Yeah, this sounds right to me. I'd go so far as to say “Racist policies not related to immigration” is a bit of an “eargreyish”-style convenient-coinage.
I'd agree with this if my impression of the discourse at the time was that people anticipated that Trump would be unable to enact racist policies unrelated to immigration. If the people around you spoke and thought as though we could count on the Constitution to restrain Trump from doing anything else bad-and-race-related, that's plausibly a crux- an aspect of your experience which, if I shared it, would cause me to agree with you.
However, it's a very poor description of *my* experience. I saw quite a lot of people expressing really a lot of race-related anxiety about Trump, quite apart from immigration concerns. That means I can't really believe Scott created the category he was responding to, and it's hard for me to believe he exaggerated its prominence in the discourse.
Yeah, to be honest, from what I remembered, all the talk I heard of the possibility of Trump-sanctioned racist policies would have been immigration-based (albeit potentially so wide-ranging as to affect people who by any sane metric haven't counted as "immigrants" in two generations).
There was worry that garden-variety, non-lawful racist abuse would skyrocket as a result of Trump-supporting police *turning a blind eye* to it, and things like that, but I don't think that should be expressed as "non-immigration based Trump policies".
The context though is that immigration in the West is so far to the left compared to the rest of the world. One insightful comment a few years ago was that when people were freaking out about Le Pen, the actual most restrictive leader immigration-wise was elected in South Korea's Moon. In Asia, Japan and South Korea are extremely restrictive immigration wise and Singapore very explicitly has ethnic quotas in order to keep demographic balance. In the West, we've decided as a culture, that even if the population is to electorally choose to restrict immigration, every facet of society should fight tooth and nail to preven that from happening.
That is because the major part of progressive discourse is that only whites can be racist, so bringing up Korea or Japan is counterproductive. They don't even call Chinese racists, despite believing that they perpetrate a literal genocide.
China has refined racism to the point where they practice racism against other people whom the rest of the world calls "Chinese." That they discriminate mostly based on language, though naturally skin color plays into it as well. Did you know all white men are billionaires, want Chinese mistresses, and are enormously well-hung? My coworkers in Shanghai thought nothing of telling me these things "everyone knows" about white people. Never mind what they said about Africans.
Yeah - if they'd gone from 61% to 30% under Obama, then it would have been literally impossible to do worse by this metric, which seems pretty questionable. "Factor of change in the favorable/unfavorable ratio" seems like a natural choice; by that metric, 2008/2017/2020 ratios are 1.56 / 0.85 / 0.56, for which Obama shrinks by a factor of 1.83 and Trump by a factor of 1.51. (So the conclusion is the same in the end.)
One thing I’ve gotta mention on institutions: you gave yourself a D for guessing Trump’s impact on them, but from what people like Michael Lewis have written, Trump totally ignored/purposely tore down a lot of governmental institutions, and our terrible early response to COVID was, in large part, due to decisions Trump made in early 2017 upon taking office. So I’d give yourself a higher grade there.
The thing about this line of argumentation is that the US Covid performance, in terms of things like deaths per capita, seems to be somewhere towards the middle of the pack among Western countries, including ones that didn't have a Trump-like "institution-wrecking" figure.
Maybe the US could have been a top-tier country on Covid without Trump, maybe not, but to me, "institution-wrecking" sounds like, I don't know, canceling the CDC. There wouldn't have been a Fauci if the alarmist vision of Trump came true.
While Trump certainly didn't help matters, my sense is that a lot of the complaints about Trump on Covid are failing to account for the degree to which the President's power is limited and America's failures are mostly civilizational.
Autocrats don't announce their intentions. Instead, the hollow out institutions from within. It's not like Hitler called a press conference to announce the Final Solution, or that Putin announced plans to run phony elections.
And BTW those western countries also rely on the CDC's early warning system in China, just like they did with Ebola and Zika. That's part of the reason the CDC was the most respected in the world.
Hitler didn't call a press conference to announce the Final Solution, but the Nazi party official platform in 1920 included the sentence: "No Jew, therefore, may be a member of the nation," and the Nuremburg laws of 1935 criminialized sex or marriage with Jews and stripped them of their citizenship (after a series of run-ups to this level of prohibition from 1932-35). Not in any kind of veiled or coded way: "Marriages between Jews and citizens of German or related blood are forbidden," is the (translated) text of the law.
One particularly terrible part of liberals being desperate to equate Trump with Nazis over the last 5 or so years has been, amazingly, them downplaying all the horrible shit that the Nazis did.
America had a number of advantages over European countries—we got cases and community spread later and we’re richer—so applying a high standard is appropriate.
America is also much more obese than most of those countries, which carries high susceptibility to COVID
This also mostly ignores the development of and purchasing decisions related to the vaccine, which the US and UK have embarrassed the rest of the West regarding, and requires updating some priors on Brexit.
You really really can't compare the US with most of those nations who don't have the ability to create good statistics at all. Russia for example has far greater excess mortality than their listed Covid deaths would indicate.
I don't know, Canada had (until recently) about 3x fewer Covid deaths and 3.75x fewer cases than the U.S., even though the virus survives better in cold weather / indoors / less sunlight. And the U.S. had an anomalous period from July to September 2020 when it was affected much worse than other developed countries:
It has been argued that European countries have higher risk because their cities are packed more tightly with people, which also helps explain the severity of Covid in NYC. If this is true then Canada seems like a good point of comparison due to having similar city designs with similar suburban sprawl.
This is such a jaw-dropping question (I know you had a busy 2020, but still) that I imagine it must be setting up a very boutique interpretation of "institutional screw-ups." Like if one makes the obvious point about the disbanding of the dedicated NSC pandemic team in 2018, would it fall asunder because Trump probably would've just ignored them like he did the various fragmented agencies the authority fell to?
My main criticisms for Trump's pandemic response had been his terrible optics (ie tweeting that he didn't think masks mattered), his failure to close borders early, his failure to release stockpiles of things that states needed, and his failure to pressure the FDA to approve tests faster. Honorable mention for terrible patchwork shelter-in-place policies although I don't know if that's something he could have fixed or if states rights let them ignore the president on these kinds of things anyway. None of these seemed like the result of destroyed institutions. DJ's answers and your answer are helpful, though I'm surprised you're surprised I needed reminding about this - I don't think Michael Caputo is a household name or Trump's disbanding of the NSC pandemic team was especially covered (although in retrospect I think I had heard about it earlier).
In general I would prefer you not make fun of me for admitting ignorance and asking for information, because that disincentivizes me to to try to learn more about things I might be behind the curve on.
Multiple quotes from experts and Congress concerned that the CDC made the most sense and that the new administrative structure would politicize it, a consequence that Jared Kushner did his damnedest to explicitly realize when he claimed in a cringey press conference that it wasn't meant for the states and then had website's description altered to conform with his assessment.
I'm definitely not trying to shame you, but I gotta say I'm surprised you spoke so confidently about institutions and now plead ignorance. Michael Caputo is one of dozens of Trump operatives who sabotaged institutions throughout the government.
Some other examples:
* Trump firing FIVE inspectors general after the impeachment (the previous record for a president is one, by Obama, and the guy he fired was very old and acting bizarrely, as if he had dementia). The IG regime was created specifically in response to Nixon's abuses of power.
* EPA director Scott Pruitt being under 15(!) investigations before he finally resigned
* By the end of his term, something like five of of Trump's senior defense & intelligence appointees were "acting," meaning they were not confirmed by the Senate. One of them appears to have been involved in delaying the National Guard on January 6. Another was fired after he told the truth that the elections were not stolen. William Barr resigned for a similar reason.
* After the first impeachment, every senior official who did their Constitutional duty and testified before Congress was fired or, in the case of Vindman, denied military promotion.
* Relatedly, before the first impeachment Trump refused to allow *anyone* in his administration to submit to Congressional oversight, something no president has ever done.
* He was only the second president ever to fire an FBI director. The first was Bill Clinton firing William Sessions, and that only came after clear and convincing evidence that Sessions was using government aircraft for personal errands.
I could name at least a dozen more, but just remember: the first rule of institutional sabotage is you don't talk about institutional sabotage.
It seems to me that any good-faith attempt to fix the US's institutions (which I hope we can all agree need some serious work) would look like an attempt to "sabotage" them to anyone who doesn't want that to happen.
Not at all. In the seventies after Nixon there were massive overhauls to the FBI, the CIA, the IRS etc. The Church Committee in particular. Among other things the Congressional intelligence oversight committees were created. Before that Congress had almost zero visibility. Inspectors General were created during that period and expanded multiple times over the next 25 years.
Trump closed borders much earlier than Canada. At the time, Canadians were dumbstruck that could even be in consideration. Now in hindsight, closing them earlier was obviously the correct move, and I wish my country had not been so quick to judge it as xenophobic.
Trump didn't close borders with all countries until months in. Travel with Europe was open long after it spread there. US citizens returning were not quarantined on arrival.
I don't recall US boarders ever being closed in any meaningful sense. There were additional restrictions in place for travel from various places at various times, but "closed"? Never.
His optics were terrible, and his bully-pulpit leadership disastrous, but I think the other things he either did OK on, no worse or better than anyone else, or did OK. Borders were closed in the US pretty promptly, about the same time as they were in Italy (which had more warning), and much earlier than most other European countries -- indeed, Trump got shit for that from Democrats at the time because they thought he was trying to whip up fear and loathing of China.
There's zip he could have done about the state-level responses, as federalism gives the Feds very little control in this area (which always surprises everyone every time FEMA proves *not* to be The Avengers on steroids when natural disaster strikes). Disaster response is a state and local thing, and they hold onto that right and power quite jealously. There's *no* governor, red or blue, who would've stood for Trump, or the CDC, or any gol-darned Washington chair-polisher telling them what to do. He certainly could have organized and cheerled from DC better, and his treatment of the Federal publich health team was a disgrace, a four-alarm clusterfuck. But there's nothing at all he could have done to make Kristi Noem or Ron DeSantis lock their states down, or change Gavin Newsom's plans.
Quite honestly, I think it would have taken an *extraordinary* leader of men to get the American response much better than it was. You have only to look at all the other Western nations -- pretty much none of them did noticeably better, except those few in very unusual circumstances (e.g. Australia and New Zealand), to which contributed unique geographic situations *and* a cultural and political homogeneity that was far out of reach for any American politician. I cannot see Hillary Clinton doing any better job at the nuts and bolts, although she would certainly have presided over less of a clown-car circus at the Federal level.
Why is it *very* different? It's certainly no different than what every other country did. And would you seriously propose simply marooning every overseas American, with no warning, no recourse, for the following year? This would have been completely untenable politically. No politician at all could propose that and get the enabling legislation. For that matter, enforcement would be profoundly difficult anyway -- you have perhaps heard of our difficulties sealing the US-Mexico border, despite several hundred miles of tall fence, spotlights, barbed wire, trained guards...?
I'm pretty sure if Trump tried to close borders to citizens, we'd have another impeachment on the record. He was called racist for preventing those that have zero right to come in from coming in. I can't imagine what he'd be called if he had tried to block those that have the full legal right.
"Trump got shit for that from Democrats at the time because they thought he was trying to whip up fear and loathing of China."
Cite?
"There's zip he could have done about the state-level responses"
Well, if you define "state-level responses" as "responses that the federal government can't influence", that's true by definition. But there's absolutely more he could have done.
Seriously? While all the press has been calling him racist for having covid-based travel restrictions, and all the leftist politicians called for going to celebrate to Chinatown and hugging everybody around to show we're not like the racist Trump - it's Trump's fault alone for not doing enough to close the borders?
I think his greatest failure by far was his failure to provide leadership to the states. States cannot close their borders. Accordingly, having piecemeal shutdowns on a per-state basis is akin to having families quarantine alphabetically and in sequence for 5 weeks each.
States could at least do basic things like stop putting sick people into nursing homes and develop robust medical protocols to guard the most vulnerable instead. Not only they did not - the people who thoroughly bungled that are praised by the media and actually awarded prizes for their "leadership". And yet, it's somehow Trump's fault of leadership. There was no leadership possible with all Dem leadership hating Trump guts and doing everything possible to obstruct his every move, no matter what. He could close the borders (which he was called a racist by Dems when he tried) earlier, but he couldn't force the state govs to do anything, and if he tried, they'd probably do the opposite just to spite him.
