 if things dragged on too long there. Alternate electors are not illegal or even necessarily shady.
The Electoral Count Act of 1887 lays out how alternate elector slates are handled. The process is to have the Senate and House independently determine which slate is legitimate; if they can't agree, the slate verified by the governor of the state in question wins. If you want to know where Trump went wrong, search for the Eastman memo. The VP does not have the authority to unilaterally choose elector slates.
No, they were fake electors, that's why they are being charged. Loraine Pellegrino has already plead guilty, and others are in the process of being prosecuted.
Alternate slates of electors have to be empowered by the legitimate legislature.
I don't think this is true, or otherwise the 1960 electors would also have been illegal. The ECA is rather vague and only requires that the electors be ratified by the state executive. Further, I don't think the alternate slates have to be certified to be legitimate or that wouldn't be the proposed tie breaking method. But I'm not sure and if you have any links to the relevant US code or such I would appreciate it.
The 1960 electors were all done in the open, with the state government ultimately agreeing they should be the slate. On Dec 19, the Dem slate cast their ballots one minute after the Rep slate, at the same place. That's different from getting eleven of your buddies to sign a document saying that they're "duly elected and qualified Electors for President and Vice President of the United States of America from the State of Arizona" with no involvement from the state legislature whatsoever. Otherwise I could just make a slate of electors myself for every state and try to send it to Congress, and it would be all gucci, when that's obviously filing false documents (and illegal, and basically what Trump did*).
*: In most cases. PA and NM both included hedging in their language, so their electors aren't being charged.
Their votes didn't have any legal value because they were contingent on the various state elections being declared fraudulent, which obviously never happened. But the text of the ECA only stipulates that the electors must be officially selected by the states, which they were. The text of it here: https://govtrackus.s3.amazonaws.com/legislink/pdf/stat/24/STATUTE-24-Pg373.pdf
The ECA was amended in 2022, because it was rather vague and didn't prevent these kinds of things from happening.
They were indicted, which doesn't mean much. A couple people took plea deals before trial, but again this doesn't get into the legal theory of why what they did was unlawful. AFAICT, the alternate electors were within the legal process established by Article II and the ECA.
Now, it's entirely possible they violated state law in their individual jurisdictions. I don't know the penal code for every single state where this happened, but all of the indictments seem to be some form of a filing false documents charge.
> Has anyone done a deep dive on the fake electors scheme? And have there been other instances of similar behavior in American history?
It's called "submitting an alternate slate of electors," and it's been a common practice throughout American history. Practically any time there's been a state where the race was close enough to be contested, both parties, as a standard practice, will submit their electors and then wait for the recounts to resolve which slate becomes "official."
Democrats calling this completely standard practice, which they have engaged in plenty of times over the years, a "scheme" to submit "fake electors" in this particular instance, is nothing more than a game of Calvinball.
Purely as a matter of empirics, in how many previous elections has a state sent more than one slate of electoral votes to the senate? My understanding is that it happened once, in the 1880s, and it almost caused a constitutional crisis that led to the ECA. And then it happened again, once, in the 1960s in the Nixon/Kennedy case. And that's it. If it happened more than that, I'd love to hear about it, because I have done a lot of research on this and may have missed something.
The first time was 1876. Also apparently someone in Oregon sent in an alternate slate in 1888, but it was regarded as a joke (possibly about the ECA that was passed the year before?) and ignored. 1960 in Hawaii was the second (real) time, and that's it afaik.
Problem is that the way in which they went about alternative electors would have ended up with them losing 0-9 in the supreme court in the opinion of the people who orchestrated the whole alternative electors plot. This should give you a clear indication that what they were doing was not legal.
- Use those claims as a justification to throw out electoral votes from blue swing states
- Claim that with the remaining electoral votes, Trump won
It's a really dangerous idea, one that is about as close to 'only counting the votes with my name on it and discarding the rest'. I would focus less on the riots, they are a bit of a distraction, and instead focus on the legal play that almost would have worked if Pence was a weaker man.
Thank you. This is what I was looking for. Definitely a shady play. I agree with you, the riot was mostly just noise the media could cry about for 4 years.
To play devil's advocate: Does the lack of voter id laws in many blue and swing states concern you?
A question that cuts to the point: is it possible to legally demonstrate fraud under circumstances where ID is not checked?
I haven't felt the need to consider whether voter ID laws are good or bad because I don't think they are material to how I feel about J6. The Trump team filed 60 (!) cases alleging fraud in a variety of ways. By the time of J6, all but 4 had been dismissed, including from R appointed judges. So a lot of people with a lot of motivation looked into this and couldn't find anything.
(And even if you ignore the cases, Trump's DOJ, Republican state officials, and Republican election officials ALSO couldn't find anything, even when directly asked by Trump. Here's an example transcript of a call where Trump is trying to get a Georgia official to admit there was fraud, and the official goes, paraphrasing, "I'm sorry man, I really wish there was, but there isn't": https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/03/politics/trump-brad-raffensperger-phone-call-transcript/index.html)
- More faithless electors defected against Clinton than against Trump
- The 2020 schemes were completely driven by Trump; Clinton did not create or promote the 2016 faithless elector campaign
- The 2016 pro-Clinton faithless elector campaign was conducted in public, whereas Trump/Eastman's secret plan was designed to blindside everyone who wasn't in on it.
- Electors' freedom is clearly implied by the constitution, otherwise there's no reason for electors to exist in the first place. Even if state law creates a penalty for faithless voting, once a faithless vote is cast, people might raise their eyebrows, but the vote is valid and will be counted. Thus, no conspiracy was necessary. But Trump/Eastman's plan involved misleading their so-called "fake electors", i.e. if the electors knew what Trump/Eastman were planning to do, they likely never would have agreed to act as a second slate of electors in the first place. The plan also required Pence to disregard federal law without seeking a court ruling on their ad-hoc self-serving theory that the law was unconstitutional.
- In 2016 Clinton won the popular vote, which motivated the campaign
- In 2020 Trump knew that he lost both the popular vote and electoral college, after convincing his fans beforehand that the election would be rigged and encouraging them to prepare to intervene ("Proud Boys? Stand up and stand by!")
- The 2016 campaign was simple; Trump's scheme was elaborate, with many moving parts
- After losing, Trump attempted to mislead the public and convince many officials to act immorally and/or illegally in order to produce an outcome that was arguably, itself, constitutional in a narrow technical sense.
I just learned that Nick Fuentes prefers Game of Thrones to Lord of the Rings, so he's dead to me. Or he would be, if I ever knew anything about him or cared 😁
I say, It's Her Turn Now! For Jill Stein - this is her third bite at the cherry, after 2012 and 2016. She was even accused of the dreaded Russian collusion, God bless her. So I think she should have her chance to sit in the White House and introduce her own Green Party bills if she wants to do so.
Trump was President 4 years, and couldn't keep the bureaucracy from defeating him or even to stop the Justice Dept. from suppressing the Hunter Biden tax investigation or using lawfare against him. He's no dictator; he couldn't even dictate to a secretary if she had civil service protection.
The Democrats, on the other hand, has the media, the FBI, the CIA, the State Dept., the military, and the rest of the bureaucracy. And they don't even bother to pretend that it's Joe Biden or Kamala Harris who is running things. Don't you find that disturbing?
I agree that one small shoplifter can't damage the company. But if you get lots of them, because shoplifting is easy/fun/not a crime/not prosecuted, it adds up. Idiot teenager who steals a lipstick because she's on a sub-reddit that boasts about boosting stuff from stores isn't a problem. Gangs of teenagers doing it? That starts to become "we have to lock up our goods, or at least keep them behind the counter where the sales assistant hands them out, and this inconveniences our ordinary customers, who may become so aggravated, they stop coming to our store".
Then add in organised criminal shoplifting, and it does become a real problem.
"A man who carried out 12 shoplifting offences in Cork City was jailed for seven months as the sentencing judge said shopkeepers were challenged by such thefts as they strive to pay their staff, rates and other business expenses.
...Previous to the 12 new theft offences, the defendant had 205 convictions, including 37 for theft, 31 for being threatening and abusive and 50 for being drunk and a danger."
People are naturally sympathetic to stories of "person arrested for small theft, wanted to feed their children" and I'm sympathetic to that myself, *when* it's genuine. But again, professional criminals use children as decoys when going in to steal, and use pleas of "I was only trying to feed my kids" when the fact is that they routinely engage in theft:
"A mother of three is starting a 10-month jail term as a result of the theft of €24 worth of groceries from an Aldi supermarket.
What made the shoplifting offence by Mary Cash more serious was the fact that she had 36 previous convictions for theft, the court was told.
A sentence of three months was imposed on her for this latest offence committed on September 25, 2023, in Aldi at The Elysian building in Cork.
Compounding matters, the 38-year-old woman had a 10-month suspended jail sentence hanging over her. That sentence had been imposed for previous thefts but suspended on the condition that she would not commit any more offences for the following year.
The September 25 offence triggered an application by the prosecution to revoke that suspension."
I do see why courts and police don't bother with 'small' crimes as a waste of time and effort, but on the other hand, a lot of small crimes add up, and someone who gets away with small crimes may be likely to keep committing them, or to move on to more serious offences.
"A woman allegedly shoplifted a number of items from Penneys on her way to court to appear on other shoplifting charges, a court has heard.
Lisa Mongan appeared at Letterkenny District Court in Co Donegal charged with stealing property valued at between €400 and €600 of cosmetics and clothing from Penneys at Letterkenny Shopping Centre.
The court was told that gardaí have CCTV footage which shows Ms Mongan (33) lifting items and placing them into her bag before walking out without paying. None of the items were recovered.
The incident happened at around 10am on Wednesday morning, moments before she was due in court on similar charges."
Declaration of bias: worked in retail many, many moons ago; was targeted by organised shoplifters, they distracted me and made off with lottery ticket cash, I got hauled over the coals by my manager for it, so I am on the side of "yes arrest the so-and-sos" 😀
Yes, I did read Part III. I've just written up some disagreements. It's embarassingly long, but that's because I respect you and wanted to give as good a reply as I could in half an hour.
Argument 1. The Democrats are slowly and quietly eroding democracy, but Trump is attacking it outright.
Counterargument 1. First, think about what Trump’s done to democracy. Nothing, except cast doubt on the integrity of the 2020 election. There, the real question is whether there was really zero cheating as almost all the media says, or at least a trivial amount of cheating, whcih is what some intellectuals say. It is begging the question to say that complaining about a stolen election is anti-democratic.
What about January 6? That was a riot, never truly investigated, probably instigated by the Left, possibly even with FBI help. Who benefited from it? Who *could* have benefited from it? The riot cut off the planned debate on whether the election was stolen, and gave the Democrats a cudgel to use for 4 years. See https://www.unz.com/article/remembering-the-reichstag-fire/ .
What Trump *has* done is talk very wildly about things like throwing Hillary Clinton in jail. But we all know that he is constantly hyperbolic. His talk is poetry, not prose, in the sense that it conveys meaning well, but not the literal meaning. He never did put Hillary in jail, and she undoubtedly committed an illegality (was it criminal or civil? I think it was criminal for Genl. Schwarzkopf) with her use of confidential info.
What about the Democrats? The reason their illegalities seem mild is because the media won’t cover them as anti-democratic. The unilateral forgiveness of student loans was illegal and an offense against democracy, even though it doesn’t sound dangerous. What about the hundreds of Jan 6 felonies misusing a false-records statute, which the Supreme Court threw out recently? What about the prosecutions of numerous Trump officials, and of Trump himself? Don’t say: “Republicans deserve it; Democrats don’t.”
The Democrats have seriously proposed packing the Supreme Court, and getting rid of the electoral college. They have overthrown a President— the Biden disappearance— and chosen a presidential candidate who had no popular support even in the Democratic Party.
So, the Democrats walk softly but carry a big stick. Trump does the opposite.
Argument 2. The Democrats have two serious obstacles to destroying democracy: the Supreme Court, and their lack of internal unity. Both of those favor the Republicans.
Counterargument 2. The Supreme Court would also stop Trump from becoming a dictator. We have no evidence to the contrary. The 6 more Republican justices, unlike the 3 Democratic justices, do not vote in lockstep. Also, it is not true that the Democrats have less unity. How many Democratic officeholders have condemned Joe Biden or Kamala Harris? Trump has lots of his former officials and lots of Republican leaders who hate him, and are willing to say so in public. Half the party, at least, has distaste for him— I, myself, am an example— and he is actually to the left of the Republican Party, a feature concealed by how willing he is to talk big about how bad the establishment is.
Argument 3. It’s bad if you want to “be pro-freedom, pro-liberalism, and pro-democracy, but didn’t really take a stand against somebody trying to attack enemy politicians and rig an election.”
Counterargument 3. I think maybe you were getting tired of writing at that point, as I am now myself! Otherwise, you’d think about how viciously the Democrats attack Trump. Has Trump even called Harris a Communist? He has obvious contempt for her, but that’s his opinion and why should he hide it? And “rig an election”? How is Trump doing that? The Democrats, on the other hand, … well, suppressing the NY Post’s Hunter story, Pfizer delaying vaccine approval just so Trump wouldn’t get credit before the electoin, changes in voting rules (in PA saying absentee ballots wouldn’t be checked for signature mismatch), the media propagandizing, and the internet platforms throttling conservatives. . .
Argument 4. Whatever bad things the Democrats do or intend to do, Trump would also do if he could get away with it.
Counterargument 4. Maybe he’d like to— he says wild things, but historically he has been all talk and no action. Suppose he *would* like to. Unlike the Democrats, Trump can’t get away with anything. The Democrats have 90% of the media power on their side— of the cable news, of broadcast news, of internet platforms, of newspapers, of magazines, of webzines. . . The Democrats have the Bureaucracy, including the FBI, the Justice Dept., and the armed forces. The Democrats have most lawyers and lobbyists and nonprofits groups, and the most money.
Trump's repeated nickname for her is Comrade Kamala, and he has called her a Marxist and a communist several times, as well as also calling her a fascist.
Thanks. I googled and I see he's called her communist a lot. That's funny about also calling her a fascist. It has some truth in it-- the cooperation of business and government-- but she's not much of a populist nationalist ("garbage" and all that).
Unz promotes theories that really are conspiracy theories, yes, and deranged people follow him and ruin the comments. But occasionally there is something good on his site. He hosted Steve Sailer, who is first-rate.
Eric, I think you're a smart guy (I went to school with your daughter in fact), but you're totally off-base here. I'm just going to focus on the election fraud comments, but the rest of what you say is in the similar naive-yet-well-put vein.
The claims of fraud in 2020 shown to be spurious if you apply even a modicum of scrutiny. Even ignoring the specific accusations of wrongdoing, none of the final results in the "contested states" are suspicious. As a matter of fact, Trump over-performed in the very places where the fraud was alleged! He did better than Hillary in the dense inner-cities of Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, and other major cities across the country. Where Trump did poorly was the suburbs, someplace it is unfathomable that a clandestine widespread voter-fraud operation between dozens of municipalities could be carried out. Of course, you could argue that he would have done better in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, etc. had there been no fraud, but that is certainly a bit of a stretch.
It seems deeply naive to me for you to still think the fraud case in 2020 was not properly litigated or that there exist true lingering doubts. You are an economist! Look at the data!
I feel like the motte here is "election security isn't very good in a lot of places, there's some sketchy stuff that happened in a few places, Pennsylvania probably changed their election rules in a way they weren't allowed to" and the bailey is "Venezuelan voting machines cooked the votes, massive numbers of illegal immigrants voted and changed the election outcome, there was massive fraud all over the place." When the bailey got its day in court, it always lost; the motte is true but doesn't seem like it even remotely adds up to a stolen election--instead, it looks like the kind of stuff that happens every single election.
Part III fails to take into account who each side's weapons are aimed at. The Republican weapons of mob violence and threats are aimed squarely at elites, but not at me. I'm nobody. There will never be a Republican mob at my house. The Democrats' weapons of institutional oppression and censorship are aimed at me. They want to control what I can say and what I can read on the internet. You, having been directly in their crosshairs should know that.
>The Republican weapons of mob violence and threats are aimed squarely at elites, but not at me.
No, they're aimed at whoever Trump blasts on Truth Social for the day, and there were multiple defamation lawsuits filed on behalf of private citizens like Ruby Freeman and Shay Moss and private corporations like Dominion and Smartmatic because they were the target of Trump, Fox News, OAN, Newsmax, and his other election denying allies like Giuliani and Powell. There were Republican state offices and Republican government workers that received death threats and bomb threats because Trump convinced his supporters that they were involved in stealing the election. Anybody who crosses Trump gets their business, workplace, family members, and personal life attacked relentlessly. Trump is currently threatening to revoke broadcasting licenses from news stations he doesn't like. He's completely uncalibrated and does unfathomable damage to random people around him.
How would we get an honest count of how many attempts at censoring or silencing dissenters happened under the Trump administration vs the Biden administration?
Your main example of how the Democrats control everything is their suppression of the legal investigation into Hunter Biden's taxes. According to Wikipedia he "pled guilty to all of the tax charges" last month. Interesting that the vast conspiracy was so ineffectual.
In short: the Justice Dept. slow-walked the investigation, purposely sabotaged it, and then were going to have him plead guilty to a minor charge while dismissing all the majors ones (such as not filing tax returns for some years!) and trying to stop any investigation of illegal income from foreign lobbying. The judge noticed the sly scheme and blocked it. It went public, so Justice had to pretend it was being more serious, so they brought some other charges-- again, as weak as they could-- and had Hunter plead guilty. Meanwhile, the IRS agents who were whistleblowers are being demoted and prosecuted.
They didnt'? They have been trying to rush it in a way that almost no criminal trials are conducted to try to get a PR win for the Biden admin in front of the election.
We’ll see. His sentencing is notably in December, after the election. As Eric said, he could have been charged for more if the DOJ didn’t slowdown the case. The judge might not give him anytime in prison, and even if he does, Joe could pardon him in the hour. I would bet money that Hunter doesn’t serve more than a week in prison.
I think Biden pardoning was likely even if Biden stayed in and won the election. It's his son in jail, and if pardoning Hunter hurts his second term, so what? It's his son.
The gun charges are in a weird place, because a protracted legal battle would probably find the specific laws unconstitutional under recent SCOTUS rulings. But that's not certain, and it'd be a messy fight with Rs having to be the ones pushing in favor of gun control during the while. Maybe he pleads though, and it's moot.
Thanks, but I dislike videos-- I can read faster than I can listen. I know Trump is trying, but I don't think he has it in him. He's just not a good manager; what he's good at is dealmaking-- thus his success in foreign policy and failure in domestic.
True! Ya got me! I've never cared about his other policies. He sucked up to Russia when it mattered the most, and that invalidates any resistance to Russia he's displayed before that.
The "matters most" was Ukraine, and Trump was going all he could to get western Europe to spend more money on weapons and to not build NordStream 2.
This is actual real world stuff. Europe's two biggest issues supporting Ukraine have been "but we don't have enough military materiel to spare" and "but we need Russian gas."
It's not secret. Major newspapers wrote about it for weeks. It was a long process. There were news cameras there.
But it's not "Trump is Putin's bitch, ha ha piss tape har har har" so yeah it didn't get your attention.
As usual when discussing anything relating to Trump, people get distracted from the topic and want it to be a referendum on "trump bad"
I wasn't claiming Trump was some foreign policy genius. Or even that his motivations were good. Just that he wasn't operating under Russian influence.
Putin knew he was planning to invade Ukraine, and Europe would object, and that NordStream 2 would be a way to make it harder for Europe to object. If Putin had *any* *actual* leverage over Trump, Trump would not have been jumping up and down telling Europe to do the two worst possible things for the invasion. Trump wouldn't have signed the sanctions bill against Gazprom.
The generals have been replaced by dependable servants of the Left. Military policy has been crazily woke, and the conservative officers either resign (I've known some) or go along unhappily. And the generals decide who gets assigned to Washington DC.
>Trump was President 4 years, and couldn't keep the bureaucracy from defeating him or even to stop the Justice Dept. from suppressing the Hunter Biden tax investigation or using lawfare against him.
And he has spent the last 4 years explicitly planning to overcome this in his next term.
What do you think about voting for a third party candidate that you would not vote for if they had any chance of becoming president? I’m in a safe state and tempted to vote Oliver to signal that I don’t like Harris or Trump and would prefer if both/either were more libertarian, but I think Harris would likely be a better president than Oliver.
Slightly against based on the same protest-vote considerations as talked about in Part IV. Also, if you're going to protest vote, why not a third party candidate who you like, or a write-in?
I understand everything you said except for your inclusion of Stein. Her running mate Ware praised Hamas for its Oct 7 massacre (and even released an album on Spotify named after Hamas’s operation called ‘Aqsa Flood’).
If we are against violation of norms, not endorsing Stein, seems a good place to start.
I didn't know that and agree it's stupid. I do however think that's basically within the scope of free speech, in the sense that it's stupid and we should be against him but it's not the same kind of bright-line norm violation as the Trump stuff.
I definitely meant the "endorses Harris, Oliver, or Stein" as a poetic way of saying "not Trump".
Imo Jill Stein and communist aligned politicians that want to eliminate American foreign policy and install socialist economic policies are comparable threats to Trump. The good thing is that they comprise very little of the left wing voting block, so probably won't ever be a future threat.
Stein's running mate's celebration of Hamas atrocities is in line with Stein's own comment posted on Oct. 8 that "When a murderous occupation makes peaceful resistance impossible, it makes violent resistance inevitable." (https://x.com/DrJillStein/status/1711101660955574616).
It's also consistent with her longstanding apologism for dictators and their atrocities, as long as the dictators are opposed by America.
The Green party, in part quoting Stein, praises Chavez and Maduro for their great success in Venezuela, in spite of "American sabotage" as "the head of the white, Western, capitalist united front" (https://www.gp.org/solidarity_with_venezuela_and_maduro).
Harris and Trump have both endorsed and funded/promised to fund Israel's massacre, which exceeded that of Hamas by multiple orders of magnitude, and which is aimed not at ending a perpetual blockade but at wholesale ethnic cleansing
> "The most obvious is SCOTUS, which is firmly Republican. They seem pretty interested in the project of rolling back the past few decades of progressive power grabs, and I’m pretty happy with a lot of how that is going"
I don’t think Scott meant it as a good thing on its own, but rather that it’s indicative of the current leanings of SCOTUS, which would provide a counterbalance to a Harris administration.
If you think both parties are kinda nuts then your bias should be for divided and ineffectual government. You are far likelier to get that voting Democratic.
> If you think both parties are kinda nuts then your bias should be for divided and ineffectual government.
I don't think this is true unless you're also in favor of like, anarchism and accelerationism in general. "Firebomb a Walmart", and whatnot.
I especially think it's untrue if the way you practice this is "well, every once in a while I'll elect the guy who hates gay marriage, and then I'll elect the guy who loves it, for fun". This just seems like a way to make people miserable.
I don't really care what the Constitution says outside of its ability to defend things that I like. If you wanted, you could easily just say "it endows us to liberty and happiness, this is a liberty and a happiness, ergo". Lots of things weren't enshrined in the Constitution until they were.
Let's not pretend like the SCOTUS was inspired by the fact that Roe isn't in the Constitution either. They were inspired by the fact that, ideology first, they're pro-life lol. Why else was it, alongside any other culture war topic, a 6-3 vote? What, 3 of them just so happened to find genuine reason in the Constitution where the 6 others didn't? And those 6 just happened to find new evidence the original 7-2 overlooked? C'mon lol.
I'd recommend reading the Roe vs Wade decision. Then try telling yourself, with a straight face, that 1) the right to privacy definitely implies the right to an abortion, but only in the first semester, and 2) the Constitution never mentions "privacy" or anything like it, but it definitely protects privacy, trust us bro. Those two pillars are the basis of R v. Wade.
The comment you're replying to is basically entirely about how this is totally arbitrary and not something anyone actually cares about except as a means to dodge what they actually want, which is for abortion to not be a right.
"2) the Constitution never mentions "privacy" or anything like it, but it definitely protects privacy, trust us bro."
Genuinely I have never understood this argument against the right to privacy, or any other one not specified. Literally the Ninth Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Literally the Constitution says "just because it's not specified doesn't mean you don't have it". Even if you think there isn't a right to privacy, this specific line of argumentation against it seems completely invalid to pursue from a Constitutional law perspective.
The comment you're replying to is basically entirely about how this is totally arbitrary and not something anyone actually cares about except as a means to dodge what they actually want, which is for abortion to not be a right.
>I don't really care what the Constitution says outside of its ability to defend things that I like.
By that argument, SCOTUS should have ruled that abortion is unconstitutional because that's a thing they like and it doesn't matter what the Constitution says.
Again, what, it just so happened that these 6 conservative justices were smarter and more keen on the eye than every previous one? No. They decided "I want to overturn Roe v Wade" and then made up some shit to get there. Similarly, the original 7-2 guys decided "I want abortion to be protected" and made up some shit to get there.
>Why else was it, alongside any other culture war topic, a 6-3 vote? What, 3 of them just so happened to find genuine reason in the Constitution where the 6 others didn't? And those 6 just happened to find new evidence the original 7-2 overlooked? C'mon lol.
What evidence would move you away from this maximally cynical take? The Trump justices (Gorsuch, ACB and Kavanaugh) do vote differently from their conservative peers often, even in controversial, culture-war issues. For example:
> What evidence would move you away from this maximally cynical take?
Nothing. I don't even think this is particularly cynical, I think it's basically tautological lol.
There isn't an objective interpretation of the Constitution, and there never will be. I don't think the SCOTUSes are chosen on their "ability to interpret the Constitution" as much as they're chosen by their "similarity to the party line". There might be *some* that were chosen for the former, but even then... how do you measure this? What benefit does anyone gain by selecting someone who acts against their own values? What benefit is gained by interpreting the Constitution in a way that's contrarian to what anyone believes, just because it could be "true" if viewed through some arbitrary lens? What even is the lens? "What the Founding Fathers would've thought"? Would've thought with what information and raised into what context? "How would old Georgie feel about computers" is the realm of fantasy.
I can believe that SCOTUSes believe in their own heads that they're "following the Constitution" and that this happens to reinforce their political beliefs just doesn't register to them, or they chalk up to happy coincidence. I can also believe that since they believe themselves to have an axiom of "the Constitution is good and supreme" that they sometimes vote against themselves. I still think that bias exists and is inextricable, though, and I don't believe every SCOTUS is so ignorantly noble.
I'm pro-choice and I think it was probably net good, because I think the marginal increase in both legal system internal consistency and state power probably outweigh the dysgenic effects. But it's a judgement call, could go either way
I feel like there are... okay arguments about affirmative action either way, but I feel like this is a relatively minor thing to sway an opinion to "I'm happy with a lot of that". Like, I don't personally think affirmative action is great. I also don't think "none" is necessarily better, or that the idea behind it is flawed.
This is another one where we could have a 10,000 word argument and I'm not really up to doing it, but you might be able to piece together small bits of my opinion from this tangentially-related review: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke
On a first read, I don't think we're really disagreeing much in that review or in here. I just think that:
1. I feel like if I was pro-choice, the ending of Roe would at least match this, and thus I would need more than this to say "I'm in favor of the current SCOTUS"
2. More generally - and I think this is a consistent problem you run into - I feel like you see "anti-woke" allies and just kind of ignore their intent because something superficially pleasing happened. I don't think the SCOTUS ended affirmative action because the GOP has nuanced opinions about the effects it has on the business culture, I think they did this because they're racist lol. You frame it as "being afraid of being called racist", but I don't think that fear is unfounded either.
If I was in control of the big magic button that does whatever I want whenever I want it I would replace affirmative action with a general investment in poor families with the further goal of promoting urbanization if they're rural. This would sidestep the discussion of unfair treatment towards black people since it doesn't explicitly target any racial category but would in practice hit them disproportionately (alongside rural white families).
Is the SCOTUS going to do this, though? Do they want to? Do they have any general idea in mind for "improving the quality of life" or "helping black communities"? Forget the racism and reparations angle, if you're in favor of "lowering misery" then "poverty in black communities" is a problem to be solved regardless. Does the SCOTUS give a shit about that, though? I don't think so, lol. I don't think they even give a shit about rural whites either, for that matter.
It is absolutely possible to be pro-choice and in favor of ending Roe. I am, and yes, there are undoubtedly dozens of us. Roe was as horribly decided as any decision since Dredd Scott, corrupted the judiciary beyond reckoning, and provided the driving electoral force behind the Republican party for decades. That's _way_ worse in my ledgers than it's first-order effects.
If you're pro-choice but are also against enforcing it in any way, then you're not actually pro-choice.
If you're pro-choice and think Roe is the wrong way to enforce it, I think that's fine. I think if you think the SCOTUS ending Roe is then a precursor to them enforcing it the way you want them to, you're incredibly naive.
If you're pro-choice, think Roe is the wrong way to enforce it, and think that SCOTUS will not do anything positive with abortion rights now that it's gone... then what are you happy about, exactly? "It won an election" is good, I suppose, but I don't think this is a long term gain at all.
Why do I care if SCOTUS ended affirmative action because the conservative justices (including Thomas) are racist? The result is that it ended a racist practice.
Because "a guy taking a big W for the racists, who is still in power and will continue to do this" is not an "epic win" even if the racists happened to be kind of correct on one point. It definitely doesn't justify the racists being in power, or sway me towards having a positive opinion of them lol.
I have never seen anyone defend affirmative action, for example I have never seen anyone claim that X benefited from it and that it is good that X benefited from it and I have seen many ostensibly supportive articles and speeches on the subject that never mention the word Asian or say why they like it.
Affirmative action by race in college admissions has been done away with (in principle). As far as I am aware, affirmative action by gender is very real and as strong as ever. In STEM, it is by far the dominant form of affirmative action. Is there any sign that that's going away any time soon?
(Note: yes, I obviously mean affirmative action by gender in the workplace. In undergraduate admissions, affirmative action by gender is a thing basically in two (top) institutions - and also, in effect, in plenty of liberal-arts colleges, though then it's not called that because it goes in the opposite direction (discrimination in favor of men). There may be a bit of spillover into other institutions, but let's not get distracted.)
Ending Chevron deference was big. Also several cases where they found the EPA exceeded their rulemaking authority. I'm not happy that they made up a nonsense "major questions doctrine" but it has the effect of rolling back progressive power grabs
I don't know what these are or why they're good, but I'm going to just make a guess based on the words used therein and say like:
* Reconcile these beliefs with a belief that pollution is bad, that climate change is bad, so on.
* "Well, they get in the way of nuclear or solar" isn't convincing, because I'm going to guess they also get in the way of many other things as well, and "it hinders a good thing" doesn't mean "it should have no things".
Of course I could just be entirely wrong on my assumptions here.
The EPA does very little to actually help prevent pollution or climate change. They picked all the low hanging fruit in the 70's to 90's. Now most of what they do is limit growth, particularly in the energy sector, which is bad because I think the solution is climate change is technological and will require lots of energy and other resources
The Constitution isn't a mathematical list of properties, and the fact that there can be "conservative" and "liberal" SCOTUSes indicates this. Rewording: wow, it sure is crazy that the SCOTUS happens to believe the Constitution is in line with [insert current GOP position] whenever the GOP gets that position.
You can even ignore intent entirely here. Do you think that the SCOTUS' decision will lead to "generalized energy sector growth" or "oil sector growth"? In future cases related to the oil sector, do you predict the SCOTUS will rule in favor or against them on average?
You have to be smoking something to think this SCOTUS is genuine about anything. I'm sure the ruling has nothing to do with oil execs parading the justices around on private vacations and giving them millions in gifts.
Just as a currently salient example, I think there's a case to be made that the reason minor property crimes like shoplifting stopped being prosecuted in California was that the Supreme Court literally told California in 2011 that they had to reduce their overcrowded prison population. This lead to things like Prop 47 and a general reluctance to prosecute low-prority offenses. The decision was 5-4, and I don't think anyone thinks the case would turn out the same way under the current court.
I don't know what the balance of suffering is between "overcrowded prisons" and "shoplifting", which I think overall has probably somewhere between the effect of "a bit of dirt fell in my eyes" and "my spacebar got sticky for a few seconds" in terms of badness.
I used to work stock. Not only did we not notice shoplifters, it would be literally impossible for us to notice because the stock we got in was completely uncorrelated to how much inventory we sold. Frequently we had heaps of shit laying around in the back until the back had no more room to store it. It would have benefited us if people had stolen more lol.
It's the best court in my memory, and I'm 77. I'm really enjoying eavesdropping on court through C-Span audio. Some of the attorneys get rather full of themselves in their rhetoric, and it's a delight to hear the justices, particularly the women, set them straight. Despite all Mr. Biden's sniping and all the media theatrics, most are scrupulously impartial, and their professionalism in the face of Mr. Biden's rants and conspiracies just demonstrates that their first concern is for the institution and its integrity. I'm following Brown Jackson and Coney Barrett. They're up to some great things.
Even ignoring his politics, Trump is a fascinatingly strange guy. Describe him ("a macho he-man who doesn't drink beer, refuses handshakes because he's afraid of germs, and who eats pizza with a knife and fork") and he sounds like a poorly-written fictional character.
In 2016, I wasn't a Trump supporter, but I was curious about what would happen with him in charge. Now we know: to the extent he has good ideas, he lacks the temperament to make them happen (you need to occasionally make concessions to political enemies, instead of blindly fighting them at every turn). His leadership style was reactive and emotive, lacking any kind of long-term vision or plan.
I do not know what would happen during a Trump presidency. Likely, he doesn't, either. I do know that there are many more ways to accidentally break a country than to fix it.
Your assessment of Trump is correct, but the Democrats had some role in the intense, reactive fighting, and it resulted in he Democrats in Washington leaving money on the table.
We know that Trump isn't anchored to many positions. We also know that for most of his life he was a Democrat from Queens. And we know that he's susceptible to flattery and has a short memory; flatter him and he loves you, even if he hated you five minutes ago.
If I'm a Washington Democrat after the 2016 election, I come to Trump all smiles. I know he wants his border wall. I figure out how to trade the wall for a set of domestic priorities that I'd never get under a conventional Republican president.
Instead they fought him with everything they had. I guess that was successful enough, but I'm pretty sure they could have gotten more.
You're ignoring the fact that Trump has no incentive to cooperate with Democrats on anything. One of his biggest selling points is "owning the libs", and politics in general rewards fighting as hard as possible, or at least being seen to do so.
You're forgetting that earlier this year, Democrats spent months negotiating a bipartisan border security deal only for *Trump* to veto it because having the border be solved would be bad for his campaign.
Trump cannot be analyzed using the normal incentive structure for politicians. He is motivated by television ratings and other bullshit measures of popularity. He spent the first week of his presidency in an insane fight over how the attendance at his inauguration compared to Obama's. His incentives aren't ideological; they're egotistical. He doesn't care who's kissing his ass as long as his ass is getting kissed. If the Democrats could just figure that out they could get anything they want from him.
From the perspective of immigration hawks, the Border Act of 2024 was an abomination. What you may not understand about the GOP is that the party as a while isn't that hawkish on immigration. It's got a big section of Chamber of Commerce types who love the idea of cheap labor. So the fact that there were enough Republicans to get that bill across the finish line until Trump told them to stop doesn't mean that it was a good bill. It was a toothless bill that would have allowed Harris to pose as an immigration hawk while still allowing Infinity Mexicans into the country.
Congress and the White House engaged in the bipartisan pursuit of good government, is *boring*. It gets relegated to CSPAN with maybe a brief mention of the results on CNN. The President in a standoff with Congress, saying outrageously inflammatory things and pwning the libs, *that's* good television, That's what gets Trump the ratings he wants,
So no, even if Trump's private political views are compatible with the Democrats and there's room for a compromise, it's not going to happen.
You are assuming that you can get face time with the President.
There was a bipartisan group of Senators that tried to negotiate a deal on immigration. The idea was to build the Wall and write DACA into law. But as far as I know, these Senators never got to speak to Trump directly about this proposed deal. Instead, Trump assigned Steve Miller to handle the negotiations. Miller said that the bill would have to do more that just build the Wall to get Trump’s support. Miller got changes to the diversity lottery and family reunification provisions of immigration law written into the bill, but that wasn’t enough to get Trump to support the bill, and the attempt to draft a bipartisan bill died.
I suspect that with a bit of charm and flattery, Trump could have been talked into supporting the bill. After all, “Build the Wall” was one of his top campaign promises, and one of his major objections to DACA was that it was done via executive order rather than by Congress. But the person who gets face time with the President isn’t you, a Washington Democrat. It’s probably not your Republican colleges in the Senate, either. It’s Steve Miller, who reports back to Trump about the status of the negotiations periodically, and who, I suspect, was not in favor of building the Wall.
Admittedly, I had not fully read it at the time. I am now educated, but I can say that it hasn't changed my initial opinion (maybe I'm stuck in a local maxima).
What I disagree with:
Consolidation of power: A core claim of authoritarianism you made was regarding the consolidation of power. In our country, the institutions consolidating power are dominated, top to bottom, by left-wingers. These same institutions seem unaccountable to any real oversight. The right, in this case, Trump and supporters like Musk, are advocating for disarming these institutions. At the very least, it would be a net positive to bring some balance to them.
Retribution against dissenters and threatening jail time as a form of coercion: Our judicial system has already been actively weaponized against political opponents to a level I would never have believed possible in a first-world country. If Donald loses, there’s a real chance he could be in jail before the end of next year on trumped-up charges. Consider the myriad of lawsuits against Elon Musk for simply refusing to capitulate to pressures from institutions that operate like an apparatus of the Democratic Party.
What should be added:
Dangerous rhetoric and attempts to eliminate political opponents: Hopefully, this one needs no explanation. The amount of leftwing violence and memory holing of it is shocking.
Harming election integrity - elections have two jobs, 1) accurately tally the votes of American citizens on candidates and propositions and 2) be perceived to accurately do so. Both are equally necessary. The press against common sense voter ID rules and other integrity measures is dangerous to both 1 and 2.
> the institutions consolidating power are dominated, top to bottom, by left-wingers
To the contrary, the two nearest institutions to the US Presidency, SCOTUS and the US Senate (once red-state Democrats like Manchin and Tester are finally washed out), are both dominated by the right.
> If Donald loses, there’s a real chance he could be in jail before the end of next year on trumped-up charges.
The "trumped-up charges" claim there is doing a lot of work. The publicly available evidence, particularly in Jack Smith's two cases, is already pretty damning, in my view. Not sure this is worth discussing further in this context, but just wanted to state the obvious counterargument.
> The amount of leftwing violence and memory holing of it is shocking.
In the 1970s, sure. In the 2010s and 2020s, though, acts of political violence on the right have been much more frequent than those on the left.
> The press against common sense voter ID rules and other integrity measures is dangerous
There is unfortunately a thin line between "common sense" rules and attempts to gain a partisan advantage. Pretty much any attempts to change the system of voting run aground in this manner -- for instance, both pandemic-motivated expansions of early voting and their subsequent post-pandemic rollback degraded trust in the system.
But also, in the spirit of Part III, Trump himself has done far more to harm perceptions of election integrity than arguments against voter ID, not from any principle but simply as an attempt to gain (perceived) advantage for himself.
> In the 2010s and 2020s, though, acts of political violence on the right have been much more frequent than those on the left
The summer of 2020 was approximately as destructive as a category 2 hurricane, in what universe does this not count as one of the most massive examples of left wing violence ever recorded?
Yes, I am specifically talking about political violence, following the heading of "Dangerous rhetoric and attempts to eliminate political opponents".
On the rhetoric note, it's particularly instructive to compare the reaction of Democrats to attempted political violence against Republicans to the reverse.
Thousands of people were jailed for crimes that took place. Many of the most destructive ones remain in prison today. Feel like people don't bring this up enough.
When people bring it up they're comparing the scale, destructiveness, relative leniency, and targeting.
2020 riots were widespread and several orders of magnitude larger. "thousands" could have been jailed (unlikely; the vast majority were catch and release dismissals), but still only a small fraction of total criminal activity.
January 6, a huge percentage were charged, caused much less damage, was much less widespread, zero direct deaths, and there's been exactly one dismissal. From a utilitarian perspective it should undeniably be the less concerning event.
Because some people conveniently don't define that as "political violence," just like some people call their politics "basic human decency" instead of considering it topics that people can reasonably disagree over.
I mean, if I had taken secret documents and stored them in my bathroom, I'm pretty sure I would be in jail right now. In fact, I can think of one case where a woman took secret documents home from her federal job during COVID, and she remains in jail.
So that doesn't seem very trumped up?
Re: Musk, he's currently giving out a million dollars in a sweepstakes to secure a political pledge which is only kinda tricky but seems like a pretty obvious violation of bribery law and election fraud. That's why it isn't, you know, a common campaign tactic.
It seems like this is the opposite of weaponization. It just seems like... Well, a lot of Republicans now are pretty cool with breaking the law, and very rich people think they can get away with it, because they so often do?
A different candidate is well known for having secret documents in her bathroom, deleting the evidence, and was notably not chatged for it nor for felony business record manipulation to swing an election.
And I was in favor, then and now, of prosecuting Hillary for that. I'd like war crimes charges for her husband, too- I'm very upset about this whole presidential immunity thing.
The point was not your hypocrisy. The point was completely uneven enforcement of the law. This, along with a long list of other instances, why I cannot take claims about how voting for dems against Trump because of "rule of law" and "norms and precendents" seriously.
>Consolidation of power: A core claim of authoritarianism you made was regarding the consolidation of power. In our country, the institutions consolidating power are dominated, top to bottom, by left-wingers. These same institutions seem unaccountable to any real oversight. The right, in this case, Trump and supporters like Musk, are advocating for disarming these institutions. At the very least, it would be a net positive to bring some balance to them.
Can you hear yourself? Getting rid of agencies is CONSOLIDATION OF POWER. That is literally what Trump is out to do. Remove climate scientists, remove MDs and PharmDs from the FDA, etc... And hand all the power of those agencies to himself. And your bit about these agencies being dominated by left-wingers is complete fantasy, feel free to back that up with some data. We'll all wait.
What your terrible sources fails to mention is the most important part, 98% of federal employees don't donate to any party. So extrapolating from the 2% is some real wise guy statistics.
Which things? Prosecuting people of the opposite party? As far as I can tell right now, most politicians being prosecuted under Biden are Democrats, and they're not ones that he particularly thinks of as enemies.
That's an interesting point about prosecuting democrats. The only one that comes to mind is Mayor Adam's and it seemed like his prosecution came after he started complaining about the flood of illegal immigrants being shuttled into NYC.
You might suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome if you haven’t been watching the prosecutions of various other political figures, like Bob Menendez, Hunter Biden, George Santos, and the like. Theres a lot of people being prosecuted, but people like to focus on Trump, because he’s larger than life. He’s the only person being prosecuted who seems like an enemy of Biden (Adams was generally an ally of Biden) and it’s unfair to single him out because even his supporters acknowledge that he’s a sleazy character who is likely guilty of some crimes.
But Santos isn’t an “enemy” of anyone. There’s really no case that any of the people being prosecuted are merely being prosecuted as enemies. The justice system seems to be targeting sleazy people in and adjacent to politics, regardless of their political affiliation.
Well, yes, if whenever a Democrat gets prosecuted, you conclude that it must have been political because [insert whatever position they hold which is different from the administration's], then you will find all Democrats and Republicans and indeed all humans are being politically targeted. No Democrat is in perfect lockstep with the Biden administration.
> You seize power by getting a bunch of people to zerg rush the opposing politicians and beat them up until they declare you in charge. Too bad you were foiled by a locked door, you'll get them next time. I won't claim this strategy has never successfully taken over a government, because history is long and weird. But I can't think of any examples.
...Isn't that just describing a coup? Seems like there are plenty of examples throughout history.
I think coups tend to be planned pretty hard, like "we'll get this regiment to seize this TV station, then that regiment to take over this building", not just "go forth! Attack opposing politicians!"
But I think the fall of the Ceausescu (sp?) regime in Romania might be a real example? Or perhaps it falls too far to the other side (i.e. no one was planning it at all)
There was more of a plan here. The original plan didn't involve a mob at all: it was to manufacture doubt about the election, throw up fake alternate electors, have Pence declare that those states were indeterminate and couldn't be counted and that therefore the election should be thrown in the house. The first 2/3 of the plan worked; it failed because Pence wouldn't do part three. The point of the mob was to try to intimidate Pence (or possibly Congress, I think they might have been able to do something similar, not sure on this part though) into carrying it out.
Maybe it wasn't the Best Coup Ever, but it was a real plan and he really tried. (He tried a lot of other things too—remember Georgia and "just find me X,000" votes, where X was what he needed to win? But the above plan was what it came down to on the 6th.)
I think a good real life counter-example might be parts of the French Revolution. The Storming of the Bastille and Women's March on Versailles were more-or-less spontaneous and disorganised mobs that usurped political authority (though without officially overthrowing the government immediately).
In that case a likely key cause of its success was the inherent weakness of the state and army at that time, as well as terrible mismanagement of the situation. I don't think anything similar would have been feasible on Jan 6.
Napoleon's coup of Brumaire was basically this, tbh.
A huge clusterfuck with Napoleon's brother and some grenadiers literally trying multiple times to force politicians out of the building. It almost didn't work, but Napoleon's brother tried once last time and he finally forced them out. Napoleon Bonaparte was terribly bumbling throughout.
It was such a close run thing that you really could imagine the coup falling with an extra locked door or two.
1/6 meets the technical definition of a coup attempt, but it was a pathetically incompetent one, doomed to failure and the only question is how much damage it could have done. Making a coup actually work requires a lot more planning and skill than that. But the Beer Hall Putsch was also a pathetically incompetent coup attempt. It's a really, really bad idea to let someone attempt a coup, learn from their mistakes, and have a second chance at bat.
The Reichstag Fire didn't involve a violent mob marching against the local government with the vague notion that a sufficiently forceful demonstration would somehow result in their leader being placed in power. The Beer Hall Putsch, did. And I can't think of a better match offhand for 1/6 in the "high-profile but pathetically inept attempted coup by a mob of idiots" department.
The Reichstag Fire is something you do AFTER you've fully centralized power within the government, not before. The point of it is to finalize the ascent of the leader to dictator and give him absolute power; you can't do that while you still have so much opposition within the government and military.
Oddly enough, both candidates have a clear, recent 4-year track record of what their respective Administrations accomplished. (Yes, Kamala Harris wasn't formally in charge of the Biden Administration, but Biden has said that she consistently played a major decision-making role, and Harris has said that she can't think of anything she would have done differently than Biden. The best picture we can get of what her hypothetical presidency would look like is the last four years.)
So if we stack the two up against each other, we had one of the best periods in living memory under Trump Administration policies and, and an utter dumpster fire under Biden/Harris Administration policies.
I don't particularly personally like Trump either, for many of the same reasons as Scott in fact, but when you take a step back and look at the big picture he's clearly the better choice by an order of magnitude.
I don't actually want to hold the 10,000 word debate it would take to clear this up, but I'll just register my opinion, without evidence, that I think most of the good things about the Trump administration were the general strong post-2008 recovery, and most of the bad things about the Biden administration were dealing with the aftereffects of COVID and COVID relief policies.
If that's your take, and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here, but it kind of feels like you're looking purely at economic prosperity. And sure, you can credit most of that to actions that happened before both presidencies began — though honestly, reaching back 8 years in Trump's case is a bit of a stretch — but that's not what I was referring to at all.
Policy issues that had nothing whatsoever to do with economic prosperity:
* Net negative illegal immigration under Trump (precisely the opposite of what you'd expect, from a purely economic standpoint, in a time of prosperity!)
* De facto open borders under Biden, and all the devastation downstream from that.
* The Abraham Accords. One of the greatest foreign policy achievements in our nation's history. Its immense value can be seen clearly in the current Israel/Iran conflict: look at the way, for the first time ever, its Arab neighbors have chosen *not* to pile on, and have even helped them defend themselves! That would have been absolutely unthinkable 10 years ago.
* Medical pricing transparency under the Trump FDA. This got us halfway to a healthcare policy that actually works, and would have gotten us the other half of the way had hospitals and insurers not fought them tooth-and-nail at every step.
* The disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal under Biden.
This is the sort of stuff I'm basing my decision on here: the policy decisions the two different Administrations gave us, and the effects that those decisions have had. Not economic factors which, I agree with you, are largely outside of their control.
The Afghanistan withdrawal was started under Trump and the next administration adhered to it. That’s the way that foreign policy should work if agreements are made. It’s also something Trump campaigned on
> The Afghanistan withdrawal was started under Trump and the next administration adhered to it.
No they didn't. They changed the timelines, and the security arrangements. Pretty significantly in some cases. If that had been true, you would have a point, but Biden changed the plan, and so he owns the consequences.
Honestly, Obama and Trump both share a decent amount of blame here. We went into Afghanistan to get Bin Laden. Then we got him, on May 2, 2011.
Mission. Freaking. Accomplished.
On May 3, 2011, Obama should have given the order to begin packing up, rather than redefining the mission to even more Bush-style "nation-building" nonsense that was not working and clearly was never going to work. (Well, maybe if we had stayed there, and worked a lot harder at it than we were working, for about 80 years. Then we'd have had a decent chance at making real change. But that was *never* in the cards.)
Trump at least made plans to leave, but too late to implement them. But the plan that got put into effect by Biden (at least he actually finally did it!) was not the Trump plan.
Abraham accords have been terrible for many reasons, the most obvious one being that the horrible Hamas attack on Israel was a direct response to the agreements, which lead to horrible mass bombings of palestinians as retaliation killing tens of thousands of civilians, and then to bombing of Lebanon. Overall these events lead to almost 50 000 death.
It followed generally a logic of making peace in middle-east while completely ignoring the situation of Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank., therefore building that peace over an injustice.
Morocco entered the deal to legitimize its colonization of Western Sahara. This was a deal between two colonizing powers, creating once again injustice.
Sudan entered the deal just to be removed of the list of state sponsors of terrorism. The fact Sudan is part or out of this list should never have been dependent on this whole deal, that's pure blackmailing.
> It followed generally a logic of making peace in middle-east while completely ignoring the situation of Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank., therefore building that peace over an injustice.
Not at all. The great genius of the Abraham Accords was to finally do what should have been done all along and disregard the illegitimate and irrelevant position of the so-called "Palestinians." The only injustice there is Egyptian and Jordanian thieves living on occupied Israeli territory for over half a century and acting like they have some valid claim to the stolen land.
The big obvious one is crime. There's a lot of severe, violent crime (assault, murder, rape, robbery, drug dealing, etc.) being committed by illegal immigrants, made all the worse by "sanctuary" policies, in which local jurisdictions forbid the police to arrest and prosecute illegal immigrants who commit crimes because detaining them would make it all too easy for ICE to find them and throw them out.
When this is brought up, one common reply is to claim that the crime rate of "immigrants" (the people making this claim always studiously avoid acknowledging the fact that we're talking about illegal immigrants) is lower than that of US citizens. This rebuttal is nonsense for two reasons. First, illegals are here illegally. By definition, the criminality rate of illegal immigrants is 100%. And second, even if we look past that, the claim is still quite irrelevant given that their crimes are not somehow replacing or displacing the crimes of US citizens with a lower number of crimes; they're being added onto them. (In other words, if you have a million peaceful, largely decent illegals and only one who's a murderer, you still have more total murders than you would have had without them.)
The less obvious but still quite serious problem is housing costs. We've got something well over 10 million illegals in the USA, and like everyone else, they have to live somewhere. When you're experiencing a housing shortage, as most of the country is, this additional demand pressure drives prices up at a massively disproportionate rate. ( https://robertfrank.substack.com/p/congestion-pain-is-hyperbolic ) It's not a coincidence that the prices for both mortgages and rentals skyrocketed immediately after the Biden Administration took power.
Isn't crime significantly down in 2024? IF so, wouldn't the spike in crime previously match Scott's "the aftereffects of COVID and COVID relief policies"?
Re: housing - this is a legit problem, so a purely non-leading question: my understanding is a decent amount of the construction business in the US uses illegal immigrants; are you worried that deporting them would have more negative consequences on housing prices due to increased labor prices, than positive consequences due to fewer people needing houses?
> Isn't crime significantly down in 2024? IF so, wouldn't the spike in crime previously match Scott's "the aftereffects of COVID and COVID relief policies"?
Only if there's a good reason to believe that COVID causes crime.
> are you worried that deporting them would have more negative consequences on housing prices due to increased labor prices, than positive consequences due to fewer people needing houses?
No, because the labor effect is basically linear, while the effect of excess load on an overloaded system is hyperbolic. The price relief from letting off all that excess demand should be orders of magnitude greater than any price increases due to higher labor costs.
> one common reply is to claim that the crime rate of "immigrants" (the people making this claim always studiously avoid acknowledging the fact that we're talking about illegal immigrants) is lower than that of US citizens. This rebuttal is nonsense for two reasons. First, illegals are here illegally. By definition, the criminality rate of illegal immigrants is 100%.
Did you know that Martin Luther King Jr. was a criminal?
But seriously, not only is that claim noncentral (and immigration per se is a victimless "crime"), "illegal immigration" isn't actually a crime in the first place, so the claim is false on its face. The term "illegal immigrant" is a hyperbolic distortion of the actual status of undocumented immigrants, which is simply people who have stayed in the country longer than they are welcomed (which duration is sometimes zero). "Illegal" immigration is a civil offense, not a criminal offense, so "breaking" the law in this case does not actually make someone a criminal.
As a point of comparison, did you know it's also illegal for your kid to host a lemonade stand? Not only is child labor against the law, so is operating a business (especially one that serves food) without a license. The type of criminality represented in dodging the authorization process for legal immigration is akin to the criminality of dodging the licensing process for setting up a lemonade stand (or babysitting, or mowing neighbors' lawns for cash, etc.).
> The term "illegal immigrant" is a hyperbolic distortion of the actual status of undocumented immigrants, which is simply people who have stayed in the country longer than they are welcomed (which duration is sometimes zero).
It's not "simply" anything. It's the violation of a sovereign nation's right to self-determination and coherence. And no amount of throwing around irrelevant examples that have nothing to do with that will make that any less of a grave offense against the entire nation and all of its legitimate citizens.
8 U.S.C. § 1325 (Improper entry by alien) is a criminal offense with a penalty of up to 6 months in prison. 8 U.S.C. § 1325 (b) lays out civil penalties and includes this: "Civil penalties under this subsection are in addition to, and not in lieu of, any criminal or other civil penalties that may be imposed."
> And second, even if we look past that, the claim is still quite irrelevant given that their crimes are not somehow replacing or displacing the crimes of US citizens with a lower number of crimes; they're being added onto them. (In other words, if you have a million peaceful, largely decent illegals and only one who's a murderer, you still have more total murders than you would have had without them.)
If you're going to argue that immigrant crime is bad because it adds to absolute crime levels, you should also credit immigrants for their absolute contributions to economic and social welfare.
I apologise I don't have exact math for this, but it is my understanding that immigrants are on average beneficial to the economy, and given that crime is rare, if you sum up the net economic contributions and subtract the net economic damages, I suspect immigrants will still come out on top. First google result sez crime costs on average about $2,200 per capita, with violent crime accounting for $2,000 of that. Immigrant violent crime rate is less than half of non-immigrants, so trim that to $1,200, and you've got average damages of less than what the average person pays in sales tax in a year. Even if you ignore the fact that undocumented immigrants still pay other taxes (random internet search sez nearly $9,000 per capita), not even they can avoid paying sales tax. So, economically speaking, undocumented immigrants pay more than enough to offset any crime they bring—and that's just from taxes! They contribute to the non-government economy just as much as anyone else.
As for social welfare, as anecdotal evidence, undocumented immigrants make up a significant portion of the population of my city, and the worst story I've heard of their impacts on the community are that their Cinco de Mayo celebrations are too loud and block traffic. Most encounters I or non-immigrant people I know have with undocumented immigrants are positive or neutral, same as with non-immigrants.
> If you're going to argue that immigrant crime is bad because it adds to absolute crime levels, you should also credit immigrants for their absolute contributions to economic and social welfare.
I might, if I had any reasonable way to determine how much "contribution" makes the rapes and murders worth it.
> I apologise I don't have exact math for this, but it is my understanding that immigrants are on average beneficial to the economy
Legitimate ones often are, yes.
> and given that crime is rare
This is *very much not* a given.
> First google result sez crime costs on average about $2,200 per capita, with violent crime accounting for $2,000 of that.
By what formula? I am deeply suspicious of any attempt to put a dollar value on violent crime, particularly murder. There's a reason courts of law have the concept of "Irreparable harm."
> So, economically speaking, undocumented immigrants pay more than enough to offset any crime they bring—and that's just from taxes!
They also exacerbate the housing shortages we're suffering throughout the country, driving prices up in a massively disproportionate way for every single renter and person trying to buy a home. Per Bastiat, this counts as economic damage — having a roof over your head is just as much of a non-voluntary expense as keeping your windows intact — and it's directly damaging a significant portion of the entire population of the USA.
What makes you say it's a dumpster fire? Things are pretty good! The stock market is at an all-time high. After a covid-related increase, inflation is down to the normal 2% level. Unemployment is 4.1%, near record lows. Apartment construction is at a 50-year high. GDP growth is healthy. Wages are up. Carbon emissions are down. New businesses are being formed at almost twice the rate of 2019. The good numbers are up and the bad numbers are down. If you're just talking about inflation, we had less than most other developed countries and managed to bring it down rather quickly by historical standards. I expect it to stay low no matter who gets elected unless there's another huge shock
Life expectancy in America vs other developed countries was a big factor in my vote. I really do hope RFK Jr will play a role in the Trump administration, and that to me is reason enough to hold my nose and vote orange.
Walz and Vance to me are almost the same person, though Vance is more eloquent. Harris represents the status quo: sicker, fatter, and lazier America. The wars will likely continue under both though Trump at least pays lip service to ending them. Meh, we the people lose again... surprise?
The life expectancy gap between the US and other countries is largest among young people, for whom "healthcare" has the least to do with their health. Opposing seed-oils isn't going to stop young people from dying of drug overdoses. Also, vaccines are good.
The good you could distil from RFK Jr. - diet and exercise, are already typical advice of doctors. They don't just run around telling patients to eat more cheeseburgers, since they can be healthy at every size.
My hope is that he is allowed to gut the FDA and USDA. Both agencies have a huge role to play in how sick Americans have become. FDA panders to drug lords in lab coats (sackler family anyone?) while USDA permits labelling beef raised and slaughtered in Australia to be marked "made in the USA" which is killing local farmers.
Our federal policy for "health" is abysmal. Not giving coke to welfare recipients is apparently "racist", nevermind the heart disease.
Ultimately you're probably right in that his influence will be small. Trump is famous for blowing off those who actually got him elected and voted for him.
The vaccine thing in my opinion is a footnote at this point. The only thing I'd like rfk to do on that front is allow vaccine injured patients to sue. "Unavoidably unsafe" (thanks Reagan) is horse shit and if that phrase doesn't mean anything to you, you're not well informed about vaccine policy and history.
I don't doubt there we're once things it helped improve for Americans. Today it's bloated and full of self-serving bureaucrats.
And the results speak for themselves. Life expectancy, chronic disease, obesity didn't just fall out of the sky. At best, they "slipped by" the FDA. At worst, FDA was complicit. Either way, it must be reformed or replaced.
Eat cheeseburgers, maybe not, but all 90% of doctors do tell patients is, here's another pill, take it for the rest of your life, I'll see you next year. We have above board drug dealers in this country and we call it "healthcare".
Did you know nutrition classes are not required to graduate medical school?
It always looks so good when LFRP is conveniently left out of the numbers.
> GDP growth is healthy.
I'll admit it's been a while, but last time I checked, we had a small degree of *nominal* GDP growth which was below the rate of inflation. Which means a recession in real-money terms. Has that changed?
> Wages are up.
Again, nominal vs. real-money is relevant here. I can't speak for anyone else, but my wages are up about 5% over the last few years, in which time we've had about 20% inflation.
> New businesses are being formed at almost twice the rate of 2019.
Now look at how many businesses were *lost* during the COVID lockdowns. This isn't growth; it's recovery.
And it's not even a particularly good recovery. The yield curve has been inverted since July 2022, a record-long duration for a reliable predictor of impending recession. The Sahm rule, a reliable indicator of *current* recession, was triggered 3 months ago. We've seen more mass layoffs in the past year than at any point since 2008. The "person on the street" sentiment is abundantly clear: we are in a recession, and have been for at least a year now. If the official data doesn't agree, it's worth taking a critical look at that data, because it's quite possible that it's measuring the wrong things.
Meanwhile, housing prices are sky-high for both homebuyers and renters, with almost the entirety of the rising generation priced out of the market. We have millions upon millions of illegal immigrants wreaking havoc in our cities, including well-organized criminal gangs. (And these last two points are not unrelated: https://robertfrank.substack.com/p/congestion-pain-is-hyperbolic ) Two of our important allies are engaged in wars for their very survival, and our resources are stretched so disgracefully thin that which one to support has turned into a political issue because we don't have enough supplies to go around.
I say it's a dumpster fire because it is one. If you happen to live in circumstances privileged enough that everything looks rosy... I'm happy for you, I guess. But your perspective still comes across as dangerously myopic to those of us who don't.
> The last period of zero-inflation was under Obama.
When would that be? According to https://www.investopedia.com/inflation-rate-by-year-7253832#toc-historical-us-inflation-rates-from-1929-to-2024 every single year of Obama's presidency had a positive inflation rate. And don't forget that Obama's Fed thought that it was unacceptably low and was flooding the economy with free money the entire time, recklessly reinflating both of the bubbles that had popped with good reason in 2001 and 2008, in a deliberate attempt to cause more inflation. The last thing I *ever* want is a return to that disastrous policy!
> LFPR higher now than at any point under Trump
Only for so-called "prime age" workers. When you have to selectively cut out such huge swathes of the working-age public to make the numbers look good, it's usually because the real numbers don't look good.
> the job market was on fire in 2021-22 and is still better today than at any point under Trump
Ok, what job market are you in?!? Because if you look around LinkedIn, for the last year and a half it's been a steady, constant, incessant drumbeat of layoffs, layoffs, layoffs, layoffs, and more layoffs, and every day another half-dozen stories that all read the same way: "I got laid off months ago, I've applied to hundreds of places, no one is granting any interviews, and now my savings are running out and I'm worried my family and I will lose our homes."
> the job market went from ridiculously good in 2021-22 to only pretty good today.
The Sahm Rule begs to differ.
> Trump’s policies of NIMBYism, protectionism, and restricting blue-collar immigration such as construction workers will make this much worse.
It's possible that that could have some small effect. But you know what will have a huge effect in the opposite direction? Mass deportation of illegal immigrants, relieving demand-side pricing pressure that's gone hyperbolic in an over-capacity system.
> Remember that the real surge in house prices happened in 2020, under Trump.
It started Q2 2020, according to your favorite site ( https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS ), and you can hardly blame Trump for Covid insanity. Before this point, prices had been coming steadily down ever since 2017.
Then Covid hit and the world went crazy, but even then, the slope of the graph turns sharply higher in Q2 2021, as illegal immigrants began flooding in and overloading the system, and didn't begin to moderate until a year and a half later after the Fed rate hikes brought house-selling to a screeching halt and froze prices at insanity levels ever since.
> Gaza and Lebanon are not our important allies.
You're right. So why even bother bringing them up?
> It really doesn't. It means *traders* are making money. All the money for the companies has already been made when the stock is initially sold onto the market, and when they try to sell more, it's typically considered a sign that the company is in trouble.
Tell me you don't know how the stock market works without telling me you don't know how the stock market works.
Traders make money on stocks because stocks represent ownership in the company. They pay dividends based on company performance, so if the company performs well, people will want to buy the stocks. Stockholders also contribute to the direction of the company, so, if you own a majority share of the stock in a company, you can do basically whatever you want with it. Both of those benefits are more valuable the more successful the business is, so a business's success tends to track the demand for (and consequently, price of) its stocks.
Admittedly, it isn't deterministic in reverse, as stock prices can become inflated without representing the actual value of the company (see: GameStonk, or the dot-com bubble), but usually they track the actual performance of the company pretty well.
The IPO is how companies make money *from* stocks, but the company still makes money via its day-to-day operations and its actual, y'know, business, and that's what drives the price of stocks post-IPO.
Yes, real GDP growth is running at approx. 2.5-3% right now and has been for a while. I'm rather surprised that you have so much to say on these topics without knowing this.
A high inflation rate is bad for obvious reasons, but a low or negative inflation rate is also bad because you want to encourage people to spend money, not stash it under their mattress. The happy medium is about 2%.
Change one or two words and it's the exact same complaint people were making about Bush. "Oh, sure, by all the measurements it looks good, but that's all fake, the *real* economy sucks!"
> a low or negative inflation rate is also bad because you want to encourage people to spend money, not stash it under their mattress
Pure nonsense. The reason national banks around the world are pushing for positive inflation rates is because governments around the world are in debt, and inflating your way out of unmanageable debt has been the time-honored solution to such issues since ancient times.
If you really think that people would stop spending under deflationary conditions, consider the following thought experiment: You have good reason to rationally believe groceries are going to be cheaper next week than they are today. But you need to go shopping for groceries today. What *exactly* are you going to do while you wait for the prices to go down?
Likewise, if you believe the other standard (but equally nonsensical) argument against deflation, that it causes high-end investors to want to stop investing, consider this thought experiment. You're a big-shot investor with a few million dollars to invest in some project. In Economy A, you have inflationary conditions, so you're being asked to spend expensive dollars today in the hopes of receiving debased dollars in the future. In Economy B, you have deflationary conditions, where you're being asked to spend cheap dollars today in the hopes of receiving more-valuable dollars in the future. Which do you prefer? To ask the question is to answer it!
Inflating your way out of debt doesn't work in the long term because bond holders aren't stupid. No matter what the inflation rate is, bond holders will demand an interest rate higher than that to account for risk, or else what's the point of buying the bond?
"But you need to go shopping for groceries today. What *exactly* are you going to do while you wait for the prices to go down?"
Yes, way to go for cherry picking the one expense that everyone has to incur on a regular basis because they die otherwise. Groceries are a small fraction of even a middle class budget, and a negligible fraction of the expenditures of the rich. Do I really have to upgrade my laptop this year, or can I wait until next year? Do I really need to replace my clunker for a Tesla now, or can I wait a few years and get a better car with the same money (and not just because of technological improvement)?
"In Economy A, you have inflationary conditions, so you're being asked to spend expensive dollars today in the hopes of receiving debased dollars in the future. In Economy B, you have deflationary conditions, where you're being asked to spend cheap dollars today in the hopes of receiving more-valuable dollars in the future. Which do you prefer?"
The currency is just a unit of measurement. What determines how much I get from my investment is the economic output of the thing I am investing in. Who cares if that's measured in "debased dollars" or "expensive dollars" if I can exchange it for the same number of apples or potatoes? If I measure a growing child with a shrinking ruler, the child is still growing, even though the millimeter is being "debased"!
In Economy B, I might consider not investing at all. After all, I'm essentially getting a risk free return from putting the money under my mattress.
> Inflating your way out of debt doesn't work in the long term because bond holders aren't stupid.
While this may be true, it hasn't stopped anyone from trying, from the ancient Romans to the modern central bankers.
> No matter what the inflation rate is, bond holders will demand an interest rate higher than that to account for risk, or else what's the point of buying the bond?
I dunno. Why don't you ask all the bond holders who were all too willing to flock to the insanity that was negative-rate European bonds about a decade ago?
> Yes, way to go for cherry picking the one expense that everyone has to incur on a regular basis because they die otherwise.
If you need to fill up your car today, and you rationally expect that gas is going to be cheaper next week... how are you going to get to work in the meantime? If you think rent's going to be cheaper in 3 months, where are you going to live until then? It's not just food. All the biggest line items on a consumer's budget are non-discretionary expenses.
If you have all these opinions but don't even know real gdp growth then it sort of looks like you're deliberately ignoring anything contrary to your pre formed views
> It always looks so good when LFRP is conveniently left out of the numbers.
This isn't "convenient" it's the way unemployment is measured.
Every single administration of my life -- every single one of them -- someone pretends that leaving out people who aren't seeking jobs is some brand new thing invented by the current administration. Start the clock on the 47th president.
I do not mean this in an offensive way, but I think you have cognitive bias, as other repliers seem to be pointing out too. For example, I think that you learning that real gdp growth has been about 3% recently will not change your political views at all, even though you should update them at least a little based on this new information.
This should deeply concern you. You should be especially concerned that you might not be thinking rationally since we are talking about politics too, and people are known to have impaired rationality on either side when it comes to political issues.
As a rational individual, what deeply concerns me is the fact that the prices for everything from groceries to housing to gasoline went up significantly more than the official inflation rate. This means that the official numbers are not an accurate measurement of reality, and thus not a particularly good basis for a rational discussion.
Cumulative inflation since 2020 was 20%. Groceries specifically were 25%. This is in line with my lived experience. Do you think it is possible that you are noticing the things which have increased in price, while not noticing the things that have decreased in price or remained constant since 2020? Or perhaps you are living in a region where inflation was higher than the national average?
If the federal government were lying about inflation numbers I feel like there would be a stronger argument with numbers showing this, rather than just feeling like its not correct. I don't think it would be impossible to falsify what the BLS has put out if it really was wrong. So my question to you is, why hasn't anyone done it yet?
> Cumulative inflation since 2020 was 20%. Groceries specifically were 25%. This is in line with my lived experience.
>
> Do you have any data on that?
I do. I tend to be a bit of a packrat about saving receipts, and I'm pretty consistent in my eating habits. I can go back and check, and the same set of groceries that cost $43 four years ago costs $68 today. This is an increase of over 50%, more than twice the cited rate.
The average price of gas in the US right now is a bit above $3.10/gallon. 4 years ago it was $2.20. This is an increase of about 40%, approximately twice the cited rate. (And just look at all the news articles we've seen recently, cheering about how much gas prices have come *down* in recent months!)
Per https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SETA01, the price of new cars has "only" gone up about 20%, and per https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SETA02 used car prices have actually been coming down a bit after a massive inflationary spike — 43% in 13 months! — beginning January 2021, but they're still up about 14% overall. So... yay for infrequently-purchased goods, I suppose?
But as long as we're talking about infrequent purchases, let's look at one of the most reliable trends of the last century: electronics. Technological progress has steadily brought the nominal cost of electronics down, down, down, in open defiance of inflation, since years before Gordon Moore gave the trend its famous name. I happened to buy the computer I'm writing this on right now in 2020, for about $1500. I just checked on the manufacturer's website, and replacing it today with a comparable system would cost a bit under $2000. In a historically deflationary sector!
> If the federal government were lying about inflation numbers I feel like there would be a stronger argument with numbers showing this, rather than just feeling like its not correct. ... So my question to you is, why hasn't anyone done it yet?
If the numbers I presented above aren't convincing enough for you, check out Shadow Stats, at https://www.shadowstats.com/ . John Williams (not the famous composer) calculates inflation by what used to be the standard formula, before they replaced it in the 1990s with a new formula that conveniently reports significantly lower numbers, and produces results that are far more in line with the intuitive feeling of what we're experiencing.
Disclaimer: this is a paid service; not all of the data is available for free. Gathering, calculating, and verifying all this data takes a lot of work, and it's not being done on a government budget. Sadly, this is probably why you haven't heard about it.
> we had one of the best periods in living memory under Trump Administration policies and, and an utter dumpster fire under Biden/Harris Administration policies.
You should be alarmed. The thing is, the people Trump sees as the problem in his first administration were not slow-moving bureaucrats in the FDA, but Republicans like Mike Pence, Jeff Sessions, and Bill Barr who didn't just give him everything he wanted. He's been very clear on this point -- he demands loyalty above all else, and it's foolish to think that this sort of unquestioned loyalty he seeks is positively correlated with competence.
Do you feel that Democratic immigration policy - which *seems* overwhelmingly self-serving in an electoral context - is a (presumably, lesser) violation of democratic norms?
This is the only time that "immigration" appears in either the post or the comments. I would've expected it to feature more prominently, since 11 figures worth of people walking in through the border is an existential consideration, and one of the main reasons it could be worth swallowing a huge pill like Trump's behaviour. I'd expect it to be the main point of debate.
How is [8, not 11] figures of people walking through the border an existential concern? Didn't your ancestors walk through the border at some point? Can you point to any actual harm these border-walkers have done to you?
It puts the country qua the country out of existence. Every political issue discussed here is less consequential and more reversible. And those issues are affected anyhow, since it permanently shifts the political orientation of the country.
I think those other points are a little below the standard of discourse here. The issue is highly significant to the public but it was elided in this analysis. That's true regardless of my ancestry, experiences, and any beliefs you might have about whether open borders are a good thing.
I think insofar as the policy itself is "let immigrants in", it's not a violation at all - it's legitimate for a country to choose to let immigrants in if that's what normal democratic processes decide.
Insofar as the policy is "don't enforce the immigration laws and have sanctuary cities so that other people can't either", I think it's a minor violation. All countries make decisions about what to enforce or not enforce, and Democrats who deprioritize enforcement of immigration laws are using the normal legal/democratic process to decide to do that (eg they were elected DA, and then they use normal DA powers to say this is one of the laws they're not enforcing). I say "minor violation" rather than "no violation" because I think it sucks to have laws that aren't enforced and that in a perfect world we would have pretty strong enforcement - but I do think that boat sailed decades ago and the Democrats on immigration here aren't much of an escalation (see eg going 1 mile above the speed limit, rich people using LSD, etc).
You're right that the Democrat open-borders-but-Mexico-only policy is similar to Republican policies, and not disliked by the Republican establishment. But it is hated by the general public, and it is weird-- let some people in with zero vetting, but if you want to enter legally, have a five-year process? Who would vote for that? It is the current policy ONLY because putting that into a statute would never pass.
Expanding on this… immigration is - per Gallup - about as popular as it was a month after 9/11.
If our legitimate electoral process ends up producing a mismatch between voter preferences & outcomes such that we won’t even enforce the immigration laws on the books… maybe our process is the problem?
From an admittedly right-leaning perspective, not enforcing laws seems like an end run *around* democracy - not an expression of it.
> If our legitimate electoral process ends up producing a mismatch between voter preferences & outcomes such that we won’t even enforce the immigration laws on the books… maybe our process is the problem?
The process self-corrected, since a candidate showed up who said he'd enforce immigration laws, even building a wall, and he got elected.
That does sound like a perverse incentive: if I want to do it legally, it will take me five years. Alternatively, I can fly to a South American country, come in over the border, and Bob's your uncle!
How is Democratic immigration policy self-serving? Does allowing refugees somehow help Democrats? The only thing I can imagine you thinking is some sort of long game, where we let people in, give them time to get Green Cards, then give them five years to become citizens, and then hope that they start voting for us. But that's a very long game, and many immigrant groups are clearly quite strongly Republican (particularly the ones that came as refugees, like Vietnamese and Cuban immigrants).
I don’t think it’s a permanent shift - several immigrant groups have changed which party they lean towards in the past few decades. Do you think that will stop changing? (I believe that in Orange County, where I live now, it’s only because of immigrant communities that Republicans still have some safe seats!)
Also, five years is the minimum time from green card to citizenship - since there are usually years before a green card, and people usually don’t even complete that last step in just five years, it’s probably closer to ten on average.
Vietnam & Cuba are special cases when it comes to country of origin. Also: the GOP slant is overwhelmingly found in older generations of those groups - particularly those who actually had to flee.
Successful asylum claimants start a 5-year clock, but even 10 years isn’t that long in the scheme of things.
If Texas turns blue, it's Game Over for Republicans winning the White House for at least a generation.. And Democrats have been talking about this as a goal for at least 25 years.
Politicians play long games and importing new Democrats is that most obvious example.
But what exactly is the mechanism for immigration turning Texas blue? Lots of hispanic/latino Texans vote red, especially as you go down the generations. If anything, it seems more likely to me that Texas eventually going blue will be a matter of (white) housing refugees fleeing from blue states with housing shortages. And while northeastern blue states are being less proactive about their housing shortages, the west coast is largely going YIMBY, so if anything, Democrats are actively slowing down their taking of Texas.
How do you mean? Texas has fewer electoral votes that Michigan/Wisconsin/Pennsylvania, and immigration backlash seems to be a major factor turning those states red.
Notably, 1988 is also the *first* time Texas went red in a non-landslide election. It was reliably blue up until then. These things are constantly changing, and with the current electoral landscape, locking Texas blue would not make the election a foregone conclusion (especially since other changes to the political system would likely equilibrate in ways that make the Midwest redder).
Equilibrium is most early achieved in a closed system. Positions that would turn Texas bluer might turn Michigan (and Massachusetts and Hawaii, for that matter) redder. But turning Texas bluer by importing Infinity Mexicans requires no horsetrading at all.
I can't believe we're having this discussion about (I) whether the Democrats are trying to tilt elections by bringing in Undocumented Democrats, and (ii) whether Texas becoming a blue state would be harmful to the Republican. They openly brag about the former, and the latter is perhaps the most trivially obvious political statement I can make.
How so? An immigrant becoming a voter takes years, and it frequently never happens. 14th Amendment citizen voters takes minimum 18 years. No one in politics has incentives to plan that far ahead.
Politicians are people too. Do you not care what happens to your country or your children in 18 years? Can politicians not care about climate change because it is more than two terms away?
Even if the main goal of open borders isn't to get votes, it still happens. If Bob's politician has a small chance of doing a coup on you, but yours has a very high chance of attaching tens of millions of voters to Bob in a democracy who vote overwhelmingly for you over a longer timeframe, don't you think that's an important topic when discussing Bob's decision tree
If the Hispanic vote ever goes R in an environment where the political centre of mass has not shifted far and away from the American baseline, I will reevaluate my opinions.
An immigrant becoming a voter takes checking the wrong box when you go to the DMV, and then the Democratic Party will do everything they can to stop you from being removed from voter rolls.
I think Biden, and Obama before him, deporting record numbers of illegal immigrants, and recent Biden administration efforts that have reduced border crossing to record lows, to be quite impressive and I support them in that! I wish Biden could have funding to do more, but alas Trump instructed his allies in congress to shoot down a border funding bill because he actively wants the border to be bad to help him be elected.
But I understand if you are a bit of an open borders type you might want to vote for someone who implements less effective policy there, I certainly get that stance even if I don't share it.
Behold! You have elucidated my opinion better than I can. DEI is in retreat. Wokeism is in retreat. ACAB is in retreat. Attacks on "Big Oil" are in retreat. The only thing on the left that has any legs is transgender issues, and it already feels like it is stalling out. Trump's mindset of "Whatever I can get away with" is corrosive to the fabric of a nation. Should new liberal laws be passed by Kamala, those can be repealed in the future. But the corrosive destruction of the belief in free and fair elections, the demonstration that the rule of law is fake, the ability to force the entirety of the government to bend its will to a single person's whim will surely kill this nation. And what rises in its place is likely to be a nuclear wasteland as regional warlords try to take each other out.
And for the record, the plot on Jan 6 was clearly: Get a mob into the capitol, to either get the ballot box, or gain access to the box. Stuff the box full of the false electoral ballots that were rushed to DC before the 6th. Once the box has the false ballots inside it, declare the continued count of ballots to be impossible, and switch to the one-vote-per-state mechanic, which would have re-elected Trump, who would then pardon everyone involved.
Also, Ron Johnson tried to get fake electors to Mike Pence. Their main goal was to claim that competing slates of electors from too many states meant it was a failed election and throw it into the House, where Trump would win because the vote is done based on state delegations, not individual representatives.
They weren’t “competing” electors. They were fake! Fraud! Dozens of them have been indicted in four states! Trump’s attorney behind the scheme was disbarred.
This is motivated reasoning in the extreme. Trump defrauded 7 states by having false electors forge state documents. This was not a case of the states themselves forming alternate electors. These weren't even the official republican electors that were appointed in case Trump won. They were ragtag groups of loyalists willing to commit a felony, or in some cases tricked into it. You really discredit your entire defense of Trump.
I'm jealous of the alternative universe some of you people seem to live in, but in the real world that shit is here to stay. Of course, neither Trump nor his joke of a party can do shit about that either, but at least may he continue to spit in their faces for a few years longer from on high.
I think this is sufficiently implied that if I included it, I would also have to include things like "and then drive home from the voting booth, instead of staying there forever and slowly starving to death."
See, you're full of good advice, that I shall be sure to take on election day!
But yes, certainly I am not accusing you of failing to badger people to do Better Things - more just... emphasizing for the "just win THIS election" crowd that unless you follow up with Good Policy, you're just gonna get a more empowered anti-status-quo dude on the ballot in 2028. Or, if you do badly enough, and this threshold is NOT currently high enough, in the streets with a mob in 2027.
" instead of staying there forever and slowly starving to death."
This is why Australians have sausage sizzles during elections! Now you too can stay as long as you like in the vicinity of the polling booth and not be in danger of death from starvation!
"Sausage sizzles have become a recognised and expected addition to polling booths at Australian elections, with sausages at these stations nicknamed 'Democracy Sausages'. There was widespread media coverage of this in the 2013 and 2016 Australian federal elections, with the hashtag "#democracysausage" trending on Twitter. Twitter also added a sausage-in-bread emoji to the '#ausvotes' hashtag on the day of the 2016 election; it was the most widely used emoji in relation to the election under that hashtag. During the 2016 election, the leader of the Australian Labor Party, Bill Shorten, came under scrutiny for the way in which he consumed his sausage in bread."
"Democracy sausages" are the sausages wrapped in a slice of bread, bought from a sausage sizzle operated as a fundraiser at Australian polling places on election day, often in aid of the institutions that house the polling place. In 2016, 1,992 polling booths (just under one-third of those across Australia) had a sausage stand by the count of the Election Sausage Sizzles website."
"Put this way, you could argue: okay, January 6 was bad. But it was like a ten-year-old child's idea of authoritarianism. You seize power by getting a bunch of people to zerg rush the opposing politicians and beat them up until they declare you in charge. Too bad you were foiled by a locked door, you'll get them next time. I won't claim this strategy has never successfully taken over a government, because history is long and weird. But I can't think of any examples."
I've said it before and I will say it 1000 times more but all the evidence shows that Trump did not plan January 6 or try to use it to seize power, he literally within an hour of it happening told everyone to be peaceful, he told them all to go home, there is no evidence that he coordinated with the rioters, there is no evidence that he tried to use any of the armed forces or any of the US secret police or the secret service or like, a private paramilitary force to take over on January 6.
January 6 was a riot. It was not an attempted coup by Donald Trump. It did not fail to seize power because it was incompetent, but because it was literally not a planned attempt to seize power. Donald Trump's rhetoric on and before January 6 was well within normal range of political rhetoric in America, nowhere near incitement to riot, and it is immoral to hold him culpable for the actions of a tiny fraction of his supporters that got out of hand especially given he explicitly told them not to.
Not only is all of this obviously true if you paid attention on the day of it, read the logs and watched the video of guys walking through the Capitol, it's also LEGALLY true. No one who has been surveilling Donald Trump for the last 8 years has legal evidence despite him being investigated by intelligence agencies, the department of justice, congress etc.
To argue that January 6 was a coup attempt is literally a conspiracy theory, in the pejorative sense of the term.
As far as authoritarianism goes I think kicking a sitting president off multiple major communication platforms via coordinated backroom deals by his political opponents is a lot more scary creeping authoritarianism than some of trump's vague threats against other politicians (which you don't even specify), but ALSO trump himself is being threatened by jail from many axes. In ADDITION, I personally have been threatened by the other side directly.
Using the FBI against your opponents is far more authoritarian than anything Trump has actually done.
He was president for 4 years! He had every opportunity to arrest his opponents, to give orders to the armed forces, etc. etc.
He didn't do any of that shit, whereas his supporters have actually faced significant legal consequences, constant investigations, arrests and jailtime, etc.
I have to admit I haven't read the back and forth about exactly how deliberate Trump was on 1/6 because everyone talking about it is a hack who ends up enraging me in some way. If I were more virtuous, I would have cited his attempts to bully election officials in Georgia, which I think are a clearer-cut case. But those don't have as much name recognition as 1/6 so I went with 1/6 instead and am not going to claim to be 100% sure you're wrong here.
> those don't have as much name recognition as 1/6
Please, Scott, think about why that is.
January 6th was exactly the symbol the priestly class needed. They created it and amplified it, precisely so people wouldn't think about the reality behind it, and just take it as a given.
There's ample evidence the priestly class _wanted_ this outcome, and that the FBI was involved, just like with the staged meg whitmer capital. People _predicted_ the feds were planning a capital breach the night of january 5th:
He was fairly deliberate. He managed some paper-thin pretense of "oh I'm not responsible" but he also did things like this:
>Instead, President Trump reached out to Rudolph Giuliani and friendly Members of Congress, seeking their assistance in delaying the joint session of Congress. And the President tweeted at 2:24 p.m., at the height of the violence, that his own Vice President lacked the “courage” to act—a statement that could only further enrage the mob.
[...]
> On the 6th, as the riot began to escalate, a colleague texted Hicks and wrote, “Hey, I know you’re seeing this. But he really should tweet something about Being NON-violent.” “I’m not there,” Hicks replied. “I suggested it several times Monday and Tuesday and he refused.”
[...]
> Multiple witnesses told the Select Committee that Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy contacted the President and others around him, desper- ately trying to get him to act. McCarthy’s entreaties led nowhere. “I guess they’re just more upset about the election theft than you are,” President Trump told McCarthy.
There were no National Guardsmen anywhere on Capitol grounds when the Jan 6 rioters were beating the shit out of cops and breaking their way into the Capitol. He was the commander-in-chief: if he had requested NG, they would have been there.
I don't know what weird alternate universe you live in where he requested more NG in any meaningful sense. I assume you're equating an offhand comment he made at some point in his life to actually using his powers as President to request more NG.
And for every one of those thousand I will remind you that there was a fake electors scheme and multiple efforts to get those fake electors to Mike Pence outside the normal chain of custody. Mike Pence resisted the effort and altered his opening remarks to make sure it was clear he would not accept them.
The entire time during the riot (and even after the rioters dispersed), Trump and his coconspirators were applying pressure to Pence and other lawmakers to stop the certification of the election. He watched the violence and did nothing for nearly 3 hours while his staff and family begged him to call it off. The one tweet "he" sent telling them not to hurt police he didnt even write, and didn't call them off. Nevermind that this was merely the final step in his scheme to overturn the results. He already had false electors drummed up and ready, tried to force his DOJ into making false allegations of election fraud, told Pence to unilaterally make him the next president and pressured state officials into coming up with new votes. None of this is even disputed. To call Jan 6 and the actions leading up to it anything but a coup attempt is a denial of the obvious.
All of these are separate from the question of whether trump planned the riot on january 6 as an attempt to violently seize control of the united states.
“But when I ask what work I have to do, it’s to prod the part of my brain that says “The Democrats are terrible!”
I’ve found MDMA is exceptionally effective at reconsolidating whatever intense maladaptive reactions I activate/trigger while on it. It seems to provide a universal mismatch.
This Blogs transition from a cutting edge exploration of ideas to just another website repeating leftist tropes has been a dynamic and insightful look of at the importance of anonymity in the maintenance of free expression.
The internet is a dimmer place without Slate Star Codex and Unqualified Reservations. All we can do is mourn what was and celebrate that we ever had such golden content to peruse.
Come on man, this is silly. Scott has always been a lib, and will always have lib values and opinions. He's intellectually honest and charitable enough to point out flaws on his side and create a space where vigorous disagreement is encouraged, but that doesn't mean he has to conform to whatever substack flavoured online right opinions are in vogue.
To be fair, we're all of us dragging down the level with the discussion of politics; it is to be hoped that once the election is done and dusted, normal programming will resume.
Though my own country is probably going to have a general election sometime in November, so you're all welcome to pile in with opinions on who we should vote for, why, and why the other lot are a shower of [ahem].
Conspiracy theories about poopypants and fake AI electioneering welcome! (Please somebody give Simon Harris a good kicking, I dislike the guy on sight even though he hasn't been a terrible leader to date).
Hmm - this is the start of a possible conspiracy theory! You guys are set to try and re-elect an incumbent called Harris, we are set to try and re-elect an incumbent called Harris, is there a sinister connection? 😀 The Year of the Harris! What mysterious and even nefarious influence does this family, nay, this clan possess to be running for high office?
>To be fair, we're all of us dragging down the level with the discussion of politics; it is to be hoped that once the election is done and dusted, normal programming will resume.
Very much agreed!
>Though my own country is probably going to have a general election sometime in November
I offer my condolences. I hope that your candidates are from a better batch than the bottom of the barrel we got!
For those still reeling from the covid regime, the *one* kind of authoritarianism from Trump they can rule out completely is of the epidemiological sort.
He had a chance to go big with that national emergency, and he sat on his hands.
Great point! Covid was the perfect opportunity to expand his powers, but instead, he let the state governors do it. Trump could have suppressed dissent (more than the CDC and NIH actually did-- and he wasn't controlling them), faked the figures to show better progress, commanded Pfizer to follow its own protocols and approve its vaccine rather than wait for 3 weeks just so it would be announced after election, federalized the voting booths, . . .
In Mexico there is a saying, something like "the vote is free and secret." I wish Americans adopted this. Nothing against you Scott, but it would rid us of months of having to listen to everyone's endorsements, which gets very old very quickly.
One argument that you made last time, but haven't emphasized this time, is that Trump galvanizes the worse impulses of the social left. Do you still feel this way?
A related argument, which I'm not sure if you have made (but which I am making!), is that Trump disagrees with some of the better economic instincts of the right, and seems to move the party with him when he does. For example, the GOP has moved considerably anti-market on trade issues becuase of Trump's 2016 rhetoric, and now many in the party seem to be defending across-the-board tariffs.
I'm European, and while the outcome of this election affects me greatly, I mostly treat it as spectator sports.
However, some things to consider:
1. What's interesting in this election is that both candidate have a firmly established track record in power (as President and VP). I'm going to go ahead and say that, in this observer's opinion, Trump's track record is a lot better. I wouldn't chalk that to Trump being great (I think he's despicable and not incredibly smart either), but rather to where some of his sympathies and supports lie and consequently what policies get or do not get passed.
A lof of things that Trump got flack for actually held some water. The Dems have said they would keep building his wall that we all made fun of. Immigration seems to be an issue, after all (I genuinely thought he was inventing a concern at the time). America was lucky to have him in the worst of Covid — lockdowns were not the way to go. They can work but they're hard to do well, and America is not a tiny insular and culturally homogenous country where those things are comparatively easy. Operation warpspeed went well. Trump should probalby not get credit, but would it have gone as well with the Dems... my intuition is no. Tump lowered the taxes to great effect, etc... I don't know how I feel about his tariffs and trade war with China, but the Dems were keen on continuing them.
I don't think the Biden admin did anything super wrong, but it's been mid the whole time at best. The handling of the varying armed conflicts lacked direction, and it would have seemed better to put the foot down one way or the other. They've ran the money printer like crazy, which is sometimes called for, but I don't think we'll get the return on investment in this case.
You could say it wasn't Kamala's administration, but her lack of clear policy, and her general discourse makes it seem like she's fully aligned with the general party line. It doesn't seems like she has any plan other than "more of the same", even now that she is the candidate.
2. Most things that we are blamed Trump for, he is only indirectly responsible for. Jan 6 first. Did he foster the culture that allowed it? Most definitely, though it would have existed without him, but he did give them the casus belli. Did he mastermind it and willed it to happen? Most definitely not.
Roe vs Wade repell — that was the supreme court's doing. He packed the supreme court, but everyone does that (Dems as well). He broke tradition by nominating a new member to SCOTUS at the end of his mandate, but this was widely supported by his party, and I wouldn't have put it over the Dems to do the same. Still, not great, but also not the same as him point blank banning abortion.
3. The election stuff is troubling, mostly the reaction to it. I really haven't done enough research here but it seems plausible that (1) he did not win the election and (2) there were election irregularities. The reaction of "Trump is a crazy dictator" and "all of it is hogwash" is troubling. In a democracy, these things ought to be investigated seriously — I think they probably where to some (a large?) extent, which is why (1). But the public discourse around it is absolutely toxic and contrary to the spirit of democracy (on both sides). I think it's also plausible that Trump believes in good faith that the election was stolen and that this is not a ploy for him to remain in power. (This is not an endorsement of his character, and I'm not saying he wouldn't if he thought he could get away with it, but I tend to believe that he genuinely believes the election was stolen.)
4. The consequentialist/utilitarian argument: I believe policies under Trump (mostly, economic policy) will lead to vastly better outcomes than policies under Kamala. The market seems to believe this as well. The economy is crucially important to everyone, in ways that people tend to underestimate. Trump will be less good for some people (women who want an abortion and trans people among them) but on the whole, the economic considerations tips the scales all the way.
5. Trump can't run for another mandate, which I think should lower the concerns about his authoritarianism. He's not (and is never going to be) powerful enough to be able to allow himself another run, and if he tries, watch all hell break loose. He's also old enough that there wouldn't be much point.
Relatedly, most of the harm he has done to political norms has already been done. We have already paid the price, we might as well take the benefits.
6. One of the thing I was most concerned about for Trump was his handling of international conflicts. I think now I see things in a different frame: Trump is higher variance. He is more likely to bring conflicts to an end, and more likely to make something disasterous happen. Of course, it all depends on your definition of disaster here, but I think the odds of a disaster are comparatively very low. Russia or Iran detonating a nuke would be a disaster. Escalating the conflict with Iran such that they can *never* detonate a nuke might be good (*), or might be bad, but it's not clear is meaningfully worse that the morass situation the Dems are likely to leave this in.
(*) I do think Iran getting a nuke is probably one of, if not *the* worst relatively likely thing to happen to the world. Sure, evil AGI would be worse, but I rate that orders of magnitude less likely in our lifetime.
So anyway, for all these reasons, I lean towards thinking Trump would be better for America and the world. Kamala is sure to be predictably bad, Trump will most likely do better on net, with a small but definitely present chance of fucking up something important. I think the main difference is that Trump's mistake will be mistake of actions, whereas the Dems' mistakes are mistakes of inaction, steadily cruising down a slope of problematic policy and ignoring very real issues.
A lot of this is thoughtful and reasonable. I do want to counter your point re: "America was lucky to have him in the worst of Covid", because Trump rhetorically downplayed the severity of virus and the efficacy of social distancing measures (at a point in time, pre-vaccine, when those measures had a real impact on the spread of the virus) to such a degree that the Republican-heavy portions of the country faced significantly higher covid-19 deaths than Democrat-heavy ones.
Now, there are some confounders in there (pre-existing conditions like diabetes and obesity are likely higher in those Republican-heavy districts) so I don't want to over-state this. But the overall dynamic it created was one where (some) Trump supporters showed their allegiance by not masking, not distancing, and not vaccinating; whereas Democrats largely did the opposite. And even though we can say with hindsight that (some) Democrats went overboard in the other direction, it's absolutely the case that a whole lot of Republicans got sick or died as a consequence of this recklessness. Again, going too far has its costs (as you mention with lockdowns) but encouraging a culture of not taking the virus seriously was wildly irresponsible in my view.
"because Trump rhetorically downplayed the severity of virus and the efficacy of social distancing measures (at a point in time, pre-vaccine, when those measures had a real impact on the spread of the virus) to such a degree that the Republican-heavy portions of the country faced significantly higher covid-19 deaths than Democrat-heavy ones."
Pre-vaccine (so for 2020) Republican-heavy portions of the country did not clearly face higher covid-19 deaths, Instead there was a period of far higher deaths in blue states in spring 2020, followed by moderately higher deaths in red states through summer and autumn 2020, averaging out to similar numbers for the whole of 2020. This is what you'd expect if social distancing measures and masks weren't effective.
Wouldn't we expect blue regions to have higher deaths in general due to population density? Implying that *any* time period where red states outpaced blue states was likely due to something happening sub-optimally in red states?
Maybe, but you claimed that red regions had more deaths, pre-vaccine, when this isn't clearly true. And if we're going to allow population density, we also have to allow that Republicans are older than Democrats, and age has an overwhelmingly powerful, multiple orders of magnitude effect on covid death rates, far more than could be accounted for by population density.
Also, this is from the Discussion section of the paper you cited:
"Regarding COVID-19 cases in 2020, more lockdown days and more mask mandate days were significantly associated with fewer COVID-19 cases. These findings are supported by studies that observed the decreased trend in COVID-19 infections occurring after mitigation measures are implemented, such as social distancing and restricting large gatherings [56] and such as face mask mandates [57]. Specifically, for mask mandates in the year 2020, similar results were found - that for states that had high adherence to mask wearing, COVID-19 rates were low [25]."
You specified deaths. "COVID-19 deaths in 2020 did not significantly correlate with mitigation efforts.". Cases are overwhelmingly cofounded by different testing practices, which itself is a mitigation effort, so death data should be prioritized over it.
One could see how you're reasoning thusly. It's reductive, but it's the difference between a leveraged binary option vs a depreciating asset. But even through just these lenses, the choice of candidate isn't clear-cut as it ultimately depends on how much drawdown your portfolio can take.
If you are European, I really don't see how you could think Trump could be good for you. He is absolutely disbanding NATO and letting Russia take Ukraine the first chance he gets.
I'd rather have Ukraine sovereign, even if it's at some cost to our economies. But if you want to be callous, I don't think Putin is going to go against NATO, no.
I get that his scepticism of NATO is worrying but there is no evidence that disbanding NATO or abandoning Ukraine are his policies or likely to happen. My impression is that Trump was much more keen than Obama to arm Ukraine in the 2014-2022 period.
Did you see his response to the debate? He was pointedly asked about Ukraine and he gave an answer that made it clear he would demand an immediate end to the war in a manner that benefited Russian interests
That's probably an unfair characterization, though he certainly cares a lot less than we do. There's a silver lining too — he was right that Europe underspends on defense (and pay less than their commitment) — and a combination of that and Putin's aggression have lead to wake up a little. I don't think it's a good thing to rely on the benevolence of the Americans to keep us protected (ideally we rely on both their benevolence & on our own military capability, of course :D).
One thing that throws me off is that when people discuss economic policy, they typically assume that Republicans are better and I've rarely fully gotten that.
I think Republicans care more, but tax cuts that run up the deficit are probably in some sense self-defeating. Regulations may challenge the economy, but reducing regulations isn't uniformly good, as fewer regulations don't intrinsically mean more competition.
I don't necessarily disagree, but the policies Kamala has floated are borderline insane (her price gouging ideas that she has since disavowed, a wealth tax that would by all count decimate small and medium businesses, etc...). I frankly doubt she'll do the wealth tax, it's too insane — I don't take Trump at his worth and I don't Kamala either, but the general gist of their policies are generally pretty clear.
Also, yes, reducing regulations is not always good. But I think we're mostly on the side of too much regulation right now.
There's also frankly general incompetence in the regulators. Look at the EU's regulation. GDPR sounds like a good idea, and big tech was the first to protest... but in practice they benefit the most from it as doing business as an incumbent is a minefield. Let me not get started about the SEC in the US (crooks).
Honestly, if I don't think Trump will pick or listen to rational advisors, then I don't trust Trump. If Kamala has an economic advisor, then I suspect she'll back off from crazy ideas.
I think my challenge is that "regulations" isn't a bucket or quantity. The problem is having the wrong regulatory mix for a problem. This isn't to fight your intuition, but just "removing regulations" may hurt a market as well.
This is generally carefully argued, but I disagree with point 4. As far as I can tell, Mr Trump wants to encourage the millions of people of Chinese origin in the US to leave and to go to (or return to) China, while also trying to run the US as an isolated fortress. This is a short term tactic with large long term economic consequences, and would be very hard to undo even if 4 years later strenuous efforts were made to do so. As far as I can tell it hands over long term economic leadership to China. Right now the dollar is a useful tool that allows the US to live beyond its means. This convenient arrangement goes away if a new hegemon decides control over a fiat currency would be useful. Why should the US voluntarily take off the hegemon's mantle and throw it in the general direction of a rising power?
That's probably too extreme, I doubt there's going to be any deportation of anyone that is not an illegal migrant.
But I'm worried that immigration becomes a catch-all immigration that includes skilled immigrants. I'm hoping there is enough countervailing opinions in his circles to that point in particular.
I don't think Trump is very ideological. I think he's a self-interested crook who will mostly do what he think benefits — I just happen to think that, on balance, that aligns with the interest of most people.
There's definitely people who'd do much better than Trump — it's a choice between bad and worse, and I don't think Americans should pick worse in this particular instance (but life will go on whatever happens).
4. Trump's 20% tariffs across the board will cause much more inflation than anything Kamala will need both houses of Congress to pass. See also #1.
5. There's lots of ways he can destroy the government, for example by reinstating an executive order that allows him to replace nonpartisan workers with loyalists.
Also, JD Vance has said that he wouldn't have certified the 2020 election results. Normalizing this behavior by Republicans is utterly terrible.
6. Trump failed to answer whether he would support Ukraine in the debate against Kamala. JD Vance says he doesn't care at all about Ukraine. March to Return border riots occurred under his watch in Israel. Him only hiring loyalists this time around also means his stupid speculations won't be challenged, which is awful concerning the rest of his character.
> These are the people who would spend the whole session droning on about how the first Book of Heberdazzah said King Shmog died in Beersheeba, but the second book of Heberdazzah said King Shmog died in Jerusalem, so the whole thing was a flimsy tower of cards that no sane person could possibly believe
Yes, I too was party of the new atheist groupings in college and after, and when I met these guys in real life or online they were also keen to deny the existence of Jesus at all, as a if the very existence of the man would put their atheism at risk. They had to eliminate everything.
Can you give more clarity on the foreign policy issue? Does the link to a Noahpinion piece indicate you think Kamala will take a more Neocon-ish stance and that you think that's preferable to a more isolationist stance under Trump? That seems like a questionable view.
I'm not American, but US-China tensions would be a top consideration if I was, particularly since it might coincided with an AI fuelled arms race over the next 4 years. Basically, I'm quite worried about the US starting WW3 over freedom and democracy, and the current Democrats already seem quite hawkish.
> Put this way, you could argue: okay, January 6 was bad. But it was like a ten-year-old child's idea of authoritarianism. You seize power by getting a bunch of people to zerg rush the opposing politicians and beat them up until they declare you in charge. Too bad you were foiled by a locked door, you'll get them next time. I won't claim this strategy has never successfully taken over a government, because history is long and weird. But I can't think of any examples.
You might have intended this to be a straw man for comedic effect (ignore my comment if so). Otherwise, it is worth pointing out that the Jan 6 thing went beyond a rowdy crowd and a dude in a funny hat chilling shirtless in the capitol lobby. Chillingly, the Jan 6 ploy involved a legal strategy of triggering a constitutional crisis using the ambiguously-phrased powers of the vice president, and fake slates of electors.
(The fake electors have been getting smacked around in the courts but would presumably be pardoned in a second trump administration; EDIT -- incorrect since these are state charges, per Chastity below)
>>"Are these politically-motivated show trials? As usual, the Democrats have so carefully followed the rules and covered their tracks so that it’s hard to say for sure. But it’s fair to be suspicious..."
Who are you kidding? This is deliberate, naked lawfare. Any failure to see this truth for what it is is pure cognitive dissonance.
* In the E Jean Carrol case they had to change the laws to be able to go after Trump.
* The Latisha James fraud trial is based on a novel interpretation of the law that has never been used before, by a DA who explicitly campaigned on finding a way to get Trump. And where the business that would ostensibly be the victim acted as a witness for the defense.
* Fani Willis and Nathan Wade will likely be disbarred for their misconduct. And the SCOTUS decision has gutted this case.
* Jack Smith is not a valid special prosecutor and was not properly appointed, and Trump is protected by executive authority/Presidential immunity.
The Democrat prosecutors are like 0/5. Please, be serious.
I will grant that it's been a mixed bag. But the publicly available evidence in the two Jack Smith cases is already quite damning. The way Trump's legal team (and Cannon) have instead tried to attack Smith's appointment is both flimsy and telling. And while SCOTUS did grant fairly broad immunity, it only affected ~20% of the evidence. The rest is plenty.
There's an angle that comes from the confluence of your steelman. I feel obliged to argue this position because it's my own.
Your argument that Trump's ineptitude in trying to bring about authoritarianism makes him a more viable option than the DNC, who are trying to bring about authoritarianism in a more subtle and effective fashion is a strong one.
For this exact same reason, I am less concerned about Trump's stupid ideas. He's not as able to implement them, like in his first term he'll face pushback and obstructionism and effective resistance (and #Resistance) to the most objectionable parts of his agenda. Kamala is a slick operator who will act as a mouthpiece and vessel for a truly horrendous platform of a truly horrendous party controlled by ideologues, extremists, and wannabe tyrants. If you have to cast a vote between O'Brien from 1984 and Doctor Doofenshmirtz from Phineas and Ferb, of course you vote for Doof. Not because he's less evil, but because he's less effective at evil.
Does he bring us closer to authoritarianism? Yes. But Kamala does it quicker and more efficiently.
January 6 was bad. But new security measures and awareness of that sort of possibility make anything similar unlikely to repeat. Trump himself got so much blowback that he's moved to distance himself from it (he won't renounce it either, but if it was popular it would probably be the central message of his campaign instead of something he has to talk his way around when reporters ask him about it.) After four years Trump's term is over and he can't be president again.
Republicans are always a more unified party than the Democrats outwardly, but win or lose Trump won't be around for much longer (he's the same age now as Biden was in 2020) and the Republicans will then fall to infighting as they did during Trump's brief time in the winter (2021-2022, when it seemed possible that the Republican nominee in 2024 may not be him). It doesn't matter if Democrat elites are acting like catty high schoolers, what matters is a legion of non-famous progressive staffers, activists, fundraisers, and so on that are working every day to reshape institutions to their inhumane view of the future. A future you of all people should know enough to fear.
You're right that the Right is picking up some momentum. But if any of these victories are to be held, it also means holding Congress and the White House. Democrats have controlled the White House for 12 of the last 16 years, and Trump's first term was largely inept and almost all of his reforms were rolled back by Biden. It's distasteful to support Trump, but aesthetics aside he is the less threatening and more encouraging candidate.
I want better for my fellow Americans in the Democratic Party. I want them to look inwards and ask themselves why they have so much trouble beating such an obviously-horrendous candidate. Sure, they might double down on "everyone is racist and sexist". But some won't, and more voices will rise trying to free your party from the activist class that has captured it. If Kamala wins, no matter how thin her margin, then the Democrats will conclude that they are perfect and don't need to change a thing.
Finally, I'd like to touch on how Trump helps opens the door for a Chavez-esque dictator in the future. I fully agree that this is a major concern. But I think he's also likely to close that door, because he isn't going to become a dictator himself as you said, but he will teach our institutions to be more wannabe-dictator-proof. He already has, e.g. the piteous and doomed-to-fail sight of January 6 led to great improvements in securing government buildings against protests and riots. Meanwhile if Kamala wins, the DNC will continue to twist those same institutions not to keep dictators out, but themselves in.
There are other things that make me prefer Trump over Kamala. This alone would not sway me, because I don't want Trump to be president and don't think it will be good for the country. But as you said, it's a choice on the merits, and in this area I think Trump is the lesser of two evils.
> "Kamala is a slick operator who will act as a mouthpiece and vessel for a truly horrendous platform of a truly horrendous party controlled by ideologues, extremists, and wannabe tyrants."
> "I want better for my fellow Americans in the Democratic Party. I want them to look inwards and ask themselves why they have so much trouble beating such an obviously-horrendous candidate. Sure, they might double down on "everyone is racist and sexist". But some won't, and more voices will rise trying to free your party from the activist class that has captured it."
Could you please elaborate on what you mean by this? I presume that when you talk about extreme activist ideologies you mean things like the Free Palestine movement, trans issues, anti-white diversity initiatives, "wokeness", things like that. Am I getting that right?
Something I continue to have trouble with during this election season is the claim that these issue are core to the Democrat movement right now. My perception is that these are mostly sideshows; that wokeness has been in pretty steep retreat since 2021; that most people I know who vote Democrat do it for "normal" reasons like caring about the environment, reproductive rights, marriage equality, progressive taxation, stuff like that. I'll note that basically none of the things mentioned in the prior paragraph were platformed at the DNC this year. It feels to me that to declare all Democrats to be woke or Marxist or whatever is just as much of a smear as stating that all Republicans are racists.
Why do you think our perceptions are so different? (and please do let me know if I'm misunderstanding you)
Thanks for responding. Let me clarify my points some.
> Could you please elaborate on what you mean by this? I presume that when you talk about extreme activist ideologies you mean things like the Free Palestine movement, trans issues, anti-white diversity initiatives, "wokeness", things like that. Am I getting that right?
Sure. I don't really like the term wokeness but it roughly gets at what I'm talking about.
> Something I continue to have trouble with during this election season is the claim that these issue are core to the Democrat movement right now. My perception is that these are mostly sideshows; that wokeness has been in pretty steep retreat since 2021
This is correct IMO! But those losses starting in 2021 were after a long, LONG series of victories to bend institutions - universities, newspapers, federal and state agencies, the scientific establishment, corporate America, law, nearly every area of public life - to their will. That isn't undone, not even close. There have been significant defeats and the movement is weaker than it was, but it's still an incredibly potent force and could easily regain the momentum.
> that most people I know who vote Democrat do it for "normal" reasons like caring about the environment, reproductive rights, marriage equality, progressive taxation, stuff like that. I'll note that basically none of the things mentioned in the prior paragraph were platformed at the DNC this year. It feels to me that to declare all Democrats to be woke or Marxist or whatever is just as much of a smear as stating that all Republicans are racists.
Indeed, most Democrats are ordinary people with reasonable concerns, as are most Republicans. Both have a dangerous minority who reject the social contract and try to seize power for themselves. The difference is methods: the MAGA right follows Trump's lead, so they are loud, attention-grabbing, and have the subtlety of a sledgehammer. This makes it easy to coordinate resistance against the worst of their vision. The woke left is decentralized, embedded into institutions, and very adept at using bureaucratic processes.
You are correct that woke ideas didn't get much airtime at the DNC. Kamala, like Biden (and like everyone who wants to win a general election) is running as a moderate. But even though Biden is a moderate his administration has been the most left-wing in American history. Why? Because the activist class of woke leftists wield most of the power within the apparatus of the party, the day-to-day of wielding the power that comes with being the ruling party.
These things get tons of coverage in conservative media and (pleasingly) have begun to break through into other institutions. For example, there was a recent article in the dreaded New York Times about the $250m DEI initiative at the University of Michigan. It's quite good, and quite upsetting - moreso when you realize the exact same trend has played out at thousands of other universities, and workplaces, and agencies. If Trump's genius is he's bad in so many ways, the woke left's genius is that they attack in so many directions at once that it's impossible to coordinate or even report on everything. This is one of the reasons why there are so many anti-woke blogs and political celebrities, because they have new red meat for their readers every single day!
tl;dr both parties are mostly a reasonable majority begrudgingly working with an unreasonable minority out of fear of the other team's unreasonable minority. But the MAGA right is blustering and inept, the woke left are capable of much more destructive and lasting harm.
Agreed that the NYT's article about the University of Michigan was a great and fascinating article, but I came away with a somewhat opposite interpretation. If the (left-center bastion) NYT is publishing articles largely skeptical of 'wokism' where they highlight the ineffective and nonsensical conduct of the administrators and the relative indifference of the students, to me, that's a big sign that pushing back against woke is actually becoming _mainstream_ now. Perhaps even signaling the beginning of decline of woke in general. Hold fast! Soon we might be able to go back to hating each other for more traditional reasons, like tax policy!
Thank you for your analysis and perspective, Scott. My analysis resulted in a vote for Trump last week here in NC. I disagree with your assessments of the left’s threat. I would summarize your analysis of the left’s threat as a slow melt toward evil/bad/inhumane/enslaving results “within” the system. In America, I would hope we all define the system, most broadly, with the first principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Assuming this as our system, the left, its captured machines (media, academia, tech, government, etc), and its leaders have proven (Covid prime example) to be antithetical to those principles. If I was to place a probability on Trump’s likelihood to be a Chavez dictator, assuming your interpretation of the evidence, it would be higher than 0%. And yet, the left’s slow march toward stealing our freedoms is much higher and far riskier to the sovereignty of the American people. Again, thank you for helping people think.
When you're terminally online, it's easy to convince yourself that the majority of elites are left-wing, when in reality they're either centrist liberals or right-wing. We don't have a meaningful number of left-wing elites; what we have is a vocally online left-wing movement that can occasionally dominate certain social media spaces. I say this as a left-wing person: the only space even partially captured by the left (as opposed to moderate Democrat libs, who are centrists at best) is academia. And even then, it's tenuous and variable. If you think media, tech, or the government has been 'captured' by the left, it's because you've been told as much by right-wing institutions mad about things not being as far right as they are.
You seriously count Bezos forcing his editorial board not to endorse any candidate in the paper's name an instance of putting a Republican thumb on the scale? Whereas a mainstream newspaper endorsing the Democratic candidate is simply business as usual? I'm at a loss for words.
If strict neutrality looks like right-wing bias to your eyes, you're wearing left-tinted glasses.
"Forget whether eliminating the filibuster should really count as a threat to democracy;..."
Does not the elimination of the filibuster actually entail a closer realization of democracy given that it eliminates barriers to majority rule? This is the problem with eliminating it if so, in that the check that the filibuster poses to majoritarian rule would be wiped out. I am sure many would think that a good thing, but I think there is a case to be made (a la Tocqueville and others) that mass democracy will often precipitate authoritarianism rather than ensure the long term survival of democratic norms that opponents of the filibuster want to further. It is one of those instances in which the greater realization of a thing actually precipitates its demise.
The filibuster is an absurdity. It should’ve been eliminated in 1891 when the House got rid of their version. Instead we got 73 more years of Jim Crow.
And in case the current version of the filibuster is doubly absurd since the changes in the seventies. Now you don’t even have to filibuster. You just say you’re going to filibuster and that effectively kills the bill.
I agree that if someone is going to filibuster they should be forced to filibuster. That said, my only point was that eliminating the filibuster would not be a threat to democracy but would signify an expansion of democratic norms. Not sure that is entirely good in principle, even if it turned out the the filibuster has had its day and ought to be retired.
I'm not convinced this is as open-and-shut as you say. What is the utility function being assumed here? It seems entirely possible to me that having additional friction in the legislative process actually leads to a better outcome over the long term, even if the mechanism is absurd and there are decades during which old legislation sticks around causing misery and distortions before it can finally be removed. You could also say that constitutional monarchy or Confucian respect for tradition is absurd but they have much the same function.
You might be right but this needs a better argument.
The game theory right now is that if you are in the minority, you don't have to negotiate at all until there is a supermajority, and that's extremely rare unless one party dominates or there is a fracture in the party like the Democrats in the sixties over Civil Rights. But if it's a simple majority then suddenly it makes a lot of sense for Senators to negotiate sooner and try to extract a concession.
Furthermore, the lack of public understanding of the filibusters incentives candidates to run on policies that they know will never, ever pass, like Medicare for All as a way to stand out in their primaries. So you have a situation where candidates rarely have to run on their record because there isn't even a vote.
People act like the filibuster is a sacred institution when the truth is it wasn't used that often until the nineties, and has been modified many times. That was when the the parties realized that the changes in 1975 allowed them to quietly obstruct legislation merely by threatening to filibuster but not having to actually go through with it. The president would get the blame for not getting anything done, and there would be no Strom Thurmond or whoever standing up there for 24 hours, putting a name and face on the opposition.
Thanks, so you are specifically objecting to the filibuster mechanism beyond its function of adding friction. I find your description now much more convincing.
Thank you for this well written piece. I disagree with you in a few places, but this is by far the best overall summary of the election choice one is going to find on Earth.
This could be one of those elections where the losing party is better off over the longer run. When Carter was elected it seemed like a great Democratic triumph - they had overwhelming majorities in the House and Senate. But Carter became unpopular mainly because of things that neither he nor any other president could control, chiefly stagflation and the Iran hostage crisis, and so his presidency led directly to 12 years of Reagan and Bush. For 2026 and 2028, my bet is on the party that loses next week.
The Carter Administration was responsible for a massive amount of the Code of Federal Regulations, much of which forms the backbone of major regulatory regimes today. The enduring influence of those years is easily understated.
I think there is also a good chance of an internal re-assessment by the republicans, if they lose. Two loses in a row can make a party stop and take stock.
Sometimes, one loss is enough, but I think a loss by Harris is too easily explained away and won't lead to much introspection among the democratic party.
It does sometimes work that way, but it's worth noting that 2016 was an election where that was decidedly not the case. Trump got 3 SCOTUS appointments and then a pandemic-induced rally around the flag effect that, unlike other incumbent governments around the Western world, he was unable to capitalize on. And there are still quite a few old SCOTUS justices.
It's also worth noting that even if Trump wins, Democrats will have a hard time winning durable Senate majorities for the foreseeable future. In the presidential race, there are 7 swing states, 19 safely Democratic states, and 24 safely Republican states. Republicans have been doing a terrible job of nominating electable swing state candidates recently; once they stop doing that, they'll have a firm grip on the Senate.