"Not only they did not - the people who thoroughly bungled that are praised by the media and actually awarded prizes for their "leadership"."
Cite?
"There was no leadership possible with all Dem leadership hating Trump guts and doing everything possible to obstruct his every move, no matter what."
That's a bunch of paranoid victim complex bullshit. Dems didn't oppose Trump for the sake of opposing Trump, they opposed him because he had bad idea after bad idea, and pretending otherwise is bad faith propaganda used to excuse Trump's incompetence.
"He could close the borders (which he was called a racist by Dems when he tried) earlier"
Actually, I would guess they probably can. There's not a lot a state can't do on an emergency basis, when it's plausibly justified by public health concerns. Few state constitutions contain anything equivalent to the Tenth Amendment, so in principle their police power is unlimited.
I doubt the assorted supreme courts would put up with it indefinitely of course -- but then, quite a lot of the pandemic measures fall into this category. Having the governor close businesses by fiat or order people not to venture from home without a shred of enabling legislation is no less an infringement on state and Federal civil liberties than preventing Arizonans from freely crossing into California.
But I agree hardly any state *would* without the encouragement and assistance of the Federal government. If nothing else, it's impractical, they don't have border guards. But the Feds *could* have, for example, shut down nonessential passenger and airline and rail travel, and deployed Federal resources to help control highways.
Whether that would have had an impact is a very interesting question. The Chinese experience strongly suggests it might have been the single most effective thing to do, but that's a big extrapolation from murky data, so who knows?
I think calling whatever comes out of CCP "data" is giving it way too much credit. Statistics has always been a form of non-scientific fiction in communist dictatorships, and I don't see why CCP would make an exception in this particular case.
This was my major frustration throughout last spring and summer. (By Fall, I was resigned.) The plan for basically everything was, "leave it to the states", but states can't effectively squash an outbreak because they can't regulate interstate commerce! They're not good at coordinating on things like this. (This is why we have a Federal government...)
So from everything to data collection and reporting standards to testing protocols to "opening" and "closing" plans, you had a confusing mishmash of regulations and information. Coordination and leadership were utterly lacking.
I'd suggest the NSC reorganization was linked to the bad response:
>In 2018, Trump fired Tom Bossert, whose job as homeland security adviser on the NSC included coordinating the response to global pandemics. Bossert was not replaced. Last year, Rear Adm. Tim Ziemer, the NSC's senior director for global health security and biodefense, left the council and was not replaced. Dr. Luciana Borio, the NSC's director for medical and biodefense preparedness, left in May 2018 and was also not replaced.
Oh come on. What exactly would an intact NSC have done to make a damn bit of difference? We're a a full 14 months into the pandemic *now*, with enormously greater information about it, a raft of powerful vaccines, better treatment ideas, much better scientific info about how it spreads -- and what is the NSC doing that is any bit of good? Cases have been soaring in Michigan -- what has been done about that by the NSC? If they would've been effective 14 months ago, why, they should be twice as effective now, with what we've learned. I'm not seeing it.
So far as I can tell, the *only* clearly and seriously effective response to COVID was developing a vaccine extremely rapidly. (Maybe some of the public health hokey pokey -- lockdowns, mask mandates, et cetera -- was useful, and maybe it was marginal, and it will take years of research to know which it is.) That was largely a private effort, except insofar as (1) we should give credit to the NIH and friends for funding the basic research 25 years ago that made the technology available when it was needed, and (2) it probably helped that the Federal Government was willing to guarantee a huge pot of revenue to Pfizer, Moderna, J&J et cetera if they invested in the vaccine. One can give the Trump Administration some credit for that, but on the other hand it was kind of a no-brainer and enjoyed bipartisan support I imagine.
The Forbes article summarizes some WaPo reporting. The gist is: the USPS had a plan in April to mail every American household multiple reusable masks. The White House spiked it, supposedly to prevent panic. (In April!) This was back when the Surgeon General was demonstrating how to make masks out of t-shirts.
How big a difference would this have made to pandemic trajectories? I have no idea. But I think there was a lot of stuff like this.
Is this in reference to getting rid of the "pandemic prevention team" of the CDC? That's the main thing I remember people talking about along these lines.
Robert Redfield was an incompetent political sycophant? Everything I've read suggests that he was a talented and generally respected scientist and administrator, highly regarded for his previous work on HIV/AIDS. And the failings of the CDC under his tenure look like the typical failings of otherwise-competent bureaucrats subject to the Iron Law, not incompetent political sycophancy.
The pre-COVID CDC was too low profile and too far from Trump's core interests to attract Trump's attention, or to be a valuable prize for his sycophants. It looks like he may have appointed one "sycophant" when filling out the offices in 2017, Brenda Fitzgerald, but then mostly lost interest when Fitzgerald went down in a scandal a few months later.
Politico: "But since Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign official with no medical or scientific background, was installed in April as the Health and Human Services department's new spokesperson, there have been substantial efforts to align the reports with Trump's statements, including the president's claims that fears about the outbreak are overstated, or stop the reports altogether."
If Trump was appointing competent technocrats to actually *lead* the CDC, etc, and Trumpist sycophants to brag about it, then that's much less damning than the original claim that Trump was appointing the sycophants to the leadership positions.
And in any event, the media seems to have had no trouble routing around the Trumpists and going to e.g. Anthony Fauci for their messaging. Fauci having served in the same position under every president from Ronald Reagan on down, I think it's unlikely that he's anybody's sycophant (except maybe his own).
I'm no fan of Trump but Scott and others specifically pan his pandemic response. It's not clear to me what the counterfactual would be? What would a Clinton administration have done differently that would have made a material difference in the course of the pandemic? It's hard to believe that the FDA under Clinton would have been less risk-averse allowing a vaccine to be administered earlier, and it seems Macron can be seen as an ideological stand-in for Clinton, but France's experience with the pandemic hasn't been noticeably better than the US. Not to say that Trump made good decisions here, but just that it's not clear that Clinton would have made better ones.
The winning move was to close borders earlier and lock down for the six weeks or whatever that was necessary, at the start of the pandemic, to eliminate the virus. Clinton wouldn't have closed the borders earlier, so what was needed was a Super Trump of some kind.
She would've closed them sooner because she would've had better information. She would've had better information because she wouldn't have cut two thirds of the CDC observation staff in China, something Biden criticized all the way back in 2019.
The only reason the travel bans happened at all is because Trump's assistant national security advisor had backchannel contacts in China from his days as a reporter covering SARS.
I think the border thing is super hard to say. I could argue either she would have delayed even longer closing the border, since a bit part of the 2016 election was about how border control is racist. Or could have been a Nixon to China moment and the national press would have been more accepting of the "good guys" doing something like that.
A hard border-closing response would've led to a different pandemic in the US, but I'm not real convinced that it would've led to a substantially better one by the numbers. We aren't New Zealand. We weren't going to keep Coronavirus out of here forever. Canada and Mexico were both hit hard, and even if they hadn't been, you can't actually shut down the borders all that hard for all that long -- you're inevitably going to have a lot of exceptions to the rule for a variety of reasons (like citizens coming home), and something is going to break through.
Where the peaks in the graphs were would've looked different, but does pushing the first peak back a couple of months actually lead to a different result? The vulnerable people would've still been there to get infected and die.
That would do precisely nothing. US borders - especially the southern border - is hugely porous, and hoping it can be airtight closed for six weeks (why six? who knows) is pure magic fairy tale. Probably not even for six minutes. Moreover, by the time US politicians realized what is happening, enough people carrying the virus were in to make "eliminating the virus" absolutely impossible.
Similar weirdness is going on Africa: the entire *continent* is reporting a mere 4.4 million cases and 120,000 deaths (and if we leave out South Africa it's 2.9 million cases and 65,000 deaths). Nigeria (population 200 million) is reporting a mere 2,000 deaths to date, which is approximately what the US has reported for the state of Idaho (population 1.7 million).
Of course, it could be utterly hopeless reporting, or...something else. This disease has a lot of seriously weird results.
Africa heavily skews young and older people die more of COVID. Also, it's poor enough that people with preexisting conditions are probably dead of something else.
That was not the winning move and lockdowns have had no effect. The data on this is quite clear.
I have to admit I'm disappointed that a long post all about rationality and data based decision making has a comments section filled with people who believe lockdowns and masks work when you can simply look at the case curves for different countries and see that there is no correlation. Or you can read studies that do that analysis more rigorously of course, but it's not really necessary.
Trump's COVID response was actually pretty good and I have often found myself wishing we had a Trump-like politician where me and my family live in Europe. He correctly ascertained that Fauci was full of it and brought in someone a lot more rational and with better integrity, not that voters rewarded him for it. He correctly realised that it wasn't as dangerous as was being made out. He correctly understood that lockdowns have terribly severe costs. His big mistakes were when he tried to follow the advice being given by his advisors, prior to realising that they weren't actually experts in what they claimed to be. Most of the world hasn't got anywhere close to that point yet!
"you can simply look at the case curves for different countries and see that there is no correlation. Or you can read studies that do that analysis more rigorously of course, but it's not really necessary."
CIte?
"Trump's COVID response was actually pretty good"
Refusing to let a ship dock because you don't want to "increase the numbers" is pretty good? Holding superspreader event after superspreader event is pretty good? Claiming that 85% of people who wear masks get COVID is pretty good?
"He correctly ascertained that Fauci was full of it"
How so?
"and brought in someone a lot more rational and with better integrity"
Who?
"He correctly realised that it wasn't as dangerous as was being made out."
He was correct in claiming that it was no worse than the flu? Just how dangerous was it being made out and by whom?
"He correctly understood that lockdowns have terribly severe costs."
Everyone realized that.
"His big mistakes were when he tried to follow the advice being given by his advisors, prior to realising that they weren't actually experts in what they claimed to be."
Re: Trump. By “pretty good” I should probably have written better. I mean it in some very specific ways better than other countries. This does not mean good in an absolute sense. His response looks good only relative to the disastrous responses by other leaders who by and large failed to get to grips with the very poor quality of expert advice they were being given. In my eyes,Trump replacing Fauci with Atlas was a big success, one big enough to offset many other mistakes. Blaming politicians for listening to bad advice is fine, but it’s not fair to criticise them for that right at the start. No leader can be expected to understand which obscure advisors are reliable at the start of a crisis. Not understanding it after a year though, is much harder to forgive. Trump is one of very few world leaders who successfully saw through their state epidemiologist and he does deserve credit for that. Perhaps you aren’t aware that Fauci has admitted to lying to the public (for the greater good as he sees it) TWICE now - this is a pattern for him. I think any advisor who routinely admits lying in order to manipulate the public is by any definition “full of it”. And that’s just the ones he admitted. Look at his response to Texas not diverging from lockdown states - he has started to claim that in the states still in lockdown everyone is ignoring the law. That’s delusional.
WRT the specific decisions you mention, I am very skeptical about “superspreader” events because so many of them happened and again, case curves did not inflect. Most obviously the US election. That wasn’t a huge surprise because as already mentioned, in fact the data doesn’t seem to reliably support any strong connection to how much contact people have. There’s just no correlation. It’s as if what we do has no impact at all (except maybe vaccines).
Re: flu. There are IFR meta-studies that place IFR in range of a strong seasonal flu, and of course for the under 70s it’s far below, it’s not even comparable. Flu kills children and young people at rates that are statistically meaningful, COVID basically doesn’t.
Re: lockdown costs. It’s not obvious everyone does realize that. Go read the literature and try to find any discussion of costs vs benefits from epidemiologists. When I did this exercise I couldn’t find any. Even a paper that claimed to be a cost/benefit analysis declined, in the end, to actually do such a thing because the value of a life would have been controversial.
The first result I got when I google “lockdown effect on covid” was https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7293850/ “The lockdown, one of the social isolation restrictions, has been observed to prevent the COVID-19 pandemic”. So reading the studies on lockdowns does not, in fact, lead to the clear conclusion that they were ineffective. And you didn't give any support for your claim that simply looking at case curves proves your position.
“I mean it in some very specific ways better than other countries.”
If you just mean that you can cherry-pick some bad policies of other countries, that's not saying much.
“His response looks good only relative to the disastrous responses by other leaders”
But the US is one of the worst countries in the world, so no, Trump's response does not look good compared to other countries.
“In my eyes,Trump replacing Fauci with Atlas was a big success,”
How so? The death rate at the end of Atlas' tenure was more than twice what it was at the beginning. He advocated “rising up” against the government in response to COVID restrictions and claimed that masks don't work.
“Perhaps you aren’t aware that Fauci has admitted to lying to the public”
Cite? Also, Trump admitted to deliberately misrepresenting COVID to “stop panic”.
“I think any advisor who routinely admits lying in order to manipulate the public is by any definition “full of it”.”
Twice isn't “routinely”, as opposed to Trump, who DOES routinely lie.
“WRT the specific decisions you mention, I am very skeptical about “superspreader” events because so many of them happened and again, case curves did not inflect.”
Trump causing a few hundred people to get COVID isn't going to be a large effect on the overall numbers, but it's still a horrible example to set.
“in fact the data doesn’t seem to reliably support any strong connection to how much contact people have.”
That's just false.
“There are IFR meta-studies that place IFR in range of a strong seasonal flu”
Yet another claim that needs a cite. Unless you're including the 1918 pandemic in the category of “strong seasonal flu”, in which case this is wildly misleading. Also, COVID is more infectious than the flu. COVID has killed around half a million Americans in a year. That quite simply is not “basically the flu”. Period. There is no justification for claiming otherwise.
“Go read the literature and try to find any discussion of costs vs benefits from epidemiologists.”
Cost versus benefits of lockdowns is more of an economic issue than an epidemiological one. I was able to very easily find cost-benefit articles, for instance http://www.sfu.ca/~allen/LockdownReport.pdf . A cost/benefit analysis is indeed difficult to do. That just supports the idea that quantitative cost/benefit analyses not being more common is not indicative of lack of concern.
I think partly this is optics (Trump conspicuously serving as an anti-role model by denying the importance of the pandemic and of shelter-in-place measures), part of this is various little things like refusing to release federal stockpiles that should have been released, and part of this is things that yes, a Clinton administration would have gotten wrong too, but which I'm still angry about.
By the end of it, European rates will climb up higher. Barring a huge, huge disaster, not enough to get Germany to U.S. levels, but still will be closer.
I think that culture and state choices accounts for most of the differences. Your comment has zero actual policy proposals for what Trump could have copied from other nations with better results, which would have made a major impact.
That's a state-level responsibility and having a plan without the vaccines is useless, while it is fairly trivial to 'plan' if you have plenty of vaccines.
As a EU resident, I'd gladly offer a trade where we get your huge supply of vaccines and you get our 'wonderful' plans.
I didn't say anything about Europe having a better plan. But, like, Biden announced yesterday that everyone 16 and up is vaccine-eligible now. How could he have done that if it's a state level responsibility?
Can you point me to the huge production facilities at universities that produce the vaccines for free and give them to the states?
Excess mortality differs greatly inside the US and is way higher in the north-east, so you can't blame that on the federal government. The US is similar to the EU, in that states decide on lock down measures and such. I also think that culture and luck has a huge impact.
But ultimately, without large-scale vaccinations, the vaccine will just stay around for a very long time, regardless of the lock down measures. Vaccinations are the only way out.
The federal US and EU government have both taken control of vaccine procurement (including funding production facilities, signing contracts and choosing to allow/ban exports). The US is clearly doing much better both before and after Trump left office, suggesting that it wasn't Biden who fixed things. The incompetent EU decided to sign huge contracts with the very inexperienced Astra-Zeneca, who offered extremely cheap vaccines, but who happen to not be very good at scaling up. And they exported a lot of their production out of the EU, despite the EU funding these facilities. In the entire US, 16+ are now eligible. In The Netherlands, we are still vaccinating only the elderly and at-risk groups.
"Can you point me to the huge production facilities at universities that produce the vaccines for free and give them to the states?"
That rather looks like a straw man.
"Excess mortality differs greatly inside the US and is way higher in the north-east, so you can't blame that on the federal government."
That's a non sequitur, both in that it doesn't address what I said, and that the second part of the sentence doesn't follow from the first..
"The US is clearly doing much better both before and after Trump left office, suggesting that it wasn't Biden who fixed things."
If Biden isn't responsible, it's an odd coincidence that the turn around happened right around when he took office. And Trump didn't have any hesitation about taking credit for the low unemployment that happened to occur during his presidency. He can't have it both ways.
There's the institutional issues baked into the US that predate Trump, but downplaying the threat of covid (at the time when his leadership was the most necessary--early February-March) was something that Clinton very significantly wouldn't have done.
Why do you think that ? Emmanuel Macron is probably the closest thing to the Democrats Europe has to offer, and he was downplaying the threat as late as March 7. (Sadly I can't find a link in English, but he went to see a play on March 7. with the explicit intention of "Encouraging people to go out despite the crisis".
None of the things you said are true. Trump was an excellent role model. You claim he resisted social distancing and shelter-in-place measures, but here is a quote from March 11th:
"In particular, we are strongly advising that nursing homes for the elderly suspend all medically unnecessary visits. In general, older Americans should also avoid nonessential travel in crowded areas. My administration is coordinating directly with communities with the largest outbreaks, and we have issued guidance on school closures, social distancing and reducing large gatherings. Smart action today will prevent the spread of the virus tomorrow."
And you claim he denied its importance, but if that's true, why would he declare a state of emergency on March 13th:
"To unleash the full power of the federal government in this effort today, I’m officially declaring a national emergency. The action I am taking will open up access to up to $50 billion of, very importantly — very important and a large amount of money for states and territories and localities in our shared fight against this disease. And in furtherance of the order, I’m urging every state to set up emergency operation centers effectively immediately. You’re going to be hearing from some of the largest companies and greatest retailers and medical companies in the world. I’m also asking every hospital in this country to activate its emergency preparedness plan so that they can meet the needs of Americans everywhere."
He was also pro-mask. Here is two direct quotes from July 21st:
"And we’re asking everybody that when you are not able to socially distance, wear a mask. Get a mask. Whether you like the mask or not, they have an impact. They’ll have an effect and we need everything we can get."
"I carry the mask. I went into Walter Reed Hospital the other day. I have the mask right here and I carry it, and I will use it gladly, no problem with it. And I’ve said that. And I say, if you can use the mask, when you can, use the mask, if you’re close to each other, if you’re in a group. I would put it on when I’m in a group. If I’m in an elevator and there were other people with me, including like security people, it’s not their fault. They have to be in the elevator. I want to protect them also. I put on a mask. I have no problem with the masks. I view it this way. Anything that potentially can help and that certainly can potentially help is a good thing. I have no problem. I carry it. I wear it. You saw me wearing it a number of times and I’ll continue."
...
I don't believe any of this, of course. I pieced it together with Google to be a contrarian smart-ass. Any reasonable person who followed Trump can see past the self-contradiction and occasional willingness to read Presidential-sounding scripts (usually while sniffling a lot and pivoting between a left and right teleprompter) and accurately assess what he really believes and demonstrated to his followers in his off-the-cuff remarks at rallies (their new hoax!) and tweets (LIBERATE MICHIGAN). You don't have to be a super-allist to suss the difference between Rally Trump and Podium Trump; it's usually pretty clear to both his followers and his detractors. And like you said, the optics do matter.
The relevance of this example to your racial apologia is left as an exercise for the reader.
I agree, I felt Scott relied too heavily on official quotes and not enough on subtext for some of these conclusions. An example is the capitol riot. Yes, Trump did eventually tweet for his supporters to stand down. However, that was several hours after they first breached the capitol.
Trump's silence during that time is significant; his supporters had illegally broken into a government building with the 'goal' (although that word implies too much forethought) of contesting the results of an election that he lost, and he was willing to wait several hours before saying anything to stop it. This is the behavior of someone who, if not actively hoping for an insurrection, is at least open to the idea of it. I understand that Scott is looking for objectivity, but only looking at official statements misses a big part of the picture.
Perhaps I'm being uncharitable, it just seems odd to give himself a B on his coup prediction. A legitimate coup attempt would require Trump to fully commit to it and open himself up to immediate legal punishment if it failed.
Also I think the race section should have mentioned the George Floyd protests and subsequent police responses. Don't know how Scott would grade Trump's response, but at the very least it seems like one of the most important race-related events to occur during Trump's presidency.
"Any person with sufficiently biased priors can see past the obvious evidence negating them to continue believing in their priors, it's obvious, read the -- subtext". This is ridiculous, frankly you remind me of string theorists constantly trying to defend their untenable positions.
shambibble clearly said " Any reasonable person who followed Trump". That is clearly a reference to EVIDENCE, not priors, and you are being dishonest in pretending otherwise. And if Trump made pro-mask statements sometime and anti-mask statements other times, it is legitimate to characterize him as standing in the way of masks. If someone is accused of being racist, compiling a list of times where they were not actively engaged in racist activity doesn't counter the charge.
“My priors are trump is racist so anytime he makes a statement that can vaguely be interpreted as racist, it is obviously his racism and anytime he makes a statement EXPLICITLY CONDEMNING RACISM, his reasonable supporters will discard it as false propaganda, so I shall too.” Can you see the ridiculousness of your logic? If you want examples of Trump explicitly condemning racism, Scott has linked to many examples and yet examples of Trump being racist is what? “ Fine people on both sides” - He condemned white supremacy just a sentence before, so he genuinely believed that there were people who were simply protesting taking down of statues. “they are rapists, thieves and some I assume are good people” - He genuinely believes immigrants cause crime. “Shithole countries” —He believes those countries are actually bad, nothing to do with race. Can you see why your priors are so clearly binding you? I’m not going to continue this conversation if you’re just gonna argue that I’m wrong without considering any charitable explanations of Trump.
I think it's plausible that Clinton would have generally driven a more coordinated federal response. Contact tracing was never seriously attempted in the US; perhaps federal leadership here could have ringfenced infections.
Likewise, Trump actively advocated for doing less testing, because he thought that the case numbers were only going up because we were doing more testing. It seems very likely that Clinton would have pushed federal funding for more tests, and more testing would have potentially allowed us to respond quicker to the successive waves of infection.
Many other countries that locked down hard also gave generous economic stimulus; for example paying partial salaries for furloughed workers. It seems at least directionally likely that the US would have experienced less lockdown fatigue (and therefore potentially had a lower R) if at the margin fewer people were forced to work in unsafe jobs.
The US has managed to politicize mask-wearing in a way that is quite exceptional for developed countries. Unclear to what extent this would have happened without Trump, but at least directionally, he was pushing the public away from evidence-based medicine in a way that was harmful.
As you say I think it's likely that "Project Warp Speed" would have gone down differently. I can see a world where the Very Serious People oppose handing a huge check to pharma companies, and so we got fewer doses by this time -- as happened in the EU. However there is a huge difference between the Democratic establishment (i.e. Clinton's wing of the Democratic party, not AOC's) and the European left in terms of the degree of basic faith in capitalism; it doesn't seem implausible that the Democrats would be OK with a "vaccine new deal" to hire furloughed employees as contact tracers and set up a speculative fund for vaccine development. I could easily imagine the Democrats spending more on their version of "Warp Speed".
> Contact tracing was never seriously attempted in the US; perhaps federal leadership here could have ringfenced infections
The Australian experience was that contact tracing plus limited lockdowns can work if there's low (single digit) cases per day, and that contact tracing can scale to dozens of cases a day in conjunction with serious lockdown.
It's not that great beyond that point though. Contact tracing teams take time to build and scale out, and they only catch some fraction of potential infectees.
As part of a serious plan for eradication it works great, but throwing "more contact tracing" into the US coronavirus situation wouldn't make much difference.
"As part of a serious plan for eradication it works great, but throwing "more contact tracing" into the US coronavirus situation wouldn't make much difference."