Yes, population shifts mean that the Senate is moving steadily towards a permanent Republican majority, and with it a future in which only Republicans are appointed to the SC. Soon this process will have passed the "event horizon"; it is likely the only way of slowing it is for Democrats to obtain control of Congress and admit DC and PR as states in the next few years.
Once again we're not voting for the productive policies and unifying elements of "our" candidate but against the existential threat of the "other" candidate. I look forward to a time, should it ever come, when we're less cynical and defensive. But I'm voting the same way you are for many of the same reasons. One is slow suicide with the time and ability to thwart, the other is fast with less time and opportunity to thwart. I like to take things slow, thank you very much.
And underappreciated reason for this is that information-gathering abilities are so advanced now, and the parties are so integrated in their polling and strategy efforts, that both parties have basically converged on the popular consensus for most consequential popular issues, making it pointless to talk about them. Hence culture war bullshit instead.
Do you believe the Republicans want to stop all immigration and the Dems want to bring in tens of millions of immigrants a year and this will have a huge effect on the economy? Nope, the dems noticed that being strict on the border is popular right now, their rhetoirc and proposals are about as strict as the Reps, and will probably stop more illegal immigration overall because they're more technocratic.
Reps want to support the police and Dems want to defund them? Nope, Dems are over-funding police in record numbers and are as tough on crime as the Reps, aside from not wanting to introduce bathroom bills or w/e.
Regulations? Dems are getting in on Ezra Klein's push for deregulation to allow more building, their plans are as broad and serious as Reps here.
Etc.
Both parties are already doing the things that the majority of the country wants. Thus the election ends up just being about wedge issues and scare tactics.
That was a fantastic argument - "In defense of TDS", from Bentham's Bulldog. He makes this complex argument beautifully.
It's complex because there's so much fake information out there, including from well known media outlets, that the real argument has been lost in all the noise.
This was precise. I wish this writer had managed the Harris campaign's communications, instead of whoever is managing it. They throw out abstract concepts like "fascist" that fall flat. And Harris simply doesn't have Bill Clinton's or Obama's way with words even with simple questions..
"And Harris simply doesn't have Bill Clinton's or Obama's way with words even with simple questions.."
I've seen this attributed to her being from California. You don't have to win over the public, because it's 'vote blue no matter who', you don't have to beat the other party's candidate because they have a snowball in hell's chance of getting anywhere, so your main rivals are within your own party and that's a simple matter of back-stabbing, alliances, and being able to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds 😀
So she's never really had to stand up to hard questions or debates as other politicians have had to do, which is why she is poor at unscripted, unrehearsed, spontaneous speeches or fluency in getting the message out.
Perhaps it's just me, but I believe that it's a sad commentary on the state of our political system when a so-called "endorsement" of a candidate is 99% based on railing against your candidate's opponent.
I miss the days when someone would actually endorse their candidate based on their candidate's merits. I somehow expected Scott might be up to that. I was naive.
I grant you that, and voting for the lesser-of-two-evils, is certainly the unfortunate situation many of us believe we are facing. However, an endorsement should explain all the reasons you support your endorsed candidate. That being absent is not simply a sad statement on our political system. An endorsement should be reasons to support someone. Given that's not possible, I'm not sure it's really an endorsement. It's more of a "Here's how I'm voting and why." Perhaps it's semantics, but endorsing something is like cheering for someone. Cheering against someone and calling it an endorsement is just petty.
When was the last time you endorsed a candidate without hesitation? While almost all the candidates since 1984 seem, in comparison, amazing candidates, they all appeared to have serious flaws at the time. Some illustrative examples:
Dukakis: "far left governor of Taxachusetts"
George HW Bush: went into the VP slot a solid person, emerged a shallow husk of a man
Al Gore: wooden, out of touch, product of privilege with no knowledge of the real conditions of the typical US citizen.
George W Bush: dumb, out of touch, product of privilege/etc
Obama: inexperienced, friends with radical leftists
McCain: too old, too institutionalized (to the Senate mode of action) by too much time in the senate
Romney: too craven in pursuit of voters, no strong core of policy beliefs, product of privilege who doesn't understand real conditions, etc
H Clinton: (don't get me started on this one...)
I don't remember off-hand the tragic flaws of Kerry and Dole, but they didn't even win.
In all cases, it was really hard to look at the candidates and say, "This is a wonderful candidate and it makes me proud to endorse them."
McCain's warhawkishness is definitely the biggest problem. As an Arizonan who definitely liked him more than Trump, I can say he seemed a decent, good man, and simultaneously he would've been an incredibly terrifying president. Highly recommend "David Foster Wallace on John McCain: ‘The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys and the Shrub’" - magnificent article about DFW reporting on his campaign trail.
(My favorite quote from that one: "As one national pencil told Rolling Stone and another nonpro, “If you saw more of how the other candidates conduct themselves, you’d be way more impressed with [McCain]. It’s that he acts somewhat in the ballpark of the way a real human being would act.” And the grateful press on the Trail transmit – maybe even exaggerate – McCain’s humanity to their huge audience, the electorate, which electorate in turn seems so paroxysmically thankful for a presidential candidate somewhat in the ballpark of a real human being that it has to make you stop and think about how starved voters are for just some minimal level of genuineness in the men who want to “lead” and “inspire” them.")
Agreed. For my time and money, essays were DFW's best work and the McCain campaign embed was a good one.
Though much longer and with fewer satisfying sharp, witty bites, McKay Coppins's Romney: A Reckoning does a good job of showing both the best and the worst of that man.
Oh, Bill had flaws out the wazoo, but he also had charisma out the wazoo, was genuinely smart, and had the convincing background of being "just an ordinary guy" (he got a lot of stick about being a rube from Arkansas).
I wouldn't trust him as far as I could spit, but I also wouldn't mind seeing him as president again 😁
Bob Dole I think was perceived as wacky on economics? and as some kind of rambling old uncle/grandpa? Didn't he say something about cow's milk (I have a snippet stuck in memory of some comedian on Conan O'Brien's show going on about Dole and the moo-juice)?
Kerry was just Kerry. Apart from the whole Swift Boat thing, he had this aura of New England patrician privilege (I don't know how much of that was real) and of course, being the husband of a millionairess heiress, he didn't have much of a leg to stand on when trying to talk like a representative of the ordinary man.
>Yes. After all that, the American people, looking for a leader, ended up with a choice between ointment and suppository. The fall campaign was an unending national nightmare, broadcast relentlessly on cable TV. CNN told us over and over that Donald Trump was a colossally ignorant, narcissistic, out-of-control, sex-predator buffoon; Fox News countered that Hillary Clinton was a greedy, corrupt, coldly calculating liar of massive ambition and minimal accomplishment. And in our hearts we knew the awful truth: They were both right.
This was true in 2016, but it very well might not be true in 2024. He's promising to deport millions of illegal immigrants—the number keeps going up to the point where he is promising to deport many legal immigrants as well. Simply for logistical reasons, you don't do that without putting people in camps. Sure, he *might* not do that... but it's been one of the strongest themes/promises of his campaign so it's very likely he will at least try. Which means that yes, he'll put people in concentration camps. (Not death camps, which is what Hitler put people into, and the original that I ellipsised above mentioned Hitler, so *maybe* that was meant to apply only to death camps. But it didn't say death camps; it said "camps". Which very much includes concentration camps. Which, of course, while not as bad as death camps, are really really bad!)
Thing is, if he tries to do this, there will also be massive protests, and Trump will definitely invoke the Insurrection Act. He wanted to do that against the BLM riots but was talked out of it by people like Mike Esper and Mark Milley. Those people will not be around this time m
But I think this is worth more than a simple edit? (I mean, thank you for the edit, and now it's correct, but I also think it's indicative of a more substantial point. I think it actually matters that he is going to put people in concentration camps on a massive scale and then deport them. I agree death camps are worse and Hitler should be taken as vastly worse than, say, Americans interning Japanese citizens in WW2. But that doesn't mean the latter wasn't *bad*. And it was also "putting people in camps". I don't think this is equivocating; I think it's a thing, far worse than anything we do right now, although of course it clears the low "not literally as bad as Hitler" bar.
And deporting howevermany millions of people will be bad. A program of that size goes beyond "some people are falsely imprisoned" anyway, because you can't do anything at that scale while maintaining anything like our usual due process safeguards. So you are virtually guaranteeing more serious deporting of legal immigrants & almost certainly citizens too.
I think there is a reason that members of Trump's cabinet and joint chiefs are warning he's going to be a dictator, and it's stuff like this. His plans are now much more explicitly authoritarian. I don't think that should be glossed over.
It is not clear to me that when choosing between (1) allowing people to continue committing crimes (being in the country illegally) & (2) putting those criminals in make-shift prisons ("concentration camps"), the latter is worse. Imprisoning people because of their ethnicity or national origin, as the US did during WW2, seems like a completely different matter than imprisoning people because of their crimes.
I would point you to Sam B's answer in his comment just below this one (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-endorses-harris-oliver-or-stein/comment/74866450). This will be a mass military action which will have nothing of significance in common with enforcing laws & putting people in jail. This is particularly true given that, on this scale, there is no possibility that normal court protections, due process of law, will be part of the process. This will be the military rounding people up and throwing them in makeship camps. So, yeah, concentration camps. Pretty bad!
It will also inevitably capture both legal immigrants—hell, J.D. Vance has talked about throwing out the Hatians in Ohio who are legal immigrants—and (most likely) US citizens, particularly when you remember that the right has been talking for years now about doing away with birthright citizenship (flatly unconstitutional, but that doesn't mean a compliant Supreme Court won't go along with it). So it will end up including people for their ethnicity/race, too.
That link isn't working for me., but again I think this is a really big omission on your part. As the next post mentions, this isn't a trivial thing. If he really does it at the scale he is proposing (an open question I think)., this 10 million+ people, many of whom have lived here for decades being rounded and put in hastily-built mass detention facilities. Many of them came here as children and have no memories of other lives. It would be if successful one of the largest forced population transfers in human history. All of the others were accompanied by mass death. Even the process of rounding them up will be violent--blue state law enforcement won't be allowed to help by their governments so the Project 2025 proposal is to send red state national gaurdsmen in to do it (not nearly enough federal law enforcement). So we're talking about essentially military forces going door to door in major cities hunting down undesirables at at massive scale.
Once they are detained, it will take time to process and deport them. Many home countries may simply refuse to accept deportees. So we'd end up with millions of people in hastily-built detention facilities built by a government that hates them and has no interest in their welfare. Death would follow for some at least. This would be a crime on as great a scale as the Japanese internment.
The Nazis didn't start with death camps. They just wanted to deport people they didn't like. When that proved to be a logistic nightmare, they put said people in concentration camps. When all the other countries refused to take those people, they evolved the concentration camps to be death camps. It all sounds exceedingly similar.
Mexico doesn't have the leverage to refuse to take these immigrants, though. Worst case scenario, the boats can always just dump their cargo onto a random coast within the country.
>okay, January 6 was bad. But it was like a ten-year-old child's idea of authoritarianism. You seize power by getting a bunch of people to zerg rush the opposing politicians and beat them up until they declare you in charge. Too bad you were foiled by a locked door, you'll get them next time.
I think the more pressing issue is the false elector scheme, especially since this time Trump won't have any guardrails from within the party.
If I understand correctly, the argument is "while this administration is doing a bad thing X, a future Trump administration might do 10X". X could, for example, be stacking courts to limit ballot access.
I guess the difference between us is that you put a lot of emphasis on "10X", and I put more emphasis on "might". This administration is already putting its critics on a terrorist watch list (Tulsi Gabbard), with nearly zero reaction from establishment media. If Trump will start doing the same thing, I’ll object to that. But right now, democrats are doing it, and that’s what I’m objecting to.
The only source we have for Tulsi being on a (TSA btw which doesn't actually stop her from doing anything) watch list is herself. The fact that the TSA stops me every time "randomly" and finds something in my genital area "randomly" doesn't mean that I'm on a watch list, it means that they're assholes.
I've been stopped "randomly" by the TSA too (back when I was younger, had a big beard and could easily pass for an Arab). It was always over in a minute. I don't believe I randomly had three air marshals join me on a flight, with bomb-sniffing dogs following me in both airports. Have that happened to you?
More to the point, it's true that I cannot independently verify the existence of whistleblower complaints, or how exactly you get SSSS. I do have an heuristic, however. When a false claim of this nature is made, the media tends to amplify it with "look how dastardly they are, lying about Obama". I often see articles in the New York Times titled "unfavored person X made a false claim". Politicians join in with "look, the other side is deranged!". So when a very serious claim like this gets made and there're crickets, that suggests they cannot find anything to discredit it.
I appreciate the attempt at steel-manning the pro trump position. But i think you've left out some key pieces of evidence that matter. You're talking about 'bright line violations', but it seems that you're doing the same definitional trick the left does, where it's only a violation when the other side does it.
You're referring to January 6th while ignoring evidence such as:
- the federal government witheld evidence that defendants could have used at trial
- trump did indeed call for national guard on that day but pelosi rejected it:
- the accusation that the feds planned a capitol breach on january 6th was made _before_ january 6th, on the night of january 5th, because a guy named Ray Epps kept telling people to GO INTO THE CAPITAL, and the FBI won't definitively say whether or not he was working for them, and for some reason the FBI stopped looking for this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erafzh-YahE
- the FBI won't say how many field agents they had involved in january 6th, and they have a history of entrapping right wing persons, such as the fake kidnapping of Meg Whitmer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHbu6YQ7BOU
- ostensbily there was a 'pipe bomb' that day, which everyone has forgotten about, for some reason
So, sure, viking man took an unscheduled tour of the capital building. That's bad. How is that Trump's fault? People would have questioned the results of the election even if trump had conceded, because the margin of error was so thin, the count showed trump leading until late at night, and there's no reason to belief the elections are more secure than the border. So trump is responsible for people thinking the election was stolen, and the damage they cause, why isn't Harriss responsible for the 19 deaths and billions of dollars in damage from the George Floyd riots?
If "viking guy gets into the capital because there is no real police presence" is a bright line, why isn't
- letting tens of millions of people into the country illegally
- explicitly saying you're trying to get around supreme court ruling against studnet debt forgiveness
- making up charges to level against the opposition candidate
- lying about the health of the current president until it was too late to run a primary
_also_ crossing a bright line? Where exactly are these lines?
You do a great job painting two pictures of authoritarianism. The left wing authoritarianism one looks like, it's where we already are.
Do you really think we are _closer_ to right wing authoritarianism, than left wing authoritarianism?
> - trump did indeed call for national guard on that day but pelosi rejected it:
Only Trump has the authority to call in the National Guard. Pelosi had no ability whatsoever to make any decision on where the National Guard goes. Once people were breaking into the Capitol and threatening MIke Pence, Trump should have called in the NG, but he refused to.
> If "viking guy gets into the capital because there is no real police presence" is a bright line, why isn't
Because the Jan 6 shit was part of a criminal conspiracy to convince/force Mike Pence to throw out the election results!!! If what Trump tried to do was fine, then it will be fine when Kamala throws out the EVs of every single fucking red state come 2025, and anoints herself as God-Queen of the country.
>If what Trump tried to do was fine, then it will be fine when Kamala throws out the EVs of every single fucking red state come 2025, and anoints herself as God-Queen of the country.
Hey that's my line! :-)
I have said that the morbidly funniest outcome would be if Trump winds the electoral college - and incumbent Vice President Kamala Harris does what Pence declined to do, and refuses to certify the election. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-353/comment/74537292
I used to think January 6 was just an unplanned riot, and it *was* an unplanned riot, but the plan was to have Mike Pence endorse the alternate slates of electors that various states were putting forward.
Then we'd need to go to SCOTUS, who probably would have said STFU, but this is still significantly along the banana republic slide.
I think a 2nd Trump Presidency will be a lamer version of his 1st. It will be very similar to how the Conservatives governed UK. Get elected on a platform to reduce immigration, but instead flood the country with "legal" immigrants by handing out student and temporary worker visas like candy in every 3rd world country like the Canadians and the Brits are doing. They get to claim that they reduced illegal immigration all the while making their corporate buddies happy by suppressing wages and increasing housing costs. So I can sympathize with Fuentes, as I fully expect my own side to completely backstab me.
In the UK, the Conservatives couldn't even claim to have reduced illegal immigration - it's been going up for years. Each time they got elected in the past 14 years, they campaigned on lower immigration, then subsequently actively increased it. Finally we had enough and wiped them out in the recent election, partially for this but mostly just for generally being corrupt, inept liars.
Unfortunately they've been replaced with an even worse party, mainly from voter apathy and the first-past-the-post electoral system.
It's truly over for the UK. Elect Conservatives and you get millions from India. Replace them with Labour, and you get millions from Pakistan. Well every population gets the government that it deserves I guess.
I think you're a lot more certain about your ability to predict bad things potentially happening than I am. I think this touches on something real:
"Why do you think people can make infinity billion dollars starting an anti-woke Substack? Who's paying that money? Not psychologically well-adjusted people with no wokeness-related trauma, that's my guess."
True...but that trauma exists for a reason. It's ongoing. And I am highly confident that it will continue to occur under Democrats. And all of Trump's evil is outside my direct experience. Somebody said that somebody said, rather than things I can observe with my eyes.
I was in California for Covid and the Democrats locked me in my go**amn house for a year and half. Their DEI garbage is still in my workplace, where it's been for the past 10 years. I got cornpone opinions, same as everyone else, and they've been messing with my corn for 10 years.
Now, you don't have to agree with my interpretation of these policies, that's fine, but why would I vote on the basis of far-off, theoretical harms reported by third parties rather than harms I directly observe. If you have liberal/SJW trauma and not Republican trauma...why is that not an important factor?
I think that Trump's stated policies are worse than Harris's; however, Harris is vastly more capable of actually implementing them than Trump is. So, it's a bit of a toss-up. Of the two of them, I think that Harris is the one who is fully capable of instituting price controls, for example.
Harris has already mostly walked back her price controls idea. She is tacking to the center and listening to economists’ criticisms. Trump will do no such thing because he thinks he understands economics better than everyone else.
“She is tacking to the center” out of pure ambition and a desire to get elected. She is pure cynical ambition personified and will flip to whatever position appears to be most convenient. There’s really nothing to her and “access” will be extremely high stakes. She will be right back to “defund the police” if it once again becomes popular among the activists. Of course, Trump is a more malignant force of vengeance and pride. While Trump may unfortunately have Congress (or at least the Senate), he has basically zero percent of the Federal bureaucracy. I think either of them could thankfully end up hamstrung, though possibly in different ways.
The woke wave has created in my view and it’s receding. Defunding the police is not an idea that any politician going for national votes will get behind for a generation at least. You’re right that Kamala tacks to the center because she is hollow and wants votes from the median voter. But that’s causing her to distance herself from the far left in a way that Trump isn’t distancing itself from the far right (except on abortion). So 2024 Kamala is the best choice if you don’t want an extremist candidate, even if 2020 Kamala was far more extreme.
Despite Scott's protests that he is not saying much of any moment, his counter-argument #1 here is the only one I have seen anywhere that really moves me in contemporary commentary. I inhabit a non-swing, solidly and reliably Tribe-Blue, region of the lower 48, so I have the luxury of not needing to hold my nose, but if I lived in maybe-maybe-not-land, this is the argument which would make me feel OK about the nose-pinching, because it pays the pro-DT argument it is opposing the compliment of taking it seriously. These are, in fact, the only kinds of arguments that sway me, because they are *arguments* and not poses.
Interestingly, my thought process whittled down to “What policies do I actually care about?”
I realize I don’t care about the majority of the policies that are talked about, as I either doubt the president’s role in influencing them, or don’t personally care. A few niche policies I realize I do care about, and I simply picked the candidate who aligned more with those niche policies.
No more agonizing on who’s more likely to lead to societal collapse, no more balancing a thousand different hypothetical probabilities, just “I care about issues X and Y. Candidate A seems better for issues X and Y than candidate B. I am voting for candidate A.”
Somehow this seems much simpler and more useful than trying to use Bayesian reasoning to assess arguments and counter arguments for either candidates authoritarian propensities.
Well, that was disappointing but expected. I get that you have your hard-headed ideals, but can't you think of this situation a little more pragmatically? Let's say that you endorsed Trump. Anyone that you would alienate by supporting Trump, you already alienated years ago anyways. If Trump loses, you're perfectly fine, back to the status quo. If he wins, you have better standing with the new establishment.
But if you endorse Harris and she loses? You're screwed. You make an enemy of the new establishment, and even the liberals won't protect you because they still hate your guts. Almost no one is going to take your side.
...You have a family now. Maybe it's time start valuing your safety over your ideals.
“Anyone that you would alienate by supporting Trump, you already alienated years ago anyways”
This might be the wrongest thing I have heard all day. Scott still has plenty of us fans who value him for being a principled guy, a rational thinker, and a great human being. All of that would be out the window for us if he endorsed Trump just for personal gain as you suggest.
Why don’t we go through the list of people who publicly asked the NYT not to dox Scott? How many of them do you think are voting for Trump?
"Nice family you've got there; shame if something *happened* to them"? Really?
I suppose we can very charitably assume that you aren't trying to threaten Scott's family yourself. But you're basically making that threat by proxy for others, and advising him to pre-emptively submit without the villains of the tale having to get their hands (or keyboards) dirty.
I really did not mean that as a threat, I genuinely do just care about his safety. In a worst case scenario, things are going to be bad whether I want them to be bad or not. Leaving the country would also be a perfectly good option. (Though, I highly doubt that what's happening will be isolated to just the US...) It's just a good idea to hedge your bets, that's all.
> Anyone that you would alienate by supporting Trump, you already alienated years ago anyways
What are you talking about? Do you think this is some conservative clubhouse?
IIRC the survey has more liberals than conservatives by a good bit. The conservatives, however, *post* a lot more, because of ... well, the same bug as whatever drives them to vehemently debate the finer details of exactly whether Jan 6 counts as bad, I guess.
Not this specific blog post obviously, Scott has plenty of time to switch gears if he wanted to. Hell, even Vance compared Trump to Hitler once, and look where he is now. I'm just afraid Scott's eventually going to do something stupid because he needs to stay "ideologically consistent" or because it's "morally right," when he really can't afford to do stuff like that anymore considering how much more he has to lose now.
Look, almost none of the people posting here know what it's like to live in the kind of world Trump wants to make. But it is very easy to survive, even thrive in such a world! You just need to be a bit more careful about your actions and stop taking your life for granted. Don't let all of those ideals get in the way of what really matters: your survival and happiness.
> Or take the many legal cases that Democrat-controlled prosecutors’ offices have filed against Trump since he lost the presidency. Are these politically-motivated show trials? As usual, the Democrats have so carefully followed the rules and covered their tracks so that it’s hard to say for sure. But it’s fair to be suspicious, and I know people who are considering voting for Trump on this basis alone. Meanwhile, here’s Trump:
> >“WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences,” Trump wrote. “Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials."
Yeah, that's the last few decades in a nutshell.
First, it's hard to support the assertion that "the Democrats have so carefully followed the rules and covered their tracks so that it’s hard to say for sure" with a straight face. Not when Alvin Bragg openly campaigned on a promise to prosecute Trump. ( https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/20/politics/bragg-new-york-trump/index.htmlhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/06/12/trump-prosecutor-alvin-bragg/ ) Not when the judge was openly putting not just his metaphorical thumb but an entire anvil on the scale throughout the trial, from jury selection to jury instructions. Not when Bragg refused to prosecute real crimes but used procedural tricks to inflate a single time-barred misdemeanor into dozens of live felony cases.
There's simply no room for a rational, dispassionate individual to doubt that this is purely politically-motivated persecution.
But more to the point... *this is what always happens.* It's the same old story we've seen again and again since at least 2000:
1. Democrats decide to break some important norm.
2. Republicans warn them, "you shouldn't do this, it sets a bad precedent."
3. Democrats do it anyway.
4. The precedent now being set, Republicans turn it to their advantage a few years later, because this is a thing we've established is OK to do now.
5. Democrats cry foul and play the victim.
The fact that Democrats never seem to learn, never seem to realize that they need to STOP BREAKING IMPORTANT NORMS if they don't want this to keep happening to them, is in and of itself enough reason to put me off ever voting for them again, at least until they finally wise up.
The big, obvious, brightly glowing neon sign example was Harry Reid invoking the so-called "nuclear option" in 2013, changing Senate rules to exempt judicial confirmations from the filibuster so he could push through a few candidates that Democrats wanted on a bare majority vote. Had that precedent never been set, it's likely that Republicans would have been unable to seat the Justices who overturned Roe v. Wade.
Serious question, what rule does "Not when Alvin Bragg openly campaigned on a promise to prosecute Trump" violate? If he thinks Trump did something illegal and needs to be prosecuted and is willing to invest his career into focusing on that, why shouldn't he say that in his campaign? As far as I can tell he's promising to pursue that case where another person might not pursue it, which is... fine? Prosecutors pick which cases to pursue all the time.
> Serious question, what rule does "Not when Alvin Bragg openly campaigned on a promise to prosecute Trump" violate?
Not a rule, but it "violates" the concept that "we really have no way of knowing that this was a politically-motivated prosecution" seven ways from Sunday, which was the point I was making.
I'll link to a list of Bragg campaign statements at the end of this comment. In a nutshell, a major theme of his campaign was the breadth of his experience, indicating his ability to handle all aspects of his office. It was known that the current DA (Cyrus Vance) was investigating the Trump Organization, and Bragg talked about how his experience qualified him to take over that case. He made statements like, “I haven’t seen all the facts beyond the public, but I’ve litigated with him and so I’m prepared to go where the facts take me once I see them, and hold him accountable.”
After taking office, Bragg reviewed the case and decided it wasn’t strong enough to justify a prosecution at that time. The lead prosecutor for the case, a holdover from Cyrus Vance’s term in office, resigned in protest. The investigation continued and prosecutors eventually developed a case that Bragg decided was strong enough to go forward.
If this is enough to convince you that the prosecution was politically motivated, I think you’d call the decision to prosecute politically motivated no matter who had won the race for DA or what they said during the campaign.
The DA's office, as you noted, had looked the case over and found there was nothing worth prosecuting. The FEC, which has exclusive jurisdiction over campaign finance issues, had *also* looked the case over and found nothing worth prosecuting. And yet Bragg filed charges anyway, right as the election campaigning was getting into gear. And Biden's FEC, which typically jealously guards its exclusive jurisdiction over campaign finance issues, just sat back and let it happen.
Anyone for whom those facts alone aren't sufficient evidence that the whole thing is a blatantly political persecution is suffering from a severe case of stuck priors overriding their rationality.
Prosecuting an individual because of who they are is the problem. The point of rule of law is everyone is equal and deserves the same treatment. Pledging to prosecute Trump in general is a violation of that principle. If Bragg ran on "Trump's lawyer paying off a porn star and not disclosing that as a campaign contribution is a clear violation of the law" and that was how the campaign finance laws were applied to everyone else then indeed there would be no problem.
I mean, I'd interpret that campaign promise as saying "I'm going to prosecute him for the things he did, which anyone listening already knows about". Not "I'm going to find something to prosecute him for".
>Put this way, you could argue: okay, January 6 was bad. But it was like a ten-year-old child's idea of authoritarianism. You seize power by getting a bunch of people to zerg rush the opposing politicians and beat them up until they declare you in charge. Too bad you were foiled by a locked door, you'll get them next time. I won't claim this strategy has never successfully taken over a government, because history is long and weird. But I can't think of any examples.
Bret Deveraux can, and he also argues that, while the attempt being foiled by locked doors looks silly indeed, that is no predictor for the next time:
> While the insurrection was happening and in its immediate aftermath, there was a tendency to focus on the more frivolous, silly parts of it. And there were truly silly looking things. And there are still commentators – some deluded, some acting in bad faith – attempting to insist that this wasn’t serious. They are wrong; the Capitol Insurrection was deadly serious both in the very literal sense that people died (which I think seems to be missed in some quarters), but also for what it means.
>No ancient Greek would have had any trouble in understanding what happened on the 6th or that it was a serious attempt (albeit an incompetent one) to seize power. Having a leader or a political faction move with a mob (often armed, but not always so) to try to disperse the normal civic assemblies of a Greek polis and occupy their normal meeting place was a standard maneuver to try to seize power during stasis.
> Later in 411, the ‘Four Hundred’ would seize power in exactly the same way, arriving with a mob of armed supporters to disperse the Athenian boule – it’s council (Thuc. 8.69). That’s four examples of this exact tactic from Athens alone (Athens was by no means the most stasis-prone ancient state, by the way – that was almost certainly Syracuse).
> Let’s come back to Peisistratos, because he is instructive here. Peisistratos tried to make himself tyrant of Athens twice before his third attempt succeeded.
The bit about the two-player psychodrama in which the Democrats (or at least the objectionable portions of progressive orthodoxy) are the outgroup to the Republican's fargroup is extremely apt and I applaud Scott for writing it.
One related concept I think is that of ingroup conformance and Scott's "different worlds" essay -- whoever wins the election, both Scott and the Muslims in Michigan are going to be going to the same workplace and seeing the same people at cocktail parties (or perhaps the teetotaler equivalent depending on how observant the Muslims in Michigan are). So the ingroup/outgroup antagonism genuinely *is* the proximate struggle because the same people and organizations remain one's ingroup regardless.
What takes an act of will is reminding oneself that the election has to be judged with respect to its material consequences as if both sides were fargroups regardless of the fact that one side is aligned with outgroup orthodoxy and one side are just people you never actually see or meet because they're in "different worlds" land.
This next week is going to give me such agita so rather than doom spiral I plan to relax by reading some early modern history that will undoubtedly have little relevance to the current state of affairs
"One word conspicuously missing is 'Trump'. Doesn't Trump support Israel even more than Harris?"
Yes! He does! Because he's trying to hold older evangelical voters, but yes. The point isn't to take a stand for Palestinians or Gaza. The point is to punish the politically impure.
Also, "As usual, the Democrats have so carefully followed the rules and covered their tracks so that it’s hard to say for sure," is exactly the reasoning that gets your ass clapped by a $965 million settlement.
Any other R candidate will be pro Israel for the same r reason. But it's conceivable that Harris could be replaced by a n anti Israel D, since there are a lot of them.
One thing, I don't know if it will persuade any Trumpists, but there is this perception among many that he "actually" "cares" "about them."
Remember, on Jan 6, that Ashli Babbitt was shot. One of his most loyal followers, willing to go over the top for him. She died, pointlessly, fruitlessly. Hundreds of his supporters were right there at the time. His most loyal people, right in the line of fire.
Did he tell them to leave the dangerous situation they were in? No. He didn't. He told them to "stay peaceful." You are just meat to be thrown to your death for him. He doesn't care about you, and never has.
He didn't know what caused Ashli Babbitt to be shot. For all he knew, there was an active shooter situation. He prioritized his own desperate clinging to power over his followers' well-being, because that's the sort of person he is.
I'm not concern trolling, I'm simply expressing the objective reality. The idea that Trump actually cares about his followers as anything other than idiots to steal money from with NFTs and rugpull cryptocoins is an absurdity, made all the darker by the death of Ashli Babbitt.
The compromise was terrible. I forget what the merits were. Suppose we have a state where the governor uses violence to keep Blacks from voting Republican, as happened there. Should the House of Reps. certify the governor's slate of electors, or the Republican one?
If you somehow came to know that the 2020 election had, in fact, been stolen, how would your opinions change?
By the way: I have found it UNBELIEVABLY difficult to get any opponent of Trump to answer this hypothetical question. But you are a rationalist who is epistemologically competent, so I trust that you can.
Well it’s not a well formed hypothetical. What do you mean by ‘came to know’? Do I have access to undeniable proof that I can share? Or do I get it in some non-transferable way?
There is a large amount of evidence of various kinds, which different people weigh in different ways, it is still a DEBATABLE topic. Scott seems to be making the conclusion that the election was not stolen an important load-bearing proposition, but maybe it doesn’t actually matter to him, and I’d like to know that.
I have two questions for you which are simple yes or no questions that I hope you have enough integrity to answer:
1) did you ever believe that Trump colluded with Russia before the 2016 election?
2) did you ever believe that the “Hunter Biden laptop” was Russian disinformation?
Because I had an INCREDIBLY hard time getting Trump opponents to even CONTEMPLATE the proposition that Russiagate was a Clinton campaign hoax, because they did not want to be put in the position of saying that it MATTERED and then later have to admit that the people who fabricated and used that hoax against Trump were unethical.
Similarly, I could never get Joe Biden supporters to say *whether it mattered if Biden took bribes*, they would not contemplate the hypothetical possibility that the laptop was authentic because then they would have to admit that they supported Biden over Trump anyway even though they believed he probably did take bribes.
I do, thank you. You're basically trying to test for good faith in advance. Which is an admirable goal.
For my part - yes, it matters to me whether Biden actually took bribes, and there is a nonzero chance that he did. It still would not especially swing my vote, though, given that I have a much higher confidence that Trump did much more in that same vein.
But it does matter. If I were to learn, incontrovertibly, that Biden did take bribes, and that Trump (despite all the evidence) did not, it would significantly shift how I feel about this election.
May I flip it around? If you were convinced that Trump was taking bribes, and that Biden had not, would it change how you want to vote? I am assuming (but please correct me if I am wrong) that you would vote Trump.
The laptop makes it completely clear that Biden did in fact take a lot of bribes from foreign countries, and it was just revealed that the FBI knew in 2019 that this was the case and instead of pursuing the case they “pre-bunked” the story because they expected it to come out after they sat on it for long enough (they did and it did).
Those Biden bribes were much worse than anything Trump did, as you would agree if you familiarized yourself with all the facts of his family bribe-laundering scheme.
But if Biden had not been not corrupt, and Trump was, then I would probably have voted for Biden in 2020.
Because…who cares? If a 9/11 Truther asked me how I would feel about about America if 9/11 was an inside job, it would be clear that they were just attempting some sort of persuasion approach to, a few steps in, attempt to get me to believe (or validated their anger about) the fact that 9/11 was, in fact, an inside job.
Sorry, not playing whatever game you’re pushing. The fact that you believe it makes me very uninterested in discussing it with you unless I think i can somehow shake you out of your stupor.
It makes sense to ask whether a person thinks a question MATTERS before wasting time trying to persuade them.
It makes sense when someone states an opinion to ask what are the “load-bearing” facts that affect that opinion.
You refuse to even address whether it matters, which only makes sense if you think it has actually been conclusively proven that the hypothesis is false.
No, it wouldn't, because I've heard trump explain why/how he thinks it was stolen and it's laughable, to the point that I don't think he believes it (and if anyone could believe it against all evidence, it would be someone with his personality). If you're right for the wrong reasons, I'm still mad at you for trying to overthrow the government.
Fair answer. But hopefully it would also make you realize that what Trump did was an egregious norm violation where he became the first president since the founding of the country to not peacefully transfer power to his democratically elected successor. And that he was so insistent on the lie that he convinced or bullied half the country to go along with it. And that this lying demagogic figure is who his supporters have tirelessly backed for nearly a decade. And that maybe this is why so many of his critics are horrified by the man.
It wasn’t a lie. He believed it had been stolen, and wanted Congress to look at the evidence. He told the protestors to protest peacefully.
What you say takes for granted that the election was not, in fact, stolen, and my whole point is that this is an unsettled issue of fact. But I don’t want to try to settle that question here. I just want people to admit that this issue of fact matters. (I do NOT want to hear statements of the form “he couldn’t have known it was stolen therefore his behavior was illegitimate”, that’s moving the goalposts because earlier you called it a “lie”, and there is a big difference between being mistaken and lying. And he was not mistaken about the issue being unsettled. The evidence was NOT addressed at the time, and what has come out since then shows that it was almost certainly stolen in Arizona and Georgia (although a third state would have been needed to change the outcome).
In Trump's world of delusion, its hard to know what he really does and doesn't believe. We do know, however, that he repeated claims that his DOJ, state officials, and white house counsel had already debunked, to him specifically. So at the very least he lied to the public with allegations he knew were false.
I do think, to the extent that Jan 6ers believed Trumps lies, they were actual patriots. It does matter if the election was stolen or not, and if Trump had successfully done so on Jan 6, the country should of course not roll over and just let it happen.
You're wrong about the stolen election claims in Arizona and Georgia, those state governments don't agree with your assessment, and they're both republican run.
1. A case wherein I didn't ever look into whether 2020 was stolen or not, and thus "the election was stolen" could plausibly mean "Trump's claims of fraud were correct." This would very heavily change my positions on everything relevant, though my policy positions would still be more D-aligned than R-aligned.
2. The real world, where I did investigate, and found there's fucking nothing, where Trump was told by staff "yo that claim isn't true" and then went out and repeated the lie the next day. This would mean I would support criminal prosecution of the involved parties. I'd still vote Harris, though, unless she was personally involved in this imaginary voter fraud, because her policy positions are closer to mine and Trump was only "right" by luck (magical intervention from God, in that we are now in a stupid hypothetical universe, really), so his coup attempt was still bad. He did claim 2012, the 2016 primaries, the 2016 election, and the 2020 election were all rigged against him/the Rs, often months in advance, after all.
Yes, obviously I would be against Harris now if Biden/Harris had actually stolen the 2020 election. I'm surprised you found anyone who said otherwise. Perhaps you tried to frame it as "given that Biden/Harris stole the election" which is quite obviously false so no wonder there was resistance.
Whether the 2020 election was stolen is the most important political question of the 21st century. It would change everything for me if it was. As long as it was NOT stolen, everything Trump did after that date was horrible. If it WAS stolen, then it was a valiant defense of the United States.
But, I just haven't seen anything remotely persuasive. The best people can come up with that I've seen is "some states changed their voting rules incorrectly", which while bad, is hardly evidence of theft but rather an improper response to the COVID emergency, and certainly not a reason to throw out millions of voter's opinions. If there is any actual persuasive evidence of intentional theft I'd love to see it, because I've read a lot of conservative sources on this and remain completely unconvinced.
>Whether the 2020 election was stolen is the most important political question of the 21st century.
Hmm... I consider it important, but not so _overwhelmingly_ important.
I consider Harris's statement that she wants speech on social media "regulated" [censored], and the way the Biden/Harris administration used Facebook and Twitter as proxies for the administration to unconstitutionally censor political speech to be comparable in importance.
( Morbidly, if the USA+NATO or Putin winds up misjudging Putin's invasion of Ukraine or if Xi invades Taiwan, and either of these results in a nuclear exchange, that will overshadow every single other political event of the 21st century up through today. )
There was no voter fraud. Every court case was thrown out due to lack of evidence. Fox News was sued for millions for spreading lies that they knew were lies. Giuliani had to concede under oath that he lied about everything. Audits of the state counts found at most a dozen or so illegitimate votes, which makes it extremely extremely rare.
It would upend my whole world view in a major way. Perhaps more than anything else in my life. I would probably not vote for either party and not support either candidate or party in any way. I'd probably become a conspiracy theorist and start believing in many other alleged schemes.
(I'm extremely confident that it wasn't stolen, though. I'd bet all of my life savings on it. And I'd bet a lot of money 2024 won't be stolen by the Democrats if Harris wins.)
Not gonna vote for Trump but I prefer that he wins. I also don't think the election was stolen but I don't blame people (too much) for thinking that it was. Our elections *look* like they're not secure, and the Democrats spend every ounce of their energy fighting the most basic attempts to keep them secure.
But Trump has no evidence. He just makes stuff up. He says whatever he wants to be true regardless of how preposterous it is. So if he got this one right, it's only by accident.
> "I won't claim this strategy has never successfully taken over a government, because history is long and weird. But I can't think of any examples."
I'm not informed enough to have an independent opinion on this, but I believe Brett Devereaux (of acoup.blog) is fairly popular round here, and I recall him posting a commentary on this event where he claimed that "armed thugs occupy the physical seat of government" was a pretty effective strategy for performing a coup of democratic city-states in the part of history that he studies, and he seemed to think most people were not taking this threat seriously enough.
This is why the Democrats didn't want Trump to call in the National Guard. They didn't want armed forces that take orders from Trump occupying the physical seat of government.
It's kind of a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't for Trump, and I think he made the right choice, at least regarding that issue. If he had called in the National Guard, anything he said could be interpreted as orders to be carried out by them. As it is, his words are interpreted as insurrectionist orders to a disorganized mob armed with pepper spray. How much more insurrectionist if he had had soldiers on hand?
I'm detecting a subtext from some Trump supporters in the comments that Scott's just pretending to care about policy and is really just grossed out by Trump and his coalition. I'm not saying that's the case, but suppose it was. Could you really blame him?
Suppose there was a party, the Yellowish-Green Party, that publicly embraced identity politics for women and non-whites while condemning identity politics for whites or men as "hate." Would anyone be surprised, then, if I told you the group least likely to vote for that party was white men?
What has Trump and the wider GOP done to appeal to tech-adjacent* youngish secular white men who live in the Bay Area? They certainly have some issues like crime, homelessness, and affirmative action. But, whatever the reasons, the GOP rarely talks about affirmative action. Trump and the GOP's political strategy has been to appeal to low-class, Christian fundamentalist, and conspiracy minded people with stuff like Hulk Hogan, "prayer breakfasts," and the embrace of RFK Jr. That may well be enough for electoral victory, he's currently a slight favorite in the prediction markets. If so, he won't need the support of Scott. Would he deserve it? Can you really answer "yes?"
Don't despair. You've got in your coalition laid-off factory workers, Biblical literalist preachers, and "natural living" antivaxxer dog moms who used to vote Democrat. If you want a coalition with more people like Scott, maybe try to influence your coalition to stop appealing to religion and conspiracy theories. Relevant tweet:
Taking Ars Technica comment sections as a proxy for tech-adjacent youngish secular white men who live in the Bay Area, the net effect seems to have been pushing them away from Musk rather than toward Trump.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them vote Republican. If your identity is so tied up in "Being a good member of blue tribe" you'll find a reason to vote blue no matter who.
I *guarantee* you that if the nominee was Vance, Vivek, or DeSantis, Scott and the Ars Technica comment sections would find something else to disqualify them.
I'm not that politically aware/don't follow the shit that closely but weren't at least vivek and desantis running on a bundle of ideas and vibes that's incredibly similar to trump's? It doesn't really seem surprising to think that if you would say "don't for for this guy" you would also say "don't vote for that guy who's really similar"
Vance actually seems more different to me, but idk enough about what him running would look like if he was the nominee-- I suspect it'd be very different though
"the Yellowish-Green Party, that publicly embraced identity politics for women and non-whites while condemning identity politics for whites or men as "hate." Would anyone be surprised, then, if I told you the group least likely to vote for that party was white men?"
You don't need to make up a new party! This is the actual position of the Democratic Party. The Trump/GOP appeal for is youngish secular white men is simply...not doing that!
>I'm not saying that's the case, but suppose it was. Could you really blame him?
IMO Scott has been more of an asshole since moving from SSC to ACX (this is not necessarily a bad thing), and I think the bluntness of "Yes, I am an elitist that hates rednecks, and I can comfortably ignore the equivalent folx on the other side" would be refreshing. But it cuts against his old "On Niceness" thing.
>What has Trump and the wider GOP done to appeal to tech-adjacent* youngish secular white men who live in the Bay Area?
Been less openly hostile to them and their industry than Democrats?
I agree with this post, but there's one important way that Kamala and Democrats are bad that is not also the case with Trump that needs mentioning: COVID tyranny.
It was democrats that kept mask and social distancing mandates in place long after safe, effective vaccines were widely available. It was democrats that kept schools closed for years longer than they needed to. It was democrats that co-opted public health agencies to push their woke agenda (see eg https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/04/public-health-protests-301534), destroying public health agencies' credibility in the process. Republicans, including Trump, do not share this extreme fault.
My personal take is that because this was largely state-level policy, implemented largely by state-level officials, and thus one should vote for Republicans all the way down the ballot in state-level elections and below. In the national-level elections, I'm voting for Kamala (and the Democratic senator in my state, New Mexico) for more-or-less the same reasons that you outlined above. But some people I know think that COVID tyranny is a good reason to vote for Republicans even at national-level elections, to punish Democrats. So I figured I'd just mention that here.
It absolutely does work that way. The president's party gets punished/rewarded for the way that state-level officials behave, and vice-versa.
After the President has been in office for nine months, there are elections in politically significant places: governors of Virginia and New Jersey, mayor of New York City. These are always considered to be referenda on the President's job so far.
I agree, which is why I'm voting for Harris, and for Republicans for all state- and local-level elections. But, some people are motivated to vote for Trump for these reasons, so it is worth addressing these reasons if you want to convince people.
Electing Republicans will just reward their obstructionism and ensure that Kamala will have her hands tied on the border and any other policy you may want for four more years.
Kinda curious what you think Kamala's agenda is. Most people express their issue with her is that she stands for nothing, has no agenda, and is talking and campaigning like a neocon. Which is probably good strategy honestly. Dem voters do not agree on much right now, and any policy position she takes will only cost her voters. I agree with you, I don't want any change (besides reinstating abortion rights and curbing illegal immigration down a bit). Isn't Kamala literally running on not doing anything? A quick peruse of her website mentions price-gouging restrictions and closing tax loopholes. None of which will happen because her donors won't let her. What are you afraid she is going to do?
Here are a few Kamala agenda items I can think of off the top of my head that I want obstructed:
1. Price controls. I do not want price controls on food as a misguided attempt to control inflation (which is currently very much under control). That this is even a possibility that Kamala brings up signals that she is deeply economically illiterate, and thus we would benefit from having whatever wackier economic proposals she cooks up in the future obstructed by Republicans.
2. I want our courts to stick to a literal interpretation of the plain text of the law. I do not wanting them inserting their own policy ideas into how they decide to read the law this week. If Republicans control the senate, they'll fight back against any aggressively anti-textualist judges she nominates, and force her to nominate more textualist judges.
3. Popular-but-ultimately-unhelpful modifications to the tax code, such as unrealized capital gains taxes. Republicans are likely to fight back against this.
4. Deficit spending. Since the US is in good economic times, we should be cutting back on spending and reducing our debt right now. If congress is not full of yes-men and yes-women, Democrats are unlikely to be able to spend as much as they want.
I acknowledge that on some of these issues, a Trump Presidency would be much worse than a Kamala presidency. But I think that a Kamala presidency with a hostile congress is more likely to have these harmful goals obstructed than a Kamala presidency with a friendly congress.
There are also some parts of the Kamala agenda I don't want obstructed. I like that she's a YIMBY when it comes to housing; thankfully this is not something Republicans will necessarily obstruct. I like that she will continue pouring money into R&D and investment into clean energy. Republicans make a big stink about not caring about climate change, but in practice they [don't obstruct these efforts much when they benefit red states, as they have been lately](https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/red-states-renewables).
Abortion rights are, unfortunately, a total non-starter when it comes to federal legislation currently; this is unlikely to change even if Democrats control both houses of congress. There's just no way they'll get 60 senate votes for this party-line issue. And the same applies to Republicans' abortion agenda: there's no way they'll get 60 votes in the senate for any federal abortion restriction legislation. So, unless either party decides to use the nuclear option and ditch the filibuster in the senate, abortion is highly likely to remain in its current (not ideal) status quo of being a state-level issue. I understand the desire to punish Republicans for the egregious abortion restrictions popping up in red states, although this is better done at the state level since that's where abortion restrictions are coming from. By all means vote your conscience and boot out all your state-level Republican lawmakers if this matters more to you than (eg) COVID tyranny.
>One worry is that Trump tries to pack election boards with his supporters and give them a mandate to fiddle with election law in ways that make him more likely to win
Is the concern that he'd do this before getting elected, or after? If before, then it's not a consequence of him getting elected. And if after, then why would he be trying to subvert an election after winning it?
Did you know Trump just sues CBS news for not covering him in a positive light? He regularly calls the news the enemy of the people, in different words.
Do you have any evidence of any Democrat politician taking free speech away? Has Biden done that? Has Kamala even hinted at taking away free speech?
What does having a non-bipartisan transition team even mean? Kamala said she would appoint Republicans to her cabinet. Would Trump appoint a Democrat? You know the answer.
I really like this piece, but I think you make a mistake on abandonharris. They clearly loathe Trump even more than Harris, but they have no leverage over Trump. (Does anyone?) They have (or at least think they have) some chance of getting Harris to actually move much farther towards their position because their position is indeed what the Democratic Party would espouse if not constrained by the fact that their view is really, really unpopular.
That leaves open the question: do they have to actually follow through on their threats even if it elects Trump? Can they afford to play a game that long? What choice do they have? If they fail to carry out the threat to abandon Harris (and they don't have to vote for Trump to do so -- they only have to abstain from voting or vote Stein) then they lose all credibility for the next threat...
Yeah, that was Scott's point, but I don't think it's their point. They actually think they can affect her while they know they can't affect Trump. They have a strategy, not just a reaction.
I don't understand a strategy built on "I am electing someone I can't influence, but that's OK because can stand outside the White House cursing government policy while arguing with the unsuccessful candidate". How is that a strategy?
But that assumes that the effort to persuade has any value? It seems quite likely to me that if Ms Harris is not elected then the 2028 ticket is not going to include her. This really smells to me more like a vote suppression tactic.
She won't be on the 2028 ticket, but whoever is on the 2028 ticket will say "oh shit I need to pander to Muslims in order to win Michigan".
At least, that's the theory. It's been tried at various times by various groups who think they deserved to be pandered to, with varying degrees of success.
They don't clearly loath Trump. A lot of them are traditional Muslims who would feel quite at home with a Trump administration's social policies, particularly on LGBTQ issues.
Notably, as far as loss of government contracts to those who disagree with party orthodoxy,
"With the introduction of Executive Order (E.O.) 13985, federal agencies and contractors must now incorporate DEI into their contract solicitations and proposals." (https://www.userogue.com/blog/dei-govcon).
Of course, Trump's authoritarian tendencies, and the obsequiousness of the Republican party to him make such concerns even more relevant to him.
I'm not 100% up on all the Musk drama but the one I remember is Tesla reincorporating in Texas after a Delaware judge denied his $56 billion compensation package on...not the most impressive challenge.
And, admittedly, it's a really subtle thing but...corporate incorporation is one of those boring things that can really, really matter.
Having said that, a good search of "Musk criminal charges" brings up a criminal probe over self-driving claims, a federal wire fraud probe for misleading investors, a federal investigation into Tesla glass houses (wut?) and a charge in Manhattan for illegal perks he might have received so...there's at least something going on. I dunno, organizations of that size and complexity are almost always involved in multiple ongoing lawsuits.
Lawfare against Musk, including the equivalent of withholding gov contracts includes the the California Coastal Commission rejecting SpaceX operations, explicitly partly due to Musk's social media activity (they're rarely dumb enough to admit it), with the commission's chair commenting:
"We're dealing with a company…the head of which has aggressively injected himself into the Presidential race and made it clear what his point of view is."
And another commissioner commenting:
"Elon Musk…hopping about the country, spewing and tweeting political falsehoods."
Forcing companies to include DEI pledges and statements to secure government contracts implicitly excludes those who don't support the party lines on such matters.
Of course, the threat of criminal prosecution can have a chilling effect, even if charges aren't ultimately brought.
And of course, even civil suits targeted at political opponents would be squarely within Scott's concerns about what a Trump administration might do. Are targeted civil suits and legal impositions explicitly motivated by opposition to speech any less significant than Scott's example of withholding government contracts?
And if the many suits that Musk and his companies have faced recently are really just par for the course and not related to his political positions (ignoring the California Coastal Commission which explicitly connected them), then that would, if anything, undermine the distinction between the situation under a Trump presidency and the one under a Democratic one.
While it may seem more unfair to rarely withhold a contract or wage lawfare against individuals while leaving everyone else unscathed, it's better than the alternative in which such behavior is so widespread that it's hard to identify instances of deliberate targeting.
I haven’t followed Musk’s travails that much except insofar as Boca Chica is concerned, but I do remember at the time, when California permitted some dude to sue Tesla or Space-X on civil rights grounds because some Hispanic workers were rude to a black worker (sorry, vague on the details except that it made a mockery of the law) over a period of like a month, that Musk might defect from that whole scene - I mean, if that’s the future, the courts are going to be very busy delivering judgments. People have their head in the sand about the multiethnic coalition. It’s not going to be that multi.
> reach out to the 0.001% other people stuck in the same psychological vortex I was and see if any of it rings true.
Holy shit. It me! I think this is probably your most impactful post for me yet, so thanks. I voted last week and spent an impressive amount of time staring blankly at the ballot before ultimately voting "correctly" but feeling a strange kind of defeat about it. I told my wife after we both got out of voting, "Huh, I feel like I just ate a big plate full of kale". I've been ruminating on it ever since, and wondering why I struggled so much and felt like that afterwards.
But I think you really hit the nail on the head for me. I actually finally feel a bit happy about my vote. Thanks!
Yeah, this was definitely one of those "intelligently crystallize complex thoughts I previously couldn't put my finger on" posts for me. A whole lot of "hey, that's me!"
Also, "I feel like I just ate a big plate full of kale" is the best thing to say about a reluctant Democrat vote I have ever heard.
Well, that was a lot, actually. I ultimately ended up voting early for Trump (when I told my dad, he texted back 'me too, lesser of evils' which summed up the state of affairs). By the end of first section, I regretted it. After finishing the post, I kind of shrugged off your rhetorical spell on me because you started making empirical claims about the future ... and I just didn't buy it. I expect a 2nd trump term to be like his first. A lot better than average, if you don't get emotionally involved. And I expect a second kamala term to be like her first. My object-level of the world has failed last few years, and the black box algorithm inside my head is outputting an expectation that things will be fine to pretty good. Remind me you told me so in the gulags.
There is an episode in "The Good Soldier Švejk" that describes the situation perfectly -- a troop walks into the village that has only two wells. They test one of them and see that it has cholera bacteria. The leader then says "let's not test the other one -- if it also has cholera, what are we going to drink".
I suspect the majority of people voting for either candidate just tested the other one first
Very thoughtful essay, and great framing. There are some very thoughtful comments here genuinely grappling with the truth, giving respect to others’ opinions, agreeing on basic facts, and agreeing to disagree based on what people find more important. Then there are some people saying things that are easily refutable with a google search, like “police let in protesters in January 6”.
That "right-wing authoritarianism" article is basically saying how right-wing authoritarians are terrible in every possible and impossible way and are just low-level NPC scum. And while that is pleasant to hear about my double-outgroup, I wonder how this applies to...
2) Right-wing authoritarians who actually seem pretty smart (I won't signal-boost them, but I'm sure readers of Scott can remember his fights over Neoreaction)
What exactly changes in the underlying psychology, what is different about their psychometrics, compared to RWAs, according to the theory?
To add to the ingroup, outgroup, fargroup point, and to address all the people commenting that they will be voting for Trump, I would like to put forward for consideration that perhaps these members of a rationalist-focused community aren’t acting 100% rationally after all. People are voting for Trump for all kinds of reasons, a lot of them subconscious or based on personal calculations of “what do I stand to gain or lose personally from this candidate,” or “it was really uncomfortable to worry that I was going to be called out during the MeToo era,” or “I felt unfairly socially punished and embarrassed when I misgendered my longtime friend/colleague.” I was surprised at the pro Trump rhetoric in the comments here, but then I stepped back and thought about who makes up this community (scroll down through the comments… you see “Bob,” Nathanial,” Scott, “John,” and one brave and lonely “Katie”).
Anyway, I’d hazard a guess that most people in this community are men. And who has most often been the targets of the MeToo furor and the Left’s liberal “woke Mob?” Men. Who stands to lose the most power/money if we have higher taxes on corporations? Men. Who are the people who have accrued enough wealth and power from our status quo so that they will be cushioned (for a while) from the painting-ruining kind of anarchy that could happen under a Trump presidency? Men.
Don't let your your feelings and resentment of the left get the better of you! The chaos and authoritarianism under Trump will eventually make your life worse as well.
Interesting. Am I hearing that you feel unfairly singled out by the Left? Ultimately voting for someone whose platform is based on greed and mendacity isn't a good long term strategy for stability even if you have enough resources to ride out the initial rockiness better than others. And voting for a greedy despot isn't a good choice to make just because your feelings have been hurt by the left.
I happen to think Trump is bad for everyone in this country over the medium term, due to the general corruption likely to occur. But I'm more or less at the FIRE point--a guy who intends to keep working might well wish to weaken HR laws to keep a female rival from taking him down with a false accusation, for instance.
When you say "false accusation," what do you mean exactly? Like a false allegation of sexual harassment or assault? Or an accusation of discrimination?
I mean, you're right that most rationalists aren't all that rational. I don't think anyone is, frankly. Rationalists try harder than most people but they tend to drift in a certain direction because the people who would push them in others (leftists of various sorts) don't show up.
Frankly...I'm OK with that. Nerdy guys are bad at forming groups and advocating for our interests relative to other personality types (high-profile nerd guys like Musk and Zuckerberg are really just out for themselves), and if this serves as a de-facto nerd caucus...cool. We're people too, we have the right to advocate for our interests, if we have to launder it in our own heads through a bunch of stuff about Bayesian estimation of probabilities...well, it's no sillier than some of the things leftist academics are saying, and has more equations, which is a plus for me at least.
Thing I got out of Robert Anton Wilson ages ago is, our rational minds are just the guy riding the elephant--our instincts and urges and peeves are doing the driving. You can try to check it with all the stuff rationalists do like checking their predictions, but ultimately our reasoning evolved to persuade other people (and ourselves!), not understand the universe. You can't understand the universe--the number of atoms in it greatly exceeds the number of atoms in your brain. But you can pick the best reality tunnel you can.
As for the rest of it: IMHO, you're right, there's a gender war, and Trump is on our side and Harris is on the women's side. I have to put that aside and vote for Harris because I'm convinced Trump will do more damage to the country as a whole. Patriotism feels right-coded and therefore vaguely antifeminist to me, so I'm cool with that. But it's really just that Scott scared my elephant with pictures of Venezuela. And I'm cool with that too.
A vote for trump is ultimately a vote for greater wealth disparity and an increased erosion of the middle class... What worries me the most is the dramatic increase we're seeing in the power and wealth of a few oligarchs who are not only getting away with not contributing adequately to the social safety net, but are also being allowed to run amuck and contribute to an erosion of classical liberal values in this country... all the while often being funded by our tax dollars. I see how (in the short term) it makes sense for someone who has benefited a lot from this (wealthy men, for example) to believe that voting for Trump will personally benefit them. Maybe it will, **at first**! But think about what it means to erode the middle class and remove social safety nets. If more people are poor and can't address their basic needs like food or health care, more people will engage in criminal behavior. There will be more social unrest. And unless you're at an Elon Musk level of rich where you can just watch the world burn from a bunker somewhere, you're not going to be able to build a big enough wall to protect yourself from the inevitable hungry and angry masses. Even if you don't feel threatened by policies that attack the personal freedoms of others (women, for example), it **still benefits you** to contribute to a stable society and make sure, for example, that every child has enough to eat and *other* people also feel like they they are living in society that values freedom. It's in your best interest that others believe they have a chance at building wealth and happiness as well.
Ironically I'm almost getting to the point where my interests are neutral with respect to redistribution, and may even be harmed slightly by the attempts at redistribution that target the upper middle class with salary rather than capital income. But, yes.
BTW, if you read carefully, I didn't say I was actually going to vote for Trump, just that feminist arguments make me *want* to. Ultimately I was swayed by similar concerns to Scott's around Trump decreasing overall state capability over the medium term.
>Who are the people who have accrued enough wealth and power from our status quo so that they will be cushioned
Maybe consider that not everyone here is a stinking rich tech worker and instead, like an echo of opinions from the past, *don't want to be judged and punished for immutable characteristics.*
This is a very good argument against the reasons people were voting for Trump in 2016. But the reason I'm donating to Trump in 2024 (voting is pointless in California) is to vote against a tax on unrealized capital gains, and against a person who could propose it without understanding the problem. This is so unbelievably bad that it's well worth risking Trump. Only things that Trump has <1% chance of actually doing are things that would be worse than that: his tariffs would certainly be an economic drag, but none of them will actually break the infinite money machine the way an unrealized gains tax would. And unlike Trump who has a Thiel plant for a running mate to rein him in, Walz has similarly indicated no real knowledge of investment. A Harris vote is as dangerously high-variance of an economic risk as a 2016 Trump vote was a liberalism risk.
The ruling is awful. The best reductio of the ruling is one given by Roberts in his opinion - Trump pressuring Barr to illegally confiscate voting machines from the states is now unreviewable behavior by any court because it's part of the President's conclusive and preclusive roles as President to order around Attorney Generals. The presumptive immunity for official acts is also awful - bribery for example is a law only enforceable when a President takes money to make an official act on someone's behalf. The President is now immune from any bribery charges unless prosecutors can argue that bringing the accusation to court won't interfere with the President's Constitutional duties - so for example if the President takes a bribe for pardoning someone, that's most likely unreviewable evidence since that is a Constitutional right afforded to the President.
"Chavez fired everyone competent or independent in government, because they sometimes talked back to him or disagreed with him"
Competent? Have you dealt with people in USCIS? I just have too many awful experiences when dealing with the government and its ossified, unaccountable bureaucracy.
Independent? Trump's felony prosecutions, as one example, were an indicator of the lack on any true independence in US government. The elites, media, military, big tech, etc. are all in lock-step; that's not independence, that's more like the fascism they decry.
I'm a life-long liberal, but the Democrats have failed me too many times (especially at the state level), and the selection of Harris (no democracy there) was just the cherry on top. Trump might be bad, but that does not mean his opposition is therefore good or even worthy of any kind of support. I'm angry at all of my leaders.
Great article! Really made me think - especially the part about violating brightline norms vs slow corrosion.
On the whole I don't quite agree.
So first off, despite believing that Trump is an authoritarian wannabe dictator, I don't buy that Jan 6 was a clear cut violation. My beef with his post-2020 election antics is with his loud and unabashed rejection of the election results. Jan 6th itself was obviously just a rally gone wrong - Trump wanted them to "peacefully and patriotically" overturn the election and it ended up devolving into chaos because of an immense security arrangement failure by Nancy Pelosi et al. It's worth noting that even then the mob killed exactly zero people and the many many actual criminal acts committed in the process were punished just like Just Stop Oil antics do. The best proof of the fact that Trump committed no crime/bright line violation is that he's had a million cases thrown at him (some legit, others less so) but not a single one of them alleges he incited violence (or an "insurrection") that day.
Trump's shameful anti-democratic actions should be utterly beyond the pale...but in fact they're not. They were just a louder, much more obstinate version of the protests some Democrats did to try and overturn the 2000, 2004 and 2016 elections. I completely agree that Trump was and is unambiguously worse but importantly it's a difference in degree not in kind. And none of the Democrats have been taken to task for their awful actions in a way remotely comparable - Jamie Raskin, one of the wannabe-overturners/certification objectors of 2016, was literally put in charge of the Jan 6th investigation. And as far as I'm aware exactly zero Democrats denounced Stacey Abrams' equally anti-democratic rejection of the 2018 governor election (genuinely I don't really believe any liberal who claims to be anti-authoritarian actually is if they wouldn't support Kemp over Abrams in 2022). Trump has polarized this issue and made the Republican party the "elections only count if we win" party - and I hope this means Democrats' will be more stringently pro-democratic in the future - but my point is that what he's done (as awful as it is) is a worse version of the same malfeasance that the Democrats are guilty of, not a clear-cut criminal deviation from prior norms.
The other part of your argument I don't find as convincing is the slippery slope to Hugo Chavez. We both agree that Trump will not realistically become a dictator/Chavez/whatever. I hear your concern that he could just become 10% Chavez and the next person becomes 20% until we reach oblivion but I don't find it realistic. In fact I think it's literally the opposite of how it works. America is an oppositional creature. That's why electing Trump led to an unprecedented blossoming of wokeness and the Biden presidency has the woke on their knees and mainstream liberals parroting Chris Rufo from 2021. That's why short of 9/11s the president's party loses the popular vote every midterm (and the opposition to the massive sea change that was Dobbs is what limited the damage for Democrats in 2022). Beating Trump in 2020 made him - and Trumpist authoritarianism - FAR stronger. His favorables are through the roof compared to during his presidency. He basically already won the election by July but Democrats very smartly decided to scrap the whole thing and got very lucky with Kamala magically rebirthing as the most popular active politician in the country.
Neither you nor I can predict the future. But "Trump goes 10% Chavez, next guy goes 20% and we spiral" is just one possible future. Another possible one is "Trump wins, tries to do authoritarian stuff, the reborn resistance stymies him, the economy randomly crashes and everyone hates him by 2028 and the Republican party finally moves on to someone more normal". And in the case that Kamala wins, it's extremely plausible to me that "Kamala quickly becomes unpopular, Trump is thrown in prison over dubious charges, the entire Republican party goes full must-destroy-our enemies, and eventually by the next general election-timed recession they have an unapologetic fascist ready to go". It's certainly much more plausible to me than "Kamala wins, Republicans realize the error of their ways and see Trump rot in prison with a smile and nominate Liz Cheney (or even Nikki Haley) in 2028". Fundamentally if you hate a movement in this country (like wokeness or Trumpism) you're gonna be in a much better spot if the party that supports has the presidency than otherwise. There's edge cases and policy concerns and SCOTUS seats to consider but if your main, primary issue is to defeat a specific movement or ideology (authoritarianism, specifically as manifested in the current Trumpist Republican party) you'd much rather hand them the presidency and watch them wreck themselves.
To put all my cards on the table, I'm not American (I just live here), I can't vote, and if I could I almost definitely wouldn't vote for Trump. But I think the argument for voting for him is stronger than you've made it out to be.
At first I had a similar thought about Jan 6, but Jan 6 actually was a component of an overarching plot to try to overturn the election. Trump wanted it to happen and (for many hours) refused to halt it because he wanted to put pressure on Congress and particularly Pence so the plot could continue.
The liberal political streamer Destiny will be releasing a detailed video making the case that January 6 was a significant part of this plot. The issue is the plot, not necessarily January 6, but January 6 absolutely was part of that plot and not just a sudden riot.
Appreciate the response! To be clear I obviously think Jan 6 was awful but my contention is very simply that it wasn't a clear-cut criminal deviation frome existing norms. If he had ordered/encouraged his supporters to hurt Congresspeople or Mike Pence, it would have been one (and also a clear unambiguous crime for which he'd have been correctly charged - he'd be rotting in prison since 2021).
The fake electors plot was, again, awful and undemocratic...but it wasn't categorically different from what the election objectors tried to do in 2000/2004/2016. Or, for that matter, what the Hamilton Electors campaign tried to do in 2016.
It might seem like I'm being pedantic here but I really think it's important to avoid this slippery slope. The more we falsely equate Trump with a violent fascist, the easier we make things for a future violent fascist because he can say there's precedent. Trump is fundamentally NOT the kinda guy who orders hits on his political opponents. He never tried to assassinate Biden or anyone (and didn't even try to imprison Hillary despite promising to) because he is just not that kind of authoritarian. Hitler was. Chavez was. Putin is. That's not remotely a high bar but it is a categorical difference between Trump and actual fash-y people - that is the clear cut bright line and I absolutely do not want to blur it.
The obvious difference here is that Kerry and Clinton conceded very quickly in 2004 and 2016, and Gore conceded in 2000 following the Supreme Court ruling.
The difference is kind, not degree: there has never been a modern presidential campaign before Trump 2020 who coordinated and orchestrated anti-democratic attempts to overturn election results. That's a distinct phenomenon from partisan sore losers filing frivolous lawsuits and griping to the media.
Between Kerry/Clinton in '04/'16 and Trump in '20, I absolutely 100% agree there's no real comparison - it is a difference in kind.
But if you look at the Democratic electoral college objectors like Barbara Boxer in '04 and Jamie Raskin in '16, it's exactly the same kind of shameless nakedly partisan anti-democratic demagoguery that Trump took up in 2020 (and which unfortunately got far more purchase within his party). Had Boxer's insane conspiracy-fueled objection somehow passed the Senate, it would have literally overturned the 2004 election (weirdly this wouldn't have been true for the maniacal 2020 Republican objectors because they chose to challenge only two states that wouldn't have been enough to overturn the election).
The fact that some Democrats (though thankfully not the presidential candidates themselves) had previously tried the same election-denying antics is why his escalation is not, to me, a new bright-line violation.
I don't know the ins and outs of all of the cases involving Trump and don't have fully formed opinions of how much they're about criminal wrongdoing by Trump vs partisan witch hunting. But regardless until and unless he's actually convicted of a crime involving his attempts to overturn the election (the felony convictions were about the "hush money" which is a different issue) I'm not presuming him guilty of anything there. Much like Barbara Boxer or Jamie Raskin his actions were appalling but they haven't actually led to any criminal conviction yet.
I like this a lot and, contrary to your closing caveat, believe it's drastically more persuasive than anything else I've seen.
PS: I think the following is missing the word "with"?
> (compare institutions that were formed bright-line mandates to discover truth or advance knowledge that shifted to warring against the subtle damage of racism or right-wing-opinions or whatever...
"Put this way, you could argue: okay, January 6 was bad. But it was like a ten-year-old child's idea of authoritarianism. You seize power by getting a bunch of people to zerg rush the opposing politicians and beat them up until they declare you in charge. Too bad you were foiled by a locked door, you'll get them next time. I won't claim this strategy has never successfully taken over a government, because history is long and weird. But I can't think of any examples."
That is actually pretty close to how the National Fascist Party took over the government of Italy in 1922.
It "helped" that Italy was still a constitutional monarchy. King Victor Emmanuel III had the constitutional power to dissolve governments and appoint new prime ministers. On October 30, 1922, he appointed Benito Mussolini as Prime Minister. We all know how well that went.
I also think things like depolicing and progressive prosecutors are more fundamentally anti-democratic in their basic nature than any amount of election denial or threats to jail political opponents. Partially or even fully rigging elections, or weaponising the justice system, cannot compare to just outright letting favoured groups ignore the laws. On a scale of respect for the foundations of a democratic society, "rig the process by which laws are made" and "enact laws that violate fundamental freedoms" are close to the bottom; "the laws mean nothing" is *rock* bottom. (The same can be said for illegal immigration).
And that's not getting to the fact that the latter policies are already *actually happening* and the former are at most proposals or fantasies. Another thing that's already actually happening: numerous Western countries literally outlawing right-leaning beliefs (see the the discussion in my first link above). You can't compare judgements on what's happening with judgements on what might happen: the latter has whole realms of rational uncertainty that the former outright lacks. And these things also show why a conservative Supreme Court isn't too much reassurance: the left has ways--getting other countries to censor the internet for you, or letting favoured demographics beat up dissidents and unfavoured demographics (whites or business owners) and ignoring all laws to the contrary--of getting around this that are *already being used*.
Second, your point about bringing things closer to a banana republic is valid and well-put, but misses an important rational consideration. *All else being equal*, sure, going 10% of the way to a banana republic should be rejected the first time, not the third or fourth time. But what if the first time the choice is "10% of the way to a banana republic, or a more subtle but almost total permanent left-wing takeover of culture and institutions", the second time the choice is "20% of the way to a banana republic, or a substantial but somewhat limited left-wing authoritarian advance", and the third time the choice is "30% of the way to a banana republic, or a largely sane and reasonable left-leaning government that has comphrehensively purged its extremists and has a recent track record of respect for freedom"? Then it seems very clear to me that the rational option is to wait until the third election to firmly reject the banana-adjacent right, and doing so earlier just straightforwardly has worse expected value.
And that's just thinking consequentially. What about the deontological and virtue-based significance of punishing the incumbent party for their outrageous and norm-violating actions? As I discuss in my linked comment, there's a fundamental difference between the incumbent administration and the challenger. Voters only have a binary choice, and if they want to reject both side's extremism, there's only one clear way to do that: keep voting out the incumbent party as long as its term had a record of a extreme and authoritarian policies. Keep voting out the incumbent party unless and until they have an actual moderate and freedom-respecting term. Then reward them for that.
The Biden/Harris administration has fallen far short of that standard, and so did the last Trump administration. So it was rational and just to vote both of them out. Rational because, as above, even if a Trump win sets the banana republic clock forward 10%, next election you may have a chance to stop that clock in its tracks in exchange for a reasonable Democratic administration that has (for example) purged the anti-police activists completely, thrown all the progressive prosecutors out of its party, and committed to both respect for freedom of speech itself and serious diplomatic consequences (including ending military protection) for any country that tries to censor the internet. Which is just higher expected value overall. And because it's just *right* to punish the Biden administration for choosing not to govern as a moderate and instead coercing censorship, opening the border, and tolerating exreme policies and rhetoric from its own down-ballot party.
Choosing to say "yes the Ds have been very bad, but Trump is so bad I'll still vote for them" is (a) letting them get away completely with these obboxious choices with no consequences and (b) sending the message that there *are* no consequences for this behaviour, endorsing the D activists who spit on moderates by saying "as long as Trump is the opponent, the moderates *have* to vote for us, so we can do whatever we want", and encouraging extremism (in both parties!) more and more, by telling them they'll face no consequences (even if they're the incumbent) as long as they can paint the other side as even worse.
Wheras voting out extreme incumbents consistently will eventually (or quite soon) sink in the message of "if either party wants more than one term, they have to actually govern reasonably. No exceptions." Which will do more than anything else to set back the banana republic clock in the long run, in my opinion.
I literally googled 3rd-party candidates from the parking lot of the polling place to see if I could vote for one. Oliver and Stein both label Israel's Gaza operation a "genocide," which was a no-go for me. A little surprised not so for this blog. This certainly distinguishes you from other-Scott, who has a somewhat overlapping place with you in my brain-space.
This was a great piece, and I especially enjoyed the ingroup-outgroup-fargroup piece at the end. I think one slight addition is that *stipulating a somewhat hidden premise* of the right being the left's far group, the idea of punishing Harris seems to make some sort of sense.
I don't agree with this premise, for the record - but my impression of the last few years of seeing popular discourse on American politics is just that beyond hating the right, the left just doesn't understand them and doesn't really see them as rational actors. I'm not gonna say whether this is right or wrong, because as someone who's at least culturally left-ish, I'm ill-equipped for that - but there's a real undercurrent of the right being this agent of pure chaos that's not even self-serving, but utterly arbitrary. Any time a woman is like "I voted for Trump", half the discourse is "dang, this person is an IDIOT and a MORON who doesn't know what's good for them and clearly hasn't thought this through". And so far, all this is just well-known and regrettable.
But I do think there's a decent chance that the "two-character psychodrama" Democrats described here aren't motivated as much by pure vitriol as they are by a weird sort of optimistic disappointment. You can't be disappointed by people you don't see as capable of anything productive, but the Dems (to the left) are supposed to share their exact thought processes and their exact goals, they're supposed to be right in being left only to have gone slightly awry and ended up (at least on Gaza, where I've seen this reaction the most) just right instead. To them, Kamala Harris is worth trying to get through to, because being on the left (even nominally) means she can learn from her mistakes - so, naturally, you have to make sure that she knows this is a mistake by making her lose, even if it means Trump gets in. The alternative to the anti-Harris left of punishing Trump for not being a Democrat is, by my estimation of their thought process, something like trying to spank a chimp until it can do calculus.
I'm not totally sure this is a rational way to approach it, because on the margins, Trump seems a lot worse than Harris to even those people who want Harris to lose based on Gaza - both seem about equally bad for Gaza from a Palestinian-supporter perspective, but all that should mean in theory is that Gaza isn't much of a voting issue since neither will make a difference there. But the way some Dems seem to see it on Gaza, Trump is this weird guy you don't know who's out on the street eating garbage, where Kamala Harris is an old friend from college who got straight-As and was invited to your wedding who's also eating garbage for some reason. The action is the same and ideally neither eats garbage, but with no other choices, at least you know how the second person's mind works so you can yell at them or cajole them until they stop, they'll respond to incentives - where the first guy is just gonna keep eating garbage so he's somewhat ironically not worth thinking about
I agree Trump has authoritarian instincts, but fortunately the US has a constitutional amendment limiting presidents to two terms so he can't stay past his next one. Also, he's old enough that he'll be Biden's age by the end of the next one and incapable of the duties of president (which is its own reason not to vote for him).
To be both Hitler and a Nazi is redundant point in this otherwise eloquent critique of the finer points of the problem.
Orange: It is inherently bad. Make up your mind between red and yellow. Those are the two real candidates. The color orange is just a cop out.
Hitler: He was a Nazi.
Cheeto: Not healthy. Cheeto dust is associated with negative stereotypes of messiness and lack of self control. Even worse it is orange.
Fascist: Inherently wrong. They have unchecked power. For example, they can decide to make the national flag solid orange.
Tiny hands: This is tricky. What the problem with small hands? The answer is that it is obviously a metaphor. It refers to not having a strong “grasp” on the important issues. Like choosing between colors.
This is from the 2016 Republican primary. Trump insulted Rubio by calling him Lil Marco. Rubio responded with the tiny hands because there may or may not be a correlation between hand and penis size.
> ACX joins such based heterodox thinkers as Curtis Yarvin, (...): Donald Trump is the wrong choice for US President.
I'm going to presume this was facetious. Else, I'm afraid you misunderstood the angle the bugman was going for. Which, to be fair, would be completely understandable.
> But I have heard from many readers who have come away disturbed and/or confused by my endorsement of Biden. To be clear: all I have is a good plan for Biden. I also have a good plan for Trump (or anyone else). It is the same plan and very simple. I do not think Biden or Trump or anyone else will use it—but they should. They should!
I will vote for Oliver because he carries on the liberal tradition of which you, quite accurately, speak so highly. He was nominated at the instigation of the Classical Liberal Caucus!
I live in a state which will not be close, and so there is no question of voting strategically.
Scott, I wonder if you think it would be appropriate to characterize what you're describing in Part III as "Woke Derangement Syndrome", obviously motivated by the Trump analogue. To the extent that it's a real thing, this syndrome in both cases amounts to overstating the flaws in that which is more proximate relative to the flaws in that which is more distant.
Googling the term, it appears to be primarily applied to the likes of Ron Desantis. However, just as the charge of TDS is more commonly levied (rightly or not) against Never Trump Republicans and conservatives, I think the hesitancy you describe here fits the bill more cleanly.
This psychodrama of people overreacting to their raised environment --- seems to turn out good bloggers? Yarvin's parents were supposedly literal Communists, and now he thinks the USA is literally Communist and we need a monarch.
It seems to me you overreact too much. Steve Sailer, Roissy, Moldbug all caused me to rethink things. I became a reactionary in my head for a while until I was able to digest the material and shit it out.
Our country is still run by fundamentalist Christians in 13th century robes who oppose abortion rights. So is my state. Give your head a shake. Opposing liberals is a luxury.
It's a great post. A perfect example of why we love your writing so much. But, c'mon, man! Trump is much worse than you make him sound with your tepid endorsement. Get over your psychodrama and endorse Harris with stronger words and leave out these 3rd Party underminers.
I may have the same problem, but from the opposite side. I'm from Russia, and this obsessive criticism of the woke, which seems to have become taken for granted by American intellectuals, looks as strange as possible to me.
You know, here in Russia, basically everyone is against the woke too, from fascists to people who call themselves communists. Most here see Trump as the voice of common sense. This is an anti-woke country. And honestly, you all should learn a little more about what that looks like in practice. I'd say the extremes of the woke is a modest price to pay to keep your country from turning into Russia.
I'd say the experience of many intelligent people in the US ("intellectual" is not a label anybody chooses for themselves there) has been as follows: 1. for many years, be the only person in the room who is interested in or advocates X; 2. within a few months, see people (who call themselves "woke", or at least did so at the time) advocate for X, X^2, X^3 - all while forming online and real-life mobs, indulging with gusto in the narcissism of small differences, and taking any remark on how they have a suboptimal communication strategy as an occasion for vulgar name-calling, accusations of racism, and much worse.
To some extent 2 was a phase; to some extent it's still a thing - the fever has passed, but the people who grabbed and displayed power will never apologize, and still take very badly to criticisms - reacting much as before, just with less success.
I agree that *not* advocating for X would be the wrong conclusion. I agree that the kind of reaction to wokeness that you see in Russia or Florida is excessive at best and a very thin cover for anti-Xness, the authoritarian personality, etc., at worst (which is often).
>I'd say the extremes of the woke is a modest price to pay to keep your country >from turning into Russia.
I agree with you, but change on the smaller scale has to also be done voting in local elections. Progressives would rather leave rural and small-town America than change it.
I don't get the sense that any of these bloggers that I rather enjoy reading have ever actually lived off the coasts or outside of university towns.
The Democratic Party psychodrama really resonated with me. Thanks Scott!
I tend to hold my side to a higher standard. Not because I’m a disciplined thinker, it’s just my natural tendency. I’m sure some others are wired the same way.
I feel like your rebuttal points are extremely weak.
Your first point makes a distinction between illegal and legal acts, and then hand waves that into a distinction between overt and non-overt norm violations. 1. the initial distinction is talking about how crimes are prosecuted, white-collar crimes (e.g. Oil Executives acting badly) are illegal they are just difficult to prosecute. If Trump violated the law then OBVIOUSLY he should be prosecuted. However, this is separate from your argument on who should be president which is making the distinction about norm violation. This distinction seems incredibly fuzzy. Personally, I find the suppression of free-speech to be a far-bigger deal than a disorganized rabble protest that should have been trivial to shutdown. Mark Zuckerberg is on record saying that the Democrats pressured him to favor them politically via Facebook. That is insane! The first move a Tyrant makes is to ensalve the "free" press.
Your second point reads as though your a simply ignorant and too close to your own party. It is everyone's political bias to see their own party as disorganized and varied, and the other party as a monolith. In terms of actual actions (rather than vibes), the Democrats have acted as a very effective and coordinated monolith in first replacing Joe Biden with Kamala Harris and then closing ranks in support of her. Further, Trump has been endorsed by many many people who were first his biggest critics (e.g. JD Vance, Tulsi Gabbard, etc.). Indeed, many of those who endorse Trump actively disagree with him on several issues.
If you look at the ACTUAL campaign rhetoric used then you can see that Trump is far far away from running on a dogmatic platform. For example, JD Vance describes Trump campaign as a big tent collation, and often says how voters don't need to agree with Trump on everything. This is STARK contrast to the Democrats, who demand that voters vote for them, else they are the enemy (e.g., look at Michelle Obama describing how men who don't vote for Kamala MUST BE ANTI-WOMEN.
Your third point: you do sound like a hypocrite. You seem to be playing the apologist for a movement associated with being anti several of your core values (i.e., truth-seeking and wanting to improve the world RATHER THAN VIRTUE SIGNAL). Kamala Harris has been pro ridiculous and harmful policies such as defund the police, meanwhile JD Vance has gotten flack from both sides for doing pragmatic things that genuinely attempt to improve the world, e.g., attempting to get Silicon Valley billionaires interested in rural infrastructure investments.
I don't have a strong critique of your fourth point. But I will point out that Democrats are quick to cast the first stone, while being very very far from sinless. E.g., calling out people for polarizing rhetoric while actively describing their opponent as Hitler (!?!?)
In short, I am saddened, as you seem to be drinking the cool-aid and listening to the loudest. E.g., one party SCREAMING that the other is a threat to Democracy. Haven't you considered that those SCREAMS if effective are themselves a threat to Democracy? If you actually look at the BULK of the campaign rhetoric, the Democrats are running on demonizing their opponents (e.g., it is the end of the world if you vote for him, he will eliminate all your rights, etc...), while the Republicans are running on actual issues like the economy.
Amusingly, despite disagreeing with a decent chunk of the post, I must (grudgingly, as Scott did, because both of these options suck balls) agree with the conclusion for an entirely-separate reason: Trump's too old.
There's a significant chance that whoever's elected on Tuesday will have to lead the USA (and the free world) in WWIII. There's also a quite decent chance that Trump will have gone senile between now and then (he's deteriorated noticeably since 2016), and due to his narcissism and his base's intense personal loyalty (cf. "Hang Mike Pence") it's unlikely either he or Vance would invoke the 25th Amendment.
Don't get me wrong, I'd be a lot more comfortable with Vance in the top job than I would Harris or Walz, because they might hesitate to do the needful (e.g. if a nuclear exchange with the PRC ends with Beijing run out of nukes but refusing to surrender, I'd trust Trump or Vance to play the "we burn a Chinese city every hour until you surrender" card, while Harris or Walz might waffle long enough to let them build more nukes). But that's not in the cards unless Trump literally dies in the meantime.
Weird that Scott doesn't mention immigration at all. Seems to be a clear marker about what happens under which administration that can't be attributed to outside influences (e.g. Biden/Harris could use COVID as excuse for bad economy under them)
I think you should definitely withhold your vote from Joe Biden over this. OTOH, while Kamala et al leaving Biden as the president for political expedience seems bad, I can't actually get too worked up over a senile dude tripping over his tongue and saying something offensive.
“[SCOTUS seems] pretty interested in the project of rolling back the past few decades of progressive power grabs, and I’m pretty happy with a lot of how that is going.”
Are there any examples of these SCOTUS rulings that have been good? I’ve mostly just heard of terrible ones (namely overturning Roe v Wade, the sovereign immunity ruling, and the Chevron ruling). My best guess is that maybe the Chevron ruling is less bad than I think, because the FDA does suck in many ways, but it still seems hard to be actively happy about it. Are there other good rulings I’m not familiar with?
Most people I know who are political decouplers and know what's going on seem to approve of the Chevron ruling - I don't follow it myself but the social consensus of people I trust who do (including those who vote D) is that it's good. Their anti-AA ruling also seems good, and I'm guessing Scott approves of them siding with California pig farming regulations.
Roe v Wade was bad judgement, even Notorious RBG thought it was bad. Unfortunately it means the Dems will be using abortion as a campaign hammer rather than actually protecting it. Letting precedent stand for the effects rather than for the law is itself bad precedent.
Chevron is good because the status quo under Chevron led to too much flip-flopping as administrations changed, and that's not how law should function.
That's just how it works in US elections. You vote for who you dislike least. Harris isn't a particularly charming or enticing candidate, but Trump is so, so, so much worse than Harris that Harris could be much worse than she is now and I and at least a hundred million others would vote for her without hesitation.
If it were Harris vs. someone else, then it might make more sense to try to compare the positive traits of each candidate.
Here's the thing: in most industries, the products are actually fit for purpose.
Want to buy a car? Go ahead, they're mostly basically fine. Want to eat some cheese? Go ahead, there's lots of brands, none of them is poisonous, just choose the one that tastes the best to you.
But the position of President of the United States? That is a job that no mortal human should have. It's too important, and humans are too fallible. It's not just because the US has nuclear weapons, it's because the US is too preeminent and holds too much of the hopes and dreams of the free world. If Belgium or Canada or even France falls then humanity is okay, but if the USA falls then humanity is fucked.
Except… I’ve heard the end is coming my whole life and guess what… it’s never been better for more people. I realize it could be better. but that doesn’t change that life keeps getting better. Park the US self importance because humans are amazing at overcoming and getting shit done. Your premise is that no human is fit for the job yet it keeps getting done so simple observation is against that view.
The US has 300 million people working to make their lives better, I give that better odds than the election of one person undermining the whole thing. Have some faith.
If you are an American voter, especially if you live in a swing state, I strongly urge you to vote for Jill Stein.
Donald Trump is a bigot who ran a campaign on hatred. Maybe at one time in his life he had a positive vision for America, something about making it great, but in 2024 he ran on "they're eating the dogs" and "Kamala's for they/them". Just sheer ugliness and fearmongering against people who have been through more than enough shit in life as it is. He should not be rewarded with the Oval Office.
Kamala Harris is your usual cop who believes in one set of rules for the rich and another set of rules for the little people; struggling parents go to jail but Steve Mnuchin (Trump's treasury secretary!) doesn't. When massive fraud crashed the economy in 2008, she was one of the people working to make sure no one responsible paid for their crimes. And the 2024 "primary" made a mockery of democracy. She should not be rewarded with the Oval Office, and any party which chooses its nominees without allowing the people a say, then relies on fear of a spoiler effect (and lawfare against third parties to kick them off the ballot) to get elected, should be punished.
While Harris and Trump consign mass slaughter, Stein gets arrested for protesting wars. She deserves your vote.
So who's voting Trump at this round besides anti-vaxxers and pro-palestoid leftists? I guess even Bibi if he could vote in US would secretly circle the Dem ticket.
I have two criticisms of your argument. The first is that while the right currently controls the Supreme Court, the left controls the universities, the major media, the federal bureaucracy and to a lesser but significant extent the K-12 public school system. If you look at professors in most fields, reporters, federal employees or public school teachers, I think you get the same pattern.
Control of the Court can be changed in a year, given sufficient Democratic power to expand the court — which has been done once already (by a Republican!) — or in a decade or two given less solid control. There is no comparable way to change the Academy or the schools. Musk demonstrated one way of rapidly changing control of the media, but I doubt the NYT is for sale.
My second criticism of your argument is that, while Trump has threatened lawfare, the Democrats have done it, repeatedly and ferociously. Finding Rudolph Guliani liable for damages of 148 million dollars for slandering two people is an abuse of the legal system almost on the same scale as the legal trick to steal the election proposed in the Eastman memo — and, I hope unlike that, legal. That is not even the largest penalty imposed on people on the Trump side by their opposition.
Your criticisms of Trump are on the whole fair. My own view is that the one good thing about this election is that one of them has to lose.
"If you’re in a safe state and want to trade your protest vote with a swing state voter, or vice versa, go to https://www.swapyourvote.org/ "
I am surprised that this is legal in the US. In Germany it is illegal to sell your vote, regardless whether you sell it for money or for the promise that the other person does something for you.
I initially thought so aswell, but if you read the site this is simply pledging that you are going to vote for a specific party without exchange of money or proof of having cast a vote (which I don't know if possible at all in a secret election):
> Importantly, vote swapping involves no financial exchange. It’s more of a conversation and a pledge to one another. Both the swing state voter and the safe state voter agree to a political coalition-building strategy that advances their interests, which is similar to many other common political deals.
Yes, I got that. But that is still illegal in Germany.
"Any person who offers, promises or grants gifts or other benefits to another person for not voting or for voting in a certain way shall be liable to a custodial sentence not exceeding five years or to a monetary penalty."
I am no lawyer, but "benefits" is a very broad term, and I believe that it basically includes any "if you vote X then I do Y" statement. Here, Y is the promise of casting your own vote in a certain way. Note that it does not play a role whether the two sides stick to their promises. Making the promise is illegal.
Of course, there are lots of situations in which such deals are normal political procedure. But for voting, it is prohibited.
EDIT: by the way, the next paragraph is: "Likewise, anyone who demands, allows himself to be promised or accepts gifts or other benefits for not voting or for voting in a certain way shall be punished.". So if someone makes you such an offer and you do not refute the promise, you are already breaking the law.
Their best defense is it's all a good lark since there is no enforcement or even verification mechanism. If people start doing things to *prove* how they voted, they'd get in trouble.
In fact, when you sign up, they're avoiding any chance of verification:
> I affirm that I retain complete decision-making power over my choice of whom to vote for at all times.
> I will vote for who I want to vote for.
> I will not share any image of my blank or completed ballot in connection with this program.
> I understand that this pledge is not legally binding or enforceable in any way.
Proving who you voted for is possible, given mail-in voting, although I don't know if anyone is doing it. Just fill out your ballot in the presence of the person who bought your vote, sign it, seal it, and give it to him to mail. That is one argument against mail-in voting.
Germany does have mail voting. I am not sure what you mean by unrestricted. If you want to vote per mail, then you contact your local election office, and if you are in their list of residents then they will send personalised voting papers to your home address, so identification is by your home address. You return your personal voting papers with your name and address, which you have to sign, together with a sealed envelope with your vote. So, they can tick off your name and address from the list of voters without having to open the sealed envelope with your vote.
In America, you get tons of people who: show up at the poll saying “they didn’t receive their requested mail ballot” (once, memorably, the middle aged daughter was mouthing to me, it’s in the pile of mail on the kitchen table). Or they bring the ballot on polling day “because they were afraid it would get lost in the mail” or that it would be too late. Only they didn’t bring the envelope. Actually, they didn’t fill it out yet … actually, they just remembered that they love to vote in person.
Or they show up during the up to 3 weeks (!) of early voting - so hard to resist all those signs! - and the computer said, mail in ballot requested and sent, so you have to tell them they can’t vote unless they bring that ballot from home so we can “spoil it”. Now they’re mad, and the typical solution to that is to let them “provisional” vote with a promise to destroy the ballot “if it comes” (i.e. when they locate it in their mess).
Those tend to be people who have lived in their homes a pretty long time.
As for the rest of the electorate, they aren’t registered and quite a surprising number don’t know what county they live in. A lot of times they are unclear about where they live. Which obviously makes them catnip to the left, who would presumably prefer the vote to be conducted by a the people who don’t live anyplace and have no connection to anything, especially property.
Oh man, if we go to all mail in voting, they’re going to have to get creative.
Ok, that does sound bad. To be honest, I have no idea how much these problems occur in Germany since I haven't been polling clerk myself. I assume non-zero as well, but I have no idea how much.
This they don't check. They assume that physical mail is safe. This is the foundation of a lot of things. If you can intercept someone else's physical mail, you can also order a new passport or ID of that person and intercept/steal it.
At voting day it would become evident that *something* is wrong, because when the person will try to cast their vote, they would get told that they have already voted by mail. There would be no way of correcting the fraud, but it would certainly be reported. If there are dozens or hundreds of such cases, then it would become clear that the election was compromised.
>On August 6, 2007, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that "the websites' vote-swapping mechanisms as well as the communication and vote swaps they enabled were constitutionally protected" and California's spurious threats violated the First Amendment. The 9th Circuit did not decide whether the threats violated the U.S. Constitution's Commerce Clause.
"Why do you think people can make infinity billion dollars starting an anti-woke Substack? Who's paying that money? Not psychologically well-adjusted people with no wokeness-related trauma, that's my guess."
Not only is it a dickish comment, it's wrong! The top earning substack by several million dollars is the very #resistancelib Letters from an American: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/about
It's much, much more profitable to be bog-standard #resistance. I suppose one can argue jokes can't be wrong, but it definitely falls flat if you happen to be aware of the context rather than just trusting Scott.
> In this psychodrama, the Republican Party is an offscreen character
To me, it really looks like because it is so, not because of some "trauma". I mean, look at 90's US, today's US, look at the difference, does it looks like the country have been shaped in a balanced manner by both sides ? If you presented me the 90's US, then told me "and then the Democrats proceeded to win every single election for 30 years", and then presented me today's US, the only weird points would have been "what the hell is happening in the supreme court in the last two years ?" and "how come the second amendment is still there ?"
You might be traumatized, but I don't see how your trauma is connected to the Democratic Party.
In terms of policy the main differences I see between now and the 90s are 1) more acceptance of gays 2) banning of abortion in red states 3) broader health care coverage.
#1 is a social change not a government policy. #2 is a shift to the right. #3 I don't see how it has hurt you.
To me, it’s a simple choice: Do you want a relatively powerless egomaniacal blowhard in charge, or a thousand tentacled, malevolent machine dictating every nuance - or rather eliminating every nuance - of your life?
I genuinely do not know what you are talking about. What is this thousand tentacled, malevolent strawman you are talking about? Surely not Harris, the most moderate, milque-toast politician Dems have run since Bill Clinton? Not the Harris that brags about owning and shooting guns? Not the Harris who has promised to put Republicans in her cabinet? Not the Harris who campaigns with the Cheneys and has been endorsed by republicans from Schwarzenegger to Adam Kizinger? Not the Harris that all left-wing media has disavowed for not being left enough?
Also, what do you mean relatively powerless? Are you aware that Trump spread lies about voter fraud and tried to steal the 2020 election after he lost? Are you aware Trump switched his VP after Pence refused to steal the election for him, and Vance has promised on tape that he would have done what Pence's morals didn't allow him to do? That Trump's corrupt supreme court justices have just granted him immunity for crimes committed in office?
I worry that the hyper partisan "news" problem is just getting worse and worse by the year.
The ACX endorsement is unsurprising; the professional managerial class is closing ranks with the neocons to fight against the evil Trump.
As an old school American: I applaud and endorse everyone's right to make their own decisions on Presidents, to exercise their Constitutional right to free speech and so forth.
I do find it tremendously amusing to see this talk about Trump being an authoritarian danger - one so dangerous that the Democrats subverted their own voters to insert a replacement candidate when their actual primary winner looked to be losing too badly. Or that the manifest mental health problems of Biden were never an issue until it looked like he could not beat Trump without the assistance of mass COVID/lockdown era mail-in ballots.
I will say, however, that anyone who thinks next week's election will be close, is delusional to an enormous degree.
Exhibit 1: Real Clear Politics' own 2024 election poll coverage
On the right side, there is a bar of info including "This Day In History - X Days to Election" (present X=5
RCP Average for national, 5 days before the election:
2024: Trump +0.4
2020: Biden +7.4
2016: Clinton +1.3
As we all can easily verify: Trump won in 2016. Hilary Clinton had a 2.1% popular vote margin over Trump but Trump won 304 electoral college votes.
In 2020, Joe Biden beat Trump by a 4.5% popular vote margin and received 306 electoral college votes.
Look further down said table - it shows the same relative information for the 7 battleground states. It is a sea of red.
I expect Trump to win at least 300 electoral votes.
I see 312 as a median number with a low chance of a 100 electoral vote margin (319).
The chance for Trump to win the popular vote is over 50% - but possibly only 60% to 70%. I personally expect this to happen because Harris is inspiring zero enthusiasm outside the wealthy liberal/PMC group - which translates a "normal" to "low" turnout situation (i.e. no massive COVID era mail-in ballots; mail-in ballots are down 50% across the board) into a low turnout primarily among core Democrat demographics.
Cue ensuing meltdown a la Halperin's comment on Tucker Carlson: "Millions with mental damage"
Having the voters select a candidate is the weird thing. You don't see it in other countries. You only saw it in America in the past few decades. The Democratic party did just fine for over a century picking their own candidates.
Democrats interpret non-Democrats huffing and puffing of "don't you feel disenfranchised? aren't you mad? don't you want to stay home?" as an attempt by the non-Democrats to suppress their turnout. And they're right. Nearly all the upset comes from Republicans mad they didn't get to run against zombie Biden.
I think Trump is more likely to win than Harris, but the meltdown if Trump wins will pale in comparison to the meltdown from the right if Harris wins. (Including from you, given what you've expressed in this comment. You will probably say it's due to fraud, or something.)
There is some possibility that Harris could win: a massive wave of turnout of Democrat voters on Voting Day swarm under the normal overwhelmingly Republican in-person voters.
But of course, that ain't gonna happen.
The honest people studying the voting demographics have looked at present trends vs. past performances and have found the following:
1) Mail-in ballots are down 50% across the country. The "record turnout" of 2020 unquestionably helped Biden, regardless of your views on the "trust and safety" of mass mail in voting - but mass mail in balloting is not happening in 2024.
2) Harris was chosen to appeal to blacks, Asians, and the PMC class. She is, at present, underperforming both Biden and HRC with the former 2 demographics. She is overperforming with the PMC (i.e. credentialed or the ACX crowd) but the margin is much less than the losses
3) Harris is, however, utterly failing with the supposed "safe" Democrat demographics: working class in general, Hispanics, union (notably the Teamsters declined to endorse Harris), Catholics, Scandinavians, Germans, etc etc. Anyone who thinks this is not going to be a problem in the Great Lakes swing states, is badly uninformed.
4) Enthusiasm among key categories is visibly and sharply lower: 18-24, Hispanic women, others. The Public Polling project is showing 71% of "Will Not Vote" are classic Democrat voting demographics headlined by the above 2 categories.
5) I could go into the contrast of likely/leaning Trump voters vs. likely/leaning Harris voters between actual votes and turnout (or lack thereof), but I think you should be getting the picture.
The above points are why Trump is literally favored to win the popular vote even despite the presence of so many polls that overstated Democrat vote shares by 5% or more in 2016 and 2020. Note again that both Biden and Clinton won the popular vote by 4.5% and 2.1% respectively but Trump beat Hilary. How can anyone really say Harris has a strong chance to win when Trump will certainly not lose the popular vote by much and may very well win it outright?
So yes, I do say that a Harris win would elicit a lot of very close scrutiny and deservedly so.
As for meltdown: I remember when Trump won in 2016 - the burning cars and rioting in Washington DC. Somehow the lack of burning cars and rioting constituted a worse threat for January 6, 2021...
"Violence flared on some streets of Washington, D.C., today amid Donald Trump's inauguration — with people smashing car and store windows, clashing with police and even torching a limo, leading to more than 200 arrests." <-- 2017
Scott, if it makes you feel better ,your writing first caused me to come out for Trump back in the first election, then for Biden. Now I am a cheerful AI doomer, secure in the knowledge that no matter who gets in, the end is the same.
Thanks for highlighting the psychodrama. Plurality voting mathematically is just a choice between the two major options yet it is so easy to slip into a framing of a hypothesis test or "sending a message".
This actually gave me insight into the Never Trumpers among my own tribe (to the extent that they're part of my tribe). I never understood how a visceral contempt for Trump's foibles could lead them into the arms of Harris, who is just objectively and obviously so much worse (given our tribe's assumptions). Now I understand. Harris and the Democrats aren't part of their psychodrama - she is (they are) totally off stage. But unlike you, they haven't zoomed out. Interesting.
Me too. I wonder if he posted then edited it? But I only got the one email, so maybe he originally posted it but unchecked the email box, so he removed and reposted with it. (Or maybe it's just a substack bug)
Another year, another ballot full of conflicted feelings and nose-holdings. I wish to see the return of a Respectable Right party in my lifetime (especially locally, smh #CAGOP) so that there's some realistic choices besides being bedfellows with one flavour of crazy or another. It's gonna be a weird next 4 years dealing with constant shortages at work, no matter who wins...either from price controls, or from tariffs, since so many of my company's products are imports. No one wins, some just lose harder.
The psychodrama angle was interesting and I'd like to believe that's an accurately charitable interpretation of, say, Queers for Palestine or Sunshine Movement. Perhaps that's just increasing personal desperation at trying to salvage my former leftist ideals, though. One wants to believe it wasn't just eyescales all the way down.
(Nb: weird to post this as the comment total is currently at 666. TINAC.)
Economically, I guess the advantage of Harris is she can't pass price controls with an r congress? So (aside from foreign policy and staff choices/deregulation, where I think Trump would be better), I guess the move is to vote Harris and then GOP downballot.
Yes, I try to give the GOP the time of day when possible. There are still some minimal thresholds for competency and quality that I won't budge on, though...which, again, makes things difficult in California, where the Republican Party never bothers to expend meaningful effort or $ on because why would you. (Outside maybe Orange County and a few other safe-by-quirk-of-districting places, anyway. Darrell Issa's alright.) So the downballot has idiots like, I dunno, Yvette Corkrean challenging Senator Scott Wiener, or Ellen Lee Zhao for SF Mayor. Both excellent examples of Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence! And of course several offices have no R nominees at all. But I tried to reward the MVPs (Minimum Viable Politicians) where they could be found.
Man I wish I could vote against Lina Khan directly. Not how appointments work, sadly. Chevron did open the door to potentially good lawmaking, not sure if Congress has the muscle memory to do that anymore though. FP a mixed bag, I think it's important here to distinguish between making the right noises and actually achieving results. That soybean deal of the century didn't actually get clinched, and Euro defense spending/energy autarky didn't hugely shift either! OTOH, it does say a lot how Dems either kept Trump's border policies or tacked back towards them after getting burned. The actual wall itself still seems like a silly boondoggle, but I'll admit to being surprised at the effectiveness of Remain in Mexico. Do wish there was more bipartisan appreciation of CBP though. One of many government arms, like police, where I think underinvestment is the greater error. It's less about the direct efficacy of such spending, and more about buying a more generous cushion of "voters believe the Society of Laws is functioning, and are willing to move a bit higher on Maslow's hierarchy of experimental policy changes". (This is one of the roads not taken that I think Harris will regret if she loses - not leaning harder into the Hardass Cop background. Lot of hunger for Law & Hors d'Oeuvres vibes among the electorate these days, even in blue bubbles.)
> A long time ago, I wrote about the difference between ingroup, outgroup, and fargroup. Ingroup and outgroup you know. But how come people have stronger emotions about Ibram X. Kendi (or Chris Rufo) than about Kim Jong-un or whoever's committing the latest genocide in Sudan? It's not because you're American and naturally care about American affairs - how about that Brazilian judge who banned Elon Musk's X? It's because all those guys are part of your psychodrama and some Sudanese psychopath isn't. Well, Kamala Harris' price controls are my outgroup; Donald Trump setting tariffs is my fargroup.
discussion of this^ phenomenon more generally, including: Copenhagen interpretation of ethics, control in relationships, open source hate, tractability as the mind-killer
I won't argue that the Dems don't have a long term plan that won't result in exactly what you're describing. Harris seems like the best from that side you could get into the Presidency, though. She's stating she'll put a Republican in her cabinet (goes without saying it won't be a MAGA one), and is a gun owner. So she's not AOC. Ex-prosecutor who people have argued was too tough on crime. I think she's's a reasonable choice for a conservative voting for, say Larry Hogan, and wanting policy that works against the agenda you're describing. I don't think the call to vote against Trump is a call to abandon an opposition party. I don't see how a Trump crony state enacts any particularly useful changes for anyone outside of the circle looking to glorify his own ego. No one will be shadow running things behind the scenes, he'll just grow more and more unpredictable with a staff frantically trying to appease him and stay in his good graces.
For what it's worth, AOC seems to be moving away from the far-left and may turn out to be quite a good, charismatic, mainstream-left liberal. I think she could possibly be an excellent candidate for the next election. She's not her former annoying socialist self anymore.
Yea to the point that she is now being publicly scorned by actual progressive activists as a sellout, "just another corporate Democrat", etc.
Meanwhile two of AOC's fellow "Squad" congresscritters lost their party primaries _hard_ earlier this year, so in substance the Squad will be down to a single member this January.
Yeah, she’s a little too smart and savvy to stay in the far left echo chamber, though I think ideologically she’s left of Harris. The far left circular firing squad is alive and well otherwise. I semi-seriously wonder if the people harassing only Harris about Gaza are Russian assets.
Harris' written economic policy plan is significantly markets-oriented, about as much so as any Democratic nominee in decades. It's a shame that just one small piece of it -- a down-payment subsidy for a small set of new homeowners -- is the only piece that reached the headlines (and has been wildly misrepresented).
In 2019 my sibling and some friends who are longtime Bay Area residents were literally LOLing at Harris' attempt to reposition herself with the party's progressive wing. Today they all say that was the clumsy and inauthentic move, that the Harris we're seeing now is how she'd seemed prior to 2019.
I’m pretty happy with her positions overall, and I think more moderate minded conservatives will be too, if they give her a chance. Middle-minded coalition wouldn’t be the worst thing to emerge from all this.
This is great. I think a lot of my friends here in the UK are engaged in the exact same psychodrama with the Labour Party and Keir Starmer (who they call "Keith", for some reason), forgetting that the Tories are still worse on basically every axis.
I actually think that the more relevant parallel is Brits comparing Trump to the Tories (forgetting that Trump is worse on every axis)!
In the UK there's a much clearer balance between the two main parties. The Tories have made some cock-ups over the last few years, and should have been voted out, but in terms of individuals and policies, I think the median ACX reader would prefer a mix of the two.
Centrist Tories (Tugendhat, Stewart, Osborne) have been among the most clear-headed MPs on economic and geopolitical issues, and even the populist/Brexiteer right of the party is surely more virtuous than any MAGA Republicans. With Labour - the right of the party is largely intelligent and sensible, while the left often match the stereotype of dullard populists or radical identitarians with no understanding of basic economics.
Starmer is also broadly similar to Sunak in terms of personal qualities. Both are clearly fairly decent, competent blokes with a few flaws.
This is just night and day with the U.S. situation. Neither party is anywhere near Trump's constant bullshitting, lack of any personal virtue, unseriousness on the global stage, anti-democratic tendencies, and complete policy incoherence. Even our unserious third parties (e.g. Reform UK) aren't in Trump territory!
Oh hell yes. I'd take Sunak over Trump in a heartbeat. Hell, I'd take Liz Truss over Trump in a heartbeat - yes, she was an economic disaster, but she's not an actual criminal.
No, I'm in the same psychodrama as you, though of course in my case it was something else, basically feminism making me into a mewling wormboy and ruining my first attempts at relationships (which started in my late twenties) because I was convinced everything was harassment, and before that watching as crime fell in the city I lived in in the nineties when they decided to get tough on crime and I was actually able to walk around freely. The later corruption of science by left-wing politics further strengthened this dynamic. I know, I'm jumping around in time. The atheism-as-getting-over-fundamentalism description clicked completely. I'm vaguely afraid of the right, but I HATE the left.
The economics stuff doesn't bother me that much--we had our shot at neoliberalism/libertarianism/deregulation in the 90s and 2000s, and it didn't work. The banks blew up the economy with bad mortgages and the unemployed ex-manufacturing workers voted for Trump. Sic transit gloria libertariani.
But, I basically feel the same as you. No, he's not Hitler, but he could be Chavez. The irony is, with all this I mentioned above, I get how the Trump people feel, and I understand why they're voting for him. But, I'm taking a Zofran (that right?) and voting for Harris.
It's very telling that, while, during the AIDS crisis, progressives (rightly) mocked the abstinence-only, gloom-and-doom approach, and emphasized positive examples of safe sex (even while acknowledging that it is only safe*r* sex), not a single discussion as to how to fight against harassment seems to involve a single example of what is *not* harassment. The effects are most likely not a bug, but a feature.
That said, of course I'm voting for Harris (or rather I would vote for Harris, if I were a citizen).
That writeup struck you as _strongly_ supporting Clinton?
"If something terrible happens like China tries to invade Taiwan, she will probably make some sort of vaguely reasonable decision after consulting her advisors. She might do a bad job, but it’s hard to imagine a course where a Hillary presidency leads directly to the apocalypse, the fall of American democracy, et cetera."
"I don’t see a Clinton presidency as making the world non-functional"
"she probably won’t be able to increase immigration very much"
There is literally not a word in there about Hillary Clinton being actually _good_ at any aspect of being president, and 80 percent of Scott's text was about Trump.
Really Scott's 2016 election endorsement summed up Hillary's overall weakness as a major-party nominee.
Scott implicitly illustrates how signalling games work in a hierarchical system (here: a state).
Rulers are important for they “set the tone” (=signal) for what is normatively acceptable to do for those employed by the state, when they use administrative and professional discretion to make decisions (which all of them must constantly do). A ruler sets the tone for the informal norms concerning how administrators, street-level bureaucrats and everyone else getting money and/or power and/or prestige from the state can legitimately act. As well as setting the tone for what those who become rulers after them, can normatively do while still being perceived as only doing “normal” political behavior.
Essentially (& formulated a bit grander), it is how normative change is brought about in a state/system.
While at it: The way autocrats succeed is quite often to push policies that are fairly sensible at the time, or at least very popular for understandable reasons (today: protectionism & put an effective stop to illegal immigration); that existing rulers for some reason cannot or do not want to pursue. Famous historical examples: “Peace, Bread, Earth”, and “Tear up the Versailles Treaty”. There were good arguments for both, back in 1917 and 1936.
…but when autocrats get into power, they have a tendency to do a lot of other not-so-popular stuff in addition to what got them into power. In particular, to skew the rules of the game (the meta-game) to ensure that they and their side are unlikely to lose again in the future. And with that in hand, they can do a lot of other not-immediately-popular stuff (like killing all Kulaks or invade Poland), and there are no-one there to effectively stop them anymore.
Putin is a present-day example. He came to power to reverse the rather traumatic Cold Turkey-transition to a market economy, which quite understandably was unpopular with the Russian people. In the near past: Chavez, sure (and now Maduro). Orban in present-day Hungary might also be an example, although so far a quite light version. Notice that all of these systems are still formally democratic, with elections & Constitutions and all.
You don't mention Trump's worst foreign policy idea--one he kept trying to do in his first team but was stymied from by his inability to fully control the military (something he will be better at in a second term, most likely): He really really wants to invade Mexico, whch would e a truly terrible idea: https://responsiblestatecraft.org/donald-trump-mexican-drug-cartels/
>"Given that we have a judicial defense against the left but not the right, it’s probably safer to elect left-wingers than right-wingers."
The judicial defense against the left consists of robust immunity for one guy. That's not nothing - he's the top guy - but there always has been a backdoor way to ensure that the president never get prosecuted for anything: He wakes up on his outgoing January 20, resigns, and the VP pardons him.
Meanwhile, for the left's political crimes to be punished, you need a Washington DC jury to vote unanimously to convict. That's why Steve Bannon goes to jail for blowing off Congress but no Democrat ever will.
I have a different perspective on this - my main reason for supporting Harris is that I believe that in the event of a scenario like a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, escalation to a nuclear conflict is significantly more likely under Trump than Harris. Trump is more likely to escalate due to his impulsivity, and the other side might want to pre-emptively strike because of his unpredictability.
Even though Trump shows much less interest in supporting Ukraine and Taiwan, I think he would regard it as a personal failure (and insult) if an invasion started during his presidency, and so would be tempted to respond strongly.
Background: I'm right-of-center, but not a registered Republican; I live in a red state and always vote third party (I'll be voting for the American Solidarity Party this year, as I did in 2020).
I'm curious as to how many people voting for Trump this year (especially people who didn't vote for him previously) aren't really voting for Trump, or even against Harris, but against "the elites" or "wokeness" or the "Cathedral" or whatever other term you might use. Harris doesn't bother me more than the average Democratic politician, but what I'm sick of is the constant dishonesty from the media on just about every culture war issue. "Republicans want to ban books!" is the cry, when what's actually happening are attempts to keep school libraries from supplying sexually explicit material to children. No government is trying to ban Amazon from selling those books. "Mostly peaceful protests," the chyron says, as buildings burn in the background. Now, there's a fair argument to be made that another Trump term would just lead to more left-wing nonsense from the elites in the media and academia, but I can't blame anyone who wants to vote Trump just to "own the libs."
On another note, this feels like the most economically idiotic election ever. Almost every proposal on both sides is just a naked attempt at pandering. Biden's student loan forgiveness is just a handout to the middle class college-educated people (screw the guys making an equal amount of money who didn't go to college, they're Trump voters anyway). Price controls are stupid. I had forgotten about the unrealized capital gains tax proposal until I saw it in this thread (that's a nightmare to try to enforce). Trump's tariffs probably won't work. And Trump's idea of no taxes on tips or overtime? That's idiotic. I teach high school, and I'm sure there are waiters at fine dining establishments in my city (and probably people working at Outback Steakhouse or whatever) who make more than I do. I don't begrudge them their earnings, but why the hell should they pay less taxes than I do?
"She’ll fight to raise the minimum wage, end sub-minimum wages for tipped workers and people with disabilities, establish paid family and medical leave, and eliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers. "
I'm in favor of not taxing tips, because I think a lot of tip money, maybe most, doesn't get taxed anyway. Why not make the laws reflect the reality?
On the other hand, income tax by itself is rather problematic. Sales tax is more egalitarian: if you're spending money, you can pay the tax. Exceptions would abound with a national sales tax, such as food, securities, and whatever lobbies succeed. The biggest problem is that once sales tax from all sources reaches a certain point (my memory says about 15%, but I can't confirm it with Google), people evade the tax by barter or other workarounds.
"Regressive" is a marketing term to promote wealth redistribution. Sales tax is the most fair of taxes, as it applies to all equally. What can be more fair?
"Regressive" is applied to it to imply it keeps poor people, who pay EXACTLY THE SAME SHARE AS EVERYONE ELSE, from getting ahead, as the rich should pay a larger share. You may think it's a good idea for the rich, who have more disposable income, to pay a larger share, but you cannot argue it is actually a fairer way to tax.
I don't understand how another kind of tax to replace the revenue would be increase economic velocity.
> Another is that Trump might threaten opponents with jail time
How awful, could you imagine politicians punitively weaponizing the legal system against their defeated opponent? Perhaps by frivolously indicting them on trumped up charges in friendly jurisdictions?
When it's your guy committing obvious crimes and getting them slow rolled or dismissed by judges he appointed in contravention to a couple hundred years of precedent, it's lawfare.
When it's their guy getting investigated for multiple years by congress and having nothing come out and having things leaked by highly placed officials that disappear the second they might actually need to stand up in court, it's justice.
I’m good personal friends with Douglass Mackey, who was raided and arrested by the FBI for “meme crimes” against Hillary four days after Biden took office. He missed the birth of his first child while flying back and forth from Florida to New York, and since no circuit judge has the spine to throw out a federal prosecution case, he will spend hundreds of thousands more in legal fees to appeal this lawfare.
This is why I scorn liberals who with trembling hands and quivering lips type out that big bad Trump will be “authoritarian”and put his enemies in prison. He didn’t, but you guys sure did! You are projecting, and even the smartest nerds among you can’t ever see it. None of you were bullied properly at any stage of your lives, and when you do finally receive your comeuppances, they will be long overdue and well-deserved.
I have zero sympathy for him. As much as I hate Trump, I'd feel the same if a Harris supporter was trying to pull the same shenanigans on Trump supporters. We need law and order and we need elections free of subterfuge.