Denmark, Norway, Finland, and South Korea suggest otherwise.
By almost every metric, the U.S. delivered more aid and stimulus to its citizens than did any other country. The "European countries gave out much more money" meme is a progressive lie (surprise!)
2. Of course it's impossible to know if a Clinton White House would have implemented any positive actions that would have improved things, and I think it's fair to argue that perhaps it wouldn't have. But it seems clear that a Clinton White House would have resulted in far fewer negative actions that exacerbated the pandemic in the US (nearly all of which come down to Tweeting, honestly).
Clinton's pandemic response would have been to send the VP to the Wuhan wet market to eat bat soup as a show of anti-racism and solidarity with the AAPI community.
Not necessarily. The current condition of the woke media landscape is in part a reaction to Trumpism, which indeed is one of the reasons Trumpism is bad, and the early dismissals of COVID by liberal media outlets were partly a reaction to Trump's anti-China rhetoric/policies. If Clinton had been elected in 2016, Vox in early 2020 would have looked somewhat different - exactly how different, it's hard to say.
"our terrible early response to COVID was, in large part, due to decisions Trump made in early 2017 upon taking office. So I’d give yourself a higher grade there."
I'm having a hard time reconciling "When the Capitol riots happened, with basically no links to white supremacy" with the number of subsequent arrests of people in explicitly white supremacist organisations, wearing "six million was not enough" shirts, etc.
If ten percent of a room is wearing explicitly Nazi ideology on their shirts, I am not mollified by the other 90%. Ten percent nazis is a lot.
I think 20 Nazis – and Nazis today – are shit, not a "shit fuck ton".
(Modern) Nazis, and similar extremists of all persuasions and linear directionalities, are almost entirely edgy LARP-ing; not significant threats to basically anyone.
20 human bodies are certainly scary. But even 20 physically peak humans are not really a match for the power of the American state, or the sub-governments beneath it. I think the person you are responding to does not really see Nazis as dangerous because the state has a high interest in ensuring no one uses violence except itself, even if it's slow to react.
A single human body in the right place at the right time is more than sufficient. Given the stated, explicit goals of Nazis, any proximity to the levers of power is unacceptable.
Meh – I just don't see much of any evidence that Nazis – today, in 2021 – are even as dangerous as eco-terrorists or street gangs.
I don't even consider Nazi ideology to be particularly dangerous – in part because of 'memetic allergies', but also because there are LOTS of ideologies that seem at least as dangerous.
I think it's much more likely that millions would be murdered by a 'communist' (or socialist) revolution than a Nazi 'coup'.
I would posit that 20 Nazis are not *dangerous enough that we should freak out about it* if: they represent a tiny minority of the population that has no widespread public support and no conceivable means of leveraging their way to institutional power (the Capitol riots do not count as such because, even if a non-zero fraction of them were Nazis, as far as I can tell, they were an undisciplined rabble who bumbled into the legistative building and caused some chaos, but had no hope of actually swinging the outcome of the election in the real world).
Doesn't mean you shouldn't personally avoid them if you are of one of the demographics that Nazis get het up about, but it does mean that a Nazi takeover shouldn't be anywhere near the top of your list of potential threats to the USA that you ought to expend mental energy worrying about.
_Maybe_ they're slightly more dangerous than median people (or men). But they definitely seem much less dangerous than nation-state militaries, government police, private security, { revolutionaries / freedom fighters / terrorists }, drug cartels, organized crime members, etc..
I'm not even sure Nazis – again, today – are even as dangerous as neighborhood street gangs.
Why DO you think Nazis are dangerous – again, today?
Your second paragraph is a list of groups that have never stormed the capitol to interrupt the peaceful transition of power. (Ok the British did burn the white house down, but I think that's the exception that proves the rule in this case).
My list, of Nazis, is one very visible subgroup of the group that did, stay with me here, storm the capitol to interrupt the peaceful transition of power.
That is why I think nazis are dangerous. Because they have demonstrated means, motive, and ability to storm the capitol to interrupt the peaceful transition of power. In a way that no other group in human history has outside of wartime.
That # is just wrong. There are 400 people who have actually been charged and probably somewhat more who were involved. Additionally most Nazi's know that showing up in their full regalia doesn't win any political battles.
My mistake, that shirt was from a different protest in DC by the same group just on a different day. I was actually thinking of "Camp Auschwitz" which was definitely there on the 7th.
There were also some very prominent confederate flags. I know there are plenty of people who are going to say that a confederate flag isn't a symbol of white supremacy, but it pretty literally is a symbol of white supremacy.
If you took a random sample of people displaying US flags, and a random sample of people displaying Confederate flags, I have 99% confidence than the Confederate-flag-displaying sample would contain at least 2x the proportion of white supremacists.
I think that's true, but also not really what I'm getting at. The proportions could be exactly the same, and the Confederate flag would still be the banner adopted by a group of states who were literally fighting to preserve thee institution of slavery.
Sure, but correlation is a terrible condition to use here. If you take a random sample of people displaying US flags, and a random sample of people displaying Tennessee flags, I have 99% confidence that the Tennessee-flag-displaying sample would contain at least 2x the proportion of white supremacists.
This isn't because the Tennessee flag is a hate symbol. It's because there are more white supremacists per capita in Tennessee than in the US. Similarly, the Confederate flag correlation could be adequately explained by their being more white supremacists in the former Confederacy. Which... is almost certainly true, though I was unable to find solid evidence.
The US flag wasn't adopted by a set of breakaway states who declared war specifically to defend the right of white people to own black people as property.
Wait, uh..... wasn't it, though? I mean, one could argue that the British were not interfering with the colonists' slave arrangements, and so the war wasn't over that. But it is worth noting at the US flag was adopted by a set of breakaway states who not only owned black people as property, and not only immediately encoded this state of affairs into law post-breakaway, but encoded in their *founding Constitution*
The confederate battle flag was not especially popular until the fifties, when states like my home state of Georgia started incorporating it into their state flags as an f-you to civil rights protests.
I've edited this to say "organized white supremacy", but I think my point is basically correct, and something like - if white supremacy had suddenly stopped existing in 2016, the Capitol riots probably would have happened the exactly the same way they did in our world, plus or minus a t-shirt slogan.
I would take a step back and say "What exactly is the definition of white supremacy?" These words keep getting thrown around and I'm not even sure exactly what they mean. And I know they keep getting confused with "White Nationalism" which is a different concept.
In particular, we have the distinction that 'supremacy' could mean someone thinks that white people are, as a factual matter, the best sort of people, or it could mean that someone thinks that white people ought, as a normative matter, to have special legal privileges that other people don't get.
I don't know how much overlap there is between the two groups. I suppose "White people are the best, and will tend to come out on top in any fair competition, so therefore they don't need any special privileges, just equal opportunities" is a coherent position that one could take, which, although such a person might disagree with a traditional liberal on the factual question, would mean that they would still support the same policy proposals as the traditional liberals. It's the ethnonarcissists of the "we want special privileges for our race" type that I'd be more worried about - especially since the current zeitgeist is heavily boosting various non-white ethnonarcissists, which I can only imagine will make recruiting much easier for the white ethnonarcissists.
I also have to weigh in on institutions. If you consider "faith in the accuracy and fairness of the election system" as an institution (which I do), Trump has done a *lot* of damage to that institution and may have irreparably harmed it (40%), to the point that sometime in the next 12 years, there will be another violent election-fairness protest similar in scope to January 6th, 2021.
We had 4 straight years of "Russia stole the elections. Trump is a manchurian candidate puppet president. Stacey Abrams is the real governor of Georgia. Asking to see an ID is Jim Crow." All thanks to the Resistance crowd.
The elections were a joke and will only continue to become moreso with the passage of time until the whole house of cards collapses.
Just to steel-man one particular arrow in your opponents' quiver, there, the argument is not that asking for ID (i.e., confirming the identity of voters) is a kind of voter suppression. It's that, for example, refusing to let someone vote at all, or throwing out a vote rather than making it provisional, in a situation where someone doesn't have ID, is a kind of suppression. It's a nuance that doesn't make for great soundbites, but if you're going to die on that hill you should at least be aware of the actual problem people have with these kinds of laws. Progressives don't want voter fraud to be easier, I promise.
On that last note: I don't know that I know of a single progressive who thinks voter fraud is even possible in a real sense. The response I see nearly 100% of the time to accusations of voter fraud is that we've looked for it in the past, didn't find it, and that any accusations of voter fraud are thus just super-silly.
I'm not really all that sure if it's wrong or right, but if you don't believe voter fraud ever happens in any kind of significant way, I'm not sure "wants fraud to be easier/harder" even parses - of course you don't want any kind of requirements to vote that might be effective; since voter fraud is fake and any restriction that might catch it would have collateral damage in non-fake voters not being able to vote, it's a cost without a benefit.
I suspect the causality might be the other way around here. It's not that they think voter fraud doesn't happen so they don't want voter ID, it's that they don't want voter ID to they think voter fraud doesn't happen. Motivated reasoning.
To my way of thinking, if the opportunity and motivation for fraud exist, then fraud will happen.
The main source of voter fraud is presumably people voting in the name of people that they know won't be voting for themselves. The least egregious (but still very illegal) version would be casting a vote in the name of an elderly relative who is too decrepit to vote on their own; the most egregious would be to somehow obtain a list of too-decrepit-to-vote people and send a mob of party operatives to vote for them.
Typical turnout is about 50%, so there's another 50% of voters whose identities are up for grabs. What fraction of these people will have a vote cast in their name? I'd guesstimate somewhere on the order of one in a thousand, which means 150,000 votes.
Somewhat relatedly, this recent study https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/morse/files/1p1v.pdf attempted to estimate the prevalence of double-voting and came out with an estimate of one in four thousand. This is a head-scratcher though; if one in four thousand people double-votes, then why aren't one in four thousand people getting convicted of double voting once the state tallies up the lists of all the people who have voted?
To be fair, you're not talking about conversations about voter fraud as a concept, you're talking about conversations about widespread anti-Trump voter fraud in the 2020 election, which is a very specific thing.
Ask your progressive friends if they think voter fraud is possible in the abstract and they will, I would wager, largely say "of course". Many of them will point to the handful of people who have been identified who *did* commit voter fraud in 2020 by attempting to vote twice, all of whom (to my knowledge) allocated those double votes to Mr. Trump.
But more importantly, people who have thought seriously about voters' rights issues are well-aware of the history of voter fraud in this and other countries, and I haven't talked to any who are as blind as you're implying.
I'm sure they would answer in the abstract that voter fraud is potentially an abstract thing that could potentially happen. But it's meaningless in a practical sense (and applying, of course, to the people I've talked to) for a couple reasons, in ascending order of what I think is importance:
1. They never encounter voter fraud or potential voter fraud they will acknowledge. This is pretty convoluted, of course: is it just the particular cases being particularly weak, as you say? Is it on party lines? Is it everything? This is the weak question.
2. I think the strongest evidence for them not believing in potential voter fraud is the implication of what I talked about above - there's no level of fraud-prevention I've ever seen them be OK with. This sounds like an exaggeration but I've never seen any proposed preventative measure they didn't portray as a racist plot to disempower PoC.
Bear in mind my usual personal stance is that I don't necessarily think there's a ton of voter fraud, or at least not that I could credibly point to/prove. So I'm at a similar balance point to them, or at least more similar than you'd think; I don't think we should do tons and tons of restrictive things.
Just to engage with point number two for a minute, are you saying that all progressives that you're aware of are *for* eliminating all fraud prevention measures in the voting system, such as confirming residency, preventing double-votes being counted, and paper ballot backups?
The Republicans are doing it to suppress the urban vote. Urban voters are mostly the people who don't have photo ID.
The Republicans get upset when people start pushing for everyone to have ID. If they cared about fraud, they'd be in favor of it. They are instead opposed.
Indeed, they were opposed to securing the election before the 2020 election. Mitch McConnell stopped the voting security bill in Congress. Mitch has been opposed to bills that do things like force electronic voting machines to leave paper trails.