From my superficial engagement with this alleged discrepancy:
>The deceptive ad stated: “Avoid the Line. Vote from Home,” “Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925” and “Vote for Hillary and be a part of history.” It also included fine print at the bottom that mimicked a real ad, stating: “Must be 18 or older to vote. One vote per person. Must be a legal citizen of the United States. Voting by text not available in Guam, Puerto Rico, Alaska or Hawaii. Paid for by Hillary For President 2016.”
So we have somebody doctoring political ads and creating fake accounts and giving misleading information about voting vs somebody posting a video of themselves saying misleading information about voting on their personal page. The first is clearly worse. The second might qualify for conspiracy against rights.
Actually now that I look at the date of course it doesn't. Voting day was November 5th in 2016 and this video was posted on Nov 8th. What a nothingburger.
For the record, Doug did not serve seven months in prison, nor any extended past being detained. His "conviction" (I use the quotes because it's bullshit) binds him to the court system, but not prison.
You are mentally ill and need to accept the private parts you were born with, despite being both unloveable and physically ugly.
That is an absurd characterization of Mackey's rightfully-illegal actions and of the process against him. If a Harris or Trump or anybody-else supporter does the same things now that person should and I hope will be prosecuted and convicted.
Phall is right. Ricky Vaughn was a hugely influential poster, who posts an obvious meme (in similar formats to what many others have posted - Jimmy Kimmel (or was it Fallon?) made a similar joke YESTERDAY).
And they say these are rightfully legal and totally unbiased and not targeted. It's an absurd, blatant 1A violation, and selective prosecution.
For example, on November 1, 2016, in or around the same time that Mackey was sending tweets suggesting the importance of limiting “black turnout,” the defendant tweeted an image depicting an African American woman standing in front of an “African Americans for Hillary” sign. The ad stated: “Avoid the Line. Vote from Home,” “Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925,” and “Vote for Hillary and be a part of history.” The fine print at the bottom of the deceptive image stated: “Must be 18 or older to vote. One vote per person. Must be a legal citizen of the United States. Voting by text not available in Guam, Puerto Rico, Alaska or Hawaii. Paid for by Hillary For President 2016.” The tweet included the typed hashtag “#ImWithHer,” a slogan frequently used by Hillary Clinton. On or about and before Election Day 2016, thousands of unique telephone numbers texted “Hillary” or some derivative to the 59925 text number, which had been used in multiple deceptive campaign images tweeted by Mackey and his co-conspirators.
I appreciate Scott's analysis and rational approach to the election, but for me the fundamental problem is the candidates' lack of experience and capability for the office, and the lack of a substantive, legitimate process of selection for either candidate.
I realize participating in the whole process is like reading fiction (Politics is mostly fiction, after all), but in reading a novel one has to be able to suspend one's disbelief.
"the candidates' lack of experience and capability for the office" -- Harris today has a stronger resume for the office than a dozen previous presidents did, including a couple of our most famous and well-regarded ones. Trump when elected in 2016 had none of that, but he did get elected so now has 4 years' experience in the office.
(I realize that's all just about the "experience" part, and "capability" is a different issue.)
For an endorsement that spends so many words on the subject of authoritarianism and the violation of norms around democracy, freedom and liberalism, it is a travesty that the partisan response to COVID isn't mentioned. The elephant in the room here is that Democrats, first as state governors, then under president Biden, were obviously more authoritarian in their response to COVID. Without subtlety. That broke bright-line norms in ways so numerous it would take a whole article to list them all (to name a few, rights to education, assembly, movement, religion, speech). Altogether frankly bordering on Totalitarian. To make the argument that Democratic excesses are limited to "subtle damage", and claim Harris would be less authoritarian than Trump, while dodging any discussion of the most overt acts of authoritarianism in decades if not longer, is self-discrediting.
And to pre-empt the obvious criticism of Trump's handling of COVID: Yes, Trump did acquiesce to Democratic governors. An absolutely despicable act that would be disqualifying in every other circumstance... Except that his alternative is the political faction that he acquiesced to. This is not a good argument for a Democratic president, merely an argument for an even more aggressively Republican one.
The comments are fun but commenter apxhard gets at the numbers that matter: few hundred (?) let into the US Capitol; never-to-be-reckoned millions let into the country. Talk about the former all you want, until you’re blue in the face, but please don’t be so rude as to mention the latter.
This is the only reason Trump may win, and the reason one should expect he won't be allowed to, if the same Good People do their job as in 2020.
Trump was unsuccessful in passing border legislation during his 2016 term. Biden has passed multiple bipartisan bills and Kamala has the record for most tiebreaker votes in the Senate as VP. They would've also passed another bipartisan border bill if Trump didn't order Republicans to vote no on it so he could run on the border (you can look up Republicans literally admitted this, or "RINOs" as they're called nowadays). His wall that he couldn't get funding for would also be mostly useless now since immigrants are mostly abusing the assylum process, not hopping the border. Maybe his deportation plan would work, but on literally everything else about the border Democrats are better than Republicans on now because Trump holds the reigns to the Republican party and doesn't care how much legislation he has to shoot down to keep himself in charge.
I think the whole "Trump is greater evil but he is so obvious in his evil so that it's lower risk" line of argument entierly loses all sense at the point where half the country is ready to vote for him.
Obviousness of evil can only be considered an advantages if people are more distrustful to it than to less obvious evil. The moment where people successfully twisted themselves into thinking that obvious evil deserve *more* trust and support, it just turns into a maximally undignified failure mode
Well it's not half the country, actually around 30 percent. (It's about half of those who are interested enough to show up and vote.) But your point holds regardless.
"Evil" can be a matter of opinion. If you agree with him (or his policies), he's the greatest thing. If you are against him (or his policies), he's evil.
I don't particularly care about people who like authoritarianism (or at least think they do) and therefore vote for Trump. That's rational based on their preferences as far as they themselves understand them.
Nor people who believe that Trump is less authoritarian than Harris. They are wrong, of course, but they are wrong in the standard very boring way, which I'm not interested in.
But people who buy "the strongest counterargument" that Scott mentions it in the post are commiting an actually bizarre and facinating reasoning mistake. And so I'm addressing them in particular.
I saw a guy on Substack say his mother used to make him so mad he had to hit her and Kamala reminds him of his mom and that’s why he’s voting for Trump. Honestly, I think about that a lot.
I hate Trump and frankly I agree with the literal reading (if perhaps not the meaning) of Biden's gaffe that most Trump supporters are garbage, but that seems like a silly weakman jab. Most Trump supporters aren't *that* crazy, violent, and stupid. Just on average a lot more crazy, violent, and stupid than people who don't support Trump.
No one has a monopoly on crazy, violent, or stupid. "Conservative" means not taking risks, and you will find the vast majority of truly conservative people are Republican from that standpoint. This can take many forms, including "my father was a Republican, and his father was Republican, and I don't want to rock the boat".
Obviously everyone should vote third-party in protest to the system.
> First you need to maintain a peaceful country that runs on the rule-of-law, and if you succeed, only then can you take your next step of worrying about all the people trying to find sneaky ways to gather power within the system.
Erm, so what, people in Russia should just vote in fake elections, because everything else is against law?
Russia is not a peaceful country that runs on the rule-of-law, it is a oligarchy/autocracy where if you complain into a microphone you fall out a window.
Yes, in some cases. But in other cases if you try to change something, you will be arrested, and it probably would be technically lawful. And anyway, if it was the law that anything emperor says is the law, would you still need to preserve this system because it's against the law to change it?
I would suggest the psychodrama brilliantly described here for ex-religious-believers vis-a-vis their old religious identity, and for Muslims vis-a-vis Democrats, is different from the psychodrama a lot of deeply anti-Trump people experience in relation to Trump. The latter is not based on being formerly right-wing or Republican, and then having rejected that object-cathexis. It's based on Trump pushing a lot of buttons with them in relation to Nazis and similar historical persons/images/eras that they already, and in many cases all their lives, regarded as bad. I do NOT mean to say that people who experience the psychodrama I'm describing in relation to Trump are right (or, for that matter, wrong) to do so, in a political sense (or a psychological sense). I'm simply saying the psychodrama experienced when separating from a previous identity is very different in nature from that experienced when one feels one is confronting a lifelong bogeyman/object of fear and hate. ("Never Trump" Republicans may, of course, be experiencing something more like the trauma of breaking with a long-held identity.)
I think the professional class is reflexively anti-Trump for a simple reason: they are generally people with high conscientiousness who instinctively loathe a low conscientiousness person who has power.
Trump's rioters committed political violence because of Trump's rhetoric, lies, and goading. The guys that shot Trump were not told to do that by Kamala Harris. That is a key difference. The shooters were also all registered Republicans and former Trump supporters, so there's that.
I have a question, CV. Would you say that people are happier and more free under the current Chinese government, or under the current government of the USA, or under the current government of Russia?
I think people seem to be happier as long as they are in a booming economy, irrespective of governance. Chinese people were very happy with their govt in the 2000s because they were in an economic boom. Not so much right now. I'd say Americans are probably happier at the moment because the other two countries are in war and recession.
As far as freedom, no question USA wins. You have the freedom to say anything against the govt. No one will send you to a "re-education" camp if you are an ethnic minority. No one can send you to prison without due process.
Though I guess there are also other senses of the word "free."
A Chinese woman is more free to walk around at night alone in a big city, because crime is so incredibly rare. She also has more rights to her body than in most of the US right now, though that can change on a whim.
The US has great systems of matching smart people up with the resources they need to go to school and getting grants/loans. So you are probably more free to start a business here. You are also more free to buy guns, which is what caused the Trump shooting attempts in the first place.
>So (continues the strongest argument I can think of for supporting Trump) the Republicans egged on a guy with face paint and a horned helmet to smash furniture in the Capitol. Meanwhile, the Democrats got every social media company in the country to censor opposing opinions while swearing up and down that they were doing nothing of the sort, all on some sort of plausible but never-put-into-so-many-words threat that things would go worse for them if they didn’t. They did it so elegantly and naturally that even now nobody really wants to call them on it - partly because it’s hard to tell where free corporate choice ended and government coercion started, and partly because they’ve successfully established a culture where it’s declasse to even talk about it....
I'm glad you wrote this, but I would like to see you seriously engage with alternative perspectives on this one topic. I am aware that when talking about 'conspiracies without a central plan', weird institutional effects and other foucaultian/"cathedral" type dynamics that purportedly occur, you're not *supposed* to be able to point to clear unambiguous evidence that its happening (e.g. that certain business leaders have been threatened with lawfare or told they'll be fired if they don't go along with it). And we know there is such a thing as social pressure to say the acceptable thing, and that this pressure got quite strong in 2020/21. That's all real.
But of course this means its near impossible to reach any consensus on how bad this kind of institutional capture is, we end up conspiracy brained "trust me bro the institutions are all overtaken that's why they're all united". That's what's so dangerous about this "subtler is worse" narrative.
You correctly point out that however bad this media-government-academia collusion is, it *can't* be worse than overt attempts to overturn democracy, because making the system subtly worse in ways we can't clearly point to aren't and cannot be worse than chucking a bomb at it.
>Here the Democrats are the fossil fuel executives slowly boiling democracy to death, and the Republicans are the activists throwing paint on it. Our first priority is to punish the bright-line violation, lest civilization collapse; afterwards we can focus on pushing back against the subtle damage.
But I still think you're overrating the media-academia-government collusion towards progressive social ideas ('woke cancel culture') thing. I think it's a real problem, got a bit worse around 2020/21 and has since receded. But how to resolve this disagreement? Seeing nothing overt isn't evidence, institutions checking each other's work (e.g. newspapers fact checking each other) isn't evidence as its all supposed to be self-reinforcing. But of course, such things do happen in history and there's not literally none of it happening now, so how bad is it? You just have to drill down on the specific cases.
I think the strongest specific instance where proponents of this narrative say we saw a smoking gun of problematic media-government-academia-corporate collusion is the Twitter Files.
Maybe start there? I think that how bad those findings were was exaggerated a lot, and it was more a case of well intentioned people with liberal biases trying to be impartial (as opposed to trying to be censorious) and correct for their biases with mistakes being made. This overlong segment from destiny interrogating the twitter files journalists or the sam harris episode on it is the closest I've seen to the whole thing being actually tested on facts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TWMPzGDvUM
Maybe that way we can untangle this, because I think you're greatly overrating how big of a threat this kind of ratchet is. It could get worse in response to more Trump, I grant you, but currently like 95% of the escalation is happening on the Trumpy side.
I’m in the libs my out group, trump my far group camp, and not in a swing state. Missing from your endorsements is no vote top of ticket, which is consequentially equivalent to third party, but I think even more justified. Just because it’s not up or down on dems, it doesn’t imply lesser of two evils as the only option. I voted the state plebiscites, and for city council and school board, but just because orange man really is bad I’m still not giving symbolic assent to the cathedral. That said, the real tradeoff in swing states I think is that trump is higher variance and Harris worse mean, so the decision is more risk tolerance determined than first principles.
A higher variance and higher mean is less risk-tolerant, but ought to be better in the long run, than a lower variance and lower mean. Consider the stock market. Generally speaking, one can take high risk with high rewards, or low risk with low rewards. Both strategies make money, but the high risk one won't make money (and may lose money) in any given year, but ought to earn more than the low risk one over the long haul.
Scott's analysis of institutional threats contains a fundamental error in how it conceptualizes system risk.
The bright line violation framework appears compelling at first glance. However, this framework commits two serious errors. It treats institutional stability as a linear decomposable system when reality proves far more complex. More critically, it reverses the actual causal relationship between institutional decay and norm violations.
In my work modeling complex systems, we frequently encounter situations where obvious signals prove less predictive than subtle interaction effects. Financial systems provide an instructive example. Major financial collapses rarely stem from obvious fraud. Instead, they emerge from the gradual accumulation of systemic risks, regulatory capture, and the slow erosion of safeguards. By the time someone commits obvious violations, the foundation has often already crumbled.
Scott writes that we must "first maintain a peaceful country that runs on the rule of law" before addressing subtle power accumulation. This assumes both that we can meaningfully separate these processes and that bright line violations cause institutional decay. My experience in risk modeling suggests both assumptions fail. These are not distinct phenomena we can prioritize separately. They operate as coupled variables in a complex system. More importantly, the causation runs primarily from institutional decay to norm violations. When institutions become hollowed out through bureaucratic corruption and erosion of checks and balances, they lose the capacity to prevent obvious violations.
Consider how we approach anomaly detection in machine learning. When training models to predict system failures, we quickly learn that obvious red flags often matter less than the subtle interactions between seemingly minor variables. The most catastrophic failures typically emerge from these interaction patterns rather than single dramatic events.
Political systems exhibit what risk theorists call fat tailed properties. Small perturbations can cascade into systemic collapse through multiplicative interactions. The distinction between bright line violations and subtle degradation creates an artificial separation that obscures how institutional failure actually occurs. These factors interact through power law distributions not linear relationships.
Democratic institutions often display metastability. They appear robust while gradually accumulating hidden fragilities. Surface level stability can mask underlying instability until the system suddenly crosses critical thresholds. The bright line framework dangerously misses this dynamic by focusing on visible violations rather than systemic risk factors.
Historical examples repeatedly show institutional collapse appearing sudden but preceded by long periods of seemingly minor erosion. The Weimar Republic, Venezuela, and Hungary demonstrate that by the time obvious violations occur, the capacity to resist them has already been compromised. The bright lines often break precisely because the underlying system has already been compromised through more subtle mechanisms.
This analysis suggests we must fundamentally reframe our decision criteria for voting. Rather than asking which candidate commits more obvious violations, we must evaluate their impact on institutional integrity. We must assess who will strengthen rather than erode checks and balances, who will improve rather than degrade bureaucratic competence, and who will enhance rather than diminish long term democratic resilience.
Scott's conclusions about voting therefore prove actively harmful. By directing political energy toward less important factors while allowing critical institutional decay to continue, his framework accelerates rather than prevents democratic backsliding. Effective institutional protection requires understanding and monitoring the entire risk surface with particular attention to subtle degradation of systemic safeguards.
This analysis draws heavily from complex systems theory and risk management principles that I apply daily in my work. The key insight remains consistent across domains. In complex adaptive systems, the interaction effects and direction of causality often matter more than individual components. Our institutional analysis and resulting political choices must reflect this reality.
You make interesting points here. At the same time, let me vent my frustration on complexity theory related to risk management (since I am in the same business, sort-of):
Most of the complex interaction effects & their outcomes cannot be specified in advance. Partly because we cannot operationalize the variables in sufficient fine-grained detail, partly because we do not know their distributions in advance, partly because interactions effects fast multiply – you tend to end up with “everything is connected to everything else in god-knows how many perturbations”. And it sometimes only takes a tiny-winy change in some of the variable specifications for the outcome to veer off in a totally different direction.
In this situation, I tend to suggest rules-of-thumb to students, to avoid being overwhelmed by the demand for yet more & ever more (costly and often impossible to obtain) detailed information before making a decision (in this case: A decision what to vote on November 5th, for those who have a right to vote in US elections).
Such as: A candidate who openly states that he/she does not care too much about the rule of law, or gets across that he/she only follows the letter (not the spirit) of the law, and/or demonstrates that he/she is happy to wing it to reach a preferred outcome, sends a signal further down the lines that “it is ok to play hard and fast with whatever is the truth to get a result your superiors want”. This is a potentially dangerous norm to induce in a system (such as a state bureaucracy). Add that a primary way in which norms in a system change is if the “allowed” norms signalled from up-above in a hierarchy change. (Hierarchical diffusion of norms, based on good old diffusion theory a la Everett Rogers - a traditional workhorse in the study of behavioral change.)
Would you say that this type of “rule of thumb” (which is very information-efficient, and sort-of a type of heuristics) is a totally fallacious way to make judgements when under a time constraint? And if so: Does complexity theory offer a viable alternative, again given the time constraint and the cost of ever-more information gathering?
It is not a rhetorical question. My intuition senses that complexity theory “in theory” has a lot to offer. It is just that it is usually well-nigh impossible to get much help from it in practice, for the reasons indicated above.
Notice the term "price controls" does not feature in your article. She said "price gouging" instead, and it was not clear at the outside how that would distinguish itself from price controls. Harris seems to have walked it back based on what I had read on NoahSmith but there's still skepticism on the part of economists.
It wasn't so much a walk back as it was a bunch of people wrongly assuming that she was proposing price controls when she brought up this anti-price gouging plan, and then just quietly dropping the issue when they realized that wasn't the case.
Seems pretty obvious that it's covered by this part of the essay:
>Yes, left-wingers are subtly weaponizing norms to support their own side, in much the same way that once you’ve established basic principles of non-murder / non-theft / capitalism, businessmen can exploit those principles to run businesses you don’t like. “People are working within the system to do something I don’t like” is a more refined level of problem than “there is no system and we’re in the state of nature murdering each other”. First you need to maintain a peaceful country that runs on the rule-of-law, and if you succeed, only then can you take your next step of worrying about all the people trying to find sneaky ways to gather power within the system.
No-one has been directly blatantly lying about Bidens state (the way Trump has been blatantly lying). People might have skirted the truth in plausibly-deniable ways, which is within the system.
>No-one has been directly blatantly lying about Bidens state (the way Trump has been blatantly lying). People might have skirted the truth in plausibly-deniable ways, which is within the system.
You know how you decide that Pluto isn't a planet? You create a definition which includes a characteristic specifically designed to exclude Pluto, and then you notice that Pluto doesn't meet it.
This is a blatantly gerrymandered standard defined so that you can say "the Democrats are abusing the system too but not in that exact way, so it doesn't count".
This argument is addressed by part III of the article we are discussing, so I don't understand why you're restating it without addressing Scotts counterarguments.
A more simplistic and pragmatic view to who to vote for:
We're looking at this election wrong if we get caught up debating Trump's character flaws or imagining worst case scenarios. Instead, we need to look at the actual binary choice in front of us:
Choice 1: Trump presidency that will likely resemble his first term (2016-2020)
Strong economy
Better border control
No new wars
Abraham Accords
Coherent foreign policy (even if rhetoric was wild)
Choice 2: Harris presidency that will likely resemble Biden years (2021-present)
High inflation
Border crisis
Ukraine invasion
Iran strengthened
Middle East destabilized
Once you strip away all the moral panic and look at the pure binary choice of likely outcomes, Trump's policies produced better results for average Americans. It's clear to me when you strip away the moral panic, it is Harris who threatens America's (and the world's for that matter) stability mechanisms.
* The president orders his VP to ignore the votes and just pick the winner of the next election instead. ("The president sicks his mob on the VP when he fails to comply" isn't needed anymore since the VP has ensured his loyalty.)
* Record-setting deficit spending during a strong economy.
Deficit spending during Trump’s term is a bit misleading to attribute it solely to discretionary policy. If you recall we had a period of robust economic growth, and the pandemic demanded substantial emergency spending, which spiked the deficit. Criticizing the spending without considering the pandemic context is intellectually incomplete.
The idea that any administration could just "pick the winner" ignores the electoral safeguards that prevent such overreach. Regardless of intent, our electoral system has mechanisms to resist overreach. Trump tested boundaries, the strength of the system remains robust and the transfer of power followed.
Ultimately, the question becomes whether policy results—like economic growth, border security, and stability—outweigh concerns about intentions, because I'm looking at results. Because, frankly a middle east escalation and a WWIII scenario does not sound appealing.
> The "electoral safeguards" you mention were people like Mike Pence.
If Pence went along with the Eastman scheme, there were still multiple safeguards in the way. A SCOTUS challenge would probably rule that the VP was not vested with the power to throw out electoral votes under Article II. If the election went to the House, Pelosi had control of the procedures and could have just stalled until Jan 20th when Pence and Trump are thrown out and control of the government reverts to the Senate. Anything in the Senate could have been stalled by filibuster in a similar manner. Congress could have impeached Trump and/or Pence and thrown them out of office.
I don't want to minimize Pence's role, because the chaos and reputational damage to our institutions would have been much worse if he went along with the scheme. But our government isn't so fragile that someone can just decide to steal an election like that.
Let’s be real—deficits aren’t created by tax cuts alone. Trump’s tax cuts actually boosted revenue through economic growth and job creation. The bigger driver of deficits was mandatory spending on things like Social Security and Medicare, which neither party has dared to touch. Before the pandemic hit, the economy was thriving, with record-low unemployment and wage growth across income levels. COVID forced emergency spending; any administration would have done the same.
As for “safeguards,” our system is more than one person like Pence. Courts, state officials, and bipartisan checks resisted overreach in 2020, proving that no administration can just steamroll election rules. If the focus is stability, look at the policies: under Trump, we had no new wars, historic peace deals, and steady economic growth. The question is, are we better off with that approach or risking another term of instability and economic strain?
In the same way, how do you expect inflation to continue? Why would the Ukraine war go on for an additional four years?
I'm against Harris (not exactly for Trump, but there you go), but the President doesn't have control over everything. The President does get the credit, and often the blame, for what happens.
Inflation is already curtailed. This is really a choice between "tariffs and deportations", vs "a housing development policy".
Tariffs don't produce good outcomes for consumers, and it's ridiculous to ignore Covid in your assessment. Trump was effectively voted out as incumbent because of it, and then followed high spending which was a global phenomenon that every country felt. But you can't pretend Trump wasn't at the helm when the global economy tanked in 2020.
Biden expanded that rationale with the CHIPS act, and to a lesser extent tariffs on Chinese EVs. The point about Trump is his tariffs go well beyond that, and don't only involve China, as seen here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_tariffs . This clearly not just a case of national security.
If inflation is “already curtailed,” then why are prices still sky-high for essentials like food, energy, and housing? Sure, the inflation rate has slowed, but it’s still eating into average Americans’ wallets. Trump’s policies pre-COVID balanced growth with lower inflation and didn’t require massive government spending. What we’re seeing now is elevated prices across the board, directly tied to today’s high-spending policies.
And saying it’s “tariffs vs. housing development” is a false choice. Tariffs on China did raise some prices but also protected American industries and reduced reliance on a hostile foreign supply chain—an economic advantage that goes beyond consumer pricing alone. Meanwhile, housing shortages have been a problem for decades, mainly due to restrictive zoning and red tape at the local level. Biden’s administration hasn’t made housing any more affordable, nor has it removed the obstacles that hold back development.
On COVID, yes, it hit the world hard, but dismissing Trump’s economic record because of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic is just unfair. Look at his first three years: record-low unemployment, solid wage growth, especially for lower-income groups, and a thriving economy. Every country took a hit in 2020, but the policy foundation Trump laid out prepped the U.S. for rapid recovery, which we’ve been struggling to sustain under Biden.
As for high spending, both parties signed off on COVID relief, but Trump’s post-pandemic plans weren’t to keep the faucet running. The current administration, however, doubled down on massive spending even after the crisis, driving up debt and, yes, fueling inflation.
So, from a pragmatic standpoint, Trump’s policies showed they could deliver a stronger economy with lower inflation, especially for everyday Americans.
> Trump’s policies pre-COVID balanced growth with lower inflation and didn’t require massive government spending.
That's not surprising because it was *before Covid*. Covid spending led to inflation. That has now subsided.
The other user explained what inflation is. Public sentiment hasn't caught up with wage growth and inflation rate, it's just vibes. Housing, of course, is it's own problem, and Harris is proposing measures to drastically increase housing supply which would lower prices.
> Biden’s administration hasn’t made housing any more affordable, nor has it removed the obstacles that hold back development.
Good thing we're not talking about Biden.
> Look at his first three years: record-low unemployment, solid wage growth, especially for lower-income groups, and a thriving economy.
That's what's happening *right now*. The economy is doing well.
Most of your list does not make sense. Strong economy was on the same trend as in the Obama years. Trump did not cause it. There has been no new wars since WWII for the US. Inflation of course was not high, COVID didn't happen yet. Ukraine wasn't caused by Biden. You mentioned the border twice. Middle East also was not caused by Biden. You seem to blame Biden for everything that was caused by random chance. Might as well blame Trump for all the BLM riot and all the death and economic effects of COVID then. He was president when COVID happened, wasn't he?
Regarding economic growth, it is true that the economy during Trump’s first term followed a trajectory that began under the Obama administration. But, claiming that Trump’s policies did not contribute to that growth ignores critical data. Corporate tax cuts during his presidency incentivized business investments, deregulation reduced barriers for growth, and unemployment reached historic lows. These measures were significant accelerators rather than mere continuations. The assumption that trends persist unchanged without policy intervention is misleading.
On the topic of wars and foreign policy,the US has not engaged in new wars since WWII oversimplifies history. The we have been involved in significant conflicts, such as Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, with various levels of military commitment. The distinction with Trump's foreign policy is that it marked a shift away from decades of interventionism, focusing instead on negotiation, as seen with North Korea, and reducing troop deployments. This preserved American resources and lives, demonstrating imo, a calculated approach to maintaining peace without costly involvement.
While he was in office when COVID began, attributing the resulting economic downturn and global inflation solely to his administration overlooks context. COVID was an unprecedented global event. What truly distinguishes administrations is their response. The massive economic stimulus during the pandemic, which continued under the Biden administration, had long term inflationary consequences. In 2021, the rapid and aggressive fiscal policies compounded inflation pressures that were already forming due to disrupted supply chains.
Concerning border policy, addressing it twice is not redundant when evaluating policy impacts and outcomes. The current border crisis has been significantly exacerbated by reversing Trump era measures. This policy shift has led to record breaking crossings, impacting national security, straining local resources, and affecting social stability. Effective border control plays a critical role in preserving these areas.
On the matter of Ukraine, claiming that this situation was unrelated to US foreign policy under Biden overlooks the role of perceived American strength in global stability. Although Putins decisions are ultimately his own, the shift from assertive deterrence under Trump to perceived inconsistency under Biden created an environment that emboldened opportunistic actions. This does not assign all blame to one leader but acknowledges the complexity between leadership perception and global power moves.
Lastly, drawing a moral equivalence between the impacts of COVID under Trump and policy driven crises like the current inflation and border issues under Biden misrepresents the nature of these challenges. COVID was an external event that required reactive measures, while policy driven problems, such as inflation linked to monetary decisions and border security, reflect deliberate policy choices with foreseeable outcomes.
The point is not to assign blame arbitrarily but to objectively assess outcomes tied to policy decisions. An evidence based examination shows that Trump's policies led to stronger economic performance, better border management, and a more controlled geopolitical stance compared to the current administration.
I appreciate you taking the time to better explain your positions. I am not nearly as well-read and would have to take time reading up on each one of these. The one thing I do not agree with, however, are the corporate tax cuts. The Ukraine point also seems shaky, tbh. As does the stimulus inflation point. Although we got inflation, we also got a soft landing with low unemployment. What it worth it? Reasonable people can disagree.
I am in favor of increasing taxes to better fund education, research, research on education, and infrastructure. And Dems seem to be the better ticket for those issues.
Ultimately, the overturning of Roe and trying to steal an election overrules it all for me. I do not feel safe traveling to 1/3 of my own country. That is ultimately why I will be voting blue up and down ballot for the rest of my life. Even though I was mostly libertarian leaning before 2016.
On corporate tax cuts, the reality is that lower taxes incentivize growth. Capital left in the hands of businesses is reinvested, creating jobs and raising wages. If higher taxes were the solution, states with the highest tax burdens would lead in education and infrastructure, but that’s not the case.
You mention funding education, research, and infrastructure, but do Democrats effectively achieve this? Decades of increased spending have often yielded stagnant or declining results, particularly in education. More funding without accountability leads to bureaucratic bloat, not better outcomes. Infrastructure projects frequently suffer from inefficiency and waste under expansive government management. The result? More red tape, misallocated resources, and subpar results. Good intentions do not guarantee good outcomes; higher spending without smarter spending is political theater.
Your view on Ukraine underestimates deterrence. Geopolitics is about what adversaries believe they can get away with. Why did Russia hold back during Trump’s tenure but invade under Biden’s? Leadership perception matters, and ignoring that is a dangerous oversight.
On stimulus and inflation, while we avoided economic freefall, the cost was long term damage. Inflation erodes purchasing power and hits the poor hardest. A temporary “soft landing” doesn’t outweigh the consequences of unchecked government spending. Flooding the market with printed money has predictable outcomes—high inflation.
Now, Roe v. Wade. Overturning it didn’t ban abortion; it returned the decision to states, respecting federalism. Feeling unsafe over differing laws is an emotional reaction, not a matter of real safety. Disagreement with state laws shouldn’t mean you feel threatened traveling in your own country. That’s not safety; that’s discomfort.
As a libertarian leaning voter before 2016, you valued limited government and individual responsibility. Does voting blue “up and down” align with those principles, or is it a reaction based on selective outrage? Emotional voting expands government power at the expense of freedom. Real safety and freedom come from balanced governance, not knee jerk allegiance to one party. Think beyond the headlines.
1. I really want to punish Republicans for taking away my rights. I care about this one issue over all others.
2. It matters that virtually all Republicans lied about the last election. This is a BIG deal and cannot be normalized.
3. Punish Republicans for the past decade and a half of obvious partisan obstructionism, including the fiasco with Merrick Garland
4. Punish Republicans for the blatant misogyny since 2016. Again, this is a big deal for me and should not be normalized. The fact that the president brags about groping women and has brought redpill into the mainsteam really really sucks. Everyone around Trump speaks about women with hate and disdain. They constantly call Kamala stupid, r-worded, DEI, childless cat lady, having pimp handlers, working the corner, Hawk Tuah, heels up harris, etcetcetc. Not to mention the racist, anti-insert-group hate that they also promote. I feel like this caused a huge decrease in societal trust and general public decency, which I care about more as I start thinking about having kids. I know from my nephew that this toxic stuff is starting to seep into kids' vocabularies. My nine year old nephew has started using the f-word, feminist, and "LGBT" as insults. He learned it from his friends at school, along with online gaming. This should be horrifying, and def wasn't around when I was his age.
And the rest....
I agree that neither party has done a good job on education, infrastructure, tech, etc. But at least Biden got a few bills passed. I would like to see massive funding to education research to reverse the decline in education that I see in the public. Neither party would do what I want, but Dems lean closer. Republicans are nuts on this issue! Ohio is giving millions of dollars in taxpayer money to private, religious schools. That is the opposite of what I want. I don't need people getting even dumber. Between the party that stupidly overspends on education, and the party that wants to abolish the DOE, defund education, and turn the US into the Christian taliban, I would much prefer the former.
On cutting taxes, I am more in favor of raising median wealth than total GDP. My current understanding of econ (which is not much) is that your argument is pretty much Reaganomics, which is what led to the income gap graph we have today? I could be convinced on this specific issue. Though I don't really believe Harris is going to raise taxes dramatically. My gut feeling looking at this graph is that I probably want to skim a little more off the top to fund stuff like homelessness, education, infrastructure, research, etc. That is, without going too far as to severely stall GDP growth. And (D)s are like 5% better than (R)s at this I guess.
I am not convinced at all on the Ukraine and inflation issue. I feel like you might be a bit biased on these topics tbh. Almost everyone would probably prefer the soft landing to a hard landing with low inflation.
And yes, at this point the Dems are more libertarian than the Republicans. The covid stuff is a drop in the bucket compared to being forced to give birth against your will. No govt in my uterus, please. The fact that you think this is about headlines and irrational women emotions tells me that you have never truly considered what reproductive rights mean for someone who has a uterus. It is a decision that has lifelong consequences for one's health, education, income, cognition, appearance, dateability, and all aspects of a woman's life. It can leave you with permanently stretched out skin, a weakened pelvic floor, brain fog and fatigue that lasts years, death, or hundreds of other health effects. Not to mention having to abandon a poor kid to survive the foster care system with no loved ones. I suspect this is very hard to understand for someone who could never be affected by this issue. Bodily autonomy should NEVER be up to the states. Abortion bans have to be most illiberal thing possible next to slavery. It is a fundamental human right, and should be protected by the Constitution in the same vein as all other freedoms.
Imagine if certain states wanted to make kidney donation mandatory. Anyone you have sex with can take your kidney if they require it for life. Would any of your above points still matter to you? Would you be comfortable with it being a states rights issue, if the moment you travel to Texas, they can take your kidney there, but not in your state?
Trying to convince a pro-choice woman to vote Republican would be like trying to convince a Palestinian-American to vote Trump. If they had relatives stuck in Gaza.
At this point, the only things I lean right on are the border and maybe some fiscal conservatism. The border is not a huge issue for me, and I do not want to reward Republican obstructionism on that issue by voting for them.
Fiscal conservatism has been completely abandoned by the Republican party, running up huge deficits for no reason during an economic boom. Besides, we know how Trump chooses his advisors. He is a narcissistic blowhard that fires anyone who disagrees with him. Whereas Harris has listened to the experts at every turn and has shown herself to be ruthlessly disciplined and practical throughout the campaign. Some minor public speaking gaffes aside. So all-in-all, I think libertarians have been entirely consumed by the Dem party. Especially women. And I think the polls are agreeing with me this year.
Back in 2016, I can remember Trump being analogized to The Mule, the character from Asimov's Foundation stories. Certainly his "authoritarianism" is that of The Mule: it dies with him, and it doesn't much care about what you do in the outlying systems as long as you acknowledge him.
The American left's authoritarianism is that of the Second Foundation. They want to psychologically manipulate every aspect of existence in order to bring forth the glorious peaceful perfect future 1000 years from now. They very much care what you do, in every mundane aspect of your life, from what car you drive to what kind of stove you own. They make nothing of value, but have power by manipulating the people who can. There is no single head whose death or destruction ends the tyranny.
I fail to see how bureaucracy is any better than autocracy, when the more fundamental question is *what* power is being exercised over your lives, not *who* is exercising it. An autocrat who slashes regulations for 4 years and goes home to sell chintzy watches, or hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats writing ever more detailed regulations over every tiny little transaction that occurs in this country, I know which of these is more authoritarian. I won't give either one the moral sanction of my vote, but if I saw it as Scott does as a condemnation of the other, it would be an easy call.
>Fourth, for every bad thing the Democrats are doing to subtly-in-the-long-term-within-the-system try to undermine freedom, Trump also wants to do those things.
Not quite. One exception, and one bad thing which isn't directly related to freedom:
The exception is doubling down on Woke in general, and DEI in particular during the Biden/Harris administration. Re Woke, one notable _in_action of the Biden/Harris administration was that during the antisemitic campus demonstrations over this last year, the Biden/Harris administration did virtually nothing to lessen the frequently _physical_ threat to Jewish students and faculty. Re DEI (which damages freedom of association as well as economic efficiency), the Biden/Harris administration exacerbated it ( https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/06/25/executive-order-on-diversity-equity-inclusion-and-accessibility-in-the-federal-workforce/ ).
The other Biden/Harris bad thing, albeit not a freedom issue, was approximately doubling the number of illegal immigrants entering the USA (except in this last year, when, with the election looming, they clamped back down - but who knows if Harris might double them back to 2021 levels if she wins? It has never been clear what the real motive for the doubling was). Just to be clear: I have no objection to _legal_ immigrants. It might even be that the optimal choice for the USA as a whole would be to double legal immigration. But _legal_ immigrants get vetted, so we have some control that e.g. gang members are mostly weeded out.
Borders are meaningless to increasing numbers on the left. Especially the college educated, white collar middle class types that staff all the bureaucracy and leftist think tanks. I full expect a dramatic increase in illegal immigration if she wins, some reduction a few months before the next midterms, and rinse and repeat.
But honestly I expect illegal immigration to keep going up dramatically every year under Democratic administrations. As more people enter illegally, more people across the third world know its possible to enter illegally. It used to be just Mexicans crossing the border, then the Central Americans, Caribbean Islanders, and South Americans started showing up. Now there's hundreds of thousands from Africa, India, and rest of Asia showing up. Just think about how many billions live in these places. There's no shortage of supply. All you have to do is fly to Central America and walk to the border. As more people do it, the cost per person will go down, making it even more affordable for the billions across the world to do it. Hundreds of millions will enter illegally and the best the post-Trump, "moderate", "principled" Republicans will do is reduce taxes from 49.99% to 49.98%. This country is screwed.
Many Thanks! Yeah, my guess is that whatever motivated the Biden/Harris administration to double the flow of illegals for the first three years of that administration presumably still motivates Harris, so my best guess is that a Harris victory would raise the flow back to 2021 levels. I wish I knew what their motivation actually was. Lots of plausible guesses have been made, and, of course, I would never expect an honest answer from the administration itself, so we are all left guessing...
Many Thanks! Yes, that seems like a safe bet. Though, to mention two of the guesses: Consider two regrettable, but nonetheless distinguishable possibilities, one, where the Democrats are going to turn illegal immigrants into illegal voters, or two, where the Democrats are funneling illegal immigrants as cheap labor with no recourse to law to companies which exploit them, and are then campaign contributors to the Democrats. I wish I knew what the truth was.
I agree on the border, but it seems to me that campus harassment falls within the purview of colleges. Ostensibly they already have rules in place to punish this behavior, so any lack of follow-through is a failure on their part. I don't see how federal policy has any bearing.
DEI is a frankenstein that is going to be picked at in the coming years, possibly eroded. Corporations seem to be moving away from it. Your link on DEI has to do with the federal workforce.
The Obama administration issued a Dear Colleague letter through the Dept of Education to the universities to change the way they handled accusations of sexual misconduct via Title IX.
And Trump rescinded it, then Biden partially or completely reinstated it (I think?).
Many Thanks! Re campus harassment, I agree with Rothwed - the Federal government does have quite a bit of power to influence the manner and degree of enforcement of similar policies.
edit: Forgot to mention - yeah the link was about the Federal workforce, but there are also ripple effects, e.g. through requirements on contractors.
Thanks for this. Yeah another year of the lesser of two evils. I'm in a very blue state and am stuck at either writing in a name (again) or holding my nose and voting for Trump. I guess I'll decide on the 5th.
You come closer to capturing my own discomfort with the Democratic party than anyone else I have read. I want to have a prosperous economy and make the precariat less precarious. I don’t want anyone telling me how to think of imposing tougher restrictions on me than “don’t hurt others.”
It's not a static identity at least. In the Clinton years the GOP were frustrated that the party had embraced "neoliberalism" so much that it was difficult to campaign to the right of it on economy. Today the whining from fellow liberal voters seems to be that the DNC is too right-wing/centrist. They seem to get the message though based on polling that voters are prioritizing economy/inflation above all.
I appreciate the two-character psychodrama framing, and I endorse it as a good way to vote.
I'm tired of having an existential crisis every election, eventually voting Democrat as the lesser of two evils, and then getting stabbed in the back by those same Democrats when they interpret my "not Trump" vote as some kind of progressive mandate.
But what was I expecting, exactly? The democrats never had to do anything for my vote. "Vote third party unless the Republican might actually win" doesn't solve the incentive problem. And I'm tired of waiting for some mythical future where the Republican candidate is the lesser of two evils, so that I can finally have an actual voice.
The Comet King didn't want humanity to die. But he knew that pre-commitment was effective game theory, so when the situation called for it, he threatened to end humanity if the devil didn't back down.
That doesn't mean I'm voting for Trump. In this context, that would mean sacrificing my principles to more effectively spit in the face of the outgroup, which is partly how we got into this mess.
But I'm not voting for Harris, either, when she completely failed to give me any reason to vote for her, and when she said shit that makes her unfit for office along the only dimensions I care about.
Democrats need to do better if they want my vote. It's my vote, so my psychodrama is what matters. Any other posture would be making compromise with sin.
I can't guess from the sentiment whether you think the DNC is not left-leaning enough or too left-leaning.
The DNC already does the calculus for maximizing turnout in their favor, whether that includes you is a moot point. There are only two parties at the end of the day.
I think the DNC is too left-leaning on specific issues.
I fail to see how it's a moot point. Elections are an iterated game, and the calculus in the next election will be different if people like me refuse to vote for someone we consider unfit for office. The difference will be marginal, but my vote is also marginal. Traditional decision theory would tell me not to waste my time at all.
>and then getting stabbed in the back by those same Democrats when they interpret my "not Trump" vote as some kind of progressive mandate.
What the hell progressive things have Democrats done recently?
I agree the culture has moved slightly left, but that's mostly been younger people taking over the culture because they understand the internet. Aside from some grants for wind and solar, what exactly have the Democrats done to betray you?
If you could press a green button to chop your arm off, or a red button that would do nothing, would you spin the wheel? Something tells me people that are so cavalier about this election are the people who are the most insulated from its worst effects. For you, the buttons are for other people's arms, which allows you to sit back and disengage.
I'm not going to participate in a pissing contest where we argue about who has legitimate grievances or fears about this clownshow of an election. I have my worldview, you have yours, and neither worldview is "correct" in a way that could invalidate the lived experience that contextualizes my futile effort to communicate with you, or vice versa. The rhetorical path you're trying to take is a dead end.
Here's another path, which may or may not be a dead end: Why do you think anything will ever get better if people keep giving their vote away to the less evil candidate? What possible motivation could politicians have to care about the things you care about, when there's an endless stream of bogeyman in the other party to keep you in line? Do you think partisan primaries will give you a voice? How often do you even see contested primaries, outside of presidential elections? And what's your strategy for electing an actual moderate, when partisan primaries specifically exclude half of the people who might otherwise vote for them?
Every election, I would ask myself these questions. Every election, I would do the same thing everyone else does: Hold my nose and vote for the lesser evil. And where are we now? In a world where Donald Trump is the Republican nominee, and the Democratic party can't even hold a primary, much less nominate a candidate who deserves to win. A world where you feel entitled to criticize me for not using my voice to support your candidate, but you can't be bothered to care about who I am or why I think Harris is unfit for the office of President. A world in which that same attitude is the foundation of the Democratic platform, when they're supposedly trying to build a coalition to defeat an existential threat to Democracy.
Will voting third party save the world? Probably not. But the entire country has been trying it your way for as long as I've been alive, and the hole keeps getting deeper. I'm no longer willing to keep digging if the Democrats can't at least meet a very low bar. If that makes me a villain in your eyes, then I'm sorry you feel that way.
First, thinking Kamala Harris is evil is crazy. I have no idea how one could possibly arrive at that conclusion. She's the most moderate, milquetoast candidate since Bill Clinton. She is literally campaigning with Liz Cheney!
It is also crazy to think that voting Dem all these years caused Donald Trump to happen. Real wages have been going down for decades. The US will never again see the prosperity we saw after WWII. When people start to see a lower standard of living, they tend to vote for more fascist candidates in the false hope that a dictator can come in and solve all their problems for them. We saw this in Germany, Gaza, Venezuela, etc. It is also happening now all over the world. Inflation from COVID is killing all incumbent parties worldwide, from France to Germany to Canada.
Obama cannot be blamed. He had a number of big policy accomplishments, the biggest of which was the ACA. It is so popular that Republicans cannot get rid of it at this point. Shame that he was obstructed by Republicans from doing much else.
Biden had to drop out a very short time before the election. Using that time to make Dem candidates bicker and squabble for two months would have been a pointless endeavor. That would leave only one month to actually run the campaign. That would not have been feasible! Not to mention, Kamala was already on the ticket. The Dem candidate was Biden-Harris. Or course it makes sense that Harris become the nominee if Biden has a health issue.
Republicans weigh their choices and press the button that aligns with their view most. Who cares that Trump tried to steal an election? I just want the Mexicans out!
Dems will agree with 80% of the button's platform, and pout their lips and flap their arms because they want to purity test their candidate. I do want to prevent the decline of democracy...........but I didn't get my favorite guy in the primary, so Imma just sit at home.
I guess you can make your point by voting third party, but what does that even do? No one will have any idea why you voted third party. Could it be because you are an anti-abortion Democrat? Could it be because of Gaza? Could it be you wanted Kanye for president? You are not making the point you think you are making.
You are free to vote for the candidate that most aligns with you on the issues, and then get involved in politics to push him/her to do what you want during his/her term. You can organize protests, write an op-ed, organize a PAC for the next election, even make a YouTube video convincing others to join your cause.
But that would make too much sense and take too much effort. Some people are more interested in complaining than doing. I have a feeling no matter who the nominee was, you would find a way to hate them and sit out the election.
I notice that whenever Republicans are disillusioned by their party, they seem to always endorse Kamala. Geraldo Riviera, Liz Cheney, Schwarzenegger, John Kelly, Bad Bunny, Scaramucci etc are all publicly voting Dem. I have not heard of any Republicans talk about a protest vote, or just sitting out the election. That is the fundamental difference between the parties it seems. Republicans are doers, and Democrats are whiners. That is what my grievance is about the Dems.
Notice that I never called you a villain, but you insist that's how I see you as. I will never call you a villain because villains actually have to get off their couch and do bad things. Key word is DO. And please save the tears about me feeling "entitled to criticize you for not using your voice to support my candidate." This is an internet comments section. I AM entitled to criticize any opinion you put out publicly that has a reply button. And so can you. That's what free speech is. I'm sorry that you don't like it.
I don't particularly care if I'm crazy under your worldview. Harris wasn't moderate when she ran against Biden; she just pretends to be moderate now because she has no principles. Everyone has their own theory about why Donald Trump happened, and no single theory is sufficient, but obviously I find my own theory more credible than yours. The Democrats should have had a primary at the usual time, preferably without Biden, and their failure to do so has consequences that are 100% their own fault.
It doesn't matter how involved I've been in politics, because there is no objective threshold which is ever enough, and you're incentivized to frame what I've done as inadequate for rhetorical reasons.
I voted for the Libertarian. I don't consider myself a Libertarian any more than I consider myself a Democrat, but it doesn't take a doctorate in political science to look at the vote totals and infer the direction that I think the party should move.
I concede that "entitled to criticize me" was the wrong objection. The issue is that you clearly feel entitled to my vote. That attitude is ubiquitous in the Democratic party, it contributes to the ongoing collapse of the coalition, and you can't solve that problem by yelling at random people on the internet. Coalition partners who get nothing from the coalition will eventually leave. That's how a functioning democracy works.
Free speech is what you make of it. You're angry, I'm angry, everyone is angry all the time. Welcome to the year 2024. I'm trying not to be an asshole in this comment section because it doesn't help anyone, it makes me feel bad, and it isn't aligned with my values. You're your own person, and you can do whatever you want, but I really don't see what the point of any of this is. I thought I had something novel to say, so I wrote a comment on the internet. I only do that a few times per year, and it's not because I think arguments like this are a good way for anyone to spend their time.
I'm sorry if it seemed like I felt entitled to your vote. You are of course free to vote however you want. Obviously an internet comment was not going to change your opinion. We are both just screaming into the void.
I just thought I'd make a little observation about what I am reading online. Please do not take this to be an attack on you. I am just opining on the state of the Democratic party in 2024. Of all the discontent I see online, around:
1/4 are Muslims who are upset Kamala is too pro-Israel
1/4 are Jews who are upset Kamala is too pro-Gaza
1/4 are progressives who are upset Kamala is too moderate
1/4 are moderate Dems who are upset Kamala is too progressive
But ultimately it is only the Dem's fault for not pleasing all these groups. It is also their fault for ever expressing frustration that any of these four groups could be acting a bit irrational. And it is certainly their fault that Trump became the Republican nominee.
In fact, I hope they lose so they can see be punished for these grave sins. I wish for a Trump presidency so that he can protect me from all the alarm bells ringing in my head about his last power grab when he lost a democratic election. And the growing pit in my stomach of fear and anger at women no longer getting a say in whether they have to give birth. I'm sure Trump will protect me from all of that soon, whether I like it or not.
Since anytime anyone here brings up J6 as a reason not to vote for Trump, someone else brings up BLM riots as a reason not to vote for Kamala, as if these were parallel events with equal participation by both candidates, I think it’s worth noting the political difference between the two.
The BLM riots were associated with a poorly defined, and in my opinion largely unfounded, outrage over race and policing. The rioters who caused violence didn’t do so with the intent of affecting some specific change, nor were they in support of a specific politician or political candidate. They were throwing a shit fit and the worst among them were destructive, similar to previous race riots.
J6 on the other hand was distinct in intent, scope, and target. It involved a coordinated effort to overturn a certified election and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, with participants explicitly motivated by Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of election fraud. It was an attempt, however unorganized, to disrupt a democratic process and directly challenge the legitimacy of the election.
Both the BLM riots and J6 were bad.
BLM riots led in total to 19-25 deaths across the country over months. J6 led to 5 deaths within 36 hours. No doubt the BLM riots led to far more total property damage than J6, while J6 led to far more reputational damage, just as an attack on the Kremlin, or Westminster Abbey would for Russia or England. J6 also set an alarming precedent that impacts our election process going forward. BLM riots were similar in scope and intent to past instances of destructive civil unrest. It’s worth noting both the BLM riots and J6 happened while Trump was in office.
To suggest that Kamala should be held directly accountable for the BLM riots the same way Trump should be for J6 is irrational.
I wouldn’t deny she was supportive of BLM protests or people arrested in association with them. I don’t think I did anywhere above. That would also be irrational. Kamala Harris exercises poor judgment as Trump does. I can’t stand the sight of either of these clowns.
My point is that Kamala holds less direct responsibility for the various BLM riots than Trump does for J6. Do you disagree?
I think the rest of your comment is fair, which is why I only brought up that one point. Although I think it's a bit disingenuous to say J6 "led to" 5 deaths when those were natural causes of people in the vicinity unrelated to any violence, except Babbitt and (very tenuously, maybe) Sicknick.
Many of the 19-25 deaths I cited as BLM-related deaths were due to similar vague or plausibly unrelated circumstances. I can find no way to accurately tally the casualties attributable to either event. My poorly made point was that it seems fair to attribute more deaths to the many BLM riots than to J6.
> My point is that Kamala holds less direct responsibility for the various BLM riots than Trump does for J6.
I think this is fair. I think that one big problem with this whole thread, including Scott's original post, is that we're weighing up the problems with Donald Trump the individual versus the problems with the entire Democratic Party machine.
And this is actually kinda fair. The biggest downside of voting for Kamala is that you get the Democratic Party machine and all the rubbish that goes along with it -- the actual figurehead isn't that important. The biggest downside of voting for Trump is that you get Donald Trump in particular, his downsides are highly idiosyncratic to him as a person.
The Dem machine doesn't really have that many problems. It's mostly the leftist twitter activists, which the Dem party has mostly shed off due to Gaza now.
I think Kamala Harris would increase the risk of race riots, but more importantly, she will give the race rioters what they want. They already got a holiday, a vice-president, a guilty Chauvin verdict, a renamed NFL team, the Robert E. Lee statue, a mural at a Target they burned down, a reduction in police enforcement (even as police get more funding), Pelosi kneeling in a mask, exemption from social distancing requirements, and money. I actually held my nose and voted Biden in 2020, thinking this nonsense would pass. But then 10/7 happened, and the race rioters tried to make Hamas the good guys for about five days before Boomer Jews were able to wrest back control of the narrative.
I expect President Harris to turn the heat up on race. We've already heard that she will bring up race/gender questions at basically every White House briefing. And then she picked Tim Walz, who either deliberately or stupidly allowed Minneapolis to become BLM ground-zero while he was governor.
If Trump or Vance becomes a strongman, I don't expect life will change much for the ordinary American. Economic growth will be stifled, and you won't be allowed to protest the regime, but as long as you keep your head down you'll survive. But if Harris or her successor start a race war, I can see ordinary citizens being turned on ordinary citizens, like we saw in Rwanda.
I don't see any mention either in Scott's post or the comments of Trump's character, but I think that's a key consideration.
The man has no convictions other than his own perfection, and no emotions other than revulsion and rage. He has repeatedly shown disdain for entire categories of people (women, soldiers, foreigners) and pretty much every institution, but no empathy for even his own family. He's frighteningly susceptible to flattery, especially by strongman dictators, but totally indifferent to the suffering of children. And he's getting older and more befuddled.
Can one person make much difference in 4 years? Probably not if there are no emergencies. But when the chips are down and there's a crisis, is he going to have a sense of what is best for the American people? Or is he going to call up Putin for advice on to how to best help the rich white males around him?
I hear his supporters say they aren't voting for a babysitter for their children, but someone to lead the country. But I think when we stop expecting decency from our leaders we should be prepared to stop expecting it from our fellow citizens as well.
It was an Alfred Smith dinner after his debate with Hillary Clinton. He had two jokes in the clip: saying Clinton would laugh a lot tonight, sometimes even at appropriate moments; and he said she accidentally bumped into him, and very civilly said, "Pardon me," to which he replied they would need to talk about that after he was elected. Note that you can see Clinton laughing during the clip, too.
I haven't surveyed all of his jokes, so can't tell if this is the funniest, but it is the funniest I know of.
I appreciate the effort, but if a marginally amusing pun surely written for him is the best you got, I’m not changing my mind that the dude is not droll.
I never said he was wildly funny. I said no one could dispute that he has a sense of humor. You can search for other jokes he has made, but you'll surely say those were also written for him. He HAS delivered the jokes, at the least.
I thought a good debate question would have been something like "What would you do for a Klondike bar?" Klondike would, of course, love such a question, and it shouldn't blatantly promote any particular product or service, but such a question would show something about the candidate. I imagine Harris's answer would be something about her being raised in a middle-class family.
On the other hand, Harris, and the entire elite of her party, everyone who interacted with Biden enough to observe his mental condition, were happy to conceal it, to do their best to put someone suffering from serious age related cognitive decline in the White House.
It's not clear how much of what is different about Trump is his irresponsibility, how much his not bothering to hide it.
I don't think this had any bearing on Biden's character. Do you think Biden is also at heart someone who has no respect for anything but himself, and just needs some flattery to sell out his fellow citizens - but has hidden his core indency (or more recently had it hidden by others) all these years? That's at least shows some self-awareness and - importantly - a recognition of the values that keep us all from turning on each other. But I doubt it - even the GOP senators who worked closely with him for many years have nothing bad to say about his character.
Harris is a bit more of an unknown in this respect, there were stories during the 2020 primary of her treating her staff shabbily, and having a bit of a temper. Seems like those stories would have resurfaced more recently if there was much to them. Doesn't seem to have many political principles, maybe abortion rights and some sort of middle/muddle way on crime. But I don't think she will make decisions out of rage or disdain, or that are indifferent to human dignity or human suffering.
It has no bearing on Biden's character, some on Harris and the character of top level politicians. This evidence is only for Democrats but I don't assume Republicans are better.
The way you know that they weren't happy to do that is that they didn't do that.
I mean, come on. Unlike the flunkies Trump has surrounded himself with, Biden's party and confidants launched a long campaign both behind doors and in public to convince him to step down even though he had no intention of doing so far a long time, and eventually succeeded. He's no longer on the ballot.
What did you want them to do, kick him down a flight of stairs? This is what the system working looks like. You should be praising them for having the courage to do that for the good of the country, at a time when Harris's approval ratings were even worse than Biden's and they had no clear roadmap from there to victory.
> What did you want them to do, kick him down a flight of stairs?
What they should have done is the same thing they did, except six to nine months earlier. They should have pressured Biden to drop out before the primaries began, so the Democrats could have had a meaningful primary.
They did that until the debate exposed his condition to the public, making it impossible to continue the pretense that he was fine. Only then did they start trying to force him to step down, because the alternative was losing the election.
> Put this way, you could argue: okay, January 6 was bad. But it was like a ten-year-old child's idea of authoritarianism. You seize power by getting a bunch of people to zerg rush the opposing politicians and beat them up until they declare you in charge. Too bad you were foiled by a locked door, you'll get them next time. I won't claim this strategy has never successfully taken over a government, because history is long and weird. But I can't think of any examples.
I think the Storming of the Bastille in 1789 was very much like this (although the ensuing French Revolution did turn out to be a massive clusterfuck just a few years later).
>All of this will be unbelievably obvious to 99% of you, but I promised I’d try to say something different from all the other articles on this exact topic, and the best I can do is reach out to the 0.001% other people stuck in the same psychological vortex I was and see if any of it rings true.
This is more important than you make it out to be, because - like your college Atheism club, like r/atheism back in the day - that .001% are the most dedicated and loudest people in the space, who end up representing 80% of the discussion you actually hear if you enter the space.
The passively-listen public generally gets caught up in the psychodrama of whoever is controlling the public narrative, and I think that's mostly people involved in some kind of thought-consuming psychodrama like you describe. Making even one of those people realize what they're doing and take a broader perspective can have a hugely outsized effect on how everyone else experiences the discussion.
A clarification on Just Stop Oil: they never threw paint at paintings, just soup. They put paint on a sculpture, which can be wiped off. The painting they “smashed,” it was only the glass casing of it.
Many curators are largely ok with Just Stop Oil because they realize their tactics don’t involve *actually* damaging the art (which would put the protesters at greater legal risk), instead elevating it to play a role in raising awareness of, as you said, subtle issues missed by the legal status quo — which is what a lot of good art is actually for.
Their acts of protest are arguably quite art literate, and could be construed as advancing art, or even being works of art themselves.
Well mostly because the Museum staff are ideological allies of the protestors. Museum staffs won't let a lot of Christian groups protest abortion by throwing soup at their paintings. Basic friend/enemy distinction at work.
"The art world" is made up of a combination of trust fund babies on one hand, and people who are demonstrably terrible at making rational career decisions on the other.
The damage Just Stop Oil has done to museums is devastating to patrons .You now have to wait in an hour-long security line to get into The National Gallery. Basically, they did to museums what Al Queda did to our airports.
That's not "growing pains", it's pain associated with one very specific group that invented a brand new way of being awful that nobody had ever considered before.
For centuries we've had paintings hanging in galleries and while the galleries understood that theft might happen they never needed to worry about vandalism. Now they do, and our lives are all worse, and the oil industry is unaffected (or perhaps more sympathetic than it otherwise would be).
Those attacks didn't do severe damage simply by luck. The soup didn't damage the Van Gogh because it was covered by glass, otherwise you try cleaning tomato soup off thick impasto without doing damage, just ask an art restorer.
Smashing the glass over the painting could have resulted in tears and embedded shards in the canvas. Again, we're just lucky these little brats are all ineffective idiots.
Other paintings *have* been damaged by glass smashing.
The sculpture was lucky, again because it was inside a glass case. These people are idiots, from privileged backgrounds (just listen to the accent of the purple-haired missy with the soup throwing) and who can afford to waste time and money and effort doing these symbolic protests before going back to their well-heeled lifestyles.
So to clarify your position, you’re arguing it’s just a coincidence that they haven’t actually damaged art yet, despite their best efforts to do so, or is it that they’ve taken steps not to destroy art but you feel they are insufficient?
Well said. I can't disagree with any of it. Well, I suppose I could quibble a bit whether the Republican part is really stronger or more cohesive than the Democrats, but that's really beside the point.
So I'll vote for whoever the libertarian candidate is, not knowing or caring whether he's "really" libertarian in any meaningful sense. For the third time.
While I ultimately voted for the malarial mawkish tzar, your argument against left-wing illiberal authoritarianism is pathetically weak. There may be social headwinds, but not political ones. Harvard had no issue driving through the loophole Roberts left them. Do you think granting agencies will be removing their discriminatory requirements because they saw the light on their own?
Thankfully, VPs tend to be powerless unless disaster strikes (ahem), but Tim Walz has come out harder against freedom and free speech than Trump ever has. My hope, and I assume yours, is that Harris is in good health, no funny aneurisms in hiding, and Walz's age keeps him out of following her up.
I'm surprised that most of the conversation is focused on the 2020 election, when fraud is already a serious issue in the current election. If you're going to base your vote on which side seems to value election integrity and the democratic process more, I think it would be a good idea to get up to date on current events.
> Surely [oil companies are] worse than ruining one picture, which can probably be restored later anyway.
Just stop oil didn't ruin any pictures. They intentionally only targeted paintings they knew to be behind glass. I don't support Ithem, but they should be represented fairly.
They didn't ruin any paintings, but they ruined entire museums. The security line to get into the National Gallery in London is now worse than the ones at Heathrow.
That seems like a National Gallery problem? If no one ever ruined or tried to ruin any of their paintings, and in response they increased security so much that now they ruined their own museum, maybe they should be less bad at their job.
That's a lot of words for "status reasons." I recognize it, as I feel it. And I'm watching a friend go through these verbal perambulations and rationalizations as we speak.
It's funny, though, that neither one of us is a psychiatrist, and we recognize it. You, apparently, do not.
I think this is the most honest comment of a Trump supporter. It's been about class for a long time, and it's not the capitalist class vs the worker class. It's the literate class vs the illiterate class. It's the people that can deal with a complex world both technologically and socially vs people that just want to scream stop and go back to simpler times because they can't catch up with the modern demands.
This divide isn’t about “literate” vs. “illiterate” but about risk management and preserving stability mechanisms that support everyday life. Many Trump supporters prioritize policies that manage risk and avoid irreversible consequences in areas like border security, economic stability, and international relations. Their perspective isn’t anti-progress but pro-stability, focused on ensuring changes are measured and do not threaten the foundational elements of society.
Framing this as a “class conflict” ignores that many Trump supporters are educated, tech-savvy, and professionally accomplished. They recognize the need for progress but question policies that, in their view, destabilize key institutions and systems without adequate safeguards. This isn’t about wanting simplicity—it’s about managing risks responsibly to avoid potentially irreversible disruptions to economic and social stability.
Why do you feel the need to project that he doesn't believe what he espouses? It's a pathetic rhetorical device. Either engage with the arguments at face value, or don't.
How nice that you feel comfortable to project and justify it because... his endorsement not an open discussion? Are you joking? Or are you saying "Scott didn't use enough words"?
Either way, I would not have doubled down on that.
It is nice for me to be comfortable in my own skin on the internet. Thanks!
But you misunderstand. Perhaps I am a bad communicator?
My point is the utter lack of discussion of status factors is a glaring hole. This is *obviously* an important issue in this particular choice. For *everyone*. So it seems to me that dog is not barking really, really loudly.
"""Put this way, you could argue: okay, January 6 was bad. But it was like a ten-year-old child's idea of authoritarianism. You seize power by getting a bunch of people to zerg rush the opposing politicians and beat them up until they declare you in charge. Too bad you were foiled by a locked door, you'll get them next time. I won't claim this strategy has never successfully taken over a government, because history is long and weird. But I can't think of any examples."""
I'm not worried about Trump or January 6, but it pleases me to be the 15th or 20th commenter to reply with examples.
1789 Bastille was mostly spontaneous.
1789 Women's March on Versailles was spontaneous.
1792 August, the Tuileries Palace riot, was mostly spontaneous.
1792 September was a planned coup but with a large spontaneous riotous element.
1794 End of the Committee of Public Safety was definitely a planned thing in the convention halls, but quickly spun out of control.
1830 Fall of Charles X was spontaneous reaction to repression, and caught the political class flat footed for a day.
1848 Fall of his successor Louis Philippe was spontaneous and again caught the political class flat footed. This was the absolute most classic case of what you're talking about: *several times*, a legislative body was deliberating, and a mob just stormed the building and forced a new government. If I remember correctly, this actually happened twice in the same day.
1848 Berlin was spontaneous.
1848 Vienna was spontaneous.
1848 Budapest was spontaneous and caught the political class (themselves trying to have an orderly revolution-of-devolution) flat footed.
1871 Paris Commune was quite literally a mistake, when the powers-that-be tried to seize the guns, failed for lack of horses, and the city woke up and rioted to control le buildings. EDIT: I partially retract this one, because what happened in the riot is the National Guard took over the buildings. But. The National Guard, at that time, was primarily composed of *new recruit* socialist working class citizens who had just gone about electing their own officers. It was a sort of lightly organized force recently distilled from the masses.
1905 Russian Revolution was a spontaneous set of riots that escalated to full blown, well, Russian Revolution.
1917 February was spontaneous.
1917 October was not spontaneous, but Lenin was almost caught flat footed, knew he was about the miss the spontaneous wave, and raced HARD to get out in front of it.
Is there really a positive case to be made for Jill Stein? I'm reading her website, and she sounds like a very radical woke leftist. She's stood in as more or less a protest vote for those one the left who don't want to vote for the Democratic candidate, but do people even realize what they are voting for when they vote for Stein? Are you just endorsing her as a protest vote and ignoring her platform?
More generally, have Green parties around the world done more good than harm? My sense is they generally stand in the way of getting good things done. Can someone make a positive case for them?
I always saw her vote as more of a "the Democrats aren't leftist enough" kind of vote. Like, yes, it's a protest, but the direction of the protest is much more specific. I don't know that many Stein voters care about the specific details of her platform, so much that it's incontrovertibly further left than Harris or other mainstream Democrats.
I'm failing my own personal test of character by even commenting on this post after I swore not bother trying to talk to random people on the internet about politics ever again (this comment section is a pretty good example of how that's impossible). But as long as I've lost and am in my feelings: are all the people who are insisting Trump won't be as bad as he is actively saying he wants to be at every rally willing to commit to apologizing if they are wrong about this? Meaning if manages to get his way and engages in mass deportations, or starts throwing political dissidents in jail, or finds a way to justify running for a third term or making himself president for life, would anyone currently supporting him be willing to say that were those conditions to manifest they made a bad call?
I'm not fear-mongering, its perfectly rational to say "I see all the indicators that my candidate wants to do destructive illiberal things in addition to the policies I want, and I'm gambling that the positive things will come about and the negative things won't." But the corollary of that is that you are committing to say "I was wrong in my assessment of the odds that things would get this bad and if I'd known I would have done something differently." Which is the thing I suspect no one is actually willing to do. All the people who are making arguments that things won't really be allowed to get that bad will immediately pivot to saying "actually these bad things are really just fine" if they happens, and that's the part that really drives me insane.
Rational people (or so I'm told) are supposed to update their priors based on new information, but we've been bombarded with information for years on how Trump has no respect for democratic norms or rule of law or anything other than naked power, and how his team has been planning how they would consolidate power and work more ruthlessly and efficiently in a second term than the first time around, and it doesn't seem to have affected any of the pro-Trump rationalists calculations, which makes me suspect that no evidence of Trump's illiberalism would make them update to "maybe Trump is too dangerous." Which means either they are A) bad rationalists or B) their ultimate priorities are in a different place than where they are pretending and they don't worry much about illiberalism in their calculations.
I wouldn't expect to get any takers with your current approach. You're equating facets of real authoritarianism with a policy proposal (that has majority support) of simply enforcing existing laws. If you want a calm rationalist meta-cognition discussion about politics, you have to keep your policy preferences out of it.
That sounds like a partisan gotcha talking point to me, and I have a feeling its factual basis is that one time he threw a number out off the top of his head while going off-teleprompter at a rally.
Look, your original points are interesting and worth being mulled over, and my objection is really just a single-detail quibble. The problem is that you need to do this sort of thing with a really pure mind, or else you're just trying (probably without even realizing) to use lofty rationalist language to sneakily sway people based on your political preferences, rather than actually improving anyone's thought process detached from the content. And I'm voting for Harris, in case that helps defuse suspicion about my motives here.
I mean, he said it in a Times interview, his campaign has repeated numbers multiple times, the consequences of having a totally distorted view both of the number of illegal immigrants present in the country and the huge negative social and economic costs of mass deportation all seem quite predictable to me and the sort of thing I would like both leaders and their supporters to hold themselves accountable for .
But I take your point, I'm biased about this stuff. I think everyone is, its too big and all-prevailing to not have some kind of emotional response to. Maybe your emotional response is oversimplifying the narrative and treating anything really insane Trump has insisted he wants as Blue propaganda. Mine is certainly to fixate, but to be clear I'm not fixated on the bad things Trump wants to do, I'm fixated on the way his supporters justify voting for him when they also think that stuff is bad. The ones who clearly have some kind of cult complex where they think he's a god actually make the most sense to me. Its crazy but its a well-observed, documentable kind of crazy. The ones who hate Democrats for cultural reasons and don't pay that much attention to what Trump actually says also make sense to me, its Democrats fault for becoming so culturally arcane no one without a college degree feels they belong in the party anymore. But the ones who say things like "sure he says he's prepared to turn the military on people who protest his actions if necessary and that would be awful, but I don't think anyone in the military would really let him do that" are the ones who to me are committing a grave and obvious moral failing even by their own internal worldview. They are basically relying on someone else to do the thing its their final responsibility to do, which is inhibit the illiberal tendencies of their government.
Somehow getting through an entire post on the Latin Americanization of US politics, here supposedly exemplified by Trump (unfairly; prosecuting political opponents and threatening tech companies into compliance have been feature of Biden/Harris since before they were in office), without mentioning immigration once. If I didn't know you, I would've assumed this was a Straussian Trump endorsement.
What's the point of mentioning immigration? The Dems are tough on borders now too, the candidates barely differ on their policies there. Only difference is how inflammatory their rhetoric on the topic is.
The Dems SAY they are tough on borders now, since they found out it was an actual issue people cared about. I get the impression they want as many immigrants coming in as possible, whether legally or not, because it suits their political purposes.
I mean you get that impression because of a gigantic media apparatus designed from the bottom up to manipulate your impressions about the parties, one half of which is trying to give you that specific impression. What have Democratic elected officials actually *done* in the last year which supports that belief?
Right, the immunity is relevant to Bill. I agree that Trump should have prosecuted Hillary. But the fact that he failed to do so seems to make the case that the uneven-ness seems to be his fault, as well as the fault of many, many others over time.
Thus, I see the Trump prosecutions as positive, and hopefully the first step of many where political figures are prosecuted for crimes. Add Menéndez, Cuomo, Adams, hopefully with more to come.
I think the norm that was started with pardoning Nixon was a bad norm, and instead the norm should be "enforce the law."
+1 Trump has my vote. Im ignoring the moral panic and looking at the outcomes of two nominees. It's clear which one is better when you ignore the controversies, rhetoric, and just focus on policy outcomes for Americans.
'Anything' meaning 'his multitude of obvious crimes'.
If you decided you had to prosecute Harris for something, what would it be? Does she also have a half dozen equally obvious and severe crimes that you could prosecute her for if you wanted to?
It's pretty easy to prosecute someone once you decide you have to prosecute him for something. Anything.
I'm not close enough to Harris to know of anything for which she could be prosecuted, but "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." Anyone these days who comes to high office, such as Vice President, is not the most honest of men.
Trump's been getting accused of rape and bragging about assaulting women for decades, and his shady business practices and creative accounting have been well known for a similar period. His intimidating call to 'find more votes' was public years before anyone decided to prosecute, and his public and behind-the-scenes involvement in Jan 6th was on every station the moment it happened.
You cannot with an honest face say that there is exactly as much legal ammunition against Harris and we just don't know what it is because no one decided to prosecute her yet. We knew most of the evidence against Trump long before anyone decided to prosecute, and we knew about his criminality and propensities long before he ran for President. He's an extreme outlier for American presidents in terms of obvious public-facing law-breaking across multiple domains and schemes.
You can say you have faith that anyone who makes it to VP must be dirty so Harris must have hidden crimes. I think that's silly motivated reasoning, but sure, lets grant it as true. The fact that the public has never heard of any of those crimes is sufficient reason to expect her to be unlikely to get prosecuted, relative to someone where the public has heard their crimes and seen the evidence.
My main point is that the Democrats have been trying to hang crimes on Trump since he was elected. They selected the person, now to find the crimes. I don't want to argue the actual merits of Trumps judicial proceedings here, for it would take a lot of research and I doubt either of us will be convinced of much, since the "trials" have been in the public eye for so long.
I agree there can't be exactly as much legal ammunition against both, but that isn't really the point. The felonies for which Trump was convicted is a reasonable example: they could (should: opinion-based) have been tried as misdemeanors. The merits of the case aren't relevant. It's the PERSON who is on trial, and that in itself is a threat to democracy.
He didn't endorse Democrats at large. He endorsed Kamala Harris. The difference is key.
If you're going to hold Harris responsible for the overreaches of Democratic governors (who were the ones responsible for many of the things you complain about), then you could equally tie Trump to the many overreaches of Republican governors. That way lies madness and blind partisan anger.
Yes, I think it's appropriate for a rationalist to try to make those distinctions.
>Forget whether eliminating the filibuster should really count as a threat to democracy;
Of course, I understand why Scott declines to rule on the merits here: it's irrelevant to the argument he's making, whereas the fact that Trump wants to do it too is relevant.
However, I think that it's important to point out the obvious here. Eliminating the filibuster, whether a Democrat or Republican legislature does it, is very, very, very obviously not even remotely a threat to democracy. It's simply a different procedural way of doing legislative representative democracy. Maybe a better one (because efficiency), maybe a worse one (because hasty decisions, inflamed passions, instability), but it simply would make it easier and quicker for a legislative majority to pass bills. And neither Harris nor Trump has proposed eliminating it in a non-democratic manner.
The reason I think it's important to point out is that it's a great example of the kind of bizarre logic that I keep seeing people resort to when making the case for Trump versus Harris, which amounts to "sure, Trump literally tried to overturn an election he obviously lost, but Harris proposes to accomplish a thing I don't like by encouraging Congress to pass a bill which she would then sign--which, because I don't like it, is precisely as bad!"
The filibuster is what prevents the majority from steamrolling over the minority, like they did in 2010 for the Affordable Care Act, which had a filibuster-proof voting block. The only ones that want filibusters eliminated are the majority party, whichever that is.
That's right, the legal majority as specified in the constitution should not allowed to decide anything because a procedural rule is no longer enforced as of 18 whatever.
This is a smart, logical way to run our government and will surely never backfire constantly.
There's nothing incompatible with democracy and 51% of people tyrannizing the other 49%. Procedures that make it so a larger majority is required act as a check against majority tyranny. It's part of a trade off between representing the will of the people and protecting the rights of individuals and minorities. The government is slow to respond to change as a result, but that's kind of the point.
If your definition of "tyrannizing" stretches to "one half of one of the three branches of government can function without a 60% majority", then it is a wildly non-central example of tyranny, and does not come with the moral valence other forms do.
There is this negotiating strategy called "compromise" that can be used to get people to do something you want that they don't, that has been used to counter the filibuster for about 235 years.
"not be allowed to decide anything" doesn't really happen, at least not very often.
> These are the people who would spend the whole session droning on about how the first Book of Heberdazzah said King Shmog died in Beersheeba, but the second book of Heberdazzah said King Shmog died in Jerusalem, so the whole thing was a flimsy tower of cards that no sane person could possibly believe.
While annoying, to the best of my knowledge this problem occurs just as much in unimpeachably secular historical documents.
The only thing this argument will really prove is that Heberdazzah can't be the unerring word of God. The text provides strong support for the Beersheba theory and for the Jerusalem theory, considered relative to other locations.
Kamala Harris was not voted by a single democrat. She was selected by a cabal of DNC. This is about as anti-democracy as anything trump is accused of.
Elizabeth Warren said that the same DNC rigged the nomination process in 2016. She went on record and said this openly on TV, google it on YouTube.
The DNC is actively anti-democratic and everything you think Trump is supposed to be. In addition the coordinated legal attack against trump is beyond forgiveness. I can’t vote for that, so I will plug my nose and vote trump and hope he wins.
Political parties aren't democracies, the government is a democracy.
Parties can put their name next to any candidates they want, they are private entities. The people get to vote during the actual election.
The idea that the people should get to choose what candidates are on the ballot as well as which candidate wins is little more than the parties sucking up to their members and trying to look good for donations. It has some benefits, but also massive drawbacks that have screwed us over, because the primary process is designed as a show and spectacle rather than a method to accurately choose the best candidate.
Voters are in no way obliged to a primary process, and it's nothing like anti-democratic to skip it. The government is Democratic, and we vote on who runs that.
1) if the DNC is willing to install their candidate of choice and do whatever it takes to do it, it’s guaranteed they will also do whatever they can do to ensure they will maintain power. Case in point: a) censoring companies and spreading their propaganda without opposition b) coordinating a criminal attack against trump with the most absurd “crimes” possible to try to keep him out of the election. Both failed so far but next time up they will do a better job.
2) if trump did what the DNC did, ie have himself selected by the GOP instead of being voted for by citizens, I guarantee you would be up in arms.
The idea that the DNC can engage in undemocratic behavior before the election but that they will clean up their act for the election is absolute delusion.
1 is like arguing that if a supermarket decides to stop carrying your brand of toothpaste, obviously that means they will break into your house and steal your toothpaste too. One of these is the normal and legitimate functioning of their own organization, the other is a bizarre and unprecedented crime.
1a. is nonsense of course, people are half-remembering some implications that they tried to suppress anti-vax rhetoric during the pandemic. Whether you think it was ok to do that or not, they were trying to save lives during a public health emergency. Nothing out there about them trying to win elections through censorship, that's an entirely different thing that people are just making up. Especially ironic that you say 'without opposition' when the owner of Twitter has declared fro Trump, is breaking laws to give away millions to buy votes for him, simply deactivates or takes over accounts supporting Harris whenever he feels like it, and pushes pro-Trump content to users every day. 'No opposition'.
1b. If Trump doesn't want to be tried for crimes he should stop doing so many obvious crimes and leaving so much evidence of them in the public eye. We've never had a president this obviously criminal in teh past, we don't know whether the prosecutions are unprecedented because the situation has an n of 1. But even a moment of investigation reveals that the prosecutions are *not* coordinated, and Biden actively held federal prosecutors back from prosecuting Trump for years.
2. I assure you I would no, I would be overjoyed that they have ditched the idiot process that gives us celebrities disaster cases like Trump in the first place. I've been making arguments against the primary system for over a decade now.
I might still attack their choice in candidate if I didn't like them, like you are. But I wouldn't make up bad reasons to do it.
I think this steals at least one substantial base. But more than that, it feels entirely hysterical.
Claiming that the actions of the Jan 6 rioters were guided or directed or planned or, heck, even *wanted* by Trump is, as far as I can tell, not supported by anything other than pure projection. Did he do stupid challenges and set up alternate slates of electors? Yeah. That was dumb. But not criminal. Is there any substantial evidence that he had any significant hand in the people storming the capitol, or even *stood to gain anything* by their doing so (ie that their actions had any chance of net benefit for him, considering the inevitable blowback for having done so)? No.
But more than that. I will draw my personal line in the sand, my own prediction. If Trump is elected, the only measure by which he will be more Authoritarian than the status quo ante is in "number of committed Democrats in power". Everything else will be in the noise.
More than even that--I will predict that there is a *much* larger chance that Harris, if elected, will be, by any sane measure, more authoritarian. Why do I think so? Compare the first Trump administration to the Biden/Harris administration. The latter has *already* imposed increasing (monotonically so) amounts of concerted government power to deny rights and to increase concentration of power in federal hands. The former...had its ups and downs, but generally *decreased* the amount of concerted government power.
And even worst case, a president cannot (physically) rule alone. As we saw under the first administration, it's fairly easy for lower-level bureaucrats to stymie anything the political people want. And no, there is ~0% chance he will be able to change that. And ~100% chance that they will oppose any big initiatives.
So overall, no. Trump is way less of a threat to anything than Harris is, except the political power desires of Democrats and establishment-types. Which is, in their eyes, the same as evil. Democracy === rule by Democrats. That and nothing more. Anything that threatens the Democratic establishment === a threat to Democracy. And that's utter BS.
> The latter has *already* imposed increasing (monotonically so) amounts of concerted government power to deny rights and to increase concentration of power in federal hands.
Such as? Can you lay anything out in concrete rather than ambiguous terms?
- use the fraud claims to declare both the fake and the real elector slates illegitimate and throw out both
- declare Trump winner of the majority of remaining electors
As I've said elsewhere, this is about equivalent to "only count the ballots that have Trump on them and throw out the others". It's incredibly dangerous, and would have at the least caused a constitutional crisis if Pence were a weaker man.
I am generally hesitant to infer someone's (unstated) positions via the Internet, but to me it is rather obvious that the post with this exact title would be up here on this very day no matter what in most realities where the Republican party has anyone but the most inoffensive of RINOs as its candidate.
Consider this counterfactual:
Assume Trump suddenly had a heart attack sometime in 2022 and dropped dead. The GOP heaved a sigh of relief, purged the MAGA fraction and had a competitive primary. The eventual winner was a right-wing culture warrior who appeals to the base, let's say a Ron DeSantis type. This nominee runs on a somewhat populist platform, but is moderately competent, doesn't say anything particularly insane and is not an aspiring authoritarian. Meanwhile the Dem party acts exactly the same as in our reality, you have the candidate swap, the price controls in the platform, the whole 9 yards. Would anyone believe that on October 30, 2024 a post would appear on here with the title "ACX endorses DeSantis"? Does Scott himself even believe it?
I think that, at the end of the day, Scott very much wants to project the image – to all, including himself – of a rational voter, who picks his candidates based on the merits of their platform and general competency. But alas, it just isn't true. He (like many others!) votes primarily on values, and, being Blue Tribe-adjacent in values, he just couldn't stomach voting for a committed Red Triber. The ACX voting guides provide ample evidence of that – the final lists, if not necessarily "vote blue, no matter who", still end up like 80% Democrat every time. And in California too, where D governance in the recent years ranged from unimpressive to outright disastrous.
What is left unsaid in the post is that no real right-wing candidate for President is getting ACX's endorsement no matter how bad the Democratic party gets. Trump may be uniquely bad as a candidate, and I think that could be a valid argument, but you have to be pretty delusional to think that ACX would support a GOP candidate if Trump was for some reason not running. Scott may be able to bedgrudgingly stomach a Nikki Haley-esque RINO (still wouldn't outright endorse her, probably!) against Harris, but never a real right-winger. The values are just too alien.
The ACX post from the alternate reality where Trump is no longer a factor and DeSantis is the candidate would feature the exact same title, a lot of griping about how bad the Democratic party has gotten, but would invariably end with some version of "but ultimately a vote for DeSantis would be detrimental for The Heart of Our Nation because he doesn't like trans people and illegal immigration, so vote Harris, I guess. Sorry, folks, I don't like it either!"
RINO refers to a Republican in name only. Here by RINO I mean a centre-right politician, who doesn't dangle red meat in front of the Republican base, is moderate on social issues, and mostly focuses on economics. (So, Haley or Jeb! circa 2016)
Which is not at all what the GOP electorate wants, as shown by Haley's performance, but is the only type of Republican that doesn't inspire visceral disgust from self-anointed rational centrists/"independent voters" like Scott. And he'd still probably take a dumb and corrupt Generic Dem like Newsom before Haley if push came to shove in the general election.
RINO should mean someone without actual political convictions, who is currently Republican because it will be best for them, whether the most profitable, advancing in their career, etc.
I have a friend who leans left, and he said he would definitely be voting Republican this election...if it were anyone but Trump. He said he certainly would have voted for Haley if she had won the nomination.
I don't think that's true, it just looks that way because both parties move with the voters. Let's say I'm willing to vote Republican when the Republican wins by 2% - so if the Republican gets 51% of the votes compared to the Democrats' 49%, I'm gonna vote with the Republicans. Anything closer than that, I'm voting Democrat. Thus, the Democrats can only afford to move to the left such that it alienates the most moderate 2% of the country before I too defect to the Republican Party.
I was born in 1991 - there have been eight Presidential elections since then. Over those elections, the Republicans have won 51-49 or more in exactly one election -- 2004. Thus I will have voted for the Democrats in 7 elections, and once for the Republicans. And I'm in the most moderate 2% of the country!
There are plenty of Democrats I won't vote for - but our political system makes sure they never make it to the general election.
Nobody even wants to remember when there were riots all over the country (based on completely false premises) that Harris went to visit and console a rapist who brought children to the house of his victim to harass her, and then she publicly fanned the flames of an additional huge riot that resulted in a town’s destruction. The rapist’s shooting was one of the most obviously justified police shootings right from the start. So much so that he was never charged even amongst a nationwide frenzy to charge cops with anything.
I understand hating Trump, but Harris’s actions there were worse than any single thing Trump ever did.
Contentless insults like this are not only against the rules, they make the case against Harris better than any other comment can.
Believe it or not, voters aren't going to forget BLM and Defund the Police, no matter how much you try to memory hole it. Every single mention of January 6 can be met only with laughter when it comes from any Democrat who supported the riots. And whenever it's raised, no one on the left seems to have any response other than ad hominem and "but...but...it's not the SAME!!!!!"
And this is why I hate you. Sorry. Trump is a moron. He’s unfit. But every time I point this out I get this same crap. Biden got on TV and lamented the raping thug as a victim. Harris went to visit his family and told the rapist thug she was proud of him. They knew what they were doing. They knew what was happening. It directly contributed to the riots. Harris is happy to watch a country burn as long as it helps her pander to black people.
This is actually something I'd love to see a deep treatment on.
It's trivial to draw lines between Trump and J6, and his reaction to it is unequivoval: he wants to pardon the people involved and retcon the whole thing into at worst a nothingburger and at best an expression of patriotic virtue.
Democrats, by contrast, have mostly run away from the riots, and have not tried to pardon the criminals involved, at least in my observation. You can find people excusing the rioters even post facto, but these are not the people running for office, and in fact are usually hostile to mainstream Dems like Harris.
So the reason people can say "it's not the same." ... is that it's not. Both J6 & the BLM riots were abominable. Only one party (the Dems) seems to agree with that, based on their rhetoric and actions in the aftermath.
There aren't any. Trump calls it a day of love, says he would pardon everyone involved, and he was trying to host a Jan 6 awards show before cancelling it.
He is clearly anti regulatory capture, and corruption. This is a massive change from the Democrats (e.g., Nancy Pelosi's stock investments mysterious (massively) outperforming the market, due to shady connections).
There is no mystery. Most of her stocks are in tech companies and publicly available S&P top 10 companies or top x or whatever. Why are you commenting on this with no proof and seemingly no knowledge of the stock market?
I don't think that is true. I've seen Democratic / Neutral sources state that she quite significantly outperforms the stock market (i.e., vanishingly low p value of it being by chance). There are apparently even index funds that explicitly attempt to mimic her investments.
E.g., it was up 90%+ this year! And quoting from this top link found on google: "Investors are eager to monitor and track stock trades and new acquisitions by US politicians, as these transactions are often believed to be based on insider knowledge that isn’t accessible to the general public."
JD Vance is way way more grey tribe than Kamala Harris. He references an astral codex ten post (https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/08/gay-rites-are-civil-rites/) on Joe Rogan. Despite this affiliation, Scott endorses Kamala who is about as anti-grey tribe as you can get (e.g., supporting Defund the Police, and other such actively counter-productive virtue-signalling policies).
If you want someone who will listen to the rationalists, then vote Trump and Vance.
It is a tragedy that Scott, and others endorse Kamala. How bad do the Democrats have to be for you to consider ever voting against them? I feel like people are just completely un-grounded in supporting the Democrats. The Democrats talk a big game about helping people, but in terms of what they actually do, they harm: We can't have any more of this. It is a corrosive destruction of American capital, both infrastructure and social.
See Bill Maher on exactly this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Djs2q-KtSsE&ab_channel=RealTimewithBillMaher. The left has a huge problem with endorsing (wrong and harmful) extremists. It would suite the Democrats politically to disavow the extremists, but they are fundamentally captured by the extremism.
If JD Vance was the Presidential candidate, and not a VP who explicitly said he would do what Pence refused to (throw out the results of the 2020 election because his boss lost), then discussing his personal opinions would be worth talking about.
He's basically acting as the spokesman of the Trump administration right now, so I wouldn't completely dismiss what he has to say. Most importantly, it means Scott has an easy path to getting in good standing with the new administration! It'd be such a waste to pass up such an opportunity...
I can't really engage with any object-level position of JD Vance. He's supported the lie that Trump won in 2020, and he's said he would do what Mike Pence refused to (again, coup the government at Trump's behest). Whether or not this is what is truly in his heart (doubt it), it shows such a severe lack of character that he can't be trusted. He once called Donald Trump potentially "America's Hitler," and now he's sucking him off? This is a man willing to do anything for power.
Why, Chastity, why are you engaging in kink-shaming, slut-shaming, and homophobia with your attitude that oral sex is something disgraceful and degrades the person involved? Sucking people off is such a great thing, an entire month of the year is devoted to celebrating it! 😁
And now you're anti-sex worker! Don't you know that sex work is real work? Do you think all the clients of exotic dancers, strippers, escorts, and ladies of negotiable affection are morally upright persons? Some are adulterers, even!
Sorry, but the more you preach from a moral standpoint, the more regressive and bigoted you seem.
You mischaracterize him. Watch his interview with Joe Rogan. He clearly articulates that the Democrats successfully pressuring Facebook to censure Republicans may have changed the outcome of the election, and that in that sense (in a fair election, without democrat censorship) 'Trump should have won.' He also admits that the past is the past, and that the best approach now is good policy focused campaigning.
"If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others that we needed to have multiple slates of electors and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there." - JD Vance
If he actually believes what he said on Rogan, then this statement is even more disqualifying. Because Facebook censored Republicans, we should throw out the election results? It's insane.
He references the post and completely misses the point, as discussed on reddit.
You're yet again using emotive language and projections about character and motives (which is fucking rich), not a hint about policy, data and results. Noah goes over Harris' policy ideas here: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/lets-evaluate-kamala-harris-entire
He lied about the results of the last election. He said that if he were Pence, he would have helped steal the election for Trump. That is disqualifying alone.
You mischaracterize him. Watch his interview with Joe Rogan. He clearly articulates that the Democrats successfully pressuring Facebook to censure Republicans may have changed the outcome of the election, and that in that sense (in fair election, without democrat censorship) 'Trump should have won.' He also admits that the past is the past, and that the best approach now is good policy focused campaigning.
Please reread my original comment. Even if Facebook censored Republicans, which I don't believe, you STILL cannot steal an election.
If you really believe that, the Hillary should have just stolen the election from Trump because the media was giving him wall to wall coverage every day. And Biden should steal the election in 2024 because Elon Musk made twitter a right wing platform, right?
> Even if Facebook censored Republicans, which I don't believe,
Zuckerberg sent a letter to Congress laying out:
-The Biden admin pressured Facebook to censor content about covid-19, which they did.
-The FBI told Facebook to throttle the Hunter laptop story as disinformation, which they did, even though the story was legitimate.
So Facebook acted to censor anyone posting things about covid the government didn't like, and also suppressed an important news story unflattering to Biden just before the 2020 election. I guess this isn't censoring Republicans per se, but Facebook undeniably acted as a censor for Democrat interests.
Censoring misinformation is a fundamentally different thing than censoring a political candidate. They did not censor Republicans. You were always able to post pro-Trump content, arguments about the tax rate, pictures of fetuses along with a quote from the bible, etc. You just cannot publish misinformation. Especially if it is dangerous.
Do you think Hamas should be able to publish a false statement that "99% of Israeli Jews want to kill everyone in Palestine" in the middle of an armed conflict? Probably not, because it is a lie and might lead to people getting killed. You would at least want a warning screen that says "This information is false," right?
Also, the Hunter Biden story was only temporarily taken down while it was being fact-checked for truth. Then it was put back up. So I do not see this as political censorship. But they did make a bad call since it was true.
This is in contrast to Elon Musk blatantly doing political censoring for Trump's campaign:
Censoring *anything* by the federal government is in clear violation of the 1st Amendment. Case law makes it very clear that the government outsourcing activities that would be illegal for the government to do is just as illegal. This is a central pillar of American governance; censorship is not something the government should be doing. The letter also makes it clear that the information being censored was not just fact based but also included obvious satire and humor. Not that censoring "misinformation" is acceptable either, because it requires a value judgement about truth that is vulnerable to all of the systemic and tribal biases people have.
“I always say, we have two enemies … We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within, and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia, and all these countries
… We have some very bad people; we have some sick people, radical-left lunatics.
And it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by the National Guard—or, if really necessary, by the military.”
“The thing that’s tougher to handle are these lunatics that we have inside, like Adam Schiff,” the former president added, referring to the California Democrat running for Senate.
The guy who made up stories about Haitians eating pets and doubles down justifying it? You think trying to downplay "inflammatory rhetoric" is a good tactic?
Congrats, you found the only clip on the internet of Vance being normal. Not usual the cat and dog eating, election denying, childless cat-lady comments from him. Or the weird psycho-sexual spanking comments from Tucker Carlsen. Or the criminals and rapist lies about Mexicans. Or the pimp handlers comment about Kamala. Or the "comedian" hired to call Puerto Rico a pile of trash. Or the ..............................................................................................
o Vance has praised Obama for offering “hope” and said he would “miss him” as
Obama was leaving office.
o Vance characterized Obama’s “guns and religion” comment as “well-
intentioned”.
• Vance has praised democratic-socialist Bernie Sanders.
o Vance said Bernie Sanders was his favorite Democrat running in the 2020
Democrat primary.
o Vance predicted that Trump was part of a political realignment that would
position Trump and Bernie Sanders on the same side in 20 years."
The current line of Democratic party attack against VD Vance is laughably divorced from reality. JD Vance's dirty secret... His main weakness (as far as the Republicans are concerned) is that he is too liberal.
Again, classic democratic party tactic: smear and tar your opponent. Who care about truth?
You are the one who does not care about truth. The conservative media only covers the bad about Harris, and never the good. You cannot come yell at me and tell me to only look at the good about Vance and not the bad.
Be honest, if any democrat said half of the crazy shit republicans say, it would be instantly disqualifying. Can you imagine Kamala Harris saying Appalachian rednecks are roasting squirrels? Or Walz saying the republican party is run by spinsters and incels? C'mon.
Yes but she would never be allowed to say that. She would be forced to apologize 50 times over, even if the statement were true.
Meanwhile, Trump is still running with the lie that Haitians are eating cats and dogs. Even doubling down when the original woman that posted that information on Facebook has said that she was just speculating.
If we're going just off what JD has said, hasn't he also said that Trump was unfit to lead and privately told people that he thought Trump was like Hitler? I'm willing to listen to JD if we're consistent about what we're listening to him about.
Anybody but me interested in doing this? Select 100 comments randomly, and fact check them. We could divide up the work. To improve fairness, we could have pairs of people of opposing political views check a set of posts & meet to resolve any disagreements regarding whether a certain one contains factual errors. If they are unable to resolve their disagreement, they can pass the unjudgable post to a different pair of judges. Then post the results. To spare the individuals posting we could only post the errors found, not the posts containing them And we could analyze scores by group -- i.e. errors in posts in favor of candidate A, and posts in favor of candidate B.
I found Section IV way more relevant to my situation than I expected. I really have been holding Democrats to a much higher standard than Trump. Well done, Scott!
>Another is that Trump might threaten opponents with jail time (or simply loss of government contracts) unless they support him. I don’t know whether Jeff Bezos’ decision to shift Washington Post away from endorsing Harris was motivated by fear, but it’s a good model for the type of situation I worry about.
I find it bizarre that there's a whole section on whether the Democrats also pose an authoritarian threat that doesn't address the fact the Biden-Harris administration is already doing these things. Musk opposed them, so they cancelled Musk's Starlink contract, ramped up regulatory harassment of his companies, and awkwardly carved out holes in subsidies to exclude his products. Prosecutors are trying very hard to send Trump to prison using legal arguments that are stretched at best and would definitely not be applied under normal circumstances. They're even sending one of his supporters to prison for making a very routine election joke on Twitter.
I do not understand why politicians seem to suck so much at politicking. Why did Trump appoint judges that overturned Roe? Why did Biden do almost nothing on the border for the first three years? Pretty sure both of these decisions were known to be extremely unpopular for a long time. They had to have known that these issues would kill them in the next election, right?
If I were to guess, Trump just let the Republican machine pick his choices for him, and right wing thinktanks are run by religious fundamentalists who are so rabidly anti-abortion that they would knowingly sacrifice Trump's re-election chances for their one pet issue.
And for Biden, maybe immigration wasn't polling as super important a few years ago, and Biden foolishly decided to use all his bargaining chips on the infrastructure bill which did not help him at all politically? Or was he afraid being too hawkish on the border would turn Latino voters against him in the next election?
Does anyone have a better explanation for either of these choices? I feel like this election would have been a blowout if either candidate did not make their respective blunder. You would think each president would cynically govern based on polling to ensure their own re-election. Why don't they? I am baffled by their choices.
Trump mostly appointed judges based on the recommendation of the Federalist Society. FedSoc is originalist, meaning they base their legal theories on the Constitution as originally intended. Roe v Wade was terrible jurisprudence because it tried to create a right to abortion out of existing rights to privacy that clearly never allowed for such a thing. Overturning it also made abortion an issue for the states, which all political issues were originally intended to be with the exception of those explicitly granted to the federal government. So that decision clearly aligned with the interests of the FedSoc judges.
Whether Trump would appoint Barrett and Kavanaugh if he could do it over again, I don't know. He doesn't seem particularly interested in abortion restriction himself, and it's an electoral loser for the right.
I mean, the conservative judges are not known for being consistent on either precedence and originalism. Seems like all the judges are partisan activist judges for the most part. But I appreciate the clarity on the Federalist Society. Trump was definitely a fool for listening to them. I will personally be voting Dem for the next 20 years on that issue alone, since my personal rights are now under threat.
What rights are those? Murder isn't a federal crime (except it is when other circumstances apply, such as crossing state lines or occurring on federal property, etc.). Do you, therefore, have a right to murder? States forbid murder, so you don't.
The ruling said the states must decide whether to allow abortions.
Abortion is not murder. Abortion is not allowing another being to take from your body without your permission. If your friend needs a kidney to live, are they allowed to take yours? Does their right to life overrule your right to bodily autonomy? The answer is no. And that's the standard for living, breathing, viable human beings. Not a zygote that has no consciousness, no memories, and no way to survive by itself. Abortion should be constitutionally protected.
"Murder is the unlawful killing of another human without justification or valid excuse committed with the necessary intention as defined by the law in a specific jurisdiction." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder
Abortion isn't murder if the law says it isn't, or if the zygote isn't a human. Whether a zygote is a human is up for debate. A woman has the right to choose whether to create a life, but not to end one. States should not lose the right to determine whether the abortion is justified or valid.
If your friend needs your car to live, like to drive somewhere to get medicine, do they have the right to take (steal) it? You must give permission, whether it's a car or a kidney.
Those are all your opinions, not facts. Civil rights issues like bodily autonomy, slavery, etc. should not be up to states.
Also a car is property, not part of your body. My analogy is more relevant. No one can take your kidney, and no one cannot take your blood either or occupy your uterus. NO ONE should be able to take from your body against your will. Your rights ends where my nose begins. That principle is universally recognized except when women are concerned, it seems.
Men will riot if forced to wear a mask for the duration of their shopping trip. Even if it saves real human lives. Women are forced to endure nine months of pain, suffering, harm to their bodies and brains, damage to their education and/or careers, economic setbacks for decades, and possible death because they are seen as hosts for a more important zygote. Why is so very hard to get people to see women as people and believe they deserve the same rights as everyone else?
"right wing thinktanks are run by religious fundamentalists who are so rabidly anti-abortion that they would knowingly sacrifice Trump's re-election chances for their one pet issue"
Gosh, thanks for the reminder I should visit my doctor about that rabies shot! You know, what me being rabid and all that as a pro-lifer!
Glancing through the comments I see most of them agreeing, so I'll add a -1 here.
The biggest argument against Trump is authoritarianism and the Jan 6 riot. Problem is, this might be extrapolating in the wrong direction. Jan 6 was far from a planned, well-organized event - the worst you can say about Trump is that he was willing to use it. But this single event, not even of his own making, cost him more fans from his own camp than all the other years of mistakes combined. This was a signal, for both Trump and anybody inclined to go that route any time soon.
On the other hand, Democrats actually tried to put Trump in jail, repeatedly. People have tried to kill him, repeatedly. These are not tweets or rants or threats - these are actual things that happened, multiple times.
There are other examples of double standard in the post. Scott used examples of Trump fixing prices in a niche industry - but that looked like something decided somewhere in his administration, possibly as a result of political negotiation and without much input from him, if at all. Harris on the other hand - I think her first major political promise after getting the nomination was about price fixing. I agree that she was probably just latching onto the issue of the day and not giving it much thought, but still: first major campaign promise, vs a footnote in 4 years of presidency.
Responding just to the first point, I think you are modeling J6 incorrectly. I've mentioned this a bit elsewhere in this thread -- the riots are a bit of a distraction, you should be very aware of the lawfare Trump was trying behind the scenes to illegally stay in power. Take a look at the Eastman memos as a primary source: https://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2021/images/09/20/eastman.memo.pdf
It's pretty short, but a quick summary of their plan:
- manufacture claims of fraud in swing states that voted Blue
- use the fraud claims to justify throwing out the electors from that state entirely, effectively making it as if those states didn't vote at all
- use the remaining electoral votes to declare the race for Trump
This is about as close to "only count ballots with my name on it" as you can get. Incredibly illegal, incredibly dangerous. I highly recommend you update your prior that J6 (the soft-coup attempt, not the riot) was well planned, intentional, and very very bad.
Very bad, and also a good model of the kind of thing Trump might try to get away with. I have every expectation that Trump would try to claim the 22nd amendment is unconstitutional at the end of his presidency, if he were to win in a few days.
I don't think this represent's Trump's arguments well. Suppose you were playing the Super Bowl and the other team switched the venue to their home stadium and stacked the referees with their guys, would you admit you "lost" (even if you ended up scoring fewer points)?
Trump's campaign has three arguments along these lines:
1. That the media deliberately interfered in the election https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/ For example, withholding the story that Joe Biden was engaged in influence peddling, and claiming the Hunter laptop story was "Russian disinformation"
2. That multiple swing states changed their election procedure in illegal ways, either amending the written law in violation of the state constitution, or election officials disregarding the state law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_v._Pennsylvania
3. Trump followed the law. You do, in fact, have a right to protest outside, and talk to your representative at the Capitol building. He said do so "peacefully." Congressmen may in fact vote against certifying the results an election. Sometimes they even certify an alternate slate of electors, as Hawaii did in 1960. (I disagree it was warranted in 2020, but it is technically an option.)
Sorry, I don't think you read the Eastman memo. If you did, I would love an explanation of how that plan was legal.
If you start from the perspective that the election was fraudulent, there's not much to discuss except to say that many people attempted to find fraud and weren't able to, including the various courts that dismissed every case Trump filed. I think if you really believe the election system is already rigged, you just shouldn't vote at all.
The memo merely seems to describe a legal way of challenging election results, what part do you object to specifically?
Yeah, lawyers are slimy and they represent approximately half of all losses in court, but at the end of the day their job is to score those "Hail Mary pass" decisions, I can't really blame Trump for a lawyer he hired just doing his job—especially when the memo doesn't even seem to have been followed in any capacity. I'm mostly only interested in what ended up actually happening, not what lawyers were wargaming. Because as it turns out, there was a process, and some seldom-invoked parts of it were followed, but it was nonetheless followed, and it resulted in a peaceful transfer of power.
Sorry, I again think you didn't read it, or if you did you didn't read it closely. The memo explicitly calls out that what they're doing violates the ECA. They also clearly put a lot of effort into trying to put this plan into action, and got very far. If it wasn't for Pence, they would've easily created the worst constitutional crisis this country has seen in a century.
Given that you've already voted at this point, I don't really think it's worth arguing online much more. I hate to say this, but I think you need to do more research on at least the baseline facts here.
Well it's not like I'm trying to sway your vote either. I wanted to respond to what I see as a common misperception.
First, the memo specifically says the ECA is "likely unconstitutional" and I can't speak to this not having read the text, but in general I'm sympathetic to the argument that the law has limited authority to tell electors or states how they must cast their votes.
Second is even if it is constitutional, that doesn't show malice, that shows a lawyer trying to do his job, and they didn't actually do anything illegal—in contrast, there were actual election officials in 2020 who actually did illegal things in how they held their elections.
Trump not being in jail is the main reason I am voting D even through I dislike them 1% less than the Rs.
Trump openly committing the crimes he has in plain view of god and the news and everyone and the conservative establishment rejecting the evidence of their eyes and ears is so outrageous to me that it's hard to imagine what the Ds could do to outweigh it for the next couple cycles.
It actually shocked me, I thought I was unshockable after the Bush years but here we are.
It is reasonable to expect that a Harris administration will be very similar to the Biden administration. It is also reasonable to expect that a Trump second term will be very similar to his first term.
I don't agree that the second of these is a reasonable assumption, because Trump is likely to surround himself with more maga loyalists and fewer conventional Republicans/conservatives this time round, and he will have a much more sympathetic supreme court - I would be surprised if this time round he appoints as many people who end up declaring him to be fundamentally unfit to lead.
I do agree that a Harris administration is likely to be a bit more similar to the Biden administration, but the fact that it will probably constrained by a hostile senate and house may well lead to significantly different outcomes.
When talking about authoritarianism, I think people really need to be bringing up immigration more, for two reasons.
Firstly, whilst we might like to think that just moving to America is enough to turn someone into a freedom-loving, go-getting USAian, that doesn't seem to be true, at least not in the numbers we're seeing now. If you bring in millions of people from countries where corrupt, authoritarian quasi-dictatorships are the norm, the most likely result isn't that the newcomers spontaneously realise that Anglo-style fair play and individualism is the way to go, but that existing norms about fairness and individualism get eroded and the country as a whole becomes more inclined to tolerate corruption and authoritarianism.
Secondly, liberal norms require a very high level of social trust and cohesion to maintain. You agree to let the other side compete in free and fair elections because you trust that, if they win, they won't use their newfound power to make your own life unbearable. You don't try and get the government to micromanage every aspect of people's lives because you trust that, when left to their own devices, most people will act in a way consistent with maintaining a functional society. You don't try and fleece people outside your electoral coalition and get all their money for yourself because you recognise your political opponents as fellow members of your polity, and you believe that this membership outweighs matters of party politics. And so on.
Now, what does increased diversity do to social trust? Let's see what the data says:
"This article reviews the literature on the relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust through a narrative review and a meta-analysis of 1,001 estimates from 87 studies. The review clarifies the core concepts, highlights pertinent debates, and tests core claims from the literature on the relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust. Several results stand out from the meta-analysis. We find a statistically significant negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust across all studies." https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-polisci-052918-020708
So increasing the US' ethnic diversity will inevitably result in (further) reducing its social trust, and so (further) eroding the conditions which are necessary for the US to exist as a liberal democracy and not as an authoritarian dictatorship. And ask yourself, which of the parties is committed to increasing the US' diversity as much as possible, and which isn't? Which party is most committed to the (anti-science) position that "diversity is our strength"? And which one, therefore, will do the most to undermine the preconditions for the US' continued existence as a liberal, democratic state?
<i>If so, has this immigration demonstrated the outcomes you predict?</i>
I would argue yes, in three ways:
(1) My (admittedly unscientific) impression of reading contemporary and historical documents is that US politics is more corrupt than those of Western Europe, and have been since at least the mid-19th century.
(2) Several corrupt organisations were introduced and/or catered for immigrant communities, Tammany Hall and the Mafia being two of the more obvious examples.
(3) Racial minorities were a key part of the New Deal coalition which made US government much more centralised and controlling that it had previously been (and, if you believe Hanania, laid the groundwork for the rise of wokeness).
Very sensible.
You're conflating the woke with the DNC. There's nothing to the idea that e.g. the Biden administration is responsible for "the decline of discussion culture and free speech".
Woke capital is also backpeddling out of their own accord.
I am confused why so many people conflate pointless and toothless culture wars issues with the presidency. First of all, Kamala has never been woke. Second, letting Republicans into power will make "woke" stronger, since there is always a backlash to the incumbent party. Woke peaked under Trump, with MeToo and BLM riots. It has been losing relevancy under Biden because it is no longer countercultural.
Also, are Americans so spoiled now that this is what we are focused on? Do they think their democracy is 100% foolproof from a guy that tried to steal the last election? Who tried to destroy the department of education and the NIH? Do they think they are immune to the religious extremism talking over the government like what happened in Iran and Afghanistan, after Trump appointed Barrett to the Supreme Court? After a third of American women just lost the right to not be forced to give birth against their will? It is genuinely baffling to me that anyone would vote based on BS issues like DEI rather than things that affect real people. I really hate to say this because it is so over-used, but you are really sitting at the height of privilege and self-absorption if you think woke is the highest issue in the country. Woke people can maybe get you banned off a private social media platform. In some cases, maybe get you fired from a private company. There has never been a threat to the first amendment or any censorship from the govt under a Dem president. While on the right, Trump is literally talking about the media being the enemy of the people. He just sued CBS this week trying to punish the news for not taking his side! You know Trump has no morals and no respect for the Constitution. People that think like this make me want to rip my hair out.
<i>Second, letting Republicans into power will make "woke" stronger, since there is always a backlash to the incumbent party. Woke peaked under Trump, with MeToo and BLM riots. It has been losing relevancy under Biden because it is no longer countercultural.</i>
Wokeness, as we all know it, began under Obama, in part because of his actions and policies. And the idea that wokeness has been losing relevancy over the past few years is contrary to my personal experience.
<i>I really hate to say this because it is so over-used, but you are really sitting at the height of privilege and self-absorption if you think woke is the highest issue in the country.</i>
I think it's the other way around, actually. If you're poor, you rely more on having a good ambient culture, because you don't have the resources to insulate yourself from the effects of living in a bad one.
<i>Do they think they are immune to the religious extremism talking over the government like what happened in Iran and Afghanistan, after Trump appointed Barrett to the Supreme Court?</i>
This is just absurd.
1) Which policies of Obama's caused woke? As I understand, it happened over decades as a backlash to the severe oppression of certain groups throughout American history. The word "woke" started in the 1940s. The term "African-American" instead of black started in the 80s. The extreme feminist activism of the 2010s (Slutwalk, FreeTheNipple, etc.) is just another wave of the same brand of bra-burning activist stuff from the 1970s. The stuff coming out of Buzzfeed and Vox today is so unbelievably tame compared to the "woke" books back then. I believe that the social justice movement has been bubbling under for decades, but exploded in the Obama era because the internet first became accessible for teens. And I cannot argue with your personal experience, but I feel like woke reached its peak during Trump and has been dying down. The only "woke" stuff I see now is right wing grifters complaining online about the odd latina actress in a Disney movie. I don't believe there has been any new "woke" protests or movements? I would not count Gaza because it is a war, not a trivial issue.
2. Huh? How is a poor person harmed by woke? Why would they need resources to insulate themselves from it?
3. Everyone thinks a dictator is absurd until it happens in their country. It is weird how people are so mad about woke but not mad that SIX of the nine supreme court justices are Catholic, and use the court to impose their religion on the entire country. Isn't all the extreme religious stuff worse than some occasional, misguided attempts at equity that sometimes goes too far?
<i>I would not count Gaza because it is a war, not a trivial issue.</i>
No true Scotsman thinks Gaza is a woke issue.
<i>And I cannot argue with your personal experience, but I feel like woke reached its peak during Trump and has been dying down.</i>
Anti-white rhetoric is as normalised as ever, for one example.
<i>Huh? How is a poor person harmed by woke? Why would they need resources to insulate themselves from it??</i>
Letting criminals off because systemic racism is absolutely a policy that harms poor people.
<i>It is weird how people are so mad about woke but not mad that SIX of the nine supreme court justices are Catholic, and use the court to impose their religion on the entire country.</i>
Not as weird as people who can't see the difference between "States can decide what they want their abortion laws to be" and "The Taliban".
Ok.
From ABC news: "Woke is defined by the DeSantis administration as "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them." Gaza is not just a systemic injustice. It is not about harmful language or representation or any of that. It is a literal war that has killed tens of thousands. It is fundamentally different from "woke" issues. Is that hard to see how protesting a war should be in a different category than using the right pronouns?
Where is this anti-white rhetoric? On Twitter? Be honest, does this actually affect your life if you don't go searching for it?
About the criminals, are you talking about Prop 47? What a fluke:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-case-against-proposition-36
I don't know enough about California politics to know if Prop 47 was good or bad. But I live in a woke state with one of the lowest crime rates in the country. Why don't you blame conservatism for states like Alabama and Louisiana, which have way, way worse crime than California? Do you think Alabama has turned woke too?
It's also funny how you hate the woke agenda but are a-ok with the Catholic agenda imposing their religion onto everybody. Makes it hard to believe you actually care about the things you say you care about.
<i>Where is this anti-white rhetoric? On Twitter?</i>
Just read any mainstream media publication or academic journal, and count the number of times "white" is used in a negative sense vs. the number of times it's used in a neutral or positive sense.
<i>Be honest, does this actually affect your life if you don't go searching for it?</i>
Being constantly told that my race is responsible for all the bad things in the world does affect my life, yes.
<i>About the criminals, are you talking about Prop 47?</i>
No, I'm talking about the general woke reluctance to do anything about crime, because that would disproportionately involve locking up underprivileged people, and therefore be racist.
<i>It's also funny how you hate the woke agenda but are a-ok with the Catholic agenda imposing their religion onto everybody.</i>
Be specific. What tenet of Catholic belief has the Supreme Court imposed, and how?
The treatment of Gaza in the years leading up to 10/7/23, is very much considered a "systemic injustice" by the woke left (among others). 10/7, and the ongoing violence by Hamas and Hezbollah, are considered by these people to be side an act of heroic resistance to systemic injustice (see e.g. BLM or Antifa). Israel's assaults, are considered to be brutal genocidal violence meant to perpetuate systemic injustice.
To the woke, Gaza is absolutely a woke issue. I don't know whether it is a good thing or a bad thing that it has distracted so many of them from their other issues.
Yeah, I agree.
It's not certain Trump is going to be the next Chavez. I frankly don't expect a Democrat-counterreaction feedback loop--I just expect the acceptable level of corruption to rise to the point where we look more like Argentina or Brazil and less like Canada than we do now. But the risk is high enough I'm concerned, because it could cause significant negative effects to the country downstream over the next few decades. Further than that, I have no predictive ability whatsoever.
With Kamala in charge, if woke makes a comeback, I'll just come out as bi.
I can and have politically maneuvered against a too-woke office and can tune out a DEI session if it makes no sense. I make my worth very apparent in a workplace. Things move downstream from there. I'm fine. I make $155k a year. So is Elon, he's worth over 100 billion.
I can't maneuver against or tune out a true autocrat like Orban, Putin or Chavez. Most people who live in the democratic West can't even comprehend what that is like. Venezuela is ruined, and Russia is a social trainwreck that sent hundreds of thousands of young men to die as cannon fodder.
Things might be fine if Trump becomes president. Don't come back to me if he gets elected and it is in 2029. But the small but real risk things might not be fine is a small risk of catastrophe. A freedom X-risk if you will. The US, with all it's power and might, has always had a check on the president and an easy way to remove the governing party on a national level.
Left vs right in the US is like that coughing baby vs nuclear bomb meme to me.
>> I'm fine. I make $155k a year. So is Elon, he's worth over 100 billion.
Conditional on Harris winning the presidency, I predict (90% confidence) that Elon goes to prison by 2028.
I would be willing to bet a large sum on this - what's your appetite for a bet here?
In principle I’d be willing to bet a hundred bucks. In practice, I don’t know how one would operationalize a bet on a 4 year timeframe between two pseudonymous internet strangers.
$100 isn't worth it, but it's certainly doable. You put money in escrow and appoint someone to judge it according to criteria that you agree on.
$100? At 90% confidence? It's basically free money! At an even bet, your expected value is 80% of what you are betting! You should bet half your savings or something!
...you should, if you seriously believed what your were saying, that is.
I would also be willing to make a large bet that he doesn't
Wow! You would give 9:1 odds of Elon Musk ending up in prison within 4 years if Kamala wins.
I'll take those odds.
It's a nice thought but you seem not to be aware of the fundamental constant of the American legal-economic system.
Rich people do not go to prison. That's why when they do it makes the papers.
People from the top 10 percentile of socio-economic standing in the United States comprise less than 0.01% of current prison inmates.
Your fantasies about how the world operates have no relation to how it actually operates.
Martha Stewart went to prison,. Jeff Skilling went to prison. Martin Shkreli went to prison. Samuel Bankman-Fried went to prison. Just off the top of my head. I'm not sure all four of those were literal billionaires, but they were certainly in the 1% of the 1%, and they went to prison.
Yes, it's newsworthy when a billionaire goes to prison. It's newsworthy when a billionaire does pretty much anything. But being very very rich, does not endow people with get-out-of-jail-free cards, or anything remotely close to that. It does mean that prosecutors have to bring their A game, and they may not bother if that means giving up five easy convictions of ordinary criminals. But rich + controversial + widely hated, yeah, if there's provable fraud and if it won't get them in trouble with their bosses, it can happen.
Or not, because often billionaires don't commit serious crimes. One thing money is good for, is hiring lawyers who can advise you on how to accomplish your goals legally, and where the line is. That, plus a legal team that can fight against bogus prosecutions based on false accusation, is a pretty good way to be confident you're not going to go to prison. But it only works if you listen to your lawyers, and this is Elon Musk we're talking about.
I wouldn't go to 9:1 odds on Musk without a specifically alleged crime for him to go to prison for. And I wouldn't expect him to actually be incarcerated in four years, because see e.g. the criminal cases against Donald Trump. But if Harris is elected, he is I think at significant risk.
Yes, and they all made the papers like I said.
It's true that famous people are more at risk than non-famous rich people so that prosecutors can make a name for themselves, so I cheated a little bit by pointing out that the prison population is 0.01% from the top 10 percentile, but I figured it was worth pointing out. And with Elon's gazillions I think he's as insulated as your average fellow with just 30 mil to rely on.
The fact that America's economic-legal system matches that of Sodom and Gomorra ought to be brought up every once in a while.
https://youtu.be/I9QAKgC4aiw
Haven't been following that part of the news much - what would Elon be charged with?
I don't know, but I'm sure something could be found. Show me the man and I'll show you the crime, and all that.
Oh, my sweet Summer child.
Ever hear of “Show the man, and I’ll show you the crime.”?
I had hoped that the Democrats would lay off that a bit to distinguish themselves from Trump who would absolutely arrest rich and powerful people on trumped-up charges (sorry that pun is so bad it wasn't meant to be a pun). What's with Vote Harris, get someone who respects the law?
(Though somehow Hilary Clinton stayed out of jail during Trump 1.0, so maybe presidents can't do everything they want.)
This seems like a weak bet because Elon Musk has a very long track record of breaking actual laws and getting into trouble over it. Nothing jail-worthy yet I'd say of course, but the idea that he would step over the line and get a ~6 month sentence seems perfectly possible, particularly in the world where his Trump Gambit failed.
So bet wise I don't think you can really get around that. I ofc would take 95% odds that the Harris administration will not invent charges to jail a political opponent because that is something the Dems don't do, but then you have to decide "is he actually guilty" for the bet - not a good resolution criteria!
(I guess you could just roll "odds Elon Musk will commit an actual crime" into the bet, seems rough though)
The beauty of `3 felonies a day' is that almost everyone is `actually guilty' of an `actual crime.' So you don't need to invent charges, all you need to do (once you've decided that you want to put X in jail) is to figure out which actual (but seldom prosecuted) crime X is guilty of.
So yeah, I'm not predicting that the Harris administration will invent charges either. I'm just predicting that if Harris ends up in the white house, then Musk will be convicted of an actual crime, for which he is actually guilty, but for which there is a ~0% chance he would have been actually prosecuted if he didn't have a political target on his back.
But the "3 felonies a day" thing just isn't true? Like it is a combination of "completely made up" and conflating wildly different things. You could probably find a fine for a improperly filed permit application on most people's backlog, sure, but you absolutely could not find a jailable offense on 95% of people. The bar for criminal offenses is actually very high!
Which you can know because if the majority of politicians had such a record, *their enemies would be jailing them over it!* That hasn't happened to Harris or Romney because they haven't committed crimes. It is happening to Trump because he *has* committed crimes. And Musk has previously committed way-more-than-average levels of "big fines" that have had explicit warnings that repeat offenses could result in criminal prosecution. Bayesian odds made this pretty easy.
This goes back to your question from last open thread about what Trump can actually do — a Presidency is an incredibly contingent thing. You run on one agenda and then in office spend most of your time and energy dealing with the crises of the moment and they either defeat you or empower you. It’s like trying to create a weather report for October 31, 2025.
Thank you.
>"why should we vaccinate against measles when measles is so rare?"
Trump saying he'd put the anti-vaxxer RFK in charge of "health" was just the most recent outrageous thing he's said. By this point I've lost track. There are many things I'd like to change about the Democrats, but a second Trump presidency would be a mistake for America.
If antivaxxers got their way, they would kill more people than Hitler. People like RFK should be nowhere close to the levers of health policy.
Where’d you get your medical degree from?
#doctorsforRFK
You don't need a medical degree to know that vaccines are good. I'm sure if I polled doctors they would support me on this, too.
"You don't need a medical degree to know that vaccines are good"
That's right, you just need to believe every whitecoat on TV.
What are you doing on this blog when you don't believe in one of the most rudimentary, well-established facts in medical science?
You seriously believe vaccines (generally speaking) do more harm than good?
That or be scientifically literate
"Vaccines are good" is like "plastic is recycleable". Not all plastic is recycleable, and historically some vaccines have hurt people, or not been very effective. Blindly trusting everything labeled a vaccine because you "believe in science" is... not good actually.
Actually, it is good! It is way better than believing antivaxxers and getting your kid killed by measles, as happened in Samoa in 2019!
except your kid is absolutely better off if every kid is taking all the prescribed vaccines rather than not taking them.
People like Chastity are retarded and only think in black and white.
Why must one be antivax or non-antivax? I'm against COVID vaccines, but for "real" vaccines, defined (by me) as vaccines that work for longer than a year.
Antivaxxers that are against vaccines on general principles that don't have a better alternative for fighting diseases have a poor position.
Kennedy has been antivax since before Covid, and as such, your nonsense crying about how COVID vaccines aren't "real" vaccines is irrelevant.
A doctor's opinion regarding Kennedy: https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/acx-endorses-harris-oliver-or-stein?r=1n32iy&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=74829071
I object to your "nonsense" classification, as my point stands that COVID mutates too fast for vaccine strategy to work well, as mRNA viruses do. Get vaccinated against the common cold; it's certainly possible to develop one, and also certainly not worth the effort, useful though a workable one would be. The point stands that one can be in favor of some vaccines and against others.
What does it mean for a vaccine to “work for longer than a year”? Covid vaccines seem to (in that they reduce infection rates even in people who haven’t been vaccinated in a year) though like many other vaccines, they do lose some effectiveness, and like some other viruses, covid mutates quickly.
Do they not know how long a vaccine "works" by detecting antibodies, or some such combination, against the disease for which the vaccine was developed? I have every confidence a COVID vaccine would work...until COVID mutates again. In that case, you would still have antibodies that are effective against the original strain, but less so against current (and future) ones.
It's hard to tell whether, as you suggest, the vaccine reduces infection rates past, say, three months. You would need a control group, and need to be careful of lots of biases in both the test and control groups.
I got COVID in April of 2021, and again in April of 2022. I did not get any vaccines, as I considered myself to be "naturally vaccinated". What would the artificial vaccine do that the actual disease didn't do? Both involve exposure to proteins to train your immune system.
Yeah it’s very hard to test effectiveness in real-world contexts, given how many confounders there are once vaccines are available and different types of people are choosing whether and when to get them.
There are ways to test blood for the presence of antibodies. My understanding is that most vaccines and infections produce an initial burst of antibodies that gradually fades - but there are some differences (e.g., syphilis antibodies never fade to zero, but many other infections do). And perhaps more importantly, a lot of the protection is provided not by antibodies that are constantly detectable, but by memory cells (B cells?) that can re-emerge when they detect the thing they are remembering.
I think when you get an infection, your body tries to train on everything present at the time of the infection, which includes various proteins on various parts of the virus, and possibly some things not associated with the virus. When you get the COVID vaccines, you only get the spike proteins, so your body especially focuses on learning that. Since the spike protein is the part that is on the outside, it might be more relevant for protection against initial infection, but I don’t know what they’ve actually found about that.
All viruses are constantly mutating, but if the mutation hasn’t changed it too much, then a lot of the antibodies against the old one will still work equally effectively, or perhaps slightly less effectively. Some viruses have more mutation in some parts than others.
Kurzgesagt has had a really interesting series of videos about the immune system (starting several years pre-pandemic), which is much weirder and more complex than we often think. I sometimes wonder if there might even be a second consciousness in our bodies, run by the immune system, which is as complex as the nervous system, but quite separate from it.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zQGOcOUBi6s
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lXfEK8G8CUI
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LmpuerlbJu0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-K7mxdN62M
"If antivaxxers got their way, they would kill more people than Hitler."
Please stop posting garbage-level troll comments. It really brings down the possibilities for earnest and informed discussion here. Thank you.
It's simply the actual, factual reality:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/lives-saved-vaccines
There is no point of no return for almost anything. Still, what happens during any cycle matters. Even if we will eventually get to a good place, it’s better if there is less suffering along the way.
> If antivaxers win, disease noticeably goes up... then support for vaccines comes back and antivaxers lose support?
Not necessarily. The first thing the antivaxers would say is that the diseases are actually a result of vaccination, therefore we should have even less of it.
Chastity is a troll. Engagement isn't worth the energy.
This is delusional. Especially because RFK has no plans on banning vaccines you dumb fucking retard.
Trivially: do you think he supports the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act? A repeal of that law would amount to a de facto ban. Retard.
Michelle Obama pushed for healthier school lunches. RFK Jr. pushes for not vaccinating people and bringing back the eras where generations were decimated by (now-preventable) diseases, in addition to at least a dozen other inane and insane ideas. Trying to improve Americans' health is good, but RFK Jr. would do the polar opposite.
This is a blog dedicated to ideas of rationality and RFK Jr. is an excellent example of anti-rationality and anti-intellectualism.
> Michelle Obama pushed for healthier school lunches.
...and look at the results she achieved: smaller portions of lower-quality food, for higher prices. ( https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/hungry-students-send-messages-to-michelle-obama-over-sloppy-school-dinners-9878328.html )
If the country stopped judging politicians on their stated goals, and started judging them based on results produced by their policies, we'd never see another Democrat elected for the next 20 years.
Could not agree more. It would be awesome to put together a dashboard of different metrics to view correlations as different policies are adopted.
A bit like a success rate graph at SaaS companies (products like data dog or grafana). You see when the code changed and look for errors or bad performance as a potential result.
No graphs, but: https://robertfrank.substack.com/p/by-their-fruits-ye-shall-know-them
Don't both parties have a huge failure rate in attaining desired policy results?
Not really.
Just to give a few recent examples:
The Abraham Accords.
Desired result: stabilize relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors.
Achieved result: When war broke out between Israel and various Iranian groups, not only did Israel's Arab neighbors, for the first time ever, decline to pile on, they actively came to Israel's defense.
Remain In Mexico policy.
Desired result: Decrease illegal immigraiton.
Achieved result: Net negative illegal immigration. (More illegals leaving the country — often voluntarily! — than entering.)
If you want to understand why people support Trump look at cases like the above. Despite his many, obvious flaws, he got good results. He got *astoundingly* good results.
And Republican emphasis on lower deficits? Trump's promises to restore coal & manufacturing?
Saying a politician got some results they like risks cherry-picking. Do I give Obama credit for the post-recession recovery and expanding healthcare coverage?
The word "when" in your description of the results of the Abraham Accords is doing a hell of a lot of work.
Sure, but since we'd never see another Republican elected either....
> inane and insane ideas
What would you consider are the top 2 worst ideas he put forward? Whatever we're doing is clearly not working and is in desperate need of change.
...Diabeetus...
Is this limited to RFK Jr, or do ideas from Trump count?
If the latter, I'd like to nominate looking into injecting disinfectant for Covid.
I'm afraid Trump's idea was worse than injecting disinfectant - he wanted to get the covid in their lungs not their blood stream. The idea he proposed in that press conference was to fill their lungs with disinfectant. Since doing this with just water is fatal I'm glad he accepted his advisors' recommendations against this one.
Many Thanks! Ye gods, I hadn't known he suggested _that_. ( Were there two press conferences involved? One that I watched included Trump saying "injected" and "disinfectant" in a suggestion of his. In the same press conference, he was also suggesting using UV... I have no idea how he was thinking of administering _that_ to the inside of someone's lungs... )
You need to watch the whole video. Yeah he says "disinfectant" and he's talking about light, which was just mentioned. No one says bleach.
You mean looking into a proven trearment for other diseases? Do you think he sets medical policy? He was relaying what he was told by doctors.
Many Thanks! If he somehow turned recommendations for external use of disinfectants into suggesting looking into injecting them, that is pretty severe garbling. Most people learn, prior to adulthood, that disinfectants are for _external_ use. Now, Harris is bad enough ( speech censorship proposal, illegal immigration spike, Woke in general ) that Trump may be the lesser evil, but I'd prefer a GOP candidate with better common sense.
I’m a doctor who listens to a lot of what RFK Jr has to say and I could not disagree with you more strongly
Please could you share some examples of his good health policy ideas, or why you think stopping vaccinating people would be good for their health?
Ah, I see you did this below. Thank you!
This is *exactly* the "Biden is bad for Palestinians so I better vote for Trump" argument!
Yes, American health and nutrition is bad. Does your proposal of getting rid of the standardized measles vaccine do anything to *improve* that?
Yes, of course it does Kenny, because the people responsible for America’s bad health and nutrition are meanie assholes, and so are the people responsible
for the measles vax requirement.
Not sure. Vaccine policy is a footnote for rfk jr at this point.
Ending the revolving door between pharmaceutical companies and the FDA seems much more promising to me. Ending advertisements for pharma seems like a good idea too.
Ending pharmaceutical advertisements sounds like a good idea. Has someone proposed that law? (Would an executive like RFK be able to unilaterally impose it without a congressional law?)
Perhaps more importantly, would the current Supreme Court (which has the most expansive view of the first amendment of any court to date) actually allow such a restriction? I know that traditionally commercial speech is held to an intermediate scrutiny standard (instead of strict), but A) the legal reasoning for that distinction is kinda weak and B) even if they maintain intermediate scrutiny as the test, it's a notoriously flexible test to judge prejudices. The common saying on standards of scrutiny is:
Rational Basis: the government wins
Strict Scrutiny: the plaintiff wins
Intermediate Scrutiny: the judge wins.
That sounds plausible. As far as I know, the restriction on tobacco advertising is entirely the result of a voluntary legal settlement that avoided even larger financial penalties, rather than an actual law.
Not sure how RFK's nuttery is supposed to be an improvement.
Can you not take a look at the man and ask yourself, "could he, just maybe, have a good grasp on what being healthy looks like"? And just maybe, with his legal and environmental background he might be a good fit?
Or do you, like many Americans, take health advice from obese people who aren't required to take nutrition classes (44% of doctors are overweight according to Google)?
Why are 44% of physicians overweight?! At this point I don't care about the vaccine element of Bobby's policy, I care that he cares about figuring out the root causes of our chronic disease epidemic.
No I can’t think those things. His theories about health are complete nuttery.
Which theories specifically are you referring to? Top 1 or 2 worst offenders would be adequate in my opinion.
I'll do the same but highlight one I happen to agree with him on: the FDA is overwhelmingly run by the pharmaceutical industry which has outsized influence due to the revolving door.
I'll lean on Scott Gottlieb and Stephen Hahn as example cases. The best rebuttle being that the idiot who put them in charge is the same idiot I'm advocating for.
- vaccines cause autism
- COVID-19 was engineered to target people by race
- mass shootings are caused by prescription drugs
- COVID was exaggerated as plot by Fauci and Gates to give money to pharma
- seeds oils are the cause of all kinds of health woes
If FDA makes any mistake regarding pharmaceuticals it's that they are entirely too risk averse.
I actually don't think being in good shape is all that good a proxy for being able to make sensible policies wrt drug safety, recommended vaccine schedules, and the like.
It shouldn't be the sole qualification, but it is a factor in my opinion.
Unhealthy, overweight people have the position RFK is vying for. Excellent personal health should be the *minimum standard* to be considered for the position.
Banned for this comment, vacuous and unrelated enough that allowing things like this lowers discussion quality.
I too heard Trump say RFK would be out in charge of health!! Completely insane.
Joe Rogan, who interviewed Trump, is entertaining and intelligent but he's not educated deeply on things like vaccines about which he has strong opinions! He and Trump seemed to share opinions about many things.
What strange times we live in.
He’s not antivax. This is another liberal media hoax
If you listen to what RFK actually says, instead of what they report about him, you’d quickly realise this. Look, he has expressed some skepticism about the intensity of the current childhood vaccine schedule and whether that could be related to the dramatic rise in chronic disease among children. Maybe studies will prove that he’s wrong to be skeptical, but the point is that you’re allowed to ask these questions when trying to understand the root causes of the decline in health and the rise in chronic disease, mental illness and obesity over the past decades.
Most of his actual policies are about taking on the powerful lobbying companies who (for example) allow pesticides to be present in the American food supply at levels that are banned in Europe. Or the influence of Big Pharma over medical education.
Make America Healthy Again shouldn’t be controversial.
Besides the fact that Tulsi Gabbard is in a cult and is a grifter, RFK Jr. is insane and Vance support Curtis Yarvin, if there was a billionaire supporting Kamala Harris who would get a spot in her cabinet if she won I'm sure you would be very happy too lmao. Elon Musk might be a successful CEO but he obviously has no place trimming down the government, especially because he would obviously benefit himself
Vance supports Curtis Yarvin? In what way? Do you have a citation?
https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/16/24266512/jd-vance-curtis-yarvin-influence-rage-project-2025
Control+F "Curtis Yarvin"
That's... not a very charitable article. First off, I note it tries to imply/claim the Thiel (a libertarian) and Yarvin (an authoritarian monarchist) are aligned (citing a proposition that you could also get the Constitutional Convention to agree with!), and then only details Yarvin's views otherwise. That's a blatant smear vs Thiel.
Next, he does the exact same thing with Vance; Vance claimed that Trump needed to fire the entire federal government (and indeed, cited Yarvin as to why that extreme measure was justified.) But then he drops Vance/Trump entirely, and describes Yarvin's preferred replacement for the bureaucracy (authoritarian monarchy), implying that this was also Vance's goal... while ignoring that it's entirely in opposition to everything Trump and Vance have said about their goals for a WEAKER administrative state.
I do, sincerely, appreciate you replying with a source, but I find that source really unpersuasive of the claim it's trying to make, and generally pretty scuzzy.
He’s also in INCREDIBLY good shape for a 70-year old.
Honestly, as a doctor and someone’s who cares most of all about public health I agree with Rogan. I’d support Kennedy over either Trump or Kamala.
(Covid vaccines still work btw)
RFK is healthier than 85% of the people I see at SSC meetups
Not their fault because they have no free will. Unfortunately I also have no free will and am voting for Trump. Alas...fate is cruel...
RFK has literally said "I do believe that autism comes from vaccines" and "I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, better not get them vaccinated." Whatever you think of the "liberal media," they generally don't outright make up quotes. https://apnews.com/article/rfk-kennedy-election-2024-president-campaign-621c9e9641381a1b2677df9de5a09731
>Make America Healthy Again shouldn’t be controversial.
"The *slogan* for my policy sounds uncontroversial, therefore the actual policy shouldn't be controversial either, right?"
If someone advertised defunding the police as "Make America Safe Again," I expect you'd find that controversial even though the slogan sounds reasonable. That's how I feel about RFK saying "Make America Healthy Again."
Once again, "I'm not anti-vaccine, I'm pro-safe-vaccine" turns out to be "actually I'm anti-vaccine."
I will continue fighting against the straw man that RFK Jr is anti vax for as long as it takes. The truth will win.
https://x.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/1845995741833011374
RFK also said Trump was a grave threat to democracy before changing his tune and endorsing him for President. Posting a politician's own propaganda tweet when they have a history of going against what they've publicly said and they've issued far more irresponsible sayings on the specific subject is hilariously epistemically irresponsible.
https://apnews.com/article/rfk-kennedy-election-2024-president-campaign-621c9e9641381a1b2677df9de5a09731
>In July, Kennedy said in a podcast interview that “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” and told FOX News that he still believes in the long-ago debunked idea that vaccines can cause autism. In a 2021 podcast he urged people to “resist” CDC guidelines on when kids should get vaccines.
He said the Democrats were a worse threat to democracy, on CNN. This was all prior to endorsing Trump and it was based on them systemically shutting him out of the primaries and giving him zero media coverage and attacking his campaign via lawfare. Why do you think he changed his tune?
Nah, what’s “hilariously epistemically irresponsible” is posting left wing propaganda on a politician and insisting it better represents their views than actual things that they say.
I’m sure all of your scare quotes are correct, he did say these things at some point, but so what? You’re allowed to express skepticism about the intensity of the vaccine schedule for children, you’re allowed to wonder if it might be linked to the rise in chronic disease such as autism, as long as you acknowledge that you might be wrong and more study is needed.
That’s RFK Jr’s position. It’s pretty reasonable, and maybe you need to think why these mainstream media outlets keep selectively quoting him and misrepresenting him. What else are they doing that with?
I've seen RFkj speaking to both friendly and adversarial audiences. Generally, when I see him speaking to adversarial audiences, he's saying the kind of thing Turtle is talking about and I think, "Yeah, that's a great description of some of the problems with the system I also see. This guy is smart and understands what he's talking about!" When he's speaking to friendly audiences he starts going off on how vaccines cause autism and nobody in their right mind should give one to their children, and I think, "Why did I ever think this guy was anything but an ideologue, again?"
What do I expect from an RFKj-influenced NIH/CDC/etc.? He'd be walking into an adversarial environment, so I would expect him to do things like preside over updating the vaccine schedule* to something more rational, or allow legal action against vaccine manufacturers who hide adverse effects or otherwise try to cheat the system, or implement more stringent testing of adverse effects of pesticides and fertilizers. I don't see him able to do something like banning vaccines, or getting the CDC to declare that they cause autism or anything like that.
In general, I don't expect a big change, since moving the US government system is generally a slow-run thing. I expect a few 'big splash' ideas to punch through, but probably nothing of dramatic consequence. As with any politician, some good, some bad, but nothing dramatic.
So it's a wash? Maybe not. Focusing on improving the public health agencies could significantly improve trust in US heath-related government agencies, which is NEEDED after the last few years. Trust is earned. After COVID, trust was lost for a reason. That needs to be built back up, or it doesn't matter what your vaccine policy is, people won't listen to it. As someone who thinks vaccines are a huge good and who recommends them way more than RFKj would be comfortable with, I suspect RFKj could actually increase uptake in the long run (or at least preside over a decrease in the fall in vaccinations).
*"Like what changes, exactly?" Nearly everyone I know who's anti-vax cites early neonatal vaccination as the thing first piqued their skepticism. In other words: Hep B. But why give any neonatal vaccines, since kids don't develop T-cells for 6-12 months, and maternal antibodies are protective? First, childhood vaccinations don't usually provide much in circulating protective antibodies and most adults don't get boosters. (We should really focus on getting updated vaccinations for WOCBP, but whatever.) Meanwhile, there's some evidence that early neonatal doses of hep B can prevent maternal transmission of hep B (but it's not a 100% thing, and really you should be giving them hep B IG if the baby is in danger of contracting hepatitis from their mother - something we only do if we test mom and discover an active infection).
What's the potential benefit to universal hep B vaccination? Okay, there are approximately 5.8 cases of hep B per 100,000 people in the US. Assuming that rate for pregnant women, of the 3.6 million babies born every year around 209 should have mothers with hep B, of which maybe a hundred might go on to contract it (transmission rate varies based on mother's hep B titers).
Now, I don't know how many mothers are refusing all vaccinations because of the hep B vaccine, but I have personally met at least a dozen and I don't go around asking, so I'm going to say that number is probably pretty big. Large enough to bring equipoise into the discussion: is it overall beneficial to have a policy that might help a hundred kids in exchange for putting millions more at risk?
And more importantly, could there be a BETTER policy that still protects that 100 kids, while improving trust in recommendations by health authorities? For example, by testing women for hepatitis B ahead of time, then only recommending the vaccine if they test positive (at which point we'd also give the hep B IG and monitor infection).
"But the vaccine isn't harmful! We don't have any evidence demonstrating adverse effects of the hepatitis vaccine, so why not just give it to everyone?" Um ... the vaccine *recommendation* appears to be harmful in that it leads to vaccine skepticism, even if the vaccine itself isn't directly harmful. It's not even a choice between fewer kids dying of hep B over more kids dying of not getting MMR/DTaP/etc. We can improve this system, and while RFKj isn't a perfect vessel for doing that, it's certainly better than screaming "trust the science!" while more and more people stop trusting good medical evidence.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment.
I just want to re-iterate a key point about RFK Jr, because the vaccine stuff is controversial and tends to suck all the oxygen out of the room.
The reason why I support him has nothing to do with his opinions on vaccines, and everything to do with him promising to take on Big Pharma, Big Ag and the profit motive in corporate medicine.
He says stuff that many doctors have known for a long time about how the system cares more about profits for the few than health for the many.
He talks about the prevention of chronic disease for pennies, rather than treating it for millions.
He talks about really looking into the causes of why our health has worsened so much in past decades. What’s going on? These are questions that the establishment has not thought to ask - or rather, prefers not to think about because it might threaten their campaign contributions from the big players in “healthcare.”
I’m really excited about RFK Jr in the administration.
I'm uncertain about his short term efficacy, but encouraged that health policy (and not just health insurance or costs) is becoming a national issue. If this is what it takes to get us there, hopefully we see both parties take an interest in the next election. If so, the long run effect will dramatically outstrip whatever he can do in an administration.
Sure, you can take a couple scare quotes out of context and make it look like he believes no kid should ever be vaccinated.
The media are professionals at doing this type of thing.
Yet when I follow the link in your article, it even admits that he insists he is NOT antivax.
Well I guess if somebody insists they're not x they must not be x. Seriously, do you not hear how crazy all your defenses sound?
Do you have a better way of inferring someone’s beliefs than listening to things that they say?
How would the context justify or change the meaning of the statement that vaccines cause autism?
""liberal media," they generally don't outright make up quotes."
Yeah, just like they didn't claim Rittenhouse was a murderer, AM I RIGHT.
Here's the trump of Trump's transition team talking about withdrawing approval of ALL vaccines: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/robert-f-kennedy-trump-transition-chair-vaccines-public-health.html?utm_source=flipboard.com&utm_medium=social_acct&utm_campaign=feed-part
Personally I have no qualms with them all being approved, I'd just like to remove the liability shield. The government should not be in the business of protecting drug lords from the people. Bad drugs should not be protected. That isn't how free markets are supposed to work.
So I got curious and checked out the guy's campaign website which spends an entirety of 180 words on his healthcare plans (always the sign of a deep thinker). It vaguely suggests banning some food additives, banning (or taxing or whatever, unspecified) ultra-processed food, and ban toxic chemicals "from our air, water, and soil". I.e., regulation, regulation, and more regulation. Great fit for the Trump/GOP agenda of deregulation and kneecapping agencies like the EPA.
I mean, if you want healthier food, what better idea than to vote for the guy whose presidency was full of controversies like these: https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/trumps-toxic-wake-10-ways-epa-has-made-life-more-hazardous
You think banning toxic chemicals from our air, water and soil is a bad idea?
Why?
More like an obvious lie, when said while campaigning for the guy whose last four years of presidency where characterized by removing such bans, and his plans for his next presidency include doing more of that (see e.g. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/project-2025-would-make-it-easier-for-big-corporations-to-dump-dangerous-toxins-that-poison-americans/ ).
One can debate whether the current US regulations strike the right balance between caution and growth, but a pretty clear and consistent pattern is Democratic governments erring more on the side of caution and Republican governments erring more on the side of growth, and everything Trump did before as a president and says now as a presidential candidate fits into that pattern. Health advocates putting their faith in Trump are tied in level of idiocy with the muslims who think Trump is going to stop the war in Palestine.
I think that's an absolutely horrible idea. The dose makes the poison, and there are very few things that aren't toxic at some level. Oxygen, for example, is literally toxic, and I would be amused to see someone banning oxygen from the air in our schools, because Think Of The Children!
*Placing reasonable limits* on toxic chemicals, is a good idea. But you need to establish the limits you're talking about, so the rest of us can decide whether they are reasonable. If your proposal is being described as "banning toxic chemicals", the smart money is on the proposed limits being very unreasonable.
I understand your point now. But it seems to rest on the idea that banning toxic chemicals can’t reasonably be interpreted as banning toxic levels of chemicals.
He is not an anti-vaxxer afaik and I have researched his statements for myself. He thinks too many untested vaccines are in use, and that vaccines are used on the very young in excessive amounts. The dose of vaccines given to US children is actually considered quite excessive in much of the rest of the world.
I think the analysis of who is more evil (Trump) is spot on. That said i think I’m still going Trump because his brand of authoritarianism is hated by the media and a majority of the public. Also his brain is jelly and Ivanka and Jared will be running the show and they are standard chamber of commerce neoliberals which is why Trump didn’t do anything authoritarian last time.
See how little power he has when he moves against popular will - ie republicans have been on the back foot on abortion since Dobbs because abortion is deeply popular and when a ban will be enforced, suddenly a lot of republicans decide to be pro choice. Trump will lose congress in the midterm if he tried and it will be gridlock before that.
If Harris wins, the media and most power centers will back her bid for authoritarianism and things start getting bad real fast.
That’s generally true but Roberts hates Trump, and Kavanaugh and Gorsuch don’t like him either. They won’t bend the law to help him, the immunity decision was restrained in scope - they remanded it to the trial courts to develop facts and explained what kind of acts would and wouldn’t be immune based on the nature of the constitutional power he was exercising. If they wanted to protect him they would have just granted him absolute immunity and spared him from years of litigation.
Roberts also thinks Alito and ACB are hacks - if you read his concurrence in Dobbs it’s him calling them idiots for repealing Casey v PP when they could just boil the frog slowly and roll back abortion window as fetuses become medically viable sooner.
So this court will go right in culture war issues, checking Harris more than Trump, but they also won’t carry any water for Trump personally - even if you’re cynical, Roberts, Gorsucch, Kavanaugh all want to keep getting sweet speaking gigs and teaching boondoggles from moderate never Trump conservatives
"they could just boil the frog slowly and roll back abortion window as fetuses become medically viable sooner"
Yes, and there would still be the clamour for exceptions and heart-rending cases of "rape, incest, threat to life of mother" as to why there should be legal ability to carry out an abortion at twenty weeks even though that's the new viability limit.
'Late-term' (or however you want to define them, the matter is of course controversial) abortions are rare, but do happen:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9321603/
"Conclusions
The inherent limits of medical knowledge and the infeasibility of ensuring early pregnancy recognition in all cases illustrate the impossibility of eliminating the need for third‐trimester abortion. The similarities between respondents' experiences and that of people seeking abortion at other gestations, particularly regarding the impact of barriers to abortion, point to the value of a social conceptualization of need for abortion that eschews a trimester or gestation‐based framework and instead conceptualizes abortion as an option throughout pregnancy."
Another paper thinks "viability" is useless as a legal definition:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8249091/
"In this paper, I explore how viability, meaning the ability of the fetus to survive post-delivery, features in the law regulating abortion provision in England and Wales and the USA. I demonstrate that viability is formalized differently in the criminal law in England and Wales and the USA, such that it is quantified and defined differently. I consider how the law might be applied to the examples of artificial womb technology and anencephalic fetuses. I conclude that there is incoherence in the meaning of viability and argue that it is thus a conceptually illegitimate basis on which to ground abortion regulation. This is both because of the fluidity of the concept and because how it has been thus far understood in the law is unsupported by medical realities. Furthermore, it has the effect of heavily diluting pregnant people’s rights with overly moralistic limitations on access to healthcare."
You may think your proposal will boil the frog, but there are plenty of people waiting to scoop the frog out of the pot on the plea of necessity.
Including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists:
https://www.acog.org/advocacy/facts-are-important/understanding-and-navigating-viability
"Viability is just one factor that patients and health care professionals use when considering whether to proceed with or end a pregnancy, and gestational age is only one factor considered when estimating viability. Legislative bans on abortion care often overlook unique patient needs, medical evidence, individual facts in a given case, and the inherent uncertainty of outcomes in favor of defining viability solely by gestational ages. Therefore, ACOG strongly opposes policy makers defining viability or using viability as a basis to limit access to evidence-based care."
Indeed, "A fetus at X weeks isn't viable" was never a position that Pro-Choice was willing to commit to; it was a fig leaf for absolutism.
I think you're trusting the exact guardrails that authoritarianism tries to subvert. I agree that the guardrails will probably hold this time, but I think attacking them does a little bit of long-term damage each time.
And I think it's pretty hilarious to accuse the GOP of being more in violation of "brightline norms" when close to half of democrats favour internment camps for anti-vaxxers and the BLM/Antifa riots were orders of magnitude worse than Jan 6 along every measurable dimension, along with the minor detail of trying to storm the White House.
We are long past the point of any realistic expectation that the Blue Egregore is going to spontaneously reform itself without putting a lot of their institutions to the torch. I think it's unlikely Trump will turn out to be a literal dictator, but in the worst case scenario I'll take Pinochet over Maduro any day of the week. I'll even take a Hitler over a Mao.
When again was the part where the BLM/Antifa riots tried to overthrow the result of a presidential election?
Do you think killing a president wouldn't count as overthrowing the result of an election?
Perhaps, but depends on how. If it's a singular event, democracy likely holds in this situation, as the succession of power would still be maintained and not subverted.... you are only removing from office, you are not installing into office.
you did say *every* dimension.
What do you actually think happens when a mob storms the white house? Because I'm guessing it's a big pile of dead rioters while the president and his family are in a secure room with several locked doors and armed guards between them and danger.
Why are you treating this as if it were a hypothetical? Trump was, in fact, escorted to a security bunker although so far as I can tell zero rioters were mowed down with assault rifles, and I'd be surprised if many of them were even prosecuted.
And what is the point of this argument? An attempt at overthrowing the government doesn't count if you could reasonably predict it would be futile? How does this not apply to Jan 6?
What do you think actually happens when rioters storm Congress, attempting to overturn the election results? Congress bugs out for a couple of hours, a guy in a Viking costume sits in the big chair for a couple minutes, and then Congress certifies the election later in the day.
Implicit in all the hysteria about January Sixth is that had the rioters managed to get their hands on some paperwork in the House chamber, they could have ticked a few boxes and Donald Trump would be president again... And everyone would just agree to it. Nothing we can do, the rioters got the Magic Paperwork.
I don't know if you knew, but "killing the president" is a pretty popular pastime in the USA. It's just about the most deadly job you can hold, with 4 out of 45 killed and many more attempted. And yet, the *institution* of democracy hasn't taken any damage, which is the whole point of the excercise - democracy holds even if you kill the guy in charge, because there is an agreed-upon, non-violent system of succession.
The only fundamental danger to democracy can come from the top, if the separation of power breaks down for any reason and is exploited by the executive branch to keep it broken down.
This never made any sense to me. How exactly does a mob rampaging through the capitol building constitute a coup? It’s not like if you capture the flag in the basement you become president automatically. Even if they take some congressmen hostage, so what? BLM riots killed a lot more people and broke a lot more things while insisting they were peaceful.
I should acknowledge that Trump did ask his staff if he could have a little coup, as a treat. Trump totally would if he could. But he can’t. His staff ignored him. The same thing will happen this time - the military and security state would put a bullet in Trump before letting him illegally stay in power. The scary antidemocratic move is for republican statehouses to change how electors are chosen - either by legislative vote or by county or congressional district. That could let them engineer lots of EV victories with a minority of the population.
I think Trump would be a little more careful about choosing his staff this time. I liked Tillerson and Mattis, for example, because they were successful in their respective domains and I respected that and was somewhat impressed by Trump choosing them, and dismayed by how the media reported on them. And Pence was... fine... I guess, and establishment. Those are the sorts of people who would ignore Trump and not try to give him his little coup. But they were all pushed out in various ways and are now openly against him.
This time around, he wouldn't pick people like that. Vance, for example, scares me, and strikes me as someone who's intelligent and calculating enough to do damage, and not rein in or ignore Trump.
I think the idea was that having a mob rampaging around would scare Mike Pence into throwing out the electoral votes like Trump wanted.
But what was supposed to happen after that? That's the part where it gets fuzzy for me. I don't see the threat.
>Even if they take some congressmen hostage, so what?
> How exactly does a mob rampaging through the capitol building constitute a coup?
I think you're missing the context. The "mob rampaging through the capitol building" happened during the usually pro-forma electoral vote count. At least some of the rioters intended to intimidate enough officials -- Pence and/or Representatives/Senators -- to refuse to certify a majority of electoral votes for the Biden/Harris ticket. They could have then either declared an outright Trump/Pence victory or thrown the race to the one-vote-per-state tiebreaker mechanism, to the same result.
That's how it constitutes a coup: it is a threat of violence directed at officials precisely when they are taking (nominally ceremonial, but still important) actions to transfer power. Had the intimidation worked, it would have caused a constitutional crisis -- it's not clear that the courts have the authority to intervene in the legislature's duty here, even if they've performed that duty corruptly or incorrectly.
>Even if they take some congressmen hostage, so what?
Trumpers are braindead. To be clear. He intended to force Mike Pence to accept an alternative slate of electors and declare him president. All of this is clear as day if you did the intellectual work of reading something.
I'd say mob to pressure Pence is bad, but sending fake electors is magnitudes worse
I think you may be conflating the Democratic Party and the Blue Tribe. When you say "half of democrats favour internment camps for anti-vaxxers" I'm assuming you mean democratic voters, not politicians. Well, this is an interesting fact about american civics, you actually don't vote for the voters, you vote for the politicians. If you and I vote for the same candidate, and that candidate wins, I don't get to hold any sort of government office out of the deal.
This is relevant because of the massive gap between how much the GOP has been taken over by its most extreme elements, and how much the Democratic party has. If you hate left-wing populists and right-wing populists the same amount, then obviously you should prefer the Democratic Party by a huge margin.
I don't hate them by an equal amount, since the extremists on the left getting their way would literally destroy civilisation, and given that Blue Tribe elites kept much of the planet under borderline house arrest for 18 months I don't see much daylight between them and the 'extremists'.
The rest of us understand that India did not shut down due to "Blue Tribe elites". Other governments did lockdowns because they thought it was a good idea.
Plenty of people disagree with that. But saying it was because a US political faction had enough power to force most of the globe to act against their interests, and burned that overwhelming international influence on... forcing Italians stay at home for 18 months? That's pretty ridiculous.
India shut down for about two months. I don't think anyone is actually all that upset about shutdowns of four weeks to eight weeks, even a bit longer. It was not clear what was going on. It was what followed, a virtual dictatorship of unreason, that was so odious.
Seems worse with the Democrats. I know a lot of Democrat voters and they are reasonable people. None of them believe that thieves should go unpunished, or that schools should be dumbed down for "equality," or that transgenders should be allowed to play in women's sports. A solid majority of Democrat voters are like this. And yet when Democrats get into office, we get those insane policies.
The Republicans seem to have the same general structure with a reasonable electorate and crazy ideas on top, but when they get elected, for whatever reason, we don't get those crazy policies actually in effect (with some notable exceptions in FL).
Depends what you define as crazy, really. I'm pretty liberal, but I would consider it crazy to try to ban IVF or to ban abortions with no exception provided for rape, incest, or nonviable fetuses.
I would consider an iVF ban to be crazy. AFAIK that has not happened anywhere.
I am pro-choice myself, but I do not consider abortion bans crazy. I can see how reasonable people could consider that murder. Lack of exception for non-viable, I consider crazy.
I consider any exceptions for rape and incest to be crazy. Whatever our law about abortion is, it should not take these factors into account. Any such exception creates a situation where we have an entity whose right to live is removed based on the crimes of its parents. Now that's crazy!
Can you share the data about close to half of Democrats favoring internment camps for anti-vaxxers?
I was fairly skeptical on that one, but I think it's coming from this Rasmussen poll in 01/2022: https://bit.ly/3YKoGRP . They ask the question, 'Would you strongly favor, somewhat favor, somewhat oppose or strongly oppose a proposal to limit the spread of the coronavirus by having federal or state governments require that citizens temporarily live in designated facilities or locations if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine?'; 45% of Democrats said yes (29% of all voters, 22% of Republicans).
That said, I question whether this is representative of overall Democrat sentiment, given that:
- Rasmussen is as far as I know widely considered a low-quality and strongly right-leaning pollster; Wikipedia mentions that 538 dropped it for being low-quality (https://bit.ly/40sQJ9K) and cites a study that rated it 24th of 28 pollsters in accuracy (https://bit.ly/4hrUORq).
- This was at the height of the Omicron spike, when cases were going through the roof and people were panicking (Our World In Data: https://bit.ly/40qF3Er ).
I also think that "favour internment camps for anti-vaxxers" isn't the best summary of the question asked (as shown above).
But it's certainly a real finding from a real poll.
Rasmussen's low quality might shift the needle on what we should believe is the accurate percentage of Democrats want to throw unvaccinated people in internment camps, but it doesn't entirely negate that some people want this. What is an acceptable level of democrat desire for camps? 40%? 30%?
People panicking isn't an excuse for desiring internment camps, because an awful lot of wickedness is preceded by panic including most historic cases of people being thrown in internment camps.
*Democratic, please. EDIT: Either I misread your comment, in which case sorry, or else you yourself edited what I objected to, in which case thanks.
Issue-based (as opposed to candidate-based) polling is notoriously unreliable at determining preferences, because the phrasing of the question (or just the fact that the question is being asked) can mislead people about what the policy is and how reasonable it is. During the height of COVID panic did any influential Democrats call for unvaccinated people to be interned anywhere? If not, it’s hard to see how this poll is relevant to anything.
> People panicking isn't an excuse for desiring internment camps
No, absolutely not. I don't mean to imply that it is, only that I think this poll would have gotten pretty different results at almost any other time (and MA_browsing says 'close to half of democrats favour internment camps', suggesting that it's true currently).
> What is an acceptable level of democrat desire for camps? 40%? 30%?
Reasonable point! I don't feel great about *anyone* advocating for this, although again, I don't think any Democrat I know would endorse this.
But if it's (by assumption of the poll question) temporary, and in the middle of a pandemic that appears to be growing exponentially (and which had had a much higher rate of mortality at the time the poll was taken than it does now)? Sure, I guess somewhere between 30 and 40% I'd stop feeling alarmed by the possibility of that actually happening. There are all *kinds* of terrible things endorsed by at least 30% of each party (not, of course, typically the *same* terrible things across parties). And in this case note that 29% of voters overall were in favor of this at the time.
Worth noting that Nate Silver (whose model still uses Rasmussen) considers it a relatively precise poll with a consistent model bias.
For candidates. That doesn't necessarily reflect on their polls on issues, which as I said in another comment is known to be unreliable in general. Arguably them just asking the question—about a policy which to my knowledge no Democratic politician or health official had proposed—is itself a form of bias.
Thanks! Although I don't have a strong opinion on Rasmussen myself (I haven't paid a ton of attention to their quality or accuracy, I don't see their polls enough to care), I did notice that the same Wikipedia page I cited above says that
'An analysis by Nate Silver on FiveThirtyEight ranked Rasmussen 20th out of 23 pollsters for accuracy in the 2012 elections, with an average error of 4.2 points.'
and
'Nate Silver described Rasmussen as "biased and inaccurate", saying Rasmussen "badly missed the margin in many states, and also exhibited a considerable bias toward Republican candidates."'
That said, those are from 10 - 15 years ago; possibly they've improved or he's changed his views for other reasons. Although I agree with Tom Hitchner that it's not clear that their accuracy on candidate polls can be treated as a good representation of their accuracy on issue polling.
Rasmussen and Atlas have been the most accurate pollsters in recent presidential elections although they did not call recent midterms accurately. This is a matter of historical record. They are right wing.
Thanks! Can you point to some evidence of their accuracy over time in presidential elections? I treat Wikipedia as a reasonable first-pass source -- it's certainly wrong sometimes, but I think the burden of proof falls on the person claiming it's wrong.
We now have data on Rasmussen's latest polling, and their polls on the 2024 presidential race were pretty much exactly accurate, unlike almost all of the "mainstream" polls. They called the national election and the states.
That does not make it accurate in general, but I think that the same thing happened in 2020 and 2016.
I agree that if you make things up, then your opponents look much much worse.
I note the shift- how is it relevant what 50% of democrats believe in? Are the survey participants getting elected? Did politicians suddenly swear they'll all obey their voters' every whim when I wasn't looking? If so, why do we suddenly believe them?
Jan 6 was organized by Trump with the intent of intimidating Congress and Pence into refusing to certify. For comparison, even if the BLM riot in front of the White house had a plan to breach the perimeter (instead of... throwing trash at Secret Service and yelling about racism, as all serious assassins do), this would still be a nonsensical comparison because it was organized by randos, not politicians. Torching political institutions would have approximately no effect on such mobs' ability to act like unserious mobs.
These guardrails have held up for so long, it's easy to forget that they were not given by God.
"The guardrails of liberty must be refreshed from time to time (every four years) by the votes of patriots."
That did not turn out as elegantly as I hoped, but I think it's true. If you vote for the guy who is more overtly trying to bash the guardrails, you won't be able to rely on those guardrails for very long.
Partially because it sets a precedent: Trump winning creates more Trumpists in the future. If Trumpism succeeds, it will create more Trumpists.
*While I am not for Trump*, I am amused that the original quote is arguing for the opposite of what you're arguing for. Here, in all its context:
"""
We have had 13. states independant 11. years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure. Our Convention has been too much impressed by the insurrection of Massachusets: and in the spur of the moment they are setting up a kite to keep the hen yard in order. I hope in god this article will be rectified before the new constitution is accepted.
"""
[Typos are just the way they wrote at the time, or the site I grabbed it from]
Hey Scott, I have a younger sister who was in her early 30s during Covid. She was a social worker assisting teens just out of Juvenile Detention. During Covid she worked completely remote. Her assessment of the vaccine was that it was risky due to the unprecedented low levels of testing. Between her age, the fact she worked remote, and her risk assessment, she decided not to get the vaccine. Despite having stellar performance reviews, she was fired for this.
I struggle to take your authoritarian claims seriously. The guardrails have effectively prevented the right from becoming authoritarian. They have not done so with the left.
I hate that both parties are walking down this road, but only one seems to be actually effective.
I'm confused. Would it be more authoritarian for a government to enforce certain kinds of employment policy, or the opposite? Does it matter what level of government is doing the enforcement? Does it matter if the employer is themselves a (different level?) government agency? Does authoritarianism have no need for government at all, and can just describes a form of free association between individuals???
IMO one of the predominant political successes of the 20th century was federal recognition of individual rights as a tool to constrain state power, in a result that presently codes as left-wing. I don't think a one-dimensional definition is going to cut it here.
I feel like both candidates attack the guardrails and it's irresponsible to only highlight attacks from one side. It's like standing inside the gates of a besieged city with two rival armies vying for the right to sack your home, and pointing out that you don't like Red armor, so let's let the Blue soldiers be the ones to do pillaging.
How can you affirmatively recommend a vote for Harris without having an honest discussion of how she was instrumental in hiding Biden's decline? As the VP, most of her job is to take over in the event the president is incapacitated. She took over Biden's campaign when he was incapacitated, but not the WH? Indeed, she still insists he's sharp as a tack. How long did she hide Biden's decline, and what role did she play in his ouster after it was too late to hold a real nomination? How did she secure delegates pledged to Biden without ever going to the voters?
Everything about her campaign seems like a corrupt backroom deal to engineer an appointment, as opposed to respect for democratic electoral norms. Indeed, the last 3 Democratic 'nominees' were engineered placements of one type or another (freezing out Sanders in 2016 and 2020, giving Clinton access to party funds during the primaries, etc). A vote for Harris is a vote to perpetuate this corruption of one of the two major parties. There will never be popular input into the Democratic party's nomination process until there are consequences for ignoring the will of Democratic party voters within the party. If party officials perceive that their voters will "vote blue no matter who", they'll eventually jettison party principles to the point where they're willing to campaign with their ideological opponents of yesteryear, like George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, or Dick Cheney.
Meanwhile, there was Crossfire Hurricane, which seems like completely bulldozing the guardrails of American democracy. I guess you could argue that Trump will ALSO weaponize the government. Maybe he will continue/escalate prosecution of his political opponents, control/censorship of media, etc. After all, didn't he team up with Musk and Twitter? Maybe next he'll go after Facebook, Apple, Google, etc. That could be catastrophic, since the censorship apparatus for those companies is already in place. But wait ... who put that dangerous censorship apparatus in place to begin with? And is it responsible to vote in favor of that candidate if the potential to exploit it is an argument against Trump?
When one other party continues something that was started under the other party it becomes Standard Operating Procedure in American politics. But how is that an argument in FAVOR of the initial offending party?
Indeed, if the Harris regime is rewarded with a win, they might conclude that part of the winning strategy was branding her opponent as a felon and proceed to prosecute her next opponent, too. Maybe the next step really is to put them in jail, and then do we really have a different system than a banana republic? There's a possibility that the Trump team will see the prosecutions as having helped him, in which case maybe they'll demur after the election, similar to how they moved on from the "lock her up" chants in 2016.
Or maybe they'll go for revenge. If you believe Trump will prosecute his political opponents, don't vote for him. (He said he would, then suggested later he wouldn't. But he talks a lot about "prosecuting cheaters", whatever that means. With Trump it comes down to who you choose to believe: Trump or Trump.) But if the potential for prosecuting your political opponents is a reason NOT to vote for Trump, how could you also justify a vote for Harris?
Let's talk about what a real authoritarian regime looks like. First-generation regimes are centered around the revolutionary leader who overthrew the last government. They tend to be strongman types who have a close tie to the military that put them in power. Late-generation authoritarianism often goes the opposite direction, setting up some emperor/monarch/dictator in the Sacred City and not allowing him/her contact with the outside world. Then a bunch of bureaucrats fight over the Dear Leader for influence, controlling the country by proxy. Not sure how much that describes a Biden, Trump, or Harris presidency. Probably all of them to some extent.
Let's not be blind to half the argument because we made up our minds already. Arguments that "sure this side is bad, but the other side is worse because of X" don't hold water. You have to earn my vote, you don't get it as a way to prevent the other side from getting in - swing state or no.
While Trump has some alarming rhetoric around authoritarianism, I'm curious as to your take on some of the actions by the Biden administration. For example, do you see the weaponization of the justice department against Trump and Elon as justified? Do you agree with the policy that it should be illegal to spread misinformation? That creating AI-generated parodies of a political figure should be illegal?
Justice system: The question isn't whether a law can, somehow, be used to gain a conviction, but whether it is fairly applied. If large numbers of black people get pulled over and given tickets for infractions like going 5mph over, having a taillight out or whatever that's fine so long as the police are aggressively going after everyone else who's going 5 over. If there's a racial disparity, it could be because of a difference in offending rates or a difference in enforcement. Democrats have been arguing for decades that enforcement in the justice system is unfairly slammed against unfavored groups. Republicans refuse to see it, though, insisting that the problem is a difference in offending rates.
Trump's case looks like an enforcement difference, especially given campaign promises (now fulfilled) to aggressively pursue some kind of legal action against him.
Also, sometimes the process is the punishment. If you're a minority business owner who doesn't trust banks and works only in cash, civil asset forfeiture can seem extremely unfair, especially when you have no recourse to a justice system that effectively assume your a drug dealer because you were carrying cash around. For years, Republicans dismissed concerns like these when it was about minorities. Now they see the Carroll case looking like it may get reduced or overturned, and they're beginning to understand that the point wasn't to take Trump's money permanently, but to ensure he was unable to self-finance. It's legal to self-finance, but if the people in power don't like what you're doing or how you're doing it, they'll find a way to use the justice system against you. This is nothing new, but it's new for Republicans to realize it. (They just think it's limited to Trump , or maybe J6 protesters). Meanwhile, it's disappointing to see Democrats suddenly insist that the justice system is fair. Since when?
(I will say I think Elon has almost certainly done something illegal with his million dollar giveaways. He'll likely get away with it, since the punishment will be some kind of fine and the giveaway will have the desired effect on the election before it's reversed. It's a price he's willing to pay. Meanwhile, if government contacts and launch approvals hadn't been leveraged against him, I think Elon would have stuck to tweets against 'the libs'. He's on a tight deadline to get Starship ready for the next window to Mars. That's the thing he cares about most in the world, and going after it is what clearly activated him - something I think is bad, since Elon is clearly effective in tech development and him getting sucked into politics. The Musk golden goose almost certainly has a few more eggs to lay, and it'd be a shame to lose out on that. However, blowback from powerful people like Elon is why government usually only weaponizes against powerless people.)
Misinformation: I think the worst culprits of misinformation never get censured by the government because they're doing the government's work. Misinformation has been a problem for decades, but when it's combined with government power it allows significantly worse excesses than when it runs rampant on its own. Compare the effects of the demonic preschool scare in the 90's to the WMDs in Iraq lie, or the supposed link between Saddam and Al Qaeda - who hated each other in reality. The government claiming that Russia blew up their own pipeline, that the US was winning in Vietnam, that the Biden laptop was a forgery after they'd internally confirmed its authenticity, that they weren't spying on American citizens, and on and on. Intelligence agencies have executed many misinformation operations against the American people to get things to go their way, but there is never any suggestion of taking corrective actions against them, despite the fact that it's clearly worse when they do it than when it arises organically.
I think a good case study of the problem of misinformation is COVID-19. There was plenty of misinformation circulating during the pandemic, and it took both the organic form and the government-sponsored/supported form. We've now learned the government did a huge amount to crack down on natural misinformation, but that they also clearly eliminated a lot of true information specifically because it cut against their own misinformation they were trying to spread. The government's threshold isn't about whether information is "true" or "false", but whether it advances their interests or not. They are not a disinterested third party, and as such cannot be relied upon as an arbiter of truth.
As an expert in this field, it wasn't difficult for me to spot which was which during the pandemic, but many people I knew weren't able to do the same. They were usually credulous in favor or opposed to the government line. So for my anti-government friends, they would agree when I pointed out obvious government misinformation about COVID-19, but then they'd start talking about some other misinformation and I'd have to correct them. They were generally less responsive to correction when it was something the government had called out, since their experience was that the government wasn't credible (which it wasn't). My friends who were credulous of the government line refused to believe corrections to government misinformation, even after it was proved, until the government came out and explicitly acknowledged wrongdoing, or it became generally acceptable to admit the government line was no longer tenable.
Is misinformation a problem? Yes. Is it a good idea to give the government control over what should be labelled 'misinformation'? No. Sad experience demonstrates that this will only serve to amplify the spread of misinformation - and in particular dangerous misinformation.
AI generated parodies: I feel like we've been hearing the deepfake scare for a long time, without seeing much come from it. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it doesn't seem to have materialized in a meaningful way. I remember the claim Republicans made a few months ago that Harris's campaign had faked a photo at an airport to add to her crowd size, but then it turned out there were a bunch of other photos of the event from hundreds of cell phone cameras, so nothing ever came of it because it wasn't faked.
Except, I don't care about crowd sizes to begin with, so the whole discussion seemed dumb. I'm not sure where the line crosses from parody to fraud, but this is not a question that began with AI-generated images. The best satire is the kind that's as close as possible to believability. I remember Republicans getting really angry in the early 2000's when Onion articles would get circulated as truth by Republican lawmakers and pundits, because the parody was close enough to things they actually believed that they bought it. Back then, they wanted to shut down parody for the same reason Democrats went after the fake Harris campaign video - except the Onion never explicitly labelled its content as parody and the AI-Harris video did.
I know outlets like the Onion and the Babylon Bee have legal departments that review all their content to make sure it doesn't cross the line from parody to fraud. If you're setting up a fundraising website based on fake content and calling it parody, you're potentially fooling people into contributing money to something they believe is real when it isn't. That seems like outright fraud to me. But we have a long tradition in the US of allowing parody to mock people's beliefs without explicitly coming out and telling them they're being mocked. When you start going after the satirists, you know you've lost the argument.
I'm a libertarianish-conservativish person who basically feels the same way about this election that Scott Alexander does. Can you tell me more about what you mean by Kamala's "bid for authoritarianism"?
Fairly liberal and voting for Kamala here; I think a lot of the concern about this is based on Joe Biden's administration pressuring private companies to self-censor and the various legal actions against Trump, especially the hush money trial which is pretty clearly politically motivated IMO.
"That said i think I’m still going Trump because his brand of authoritarianism is hated by the media and a majority of the public"
Is this not just an admission that you are, very literally, motivated by causing harm and spite?
I think he means that since it's a less popular brand of authoritarianism with elites, it's less likely to succeed.
Right. It's similar to what some libertarians have said about voting for the bad Republican: it'll provoke the media into being critical again.
I don't think "critical" is quite the right word. Yes, the media questioned many of the Trump administration's claims when he was in power, but it also credulously hyped a lot of stories that turned out to be false. It didn't seem to me that it was doing its job so much as just trying to help the opposition.
Isn't Trump's (and his most avid followers) bid for authoritarianism, if you will, depend on a circulation of elites, such that the very elite class that you seem to assume will rise up against him will be cut off at the knees and effectively replaced?
>such that the very elite class that you seem to assume will rise up against him will be cut off at the knees and effectively replaced?
Is that even physically feasible? That's probably a large (maybe even overwhelmingly large) fraction of college faculty and mass media people.
Replacing the existing "resistance" elite would be impossible, but it is also unnecessary. It is only important to replace a subset of the elite who effectively leverage power over a larger swathe of the elite class and/or control how funding is distributed to universities, states, cities, etc.
This one reason why he wants to use the impoundment powers of the President (whether it is lawful or not is another question) so that he can distribute favors to those who fall in line and cut off contracts to corporations, grant moneys to universities, funding to local entities. Most of these entities will effectively cave if it means their funding streams dry up.
Or, for example, it is also why he wants to eliminate protections for civil servants. He is not going to fire all of them, he just has to fire a few and ensure that everyone else knows that he has the ability to do the same with them. Most people will fall into line at that point.
Just look at the way big tech (Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, etc.) are already bending the knee. If he can effectively "control" them, middle management won't matter and the "resistance" will be little more than an aesthetic.
the downside of this is that the media being critical comes with a resurgence of insane leftist activism
" it'll provoke the media into being critical again"
Until their guy wins the election after the bad Republican, and now everything is gas and gaiters. Remember how Covid was so deadly, even the chance of spreading it by attending your local church was too great a risk, so please don't hold religious services - but protest marches are a-okay because racism is a bigger threat than the Most Deadly Disease Ever.
If we're going to have things imposed on us by fiat, at least placate the plebs by being evenhanded about it?
This doesn't make sense to me. If one brand is less popular but it manages to win next week, doesn't that make it significantly more likely to succeed?
Let's say there's a two-step process to bulldozing the guardrails against authoritarianism: gaining sufficient popular support, and gaining support from elites. Whichever party wins the election next time would de facto have crossed the "popular support" pillar. Then we would want to be concerned with preventing whichever party has also completed institutional capture from instituting authoritarian policies, since the guard against less popular authoritarian movements is elections.
Why are you equating something being hated with "causing harm"? In my experience those are barely correlated.
I mean, being motivated by spite implies that you're doing something less because you think it's "good" and more because it will "make your enemies mad". You see a lot of "liberal tears" stuff, not so much "conservative tears". I think this is because conservatives in general kind of care less about "good things" as much as they care about "no good things for people I don't like".
No, sorry to convey that. I’m saying Trump’s authoritarianism is loathed by me, the media, 60-70% of the public, 80% of congress, the military, and the security state. There’s no base of power for him to launch a coup from or more slowly erode our freedoms. We had 4 years of Trump and zero authoritarianism bc of this. Meanwhile the FBI has succeeded in eroding our privacy rights under Clinton/Reno as Bush/Ashcroft. Bush normalized torture when Obama refused to prosecute it. Obama pioneered drone-murdering US citizens overseas without due process. Trump refused to get us entangled with Syria and his strike against Soleimani was the perfect deterrent to Iran, bc it deftly avoided collateral damage or escalation.
That's fair, sorry to jump to conclusions.
That said, I still think this is a wrong way to think, and doesn't result in any good. I think that "Trump is so offensive he won't get anything done" was 65% "true" in 2016 but is closer to 30 or 40% "true" now. Do I think he'll bang his executive gavel and put everyone trans in camps? No. But like... the GOP is obviously a party of Trump now. They tried to replace him with a technically more competent DeSantis and thankfully failed, but even DeSantis couldn't bring himself to seriously criticize Trump *while* actively running against him.
I think the GOP is filled with way more yes-men than it was before, and I think that Trump's influence on their culture will extend past his death. I think him having been elected at all is kind of disastrous long-term in this sense. After he dies, he's going to be replaced by a guy who expresses basically the same opinions, but also isn't so impulsive and narcissistic that he hamstrings himself every time he tries to get something done that takes longer than a week.
This is why I said it's "thankful" DeSantis lost, lol. I think "the guy whose campaign staffers were putting Black Suns in his Twitter videos" combined with "presentationally being a professionalish politician" is far more dangerous than "Trump", and this kind of politician is something enabled by Trump having been elected.
I'm trying to read this in a way that doesn't sound like "my political opponents getting elected is a bad thing."
Could you frame any of this in a way that Trump voters, even hesitant Trump voters, would agree with?
Almost all of the Trump hesitancy (as opposed to fully supportive or opposing) I see is about his temperament, so getting his policies without the temperament would be seen as a good thing.
I get that, for instance, many people oppose his immigration stances. But, like, the majority of the US population actually supports it. What does it mean to live in a democracy? It can't mean that a minority who hold the reigns of power get to block the will of the majority just on their own preferences. The Constitution can stop the majority, but not a self-selected minority. Claims that Trump is undermining democracy rang very hollow in such conversations.
> I'm trying to read this in a way that doesn't sound like "my political opponents getting elected is a bad thing."
I mean... this seems kind of tautological, doesn't it, lol? I'm not sure why you're trying to read it in a way that doesn't imply this - that is what I'm implying. I don't want Republicans to win offices.
> What does it mean to live in a democracy?
I believe that there are certain things that supersede democratic concerns, democracy itself ironically being one of them. If everyone voted to have an absolute monarch, I'd still say we shouldn't allow that! Putin was arguably legitimately democratically elected at some point. He definitely isn't *now*. There should be systems to prevent this kind of thing from happening.
Anyways, I don't think it's possible to convince the average Trump voter. I think it's possible to convince some people on the margins whose opinions seem kind of flippant and random (this is true for most people in general, they just consistently have random opinions within the window of partisanship). But like... anecdotally, a lot of Trump supporters are just kind of stupid and emotional, and the ones I know who are *really* into it just seem mentally ill. The most success I have in converting Trump members (largely through family) comes not from argument but rather "acting like they're being embarrassing" or "refusing to talk to them" or "saying something really pithy and vaguely religious because a lot of people have huge biases towards someone saying a belief is spiritual".
You are, of course, welcome to have an opinion. I thought you were making a case that might try to appeal to general principals or would be convincing to others so that more people would want to choose your stance.
Naked partisanship isn't exactly new. I would prefer a world where there is less of that, such that we may be able to convince one another of important differences in positions. I think that would also make transitions between administrations less jarring and concerning.
>What does it mean to live in a democracy? It can't mean that a minority who hold the reigns of power get to block the will of the majority just on their own preferences.
This is one of the reasons why a lot of ancient authors (notably Thucydides) were so critical of pure democracy. Democracy without any additional protections leads to the domination of demagogues and the tyranny of the majority. That's why we're a constitutional republic and not a pure democracy. The Bill of Rights most definitely says that minorities can block the will of the majority, if the will of the majority is to take your guns, to censor your speech, to keep slaves, etc etc etc. I don't think most conservative policies are bad enough that they violate our rights in this way, but some of the more extreme ones (bans on abortion that don't make clear exceptions for rape, incest, or the safety of the mother, various free speech infringements meant to curtail wokeness and crossdressing, throwing someone in prison for using the wrong bathroom) seem to qualify.
It sounds like you have already determined which issues matter to you more than the ability of others to have an opinion. How do you think your opponents should reconcile *their* list of non-negotiable items when they differ from yours?
My arguments against the zero authoritarianism view is that the Roe v Wade court stacking, his draconian treatreatment of migrants, the overall election effort, both the legal maneuvering and the big lie, were authoritarian. Not categorically denying QAnon was authoritarian. They're as modern authoritarian vs traditional as the quasi-theological social elite oligarchs that Scott is still looking to work against in the long term. But they all had greater negative short term impact. And his support and admiration of authoritarians worldwide builds strength for the growing influence of strong man style politics worldwide.
Would Democratic politicians not "categorically denying" BLM riots be authoritarianism? If so, what makes Republicans/Trump worse on this metric? I'm trying to figure out your definition, and it seems to just run along partisan lines. That's fine for your opinion and your vote, but doesn't seem very convincing.
My comment was directed at there being zero actual authoritarianism during Trump’s presidency, with examples to show where I think there was. I’m saying, for instance, that helping fuel an entire mythology around satanic pedophiles having taken over the government, which people I know actually believe, were as least as modern authoritarian as those done on the left (see sentence 3 - really seems like you skimmed over that, though if you can explain how my describing the left as “quasi-theological social elite oligarchs” is a neutral description, let me know and I’ll try to work harder to make it more negative in the future). So no denials or counterarguments against the existence of left authoritarianism. The fact that left authoritarianism exists doesn’t have any relation to whether or not Trump’s authoritarianism (and I do mean specifcally his, rather than the right as a whole) exists beyond mere rhetoric. Beyond that, the debate’s about relative impact, and yes, there I’m partisan, I believe for the right reasons, but sure I have biases. Those biases do not include believing my side - such that it is, I’m pretty moderate - has absolutely zero authoritarian impulses or impacts. As to my metric, it’s immediacy. Not denying that the right should exist as an opposition party to the left. The “which is worse?” question is a long-term minimization & optimization project. I think individuals should be voting their interests through parties, not letting parties enact party interests through individuals’ votes. By all means, vote straight ticket GOP. I just think if you’re not in the upper echeolons of the Trump’s circle, Trump being back in the Whitehouse will not be in your best interests.
That's fair. I wouldn't classify most of the things you did as authoritarian in the first place, so I was double-checking to see if we were even using the same language. It appears that we are, but you generally include more things as authoritarian than I do, which is fine.
I think this analysis is wrong in a subtle way. It's true that all those institutions dislike Trump and will scrutinize everything he does - but how often does the media's criticism of Trump make you think "yeah, they nailed it! Spot on!"? The media and commentariat haven't prosecuted the case against Trump very well even after 10 years, so Trump being in power again will just enable more caterwauling and less cogent analysis. There's a sense in which he breaks people's brains (not just his supporters'), so the combination of "evil president + bad arguments for why he's evil" just means you're going to get an evil president without effectively persuading people that he's evil, not to mention a very exhausting four years.
Also, respectfully, your Iran comments are a bit off-base. I write about Iran constantly and wouldn't be able to do justice to everything wrong above, but it's unclear if Iran even *can* escalate and what real escalation by them would look like at this point (notably, they did and continue to respond to Soleimani's killing, which led a bunch of symbolic retaliations and 176 passengers of Flight PS752 being pointlessly murdered). It's further unclear whether Trump did anything particularly unique by taking out Soleimani (I think the Obama foreign policy establishment might have done the same). Characterizing this as "the perfect deterrent to Iran" is really misleading - a year later they elected a crazy hardliner!
Trump ramped up drone strikes amount by a factor 10x.
See, I agree with what you're saying, but to me, that's another reason not to vote for Trump. If he wins, it will absolutely accelerate the bad tendencies in "the media and most power centers" due to backlash. Left wing people got way crazier 2016 -> 2020, and moderated 2020 -> 2024.
This seems like just giving in to the heckler's veto.
Kind of, yeah? We have a democracy with millions of people. That a candidate (and I include Trump, Hillary Clinton and anyone else with ridiculously high disapproval ratings) is absolutely straight up hated by ~30 million of them, and we absolutely have evidence that "hatred of specific other side candidate" leads to extremism and violence in "our" side, then I am fine with biasing my vote on avoiding that backlash.
I might rephrase it as "when you nominate a hated candidate, it gives the other side license to adopt more extreme policies because the relative cost for doing so goes down, so I want to disincentivize parties from doing that."
What is the relative rate of hatred of republicans for Harris vs Democrats for Trump?
I don't know a perfect way to measure it, because normally I would use previous elections and long-running disapproval ratings, and there's less of that info available for Harris (though for similar reasons I would have suggested the Dems running a candidate who actually had been thru those things, so as to avoid backlash-y behavior from their own party members), but I feel pretty confident that the former is less than the latter.
The Democrats cut the rod for their own backs, and they're stuck with Harris because of the denial around Biden until the bitter end. After that, they couldn't pick anyone else, but the impression the 'party of democracy' gives by putting up a candidate without even a pretence of having a convention to choose from a selection, that the party in general could vote for, instead of the elites saying "this is who you have to approve and it doesn't really matter either if you don't approve because we've already decided" isn't too great.
This is exceptional circumstance, but the idea that Kamala is the people's choice is really bending reality.
Yeah, but the hatred for Clinton was explained as "sexism! hate for strong women! anti-reproductive rights!" (and race got pulled in when the black women feminist voters were angry with the white women feminist voters for not coming out and voting enough for Hillary). It wasn't "gosh, maybe we shouldn't have picked the most unpopular choice possible" reflection, it was "the people are wrong and we have to double down on educating them to be better".
I'm astounded that Trump has been as successful as he has been, but he's resonating with *someone* on *some* issues, and just beating that away with "Fascism! Racism! Sexism! Homophobia! Transphobia! Christofascists!" is not going to fix the problem of "what is he getting right that we aren't? what candidate can we put forward that appeals to the deplorables/garbage?" (and that's part of the problem right there: the deplorables and garbage attitude to something like a quarter of the country, if I'm being generous to Hillary in her division of Trump voters into 'half of them are sincere but too stupid to know what's good for them, the other half are evil').
Harris is pretty historically underwater, at least compared to pre Trump/Clinton candidates. Long term I hope both parties start nominating candidates that are at least 50% popular. In the meantime, how does this help us determine who to vote for now? Someone (whether it were Trump or Harris) being slightly less unpopular is not a convincing argument.
The heckler’s veto plus threats of violence is what got so many Republicans to capitulate.
Lindsey Graham and Mitt Romney were harassed at the airport.
Adam Kinziger and Liz Cheney have both said they talked to several Republicans who wanted to vote for impeachment but feared violence against their families.
A Republican legislator in Michigan was hounded out of the party after his exhaustive investigation found no evidence of election fraud. Same for the former Arizona speaker of the house.
Not just "threats" of violence. I notice that two attempted assassination attempts - including one that almost worked - against Trump didn't merit even a mention in ACX's spiel about "threats to democracy".
Assassination attempts are bad, be it against Trump or Nancy Pelosi’s husband.
There was an attempt against George Wallace but still I am glad he didn’t become president
Not to mention that, like...it wasn't the Democrats behind those assassinations? The constant equivocation between Democrats, anyone who hates Trump, and left-wingers more generally is getting old, as someone who would be considered a left-wing extremist by 80% of the commenters here, it seems.
Genuinely, Democrats are almost all neoliberal corporate shills. It's just that they're not actively trying to roll back civil rights and make life actively harder for myself and my loved ones. Deepest hope of this election would be that the Republican party shatters and the Democratic party splits in half with the most centrist/center-right elements linking up with the remnants of what was once the GOP to have a new paradigm with a genuine progressive party as an option for once.
Neither of the failed assassins was a Democrat/on the left. One was a depressed teen who wanted to go out with a bang via suicide by cop. The other one a guy with some meth problems who became crazy in Ukraine, and said he voted Trump in 2016.
Perhaps it is time to consider whether democracy is in a ratchet death spiral, everywhere in the world. Perhaps now that we have the society, prosperity, and technology we have, there is no way to prevent each side's strong incentive to be worse tomorrow than they were today.
What do *you* do if democracy is irretrievably broken? I hope the answer isn't "lay down and die", because historically a ton of people have been very happy living in not-democracies.
I'm utterly sick of this claim that wokeness and left-wing extremism was in any way caused by a backlash to Trump. It's completely and demonstrably false.
The first recognisable instance of cancel culture I know of was in February 2013, a campaign to get Orson Scott Card removed from co-writing a Marvel comic storyline because he opposed gay marriage. (It succeeded IIRC by convincing his co-writer to drop out, killing the storyline). The two canonical and famous defining examples were Justine Sacco (December 2013) and Brendan Eich (April 2014). By mid 2015 there had been dozens of such cases, the realignment of society towards these unprecedented new norms of "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom to dissent from the progressive orthodoxy" was well underway, and the only reason it didn't have a clear name yet was because there was so little pushback to this among the elite institutions that it wasn't thought to need a name other than "basic decency" or "correct opinions". And all this was before Trump had even announced an intention to run for president.
So I think three things are undeniable. (1) This was not at all caused by Trump's election but by Obama's re-election. Far from being a fearful reaction to losing power it was a triumphant "now we can freely hurt the people we hate" reaction to winning. (2) Two of those three defining cases were based around the issue that the left was most clearly and overwhelming winning on (homosexuality/gay marriage), further proof that cancel culture had nothing to do with desperately resisting the powerful and everything to do with sadistically crushing the losers. (3) Trump was a backlash to (among other things) wokeness and cancel culture, and the narrative that it was the other way around is unbelievable memory-holing and past-rewriting. Kind of like the Nazis/Bolsheviks justifying their seizure of power as justified by the Allied wars against them!
The more proximate thing was the end of Occupy Wall Street after it had gotten infested by the woke and subsequently petered out. These terms see a sharp uptick starting in 2011-2014, depending on term and publication:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-great-racial-awakening
I am sick and tired of people claiming the Dixie Chicks are an example of right-wing cancel culture. They were "cancelled" for things they said in public, as part of their public performance and deliberately made in front of an audience.
What actually got them into trouble was trying to say one thing in front of one audience that another audience would be angered by. Honest people shouldn't be doing this, and dishonest people shouldn't be surprised if they're caught at it.
Also, notice that this is pretty much the only right-wing example anyone can ever find?
I did not see Justine Sacco as a triumph of liberal or left-wing cancel culture; the position that she was stupidly claimed to hold by people who didn't or didn't want to understand irony was one that no conservative with a brain would actually consciously hold (white people don't get AIDS). Rather, I saw it as an example of an online mob, and how easily it could form in social media. That did predate Trump's election, but it does not seem to be inherently political, let alone in the narrow sense of having one particular political coloring. Rather, it is a phenomenon that fed into online wokedom later, and not only there; it would be silly to claim that right-wing online mobs can't form - it's just that we associate "mobs of righteousness" with the woke.
It is clear to me that wokeness has helped Trump and is helping him now, though it's unclear by how much. But Trump I was not somehow a reaction to the Justine Sacco case. How much Trump was a reaction to then-incipient woke - that's an open question to me, though I have much stronger doubts than I would now. The wave of woke had only barely lapped the shores of most people's consciousness during Trump's ascent, even if it was already a thing in some circles.
I don't think that's an accurate description of the Justine Sacco mob. I think it consisted of tweets like "this bitch just insulted Africa" and "welcome to black twitter" and endless accusations of her being privileged and flaunting her privilege. In other words, these were woke people (not apolitical or centrist), and their anger was not thinking she wasn't joking, but thinking it wasn't an acceptable thing to joke about. (And not because of a concern for the feelings of AIDS victims specifically, but for much more general woke reasons of racism and marginalisation and privilege).
As for wokeness barely lapping the shores, I think that's clearly wrong as well. Look at the comments on Scott's 2016 version of this post. There's heaps and heaps of references to voting for Trump to fight against wokeness (or "social justice", "political correctness" or "SJWs" as it was known then). It was a widely recognised phenomenon that had been taking over society for several years, among anyone who was paying attention, by that point. The main change during the Trump administration was giving it a clear name--the terms "woke" and "cancel culture" were popularised 2018-2019 or so. But this is an example of rising *resistance* to wokeness: naming it means acknowledging it as something that can be criticised and opposed and as something that certainly isn't remotely equivalent to "kindness" or even to "progressivism" in any way.
I said lapping the shores of *most people*'s consciousness. Of course the average reader of Slate Star Codex was overexposed to the woke early on.
Ok fine, but I maintain that it was far more widely known. Brendan Eich was a household name in conservative media regarding the excesses of the left. So were people like the British scientist (I forget his name) who joked about falling in love with female co-workers. BLM started in 2013 I believe, and by late 2015 was a household name, doing things like aggressively shutting down a Bernie Sanders speech and shutting down the dedication of a Christmas tree (!), and other things that had nothing to do with Trump but were left-extremist attacks on centrists, fellow leftists, and apolitical people. And Hillary Clinton ran her campaign on extremely heavy and blatant identity politics, as well as using woke language in her speeches.
I think if you look at archived online discussions from 2016 from many sources you'll see many references to wokeness in numerous forms.
Very astute analysis, thank you for giving me some context to consider. I lean more heavily to the idea that Obama's reelection started it all. The smugness with which he approached Romney and his other opponents publicly (and, yes, the winking at the IRS to punish enemies privately) created more threat to democracy than Trump did in his actual presidency.
Kind of infuriating to watch Obama drift back into the picture now with the same progressiver-than-thou rhetoric that marked his presidency (e.g., telling black men that they're not voting for Harris solely because they're afraid of women). There's probably a good book to be written about all the cultural things that soured in and after his presidency.
I don’t it caused it, I think it’s a repeated game of escalation/arms race. The extremists on both sides empower each other, and becoming more extreme increases the likelihood of the other side doing so as well. Their true enemies are the moderates.
Who fired the first shot in this latest, ongoing culture war? I could be convinced that the left started it, but partisan extremists on both sides have been gleefully making the vicious cycle turn faster.
I think that a lot of the guardrails against Trump have eroded since last time. For instance, previously Mike Pence refused to put Trump above the constitution (and Pence has now stated that Trump should never be president again). Now J.D. Vance has explicitly said that he *would* overturn the election in Trump’s favor if it happened again. Similarly, Trump now has a Supreme Court that will support him to the degree of offering presidential immunity. Trump has explicitly been trying to attract followers who will be personally loyal to him and support his bids for power, and it seems like he has been succeeding even with his endless parade of scandals.
Contrast that with the supporters Harris has, who initially supported Biden and then (reasonably) decided that they wanted him replaced when he seemed too old and addled. Compared with Trump, Harris’s support is more fragile, and we should expect that it would pivot to favoring some other generic Democrat for reelection if Harris did anything too egregious.
I have a different take on the facts but your position is well thought out and if i agreed with you on the facts I’d be voting for Harris for the same reasons.
Thank you! Out of curiosity, what facts do you disagree with? It can definitely be tricky to say *for sure* how dangerous Trump would be with the people around him trying to keep him in check, but it seems to me that some of the people in the best position to know those facts would be the people who have been in those positions before.
And it’s not just Pence, but also Kelly (Trump’s former chief of staff), Grisham (his former press secretary), Scaramucci (his former communications director), and at least 10 other notable officials that worked under Trump who are standing against him. These include people with largely conservative values, who are presumably aware of the problems with the Democratic Party, who still think Trump is more dangerous. Same thing with Dick Cheney and Mitt Romney (to my knowledge, McCain was also not a fan of Trump).
That’s a pretty big update for me. Whenever I see people acting in opposition to the way they would normally be biased, I take those views a lot more seriously.
>Now J.D. Vance has explicitly said that he *would* overturn the election in Trump’s favor if it happened again.
I'm not entirely sure how this is supposed to operationalise. I mean, if there's an election in 2028 and Vance is VP that means Trump got elected now, which means Trump would be indisputably ineligible due to term limit and Vance couldn't "overturn the election in Trump's favour" (since the SCOTUS and/or military would step in at that point).
>Similarly, Trump now has a Supreme Court that will support him to the degree of offering presidential immunity.
I will note that while the scope of presidential immunity is debatable, the *existence* of a "things that are illegal for private citizens aren't always illegal for government agents performing official business" rule is kind of inherent in society. Protection money vs. taxes. Kidnapping vs. arrests/imprisonment. Murder vs. death sentence. Piracy/freebooting vs. warfare.
Ivanka has been missing from action and reportedly wants nothing to do with politics any more.
His other sons like Don Jr are ascendant, recommended Vance, and are in charge of purging the party and administration from people willing to stand up to Trump.
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/vance-walz-vice-presidential-debate-election-2024/card/donald-trump-jr-s-main-job-keeping-bad-actors-out-of-transition-team-6HLZI8Lo6dNw41ueWKbh
I agree, I also find it absurd that Trump will easily turn the entire country into a fascist state when literally most of the elite is against him, whereas it is much more feasible for Kamala Harris to enact terrible left-wing economic policies that will harm capitalism and make everyone miserable.
Does Trump need to succeed at fascism to degrade the country in bigger ways than bad policy?
Yes.
The question was rhetorical.
The president has a lot of ability to weaken norms, damage foreign relations, or increase corruption that don't end in fascism.
The answer to the rhetorical question was "no"
What is 'the elite'? Academics have near-zero hard power, and their soft power has been much damaged by overzealous sophomores (in the literal or general sense: people whose intellectual development stopped in their sophomore year) who cherry-picked some terms here and there and ran away with them.
Yes, I also found this part of the comment strange. Usually when people refer to the 'elite' they either mean academics, policymakers, or rich people. It's definitely not academics, who as you say have little sway, policymakers, who the Trump admin would be putting into or taking out of power, or rich people, who... I mean, just look at the WaPo nonendorsement scandal. At the very least there are plenty of extremely powerful 'elites' who do not want a Harris presidency.
Why then do economists across the political spectrum support Harris?
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/23/politics/nobel-prize-economists-harris-economic-plan/index.html
Why do even Trump's supporters say that his policies will cause higher prices, higher inflation, a larger budget deficit, and a market crash?
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/29/elon-musk-trump-allies-economy-plan-short-term-pain-harris-election.html
> Ivanka and Jared will be running the show and they are standard chamber of commerce neoliberals which is why Trump didn’t do anything authoritarian last time
FYI: Ivanka and Jared reiterated that they're not coming back into politics just yesterday. ( https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/style/ivanka-trump.html ) Jared Kushner said that he "wouldn't accept the offer" to work in another Trump administration. ( https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/will-trumps-son-in-law-jared-kushner-return-to-white-house-if-ex-us-president-wins-2024-race-101707912942378.html )
Yeah bc they want to be allowed back into polite society if he loses. But if he wins all bets are off and they’ll find themselves drafted back in.
Seems like you're betting a lot on a speculative assertion about someone's motives.
Unless you live in a swing state, your vote does nothing anyway, so cast it for Oliver and make a firm statement against that sort of thing.
>That said i think I’m still going Trump because his brand of authoritarianism is hated by the media and a majority of the public.
"No one goes to that bar, it's too crowded."
If Trump wins, can you really claim that his brand is less popular?
>If Harris wins, the media and most power centers will back her bid for authoritarianism and things start getting bad real fast.
I'm not totally sure what authoritarianism you're referring to, aside from Harris saying platforms like X should have more restrictions. Given that the Supreme Court is dominated by conservatives, I don't expect Kamala to be successful in challenging freedom of speech.
They don't need to actually get a ruling in their favor. They can just suppress whatever speech they want, the 9th Circuit rules for them, and then, much later, the Supreme Court overturns it. Then they do it over again.
The same slow authoritarianism (both a combo of gov policies and elite non-gov policies) that has been turning people towards trump for 8 years.
Examples being: affirmative action, speech restrictions at schools/workplaces, COVID mandates, nation’s capital “black lives matter” painted on the street, etc.
I am definitely looking forward to the "mostly peaceful" Dem protests and attempts to overturn the election/s when Trump is elected and inaugured, just like last time. Maybe people won't forget the second time?
The guardrails that held last time were name Bill Barr and Mike Pence. The fact that he replaced Pence with Vance shows that the guardrails will not be nearly as strong next time
I would argue the right's SCOTUS control is one of the more concerning authoritarianism issues at the moment, particularly if they get more control than they currently have and so no relatively reasonable justice/s can swing a verdict. I am also concerned that popular will does not support policies that will keep this country stable and properly running, and may support really awful things, and that a right-wing administration will ignore this issue even when the Constitution would normally protect people. Probably one of the more obvious points here is related to free speech; most people on the left and on the right want to censor their political opponents, and a party that doesn't respect the rule of law is more likely to fully and directly subvert that (and specifically, more likely to use the government to severely persecute private individuals who disagree with them) than a party that at least allegedly does.
But I'm also a single-issue voter on whether I'll be able to keep my passport, so take my words with a grain of salt.
There are thousands of quotes, articles, and interviews with members of Trump's staff from the first term talking about how they had to constantly distract and delay him in order to avoid doing the insane things he asked for, and instead just do their job normally in spite of him. That's why he couldn't cause too much damage the first time (this is what he and supporters call the 'deep state', career bureaucrats just doing their job normally and resisting bad orders from on high).
The last 4 years has been Trump and his closest allies vowing to correct this injustice, and building a huge network of cronies plus loyalty tests and plans for who to fire and replace on day one. Vance was chosen on the back of a long campaign of arguing that democracy was violated during Trump's first term by bureaucrats ignoring Trump's demands, and vowing to implement anything Trump wants including not certifying electors.
'Trump didn't accomplish many crazy things in the first term so he won't in the second term' is a good outside-view prior on how the world probably works. But the inside view contains mountains of specific evidence on why that's not likely to be actually true in this one case.
"It went fine last time" isn't a totally reassuring argument when Trump and all the yes-men around him have been talking for the last four years about how much better they're going to vet executive branch appointments for yes-men and prevent the internal resistance that kept his previous administration in check.
Countless members of his former administration have openly admitted to ignoring Trump's requests, distracting and delaying him, and functionally treating his whims like that of a grumpy toddler. Most of them have said he's not fit to be president, and have endorsed Harris. Those people aren't going to be in the White House this time around. The guard rails will be weaker.
Thank you for the psychodrama angle and the analogue to New Atheism. It’s a pretty powerful metaphor for me personally as well and I felt that pang of recognition as you elaborated on why you tend to react more viscerally to left-leaning malpractice than the reverse. You’re not alone.
Most people, though, including myself, react more viscerally to wrongdoing by the opposite side than by their own.
But what "opposite side" means depends on where you're standing. I think most ACX readers wouldn't necessarily consider a Trump fan their direct opposite, politically.
Scott already mentioned the near group/out group/far group formulation.
Most people react viscerally to wrongs by their out group, not by their far group.
For lots of people the political out group is the other party, BUT for lots of people (Like Scott) it is not.
> I would feel like a total hypocrite with no ground to stand on if I claimed to be pro-freedom, pro-liberalism, and pro-democracy, but didn’t really take a stand against somebody trying to attack enemy politicians and rig an election.
Oddly, this is one of the main reasons I will be voting for Trump despite being in a Blue Safe State. I guess everybody has their own take on events.
Yeah. My brain started composing a top level response to this one, but it was just going to be a list of "Hey, this bad thing that you said that Republicans did, here's a place where Democrats did something comparable or worse!"
But what happens then? There'e be a massive tree of replies going "But actually that thing is not as bad, the Republican thing is worse!" with replies going "No way, actually the Democrat thing is way worse". It seems like a boring discussion.
What depresses me is that someone as smart as Scott and someone as smart as I can see the world so differently, and see it as something so obvious it hardly even needs to be argued. I mourn for my nation.
Post-truth is a depressingly accurate term
Except that it is based on the fantasy that there was a time that was truth time.
In my opinion, the enlightenment thinkers sought after, believed, and argued for absolute Truth.
In the modern/post-modern thinkers, everything is relative. Isn't the braindead, but popular meme, "find your truth"?
You're right in that lies have always abounded, but we've quit putting a premium on even the attempt to uncover Truth.
So the post-truth era started before WWI, and was preceded by the "basically in favour of truth, albeit don't know much of it" era.
Most contemporary thinkers do believe in truth too. And plenty of thinkers in the 1700s didn’t. It’s just that the direction of movement was different. We are still in a much more truth oriented academic world than we were for most of history (and certainly for the general public).
"Post-media-consensus" might be more accurate but doesn't have that ring.
That sounds right.
Things were beyond repair long, long ago. As for this essay, it's not his fault, and obviously raw intelligence is no more a protection against drowning in misinformation than it is against drowning in water. It's just not the right tool. I hope none of us are here on ACX because we think Scott is right about everything, or even most things.
"Repair" is the wrong word, because it sounds like you want to return something that used to work well to its former well-working state.
I don't know what this time is that people talk about where there aren't people who are smart and yet obviously deluded.
When propaganda was more centralized, things certainly had the appearance of working better, and I suspect that plenty of people are nostalgic for those simpler times.
>plenty of people are nostalgic for those simpler times.
"And that's the way it is." - Walter Cronkite
I'm using the wrong word because you're hallucinating my opinion? That's not how language works - I used an old phrase correctly and to express what I wanted to express, mind your business.
<quote>I hope none of us are here on ACX because we think Scott is right about everything</quote>
Or that we're right about everything.
Only use Scott's opinion to update your priors. I think most of us are here because his opinion is evidence to update in the same direction.
Not for politics
I'm here because of Unsong, hoping for more like it. Sometimes, I get it, such as the (fake) Republican primary debate.
>someone as smart as Scott and someone as smart as I can see the world so differently
Convergence from updates from evidence is _hard_ . Did you follow the lab leak/zoonosis debate, and see how far apart even the judges were at the end, a factor of 50? And that was with everyone doing their best to present all of the evidence they had. Depressing, but I think unavoidable. ( And politics is worse - much that we want to know is not "What _did_ happen?", but "What will this person do in the future?" )
A good explanation to rectify the disparity may be that one of you is not as intelligent as you previously imagined.
So, if you see the situation as an escalating tit-for-tat, with each side becoming terrible in response to the other, then surely it's incredibly important that we break that cycle. It's not a conflict that one side can win in way that doesn't leave us an economically broken one-party state, so we're going to have to deescalate- which means political norm-breaking, fewer power grabs, less fighting of cultural battles with governmental force, and so on, even when these things feel like justified responses to provocation.
A liberal democracy is like a nuclear reactor containing and running on the dangerous fuel of political competition. When that competition leaks outside of democratic norms, it becomes something deadly rather than useful.
It may be the case that neither party is willing to fully commit to keeping their competition contained, in which case the question becomes: which side is more likely to escalate? Which is willing to go further to "win"?
Okay, but the question is how to vote in this election. Is there any choice that breaks the cycle in this election?
If Harris wins, Trump's federal prosecutions go forward. Now I'll say that I think the Florida documents case is legitimate. But the other three contain various levels of bullshit, and I'm not even a Trump partisan. And 1/3 of the country views the whole thing as illegitimate lawfare. So electing Harris doesn't break the cycle; that 1/3 will be in power eventually and looking for revenge.
What's it's going to take to start breaking the cycle now is for the Democrats to decide that the prosecutions of Trump must stop. They would have to decide, to borrow Scott's example, that these were crimes but maybe they didn't actually harm anyone the way that shoplifting really doesn't do much harm.
Trump got Presidential immunity for most of his actions he took as President and the Jack Smith indictment had to be refiled. Why would he need Democrats to stop prosecuting him?
I agree that Trump may not *need* for a Biden and/or Harris administration (along with Georgia and New York) to drop his prosecutions. He may yet avoid legal punishments by a combination of appellate decisions and acquittals. But my response was to concerns about escalating tit-for-tat lawfare and weaponization of political power, and what those could do to the country. I want to live in high-trust society and those things work against it. To the extent that these persecutions are political, the only way out that doesn't leave somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of the country feeling angry and defeated is a political compromise.
No, my comment was rhetorical. Trump obviously needs a federal pardon because he not only committed crimes as official acts of the President but as a private citizen seeking reelection. I also think the best resolution to uniting the country would be trying Trump for treason and everybody who intended to vote to decertify the results of the 2020 election. Also, borrowing on Trump's plan to delicense news media, we should probably delicense Fox News, OAN, and Newsmax for their peddling of election fraud lies that they either have admitted to lying about or are in the process of losing their multiple defamation suits in court. Ideally this would bring back normalcy to the conspiracy laden right wing in our country and show that there are consequences for trying to sow this much division in the country, especially through illegal means.
Surely it's more boring to just say Democrats did worse without giving any examples?
If it helps you there is a large contingent of people desperate to vote for Trump but are turned off by his authoritarianism.
It's more boring, but it's shorter.
What specifically is the claim that Kamala Harris tried to attack enemy politicians and rig an election? I genuinely haven't heard this allegation but I don't follow American politics closely.
Not Kamala personally but Democrats in general.
Regarding rigging an election: the concerted suppression of information harmful to Biden in the last election, the "fortification" of that election by Zuckerberg et al. in ways that (surprise) only helped Democrats, the unConstitutional changes to state election rules by people other than the state legislatures, the mysterious and unprecedented suspension of vote-counting in precincts of swing states, the videos of mishandled ballots and testimony of whistle-blowers, and the endless fraud that Trump was a Russian agent, which the FBI knew from Day One was bogus. In this election, attempts to disqualify Trump from the ballot on grounds of insurrection when neither he nor *anybody else* has been even charged with insurrection.
Regarding attacking an enemy politician: Denying RFK Secret Service protection; constant equation of Trump with Hitler, doubtless contributing to three different assassination attempts; and the invention of historically unprecedented accusations of bogus felonies in the hopes of jailing him before the election.
Trump has been threatening his opponents generally with jail time.
No Democrat has done that, even though Trump personally has been prosecuted for various credibly-alleged crimes.
If Democrats were threatening their opponents generally, we would have seen a lot of investigations of Ron DeSantis and Milo Yiannopoulos and Joe Rogan and Kristi Noem. Instead, when we look past our Trump-focused-syndrome, we see that the investigations of politicians are basically a mix of various corrupt types of all parties (Eric Adams, Bob Menendez, Hunter Biden, locally in Southern California Andrew Do, etc.)
Banned for this comment.
Trump threatens to throw people in jail, but he's just bloviating. He never actually tried, even when he had the power. Democrats have an actual track record of wielding the legal system to try to imprison their defeated opposition.
There were at least a dozen lawsuits trying to prove voter frtaud and overturning the election. Mostly by that Krakedn lady who I've forgotten the name of, and Giuliani. All failed.
When you run for attorney general or prosecutor on a platform of "I will find something I can charge Donald Trump with and then prosecute the heck out of him," that is pretty close to threatening your opponent with jail time.
You can hardly compare private owners of social media companies slowing the spread of new, potentially bad information right before an election to Donald Trump (the guy I assume you're voting for!) literally manufacturing false slates of electors to try and get Mike Pence to overthrow the results of the election.
Have you read the Twitter Files? The “private owners” of social media companies were leaned on *very* heavily by government entities.
I acknowledge that “overthrow the election” is the Leftist way of describing what went down when it came time to count the votes. You must know that your opponents describe it differently, as the last legal and Constitutional opportunity to correct what they saw as fraudulent votes.
Non state-legislative approved slates of electors is not legal *or* consitutional. Does this look lawful to you? https://youtu.be/P_NgLQxMV9c
I think most rank and file Republican believe this, but I do not think many Republican federal elected officials or appointees actually believed it.
I saw the messages rather melodramatically so named. I saw nothing except suggestions which could be freely ignored. Social media companies have $ for lots of lawyers.
Seriously. It's just beyond belief that we're now both-sides-ing as disingenously as _that_.
One thing I've learned during this past decade is how few Americans actually take seriously the central importance of protecting our Constitutional system. I already knew that about some, mostly on far left. I had no idea, and would not have believed if it told, just how wide a swath of people to the right of me have zero actual respect for our Constitutional structure and norms.
Turns out to be _far_ more people than to my left. It's an example of something that Donald Trump had intuited by the time he came down that golden elevator, and he was right about it and I was way wrong.
The left wing in the United States of America has benefitted from Constitutional protections far, far more often than it has been stymied by them. Free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press? These are all things that favor iconoclasts and boundary-pushers, and regardless of which side one might think today's iconoclasts are one, historically, it's mostly been the left, and we remember our history. We actually fully give up on respecting some constitutional protection, collectively and legally? Next time the pendulum swings it'll be the latest strain of McCarthyism, complete with life-ruining prison sentences. That's the whole reason so-called "cancel culture" became a thing: it's vigilante social consequences to try to force behavior change through non-governmental avenues.
The leftists who don't give a shit about constitutional norms and protections are often just straight up tankies. Fuck tankies.
There's too much wrong in your understanding of the history to even begin on, but I agree with your closing statement and always have.
Doesn't change the shock of learning how many _more_ Americans to my right bluntly consider our Constitution worthwhile only to the degree that it supports their particular priors and wishes. If a leftie 20 or 30 years ago had predicted the extent of that I'd have dismissed it as the usual tankie bullshit...in fact I'm pretty sure that happened given where I was residing during that period. On that point, sadly, they were right and I was wrong.
It's amazing and a credit to the Democrat propaganda machine (corporate news) that people believe this. Appointing a set of alternate electors is what state law prescribes, generally, when challenging election results. This allows you to have people ready if your challenge is successful. They actually discuss this in the recorded phone call, if you bother to listen.
It's true that states decide themselves if they want to issue alternate electors, like Hawaii in 1960. Now which state legislature, governor, attorney general, or any other higherup authorized Trump's alternate electors? None of them, that's why they're fradulent. Not a single state representative authorized Trump's electors, despite him lying about all the supposed states rescinding their certified electors during the Raffensperger call.
Do you count all campaign advertisement as "rigging an election"?
I think the attempts to disqualify Trump from the ballot on grounds of insurrection involved attempting to charge him with insurrection - which the courts struck down.
No, of course not. Where did I say anything about advertising?
Neither Colorado nor Maine brought charges for insurrection. How could they, it being a Federal crime?
Your only allegation of election rigging was about someone spreading or not spreading information. That’s what advertising is. Even if you think these informational maneuvers are violations of law, they really don’t seem like “rigging”. They’re comparable to what Russia did on behalf of Trump during the 2016 election, not to what Trump tried to do after the 2020 election.
Reread please. You missed the unconstitutional changes to election rules, the governmental interference in the news, and the mishandling of ballots.
This is not even remotely comparable. This is all looks and sounds like a complete farce.
Trump had tried to overturn an election on the false claims of fraud. Democrats had never ever done anything even remotely close.
Why draw a distinction between making fraudulent claims after the fact vs fabricating and suppressing evidence alike before an election to throw it?
Because one is free speech and the other is treason? Free speech isn't required to be good, but at least you can counter it with other speech (or in this case, other platforms). You can't really reverse in the same way someone overturning an election like Trump tried to do.
>Free speech isn't required to be good, but at least you can counter it with other speech (or in this case, other platforms).
Well...
1) I don't think it's accurate to refer to "government actors leaned on platform operators to censor other people saying X" as "free speech".
2) In practice, no, you can't actually counter such censorship with "other platforms" if all of the big platforms are in lockstep, because 90% of people are not actually *on* other platforms to hear you. See Scott's article (https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centralized-web/). Elon Musk buying Twitter ended this regime for real because Twitter already is a big platform... except that Biden's been harassing him ever since and Harris/Walz seem if anything less moderate.
This was more believable before a group of tech companies colluded in broad daylight to kill the fastest growing app/social media company (Parler). The claim that people used it to coordinator January 6 was a barest fig leaf for that effort, considering how Twitter had been effectively used by the likes of active terrorists including ISIS/Daesh for years.
Why make a distinction between two completely different things? Interesting question. But kinda expected from the post truth crowd.
One of these pro Trump commenters is not like the others
With respect, Scott's saying Trump is a uniquely bad individual to vote for president and he'd make a stand to vote against him because he personally tried to "attack enemy politicians and rig an election."
Coming back and saying Democrats 'in general' have done the same and therefore not vote for Harris seems quite different and is a much more sweeping claim. I mean, you could use this as an argument to always vote Republican in every election in the USA. At that point are you really 'taking a stand'?
Also just to nitpick one item on your list, uhh, what's especially bad about 'attempts to disqualify Trump from the ballot on grounds of insurrection'. Seems perfectly legal to me, certainly doesn't seem to have anything to do with rigging.
Like, back in the day, didn't Trump, among others, attempt to disqualify Obama on the grounds that he wasn't born in the USA, despite Obama never having been charged with immigration fraud? Was that somehow rigging too?
Oh yeah, I had forgotten about the fortification thing.
"Our shadow campaign fortified the election so the right candidate would win" doesn't sound like something you should be boasting about, but of course since it was against Literal Hitler all methods are legitimate, right?
https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-secret-history-of-the-shadow-campaign-part-1/
"In February 2021, Molly Ball of Time magazine published an article titled “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election” that took both sides of the aisle by storm. Depending on the reader’s perspective, the story was a tell-all confession or a story of epic heroism about a massive, multi-faceted, and secret campaign to “save” the 2020 election by helping President Joseph Biden win and defend his win from legal challenges by President Donald Trump and his allies. Now, as the 2024 election seems destined to be something like a rematch, it’s time to revisit the old article and see what the conspirators—or heroes, depending on one’s view—are doing now.
... Ms. Ball, undoubtedly aware of the opposite ways readers might interpret her article, concluded the introduction with the following lines:
That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream—a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures."
Wow, you Americans are so lucky the secret cabal is only out there to do good! They only work behind the scenes to change the bad laws that would prevent a clean sweep by the right candidate!
I don't understand how your epistemology is so fucked that you think somebody writing a flowery article about a "secret cabal" is in any way shape or form strong evidence that Democrats tried to steal an election, but Trump falsifying electoral votes and directing his AG to confiscate voting machines isn't. What is a single alleged crime that took place from that Time magazine piece?
All of which is to say, "It's okay when *we* do it".
No, it's to say that you have no object level facts that any fraud took place on behalf of the Democrats, and are instead so ideologically poisoned that you're reading tea leaves on the meta level by accusing Democrats of fraud because somebody wrote a Time piece using spooky language to characterize legal coordination between Democrat operatives during and mostly after election time.
You seem to be equating "literally called up the governor of a state and asked him to find more votes" with "said mean things about your opponent." As Scott put it, there are different levels to this sort of thing, and punishing open, blatantly illegal attempts to subvert democracy is much more important than punishing attempts to get an advantage legally-but-scummily.
(Also, all 2-3 assassination attempts (the third one it's debatable if he was actually an assassin or just a sovereign citizen who didn't understand gun laws) came from right-wingers, inasmuch as crazy assassins have coherent politics. It's hard to explain that as a product of comparing Trump to Hitler.)
I am equating no such things; I disagree with both characterizations of the events in question.
And I am astonished to hear somebody claim that the first two assassins were right-wingers. Crazy I’ll grant, but if everything they had read or heard for eight years told them that Biden was the Antichrist, do you really think Biden would not have been their target?
I could grudgingly forgive the Democrats if after the first attempt they had moderated their rhetoric, but no, they doubled down. That tells me it had the desired effect.
Why then did Trump appointed judges shoot all of those election fraud lawsuits down? The MAGAs couldnt make anything significant stick
I don’t know. But it would have been a service to the country to actually resolve these questions one way or the other, rather than sidestep them. We might not be having this argument if they had.
Well it was resolved. Trump supporters brought cases before Conservative judges and almost every single one was shot down due to lack of evidence.
If there really is evidence of significant voter fraud out there, you should be mad at the Trump faction for not being able to bring the required evidence in front of fairly friendly judges.
Or consider that maybe this evidence did not exist after all.
I believe there were still cases pending that were deemed moot after Congress met, and appeals for those dismissed for lack of standing. But that’s not germane to my main point, which is that the merits should have been resolved rather than sidestepped.
Propaganda is there everywhere, all the time. Yes, it's there with the Hunter Biden laptop story just like it was there with the Russians leaking DNC emails.
What makes Trump special is that he took steps to decertify actual election results.
Unfairly fighting in the information war isn't good but it simply doesn't measure up to what Trump tried.
https://www.factcheck.org/2023/08/what-trump-asked-of-pence/
I know that’s the description of events that the left prefers. Your opponents do not believe he was attempting to decertify actual election results, but rather attempting to use the last legal, Constitutional means to correct improprieties.
Your flat phraseology settles the matter for you, but will not convert somebody not already on your side.
Explain to me this "legal Constitutional means to correct improprieties"
How does it work?
The Constitution states that Congress counts the Electoral Votes. It puts that responsibility on the members of Congress rather than on some clerk with an adding machine because it is a vitally important operation. They are expected not only to do arithmetic but to certify to the nation that the numbers they are adding up were validly obtained and correctly reported.
Most of the time this certification process is trivial. Sometimes it is obviously contentious. During the years of and following the Civil War there were bona fide arguments about what the actual results of some state elections were, and the Congress stepped up to resolve them.
There were a number of discrepancies, as I have described, in the 2020 elections -- changes in the election rules that were made by minor officials rather than (as mandated by the Constitution) the state legislatures; weird and unprecedented suspensions in vote-counting in some swing districts, and resumption after Republican poll-watchers had left; bales of ballots that showed up with shaky provenances. Some of these led to litigation that was pending right up until January 6, and Republicans very properly put together slates of Electors who would cast their votes if the litigation went their way. Many of these problems are unsurprising considering the challenges of holding an election in the depths of a global pandemic, so it's also unsurprising that Congress in 2021 faced an unusually contentious task.
If the Congress had decided that it was necessary to wait a short time for these cases to be resolved, or that the issues in question merited recognizing the alternate slates outright, that is their job. They chose not to, and that too is their job. Because the Congress made the choice they did, Joe Biden won the election and was peacefully inaugurated on January 20. Had they made a different choice, Donald Trump would have won and would have been peacefully inaugurated. That's the way it works.
I'm not one of those that say Trump "really" won in 2020. But I don't see any impropriety in his attempts to plead his case, any more than I see impropriety in Gore's gamesmanship about recounts in 2000.
https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/why-do-i-think-there-was-fraud-in
https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/329614-election-crimes-were-detected
Neither of these posts even tries to link specific actions to Kamala Harris. Like you even say "maybe the Democratic Party was just better at taking advantage of the absentee voting rules"
Honestly of lot of stuff here just comes accross as conspiratorial to me.
"Despite nobody much liking Biden as a candidate, he received a record number of votes nationwide. There were 19 bellwether counties that voted for the winner in every presidential election from 1980 through 2016, but in 2020, 18 of the 19 voted for Trump. In all but one election since 1964, the candidate who won the Presidency saw his party gain seats in the House of Representatives. Not so in 2020: the Democrats lost House seats. Biden came up with just the votes he needed at just the right time. Republicans wondered how."
Come on man, how are statistics like that supposed to be convincing evidence of rigging? I just looked up that New York voted for the winner every election but one between 1880 and 1944... But then they voted for Dewey in a tight election in 48, something fishy I say, fraud.
Right-- I have nothing on Harris personally, or Clinton for that matter. That does't alter the fact that the election looks rigged-- by somebody, and it wasn't Trump.
I find the voting pattern in 2020 odd, and I haven't seen a good explanation except the one you and I both mentioned: that the Dems were just really good at targeting in that year. I am on the lookout for an explanation. I haven't seen one. Some professor ought to write an article on it-- it really is an interesting question as to what happened.
The first article says:
> One’s belief in whether Biden really won is rather like one’s belief in God: the evidence is insufficient for proof or disproof
This is uh, refreshingly frank, I guess. Usually if there's no evidence of a crime and no suspects, you do not assume a crime has taken place, but there's a certain logic to a religious person having *faith* in such a thing. It's also fair to think that if security was poor enough, the election should be repeated, but I wonder whether Mr. Rasmusen (Edit: just noticed that he is you) was outraged about the Supreme Court halting the recount in 2000 and declaring Bush the winner.
While he acts like it's easy to commit voting fraud (both in person and absentee, just with more fraud possible for absentee) I expect this to be untrue and therefore expect evidence of the claim. Surely election officials would notice that the same person voted twice, let alone 1000 times? You need a name on the ballot, and the name is checked against voter rolls, right? How is large-scale fraud supposed to go unnoticed?
And then in the later article he says, well, it *was* detected for 329,614 ballots in the country. I wasn't sure where that number came from at first, but after plugging some numbers in my calculator I think he is saying that “Non-matching signature” (the most common case), “No voter signature” and “Voter already voted in person” all count as attempts at fraud.
By coincidence, we recently asked one of my few friends to sign documents on our passport applications (they required someone outside the household to sign it for some reason). But multiple signatures were required and we didn't notice that our friend used quite different signatures in different places, which almost derailed the process after the application was submitted. My friend then explained to us that she doesn't have a consistent signature. Mr. Rasmusen is saying that 0.26% of all ballots had mismatching signatures which is "fraud at first look", and essentially says "even if 90% of those aren't *really* fraud that would leave 0.047% in the three categories combined which is still a *lot* of fraud". Um, okay, but (1) why assume a minimum of 10% were real fraud attempts, or that a fraudster's technique would *ever* be to leave the signature line blank? (2) 0.047% countrywide surely wouldn't swing the election, (3) all of this was detected which means none of the alleged fraud attempts succeeded.
So then he's like ahh, but sometimes they don't bother to compare signatures at all, or are lenient about matching them". Okay, but still, why should you actually believe large-scale fraud really happened? I mean, take me through the process. You are a ne'er-do-well who wants to vote 1000 times.
(1) How do you actually pull if off without being detected?
(2) How do you know that most of these undetected fraudsters voted for Biden?
And then he's like "I’d guess more like a million [were fraudulent]" and justifies this by linking to the first article, which explains how it's faith-based.
This is a sincere attempt to clarify your perspective:
Are these two translations the way you are thinking about the key claims
"attack enemy politicians" = "legal cases against Trump"
"Rig an election" = "early voting and mail in ballots?"
The legal cases against Trump are "attack enemy politicians".
Early voting is fine. Mail-in ballots are not by themselves rigging, but they make rigging much much easier. https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/cheating-with-absentee-ballots
The legal cases against Trump are the crimes he very obviously, blatantly, committed. He was convicted of the Stormy Daniels case and you can just read the indictments for the other cases. It's actually insane how you people mindfucked yourself into believing that the American court system can just be trivially suborned. I guess in that reading the most trustworthy person to take control of it is the guy who constantly talks about how he needs to crush the "enemy within" (his political opponents).
> He was convicted of the Stormy Daniels case and you can just read the indictments for the other cases.
You can. And if you don't know anything about the law, you might even end up coming away thinking that he did something wrong. But to anyone who knows what they're looking at, the entire thing is a joke.
The thing he was alleged to have done in the Stormy Daniels case *was not a crime.* It would have been laughed out of court had it not been a court run by a politicized judge, and it will never survive on appeal.
The Bragg persecution is even more laughable. Read the analyses by Andy McCarthy, a career prosecutor from SDNY (Southern District of New York, where the trial was held.) The trial was a farce from beginning to end, and contains at least half a dozen severe, obvious errors, any one of which is enough to completely overturn the case on appeal.
I actually believe in our court system. The thing he did was a crime, that's why he was convicted. You cannot convict people for things that aren't crimes.
If you don't believe in our court system, again, I don't understand why you want to put the guy who talks about locking up every single political opponent (or even people who didn't dicksuck him about his election denial claims) in charge of it.
> You cannot convict people for things that aren't crimes.
Oh, you sweet, summer child...
They say that the average American commits three felonies a day. (Yes, I understand the median would be a better measure, but this is the famous stat.) Of course he has committed SOME crime. The problem is the selective (and this case, obviously politically motivated) enforcement.
I still don't understand what exactly the crime was, I took away from it that he was convicted of paying a bribe out of the wrong bank account? That he should have claimed it as a campaign expense? I don't know, but I do see that nobody seems to have gone after Stormy Daniels to return the stolen money that was the proceeds of crime, so colour me unconvinced that this was the Crime of the Century.
https://gwern.net/modus - one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens.
You look at your court system doing all sorts of outrageous nonsense against Trump and you think: well, I'm not a lawyer, the judges know better, our court system is respectable, I don't understand how or why, but my own lying eyes are deceiving me probably.
Another man looks at this and thinks: well, that's it, the court system has been subverted, we can no longer trust it.
An interesting thing is that there doesn't seem to be an object level disagreement even. You agree which way the evidence points in each individual case. If I asked about more of them, like for example the novel legal theory that you don't have to give a person the right to any legal representation to judge them a traitor if you're not going to impose any penalties, and then another court can cite that judgment to remove them from ballots, again without any representation because this time they are not doing any judgment, you'd probably agree that that too is outrageous nonsense.
The only disagreement is that you think that there's not enough evidence yet to stop trusting the court system. But if you agree that you will probably change your opinion in the future if things continue to go the way they are doing, then why not change your opinion now?
Hmm...
I tend to think of the classified documents case as having merit. Other politicians who retained classified documents returned them when asked, Trump, not so much.
The other three look essentially purely politically motivated to me:
Stormy Daniels - basically mislabelling a payment - when the statute of limitations had run out. The legal theory used is more twisted than a pretzel.
The real estate valuation estimate thing - basically accused of being a realtor.
The Jan 6th - Yeah, he used inflammatory language, as if Biden and Harris don't use similarly inflammatory language against him. If Jan 6th had _really_ been intended as a coup, he would have told the rioters to arm themselves.
I would recommend actually reading the January 6 indictment. He did not just "use inflammatory language," he knowingly spread lies, put together false slates of electors, and attempted to pressure Mike Pence into throwing out the results of the 2020 elections.
I think the Mike Pence thing is the most blatant attempt to overturn an election I've ever seen. He wanted the vice president, a single man, to unilaterally choose to overturn the election, despite having no authority to do so by his own admission. If that's not a coup attempt I don't know what else to call it.
> You can. And if you don't know anything about the law, you might even end up coming away thinking that he did something wrong. But to anyone who knows what they're looking at, the entire thing is a joke.
Not really. The facts there were pretty clear. The conviction is sketchy, because it relies on a questionable legal framework to bypass the statute of limitations on the misdemeanor version of the law, so I suspect it might get overturned on appeal.
But "can't be prosecuted for a crime he clearly committed and that a jury determined he committed because of a procedural bar" is not the same as saying he did nothing wrong. He did something wrong and didn't get caught until the statute of limitations ran out.
Be civil. Seriously. This website has a good comment section, and civility is part of that (and more easily policed than stupidity).
>It's actually insane how you people mindfucked yourself into believing that the American court system can just be trivially suborned.
Have you heard of all-white juries in the Jim Crow South? The peremptory-strike process in jury selection actually makes it very easy to wipe out a minority from a jury, because knocking out a juror who's part of the minority will probably result in replacement with a member of the majority, but the other side knocking out a juror who's part of the majority will probably result in replacement with another member of the majority - and both sides get equal numbers of peremptory strikes.
And, well, Manhattan is 85% Democrat, and Trump is so incredibly polarising that most jurors would vote their party.
I'm not saying I like Trump (I don't), and I'm not saying all the cases against him are baseless (there's a case to answer for some of them). I am saying that I treated the Stormy Daniels conviction as a null update regarding Trump's character because the circumstances rendered the verdict nearly a foregone conclusion regardless of the facts of the case.
If you believe that Trump (or any other person) raped somebody in the changing room of a department store and got away with it, I have a bridge to sell you.
I have actually read quite a lot about sexual assault - it was one of my hobbyist interests in college, having read cover-to-cover multiple books on the subject, regularly going through Google Scholar on it, etc. The idea that somebody raped somebody else in a private location that was otherwise "public" is so insanely banal that your comment suggests nothing but your own ignorance.
e: For example, from Anna Salter's Predators:
> An offender may molest a child in a room with the door open and the other parent in the next room. He may molest a child with other children present who are witnesses and can confirm the child’s testimony. He may meet friends who have moved far away in a motel halfway between their two towns, play cards in one room, and take breaks to “check” on the kids sleeping in the next room, but instead molest them with the door open but out of sight. He may take a break from watching a ball game at a friend’s house to go to the bathroom but walk, instead, into a child’s room to molest her.
>All these are real cases of offenders who have been caught because their detection apprehension was too low. Every once in a while a parent walks in on one of the above scenes and cannot be convinced they didn’t see what they saw. But the sad fact is that for detection apprehension to be that low, the offender has to be successful at molesting children for many years.
This sounds a hell of a lot more crazy to me than raping somebody in a bathroom, changing room, or other semi-public location.
Do you have Trump Derangement Syndrome? Because there are very, very many "enemy politicians" under *any* definition of "enemy politicians", and this list of enemy politicians has very little overlap with the list of politicians who are in the middle of prosecution for crimes right now.