The Mueller report document scads of evidence of collusion, and the Senate Intel report documented even more. What the Mueller report did not prove was conspiracy. However the Mueller report also says that their investigation was severely hampered by potential witnesses like Manafort and Papadopoulos lying and deleting evidence, such as text messages.
In Papadopoulos' case, his lies prevented them from being able to question Joseph Mifsud, the guy who told him Russia had Hillary's emails. Mifsud disappeared not long after Papadopoulos was arrested.
Yeah, this whataboutism is really just not true at all. I'm sure you want it to be true, but these aren't mainstream opinions. I'm a progressive. All my friends are progressive. No one I know believe any of these things as you've stated them. Here a some things that many progressives do actually believe:
1. There was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Mueller found the same thing, so this is hardly the stuff of conspiracy.
2. The purpose of voter ID laws is to make it more difficult for Democratic-leaning voter blocs to vote. There are many, many examples of Republicans explicitly admitting this, so again, not exactly a conspiracy conspiracy. Plus if you know anything about the actual history of voting in the United States, you kind of have to be trying hard to not understand what is going on with these laws.
Tell ya what. How about you go read the Mueller report's extensive documentation of ties between Trump campaign officials, surrogates, and family members and Russia and let us know what you find. And since you'll find absolutely nothing to be concerned about, spend a few minutes reflecting on how you would feel if, say, Barack Obama had done the same things. And then after concluding that there's no validity to that comparison at all, come back here and post some more insightful one-word rejoinders.
"How about you go read the Mueller report's extensive documentation of ties between Trump campaign officials, surrogates, and family members and Russia"
"Ties" are not "collusion". I'm Russian myself; I did not collude with anything.
I actually had to google blueanon. Wow, you could not be more wildly off-base on that one. I'm temperamentally pretty much the exact opposite of a conspiracy theorist. I'm also pretty good with logic, so if I see any in your posts, I will happily consider it.
Well, the purpose of things like moter-voter laws and laws that permit "farming" of ballots (where 3rd parties collect ballots en mass to deliver them) is to make it easier for Democratic-leaning voter blocs to achieve higher turnout. Not asking for IDs in a place with a massive illegal population -- e.g. California, Texas -- certainly does at least make it easier for certain kinds of fraud, too, and the direction it goes isn't hard to guess.
Both sides angle for rules that gerrymander the election to favor their voters. Duh. They have for centuries. This is nothing new, and anyone who clutches pearls at *either* side trying to skate right up to the line of illegality and/or political suicide is either dreadfully naive or a tool. That's the way politics has worked, has always worked, will always work.
The best we can do is try to set some crude and easily enforceable ground rules that hold the hanky-panky to a dull roar. Sure, in close elections some skulduggery might bump it one way or the other -- but it's a *close* election, which means the electorate is kind of divided on which way it goes anyway, so maybe it doesn't matter too much -- any amount of chance events could've tipped it, too. What we *don't* want is for *non-close* elections to be able to be pushed into bullshit outcomes, the kind of East Germany thing where 80% of the people hate the State but mirabile dictu the ruling party always gets 99% of the vote.
Well, if you don't see an ethical difference between making it easier for people to vote and making it harder for them to vote, I'm not totally sure what to say. I guess I might point out that the practical barriers and disincentives to voting fall much harder on certain demographics. I might also point out America's grotesque and ongoing history of disenfranchisement, which again is not exactly randomly distributed. (I myself only recently learned of the existence of white primaries, to take only the most egregious example.)
Also your claim about "both sides" isn't really as true as you think. Democrats are much more likely when in power in state legislatures to push for good governance approaches such as non-partisan districting boards. I am not claiming that Democrats are angels -- angels have a hard time getting elected -- but your handwaving that "everyone does it" is just a form of "dreadful naïveté" passing as insight.
(And yes, the partisan valence of much of this vote suppression flipped in the middle of the last century, but it has always been the same people getting screwed.)
Finally, the types of voter fraud you are alleging, such as non-citizens voting, has never been found at any sort of meaningful scale, despite the incredibly strong incentives that Republicans have to unearth it. It is, as they say, fake news. We are not East Germany. You might want to put down those pearls.
Alas, it's not a question in *either* case of making it easier or harder for "people" to vote -- because "people" aren't all identical. Indeed, that's the reason the Democrats favor one and the Republican favor the other. Requiring voter ID makes it harder for Democrat constituencies to vote (or so they say), but doesn't affect Republican constituencies (or so they say). Ballot farming makes it easier for Democrats to accumulate votes, while not affecting Republican voter turnout much. And so forth.
Surely you must know this. (Which makes your opening paragraph appear to me either naive or disingenuous.) There wouldn't *be* partisan rancor over the issue if it affected all "people" identically. It's precisely because it doesn't that the parties are at odds over it.
That's leaving aside the fact that, no, I do *not* in fact think making it easier for people to vote is a priori always a good thing. We could let criminals and children under 15, vote, too, or those who are mentally incompetent, or the imaginary friends of children to vote. We could let people vote as many times as they like. This would all increase the vote totals, but would not be an improvement. Votes are not of equal quality, so to speak. That's why we restrict voters to those over 18, those not serving time for felonies, et cetera. If we could further restrict the vote to people willing to spend more time and effort studying the issues and candidates, I think that would be a good thing. So, no, the proposition that "anything that makes it easier to vote is good" does not strike me as logical or healthy for the Republic, more along the lines of a mindless slogan that mistakenly identifies wider participation with more meaningful participation, which is as silly and dangerous as thinking that if two ounces of rum per person makes the party go, why then two fifths each should be even better.
Democrats are more likely to push for good governance? On what do you base that? They're just inherently better people? Something in the water they drink at conventions, is it? I'm sorry, as an unsupported assertion this doesn't even pass the laugh test with me, and you have adduced zero empirical evidence.
That there has *never* been large-scale voting fraud is an assertion that is quite ahistorical. Perhaps you want to read up on so-called "machine politics?" Ask yourself how Harry Truman got to be Senator? Look into the suspicions of what the Daley machine did for JFK in Chicago in 1960?
Perhaps what you meant to say is that you don't think it exists in the 21st century, at least on a wide scale. Maybe. But how would we know? The powerful incentives of which you speak are not by themselves sufficient to guarantee discovery. You would need money, a lot of it, and you would need to figure out some way to gain information from a segment of the population (illegal voters) that by definition are very reluctant to talk to strangers. You might as well assert that the extent of child pornography ought to be very well known, since normal people have a very strong motivation to discover any of it that might exist.
I don't myself think there *is* enough illegal voting to swing elections, personally, as it happens. (And I think Republicans are more interested in demagoguing the issue than finding out.) But I'm aware that's just a wild guess, and that in truth nobody really knows.
It's not an unsupported assertion. You just don't care. It's not hard to learn about the modern history of gerrymandering, which changed in nature in the last few decades with the advent of much more granular voter data. This enabled much more targeted strategies of vote dilution, and yes, it was a lopsided partisan effort. It's not really a secret at all that these efforts have primarily been driven by Republicans. Can you really not be aware of this?
If you don't like the idea that this is because one party is better than the other, then feel free to chalk it up to electoral incentives. Republicans face shrinking demographics and Democrats growing demographics, so one party naturally favors disenfranchisement.
Also, personally, the notion that some political parties are worse than others doesn't strike me as so strange. It's a (simplified) commonplace that more liberal politicians are motivated by the notion that government should help people, and conservative ones are motivated by the notion that government can't or shouldn't help people. This draws different types of people into politics with different types of motivations.
Or to take an example closer to home: I believe that people are in fact more or less identical with regard to their right to access to vote. You, I now understand, are one of these democracy skeptics who believe that only "high-quality" votes should count. I take this as strong evidence that my principles and motivations are better than yours. It's not simply that we differ on marginal tax rates or foreign policy or something where we can all politely disagree. You hold odious opinions.
(For the record, I think a strong case exists for allowing people younger than 18 to vote, and there is no good case at all for denying the vote to felons. Also, this "in truth no one really knows" bullshit is just total cowardice on your part. This topic has been investigated endlessly. The child pornography analogy is so egregiously stupid that I'm pretty sure your own vote couldn't possibly pass your test for quality.)
Your second point feels like saying “Some highways were built to screw over urban blacks, so we can conclude all highways are bad.”
Obviously some voter laws are going to be aimed at suppressing democratic voters, and we have evidence of it sometimes happening in the past, but that’s pretty different than a general conclusion about them.
Except Russia did interfere in the 2016 elections. Without said interference, given how close the election was, there's a good chance Trump would have lost.
It's simply objective fact that the Russians have been attacking the US via propaganda. The far left and the far right have both been influenced.
Bernie Sanders was also boosted by the Russians. So was BLM. So were antivaxxers.
Russia has been making our problems worse.
It's not a made-up issue; we have caught them doing it, and the US intel agencies all agreed this happened.
Trump's campaign even reached out to Russia for help, and Trump asked Russia for help on national TV. "Russia, if you're listening".
You seem to have a short memory.
The idea that Trump was a Russian asset was investigated by US intelligence and the FBI.
And the ID thing is complicated. I don't have an issue with people presenting ID to vote. The problem is that the Republicans are opposed to any sort of national ID card, which is necessary for such. Right now, we just use drivers' licenses, but if you don't drive, you don't have one of those, and most people don't travel internationally so don't have passports.
If the Republicans were like "We want to issue national ID cards and make it a requirement for in-person voting and registering to vote" I'd be 100% on board with that. But if you start bringing up national ID cards, they get upset.
Perhaps, and this is very very speculative, but perhaps the media narrative was different because the womens march didn't violently break into the capitol during a joint session whilst chanting "hang Mike Pence".
"Due to privacy laws, Dr Diaz is unable to say whether the officer had any pre-existing medical conditions. However, he did acknowledge the policeman's role in the events, telling the Washington Post: 'All that transpired played a role in his condition.'"
Apologies, should have phrased my comment better: you might conside using a broader metric such as "injured" to avoid having your argument dismissed/complicated by the counterpush against the "beaten to death" narrative inaccuracy.
Thanks! I'm not sure how I got this wrong - I wrote most of this piece in 2020 and it's possible that 2019 wasn't out yet? I'll double check this and if it proves true I'll edit that section.
I'm also unsure how you're scoring your sixth "Wolf" prediction. You seem to be counting 2017 as part of both the Trump and Obama years; there simply isn't a data point for it as far as I can tell. Given the point you were trying to make, I would think 2008-2016 and 2016-2020 makes the most sense as a measure, which would mean positive black views of race relations declined 12 points under obama (61-49) and and 13 points under Trump (49-36).
Intuitively it feels odd to me to compare eight years of Obama to 4 years of Trump. For example, if we think there's a general trend of declining race relations, then we would almost always end up thinking the four-year candidate was better for race relations than the eight-year one. I think it'd be interesting to compare the first four years of Obama to the first four years of Trump.
But perhaps I misunderstand how best to do it. It's not an area that I have any expertise in.
I had extensive problems with Scott's predictions and let him know about it in the comments but those have been deleted. Basically he set himself up to "successfully" disprove the argument "Trump is an outright racist" by making predictions more geared to disprove "Trump will successfully pursue ethnic cleansing."
But the predictions are what they are. I'm now more irritated that he's giving himself 9/10 when from my view it's more like 7/10, with all of his sub-90% predictions whiffing. This speaks to a mis-calibration.
Clarification: I also had comments to that effect deleted (but not for no reason tbf, there's an argument for topic relevance). I can't speak to any details of shambibble's specific deleted posts.
"Basically he set himself up to "successfully" disprove the argument "Trump is an outright racist" by making predictions more geared to disprove "Trump will successfully pursue ethnic cleansing.""
According to this post, his position was not that Trump was not racist, but that he wasn't in league with the KKK and openly encouraging racist attacks, etc. etc.?
I am talking about his "Wolf" post, not this one. As I said in the comments at the time, it basically reduced to a semantic dispute about how "open" (not "outright," I misremembered) one's racism has to be before using the term "openly racist" was justified as a descriptor.
To the extent Trump contradicted himself a lot and occasionally managed to read saccharine Presidential-sounding stuff off a teleprompter, he is uniquely suited to the sort of cherry-flavored charity pie being baked here. It's the same thing that permits Scott to gamely claim Trump was against the riots because of his belated "go home" tweet several hours after the fact, once it became apparent Pence and Congress had successfully evacuated and they wouldn't accomplish anything but make people mad.