How many Republican members of Congress, or Republican governors, or Republican mayors, are currently being prosecuted? How many Democratic members of Congress, or Democratic governors, or Democratic mayors, are currently being prosecuted?
There is literally one person who is an "enemy" of Joe Biden who is being prosecuted right now, and it's not Hunter Biden, or Bob Menendez, or Eric Adams, all of whom *are* being prosecuted.
John Eastman was disbarred. Peter Navarro was jailed. Giuliani was disbarred and ordered to pay $150 million for defaming a Georgian election worker.
I forgot there were a few others like them. But do you claim they weren’t guilty? Criminals should be prosecuted even if they have enemies who are in power.
Depends if the laws are sufficiently broad and vague that everyone is technically guilty of something. The offences on which Trump has been actually convicted seem to have this flavor.
The Giuliani damages bill was, frankly, insane, but is just part of the general US issue of juries setting insanely high figures for punitive/exemplary damages. Navarro could have showed up and pleaded the fifth, so that doesn't look like unfair treatment (sure, it was a witch-hunt-y house committee, but that's more of an Americanism than a Democrat thing). Eastman being disbarred looks like partisan targeting,* but I haven't gone through the California Bar Court proceedings.
*It all comes down to the general issue of whether "conspiracy to attempt to incite Mike Pence to do a thing" is a treasonous plot, or a bunch of morons larping at being hardball political operators. I can see the argument that if he'd actually done it successfully then it's in coup territory, but I just can't take it seriously as it's so obviously the least serious parts of the Trump circus clowning around.
I have no objection in principle to early voting and mail-in ballots. It is clear that they open the door to fraud in a way that must be guarded against, and it is far from clear that they were adequately guarded against in 2020: Several states eliminated the requirement of comparing the signature on the envelope to the signature on the registration, to give one trivial example, and there were several stories about boxes of ballots appearing with inadequate provenance. Those stories might all have been false, but the system gives us no way of knowing. My biggest objection is that many states started doing mail-ins without being ready for it, and the decision was made in ways that did not involve the state legislature, which is the one firm requirement stated in the Constitution. In the light of Covid neither is surprising, but given the fact that all the worst anomalies happened in swing states that (in the end) favored Biden, it's hard not to conclude that the Democrats made sure not to let the crisis go to waste.
Continuing with the spirit of my original question, is it fair for me to summarize your answer as, "yes, 'rigged elections' = 'early voting and mail-in ballots'?"
Putting aside the specific claims you are making, I agree with you that there is something deeply troubling about all of this. Democracy clearly does not lead to choosing perfect policies or amazing leaders. At a minimum, though, it should deliver legitimacy. IF US elections are clouded with a fog of illegitimacy, then they are not delivering the most important and only expected benefit from the process.
When a large enough group of people don't believe the election result is legitimate, it creates a pressure that threatens to be relieved through violence.
I don't think either major party sees this risk or has taken the necessary steps to address it.
I don’t agree that that is a fair summary. Equating early ballots and mail-in voting with rigged elections is pessimistic and simplistic. It may be that there is no way to have the former without the latter, but I don’t believe it.
But I think I do agree with everything else you said. I have read lots of people who see the risk you point to and who have described ways to address it. (Most of these do involve drastically cutting back on early voting and mail-ins, which I think is overkill.) But I don’t recall ever hearing anybody you’d call a party bigwig address it.
Sorry, I'm not trying to put words in your mouth. My original intention was to expand on your statement:
>this is one of the main reasons I will be voting for Trump
by working out what "this" meant. I grabbed the two specific items in the Scott comment that you quoted and assumed "this" was pointing at those. I think I've misunderstood, but not necessarily gotten closer to the "this."
My guess is that you've already clarified in response to other comments, but I'm not sure that I will have time to go through and find the answer. Sorry that this attempt to start bridging between alternative realities didn't bear fruit.
I don't think the election was rigged (beyond the usual amount of fraud or stupidity) but the way it was handled, I also don't think there is a way to stand over the process as "absolutely 100% secure, no possibility at all of something going wrong".
Very small changes in voting patterns in places like Maricopa County flipped the state to Biden, and that's the kind of thing that on first glance looks very suspicious - this county voted red all the other times, but *this* time it's blue? - until you dig into it. But most people are not going to dig into every single strange-looking result, so the perception can legitimately be "this was fraud" and not "this was a small number of swing voters who did change their minds from last time, just enough to tip over the line".
Also the flip-flopping about voting machines: 2016 - the Russians hacked them to give Trump the victory! 2020 - impossible to hack so the result is impeccable! 2024 - looks like revving up the hacking story again in case Trump wins/loses:
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/12/hackers-vulnerabilities-voting-machines-elections-00173668
"Those discoveries come amid ongoing foreign and criminal targeting of U.S. elections. In 2016, Russian hackers both targeted the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and compromised voter registration databases in multiple U.S. states. It’s affecting this election cycle already, as POLITICO first reported Saturday that the presidential campaign of former President Donald Trump was hacked, a breach the campaign attributed to Iran.
While there’ve been no foreign cyberattacks taking wide swaths of voting machines offline on election day or evidence of hacks that affected results, the risk is always there."
> Also the flip-flopping about voting machines: 2016 - the Russians hacked them to give Trump the victory! 2020 - impossible to hack so the result is impeccable!
Do you have in mind any specific people who said both of those things explicitly? It's very easy to falsely perceive flipflopping just by not paying close attention to who said any specific thing and imagining everyone who disagrees with you as some sort of giant hivemind. And yes, I have been guilty of that as well - being careful is hard work. But that doesn't make it any less important.
I agree, we absolutely need elections we can trust. And, unfortunately, as a weird artifact of our two-party system, there's one party that has decided to officially oppose strengthening elections in basically every possible way. They've even decided it's a good idea to - uniquely among Western democracies - oppose _requiring an ID to vote_! I don't believe that Democrats are doing this because they're planning to commit systemic fraud, but I also suspect they think that any low-level fraud that occurs is likely to benefit them. (Otherwise, I don't understand why they would pay the political cost of loudly and proudly being against election integrity, rather than just having no official stance on matters like mail-in voting and voter ID.)
As a left-wing person? Because it's much easier to pass a requirement for voter ID than it is to simultaneously also pass a requirement to make acquiring that voter ID easy enough to ensure every citizen/voter who wants to get one can get one. The left is far more worried about voter disenfranchisement, a real historical thing that has happened to minority groups throughout our history quite often, than it is about voter fraud. And voter ID laws set by state legislatures are often one means of enacting voter disenfranchisement through careful selectivity of which methods of identification count and which don't. Do state university student IDs count? How expensive is the process to get an ID that counts? How much time does the process take? Are there readily available places within walking or bus distance of voters who may not own a car? We already have voter turnout manipulation with polling station placements and removals in many states. There are what we consider to be genuine and real threats to meaningful democracy already demonstrably occurring, and so we oppose the solution put forward to something which is not yet demonstrably a problem and could reinforce the problems we do see.
I would rather have an election where voter turnout in every state is improved by 100,000 voters and there end up being 10,000 fraudulent votes cast in every state than one in which we lose 100,000 voters in turnout and only prevent 10,000 fraudulent votes. The mathematics of which one is preferable seem patently obvious to me, personally, even in what I consider an egregiously extreme scenario that favors the idea of voter fraud being more of a problem to a degree I find farcical based on the evidence I have available to me.
I'm genuinely curious - what exactly would "demonstrate" to your satisfaction that it is a problem that _you do not have to prove who you are to vote_? To me this is at the level of needing a double-blind study to prove that parachutes save lives. As far as I know, no other democracy in the Western world is so weirdly stupid about this (sometimes they allow minor exceptions to ID requirements, but they're principled and limited).
I understand that disenfranchisement is the party line, but as you said yourself, the other solution to the problem is to make it easier to get ID. There was no reason Democrats had to hitch their wagon to the dumber solution.
I do appreciate your honesty about your fraud tolerance. I think I have a fundamental disagreement with you there. I would absolutely prefer a system with zero fraud, where sometimes people don't manage to vote because it's not as convenient as they'd like. When issues are truly important (ie, democracy is on the line because Trump is Hitler^WChavez), people will overcome minor inconveniences to vote, and the system still works. But if people can't trust that the results of an election are legitimate, everything starts to break down. All Trump's sore losing in 2020 would have convinced far fewer people, and caused much less trouble, if Democrats weren't actively taking the position that election security isn't "demonstrably a problem".
>They've even decided it's a good idea to - uniquely among Western democracies - oppose _requiring an ID to vote_!
Why do I see this repeated so often? Canada doesn't require an ID to vote. Having someone vouch for your identity is the legal requirement.
I'm Canadian, FYI. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_identification_laws#Federal_elections
The only exception to having an ID is:
"Take an oath and have an elector who knows the voter vouch for them (both of whom must make a sworn statement). This person must have authorized identification and their name must appear on the list of electors in the same polling division as the voter. This person can only vouch for one person and the person who is vouched for cannot vouch for another elector."
As you can see, the exception is strict, and careful to avoid the potential for abuse. If you intended to make some point that Canada's voting security is just as lackadaisical as the non-voter-ID states, well, you're flatly wrong.
Mostly, I agree with you, though:
(0) It probably won't surprise you that some D's think working for better voting security would be repurposed to support criticism of the 2020 POTUS result
(1) I encourage you to read about the disparate impact of ID availability (as mentioned by another respondent)
(2) my understanding is that R's oppose a national ID solution (for reasons, but this helps illustrate that the issue has nuance that may lurk beneath the surface)
(3) a sincere effort from both parties to make voting accessible and secure seems like an extremely reasonable ask.
I'd note that I don't agree with the respondent below about the threshold of election fraud they would tolerate for the extra participation. That's because (a) I don't think we are nearly so close to the technical efficient frontier that those trade-offs are necessary and (b) many factors influence legitimacy and I think that amount of fraud would blow-up the system. Part of my reasoning for (b) is that the structure of POTUS elections already makes the vast majority of voters feel disenfranchised, so the baseline level of feeling legitimate is already low, and the overall result is sensitive to small numbers of votes in a small number of places.
Finally, on that point (a) about the efficient frontier. I originally left out the word "technical" and then realized that we might be at the efficient frontier on what is politically/practically achievable.
I'm curious: when you read that ID access and voter suppression is a concern, did you update your model of the world? Note: this is a sincere question and I'm not making an implied claim that you did not update.
> I'm curious: when you read that ID access and voter suppression is a concern, did you update your model of the world? Note: this is a sincere question and I'm not making an implied claim that you did not update.
Well, no. It wasn't new information, of course. It's basically impossible to navigate society without hearing each and every left-wing argument 100 times. I probably should have been clear that I knew the official party line about "disenfranchisement" and considered it at the level of most political tropes: silly, but virtuous-sounding enough to be yelled at rallies without thinking about it too hard. For one thing, it stretches the definition of "disenfranchisement" to an almost absurd extent - would it be "disenfranchisement" if I have to cross the street to vote, and I'm too lazy? Putting an absolutely _trivial_ step in front of voting, that has a _very good_ justification for existing, is not racism. There were real examples of disenfranchisement in the past, and they do not resemble modern voter ID laws.
I had thought that serious people were not serious about that justification. However, I'll say that I did update (slightly) because @Rolepgeek seems both smart and sincere about it.
> I have no objection in principle to early voting and mail-in ballots. It is clear that they open the door to fraud in a way that must be guarded against
Why is that, in and of itself, not sufficient grounds for objection-in-principle?
And if it's not, here's another clear objection: In addition to integrity/fraud problems, they open the door to vote-security problems as well. Just look at the multiple cases we've seen in the last few days of ballot drop boxes being firebombed by Antifa terrorists, destroying hundreds of ballots.
All true. But I’m techy enough to believe that it’s a solvable problem.
In my Substack I suggest a way to improve absentee ballot procedures to reduce the ease of cheating somewhat, but it's an intractable problem, because it makes vote-buying too easy. That's why most countries in the world don't allow it, or allow it only for citizens who are abroad. https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/cheating-with-absentee-ballots
In 2020, I rather liked the convenience of mail-in voting. But, AFAIK, it has one unsolvable problem. Since the vote is cast in a home, away from a voting booth with a poll worker observing who is in the voting booth, one can never know that the vote wasn't coerced.
Good idea. We'll make the ballots out of asbestos.
>Those stories might all have been false, but the system gives us no way of knowing.
The system gives you plenty of ways of knowing. Georgia had two state recounts and an internal audit. There was video footage released the day of Rudy Giuliani lying about Ruby Freeman and Shay Moss running multiple ballots, bringing out hidden suitcases, being professional fraudsters, and dozens of news sources reporting on it. Pennsylvania had recounts in multiple contested counties. Any and every audit of Dominion and Smartmatic voting machines showed they were more accurate than hand counted ballots. There is an infinite amount of evidence that our elections are safe and secure and the leading proponents of the negation of that proposition are literally all liars, some of which like Giuliani admitted to lying in court or Powell saying she wasn't making statements of fact.
Now if only you could back up your stance by pointing to the Democrats actually trying to rig the election, then you might have a point.
Chase Oliver supports none of that; libertarianism is liberalism taken to logical extreme. A vote for Trump in a solidly Dem state has no effect, so why not make a truly pro-freedom statement?
I am pretty confused by this, assuming "attacking enemy politicians and rigging an election" is mostly around January 6th.
I am not American but would have voted for Trump in 2016 - like explained in this post I strongly subscribed to the "furniture must be smashed in the Capital" view so I just wanted to vote for whoever was anti-establishment (naive "fuck the system" and all that).
But any and all support I could possibly have had for Trump completely died on January 6th. What is the take on these events that someone smart can take that is pro-Trump? I have tried as a mental exercise and I just cant find it. Maybe my Overton window needs expanding but the more reasonable answer just seems to be you cant be pro-democracy, pro-freedom, and pro-liberalism if you also believe January 6th happened the way that virtually all evidence seems to suggest it happened.
Look around this thread. There are multiple explanations.
If you want a more concentrated take, there's a thread on DataSecretsLox titled "Change Your Mind: Trump's Behaviors on Jan 6 are Sufficient Reason to Vote for Kamala", where someone makes a college effort to present the other side, and gets a lot of counter-responses. There's not much one can do to summarize it, unfortunately, given the number of charges made against Trump, but my attempt at a gist is that many of the accusations against Trump are for things he didn't actually do, or are theoretically possible but incompatible with what we know of his public face; there are a few irregularities that were conspicuously not investigated by the other side; and while there are some things one could lay at Trump's feet, they're relatively minor and also the sort of thing one could lay at the feet of anyone else.
I doubt I agree with all of the counter responses (or the OP), but it's a pretty long thread, so anything you have a question about is likely to have been mentioned there by now, including a general counternarrative.
I appreciate the response and the pointer on where to learn more, but if I go to https://www.datasecretslox.com/ I cannot find "Change Your Mind: Trump's Behaviors on Jan 6 are Sufficient Reason to Vote for Kamala"
"Many of the accusations against Trump are for things he didn't actually do... and while there are some things one could lay at Trump's feet, they're relatively minor and also the sort of thing one could lay at the feet of anyone else. "
Ok, well which are false/minor from this list below - that as far as I can tell actually happened? Surely there has to be some go-to pro-republican article/website or something somewhere that open-minded intellectually rigorous people tend to be recommended to read if these are all demonstrably false/minor?
1. Trump had knowledge that he lost the 2020 election but spread misinformation to the American public and made false statements claiming significant voter fraud led to his defeat;
2. Trump planned to remove and replace the Attorney General and Justice Department officials in an effort to force the DOJ to support false allegations of election fraud;
3. Trump pressured Vice President Pence to refuse certified electoral votes in the official count on January 6, in violation of the U.S. Constitution;
4. Trump pressured state lawmakers and election officials to alter election results in his favor;
5. Trump's legal team and associates directed Republicans in seven states to produce and send fake "alternate" electoral slates to Congress and the National Archives;
6. Trump summoned and assembled a destructive mob in Washington and sent them to march on the U.S. Capitol; and
7. Trump ignored multiple requests to speak out in real time against the mob violence, refused to instruct his supporters to disband, and failed to take any immediate actions to halt attacks on the Capitol.
Despite the fact that this thread in general seems to generate more heat than light and I'm sorry I started it, I was about to take you seriously and put together a summary. This list makes me think you are trolling; each item is phrased in such a way as to put it in the worst possible light. The link Paul Brinkley cites is https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,12502.0.html.
But for the record:
1. Trump believed that he had won the election and publicized that belief in an effort to correct for what he saw as fraud. Which statement is correct? Neither you nor I can read his mind.
2. "Planned to remove and replace"; "false allegations". Did he in fact remove and replace? What if the allegations were true? Do you know? Complaining about "planned to" is pretty weak sauce.
3. Trump argued strongly for Pence to take actions that Trump and Trump's lawyers believed were unusual, but nevertheless both legal and arguably Constitutional. That was his right. Pence chose not to take those actions. That was *his* right. I discussed this at greater length earlier in this thread (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-endorses-harris-oliver-or-stein/comment/74940194)
4. Trump believed there had been counting errors or perhaps even malfeasance in Georgia, and he requested officials there to investigate. What "pressure" was he even in a position to apply? Do you imagine he was about to send troops, or a cruise missile?
5. Alternate slates of electors is the normal way to deal with contested votes.
6. Trump held a rally. At its end, he requested the attendees to "peacefully and patriotically" march to the Capitol to make their feelings known. He did not advocate violence. There were a few troublemakers like Ray Epps who were waiting there even before Trump started his speech, and directed the arriving protesters to enter the Capitol, after removing the signs and obstacles that would have made it clear this was impermissible; there are reasons to suspect that Epps and his compatriots were Feds trying to incite violence. They were remarkably unsuccessful; the protesters lined up and were admitted to the building by Capitol guards who held the door for them. Video of the event mostly shows people wandering around, sightseeing, while guards stood by to make sure nothing untoward happened.
Protests at the Capitol are not rare occurrences. This one got very slightly out of hand (or was pushed) but neither you nor I have any reason to believe Trump planned for it to do so.
7. Trump did speak out, urging people to remain peaceful. And why wouldn't he? His plan was to convince the Congress to act, in their Constitutional capacity as certifier of the vote counts. It would have been stupid to muddy the waters with violence. You may say he waited too long, but Monday morning quarterbacks are seldom convincing.
The list was simply copied verbatim from Wikipedia. Sorry, I wanted to change them to something that are more in line with what I actually believe. But I honestly got overwhelmed by the prospect and thought it was good enough to start a good faith discussion.
1. (point 1 is again verbatim from Wikipedia):
Many in Trump's inner circle informed the president he had lost and there was no evidence of widespread fraud. According to several video clips of prior testimony shown by the committee:
1.1 A senior adviser to the Trump campaign, Jason Miller, testified that Trump was internally advised he had lost the election. According to Miller, the campaign's top data aide, Matt Oczkowski, told Trump very shortly after the election "in pretty blunt terms, that he was going to lose".
1.2 Trump campaign lawyer Alex Cannon testified he had spoken to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in November 2020 soon after the election and told Meadows there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud. According to Cannon, Meadows replied: "So there's no there there."
1.3 According to his testimony, attorney general Bill Barr "said that Trump’s claims of voter fraud were 'bullshit'".
1.4 Ivanka Trump said she "accepted" Barr's assessment.
To me with all this you start with "he knows he lost" and if there is strong evidence to the contrary we update. It seems silly to be neutral "we cant read his mind." That's infantilizing. Trump isn't a child. He had all the evidence presented to him and so many in his circle telling him he had lost and he still decided to go against it all and spread "alternative facts" to his constituents.
There was no "I commit to a peaceful transfer of power but I must get to the bottom of what I believe are irregularities as is my right." No it was just "The election has been stolen! Rile up your emotions!" or to quote him directly "This is going to escalate dramatically. This is a very dangerous moment in our history. ... The fact that our country is being stolen. A coup is taking place in front of our eyes, and the public can't take this anymore."
2.
Last I checked planning to overthrow the results of a democratic election is pretty fucking bad even if you didn't succeed. And worst when the president does it. I'm kinda like weirded out you don't think that's a big deal. Wouldn't you think it a big deal if you found out Kamala planned to overthrow the election results even if she didn't succeed? Would you tell anyone she only "planning to" is weak sauce?
- On December 14, two weeks after Barr stated there was no evidence of significant election fraud, Trump announced that Barr would be leaving as attorney general by Christmas.
I'm a "take people at their word" kinda guy.
Particulars on this point I am not interested in. I should not have copy-pasted this point. The main crux is just that he clearly pressured the hell out of so many lawmakers. If Harris had done the same - even if she *actually* believed her election was stolen - it would be just as appalling. Same goes for Trump. i.e. See points 3-4.
3.
- In late December, Pence called former vice president Dan Quayle for advice, and Quayle told him (according to reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa): "Mike, you have no flexibility on this. None. Zero. ... I do know the position you're in. I also know what the law is. ... You have no power."
- Although the fourth Wednesday had passed, Trump still believed that Pence had the authority to reject electoral votes, and kept asking him to do so; however, over lunch on January 5, Pence informed Trump that he did not believe he had any such authority.
- Attorney John Eastman incorrectly told Pence in a January 5 Oval Office meeting that Pence had the constitutional authority to block the certification, which Trump reportedly urged Pence to consider.
- By January 5, Trump was continuing to assert that Pence had unilateral power to throw out states' official electoral certificates on grounds of fraud.
- In March, when ABC News' Jonathan Karl asked Trump if he was worried about Pence while the crowd was chanting, Trump defended the crowd, saying they were "very angry" and that it was "common sense" that they would want to stop Congress from certifying the election result. (you know after the whole "hang Mike Pence" stuff)
- Trump released a statement asserting, falsely, that Pence did have such power: "Unfortunately, he didn't exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!" and "they now want to take that right away".
- Pence: "President Trump is wrong. ... Under the Constitution, I had no right to change the outcome of our election."
Your quote:
"""
I'm not one of those that say Trump "really" won in 2020. But I don't see any impropriety in his attempts to plead his case, any more than I see impropriety in Gore's gamesmanship about recounts in 2000.
"""
Maybe I just don't know what the 2000s were like. Did Gore really pressure anyone as hard as Trump clearly deliberately pressured Pence? Is there anyone like Pence in the Gore story that did a complete 180 and was appalled by Gore and no longer endorses him?
4. Same as with the disinformation he spreads. He knows how much power he has wielding his base. Here are a few republican remarks:
- She [Kim Ward] stated that Republican leaders were expected to support Trump's claims and if she had announced opposition to the letter, "I'd get my house bombed tonight"
- The day the suit was filed, Trump warned Georgia attorney general Chris Carr to not rally other Republican officials in opposition to the suit
- After Georgia had twice recounted and twice certified its results, Republican secretary of state Brad Raffensperger received death threats. He was pressured to resign by others in his party, including the state's two senators.
- Trump called the investigations chief in the Georgia Secretary of State's office, who was then investigating allegations of mail ballot fraud, and urged the official to "find the fraud"
- Trump blocked government officials from cooperating in the presidential transition to Joe Biden.
- He repeatedly urged Georgia Governor Brian Kemp to convene a special session of the legislature to overturn Biden's certified victory in the state, and he made a similar plea to the Pennsylvania Speaker of the House.
- In an early January 2021 phone call, he pressed the Georgia secretary of state to "find" the 11,780 votes needed to secure his victory in the state
That last one was a particular holy shit for me. Would help a lot if that one was debunked thoroughly...
Anyway, these are not the actions of a truthseeker whose goal is the truth regardless of whether the truth is there is or is not fraud. These are the actions of someone that has an end-goal goal regardless of the truth.
It's not like he was trying to talk to fellow republicans and have them explain to him how things can "look weird" but still be likely he lost.
5. Is it now? Again, Wikipedia:
"The intent of the scheme was to pass the fraudulent certificates to then-vice president Mike Pence in the hope he would count them, rather than the authentic certificates, and thus overturn Joe Biden's victory. This scheme was defended by a fringe legal theory developed by Trump attorneys Kenneth Chesebro and John Eastman, detailed in the Eastman memos, which claimed a vice president has the constitutional discretion to swap official electors with an alternate slate during the certification process, thus changing the outcome of the electoral college vote and the overall winner of the presidential race. The scheme came to be known as the Pence Card. By June 2024, dozens of Republican state officials and Trump associates had been indicted in four states for their alleged involvement... According to testimony Trump was aware of the fake electors scheme, and knew that Eastman's plan for Pence to obstruct the certification of electoral votes was a violation of the Electoral Count Act."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_memos
This doesn't seem like a "normal way to deal with contested votes." Granted there seem to be weird loopholes to make it legal, but seems pretty damn fringe and done in bad faith. i.e. this is not a tactic someone who believes the election was stolen would use. This is the tactic of someone who desperately wants to stay in power at all cost would use.
Also, this takes us back to "there was clearly a concerted plan" from point 2.
6.
"there are reasons to suspect that Epps and his compatriots were Feds trying to incite violence"
I presume you aren't going to drop a bombshell like that without evidence?
"""
the protesters lined up and were admitted to the building by Capitol guards who held the door for them. Video of the event mostly shows people wandering around, sightseeing, while guards stood by to make sure nothing untoward happened.
"""
What the actual fuck? Did you like watch ANY of the video footage? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:January_6_select_committee_new_footage.webm
Police were fucking knocked out blood over their head. And if there is to be any conspiracy theorizing it should probably start with why there was so little police support at the Capital that day - something the current government in power during the riot (Trump) had a say over.
Haven't looked into this myself so don't mean to insinuate anything. But it seems a totally fair question to ask.
""""
Protests at the Capitol are not rare occurrences. This one got very *slightly* out of hand
"""
Can you point to any protest in the Capital that is similarly violent (at least at the level of police being knocked out and suicide-level trauma) that the media considers only considers getting "slightly" out of hand? Like if you can find something similar that was some pro-leftist riot at the Capital where police committed suicide after from the trauma sustained that would help your claim that this was a normal-level thing to happen in the American Capital.
If not, what I am left with is something that fully looks like a concerted effort by Trump to use a mob to pressure the government to get what he wants. I mean hell, he resisted sending in the National Guard and at the rally said he would *never* concede the election. On social media, Trump was suggesting that his supporters had the power to prevent Biden from taking office and One of his tweets, posted on January 6, 2021, at 5:43 a.m., was "Get smart Republicans. FIGHT."
Seriously, what has to be true about the events that unfolded that we must definitively conclude that Trump was using the mob to pressure Pence to overturn the election? What is missing or has to be different?
What about what happened *has* to be different that point 6 is a very reasonable conclusion given all the evidence we have? Tell me what we need to find that you would change your mind. And then commit to changing your mind if we do find it. I am happy to do the same for the reverse. I have already noted some cruxes earlier.
Some other quotes at his rally:
- As to counting Biden's electoral votes, Trump said, "We can't let that happen" and suggested Biden would be an "illegitimate president".
- 'Something's wrong here. Something's really wrong. [It] can't have happened.' And we fight. We fight like Hell and if you don't fight like Hell, you're not going to have a country anymore".
- "going to the Capitol and we're going to try and give [Republicans] the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country"
- "you'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated"
- He called upon his supporters to "fight much harder" against "bad people"; told the crowd that "you are allowed to go by very different rules"; said that his supporters were "not going to take it any longer"
Let's assume Trump has many lawyers on his side that can tell him what he can and cant say if he wanted to rile up a mob. Isn't everything he said and did consistent with what someone smart and careful would do to try and deliberately rile up a mob without getting caught?
7.
Yea but that was after a ton of pressure from his aides. It was only after being pressured by his cabinet, the threat of removal, and many resignations. I forgot which one but on the phone one of his aides even had to say "who do you think you are?" in disbelief when telling Trump he has to end the riot and things are getting out of hand. Because Trump's response was basically something like "well you have to find a way to make this work." I don't like this memory being tenuous so I'll be sure to link evidence to it if I can find the call again (otherwise I'll retract and point out if I find it was a lie)
He used the word "fight" 20 times and the word "peacefully" once in his entire rally.
For me the waiting too long to act isn't nearly as damning as how much damn pressure was needed to get him to talk down the rioters.
There was also the whole trying to seize voting machines thing. Which just by itself is damning.
Ah yes, once again if a Democrat will be elected, it'll be "on the bold platform of not being Donald Trump". The wrong lizard musn't get in.
I mean, I basically agree with this. I think it's a dumb situation to be in, but I blame the Republicans who nominated Trump. Yes, if you nominate a bad enough guy, you can force voters to vote for the other party's crappy candidate just to avoid him. That's not a criticism of the voters' decision algorithm, that's a criticism of the nomination process.
How much effort did the Democrats put in to making sure their opponent would be Trump, however?
I think not much? If parties are that good at hacking other parties' nomination process, the GOP should have made the Dems stick with Biden.
It's not easy for the Republicans, just the Democrats. Back in 2016, the propaganda press gave Trump lots and lots of free publicity, so he could win the primaries.
What's probably not intentional, but still true, is that in 2019 the Democrats, controlling various government units, started criminal cases and lawsuits against Trump, to his considerable benefit as far as getting the nomination went, because of the sympathy vote.
>Back in 2016, the propaganda press gave Trump lots and lots of free publicity, so he could win the primaries.
Was this a concerted effort or just failing businesses chasing ratings? If anything, their "mea culpa" from that situation made them intolerable during Trump's term.
Not a concerted effort, I think. Trump was getting big ratings for them and they followed that incentive gradient, which led in part to his election. They should have ignored him, should have went "huh, interesting, Trump's running again" and moved on, and maybe none of this would ever have happened.
Maybe. There are a lot of other factors for Trump's 2016 win.
It's not even a speculation: https://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/the-hillary-clinton-campaign-intentionally-created-donald-trump-with-its-pied-piper-strategy/
I don't think a single democrat I know wouldn't instantly push a button to replace Trump with McCain, or Romney, or Liz Cheney. Trump running is a nightmare opponent for them.
That sounds plausible, but with enough time, you can probably Dutch book them: pick a candidate, let them call him a Nazi fascist racist etc., work themselves into a frenzy, and then offer them the option to replace him with someone else. Then they call HIM a Nazi fascist racist, and so on.
I don't think most of the "free publicity" in 2016 was intended to make Trump the candidate. It was mostly because he was often outrageous and controversial, which pulls in eyeballs. And I don't think liberals expected the unending torrent of negative coverage to help him. David Shor was on the rationally speaking podcast talking about this a while ago, and most Democrat campaigners were wildly wrong about what sort of ads would help persuade swing voters that year.
Quite possible. He made good copy.
"The Democrats prosecuted Trump not because they wanted him to be punished but because they wanted to ensure he would be re-nominated in 2020" is an absolutely galaxy-brained take.
In 2016 Hillary preferred Trump, thinking he'd be easy to best. That doesn't make Trump their fault, but it is an irony.
It's like, if you will, Israel supporting Hamas way back because they figured they were so outrageous that they could be leveraged to work against the real, concrete villain, the PLO.
Way back, Israel supported Fatah against Hamas (during the civil war in Gaza, 2006). Are you referring to even before that?
Yea like the 80s or 90s? I'm not super knowledgeable here.
Gotcha. I don't know much about Hamas pre-2006 either
I assumed this was about this: https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/
<quote>In 2016 Hillary preferred Trump, thinking he'd be easy to best. That doesn't make Trump their fault, but it is an irony.</quote>
It's the monkey paw wish
LOL! Many Thanks!
A better analogy might be the USA arming and supporting the Taliban against the Russians in Afghanistan, then in the end the Taliban became *their* problem to deal with.
I accepted this argument in 2016, and think it was largely (if not majority) true, but a lot of the "let's get the GOP to nominate Trump, then we'll win" doofus really learned a lesson.
I'm not sure I'm following the implied argument here.
Suppose your threat model is "Democrats can effectively choose the nominees of both the Democrats and the Republicans". Then the way you should act is...what? Vote for the Republican candidate (that the Democrats selected)?
Personally I'm voting third party.
Where are the Yang Gang? Why are they all keeping silent? Surely now is the time that cometh the hour, cometh the man!
Yang would have been nice, but we didn't get Yang, and I don't care for any of the jokers we did get. Between the two choices who have a chance, I vaguely prefer Trump, but that's mostly because I want the Democratic party to be a real political party again and so I want them to fail miserably, rather than having a legitimate preference for the man himself.
Also if Trump has his second term we never have to hear about him again.
Good comment!
The model isn't quite that, or you're right. Rather, it's: The Democrats can influence who the Republican nominee is, to be either someone they like more (Jeb Bush) or someone they like less (Trump), but not somebody ideal (Bernie Sanders). If they help Jeb, though, they lose in the general election, and Jeb is almost as bad as Trump (or maybe even worse, since Jeb would be mor effective in office).
I think the Democrats really dodged a bullet, twice, when Cruz and DeSantis lost the nomination. Their rhetoric is milder, but those two know how to fight a bureaucracy and win.
None?
~all evil is downstream of our voting systems
electoral college bad
choose-one bad (give us STAR voting or, more palatably, Approval Top-Two Jungle Primaries)
I think replacing the electoral college with sortition would also help.
Any kind of cardinal voting system please! I'll even take approval voting if I have to!
My preferred ones though are quadratic, score, STAR, or perhaps even liquid democracy if I'm feeling fancy.
Why shouldn't Republican states support the "popular vote" thing, too?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
I remember very well Trump saying back then that yes, he didn't win the popular vote, but he didn't campaign for that; he could have won the popular vote if he'd had to, in fact, it would have been easier.
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/04/26/trump-electoral-college-popular-vote-555148
So why shouldn't Texas join the National Popular Vote compact?
What kind of Republican would you ever vote for? Any actual names, if the democrats started to become more authoritarian
Could you list some current “Republicans” who aren’t in the Trump cult?
Romney, McCain, Howard Baker, Manchin (lol)… hell, even hippie Goldwater today.
What does "being in the Trump cult" mean?
There were a whole bunch of primary candidates this time around, would any one of them do?
A perfect example of a strawman.
This is called a "party switch." What used to be the Democratic Party before June 28 became the Republican Party of today.
Since when was the Democratic Party line ever "Kamala Harris is absolutely useless"? Not to mention that there was a lot of dissent against Biden between the debate and him stepping down...
Whole “bunch” who all got less than 1% besides today’s man-hating Nikki?
Ok, you got me - Doug Burgum. I’ll write him in if you do the same for Jason Palmer.
It's not a question of whether the Republicans would vote for one of them, but whether someone currently voting for Harris or another Democrat if the Democrats became "too authoritarian." If Democrats will not support any Republicans even if the Democrats are acting as authoritarians, then the argument that we should vote for Harris because "Trump is authoritarian" doesn't mean much.
I’m not American but I could name a few - schwarzenegger is a recent obvious example.
Larry Hogan, Charlie Baker, Phil Scott, maybe Spencer Cox. I probably wouldn’t vote for Brian Kemp but if he won I wouldn’t be especially upset about it.
None of those would have won a Republican primary in 1980-today. None would have gotten even if you magicked away the winner. High probability of them failing even if you did it to the top 3. Significant even if you removed the top 5.
Kemp could win in some of the 3/5 scenarios. But you still said you wouldnt vote for him. So your opinion is kinda moot. Its like a Republican saying they wouldn't vote for Joe Manchin but wouldn't be terribly upset if he ended as president.
A *federal* primary, you mean? But that just brings us full circle - I'm willing to vote for a Republican and have in fact voted for one of the names listed - and he won! The Republican primary process is such that they'd never pass it to the presidential general, sure, but that doesn't make *me* more of a partisan.
As someone who would not have voted for a Republican presidential candidate in the last 30 years, McCain seemed kind of okay to me, just really hard to vote for because I hated Bush and Obama's speeches were so good. But ~last year I heard McCain talking off-the-cuff about the Ukraine war in 2014, and everything he said precisely matched my own understanding of Ukraine-in-2014 (which I mostly learned about in 2022) so I went away very impressed, especially after these many years of Orange Man, and I really wish he hadn't died.
Romney was more suspicious to me rather than clearly bad, and his vote to impeach Trump really does him credit. So I'd vote Romney if the Democrat was particularly bad. In a Romney-Hillary matchup, I think I could at least stay home on election day without remorse.
Since Schwarzenegger ran as Republican I would've been biased against at the time, but I recently saw he's actually the leader of a climate and environmental action group which makes me go "oh I guess I like you now", and I listened to one of his speeches for it and it was quite good―and pragmatic, a common virtue of Republicans. No native American invited to give a prayer, no irrational worries about all the places microplastics have been located, +1 Arnold.
You can also blame the 8 republicans who agreed he was to blame for Jan 6, but failed to vote to convict because they said “he was no longer president so it doesn’t matter.”
Those are the cowards who could have protected their own party from him but didn’t, who gave in to fears of death threats to their family and mob threats.
With those 8 votes you’d have hit the supermajority needed to convict at 66/100
The supermajority needed to convict is 67/100 and there were 57 votes for conviction.
Thanks, I must’ve wrong somewhere. I’ll do some research. Appreciate the correction
I think this heuristic is basically a good analog to what most people are choosing this election. People either are voting:
1) on the bold platform of not being Donald Trump OR
2) on the bold platform of not being a democrat
People choose which heuristic to use based on whether they think democrats OR Trump has the highest chance of ending American civilization as we know it.
IMO one might as well flip a coin, but with a slight edge towards democrats edging the chance higher.
The options I see are trump turning USA into some authoritarian South American-like country, or democrats turning us into a slowly dying and useless EU.
Authoritarian countries are worse now, but I suspect EU-like ideals will lead to an eventual total decay of the west without USA to prop it up, eventually being worse.
At the end of the day this decision on the coin flip probably comes down to who one associates with. On the internet I associate with a combo of people, but IRL I associate with rural blue-collar people who I love and respect. Group-think leads to One Obvious Answer, so fuck it I’ll go with it.
I can’t wait to listen in to the results via satellite radio from my hunting camp in national forest where there’s no cell service/internet.
Yeah. Basically "the one pro-Trump argument that genuinely bothers me" from the post, right? I definitely agree with you, including that the worst case with the democrats is probably worse. I'm going with a simple cautious heuristic, though: avoid any short-term disasters. The democrats are just going to keep making things gradually worse. Trump could plausibly make things suddenly greatly worse.
Ah strategic voting, the quickest way to make your vote meaningless. If nothing Trump could do would keep you from voting for him, your vote doesn't matter ... to him. Same with Harris. This is why campaign promises get broken, because your revealed preference is that you don't care whether they actually govern after they get into office.
Contrast this with, say, a vote for Stein or Oliver in a suburb of Philadelphia (assuming Stein/Oliver earned your vote). If Harris wins, her staff will want to win the next election by shoring up support. They will notice that they can get XX,000 voters in certain suburbs of swing state cities if they pursue policies these voters care about. So in the next 4 years, they're going to start governing in a way that they hope will persuade these voters. If Trump wins, his team will make some of the same calculations, ensuring some policy proposals from persuadable voters are incorporated into the next administration to shore up support.
Meanwhile, if you're not a persuadable voter, but are going to vote for "the other candidate" no matter what, there's no reason for a politician to change the way they govern in order to earn your vote next time. They got it without having to earn it.
IMO this was one of Douglas Adams's worst takes. If a randomly chosen ordinary "non-lizard" American magically got a major party nomination, they would likely be crushed in the election, because they wouldn't have anywhere near the star quality of their opponent. Voters largely (and mostly correctly) prefer typical politicians, because they are more charismatic, more competent, and smarter than average people.
smarter than average people [citation needed].
https://www.nber.org/papers/w23120 "[Swedish] politicians are on average significantly smarter and better leaders than the population they represent."
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4166034 "We document that electoral candidates nominated by political parties fare better than the office-eligible population in multi-dimensional tests of cognitive and non-cognitive ability conducted by the Finnish Defense Forces. The politicians elected by voters demonstrate even higher levels of ability."
It's also the case that politicians generally have much higher education than the average person, and educational attainment is strongly correlated with intelligence.
Does this apply to Swedish local politicians, or to national politicians only? Because I've seen local guys up close and I'm not convinced they are that much smarter, better, stronger, faster, we can rebuild him, we have the technology - sorry, where was I going?
Yeah, there's not a whole heap to choose between Local Politician and Average Citizen.
MPs do best but local politicians are also substantially better than the average population, especially mayors. See the figure in section 8 in the paper (p. 29 or 31).
You might be confusing smarter and better.
Yes, but not all smart/competent/charismatic people are lizards!
Being smart/competent/charismatic is needed to succeed with general voters, sure. But the lizard analogy is also pointing at worse traits needed to succeed behind the scenes and get on the ballot in the first place, relating to being power-hungry, two-faced, open to power-brokering with special interests and party insiders, etc.
I think there are a lot of genuinely good people that voters would vote for, who can't make it through the gauntlet to get their party's support.
So stop nominating him then.
Listen, I very badly want Approval voting so that we can break teh two-party system. Any time you want to throw your weight behind that reform, you will be welcomed to the movement.
Until then, it's a two party system, and yes that means choosing the lesser of two evils.
If you don't like the opposing party, nominate someone less evil!
Yes, it's a low bar, but It's certainly better than the platform of "being Donald Trump."
I mean sure if I agreed with you that Jan 6 was so terrible I might be against trump too. If you hurt someone, then yeah you should get prison but what I saw was people entering already open doors, with cops welcoming them in and chatting it up as they wandered the halls. Until Jan6 I actually had no idea that entering the capital was illegal - protesters do it all the time in state capitals and it's celebrated.
I am not a January-6-ologist in the way that some people are, but I predict that people will show up here with evidence that it was pretty hard for people to do January 6 by accident without realizing it was illegal.
I think the argument is that as far as riots go, it wasn't that bad*, and the extent to which the people who participated in it had the book thrown at them was unprecedented.
*people usually point generally to the BLM riots, but the specific example I always think of is CHAZ/CHOP, which was way closer to what I'd call an insurrection, and had a bunch of people end up murdered.
I agree that CHAZ was probably more violent and lawbreakingy than 1/6, but CHAZ was just futzing around with part of Seattle, whereas 1/6 was going against the US Capitol as they were trying to certify an election. Worst case scenario for CHAZ was approximately what happened, worst case scenario for 1/6 is they ... threaten? rough up? Pence into declaring the election for Trump, and then we have some kind of coup or civil war or something. So I think it's fair to classify CHAZ as "random criminality" and 1/6 as something sort of like "attempted coup" (coup is a strong word and I prefer "insurrection", but something along that pathway).
Also, AFAIK Kamala Harris wasn't personally responsible for CHAZ.
> Worst case scenario for CHAZ was approximately what happened, worst case scenario for 1/6 is they ... threaten? rough up? Pence into declaring the election for Trump, and then we have some kind of coup or civil war or something
I don't think the law works that way. You can't just force the Vice President to say some magic words and bam, the election is overturned. I don't know what happens exactly, I assume the Senate reconvenes later once the immediate physical danger was passed and passes a "well actually" resolution. And if that doesn't happen then I'm sure there's all sorts of Supreme Court challenges. There's
If anyone thought the "VP says magic words" theory really worked, then the legislature's top priority in 2021 should have been to change the procedure by which the nomination is confirmed, because it's currently ridiculously non-robust... not against a random group of protestors entering the Capitol but against a VP less scrupulous than Pence.
(I also don't think any of this is physically possible, not for an unarmed group of citizens. Capitol security was shit, apparently, but not close to being that shit.)
That makes me wonder, who would be next in line to certify the election if the Vice President is murdered?
Xe does that in capacity as President of the Senate. Presumably the Senate pro tem
There were separate slates of electors set to go for Pence to approve.
This all gets overshadowed by the riot. There was a plan separate from the riot.
Correct. It was one aspect of a multi-pronged coup attempt by Trump and some of his lawyers.
I recommend everyone here read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot
1. It wasn’t just “magic words.” The plan involved trying to get Mike Pence to accept fake electors along with the certified ones. They wanted him to announce there were competing electors and ultimately throw the election to the House. Ron Johnson and Mike Lee were both part of this scheme, as were a few House members.
2. The Electoral Count Act was updated last year to clarify that the VP’s role is strictly ministerial, and raised the objection threshold to 20% from the previous one each from the House and Senate.
You can force the Vice President to say some allegedly-magic words and then millions of idiot Trumpists will believe that Trump is so obviously and legitimately President that it's their duty to back his play with their AR-15s. Even the possibility of that, makes 1/6 far more dangerous than CHAZ.
Under the law as it existed four years ago, it basically explicitly said that the Vice President's magic words determined the President. They have now changed the law.
Fair enough, I stand corrected on that particular aspect.
(I still don't believe that the VP's magic words would have determined the President in practice, particularly not if uttered under duress, but it's good to hear that they changed the law to make it more explicit.)
My understanding is that, under the law as it existed four years ago, it was just about possible to argue with a straight face that the Vice President's words determined the President. It has now been explicitly foreclosed.
"I don't think the law works that way."
My threat model is something like:
- Under duress, Pence says Trump won the election
- There's some Plan B but it takes 66% of Congress and nobody can get 66% of Congress to do anything these days.
- There's some Plan C, but the guy in charge of the relevant Congressional committee is a Republican, plus he just saw Pence get beaten up for defying Trump and he's not that excited about tempting the same fate.
- Trump is inaugurated on January 20, this wasn't "legal" according to the best and smartest interpretation of the law, but who's gonna stop him?
In this specific example, the relevant law dictates that both chambers of Congress have to agree if dual slates of electors are submitted. Say the House backs Trump and the Senate backs Biden. Now the tie is split by which elector slate is certified by the relevant state government executive. None of the Trump alternate slates were certified, so Biden wins. Even if Trump somehow subverted that system, he still has to survive a court challenge. The only way his plan works is if he can convince the state legislatures to throw out the legitimate Biden electors. And all of the relevant statute was amended in 2022 precisely to prevent another incident like this from happening.
This is roughly my model of Trump's plan. With the caveat that it probably wouldn't have worked.
The law is not a magic contract enforced by invisible gods. It's a human construct whose enforcement rests on legitimacy and belief. Consider how many times in the past countries had a civil war over whether the dead King's brother or the dead King's bastard son was supposed to be the heir to the throne. Didn't they have a succession law? Sure, but it was muddy enough that both those people could say to have some legitimate claim, and then the fact that various prominent aristocrats had conflicting interests did the rest.
Similarly, there is no magic word that makes the President. But if comes to the point where one political body says that the president is A, and another says that's invalid for <reason>, the president is B, then you have a succession crisis. If roughly 50% of your army's generals are persuaded that their sworn duty is to A, and the rest that it's to B, then odds are you also have a civil war.
I think that's fair but also, maybe Jan 6 also went about as bad as it could've? Like, what if the protestors were not let in? What if there was an actual security detail in place? Even if they got there and threatened pence, would that actually do anything?
> whereas 1/6 was going against the US Capitol as they were trying to certify an election.
Hmm. I wouldn’t vote for Trump were I American, because he’s as mad as a box of frogs. Stability is what is needed now.
However, even insurrection is too big a word here. Coup is ridiculous.
Let’s say the protestors had entered the Capitol and had stopped the ratification. What then?
Is it essential that the vote take place in that building? At that hour? Could the politicians not reconvene in the Tennis Court? You will get the reference.
Does it have to be on Jan 6th? Would Trump have been dictator for ever if the protestors occupied the building until Jan 7th? Jan 8th?
If the vote isn’t timely, does the Supreme Court throw its hands up in the air and issue a judgement saying because the constitution is ambivalent here, and even though the election looks like it went to Biden, with there being no vote because of an illegal entry into Congress the presidency is now Trump’s for life. He can proclaim himself King if he cares, nothing can be done. Meanwhile we might as well disband the court and let’s have no more discussion of constitutions. It was a vote on 3pm Jan 6th or Tyranny.
The word insurrection sounds more formidable to me, I’d expect a tank or two.
> Is it essential that the vote take place in that building? At that hour? Could the politicians not reconvene in the Tennis Court? You will get the reference.
> Does it have to be on Jan 6th?
Legally speaking, yes it had to be in that place at that time, according to the law. Meeting in the tennis courts would technically be a constitutional revolution of sorts.
I believe they've now changed the law so that the event is a formality, rather than the actual determination.
The word "insurrection" is used specifically because it sounds formidable. My personal feeling is that it's like the word "racist". You don't need to microanalyze dog whistles to determine who's secretly racist - an actual racist is all too happy to tell you their racist ideas. (Since they're so rare in modern society, it's too easy to forget what real racists actually look and act like.) And you don't need to pick out whether 3 words in Trump's speech could be interpreted as maybe kinda leaning towards insurrection. An actual "insurrection" would require somebody - ANYBODY - involved to know that they were trying to commit an insurrection. The people merrily tromping through and taking selfies in a building that's mostly open to the public sure weren't thinking that.
>and then we have some kind of coup or civil war
Come on, there is no plausible scenario where that happens. Trump made a perfectly legal (though tasteless) challenge of the electors. That is in no way an attempted coup. I agree that he disrupted the perception of the normal transfer of power, but that's all he did. It was a superficial interference with the ceremony and nothing more. I agree that it was tasteless and a black mark on his character, but honestly not any more tasteless than we already knew he was. "Coup" and "Insurrection" are intellectually dishonest political framings. Frankly it's beneath you. It's like accusing Colin Kaepernick of treason because he knelt for the national anthem. Yes it's tasteless, yes it means he's kind of a terrible person, but he's perfectly entitled to do it.
It wasn’t a perfectly legal challenge. He tried to submit fake electors. Dozens of fake electors have been indicted in Michigan, Arizona, Nevada and Michigan, as were a few of Trump’s attorneys.
Fine, that's election fraud, or would have been had it gotten to the point where he was able to submit them. But it didn't. It wouldn't have worked anyway (the Senate wouldn't have voted for them) and it definitely wasn't an insurrection. I don't know the details there but at worst he's guilty of conspiracy to commit election fraud, which if you're honest with yourself you know probably happens on some level in every election. You don't think the Clintons ever did anything shady?
Alternate slates of electors are not "fake electors;" it's a standard practice that Republicans and Democrats have both participated in plenty of times throughout the nation's history. The fact that people got indicted over doing it this time is evidence of Democrat depravity and political persecution, not of those people having done anything wrong.
>CHAZ was just futzing around with part of Seattle
It obviously lacked the national significance of the attack on American democracy on Jan 6, but it should be noted that CHAZ involved multiple shootings, an unarmed Black teenager who was murdered by a lynch mob, and a warlord (who was repeatedly accused of sex trafficking) handing out rifles to random people, and assaulting people on camera, with a Seattle council member not only allowing the carnage to continue, but apologizing for their murders, and praising their occupation of the police station that precipitated the violence.
The aforementioned warlord was never charged for his atrocities and the city instead coordinated with him as a de facto leader.
Multiple city officials illegally destroyed evidence regarding the crimes there.
For more, see: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/a-murder-in-chaz/.
I wish we could upvote comments
It was entirely possible that several members of Congress, and maybe Mike Pence, could have been taken hostage or killed. If Pence was killed and a state of emergency was declared, Trump might have tried to do other emergency actions justified by that.
The thing is, the foundational mythology for America *is* that kind of "private citizens rise up against a corrupt/unrepresentative government and take control of their own affairs and declare their own rulers". You have an entire day, 4th July, celebrating that! By force of arms, even!
So I think it's easier for Americans to believe that they are acting in the spirit of the Minutemen and the Founding Fathers by engaging in this sort of protest: of course the cronies of the illegitimate regime call us lawbreakers, but we are the true patriots.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolution
" In 1767, tensions flared again following the British Parliament's passage of the Townshend Acts. In an effort to quell the mounting rebellion, King George III deployed troops to Boston. A local confrontation resulted in the troops killing protesters in the Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770. In 1772, anti-tax demonstrators in Rhode Island destroyed the Royal Navy customs schooner Gaspee. On December 16, 1773, activists disguised as Indians instigated the Boston Tea Party and dumped chests of tea owned by the British East India Company into Boston Harbor. London closed Boston Harbor and enacted a series of punitive laws, which effectively ended self-government in Massachusetts.
In late 1774, 12 of the Thirteen Colonies (Georgia joined in 1775) sent delegates to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia. It began coordinating Patriot resistance through underground networks of committees. In April 1775 British forces attempted to disarm local militias around Boston and engaged them."
'Underground networks of committees' can be construed as 'domestic terrorists'. It all depends who ends up writing the history.
By contrast, the Irish foundational myth is "they went forth to battle, but they always fell". Our successful rebellion succeeded by failing and having the response crushing us be so hard, it got other countries to put pressure on Britain (particularly America, due to the Irish-American campaigning).
http://www.ricorso.net/rx/az-data/authors/o/OSheel_S/life.htm
Shaemus O'Sheel
"They went forth to battle, but they always fell;
Their eyes were fixed above the sullen shields;
Nobly they fought and bravely, but not well,
And sank heart-wounded by a subtle spell.
They knew not fear that to the foeman yields,
They were not weak, as one who vainly wields
A futile weapon; yet the sad scrolls tell
How on the hard-fought field they always fell.
It was a secret music that they heard,
A sad sweet plea for pity and for peace;
And that which pierced the heart was but a word,
Though the white breast was red-lipped where the sword
Pressed a fierce cruel kiss, to put surcease
On its hot thirst, but drank a hot increase.
Ah, they by some strange troubling doubt were stirred,
And died for hearing what no foeman heard.
They went forth to battle, but they always fell;
Their might was not the might of lifted spears;
Over the battle-clamor came a spell
Of troubling music, and they fought not well.
Their wreaths are willows and their tribute, tears;
Their names are old sad stories in men's ears;
Yet they will scatter the red hordes of Hell,
Who went to battle forth and always fell."
If so, that's really bad. That was 250 years ago and what was appropriate and valor-worthy then is no longer now. That mythos needs to die because it is a dangerous one in the world and the country we have today, IMO.
It’s actually very hard to find out about the circumstances of CHAZ; the mayor and chief of police who presumably made the decisions to withdraw police from the area have been mum about it.
January 6, and especially the fake electors scheme, was organized by the sitting president. CHAZ and BLM were not. Biden condemned BLM violence from the very beginning and has made no effort to pardon anyone associated with it.
The fake electors thing, sure. I've said as much in the increasingly Trump-centric open thread.
But, genuine question, what is the evidence that Trump organized the J6 riot?
For one thing, he used a burner phone all day on the sixth.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a41396235/the-breach-denver-riggleman-jan-6-excerpt/
And even if the didn’t organize it, he did nothing to stop it for three hours despite please from his staff, daughter and various Fox News personalities.
Also, the day before, there was a strange announcement that Charles Grassley would preside instead of Mike Pence, but Pence shut that down. When that didn’t work they apparently were hoping to get Pence out during the chaos, something the Secret Service tried to do but which Pence resisted.
Then there’s the weird fact that all the Secret Service text massages were deleted.
This seems kind of weak?
I understand why the riot and other stuff gets conflated: it creates striking imagery and bolsters the coup rethoric. But it doesn't seem like a winning message: as an (admittedly somewhat unsympathetic) outside observer to the BLM riots, I could appreciate the left-wing approach on libertarian grounds, but after J6 I don't know jf I can reconcile it as anything but "I want my guys to go free and their guys to rot in jail forever".
Okay, then why have 4 times more people been prosecuted in connection with Jan 6 than in connection with BLM/Antifa violence during the summer of Floyd, despite the latter involving hundreds of times more violent actors over a span of months, not hours, and resulting in orders of magnitude more deaths and property damage?
I’m not here to defend to BLM rioters. I’ll just note that we’ve had thousands of riots in our history, many of them extremely bloody. But we’ve only had one president who wouldn’t commit to the peaceful transfer of power.
Fine, Trump is the first. How does this make him the greater evil, compared to an entire political party that is obviously far more willing and able to inflict politicised violence?
They were not fake electors, they were alternate slates.
It was fraud. They broke the law. Dozens of them have been indicted for it.
The worst case scenario for the BLM riots was that the rioters succeeded in storming the White House and killed Trump and/or his family. That's, uh... also another way to impact election outcomes, and probably more reliable than roughing up whoever was in the capitol that day.
> The worst case scenario for the BLM riots was that the rioters succeeded in storming the White House and killed Trump and/or his family
Or one or more Supreme Court justices. Remember, at least one actual assassination attempt was made, and only averted because the guy's sister (I think it was his sister, at least) talked him down at the last minute.
Also true. It amazes me that people somehow forget how Trump survived at least two assassination attempts, enabled by what can charitably be described as conspicuous ineptitude on the part of the secret service.
Only one of them was an attempt. The other was an attempt at making an attempt, but didn't actually rise to the level of an attempt. There are many other attempted attempts in history that no one pays attention to.
You also have to be pretty naive to say Trump had nothing to do with 1/6, he was just holding a rally a couple of blocks away from the capitol on the day of the certification after losing an election that he didn't admit on losing.
I was going to go to DC on Jan 6 to enjoy a laugh at the loons, but I can assure you that once the dumb mob and smart provocateurs broke through and the police were ushering people in an orderly fashion I would have entered as well. Judging the 700th guy to enter the capital building as having committed any kind of crime at all is quite sickening.
What way are you a January-6-ologist? Have you written about it? Sorry to ask if it is trivial to find - I personally cant find it
Jan 6 isn't principally about the riot per se. The trespassing, even the violence, is just what's most visibly striking, but it's not what makes it terrible. I would agree with you that it's not that big a deal if it was just a protest-turned-riot.
The real story of Jan 6 is the story of Trump's attempt to overturn the results of the election by every possible means. The riot was the last-ditch attempt in a long series of attempts that had been going on for months prior. The real story of Jan 6 is that it was part of an attempted coup. That's what makes it completely disqualifying, what makes it so terrible that this election isn't about politics-as-usual.
> The real story of Jan 6 is the story of Trump's attempt to overturn the results of the election by every possible means. ... The real story of Jan 6 is that it was part of an attempted coup.
No. It was not. Please don't go spreading around wild allegations so far removed from the facts that even the New York Times has debunked them.
The simple, undeniable fact of the matter is, while the Trump rally in which he allegedly incited the riot was still going on, the riot was already in full swing. Before he ever spoke the allegedly inciting words, the Capitol had already been breached. Unless you wish to submit evidence that President Trump or one of his surrogates *literally has a time machine,* it is physically impossible for this accusation to be true.
What I understood from Matt's comment is: the January 6 rioters were inspired by exactly the same election denial from Trump that underpinned his refusal to concede, his pressuring of swing state election officials, his endless frivolous litigation, his refusal to initiate the presidential transition, and his holding of the same day's rally in the first place.
The Trump campaign had been sowing the seeds of that riot literally for months before Jan 6. The plan to pressure Mike Pence to reject the Presidential Elector votes had been in swing since the results were known. The rally, the speeches by Trump's cronies (like Eastman and Giuliani), and the speech by Trump himself, were all part of this same plot. They were the last ditch effort to prevent the ordinary procedure from continuing.
None of what you said contradicts any of that. Again, the point isn't "Trump incited people to violence at the Capitol." The point is the whole series of events that led there. In other words, the deliberate, months-long attempt to coup the government in favor of Trump.
Your assertion that “the riot was in full swing” is misleading. Trump’s entire speech concluded at around 1:10 pm. The first barriers well outside the Capitol were breached at 12:50, 20 minutes prior. The actual Capitol Building wasn’t entered by force until around 2:10, a full hour after Trump’s speech. No one would reasonably consider the Capitol riot was in “full swing” until the rioters at least entered the Capitol Building. And by that time they’d certainly know of Trump’s remarks more than an hour prior.
Also, I can find no evidence that the NYT debunked the claim that Trump played a role on January 6th in inciting the Capitol riot. Can you link to it?
> No. It was not.
Yes it was. Why did the protestors say "Hang Mike Pence"? What did the protestors, and Donald Trump, want Pence to do? What did Pence mean when he later said that Trump asked him to "choose between Trump and the constitution"? January 6 was the final part of the "fake electors plot", which is well documented.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot
This is a deep misunderstanding of the issue. Even if Trump *hadn't even asked anyone to go to the Capitol during his speech at all*, he would still be responsible for most of what happened at the Capitol that day.
Does he bear full responsibility? No. Would he bear more responsibility if he had said "go there and break in and show those people who we are"? Yes. But these standards are absurd.
I recommend everyone here read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot
Yes it was. You are just uninformed or are trying to burry your head in the sand. Which is more likely. Trump absolutely did try to overturn the election. He was pretty incompetent about it, because he is not the smartest. But he absolutely did try. And it is obvious.
What's amazing is how nobody remembers the faithless electors and related efforts of 2016/17, and the rioting and attempts to disrupt the EC voting and inauguration.
I think you are focusing on a single tree that is wrong about what Trump did and missing the forest of all the stuff Trump seems to have actually done.
It is possible both that the liberal media spread misinformation about Trump's allegedly inciting words AND for him to have spent over a month of concerted effort to attempt a coup.
It is a Motte and Bailey fallacy. Your Motte is that Trump never spoke the alleged inciting words. Your Bailey is that Trump never actually tried to overturn the election through over a month of concerted effort that resembles a coup.
Also... this even seems besides the point because event your Motte isn't that strong. I watched it all live. I only thought "holy shit that is not a protest that is a now a riot" after Trump was done speaking. As someone further down posted:
> The first barriers well outside the Capitol were breached at 12:50, 20 minutes prior. The actual Capitol Building wasn’t entered by force until around 2:10, a full hour after Trump’s speech. No one would reasonably consider the Capitol riot was in “full swing” until the rioters at least entered the Capitol Building. And by that time they’d certainly know of Trump’s remarks more than an hour prior.
Where's this NYT debunking you are referencing btw?
I think that if "the forest of all the stuff Trump seems to have actually done" is on the table, then so must be the forest of things Clinton, Biden, Harris, and the DNC have done, which puts us close enough to square one that you might want to rethink that.
Rethink what? Square one what? Did you even read the article this is a comment section to? The 4 counterarguments Scott brings up I think argue convincingly that the leftist monoculture can be very bad but it is still better to support right now than Trump.
Also if you pointed out something bad Harris did and my response was "well if that's on the table we need to consider the bad things Trump did and you might want to rethink that" I would look avoidant at best and like I am simply conceding that it doesn't matter and Harris is that bad at worst.
It doesn't counter-argue the claim that Harris is bad at all. Same goes for you simply pointing at Clinton, Biden, Harris. I don't care about these politicians nor particularly support them anyway.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/donald-trump-2016-mob-organized-crime-213910/
This is some of the info about Trump that makes a difference for me. They didn’t necessarily succeed in making obvious any ties to Russian organized crime per se, but he’s been swimming in “organized crime” water for a long time due to the old school NY crime families and his business deals.
His “normal” is this tradition of dominance at any cost. It’s fundamentally contrary to literal democracy. He didn’t do a good enough job last time partly because he incorrectly assessed the people around him. That problem has no doubt been addressed and he has different people visible around him now, plus all the old connections.
The quasi-tourist riot didn’t work because most of the rest of the system did their jobs. People think the ones they like will win the revolution. I am not looking forward to the mangled monstrosity of a gutted government I think Trump would usher in. I don’t see “satisfying, seamless conservatism” coming, I see a big mess with plenty more opportunities for organized crime and other outside infiltration. Jan 6 had volunteers and a Hollywood quality but his Act II would be weirder and worse. I think.
The first people to break in smashed in windows.
https://youtu.be/jWJVMoe7OY0?t=905
Tell me if you think those people were welcomed in by police, and that they would not have reasonably known they were violating the law.
The point of January 6 was to coerce Mike Pence into throwing out the electoral votes of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, New Mexico, Georgia, and Arizona. As part of his plot to get these EVs thrown out - representing tens of millions of voters - Donald Trump engaged in a criminal conspiracy to create seven false slates of electors. Loraine Pellegrino, one of these false electors for Arizona, has already plead guilty; many others are in the process of being charged for falsely representing themselves as the legitimate electors. The riot is just the cherry on top of an attempted coup.
I'm not sure if you're interested in changing your mind, but on the off chance that you are, you should read the Eastman memos (https://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2021/images/09/20/eastman.memo.pdf). They detail exactly what Trump's plan was on J6. It's a very short document, but a quick summary is:
- Manufacture claims of fraud
- Use those claims as a justification to throw out electoral votes from blue swing states
- Claim that with the remaining electoral votes, Trump won
It's a really dangerous idea, one that is about as close to 'only counting the votes with my name on it and discarding the rest'. I would focus less on the riots, they are a bit of a distraction, and instead focus on the legal play that almost would have worked if Pence was a weaker man.
There were extensive violent clashes between the rioters and capitol police on January 6, including one police officer who was beaten to death by Trump's supporters.
This is a blatant lie. The autopsy of Brian Sicknick is publicly available, anyone can read it. He died of multiple strokes that were ruled natural causes; there was no evidence of blunt trauma or allergic reaction to the chemical (pepper spray) the rioters used on him.
Once the MSM say something it is forever true in the minds of MSM devotees.
Ditto for FOX devotees in reverse.
Hey, just wanted to say thanx for posting this comment. I believed for a long time the death was a direct result of the rioters and never rechecked on the news later. I just did a double-take and you are indeed correct. I believed an untruth.
This does interestingly mean the rioters didn't actually directly kill a single person. This is an important update for me.
No problem. I think the culture war nature of this thread drew in a lot of low quality posts. Stuff that was just wrong, and could be verified as wrong with a cursory effort.
Yea kinda embarrassing how quickly it is verifiable. Up until recently also didn't believe how many Isrealis the IDF's helicopters killed after October 7th. The Hannibal Directive I knew existed, but I read some debunking article of it at the time and concluded it was Hamas propaganda. Had a friend point out actually they were used so did a double-take like I did with your comment and... sure enough. Same story as the fire extinguisher. The debunking article I read closer to October 7th was just lies.
If I am any evidence - I think it is just too useful to lie when something crucially damning is happening for implicated parties. Because even truth-seeking people cannot properly fact check so close to the event (or it is very difficult). Then they believe the wrong thing and don't self-correct until only months later when the lie can no longer be propped up and it becomes easily verifiable it was a lie all along.
This is laughably bad faith. We all watched it, the video and photos are readily available. Police were being bashed with fire extinguishers. Police were defending barriers with water cannons. It was abundantly obvious you can't storm the capitol. Congress people were fleeing for their lives and hiding in closets. Quite honestly, you should be ashamed to be either this ignorant or this apologist of terrorism on US soil.
https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1gftmjw/do_not_repeat_history_end_this_chaos_and/
Ok, so I believed the exact same thing as you. Except if you look on say the wikipedia page now it says this about his death:
"Multiple media outlets reported Sicknick's death was due to injuries he sustained, but months later the Washington, D.C. medical examiner reported there were no injuries to Sicknick... The media, however, continued to incorrectly report for weeks that Sicknick had died after being struck in the head with a fire extinguisher during the unrest, citing two "anonymous law enforcement officials" as their source"
And NONE of the reddit photos you linked show police being bashed by fire extinguishers.
I've changed my mind. It does look like it was a lie from from the leftist side to get more clicks. The left lies as well unfortunately.
I remember seeing people attacking cops on video, including with a fire extinguisher, it just wasn't Sicknick who was attacked that way. Google offers https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/jan-6-rioter-gets-four-years-hitting-officers-fire-extinguisher-rcna79141
Yup, also pretty easy to find this appalling video which is a good reminder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:January_6_select_committee_new_footage.webm
Plenty of evidence of police getting violently curb-stomped. There is a reason multiple officers committed suicide from the trauma.
I clearly didn't read the comment I was responding to clearly enough. I thought it was solely talking about Sicknick. Kinda dumb of me in hindsight.
Kindly watch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:January_6_select_committee_new_footage.webm
I won't be following your endorsement but I appreciate how balanced this article was, without resorting to 'Trump is a Nazi dictator' histrionics. One of the best election articles I've seen this cycle.
One thing you did not mention at all was Trump's age and VP choice - I like Vance and would be happy for him to step up a leadership role within the party, if not take over the Presidency, and his career would obviously be benefited substantially by a Trump win.
I did find this bit quite remarkable after yesterday's post on Prop 36, which seemed totally fine with shoplifters and drug addicts violating norms: "A single shoplifter or paint-thrower does very little damage, but this is true only because we jealously protect the norms against these kinds of people. If we truly gave up on punishing shoplifters, everyone would steal from everyone else and civilization would collapse. Asking “why should we punish shoplifters when they do so little damage?” is like asking “why should we vaccinate against measles when measles is so rare?”
Clara included a slightly different set of caveats than I would have. If I'd written that article, it would have stressed that current law mandates six months in jail for shoplifting, the new law mandates three years in jail, and [long collection of studies that I would have rounded up] shows us that criminals aren't especially moved by the difference between six months and three years of jail time when "deciding" whether to commit crimes.
I definitely don't think "don't punish shoplifters at all" is a good strategy.
If we want to get all game-theory about it, the punishment should be set at the equilibrium between where the resulting people sitting in prison are more of a loss to society than the negative externalities from the shoplifting feedback loop.
Ideally though you'd be able to think up cheaper alternatives than prison for disincentivizing shoplifting. Maybe some combination of good surveillance + high policing and better economic/welfare policies such as zoning reform, better transit, an LVT, and a minimal UBI?
Fresh off of jury duty, I decided that we should stop worrying so much about deterrence and incapacitation and such.
Punishments should be set no more harshly than the jury pool can bear. They won’t convict if they feel it’s too harsh, or they’ll want an unreasonably high standard of proof.
My impression is that probability of punishment matters more to deterrence than severity of punishment. I'm also under the impression that CCTV security tapes _potentially_ make a lot of shoplifting straightforward to prosecute, but that stores don't find it worthwhile. Maybe, instead of changing the sentence, the change should be to give the stores more of an incentive to prosecute? It is tricky to avoid incentivizing perverse outcomes, but maybe subsidize prosecution in cases leading to a conviction? ( but not so much that stores start faking evidence... )
Yeah, I'm thinking if there's like a way to easily catch and civily fine shoplifters, even for minimal sums, that might be ideal at discouraging people at the start from taking more. No one starts out shoplifting hundreds of dollars of merchandise after all. Maybe big box stores should be empowered to hire employees that follow shoplifters home, report the addresses they find to the police so the police can verify that the person caught on video shoplifting lives at the address. If so, write them a ticket (like a traffic ticket), put their face, address, and name in a database, and leave.
Many Thanks! Yes, something like that might work. I'm not sure if civil fines will work (a shoplifter with zero assets can't be effectively fined), but something that costs them even minimal amounts of time, _if_ it has a high probability of happening, might be enough to discourage them.
"Maybe some combination of good surveillance + high policing and better economic/welfare policies such as zoning reform, better transit, an LVT, and a minimal UBI?"
According to this law firm's website, it's not a blanket six months in jail, it's *up to* six month. And there are ways to avoid that, if you (or your lawyers) can wangle your way onto a 'diversion program':
https://www.egattorneys.com/shoplifting-penal-code-459-5
"What Are the Penalties for PC 459.5 Shoplifting?
Shoplifting in California is normally a misdemeanor offense that carries a maximum potential penalty of:
- up to six months in the county jail, and
- a fine of up to $1,000.
If someone is accused of stealing or attempting to steal items valued at more than $950, then that individual can be charged with Penal Code 487 PC grand theft.
Grand theft can be charged as a felony that carries up to three years in state prison.
There are situations where a defendant can face felony charges punishable by up to 3 years in jail and a $10,000 fine.
Felony penalties apply if defendant has a prior conviction for any of the following crimes:
- a sex crime that requires registration as a sex offender,
- any sex crime on a minor under 14 years old,
- any sex crime committed by using force, violence, or threats,
- gross vehicular manslaughter under Penal Code 191.5 PC,
- murder, attempted murder, or solicitation under Penal Code 187 PC,
- any serious or violent felony punishable by life in prison or death
Civil demand letter
Business owners that shoplifters victimize will also often make civil demands under California Penal Code 490.5 PC.
A civil demand requires the shoplifter to pay restitution to repay the business owner for the items stolen or damaged by the alleged shoplifter.
These letters are sent by law firms representing the business owners and can demand up to $500 to recover costs incurred by the alleged shoplifting.
Proposition 47
Before Proposition 47 was passed in 2014, you could face Penal Code 459 burglary charges with felony penalties, but now you must be charged with misdemeanor PC 459.5 shoplifting.
Anyone convicted of burglary prior to the new [law] who actually committed shoplifting, are eligible to apply for resentencing.
What Are Some Defenses to Shoplifting?
The crime of shoplifting requires a specific criminal intent to steal the items from a store prior to entry.
Thus, perhaps we can make an argument you developed the intent to steal after you entered the business.
While this defense still can result in a conviction for petty theft, it may help avoid a conviction of shoplifting in certain cases.
If an individual forgot to pay for an item or was planning to pay for an item they were carrying in a bag or pocket while inside the store, then a mistake defense can be raised.
Prosecutors will look to every fact and circumstance in a shoplifting case to prove an individual's criminal intent as it is often the key element that needs to be proven in a shoplifting case.
While not technically defenses, there are other ways that you may be able to resolve your shoplifting case without ending up with a criminal conviction. These methods include:
Diversion program: if accepted into a diversion program, you will have to agree to abide by a number of conditions set by the court, such as community service or restitution. If you complete these conditions successfully, your case will be dismissed, and you will not end up with a criminal record.
Civil compromise: this is an agreement between a shoplifter and the business where the items were alleged to have been stolen. In a civil compromise, the shoplifter agrees to repay the costs incurred because of the theft or attempted theft, and the business agrees not to prosecute the shoplifter.
Further, through prefiling intervention, we might be able to negotiate with the prosecutor to avoid filing criminal charges before court.
If you have questions about a criminal case, then it is important that you speak to an experienced criminal defense attorney."
Increasing jail sentences for petty crimes is prosocial even if it doesn't a priori disincentivize the crimes, because it reduces both time available for recidivism and the birth rate of petty criminals
The current law doesn't mandate six months in prison though. That's a huge misrepresentation of how our justice system actually works in practice. The maximum allowable sentence is 6 months under Prop 47. Nobody actually serves 6 months. I'm not an expert but probably judges give out an average sentence of 2-3 months after a trial. But 95+% of cases end in a plea bargain, and a plea bargain is less, maybe 2-3 weeks of jail time. And that's before we even start talking about progressive DAs giving offenders 1 week or less. So the comparison should be more like 2 weeks in jail vs 12 weeks in prison, which is much more significant.
I'd be interested to learn more if any commentors can post more info about the average sentence, maximum observed sentence, plea bargain process, etc. for shoplifting . I'd be impressed if someone could find a case of anyone serving more than 3 months for shoplifting in the whole state, or 1 month for shoplifting in SF specifically. Also the plea bargain negotiation seems interesting. The criminal has no leverage because they're poor and they only have a public defender. But the DA has no leverage because they don't want to spend an exorbitant amount paying a judge, prosecutor, court secretary, etc. for a trial about shoplifting less than $950, and then some progressive jury member who doesn't want to prosecute non-violent crime causes a hung jury.
+1 on this take. I support Trump but I appreciate Scott’s good faith attempt to articulate positions for both sides. His fair-mindedness, which spills over into his commenters, is the reason I hang out in this corner of the Internet.
Trump: "let's decapitate that reporter and round up the enemies within", "Hitler did some good things!","I Need the Kind of Generals That Hitler Had"
You: 'Trump is a Nazi dictator' histrionics
Can any Republican argue in good faith?
Many of them can, especially around here. But reasonableness is anticorrelated with popularity these days, so I don't blame you if you haven't noticed.
When did Trump say "let's decapitate that reporter"? I'm pretty sure if that were a thing, Google could've found it when I searched for it. I remember he "urged the military to handle 'radical left lunatics' on Election Day", but for Trump that kind of rhetoric just seems like an average Tuesday, and his actual conduct as president suggests the kinds of things he'll do in a second term, which is to say: he'll do a wide variety of bad things, divide the country even more, weaken democracy even more, maybe cause some economic problems that benefit at least some of the wealthiest, suck up to dictators and seem overly approving of them...
but probably not decapitate any reporters, commit any genocides, or become a genuine dictator even if he wants to. I think 'Trump is a Nazi dictator' histrionics are counterproductive.
I'm not voting for Trump/Vance, but I would probably vote Vance/Trump. (Assuming it wouldn't be some power-behind-the-throne deal)
Yeah regardless of your stance, you can bet that ACX take will be top notch
Good piece! I particularly like the point about how nearly all the bad things that Harris advocates like price controls are also things Trump advocates and the comparison to Chavez. I think it's worth emphasizing the J6 stuff: like, he attempted to pull off a coup. The day of January 6 where the mob stormed the capitol is a much less big deal than the months long conspiracy to get fake electors to unilaterally declare him president in violation of the law.
Remind me again, Bulldog, who were the people fawning over Chavez before it all went to hell in a handbasket? 😀
Venezuelans, mainly.
Checks out.
Does it? Were the people fawning over Stalin Russians?
I...imagine at least some of them were?
I have no idea if he was, but I am not particularly sure why pointing out that someone was wrong on a single issue 15 years ago indicates something wrong with their judgement now. It would be different if you could point to a consistent record of errors or point out a continuing systematic error that has lasted well over a decade but in their absence it provides little illumination.
My once liking Chavez, who ended up becoming a dictator, contributes to me now shunning politicians with strong authoritarian tendencies, which is why I supported neither Trump nor Sanders eight years ago.
I think it were socialists.
I'm unsure what this is supposed to illustrate.
Has anyone done a deep dive on the fake electors scheme? And have there been other instances of similar behavior in American history?
This is the second reference I've seen to it and Google results are trash. To that end, any good search engine recommendations out there?
This is the best video going over it that I've found: https://youtu.be/FzMTeopD6f4?si=PIcN_u4y-ev0duxW
They weren't "fake" electors, alternate elector slates are part of the process of legal challenges to elections. The electoral college results have a submission deadline in mid December, and if they aren't submitted they can't be used in any circumstance. So if Trump won an election lawsuit after Dec 14 2020, but didn't have alternate electors submitted, there would be no remedy and Trump would still lose even though he proved in court there was election fraud. Alternate electors were used in the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy election, in Hawaii, because there was a recount underway at the time of the deadline. You can find op-eds arguing that Al Gore should have used an alternate elector slate in Florida if he wanted to drag out his election challenge, or the Democrats should have used them in Pennsylvania in 2020 if things dragged on too long there. Alternate electors are not illegal or even necessarily shady.
The Electoral Count Act of 1887 lays out how alternate elector slates are handled. The process is to have the Senate and House independently determine which slate is legitimate; if they can't agree, the slate verified by the governor of the state in question wins. If you want to know where Trump went wrong, search for the Eastman memo. The VP does not have the authority to unilaterally choose elector slates.
No, they were fake electors, that's why they are being charged. Loraine Pellegrino has already plead guilty, and others are in the process of being prosecuted.
Alternate slates of electors have to be empowered by the legitimate legislature.
I don't think this is true, or otherwise the 1960 electors would also have been illegal. The ECA is rather vague and only requires that the electors be ratified by the state executive. Further, I don't think the alternate slates have to be certified to be legitimate or that wouldn't be the proposed tie breaking method. But I'm not sure and if you have any links to the relevant US code or such I would appreciate it.
The 1960 electors were all done in the open, with the state government ultimately agreeing they should be the slate. On Dec 19, the Dem slate cast their ballots one minute after the Rep slate, at the same place. That's different from getting eleven of your buddies to sign a document saying that they're "duly elected and qualified Electors for President and Vice President of the United States of America from the State of Arizona" with no involvement from the state legislature whatsoever. Otherwise I could just make a slate of electors myself for every state and try to send it to Congress, and it would be all gucci, when that's obviously filing false documents (and illegal, and basically what Trump did*).
*: In most cases. PA and NM both included hedging in their language, so their electors aren't being charged.
The electors were the appointed electors in each state, for the Republicans, and they met in the capital to cast the alternate votes. This is from WaPo: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-backers-electoral-college/2020/12/14/f0fcc59c-3e52-11eb-9453-fc36ba051781_story.html
Their votes didn't have any legal value because they were contingent on the various state elections being declared fraudulent, which obviously never happened. But the text of the ECA only stipulates that the electors must be officially selected by the states, which they were. The text of it here: https://govtrackus.s3.amazonaws.com/legislink/pdf/stat/24/STATUTE-24-Pg373.pdf
The ECA was amended in 2022, because it was rather vague and didn't prevent these kinds of things from happening.
Yes, they were. What insane news sources are you reading? People are being prosecuted for exactly this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot
They were indicted, which doesn't mean much. A couple people took plea deals before trial, but again this doesn't get into the legal theory of why what they did was unlawful. AFAICT, the alternate electors were within the legal process established by Article II and the ECA.
Now, it's entirely possible they violated state law in their individual jurisdictions. I don't know the penal code for every single state where this happened, but all of the indictments seem to be some form of a filing false documents charge.
> Has anyone done a deep dive on the fake electors scheme? And have there been other instances of similar behavior in American history?
It's called "submitting an alternate slate of electors," and it's been a common practice throughout American history. Practically any time there's been a state where the race was close enough to be contested, both parties, as a standard practice, will submit their electors and then wait for the recounts to resolve which slate becomes "official."
Democrats calling this completely standard practice, which they have engaged in plenty of times over the years, a "scheme" to submit "fake electors" in this particular instance, is nothing more than a game of Calvinball.
Was this before or after the recounts happened?
Purely as a matter of empirics, in how many previous elections has a state sent more than one slate of electoral votes to the senate? My understanding is that it happened once, in the 1880s, and it almost caused a constitutional crisis that led to the ECA. And then it happened again, once, in the 1960s in the Nixon/Kennedy case. And that's it. If it happened more than that, I'd love to hear about it, because I have done a lot of research on this and may have missed something.
The first time was 1876. Also apparently someone in Oregon sent in an alternate slate in 1888, but it was regarded as a joke (possibly about the ECA that was passed the year before?) and ignored. 1960 in Hawaii was the second (real) time, and that's it afaik.
Problem is that the way in which they went about alternative electors would have ended up with them losing 0-9 in the supreme court in the opinion of the people who orchestrated the whole alternative electors plot. This should give you a clear indication that what they were doing was not legal.
I'd take a look at the Eastman memos as a primary source. It's really short (https://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2021/images/09/20/eastman.memo.pdf).
A quick summary is:
- Manufacture claims of fraud
- Use those claims as a justification to throw out electoral votes from blue swing states
- Claim that with the remaining electoral votes, Trump won
It's a really dangerous idea, one that is about as close to 'only counting the votes with my name on it and discarding the rest'. I would focus less on the riots, they are a bit of a distraction, and instead focus on the legal play that almost would have worked if Pence was a weaker man.
Thank you. This is what I was looking for. Definitely a shady play. I agree with you, the riot was mostly just noise the media could cry about for 4 years.
To play devil's advocate: Does the lack of voter id laws in many blue and swing states concern you?
A question that cuts to the point: is it possible to legally demonstrate fraud under circumstances where ID is not checked?
I haven't felt the need to consider whether voter ID laws are good or bad because I don't think they are material to how I feel about J6. The Trump team filed 60 (!) cases alleging fraud in a variety of ways. By the time of J6, all but 4 had been dismissed, including from R appointed judges. So a lot of people with a lot of motivation looked into this and couldn't find anything.
(And even if you ignore the cases, Trump's DOJ, Republican state officials, and Republican election officials ALSO couldn't find anything, even when directly asked by Trump. Here's an example transcript of a call where Trump is trying to get a Georgia official to admit there was fraud, and the official goes, paraphrasing, "I'm sorry man, I really wish there was, but there isn't": https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/03/politics/trump-brad-raffensperger-phone-call-transcript/index.html)
I had an article about it https://benthams.substack.com/p/trump-attempted-a-coup
Now look up the term "faithless elector" in conjunction with 2016.
Yes. Some obvious differences there:
- More faithless electors defected against Clinton than against Trump
- The 2020 schemes were completely driven by Trump; Clinton did not create or promote the 2016 faithless elector campaign
- The 2016 pro-Clinton faithless elector campaign was conducted in public, whereas Trump/Eastman's secret plan was designed to blindside everyone who wasn't in on it.
- Electors' freedom is clearly implied by the constitution, otherwise there's no reason for electors to exist in the first place. Even if state law creates a penalty for faithless voting, once a faithless vote is cast, people might raise their eyebrows, but the vote is valid and will be counted. Thus, no conspiracy was necessary. But Trump/Eastman's plan involved misleading their so-called "fake electors", i.e. if the electors knew what Trump/Eastman were planning to do, they likely never would have agreed to act as a second slate of electors in the first place. The plan also required Pence to disregard federal law without seeking a court ruling on their ad-hoc self-serving theory that the law was unconstitutional.
- In 2016 Clinton won the popular vote, which motivated the campaign
- In 2020 Trump knew that he lost both the popular vote and electoral college, after convincing his fans beforehand that the election would be rigged and encouraging them to prepare to intervene ("Proud Boys? Stand up and stand by!")
- The 2016 campaign was simple; Trump's scheme was elaborate, with many moving parts
- After losing, Trump attempted to mislead the public and convince many officials to act immorally and/or illegally in order to produce an outcome that was arguably, itself, constitutional in a narrow technical sense.
I just learned that Nick Fuentes prefers Game of Thrones to Lord of the Rings, so he's dead to me. Or he would be, if I ever knew anything about him or cared 😁
I say, It's Her Turn Now! For Jill Stein - this is her third bite at the cherry, after 2012 and 2016. She was even accused of the dreaded Russian collusion, God bless her. So I think she should have her chance to sit in the White House and introduce her own Green Party bills if she wants to do so.
> I just learned that Nick Fuentes prefers Game of Thrones to Lord of the Rings, so he's dead to me.
Are there really adults who consume Nick Fuentes content?
https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/the-biggest-reason-to-vote-for-trump
Trump was President 4 years, and couldn't keep the bureaucracy from defeating him or even to stop the Justice Dept. from suppressing the Hunter Biden tax investigation or using lawfare against him. He's no dictator; he couldn't even dictate to a secretary if she had civil service protection.
The Democrats, on the other hand, has the media, the FBI, the CIA, the State Dept., the military, and the rest of the bureaucracy. And they don't even bother to pretend that it's Joe Biden or Kamala Harris who is running things. Don't you find that disturbing?
Did you read Part III? If so, what was your specific disagreement with my four counterarguments to this?
I agree that one small shoplifter can't damage the company. But if you get lots of them, because shoplifting is easy/fun/not a crime/not prosecuted, it adds up. Idiot teenager who steals a lipstick because she's on a sub-reddit that boasts about boosting stuff from stores isn't a problem. Gangs of teenagers doing it? That starts to become "we have to lock up our goods, or at least keep them behind the counter where the sales assistant hands them out, and this inconveniences our ordinary customers, who may become so aggravated, they stop coming to our store".
Then add in organised criminal shoplifting, and it does become a real problem.
https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/courtandcrime/arid-41470993.html
"A man who carried out 12 shoplifting offences in Cork City was jailed for seven months as the sentencing judge said shopkeepers were challenged by such thefts as they strive to pay their staff, rates and other business expenses.
...Previous to the 12 new theft offences, the defendant had 205 convictions, including 37 for theft, 31 for being threatening and abusive and 50 for being drunk and a danger."
People are naturally sympathetic to stories of "person arrested for small theft, wanted to feed their children" and I'm sympathetic to that myself, *when* it's genuine. But again, professional criminals use children as decoys when going in to steal, and use pleas of "I was only trying to feed my kids" when the fact is that they routinely engage in theft:
https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/courtandcrime/arid-41323417.html
"A mother of three is starting a 10-month jail term as a result of the theft of €24 worth of groceries from an Aldi supermarket.
What made the shoplifting offence by Mary Cash more serious was the fact that she had 36 previous convictions for theft, the court was told.
A sentence of three months was imposed on her for this latest offence committed on September 25, 2023, in Aldi at The Elysian building in Cork.
Compounding matters, the 38-year-old woman had a 10-month suspended jail sentence hanging over her. That sentence had been imposed for previous thefts but suspended on the condition that she would not commit any more offences for the following year.
The September 25 offence triggered an application by the prosecution to revoke that suspension."
I do see why courts and police don't bother with 'small' crimes as a waste of time and effort, but on the other hand, a lot of small crimes add up, and someone who gets away with small crimes may be likely to keep committing them, or to move on to more serious offences.
Some are even brazen about it:
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/courts/district-court/woman-shoplifted-items-from-penneys-moments-before-court-shoplifting-case-1.4707886
"A woman allegedly shoplifted a number of items from Penneys on her way to court to appear on other shoplifting charges, a court has heard.
Lisa Mongan appeared at Letterkenny District Court in Co Donegal charged with stealing property valued at between €400 and €600 of cosmetics and clothing from Penneys at Letterkenny Shopping Centre.
The court was told that gardaí have CCTV footage which shows Ms Mongan (33) lifting items and placing them into her bag before walking out without paying. None of the items were recovered.
The incident happened at around 10am on Wednesday morning, moments before she was due in court on similar charges."
Declaration of bias: worked in retail many, many moons ago; was targeted by organised shoplifters, they distracted me and made off with lottery ticket cash, I got hauled over the coals by my manager for it, so I am on the side of "yes arrest the so-and-sos" 😀
Mary Cash in Cash and Carry
Had no cash but went to carry
Caught again and in a fix
Prior priors three tens six
"All I took was food and drink!"
Now she's right back in the clink
Yes, I did read Part III. I've just written up some disagreements. It's embarassingly long, but that's because I respect you and wanted to give as good a reply as I could in half an hour.
Argument 1. The Democrats are slowly and quietly eroding democracy, but Trump is attacking it outright.
Counterargument 1. First, think about what Trump’s done to democracy. Nothing, except cast doubt on the integrity of the 2020 election. There, the real question is whether there was really zero cheating as almost all the media says, or at least a trivial amount of cheating, whcih is what some intellectuals say. It is begging the question to say that complaining about a stolen election is anti-democratic.
What about January 6? That was a riot, never truly investigated, probably instigated by the Left, possibly even with FBI help. Who benefited from it? Who *could* have benefited from it? The riot cut off the planned debate on whether the election was stolen, and gave the Democrats a cudgel to use for 4 years. See https://www.unz.com/article/remembering-the-reichstag-fire/ .
What Trump *has* done is talk very wildly about things like throwing Hillary Clinton in jail. But we all know that he is constantly hyperbolic. His talk is poetry, not prose, in the sense that it conveys meaning well, but not the literal meaning. He never did put Hillary in jail, and she undoubtedly committed an illegality (was it criminal or civil? I think it was criminal for Genl. Schwarzkopf) with her use of confidential info.
What about the Democrats? The reason their illegalities seem mild is because the media won’t cover them as anti-democratic. The unilateral forgiveness of student loans was illegal and an offense against democracy, even though it doesn’t sound dangerous. What about the hundreds of Jan 6 felonies misusing a false-records statute, which the Supreme Court threw out recently? What about the prosecutions of numerous Trump officials, and of Trump himself? Don’t say: “Republicans deserve it; Democrats don’t.”
The Democrats have seriously proposed packing the Supreme Court, and getting rid of the electoral college. They have overthrown a President— the Biden disappearance— and chosen a presidential candidate who had no popular support even in the Democratic Party.
So, the Democrats walk softly but carry a big stick. Trump does the opposite.
Argument 2. The Democrats have two serious obstacles to destroying democracy: the Supreme Court, and their lack of internal unity. Both of those favor the Republicans.
Counterargument 2. The Supreme Court would also stop Trump from becoming a dictator. We have no evidence to the contrary. The 6 more Republican justices, unlike the 3 Democratic justices, do not vote in lockstep. Also, it is not true that the Democrats have less unity. How many Democratic officeholders have condemned Joe Biden or Kamala Harris? Trump has lots of his former officials and lots of Republican leaders who hate him, and are willing to say so in public. Half the party, at least, has distaste for him— I, myself, am an example— and he is actually to the left of the Republican Party, a feature concealed by how willing he is to talk big about how bad the establishment is.
Argument 3. It’s bad if you want to “be pro-freedom, pro-liberalism, and pro-democracy, but didn’t really take a stand against somebody trying to attack enemy politicians and rig an election.”
Counterargument 3. I think maybe you were getting tired of writing at that point, as I am now myself! Otherwise, you’d think about how viciously the Democrats attack Trump. Has Trump even called Harris a Communist? He has obvious contempt for her, but that’s his opinion and why should he hide it? And “rig an election”? How is Trump doing that? The Democrats, on the other hand, … well, suppressing the NY Post’s Hunter story, Pfizer delaying vaccine approval just so Trump wouldn’t get credit before the electoin, changes in voting rules (in PA saying absentee ballots wouldn’t be checked for signature mismatch), the media propagandizing, and the internet platforms throttling conservatives. . .
Argument 4. Whatever bad things the Democrats do or intend to do, Trump would also do if he could get away with it.
Counterargument 4. Maybe he’d like to— he says wild things, but historically he has been all talk and no action. Suppose he *would* like to. Unlike the Democrats, Trump can’t get away with anything. The Democrats have 90% of the media power on their side— of the cable news, of broadcast news, of internet platforms, of newspapers, of magazines, of webzines. . . The Democrats have the Bureaucracy, including the FBI, the Justice Dept., and the armed forces. The Democrats have most lawyers and lobbyists and nonprofits groups, and the most money.
Have you read the article at all?
Trump's repeated nickname for her is Comrade Kamala, and he has called her a Marxist and a communist several times, as well as also calling her a fascist.
Thanks. I googled and I see he's called her communist a lot. That's funny about also calling her a fascist. It has some truth in it-- the cooperation of business and government-- but she's not much of a populist nationalist ("garbage" and all that).
Any link to Unz is automatic trash. The guys a holocaust denying nut .
Unz promotes theories that really are conspiracy theories, yes, and deranged people follow him and ruin the comments. But occasionally there is something good on his site. He hosted Steve Sailer, who is first-rate.
That of course is not who you've linked to...
Eric, I think you're a smart guy (I went to school with your daughter in fact), but you're totally off-base here. I'm just going to focus on the election fraud comments, but the rest of what you say is in the similar naive-yet-well-put vein.
The claims of fraud in 2020 shown to be spurious if you apply even a modicum of scrutiny. Even ignoring the specific accusations of wrongdoing, none of the final results in the "contested states" are suspicious. As a matter of fact, Trump over-performed in the very places where the fraud was alleged! He did better than Hillary in the dense inner-cities of Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, and other major cities across the country. Where Trump did poorly was the suburbs, someplace it is unfathomable that a clandestine widespread voter-fraud operation between dozens of municipalities could be carried out. Of course, you could argue that he would have done better in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, etc. had there been no fraud, but that is certainly a bit of a stretch.
It seems deeply naive to me for you to still think the fraud case in 2020 was not properly litigated or that there exist true lingering doubts. You are an economist! Look at the data!
I feel like the motte here is "election security isn't very good in a lot of places, there's some sketchy stuff that happened in a few places, Pennsylvania probably changed their election rules in a way they weren't allowed to" and the bailey is "Venezuelan voting machines cooked the votes, massive numbers of illegal immigrants voted and changed the election outcome, there was massive fraud all over the place." When the bailey got its day in court, it always lost; the motte is true but doesn't seem like it even remotely adds up to a stolen election--instead, it looks like the kind of stuff that happens every single election.
Part III fails to take into account who each side's weapons are aimed at. The Republican weapons of mob violence and threats are aimed squarely at elites, but not at me. I'm nobody. There will never be a Republican mob at my house. The Democrats' weapons of institutional oppression and censorship are aimed at me. They want to control what I can say and what I can read on the internet. You, having been directly in their crosshairs should know that.
>The Republican weapons of mob violence and threats are aimed squarely at elites, but not at me.
No, they're aimed at whoever Trump blasts on Truth Social for the day, and there were multiple defamation lawsuits filed on behalf of private citizens like Ruby Freeman and Shay Moss and private corporations like Dominion and Smartmatic because they were the target of Trump, Fox News, OAN, Newsmax, and his other election denying allies like Giuliani and Powell. There were Republican state offices and Republican government workers that received death threats and bomb threats because Trump convinced his supporters that they were involved in stealing the election. Anybody who crosses Trump gets their business, workplace, family members, and personal life attacked relentlessly. Trump is currently threatening to revoke broadcasting licenses from news stations he doesn't like. He's completely uncalibrated and does unfathomable damage to random people around him.
How would we get an honest count of how many attempts at censoring or silencing dissenters happened under the Trump administration vs the Biden administration?
Your main example of how the Democrats control everything is their suppression of the legal investigation into Hunter Biden's taxes. According to Wikipedia he "pled guilty to all of the tax charges" last month. Interesting that the vast conspiracy was so ineffectual.
1. For details of what happened, see my three articles starting from https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/hunter-was-too-clever-by-half-part?utm_source=publication-search.
In short: the Justice Dept. slow-walked the investigation, purposely sabotaged it, and then were going to have him plead guilty to a minor charge while dismissing all the majors ones (such as not filing tax returns for some years!) and trying to stop any investigation of illegal income from foreign lobbying. The judge noticed the sly scheme and blocked it. It went public, so Justice had to pretend it was being more serious, so they brought some other charges-- again, as weak as they could-- and had Hunter plead guilty. Meanwhile, the IRS agents who were whistleblowers are being demoted and prosecuted.
What about when they slow-walked the prosecution of Trump's criminal conspiracy to overthrow the government? Maybe the DOJ is actually just slow.
They didnt'? They have been trying to rush it in a way that almost no criminal trials are conducted to try to get a PR win for the Biden admin in front of the election.
????
They took like three fucking years to charge him lmao.
We’ll see. His sentencing is notably in December, after the election. As Eric said, he could have been charged for more if the DOJ didn’t slowdown the case. The judge might not give him anytime in prison, and even if he does, Joe could pardon him in the hour. I would bet money that Hunter doesn’t serve more than a week in prison.
I think Biden pardoning was likely even if Biden stayed in and won the election. It's his son in jail, and if pardoning Hunter hurts his second term, so what? It's his son.
Yeah, if Biden is mentally aware enough to exercise power, I assume he signs a pardon for his son on Nov 6.
Weren't there gun charges as well?
The gun charges are in a weird place, because a protracted legal battle would probably find the specific laws unconstitutional under recent SCOTUS rulings. But that's not certain, and it'd be a messy fight with Rs having to be the ones pushing in favor of gun control during the while. Maybe he pleads though, and it's moot.
Trumpworld has spent the past four years largely purging itself of exactly the sort of people who stifled Trump in his first term. For a pretty thorough exploration of this: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5Vru5lYLRStdEMFJjOd0Hn?si=e14022970686499f
Thanks, but I dislike videos-- I can read faster than I can listen. I know Trump is trying, but I don't think he has it in him. He's just not a good manager; what he's good at is dealmaking-- thus his success in foreign policy and failure in domestic.
His successful foreign policies such as being Putin's whipping boy?
Trump was out there trying to stop Europe from becoming depending on Russian gas, but you wouldn't know because you've never cared.
True! Ya got me! I've never cared about his other policies. He sucked up to Russia when it mattered the most, and that invalidates any resistance to Russia he's displayed before that.
The "matters most" was Ukraine, and Trump was going all he could to get western Europe to spend more money on weapons and to not build NordStream 2.
This is actual real world stuff. Europe's two biggest issues supporting Ukraine have been "but we don't have enough military materiel to spare" and "but we need Russian gas."
It's not secret. Major newspapers wrote about it for weeks. It was a long process. There were news cameras there.
But it's not "Trump is Putin's bitch, ha ha piss tape har har har" so yeah it didn't get your attention.
And he failed (just like Obama did when he tried to do the same thing). Not a good example of success in foreign policy.
As usual when discussing anything relating to Trump, people get distracted from the topic and want it to be a referendum on "trump bad"
I wasn't claiming Trump was some foreign policy genius. Or even that his motivations were good. Just that he wasn't operating under Russian influence.
Putin knew he was planning to invade Ukraine, and Europe would object, and that NordStream 2 would be a way to make it harder for Europe to object. If Putin had *any* *actual* leverage over Trump, Trump would not have been jumping up and down telling Europe to do the two worst possible things for the invasion. Trump wouldn't have signed the sanctions bill against Gazprom.
ChatGPTBox
Here is the text version if you prefer reading: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/22/opinion/donald-trump-ezra-klein-podcast.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare#
I do not find it disturbing that our nation is not being run by a single individual who is all-powerful in the legal system.
We had a revolution nearly 250 years ago to stop that kind of thing.
The military? Officers are overwhelmingly Republican, and enlisted are about evenly split.
The generals have been replaced by dependable servants of the Left. Military policy has been crazily woke, and the conservative officers either resign (I've known some) or go along unhappily. And the generals decide who gets assigned to Washington DC.
Is there good polling data on this?
Media - corporate centrists.
FBI - Overwhelmingly republican.
CIA - Overwhelmingly republican.
Military - Overwhelmingly republican.
You: Everything is controlled by the left!
>Trump was President 4 years, and couldn't keep the bureaucracy from defeating him or even to stop the Justice Dept. from suppressing the Hunter Biden tax investigation or using lawfare against him.
And he has spent the last 4 years explicitly planning to overcome this in his next term.
What do you think about voting for a third party candidate that you would not vote for if they had any chance of becoming president? I’m in a safe state and tempted to vote Oliver to signal that I don’t like Harris or Trump and would prefer if both/either were more libertarian, but I think Harris would likely be a better president than Oliver.
Slightly against based on the same protest-vote considerations as talked about in Part IV. Also, if you're going to protest vote, why not a third party candidate who you like, or a write-in?
I understand everything you said except for your inclusion of Stein. Her running mate Ware praised Hamas for its Oct 7 massacre (and even released an album on Spotify named after Hamas’s operation called ‘Aqsa Flood’).
If we are against violation of norms, not endorsing Stein, seems a good place to start.
I didn't know that and agree it's stupid. I do however think that's basically within the scope of free speech, in the sense that it's stupid and we should be against him but it's not the same kind of bright-line norm violation as the Trump stuff.
I definitely meant the "endorses Harris, Oliver, or Stein" as a poetic way of saying "not Trump".
I think that it is not at all obvious that "Harris, Oliver, or Stein" was poetic. It reads like an actual endorsement of Stein
It's a reference to Scott's previous everyone-but-Trump endorsement article where the intent was more explicit.
yes, I got that, but if you say "I endorse Stein" people will think you endorse Stein
Yeh that wasn’t obvious to me either (that the endorsement was poetic). It does make me a bit uncomfortable that it remains.
Imo Jill Stein and communist aligned politicians that want to eliminate American foreign policy and install socialist economic policies are comparable threats to Trump. The good thing is that they comprise very little of the left wing voting block, so probably won't ever be a future threat.
Stein's running mate's celebration of Hamas atrocities is in line with Stein's own comment posted on Oct. 8 that "When a murderous occupation makes peaceful resistance impossible, it makes violent resistance inevitable." (https://x.com/DrJillStein/status/1711101660955574616).
It's also consistent with her longstanding apologism for dictators and their atrocities, as long as the dictators are opposed by America.
E.g. her campaign website quoting her as saying that the US should be working with Syria, Russia, and Iran to restore all of Syria to control of Bashar al-Assad (https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/299659-green-party-candidate-deletes-statement-calling-for/).
And her refusal to call Putin (with whom she dined at an RT event) a war criminal (https://www.newarab.com/news/jill-stein-refuses-call-assad-putin-war-criminals)/.
And her refusal to ever blame Putin for invading Ukraine, denying the initial American claims that he'd invade the Ukraine (https://x.com/DrJillStein/status/1493005696127885316) and presenting Putin as the peacemaker opposed only by American warmongers (e.g. https://x.com/DrJillStein/status/1821295385220141271, https://x.com/DrJillStein/status/1835758094309351852).
And her approving quotes from a convicted pro-Putin pedophile, to defend (and even praise) Qasem Soleimani (https://x.com/DrJillStein/status/1216776808307351556).
And her praise for Fidel Castro (https://x.com/DrJillStein/status/802674859104935936).
She's also "just asked questions" about vaccines (https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/jill-stein-vaccines-questions-linger-green-party).
And given that this article was largely about how to prevent the US from becoming slightly more like Venezuela, it's worth noting that far more than any other candidate, Stein's positions are aligned with those of the dictators of Venezuela, whose opponents she has of course repeatedly attacked (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/05/08/maduro-venezuela-wokewashing-left-00030698, https://www.facebook.com/drjillstein/posts/1619466748093509/, and note: https://x.com/DrJillStein/status/1817993691262226455 and https://x.com/DrJillStein/status/1828587671805141037.)
The Green party, in part quoting Stein, praises Chavez and Maduro for their great success in Venezuela, in spite of "American sabotage" as "the head of the white, Western, capitalist united front" (https://www.gp.org/solidarity_with_venezuela_and_maduro).
Harris and Trump have both endorsed and funded/promised to fund Israel's massacre, which exceeded that of Hamas by multiple orders of magnitude, and which is aimed not at ending a perpetual blockade but at wholesale ethnic cleansing
What, lol? Raping and exterminating the population of southern Israel is not "wholesale ethnic cleansing"?
> "The most obvious is SCOTUS, which is firmly Republican. They seem pretty interested in the project of rolling back the past few decades of progressive power grabs, and I’m pretty happy with a lot of how that is going"
Such as?
Ending Roe and ending Chevron deference would be the big examples.
> Ending Roe
I don't know why this is a good thing, or why it would be interpreted as good from someone who (as far as I know) is pro-choice.
> ending Chevron deference
I don't know why this is a good thing either.
I don’t think Scott meant it as a good thing on its own, but rather that it’s indicative of the current leanings of SCOTUS, which would provide a counterbalance to a Harris administration.
If you think both parties are kinda nuts then your bias should be for divided and ineffectual government. You are far likelier to get that voting Democratic.
> If you think both parties are kinda nuts then your bias should be for divided and ineffectual government.
I don't think this is true unless you're also in favor of like, anarchism and accelerationism in general. "Firebomb a Walmart", and whatnot.
I especially think it's untrue if the way you practice this is "well, every once in a while I'll elect the guy who hates gay marriage, and then I'll elect the guy who loves it, for fun". This just seems like a way to make people miserable.
> I don't know why this is a good thing, or why it would be interpreted as good from someone who (as far as I know) is pro-choice.
If you're an intellectually honest person then your view on Roe vs Wade should be uncorrelated with your view on abortion.
Saying "I think abortion should be legal therefore the constitution implies it must be legal..." is motivated reasoning.
I don't really care what the Constitution says outside of its ability to defend things that I like. If you wanted, you could easily just say "it endows us to liberty and happiness, this is a liberty and a happiness, ergo". Lots of things weren't enshrined in the Constitution until they were.
Let's not pretend like the SCOTUS was inspired by the fact that Roe isn't in the Constitution either. They were inspired by the fact that, ideology first, they're pro-life lol. Why else was it, alongside any other culture war topic, a 6-3 vote? What, 3 of them just so happened to find genuine reason in the Constitution where the 6 others didn't? And those 6 just happened to find new evidence the original 7-2 overlooked? C'mon lol.
I'd recommend reading the Roe vs Wade decision. Then try telling yourself, with a straight face, that 1) the right to privacy definitely implies the right to an abortion, but only in the first semester, and 2) the Constitution never mentions "privacy" or anything like it, but it definitely protects privacy, trust us bro. Those two pillars are the basis of R v. Wade.
The comment you're replying to is basically entirely about how this is totally arbitrary and not something anyone actually cares about except as a means to dodge what they actually want, which is for abortion to not be a right.
"2) the Constitution never mentions "privacy" or anything like it, but it definitely protects privacy, trust us bro."
Genuinely I have never understood this argument against the right to privacy, or any other one not specified. Literally the Ninth Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Literally the Constitution says "just because it's not specified doesn't mean you don't have it". Even if you think there isn't a right to privacy, this specific line of argumentation against it seems completely invalid to pursue from a Constitutional law perspective.
I think the current court would strike down the Federal Partial Birth Abortion Act under the reasoning the commerce clause does not enable it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial-Birth_Abortion_Ban_Act) if it had the chance.
Well there’s nothing about abortion in the constitution so Roe was always on sticky ground.
Copy-pasting:
The comment you're replying to is basically entirely about how this is totally arbitrary and not something anyone actually cares about except as a means to dodge what they actually want, which is for abortion to not be a right.
>I don't really care what the Constitution says outside of its ability to defend things that I like.
By that argument, SCOTUS should have ruled that abortion is unconstitutional because that's a thing they like and it doesn't matter what the Constitution says.
They functionally did that, yes.
Again, what, it just so happened that these 6 conservative justices were smarter and more keen on the eye than every previous one? No. They decided "I want to overturn Roe v Wade" and then made up some shit to get there. Similarly, the original 7-2 guys decided "I want abortion to be protected" and made up some shit to get there.
>Why else was it, alongside any other culture war topic, a 6-3 vote? What, 3 of them just so happened to find genuine reason in the Constitution where the 6 others didn't? And those 6 just happened to find new evidence the original 7-2 overlooked? C'mon lol.
What evidence would move you away from this maximally cynical take? The Trump justices (Gorsuch, ACB and Kavanaugh) do vote differently from their conservative peers often, even in controversial, culture-war issues. For example:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/us/politics/gorsuch-supreme-court-gay-transgender-rights.html%23:~:text%3DJustice%2520Gorsuch%2520led%2520a%25206,religion%252C%2520national%2520origin%2520and%2520sex.&ved=2ahUKEwjv67OF0LeJAxVnq5UCHQwNGm0QFnoECBEQBQ&sqi=2&usg=AOvVaw1vQM6a3otWmHw3Ejk4yMji
> What evidence would move you away from this maximally cynical take?
Nothing. I don't even think this is particularly cynical, I think it's basically tautological lol.
There isn't an objective interpretation of the Constitution, and there never will be. I don't think the SCOTUSes are chosen on their "ability to interpret the Constitution" as much as they're chosen by their "similarity to the party line". There might be *some* that were chosen for the former, but even then... how do you measure this? What benefit does anyone gain by selecting someone who acts against their own values? What benefit is gained by interpreting the Constitution in a way that's contrarian to what anyone believes, just because it could be "true" if viewed through some arbitrary lens? What even is the lens? "What the Founding Fathers would've thought"? Would've thought with what information and raised into what context? "How would old Georgie feel about computers" is the realm of fantasy.
I can believe that SCOTUSes believe in their own heads that they're "following the Constitution" and that this happens to reinforce their political beliefs just doesn't register to them, or they chalk up to happy coincidence. I can also believe that since they believe themselves to have an axiom of "the Constitution is good and supreme" that they sometimes vote against themselves. I still think that bias exists and is inextricable, though, and I don't believe every SCOTUS is so ignorantly noble.
I'm pro-choice and I think it was probably net good, because I think the marginal increase in both legal system internal consistency and state power probably outweigh the dysgenic effects. But it's a judgement call, could go either way
Affirmative action is the one I was happiest with.
I feel like there are... okay arguments about affirmative action either way, but I feel like this is a relatively minor thing to sway an opinion to "I'm happy with a lot of that". Like, I don't personally think affirmative action is great. I also don't think "none" is necessarily better, or that the idea behind it is flawed.
This is another one where we could have a 10,000 word argument and I'm not really up to doing it, but you might be able to piece together small bits of my opinion from this tangentially-related review: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke
On a first read, I don't think we're really disagreeing much in that review or in here. I just think that:
1. I feel like if I was pro-choice, the ending of Roe would at least match this, and thus I would need more than this to say "I'm in favor of the current SCOTUS"
2. More generally - and I think this is a consistent problem you run into - I feel like you see "anti-woke" allies and just kind of ignore their intent because something superficially pleasing happened. I don't think the SCOTUS ended affirmative action because the GOP has nuanced opinions about the effects it has on the business culture, I think they did this because they're racist lol. You frame it as "being afraid of being called racist", but I don't think that fear is unfounded either.
If I was in control of the big magic button that does whatever I want whenever I want it I would replace affirmative action with a general investment in poor families with the further goal of promoting urbanization if they're rural. This would sidestep the discussion of unfair treatment towards black people since it doesn't explicitly target any racial category but would in practice hit them disproportionately (alongside rural white families).
Is the SCOTUS going to do this, though? Do they want to? Do they have any general idea in mind for "improving the quality of life" or "helping black communities"? Forget the racism and reparations angle, if you're in favor of "lowering misery" then "poverty in black communities" is a problem to be solved regardless. Does the SCOTUS give a shit about that, though? I don't think so, lol. I don't think they even give a shit about rural whites either, for that matter.
It is absolutely possible to be pro-choice and in favor of ending Roe. I am, and yes, there are undoubtedly dozens of us. Roe was as horribly decided as any decision since Dredd Scott, corrupted the judiciary beyond reckoning, and provided the driving electoral force behind the Republican party for decades. That's _way_ worse in my ledgers than it's first-order effects.
If you're pro-choice but are also against enforcing it in any way, then you're not actually pro-choice.
If you're pro-choice and think Roe is the wrong way to enforce it, I think that's fine. I think if you think the SCOTUS ending Roe is then a precursor to them enforcing it the way you want them to, you're incredibly naive.
If you're pro-choice, think Roe is the wrong way to enforce it, and think that SCOTUS will not do anything positive with abortion rights now that it's gone... then what are you happy about, exactly? "It won an election" is good, I suppose, but I don't think this is a long term gain at all.
So just to be certain - you would be absolutely strongly against a national abortion ban (like fetal protection)?
And you disagree with Trump's proposal of a 15-week national abortion ban?
https://apnews.com/article/trump-abortion-ban-15-weeks-91a9e0ce87d11dff0fa761f327bd0566
Why do I care if SCOTUS ended affirmative action because the conservative justices (including Thomas) are racist? The result is that it ended a racist practice.
Because "a guy taking a big W for the racists, who is still in power and will continue to do this" is not an "epic win" even if the racists happened to be kind of correct on one point. It definitely doesn't justify the racists being in power, or sway me towards having a positive opinion of them lol.
Very well said.
I have never seen anyone defend affirmative action, for example I have never seen anyone claim that X benefited from it and that it is good that X benefited from it and I have seen many ostensibly supportive articles and speeches on the subject that never mention the word Asian or say why they like it.
What others though? Your post seems to imply you were happy with a litany of decisions?
Some First Amendment cases, some tech censorship cases, some cases limiting the power of regulatory agencies
Thanks for the reply, great post!
Affirmative action by race in college admissions has been done away with (in principle). As far as I am aware, affirmative action by gender is very real and as strong as ever. In STEM, it is by far the dominant form of affirmative action. Is there any sign that that's going away any time soon?
(Note: yes, I obviously mean affirmative action by gender in the workplace. In undergraduate admissions, affirmative action by gender is a thing basically in two (top) institutions - and also, in effect, in plenty of liberal-arts colleges, though then it's not called that because it goes in the opposite direction (discrimination in favor of men). There may be a bit of spillover into other institutions, but let's not get distracted.)
Gender is not a protected class to the same extent race is. This is why we're allowed to have separate male and female bathrooms, BTW.
Now, this is interesting: if ERA passed, would affirmative action by gender be legally vulnerable?
I agree.
Ending Chevron deference was big. Also several cases where they found the EPA exceeded their rulemaking authority. I'm not happy that they made up a nonsense "major questions doctrine" but it has the effect of rolling back progressive power grabs
I don't know what these are or why they're good, but I'm going to just make a guess based on the words used therein and say like:
* Reconcile these beliefs with a belief that pollution is bad, that climate change is bad, so on.
* "Well, they get in the way of nuclear or solar" isn't convincing, because I'm going to guess they also get in the way of many other things as well, and "it hinders a good thing" doesn't mean "it should have no things".
Of course I could just be entirely wrong on my assumptions here.
The EPA does very little to actually help prevent pollution or climate change. They picked all the low hanging fruit in the 70's to 90's. Now most of what they do is limit growth, particularly in the energy sector, which is bad because I think the solution is climate change is technological and will require lots of energy and other resources
Do you think the SCOTUS ended this because they want to promote generalized energy sector growth or because they want to promote oil sector growth?
I think they genuinely believe that the constitution doesn't permit those kinds of expansions of executive power over commerce
The Constitution isn't a mathematical list of properties, and the fact that there can be "conservative" and "liberal" SCOTUSes indicates this. Rewording: wow, it sure is crazy that the SCOTUS happens to believe the Constitution is in line with [insert current GOP position] whenever the GOP gets that position.
You can even ignore intent entirely here. Do you think that the SCOTUS' decision will lead to "generalized energy sector growth" or "oil sector growth"? In future cases related to the oil sector, do you predict the SCOTUS will rule in favor or against them on average?
You have to be smoking something to think this SCOTUS is genuine about anything. I'm sure the ruling has nothing to do with oil execs parading the justices around on private vacations and giving them millions in gifts.
Just as a currently salient example, I think there's a case to be made that the reason minor property crimes like shoplifting stopped being prosecuted in California was that the Supreme Court literally told California in 2011 that they had to reduce their overcrowded prison population. This lead to things like Prop 47 and a general reluctance to prosecute low-prority offenses. The decision was 5-4, and I don't think anyone thinks the case would turn out the same way under the current court.
I don't know what the balance of suffering is between "overcrowded prisons" and "shoplifting", which I think overall has probably somewhere between the effect of "a bit of dirt fell in my eyes" and "my spacebar got sticky for a few seconds" in terms of badness.
From this I surmise you are neither a prisoner nor a shopkeeper.
I used to work stock. Not only did we not notice shoplifters, it would be literally impossible for us to notice because the stock we got in was completely uncorrelated to how much inventory we sold. Frequently we had heaps of shit laying around in the back until the back had no more room to store it. It would have benefited us if people had stolen more lol.
It's the best court in my memory, and I'm 77. I'm really enjoying eavesdropping on court through C-Span audio. Some of the attorneys get rather full of themselves in their rhetoric, and it's a delight to hear the justices, particularly the women, set them straight. Despite all Mr. Biden's sniping and all the media theatrics, most are scrupulously impartial, and their professionalism in the face of Mr. Biden's rants and conspiracies just demonstrates that their first concern is for the institution and its integrity. I'm following Brown Jackson and Coney Barrett. They're up to some great things.
Even ignoring his politics, Trump is a fascinatingly strange guy. Describe him ("a macho he-man who doesn't drink beer, refuses handshakes because he's afraid of germs, and who eats pizza with a knife and fork") and he sounds like a poorly-written fictional character.
In 2016, I wasn't a Trump supporter, but I was curious about what would happen with him in charge. Now we know: to the extent he has good ideas, he lacks the temperament to make them happen (you need to occasionally make concessions to political enemies, instead of blindly fighting them at every turn). His leadership style was reactive and emotive, lacking any kind of long-term vision or plan.
I do not know what would happen during a Trump presidency. Likely, he doesn't, either. I do know that there are many more ways to accidentally break a country than to fix it.
Your assessment of Trump is correct, but the Democrats had some role in the intense, reactive fighting, and it resulted in he Democrats in Washington leaving money on the table.
We know that Trump isn't anchored to many positions. We also know that for most of his life he was a Democrat from Queens. And we know that he's susceptible to flattery and has a short memory; flatter him and he loves you, even if he hated you five minutes ago.
If I'm a Washington Democrat after the 2016 election, I come to Trump all smiles. I know he wants his border wall. I figure out how to trade the wall for a set of domestic priorities that I'd never get under a conventional Republican president.
Instead they fought him with everything they had. I guess that was successful enough, but I'm pretty sure they could have gotten more.
You're ignoring the fact that Trump has no incentive to cooperate with Democrats on anything. One of his biggest selling points is "owning the libs", and politics in general rewards fighting as hard as possible, or at least being seen to do so.
You're forgetting that earlier this year, Democrats spent months negotiating a bipartisan border security deal only for *Trump* to veto it because having the border be solved would be bad for his campaign.
Trump cannot be analyzed using the normal incentive structure for politicians. He is motivated by television ratings and other bullshit measures of popularity. He spent the first week of his presidency in an insane fight over how the attendance at his inauguration compared to Obama's. His incentives aren't ideological; they're egotistical. He doesn't care who's kissing his ass as long as his ass is getting kissed. If the Democrats could just figure that out they could get anything they want from him.
From the perspective of immigration hawks, the Border Act of 2024 was an abomination. What you may not understand about the GOP is that the party as a while isn't that hawkish on immigration. It's got a big section of Chamber of Commerce types who love the idea of cheap labor. So the fact that there were enough Republicans to get that bill across the finish line until Trump told them to stop doesn't mean that it was a good bill. It was a toothless bill that would have allowed Harris to pose as an immigration hawk while still allowing Infinity Mexicans into the country.
Trump cares about his television ratings, yes.
Congress and the White House engaged in the bipartisan pursuit of good government, is *boring*. It gets relegated to CSPAN with maybe a brief mention of the results on CNN. The President in a standoff with Congress, saying outrageously inflammatory things and pwning the libs, *that's* good television, That's what gets Trump the ratings he wants,
So no, even if Trump's private political views are compatible with the Democrats and there's room for a compromise, it's not going to happen.
You are assuming that you can get face time with the President.
There was a bipartisan group of Senators that tried to negotiate a deal on immigration. The idea was to build the Wall and write DACA into law. But as far as I know, these Senators never got to speak to Trump directly about this proposed deal. Instead, Trump assigned Steve Miller to handle the negotiations. Miller said that the bill would have to do more that just build the Wall to get Trump’s support. Miller got changes to the diversity lottery and family reunification provisions of immigration law written into the bill, but that wasn’t enough to get Trump to support the bill, and the attempt to draft a bipartisan bill died.
I suspect that with a bit of charm and flattery, Trump could have been talked into supporting the bill. After all, “Build the Wall” was one of his top campaign promises, and one of his major objections to DACA was that it was done via executive order rather than by Congress. But the person who gets face time with the President isn’t you, a Washington Democrat. It’s probably not your Republican colleges in the Senate, either. It’s Steve Miller, who reports back to Trump about the status of the negotiations periodically, and who, I suspect, was not in favor of building the Wall.
It's a bit odd when all of the things you fear Trump doing in the future are actively being performed by the party in power.
Did you read Part III? If so, which part of it did you disagree with?
Admittedly, I had not fully read it at the time. I am now educated, but I can say that it hasn't changed my initial opinion (maybe I'm stuck in a local maxima).
What I disagree with:
Consolidation of power: A core claim of authoritarianism you made was regarding the consolidation of power. In our country, the institutions consolidating power are dominated, top to bottom, by left-wingers. These same institutions seem unaccountable to any real oversight. The right, in this case, Trump and supporters like Musk, are advocating for disarming these institutions. At the very least, it would be a net positive to bring some balance to them.
Retribution against dissenters and threatening jail time as a form of coercion: Our judicial system has already been actively weaponized against political opponents to a level I would never have believed possible in a first-world country. If Donald loses, there’s a real chance he could be in jail before the end of next year on trumped-up charges. Consider the myriad of lawsuits against Elon Musk for simply refusing to capitulate to pressures from institutions that operate like an apparatus of the Democratic Party.
What should be added:
Dangerous rhetoric and attempts to eliminate political opponents: Hopefully, this one needs no explanation. The amount of leftwing violence and memory holing of it is shocking.
Harming election integrity - elections have two jobs, 1) accurately tally the votes of American citizens on candidates and propositions and 2) be perceived to accurately do so. Both are equally necessary. The press against common sense voter ID rules and other integrity measures is dangerous to both 1 and 2.
Nice discussion of the four Part III arguments. Scott asked me the same question, and I replied at somewhat greater length above in ht comments.
Haha I defer to you then.
> the institutions consolidating power are dominated, top to bottom, by left-wingers
To the contrary, the two nearest institutions to the US Presidency, SCOTUS and the US Senate (once red-state Democrats like Manchin and Tester are finally washed out), are both dominated by the right.
> If Donald loses, there’s a real chance he could be in jail before the end of next year on trumped-up charges.
The "trumped-up charges" claim there is doing a lot of work. The publicly available evidence, particularly in Jack Smith's two cases, is already pretty damning, in my view. Not sure this is worth discussing further in this context, but just wanted to state the obvious counterargument.
> The amount of leftwing violence and memory holing of it is shocking.
In the 1970s, sure. In the 2010s and 2020s, though, acts of political violence on the right have been much more frequent than those on the left.
> The press against common sense voter ID rules and other integrity measures is dangerous
There is unfortunately a thin line between "common sense" rules and attempts to gain a partisan advantage. Pretty much any attempts to change the system of voting run aground in this manner -- for instance, both pandemic-motivated expansions of early voting and their subsequent post-pandemic rollback degraded trust in the system.
But also, in the spirit of Part III, Trump himself has done far more to harm perceptions of election integrity than arguments against voter ID, not from any principle but simply as an attempt to gain (perceived) advantage for himself.
> In the 2010s and 2020s, though, acts of political violence on the right have been much more frequent than those on the left
The summer of 2020 was approximately as destructive as a category 2 hurricane, in what universe does this not count as one of the most massive examples of left wing violence ever recorded?
Yes, I am specifically talking about political violence, following the heading of "Dangerous rhetoric and attempts to eliminate political opponents".
On the rhetoric note, it's particularly instructive to compare the reaction of Democrats to attempted political violence against Republicans to the reverse.
Thousands of people were jailed for crimes that took place. Many of the most destructive ones remain in prison today. Feel like people don't bring this up enough.
When people bring it up they're comparing the scale, destructiveness, relative leniency, and targeting.
2020 riots were widespread and several orders of magnitude larger. "thousands" could have been jailed (unlikely; the vast majority were catch and release dismissals), but still only a small fraction of total criminal activity.
January 6, a huge percentage were charged, caused much less damage, was much less widespread, zero direct deaths, and there's been exactly one dismissal. From a utilitarian perspective it should undeniably be the less concerning event.
[The Prosecution Project](https://data.theprosecutionproject.org/) has a lot of data for both events.
Plus that guy that [burned someone to death and got a light sentence for appealing to MLK Jr](https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/152728/prosecutors-win-light-sentence-for-man-who-set-deadly-fire-during-floyd-riots/) sticks in peoples' craw.
Because some people conveniently don't define that as "political violence," just like some people call their politics "basic human decency" instead of considering it topics that people can reasonably disagree over.
I mean, if I had taken secret documents and stored them in my bathroom, I'm pretty sure I would be in jail right now. In fact, I can think of one case where a woman took secret documents home from her federal job during COVID, and she remains in jail.
So that doesn't seem very trumped up?
Re: Musk, he's currently giving out a million dollars in a sweepstakes to secure a political pledge which is only kinda tricky but seems like a pretty obvious violation of bribery law and election fraud. That's why it isn't, you know, a common campaign tactic.
It seems like this is the opposite of weaponization. It just seems like... Well, a lot of Republicans now are pretty cool with breaking the law, and very rich people think they can get away with it, because they so often do?
A different candidate is well known for having secret documents in her bathroom, deleting the evidence, and was notably not chatged for it nor for felony business record manipulation to swing an election.
And I was in favor, then and now, of prosecuting Hillary for that. I'd like war crimes charges for her husband, too- I'm very upset about this whole presidential immunity thing.
The point was not your hypocrisy. The point was completely uneven enforcement of the law. This, along with a long list of other instances, why I cannot take claims about how voting for dems against Trump because of "rule of law" and "norms and precendents" seriously.
I will also note here that Hillary was never actually president, so "presidential immunity" is not a thing that's relevant to how she was treated
>Consolidation of power: A core claim of authoritarianism you made was regarding the consolidation of power. In our country, the institutions consolidating power are dominated, top to bottom, by left-wingers. These same institutions seem unaccountable to any real oversight. The right, in this case, Trump and supporters like Musk, are advocating for disarming these institutions. At the very least, it would be a net positive to bring some balance to them.
Can you hear yourself? Getting rid of agencies is CONSOLIDATION OF POWER. That is literally what Trump is out to do. Remove climate scientists, remove MDs and PharmDs from the FDA, etc... And hand all the power of those agencies to himself. And your bit about these agencies being dominated by left-wingers is complete fantasy, feel free to back that up with some data. We'll all wait.
Getting rid of agencies like the Department of Education would more likely devolve the power back to the states.
70% of federal employee donations went to Democrats, and the Department of Education and the OPM had $0 from employees to Republican candidates: https://www.fedsmith.com/2024/10/25/federal-employees-and-2024-political-donations/ The Air Force is the only listed agency that donated more to Republicans, and even that's 48/52%.
We can quibble about "dominated" but I don't think you're asking that question in good faith anyways.
What your terrible sources fails to mention is the most important part, 98% of federal employees don't donate to any party. So extrapolating from the 2% is some real wise guy statistics.
While I like the confirmation that you're not conversating in good faith- in situations with low data quality, we can only go with what we have.
Perhaps it's worth mentioning, I'm a reformed academic who went from very liberal to center right. I did not vote for Donald the first or second time.
Which things? Prosecuting people of the opposite party? As far as I can tell right now, most politicians being prosecuted under Biden are Democrats, and they're not ones that he particularly thinks of as enemies.
Check my reply in the thread.
That's an interesting point about prosecuting democrats. The only one that comes to mind is Mayor Adam's and it seemed like his prosecution came after he started complaining about the flood of illegal immigrants being shuttled into NYC.
You might suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome if you haven’t been watching the prosecutions of various other political figures, like Bob Menendez, Hunter Biden, George Santos, and the like. Theres a lot of people being prosecuted, but people like to focus on Trump, because he’s larger than life. He’s the only person being prosecuted who seems like an enemy of Biden (Adams was generally an ally of Biden) and it’s unfair to single him out because even his supporters acknowledge that he’s a sleazy character who is likely guilty of some crimes.
Hunter isn't a politician and Santos was a Republican?
But Santos isn’t an “enemy” of anyone. There’s really no case that any of the people being prosecuted are merely being prosecuted as enemies. The justice system seems to be targeting sleazy people in and adjacent to politics, regardless of their political affiliation.
Just gonna leave this here:
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/14/politics/doj-republicans-democrats-what-matters/index.html
Well, yes, if whenever a Democrat gets prosecuted, you conclude that it must have been political because [insert whatever position they hold which is different from the administration's], then you will find all Democrats and Republicans and indeed all humans are being politically targeted. No Democrat is in perfect lockstep with the Biden administration.
David Kingsley, can you email me, please? I;m at erasmuse61@gmail.com.
> You seize power by getting a bunch of people to zerg rush the opposing politicians and beat them up until they declare you in charge. Too bad you were foiled by a locked door, you'll get them next time. I won't claim this strategy has never successfully taken over a government, because history is long and weird. But I can't think of any examples.
...Isn't that just describing a coup? Seems like there are plenty of examples throughout history.
I think coups tend to be planned pretty hard, like "we'll get this regiment to seize this TV station, then that regiment to take over this building", not just "go forth! Attack opposing politicians!"
But I think the fall of the Ceausescu (sp?) regime in Romania might be a real example? Or perhaps it falls too far to the other side (i.e. no one was planning it at all)
There was more of a plan here. The original plan didn't involve a mob at all: it was to manufacture doubt about the election, throw up fake alternate electors, have Pence declare that those states were indeterminate and couldn't be counted and that therefore the election should be thrown in the house. The first 2/3 of the plan worked; it failed because Pence wouldn't do part three. The point of the mob was to try to intimidate Pence (or possibly Congress, I think they might have been able to do something similar, not sure on this part though) into carrying it out.
Maybe it wasn't the Best Coup Ever, but it was a real plan and he really tried. (He tried a lot of other things too—remember Georgia and "just find me X,000" votes, where X was what he needed to win? But the above plan was what it came down to on the 6th.)
I think a good real life counter-example might be parts of the French Revolution. The Storming of the Bastille and Women's March on Versailles were more-or-less spontaneous and disorganised mobs that usurped political authority (though without officially overthrowing the government immediately).
In that case a likely key cause of its success was the inherent weakness of the state and army at that time, as well as terrible mismanagement of the situation. I don't think anything similar would have been feasible on Jan 6.
Napoleon's coup of Brumaire was basically this, tbh.
A huge clusterfuck with Napoleon's brother and some grenadiers literally trying multiple times to force politicians out of the building. It almost didn't work, but Napoleon's brother tried once last time and he finally forced them out. Napoleon Bonaparte was terribly bumbling throughout.
It was such a close run thing that you really could imagine the coup falling with an extra locked door or two.
Luttwak would disagree, and he's your go-to man for understanding coups.
https://www.amazon.com/Coup-dÉtat-Practical-Handbook-Revised/dp/0674737261
1/6 meets the technical definition of a coup attempt, but it was a pathetically incompetent one, doomed to failure and the only question is how much damage it could have done. Making a coup actually work requires a lot more planning and skill than that. But the Beer Hall Putsch was also a pathetically incompetent coup attempt. It's a really, really bad idea to let someone attempt a coup, learn from their mistakes, and have a second chance at bat.
Jan 6th's analogy isn't the Beer Hall Putsh it is the Reichstag Fire. The party that seized extra power from that event was the ________
The Reichstag Fire didn't involve a violent mob marching against the local government with the vague notion that a sufficiently forceful demonstration would somehow result in their leader being placed in power. The Beer Hall Putsch, did. And I can't think of a better match offhand for 1/6 in the "high-profile but pathetically inept attempted coup by a mob of idiots" department.
The Reichstag Fire is something you do AFTER you've fully centralized power within the government, not before. The point of it is to finalize the ascent of the leader to dictator and give him absolute power; you can't do that while you still have so much opposition within the government and military.
Counterpoint: you're not voting for President, but for the entire Administration that will come with whoever gets elected. (I wrote about this recently: https://robertfrank.substack.com/p/youre-not-voting-for-president )
Oddly enough, both candidates have a clear, recent 4-year track record of what their respective Administrations accomplished. (Yes, Kamala Harris wasn't formally in charge of the Biden Administration, but Biden has said that she consistently played a major decision-making role, and Harris has said that she can't think of anything she would have done differently than Biden. The best picture we can get of what her hypothetical presidency would look like is the last four years.)
So if we stack the two up against each other, we had one of the best periods in living memory under Trump Administration policies and, and an utter dumpster fire under Biden/Harris Administration policies.
I don't particularly personally like Trump either, for many of the same reasons as Scott in fact, but when you take a step back and look at the big picture he's clearly the better choice by an order of magnitude.
I don't actually want to hold the 10,000 word debate it would take to clear this up, but I'll just register my opinion, without evidence, that I think most of the good things about the Trump administration were the general strong post-2008 recovery, and most of the bad things about the Biden administration were dealing with the aftereffects of COVID and COVID relief policies.
If that's your take, and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here, but it kind of feels like you're looking purely at economic prosperity. And sure, you can credit most of that to actions that happened before both presidencies began — though honestly, reaching back 8 years in Trump's case is a bit of a stretch — but that's not what I was referring to at all.
Policy issues that had nothing whatsoever to do with economic prosperity:
* Net negative illegal immigration under Trump (precisely the opposite of what you'd expect, from a purely economic standpoint, in a time of prosperity!)
* De facto open borders under Biden, and all the devastation downstream from that.
* The Abraham Accords. One of the greatest foreign policy achievements in our nation's history. Its immense value can be seen clearly in the current Israel/Iran conflict: look at the way, for the first time ever, its Arab neighbors have chosen *not* to pile on, and have even helped them defend themselves! That would have been absolutely unthinkable 10 years ago.
* Medical pricing transparency under the Trump FDA. This got us halfway to a healthcare policy that actually works, and would have gotten us the other half of the way had hospitals and insurers not fought them tooth-and-nail at every step.
* The disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal under Biden.
This is the sort of stuff I'm basing my decision on here: the policy decisions the two different Administrations gave us, and the effects that those decisions have had. Not economic factors which, I agree with you, are largely outside of their control.
The Afghanistan withdrawal was started under Trump and the next administration adhered to it. That’s the way that foreign policy should work if agreements are made. It’s also something Trump campaigned on
> The Afghanistan withdrawal was started under Trump and the next administration adhered to it.
No they didn't. They changed the timelines, and the security arrangements. Pretty significantly in some cases. If that had been true, you would have a point, but Biden changed the plan, and so he owns the consequences.
Honestly, Obama and Trump both share a decent amount of blame here. We went into Afghanistan to get Bin Laden. Then we got him, on May 2, 2011.
Mission. Freaking. Accomplished.
On May 3, 2011, Obama should have given the order to begin packing up, rather than redefining the mission to even more Bush-style "nation-building" nonsense that was not working and clearly was never going to work. (Well, maybe if we had stayed there, and worked a lot harder at it than we were working, for about 80 years. Then we'd have had a decent chance at making real change. But that was *never* in the cards.)
Trump at least made plans to leave, but too late to implement them. But the plan that got put into effect by Biden (at least he actually finally did it!) was not the Trump plan.
Abraham accords have been terrible for many reasons, the most obvious one being that the horrible Hamas attack on Israel was a direct response to the agreements, which lead to horrible mass bombings of palestinians as retaliation killing tens of thousands of civilians, and then to bombing of Lebanon. Overall these events lead to almost 50 000 death.
It followed generally a logic of making peace in middle-east while completely ignoring the situation of Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank., therefore building that peace over an injustice.
Morocco entered the deal to legitimize its colonization of Western Sahara. This was a deal between two colonizing powers, creating once again injustice.
Sudan entered the deal just to be removed of the list of state sponsors of terrorism. The fact Sudan is part or out of this list should never have been dependent on this whole deal, that's pure blackmailing.
The opinions of the low-IQ, low-conscience thugs of Hamas should be weighted negatively, if at all.
> It followed generally a logic of making peace in middle-east while completely ignoring the situation of Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank., therefore building that peace over an injustice.
Not at all. The great genius of the Abraham Accords was to finally do what should have been done all along and disregard the illegitimate and irrelevant position of the so-called "Palestinians." The only injustice there is Egyptian and Jordanian thieves living on occupied Israeli territory for over half a century and acting like they have some valid claim to the stolen land.
"De facto open borders under Biden, and all the devastation downstream from that"
Can someone point me to what people are talking about when they say there's "devastation" happening because of immigration?
The big obvious one is crime. There's a lot of severe, violent crime (assault, murder, rape, robbery, drug dealing, etc.) being committed by illegal immigrants, made all the worse by "sanctuary" policies, in which local jurisdictions forbid the police to arrest and prosecute illegal immigrants who commit crimes because detaining them would make it all too easy for ICE to find them and throw them out.
When this is brought up, one common reply is to claim that the crime rate of "immigrants" (the people making this claim always studiously avoid acknowledging the fact that we're talking about illegal immigrants) is lower than that of US citizens. This rebuttal is nonsense for two reasons. First, illegals are here illegally. By definition, the criminality rate of illegal immigrants is 100%. And second, even if we look past that, the claim is still quite irrelevant given that their crimes are not somehow replacing or displacing the crimes of US citizens with a lower number of crimes; they're being added onto them. (In other words, if you have a million peaceful, largely decent illegals and only one who's a murderer, you still have more total murders than you would have had without them.)
The less obvious but still quite serious problem is housing costs. We've got something well over 10 million illegals in the USA, and like everyone else, they have to live somewhere. When you're experiencing a housing shortage, as most of the country is, this additional demand pressure drives prices up at a massively disproportionate rate. ( https://robertfrank.substack.com/p/congestion-pain-is-hyperbolic ) It's not a coincidence that the prices for both mortgages and rentals skyrocketed immediately after the Biden Administration took power.
That's a lot of words and not a single statistic to show where the crime is coming from or that the police is really not enforcing the laws.
You asked for an explanation of "what people are talking about," not statistics.
Isn't crime significantly down in 2024? IF so, wouldn't the spike in crime previously match Scott's "the aftereffects of COVID and COVID relief policies"?
Re: housing - this is a legit problem, so a purely non-leading question: my understanding is a decent amount of the construction business in the US uses illegal immigrants; are you worried that deporting them would have more negative consequences on housing prices due to increased labor prices, than positive consequences due to fewer people needing houses?
> Isn't crime significantly down in 2024? IF so, wouldn't the spike in crime previously match Scott's "the aftereffects of COVID and COVID relief policies"?
Only if there's a good reason to believe that COVID causes crime.
> are you worried that deporting them would have more negative consequences on housing prices due to increased labor prices, than positive consequences due to fewer people needing houses?
No, because the labor effect is basically linear, while the effect of excess load on an overloaded system is hyperbolic. The price relief from letting off all that excess demand should be orders of magnitude greater than any price increases due to higher labor costs.
> one common reply is to claim that the crime rate of "immigrants" (the people making this claim always studiously avoid acknowledging the fact that we're talking about illegal immigrants) is lower than that of US citizens. This rebuttal is nonsense for two reasons. First, illegals are here illegally. By definition, the criminality rate of illegal immigrants is 100%.
Did you know that Martin Luther King Jr. was a criminal?
But seriously, not only is that claim noncentral (and immigration per se is a victimless "crime"), "illegal immigration" isn't actually a crime in the first place, so the claim is false on its face. The term "illegal immigrant" is a hyperbolic distortion of the actual status of undocumented immigrants, which is simply people who have stayed in the country longer than they are welcomed (which duration is sometimes zero). "Illegal" immigration is a civil offense, not a criminal offense, so "breaking" the law in this case does not actually make someone a criminal.
As a point of comparison, did you know it's also illegal for your kid to host a lemonade stand? Not only is child labor against the law, so is operating a business (especially one that serves food) without a license. The type of criminality represented in dodging the authorization process for legal immigration is akin to the criminality of dodging the licensing process for setting up a lemonade stand (or babysitting, or mowing neighbors' lawns for cash, etc.).
> The term "illegal immigrant" is a hyperbolic distortion of the actual status of undocumented immigrants, which is simply people who have stayed in the country longer than they are welcomed (which duration is sometimes zero).
It's not "simply" anything. It's the violation of a sovereign nation's right to self-determination and coherence. And no amount of throwing around irrelevant examples that have nothing to do with that will make that any less of a grave offense against the entire nation and all of its legitimate citizens.
8 U.S.C. § 1325 (Improper entry by alien) is a criminal offense with a penalty of up to 6 months in prison. 8 U.S.C. § 1325 (b) lays out civil penalties and includes this: "Civil penalties under this subsection are in addition to, and not in lieu of, any criminal or other civil penalties that may be imposed."
> And second, even if we look past that, the claim is still quite irrelevant given that their crimes are not somehow replacing or displacing the crimes of US citizens with a lower number of crimes; they're being added onto them. (In other words, if you have a million peaceful, largely decent illegals and only one who's a murderer, you still have more total murders than you would have had without them.)
If you're going to argue that immigrant crime is bad because it adds to absolute crime levels, you should also credit immigrants for their absolute contributions to economic and social welfare.
I apologise I don't have exact math for this, but it is my understanding that immigrants are on average beneficial to the economy, and given that crime is rare, if you sum up the net economic contributions and subtract the net economic damages, I suspect immigrants will still come out on top. First google result sez crime costs on average about $2,200 per capita, with violent crime accounting for $2,000 of that. Immigrant violent crime rate is less than half of non-immigrants, so trim that to $1,200, and you've got average damages of less than what the average person pays in sales tax in a year. Even if you ignore the fact that undocumented immigrants still pay other taxes (random internet search sez nearly $9,000 per capita), not even they can avoid paying sales tax. So, economically speaking, undocumented immigrants pay more than enough to offset any crime they bring—and that's just from taxes! They contribute to the non-government economy just as much as anyone else.
As for social welfare, as anecdotal evidence, undocumented immigrants make up a significant portion of the population of my city, and the worst story I've heard of their impacts on the community are that their Cinco de Mayo celebrations are too loud and block traffic. Most encounters I or non-immigrant people I know have with undocumented immigrants are positive or neutral, same as with non-immigrants.
> If you're going to argue that immigrant crime is bad because it adds to absolute crime levels, you should also credit immigrants for their absolute contributions to economic and social welfare.
I might, if I had any reasonable way to determine how much "contribution" makes the rapes and murders worth it.
> I apologise I don't have exact math for this, but it is my understanding that immigrants are on average beneficial to the economy
Legitimate ones often are, yes.
> and given that crime is rare
This is *very much not* a given.
> First google result sez crime costs on average about $2,200 per capita, with violent crime accounting for $2,000 of that.
By what formula? I am deeply suspicious of any attempt to put a dollar value on violent crime, particularly murder. There's a reason courts of law have the concept of "Irreparable harm."
> So, economically speaking, undocumented immigrants pay more than enough to offset any crime they bring—and that's just from taxes!
They also exacerbate the housing shortages we're suffering throughout the country, driving prices up in a massively disproportionate way for every single renter and person trying to buy a home. Per Bastiat, this counts as economic damage — having a roof over your head is just as much of a non-voluntary expense as keeping your windows intact — and it's directly damaging a significant portion of the entire population of the USA.
What makes you say it's a dumpster fire? Things are pretty good! The stock market is at an all-time high. After a covid-related increase, inflation is down to the normal 2% level. Unemployment is 4.1%, near record lows. Apartment construction is at a 50-year high. GDP growth is healthy. Wages are up. Carbon emissions are down. New businesses are being formed at almost twice the rate of 2019. The good numbers are up and the bad numbers are down. If you're just talking about inflation, we had less than most other developed countries and managed to bring it down rather quickly by historical standards. I expect it to stay low no matter who gets elected unless there's another huge shock
Life expectancy in America vs other developed countries was a big factor in my vote. I really do hope RFK Jr will play a role in the Trump administration, and that to me is reason enough to hold my nose and vote orange.
Walz and Vance to me are almost the same person, though Vance is more eloquent. Harris represents the status quo: sicker, fatter, and lazier America. The wars will likely continue under both though Trump at least pays lip service to ending them. Meh, we the people lose again... surprise?
I doubt thar RFK will have much influence on the Trump administration, Trump is rightly very proud of his pro-vaccine work.
But what is the mechanism by which RFK jr boosts American life expectancy? Does he actually make more Americans eat vegetables?
The life expectancy gap between the US and other countries is largest among young people, for whom "healthcare" has the least to do with their health. Opposing seed-oils isn't going to stop young people from dying of drug overdoses. Also, vaccines are good.
The good you could distil from RFK Jr. - diet and exercise, are already typical advice of doctors. They don't just run around telling patients to eat more cheeseburgers, since they can be healthy at every size.
Substacks interface blows. I meant to respond here and apparently the clipboard is disabled in the app
My hope is that he is allowed to gut the FDA and USDA. Both agencies have a huge role to play in how sick Americans have become. FDA panders to drug lords in lab coats (sackler family anyone?) while USDA permits labelling beef raised and slaughtered in Australia to be marked "made in the USA" which is killing local farmers.
Our federal policy for "health" is abysmal. Not giving coke to welfare recipients is apparently "racist", nevermind the heart disease.
Ultimately you're probably right in that his influence will be small. Trump is famous for blowing off those who actually got him elected and voted for him.
The vaccine thing in my opinion is a footnote at this point. The only thing I'd like rfk to do on that front is allow vaccine injured patients to sue. "Unavoidably unsafe" (thanks Reagan) is horse shit and if that phrase doesn't mean anything to you, you're not well informed about vaccine policy and history.
If only the FDA pandered to drug lords.
The invisible graveyard due to FDA regulation is a major topic of this blog.
I don't doubt there we're once things it helped improve for Americans. Today it's bloated and full of self-serving bureaucrats.
And the results speak for themselves. Life expectancy, chronic disease, obesity didn't just fall out of the sky. At best, they "slipped by" the FDA. At worst, FDA was complicit. Either way, it must be reformed or replaced.
My views condensed into an edgy meme: https://x.com/CollinRugg/status/1851830505307570680?t=yibgW45XWDO34YjnWBFefQ&s=19
RFK? The vaccine denier? Increasing life expectancy? Please. Don't make me laugh.
Eat cheeseburgers, maybe not, but all 90% of doctors do tell patients is, here's another pill, take it for the rest of your life, I'll see you next year. We have above board drug dealers in this country and we call it "healthcare".
Did you know nutrition classes are not required to graduate medical school?
> Things are pretty good!
You're looking at the wrong things. 😛
> The stock market is at an all-time high.
Which is awesome if you've got a few million in the stock market. For all the rest of us... who cares?
> inflation is down to the normal 2% level.
The fact that we consider 2% "normal" or "acceptable" is horrifying to begin with. ( https://robertfrank.substack.com/p/why-the-national-debt-matters )
> Unemployment is 4.1%, near record lows
It always looks so good when LFRP is conveniently left out of the numbers.
> GDP growth is healthy.
I'll admit it's been a while, but last time I checked, we had a small degree of *nominal* GDP growth which was below the rate of inflation. Which means a recession in real-money terms. Has that changed?
> Wages are up.
Again, nominal vs. real-money is relevant here. I can't speak for anyone else, but my wages are up about 5% over the last few years, in which time we've had about 20% inflation.
> New businesses are being formed at almost twice the rate of 2019.
Now look at how many businesses were *lost* during the COVID lockdowns. This isn't growth; it's recovery.
And it's not even a particularly good recovery. The yield curve has been inverted since July 2022, a record-long duration for a reliable predictor of impending recession. The Sahm rule, a reliable indicator of *current* recession, was triggered 3 months ago. We've seen more mass layoffs in the past year than at any point since 2008. The "person on the street" sentiment is abundantly clear: we are in a recession, and have been for at least a year now. If the official data doesn't agree, it's worth taking a critical look at that data, because it's quite possible that it's measuring the wrong things.
Meanwhile, housing prices are sky-high for both homebuyers and renters, with almost the entirety of the rising generation priced out of the market. We have millions upon millions of illegal immigrants wreaking havoc in our cities, including well-organized criminal gangs. (And these last two points are not unrelated: https://robertfrank.substack.com/p/congestion-pain-is-hyperbolic ) Two of our important allies are engaged in wars for their very survival, and our resources are stretched so disgracefully thin that which one to support has turned into a political issue because we don't have enough supplies to go around.
I say it's a dumpster fire because it is one. If you happen to live in circumstances privileged enough that everything looks rosy... I'm happy for you, I guess. But your perspective still comes across as dangerously myopic to those of us who don't.
> Because the stock market doing well means companies are making money
It really doesn't. It means *traders* are making money. All the money for the companies has already been made when the stock is initially sold onto the market, and when they try to sell more, it's typically considered a sign that the company is in trouble. (cf. https://investors.boeing.com/investors/news/press-release-details/2024/Boeing-Announces-Pricing-of-Upsized-Concurrent-Offerings-of-Common-Stock-and-Depositary-Shares/default.aspx )
> The last period of zero-inflation was under Obama.
When would that be? According to https://www.investopedia.com/inflation-rate-by-year-7253832#toc-historical-us-inflation-rates-from-1929-to-2024 every single year of Obama's presidency had a positive inflation rate. And don't forget that Obama's Fed thought that it was unacceptably low and was flooding the economy with free money the entire time, recklessly reinflating both of the bubbles that had popped with good reason in 2001 and 2008, in a deliberate attempt to cause more inflation. The last thing I *ever* want is a return to that disastrous policy!
> LFPR higher now than at any point under Trump
Only for so-called "prime age" workers. When you have to selectively cut out such huge swathes of the working-age public to make the numbers look good, it's usually because the real numbers don't look good.
> the job market was on fire in 2021-22 and is still better today than at any point under Trump
Ok, what job market are you in?!? Because if you look around LinkedIn, for the last year and a half it's been a steady, constant, incessant drumbeat of layoffs, layoffs, layoffs, layoffs, and more layoffs, and every day another half-dozen stories that all read the same way: "I got laid off months ago, I've applied to hundreds of places, no one is granting any interviews, and now my savings are running out and I'm worried my family and I will lose our homes."
> the job market went from ridiculously good in 2021-22 to only pretty good today.
The Sahm Rule begs to differ.
> Trump’s policies of NIMBYism, protectionism, and restricting blue-collar immigration such as construction workers will make this much worse.
It's possible that that could have some small effect. But you know what will have a huge effect in the opposite direction? Mass deportation of illegal immigrants, relieving demand-side pricing pressure that's gone hyperbolic in an over-capacity system.
> Remember that the real surge in house prices happened in 2020, under Trump.
It started Q2 2020, according to your favorite site ( https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS ), and you can hardly blame Trump for Covid insanity. Before this point, prices had been coming steadily down ever since 2017.
Then Covid hit and the world went crazy, but even then, the slope of the graph turns sharply higher in Q2 2021, as illegal immigrants began flooding in and overloading the system, and didn't begin to moderate until a year and a half later after the Fed rate hikes brought house-selling to a screeching halt and froze prices at insanity levels ever since.
> Gaza and Lebanon are not our important allies.
You're right. So why even bother bringing them up?
> It really doesn't. It means *traders* are making money. All the money for the companies has already been made when the stock is initially sold onto the market, and when they try to sell more, it's typically considered a sign that the company is in trouble.
Tell me you don't know how the stock market works without telling me you don't know how the stock market works.
Traders make money on stocks because stocks represent ownership in the company. They pay dividends based on company performance, so if the company performs well, people will want to buy the stocks. Stockholders also contribute to the direction of the company, so, if you own a majority share of the stock in a company, you can do basically whatever you want with it. Both of those benefits are more valuable the more successful the business is, so a business's success tends to track the demand for (and consequently, price of) its stocks.
Admittedly, it isn't deterministic in reverse, as stock prices can become inflated without representing the actual value of the company (see: GameStonk, or the dot-com bubble), but usually they track the actual performance of the company pretty well.
The IPO is how companies make money *from* stocks, but the company still makes money via its day-to-day operations and its actual, y'know, business, and that's what drives the price of stocks post-IPO.
Yes, real GDP growth is running at approx. 2.5-3% right now and has been for a while. I'm rather surprised that you have so much to say on these topics without knowing this.
Seriously, I'm agog at seeing this level of confident ignorance in this comment section.
2% inflation is literally the standard target for national banks around the world, including the Federal Reserve: https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/economy_14400.htm
A high inflation rate is bad for obvious reasons, but a low or negative inflation rate is also bad because you want to encourage people to spend money, not stash it under their mattress. The happy medium is about 2%.
Change one or two words and it's the exact same complaint people were making about Bush. "Oh, sure, by all the measurements it looks good, but that's all fake, the *real* economy sucks!"
> a low or negative inflation rate is also bad because you want to encourage people to spend money, not stash it under their mattress
Pure nonsense. The reason national banks around the world are pushing for positive inflation rates is because governments around the world are in debt, and inflating your way out of unmanageable debt has been the time-honored solution to such issues since ancient times.
If you really think that people would stop spending under deflationary conditions, consider the following thought experiment: You have good reason to rationally believe groceries are going to be cheaper next week than they are today. But you need to go shopping for groceries today. What *exactly* are you going to do while you wait for the prices to go down?
Likewise, if you believe the other standard (but equally nonsensical) argument against deflation, that it causes high-end investors to want to stop investing, consider this thought experiment. You're a big-shot investor with a few million dollars to invest in some project. In Economy A, you have inflationary conditions, so you're being asked to spend expensive dollars today in the hopes of receiving debased dollars in the future. In Economy B, you have deflationary conditions, where you're being asked to spend cheap dollars today in the hopes of receiving more-valuable dollars in the future. Which do you prefer? To ask the question is to answer it!
Inflating your way out of debt doesn't work in the long term because bond holders aren't stupid. No matter what the inflation rate is, bond holders will demand an interest rate higher than that to account for risk, or else what's the point of buying the bond?
"But you need to go shopping for groceries today. What *exactly* are you going to do while you wait for the prices to go down?"
Yes, way to go for cherry picking the one expense that everyone has to incur on a regular basis because they die otherwise. Groceries are a small fraction of even a middle class budget, and a negligible fraction of the expenditures of the rich. Do I really have to upgrade my laptop this year, or can I wait until next year? Do I really need to replace my clunker for a Tesla now, or can I wait a few years and get a better car with the same money (and not just because of technological improvement)?
"In Economy A, you have inflationary conditions, so you're being asked to spend expensive dollars today in the hopes of receiving debased dollars in the future. In Economy B, you have deflationary conditions, where you're being asked to spend cheap dollars today in the hopes of receiving more-valuable dollars in the future. Which do you prefer?"
The currency is just a unit of measurement. What determines how much I get from my investment is the economic output of the thing I am investing in. Who cares if that's measured in "debased dollars" or "expensive dollars" if I can exchange it for the same number of apples or potatoes? If I measure a growing child with a shrinking ruler, the child is still growing, even though the millimeter is being "debased"!
In Economy B, I might consider not investing at all. After all, I'm essentially getting a risk free return from putting the money under my mattress.
> Inflating your way out of debt doesn't work in the long term because bond holders aren't stupid.
While this may be true, it hasn't stopped anyone from trying, from the ancient Romans to the modern central bankers.
> No matter what the inflation rate is, bond holders will demand an interest rate higher than that to account for risk, or else what's the point of buying the bond?
I dunno. Why don't you ask all the bond holders who were all too willing to flock to the insanity that was negative-rate European bonds about a decade ago?
> Yes, way to go for cherry picking the one expense that everyone has to incur on a regular basis because they die otherwise.
If you need to fill up your car today, and you rationally expect that gas is going to be cheaper next week... how are you going to get to work in the meantime? If you think rent's going to be cheaper in 3 months, where are you going to live until then? It's not just food. All the biggest line items on a consumer's budget are non-discretionary expenses.
Moreover in Economy A an investor is going to invest in anything with a pulse, rather than accept negative net returns by sitting on T-bills.
If you have all these opinions but don't even know real gdp growth then it sort of looks like you're deliberately ignoring anything contrary to your pre formed views
> > Unemployment is 4.1%, near record lows
> It always looks so good when LFRP is conveniently left out of the numbers.
This isn't "convenient" it's the way unemployment is measured.
Every single administration of my life -- every single one of them -- someone pretends that leaving out people who aren't seeking jobs is some brand new thing invented by the current administration. Start the clock on the 47th president.
I never said that. I'm well aware that this dishonest measurement has been going on for a long time now. Doesn't make it any less dishonest.
I do not mean this in an offensive way, but I think you have cognitive bias, as other repliers seem to be pointing out too. For example, I think that you learning that real gdp growth has been about 3% recently will not change your political views at all, even though you should update them at least a little based on this new information.
This should deeply concern you. You should be especially concerned that you might not be thinking rationally since we are talking about politics too, and people are known to have impaired rationality on either side when it comes to political issues.
> This should deeply concern you.
As a rational individual, what deeply concerns me is the fact that the prices for everything from groceries to housing to gasoline went up significantly more than the official inflation rate. This means that the official numbers are not an accurate measurement of reality, and thus not a particularly good basis for a rational discussion.
Cumulative inflation since 2020 was 20%. Groceries specifically were 25%. This is in line with my lived experience. Do you think it is possible that you are noticing the things which have increased in price, while not noticing the things that have decreased in price or remained constant since 2020? Or perhaps you are living in a region where inflation was higher than the national average?
If the federal government were lying about inflation numbers I feel like there would be a stronger argument with numbers showing this, rather than just feeling like its not correct. I don't think it would be impossible to falsify what the BLS has put out if it really was wrong. So my question to you is, why hasn't anyone done it yet?
> Cumulative inflation since 2020 was 20%. Groceries specifically were 25%. This is in line with my lived experience.
>
> Do you have any data on that?
I do. I tend to be a bit of a packrat about saving receipts, and I'm pretty consistent in my eating habits. I can go back and check, and the same set of groceries that cost $43 four years ago costs $68 today. This is an increase of over 50%, more than twice the cited rate.
The average price of gas in the US right now is a bit above $3.10/gallon. 4 years ago it was $2.20. This is an increase of about 40%, approximately twice the cited rate. (And just look at all the news articles we've seen recently, cheering about how much gas prices have come *down* in recent months!)
Per https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ASPUS the average cost of a house 4 years ago was $400,600. Today it's $501,100. (Up 25%, significantly higher than the claimed 20% rate of inflation.) Meanwhile, per https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/average-rent-by-year , average rental rates have increased from $1185 to $1521, or approximately 28%.
Per https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SETA01, the price of new cars has "only" gone up about 20%, and per https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SETA02 used car prices have actually been coming down a bit after a massive inflationary spike — 43% in 13 months! — beginning January 2021, but they're still up about 14% overall. So... yay for infrequently-purchased goods, I suppose?
But as long as we're talking about infrequent purchases, let's look at one of the most reliable trends of the last century: electronics. Technological progress has steadily brought the nominal cost of electronics down, down, down, in open defiance of inflation, since years before Gordon Moore gave the trend its famous name. I happened to buy the computer I'm writing this on right now in 2020, for about $1500. I just checked on the manufacturer's website, and replacing it today with a comparable system would cost a bit under $2000. In a historically deflationary sector!
> If the federal government were lying about inflation numbers I feel like there would be a stronger argument with numbers showing this, rather than just feeling like its not correct. ... So my question to you is, why hasn't anyone done it yet?
If the numbers I presented above aren't convincing enough for you, check out Shadow Stats, at https://www.shadowstats.com/ . John Williams (not the famous composer) calculates inflation by what used to be the standard formula, before they replaced it in the 1990s with a new formula that conveniently reports significantly lower numbers, and produces results that are far more in line with the intuitive feeling of what we're experiencing.
Disclaimer: this is a paid service; not all of the data is available for free. Gathering, calculating, and verifying all this data takes a lot of work, and it's not being done on a government budget. Sadly, this is probably why you haven't heard about it.
> we had one of the best periods in living memory under Trump Administration policies and, and an utter dumpster fire under Biden/Harris Administration policies.
My mans completely forgot about the Rona
I remember a left-leaning FDA slow-walking vaccine approval until after the election, saying "we won't let Trump rush this vaccine!"
I don't see how that makes the period under Trump any better.
Well, many are alarmed that Trump states he will replace a lot more people in federal agencies this time. I am not alarmed by that policy.
You should be alarmed. The thing is, the people Trump sees as the problem in his first administration were not slow-moving bureaucrats in the FDA, but Republicans like Mike Pence, Jeff Sessions, and Bill Barr who didn't just give him everything he wanted. He's been very clear on this point -- he demands loyalty above all else, and it's foolish to think that this sort of unquestioned loyalty he seeks is positively correlated with competence.
Do you feel that Democratic immigration policy - which *seems* overwhelmingly self-serving in an electoral context - is a (presumably, lesser) violation of democratic norms?
This is the only time that "immigration" appears in either the post or the comments. I would've expected it to feature more prominently, since 11 figures worth of people walking in through the border is an existential consideration, and one of the main reasons it could be worth swallowing a huge pill like Trump's behaviour. I'd expect it to be the main point of debate.
> 11 figures
I think you might have missed by a few decimal places?
Hah sorry man sometimes I get my arguments and money mixed up with my arguments about migration. Yes I meant 3 fewer zeroes.
How is [8, not 11] figures of people walking through the border an existential concern? Didn't your ancestors walk through the border at some point? Can you point to any actual harm these border-walkers have done to you?
It puts the country qua the country out of existence. Every political issue discussed here is less consequential and more reversible. And those issues are affected anyhow, since it permanently shifts the political orientation of the country.
I think those other points are a little below the standard of discourse here. The issue is highly significant to the public but it was elided in this analysis. That's true regardless of my ancestry, experiences, and any beliefs you might have about whether open borders are a good thing.
I think insofar as the policy itself is "let immigrants in", it's not a violation at all - it's legitimate for a country to choose to let immigrants in if that's what normal democratic processes decide.
Insofar as the policy is "don't enforce the immigration laws and have sanctuary cities so that other people can't either", I think it's a minor violation. All countries make decisions about what to enforce or not enforce, and Democrats who deprioritize enforcement of immigration laws are using the normal legal/democratic process to decide to do that (eg they were elected DA, and then they use normal DA powers to say this is one of the laws they're not enforcing). I say "minor violation" rather than "no violation" because I think it sucks to have laws that aren't enforced and that in a perfect world we would have pretty strong enforcement - but I do think that boat sailed decades ago and the Democrats on immigration here aren't much of an escalation (see eg going 1 mile above the speed limit, rich people using LSD, etc).
You're right that the Democrat open-borders-but-Mexico-only policy is similar to Republican policies, and not disliked by the Republican establishment. But it is hated by the general public, and it is weird-- let some people in with zero vetting, but if you want to enter legally, have a five-year process? Who would vote for that? It is the current policy ONLY because putting that into a statute would never pass.
Expanding on this… immigration is - per Gallup - about as popular as it was a month after 9/11.
If our legitimate electoral process ends up producing a mismatch between voter preferences & outcomes such that we won’t even enforce the immigration laws on the books… maybe our process is the problem?
From an admittedly right-leaning perspective, not enforcing laws seems like an end run *around* democracy - not an expression of it.
> If our legitimate electoral process ends up producing a mismatch between voter preferences & outcomes such that we won’t even enforce the immigration laws on the books… maybe our process is the problem?
The process self-corrected, since a candidate showed up who said he'd enforce immigration laws, even building a wall, and he got elected.
That does sound like a perverse incentive: if I want to do it legally, it will take me five years. Alternatively, I can fly to a South American country, come in over the border, and Bob's your uncle!
Well, I had to laugh at the sanctuary cities which changed their opinions when the immigrants were bused to their doorsteps, like New York.
It's very easy to be "no human is illegal" when the people having to deal with the influx are safely hundreds of miles to your south.
How is Democratic immigration policy self-serving? Does allowing refugees somehow help Democrats? The only thing I can imagine you thinking is some sort of long game, where we let people in, give them time to get Green Cards, then give them five years to become citizens, and then hope that they start voting for us. But that's a very long game, and many immigrant groups are clearly quite strongly Republican (particularly the ones that came as refugees, like Vietnamese and Cuban immigrants).
I’m talking about the “long game” you describe.
5 years (or thereabouts) is really not that long when it’s a permanent political shift in the most important & richest country on earth at stake.
Do you not think that California’s demographic shifts & the State’s political landscape turning solid blue as a result are consequential?
I don’t think it’s a permanent shift - several immigrant groups have changed which party they lean towards in the past few decades. Do you think that will stop changing? (I believe that in Orange County, where I live now, it’s only because of immigrant communities that Republicans still have some safe seats!)
Also, five years is the minimum time from green card to citizenship - since there are usually years before a green card, and people usually don’t even complete that last step in just five years, it’s probably closer to ten on average.
Vietnam & Cuba are special cases when it comes to country of origin. Also: the GOP slant is overwhelmingly found in older generations of those groups - particularly those who actually had to flee.
Successful asylum claimants start a 5-year clock, but even 10 years isn’t that long in the scheme of things.
Also: that timeline is a malleable policy.
If Texas turns blue, it's Game Over for Republicans winning the White House for at least a generation.. And Democrats have been talking about this as a goal for at least 25 years.
Politicians play long games and importing new Democrats is that most obvious example.
But what exactly is the mechanism for immigration turning Texas blue? Lots of hispanic/latino Texans vote red, especially as you go down the generations. If anything, it seems more likely to me that Texas eventually going blue will be a matter of (white) housing refugees fleeing from blue states with housing shortages. And while northeastern blue states are being less proactive about their housing shortages, the west coast is largely going YIMBY, so if anything, Democrats are actively slowing down their taking of Texas.
People are always predicting permanent majorities and they are always wrong. Coalitions and policies aren't static.
How do you mean? Texas has fewer electoral votes that Michigan/Wisconsin/Pennsylvania, and immigration backlash seems to be a major factor turning those states red.
If Texas had been blue, the most recent Republican president would have been GHWB.
Notably, 1988 is also the *first* time Texas went red in a non-landslide election. It was reliably blue up until then. These things are constantly changing, and with the current electoral landscape, locking Texas blue would not make the election a foregone conclusion (especially since other changes to the political system would likely equilibrate in ways that make the Midwest redder).
Equilibrium is most early achieved in a closed system. Positions that would turn Texas bluer might turn Michigan (and Massachusetts and Hawaii, for that matter) redder. But turning Texas bluer by importing Infinity Mexicans requires no horsetrading at all.
I can't believe we're having this discussion about (I) whether the Democrats are trying to tilt elections by bringing in Undocumented Democrats, and (ii) whether Texas becoming a blue state would be harmful to the Republican. They openly brag about the former, and the latter is perhaps the most trivially obvious political statement I can make.
How so? An immigrant becoming a voter takes years, and it frequently never happens. 14th Amendment citizen voters takes minimum 18 years. No one in politics has incentives to plan that far ahead.
Politicians are people too. Do you not care what happens to your country or your children in 18 years? Can politicians not care about climate change because it is more than two terms away?
Even if the main goal of open borders isn't to get votes, it still happens. If Bob's politician has a small chance of doing a coup on you, but yours has a very high chance of attaching tens of millions of voters to Bob in a democracy who vote overwhelmingly for you over a longer timeframe, don't you think that's an important topic when discussing Bob's decision tree
I think you're right about the decision process, but that is not actually true in this case.
Polling shows that Hispanic men 18-30, which is the largest group among illegal immigrants, have a slight preference for Trump.
If the Hispanic vote ever goes R in an environment where the political centre of mass has not shifted far and away from the American baseline, I will reevaluate my opinions.
According to exit polls, male Hispanics were net voters for Trump.
Overturning Roe was a 40-year project that involved the creation of an alternative legal-academic and judicial structure.
An immigrant becoming a voter takes checking the wrong box when you go to the DMV, and then the Democratic Party will do everything they can to stop you from being removed from voter rolls.
What policy are you talking about? Both parties are hard on the border and immigrants right now.
Which part of their immigration policy do you think is self-serving?
I think Biden, and Obama before him, deporting record numbers of illegal immigrants, and recent Biden administration efforts that have reduced border crossing to record lows, to be quite impressive and I support them in that! I wish Biden could have funding to do more, but alas Trump instructed his allies in congress to shoot down a border funding bill because he actively wants the border to be bad to help him be elected.
But I understand if you are a bit of an open borders type you might want to vote for someone who implements less effective policy there, I certainly get that stance even if I don't share it.
> As fellow-Harris-supporter Curtis Yarvin reminds us,
I hope this doesn't sound lazy but can I have a link?
It's not really mentioned on his substack. At least, it's not like, a headline of any one of his posts and his most recent post says nothing about it.
To him being a Harris supporter, or him talking about the ways the left wing is bad?
him being a Harris supporter
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/bidenharris-2024 . I think it's half-ironic, and I was using it half-jokingly, but who even knows anymore?
He was a BIDEN supporter. See https://graymirror.substack.com/p/ousting-biden "I was endorsing Biden—the man, not the symbol."
Behold! You have elucidated my opinion better than I can. DEI is in retreat. Wokeism is in retreat. ACAB is in retreat. Attacks on "Big Oil" are in retreat. The only thing on the left that has any legs is transgender issues, and it already feels like it is stalling out. Trump's mindset of "Whatever I can get away with" is corrosive to the fabric of a nation. Should new liberal laws be passed by Kamala, those can be repealed in the future. But the corrosive destruction of the belief in free and fair elections, the demonstration that the rule of law is fake, the ability to force the entirety of the government to bend its will to a single person's whim will surely kill this nation. And what rises in its place is likely to be a nuclear wasteland as regional warlords try to take each other out.
And for the record, the plot on Jan 6 was clearly: Get a mob into the capitol, to either get the ballot box, or gain access to the box. Stuff the box full of the false electoral ballots that were rushed to DC before the 6th. Once the box has the false ballots inside it, declare the continued count of ballots to be impossible, and switch to the one-vote-per-state mechanic, which would have re-elected Trump, who would then pardon everyone involved.
Also, Ron Johnson tried to get fake electors to Mike Pence. Their main goal was to claim that competing slates of electors from too many states meant it was a failed election and throw it into the House, where Trump would win because the vote is done based on state delegations, not individual representatives.
JD Vance said this is what he would’ve done.
Competing slates of electors are common in American history and are a standard procedure in disputed elections. 1876 is the most famous case.
Yes, and that was terrible! You do think 1876 was terrible right?
They weren’t “competing” electors. They were fake! Fraud! Dozens of them have been indicted in four states! Trump’s attorney behind the scheme was disbarred.
This is motivated reasoning in the extreme. Trump defrauded 7 states by having false electors forge state documents. This was not a case of the states themselves forming alternate electors. These weren't even the official republican electors that were appointed in case Trump won. They were ragtag groups of loyalists willing to commit a felony, or in some cases tricked into it. You really discredit your entire defense of Trump.
> You really discredit your entire defense of Trump.
I think that if one side of the aisle consistently lies to protect their god-emperor, everyone sane should know who to vote for.
Alas, the US is consistently insane.
> And what rises in its place is likely to be a nuclear wasteland as regional warlords try to take each other out.
Pick a faction: Caesar's Legions or New California Republic.
https://www.unz.com/article/remembering-the-reichstag-fire/
Kamala didn't run the Administration, but neither did Biden.
>DEI is in retreat. Wokeism is in retreat.
I'm jealous of the alternative universe some of you people seem to live in, but in the real world that shit is here to stay. Of course, neither Trump nor his joke of a party can do shit about that either, but at least may he continue to spit in their faces for a few years longer from on high.
Great piece. Couple of notes:
Chapter I : Iran is another good example
Chapter IV: Massad Boulos, Tiffany Trump’s father in law and a couple of other campaign members are working behind the scenes to dissuade the Muslim community from voting. Here is the article: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/17/us/politics/donald-trump-campaign-michigan-arab-americans.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Thank you for reminding me of the fargroup, that explains my feelings on the matter entirely.
"If so, ACX recommends voting for Harris, Oliver, or Stein."
Can we add: "... and then, after the election, badgering the hell out of whoever wins to actually do good policy?"
I think this is sufficiently implied that if I included it, I would also have to include things like "and then drive home from the voting booth, instead of staying there forever and slowly starving to death."
See, you're full of good advice, that I shall be sure to take on election day!
But yes, certainly I am not accusing you of failing to badger people to do Better Things - more just... emphasizing for the "just win THIS election" crowd that unless you follow up with Good Policy, you're just gonna get a more empowered anti-status-quo dude on the ballot in 2028. Or, if you do badly enough, and this threshold is NOT currently high enough, in the streets with a mob in 2027.
" instead of staying there forever and slowly starving to death."
This is why Australians have sausage sizzles during elections! Now you too can stay as long as you like in the vicinity of the polling booth and not be in danger of death from starvation!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sausage_sizzle
"Sausage sizzles have become a recognised and expected addition to polling booths at Australian elections, with sausages at these stations nicknamed 'Democracy Sausages'. There was widespread media coverage of this in the 2013 and 2016 Australian federal elections, with the hashtag "#democracysausage" trending on Twitter. Twitter also added a sausage-in-bread emoji to the '#ausvotes' hashtag on the day of the 2016 election; it was the most widely used emoji in relation to the election under that hashtag. During the 2016 election, the leader of the Australian Labor Party, Bill Shorten, came under scrutiny for the way in which he consumed his sausage in bread."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_sausage
"Democracy sausages" are the sausages wrapped in a slice of bread, bought from a sausage sizzle operated as a fundraiser at Australian polling places on election day, often in aid of the institutions that house the polling place. In 2016, 1,992 polling booths (just under one-third of those across Australia) had a sausage stand by the count of the Election Sausage Sizzles website."
"Put this way, you could argue: okay, January 6 was bad. But it was like a ten-year-old child's idea of authoritarianism. You seize power by getting a bunch of people to zerg rush the opposing politicians and beat them up until they declare you in charge. Too bad you were foiled by a locked door, you'll get them next time. I won't claim this strategy has never successfully taken over a government, because history is long and weird. But I can't think of any examples."
I've said it before and I will say it 1000 times more but all the evidence shows that Trump did not plan January 6 or try to use it to seize power, he literally within an hour of it happening told everyone to be peaceful, he told them all to go home, there is no evidence that he coordinated with the rioters, there is no evidence that he tried to use any of the armed forces or any of the US secret police or the secret service or like, a private paramilitary force to take over on January 6.
January 6 was a riot. It was not an attempted coup by Donald Trump. It did not fail to seize power because it was incompetent, but because it was literally not a planned attempt to seize power. Donald Trump's rhetoric on and before January 6 was well within normal range of political rhetoric in America, nowhere near incitement to riot, and it is immoral to hold him culpable for the actions of a tiny fraction of his supporters that got out of hand especially given he explicitly told them not to.
Not only is all of this obviously true if you paid attention on the day of it, read the logs and watched the video of guys walking through the Capitol, it's also LEGALLY true. No one who has been surveilling Donald Trump for the last 8 years has legal evidence despite him being investigated by intelligence agencies, the department of justice, congress etc.
To argue that January 6 was a coup attempt is literally a conspiracy theory, in the pejorative sense of the term.
As far as authoritarianism goes I think kicking a sitting president off multiple major communication platforms via coordinated backroom deals by his political opponents is a lot more scary creeping authoritarianism than some of trump's vague threats against other politicians (which you don't even specify), but ALSO trump himself is being threatened by jail from many axes. In ADDITION, I personally have been threatened by the other side directly.
Using the FBI against your opponents is far more authoritarian than anything Trump has actually done.
He was president for 4 years! He had every opportunity to arrest his opponents, to give orders to the armed forces, etc. etc.
He didn't do any of that shit, whereas his supporters have actually faced significant legal consequences, constant investigations, arrests and jailtime, etc.
I have to admit I haven't read the back and forth about exactly how deliberate Trump was on 1/6 because everyone talking about it is a hack who ends up enraging me in some way. If I were more virtuous, I would have cited his attempts to bully election officials in Georgia, which I think are a clearer-cut case. But those don't have as much name recognition as 1/6 so I went with 1/6 instead and am not going to claim to be 100% sure you're wrong here.
> those don't have as much name recognition as 1/6
Please, Scott, think about why that is.
January 6th was exactly the symbol the priestly class needed. They created it and amplified it, precisely so people wouldn't think about the reality behind it, and just take it as a given.
There's ample evidence the priestly class _wanted_ this outcome, and that the FBI was involved, just like with the staged meg whitmer capital. People _predicted_ the feds were planning a capital breach the night of january 5th:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erafzh-YahE
He was fairly deliberate. He managed some paper-thin pretense of "oh I'm not responsible" but he also did things like this:
>Instead, President Trump reached out to Rudolph Giuliani and friendly Members of Congress, seeking their assistance in delaying the joint session of Congress. And the President tweeted at 2:24 p.m., at the height of the violence, that his own Vice President lacked the “courage” to act—a statement that could only further enrage the mob.
[...]
> On the 6th, as the riot began to escalate, a colleague texted Hicks and wrote, “Hey, I know you’re seeing this. But he really should tweet something about Being NON-violent.” “I’m not there,” Hicks replied. “I suggested it several times Monday and Tuesday and he refused.”
[...]
> Multiple witnesses told the Select Committee that Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy contacted the President and others around him, desper- ately trying to get him to act. McCarthy’s entreaties led nowhere. “I guess they’re just more upset about the election theft than you are,” President Trump told McCarthy.
He requested more national guard. Why would he do that if the goal were to make J6 happen?
There were no National Guardsmen anywhere on Capitol grounds when the Jan 6 rioters were beating the shit out of cops and breaking their way into the Capitol. He was the commander-in-chief: if he had requested NG, they would have been there.
I don't know what weird alternate universe you live in where he requested more NG in any meaningful sense. I assume you're equating an offhand comment he made at some point in his life to actually using his powers as President to request more NG.
And for every one of those thousand I will remind you that there was a fake electors scheme and multiple efforts to get those fake electors to Mike Pence outside the normal chain of custody. Mike Pence resisted the effort and altered his opening remarks to make sure it was clear he would not accept them.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/11/pence-jan-6-election-certification-script-00016539
The entire time during the riot (and even after the rioters dispersed), Trump and his coconspirators were applying pressure to Pence and other lawmakers to stop the certification of the election. He watched the violence and did nothing for nearly 3 hours while his staff and family begged him to call it off. The one tweet "he" sent telling them not to hurt police he didnt even write, and didn't call them off. Nevermind that this was merely the final step in his scheme to overturn the results. He already had false electors drummed up and ready, tried to force his DOJ into making false allegations of election fraud, told Pence to unilaterally make him the next president and pressured state officials into coming up with new votes. None of this is even disputed. To call Jan 6 and the actions leading up to it anything but a coup attempt is a denial of the obvious.
> all the evidence shows
> he literally within an hour of it happening told everyone to be peaceful,
This is disputed a lot, since you've recently looked at the evidence, what timestamps do you have?
It's unclear to me which of the following you believe:
1) Trump did not wish to block or delay the Congressional certification of electors.
2) Trump did not take a variety of actions on January 6 that were intended to block or delay Congressional certification of electors.
3) Blocking or delaying Congressional certification of electors was not an attempt by him to retain the Presidency.
All of these are separate from the question of whether trump planned the riot on january 6 as an attempt to violently seize control of the united states.
So #3?
“But when I ask what work I have to do, it’s to prod the part of my brain that says “The Democrats are terrible!”
I’ve found MDMA is exceptionally effective at reconsolidating whatever intense maladaptive reactions I activate/trigger while on it. It seems to provide a universal mismatch.
This Blogs transition from a cutting edge exploration of ideas to just another website repeating leftist tropes has been a dynamic and insightful look of at the importance of anonymity in the maintenance of free expression.
The internet is a dimmer place without Slate Star Codex and Unqualified Reservations. All we can do is mourn what was and celebrate that we ever had such golden content to peruse.
tbf slate star codex endorsed Clinton and was very anti Trump.
It was literally linked in the post!
Come on man, this is silly. Scott has always been a lib, and will always have lib values and opinions. He's intellectually honest and charitable enough to point out flaws on his side and create a space where vigorous disagreement is encouraged, but that doesn't mean he has to conform to whatever substack flavoured online right opinions are in vogue.
To be fair, we're all of us dragging down the level with the discussion of politics; it is to be hoped that once the election is done and dusted, normal programming will resume.
Though my own country is probably going to have a general election sometime in November, so you're all welcome to pile in with opinions on who we should vote for, why, and why the other lot are a shower of [ahem].
Conspiracy theories about poopypants and fake AI electioneering welcome! (Please somebody give Simon Harris a good kicking, I dislike the guy on sight even though he hasn't been a terrible leader to date).
Hmm - this is the start of a possible conspiracy theory! You guys are set to try and re-elect an incumbent called Harris, we are set to try and re-elect an incumbent called Harris, is there a sinister connection? 😀 The Year of the Harris! What mysterious and even nefarious influence does this family, nay, this clan possess to be running for high office?
>To be fair, we're all of us dragging down the level with the discussion of politics; it is to be hoped that once the election is done and dusted, normal programming will resume.
Very much agreed!
>Though my own country is probably going to have a general election sometime in November
I offer my condolences. I hope that your candidates are from a better batch than the bottom of the barrel we got!
You really put words on my internal political chaos there, thank you.
For those still reeling from the covid regime, the *one* kind of authoritarianism from Trump they can rule out completely is of the epidemiological sort.
He had a chance to go big with that national emergency, and he sat on his hands.
You may be right about that.
Great point! Covid was the perfect opportunity to expand his powers, but instead, he let the state governors do it. Trump could have suppressed dissent (more than the CDC and NIH actually did-- and he wasn't controlling them), faked the figures to show better progress, commanded Pfizer to follow its own protocols and approve its vaccine rather than wait for 3 weeks just so it would be announced after election, federalized the voting booths, . . .
There's a lot in this I disagree with, other than that Trump is the greater of two evils.
In my opinion, the biggest error is blaming the Democratic Party for the evils of neoliberal capitalism. The rest is commentary.
In Mexico there is a saying, something like "the vote is free and secret." I wish Americans adopted this. Nothing against you Scott, but it would rid us of months of having to listen to everyone's endorsements, which gets very old very quickly.
I'm not particularly familiar with Mexico's political situation: is that saying ironic or sincere?
Sincere. It is basically the National Electoral Institute's slogan.
Just checked and it is now universal, free, secret, direct, personal and non-transferable. Doesn't have the same ring to it.
One argument that you made last time, but haven't emphasized this time, is that Trump galvanizes the worse impulses of the social left. Do you still feel this way?
A related argument, which I'm not sure if you have made (but which I am making!), is that Trump disagrees with some of the better economic instincts of the right, and seems to move the party with him when he does. For example, the GOP has moved considerably anti-market on trade issues becuase of Trump's 2016 rhetoric, and now many in the party seem to be defending across-the-board tariffs.
I'm European, and while the outcome of this election affects me greatly, I mostly treat it as spectator sports.
However, some things to consider:
1. What's interesting in this election is that both candidate have a firmly established track record in power (as President and VP). I'm going to go ahead and say that, in this observer's opinion, Trump's track record is a lot better. I wouldn't chalk that to Trump being great (I think he's despicable and not incredibly smart either), but rather to where some of his sympathies and supports lie and consequently what policies get or do not get passed.
A lof of things that Trump got flack for actually held some water. The Dems have said they would keep building his wall that we all made fun of. Immigration seems to be an issue, after all (I genuinely thought he was inventing a concern at the time). America was lucky to have him in the worst of Covid — lockdowns were not the way to go. They can work but they're hard to do well, and America is not a tiny insular and culturally homogenous country where those things are comparatively easy. Operation warpspeed went well. Trump should probalby not get credit, but would it have gone as well with the Dems... my intuition is no. Tump lowered the taxes to great effect, etc... I don't know how I feel about his tariffs and trade war with China, but the Dems were keen on continuing them.
I don't think the Biden admin did anything super wrong, but it's been mid the whole time at best. The handling of the varying armed conflicts lacked direction, and it would have seemed better to put the foot down one way or the other. They've ran the money printer like crazy, which is sometimes called for, but I don't think we'll get the return on investment in this case.
You could say it wasn't Kamala's administration, but her lack of clear policy, and her general discourse makes it seem like she's fully aligned with the general party line. It doesn't seems like she has any plan other than "more of the same", even now that she is the candidate.
2. Most things that we are blamed Trump for, he is only indirectly responsible for. Jan 6 first. Did he foster the culture that allowed it? Most definitely, though it would have existed without him, but he did give them the casus belli. Did he mastermind it and willed it to happen? Most definitely not.
Roe vs Wade repell — that was the supreme court's doing. He packed the supreme court, but everyone does that (Dems as well). He broke tradition by nominating a new member to SCOTUS at the end of his mandate, but this was widely supported by his party, and I wouldn't have put it over the Dems to do the same. Still, not great, but also not the same as him point blank banning abortion.
3. The election stuff is troubling, mostly the reaction to it. I really haven't done enough research here but it seems plausible that (1) he did not win the election and (2) there were election irregularities. The reaction of "Trump is a crazy dictator" and "all of it is hogwash" is troubling. In a democracy, these things ought to be investigated seriously — I think they probably where to some (a large?) extent, which is why (1). But the public discourse around it is absolutely toxic and contrary to the spirit of democracy (on both sides). I think it's also plausible that Trump believes in good faith that the election was stolen and that this is not a ploy for him to remain in power. (This is not an endorsement of his character, and I'm not saying he wouldn't if he thought he could get away with it, but I tend to believe that he genuinely believes the election was stolen.)
4. The consequentialist/utilitarian argument: I believe policies under Trump (mostly, economic policy) will lead to vastly better outcomes than policies under Kamala. The market seems to believe this as well. The economy is crucially important to everyone, in ways that people tend to underestimate. Trump will be less good for some people (women who want an abortion and trans people among them) but on the whole, the economic considerations tips the scales all the way.
5. Trump can't run for another mandate, which I think should lower the concerns about his authoritarianism. He's not (and is never going to be) powerful enough to be able to allow himself another run, and if he tries, watch all hell break loose. He's also old enough that there wouldn't be much point.
Relatedly, most of the harm he has done to political norms has already been done. We have already paid the price, we might as well take the benefits.
6. One of the thing I was most concerned about for Trump was his handling of international conflicts. I think now I see things in a different frame: Trump is higher variance. He is more likely to bring conflicts to an end, and more likely to make something disasterous happen. Of course, it all depends on your definition of disaster here, but I think the odds of a disaster are comparatively very low. Russia or Iran detonating a nuke would be a disaster. Escalating the conflict with Iran such that they can *never* detonate a nuke might be good (*), or might be bad, but it's not clear is meaningfully worse that the morass situation the Dems are likely to leave this in.
(*) I do think Iran getting a nuke is probably one of, if not *the* worst relatively likely thing to happen to the world. Sure, evil AGI would be worse, but I rate that orders of magnitude less likely in our lifetime.
So anyway, for all these reasons, I lean towards thinking Trump would be better for America and the world. Kamala is sure to be predictably bad, Trump will most likely do better on net, with a small but definitely present chance of fucking up something important. I think the main difference is that Trump's mistake will be mistake of actions, whereas the Dems' mistakes are mistakes of inaction, steadily cruising down a slope of problematic policy and ignoring very real issues.
A lot of this is thoughtful and reasonable. I do want to counter your point re: "America was lucky to have him in the worst of Covid", because Trump rhetorically downplayed the severity of virus and the efficacy of social distancing measures (at a point in time, pre-vaccine, when those measures had a real impact on the spread of the virus) to such a degree that the Republican-heavy portions of the country faced significantly higher covid-19 deaths than Democrat-heavy ones.
Now, there are some confounders in there (pre-existing conditions like diabetes and obesity are likely higher in those Republican-heavy districts) so I don't want to over-state this. But the overall dynamic it created was one where (some) Trump supporters showed their allegiance by not masking, not distancing, and not vaccinating; whereas Democrats largely did the opposite. And even though we can say with hindsight that (some) Democrats went overboard in the other direction, it's absolutely the case that a whole lot of Republicans got sick or died as a consequence of this recklessness. Again, going too far has its costs (as you mention with lockdowns) but encouraging a culture of not taking the virus seriously was wildly irresponsible in my view.
"because Trump rhetorically downplayed the severity of virus and the efficacy of social distancing measures (at a point in time, pre-vaccine, when those measures had a real impact on the spread of the virus) to such a degree that the Republican-heavy portions of the country faced significantly higher covid-19 deaths than Democrat-heavy ones."
Pre-vaccine (so for 2020) Republican-heavy portions of the country did not clearly face higher covid-19 deaths, Instead there was a period of far higher deaths in blue states in spring 2020, followed by moderately higher deaths in red states through summer and autumn 2020, averaging out to similar numbers for the whole of 2020. This is what you'd expect if social distancing measures and masks weren't effective.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590229623000199
Wouldn't we expect blue regions to have higher deaths in general due to population density? Implying that *any* time period where red states outpaced blue states was likely due to something happening sub-optimally in red states?
Maybe, but you claimed that red regions had more deaths, pre-vaccine, when this isn't clearly true. And if we're going to allow population density, we also have to allow that Republicans are older than Democrats, and age has an overwhelmingly powerful, multiple orders of magnitude effect on covid death rates, far more than could be accounted for by population density.
Don't know if I agree with that last part but I stand corrected on the first. Thanks.
Also, this is from the Discussion section of the paper you cited:
"Regarding COVID-19 cases in 2020, more lockdown days and more mask mandate days were significantly associated with fewer COVID-19 cases. These findings are supported by studies that observed the decreased trend in COVID-19 infections occurring after mitigation measures are implemented, such as social distancing and restricting large gatherings [56] and such as face mask mandates [57]. Specifically, for mask mandates in the year 2020, similar results were found - that for states that had high adherence to mask wearing, COVID-19 rates were low [25]."
You specified deaths. "COVID-19 deaths in 2020 did not significantly correlate with mitigation efforts.". Cases are overwhelmingly cofounded by different testing practices, which itself is a mitigation effort, so death data should be prioritized over it.
One could see how you're reasoning thusly. It's reductive, but it's the difference between a leveraged binary option vs a depreciating asset. But even through just these lenses, the choice of candidate isn't clear-cut as it ultimately depends on how much drawdown your portfolio can take.
I don't totally disagree with this framing, but I don't think the option is binary — I think people are overestimating Trump to the downside.
If you are European, I really don't see how you could think Trump could be good for you. He is absolutely disbanding NATO and letting Russia take Ukraine the first chance he gets.
I would not be surprised if he's Russian or a Russian supporter, given the comment.
(presumably) his twitter suggests that he's from Belgium. I guess Belgium is far enough from Russia to not care about that particular threat.
I'd rather have Ukraine sovereign, even if it's at some cost to our economies. But if you want to be callous, I don't think Putin is going to go against NATO, no.
Everyone you disagree with is not a scarecrow caricature, you know.
For the record, I think the Russian government is goddamn awful, Putin is sinister as hell, and it's a tragedy what's happening here.
I get that his scepticism of NATO is worrying but there is no evidence that disbanding NATO or abandoning Ukraine are his policies or likely to happen. My impression is that Trump was much more keen than Obama to arm Ukraine in the 2014-2022 period.
Did you see his response to the debate? He was pointedly asked about Ukraine and he gave an answer that made it clear he would demand an immediate end to the war in a manner that benefited Russian interests
That's probably an unfair characterization, though he certainly cares a lot less than we do. There's a silver lining too — he was right that Europe underspends on defense (and pay less than their commitment) — and a combination of that and Putin's aggression have lead to wake up a little. I don't think it's a good thing to rely on the benevolence of the Americans to keep us protected (ideally we rely on both their benevolence & on our own military capability, of course :D).
One thing that throws me off is that when people discuss economic policy, they typically assume that Republicans are better and I've rarely fully gotten that.
I think Republicans care more, but tax cuts that run up the deficit are probably in some sense self-defeating. Regulations may challenge the economy, but reducing regulations isn't uniformly good, as fewer regulations don't intrinsically mean more competition.
I don't necessarily disagree, but the policies Kamala has floated are borderline insane (her price gouging ideas that she has since disavowed, a wealth tax that would by all count decimate small and medium businesses, etc...). I frankly doubt she'll do the wealth tax, it's too insane — I don't take Trump at his worth and I don't Kamala either, but the general gist of their policies are generally pretty clear.
Also, yes, reducing regulations is not always good. But I think we're mostly on the side of too much regulation right now.
There's also frankly general incompetence in the regulators. Look at the EU's regulation. GDPR sounds like a good idea, and big tech was the first to protest... but in practice they benefit the most from it as doing business as an incumbent is a minefield. Let me not get started about the SEC in the US (crooks).
Honestly, if I don't think Trump will pick or listen to rational advisors, then I don't trust Trump. If Kamala has an economic advisor, then I suspect she'll back off from crazy ideas.
I think my challenge is that "regulations" isn't a bucket or quantity. The problem is having the wrong regulatory mix for a problem. This isn't to fight your intuition, but just "removing regulations" may hurt a market as well.
This is generally carefully argued, but I disagree with point 4. As far as I can tell, Mr Trump wants to encourage the millions of people of Chinese origin in the US to leave and to go to (or return to) China, while also trying to run the US as an isolated fortress. This is a short term tactic with large long term economic consequences, and would be very hard to undo even if 4 years later strenuous efforts were made to do so. As far as I can tell it hands over long term economic leadership to China. Right now the dollar is a useful tool that allows the US to live beyond its means. This convenient arrangement goes away if a new hegemon decides control over a fiat currency would be useful. Why should the US voluntarily take off the hegemon's mantle and throw it in the general direction of a rising power?
That's probably too extreme, I doubt there's going to be any deportation of anyone that is not an illegal migrant.
But I'm worried that immigration becomes a catch-all immigration that includes skilled immigrants. I'm hoping there is enough countervailing opinions in his circles to that point in particular.
I don't think Trump is very ideological. I think he's a self-interested crook who will mostly do what he think benefits — I just happen to think that, on balance, that aligns with the interest of most people.
There's definitely people who'd do much better than Trump — it's a choice between bad and worse, and I don't think Americans should pick worse in this particular instance (but life will go on whatever happens).
1. America has the best post pandemic economic recovery among developed countries.
https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/the-us-economic-recovery-in-international-context-2023
Trump ran the largest pre-covid budget deficits even with his tax cuts.
https://thehill.com/business/4736740-trump-biden-fiscal-policy-deficit/
2. Detailed plan of what was meant to occur that day:
https://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2021/images/09/20/eastman.memo.pdf
Outline of Trump's actions that he took to pressure Pence:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-capitol-jan-6-panel-turns-attention-pence-thursdays-hearing-2022-06-16/
Incriminating tweets:
https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1346808075626426371
https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/1841584441224831191
3. Page 22 of the report has multiple instances of Trump intentionally lying about voter fraud after he had been corrected on it.
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-J6-REPORT/pdf/GPO-J6-REPORT.pdf
4. Trump's 20% tariffs across the board will cause much more inflation than anything Kamala will need both houses of Congress to pass. See also #1.
5. There's lots of ways he can destroy the government, for example by reinstating an executive order that allows him to replace nonpartisan workers with loyalists.
https://www.cato.org/regulation/spring-2024/schedule-f-phantom-menace#
Also, JD Vance has said that he wouldn't have certified the 2020 election results. Normalizing this behavior by Republicans is utterly terrible.
6. Trump failed to answer whether he would support Ukraine in the debate against Kamala. JD Vance says he doesn't care at all about Ukraine. March to Return border riots occurred under his watch in Israel. Him only hiring loyalists this time around also means his stupid speculations won't be challenged, which is awful concerning the rest of his character.
> These are the people who would spend the whole session droning on about how the first Book of Heberdazzah said King Shmog died in Beersheeba, but the second book of Heberdazzah said King Shmog died in Jerusalem, so the whole thing was a flimsy tower of cards that no sane person could possibly believe
Yes, I too was party of the new atheist groupings in college and after, and when I met these guys in real life or online they were also keen to deny the existence of Jesus at all, as a if the very existence of the man would put their atheism at risk. They had to eliminate everything.
Can you give more clarity on the foreign policy issue? Does the link to a Noahpinion piece indicate you think Kamala will take a more Neocon-ish stance and that you think that's preferable to a more isolationist stance under Trump? That seems like a questionable view.
I'm not American, but US-China tensions would be a top consideration if I was, particularly since it might coincided with an AI fuelled arms race over the next 4 years. Basically, I'm quite worried about the US starting WW3 over freedom and democracy, and the current Democrats already seem quite hawkish.
> Put this way, you could argue: okay, January 6 was bad. But it was like a ten-year-old child's idea of authoritarianism. You seize power by getting a bunch of people to zerg rush the opposing politicians and beat them up until they declare you in charge. Too bad you were foiled by a locked door, you'll get them next time. I won't claim this strategy has never successfully taken over a government, because history is long and weird. But I can't think of any examples.
You might have intended this to be a straw man for comedic effect (ignore my comment if so). Otherwise, it is worth pointing out that the Jan 6 thing went beyond a rowdy crowd and a dude in a funny hat chilling shirtless in the capitol lobby. Chillingly, the Jan 6 ploy involved a legal strategy of triggering a constitutional crisis using the ambiguously-phrased powers of the vice president, and fake slates of electors.
(The fake electors have been getting smacked around in the courts but would presumably be pardoned in a second trump administration; EDIT -- incorrect since these are state charges, per Chastity below)
> (The fake electors have been getting smacked around in the courts but would presumably be pardoned in a second trump administration)
Good news on this, actually! They're being prosecuted on the state level, and the President can't pardon people for state crimes.
Good point, thank you for the correction!
>>"Are these politically-motivated show trials? As usual, the Democrats have so carefully followed the rules and covered their tracks so that it’s hard to say for sure. But it’s fair to be suspicious..."
Who are you kidding? This is deliberate, naked lawfare. Any failure to see this truth for what it is is pure cognitive dissonance.
* In the E Jean Carrol case they had to change the laws to be able to go after Trump.
* The Latisha James fraud trial is based on a novel interpretation of the law that has never been used before, by a DA who explicitly campaigned on finding a way to get Trump. And where the business that would ostensibly be the victim acted as a witness for the defense.
* Fani Willis and Nathan Wade will likely be disbarred for their misconduct. And the SCOTUS decision has gutted this case.
* Jack Smith is not a valid special prosecutor and was not properly appointed, and Trump is protected by executive authority/Presidential immunity.
The Democrat prosecutors are like 0/5. Please, be serious.
I will grant that it's been a mixed bag. But the publicly available evidence in the two Jack Smith cases is already quite damning. The way Trump's legal team (and Cannon) have instead tried to attack Smith's appointment is both flimsy and telling. And while SCOTUS did grant fairly broad immunity, it only affected ~20% of the evidence. The rest is plenty.
There's an angle that comes from the confluence of your steelman. I feel obliged to argue this position because it's my own.
Your argument that Trump's ineptitude in trying to bring about authoritarianism makes him a more viable option than the DNC, who are trying to bring about authoritarianism in a more subtle and effective fashion is a strong one.
For this exact same reason, I am less concerned about Trump's stupid ideas. He's not as able to implement them, like in his first term he'll face pushback and obstructionism and effective resistance (and #Resistance) to the most objectionable parts of his agenda. Kamala is a slick operator who will act as a mouthpiece and vessel for a truly horrendous platform of a truly horrendous party controlled by ideologues, extremists, and wannabe tyrants. If you have to cast a vote between O'Brien from 1984 and Doctor Doofenshmirtz from Phineas and Ferb, of course you vote for Doof. Not because he's less evil, but because he's less effective at evil.
Does he bring us closer to authoritarianism? Yes. But Kamala does it quicker and more efficiently.
January 6 was bad. But new security measures and awareness of that sort of possibility make anything similar unlikely to repeat. Trump himself got so much blowback that he's moved to distance himself from it (he won't renounce it either, but if it was popular it would probably be the central message of his campaign instead of something he has to talk his way around when reporters ask him about it.) After four years Trump's term is over and he can't be president again.
Republicans are always a more unified party than the Democrats outwardly, but win or lose Trump won't be around for much longer (he's the same age now as Biden was in 2020) and the Republicans will then fall to infighting as they did during Trump's brief time in the winter (2021-2022, when it seemed possible that the Republican nominee in 2024 may not be him). It doesn't matter if Democrat elites are acting like catty high schoolers, what matters is a legion of non-famous progressive staffers, activists, fundraisers, and so on that are working every day to reshape institutions to their inhumane view of the future. A future you of all people should know enough to fear.
You're right that the Right is picking up some momentum. But if any of these victories are to be held, it also means holding Congress and the White House. Democrats have controlled the White House for 12 of the last 16 years, and Trump's first term was largely inept and almost all of his reforms were rolled back by Biden. It's distasteful to support Trump, but aesthetics aside he is the less threatening and more encouraging candidate.
I want better for my fellow Americans in the Democratic Party. I want them to look inwards and ask themselves why they have so much trouble beating such an obviously-horrendous candidate. Sure, they might double down on "everyone is racist and sexist". But some won't, and more voices will rise trying to free your party from the activist class that has captured it. If Kamala wins, no matter how thin her margin, then the Democrats will conclude that they are perfect and don't need to change a thing.
Finally, I'd like to touch on how Trump helps opens the door for a Chavez-esque dictator in the future. I fully agree that this is a major concern. But I think he's also likely to close that door, because he isn't going to become a dictator himself as you said, but he will teach our institutions to be more wannabe-dictator-proof. He already has, e.g. the piteous and doomed-to-fail sight of January 6 led to great improvements in securing government buildings against protests and riots. Meanwhile if Kamala wins, the DNC will continue to twist those same institutions not to keep dictators out, but themselves in.
There are other things that make me prefer Trump over Kamala. This alone would not sway me, because I don't want Trump to be president and don't think it will be good for the country. But as you said, it's a choice on the merits, and in this area I think Trump is the lesser of two evils.
> "Kamala is a slick operator who will act as a mouthpiece and vessel for a truly horrendous platform of a truly horrendous party controlled by ideologues, extremists, and wannabe tyrants."
> "I want better for my fellow Americans in the Democratic Party. I want them to look inwards and ask themselves why they have so much trouble beating such an obviously-horrendous candidate. Sure, they might double down on "everyone is racist and sexist". But some won't, and more voices will rise trying to free your party from the activist class that has captured it."
Could you please elaborate on what you mean by this? I presume that when you talk about extreme activist ideologies you mean things like the Free Palestine movement, trans issues, anti-white diversity initiatives, "wokeness", things like that. Am I getting that right?
Something I continue to have trouble with during this election season is the claim that these issue are core to the Democrat movement right now. My perception is that these are mostly sideshows; that wokeness has been in pretty steep retreat since 2021; that most people I know who vote Democrat do it for "normal" reasons like caring about the environment, reproductive rights, marriage equality, progressive taxation, stuff like that. I'll note that basically none of the things mentioned in the prior paragraph were platformed at the DNC this year. It feels to me that to declare all Democrats to be woke or Marxist or whatever is just as much of a smear as stating that all Republicans are racists.
Why do you think our perceptions are so different? (and please do let me know if I'm misunderstanding you)
Thanks for responding. Let me clarify my points some.
> Could you please elaborate on what you mean by this? I presume that when you talk about extreme activist ideologies you mean things like the Free Palestine movement, trans issues, anti-white diversity initiatives, "wokeness", things like that. Am I getting that right?
Sure. I don't really like the term wokeness but it roughly gets at what I'm talking about.
> Something I continue to have trouble with during this election season is the claim that these issue are core to the Democrat movement right now. My perception is that these are mostly sideshows; that wokeness has been in pretty steep retreat since 2021
This is correct IMO! But those losses starting in 2021 were after a long, LONG series of victories to bend institutions - universities, newspapers, federal and state agencies, the scientific establishment, corporate America, law, nearly every area of public life - to their will. That isn't undone, not even close. There have been significant defeats and the movement is weaker than it was, but it's still an incredibly potent force and could easily regain the momentum.
> that most people I know who vote Democrat do it for "normal" reasons like caring about the environment, reproductive rights, marriage equality, progressive taxation, stuff like that. I'll note that basically none of the things mentioned in the prior paragraph were platformed at the DNC this year. It feels to me that to declare all Democrats to be woke or Marxist or whatever is just as much of a smear as stating that all Republicans are racists.
Indeed, most Democrats are ordinary people with reasonable concerns, as are most Republicans. Both have a dangerous minority who reject the social contract and try to seize power for themselves. The difference is methods: the MAGA right follows Trump's lead, so they are loud, attention-grabbing, and have the subtlety of a sledgehammer. This makes it easy to coordinate resistance against the worst of their vision. The woke left is decentralized, embedded into institutions, and very adept at using bureaucratic processes.
You are correct that woke ideas didn't get much airtime at the DNC. Kamala, like Biden (and like everyone who wants to win a general election) is running as a moderate. But even though Biden is a moderate his administration has been the most left-wing in American history. Why? Because the activist class of woke leftists wield most of the power within the apparatus of the party, the day-to-day of wielding the power that comes with being the ruling party.
These things get tons of coverage in conservative media and (pleasingly) have begun to break through into other institutions. For example, there was a recent article in the dreaded New York Times about the $250m DEI initiative at the University of Michigan. It's quite good, and quite upsetting - moreso when you realize the exact same trend has played out at thousands of other universities, and workplaces, and agencies. If Trump's genius is he's bad in so many ways, the woke left's genius is that they attack in so many directions at once that it's impossible to coordinate or even report on everything. This is one of the reasons why there are so many anti-woke blogs and political celebrities, because they have new red meat for their readers every single day!
tl;dr both parties are mostly a reasonable majority begrudgingly working with an unreasonable minority out of fear of the other team's unreasonable minority. But the MAGA right is blustering and inept, the woke left are capable of much more destructive and lasting harm.
This is helpful, thank you for replying and explaining. This makes sense and is helpful to me.
I went to Michigan for undergrad actually, and read that article with some despair.
Agreed that the NYT's article about the University of Michigan was a great and fascinating article, but I came away with a somewhat opposite interpretation. If the (left-center bastion) NYT is publishing articles largely skeptical of 'wokism' where they highlight the ineffective and nonsensical conduct of the administrators and the relative indifference of the students, to me, that's a big sign that pushing back against woke is actually becoming _mainstream_ now. Perhaps even signaling the beginning of decline of woke in general. Hold fast! Soon we might be able to go back to hating each other for more traditional reasons, like tax policy!
Good piece.
It's funny how one can point to Spencer and Fuentes' takes to make the case for Trump, because those guys are outrageously far right.
Citing them seems to take as much as it gives.
But will you accept Sonski?
Best I can do
Thank you for your analysis and perspective, Scott. My analysis resulted in a vote for Trump last week here in NC. I disagree with your assessments of the left’s threat. I would summarize your analysis of the left’s threat as a slow melt toward evil/bad/inhumane/enslaving results “within” the system. In America, I would hope we all define the system, most broadly, with the first principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Assuming this as our system, the left, its captured machines (media, academia, tech, government, etc), and its leaders have proven (Covid prime example) to be antithetical to those principles. If I was to place a probability on Trump’s likelihood to be a Chavez dictator, assuming your interpretation of the evidence, it would be higher than 0%. And yet, the left’s slow march toward stealing our freedoms is much higher and far riskier to the sovereignty of the American people. Again, thank you for helping people think.
Biggest cable news? Fox. Biggest podcast? Joe Rogan. Twitter going full right wing propaganda mode under Elon? Check.
"Media is controlled by the left".
Don't forget Bezos forcing the WaPo according to his whims.
The top richest people are republicans and also own the modern media (+social media). And yet they've convinced themselves they're the downtrodden?
When you're terminally online, it's easy to convince yourself that the majority of elites are left-wing, when in reality they're either centrist liberals or right-wing. We don't have a meaningful number of left-wing elites; what we have is a vocally online left-wing movement that can occasionally dominate certain social media spaces. I say this as a left-wing person: the only space even partially captured by the left (as opposed to moderate Democrat libs, who are centrists at best) is academia. And even then, it's tenuous and variable. If you think media, tech, or the government has been 'captured' by the left, it's because you've been told as much by right-wing institutions mad about things not being as far right as they are.
You seriously count Bezos forcing his editorial board not to endorse any candidate in the paper's name an instance of putting a Republican thumb on the scale? Whereas a mainstream newspaper endorsing the Democratic candidate is simply business as usual? I'm at a loss for words.
If strict neutrality looks like right-wing bias to your eyes, you're wearing left-tinted glasses.
"Forget whether eliminating the filibuster should really count as a threat to democracy;..."
Does not the elimination of the filibuster actually entail a closer realization of democracy given that it eliminates barriers to majority rule? This is the problem with eliminating it if so, in that the check that the filibuster poses to majoritarian rule would be wiped out. I am sure many would think that a good thing, but I think there is a case to be made (a la Tocqueville and others) that mass democracy will often precipitate authoritarianism rather than ensure the long term survival of democratic norms that opponents of the filibuster want to further. It is one of those instances in which the greater realization of a thing actually precipitates its demise.
The filibuster is an absurdity. It should’ve been eliminated in 1891 when the House got rid of their version. Instead we got 73 more years of Jim Crow.
And in case the current version of the filibuster is doubly absurd since the changes in the seventies. Now you don’t even have to filibuster. You just say you’re going to filibuster and that effectively kills the bill.
I agree that if someone is going to filibuster they should be forced to filibuster. That said, my only point was that eliminating the filibuster would not be a threat to democracy but would signify an expansion of democratic norms. Not sure that is entirely good in principle, even if it turned out the the filibuster has had its day and ought to be retired.
Agree 100%. The filibuster is a profoundly anti-democratic rule on top of a somewhat anti-democratic body.
Eliminate it and the game theory of legislation changes to be more positive sum.
I'm not convinced this is as open-and-shut as you say. What is the utility function being assumed here? It seems entirely possible to me that having additional friction in the legislative process actually leads to a better outcome over the long term, even if the mechanism is absurd and there are decades during which old legislation sticks around causing misery and distortions before it can finally be removed. You could also say that constitutional monarchy or Confucian respect for tradition is absurd but they have much the same function.
You might be right but this needs a better argument.
The game theory right now is that if you are in the minority, you don't have to negotiate at all until there is a supermajority, and that's extremely rare unless one party dominates or there is a fracture in the party like the Democrats in the sixties over Civil Rights. But if it's a simple majority then suddenly it makes a lot of sense for Senators to negotiate sooner and try to extract a concession.
Furthermore, the lack of public understanding of the filibusters incentives candidates to run on policies that they know will never, ever pass, like Medicare for All as a way to stand out in their primaries. So you have a situation where candidates rarely have to run on their record because there isn't even a vote.
People act like the filibuster is a sacred institution when the truth is it wasn't used that often until the nineties, and has been modified many times. That was when the the parties realized that the changes in 1975 allowed them to quietly obstruct legislation merely by threatening to filibuster but not having to actually go through with it. The president would get the blame for not getting anything done, and there would be no Strom Thurmond or whoever standing up there for 24 hours, putting a name and face on the opposition.
Thanks, so you are specifically objecting to the filibuster mechanism beyond its function of adding friction. I find your description now much more convincing.
Thank you for this well written piece. I disagree with you in a few places, but this is by far the best overall summary of the election choice one is going to find on Earth.
This could be one of those elections where the losing party is better off over the longer run. When Carter was elected it seemed like a great Democratic triumph - they had overwhelming majorities in the House and Senate. But Carter became unpopular mainly because of things that neither he nor any other president could control, chiefly stagflation and the Iran hostage crisis, and so his presidency led directly to 12 years of Reagan and Bush. For 2026 and 2028, my bet is on the party that loses next week.
The Carter Administration was responsible for a massive amount of the Code of Federal Regulations, much of which forms the backbone of major regulatory regimes today. The enduring influence of those years is easily understated.
I think there is also a good chance of an internal re-assessment by the republicans, if they lose. Two loses in a row can make a party stop and take stock.
Sometimes, one loss is enough, but I think a loss by Harris is too easily explained away and won't lead to much introspection among the democratic party.
It does sometimes work that way, but it's worth noting that 2016 was an election where that was decidedly not the case. Trump got 3 SCOTUS appointments and then a pandemic-induced rally around the flag effect that, unlike other incumbent governments around the Western world, he was unable to capitalize on. And there are still quite a few old SCOTUS justices.
It's also worth noting that even if Trump wins, Democrats will have a hard time winning durable Senate majorities for the foreseeable future. In the presidential race, there are 7 swing states, 19 safely Democratic states, and 24 safely Republican states. Republicans have been doing a terrible job of nominating electable swing state candidates recently; once they stop doing that, they'll have a firm grip on the Senate.
Yes, population shifts mean that the Senate is moving steadily towards a permanent Republican majority, and with it a future in which only Republicans are appointed to the SC. Soon this process will have passed the "event horizon"; it is likely the only way of slowing it is for Democrats to obtain control of Congress and admit DC and PR as states in the next few years.
Democrats couldn't... find a way to appeal to people outside of 10 cities again? They have to game the system?
Once again we're not voting for the productive policies and unifying elements of "our" candidate but against the existential threat of the "other" candidate. I look forward to a time, should it ever come, when we're less cynical and defensive. But I'm voting the same way you are for many of the same reasons. One is slow suicide with the time and ability to thwart, the other is fast with less time and opportunity to thwart. I like to take things slow, thank you very much.
And underappreciated reason for this is that information-gathering abilities are so advanced now, and the parties are so integrated in their polling and strategy efforts, that both parties have basically converged on the popular consensus for most consequential popular issues, making it pointless to talk about them. Hence culture war bullshit instead.
Do you believe the Republicans want to stop all immigration and the Dems want to bring in tens of millions of immigrants a year and this will have a huge effect on the economy? Nope, the dems noticed that being strict on the border is popular right now, their rhetoirc and proposals are about as strict as the Reps, and will probably stop more illegal immigration overall because they're more technocratic.
Reps want to support the police and Dems want to defund them? Nope, Dems are over-funding police in record numbers and are as tough on crime as the Reps, aside from not wanting to introduce bathroom bills or w/e.
Regulations? Dems are getting in on Ezra Klein's push for deregulation to allow more building, their plans are as broad and serious as Reps here.
Etc.
Both parties are already doing the things that the majority of the country wants. Thus the election ends up just being about wedge issues and scare tactics.
That was a fantastic argument - "In defense of TDS", from Bentham's Bulldog. He makes this complex argument beautifully.
It's complex because there's so much fake information out there, including from well known media outlets, that the real argument has been lost in all the noise.
This was precise. I wish this writer had managed the Harris campaign's communications, instead of whoever is managing it. They throw out abstract concepts like "fascist" that fall flat. And Harris simply doesn't have Bill Clinton's or Obama's way with words even with simple questions..
"And Harris simply doesn't have Bill Clinton's or Obama's way with words even with simple questions.."
I've seen this attributed to her being from California. You don't have to win over the public, because it's 'vote blue no matter who', you don't have to beat the other party's candidate because they have a snowball in hell's chance of getting anywhere, so your main rivals are within your own party and that's a simple matter of back-stabbing, alliances, and being able to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds 😀
So she's never really had to stand up to hard questions or debates as other politicians have had to do, which is why she is poor at unscripted, unrehearsed, spontaneous speeches or fluency in getting the message out.
Yes. Very few people hone any skill without competition.
Perhaps it's just me, but I believe that it's a sad commentary on the state of our political system when a so-called "endorsement" of a candidate is 99% based on railing against your candidate's opponent.
I miss the days when someone would actually endorse their candidate based on their candidate's merits. I somehow expected Scott might be up to that. I was naive.
I don't think Harris, Oliver, or Stein are very good.
I think it's just a real, factual way the universe can be, that both candidates are bad and you have to endorse the less bad one.
I grant you that, and voting for the lesser-of-two-evils, is certainly the unfortunate situation many of us believe we are facing. However, an endorsement should explain all the reasons you support your endorsed candidate. That being absent is not simply a sad statement on our political system. An endorsement should be reasons to support someone. Given that's not possible, I'm not sure it's really an endorsement. It's more of a "Here's how I'm voting and why." Perhaps it's semantics, but endorsing something is like cheering for someone. Cheering against someone and calling it an endorsement is just petty.
When was the last time you endorsed a candidate without hesitation? While almost all the candidates since 1984 seem, in comparison, amazing candidates, they all appeared to have serious flaws at the time. Some illustrative examples:
Dukakis: "far left governor of Taxachusetts"
George HW Bush: went into the VP slot a solid person, emerged a shallow husk of a man
Al Gore: wooden, out of touch, product of privilege with no knowledge of the real conditions of the typical US citizen.
George W Bush: dumb, out of touch, product of privilege/etc
Obama: inexperienced, friends with radical leftists
McCain: too old, too institutionalized (to the Senate mode of action) by too much time in the senate
Romney: too craven in pursuit of voters, no strong core of policy beliefs, product of privilege who doesn't understand real conditions, etc
H Clinton: (don't get me started on this one...)
I don't remember off-hand the tragic flaws of Kerry and Dole, but they didn't even win.
In all cases, it was really hard to look at the candidates and say, "This is a wonderful candidate and it makes me proud to endorse them."
Obama: too inexperienced.
McCain: too experienced.
No wonder it's hard to find an unblemished candidate.
BTW, you left off the guy who wasn't sure what "is" meant.
Maybe it was a stretch on McCain.
You don't think he had any major flaws? The "Bomb-bomb-bomb-bomb-bomb-Iran" didn't seem very presidential, though, did it?
I definitely wasn't meaning to be too soft on B Clinton. Plenty of flaws on that guy.
McCain's warhawkishness is definitely the biggest problem. As an Arizonan who definitely liked him more than Trump, I can say he seemed a decent, good man, and simultaneously he would've been an incredibly terrifying president. Highly recommend "David Foster Wallace on John McCain: ‘The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys and the Shrub’" - magnificent article about DFW reporting on his campaign trail.
(My favorite quote from that one: "As one national pencil told Rolling Stone and another nonpro, “If you saw more of how the other candidates conduct themselves, you’d be way more impressed with [McCain]. It’s that he acts somewhat in the ballpark of the way a real human being would act.” And the grateful press on the Trail transmit – maybe even exaggerate – McCain’s humanity to their huge audience, the electorate, which electorate in turn seems so paroxysmically thankful for a presidential candidate somewhat in the ballpark of a real human being that it has to make you stop and think about how starved voters are for just some minimal level of genuineness in the men who want to “lead” and “inspire” them.")
Agreed. For my time and money, essays were DFW's best work and the McCain campaign embed was a good one.
Though much longer and with fewer satisfying sharp, witty bites, McKay Coppins's Romney: A Reckoning does a good job of showing both the best and the worst of that man.
Oh, Bill had flaws out the wazoo, but he also had charisma out the wazoo, was genuinely smart, and had the convincing background of being "just an ordinary guy" (he got a lot of stick about being a rube from Arkansas).
I wouldn't trust him as far as I could spit, but I also wouldn't mind seeing him as president again 😁
Inexperienced Obama h ad charisma and eloquence out of the wazoo, too.
For me McCain's biggest flaw was his choice of running mate, or whatever character flaw led to that choice.
GHW Bush was relatively unflawed (sp?).
Obama's flaw could have fixable with suitable choice of White House staff.
Bob Dole I think was perceived as wacky on economics? and as some kind of rambling old uncle/grandpa? Didn't he say something about cow's milk (I have a snippet stuck in memory of some comedian on Conan O'Brien's show going on about Dole and the moo-juice)?
Kerry was just Kerry. Apart from the whole Swift Boat thing, he had this aura of New England patrician privilege (I don't know how much of that was real) and of course, being the husband of a millionairess heiress, he didn't have much of a leg to stand on when trying to talk like a representative of the ordinary man.
>H Clinton: (don't get me started on this one...)
I really, really like Dave Barry's summary of both candidates from 2016
https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2017/01/01/dave-barry-year-review-the-train-wreck-that-was/6lREP2tn19pKlMiunNAy3N/story.html
>Yes. After all that, the American people, looking for a leader, ended up with a choice between ointment and suppository. The fall campaign was an unending national nightmare, broadcast relentlessly on cable TV. CNN told us over and over that Donald Trump was a colossally ignorant, narcissistic, out-of-control, sex-predator buffoon; Fox News countered that Hillary Clinton was a greedy, corrupt, coldly calculating liar of massive ambition and minimal accomplishment. And in our hearts we knew the awful truth: They were both right.
Yes, that pair of candidates was so bad that they exceeded Dave Barry's natural ability to comically exaggerate.
Agreed! Many Thanks!
> I miss the days when someone *could* actually endorse their candidate based on their candidate's merits.
ftfy
;-)
"Trump… isn’t going to put people in camps."
This was true in 2016, but it very well might not be true in 2024. He's promising to deport millions of illegal immigrants—the number keeps going up to the point where he is promising to deport many legal immigrants as well. Simply for logistical reasons, you don't do that without putting people in camps. Sure, he *might* not do that... but it's been one of the strongest themes/promises of his campaign so it's very likely he will at least try. Which means that yes, he'll put people in concentration camps. (Not death camps, which is what Hitler put people into, and the original that I ellipsised above mentioned Hitler, so *maybe* that was meant to apply only to death camps. But it didn't say death camps; it said "camps". Which very much includes concentration camps. Which, of course, while not as bad as death camps, are really really bad!)
Thing is, if he tries to do this, there will also be massive protests, and Trump will definitely invoke the Insurrection Act. He wanted to do that against the BLM riots but was talked out of it by people like Mike Esper and Mark Milley. Those people will not be around this time m
See my response at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-endorses-harris-oliver-or-stein/comment/74813354 , but fine, I'll edit to death camps.
But I think this is worth more than a simple edit? (I mean, thank you for the edit, and now it's correct, but I also think it's indicative of a more substantial point. I think it actually matters that he is going to put people in concentration camps on a massive scale and then deport them. I agree death camps are worse and Hitler should be taken as vastly worse than, say, Americans interning Japanese citizens in WW2. But that doesn't mean the latter wasn't *bad*. And it was also "putting people in camps". I don't think this is equivocating; I think it's a thing, far worse than anything we do right now, although of course it clears the low "not literally as bad as Hitler" bar.
And deporting howevermany millions of people will be bad. A program of that size goes beyond "some people are falsely imprisoned" anyway, because you can't do anything at that scale while maintaining anything like our usual due process safeguards. So you are virtually guaranteeing more serious deporting of legal immigrants & almost certainly citizens too.
I think there is a reason that members of Trump's cabinet and joint chiefs are warning he's going to be a dictator, and it's stuff like this. His plans are now much more explicitly authoritarian. I don't think that should be glossed over.
It is not clear to me that when choosing between (1) allowing people to continue committing crimes (being in the country illegally) & (2) putting those criminals in make-shift prisons ("concentration camps"), the latter is worse. Imprisoning people because of their ethnicity or national origin, as the US did during WW2, seems like a completely different matter than imprisoning people because of their crimes.
I would point you to Sam B's answer in his comment just below this one (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-endorses-harris-oliver-or-stein/comment/74866450). This will be a mass military action which will have nothing of significance in common with enforcing laws & putting people in jail. This is particularly true given that, on this scale, there is no possibility that normal court protections, due process of law, will be part of the process. This will be the military rounding people up and throwing them in makeship camps. So, yeah, concentration camps. Pretty bad!
It will also inevitably capture both legal immigrants—hell, J.D. Vance has talked about throwing out the Hatians in Ohio who are legal immigrants—and (most likely) US citizens, particularly when you remember that the right has been talking for years now about doing away with birthright citizenship (flatly unconstitutional, but that doesn't mean a compliant Supreme Court won't go along with it). So it will end up including people for their ethnicity/race, too.
Can't make an omelette without cracking a few eggs, right? And they are going to make the mother of all omelettes.
That link isn't working for me., but again I think this is a really big omission on your part. As the next post mentions, this isn't a trivial thing. If he really does it at the scale he is proposing (an open question I think)., this 10 million+ people, many of whom have lived here for decades being rounded and put in hastily-built mass detention facilities. Many of them came here as children and have no memories of other lives. It would be if successful one of the largest forced population transfers in human history. All of the others were accompanied by mass death. Even the process of rounding them up will be violent--blue state law enforcement won't be allowed to help by their governments so the Project 2025 proposal is to send red state national gaurdsmen in to do it (not nearly enough federal law enforcement). So we're talking about essentially military forces going door to door in major cities hunting down undesirables at at massive scale.
Once they are detained, it will take time to process and deport them. Many home countries may simply refuse to accept deportees. So we'd end up with millions of people in hastily-built detention facilities built by a government that hates them and has no interest in their welfare. Death would follow for some at least. This would be a crime on as great a scale as the Japanese internment.
Well put.
Election rhetoric. Camps? Please folks, focus on what's real.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-does-not-rule-out-building-detention-camps-mass-deportations-2024-04-30
The Nazis didn't start with death camps. They just wanted to deport people they didn't like. When that proved to be a logistic nightmare, they put said people in concentration camps. When all the other countries refused to take those people, they evolved the concentration camps to be death camps. It all sounds exceedingly similar.
Mexico doesn't have the leverage to refuse to take these immigrants, though. Worst case scenario, the boats can always just dump their cargo onto a random coast within the country.
Don't you think the Germans would have thought of dumping people somewhere? It's logistically impossible at the scale Trump says he'll do it.
>okay, January 6 was bad. But it was like a ten-year-old child's idea of authoritarianism. You seize power by getting a bunch of people to zerg rush the opposing politicians and beat them up until they declare you in charge. Too bad you were foiled by a locked door, you'll get them next time.
I think the more pressing issue is the false elector scheme, especially since this time Trump won't have any guardrails from within the party.
If I understand correctly, the argument is "while this administration is doing a bad thing X, a future Trump administration might do 10X". X could, for example, be stacking courts to limit ballot access.
I guess the difference between us is that you put a lot of emphasis on "10X", and I put more emphasis on "might". This administration is already putting its critics on a terrorist watch list (Tulsi Gabbard), with nearly zero reaction from establishment media. If Trump will start doing the same thing, I’ll object to that. But right now, democrats are doing it, and that’s what I’m objecting to.
The only source we have for Tulsi being on a (TSA btw which doesn't actually stop her from doing anything) watch list is herself. The fact that the TSA stops me every time "randomly" and finds something in my genital area "randomly" doesn't mean that I'm on a watch list, it means that they're assholes.
Incorrect. Whistleblowers brought it up first. She corroborated the story.
As far as I can tell, Tulsi is the source of the claim that whistleblowers brought it up first.
I've been stopped "randomly" by the TSA too (back when I was younger, had a big beard and could easily pass for an Arab). It was always over in a minute. I don't believe I randomly had three air marshals join me on a flight, with bomb-sniffing dogs following me in both airports. Have that happened to you?
More to the point, it's true that I cannot independently verify the existence of whistleblower complaints, or how exactly you get SSSS. I do have an heuristic, however. When a false claim of this nature is made, the media tends to amplify it with "look how dastardly they are, lying about Obama". I often see articles in the New York Times titled "unfavored person X made a false claim". Politicians join in with "look, the other side is deranged!". So when a very serious claim like this gets made and there're crickets, that suggests they cannot find anything to discredit it.
I appreciate the attempt at steel-manning the pro trump position. But i think you've left out some key pieces of evidence that matter. You're talking about 'bright line violations', but it seems that you're doing the same definitional trick the left does, where it's only a violation when the other side does it.
You're referring to January 6th while ignoring evidence such as:
- the federal government witheld evidence that defendants could have used at trial
- trump did indeed call for national guard on that day but pelosi rejected it:
https://cha.house.gov/2024/9/transcripts-show-president-trump-s-directives-to-pentagon-leadership-to-keep-january-6-safe-were-deliberately-ignored
- the accusation that the feds planned a capitol breach on january 6th was made _before_ january 6th, on the night of january 5th, because a guy named Ray Epps kept telling people to GO INTO THE CAPITAL, and the FBI won't definitively say whether or not he was working for them, and for some reason the FBI stopped looking for this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erafzh-YahE
- the FBI won't say how many field agents they had involved in january 6th, and they have a history of entrapping right wing persons, such as the fake kidnapping of Meg Whitmer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHbu6YQ7BOU
- ostensbily there was a 'pipe bomb' that day, which everyone has forgotten about, for some reason
So, sure, viking man took an unscheduled tour of the capital building. That's bad. How is that Trump's fault? People would have questioned the results of the election even if trump had conceded, because the margin of error was so thin, the count showed trump leading until late at night, and there's no reason to belief the elections are more secure than the border. So trump is responsible for people thinking the election was stolen, and the damage they cause, why isn't Harriss responsible for the 19 deaths and billions of dollars in damage from the George Floyd riots?
If "viking guy gets into the capital because there is no real police presence" is a bright line, why isn't
- letting tens of millions of people into the country illegally
- explicitly saying you're trying to get around supreme court ruling against studnet debt forgiveness
- making up charges to level against the opposition candidate
- lying about the health of the current president until it was too late to run a primary
_also_ crossing a bright line? Where exactly are these lines?
You do a great job painting two pictures of authoritarianism. The left wing authoritarianism one looks like, it's where we already are.
Do you really think we are _closer_ to right wing authoritarianism, than left wing authoritarianism?
> - trump did indeed call for national guard on that day but pelosi rejected it:
Only Trump has the authority to call in the National Guard. Pelosi had no ability whatsoever to make any decision on where the National Guard goes. Once people were breaking into the Capitol and threatening MIke Pence, Trump should have called in the NG, but he refused to.
> If "viking guy gets into the capital because there is no real police presence" is a bright line, why isn't
Because the Jan 6 shit was part of a criminal conspiracy to convince/force Mike Pence to throw out the election results!!! If what Trump tried to do was fine, then it will be fine when Kamala throws out the EVs of every single fucking red state come 2025, and anoints herself as God-Queen of the country.
>If what Trump tried to do was fine, then it will be fine when Kamala throws out the EVs of every single fucking red state come 2025, and anoints herself as God-Queen of the country.
Hey that's my line! :-)
I have said that the morbidly funniest outcome would be if Trump winds the electoral college - and incumbent Vice President Kamala Harris does what Pence declined to do, and refuses to certify the election. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-353/comment/74537292
I used to think January 6 was just an unplanned riot, and it *was* an unplanned riot, but the plan was to have Mike Pence endorse the alternate slates of electors that various states were putting forward.
Then we'd need to go to SCOTUS, who probably would have said STFU, but this is still significantly along the banana republic slide.
I think a 2nd Trump Presidency will be a lamer version of his 1st. It will be very similar to how the Conservatives governed UK. Get elected on a platform to reduce immigration, but instead flood the country with "legal" immigrants by handing out student and temporary worker visas like candy in every 3rd world country like the Canadians and the Brits are doing. They get to claim that they reduced illegal immigration all the while making their corporate buddies happy by suppressing wages and increasing housing costs. So I can sympathize with Fuentes, as I fully expect my own side to completely backstab me.
Maybe the people from 3rd world countries can contribute to making the US a saner place.
The UK experience isn't promising.
The USA _used_ to be able to do that, in the days of the melting pot ceremony. Maybe we should try reviving that?
In the UK, the Conservatives couldn't even claim to have reduced illegal immigration - it's been going up for years. Each time they got elected in the past 14 years, they campaigned on lower immigration, then subsequently actively increased it. Finally we had enough and wiped them out in the recent election, partially for this but mostly just for generally being corrupt, inept liars.
Unfortunately they've been replaced with an even worse party, mainly from voter apathy and the first-past-the-post electoral system.
It's just another football. Abortion, immigration, the black vote are pawns in the power game. What I'd really like to know: who the real players are.
We the people haven't been in charge since JFK was shot.
It's truly over for the UK. Elect Conservatives and you get millions from India. Replace them with Labour, and you get millions from Pakistan. Well every population gets the government that it deserves I guess.
This article convinced me it will significantly less "lame", but not in a good way.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/22/opinion/donald-trump-ezra-klein-podcast.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare#
I think you're a lot more certain about your ability to predict bad things potentially happening than I am. I think this touches on something real:
"Why do you think people can make infinity billion dollars starting an anti-woke Substack? Who's paying that money? Not psychologically well-adjusted people with no wokeness-related trauma, that's my guess."
True...but that trauma exists for a reason. It's ongoing. And I am highly confident that it will continue to occur under Democrats. And all of Trump's evil is outside my direct experience. Somebody said that somebody said, rather than things I can observe with my eyes.
I was in California for Covid and the Democrats locked me in my go**amn house for a year and half. Their DEI garbage is still in my workplace, where it's been for the past 10 years. I got cornpone opinions, same as everyone else, and they've been messing with my corn for 10 years.
Now, you don't have to agree with my interpretation of these policies, that's fine, but why would I vote on the basis of far-off, theoretical harms reported by third parties rather than harms I directly observe. If you have liberal/SJW trauma and not Republican trauma...why is that not an important factor?
Agree with this. Trump never hurt me or anyone I care about. Democrats have.