But ultimately this boils down to questions of media bias which aren't really an interesting debate to me and haven't gotten more interesting since. What I didn't like about the bets was only two of them really went to the question of "open" racism: the cabinet bet (which would go to his personal prejudices as the cabinet-picker) and the bet about no subordinates endorsing "the KKK, Stormfront, etc" (the biggest gimme of the lot).
The bets about public attitudes are meaningless because the President is not a dictator of public opinion. Even if the race relations number *was* unambiguous I could easily spin a story where it wasn't Trump's fault, it was the gosh-darned media's reaction to him! The bets about demographics and registries are similarly meaningless because the President is not a dictator; Woodrow Wilson was "openly racist" by any reasonable definition and yet the non-white population did not go down during his Presidency. The bets on gay marriage, registries, and internment were essentially bets on the Supreme Court, not Trump.
I tried to follow the grading scheme from the original post, which was comparing 2008-2016 to 2017-2021. There was no data point for 2017, so I took a number halfway between the 2016 and 2018 value, which was 44.5.
Well it seems the very least you could do is weight your interpolation because the 2016 data point was in Jun-Jul of that year, five months before the election, while the 2018 data point was in Nov-Dec of that year, 24 months after it.
Or you could just call it no-bet, like you would if the FBI had changed its methodology in prediction 1. It's pretty suspect to be awarding yourself the W based on assuming a constant slope when the bet is essentially about whether the slope will change at a given point, particularly when you already loaded the terms for yourself by comparing four years to eight.
Don't interpolate polling data. Scrub the prediction entirely if you've decided the sampling times aren't good enough, but the alternative is *literally* fabricating results.
Seems like you should just use the 2016 poll, because:
1) you're trying to separate what happened under Obama from what happened under Trump, and Trump (and issues surrounding Trump) could have a large effect on the results of any poll that was conducted after Trump was elected. So using a 2017 or 2018 poll would misattribute a Trump effect to Obama.
2) your original post predicted "the change in race relations 2017-2021 will be less negative/more positive than the change 2009-2016", which taken at face value implies that you will use the 2016 poll to measure the Obama change. (It's less clear how this applies to the change under Trump, since we don't have a 2017 poll or a 2021 poll.)
>I wrote most of this piece in 2020 and it's possible that 2019 wasn't out yet?
Extremely plausible, the data is usually published ~Oct the following year. (2019 was 2020-11-16, I think.) The preliminary reports come out much sooner, but are piecemeal and then you don't have an apples-to-apples comparison.
Would it overly stretch the definition of 'coup' to include Trump's political/media strategy to overturn the election results? It seems that his efforts, including Giuliani and Powell's disinformation campaign and the pressure put on republican state officials, much more credibly threatened our constitutional order than the capitol riot did.
My understanding is that the term 'coup' can be applied to any illegal usurpation of political power, though in practice I understand if dropping the violence requirement blurs too many important lines
> Would it overly stretch the definition of 'coup' to include Trump's political/media strategy to overturn the election results?
Would it overly stretch the definition of "coup" to include Biden's strategy of having Democrat-controlled states change their voting methods at the last minute to allow millions of highly dubious votes?
(The answer to both of these questions, by the way, is yes.)
Well, we use the adjective form in similar hyphenated phrases—"British-made cars," for instance. Melvin's other comments make me doubt the use of "Democrat" is a coincidence.
What was this pressure? Are you talking about the call to the Georgia officials? In my opinion that call was completely misrepresented everywhere in the media. I read the transcript and didn't see anything inappropriate at all.
The officials involved seemed to find it inappropriate, given that they leaked it to the press. But really, you don't see a problem with a president calling up a Secretary of State, saying that he won an election and he wants the SoS to make a finding to that effect? Am I misstating what happened?
I was primarily referring to the calls to Georgia officials (I disagree that it wasn't inappropriate), as well as the pressure on at least the Michigan state legislature (e.g. that famous meeting at the white house). I suspect you could easily find statements and actions of Trump or his campaign 'pressuring' the Republican-controlled Arizona, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania legislatures.
In practice a political/media strategy and $3 will get you a cup of coffee -- not succeed in replacing a government. For the latter, you need a division or two of disciplined troops, or at least a few million irregulars and the strong support of enough people with money and connections to lubricate the process considerably, maybe turn over a TV station or two to your brownshirts, supply cash for buying rifles.
And frankly anybody who imagines Trump's *actual purpose* with all the Release-the-Kraken! bullshit after the election is naive. Trump knew on Wednesday morning he had zero chance of overturning the election. But what he *also* had was monster debts and $400 million in loans coming due real soon, plus the possibility of any number of lawsuits held in abeyance while he was POTUS.
*All* of the post-election frenzy and drama was, I am sorry to say, bait to lure 70 million bitterly-disappointed MAGAs to pour out their life savings to Save the Dream. It totally worked, too. I recall reading the man raked in $250 million in completely free donations -- which he can use for any purpose at all -- between Election Day and the Inaugural. I am sure that did a great deal to ease his financial problems, and I think that was the *only* actual real purpose. It was a con that would make Bernie Madoff green with envy, all perfectly legal, too.
That's reasonable, though I am a little conflicted. Could an activity still be a 'coup', or 'attempted coup', if the damage it seeks to deal to constitutional rule occurs as a side effect of its primary motive?
No, and I strongly resist the watering down of such strong words. *That* debasement of language is much more dangerous than any of the political damage I've seen lately. People throw around extremely potent words these days -- coup, fascist, racist, revolution -- without taking thought of what it does to our discourse to be unable to distinguish between, say, what happened in the Capitol on 6 January 2021 and what happened in Petrograd on 7 November 1917. People carelessly lump making nasty blowjob jokes about Kamala Harris with a bunch of hooded guys yanking a sharecropper out of his shack and hanging him on a tree. And so on.
This is is madness, and the debasement of the essential currency of understanding and compromise -- the words we use -- is doing far more to destroy our civil institutions than anything any ordinarily corrupt politician is doing. And we are doing it to *ourselves*. We have lost all sense of restraint and proportion, and we very foolishly take for granted that we can deeply alienate the 40% of the country that isn't on our side on every point and nothing much bad will ever happen. One can only speculate that it is too far from 1861-65 for anyone to fully grasp how dangerous that delusion can be. I would have thought the 580,000 COVID deaths that can probably at least half be traced to substantial disunion and a failure to work together would also be a good warning. But apparently not.
I agree that concept creep can, and often does get in the way of important conversation. I think you might have misinterpreted my intentions; I am not trying to equivocate Trump's action with, say, the 18 Brumaire coup or your Russian example. That said, I don't find it unreasonable to contemplate a broader spectrum of constitutional harm, when evaluating Scott's prediction regarding a 'Trump coup. On that point, your argument is well taken.
Yes, agreed. I suppose I tend to view Trump as more a symptom than a cause though. If the Republic was debauched, I don't think The Donald overpowered her, I think she gave herself willingly, and we should examine our broader selves more carefully to find out why (and how). I think the tendency (on both right and left) to just pile it all on Trump, treat him like some demiurge that made 70 million of us go mad in one way, and another 70 million go mad in another way, is sadly reflective of a broader tendency that Americans have been exhibiting to become more like spectators at the gladiatorial games of politics, cheering the heroes and booing the bums, and less like sober citizen participants who fell the weight of res publica personally.
I get what you mean, though I am sometimes uncomfortable with treating Trump as this implacable sociological phenomenon. I can't quite articulate how, but there seems to be a tension between acknowledging the social and economic forces pushing our Republic into the arms of populists like Trump, and respecting the agency, and complex motivations of these voters.
In my life, it is usually my coastal academia friends that wring their hands seeking to explain Trump through the plight of rural America, and the degradation of our information diet. My father in law, a farmer in Kansas, is less subtle: "Of course Jerry would vote for Trump. Jerry's an asshole".
Like you, I dislike the heroes vs. bums narrative in our politics, to use your phrasing, but I have grown equally distrustful of grand socio-historical narratives, which I think fail to treat people as agents, and genuinely hold them to account. I realize this isn't very constructive.
(reposted because my first paragraph needed editing)
If A is a side-effect of B, B didn't seek to do A. Likewise, "attempting to accidentally do X" doesn't seem especially well-founded as a concept (see: "attempted manslaughter").
I'd call tainting an office/process for personal monetary gain corruption, not a coup.
>"stand back and stand by", which as far as I can tell is equivalent to "stand down"
This seems to me to be pretty dramatically false. I think the connotations of "Stand down" are "no action needed" while the connotations of "stand back and stand by" are "no action needed this very second but prepare for imminent action". The two statements are not equivalent but rather pretty close to being opposites.
I'm actually not sure what to make of Trump here: his grasp of language is so weak that I think it's certainly possible that he meant to say "stand down" and then Trumpbrain happened and something else came out (we see this again and again from Trump).
But I think it's pretty misleading to say that Trump's words taken at face value are equivalent to "stand down". Rather, Trump's words taken at face value say prepare for action. The room for debate is around whether Trump's words should be taken at face value.
I don't think Trump personally harbors white supremacist ideology, but I strongly agree: the connotations of "stand by" are definitely "prepare for further action."
Yes, I score trump as not very racist, but very open to courting, supporting, defending, and working with anyone who he calculates will increase his power or the likelihood he gains power, up to and including the most racist people that exist.
It's worth remembering that Martin Luther King, Jr. was fond of saying he was much angrier at white people who [paraphrasing] "looked the other way" than with rally-attending KKK members.
To me, Trump was not a KKK member, he was the most powerful, most potently signal-boosting "look the other way" person ever, and that had disastrous effects, in terms of race relations and in terms of tons of other things.
I think Trump saw that many of his supporters were being unfairly attacked as horrible people, and felt the need to defend them. Perhaps this occasionally spilled over into defending people who were being not-unfairly attacked.
Why would he? Is Trump someone who clarifies without prompting or without being in a situation where he may face backlash? I don't really get that impression.
It's possible that he didn't know who the Proud Boys were, and Biden did some 5D chess move to suggest the very group that would be least beneficial to Trump no matter how he answered. And actually, I'd be willing to believe that Biden made such a choice. But in the context of the lead-up, the only reasonable response from Trump should have been flat condemnation. And as ignorant as he is, I'd give him 50-50 of knowing exactly who the Proud Boys were, given their connection to Roger Stone.
As for what Trump meant in this response, I'd like to point out that Trump only makes sense in audio, not in transcript. You have to listen to his voice inflection and which words he emphasizes. There is no doubt in my mind that he was signalling to them "I'm on your side", perhaps phrasing it in such a way as to retain some plausible deniability.
This is what i never understood about accusations of TDS. It seemed for every leftist that was accused of uncharitably interpreting the former presidents words, there was a white nationalist making the same interpretation. So even if it was a mis interpretation, it is *both* his detractors *and* his followers making it.
ok, we can change it to 'for every 1000... there is 1...'. I don't think that changes the main point.
If the white nationalists are saying 'this guy really speaks to us', then even if he is not trying to speak to them, or doing in unintentionally, it is at least an honest mistake to think 'he is speaking to white nationalists'; and i don't think you need to be suffering from any sort of derangement to think that.
If someone is acusing leftists of suffering from TDS, they also need to be acusing white nationalists of suffering from TDS.
I've never met a white nationalist irl, though, and I can't recall ever conversing with one online. (Though it's not like I give people a political alignment quiz before I talk to them, so maybe I have without knowing it?)
If you think organized white nationalists are a rounding error, it would make sense not to factor their opinions into your communication style.
I don't know what Trump was actually thinking- and I doubt it was anything good- but I'd have mostly ignored white nationalists if I'd been in his shoes, and it wouldn't be because I was secretly courting them. It would be because I think they're a bunch of fringe nuts that aren't actually relevant (Crux!).
There was at least one commenter on the old SSC who was. I might count Steve Sailer, who still comments here, but I don't follow him and that may not represent his views.