I think that Trump's stated policies are worse than Harris's; however, Harris is vastly more capable of actually implementing them than Trump is. So, it's a bit of a toss-up. Of the two of them, I think that Harris is the one who is fully capable of instituting price controls, for example.
This seems false given the likely composition of the senate and house and the current composition of the Supreme Court.
Harris has already mostly walked back her price controls idea. She is tacking to the center and listening to economists’ criticisms. Trump will do no such thing because he thinks he understands economics better than everyone else.
“She is tacking to the center” out of pure ambition and a desire to get elected. She is pure cynical ambition personified and will flip to whatever position appears to be most convenient. There’s really nothing to her and “access” will be extremely high stakes. She will be right back to “defund the police” if it once again becomes popular among the activists. Of course, Trump is a more malignant force of vengeance and pride. While Trump may unfortunately have Congress (or at least the Senate), he has basically zero percent of the Federal bureaucracy. I think either of them could thankfully end up hamstrung, though possibly in different ways.
The woke wave has created in my view and it’s receding. Defunding the police is not an idea that any politician going for national votes will get behind for a generation at least. You’re right that Kamala tacks to the center because she is hollow and wants votes from the median voter. But that’s causing her to distance herself from the far left in a way that Trump isn’t distancing itself from the far right (except on abortion). So 2024 Kamala is the best choice if you don’t want an extremist candidate, even if 2020 Kamala was far more extreme.
Trump can actually implement tariffs. Harris isn't likely to ever even hold the senate.
Despite Scott's protests that he is not saying much of any moment, his counter-argument #1 here is the only one I have seen anywhere that really moves me in contemporary commentary. I inhabit a non-swing, solidly and reliably Tribe-Blue, region of the lower 48, so I have the luxury of not needing to hold my nose, but if I lived in maybe-maybe-not-land, this is the argument which would make me feel OK about the nose-pinching, because it pays the pro-DT argument it is opposing the compliment of taking it seriously. These are, in fact, the only kinds of arguments that sway me, because they are *arguments* and not poses.
Interestingly, my thought process whittled down to “What policies do I actually care about?”
I realize I don’t care about the majority of the policies that are talked about, as I either doubt the president’s role in influencing them, or don’t personally care. A few niche policies I realize I do care about, and I simply picked the candidate who aligned more with those niche policies.
No more agonizing on who’s more likely to lead to societal collapse, no more balancing a thousand different hypothetical probabilities, just “I care about issues X and Y. Candidate A seems better for issues X and Y than candidate B. I am voting for candidate A.”
Somehow this seems much simpler and more useful than trying to use Bayesian reasoning to assess arguments and counter arguments for either candidates authoritarian propensities.
There’s a great article on this here: https://fakenous.substack.com/p/i-dont-care-about-the-issues.
I don’t and do care about different things than the article, but that gets the idea across.
Well, that was disappointing but expected. I get that you have your hard-headed ideals, but can't you think of this situation a little more pragmatically? Let's say that you endorsed Trump. Anyone that you would alienate by supporting Trump, you already alienated years ago anyways. If Trump loses, you're perfectly fine, back to the status quo. If he wins, you have better standing with the new establishment.
But if you endorse Harris and she loses? You're screwed. You make an enemy of the new establishment, and even the liberals won't protect you because they still hate your guts. Almost no one is going to take your side.
...You have a family now. Maybe it's time start valuing your safety over your ideals.
This is the crazy norms backsliding that he wants to make a stand against.
“Anyone that you would alienate by supporting Trump, you already alienated years ago anyways”
This might be the wrongest thing I have heard all day. Scott still has plenty of us fans who value him for being a principled guy, a rational thinker, and a great human being. All of that would be out the window for us if he endorsed Trump just for personal gain as you suggest.
Why don’t we go through the list of people who publicly asked the NYT not to dox Scott? How many of them do you think are voting for Trump?
"Nice family you've got there; shame if something *happened* to them"? Really?
I suppose we can very charitably assume that you aren't trying to threaten Scott's family yourself. But you're basically making that threat by proxy for others, and advising him to pre-emptively submit without the villains of the tale having to get their hands (or keyboards) dirty.
I really did not mean that as a threat, I genuinely do just care about his safety. In a worst case scenario, things are going to be bad whether I want them to be bad or not. Leaving the country would also be a perfectly good option. (Though, I highly doubt that what's happening will be isolated to just the US...) It's just a good idea to hedge your bets, that's all.
> Anyone that you would alienate by supporting Trump, you already alienated years ago anyways
What are you talking about? Do you think this is some conservative clubhouse?
IIRC the survey has more liberals than conservatives by a good bit. The conservatives, however, *post* a lot more, because of ... well, the same bug as whatever drives them to vehemently debate the finer details of exactly whether Jan 6 counts as bad, I guess.
I'd propose that this comment is not only fascinating but a genuine data point for Trump being worse than Democrats.
When Trump's Basilisk is the argument raised, I have to wonder if the "reasonable comment section" is in the room.
> Maybe it's time start valuing your safety over your ideals.
Wild to think a *blog post* will result in real-world, physical harm.
Not this specific blog post obviously, Scott has plenty of time to switch gears if he wanted to. Hell, even Vance compared Trump to Hitler once, and look where he is now. I'm just afraid Scott's eventually going to do something stupid because he needs to stay "ideologically consistent" or because it's "morally right," when he really can't afford to do stuff like that anymore considering how much more he has to lose now.
Look, almost none of the people posting here know what it's like to live in the kind of world Trump wants to make. But it is very easy to survive, even thrive in such a world! You just need to be a bit more careful about your actions and stop taking your life for granted. Don't let all of those ideals get in the way of what really matters: your survival and happiness.
If I thought comments like these were true/necessary I would like to hope I would endorse Harris 100x stronger than I am doing right now.
> Or take the many legal cases that Democrat-controlled prosecutors’ offices have filed against Trump since he lost the presidency. Are these politically-motivated show trials? As usual, the Democrats have so carefully followed the rules and covered their tracks so that it’s hard to say for sure. But it’s fair to be suspicious, and I know people who are considering voting for Trump on this basis alone. Meanwhile, here’s Trump:
> >“WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences,” Trump wrote. “Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials."
Yeah, that's the last few decades in a nutshell.
First, it's hard to support the assertion that "the Democrats have so carefully followed the rules and covered their tracks so that it’s hard to say for sure" with a straight face. Not when Alvin Bragg openly campaigned on a promise to prosecute Trump. ( https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/20/politics/bragg-new-york-trump/index.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/06/12/trump-prosecutor-alvin-bragg/ ) Not when the judge was openly putting not just his metaphorical thumb but an entire anvil on the scale throughout the trial, from jury selection to jury instructions. Not when Bragg refused to prosecute real crimes but used procedural tricks to inflate a single time-barred misdemeanor into dozens of live felony cases.
There's simply no room for a rational, dispassionate individual to doubt that this is purely politically-motivated persecution.
But more to the point... *this is what always happens.* It's the same old story we've seen again and again since at least 2000:
1. Democrats decide to break some important norm.
2. Republicans warn them, "you shouldn't do this, it sets a bad precedent."
3. Democrats do it anyway.
4. The precedent now being set, Republicans turn it to their advantage a few years later, because this is a thing we've established is OK to do now.
5. Democrats cry foul and play the victim.
The fact that Democrats never seem to learn, never seem to realize that they need to STOP BREAKING IMPORTANT NORMS if they don't want this to keep happening to them, is in and of itself enough reason to put me off ever voting for them again, at least until they finally wise up.
"You'll regret this, and you may regret this a lot sooner than you think."
Can you give more examples of this in the post-2000 time period?
The big, obvious, brightly glowing neon sign example was Harry Reid invoking the so-called "nuclear option" in 2013, changing Senate rules to exempt judicial confirmations from the filibuster so he could push through a few candidates that Democrats wanted on a bare majority vote. Had that precedent never been set, it's likely that Republicans would have been unable to seat the Justices who overturned Roe v. Wade.
Serious question, what rule does "Not when Alvin Bragg openly campaigned on a promise to prosecute Trump" violate? If he thinks Trump did something illegal and needs to be prosecuted and is willing to invest his career into focusing on that, why shouldn't he say that in his campaign? As far as I can tell he's promising to pursue that case where another person might not pursue it, which is... fine? Prosecutors pick which cases to pursue all the time.
> Serious question, what rule does "Not when Alvin Bragg openly campaigned on a promise to prosecute Trump" violate?
Not a rule, but it "violates" the concept that "we really have no way of knowing that this was a politically-motivated prosecution" seven ways from Sunday, which was the point I was making.
I'll link to a list of Bragg campaign statements at the end of this comment. In a nutshell, a major theme of his campaign was the breadth of his experience, indicating his ability to handle all aspects of his office. It was known that the current DA (Cyrus Vance) was investigating the Trump Organization, and Bragg talked about how his experience qualified him to take over that case. He made statements like, “I haven’t seen all the facts beyond the public, but I’ve litigated with him and so I’m prepared to go where the facts take me once I see them, and hold him accountable.”
After taking office, Bragg reviewed the case and decided it wasn’t strong enough to justify a prosecution at that time. The lead prosecutor for the case, a holdover from Cyrus Vance’s term in office, resigned in protest. The investigation continued and prosecutors eventually developed a case that Bragg decided was strong enough to go forward.
If this is enough to convince you that the prosecution was politically motivated, I think you’d call the decision to prosecute politically motivated no matter who had won the race for DA or what they said during the campaign.
https://www.politifact.com/article/2023/apr/12/heres-what-manhattan-district-attorney-alvin-bragg/
The DA's office, as you noted, had looked the case over and found there was nothing worth prosecuting. The FEC, which has exclusive jurisdiction over campaign finance issues, had *also* looked the case over and found nothing worth prosecuting. And yet Bragg filed charges anyway, right as the election campaigning was getting into gear. And Biden's FEC, which typically jealously guards its exclusive jurisdiction over campaign finance issues, just sat back and let it happen.
Anyone for whom those facts alone aren't sufficient evidence that the whole thing is a blatantly political persecution is suffering from a severe case of stuck priors overriding their rationality.
Prosecuting an individual because of who they are is the problem. The point of rule of law is everyone is equal and deserves the same treatment. Pledging to prosecute Trump in general is a violation of that principle. If Bragg ran on "Trump's lawyer paying off a porn star and not disclosing that as a campaign contribution is a clear violation of the law" and that was how the campaign finance laws were applied to everyone else then indeed there would be no problem.
I mean, I'd interpret that campaign promise as saying "I'm going to prosecute him for the things he did, which anyone listening already knows about". Not "I'm going to find something to prosecute him for".
>Put this way, you could argue: okay, January 6 was bad. But it was like a ten-year-old child's idea of authoritarianism. You seize power by getting a bunch of people to zerg rush the opposing politicians and beat them up until they declare you in charge. Too bad you were foiled by a locked door, you'll get them next time. I won't claim this strategy has never successfully taken over a government, because history is long and weird. But I can't think of any examples.
Bret Deveraux can, and he also argues that, while the attempt being foiled by locked doors looks silly indeed, that is no predictor for the next time:
https://acoup.blog/2021/01/15/miscellanea-insurrections-ancient-and-modern-and-also-meet-the-academicats/
> While the insurrection was happening and in its immediate aftermath, there was a tendency to focus on the more frivolous, silly parts of it. And there were truly silly looking things. And there are still commentators – some deluded, some acting in bad faith – attempting to insist that this wasn’t serious. They are wrong; the Capitol Insurrection was deadly serious both in the very literal sense that people died (which I think seems to be missed in some quarters), but also for what it means.
>No ancient Greek would have had any trouble in understanding what happened on the 6th or that it was a serious attempt (albeit an incompetent one) to seize power. Having a leader or a political faction move with a mob (often armed, but not always so) to try to disperse the normal civic assemblies of a Greek polis and occupy their normal meeting place was a standard maneuver to try to seize power during stasis.
> Later in 411, the ‘Four Hundred’ would seize power in exactly the same way, arriving with a mob of armed supporters to disperse the Athenian boule – it’s council (Thuc. 8.69). That’s four examples of this exact tactic from Athens alone (Athens was by no means the most stasis-prone ancient state, by the way – that was almost certainly Syracuse).
> Let’s come back to Peisistratos, because he is instructive here. Peisistratos tried to make himself tyrant of Athens twice before his third attempt succeeded.
The bit about the two-player psychodrama in which the Democrats (or at least the objectionable portions of progressive orthodoxy) are the outgroup to the Republican's fargroup is extremely apt and I applaud Scott for writing it.
One related concept I think is that of ingroup conformance and Scott's "different worlds" essay -- whoever wins the election, both Scott and the Muslims in Michigan are going to be going to the same workplace and seeing the same people at cocktail parties (or perhaps the teetotaler equivalent depending on how observant the Muslims in Michigan are). So the ingroup/outgroup antagonism genuinely *is* the proximate struggle because the same people and organizations remain one's ingroup regardless.
What takes an act of will is reminding oneself that the election has to be judged with respect to its material consequences as if both sides were fargroups regardless of the fact that one side is aligned with outgroup orthodoxy and one side are just people you never actually see or meet because they're in "different worlds" land.
This next week is going to give me such agita so rather than doom spiral I plan to relax by reading some early modern history that will undoubtedly have little relevance to the current state of affairs
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15764704-the-search-for-modern-china
oooooh nooooooooo
I’d like to be on a Midazolam drip till this is over.
"One word conspicuously missing is 'Trump'. Doesn't Trump support Israel even more than Harris?"
Yes! He does! Because he's trying to hold older evangelical voters, but yes. The point isn't to take a stand for Palestinians or Gaza. The point is to punish the politically impure.
Also, "As usual, the Democrats have so carefully followed the rules and covered their tracks so that it’s hard to say for sure," is exactly the reasoning that gets your ass clapped by a $965 million settlement.
Any other R candidate will be pro Israel for the same r reason. But it's conceivable that Harris could be replaced by a n anti Israel D, since there are a lot of them.
One thing, I don't know if it will persuade any Trumpists, but there is this perception among many that he "actually" "cares" "about them."
Remember, on Jan 6, that Ashli Babbitt was shot. One of his most loyal followers, willing to go over the top for him. She died, pointlessly, fruitlessly. Hundreds of his supporters were right there at the time. His most loyal people, right in the line of fire.
Did he tell them to leave the dangerous situation they were in? No. He didn't. He told them to "stay peaceful." You are just meat to be thrown to your death for him. He doesn't care about you, and never has.
> Did he tell them to leave the dangerous situation they were in? No. He didn't. He told them to "stay peaceful."
Was Ashli Babbitt staying peaceful when she was shot?
He didn't know what caused Ashli Babbitt to be shot. For all he knew, there was an active shooter situation. He prioritized his own desperate clinging to power over his followers' well-being, because that's the sort of person he is.
More peaceful than the goon who murdered her, at least.
We can do without the concern trolling, thanks.
I'm not concern trolling, I'm simply expressing the objective reality. The idea that Trump actually cares about his followers as anything other than idiots to steal money from with NFTs and rugpull cryptocoins is an absurdity, made all the darker by the death of Ashli Babbitt.
The compromise was terrible. I forget what the merits were. Suppose we have a state where the governor uses violence to keep Blacks from voting Republican, as happened there. Should the House of Reps. certify the governor's slate of electors, or the Republican one?
Thank you, Scott. Thank you 🙏
For the sake of what remains of my sanity, I shall not read any comments on this post. Godspeed, everyone.
I highly recommend not reading the comments
I've read all the comments, and I agree that they are more insane than usual.
If you somehow came to know that the 2020 election had, in fact, been stolen, how would your opinions change?
By the way: I have found it UNBELIEVABLY difficult to get any opponent of Trump to answer this hypothetical question. But you are a rationalist who is epistemologically competent, so I trust that you can.
Well it’s not a well formed hypothetical. What do you mean by ‘came to know’? Do I have access to undeniable proof that I can share? Or do I get it in some non-transferable way?
There is a large amount of evidence of various kinds, which different people weigh in different ways, it is still a DEBATABLE topic. Scott seems to be making the conclusion that the election was not stolen an important load-bearing proposition, but maybe it doesn’t actually matter to him, and I’d like to know that.
I have two questions for you which are simple yes or no questions that I hope you have enough integrity to answer:
1) did you ever believe that Trump colluded with Russia before the 2016 election?
2) did you ever believe that the “Hunter Biden laptop” was Russian disinformation?
I was about 50% confident in #1 (until disproven) and never really believed #2. Why do you ask?
Because I had an INCREDIBLY hard time getting Trump opponents to even CONTEMPLATE the proposition that Russiagate was a Clinton campaign hoax, because they did not want to be put in the position of saying that it MATTERED and then later have to admit that the people who fabricated and used that hoax against Trump were unethical.
Similarly, I could never get Joe Biden supporters to say *whether it mattered if Biden took bribes*, they would not contemplate the hypothetical possibility that the laptop was authentic because then they would have to admit that they supported Biden over Trump anyway even though they believed he probably did take bribes.
I hope you see the relevance now.
I do, thank you. You're basically trying to test for good faith in advance. Which is an admirable goal.
For my part - yes, it matters to me whether Biden actually took bribes, and there is a nonzero chance that he did. It still would not especially swing my vote, though, given that I have a much higher confidence that Trump did much more in that same vein.
But it does matter. If I were to learn, incontrovertibly, that Biden did take bribes, and that Trump (despite all the evidence) did not, it would significantly shift how I feel about this election.
May I flip it around? If you were convinced that Trump was taking bribes, and that Biden had not, would it change how you want to vote? I am assuming (but please correct me if I am wrong) that you would vote Trump.
The laptop makes it completely clear that Biden did in fact take a lot of bribes from foreign countries, and it was just revealed that the FBI knew in 2019 that this was the case and instead of pursuing the case they “pre-bunked” the story because they expected it to come out after they sat on it for long enough (they did and it did).
Those Biden bribes were much worse than anything Trump did, as you would agree if you familiarized yourself with all the facts of his family bribe-laundering scheme.
But if Biden had not been not corrupt, and Trump was, then I would probably have voted for Biden in 2020.
Because…who cares? If a 9/11 Truther asked me how I would feel about about America if 9/11 was an inside job, it would be clear that they were just attempting some sort of persuasion approach to, a few steps in, attempt to get me to believe (or validated their anger about) the fact that 9/11 was, in fact, an inside job.
Sorry, not playing whatever game you’re pushing. The fact that you believe it makes me very uninterested in discussing it with you unless I think i can somehow shake you out of your stupor.
You fail the rationalist test.
It makes sense to ask whether a person thinks a question MATTERS before wasting time trying to persuade them.
It makes sense when someone states an opinion to ask what are the “load-bearing” facts that affect that opinion.
You refuse to even address whether it matters, which only makes sense if you think it has actually been conclusively proven that the hypothesis is false.
If you came to know that Donald Trump personally caused every single misfortune in your entire life, how would you opinion change?
You're saying it's impossible? Well, you fail the rationalist test. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200, & c. & c.
No, it wouldn't, because I've heard trump explain why/how he thinks it was stolen and it's laughable, to the point that I don't think he believes it (and if anyone could believe it against all evidence, it would be someone with his personality). If you're right for the wrong reasons, I'm still mad at you for trying to overthrow the government.
Okay, I’ll bite: I would not vote for Harris and need to seriously reconsider everything I believed.
Now your turn: if you somehow came to realize the election has not been stolen, how would your opinions change?
It would reduce the amount that I thought the Democrats were criminals enough that I would vote based on the issues instead.
Fair answer. But hopefully it would also make you realize that what Trump did was an egregious norm violation where he became the first president since the founding of the country to not peacefully transfer power to his democratically elected successor. And that he was so insistent on the lie that he convinced or bullied half the country to go along with it. And that this lying demagogic figure is who his supporters have tirelessly backed for nearly a decade. And that maybe this is why so many of his critics are horrified by the man.
Speaking just hypothetically of course …
It wasn’t a lie. He believed it had been stolen, and wanted Congress to look at the evidence. He told the protestors to protest peacefully.
What you say takes for granted that the election was not, in fact, stolen, and my whole point is that this is an unsettled issue of fact. But I don’t want to try to settle that question here. I just want people to admit that this issue of fact matters. (I do NOT want to hear statements of the form “he couldn’t have known it was stolen therefore his behavior was illegitimate”, that’s moving the goalposts because earlier you called it a “lie”, and there is a big difference between being mistaken and lying. And he was not mistaken about the issue being unsettled. The evidence was NOT addressed at the time, and what has come out since then shows that it was almost certainly stolen in Arizona and Georgia (although a third state would have been needed to change the outcome).
In Trump's world of delusion, its hard to know what he really does and doesn't believe. We do know, however, that he repeated claims that his DOJ, state officials, and white house counsel had already debunked, to him specifically. So at the very least he lied to the public with allegations he knew were false.
I do think, to the extent that Jan 6ers believed Trumps lies, they were actual patriots. It does matter if the election was stolen or not, and if Trump had successfully done so on Jan 6, the country should of course not roll over and just let it happen.
You're wrong about the stolen election claims in Arizona and Georgia, those state governments don't agree with your assessment, and they're both republican run.
Let's imagine two cases:
1. A case wherein I didn't ever look into whether 2020 was stolen or not, and thus "the election was stolen" could plausibly mean "Trump's claims of fraud were correct." This would very heavily change my positions on everything relevant, though my policy positions would still be more D-aligned than R-aligned.
2. The real world, where I did investigate, and found there's fucking nothing, where Trump was told by staff "yo that claim isn't true" and then went out and repeated the lie the next day. This would mean I would support criminal prosecution of the involved parties. I'd still vote Harris, though, unless she was personally involved in this imaginary voter fraud, because her policy positions are closer to mine and Trump was only "right" by luck (magical intervention from God, in that we are now in a stupid hypothetical universe, really), so his coup attempt was still bad. He did claim 2012, the 2016 primaries, the 2016 election, and the 2020 election were all rigged against him/the Rs, often months in advance, after all.
Yes, obviously I would be against Harris now if Biden/Harris had actually stolen the 2020 election. I'm surprised you found anyone who said otherwise. Perhaps you tried to frame it as "given that Biden/Harris stole the election" which is quite obviously false so no wonder there was resistance.
Whether the 2020 election was stolen is the most important political question of the 21st century. It would change everything for me if it was. As long as it was NOT stolen, everything Trump did after that date was horrible. If it WAS stolen, then it was a valiant defense of the United States.
But, I just haven't seen anything remotely persuasive. The best people can come up with that I've seen is "some states changed their voting rules incorrectly", which while bad, is hardly evidence of theft but rather an improper response to the COVID emergency, and certainly not a reason to throw out millions of voter's opinions. If there is any actual persuasive evidence of intentional theft I'd love to see it, because I've read a lot of conservative sources on this and remain completely unconvinced.
>Whether the 2020 election was stolen is the most important political question of the 21st century.
Hmm... I consider it important, but not so _overwhelmingly_ important.
I consider Harris's statement that she wants speech on social media "regulated" [censored], and the way the Biden/Harris administration used Facebook and Twitter as proxies for the administration to unconstitutionally censor political speech to be comparable in importance.
( Morbidly, if the USA+NATO or Putin winds up misjudging Putin's invasion of Ukraine or if Xi invades Taiwan, and either of these results in a nuclear exchange, that will overshadow every single other political event of the 21st century up through today. )
There was no voter fraud. Every court case was thrown out due to lack of evidence. Fox News was sued for millions for spreading lies that they knew were lies. Giuliani had to concede under oath that he lied about everything. Audits of the state counts found at most a dozen or so illegitimate votes, which makes it extremely extremely rare.
It would upend my whole world view in a major way. Perhaps more than anything else in my life. I would probably not vote for either party and not support either candidate or party in any way. I'd probably become a conspiracy theorist and start believing in many other alleged schemes.
(I'm extremely confident that it wasn't stolen, though. I'd bet all of my life savings on it. And I'd bet a lot of money 2024 won't be stolen by the Democrats if Harris wins.)
Not gonna vote for Trump but I prefer that he wins. I also don't think the election was stolen but I don't blame people (too much) for thinking that it was. Our elections *look* like they're not secure, and the Democrats spend every ounce of their energy fighting the most basic attempts to keep them secure.
But Trump has no evidence. He just makes stuff up. He says whatever he wants to be true regardless of how preposterous it is. So if he got this one right, it's only by accident.
> "I won't claim this strategy has never successfully taken over a government, because history is long and weird. But I can't think of any examples."
I'm not informed enough to have an independent opinion on this, but I believe Brett Devereaux (of acoup.blog) is fairly popular round here, and I recall him posting a commentary on this event where he claimed that "armed thugs occupy the physical seat of government" was a pretty effective strategy for performing a coup of democratic city-states in the part of history that he studies, and he seemed to think most people were not taking this threat seriously enough.
This is why the Democrats didn't want Trump to call in the National Guard. They didn't want armed forces that take orders from Trump occupying the physical seat of government.
It's kind of a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't for Trump, and I think he made the right choice, at least regarding that issue. If he had called in the National Guard, anything he said could be interpreted as orders to be carried out by them. As it is, his words are interpreted as insurrectionist orders to a disorganized mob armed with pepper spray. How much more insurrectionist if he had had soldiers on hand?
I'm detecting a subtext from some Trump supporters in the comments that Scott's just pretending to care about policy and is really just grossed out by Trump and his coalition. I'm not saying that's the case, but suppose it was. Could you really blame him?
Suppose there was a party, the Yellowish-Green Party, that publicly embraced identity politics for women and non-whites while condemning identity politics for whites or men as "hate." Would anyone be surprised, then, if I told you the group least likely to vote for that party was white men?
What has Trump and the wider GOP done to appeal to tech-adjacent* youngish secular white men who live in the Bay Area? They certainly have some issues like crime, homelessness, and affirmative action. But, whatever the reasons, the GOP rarely talks about affirmative action. Trump and the GOP's political strategy has been to appeal to low-class, Christian fundamentalist, and conspiracy minded people with stuff like Hulk Hogan, "prayer breakfasts," and the embrace of RFK Jr. That may well be enough for electoral victory, he's currently a slight favorite in the prediction markets. If so, he won't need the support of Scott. Would he deserve it? Can you really answer "yes?"
Don't despair. You've got in your coalition laid-off factory workers, Biblical literalist preachers, and "natural living" antivaxxer dog moms who used to vote Democrat. If you want a coalition with more people like Scott, maybe try to influence your coalition to stop appealing to religion and conspiracy theories. Relevant tweet:
https://x.com/realdschmidt/status/1850231846191407157
*I know Scott is not a programmer but IIRC he said he was surrounded by them and culturally identified with them.
"What has Trump and the wider GOP done to appeal to tech-adjacent* youngish secular white men who live in the Bay Area?"
He backs Elon, instead of targeting him, for one
Taking Ars Technica comment sections as a proxy for tech-adjacent youngish secular white men who live in the Bay Area, the net effect seems to have been pushing them away from Musk rather than toward Trump.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them vote Republican. If your identity is so tied up in "Being a good member of blue tribe" you'll find a reason to vote blue no matter who.
I *guarantee* you that if the nominee was Vance, Vivek, or DeSantis, Scott and the Ars Technica comment sections would find something else to disqualify them.
Ars Technica? 100%. It's astonishing to me how fast they turned on Musk after he began to express political opinions.
Scott? I'm less sure he writes this post, in this way, if it's Vivek, or maybe DeSantis or Vance.
I'm not that politically aware/don't follow the shit that closely but weren't at least vivek and desantis running on a bundle of ideas and vibes that's incredibly similar to trump's? It doesn't really seem surprising to think that if you would say "don't for for this guy" you would also say "don't vote for that guy who's really similar"
Vance actually seems more different to me, but idk enough about what him running would look like if he was the nominee-- I suspect it'd be very different though
I need to rip you here more, sorry.
"the Yellowish-Green Party, that publicly embraced identity politics for women and non-whites while condemning identity politics for whites or men as "hate." Would anyone be surprised, then, if I told you the group least likely to vote for that party was white men?"
You don't need to make up a new party! This is the actual position of the Democratic Party. The Trump/GOP appeal for is youngish secular white men is simply...not doing that!
Yeah I know man I read AmRen.
>I'm not saying that's the case, but suppose it was. Could you really blame him?
IMO Scott has been more of an asshole since moving from SSC to ACX (this is not necessarily a bad thing), and I think the bluntness of "Yes, I am an elitist that hates rednecks, and I can comfortably ignore the equivalent folx on the other side" would be refreshing. But it cuts against his old "On Niceness" thing.
>What has Trump and the wider GOP done to appeal to tech-adjacent* youngish secular white men who live in the Bay Area?
Been less openly hostile to them and their industry than Democrats?
Thielites in The Gundo (https://www.theinformation.com/articles/rockets-god-and-peter-thiel-36-hours-in-the-gundo-techs-latest-startup-haven) seem to be mostly techy youngish white men and big fans of the GOP.
I agree with this post, but there's one important way that Kamala and Democrats are bad that is not also the case with Trump that needs mentioning: COVID tyranny.
It was democrats that kept mask and social distancing mandates in place long after safe, effective vaccines were widely available. It was democrats that kept schools closed for years longer than they needed to. It was democrats that co-opted public health agencies to push their woke agenda (see eg https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/04/public-health-protests-301534), destroying public health agencies' credibility in the process. Republicans, including Trump, do not share this extreme fault.
My personal take is that because this was largely state-level policy, implemented largely by state-level officials, and thus one should vote for Republicans all the way down the ballot in state-level elections and below. In the national-level elections, I'm voting for Kamala (and the Democratic senator in my state, New Mexico) for more-or-less the same reasons that you outlined above. But some people I know think that COVID tyranny is a good reason to vote for Republicans even at national-level elections, to punish Democrats. So I figured I'd just mention that here.
This is like punishing Trump for the actions of Ron Desantis, American politics doesn’t work that way.
It absolutely does work that way. The president's party gets punished/rewarded for the way that state-level officials behave, and vice-versa.
After the President has been in office for nine months, there are elections in politically significant places: governors of Virginia and New Jersey, mayor of New York City. These are always considered to be referenda on the President's job so far.
I agree, which is why I'm voting for Harris, and for Republicans for all state- and local-level elections. But, some people are motivated to vote for Trump for these reasons, so it is worth addressing these reasons if you want to convince people.
Electing Republicans will just reward their obstructionism and ensure that Kamala will have her hands tied on the border and any other policy you may want for four more years.
1. State-level republicans have little ability to obstruct the federal government. Congress and the federal courts have that ability.
2. Much of Kamala's agenda I would like to be obstructed.
Kinda curious what you think Kamala's agenda is. Most people express their issue with her is that she stands for nothing, has no agenda, and is talking and campaigning like a neocon. Which is probably good strategy honestly. Dem voters do not agree on much right now, and any policy position she takes will only cost her voters. I agree with you, I don't want any change (besides reinstating abortion rights and curbing illegal immigration down a bit). Isn't Kamala literally running on not doing anything? A quick peruse of her website mentions price-gouging restrictions and closing tax loopholes. None of which will happen because her donors won't let her. What are you afraid she is going to do?
Here are a few Kamala agenda items I can think of off the top of my head that I want obstructed:
1. Price controls. I do not want price controls on food as a misguided attempt to control inflation (which is currently very much under control). That this is even a possibility that Kamala brings up signals that she is deeply economically illiterate, and thus we would benefit from having whatever wackier economic proposals she cooks up in the future obstructed by Republicans.
2. I want our courts to stick to a literal interpretation of the plain text of the law. I do not wanting them inserting their own policy ideas into how they decide to read the law this week. If Republicans control the senate, they'll fight back against any aggressively anti-textualist judges she nominates, and force her to nominate more textualist judges.
3. Popular-but-ultimately-unhelpful modifications to the tax code, such as unrealized capital gains taxes. Republicans are likely to fight back against this.
4. Deficit spending. Since the US is in good economic times, we should be cutting back on spending and reducing our debt right now. If congress is not full of yes-men and yes-women, Democrats are unlikely to be able to spend as much as they want.
I acknowledge that on some of these issues, a Trump Presidency would be much worse than a Kamala presidency. But I think that a Kamala presidency with a hostile congress is more likely to have these harmful goals obstructed than a Kamala presidency with a friendly congress.
There are also some parts of the Kamala agenda I don't want obstructed. I like that she's a YIMBY when it comes to housing; thankfully this is not something Republicans will necessarily obstruct. I like that she will continue pouring money into R&D and investment into clean energy. Republicans make a big stink about not caring about climate change, but in practice they [don't obstruct these efforts much when they benefit red states, as they have been lately](https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/red-states-renewables).
Abortion rights are, unfortunately, a total non-starter when it comes to federal legislation currently; this is unlikely to change even if Democrats control both houses of congress. There's just no way they'll get 60 senate votes for this party-line issue. And the same applies to Republicans' abortion agenda: there's no way they'll get 60 votes in the senate for any federal abortion restriction legislation. So, unless either party decides to use the nuclear option and ditch the filibuster in the senate, abortion is highly likely to remain in its current (not ideal) status quo of being a state-level issue. I understand the desire to punish Republicans for the egregious abortion restrictions popping up in red states, although this is better done at the state level since that's where abortion restrictions are coming from. By all means vote your conscience and boot out all your state-level Republican lawmakers if this matters more to you than (eg) COVID tyranny.
I was floored by this post. Didn't match my priors whatsoever.
What did you expect?
Scott endorsed Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020. Why is it surprising?
>One worry is that Trump tries to pack election boards with his supporters and give them a mandate to fiddle with election law in ways that make him more likely to win
Is the concern that he'd do this before getting elected, or after? If before, then it's not a consequence of him getting elected. And if after, then why would he be trying to subvert an election after winning it?
Donald Trump is not an authoritarian, but he plays one on TV.
Liberals used to take free speech seriously. Today, the only non-authoritarian position of today's Democrats is on recreational drugs.
Notice the number of Democrats on Trump's transition team. It's the most bipartisan transition team in my lifetime.
And his Twitter feed did not block Democrat trolls who could be downright obscene in their responses.
He was ordered by a court not to block people - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-twitter/trump-unblocks-more-twitter-users-after-us-court-ruling-idUSKCN1LE08Q/
Did you know Trump just sues CBS news for not covering him in a positive light? He regularly calls the news the enemy of the people, in different words.
Do you have any evidence of any Democrat politician taking free speech away? Has Biden done that? Has Kamala even hinted at taking away free speech?
What does having a non-bipartisan transition team even mean? Kamala said she would appoint Republicans to her cabinet. Would Trump appoint a Democrat? You know the answer.
Re: Abandonharris
I really like this piece, but I think you make a mistake on abandonharris. They clearly loathe Trump even more than Harris, but they have no leverage over Trump. (Does anyone?) They have (or at least think they have) some chance of getting Harris to actually move much farther towards their position because their position is indeed what the Democratic Party would espouse if not constrained by the fact that their view is really, really unpopular.
That leaves open the question: do they have to actually follow through on their threats even if it elects Trump? Can they afford to play a game that long? What choice do they have? If they fail to carry out the threat to abandon Harris (and they don't have to vote for Trump to do so -- they only have to abstain from voting or vote Stein) then they lose all credibility for the next threat...
You missed his point. These Muslims know Trump is worse, but they don’t hate him, because is in their fargroup.
Yeah, that was Scott's point, but I don't think it's their point. They actually think they can affect her while they know they can't affect Trump. They have a strategy, not just a reaction.
I don't understand a strategy built on "I am electing someone I can't influence, but that's OK because can stand outside the White House cursing government policy while arguing with the unsuccessful candidate". How is that a strategy?
For 2026 and beyond.... Mostly for 2028.
But that assumes that the effort to persuade has any value? It seems quite likely to me that if Ms Harris is not elected then the 2028 ticket is not going to include her. This really smells to me more like a vote suppression tactic.
She won't be on the 2028 ticket, but whoever is on the 2028 ticket will say "oh shit I need to pander to Muslims in order to win Michigan".
At least, that's the theory. It's been tried at various times by various groups who think they deserved to be pandered to, with varying degrees of success.
Although they may approve of some of his views there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0cpmlVUmsw (joking, of course).
They don't clearly loath Trump. A lot of them are traditional Muslims who would feel quite at home with a Trump administration's social policies, particularly on LGBTQ issues.
>They clearly loathe Trump even more than Harris, but they have no leverage over Trump.
Yes, ignoring your gorgeous is rati onal.
>Another is that Trump might threaten opponents with jail time (or simply loss of government contracts) unless they support him
That's basically what the Democrats are doing with Musk. Once he became a symbol of the Right, he started getting charged with crimes right and left. And Obama previously used the IRS to target conservative groups: https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2015/07/23/19-facts-on-irs-targeting-president-obama-cant-blame-on-republicans/.
Notably, as far as loss of government contracts to those who disagree with party orthodoxy,
"With the introduction of Executive Order (E.O.) 13985, federal agencies and contractors must now incorporate DEI into their contract solicitations and proposals." (https://www.userogue.com/blog/dei-govcon).
Of course, Trump's authoritarian tendencies, and the obsequiousness of the Republican party to him make such concerns even more relevant to him.
I'm not 100% up on all the Musk drama but the one I remember is Tesla reincorporating in Texas after a Delaware judge denied his $56 billion compensation package on...not the most impressive challenge.
And, admittedly, it's a really subtle thing but...corporate incorporation is one of those boring things that can really, really matter.
(https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/tesla-reincorporation-texas-delaware-musk-shareholders/)
Having said that, a good search of "Musk criminal charges" brings up a criminal probe over self-driving claims, a federal wire fraud probe for misleading investors, a federal investigation into Tesla glass houses (wut?) and a charge in Manhattan for illegal perks he might have received so...there's at least something going on. I dunno, organizations of that size and complexity are almost always involved in multiple ongoing lawsuits.
Lawfare against Musk, including the equivalent of withholding gov contracts includes the the California Coastal Commission rejecting SpaceX operations, explicitly partly due to Musk's social media activity (they're rarely dumb enough to admit it), with the commission's chair commenting:
"We're dealing with a company…the head of which has aggressively injected himself into the Presidential race and made it clear what his point of view is."
And another commissioner commenting:
"Elon Musk…hopping about the country, spewing and tweeting political falsehoods."
See: https://reason.com/2024/10/22/elon-musk-versus-the-california-coastal-commission/.
The Philadelphia DA finally found a "criminal" he'd prosecute, in Musk, regarding a lotter for those who sign a petition: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2024/10/30/philadelphia-da-suing-elon-musk-wants-enhanced-security-at-hearing-amid-threats-of-political-violence/.
In spite of the grounds for prosecution being dubious: https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/oct/22/would-the-federal-government-prosecute-elon-musk-f/.
Hanania highlights other sudden legal action against Musk here: https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1710022091058356549.
It's not obvious why widespread selection of government contractors based on their race should be less of a concern than isolated selections of contractors on the basis of their views, particularly given that Scott himself opposes affirmative action (see: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/01/20/executive-order-advancing-racial-equity-and-support-for-underserved-communities-through-the-federal-government/).
Forcing companies to include DEI pledges and statements to secure government contracts implicitly excludes those who don't support the party lines on such matters.
Not the voter bribery?
So far, Krasner has filed a civil suit, while emphasizing that additional criminal charges may follow. Musk and his companies have faced scrutiny from prosecutors in other cases, with potential criminal charges to follow, e.g. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-autopilot-probe-us-prosecutors-focus-securities-wire-fraud-2024-05-08/.
Of course, the threat of criminal prosecution can have a chilling effect, even if charges aren't ultimately brought.
And of course, even civil suits targeted at political opponents would be squarely within Scott's concerns about what a Trump administration might do. Are targeted civil suits and legal impositions explicitly motivated by opposition to speech any less significant than Scott's example of withholding government contracts?
And if the many suits that Musk and his companies have faced recently are really just par for the course and not related to his political positions (ignoring the California Coastal Commission which explicitly connected them), then that would, if anything, undermine the distinction between the situation under a Trump presidency and the one under a Democratic one.
While it may seem more unfair to rarely withhold a contract or wage lawfare against individuals while leaving everyone else unscathed, it's better than the alternative in which such behavior is so widespread that it's hard to identify instances of deliberate targeting.
I haven’t followed Musk’s travails that much except insofar as Boca Chica is concerned, but I do remember at the time, when California permitted some dude to sue Tesla or Space-X on civil rights grounds because some Hispanic workers were rude to a black worker (sorry, vague on the details except that it made a mockery of the law) over a period of like a month, that Musk might defect from that whole scene - I mean, if that’s the future, the courts are going to be very busy delivering judgments. People have their head in the sand about the multiethnic coalition. It’s not going to be that multi.
By the way, is endorsing a candidate a tradition? I'm curious why you (Scott) do it. Do you feel obligated to disclose your preference?
I think it's a reasonable thing for bloggers to do, not that different from endorsing other positions eg here https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/11/04/my-california-ballot/
Today is an anniversary of Scott's "Sort by Controversial" story (https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ - read it if you haven't!) This is not a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence.
We live in the Scissor world. Anytime you forget it, you inevitably get reminded of it.
Donald Trump is a scissors statement made flesh.
Indeed. The story is from 2018. I assume he was thinking about Trump but did not want to name him.
> reach out to the 0.001% other people stuck in the same psychological vortex I was and see if any of it rings true.
Holy shit. It me! I think this is probably your most impactful post for me yet, so thanks. I voted last week and spent an impressive amount of time staring blankly at the ballot before ultimately voting "correctly" but feeling a strange kind of defeat about it. I told my wife after we both got out of voting, "Huh, I feel like I just ate a big plate full of kale". I've been ruminating on it ever since, and wondering why I struggled so much and felt like that afterwards.
But I think you really hit the nail on the head for me. I actually finally feel a bit happy about my vote. Thanks!
Yeah, this was definitely one of those "intelligently crystallize complex thoughts I previously couldn't put my finger on" posts for me. A whole lot of "hey, that's me!"
Also, "I feel like I just ate a big plate full of kale" is the best thing to say about a reluctant Democrat vote I have ever heard.
Well, that was a lot, actually. I ultimately ended up voting early for Trump (when I told my dad, he texted back 'me too, lesser of evils' which summed up the state of affairs). By the end of first section, I regretted it. After finishing the post, I kind of shrugged off your rhetorical spell on me because you started making empirical claims about the future ... and I just didn't buy it. I expect a 2nd trump term to be like his first. A lot better than average, if you don't get emotionally involved. And I expect a second kamala term to be like her first. My object-level of the world has failed last few years, and the black box algorithm inside my head is outputting an expectation that things will be fine to pretty good. Remind me you told me so in the gulags.
There is an episode in "The Good Soldier Švejk" that describes the situation perfectly -- a troop walks into the village that has only two wells. They test one of them and see that it has cholera bacteria. The leader then says "let's not test the other one -- if it also has cholera, what are we going to drink".
I suspect the majority of people voting for either candidate just tested the other one first
Very thoughtful essay, and great framing. There are some very thoughtful comments here genuinely grappling with the truth, giving respect to others’ opinions, agreeing on basic facts, and agreeing to disagree based on what people find more important. Then there are some people saying things that are easily refutable with a google search, like “police let in protesters in January 6”.
That "right-wing authoritarianism" article is basically saying how right-wing authoritarians are terrible in every possible and impossible way and are just low-level NPC scum. And while that is pleasant to hear about my double-outgroup, I wonder how this applies to...
1) Right-wing non-authoritarians (right-libertarians/ancaps)
2) Right-wing authoritarians who actually seem pretty smart (I won't signal-boost them, but I'm sure readers of Scott can remember his fights over Neoreaction)
What exactly changes in the underlying psychology, what is different about their psychometrics, compared to RWAs, according to the theory?
To add to the ingroup, outgroup, fargroup point, and to address all the people commenting that they will be voting for Trump, I would like to put forward for consideration that perhaps these members of a rationalist-focused community aren’t acting 100% rationally after all. People are voting for Trump for all kinds of reasons, a lot of them subconscious or based on personal calculations of “what do I stand to gain or lose personally from this candidate,” or “it was really uncomfortable to worry that I was going to be called out during the MeToo era,” or “I felt unfairly socially punished and embarrassed when I misgendered my longtime friend/colleague.” I was surprised at the pro Trump rhetoric in the comments here, but then I stepped back and thought about who makes up this community (scroll down through the comments… you see “Bob,” Nathanial,” Scott, “John,” and one brave and lonely “Katie”).
Anyway, I’d hazard a guess that most people in this community are men. And who has most often been the targets of the MeToo furor and the Left’s liberal “woke Mob?” Men. Who stands to lose the most power/money if we have higher taxes on corporations? Men. Who are the people who have accrued enough wealth and power from our status quo so that they will be cushioned (for a while) from the painting-ruining kind of anarchy that could happen under a Trump presidency? Men.
Don't let your your feelings and resentment of the left get the better of you! The chaos and authoritarianism under Trump will eventually make your life worse as well.
Your second last paragraph makes an excellent case for voting Trump, and then your last one says not to.
Interesting. Am I hearing that you feel unfairly singled out by the Left? Ultimately voting for someone whose platform is based on greed and mendacity isn't a good long term strategy for stability even if you have enough resources to ride out the initial rockiness better than others. And voting for a greedy despot isn't a good choice to make just because your feelings have been hurt by the left.
Ultimately, I'm an upper middle class straight White male. If I don't vote for my interests, who the fuck will?
You may perceive voting for trump to be in your interest now, but long term it is not.
Pretty much.
I happen to think Trump is bad for everyone in this country over the medium term, due to the general corruption likely to occur. But I'm more or less at the FIRE point--a guy who intends to keep working might well wish to weaken HR laws to keep a female rival from taking him down with a false accusation, for instance.
When you say "false accusation," what do you mean exactly? Like a false allegation of sexual harassment or assault? Or an accusation of discrimination?
Please stop before you make me vote for Trump. :)
I mean, you're right that most rationalists aren't all that rational. I don't think anyone is, frankly. Rationalists try harder than most people but they tend to drift in a certain direction because the people who would push them in others (leftists of various sorts) don't show up.
Frankly...I'm OK with that. Nerdy guys are bad at forming groups and advocating for our interests relative to other personality types (high-profile nerd guys like Musk and Zuckerberg are really just out for themselves), and if this serves as a de-facto nerd caucus...cool. We're people too, we have the right to advocate for our interests, if we have to launder it in our own heads through a bunch of stuff about Bayesian estimation of probabilities...well, it's no sillier than some of the things leftist academics are saying, and has more equations, which is a plus for me at least.
Thing I got out of Robert Anton Wilson ages ago is, our rational minds are just the guy riding the elephant--our instincts and urges and peeves are doing the driving. You can try to check it with all the stuff rationalists do like checking their predictions, but ultimately our reasoning evolved to persuade other people (and ourselves!), not understand the universe. You can't understand the universe--the number of atoms in it greatly exceeds the number of atoms in your brain. But you can pick the best reality tunnel you can.
As for the rest of it: IMHO, you're right, there's a gender war, and Trump is on our side and Harris is on the women's side. I have to put that aside and vote for Harris because I'm convinced Trump will do more damage to the country as a whole. Patriotism feels right-coded and therefore vaguely antifeminist to me, so I'm cool with that. But it's really just that Scott scared my elephant with pictures of Venezuela. And I'm cool with that too.
A vote for trump is ultimately a vote for greater wealth disparity and an increased erosion of the middle class... What worries me the most is the dramatic increase we're seeing in the power and wealth of a few oligarchs who are not only getting away with not contributing adequately to the social safety net, but are also being allowed to run amuck and contribute to an erosion of classical liberal values in this country... all the while often being funded by our tax dollars. I see how (in the short term) it makes sense for someone who has benefited a lot from this (wealthy men, for example) to believe that voting for Trump will personally benefit them. Maybe it will, **at first**! But think about what it means to erode the middle class and remove social safety nets. If more people are poor and can't address their basic needs like food or health care, more people will engage in criminal behavior. There will be more social unrest. And unless you're at an Elon Musk level of rich where you can just watch the world burn from a bunker somewhere, you're not going to be able to build a big enough wall to protect yourself from the inevitable hungry and angry masses. Even if you don't feel threatened by policies that attack the personal freedoms of others (women, for example), it **still benefits you** to contribute to a stable society and make sure, for example, that every child has enough to eat and *other* people also feel like they they are living in society that values freedom. It's in your best interest that others believe they have a chance at building wealth and happiness as well.
Ironically I'm almost getting to the point where my interests are neutral with respect to redistribution, and may even be harmed slightly by the attempts at redistribution that target the upper middle class with salary rather than capital income. But, yes.
BTW, if you read carefully, I didn't say I was actually going to vote for Trump, just that feminist arguments make me *want* to. Ultimately I was swayed by similar concerns to Scott's around Trump decreasing overall state capability over the medium term.
I understood that you didn't say you were voting for Trump, and that you found Scott's argument the most compelling.
In fact, I thought you made some good points!
>Who are the people who have accrued enough wealth and power from our status quo so that they will be cushioned
Maybe consider that not everyone here is a stinking rich tech worker and instead, like an echo of opinions from the past, *don't want to be judged and punished for immutable characteristics.*
This is a very good argument against the reasons people were voting for Trump in 2016. But the reason I'm donating to Trump in 2024 (voting is pointless in California) is to vote against a tax on unrealized capital gains, and against a person who could propose it without understanding the problem. This is so unbelievably bad that it's well worth risking Trump. Only things that Trump has <1% chance of actually doing are things that would be worse than that: his tariffs would certainly be an economic drag, but none of them will actually break the infinite money machine the way an unrealized gains tax would. And unlike Trump who has a Thiel plant for a running mate to rein him in, Walz has similarly indicated no real knowledge of investment. A Harris vote is as dangerously high-variance of an economic risk as a 2016 Trump vote was a liberalism risk.
An unrealized capital gains tax is not going to happen, because Democrats in Congress almost certainly won't have enough votes to enact it.
Trump's tariffs, though, can be imposed unilaterally by him and are likely to happen.
So a Trump presidency is a much larger economic risk.
I don't think it's likely to happen. But even a 10% chance of it happening is worth Trump.
>The sovereign immunity ruling suggests they’re not willing to be a strong bulwark against right-wing authoritarianism
That seems like a debatable characterization. See e.g. https://reason.com/volokh/2024/07/10/everyone-needs-to-take-a-deep-breath-about-trump-v-united-states/.
Notably, the court, with its conservative justices, has ruled against Trump repeatedly, including regarding his election claims (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55283024) and regarding presidential immunity (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/supreme-court-rejects-trump-again-time-it-s-personal-n1233342).
The ruling is awful. The best reductio of the ruling is one given by Roberts in his opinion - Trump pressuring Barr to illegally confiscate voting machines from the states is now unreviewable behavior by any court because it's part of the President's conclusive and preclusive roles as President to order around Attorney Generals. The presumptive immunity for official acts is also awful - bribery for example is a law only enforceable when a President takes money to make an official act on someone's behalf. The President is now immune from any bribery charges unless prosecutors can argue that bringing the accusation to court won't interfere with the President's Constitutional duties - so for example if the President takes a bribe for pardoning someone, that's most likely unreviewable evidence since that is a Constitutional right afforded to the President.
"Chavez fired everyone competent or independent in government, because they sometimes talked back to him or disagreed with him"
Competent? Have you dealt with people in USCIS? I just have too many awful experiences when dealing with the government and its ossified, unaccountable bureaucracy.
Independent? Trump's felony prosecutions, as one example, were an indicator of the lack on any true independence in US government. The elites, media, military, big tech, etc. are all in lock-step; that's not independence, that's more like the fascism they decry.
I'm a life-long liberal, but the Democrats have failed me too many times (especially at the state level), and the selection of Harris (no democracy there) was just the cherry on top. Trump might be bad, but that does not mean his opposition is therefore good or even worthy of any kind of support. I'm angry at all of my leaders.
Just curious, but who did you vote for in 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020?
Great article! Really made me think - especially the part about violating brightline norms vs slow corrosion.
On the whole I don't quite agree.
So first off, despite believing that Trump is an authoritarian wannabe dictator, I don't buy that Jan 6 was a clear cut violation. My beef with his post-2020 election antics is with his loud and unabashed rejection of the election results. Jan 6th itself was obviously just a rally gone wrong - Trump wanted them to "peacefully and patriotically" overturn the election and it ended up devolving into chaos because of an immense security arrangement failure by Nancy Pelosi et al. It's worth noting that even then the mob killed exactly zero people and the many many actual criminal acts committed in the process were punished just like Just Stop Oil antics do. The best proof of the fact that Trump committed no crime/bright line violation is that he's had a million cases thrown at him (some legit, others less so) but not a single one of them alleges he incited violence (or an "insurrection") that day.
Trump's shameful anti-democratic actions should be utterly beyond the pale...but in fact they're not. They were just a louder, much more obstinate version of the protests some Democrats did to try and overturn the 2000, 2004 and 2016 elections. I completely agree that Trump was and is unambiguously worse but importantly it's a difference in degree not in kind. And none of the Democrats have been taken to task for their awful actions in a way remotely comparable - Jamie Raskin, one of the wannabe-overturners/certification objectors of 2016, was literally put in charge of the Jan 6th investigation. And as far as I'm aware exactly zero Democrats denounced Stacey Abrams' equally anti-democratic rejection of the 2018 governor election (genuinely I don't really believe any liberal who claims to be anti-authoritarian actually is if they wouldn't support Kemp over Abrams in 2022). Trump has polarized this issue and made the Republican party the "elections only count if we win" party - and I hope this means Democrats' will be more stringently pro-democratic in the future - but my point is that what he's done (as awful as it is) is a worse version of the same malfeasance that the Democrats are guilty of, not a clear-cut criminal deviation from prior norms.
The other part of your argument I don't find as convincing is the slippery slope to Hugo Chavez. We both agree that Trump will not realistically become a dictator/Chavez/whatever. I hear your concern that he could just become 10% Chavez and the next person becomes 20% until we reach oblivion but I don't find it realistic. In fact I think it's literally the opposite of how it works. America is an oppositional creature. That's why electing Trump led to an unprecedented blossoming of wokeness and the Biden presidency has the woke on their knees and mainstream liberals parroting Chris Rufo from 2021. That's why short of 9/11s the president's party loses the popular vote every midterm (and the opposition to the massive sea change that was Dobbs is what limited the damage for Democrats in 2022). Beating Trump in 2020 made him - and Trumpist authoritarianism - FAR stronger. His favorables are through the roof compared to during his presidency. He basically already won the election by July but Democrats very smartly decided to scrap the whole thing and got very lucky with Kamala magically rebirthing as the most popular active politician in the country.
Neither you nor I can predict the future. But "Trump goes 10% Chavez, next guy goes 20% and we spiral" is just one possible future. Another possible one is "Trump wins, tries to do authoritarian stuff, the reborn resistance stymies him, the economy randomly crashes and everyone hates him by 2028 and the Republican party finally moves on to someone more normal". And in the case that Kamala wins, it's extremely plausible to me that "Kamala quickly becomes unpopular, Trump is thrown in prison over dubious charges, the entire Republican party goes full must-destroy-our enemies, and eventually by the next general election-timed recession they have an unapologetic fascist ready to go". It's certainly much more plausible to me than "Kamala wins, Republicans realize the error of their ways and see Trump rot in prison with a smile and nominate Liz Cheney (or even Nikki Haley) in 2028". Fundamentally if you hate a movement in this country (like wokeness or Trumpism) you're gonna be in a much better spot if the party that supports has the presidency than otherwise. There's edge cases and policy concerns and SCOTUS seats to consider but if your main, primary issue is to defeat a specific movement or ideology (authoritarianism, specifically as manifested in the current Trumpist Republican party) you'd much rather hand them the presidency and watch them wreck themselves.
To put all my cards on the table, I'm not American (I just live here), I can't vote, and if I could I almost definitely wouldn't vote for Trump. But I think the argument for voting for him is stronger than you've made it out to be.
At first I had a similar thought about Jan 6, but Jan 6 actually was a component of an overarching plot to try to overturn the election. Trump wanted it to happen and (for many hours) refused to halt it because he wanted to put pressure on Congress and particularly Pence so the plot could continue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot
The liberal political streamer Destiny will be releasing a detailed video making the case that January 6 was a significant part of this plot. The issue is the plot, not necessarily January 6, but January 6 absolutely was part of that plot and not just a sudden riot.
Appreciate the response! To be clear I obviously think Jan 6 was awful but my contention is very simply that it wasn't a clear-cut criminal deviation frome existing norms. If he had ordered/encouraged his supporters to hurt Congresspeople or Mike Pence, it would have been one (and also a clear unambiguous crime for which he'd have been correctly charged - he'd be rotting in prison since 2021).
The fake electors plot was, again, awful and undemocratic...but it wasn't categorically different from what the election objectors tried to do in 2000/2004/2016. Or, for that matter, what the Hamilton Electors campaign tried to do in 2016.
It might seem like I'm being pedantic here but I really think it's important to avoid this slippery slope. The more we falsely equate Trump with a violent fascist, the easier we make things for a future violent fascist because he can say there's precedent. Trump is fundamentally NOT the kinda guy who orders hits on his political opponents. He never tried to assassinate Biden or anyone (and didn't even try to imprison Hillary despite promising to) because he is just not that kind of authoritarian. Hitler was. Chavez was. Putin is. That's not remotely a high bar but it is a categorical difference between Trump and actual fash-y people - that is the clear cut bright line and I absolutely do not want to blur it.
The obvious difference here is that Kerry and Clinton conceded very quickly in 2004 and 2016, and Gore conceded in 2000 following the Supreme Court ruling.
The difference is kind, not degree: there has never been a modern presidential campaign before Trump 2020 who coordinated and orchestrated anti-democratic attempts to overturn election results. That's a distinct phenomenon from partisan sore losers filing frivolous lawsuits and griping to the media.
Between Kerry/Clinton in '04/'16 and Trump in '20, I absolutely 100% agree there's no real comparison - it is a difference in kind.
But if you look at the Democratic electoral college objectors like Barbara Boxer in '04 and Jamie Raskin in '16, it's exactly the same kind of shameless nakedly partisan anti-democratic demagoguery that Trump took up in 2020 (and which unfortunately got far more purchase within his party). Had Boxer's insane conspiracy-fueled objection somehow passed the Senate, it would have literally overturned the 2004 election (weirdly this wouldn't have been true for the maniacal 2020 Republican objectors because they chose to challenge only two states that wouldn't have been enough to overturn the election).
The fact that some Democrats (though thankfully not the presidential candidates themselves) had previously tried the same election-denying antics is why his escalation is not, to me, a new bright-line violation.
In your opinion, why weren't any of the people you mentioned prosecuted for a crime, but Trump and his coconspirators were?
I don't know the ins and outs of all of the cases involving Trump and don't have fully formed opinions of how much they're about criminal wrongdoing by Trump vs partisan witch hunting. But regardless until and unless he's actually convicted of a crime involving his attempts to overturn the election (the felony convictions were about the "hush money" which is a different issue) I'm not presuming him guilty of anything there. Much like Barbara Boxer or Jamie Raskin his actions were appalling but they haven't actually led to any criminal conviction yet.
I like this a lot and, contrary to your closing caveat, believe it's drastically more persuasive than anything else I've seen.
PS: I think the following is missing the word "with"?
> (compare institutions that were formed bright-line mandates to discover truth or advance knowledge that shifted to warring against the subtle damage of racism or right-wing-opinions or whatever...
"Put this way, you could argue: okay, January 6 was bad. But it was like a ten-year-old child's idea of authoritarianism. You seize power by getting a bunch of people to zerg rush the opposing politicians and beat them up until they declare you in charge. Too bad you were foiled by a locked door, you'll get them next time. I won't claim this strategy has never successfully taken over a government, because history is long and weird. But I can't think of any examples."
That is actually pretty close to how the National Fascist Party took over the government of Italy in 1922.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_on_Rome
It "helped" that Italy was still a constitutional monarchy. King Victor Emmanuel III had the constitutional power to dissolve governments and appoint new prime ministers. On October 30, 1922, he appointed Benito Mussolini as Prime Minister. We all know how well that went.
yeah, i feel like it has worked a lot more than he gives it credit for.
Hearted about the psychodrama in particular :3
ACX joins the trend of endorsing candidates well after many of us have voted
It's before the actual election day. Seems reasonable.
Most voters cast their ballots on Election Day.
Thoughtful, even brilliant
The war in Ukraine needs to stop. I hope Trump gets reelected for this reason.
As a Ukrainian, I don't want my country to be handed over to Russia in total capitulation. I hope Trump does not get reelected for this reason.
A few thoughts in no particular order.
First, I want to link to my pro-Trump arguments here (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-351/comment/72528548) and here (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-338/comment/62090404). I importantly argue that a Harris win will function as far more of an endorsement of left-wing authoritarianism (even of the parts of it she's not personally supporting) than a Trump win would for right-wing authoritarianism.
I also think things like depolicing and progressive prosecutors are more fundamentally anti-democratic in their basic nature than any amount of election denial or threats to jail political opponents. Partially or even fully rigging elections, or weaponising the justice system, cannot compare to just outright letting favoured groups ignore the laws. On a scale of respect for the foundations of a democratic society, "rig the process by which laws are made" and "enact laws that violate fundamental freedoms" are close to the bottom; "the laws mean nothing" is *rock* bottom. (The same can be said for illegal immigration).
And that's not getting to the fact that the latter policies are already *actually happening* and the former are at most proposals or fantasies. Another thing that's already actually happening: numerous Western countries literally outlawing right-leaning beliefs (see the the discussion in my first link above). You can't compare judgements on what's happening with judgements on what might happen: the latter has whole realms of rational uncertainty that the former outright lacks. And these things also show why a conservative Supreme Court isn't too much reassurance: the left has ways--getting other countries to censor the internet for you, or letting favoured demographics beat up dissidents and unfavoured demographics (whites or business owners) and ignoring all laws to the contrary--of getting around this that are *already being used*.
Second, your point about bringing things closer to a banana republic is valid and well-put, but misses an important rational consideration. *All else being equal*, sure, going 10% of the way to a banana republic should be rejected the first time, not the third or fourth time. But what if the first time the choice is "10% of the way to a banana republic, or a more subtle but almost total permanent left-wing takeover of culture and institutions", the second time the choice is "20% of the way to a banana republic, or a substantial but somewhat limited left-wing authoritarian advance", and the third time the choice is "30% of the way to a banana republic, or a largely sane and reasonable left-leaning government that has comphrehensively purged its extremists and has a recent track record of respect for freedom"? Then it seems very clear to me that the rational option is to wait until the third election to firmly reject the banana-adjacent right, and doing so earlier just straightforwardly has worse expected value.
And that's just thinking consequentially. What about the deontological and virtue-based significance of punishing the incumbent party for their outrageous and norm-violating actions? As I discuss in my linked comment, there's a fundamental difference between the incumbent administration and the challenger. Voters only have a binary choice, and if they want to reject both side's extremism, there's only one clear way to do that: keep voting out the incumbent party as long as its term had a record of a extreme and authoritarian policies. Keep voting out the incumbent party unless and until they have an actual moderate and freedom-respecting term. Then reward them for that.
The Biden/Harris administration has fallen far short of that standard, and so did the last Trump administration. So it was rational and just to vote both of them out. Rational because, as above, even if a Trump win sets the banana republic clock forward 10%, next election you may have a chance to stop that clock in its tracks in exchange for a reasonable Democratic administration that has (for example) purged the anti-police activists completely, thrown all the progressive prosecutors out of its party, and committed to both respect for freedom of speech itself and serious diplomatic consequences (including ending military protection) for any country that tries to censor the internet. Which is just higher expected value overall. And because it's just *right* to punish the Biden administration for choosing not to govern as a moderate and instead coercing censorship, opening the border, and tolerating exreme policies and rhetoric from its own down-ballot party.
Choosing to say "yes the Ds have been very bad, but Trump is so bad I'll still vote for them" is (a) letting them get away completely with these obboxious choices with no consequences and (b) sending the message that there *are* no consequences for this behaviour, endorsing the D activists who spit on moderates by saying "as long as Trump is the opponent, the moderates *have* to vote for us, so we can do whatever we want", and encouraging extremism (in both parties!) more and more, by telling them they'll face no consequences (even if they're the incumbent) as long as they can paint the other side as even worse.
Wheras voting out extreme incumbents consistently will eventually (or quite soon) sink in the message of "if either party wants more than one term, they have to actually govern reasonably. No exceptions." Which will do more than anything else to set back the banana republic clock in the long run, in my opinion.
I literally googled 3rd-party candidates from the parking lot of the polling place to see if I could vote for one. Oliver and Stein both label Israel's Gaza operation a "genocide," which was a no-go for me. A little surprised not so for this blog. This certainly distinguishes you from other-Scott, who has a somewhat overlapping place with you in my brain-space.
Thanks for the callout on Oliver. I've only ever voted in safe States so Libertarian candidates have been my go-to, but that is inexcusable.
This was a great piece, and I especially enjoyed the ingroup-outgroup-fargroup piece at the end. I think one slight addition is that *stipulating a somewhat hidden premise* of the right being the left's far group, the idea of punishing Harris seems to make some sort of sense.
I don't agree with this premise, for the record - but my impression of the last few years of seeing popular discourse on American politics is just that beyond hating the right, the left just doesn't understand them and doesn't really see them as rational actors. I'm not gonna say whether this is right or wrong, because as someone who's at least culturally left-ish, I'm ill-equipped for that - but there's a real undercurrent of the right being this agent of pure chaos that's not even self-serving, but utterly arbitrary. Any time a woman is like "I voted for Trump", half the discourse is "dang, this person is an IDIOT and a MORON who doesn't know what's good for them and clearly hasn't thought this through". And so far, all this is just well-known and regrettable.
But I do think there's a decent chance that the "two-character psychodrama" Democrats described here aren't motivated as much by pure vitriol as they are by a weird sort of optimistic disappointment. You can't be disappointed by people you don't see as capable of anything productive, but the Dems (to the left) are supposed to share their exact thought processes and their exact goals, they're supposed to be right in being left only to have gone slightly awry and ended up (at least on Gaza, where I've seen this reaction the most) just right instead. To them, Kamala Harris is worth trying to get through to, because being on the left (even nominally) means she can learn from her mistakes - so, naturally, you have to make sure that she knows this is a mistake by making her lose, even if it means Trump gets in. The alternative to the anti-Harris left of punishing Trump for not being a Democrat is, by my estimation of their thought process, something like trying to spank a chimp until it can do calculus.
I'm not totally sure this is a rational way to approach it, because on the margins, Trump seems a lot worse than Harris to even those people who want Harris to lose based on Gaza - both seem about equally bad for Gaza from a Palestinian-supporter perspective, but all that should mean in theory is that Gaza isn't much of a voting issue since neither will make a difference there. But the way some Dems seem to see it on Gaza, Trump is this weird guy you don't know who's out on the street eating garbage, where Kamala Harris is an old friend from college who got straight-As and was invited to your wedding who's also eating garbage for some reason. The action is the same and ideally neither eats garbage, but with no other choices, at least you know how the second person's mind works so you can yell at them or cajole them until they stop, they'll respond to incentives - where the first guy is just gonna keep eating garbage so he's somewhat ironically not worth thinking about
I agree Trump has authoritarian instincts, but fortunately the US has a constitutional amendment limiting presidents to two terms so he can't stay past his next one. Also, he's old enough that he'll be Biden's age by the end of the next one and incapable of the duties of president (which is its own reason not to vote for him).
"Orange Hitler cheeto fascist tiny hands Nazi"
To be both Hitler and a Nazi is redundant point in this otherwise eloquent critique of the finer points of the problem.
Orange: It is inherently bad. Make up your mind between red and yellow. Those are the two real candidates. The color orange is just a cop out.
Hitler: He was a Nazi.
Cheeto: Not healthy. Cheeto dust is associated with negative stereotypes of messiness and lack of self control. Even worse it is orange.
Fascist: Inherently wrong. They have unchecked power. For example, they can decide to make the national flag solid orange.
Tiny hands: This is tricky. What the problem with small hands? The answer is that it is obviously a metaphor. It refers to not having a strong “grasp” on the important issues. Like choosing between colors.
Tiny hands.
This is from the 2016 Republican primary. Trump insulted Rubio by calling him Lil Marco. Rubio responded with the tiny hands because there may or may not be a correlation between hand and penis size.
Ah. Thanks for the historical scholarship on this solemn issue.
(Hard to believe but this is actually true.)
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/history-donald-trump-small-hands-insult/story?id=37395515
This was one of those times when you had to step back and recognize that the process of vying for power in the US is a total clownshow.
> ACX joins such based heterodox thinkers as Curtis Yarvin, (...): Donald Trump is the wrong choice for US President.
I'm going to presume this was facetious. Else, I'm afraid you misunderstood the angle the bugman was going for. Which, to be fair, would be completely understandable.
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/clarifying-the-record-on-biden
> But I have heard from many readers who have come away disturbed and/or confused by my endorsement of Biden. To be clear: all I have is a good plan for Biden. I also have a good plan for Trump (or anyone else). It is the same plan and very simple. I do not think Biden or Trump or anyone else will use it—but they should. They should!
I will vote for Oliver because he carries on the liberal tradition of which you, quite accurately, speak so highly. He was nominated at the instigation of the Classical Liberal Caucus!
I live in a state which will not be close, and so there is no question of voting strategically.
Others not in swing states should do likewise to send a message to the political system: we want freedom.
1/2 Our immigration laws are so stupid that is not necessarily a good/bad thing.
3 I don't know enough about this to comment.
4 Biden & Harris also support that.
5 There was no way that ended well. To me, that's an argument for Biden: he had the courage to finally cut our losses and Trump didn't.
Scott, I wonder if you think it would be appropriate to characterize what you're describing in Part III as "Woke Derangement Syndrome", obviously motivated by the Trump analogue. To the extent that it's a real thing, this syndrome in both cases amounts to overstating the flaws in that which is more proximate relative to the flaws in that which is more distant.
Googling the term, it appears to be primarily applied to the likes of Ron Desantis. However, just as the charge of TDS is more commonly levied (rightly or not) against Never Trump Republicans and conservatives, I think the hesitancy you describe here fits the bill more cleanly.
WDS. I like it. I may have it!
This psychodrama of people overreacting to their raised environment --- seems to turn out good bloggers? Yarvin's parents were supposedly literal Communists, and now he thinks the USA is literally Communist and we need a monarch.
It seems to me you overreact too much. Steve Sailer, Roissy, Moldbug all caused me to rethink things. I became a reactionary in my head for a while until I was able to digest the material and shit it out.
Our country is still run by fundamentalist Christians in 13th century robes who oppose abortion rights. So is my state. Give your head a shake. Opposing liberals is a luxury.
It's a great post. A perfect example of why we love your writing so much. But, c'mon, man! Trump is much worse than you make him sound with your tepid endorsement. Get over your psychodrama and endorse Harris with stronger words and leave out these 3rd Party underminers.
+1
I may have the same problem, but from the opposite side. I'm from Russia, and this obsessive criticism of the woke, which seems to have become taken for granted by American intellectuals, looks as strange as possible to me.
You know, here in Russia, basically everyone is against the woke too, from fascists to people who call themselves communists. Most here see Trump as the voice of common sense. This is an anti-woke country. And honestly, you all should learn a little more about what that looks like in practice. I'd say the extremes of the woke is a modest price to pay to keep your country from turning into Russia.
I'd say the experience of many intelligent people in the US ("intellectual" is not a label anybody chooses for themselves there) has been as follows: 1. for many years, be the only person in the room who is interested in or advocates X; 2. within a few months, see people (who call themselves "woke", or at least did so at the time) advocate for X, X^2, X^3 - all while forming online and real-life mobs, indulging with gusto in the narcissism of small differences, and taking any remark on how they have a suboptimal communication strategy as an occasion for vulgar name-calling, accusations of racism, and much worse.
To some extent 2 was a phase; to some extent it's still a thing - the fever has passed, but the people who grabbed and displayed power will never apologize, and still take very badly to criticisms - reacting much as before, just with less success.
I agree that *not* advocating for X would be the wrong conclusion. I agree that the kind of reaction to wokeness that you see in Russia or Florida is excessive at best and a very thin cover for anti-Xness, the authoritarian personality, etc., at worst (which is often).
>I'd say the extremes of the woke is a modest price to pay to keep your country >from turning into Russia.
Why do we have to choose between the two?
I agree with you, but change on the smaller scale has to also be done voting in local elections. Progressives would rather leave rural and small-town America than change it.
I don't get the sense that any of these bloggers that I rather enjoy reading have ever actually lived off the coasts or outside of university towns.
I'm very sad to see a man I once admired stoop down to 'orange man bad' propaganda.
Scott has always detested Trump. In 2016 he endorsed Clinton, in 2020 he endorsed Biden, and in 2024 he's obviously endorsing Harris.
The Democratic Party psychodrama really resonated with me. Thanks Scott!
I tend to hold my side to a higher standard. Not because I’m a disciplined thinker, it’s just my natural tendency. I’m sure some others are wired the same way.
I feel like your rebuttal points are extremely weak.
Your first point makes a distinction between illegal and legal acts, and then hand waves that into a distinction between overt and non-overt norm violations. 1. the initial distinction is talking about how crimes are prosecuted, white-collar crimes (e.g. Oil Executives acting badly) are illegal they are just difficult to prosecute. If Trump violated the law then OBVIOUSLY he should be prosecuted. However, this is separate from your argument on who should be president which is making the distinction about norm violation. This distinction seems incredibly fuzzy. Personally, I find the suppression of free-speech to be a far-bigger deal than a disorganized rabble protest that should have been trivial to shutdown. Mark Zuckerberg is on record saying that the Democrats pressured him to favor them politically via Facebook. That is insane! The first move a Tyrant makes is to ensalve the "free" press.
Your second point reads as though your a simply ignorant and too close to your own party. It is everyone's political bias to see their own party as disorganized and varied, and the other party as a monolith. In terms of actual actions (rather than vibes), the Democrats have acted as a very effective and coordinated monolith in first replacing Joe Biden with Kamala Harris and then closing ranks in support of her. Further, Trump has been endorsed by many many people who were first his biggest critics (e.g. JD Vance, Tulsi Gabbard, etc.). Indeed, many of those who endorse Trump actively disagree with him on several issues.
If you look at the ACTUAL campaign rhetoric used then you can see that Trump is far far away from running on a dogmatic platform. For example, JD Vance describes Trump campaign as a big tent collation, and often says how voters don't need to agree with Trump on everything. This is STARK contrast to the Democrats, who demand that voters vote for them, else they are the enemy (e.g., look at Michelle Obama describing how men who don't vote for Kamala MUST BE ANTI-WOMEN.
Your third point: you do sound like a hypocrite. You seem to be playing the apologist for a movement associated with being anti several of your core values (i.e., truth-seeking and wanting to improve the world RATHER THAN VIRTUE SIGNAL). Kamala Harris has been pro ridiculous and harmful policies such as defund the police, meanwhile JD Vance has gotten flack from both sides for doing pragmatic things that genuinely attempt to improve the world, e.g., attempting to get Silicon Valley billionaires interested in rural infrastructure investments.
I don't have a strong critique of your fourth point. But I will point out that Democrats are quick to cast the first stone, while being very very far from sinless. E.g., calling out people for polarizing rhetoric while actively describing their opponent as Hitler (!?!?)
In short, I am saddened, as you seem to be drinking the cool-aid and listening to the loudest. E.g., one party SCREAMING that the other is a threat to Democracy. Haven't you considered that those SCREAMS if effective are themselves a threat to Democracy? If you actually look at the BULK of the campaign rhetoric, the Democrats are running on demonizing their opponents (e.g., it is the end of the world if you vote for him, he will eliminate all your rights, etc...), while the Republicans are running on actual issues like the economy.
Amusingly, despite disagreeing with a decent chunk of the post, I must (grudgingly, as Scott did, because both of these options suck balls) agree with the conclusion for an entirely-separate reason: Trump's too old.
There's a significant chance that whoever's elected on Tuesday will have to lead the USA (and the free world) in WWIII. There's also a quite decent chance that Trump will have gone senile between now and then (he's deteriorated noticeably since 2016), and due to his narcissism and his base's intense personal loyalty (cf. "Hang Mike Pence") it's unlikely either he or Vance would invoke the 25th Amendment.
Don't get me wrong, I'd be a lot more comfortable with Vance in the top job than I would Harris or Walz, because they might hesitate to do the needful (e.g. if a nuclear exchange with the PRC ends with Beijing run out of nukes but refusing to surrender, I'd trust Trump or Vance to play the "we burn a Chinese city every hour until you surrender" card, while Harris or Walz might waffle long enough to let them build more nukes). But that's not in the cards unless Trump literally dies in the meantime.
Weird that Scott doesn't mention immigration at all. Seems to be a clear marker about what happens under which administration that can't be attributed to outside influences (e.g. Biden/Harris could use COVID as excuse for bad economy under them)
Joe Biden "The only GARBAGE I see floating out there is [TRUMP'S] SUPPORTERS. His DEMONIZATION SEEMS UNCONSCIONABLE."
Do Democrats hear themselves? In one sentence calling Trump's supporters garbage. In the next, calling out republicans for demonizing... WHAT?!
Scott is literally endorsing this. The loudest voice is not always correct, you know...
Meanwhile Republicans have been calling Obama a Muslim, a Marxism, and Communist, a Kenyan.
Calling Kamala low IQ, mentally deficient, having pimp handlers.
Calling Dems childless cat ladies that need to be spanked by Daddy Trump. But yeah. One small gaffe from Biden is the problem.
I think you should definitely withhold your vote from Joe Biden over this. OTOH, while Kamala et al leaving Biden as the president for political expedience seems bad, I can't actually get too worked up over a senile dude tripping over his tongue and saying something offensive.
“[SCOTUS seems] pretty interested in the project of rolling back the past few decades of progressive power grabs, and I’m pretty happy with a lot of how that is going.”
Are there any examples of these SCOTUS rulings that have been good? I’ve mostly just heard of terrible ones (namely overturning Roe v Wade, the sovereign immunity ruling, and the Chevron ruling). My best guess is that maybe the Chevron ruling is less bad than I think, because the FDA does suck in many ways, but it still seems hard to be actively happy about it. Are there other good rulings I’m not familiar with?
Most people I know who are political decouplers and know what's going on seem to approve of the Chevron ruling - I don't follow it myself but the social consensus of people I trust who do (including those who vote D) is that it's good. Their anti-AA ruling also seems good, and I'm guessing Scott approves of them siding with California pig farming regulations.
Roe v Wade was bad judgement, even Notorious RBG thought it was bad. Unfortunately it means the Dems will be using abortion as a campaign hammer rather than actually protecting it. Letting precedent stand for the effects rather than for the law is itself bad precedent.
Chevron is good because the status quo under Chevron led to too much flip-flopping as administrations changed, and that's not how law should function.
There's probably other good ones.
Is your objection to overturning Roe about the legal reasoning, or the policy change?
The policy change. I’m strongly pro-choice, and I would assume Scott would be as well?
If you’re going to endorse, it would be nice to read posts that talk about the reason to support someone, the pro-Harris side in this case.
This is a general comment because most political opinions sway more to why the other guys are bad. I naively cling to hopes of positive competition.
Imagine if businesses mostly told us how bad their competition was…. I’ll go back to sitting out politics now.
That's just how it works in US elections. You vote for who you dislike least. Harris isn't a particularly charming or enticing candidate, but Trump is so, so, so much worse than Harris that Harris could be much worse than she is now and I and at least a hundred million others would vote for her without hesitation.
If it were Harris vs. someone else, then it might make more sense to try to compare the positive traits of each candidate.
It’s not just the US. That you’re so ready to justify a broken system is the conditioning that I’m calling BS.
Here's the thing: in most industries, the products are actually fit for purpose.
Want to buy a car? Go ahead, they're mostly basically fine. Want to eat some cheese? Go ahead, there's lots of brands, none of them is poisonous, just choose the one that tastes the best to you.
But the position of President of the United States? That is a job that no mortal human should have. It's too important, and humans are too fallible. It's not just because the US has nuclear weapons, it's because the US is too preeminent and holds too much of the hopes and dreams of the free world. If Belgium or Canada or even France falls then humanity is okay, but if the USA falls then humanity is fucked.
Except… I’ve heard the end is coming my whole life and guess what… it’s never been better for more people. I realize it could be better. but that doesn’t change that life keeps getting better. Park the US self importance because humans are amazing at overcoming and getting shit done. Your premise is that no human is fit for the job yet it keeps getting done so simple observation is against that view.
The US has 300 million people working to make their lives better, I give that better odds than the election of one person undermining the whole thing. Have some faith.
If you are an American voter, especially if you live in a swing state, I strongly urge you to vote for Jill Stein.
Donald Trump is a bigot who ran a campaign on hatred. Maybe at one time in his life he had a positive vision for America, something about making it great, but in 2024 he ran on "they're eating the dogs" and "Kamala's for they/them". Just sheer ugliness and fearmongering against people who have been through more than enough shit in life as it is. He should not be rewarded with the Oval Office.
Kamala Harris is your usual cop who believes in one set of rules for the rich and another set of rules for the little people; struggling parents go to jail but Steve Mnuchin (Trump's treasury secretary!) doesn't. When massive fraud crashed the economy in 2008, she was one of the people working to make sure no one responsible paid for their crimes. And the 2024 "primary" made a mockery of democracy. She should not be rewarded with the Oval Office, and any party which chooses its nominees without allowing the people a say, then relies on fear of a spoiler effect (and lawfare against third parties to kick them off the ballot) to get elected, should be punished.
While Harris and Trump consign mass slaughter, Stein gets arrested for protesting wars. She deserves your vote.
Or Chase Oliver? The only candidate who thinks the deficit is an issue worthy of discussion? (Almost 1/3 of revenue went to pay interest on deficit.)
What are Stein's positives? She seems like a radical leftist.
Pushing the Democratic Party further left to try to capture that segment and therefore losing more future elections than they otherwise would have?
So who's voting Trump at this round besides anti-vaxxers and pro-palestoid leftists? I guess even Bibi if he could vote in US would secretly circle the Dem ticket.
I have two criticisms of your argument. The first is that while the right currently controls the Supreme Court, the left controls the universities, the major media, the federal bureaucracy and to a lesser but significant extent the K-12 public school system. If you look at professors in most fields, reporters, federal employees or public school teachers, I think you get the same pattern.
Control of the Court can be changed in a year, given sufficient Democratic power to expand the court — which has been done once already (by a Republican!) — or in a decade or two given less solid control. There is no comparable way to change the Academy or the schools. Musk demonstrated one way of rapidly changing control of the media, but I doubt the NYT is for sale.
My second criticism of your argument is that, while Trump has threatened lawfare, the Democrats have done it, repeatedly and ferociously. Finding Rudolph Guliani liable for damages of 148 million dollars for slandering two people is an abuse of the legal system almost on the same scale as the legal trick to steal the election proposed in the Eastman memo — and, I hope unlike that, legal. That is not even the largest penalty imposed on people on the Trump side by their opposition.
Your criticisms of Trump are on the whole fair. My own view is that the one good thing about this election is that one of them has to lose.
I'm struggling to understand how a jury award - regardless of the amount - is an abuse of the legal system?
Ray Epps was probably on the jury. I mean, has the FBI denied they infiltrated it?
I hate that Poe's Law is so accurate.
"If you’re in a safe state and want to trade your protest vote with a swing state voter, or vice versa, go to https://www.swapyourvote.org/ "
I am surprised that this is legal in the US. In Germany it is illegal to sell your vote, regardless whether you sell it for money or for the promise that the other person does something for you.
How is that in other countries?
I initially thought so aswell, but if you read the site this is simply pledging that you are going to vote for a specific party without exchange of money or proof of having cast a vote (which I don't know if possible at all in a secret election):
> Importantly, vote swapping involves no financial exchange. It’s more of a conversation and a pledge to one another. Both the swing state voter and the safe state voter agree to a political coalition-building strategy that advances their interests, which is similar to many other common political deals.
Yes, I got that. But that is still illegal in Germany.
"Any person who offers, promises or grants gifts or other benefits to another person for not voting or for voting in a certain way shall be liable to a custodial sentence not exceeding five years or to a monetary penalty."
I am no lawyer, but "benefits" is a very broad term, and I believe that it basically includes any "if you vote X then I do Y" statement. Here, Y is the promise of casting your own vote in a certain way. Note that it does not play a role whether the two sides stick to their promises. Making the promise is illegal.
Of course, there are lots of situations in which such deals are normal political procedure. But for voting, it is prohibited.
EDIT: by the way, the next paragraph is: "Likewise, anyone who demands, allows himself to be promised or accepts gifts or other benefits for not voting or for voting in a certain way shall be punished.". So if someone makes you such an offer and you do not refute the promise, you are already breaking the law.
I doubt that fig-leaf makes it legal.
Their best defense is it's all a good lark since there is no enforcement or even verification mechanism. If people start doing things to *prove* how they voted, they'd get in trouble.
In fact, when you sign up, they're avoiding any chance of verification:
> I affirm that I retain complete decision-making power over my choice of whom to vote for at all times.
> I will vote for who I want to vote for.
> I will not share any image of my blank or completed ballot in connection with this program.
> I understand that this pledge is not legally binding or enforceable in any way.
Proving who you voted for is possible, given mail-in voting, although I don't know if anyone is doing it. Just fill out your ballot in the presence of the person who bought your vote, sign it, seal it, and give it to him to mail. That is one argument against mail-in voting.
Does Germany have unrestricted mail voting? Does it require ID?
Germany does have mail voting. I am not sure what you mean by unrestricted. If you want to vote per mail, then you contact your local election office, and if you are in their list of residents then they will send personalised voting papers to your home address, so identification is by your home address. You return your personal voting papers with your name and address, which you have to sign, together with a sealed envelope with your vote. So, they can tick off your name and address from the list of voters without having to open the sealed envelope with your vote.
What you are describing requires an order of competence and social cohesion and, well, order - that the US hasn’t had in decades.
Is it really so bad? I was kind of assuming that this is the procedure for mail voting everywhere.
I fundamentally do not trust the USPS. This is not purely hypothetical or from news (e.g. https://www.justice.gov/usao-nj/pr/postal-employee-admits-dumping-mail-including-election-ballots-sent-west-orange-residents) but also my continued personal experience with USPS ineptitude.
In America, you get tons of people who: show up at the poll saying “they didn’t receive their requested mail ballot” (once, memorably, the middle aged daughter was mouthing to me, it’s in the pile of mail on the kitchen table). Or they bring the ballot on polling day “because they were afraid it would get lost in the mail” or that it would be too late. Only they didn’t bring the envelope. Actually, they didn’t fill it out yet … actually, they just remembered that they love to vote in person.
Or they show up during the up to 3 weeks (!) of early voting - so hard to resist all those signs! - and the computer said, mail in ballot requested and sent, so you have to tell them they can’t vote unless they bring that ballot from home so we can “spoil it”. Now they’re mad, and the typical solution to that is to let them “provisional” vote with a promise to destroy the ballot “if it comes” (i.e. when they locate it in their mess).
Those tend to be people who have lived in their homes a pretty long time.
As for the rest of the electorate, they aren’t registered and quite a surprising number don’t know what county they live in. A lot of times they are unclear about where they live. Which obviously makes them catnip to the left, who would presumably prefer the vote to be conducted by a the people who don’t live anyplace and have no connection to anything, especially property.
Oh man, if we go to all mail in voting, they’re going to have to get creative.
Ok, that does sound bad. To be honest, I have no idea how much these problems occur in Germany since I haven't been polling clerk myself. I assume non-zero as well, but I have no idea how much.
How do they verify that the ballot hasn't been intercepted and used by someone other than the voter?
This they don't check. They assume that physical mail is safe. This is the foundation of a lot of things. If you can intercept someone else's physical mail, you can also order a new passport or ID of that person and intercept/steal it.
At voting day it would become evident that *something* is wrong, because when the person will try to cast their vote, they would get told that they have already voted by mail. There would be no way of correcting the fraud, but it would certainly be reported. If there are dozens or hundreds of such cases, then it would become clear that the election was compromised.
> EDIT/UPDATE: If you’re in a safe state and want to trade your protest vote with a swing state voter, ...
Are you sure this is legal? It seems like it might violate laws against buying/selling votes?
>On August 6, 2007, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that "the websites' vote-swapping mechanisms as well as the communication and vote swaps they enabled were constitutionally protected" and California's spurious threats violated the First Amendment. The 9th Circuit did not decide whether the threats violated the U.S. Constitution's Commerce Clause.
Stalin killed more people and it only took some hundreds of people to chase the Provisional Government from the Winter Palace.
"Why do you think people can make infinity billion dollars starting an anti-woke Substack? Who's paying that money? Not psychologically well-adjusted people with no wokeness-related trauma, that's my guess."
Um...ouch?
Not only is it a dickish comment, it's wrong! The top earning substack by several million dollars is the very #resistancelib Letters from an American: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/about
Source for substack earnings: https://pressgazette.co.uk/newsletters/highest-earning-substacks/
How can a hyperbolic joke be wrong?
It's much, much more profitable to be bog-standard #resistance. I suppose one can argue jokes can't be wrong, but it definitely falls flat if you happen to be aware of the context rather than just trusting Scott.
> In this psychodrama, the Republican Party is an offscreen character
To me, it really looks like because it is so, not because of some "trauma". I mean, look at 90's US, today's US, look at the difference, does it looks like the country have been shaped in a balanced manner by both sides ? If you presented me the 90's US, then told me "and then the Democrats proceeded to win every single election for 30 years", and then presented me today's US, the only weird points would have been "what the hell is happening in the supreme court in the last two years ?" and "how come the second amendment is still there ?"
Or am I just too traumatized to see it ?
You might be traumatized, but I don't see how your trauma is connected to the Democratic Party.
In terms of policy the main differences I see between now and the 90s are 1) more acceptance of gays 2) banning of abortion in red states 3) broader health care coverage.
#1 is a social change not a government policy. #2 is a shift to the right. #3 I don't see how it has hurt you.
To me, it’s a simple choice: Do you want a relatively powerless egomaniacal blowhard in charge, or a thousand tentacled, malevolent machine dictating every nuance - or rather eliminating every nuance - of your life?
I genuinely do not know what you are talking about. What is this thousand tentacled, malevolent strawman you are talking about? Surely not Harris, the most moderate, milque-toast politician Dems have run since Bill Clinton? Not the Harris that brags about owning and shooting guns? Not the Harris who has promised to put Republicans in her cabinet? Not the Harris who campaigns with the Cheneys and has been endorsed by republicans from Schwarzenegger to Adam Kizinger? Not the Harris that all left-wing media has disavowed for not being left enough?
Also, what do you mean relatively powerless? Are you aware that Trump spread lies about voter fraud and tried to steal the 2020 election after he lost? Are you aware Trump switched his VP after Pence refused to steal the election for him, and Vance has promised on tape that he would have done what Pence's morals didn't allow him to do? That Trump's corrupt supreme court justices have just granted him immunity for crimes committed in office?
I worry that the hyper partisan "news" problem is just getting worse and worse by the year.
The ACX endorsement is unsurprising; the professional managerial class is closing ranks with the neocons to fight against the evil Trump.
As an old school American: I applaud and endorse everyone's right to make their own decisions on Presidents, to exercise their Constitutional right to free speech and so forth.
I do find it tremendously amusing to see this talk about Trump being an authoritarian danger - one so dangerous that the Democrats subverted their own voters to insert a replacement candidate when their actual primary winner looked to be losing too badly. Or that the manifest mental health problems of Biden were never an issue until it looked like he could not beat Trump without the assistance of mass COVID/lockdown era mail-in ballots.
I will say, however, that anyone who thinks next week's election will be close, is delusional to an enormous degree.
Exhibit 1: Real Clear Politics' own 2024 election poll coverage
https://www.realclearpolling.com/latest-polls/election
On the right side, there is a bar of info including "This Day In History - X Days to Election" (present X=5
RCP Average for national, 5 days before the election:
2024: Trump +0.4
2020: Biden +7.4
2016: Clinton +1.3
As we all can easily verify: Trump won in 2016. Hilary Clinton had a 2.1% popular vote margin over Trump but Trump won 304 electoral college votes.
In 2020, Joe Biden beat Trump by a 4.5% popular vote margin and received 306 electoral college votes.
Look further down said table - it shows the same relative information for the 7 battleground states. It is a sea of red.
I expect Trump to win at least 300 electoral votes.
I see 312 as a median number with a low chance of a 100 electoral vote margin (319).
The chance for Trump to win the popular vote is over 50% - but possibly only 60% to 70%. I personally expect this to happen because Harris is inspiring zero enthusiasm outside the wealthy liberal/PMC group - which translates a "normal" to "low" turnout situation (i.e. no massive COVID era mail-in ballots; mail-in ballots are down 50% across the board) into a low turnout primarily among core Democrat demographics.
Cue ensuing meltdown a la Halperin's comment on Tucker Carlson: "Millions with mental damage"
Nearly all the bitching about Biden being replaced comes from non-Democrats. It's funny.
Given that no Democrat voter was actually give the chance to either replace Biden or choose his replacement, your statement is entirely ironic.
What does "ironic" mean to you?
It means that either Democrat voters are irrelevant or that they would vote for a shaved monkey if their party told them to.
Either one is ironic for a party called "Democrat".
Having the voters select a candidate is the weird thing. You don't see it in other countries. You only saw it in America in the past few decades. The Democratic party did just fine for over a century picking their own candidates.
Democrats interpret non-Democrats huffing and puffing of "don't you feel disenfranchised? aren't you mad? don't you want to stay home?" as an attempt by the non-Democrats to suppress their turnout. And they're right. Nearly all the upset comes from Republicans mad they didn't get to run against zombie Biden.
Go worry about your own party.
The problem is, these voters were not even asked. So how can anyone honestly say how many preferred Biden to not be the candidate?
For that matter, how many of these voters actually chose Harris?
The criticisms that the fiat replacement of Biden by Harris negated the entire Democrat party primary process are valid.
I imagine most of them would have preferred for Biden to drop out six months earlier so there could have been a primary.
In a week, many of them may even be saying this openly.
The irony is, she's not inspiring much enthusiasm in Scott either, even though he's effectively endorsing her. :)
I think Trump is more likely to win than Harris, but the meltdown if Trump wins will pale in comparison to the meltdown from the right if Harris wins. (Including from you, given what you've expressed in this comment. You will probably say it's due to fraud, or something.)
There is some possibility that Harris could win: a massive wave of turnout of Democrat voters on Voting Day swarm under the normal overwhelmingly Republican in-person voters.
But of course, that ain't gonna happen.
The honest people studying the voting demographics have looked at present trends vs. past performances and have found the following:
1) Mail-in ballots are down 50% across the country. The "record turnout" of 2020 unquestionably helped Biden, regardless of your views on the "trust and safety" of mass mail in voting - but mass mail in balloting is not happening in 2024.
2) Harris was chosen to appeal to blacks, Asians, and the PMC class. She is, at present, underperforming both Biden and HRC with the former 2 demographics. She is overperforming with the PMC (i.e. credentialed or the ACX crowd) but the margin is much less than the losses
3) Harris is, however, utterly failing with the supposed "safe" Democrat demographics: working class in general, Hispanics, union (notably the Teamsters declined to endorse Harris), Catholics, Scandinavians, Germans, etc etc. Anyone who thinks this is not going to be a problem in the Great Lakes swing states, is badly uninformed.
4) Enthusiasm among key categories is visibly and sharply lower: 18-24, Hispanic women, others. The Public Polling project is showing 71% of "Will Not Vote" are classic Democrat voting demographics headlined by the above 2 categories.
5) I could go into the contrast of likely/leaning Trump voters vs. likely/leaning Harris voters between actual votes and turnout (or lack thereof), but I think you should be getting the picture.
The above points are why Trump is literally favored to win the popular vote even despite the presence of so many polls that overstated Democrat vote shares by 5% or more in 2016 and 2020. Note again that both Biden and Clinton won the popular vote by 4.5% and 2.1% respectively but Trump beat Hilary. How can anyone really say Harris has a strong chance to win when Trump will certainly not lose the popular vote by much and may very well win it outright?
So yes, I do say that a Harris win would elicit a lot of very close scrutiny and deservedly so.
As for meltdown: I remember when Trump won in 2016 - the burning cars and rioting in Washington DC. Somehow the lack of burning cars and rioting constituted a worse threat for January 6, 2021...
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/arrests-violence-flares-parts-capital-inauguration-day/story?id=44925970
"Violence flared on some streets of Washington, D.C., today amid Donald Trump's inauguration — with people smashing car and store windows, clashing with police and even torching a limo, leading to more than 200 arrests." <-- 2017
Scott, if it makes you feel better ,your writing first caused me to come out for Trump back in the first election, then for Biden. Now I am a cheerful AI doomer, secure in the knowledge that no matter who gets in, the end is the same.
The vortex is real.
Thanks for highlighting the psychodrama. Plurality voting mathematically is just a choice between the two major options yet it is so easy to slip into a framing of a hypothesis test or "sending a message".
This actually gave me insight into the Never Trumpers among my own tribe (to the extent that they're part of my tribe). I never understood how a visceral contempt for Trump's foibles could lead them into the arms of Harris, who is just objectively and obviously so much worse (given our tribe's assumptions). Now I understand. Harris and the Democrats aren't part of their psychodrama - she is (they are) totally off stage. But unlike you, they haven't zoomed out. Interesting.
I got double notification for this post. Are you trying to cheat the system Scott 👀
Me too. I wonder if he posted then edited it? But I only got the one email, so maybe he originally posted it but unchecked the email box, so he removed and reposted with it. (Or maybe it's just a substack bug)
I got two too. The republish of an edit seems pretty likely.
Another year, another ballot full of conflicted feelings and nose-holdings. I wish to see the return of a Respectable Right party in my lifetime (especially locally, smh #CAGOP) so that there's some realistic choices besides being bedfellows with one flavour of crazy or another. It's gonna be a weird next 4 years dealing with constant shortages at work, no matter who wins...either from price controls, or from tariffs, since so many of my company's products are imports. No one wins, some just lose harder.
The psychodrama angle was interesting and I'd like to believe that's an accurately charitable interpretation of, say, Queers for Palestine or Sunshine Movement. Perhaps that's just increasing personal desperation at trying to salvage my former leftist ideals, though. One wants to believe it wasn't just eyescales all the way down.
(Nb: weird to post this as the comment total is currently at 666. TINAC.)
Economically, I guess the advantage of Harris is she can't pass price controls with an r congress? So (aside from foreign policy and staff choices/deregulation, where I think Trump would be better), I guess the move is to vote Harris and then GOP downballot.
Otoh those are some pretty big asides.
Yes, I try to give the GOP the time of day when possible. There are still some minimal thresholds for competency and quality that I won't budge on, though...which, again, makes things difficult in California, where the Republican Party never bothers to expend meaningful effort or $ on because why would you. (Outside maybe Orange County and a few other safe-by-quirk-of-districting places, anyway. Darrell Issa's alright.) So the downballot has idiots like, I dunno, Yvette Corkrean challenging Senator Scott Wiener, or Ellen Lee Zhao for SF Mayor. Both excellent examples of Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence! And of course several offices have no R nominees at all. But I tried to reward the MVPs (Minimum Viable Politicians) where they could be found.
Man I wish I could vote against Lina Khan directly. Not how appointments work, sadly. Chevron did open the door to potentially good lawmaking, not sure if Congress has the muscle memory to do that anymore though. FP a mixed bag, I think it's important here to distinguish between making the right noises and actually achieving results. That soybean deal of the century didn't actually get clinched, and Euro defense spending/energy autarky didn't hugely shift either! OTOH, it does say a lot how Dems either kept Trump's border policies or tacked back towards them after getting burned. The actual wall itself still seems like a silly boondoggle, but I'll admit to being surprised at the effectiveness of Remain in Mexico. Do wish there was more bipartisan appreciation of CBP though. One of many government arms, like police, where I think underinvestment is the greater error. It's less about the direct efficacy of such spending, and more about buying a more generous cushion of "voters believe the Society of Laws is functioning, and are willing to move a bit higher on Maslow's hierarchy of experimental policy changes". (This is one of the roads not taken that I think Harris will regret if she loses - not leaning harder into the Hardass Cop background. Lot of hunger for Law & Hors d'Oeuvres vibes among the electorate these days, even in blue bubbles.)
I'm one of the 0.001% wrestling with this vibe, so I've appreciated this piece a lot.
Me too!
(Double entendre intentional.)
> A long time ago, I wrote about the difference between ingroup, outgroup, and fargroup. Ingroup and outgroup you know. But how come people have stronger emotions about Ibram X. Kendi (or Chris Rufo) than about Kim Jong-un or whoever's committing the latest genocide in Sudan? It's not because you're American and naturally care about American affairs - how about that Brazilian judge who banned Elon Musk's X? It's because all those guys are part of your psychodrama and some Sudanese psychopath isn't. Well, Kamala Harris' price controls are my outgroup; Donald Trump setting tariffs is my fargroup.
discussion of this^ phenomenon more generally, including: Copenhagen interpretation of ethics, control in relationships, open source hate, tractability as the mind-killer
https://unalienation.substack.com/p/bumps-i-strategies-supplanting-self?r=7ta9c
I won't argue that the Dems don't have a long term plan that won't result in exactly what you're describing. Harris seems like the best from that side you could get into the Presidency, though. She's stating she'll put a Republican in her cabinet (goes without saying it won't be a MAGA one), and is a gun owner. So she's not AOC. Ex-prosecutor who people have argued was too tough on crime. I think she's's a reasonable choice for a conservative voting for, say Larry Hogan, and wanting policy that works against the agenda you're describing. I don't think the call to vote against Trump is a call to abandon an opposition party. I don't see how a Trump crony state enacts any particularly useful changes for anyone outside of the circle looking to glorify his own ego. No one will be shadow running things behind the scenes, he'll just grow more and more unpredictable with a staff frantically trying to appease him and stay in his good graces.
For what it's worth, AOC seems to be moving away from the far-left and may turn out to be quite a good, charismatic, mainstream-left liberal. I think she could possibly be an excellent candidate for the next election. She's not her former annoying socialist self anymore.
Yea to the point that she is now being publicly scorned by actual progressive activists as a sellout, "just another corporate Democrat", etc.
Meanwhile two of AOC's fellow "Squad" congresscritters lost their party primaries _hard_ earlier this year, so in substance the Squad will be down to a single member this January.
Yeah, she’s a little too smart and savvy to stay in the far left echo chamber, though I think ideologically she’s left of Harris. The far left circular firing squad is alive and well otherwise. I semi-seriously wonder if the people harassing only Harris about Gaza are Russian assets.
Harris' written economic policy plan is significantly markets-oriented, about as much so as any Democratic nominee in decades. It's a shame that just one small piece of it -- a down-payment subsidy for a small set of new homeowners -- is the only piece that reached the headlines (and has been wildly misrepresented).
In 2019 my sibling and some friends who are longtime Bay Area residents were literally LOLing at Harris' attempt to reposition herself with the party's progressive wing. Today they all say that was the clumsy and inauthentic move, that the Harris we're seeing now is how she'd seemed prior to 2019.
I’m pretty happy with her positions overall, and I think more moderate minded conservatives will be too, if they give her a chance. Middle-minded coalition wouldn’t be the worst thing to emerge from all this.
This is great. I think a lot of my friends here in the UK are engaged in the exact same psychodrama with the Labour Party and Keir Starmer (who they call "Keith", for some reason), forgetting that the Tories are still worse on basically every axis.
I actually think that the more relevant parallel is Brits comparing Trump to the Tories (forgetting that Trump is worse on every axis)!
In the UK there's a much clearer balance between the two main parties. The Tories have made some cock-ups over the last few years, and should have been voted out, but in terms of individuals and policies, I think the median ACX reader would prefer a mix of the two.
Centrist Tories (Tugendhat, Stewart, Osborne) have been among the most clear-headed MPs on economic and geopolitical issues, and even the populist/Brexiteer right of the party is surely more virtuous than any MAGA Republicans. With Labour - the right of the party is largely intelligent and sensible, while the left often match the stereotype of dullard populists or radical identitarians with no understanding of basic economics.
Starmer is also broadly similar to Sunak in terms of personal qualities. Both are clearly fairly decent, competent blokes with a few flaws.
This is just night and day with the U.S. situation. Neither party is anywhere near Trump's constant bullshitting, lack of any personal virtue, unseriousness on the global stage, anti-democratic tendencies, and complete policy incoherence. Even our unserious third parties (e.g. Reform UK) aren't in Trump territory!
Oh hell yes. I'd take Sunak over Trump in a heartbeat. Hell, I'd take Liz Truss over Trump in a heartbeat - yes, she was an economic disaster, but she's not an actual criminal.
No, I'm in the same psychodrama as you, though of course in my case it was something else, basically feminism making me into a mewling wormboy and ruining my first attempts at relationships (which started in my late twenties) because I was convinced everything was harassment, and before that watching as crime fell in the city I lived in in the nineties when they decided to get tough on crime and I was actually able to walk around freely. The later corruption of science by left-wing politics further strengthened this dynamic. I know, I'm jumping around in time. The atheism-as-getting-over-fundamentalism description clicked completely. I'm vaguely afraid of the right, but I HATE the left.
The economics stuff doesn't bother me that much--we had our shot at neoliberalism/libertarianism/deregulation in the 90s and 2000s, and it didn't work. The banks blew up the economy with bad mortgages and the unemployed ex-manufacturing workers voted for Trump. Sic transit gloria libertariani.
But, I basically feel the same as you. No, he's not Hitler, but he could be Chavez. The irony is, with all this I mentioned above, I get how the Trump people feel, and I understand why they're voting for him. But, I'm taking a Zofran (that right?) and voting for Harris.
It's very telling that, while, during the AIDS crisis, progressives (rightly) mocked the abstinence-only, gloom-and-doom approach, and emphasized positive examples of safe sex (even while acknowledging that it is only safe*r* sex), not a single discussion as to how to fight against harassment seems to involve a single example of what is *not* harassment. The effects are most likely not a bug, but a feature.
That said, of course I'm voting for Harris (or rather I would vote for Harris, if I were a citizen).
He strongly supported Clinton in 2016, yes: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/28/ssc-endorses-clinton-johnson-or-stein/
And supported Biden in 2020, of course. He's a principled guy who doesn't blow with the wind.
That writeup struck you as _strongly_ supporting Clinton?
"If something terrible happens like China tries to invade Taiwan, she will probably make some sort of vaguely reasonable decision after consulting her advisors. She might do a bad job, but it’s hard to imagine a course where a Hillary presidency leads directly to the apocalypse, the fall of American democracy, et cetera."
"I don’t see a Clinton presidency as making the world non-functional"
"she probably won’t be able to increase immigration very much"
There is literally not a word in there about Hillary Clinton being actually _good_ at any aspect of being president, and 80 percent of Scott's text was about Trump.
Really Scott's 2016 election endorsement summed up Hillary's overall weakness as a major-party nominee.
...Which should tell you how much he hates Trump.
...Which is irrelevant to the comment I was responding to, as well as to my response.
Banned for this comment.
Scott implicitly illustrates how signalling games work in a hierarchical system (here: a state).
Rulers are important for they “set the tone” (=signal) for what is normatively acceptable to do for those employed by the state, when they use administrative and professional discretion to make decisions (which all of them must constantly do). A ruler sets the tone for the informal norms concerning how administrators, street-level bureaucrats and everyone else getting money and/or power and/or prestige from the state can legitimately act. As well as setting the tone for what those who become rulers after them, can normatively do while still being perceived as only doing “normal” political behavior.
Essentially (& formulated a bit grander), it is how normative change is brought about in a state/system.
While at it: The way autocrats succeed is quite often to push policies that are fairly sensible at the time, or at least very popular for understandable reasons (today: protectionism & put an effective stop to illegal immigration); that existing rulers for some reason cannot or do not want to pursue. Famous historical examples: “Peace, Bread, Earth”, and “Tear up the Versailles Treaty”. There were good arguments for both, back in 1917 and 1936.
…but when autocrats get into power, they have a tendency to do a lot of other not-so-popular stuff in addition to what got them into power. In particular, to skew the rules of the game (the meta-game) to ensure that they and their side are unlikely to lose again in the future. And with that in hand, they can do a lot of other not-immediately-popular stuff (like killing all Kulaks or invade Poland), and there are no-one there to effectively stop them anymore.
Putin is a present-day example. He came to power to reverse the rather traumatic Cold Turkey-transition to a market economy, which quite understandably was unpopular with the Russian people. In the near past: Chavez, sure (and now Maduro). Orban in present-day Hungary might also be an example, although so far a quite light version. Notice that all of these systems are still formally democratic, with elections & Constitutions and all.
You don't mention Trump's worst foreign policy idea--one he kept trying to do in his first team but was stymied from by his inability to fully control the military (something he will be better at in a second term, most likely): He really really wants to invade Mexico, whch would e a truly terrible idea: https://responsiblestatecraft.org/donald-trump-mexican-drug-cartels/
>"Given that we have a judicial defense against the left but not the right, it’s probably safer to elect left-wingers than right-wingers."
The judicial defense against the left consists of robust immunity for one guy. That's not nothing - he's the top guy - but there always has been a backdoor way to ensure that the president never get prosecuted for anything: He wakes up on his outgoing January 20, resigns, and the VP pardons him.
Meanwhile, for the left's political crimes to be punished, you need a Washington DC jury to vote unanimously to convict. That's why Steve Bannon goes to jail for blowing off Congress but no Democrat ever will.
I have a different perspective on this - my main reason for supporting Harris is that I believe that in the event of a scenario like a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, escalation to a nuclear conflict is significantly more likely under Trump than Harris. Trump is more likely to escalate due to his impulsivity, and the other side might want to pre-emptively strike because of his unpredictability.
Even though Trump shows much less interest in supporting Ukraine and Taiwan, I think he would regard it as a personal failure (and insult) if an invasion started during his presidency, and so would be tempted to respond strongly.
Background: I'm right-of-center, but not a registered Republican; I live in a red state and always vote third party (I'll be voting for the American Solidarity Party this year, as I did in 2020).
I'm curious as to how many people voting for Trump this year (especially people who didn't vote for him previously) aren't really voting for Trump, or even against Harris, but against "the elites" or "wokeness" or the "Cathedral" or whatever other term you might use. Harris doesn't bother me more than the average Democratic politician, but what I'm sick of is the constant dishonesty from the media on just about every culture war issue. "Republicans want to ban books!" is the cry, when what's actually happening are attempts to keep school libraries from supplying sexually explicit material to children. No government is trying to ban Amazon from selling those books. "Mostly peaceful protests," the chyron says, as buildings burn in the background. Now, there's a fair argument to be made that another Trump term would just lead to more left-wing nonsense from the elites in the media and academia, but I can't blame anyone who wants to vote Trump just to "own the libs."
On another note, this feels like the most economically idiotic election ever. Almost every proposal on both sides is just a naked attempt at pandering. Biden's student loan forgiveness is just a handout to the middle class college-educated people (screw the guys making an equal amount of money who didn't go to college, they're Trump voters anyway). Price controls are stupid. I had forgotten about the unrealized capital gains tax proposal until I saw it in this thread (that's a nightmare to try to enforce). Trump's tariffs probably won't work. And Trump's idea of no taxes on tips or overtime? That's idiotic. I teach high school, and I'm sure there are waiters at fine dining establishments in my city (and probably people working at Outback Steakhouse or whatever) who make more than I do. I don't begrudge them their earnings, but why the hell should they pay less taxes than I do?
"And Trump's idea of no taxes on tips or overtime? That's idiotic."
Equal opportunity idiotic, since Harris has adopted it as well:
https://kamalaharris.com/issues/#:~:text=Support%20American%20Innovation%20and%20Workers
"She’ll fight to raise the minimum wage, end sub-minimum wages for tipped workers and people with disabilities, establish paid family and medical leave, and eliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers. "
Ah but it's Trump's fault for coming up with it first!
I'm in favor of not taxing tips, because I think a lot of tip money, maybe most, doesn't get taxed anyway. Why not make the laws reflect the reality?
On the other hand, income tax by itself is rather problematic. Sales tax is more egalitarian: if you're spending money, you can pay the tax. Exceptions would abound with a national sales tax, such as food, securities, and whatever lobbies succeed. The biggest problem is that once sales tax from all sources reaches a certain point (my memory says about 15%, but I can't confirm it with Google), people evade the tax by barter or other workarounds.
Also, sales tax is regressive as hell. People should be incentivised by all reasonable means to increase velocity.
"Regressive" is a marketing term to promote wealth redistribution. Sales tax is the most fair of taxes, as it applies to all equally. What can be more fair?
"Regressive" is applied to it to imply it keeps poor people, who pay EXACTLY THE SAME SHARE AS EVERYONE ELSE, from getting ahead, as the rich should pay a larger share. You may think it's a good idea for the rich, who have more disposable income, to pay a larger share, but you cannot argue it is actually a fairer way to tax.
I don't understand how another kind of tax to replace the revenue would be increase economic velocity.
> Another is that Trump might threaten opponents with jail time
How awful, could you imagine politicians punitively weaponizing the legal system against their defeated opponent? Perhaps by frivolously indicting them on trumped up charges in friendly jurisdictions?
Minus the New York case being a bit excessive, the charges against Trump are very warranted.
When it's your guy committing obvious crimes and getting them slow rolled or dismissed by judges he appointed in contravention to a couple hundred years of precedent, it's lawfare.
When it's their guy getting investigated for multiple years by congress and having nothing come out and having things leaked by highly placed officials that disappear the second they might actually need to stand up in court, it's justice.
Ah, well. The world turns once again.
I’m good personal friends with Douglass Mackey, who was raided and arrested by the FBI for “meme crimes” against Hillary four days after Biden took office. He missed the birth of his first child while flying back and forth from Florida to New York, and since no circuit judge has the spine to throw out a federal prosecution case, he will spend hundreds of thousands more in legal fees to appeal this lawfare.
This is why I scorn liberals who with trembling hands and quivering lips type out that big bad Trump will be “authoritarian”and put his enemies in prison. He didn’t, but you guys sure did! You are projecting, and even the smartest nerds among you can’t ever see it. None of you were bullied properly at any stage of your lives, and when you do finally receive your comeuppances, they will be long overdue and well-deserved.
He was imprisoned for seven months due to intentional election interference: https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/social-media-influencer-douglass-mackey-sentenced-after-conviction-election
I have zero sympathy for him. As much as I hate Trump, I'd feel the same if a Harris supporter was trying to pull the same shenanigans on Trump supporters. We need law and order and we need elections free of subterfuge.
Do you think Kristina Wong should get in trouble?
https://x.com/gregg_re/status/1723112988121375204/photo/1
From my superficial engagement with this alleged discrepancy:
>The deceptive ad stated: “Avoid the Line. Vote from Home,” “Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925” and “Vote for Hillary and be a part of history.” It also included fine print at the bottom that mimicked a real ad, stating: “Must be 18 or older to vote. One vote per person. Must be a legal citizen of the United States. Voting by text not available in Guam, Puerto Rico, Alaska or Hawaii. Paid for by Hillary For President 2016.”
Looks like this was what the ad looked like:
https://www.nydailynews.com/wp-content/uploads/migration/2023/03/19/332CNNXUDJAD5AM3AAVOQ6C75Y.jpg
And he made multiple others, including one in Spanish.
The original Wong video doesn't include a wrong number to text or say to text at all, although it lies about the date.
https://x.com/mskristinawong/status/795999059987173377?lang=en
So we have somebody doctoring political ads and creating fake accounts and giving misleading information about voting vs somebody posting a video of themselves saying misleading information about voting on their personal page. The first is clearly worse. The second might qualify for conspiracy against rights.
Actually now that I look at the date of course it doesn't. Voting day was November 5th in 2016 and this video was posted on Nov 8th. What a nothingburger.
The 2016 US presidential election was Tuesday, November 8.
You're right, Google presents me with 2024's voting date even if I specify 2016 or 2020.
For the record, Doug did not serve seven months in prison, nor any extended past being detained. His "conviction" (I use the quotes because it's bullshit) binds him to the court system, but not prison.
You are mentally ill and need to accept the private parts you were born with, despite being both unloveable and physically ugly.
That is an absurd characterization of Mackey's rightfully-illegal actions and of the process against him. If a Harris or Trump or anybody-else supporter does the same things now that person should and I hope will be prosecuted and convicted.
The objective history says otherwise.
Phall is right. Ricky Vaughn was a hugely influential poster, who posts an obvious meme (in similar formats to what many others have posted - Jimmy Kimmel (or was it Fallon?) made a similar joke YESTERDAY).
And they say these are rightfully legal and totally unbiased and not targeted. It's an absurd, blatant 1A violation, and selective prosecution.
For example, on November 1, 2016, in or around the same time that Mackey was sending tweets suggesting the importance of limiting “black turnout,” the defendant tweeted an image depicting an African American woman standing in front of an “African Americans for Hillary” sign. The ad stated: “Avoid the Line. Vote from Home,” “Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925,” and “Vote for Hillary and be a part of history.” The fine print at the bottom of the deceptive image stated: “Must be 18 or older to vote. One vote per person. Must be a legal citizen of the United States. Voting by text not available in Guam, Puerto Rico, Alaska or Hawaii. Paid for by Hillary For President 2016.” The tweet included the typed hashtag “#ImWithHer,” a slogan frequently used by Hillary Clinton. On or about and before Election Day 2016, thousands of unique telephone numbers texted “Hillary” or some derivative to the 59925 text number, which had been used in multiple deceptive campaign images tweeted by Mackey and his co-conspirators.