I think it's very important that the Proud Boys took it as an endorsement. What is the purpose of a condemnation if the target of that condemnation sees it as a message of support?
Agree here. Why did he add "stand by"? When I watched the debate live, it felt like an egregious addition to his statement. He skirted around the question and then added a phrase that seemed to indicate "I want you to stay around for the future".
To emphasise my point, we can look at definitions.
If you look at the definition of "stand down" on Google you get: "relax after being ready or alert. Ex: no further action was required and all units stood down" (slight formatting change my own)
If you look at the definition of "stand by" on Google you get "a person or thing ready to be deployed immediately, especially if needed as backup in an emergency." (you get slightly different things depending on whether you go with standby or stand by, but the basic point emerges either way).
I'm dodging the Trump interpretation here, but I think it's important to be clear that the two statements are not, when straightforwardly ready, anything like equivalent.
I don't feel the connotations of "stand by" are quite as clear-cut as that. The phrase has two common idiomatic meanings in English*; one is "Await my signal," but another is, "Take no active part in events around you", as in, "He stood by helplessly as the house burned."
In context (paired with "stand back", contrasting with "stand down"), I certainly see why people draw the conclusions they do, but I don't think the other interpretation of the phrase is inadmissible. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if ambiguity were just what Trump was going for—not a coded call to arms, but simply a phrase that could be construed in more than one direction, in the [vain] hope that it would thereby avoid alienating any supporters of his. Straining to avoid even the smallest commitment that might offend a supporter strikes me as consistent with Trump's conduct throughout his term of office.
That said, I'm not entirely convinced that this is a standard use of the imperative "stand by" which I think is basically always used to mean "be prepared for action" rather than "do nothing". Certainly I think it would be fair to say "be prepared for action" is the more normal reading of that imperative.
But my main concern is with Scott's confidence here: I think he needs to be a lot more open to the fact that there's something much more concerning in "stand by" than "stand down", at least if we read Trump as meaning what he says. The two are not equivalent in the way that matters in this context.
Again, I don't feel it's quite as cut-and-dried as you (Lester and Dan) make it out to be. Here's a recent magazine article that includes the sentence, "But he ordered his men to stand by, to let the tide of people push up to the gate and pass through." There the phrase describes an order whose thrust is for men to refrain from involvement that they might otherwise have undertaken, and the sentence reads quite naturally to me.
That said, I certainly don't think that "stand by" makes a *good* choice of words in this context for someone who merely wants to say, "Don't get involved" without any sort of subtext, and you presumably agree that Trump must have felt at least that he could plausibly contend that they meant that, so I'm not sure our positions are really that far apart in any way that matters.
This isn't in the imperative voice (as it would be if the article read: He turned to his men and gave an order, "stand by."). I continue to think it would be really unusual to use "stand by" in the imperative to mean anything other than "be prepared for action".
To belabour the point (I hope it's not condescending to do so; I'm aiming for clarity, not condescension): the fact that it describes an order doesn't mean it's in the imperative voice and so doesn't make it a counterexample to my claim.
I should be clear so that it doesn't look like I'm shifting goalposts; the internet is big and I'm sure someone must have used "stand by" in the imperative voice it to mean "stand down" but my guess is that that usage is extremely rare, except in venues where we might think it's just a misunderstanding (like, say, badly written fanfiction).
But I agree that we mostly agree. I accept that I was guilty of basically what I'm worried about in Scott's own writing (I acted overly confident about the meaning of the words). And I _think_ we agree that "stand by" at least has importantly different senses to "stand down" in a way that makes it relevant that Trump said the former rather than the latter (where "relevant" isn't intended to be committing to any particular view of what Trump meant)
P.S. For my own sanity, I now need to be heading to bed rather than staring at internet comment threads. Just wanted to say thanks for the thoughtful replies (I didn't want it to look like I was rage quitting on the discussion, if you now send a further reply and get nothing in response :P)
I think the past tense is important in your example though. "Stand by" generally means "don't take action but be available and ready if needed." So if you say someone "stood by" then the implication is that they didn't take action for the entire duration of the incident. When talking about future events, "stand by" is pretty clearly a command to be ready to take action. I don't think there is any way to interpret it as "stand down" in the sense of "go home and don't get involved ever"
Written out like that it looks like it's obviously meant to send some subtle message, but I watched the debate live and to me it seemed like more of a verbal stumble than anything else. He didn't even say "stand back and stand by," it was more along the lines of "Stand back- a- stand by."
I interpreted it as a response to the recent-at-the-time incident where a bunch of Trump supporters drove through Portland in trucks spraying pepper spray around - trying to say "stop doing that" without outright criticizing his own supporters or looking weak by saying what Biden and the moderator were trying to get him to say.
I agree that there's lot of room for Trump interpretation here.
What I'm worried about is Scott's comments:
>Trump said the Proud Boys should "stand back and stand by", which as far as I can tell is equivalent to "stand down", the specific thing Wallace kept trying to make him say even though he had already condemned everybody.
>I'm trying as hard as I can to be charitable - maybe people thought Trump should have followed Wallace's exact wording and said "Stand down" instead of the more temporary-sounding "Stand back and stand by"?
The two phrases are in no way equivalent. People are being picky about wording _because it dramatically changes the meaning_ (not because they're nitpicking). And "stand by" isn't merely temporary, it explicitly suggests that the proud boys should be prepared to act.
I think there are plenty of reasons to think that we shouldn't just interpret Trump in the most obvious way here. I think there's a debate to be had. But my issue is that the way Scott framed things makes it sound like there's _isn't_ a debate to be had and rather like it's just clear that there's nothing wrong in Trump's words here (and that people are just being weirdly nitpicky to think otherwise). I don't think this take on things is accurate.
Agreed. This is a bizarre oversight given that Scott says he's "trying as hard as [he] can to be charitable" to the claim that this statement endorsed white supremacy.
*My* problem with this whole discussion is that we're treating it like a prepared statement where the speaker considered implications before saying it, which it clearly wasn't, 'cos he changed his mind about what to say halfway through saying it.
So while I'm really hesitant to make this kind of argument, in fact I'd *agree* with the proposition that there is no discussion to be had here - in my opinion this is one step down from trying figure out what Bush was trying to communicate by puking on the Prime Minister of Japan.
It doesn't sound like a verbal stumble. To me it sounded rehearsed. The omission of the 'd' sound in "Stand back an' stand by" is a very normal pronunciation of 'and'.
This is spot on. Apparently Scott wasn't familiar with the meaning of "stand by" (maybe most of us know it from ear books / movies?), which led to a really bad take here.
I hope he adds a correction.
(I saw this piece when a friend texted me "I can't believe Scott's take on the Trump proud boys debate moment. I don't understand how anyone can in good faith think 'stand back and stand by' = 'stand down'". Reading the piece, I had to conclude that Scott didn't know how "stand by" is used.)
A person who is able enough to become President says something, that thing is received with obvious shock and an immediate attempt to clarify, and the people he's addressing interpret it in a way consistent with his overall campaign themes... That, to me, cannot be taken as a verbal gaffe or slip-up.
The best and funniest demonstration of this point is the meme:
Her: Denounce your hoes.
Me: All my hoes stand back and stand by.
This paired with the clear weasel-wording around this softest of soft ball questions ("sure I WOULD denounce white supremacy" obv allows the addendum "but I'm not gonna") to me was exactly the problem. Trump was asked to condemn WS in no uncertain terms and in response he used very uncertain terms.
It’s irrelevant anyway, because the Proud Boys are not white nationalists or white supremacists. I think Biden knew this, knew that Trump knew it, and knew that the public had been fooled into thinking they are, which is why he jumped in with ‘Proud Boys’, like the cynical politician he is, to put Trump in a bind.
Yeah, the Korea crisis was at least as big a deal as the Iran one. And Trump's hawkishness actually worked out pretty well for all concerned (Pyongyang got pushed away from Beijing and toward Seoul, which is a huge step toward Korean reunification), but that's hardly a refutation of "high variance".
I agree you deserve an A for You Are Still Crying Wolf. But I think you overstated your success for the debate / Proud Boys moment. Rewatching the video it really did seem like he was reluctant to do a full and unambiguous condemnation. By late 2020 it increasingly seemed like he was willing to play footsie with white nationalist -adjacent groups. "Stand back and stand by" really is weaker than "stand down".
Honest question: are the Proud Boys a white supremacist organization? If they're not, then I could imagine Trump not wanting to alienate them (or to use your words, play footsie with them). I was under the impression that they were a group of rowdy anti-progressives who like to get in fights at protests and have opinions about masturbation. Are they explicitly racist, in a way analogous to the KKK or other white supremacist organizations?
They describe themselves as pro-western culture rather than pro-white, and for a while they were led by a non-white man named Enrique Tarrio. Still, I describe them as white nationalist adjacent. It seems quite possible that all the pro-western stuff is heard as a dog whistle for many members, consciously or subconsciously.
There is a case that an organisation that is clearly racist but has deliberately chosen language that avoids being explicitly racist is not racist in the narrow, explicit sense that Scott has chosen to talk about here.
And that the fact that the racist organisations of 2021 lie about racism when the racist organisations of 1961 didn't does, itself, say something about the change in racism.
The famous Lee Atwater quote about how the language for talking about race has changed (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_8E3ENrKrQ) has the obvious interpretation that they have the same attitudes as ever, but also the important one that the language has had to change. That might not say anything about the attitudes of the people saying this stuff - but it says something about the people listening.
It's often said that Trump stopped using the dog whistle and used a foghorn, but I'm not at all convinced that is true. He's not a subtle speaker, but he did continue to use coded language about race. He didn't use the n-word once while on-mic, for instance. And he spent a lot of time on mic, with all those unscripted rally speeches.
They recently had a schism which led to the formation on a new, _explicitly_ white supremacist group. This suggests that at least some of their members didn't think they were white supremacist (or at least not enough).
This moment in the debate was clearly a softball from the moderator.
Biden interrupted and sort of muddied the waters, but it seems quite clear that the moderator was saying, "In the past, people have accused you of being a racist because you wouldn't make a presidential-sounding condemnation of racists. Would you like a do-over?"
And Trump didn't refuse, exactly, but he passed on the mile-wide opening being offered to him.
The way he handled that exchange was pretty far from an embrace of white nationalism, as Scott says, but it was nowhere near a condemnation. It was more of a Trumpian version of "no comment".
He straddled a direct question in an amazingly obtuse, muddy, animated, confusing way, which allows his supporters (and Scott 😉) to carefully parse his language and claim he was staying neutral or pointing in a certain direction, in much the same way that a mathematician could analyze footage of one of those wacky-waving-inflatable-arms-guys in front of a car dealership, do some integral calculus, and say, "I am confident it was pointing, on average, NNE at 15° above horizontal, meaning actually directing traffic to the competitor across the street."
> This moment in the debate was clearly a softball from the moderator.
I interpret it as the exact opposite; it was a trap designed to get the headline "Trump refuses to denounce Neo Nazis".
It happened a few times over the course of his Presidency; Trump is the kind of guy who hates having words put in his mouth so it works great on him. You just keep asking him again and again if he'll denounce such-and-such until you eventually find a combination of words that he doesn't parrot back, and you report that was "Trump refuses to denounce Neo Nazis".
Yes, the reason why Trump gave a sarcastic "sure" was because he has always been resistant to repeating slogans and affirming articles of faith, because if he did so he would be submitting to his political adversaries' frame. So "condemning" "white supremacist groups" in order to prove that he is not a "racist" would amount to saying that his opponents' perception that he was a "racist" for not having "condemned" them was justified. "Do you condemn white supremacy" is a Milgram question: http://johnsanilac.com/w/milgram-questions/
There are a million ways to explicitly and unambiguously denounce Neo Nazis without having to parrot anything. And on occasion he has done so. But he can't resist basically saying "but not really" after. I'm with Scott in the belief that Trump isn't much more racist than the average 70 year old. But also he has a really, really hard time condemning anyone who supports him.
It's not a softball. It's a media trick to keep asking the same question, because nearly everyone hates giving exactly the same answer each time, so you tend to get an array of answers, allowing you to cherry pick to support the desired narrative.