I appreciate Scott's analysis and rational approach to the election, but for me the fundamental problem is the candidates' lack of experience and capability for the office, and the lack of a substantive, legitimate process of selection for either candidate.
I realize participating in the whole process is like reading fiction (Politics is mostly fiction, after all), but in reading a novel one has to be able to suspend one's disbelief.
"the candidates' lack of experience and capability for the office" -- Harris today has a stronger resume for the office than a dozen previous presidents did, including a couple of our most famous and well-regarded ones. Trump when elected in 2016 had none of that, but he did get elected so now has 4 years' experience in the office.
(I realize that's all just about the "experience" part, and "capability" is a different issue.)
I'm holding out for Taylor Swift and Snoop Dogg.
Stein?
I think in a post-covid world, endorsing an antivaxxer is unacceptable, even though I agree with the rest of your reasoning.
For an endorsement that spends so many words on the subject of authoritarianism and the violation of norms around democracy, freedom and liberalism, it is a travesty that the partisan response to COVID isn't mentioned. The elephant in the room here is that Democrats, first as state governors, then under president Biden, were obviously more authoritarian in their response to COVID. Without subtlety. That broke bright-line norms in ways so numerous it would take a whole article to list them all (to name a few, rights to education, assembly, movement, religion, speech). Altogether frankly bordering on Totalitarian. To make the argument that Democratic excesses are limited to "subtle damage", and claim Harris would be less authoritarian than Trump, while dodging any discussion of the most overt acts of authoritarianism in decades if not longer, is self-discrediting.
And to pre-empt the obvious criticism of Trump's handling of COVID: Yes, Trump did acquiesce to Democratic governors. An absolutely despicable act that would be disqualifying in every other circumstance... Except that his alternative is the political faction that he acquiesced to. This is not a good argument for a Democratic president, merely an argument for an even more aggressively Republican one.
The comments are fun but commenter apxhard gets at the numbers that matter: few hundred (?) let into the US Capitol; never-to-be-reckoned millions let into the country. Talk about the former all you want, until you’re blue in the face, but please don’t be so rude as to mention the latter.
This is the only reason Trump may win, and the reason one should expect he won't be allowed to, if the same Good People do their job as in 2020.
Trump was unsuccessful in passing border legislation during his 2016 term. Biden has passed multiple bipartisan bills and Kamala has the record for most tiebreaker votes in the Senate as VP. They would've also passed another bipartisan border bill if Trump didn't order Republicans to vote no on it so he could run on the border (you can look up Republicans literally admitted this, or "RINOs" as they're called nowadays). His wall that he couldn't get funding for would also be mostly useless now since immigrants are mostly abusing the assylum process, not hopping the border. Maybe his deportation plan would work, but on literally everything else about the border Democrats are better than Republicans on now because Trump holds the reigns to the Republican party and doesn't care how much legislation he has to shoot down to keep himself in charge.
I think the whole "Trump is greater evil but he is so obvious in his evil so that it's lower risk" line of argument entierly loses all sense at the point where half the country is ready to vote for him.
Obviousness of evil can only be considered an advantages if people are more distrustful to it than to less obvious evil. The moment where people successfully twisted themselves into thinking that obvious evil deserve *more* trust and support, it just turns into a maximally undignified failure mode
Well it's not half the country, actually around 30 percent. (It's about half of those who are interested enough to show up and vote.) But your point holds regardless.
"Evil" can be a matter of opinion. If you agree with him (or his policies), he's the greatest thing. If you are against him (or his policies), he's evil.
You are missing the point.
I don't particularly care about people who like authoritarianism (or at least think they do) and therefore vote for Trump. That's rational based on their preferences as far as they themselves understand them.
Nor people who believe that Trump is less authoritarian than Harris. They are wrong, of course, but they are wrong in the standard very boring way, which I'm not interested in.
But people who buy "the strongest counterargument" that Scott mentions it in the post are commiting an actually bizarre and facinating reasoning mistake. And so I'm addressing them in particular.
I saw a guy on Substack say his mother used to make him so mad he had to hit her and Kamala reminds him of his mom and that’s why he’s voting for Trump. Honestly, I think about that a lot.
I hate Trump and frankly I agree with the literal reading (if perhaps not the meaning) of Biden's gaffe that most Trump supporters are garbage, but that seems like a silly weakman jab. Most Trump supporters aren't *that* crazy, violent, and stupid. Just on average a lot more crazy, violent, and stupid than people who don't support Trump.
No one has a monopoly on crazy, violent, or stupid. "Conservative" means not taking risks, and you will find the vast majority of truly conservative people are Republican from that standpoint. This can take many forms, including "my father was a Republican, and his father was Republican, and I don't want to rock the boat".
Conservative - averse to change or innovation and holding traditional values. Also (of an estimate) purposely low for the sake of caution.
Conservatives are harder to budge to change. It's not impossible, but it takes a lot more proof. Chesterton's fence is only one aspect of that.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=conservative
Scott, can you please give examples or more details about what you mean when you say you are happy with SCOTUS rolling back progressive power grabs?
Yea, I had this question too.
Obviously everyone should vote third-party in protest to the system.
> First you need to maintain a peaceful country that runs on the rule-of-law, and if you succeed, only then can you take your next step of worrying about all the people trying to find sneaky ways to gather power within the system.
Erm, so what, people in Russia should just vote in fake elections, because everything else is against law?
Russia is not a peaceful country that runs on the rule-of-law, it is a oligarchy/autocracy where if you complain into a microphone you fall out a window.
Yes, in some cases. But in other cases if you try to change something, you will be arrested, and it probably would be technically lawful. And anyway, if it was the law that anything emperor says is the law, would you still need to preserve this system because it's against the law to change it?
No, because there is no law as such.
Law comes up from the people, in the french sense; authority comes down from god.
In russia, the authority/law mix is such that you can safely discount the law in most cases.
I would suggest the psychodrama brilliantly described here for ex-religious-believers vis-a-vis their old religious identity, and for Muslims vis-a-vis Democrats, is different from the psychodrama a lot of deeply anti-Trump people experience in relation to Trump. The latter is not based on being formerly right-wing or Republican, and then having rejected that object-cathexis. It's based on Trump pushing a lot of buttons with them in relation to Nazis and similar historical persons/images/eras that they already, and in many cases all their lives, regarded as bad. I do NOT mean to say that people who experience the psychodrama I'm describing in relation to Trump are right (or, for that matter, wrong) to do so, in a political sense (or a psychological sense). I'm simply saying the psychodrama experienced when separating from a previous identity is very different in nature from that experienced when one feels one is confronting a lifelong bogeyman/object of fear and hate. ("Never Trump" Republicans may, of course, be experiencing something more like the trauma of breaking with a long-held identity.)
I think the professional class is reflexively anti-Trump for a simple reason: they are generally people with high conscientiousness who instinctively loathe a low conscientiousness person who has power.
If you want to convince Republicans to switch sides because of political violence, you'll have to at least mention that their guy got shot.
I find it amazing that of the two attempted Trump assassins so far this year, neither had any particular political opinions, according to the FBI.
Wasn't the guy that shot Tulsi Gabbard obsessed with grammar more than any policy?
The Congressional baseball shooter was a left-wing activist, though. So they're not all suspiciously-unmotivated weirdos.
Good thing you can always trust the FBI!
Trump's rioters committed political violence because of Trump's rhetoric, lies, and goading. The guys that shot Trump were not told to do that by Kamala Harris. That is a key difference. The shooters were also all registered Republicans and former Trump supporters, so there's that.
I have a question, CV. Would you say that people are happier and more free under the current Chinese government, or under the current government of the USA, or under the current government of Russia?
Happier and more free are unrelated questions.
I think people seem to be happier as long as they are in a booming economy, irrespective of governance. Chinese people were very happy with their govt in the 2000s because they were in an economic boom. Not so much right now. I'd say Americans are probably happier at the moment because the other two countries are in war and recession.
As far as freedom, no question USA wins. You have the freedom to say anything against the govt. No one will send you to a "re-education" camp if you are an ethnic minority. No one can send you to prison without due process.
Though I guess there are also other senses of the word "free."
A Chinese woman is more free to walk around at night alone in a big city, because crime is so incredibly rare. She also has more rights to her body than in most of the US right now, though that can change on a whim.
The US has great systems of matching smart people up with the resources they need to go to school and getting grants/loans. So you are probably more free to start a business here. You are also more free to buy guns, which is what caused the Trump shooting attempts in the first place.
>So (continues the strongest argument I can think of for supporting Trump) the Republicans egged on a guy with face paint and a horned helmet to smash furniture in the Capitol. Meanwhile, the Democrats got every social media company in the country to censor opposing opinions while swearing up and down that they were doing nothing of the sort, all on some sort of plausible but never-put-into-so-many-words threat that things would go worse for them if they didn’t. They did it so elegantly and naturally that even now nobody really wants to call them on it - partly because it’s hard to tell where free corporate choice ended and government coercion started, and partly because they’ve successfully established a culture where it’s declasse to even talk about it....
I'm glad you wrote this, but I would like to see you seriously engage with alternative perspectives on this one topic. I am aware that when talking about 'conspiracies without a central plan', weird institutional effects and other foucaultian/"cathedral" type dynamics that purportedly occur, you're not *supposed* to be able to point to clear unambiguous evidence that its happening (e.g. that certain business leaders have been threatened with lawfare or told they'll be fired if they don't go along with it). And we know there is such a thing as social pressure to say the acceptable thing, and that this pressure got quite strong in 2020/21. That's all real.
But of course this means its near impossible to reach any consensus on how bad this kind of institutional capture is, we end up conspiracy brained "trust me bro the institutions are all overtaken that's why they're all united". That's what's so dangerous about this "subtler is worse" narrative.
You correctly point out that however bad this media-government-academia collusion is, it *can't* be worse than overt attempts to overturn democracy, because making the system subtly worse in ways we can't clearly point to aren't and cannot be worse than chucking a bomb at it.
>Here the Democrats are the fossil fuel executives slowly boiling democracy to death, and the Republicans are the activists throwing paint on it. Our first priority is to punish the bright-line violation, lest civilization collapse; afterwards we can focus on pushing back against the subtle damage.
But I still think you're overrating the media-academia-government collusion towards progressive social ideas ('woke cancel culture') thing. I think it's a real problem, got a bit worse around 2020/21 and has since receded. But how to resolve this disagreement? Seeing nothing overt isn't evidence, institutions checking each other's work (e.g. newspapers fact checking each other) isn't evidence as its all supposed to be self-reinforcing. But of course, such things do happen in history and there's not literally none of it happening now, so how bad is it? You just have to drill down on the specific cases.
I think the strongest specific instance where proponents of this narrative say we saw a smoking gun of problematic media-government-academia-corporate collusion is the Twitter Files.
Maybe start there? I think that how bad those findings were was exaggerated a lot, and it was more a case of well intentioned people with liberal biases trying to be impartial (as opposed to trying to be censorious) and correct for their biases with mistakes being made. This overlong segment from destiny interrogating the twitter files journalists or the sam harris episode on it is the closest I've seen to the whole thing being actually tested on facts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TWMPzGDvUM
Maybe that way we can untangle this, because I think you're greatly overrating how big of a threat this kind of ratchet is. It could get worse in response to more Trump, I grant you, but currently like 95% of the escalation is happening on the Trumpy side.
I’m in the libs my out group, trump my far group camp, and not in a swing state. Missing from your endorsements is no vote top of ticket, which is consequentially equivalent to third party, but I think even more justified. Just because it’s not up or down on dems, it doesn’t imply lesser of two evils as the only option. I voted the state plebiscites, and for city council and school board, but just because orange man really is bad I’m still not giving symbolic assent to the cathedral. That said, the real tradeoff in swing states I think is that trump is higher variance and Harris worse mean, so the decision is more risk tolerance determined than first principles.
A higher variance and higher mean is less risk-tolerant, but ought to be better in the long run, than a lower variance and lower mean. Consider the stock market. Generally speaking, one can take high risk with high rewards, or low risk with low rewards. Both strategies make money, but the high risk one won't make money (and may lose money) in any given year, but ought to earn more than the low risk one over the long haul.
Scott's analysis of institutional threats contains a fundamental error in how it conceptualizes system risk.
The bright line violation framework appears compelling at first glance. However, this framework commits two serious errors. It treats institutional stability as a linear decomposable system when reality proves far more complex. More critically, it reverses the actual causal relationship between institutional decay and norm violations.
In my work modeling complex systems, we frequently encounter situations where obvious signals prove less predictive than subtle interaction effects. Financial systems provide an instructive example. Major financial collapses rarely stem from obvious fraud. Instead, they emerge from the gradual accumulation of systemic risks, regulatory capture, and the slow erosion of safeguards. By the time someone commits obvious violations, the foundation has often already crumbled.
Scott writes that we must "first maintain a peaceful country that runs on the rule of law" before addressing subtle power accumulation. This assumes both that we can meaningfully separate these processes and that bright line violations cause institutional decay. My experience in risk modeling suggests both assumptions fail. These are not distinct phenomena we can prioritize separately. They operate as coupled variables in a complex system. More importantly, the causation runs primarily from institutional decay to norm violations. When institutions become hollowed out through bureaucratic corruption and erosion of checks and balances, they lose the capacity to prevent obvious violations.
Consider how we approach anomaly detection in machine learning. When training models to predict system failures, we quickly learn that obvious red flags often matter less than the subtle interactions between seemingly minor variables. The most catastrophic failures typically emerge from these interaction patterns rather than single dramatic events.
Political systems exhibit what risk theorists call fat tailed properties. Small perturbations can cascade into systemic collapse through multiplicative interactions. The distinction between bright line violations and subtle degradation creates an artificial separation that obscures how institutional failure actually occurs. These factors interact through power law distributions not linear relationships.
Democratic institutions often display metastability. They appear robust while gradually accumulating hidden fragilities. Surface level stability can mask underlying instability until the system suddenly crosses critical thresholds. The bright line framework dangerously misses this dynamic by focusing on visible violations rather than systemic risk factors.
Historical examples repeatedly show institutional collapse appearing sudden but preceded by long periods of seemingly minor erosion. The Weimar Republic, Venezuela, and Hungary demonstrate that by the time obvious violations occur, the capacity to resist them has already been compromised. The bright lines often break precisely because the underlying system has already been compromised through more subtle mechanisms.
This analysis suggests we must fundamentally reframe our decision criteria for voting. Rather than asking which candidate commits more obvious violations, we must evaluate their impact on institutional integrity. We must assess who will strengthen rather than erode checks and balances, who will improve rather than degrade bureaucratic competence, and who will enhance rather than diminish long term democratic resilience.
Scott's conclusions about voting therefore prove actively harmful. By directing political energy toward less important factors while allowing critical institutional decay to continue, his framework accelerates rather than prevents democratic backsliding. Effective institutional protection requires understanding and monitoring the entire risk surface with particular attention to subtle degradation of systemic safeguards.
This analysis draws heavily from complex systems theory and risk management principles that I apply daily in my work. The key insight remains consistent across domains. In complex adaptive systems, the interaction effects and direction of causality often matter more than individual components. Our institutional analysis and resulting political choices must reflect this reality.
You make interesting points here. At the same time, let me vent my frustration on complexity theory related to risk management (since I am in the same business, sort-of):
Most of the complex interaction effects & their outcomes cannot be specified in advance. Partly because we cannot operationalize the variables in sufficient fine-grained detail, partly because we do not know their distributions in advance, partly because interactions effects fast multiply – you tend to end up with “everything is connected to everything else in god-knows how many perturbations”. And it sometimes only takes a tiny-winy change in some of the variable specifications for the outcome to veer off in a totally different direction.
In this situation, I tend to suggest rules-of-thumb to students, to avoid being overwhelmed by the demand for yet more & ever more (costly and often impossible to obtain) detailed information before making a decision (in this case: A decision what to vote on November 5th, for those who have a right to vote in US elections).
Such as: A candidate who openly states that he/she does not care too much about the rule of law, or gets across that he/she only follows the letter (not the spirit) of the law, and/or demonstrates that he/she is happy to wing it to reach a preferred outcome, sends a signal further down the lines that “it is ok to play hard and fast with whatever is the truth to get a result your superiors want”. This is a potentially dangerous norm to induce in a system (such as a state bureaucracy). Add that a primary way in which norms in a system change is if the “allowed” norms signalled from up-above in a hierarchy change. (Hierarchical diffusion of norms, based on good old diffusion theory a la Everett Rogers - a traditional workhorse in the study of behavioral change.)
Would you say that this type of “rule of thumb” (which is very information-efficient, and sort-of a type of heuristics) is a totally fallacious way to make judgements when under a time constraint? And if so: Does complexity theory offer a viable alternative, again given the time constraint and the cost of ever-more information gathering?
It is not a rhetorical question. My intuition senses that complexity theory “in theory” has a lot to offer. It is just that it is usually well-nigh impossible to get much help from it in practice, for the reasons indicated above.
This repeats some anti-Democrat misinformation in the process of endorsing them:
January 6 was indeed a genuine coup attempt with a plausible theory of how to overturn the results of the election and keep Trump in power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_hearings_of_the_United_States_House_Select_Committee_on_the_January_6_Attack#7PartPlan
Harris has not proposed price controls: https://www.factcheck.org/2024/10/the-issues-vice-president-harris-anti-price-gouging-proposal/
Democrats do not have “every social media company in the country” censoring opinions, instead we’ve got Musk running twitter as a partisan Republican operation, and Meta having fully rolled over to Republican content moderation preferences: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/08/27/media/mark-zuckerberg-election-season-republicans/index.html
Notice the term "price controls" does not feature in your article. She said "price gouging" instead, and it was not clear at the outside how that would distinguish itself from price controls. Harris seems to have walked it back based on what I had read on NoahSmith but there's still skepticism on the part of economists.
It wasn't so much a walk back as it was a bunch of people wrongly assuming that she was proposing price controls when she brought up this anti-price gouging plan, and then just quietly dropping the issue when they realized that wasn't the case.
Curious where did the months lying about the state of POTUS Biden and the candidate features in your trust the party ?
Seems pretty obvious that it's covered by this part of the essay:
>Yes, left-wingers are subtly weaponizing norms to support their own side, in much the same way that once you’ve established basic principles of non-murder / non-theft / capitalism, businessmen can exploit those principles to run businesses you don’t like. “People are working within the system to do something I don’t like” is a more refined level of problem than “there is no system and we’re in the state of nature murdering each other”. First you need to maintain a peaceful country that runs on the rule-of-law, and if you succeed, only then can you take your next step of worrying about all the people trying to find sneaky ways to gather power within the system.
No-one has been directly blatantly lying about Bidens state (the way Trump has been blatantly lying). People might have skirted the truth in plausibly-deniable ways, which is within the system.
>No-one has been directly blatantly lying about Bidens state (the way Trump has been blatantly lying). People might have skirted the truth in plausibly-deniable ways, which is within the system.
You know how you decide that Pluto isn't a planet? You create a definition which includes a characteristic specifically designed to exclude Pluto, and then you notice that Pluto doesn't meet it.
This is a blatantly gerrymandered standard defined so that you can say "the Democrats are abusing the system too but not in that exact way, so it doesn't count".
This argument is addressed by part III of the article we are discussing, so I don't understand why you're restating it without addressing Scotts counterarguments.
Scott has written about this here:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prediction-markets-suggest-replacing
A more simplistic and pragmatic view to who to vote for:
We're looking at this election wrong if we get caught up debating Trump's character flaws or imagining worst case scenarios. Instead, we need to look at the actual binary choice in front of us:
Choice 1: Trump presidency that will likely resemble his first term (2016-2020)
Strong economy
Better border control
No new wars
Abraham Accords
Coherent foreign policy (even if rhetoric was wild)
Choice 2: Harris presidency that will likely resemble Biden years (2021-present)
High inflation
Border crisis
Ukraine invasion
Iran strengthened
Middle East destabilized
Once you strip away all the moral panic and look at the pure binary choice of likely outcomes, Trump's policies produced better results for average Americans. It's clear to me when you strip away the moral panic, it is Harris who threatens America's (and the world's for that matter) stability mechanisms.
You missed some parts of choice 1:
* The president orders his VP to ignore the votes and just pick the winner of the next election instead. ("The president sicks his mob on the VP when he fails to comply" isn't needed anymore since the VP has ensured his loyalty.)
* Record-setting deficit spending during a strong economy.
Deficit spending during Trump’s term is a bit misleading to attribute it solely to discretionary policy. If you recall we had a period of robust economic growth, and the pandemic demanded substantial emergency spending, which spiked the deficit. Criticizing the spending without considering the pandemic context is intellectually incomplete.
The idea that any administration could just "pick the winner" ignores the electoral safeguards that prevent such overreach. Regardless of intent, our electoral system has mechanisms to resist overreach. Trump tested boundaries, the strength of the system remains robust and the transfer of power followed.
Ultimately, the question becomes whether policy results—like economic growth, border security, and stability—outweigh concerns about intentions, because I'm looking at results. Because, frankly a middle east escalation and a WWIII scenario does not sound appealing.
The deficit was unreasonably high before the pandemic. Trump lowered taxes but didn't decrease spending so this was a pretty obvious result.
The "electoral safeguards" you mention were people like Mike Pence. They will be purged and replaced with sycophants for attempt 2.0.
> The "electoral safeguards" you mention were people like Mike Pence.
If Pence went along with the Eastman scheme, there were still multiple safeguards in the way. A SCOTUS challenge would probably rule that the VP was not vested with the power to throw out electoral votes under Article II. If the election went to the House, Pelosi had control of the procedures and could have just stalled until Jan 20th when Pence and Trump are thrown out and control of the government reverts to the Senate. Anything in the Senate could have been stalled by filibuster in a similar manner. Congress could have impeached Trump and/or Pence and thrown them out of office.
I don't want to minimize Pence's role, because the chaos and reputational damage to our institutions would have been much worse if he went along with the scheme. But our government isn't so fragile that someone can just decide to steal an election like that.
Not counting the pandemic, the deficit has had a pretty predictable upward trend since 2015. https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/national-deficit/
Recall also that Congress sets the budget that the President approves. The President has influence, but doesn't determine the deficit.
Let’s be real—deficits aren’t created by tax cuts alone. Trump’s tax cuts actually boosted revenue through economic growth and job creation. The bigger driver of deficits was mandatory spending on things like Social Security and Medicare, which neither party has dared to touch. Before the pandemic hit, the economy was thriving, with record-low unemployment and wage growth across income levels. COVID forced emergency spending; any administration would have done the same.
As for “safeguards,” our system is more than one person like Pence. Courts, state officials, and bipartisan checks resisted overreach in 2020, proving that no administration can just steamroll election rules. If the focus is stability, look at the policies: under Trump, we had no new wars, historic peace deals, and steady economic growth. The question is, are we better off with that approach or risking another term of instability and economic strain?
Under Trump we got COVID. I don't want that again.
I am not sure if this is a serious comment, but I'm not too sure you can attribute the pandemic to anything Trump did haha.
He is just making fun of you. Attributing all those things to Trump you know.
Yes.
Oh, I forgot the 2020 riots. I don't want those again, better not vote for Trump.
Q
Unless you buy the theory that Covid was Chinese election interference.
Which, y'know, I'm not saying I believe it, but I don't necessarily not not disbelieve it...
In the same way, how do you expect inflation to continue? Why would the Ukraine war go on for an additional four years?
I'm against Harris (not exactly for Trump, but there you go), but the President doesn't have control over everything. The President does get the credit, and often the blame, for what happens.
Inflation is already curtailed. This is really a choice between "tariffs and deportations", vs "a housing development policy".
Tariffs don't produce good outcomes for consumers, and it's ridiculous to ignore Covid in your assessment. Trump was effectively voted out as incumbent because of it, and then followed high spending which was a global phenomenon that every country felt. But you can't pretend Trump wasn't at the helm when the global economy tanked in 2020.
Biden expanded that rationale with the CHIPS act, and to a lesser extent tariffs on Chinese EVs. The point about Trump is his tariffs go well beyond that, and don't only involve China, as seen here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_tariffs . This clearly not just a case of national security.
If inflation is “already curtailed,” then why are prices still sky-high for essentials like food, energy, and housing? Sure, the inflation rate has slowed, but it’s still eating into average Americans’ wallets. Trump’s policies pre-COVID balanced growth with lower inflation and didn’t require massive government spending. What we’re seeing now is elevated prices across the board, directly tied to today’s high-spending policies.
And saying it’s “tariffs vs. housing development” is a false choice. Tariffs on China did raise some prices but also protected American industries and reduced reliance on a hostile foreign supply chain—an economic advantage that goes beyond consumer pricing alone. Meanwhile, housing shortages have been a problem for decades, mainly due to restrictive zoning and red tape at the local level. Biden’s administration hasn’t made housing any more affordable, nor has it removed the obstacles that hold back development.
On COVID, yes, it hit the world hard, but dismissing Trump’s economic record because of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic is just unfair. Look at his first three years: record-low unemployment, solid wage growth, especially for lower-income groups, and a thriving economy. Every country took a hit in 2020, but the policy foundation Trump laid out prepped the U.S. for rapid recovery, which we’ve been struggling to sustain under Biden.
As for high spending, both parties signed off on COVID relief, but Trump’s post-pandemic plans weren’t to keep the faucet running. The current administration, however, doubled down on massive spending even after the crisis, driving up debt and, yes, fueling inflation.
So, from a pragmatic standpoint, Trump’s policies showed they could deliver a stronger economy with lower inflation, especially for everyday Americans.
>"If inflation is “already curtailed,” then why are prices still sky-high for essentials like food, energy, and housing?"
Inflation is a rate; price is a level.
> Trump’s policies pre-COVID balanced growth with lower inflation and didn’t require massive government spending.
That's not surprising because it was *before Covid*. Covid spending led to inflation. That has now subsided.
The other user explained what inflation is. Public sentiment hasn't caught up with wage growth and inflation rate, it's just vibes. Housing, of course, is it's own problem, and Harris is proposing measures to drastically increase housing supply which would lower prices.
> Biden’s administration hasn’t made housing any more affordable, nor has it removed the obstacles that hold back development.
Good thing we're not talking about Biden.
> Look at his first three years: record-low unemployment, solid wage growth, especially for lower-income groups, and a thriving economy.
That's what's happening *right now*. The economy is doing well.
Noah in brief goes over the Trump scenario for the economy - https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/realistically-how-much-damage-could
> even after the crisis
The US economy recovered faster than literally everyone else.
Most of your list does not make sense. Strong economy was on the same trend as in the Obama years. Trump did not cause it. There has been no new wars since WWII for the US. Inflation of course was not high, COVID didn't happen yet. Ukraine wasn't caused by Biden. You mentioned the border twice. Middle East also was not caused by Biden. You seem to blame Biden for everything that was caused by random chance. Might as well blame Trump for all the BLM riot and all the death and economic effects of COVID then. He was president when COVID happened, wasn't he?
Regarding economic growth, it is true that the economy during Trump’s first term followed a trajectory that began under the Obama administration. But, claiming that Trump’s policies did not contribute to that growth ignores critical data. Corporate tax cuts during his presidency incentivized business investments, deregulation reduced barriers for growth, and unemployment reached historic lows. These measures were significant accelerators rather than mere continuations. The assumption that trends persist unchanged without policy intervention is misleading.
On the topic of wars and foreign policy,the US has not engaged in new wars since WWII oversimplifies history. The we have been involved in significant conflicts, such as Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, with various levels of military commitment. The distinction with Trump's foreign policy is that it marked a shift away from decades of interventionism, focusing instead on negotiation, as seen with North Korea, and reducing troop deployments. This preserved American resources and lives, demonstrating imo, a calculated approach to maintaining peace without costly involvement.
While he was in office when COVID began, attributing the resulting economic downturn and global inflation solely to his administration overlooks context. COVID was an unprecedented global event. What truly distinguishes administrations is their response. The massive economic stimulus during the pandemic, which continued under the Biden administration, had long term inflationary consequences. In 2021, the rapid and aggressive fiscal policies compounded inflation pressures that were already forming due to disrupted supply chains.
Concerning border policy, addressing it twice is not redundant when evaluating policy impacts and outcomes. The current border crisis has been significantly exacerbated by reversing Trump era measures. This policy shift has led to record breaking crossings, impacting national security, straining local resources, and affecting social stability. Effective border control plays a critical role in preserving these areas.
On the matter of Ukraine, claiming that this situation was unrelated to US foreign policy under Biden overlooks the role of perceived American strength in global stability. Although Putins decisions are ultimately his own, the shift from assertive deterrence under Trump to perceived inconsistency under Biden created an environment that emboldened opportunistic actions. This does not assign all blame to one leader but acknowledges the complexity between leadership perception and global power moves.
Lastly, drawing a moral equivalence between the impacts of COVID under Trump and policy driven crises like the current inflation and border issues under Biden misrepresents the nature of these challenges. COVID was an external event that required reactive measures, while policy driven problems, such as inflation linked to monetary decisions and border security, reflect deliberate policy choices with foreseeable outcomes.
The point is not to assign blame arbitrarily but to objectively assess outcomes tied to policy decisions. An evidence based examination shows that Trump's policies led to stronger economic performance, better border management, and a more controlled geopolitical stance compared to the current administration.
I appreciate you taking the time to better explain your positions. I am not nearly as well-read and would have to take time reading up on each one of these. The one thing I do not agree with, however, are the corporate tax cuts. The Ukraine point also seems shaky, tbh. As does the stimulus inflation point. Although we got inflation, we also got a soft landing with low unemployment. What it worth it? Reasonable people can disagree.
I am in favor of increasing taxes to better fund education, research, research on education, and infrastructure. And Dems seem to be the better ticket for those issues.
Ultimately, the overturning of Roe and trying to steal an election overrules it all for me. I do not feel safe traveling to 1/3 of my own country. That is ultimately why I will be voting blue up and down ballot for the rest of my life. Even though I was mostly libertarian leaning before 2016.
On corporate tax cuts, the reality is that lower taxes incentivize growth. Capital left in the hands of businesses is reinvested, creating jobs and raising wages. If higher taxes were the solution, states with the highest tax burdens would lead in education and infrastructure, but that’s not the case.
You mention funding education, research, and infrastructure, but do Democrats effectively achieve this? Decades of increased spending have often yielded stagnant or declining results, particularly in education. More funding without accountability leads to bureaucratic bloat, not better outcomes. Infrastructure projects frequently suffer from inefficiency and waste under expansive government management. The result? More red tape, misallocated resources, and subpar results. Good intentions do not guarantee good outcomes; higher spending without smarter spending is political theater.
Your view on Ukraine underestimates deterrence. Geopolitics is about what adversaries believe they can get away with. Why did Russia hold back during Trump’s tenure but invade under Biden’s? Leadership perception matters, and ignoring that is a dangerous oversight.
On stimulus and inflation, while we avoided economic freefall, the cost was long term damage. Inflation erodes purchasing power and hits the poor hardest. A temporary “soft landing” doesn’t outweigh the consequences of unchecked government spending. Flooding the market with printed money has predictable outcomes—high inflation.
Now, Roe v. Wade. Overturning it didn’t ban abortion; it returned the decision to states, respecting federalism. Feeling unsafe over differing laws is an emotional reaction, not a matter of real safety. Disagreement with state laws shouldn’t mean you feel threatened traveling in your own country. That’s not safety; that’s discomfort.
As a libertarian leaning voter before 2016, you valued limited government and individual responsibility. Does voting blue “up and down” align with those principles, or is it a reaction based on selective outrage? Emotional voting expands government power at the expense of freedom. Real safety and freedom come from balanced governance, not knee jerk allegiance to one party. Think beyond the headlines.
TL:DR if you don't want to read:
1. I really want to punish Republicans for taking away my rights. I care about this one issue over all others.
2. It matters that virtually all Republicans lied about the last election. This is a BIG deal and cannot be normalized.
3. Punish Republicans for the past decade and a half of obvious partisan obstructionism, including the fiasco with Merrick Garland
4. Punish Republicans for the blatant misogyny since 2016. Again, this is a big deal for me and should not be normalized. The fact that the president brags about groping women and has brought redpill into the mainsteam really really sucks. Everyone around Trump speaks about women with hate and disdain. They constantly call Kamala stupid, r-worded, DEI, childless cat lady, having pimp handlers, working the corner, Hawk Tuah, heels up harris, etcetcetc. Not to mention the racist, anti-insert-group hate that they also promote. I feel like this caused a huge decrease in societal trust and general public decency, which I care about more as I start thinking about having kids. I know from my nephew that this toxic stuff is starting to seep into kids' vocabularies. My nine year old nephew has started using the f-word, feminist, and "LGBT" as insults. He learned it from his friends at school, along with online gaming. This should be horrifying, and def wasn't around when I was his age.
And the rest....
I agree that neither party has done a good job on education, infrastructure, tech, etc. But at least Biden got a few bills passed. I would like to see massive funding to education research to reverse the decline in education that I see in the public. Neither party would do what I want, but Dems lean closer. Republicans are nuts on this issue! Ohio is giving millions of dollars in taxpayer money to private, religious schools. That is the opposite of what I want. I don't need people getting even dumber. Between the party that stupidly overspends on education, and the party that wants to abolish the DOE, defund education, and turn the US into the Christian taliban, I would much prefer the former.
On cutting taxes, I am more in favor of raising median wealth than total GDP. My current understanding of econ (which is not much) is that your argument is pretty much Reaganomics, which is what led to the income gap graph we have today? I could be convinced on this specific issue. Though I don't really believe Harris is going to raise taxes dramatically. My gut feeling looking at this graph is that I probably want to skim a little more off the top to fund stuff like homelessness, education, infrastructure, research, etc. That is, without going too far as to severely stall GDP growth. And (D)s are like 5% better than (R)s at this I guess.
https://apps.urban.org/features/wealth-inequality-charts-2017/
I am not convinced at all on the Ukraine and inflation issue. I feel like you might be a bit biased on these topics tbh. Almost everyone would probably prefer the soft landing to a hard landing with low inflation.
And yes, at this point the Dems are more libertarian than the Republicans. The covid stuff is a drop in the bucket compared to being forced to give birth against your will. No govt in my uterus, please. The fact that you think this is about headlines and irrational women emotions tells me that you have never truly considered what reproductive rights mean for someone who has a uterus. It is a decision that has lifelong consequences for one's health, education, income, cognition, appearance, dateability, and all aspects of a woman's life. It can leave you with permanently stretched out skin, a weakened pelvic floor, brain fog and fatigue that lasts years, death, or hundreds of other health effects. Not to mention having to abandon a poor kid to survive the foster care system with no loved ones. I suspect this is very hard to understand for someone who could never be affected by this issue. Bodily autonomy should NEVER be up to the states. Abortion bans have to be most illiberal thing possible next to slavery. It is a fundamental human right, and should be protected by the Constitution in the same vein as all other freedoms.
Imagine if certain states wanted to make kidney donation mandatory. Anyone you have sex with can take your kidney if they require it for life. Would any of your above points still matter to you? Would you be comfortable with it being a states rights issue, if the moment you travel to Texas, they can take your kidney there, but not in your state?
Trying to convince a pro-choice woman to vote Republican would be like trying to convince a Palestinian-American to vote Trump. If they had relatives stuck in Gaza.
At this point, the only things I lean right on are the border and maybe some fiscal conservatism. The border is not a huge issue for me, and I do not want to reward Republican obstructionism on that issue by voting for them.
Fiscal conservatism has been completely abandoned by the Republican party, running up huge deficits for no reason during an economic boom. Besides, we know how Trump chooses his advisors. He is a narcissistic blowhard that fires anyone who disagrees with him. Whereas Harris has listened to the experts at every turn and has shown herself to be ruthlessly disciplined and practical throughout the campaign. Some minor public speaking gaffes aside. So all-in-all, I think libertarians have been entirely consumed by the Dem party. Especially women. And I think the polls are agreeing with me this year.
Back in 2016, I can remember Trump being analogized to The Mule, the character from Asimov's Foundation stories. Certainly his "authoritarianism" is that of The Mule: it dies with him, and it doesn't much care about what you do in the outlying systems as long as you acknowledge him.
The American left's authoritarianism is that of the Second Foundation. They want to psychologically manipulate every aspect of existence in order to bring forth the glorious peaceful perfect future 1000 years from now. They very much care what you do, in every mundane aspect of your life, from what car you drive to what kind of stove you own. They make nothing of value, but have power by manipulating the people who can. There is no single head whose death or destruction ends the tyranny.
I fail to see how bureaucracy is any better than autocracy, when the more fundamental question is *what* power is being exercised over your lives, not *who* is exercising it. An autocrat who slashes regulations for 4 years and goes home to sell chintzy watches, or hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats writing ever more detailed regulations over every tiny little transaction that occurs in this country, I know which of these is more authoritarian. I won't give either one the moral sanction of my vote, but if I saw it as Scott does as a condemnation of the other, it would be an easy call.
Re:
>Fourth, for every bad thing the Democrats are doing to subtly-in-the-long-term-within-the-system try to undermine freedom, Trump also wants to do those things.
Not quite. One exception, and one bad thing which isn't directly related to freedom:
The exception is doubling down on Woke in general, and DEI in particular during the Biden/Harris administration. Re Woke, one notable _in_action of the Biden/Harris administration was that during the antisemitic campus demonstrations over this last year, the Biden/Harris administration did virtually nothing to lessen the frequently _physical_ threat to Jewish students and faculty. Re DEI (which damages freedom of association as well as economic efficiency), the Biden/Harris administration exacerbated it ( https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/06/25/executive-order-on-diversity-equity-inclusion-and-accessibility-in-the-federal-workforce/ ).
The other Biden/Harris bad thing, albeit not a freedom issue, was approximately doubling the number of illegal immigrants entering the USA (except in this last year, when, with the election looming, they clamped back down - but who knows if Harris might double them back to 2021 levels if she wins? It has never been clear what the real motive for the doubling was). Just to be clear: I have no objection to _legal_ immigrants. It might even be that the optimal choice for the USA as a whole would be to double legal immigration. But _legal_ immigrants get vetted, so we have some control that e.g. gang members are mostly weeded out.
Many Thanks!
Borders are meaningless to increasing numbers on the left. Especially the college educated, white collar middle class types that staff all the bureaucracy and leftist think tanks. I full expect a dramatic increase in illegal immigration if she wins, some reduction a few months before the next midterms, and rinse and repeat.
But honestly I expect illegal immigration to keep going up dramatically every year under Democratic administrations. As more people enter illegally, more people across the third world know its possible to enter illegally. It used to be just Mexicans crossing the border, then the Central Americans, Caribbean Islanders, and South Americans started showing up. Now there's hundreds of thousands from Africa, India, and rest of Asia showing up. Just think about how many billions live in these places. There's no shortage of supply. All you have to do is fly to Central America and walk to the border. As more people do it, the cost per person will go down, making it even more affordable for the billions across the world to do it. Hundreds of millions will enter illegally and the best the post-Trump, "moderate", "principled" Republicans will do is reduce taxes from 49.99% to 49.98%. This country is screwed.
Many Thanks! Yeah, my guess is that whatever motivated the Biden/Harris administration to double the flow of illegals for the first three years of that administration presumably still motivates Harris, so my best guess is that a Harris victory would raise the flow back to 2021 levels. I wish I knew what their motivation actually was. Lots of plausible guesses have been made, and, of course, I would never expect an honest answer from the administration itself, so we are all left guessing...
Many Thanks! Yes, that seems like a safe bet. Though, to mention two of the guesses: Consider two regrettable, but nonetheless distinguishable possibilities, one, where the Democrats are going to turn illegal immigrants into illegal voters, or two, where the Democrats are funneling illegal immigrants as cheap labor with no recourse to law to companies which exploit them, and are then campaign contributors to the Democrats. I wish I knew what the truth was.
Ha, under a Harris administration, we are going to look back to 2021 as the good old days when "only" about 20 million entered illegally.
Many Thanks! Unfortunately, that could happen... I hope not (though I really wish we had a better GOP nominee than Trump).
I agree on the border, but it seems to me that campus harassment falls within the purview of colleges. Ostensibly they already have rules in place to punish this behavior, so any lack of follow-through is a failure on their part. I don't see how federal policy has any bearing.
DEI is a frankenstein that is going to be picked at in the coming years, possibly eroded. Corporations seem to be moving away from it. Your link on DEI has to do with the federal workforce.
> I don't see how federal policy has any bearing.
The Obama administration issued a Dear Colleague letter through the Dept of Education to the universities to change the way they handled accusations of sexual misconduct via Title IX.
And Trump rescinded it, then Biden partially or completely reinstated it (I think?).
Many Thanks! Re campus harassment, I agree with Rothwed - the Federal government does have quite a bit of power to influence the manner and degree of enforcement of similar policies.
edit: Forgot to mention - yeah the link was about the Federal workforce, but there are also ripple effects, e.g. through requirements on contractors.
Thanks for this. Yeah another year of the lesser of two evils. I'm in a very blue state and am stuck at either writing in a name (again) or holding my nose and voting for Trump. I guess I'll decide on the 5th.
An embarrassing argument for Harris given this administration’s behavior.
What exactly did you think Scott got incorrect?
They won't say. It's just spineless rhetoric.
I love how the comment section is completely filled with people saying Scott is wrong, and then giving no argument or evidence.
Why do you assume most of the drive-bys are people? Smells like an astroturf op to me.
Considering that Vance cited an idea from SSC in a recent interview, good chance that the campaign knows about this page and finds it relevant.
Yep. People who disagree are naturally more likely to comment than people who agree, but some nonzero level of argument would be nice.
Similarly, the "I am deeply disappointed that Scott does not support Trump" comments, which fail to provide any reason why he should.
Banned for high temperature/low effort comment without an argument.
You come closer to capturing my own discomfort with the Democratic party than anyone else I have read. I want to have a prosperous economy and make the precariat less precarious. I don’t want anyone telling me how to think of imposing tougher restrictions on me than “don’t hurt others.”
It's not a static identity at least. In the Clinton years the GOP were frustrated that the party had embraced "neoliberalism" so much that it was difficult to campaign to the right of it on economy. Today the whining from fellow liberal voters seems to be that the DNC is too right-wing/centrist. They seem to get the message though based on polling that voters are prioritizing economy/inflation above all.
Donald Trump being the fargroup is exactly the situation I find myself in, so this was quite helpful. Appreciated!
I appreciate the two-character psychodrama framing, and I endorse it as a good way to vote.
I'm tired of having an existential crisis every election, eventually voting Democrat as the lesser of two evils, and then getting stabbed in the back by those same Democrats when they interpret my "not Trump" vote as some kind of progressive mandate.
But what was I expecting, exactly? The democrats never had to do anything for my vote. "Vote third party unless the Republican might actually win" doesn't solve the incentive problem. And I'm tired of waiting for some mythical future where the Republican candidate is the lesser of two evils, so that I can finally have an actual voice.
The Comet King didn't want humanity to die. But he knew that pre-commitment was effective game theory, so when the situation called for it, he threatened to end humanity if the devil didn't back down.
That doesn't mean I'm voting for Trump. In this context, that would mean sacrificing my principles to more effectively spit in the face of the outgroup, which is partly how we got into this mess.
But I'm not voting for Harris, either, when she completely failed to give me any reason to vote for her, and when she said shit that makes her unfit for office along the only dimensions I care about.
Democrats need to do better if they want my vote. It's my vote, so my psychodrama is what matters. Any other posture would be making compromise with sin.
I can't guess from the sentiment whether you think the DNC is not left-leaning enough or too left-leaning.
The DNC already does the calculus for maximizing turnout in their favor, whether that includes you is a moot point. There are only two parties at the end of the day.
I think the DNC is too left-leaning on specific issues.
I fail to see how it's a moot point. Elections are an iterated game, and the calculus in the next election will be different if people like me refuse to vote for someone we consider unfit for office. The difference will be marginal, but my vote is also marginal. Traditional decision theory would tell me not to waste my time at all.
>and then getting stabbed in the back by those same Democrats when they interpret my "not Trump" vote as some kind of progressive mandate.
What the hell progressive things have Democrats done recently?
I agree the culture has moved slightly left, but that's mostly been younger people taking over the culture because they understand the internet. Aside from some grants for wind and solar, what exactly have the Democrats done to betray you?
If you could press a green button to chop your arm off, or a red button that would do nothing, would you spin the wheel? Something tells me people that are so cavalier about this election are the people who are the most insulated from its worst effects. For you, the buttons are for other people's arms, which allows you to sit back and disengage.
I'm not going to participate in a pissing contest where we argue about who has legitimate grievances or fears about this clownshow of an election. I have my worldview, you have yours, and neither worldview is "correct" in a way that could invalidate the lived experience that contextualizes my futile effort to communicate with you, or vice versa. The rhetorical path you're trying to take is a dead end.
Here's another path, which may or may not be a dead end: Why do you think anything will ever get better if people keep giving their vote away to the less evil candidate? What possible motivation could politicians have to care about the things you care about, when there's an endless stream of bogeyman in the other party to keep you in line? Do you think partisan primaries will give you a voice? How often do you even see contested primaries, outside of presidential elections? And what's your strategy for electing an actual moderate, when partisan primaries specifically exclude half of the people who might otherwise vote for them?
Every election, I would ask myself these questions. Every election, I would do the same thing everyone else does: Hold my nose and vote for the lesser evil. And where are we now? In a world where Donald Trump is the Republican nominee, and the Democratic party can't even hold a primary, much less nominate a candidate who deserves to win. A world where you feel entitled to criticize me for not using my voice to support your candidate, but you can't be bothered to care about who I am or why I think Harris is unfit for the office of President. A world in which that same attitude is the foundation of the Democratic platform, when they're supposedly trying to build a coalition to defeat an existential threat to Democracy.
Will voting third party save the world? Probably not. But the entire country has been trying it your way for as long as I've been alive, and the hole keeps getting deeper. I'm no longer willing to keep digging if the Democrats can't at least meet a very low bar. If that makes me a villain in your eyes, then I'm sorry you feel that way.
First, thinking Kamala Harris is evil is crazy. I have no idea how one could possibly arrive at that conclusion. She's the most moderate, milquetoast candidate since Bill Clinton. She is literally campaigning with Liz Cheney!
It is also crazy to think that voting Dem all these years caused Donald Trump to happen. Real wages have been going down for decades. The US will never again see the prosperity we saw after WWII. When people start to see a lower standard of living, they tend to vote for more fascist candidates in the false hope that a dictator can come in and solve all their problems for them. We saw this in Germany, Gaza, Venezuela, etc. It is also happening now all over the world. Inflation from COVID is killing all incumbent parties worldwide, from France to Germany to Canada.
Obama cannot be blamed. He had a number of big policy accomplishments, the biggest of which was the ACA. It is so popular that Republicans cannot get rid of it at this point. Shame that he was obstructed by Republicans from doing much else.
Biden had to drop out a very short time before the election. Using that time to make Dem candidates bicker and squabble for two months would have been a pointless endeavor. That would leave only one month to actually run the campaign. That would not have been feasible! Not to mention, Kamala was already on the ticket. The Dem candidate was Biden-Harris. Or course it makes sense that Harris become the nominee if Biden has a health issue.
Republicans weigh their choices and press the button that aligns with their view most. Who cares that Trump tried to steal an election? I just want the Mexicans out!
Dems will agree with 80% of the button's platform, and pout their lips and flap their arms because they want to purity test their candidate. I do want to prevent the decline of democracy...........but I didn't get my favorite guy in the primary, so Imma just sit at home.
I guess you can make your point by voting third party, but what does that even do? No one will have any idea why you voted third party. Could it be because you are an anti-abortion Democrat? Could it be because of Gaza? Could it be you wanted Kanye for president? You are not making the point you think you are making.
You are free to vote for the candidate that most aligns with you on the issues, and then get involved in politics to push him/her to do what you want during his/her term. You can organize protests, write an op-ed, organize a PAC for the next election, even make a YouTube video convincing others to join your cause.
But that would make too much sense and take too much effort. Some people are more interested in complaining than doing. I have a feeling no matter who the nominee was, you would find a way to hate them and sit out the election.
I notice that whenever Republicans are disillusioned by their party, they seem to always endorse Kamala. Geraldo Riviera, Liz Cheney, Schwarzenegger, John Kelly, Bad Bunny, Scaramucci etc are all publicly voting Dem. I have not heard of any Republicans talk about a protest vote, or just sitting out the election. That is the fundamental difference between the parties it seems. Republicans are doers, and Democrats are whiners. That is what my grievance is about the Dems.
Notice that I never called you a villain, but you insist that's how I see you as. I will never call you a villain because villains actually have to get off their couch and do bad things. Key word is DO. And please save the tears about me feeling "entitled to criticize you for not using your voice to support my candidate." This is an internet comments section. I AM entitled to criticize any opinion you put out publicly that has a reply button. And so can you. That's what free speech is. I'm sorry that you don't like it.
I don't particularly care if I'm crazy under your worldview. Harris wasn't moderate when she ran against Biden; she just pretends to be moderate now because she has no principles. Everyone has their own theory about why Donald Trump happened, and no single theory is sufficient, but obviously I find my own theory more credible than yours. The Democrats should have had a primary at the usual time, preferably without Biden, and their failure to do so has consequences that are 100% their own fault.
It doesn't matter how involved I've been in politics, because there is no objective threshold which is ever enough, and you're incentivized to frame what I've done as inadequate for rhetorical reasons.
I voted for the Libertarian. I don't consider myself a Libertarian any more than I consider myself a Democrat, but it doesn't take a doctorate in political science to look at the vote totals and infer the direction that I think the party should move.
I concede that "entitled to criticize me" was the wrong objection. The issue is that you clearly feel entitled to my vote. That attitude is ubiquitous in the Democratic party, it contributes to the ongoing collapse of the coalition, and you can't solve that problem by yelling at random people on the internet. Coalition partners who get nothing from the coalition will eventually leave. That's how a functioning democracy works.
Free speech is what you make of it. You're angry, I'm angry, everyone is angry all the time. Welcome to the year 2024. I'm trying not to be an asshole in this comment section because it doesn't help anyone, it makes me feel bad, and it isn't aligned with my values. You're your own person, and you can do whatever you want, but I really don't see what the point of any of this is. I thought I had something novel to say, so I wrote a comment on the internet. I only do that a few times per year, and it's not because I think arguments like this are a good way for anyone to spend their time.
I'm sorry if it seemed like I felt entitled to your vote. You are of course free to vote however you want. Obviously an internet comment was not going to change your opinion. We are both just screaming into the void.
I just thought I'd make a little observation about what I am reading online. Please do not take this to be an attack on you. I am just opining on the state of the Democratic party in 2024. Of all the discontent I see online, around:
1/4 are Muslims who are upset Kamala is too pro-Israel
1/4 are Jews who are upset Kamala is too pro-Gaza
1/4 are progressives who are upset Kamala is too moderate
1/4 are moderate Dems who are upset Kamala is too progressive
But ultimately it is only the Dem's fault for not pleasing all these groups. It is also their fault for ever expressing frustration that any of these four groups could be acting a bit irrational. And it is certainly their fault that Trump became the Republican nominee.
In fact, I hope they lose so they can see be punished for these grave sins. I wish for a Trump presidency so that he can protect me from all the alarm bells ringing in my head about his last power grab when he lost a democratic election. And the growing pit in my stomach of fear and anger at women no longer getting a say in whether they have to give birth. I'm sure Trump will protect me from all of that soon, whether I like it or not.
Since anytime anyone here brings up J6 as a reason not to vote for Trump, someone else brings up BLM riots as a reason not to vote for Kamala, as if these were parallel events with equal participation by both candidates, I think it’s worth noting the political difference between the two.
The BLM riots were associated with a poorly defined, and in my opinion largely unfounded, outrage over race and policing. The rioters who caused violence didn’t do so with the intent of affecting some specific change, nor were they in support of a specific politician or political candidate. They were throwing a shit fit and the worst among them were destructive, similar to previous race riots.
J6 on the other hand was distinct in intent, scope, and target. It involved a coordinated effort to overturn a certified election and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, with participants explicitly motivated by Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of election fraud. It was an attempt, however unorganized, to disrupt a democratic process and directly challenge the legitimacy of the election.
Both the BLM riots and J6 were bad.
BLM riots led in total to 19-25 deaths across the country over months. J6 led to 5 deaths within 36 hours. No doubt the BLM riots led to far more total property damage than J6, while J6 led to far more reputational damage, just as an attack on the Kremlin, or Westminster Abbey would for Russia or England. J6 also set an alarming precedent that impacts our election process going forward. BLM riots were similar in scope and intent to past instances of destructive civil unrest. It’s worth noting both the BLM riots and J6 happened while Trump was in office.
To suggest that Kamala should be held directly accountable for the BLM riots the same way Trump should be for J6 is irrational.
Kamala fundraised for a bail fund (MNFreedomFund) during the BLM riots, so she did explicitly support them.
I wouldn’t deny she was supportive of BLM protests or people arrested in association with them. I don’t think I did anywhere above. That would also be irrational. Kamala Harris exercises poor judgment as Trump does. I can’t stand the sight of either of these clowns.
My point is that Kamala holds less direct responsibility for the various BLM riots than Trump does for J6. Do you disagree?
I think the rest of your comment is fair, which is why I only brought up that one point. Although I think it's a bit disingenuous to say J6 "led to" 5 deaths when those were natural causes of people in the vicinity unrelated to any violence, except Babbitt and (very tenuously, maybe) Sicknick.
Many of the 19-25 deaths I cited as BLM-related deaths were due to similar vague or plausibly unrelated circumstances. I can find no way to accurately tally the casualties attributable to either event. My poorly made point was that it seems fair to attribute more deaths to the many BLM riots than to J6.
Gotcha. I do appreciate you engaging with my digressions.
> My point is that Kamala holds less direct responsibility for the various BLM riots than Trump does for J6.
I think this is fair. I think that one big problem with this whole thread, including Scott's original post, is that we're weighing up the problems with Donald Trump the individual versus the problems with the entire Democratic Party machine.
And this is actually kinda fair. The biggest downside of voting for Kamala is that you get the Democratic Party machine and all the rubbish that goes along with it -- the actual figurehead isn't that important. The biggest downside of voting for Trump is that you get Donald Trump in particular, his downsides are highly idiosyncratic to him as a person.
The Dem machine doesn't really have that many problems. It's mostly the leftist twitter activists, which the Dem party has mostly shed off due to Gaza now.
I think Kamala Harris would increase the risk of race riots, but more importantly, she will give the race rioters what they want. They already got a holiday, a vice-president, a guilty Chauvin verdict, a renamed NFL team, the Robert E. Lee statue, a mural at a Target they burned down, a reduction in police enforcement (even as police get more funding), Pelosi kneeling in a mask, exemption from social distancing requirements, and money. I actually held my nose and voted Biden in 2020, thinking this nonsense would pass. But then 10/7 happened, and the race rioters tried to make Hamas the good guys for about five days before Boomer Jews were able to wrest back control of the narrative.
I expect President Harris to turn the heat up on race. We've already heard that she will bring up race/gender questions at basically every White House briefing. And then she picked Tim Walz, who either deliberately or stupidly allowed Minneapolis to become BLM ground-zero while he was governor.
If Trump or Vance becomes a strongman, I don't expect life will change much for the ordinary American. Economic growth will be stifled, and you won't be allowed to protest the regime, but as long as you keep your head down you'll survive. But if Harris or her successor start a race war, I can see ordinary citizens being turned on ordinary citizens, like we saw in Rwanda.
I don't see any mention either in Scott's post or the comments of Trump's character, but I think that's a key consideration.
The man has no convictions other than his own perfection, and no emotions other than revulsion and rage. He has repeatedly shown disdain for entire categories of people (women, soldiers, foreigners) and pretty much every institution, but no empathy for even his own family. He's frighteningly susceptible to flattery, especially by strongman dictators, but totally indifferent to the suffering of children. And he's getting older and more befuddled.
Can one person make much difference in 4 years? Probably not if there are no emergencies. But when the chips are down and there's a crisis, is he going to have a sense of what is best for the American people? Or is he going to call up Putin for advice on to how to best help the rich white males around him?
I hear his supporters say they aren't voting for a babysitter for their children, but someone to lead the country. But I think when we stop expecting decency from our leaders we should be prepared to stop expecting it from our fellow citizens as well.
Not to say Trump is admirable, but he certainly has the conviction he is the smartest person around. Also, one must admit he has a sense of humor.
What’s the funniest thing he ever said? I’m seriously curious.
Well, this comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rBr_WLQsFc
It was an Alfred Smith dinner after his debate with Hillary Clinton. He had two jokes in the clip: saying Clinton would laugh a lot tonight, sometimes even at appropriate moments; and he said she accidentally bumped into him, and very civilly said, "Pardon me," to which he replied they would need to talk about that after he was elected. Note that you can see Clinton laughing during the clip, too.
I haven't surveyed all of his jokes, so can't tell if this is the funniest, but it is the funniest I know of.
I appreciate the effort, but if a marginally amusing pun surely written for him is the best you got, I’m not changing my mind that the dude is not droll.
I never said he was wildly funny. I said no one could dispute that he has a sense of humor. You can search for other jokes he has made, but you'll surely say those were also written for him. He HAS delivered the jokes, at the least.
I thought a good debate question would have been something like "What would you do for a Klondike bar?" Klondike would, of course, love such a question, and it shouldn't blatantly promote any particular product or service, but such a question would show something about the candidate. I imagine Harris's answer would be something about her being raised in a middle-class family.
On the other hand, Harris, and the entire elite of her party, everyone who interacted with Biden enough to observe his mental condition, were happy to conceal it, to do their best to put someone suffering from serious age related cognitive decline in the White House.
It's not clear how much of what is different about Trump is his irresponsibility, how much his not bothering to hide it.
I don't think this had any bearing on Biden's character. Do you think Biden is also at heart someone who has no respect for anything but himself, and just needs some flattery to sell out his fellow citizens - but has hidden his core indency (or more recently had it hidden by others) all these years? That's at least shows some self-awareness and - importantly - a recognition of the values that keep us all from turning on each other. But I doubt it - even the GOP senators who worked closely with him for many years have nothing bad to say about his character.
Harris is a bit more of an unknown in this respect, there were stories during the 2020 primary of her treating her staff shabbily, and having a bit of a temper. Seems like those stories would have resurfaced more recently if there was much to them. Doesn't seem to have many political principles, maybe abortion rights and some sort of middle/muddle way on crime. But I don't think she will make decisions out of rage or disdain, or that are indifferent to human dignity or human suffering.
It has no bearing on Biden's character, some on Harris and the character of top level politicians. This evidence is only for Democrats but I don't assume Republicans are better.
That is who Trump is being compared to.
The way you know that they weren't happy to do that is that they didn't do that.
I mean, come on. Unlike the flunkies Trump has surrounded himself with, Biden's party and confidants launched a long campaign both behind doors and in public to convince him to step down even though he had no intention of doing so far a long time, and eventually succeeded. He's no longer on the ballot.
What did you want them to do, kick him down a flight of stairs? This is what the system working looks like. You should be praising them for having the courage to do that for the good of the country, at a time when Harris's approval ratings were even worse than Biden's and they had no clear roadmap from there to victory.
> What did you want them to do, kick him down a flight of stairs?
What they should have done is the same thing they did, except six to nine months earlier. They should have pressured Biden to drop out before the primaries began, so the Democrats could have had a meaningful primary.
It really wasn't that clear until the campaign schedule and the debate.
Not clear to the public, but surely clear to anyone who spent time with him. Hence why they'd been hiding him from public view for a couple of years.
They did that until the debate exposed his condition to the public, making it impossible to continue the pretense that he was fine. Only then did they start trying to force him to step down, because the alternative was losing the election.
Isn't that obvious? If it is, why your response?
> Put this way, you could argue: okay, January 6 was bad. But it was like a ten-year-old child's idea of authoritarianism. You seize power by getting a bunch of people to zerg rush the opposing politicians and beat them up until they declare you in charge. Too bad you were foiled by a locked door, you'll get them next time. I won't claim this strategy has never successfully taken over a government, because history is long and weird. But I can't think of any examples.
I think the Storming of the Bastille in 1789 was very much like this (although the ensuing French Revolution did turn out to be a massive clusterfuck just a few years later).
>All of this will be unbelievably obvious to 99% of you, but I promised I’d try to say something different from all the other articles on this exact topic, and the best I can do is reach out to the 0.001% other people stuck in the same psychological vortex I was and see if any of it rings true.
This is more important than you make it out to be, because - like your college Atheism club, like r/atheism back in the day - that .001% are the most dedicated and loudest people in the space, who end up representing 80% of the discussion you actually hear if you enter the space.
The passively-listen public generally gets caught up in the psychodrama of whoever is controlling the public narrative, and I think that's mostly people involved in some kind of thought-consuming psychodrama like you describe. Making even one of those people realize what they're doing and take a broader perspective can have a hugely outsized effect on how everyone else experiences the discussion.
A clarification on Just Stop Oil: they never threw paint at paintings, just soup. They put paint on a sculpture, which can be wiped off. The painting they “smashed,” it was only the glass casing of it.
Many curators are largely ok with Just Stop Oil because they realize their tactics don’t involve *actually* damaging the art (which would put the protesters at greater legal risk), instead elevating it to play a role in raising awareness of, as you said, subtle issues missed by the legal status quo — which is what a lot of good art is actually for.
Their acts of protest are arguably quite art literate, and could be construed as advancing art, or even being works of art themselves.
Well mostly because the Museum staff are ideological allies of the protestors. Museum staffs won't let a lot of Christian groups protest abortion by throwing soup at their paintings. Basic friend/enemy distinction at work.
Yes but isn’t it telling whose side the art world is on? People who actually care about art?
The art world is bigger than these wannabe performance artists who have made the overall museum experience significantly worse for nearly everyone.
"The art world" is made up of a combination of trust fund babies on one hand, and people who are demonstrably terrible at making rational career decisions on the other.
The damage Just Stop Oil has done to museums is devastating to patrons .You now have to wait in an hour-long security line to get into The National Gallery. Basically, they did to museums what Al Queda did to our airports.
That's a very recent change that came with growing pains. It sounds like they've somewhat fixed it: https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2024/10/revised-security-measures-at-national-gallery.html
That's not "growing pains", it's pain associated with one very specific group that invented a brand new way of being awful that nobody had ever considered before.
For centuries we've had paintings hanging in galleries and while the galleries understood that theft might happen they never needed to worry about vandalism. Now they do, and our lives are all worse, and the oil industry is unaffected (or perhaps more sympathetic than it otherwise would be).
Those attacks didn't do severe damage simply by luck. The soup didn't damage the Van Gogh because it was covered by glass, otherwise you try cleaning tomato soup off thick impasto without doing damage, just ask an art restorer.
Smashing the glass over the painting could have resulted in tears and embedded shards in the canvas. Again, we're just lucky these little brats are all ineffective idiots.
https://museumsandheritage.com/advisor/posts/national-gallery-painting-examined-by-conservators-after-damage-from-protest/
Other paintings *have* been damaged by glass smashing.
The sculpture was lucky, again because it was inside a glass case. These people are idiots, from privileged backgrounds (just listen to the accent of the purple-haired missy with the soup throwing) and who can afford to waste time and money and effort doing these symbolic protests before going back to their well-heeled lifestyles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTdquzu-BXg
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/climate-activists-smear-paint-edgar-degas-sculpture-case-180982078/
So to clarify your position, you’re arguing it’s just a coincidence that they haven’t actually damaged art yet, despite their best efforts to do so, or is it that they’ve taken steps not to destroy art but you feel they are insufficient?
I just wanted to note that I published Scott's point about Trump as far group two months before he did:
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/trump-as-fargroup
Using, of course, ideas I got from him.
Well said. I can't disagree with any of it. Well, I suppose I could quibble a bit whether the Republican part is really stronger or more cohesive than the Democrats, but that's really beside the point.
So I'll vote for whoever the libertarian candidate is, not knowing or caring whether he's "really" libertarian in any meaningful sense. For the third time.
While I ultimately voted for the malarial mawkish tzar, your argument against left-wing illiberal authoritarianism is pathetically weak. There may be social headwinds, but not political ones. Harvard had no issue driving through the loophole Roberts left them. Do you think granting agencies will be removing their discriminatory requirements because they saw the light on their own?
Thankfully, VPs tend to be powerless unless disaster strikes (ahem), but Tim Walz has come out harder against freedom and free speech than Trump ever has. My hope, and I assume yours, is that Harris is in good health, no funny aneurisms in hiding, and Walz's age keeps him out of following her up.
I'm surprised that most of the conversation is focused on the 2020 election, when fraud is already a serious issue in the current election. If you're going to base your vote on which side seems to value election integrity and the democratic process more, I think it would be a good idea to get up to date on current events.
> Surely [oil companies are] worse than ruining one picture, which can probably be restored later anyway.
Just stop oil didn't ruin any pictures. They intentionally only targeted paintings they knew to be behind glass. I don't support Ithem, but they should be represented fairly.
They didn't ruin any paintings, but they ruined entire museums. The security line to get into the National Gallery in London is now worse than the ones at Heathrow.
I didn't know this. Thank you for giving the full picture.
That seems like a National Gallery problem? If no one ever ruined or tried to ruin any of their paintings, and in response they increased security so much that now they ruined their own museum, maybe they should be less bad at their job.
Pretty sure that's an oxymoron, though I'm no endocrinologist.
Thank you, I feel like the propaganda on this topic has hidden that fact and most people don't realize it.
The point is that there is no justification for disruptive public protests. Unless there is justification, then it's okay.
That's a lot of words for "status reasons." I recognize it, as I feel it. And I'm watching a friend go through these verbal perambulations and rationalizations as we speak.
It's funny, though, that neither one of us is a psychiatrist, and we recognize it. You, apparently, do not.
I think this is the most honest comment of a Trump supporter. It's been about class for a long time, and it's not the capitalist class vs the worker class. It's the literate class vs the illiterate class. It's the people that can deal with a complex world both technologically and socially vs people that just want to scream stop and go back to simpler times because they can't catch up with the modern demands.
This divide isn’t about “literate” vs. “illiterate” but about risk management and preserving stability mechanisms that support everyday life. Many Trump supporters prioritize policies that manage risk and avoid irreversible consequences in areas like border security, economic stability, and international relations. Their perspective isn’t anti-progress but pro-stability, focused on ensuring changes are measured and do not threaten the foundational elements of society.
Framing this as a “class conflict” ignores that many Trump supporters are educated, tech-savvy, and professionally accomplished. They recognize the need for progress but question policies that, in their view, destabilize key institutions and systems without adequate safeguards. This isn’t about wanting simplicity—it’s about managing risks responsibly to avoid potentially irreversible disruptions to economic and social stability.
Why do you feel the need to project that he doesn't believe what he espouses? It's a pathetic rhetorical device. Either engage with the arguments at face value, or don't.
It's a fair question! And it might be projection.
But I feel comfortable making that claim because the lack of any discussion of this valence, even to dismiss it, is such a glaring lacunae.
How nice that you feel comfortable to project and justify it because... his endorsement not an open discussion? Are you joking? Or are you saying "Scott didn't use enough words"?
Either way, I would not have doubled down on that.
It is nice for me to be comfortable in my own skin on the internet. Thanks!
But you misunderstand. Perhaps I am a bad communicator?
My point is the utter lack of discussion of status factors is a glaring hole. This is *obviously* an important issue in this particular choice. For *everyone*. So it seems to me that dog is not barking really, really loudly.
He didn't talk about status, and therefore you're justified in saying he's merely motivated by status. Got it.
"""Put this way, you could argue: okay, January 6 was bad. But it was like a ten-year-old child's idea of authoritarianism. You seize power by getting a bunch of people to zerg rush the opposing politicians and beat them up until they declare you in charge. Too bad you were foiled by a locked door, you'll get them next time. I won't claim this strategy has never successfully taken over a government, because history is long and weird. But I can't think of any examples."""
I'm not worried about Trump or January 6, but it pleases me to be the 15th or 20th commenter to reply with examples.
1789 Bastille was mostly spontaneous.
1789 Women's March on Versailles was spontaneous.
1792 August, the Tuileries Palace riot, was mostly spontaneous.
1792 September was a planned coup but with a large spontaneous riotous element.
1794 End of the Committee of Public Safety was definitely a planned thing in the convention halls, but quickly spun out of control.
1830 Fall of Charles X was spontaneous reaction to repression, and caught the political class flat footed for a day.
1848 Fall of his successor Louis Philippe was spontaneous and again caught the political class flat footed. This was the absolute most classic case of what you're talking about: *several times*, a legislative body was deliberating, and a mob just stormed the building and forced a new government. If I remember correctly, this actually happened twice in the same day.
1848 Berlin was spontaneous.
1848 Vienna was spontaneous.
1848 Budapest was spontaneous and caught the political class (themselves trying to have an orderly revolution-of-devolution) flat footed.
1871 Paris Commune was quite literally a mistake, when the powers-that-be tried to seize the guns, failed for lack of horses, and the city woke up and rioted to control le buildings. EDIT: I partially retract this one, because what happened in the riot is the National Guard took over the buildings. But. The National Guard, at that time, was primarily composed of *new recruit* socialist working class citizens who had just gone about electing their own officers. It was a sort of lightly organized force recently distilled from the masses.
1905 Russian Revolution was a spontaneous set of riots that escalated to full blown, well, Russian Revolution.
1917 February was spontaneous.
1917 October was not spontaneous, but Lenin was almost caught flat footed, knew he was about the miss the spontaneous wave, and raced HARD to get out in front of it.
Is there really a positive case to be made for Jill Stein? I'm reading her website, and she sounds like a very radical woke leftist. She's stood in as more or less a protest vote for those one the left who don't want to vote for the Democratic candidate, but do people even realize what they are voting for when they vote for Stein? Are you just endorsing her as a protest vote and ignoring her platform?
More generally, have Green parties around the world done more good than harm? My sense is they generally stand in the way of getting good things done. Can someone make a positive case for them?
I always saw her vote as more of a "the Democrats aren't leftist enough" kind of vote. Like, yes, it's a protest, but the direction of the protest is much more specific. I don't know that many Stein voters care about the specific details of her platform, so much that it's incontrovertibly further left than Harris or other mainstream Democrats.
That's my sense too, so why is Scott endorsing her? I don't think he believes anything close to "the Democrats aren't left enough."
I'm failing my own personal test of character by even commenting on this post after I swore not bother trying to talk to random people on the internet about politics ever again (this comment section is a pretty good example of how that's impossible). But as long as I've lost and am in my feelings: are all the people who are insisting Trump won't be as bad as he is actively saying he wants to be at every rally willing to commit to apologizing if they are wrong about this? Meaning if manages to get his way and engages in mass deportations, or starts throwing political dissidents in jail, or finds a way to justify running for a third term or making himself president for life, would anyone currently supporting him be willing to say that were those conditions to manifest they made a bad call?
I'm not fear-mongering, its perfectly rational to say "I see all the indicators that my candidate wants to do destructive illiberal things in addition to the policies I want, and I'm gambling that the positive things will come about and the negative things won't." But the corollary of that is that you are committing to say "I was wrong in my assessment of the odds that things would get this bad and if I'd known I would have done something differently." Which is the thing I suspect no one is actually willing to do. All the people who are making arguments that things won't really be allowed to get that bad will immediately pivot to saying "actually these bad things are really just fine" if they happens, and that's the part that really drives me insane.
Rational people (or so I'm told) are supposed to update their priors based on new information, but we've been bombarded with information for years on how Trump has no respect for democratic norms or rule of law or anything other than naked power, and how his team has been planning how they would consolidate power and work more ruthlessly and efficiently in a second term than the first time around, and it doesn't seem to have affected any of the pro-Trump rationalists calculations, which makes me suspect that no evidence of Trump's illiberalism would make them update to "maybe Trump is too dangerous." Which means either they are A) bad rationalists or B) their ultimate priorities are in a different place than where they are pretending and they don't worry much about illiberalism in their calculations.
I wouldn't expect to get any takers with your current approach. You're equating facets of real authoritarianism with a policy proposal (that has majority support) of simply enforcing existing laws. If you want a calm rationalist meta-cognition discussion about politics, you have to keep your policy preferences out of it.
He's said he wants to deport more people than all current data suggests are in the United States illegally. Is that a rational policy proposal to you?
That sounds like a partisan gotcha talking point to me, and I have a feeling its factual basis is that one time he threw a number out off the top of his head while going off-teleprompter at a rally.
Look, your original points are interesting and worth being mulled over, and my objection is really just a single-detail quibble. The problem is that you need to do this sort of thing with a really pure mind, or else you're just trying (probably without even realizing) to use lofty rationalist language to sneakily sway people based on your political preferences, rather than actually improving anyone's thought process detached from the content. And I'm voting for Harris, in case that helps defuse suspicion about my motives here.
I mean, he said it in a Times interview, his campaign has repeated numbers multiple times, the consequences of having a totally distorted view both of the number of illegal immigrants present in the country and the huge negative social and economic costs of mass deportation all seem quite predictable to me and the sort of thing I would like both leaders and their supporters to hold themselves accountable for .
But I take your point, I'm biased about this stuff. I think everyone is, its too big and all-prevailing to not have some kind of emotional response to. Maybe your emotional response is oversimplifying the narrative and treating anything really insane Trump has insisted he wants as Blue propaganda. Mine is certainly to fixate, but to be clear I'm not fixated on the bad things Trump wants to do, I'm fixated on the way his supporters justify voting for him when they also think that stuff is bad. The ones who clearly have some kind of cult complex where they think he's a god actually make the most sense to me. Its crazy but its a well-observed, documentable kind of crazy. The ones who hate Democrats for cultural reasons and don't pay that much attention to what Trump actually says also make sense to me, its Democrats fault for becoming so culturally arcane no one without a college degree feels they belong in the party anymore. But the ones who say things like "sure he says he's prepared to turn the military on people who protest his actions if necessary and that would be awful, but I don't think anyone in the military would really let him do that" are the ones who to me are committing a grave and obvious moral failing even by their own internal worldview. They are basically relying on someone else to do the thing its their final responsibility to do, which is inhibit the illiberal tendencies of their government.
Somehow getting through an entire post on the Latin Americanization of US politics, here supposedly exemplified by Trump (unfairly; prosecuting political opponents and threatening tech companies into compliance have been feature of Biden/Harris since before they were in office), without mentioning immigration once. If I didn't know you, I would've assumed this was a Straussian Trump endorsement.
What's the point of mentioning immigration? The Dems are tough on borders now too, the candidates barely differ on their policies there. Only difference is how inflammatory their rhetoric on the topic is.
Democrats aren't trying to deport every illegal immigrant.
The Dems SAY they are tough on borders now, since they found out it was an actual issue people cared about. I get the impression they want as many immigrants coming in as possible, whether legally or not, because it suits their political purposes.
I mean you get that impression because of a gigantic media apparatus designed from the bottom up to manipulate your impressions about the parties, one half of which is trying to give you that specific impression. What have Democratic elected officials actually *done* in the last year which supports that belief?
Right, the immunity is relevant to Bill. I agree that Trump should have prosecuted Hillary. But the fact that he failed to do so seems to make the case that the uneven-ness seems to be his fault, as well as the fault of many, many others over time.
Thus, I see the Trump prosecutions as positive, and hopefully the first step of many where political figures are prosecuted for crimes. Add Menéndez, Cuomo, Adams, hopefully with more to come.
I think the norm that was started with pardoning Nixon was a bad norm, and instead the norm should be "enforce the law."
I will vote Trump while holding my nose.
+1 Trump has my vote. Im ignoring the moral panic and looking at the outcomes of two nominees. It's clear which one is better when you ignore the controversies, rhetoric, and just focus on policy outcomes for Americans.
It would be a lot harder to prosecute Trump if he stopped committing obvious crimes and leaving tons of evidence about them.
It's pretty easy to prosecute Trump once you decide you have to prosecute him for something. Anything.
'Anything' meaning 'his multitude of obvious crimes'.
If you decided you had to prosecute Harris for something, what would it be? Does she also have a half dozen equally obvious and severe crimes that you could prosecute her for if you wanted to?
It's pretty easy to prosecute someone once you decide you have to prosecute him for something. Anything.
I'm not close enough to Harris to know of anything for which she could be prosecuted, but "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." Anyone these days who comes to high office, such as Vice President, is not the most honest of men.
I don't buy it.
Trump's been getting accused of rape and bragging about assaulting women for decades, and his shady business practices and creative accounting have been well known for a similar period. His intimidating call to 'find more votes' was public years before anyone decided to prosecute, and his public and behind-the-scenes involvement in Jan 6th was on every station the moment it happened.
You cannot with an honest face say that there is exactly as much legal ammunition against Harris and we just don't know what it is because no one decided to prosecute her yet. We knew most of the evidence against Trump long before anyone decided to prosecute, and we knew about his criminality and propensities long before he ran for President. He's an extreme outlier for American presidents in terms of obvious public-facing law-breaking across multiple domains and schemes.
You can say you have faith that anyone who makes it to VP must be dirty so Harris must have hidden crimes. I think that's silly motivated reasoning, but sure, lets grant it as true. The fact that the public has never heard of any of those crimes is sufficient reason to expect her to be unlikely to get prosecuted, relative to someone where the public has heard their crimes and seen the evidence.
My main point is that the Democrats have been trying to hang crimes on Trump since he was elected. They selected the person, now to find the crimes. I don't want to argue the actual merits of Trumps judicial proceedings here, for it would take a lot of research and I doubt either of us will be convinced of much, since the "trials" have been in the public eye for so long.
I agree there can't be exactly as much legal ammunition against both, but that isn't really the point. The felonies for which Trump was convicted is a reasonable example: they could (should: opinion-based) have been tried as misdemeanors. The merits of the case aren't relevant. It's the PERSON who is on trial, and that in itself is a threat to democracy.
He didn't endorse Democrats at large. He endorsed Kamala Harris. The difference is key.
If you're going to hold Harris responsible for the overreaches of Democratic governors (who were the ones responsible for many of the things you complain about), then you could equally tie Trump to the many overreaches of Republican governors. That way lies madness and blind partisan anger.
Yes, I think it's appropriate for a rationalist to try to make those distinctions.
Banned for this comment.
>Forget whether eliminating the filibuster should really count as a threat to democracy;
Of course, I understand why Scott declines to rule on the merits here: it's irrelevant to the argument he's making, whereas the fact that Trump wants to do it too is relevant.
However, I think that it's important to point out the obvious here. Eliminating the filibuster, whether a Democrat or Republican legislature does it, is very, very, very obviously not even remotely a threat to democracy. It's simply a different procedural way of doing legislative representative democracy. Maybe a better one (because efficiency), maybe a worse one (because hasty decisions, inflamed passions, instability), but it simply would make it easier and quicker for a legislative majority to pass bills. And neither Harris nor Trump has proposed eliminating it in a non-democratic manner.
The reason I think it's important to point out is that it's a great example of the kind of bizarre logic that I keep seeing people resort to when making the case for Trump versus Harris, which amounts to "sure, Trump literally tried to overturn an election he obviously lost, but Harris proposes to accomplish a thing I don't like by encouraging Congress to pass a bill which she would then sign--which, because I don't like it, is precisely as bad!"
The filibuster is what prevents the majority from steamrolling over the minority, like they did in 2010 for the Affordable Care Act, which had a filibuster-proof voting block. The only ones that want filibusters eliminated are the majority party, whichever that is.
Majority rules, eh? You mean, like in a democracy?
So democracy is a perfect form of government?
What?
Democracy with a filibuster is better than democracy without, so that the minority cannot be steamrolled by the majority.
Majority rule, eh? You mean like in a democracy?
That's right, the legal majority as specified in the constitution should not allowed to decide anything because a procedural rule is no longer enforced as of 18 whatever.
This is a smart, logical way to run our government and will surely never backfire constantly.
There's nothing incompatible with democracy and 51% of people tyrannizing the other 49%. Procedures that make it so a larger majority is required act as a check against majority tyranny. It's part of a trade off between representing the will of the people and protecting the rights of individuals and minorities. The government is slow to respond to change as a result, but that's kind of the point.
"Tyrannizing" is a deeply loaded word.
If your definition of "tyrannizing" stretches to "one half of one of the three branches of government can function without a 60% majority", then it is a wildly non-central example of tyranny, and does not come with the moral valence other forms do.
There is this negotiating strategy called "compromise" that can be used to get people to do something you want that they don't, that has been used to counter the filibuster for about 235 years.
"not be allowed to decide anything" doesn't really happen, at least not very often.
> These are the people who would spend the whole session droning on about how the first Book of Heberdazzah said King Shmog died in Beersheeba, but the second book of Heberdazzah said King Shmog died in Jerusalem, so the whole thing was a flimsy tower of cards that no sane person could possibly believe.
While annoying, to the best of my knowledge this problem occurs just as much in unimpeachably secular historical documents.
The only thing this argument will really prove is that Heberdazzah can't be the unerring word of God. The text provides strong support for the Beersheba theory and for the Jerusalem theory, considered relative to other locations.
Kamala Harris was not voted by a single democrat. She was selected by a cabal of DNC. This is about as anti-democracy as anything trump is accused of.
Elizabeth Warren said that the same DNC rigged the nomination process in 2016. She went on record and said this openly on TV, google it on YouTube.
The DNC is actively anti-democratic and everything you think Trump is supposed to be. In addition the coordinated legal attack against trump is beyond forgiveness. I can’t vote for that, so I will plug my nose and vote trump and hope he wins.
Political parties aren't democracies, the government is a democracy.
Parties can put their name next to any candidates they want, they are private entities. The people get to vote during the actual election.
The idea that the people should get to choose what candidates are on the ballot as well as which candidate wins is little more than the parties sucking up to their members and trying to look good for donations. It has some benefits, but also massive drawbacks that have screwed us over, because the primary process is designed as a show and spectacle rather than a method to accurately choose the best candidate.
Voters are in no way obliged to a primary process, and it's nothing like anti-democratic to skip it. The government is Democratic, and we vote on who runs that.
1) if the DNC is willing to install their candidate of choice and do whatever it takes to do it, it’s guaranteed they will also do whatever they can do to ensure they will maintain power. Case in point: a) censoring companies and spreading their propaganda without opposition b) coordinating a criminal attack against trump with the most absurd “crimes” possible to try to keep him out of the election. Both failed so far but next time up they will do a better job.
2) if trump did what the DNC did, ie have himself selected by the GOP instead of being voted for by citizens, I guarantee you would be up in arms.
The idea that the DNC can engage in undemocratic behavior before the election but that they will clean up their act for the election is absolute delusion.
1 is like arguing that if a supermarket decides to stop carrying your brand of toothpaste, obviously that means they will break into your house and steal your toothpaste too. One of these is the normal and legitimate functioning of their own organization, the other is a bizarre and unprecedented crime.
1a. is nonsense of course, people are half-remembering some implications that they tried to suppress anti-vax rhetoric during the pandemic. Whether you think it was ok to do that or not, they were trying to save lives during a public health emergency. Nothing out there about them trying to win elections through censorship, that's an entirely different thing that people are just making up. Especially ironic that you say 'without opposition' when the owner of Twitter has declared fro Trump, is breaking laws to give away millions to buy votes for him, simply deactivates or takes over accounts supporting Harris whenever he feels like it, and pushes pro-Trump content to users every day. 'No opposition'.
1b. If Trump doesn't want to be tried for crimes he should stop doing so many obvious crimes and leaving so much evidence of them in the public eye. We've never had a president this obviously criminal in teh past, we don't know whether the prosecutions are unprecedented because the situation has an n of 1. But even a moment of investigation reveals that the prosecutions are *not* coordinated, and Biden actively held federal prosecutors back from prosecuting Trump for years.
2. I assure you I would no, I would be overjoyed that they have ditched the idiot process that gives us celebrities disaster cases like Trump in the first place. I've been making arguments against the primary system for over a decade now.
I might still attack their choice in candidate if I didn't like them, like you are. But I wouldn't make up bad reasons to do it.
100%
As a European, I'm very surprised to learn that all political parties in my country are anti-democratic since none of them do open primaries.
She was on the ballot with Biden though?
If ACX endorses Harris, Oliver or Stein, JD Vance endorses ACX.
At least according to the guys over at The Motte:
https://www.themotte.org/post/1222/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week
https://x.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1852088476633583800
Okay, feck it: I'm convinced now. We're living in the simulation 😁
I think this steals at least one substantial base. But more than that, it feels entirely hysterical.
Claiming that the actions of the Jan 6 rioters were guided or directed or planned or, heck, even *wanted* by Trump is, as far as I can tell, not supported by anything other than pure projection. Did he do stupid challenges and set up alternate slates of electors? Yeah. That was dumb. But not criminal. Is there any substantial evidence that he had any significant hand in the people storming the capitol, or even *stood to gain anything* by their doing so (ie that their actions had any chance of net benefit for him, considering the inevitable blowback for having done so)? No.
But more than that. I will draw my personal line in the sand, my own prediction. If Trump is elected, the only measure by which he will be more Authoritarian than the status quo ante is in "number of committed Democrats in power". Everything else will be in the noise.
More than even that--I will predict that there is a *much* larger chance that Harris, if elected, will be, by any sane measure, more authoritarian. Why do I think so? Compare the first Trump administration to the Biden/Harris administration. The latter has *already* imposed increasing (monotonically so) amounts of concerted government power to deny rights and to increase concentration of power in federal hands. The former...had its ups and downs, but generally *decreased* the amount of concerted government power.
And even worst case, a president cannot (physically) rule alone. As we saw under the first administration, it's fairly easy for lower-level bureaucrats to stymie anything the political people want. And no, there is ~0% chance he will be able to change that. And ~100% chance that they will oppose any big initiatives.
So overall, no. Trump is way less of a threat to anything than Harris is, except the political power desires of Democrats and establishment-types. Which is, in their eyes, the same as evil. Democracy === rule by Democrats. That and nothing more. Anything that threatens the Democratic establishment === a threat to Democracy. And that's utter BS.
> The latter has *already* imposed increasing (monotonically so) amounts of concerted government power to deny rights and to increase concentration of power in federal hands.
Such as? Can you lay anything out in concrete rather than ambiguous terms?
Just responding to the very first point, I think your model of the elector slate scheme is incorrect. I recommend taking a look at the Eastman memos (https://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2021/images/09/20/eastman.memo.pdf). It's pretty short.
A quick summary of the scheme:
- manufacture fraud claims in blue swing states
- use the fraud claims to declare both the fake and the real elector slates illegitimate and throw out both
- declare Trump winner of the majority of remaining electors
As I've said elsewhere, this is about equivalent to "only count the ballots that have Trump on them and throw out the others". It's incredibly dangerous, and would have at the least caused a constitutional crisis if Pence were a weaker man.
I am generally hesitant to infer someone's (unstated) positions via the Internet, but to me it is rather obvious that the post with this exact title would be up here on this very day no matter what in most realities where the Republican party has anyone but the most inoffensive of RINOs as its candidate.
Consider this counterfactual:
Assume Trump suddenly had a heart attack sometime in 2022 and dropped dead. The GOP heaved a sigh of relief, purged the MAGA fraction and had a competitive primary. The eventual winner was a right-wing culture warrior who appeals to the base, let's say a Ron DeSantis type. This nominee runs on a somewhat populist platform, but is moderately competent, doesn't say anything particularly insane and is not an aspiring authoritarian. Meanwhile the Dem party acts exactly the same as in our reality, you have the candidate swap, the price controls in the platform, the whole 9 yards. Would anyone believe that on October 30, 2024 a post would appear on here with the title "ACX endorses DeSantis"? Does Scott himself even believe it?
I think that, at the end of the day, Scott very much wants to project the image – to all, including himself – of a rational voter, who picks his candidates based on the merits of their platform and general competency. But alas, it just isn't true. He (like many others!) votes primarily on values, and, being Blue Tribe-adjacent in values, he just couldn't stomach voting for a committed Red Triber. The ACX voting guides provide ample evidence of that – the final lists, if not necessarily "vote blue, no matter who", still end up like 80% Democrat every time. And in California too, where D governance in the recent years ranged from unimpressive to outright disastrous.
What is left unsaid in the post is that no real right-wing candidate for President is getting ACX's endorsement no matter how bad the Democratic party gets. Trump may be uniquely bad as a candidate, and I think that could be a valid argument, but you have to be pretty delusional to think that ACX would support a GOP candidate if Trump was for some reason not running. Scott may be able to bedgrudgingly stomach a Nikki Haley-esque RINO (still wouldn't outright endorse her, probably!) against Harris, but never a real right-winger. The values are just too alien.
The ACX post from the alternate reality where Trump is no longer a factor and DeSantis is the candidate would feature the exact same title, a lot of griping about how bad the Democratic party has gotten, but would invariably end with some version of "but ultimately a vote for DeSantis would be detrimental for The Heart of Our Nation because he doesn't like trans people and illegal immigration, so vote Harris, I guess. Sorry, folks, I don't like it either!"
Does RINO just mean “Trump aligned”? If so, it makes sense that someone opposed to Trump and his ways would also be opposed to non-RINO Republicans.
It is easily for me to imagine the democrats putting forward a candidate crazy enough (ie crazier than Harris) that Scott would endorse Haley.
RINO refers to a Republican in name only. Here by RINO I mean a centre-right politician, who doesn't dangle red meat in front of the Republican base, is moderate on social issues, and mostly focuses on economics. (So, Haley or Jeb! circa 2016)
Which is not at all what the GOP electorate wants, as shown by Haley's performance, but is the only type of Republican that doesn't inspire visceral disgust from self-anointed rational centrists/"independent voters" like Scott. And he'd still probably take a dumb and corrupt Generic Dem like Newsom before Haley if push came to shove in the general election.
Are Romney or McCain RINOs?
McCain – absolutely, Romney – probably not, at least not in 2012. Him being an overt and committed Mormon probably disqualifies his from being one.
Republicans are supposedly the religious party? An actual religious Romney is RINO but bibles-for-cash Trump is not?
You may have misread my previous post – in it I specifically say that Romney is not a RINO due to his commitment to his religious beliefs.
RINO should mean someone without actual political convictions, who is currently Republican because it will be best for them, whether the most profitable, advancing in their career, etc.
I have a friend who leans left, and he said he would definitely be voting Republican this election...if it were anyone but Trump. He said he certainly would have voted for Haley if she had won the nomination.
I don't think that's true, it just looks that way because both parties move with the voters. Let's say I'm willing to vote Republican when the Republican wins by 2% - so if the Republican gets 51% of the votes compared to the Democrats' 49%, I'm gonna vote with the Republicans. Anything closer than that, I'm voting Democrat. Thus, the Democrats can only afford to move to the left such that it alienates the most moderate 2% of the country before I too defect to the Republican Party.
I was born in 1991 - there have been eight Presidential elections since then. Over those elections, the Republicans have won 51-49 or more in exactly one election -- 2004. Thus I will have voted for the Democrats in 7 elections, and once for the Republicans. And I'm in the most moderate 2% of the country!
There are plenty of Democrats I won't vote for - but our political system makes sure they never make it to the general election.
Nobody even wants to remember when there were riots all over the country (based on completely false premises) that Harris went to visit and console a rapist who brought children to the house of his victim to harass her, and then she publicly fanned the flames of an additional huge riot that resulted in a town’s destruction. The rapist’s shooting was one of the most obviously justified police shootings right from the start. So much so that he was never charged even amongst a nationwide frenzy to charge cops with anything.
I understand hating Trump, but Harris’s actions there were worse than any single thing Trump ever did.
That sure is a reach. Nice try.
Contentless insults like this are not only against the rules, they make the case against Harris better than any other comment can.
Believe it or not, voters aren't going to forget BLM and Defund the Police, no matter how much you try to memory hole it. Every single mention of January 6 can be met only with laughter when it comes from any Democrat who supported the riots. And whenever it's raised, no one on the left seems to have any response other than ad hominem and "but...but...it's not the SAME!!!!!"
Both happened under Trump's term, so......
Also, Kamala never supported the riots.
And this is why I hate you. Sorry. Trump is a moron. He’s unfit. But every time I point this out I get this same crap. Biden got on TV and lamented the raping thug as a victim. Harris went to visit his family and told the rapist thug she was proud of him. They knew what they were doing. They knew what was happening. It directly contributed to the riots. Harris is happy to watch a country burn as long as it helps her pander to black people.
I am unaware of any rapist thug. Actually I do know one, but he is orange, not black. Who are you talking about?
This is actually something I'd love to see a deep treatment on.
It's trivial to draw lines between Trump and J6, and his reaction to it is unequivoval: he wants to pardon the people involved and retcon the whole thing into at worst a nothingburger and at best an expression of patriotic virtue.
Democrats, by contrast, have mostly run away from the riots, and have not tried to pardon the criminals involved, at least in my observation. You can find people excusing the rioters even post facto, but these are not the people running for office, and in fact are usually hostile to mainstream Dems like Harris.
So the reason people can say "it's not the same." ... is that it's not. Both J6 & the BLM riots were abominable. Only one party (the Dems) seems to agree with that, based on their rhetoric and actions in the aftermath.
I am open to counterarguments, though.
There aren't any. Trump calls it a day of love, says he would pardon everyone involved, and he was trying to host a Jan 6 awards show before cancelling it.
https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/jan-6-awards-gala-trump-bedminster-fundraiser-rcna169320
Not at all a stretch. I simply described what happened.
Here is JD Vance on Joe Rogan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRyyTAs1XY8
He is clearly anti regulatory capture, and corruption. This is a massive change from the Democrats (e.g., Nancy Pelosi's stock investments mysterious (massively) outperforming the market, due to shady connections).
There is no mystery. Most of her stocks are in tech companies and publicly available S&P top 10 companies or top x or whatever. Why are you commenting on this with no proof and seemingly no knowledge of the stock market?
I don't think that is true. I've seen Democratic / Neutral sources state that she quite significantly outperforms the stock market (i.e., vanishingly low p value of it being by chance). There are apparently even index funds that explicitly attempt to mimic her investments.
E.g., it was up 90%+ this year! And quoting from this top link found on google: "Investors are eager to monitor and track stock trades and new acquisitions by US politicians, as these transactions are often believed to be based on insider knowledge that isn’t accessible to the general public."
Source: https://finbold.com/nancy-pelosis-stock-portfolio-performance-in-2024/
JD Vance is way way more grey tribe than Kamala Harris. He references an astral codex ten post (https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/08/gay-rites-are-civil-rites/) on Joe Rogan. Despite this affiliation, Scott endorses Kamala who is about as anti-grey tribe as you can get (e.g., supporting Defund the Police, and other such actively counter-productive virtue-signalling policies).
If you want someone who will listen to the rationalists, then vote Trump and Vance.
It is a tragedy that Scott, and others endorse Kamala. How bad do the Democrats have to be for you to consider ever voting against them? I feel like people are just completely un-grounded in supporting the Democrats. The Democrats talk a big game about helping people, but in terms of what they actually do, they harm: We can't have any more of this. It is a corrosive destruction of American capital, both infrastructure and social.
See Bill Maher on exactly this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Djs2q-KtSsE&ab_channel=RealTimewithBillMaher. The left has a huge problem with endorsing (wrong and harmful) extremists. It would suite the Democrats politically to disavow the extremists, but they are fundamentally captured by the extremism.
Listen to JD Vance on Joe Rogan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRyyTAs1XY8&ab_channel=PowerfulJRE), and you see that he actually care about improving the world, unlike Kamala Harris -- who has consistently only cared about being promoted.
If JD Vance was the Presidential candidate, and not a VP who explicitly said he would do what Pence refused to (throw out the results of the 2020 election because his boss lost), then discussing his personal opinions would be worth talking about.
Cool see you in 2028
He's basically acting as the spokesman of the Trump administration right now, so I wouldn't completely dismiss what he has to say. Most importantly, it means Scott has an easy path to getting in good standing with the new administration! It'd be such a waste to pass up such an opportunity...
I can't really engage with any object-level position of JD Vance. He's supported the lie that Trump won in 2020, and he's said he would do what Mike Pence refused to (again, coup the government at Trump's behest). Whether or not this is what is truly in his heart (doubt it), it shows such a severe lack of character that he can't be trusted. He once called Donald Trump potentially "America's Hitler," and now he's sucking him off? This is a man willing to do anything for power.
Why, Chastity, why are you engaging in kink-shaming, slut-shaming, and homophobia with your attitude that oral sex is something disgraceful and degrades the person involved? Sucking people off is such a great thing, an entire month of the year is devoted to celebrating it! 😁
It's degrading to suck the cock of a morally repulsive person. Even people who do it for fun would agree with me, they just like the degradation.
And now you're anti-sex worker! Don't you know that sex work is real work? Do you think all the clients of exotic dancers, strippers, escorts, and ladies of negotiable affection are morally upright persons? Some are adulterers, even!
Sorry, but the more you preach from a moral standpoint, the more regressive and bigoted you seem.
You mischaracterize him. Watch his interview with Joe Rogan. He clearly articulates that the Democrats successfully pressuring Facebook to censure Republicans may have changed the outcome of the election, and that in that sense (in a fair election, without democrat censorship) 'Trump should have won.' He also admits that the past is the past, and that the best approach now is good policy focused campaigning.
"If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others that we needed to have multiple slates of electors and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there." - JD Vance
If he actually believes what he said on Rogan, then this statement is even more disqualifying. Because Facebook censored Republicans, we should throw out the election results? It's insane.
He references the post and completely misses the point, as discussed on reddit.
You're yet again using emotive language and projections about character and motives (which is fucking rich), not a hint about policy, data and results. Noah goes over Harris' policy ideas here: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/lets-evaluate-kamala-harris-entire
He lied about the results of the last election. He said that if he were Pence, he would have helped steal the election for Trump. That is disqualifying alone.
You mischaracterize him. Watch his interview with Joe Rogan. He clearly articulates that the Democrats successfully pressuring Facebook to censure Republicans may have changed the outcome of the election, and that in that sense (in fair election, without democrat censorship) 'Trump should have won.' He also admits that the past is the past, and that the best approach now is good policy focused campaigning.
Oh my. I don't even know how to respond.
Please reread my original comment. Even if Facebook censored Republicans, which I don't believe, you STILL cannot steal an election.
If you really believe that, the Hillary should have just stolen the election from Trump because the media was giving him wall to wall coverage every day. And Biden should steal the election in 2024 because Elon Musk made twitter a right wing platform, right?
You must apply your standards equally.
> Even if Facebook censored Republicans, which I don't believe,
Zuckerberg sent a letter to Congress laying out:
-The Biden admin pressured Facebook to censor content about covid-19, which they did.
-The FBI told Facebook to throttle the Hunter laptop story as disinformation, which they did, even though the story was legitimate.
So Facebook acted to censor anyone posting things about covid the government didn't like, and also suppressed an important news story unflattering to Biden just before the 2020 election. I guess this isn't censoring Republicans per se, but Facebook undeniably acted as a censor for Democrat interests.
https://x.com/JudiciaryGOP/status/1828201780544504064/photo/1
Censoring misinformation is a fundamentally different thing than censoring a political candidate. They did not censor Republicans. You were always able to post pro-Trump content, arguments about the tax rate, pictures of fetuses along with a quote from the bible, etc. You just cannot publish misinformation. Especially if it is dangerous.
Do you think Hamas should be able to publish a false statement that "99% of Israeli Jews want to kill everyone in Palestine" in the middle of an armed conflict? Probably not, because it is a lie and might lead to people getting killed. You would at least want a warning screen that says "This information is false," right?
Also, the Hunter Biden story was only temporarily taken down while it was being fact-checked for truth. Then it was put back up. So I do not see this as political censorship. But they did make a bad call since it was true.
This is in contrast to Elon Musk blatantly doing political censoring for Trump's campaign:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/12/x-twitter-jd-vance-leaked-file
Censoring *anything* by the federal government is in clear violation of the 1st Amendment. Case law makes it very clear that the government outsourcing activities that would be illegal for the government to do is just as illegal. This is a central pillar of American governance; censorship is not something the government should be doing. The letter also makes it clear that the information being censored was not just fact based but also included obvious satire and humor. Not that censoring "misinformation" is acceptable either, because it requires a value judgement about truth that is vulnerable to all of the systemic and tribal biases people have.
Here is the kind of inflammatory rhetoric that JD Vance spouts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRyyTAs1XY8&t=9000s&ab_channel=PowerfulJRE
Namely: "Most Americans who vote for Kamala Harris are fundamentally good people." Wow, sure seems like he's a facistist....
This is from his boss…
“I always say, we have two enemies … We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within, and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia, and all these countries
… We have some very bad people; we have some sick people, radical-left lunatics.
And it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by the National Guard—or, if really necessary, by the military.”
“The thing that’s tougher to handle are these lunatics that we have inside, like Adam Schiff,” the former president added, referring to the California Democrat running for Senate.
The guy who made up stories about Haitians eating pets and doubles down justifying it? You think trying to downplay "inflammatory rhetoric" is a good tactic?
Congrats, you found the only clip on the internet of Vance being normal. Not usual the cat and dog eating, election denying, childless cat-lady comments from him. Or the weird psycho-sexual spanking comments from Tucker Carlsen. Or the criminals and rapist lies about Mexicans. Or the pimp handlers comment about Kamala. Or the "comedian" hired to call Puerto Rico a pile of trash. Or the ..............................................................................................
Well, CV, I already know your opinions so I can discount what you claim about Vance.
As if. There are tones and tones of clips of JD Vance coming across extremely well. Look at his campaign rallies...
Watch the VP Debate (widely praised across the political aisle)
Look at this TED talk from 8 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEy-xTbcr2A&ab_channel=TED
Look at the leaked republican dossier (via, https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/twitter-banned-me). Quoting it: "Vance has previously heaped praise upon Barack Obama.
o Vance has praised Obama for offering “hope” and said he would “miss him” as
Obama was leaving office.
o Vance characterized Obama’s “guns and religion” comment as “well-
intentioned”.
• Vance has praised democratic-socialist Bernie Sanders.
o Vance said Bernie Sanders was his favorite Democrat running in the 2020
Democrat primary.
o Vance predicted that Trump was part of a political realignment that would
position Trump and Bernie Sanders on the same side in 20 years."
The current line of Democratic party attack against VD Vance is laughably divorced from reality. JD Vance's dirty secret... His main weakness (as far as the Republicans are concerned) is that he is too liberal.
Again, classic democratic party tactic: smear and tar your opponent. Who care about truth?
You are the one who does not care about truth. The conservative media only covers the bad about Harris, and never the good. You cannot come yell at me and tell me to only look at the good about Vance and not the bad.
Be honest, if any democrat said half of the crazy shit republicans say, it would be instantly disqualifying. Can you imagine Kamala Harris saying Appalachian rednecks are roasting squirrels? Or Walz saying the republican party is run by spinsters and incels? C'mon.
> Can you imagine Kamala Harris saying Appalachian rednecks are roasting squirrels?
I know a fair amount of rednecks, and if I asked them about roasting squirrels the response would be something like "yeah they're pretty tasty."
Yes but she would never be allowed to say that. She would be forced to apologize 50 times over, even if the statement were true.
Meanwhile, Trump is still running with the lie that Haitians are eating cats and dogs. Even doubling down when the original woman that posted that information on Facebook has said that she was just speculating.
If we're going just off what JD has said, hasn't he also said that Trump was unfit to lead and privately told people that he thought Trump was like Hitler? I'm willing to listen to JD if we're consistent about what we're listening to him about.
Yeah, that kinda makes me like Vance better, except for his subsequent actions....
Anybody but me interested in doing this? Select 100 comments randomly, and fact check them. We could divide up the work. To improve fairness, we could have pairs of people of opposing political views check a set of posts & meet to resolve any disagreements regarding whether a certain one contains factual errors. If they are unable to resolve their disagreement, they can pass the unjudgable post to a different pair of judges. Then post the results. To spare the individuals posting we could only post the errors found, not the posts containing them And we could analyze scores by group -- i.e. errors in posts in favor of candidate A, and posts in favor of candidate B.
I found Section IV way more relevant to my situation than I expected. I really have been holding Democrats to a much higher standard than Trump. Well done, Scott!
>Another is that Trump might threaten opponents with jail time (or simply loss of government contracts) unless they support him. I don’t know whether Jeff Bezos’ decision to shift Washington Post away from endorsing Harris was motivated by fear, but it’s a good model for the type of situation I worry about.
I find it bizarre that there's a whole section on whether the Democrats also pose an authoritarian threat that doesn't address the fact the Biden-Harris administration is already doing these things. Musk opposed them, so they cancelled Musk's Starlink contract, ramped up regulatory harassment of his companies, and awkwardly carved out holes in subsidies to exclude his products. Prosecutors are trying very hard to send Trump to prison using legal arguments that are stretched at best and would definitely not be applied under normal circumstances. They're even sending one of his supporters to prison for making a very routine election joke on Twitter.
I'd prefer to vote for you.
I do not understand why politicians seem to suck so much at politicking. Why did Trump appoint judges that overturned Roe? Why did Biden do almost nothing on the border for the first three years? Pretty sure both of these decisions were known to be extremely unpopular for a long time. They had to have known that these issues would kill them in the next election, right?
If I were to guess, Trump just let the Republican machine pick his choices for him, and right wing thinktanks are run by religious fundamentalists who are so rabidly anti-abortion that they would knowingly sacrifice Trump's re-election chances for their one pet issue.
And for Biden, maybe immigration wasn't polling as super important a few years ago, and Biden foolishly decided to use all his bargaining chips on the infrastructure bill which did not help him at all politically? Or was he afraid being too hawkish on the border would turn Latino voters against him in the next election?
Does anyone have a better explanation for either of these choices? I feel like this election would have been a blowout if either candidate did not make their respective blunder. You would think each president would cynically govern based on polling to ensure their own re-election. Why don't they? I am baffled by their choices.
Trump mostly appointed judges based on the recommendation of the Federalist Society. FedSoc is originalist, meaning they base their legal theories on the Constitution as originally intended. Roe v Wade was terrible jurisprudence because it tried to create a right to abortion out of existing rights to privacy that clearly never allowed for such a thing. Overturning it also made abortion an issue for the states, which all political issues were originally intended to be with the exception of those explicitly granted to the federal government. So that decision clearly aligned with the interests of the FedSoc judges.
Whether Trump would appoint Barrett and Kavanaugh if he could do it over again, I don't know. He doesn't seem particularly interested in abortion restriction himself, and it's an electoral loser for the right.
I mean, the conservative judges are not known for being consistent on either precedence and originalism. Seems like all the judges are partisan activist judges for the most part. But I appreciate the clarity on the Federalist Society. Trump was definitely a fool for listening to them. I will personally be voting Dem for the next 20 years on that issue alone, since my personal rights are now under threat.
"since my personal rights are now under threat"
What rights are those? Murder isn't a federal crime (except it is when other circumstances apply, such as crossing state lines or occurring on federal property, etc.). Do you, therefore, have a right to murder? States forbid murder, so you don't.
The ruling said the states must decide whether to allow abortions.
Abortion is not murder. Abortion is not allowing another being to take from your body without your permission. If your friend needs a kidney to live, are they allowed to take yours? Does their right to life overrule your right to bodily autonomy? The answer is no. And that's the standard for living, breathing, viable human beings. Not a zygote that has no consciousness, no memories, and no way to survive by itself. Abortion should be constitutionally protected.
"Murder is the unlawful killing of another human without justification or valid excuse committed with the necessary intention as defined by the law in a specific jurisdiction." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder
Abortion isn't murder if the law says it isn't, or if the zygote isn't a human. Whether a zygote is a human is up for debate. A woman has the right to choose whether to create a life, but not to end one. States should not lose the right to determine whether the abortion is justified or valid.
If your friend needs your car to live, like to drive somewhere to get medicine, do they have the right to take (steal) it? You must give permission, whether it's a car or a kidney.
Those are all your opinions, not facts. Civil rights issues like bodily autonomy, slavery, etc. should not be up to states.
Also a car is property, not part of your body. My analogy is more relevant. No one can take your kidney, and no one cannot take your blood either or occupy your uterus. NO ONE should be able to take from your body against your will. Your rights ends where my nose begins. That principle is universally recognized except when women are concerned, it seems.
Men will riot if forced to wear a mask for the duration of their shopping trip. Even if it saves real human lives. Women are forced to endure nine months of pain, suffering, harm to their bodies and brains, damage to their education and/or careers, economic setbacks for decades, and possible death because they are seen as hosts for a more important zygote. Why is so very hard to get people to see women as people and believe they deserve the same rights as everyone else?
"right wing thinktanks are run by religious fundamentalists who are so rabidly anti-abortion that they would knowingly sacrifice Trump's re-election chances for their one pet issue"
Gosh, thanks for the reminder I should visit my doctor about that rabies shot! You know, what me being rabid and all that as a pro-lifer!
Make sure you also get the other shot that helps with reading comprehension!
Glancing through the comments I see most of them agreeing, so I'll add a -1 here.
The biggest argument against Trump is authoritarianism and the Jan 6 riot. Problem is, this might be extrapolating in the wrong direction. Jan 6 was far from a planned, well-organized event - the worst you can say about Trump is that he was willing to use it. But this single event, not even of his own making, cost him more fans from his own camp than all the other years of mistakes combined. This was a signal, for both Trump and anybody inclined to go that route any time soon.
On the other hand, Democrats actually tried to put Trump in jail, repeatedly. People have tried to kill him, repeatedly. These are not tweets or rants or threats - these are actual things that happened, multiple times.
There are other examples of double standard in the post. Scott used examples of Trump fixing prices in a niche industry - but that looked like something decided somewhere in his administration, possibly as a result of political negotiation and without much input from him, if at all. Harris on the other hand - I think her first major political promise after getting the nomination was about price fixing. I agree that she was probably just latching onto the issue of the day and not giving it much thought, but still: first major campaign promise, vs a footnote in 4 years of presidency.
Responding just to the first point, I think you are modeling J6 incorrectly. I've mentioned this a bit elsewhere in this thread -- the riots are a bit of a distraction, you should be very aware of the lawfare Trump was trying behind the scenes to illegally stay in power. Take a look at the Eastman memos as a primary source: https://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2021/images/09/20/eastman.memo.pdf
It's pretty short, but a quick summary of their plan:
- manufacture claims of fraud in swing states that voted Blue
- use the fraud claims to justify throwing out the electors from that state entirely, effectively making it as if those states didn't vote at all
- use the remaining electoral votes to declare the race for Trump
This is about as close to "only count ballots with my name on it" as you can get. Incredibly illegal, incredibly dangerous. I highly recommend you update your prior that J6 (the soft-coup attempt, not the riot) was well planned, intentional, and very very bad.
Very bad, and also a good model of the kind of thing Trump might try to get away with. I have every expectation that Trump would try to claim the 22nd amendment is unconstitutional at the end of his presidency, if he were to win in a few days.
I don't think this represent's Trump's arguments well. Suppose you were playing the Super Bowl and the other team switched the venue to their home stadium and stacked the referees with their guys, would you admit you "lost" (even if you ended up scoring fewer points)?
Trump's campaign has three arguments along these lines:
1. That the media deliberately interfered in the election https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/ For example, withholding the story that Joe Biden was engaged in influence peddling, and claiming the Hunter laptop story was "Russian disinformation"
2. That multiple swing states changed their election procedure in illegal ways, either amending the written law in violation of the state constitution, or election officials disregarding the state law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_v._Pennsylvania
3. Trump followed the law. You do, in fact, have a right to protest outside, and talk to your representative at the Capitol building. He said do so "peacefully." Congressmen may in fact vote against certifying the results an election. Sometimes they even certify an alternate slate of electors, as Hawaii did in 1960. (I disagree it was warranted in 2020, but it is technically an option.)
Sorry, I don't think you read the Eastman memo. If you did, I would love an explanation of how that plan was legal.
If you start from the perspective that the election was fraudulent, there's not much to discuss except to say that many people attempted to find fraud and weren't able to, including the various courts that dismissed every case Trump filed. I think if you really believe the election system is already rigged, you just shouldn't vote at all.
The memo merely seems to describe a legal way of challenging election results, what part do you object to specifically?
Yeah, lawyers are slimy and they represent approximately half of all losses in court, but at the end of the day their job is to score those "Hail Mary pass" decisions, I can't really blame Trump for a lawyer he hired just doing his job—especially when the memo doesn't even seem to have been followed in any capacity. I'm mostly only interested in what ended up actually happening, not what lawyers were wargaming. Because as it turns out, there was a process, and some seldom-invoked parts of it were followed, but it was nonetheless followed, and it resulted in a peaceful transfer of power.
Sorry, I again think you didn't read it, or if you did you didn't read it closely. The memo explicitly calls out that what they're doing violates the ECA. They also clearly put a lot of effort into trying to put this plan into action, and got very far. If it wasn't for Pence, they would've easily created the worst constitutional crisis this country has seen in a century.
Given that you've already voted at this point, I don't really think it's worth arguing online much more. I hate to say this, but I think you need to do more research on at least the baseline facts here.
Well it's not like I'm trying to sway your vote either. I wanted to respond to what I see as a common misperception.
First, the memo specifically says the ECA is "likely unconstitutional" and I can't speak to this not having read the text, but in general I'm sympathetic to the argument that the law has limited authority to tell electors or states how they must cast their votes.
Second is even if it is constitutional, that doesn't show malice, that shows a lawyer trying to do his job, and they didn't actually do anything illegal—in contrast, there were actual election officials in 2020 who actually did illegal things in how they held their elections.
Trump not being in jail is the main reason I am voting D even through I dislike them 1% less than the Rs.
Trump openly committing the crimes he has in plain view of god and the news and everyone and the conservative establishment rejecting the evidence of their eyes and ears is so outrageous to me that it's hard to imagine what the Ds could do to outweigh it for the next couple cycles.
It actually shocked me, I thought I was unshockable after the Bush years but here we are.
It is reasonable to expect that a Harris administration will be very similar to the Biden administration. It is also reasonable to expect that a Trump second term will be very similar to his first term.
All the rest is commentary.
I don't agree that the second of these is a reasonable assumption, because Trump is likely to surround himself with more maga loyalists and fewer conventional Republicans/conservatives this time round, and he will have a much more sympathetic supreme court - I would be surprised if this time round he appoints as many people who end up declaring him to be fundamentally unfit to lead.
I do agree that a Harris administration is likely to be a bit more similar to the Biden administration, but the fact that it will probably constrained by a hostile senate and house may well lead to significantly different outcomes.
When talking about authoritarianism, I think people really need to be bringing up immigration more, for two reasons.
Firstly, whilst we might like to think that just moving to America is enough to turn someone into a freedom-loving, go-getting USAian, that doesn't seem to be true, at least not in the numbers we're seeing now. If you bring in millions of people from countries where corrupt, authoritarian quasi-dictatorships are the norm, the most likely result isn't that the newcomers spontaneously realise that Anglo-style fair play and individualism is the way to go, but that existing norms about fairness and individualism get eroded and the country as a whole becomes more inclined to tolerate corruption and authoritarianism.
Secondly, liberal norms require a very high level of social trust and cohesion to maintain. You agree to let the other side compete in free and fair elections because you trust that, if they win, they won't use their newfound power to make your own life unbearable. You don't try and get the government to micromanage every aspect of people's lives because you trust that, when left to their own devices, most people will act in a way consistent with maintaining a functional society. You don't try and fleece people outside your electoral coalition and get all their money for yourself because you recognise your political opponents as fellow members of your polity, and you believe that this membership outweighs matters of party politics. And so on.
Now, what does increased diversity do to social trust? Let's see what the data says:
"This article reviews the literature on the relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust through a narrative review and a meta-analysis of 1,001 estimates from 87 studies. The review clarifies the core concepts, highlights pertinent debates, and tests core claims from the literature on the relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust. Several results stand out from the meta-analysis. We find a statistically significant negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust across all studies." https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-polisci-052918-020708
So increasing the US' ethnic diversity will inevitably result in (further) reducing its social trust, and so (further) eroding the conditions which are necessary for the US to exist as a liberal democracy and not as an authoritarian dictatorship. And ask yourself, which of the parties is committed to increasing the US' diversity as much as possible, and which isn't? Which party is most committed to the (anti-science) position that "diversity is our strength"? And which one, therefore, will do the most to undermine the preconditions for the US' continued existence as a liberal, democratic state?
America has 200+ years of history. Have we had significant levels of immigration before?
If so, has this immigration demonstrated the outcomes you predict?
<i>If so, has this immigration demonstrated the outcomes you predict?</i>
I would argue yes, in three ways:
(1) My (admittedly unscientific) impression of reading contemporary and historical documents is that US politics is more corrupt than those of Western Europe, and have been since at least the mid-19th century.
(2) Several corrupt organisations were introduced and/or catered for immigrant communities, Tammany Hall and the Mafia being two of the more obvious examples.
(3) Racial minorities were a key part of the New Deal coalition which made US government much more centralised and controlling that it had previously been (and, if you believe Hanania, laid the groundwork for the rise of wokeness).