Also, 'just asking' the question works to cement a belief in the minds of people who already feel inclined to that belief. So it's a good propaganda tool.
When a Dutch politician did answer exactly the same, they called him a robot. So it's a hard trick for politicians to evade without looking bad.
The Trump campaign actually made a pretty smart move by putting Trumps condemnations in a single video, which made the media look really bad to those inclined to distrust the media: https://youtu.be/Bd0cMmBvqWc
Why would an *increase* be the appropriate measure? If Nazis believed Trump was disavowing them, surely we would expect to see fewer (or zero) Nazi symbols next to Trump flags/at Trump-aligned protests/storming the Capitol/etc.
Nazis have an incentive to present a relatively popular mainstream political figure as their ally in order to seem more relevant and mainstream. The press has an incentive to present someone slightly to their right as Nazi-adjacent in order to tar Trump. They have a symbiotic relationship. Funny how the press thinks its worth helping Nazis in order to pwn Trump.
I suppose my position is that if he wanted to say, "I refuse to have words put into my mouth, so no. But here is my sincere and informed take on racism, white supremacists, and whether it's fair to assume The Proud Boys are racists or white supremacists,..." I would have very much appreciated and respected that.
Instead, what he did was to say something ambiguous. His detractors interpreted it based on their assumptions, and his supporters interpreted it based on theirs.
It is impossible to be 100% confident in either interpretation, but I have a big problem with your stance, and to some extent with Scott's, because you're both doing the exact same thing anti-Trumpists do with the same moment: Take something mealy-mouthed and inarticulate that Trump said, assign 100% confidence to your interpretation, and imply that any other interpretation is automatically unfair. "How could you possibly misunderstand his perfectly clear words!"
Instead, we should all be saying things like, "I'd say that there's a 60% chance Trump was avoiding outright condemnation of the Proud Boys because he wanted their support regardless of their status re: racism, a 5% chance he is actually a white supremacist at heart, a 25% chance he is just too dumb to answer the question effectively, and a 10% chance he is sincerely very anti-white-supremacists and wishes he could have communicated that better but got flustered in the moment. (And a 0% chance he answered as well as anyone in his position could have 😉).
To be fair, Trump is not a "here is my sincere, carefully-thought-out position on a set of sensitive and complex issues" kind of guy. He has never answered a question in that way and never will.
I think your probabilities all turn very heavily on your priors. We didn't all start with the same priors (I thought Trump was a terrible choice for president but almost certainly not white supremacist), and so we can easily arrive at very different probabilities.
> you're both doing the exact same thing anti-Trumpists do with the same moment: Take something mealy-mouthed and inarticulate that Trump said, assign 100% confidence to your interpretation, and imply that any other interpretation is automatically unfair.
This is a completely unfair portrayal of my comment(s). I never argued that my interpretation is certain to be the truth, but merely that it is a perfectly plausible interpretation, if not the most likely, that is completely dismissed by many.
I strongly stand by my claim that the interpretation by those who think that it is beyond doubt that Trump has some secret pro-Nazi agenda that he is advancing in a very smart way by making a ton of anti-white supremacy statements, but where he intentionally adds in some dog whistles that are part of some secret plan, is conspiracy thinking.
> Instead, we should all be saying things like, "I'd say that there's a 60% chance Trump was avoiding outright condemnation of the Proud Boys because [...]
You are actually ignoring all kinds of possibilities, including very obvious ones, like that his goal could be to move past this topic to talk about things that he was actually interested in talking about, that he misheard when the Biden and the moderator/other debater talked at the same time, that he doesn't know whether or disagrees that the Proud Boys are all that racist, etc.
The ease by which many of his opponents not merely demand, but seem to take it for granted that Trump should be constantly denouncing white supremacy, with an inhuman amount of perfection, while no similar demands get made of Biden, just creates a very strong perception on my part that people are rationalizing their prejudices.
What level of delusion do you have to be on to actually believe this? Amazing. It was clearly not meant as a softball (listen to Wallace's tone) and the fact that you think anyone chosen as a moderator of a Presidential debate would give a Republican a "softball" in the year 2020 means you probably shouldn't be allowed behind a wheel (as you are clearly not lucid).
Bear in mind the Proud Boys did a summit with Black Lives Matter on this exact subject. If the Proud Boys are a "white supremacist adjacent" organization, then Black Lives Matter is WS-adjacent-adjacent.
If they want to improve their image and no longer be seen as racist, it might help if they would stop flashing the white power hand sign at every photo op.
Excuse me, you have used the discredited vvhite supremacist letter 'W' no less than three times in your post. I realize it didn't become a vvhite supremacist symbol until I made it up just novv, but you're going to have to stop using it if you no longer vvish to be seen as racist.
It is important to not hallucinate racism, and I agree that happens sometimes. I assure you that is not the case here. To use your analogy, it'd be like if everyone thought my club was racist, so in response me and all the other members decided to start and end every sentence with the letter "w" to trigger the libs.
I urge you to take a look at what transpires every time these people gather, who they choose to hang out with, and their criminal records. True, most of it isn't about race, but some of it definitely is. The rest is, as far as I can gather, street brawls for their own sake.
Frankly, *that's exactly what I'd do*. Isn't this part of what pride marches are about? "You say we're sexual degenerates - well, hey, here we are marching around in BDSM gear, what now?" If you're being kafkatrapped, double down. If you tell a non-conformist not to do something, he's going to do it twice as hard to call your bluff and make you look ridiculous to onlookers.
I'm not arguing the PBs aren't a bunch of violent jackasses - they are. But calling them white supremacists when it's blatantly obvious to anyone who has read their website or seen a photo of a group of them that they aren't makes them look good while at the same time damaging society's ability to make sane decisions. It's not like there's nothing else to get them on - call them sexist, for instance, which they'll freely admit they are!
"A Salt Lake chapter of the Proud Boys gathered at Washington Square Wednesday night to try and change the narrative that they’re racist.
They appeared with Jacarri Kelley, the leader of Black Lives Matter, Northern Utah. It’s a chapter that’s unaffiliated with Black Lives Matter Utah, headed by Alexis Scott."
If the Northern Utah chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and the Zionist Organization of American hold a joint event, it doesn't mean that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is solved. It means that the Northern Utah SJP and ZOA are (unsurprisingly) rather confused.
I don't really trust the SPLC these days, they have a history of tarring individuals and groups as racist that clearly aren't. You only get so many mistakes before you lose public credibility. And the post you linked clearly states that they officially deny that they are a racist organization, so they're certainly not explicitly white supremacist if that's the case.
They include a number of examples in the Proud Boys' own words. I don't know how anyone can read those statements and conclude that they're not a racist organization.
There's also the fact that the Proud Boys were extremely excited by Trump's response and turned that "stand by" comment into rallying cry. You could argue that the Proud Boys can do whatever they want, Trump has no control over them, and nothing they do affect the substance of Trump's comments. Or you could argue that carefully parsing the literal meaning of his words ignores a ton of context, nuance, and shading, and the reaction of these hate groups provides a strong clue that something is going on here.
Are the Proud Boys a hate group? I know little about them but I thought I read they defend Trump supporters from antifa at rallies? Are there incidents of hate crimes?
Whether they tend to target minorities, I don't know. I have heard they do but don't have the data. They definitely are strongly opposed to antifa, which is basically defined as anyone who opposes them. If nobody shows up to oppose them, they will attack the nearest journalist (https://twitter.com/PDXzane/status/1309945564922961920) or roam the streets to find anyone who looks antifa enough. The narrative from antifa is that if they don't show up to fight, the PB will inevitably find someone to fight, and that person won't be as prepared.
If you have the patience for the New Yorker (which makes ACX look like Reader's Digest), here is a view into the antifa side of the story:
As for whether PB is a hate group, I'd call them alt-light. Their leader is not white. But they don't mind mingling with explicitly white supremacist groups. There will be the occasional 6MWE t-shirt. They like to flash the white-power hand sign, but I'm guessing if you called them on it they'd say it's just to trigger the libs. They officially say they are not racist. There was an attempt to schizm off a sub-group (Proud Goys) that is explicitly neo-Nazi.
I am somehow unable to link directly to the part of the PDXzane tweet thread showing the attack on the journalist. Just ctrl-F search "kicks him in the face".
Yes, "stand down" and "stand by" are not remotely the same thing. The difference may well not have been intentional on Trump's part, but the difference is there, and Trump's more unhinged supporters seem to have been just as aware of it as opponents. Mind you, minute verbal analysis probably isn't the best way to interpret Trump's manner of speech, but I'm disappointed in Scott for not acknowledging this.
Trump did attempt a coup, when he tried to get Pence to throw the votes out on January 6th. That wasn't an attempted *military* coup (since Trump didn't have the support of the military in this), but it was still an attempted coup in the sense of a blatantly unconstitutional attempt to seize power for himself. It was *arguably* a coup before then, when he blatantly tried to overturn the results of the elections, but where I'm concerned it became inarguably one when he just asked his own vice president to just throw out the results, regardless of what courts, states, legislature, or pretty much every other institution in the country said.
As for Trump's racism, he told four people of color, political opponents of his, to "go back to their countries", even though three of four of them were born in the United States. He called the coronavirus "Kung Flu". I mean these may not seem as much, but only because the man's a fucking clown who keeps saying vile thing after vile thing, so they don't seem out of the ordinary for him! But that's hardly an excuse.
The coup prediction is turning into an argument over definitions. Scott should rephrase what he thought he was predicting without using the word 'coup'.
Agreed. Trump waited hours after the Capitol was under siege to make a very tepid tweet. I don't understand taking the words of his tweet at face value while ignoring the context. His supporters know damn well he has to make public statements sometimes for appearances. I don't believe for a second Trump's weak, late tweet for the mob to leave had any impact or was sincere by Trump.
Agree. First there was legal maneuvering that bordered on a coup attempt, but the courts smacked it down good and hard. Then there was a non-violent but illegal push to have Republican officials "find" vote and evidence of fraud, as well as throwing out completely legitimate results, as well as the pressure on Pence; this also failed due to these people not wanting to do what Trump did. Then, finally, there was the actually violent coup attempt where mobs presumably intended to force the Senate to vote for Trump at gunpoint and were only minutes away from it.
It's ridiculous for Scott to give himself a B for predicting "No Coup" when nothing like it has been attempted in over a century. "Hey, there was no successful coup, just like I predicted" is a silly standard.
(Similarly, it seems kinda silly to give yourself a good rating for making several 99% predictions that there would essentially be no actual government mass-murder or expulsions of American citizens...)
"Bordered on a coup attempt" ~= "trending toward significance"
If you say "there won't be a coup attempt," and then there's no coup attempt but the president tries some (clownishly ineffectual) legal manuvering to try to stay in office despite losing the election, your prediction was correct. How else could you possibly grade that statement?
I'd grade it as cherry-picking. Scott counted the ineffectual court maneuvers but selectively ignored the multiple genuinely illegal efforts to undo the election.
"there was a non-violent but illegal push to have Republican officials "find" vote and evidence of fraud"
Is this the Georgia phone call again? Read the transcript, I didn't see anything remotely close to being illegal or even inappropriate.
"there was the actually violent coup attempt where mobs presumably intended to force the Senate to vote for Trump at gunpoint and were only minutes away from it."
Is this actually true? They couldn't have done it at gunpoint as you say, as no firearms were brought inside the Capitol. If they intended to do this, why leave all their firearms outside and at the hotel? What's the evidence that supports this interpretation?
There was any number of pushing to have Republican officials invalidate the actual vote.
Also, it's not exactly a stretch to make the interpretation that you're protesting against an important vote in Congress, and then you storm Congress, you do it in order to be able to change the outcome of the vote through violence. How else would the whole thing accomplish anything?
You misunderstand me, I'm doubting that he's part of the upper class based on how he talks. I don't think that's a complete act either, he doesn't seem to have radically altered his personality based strictly on wanting to win as a conservative populist.
This feels kind of bizarre, since it's not like we don't know Trump's background. (Unless there's a strain of Trump Birtherism I'm not familiar with: "Trump really grew up in the Bronx!") He grew up wealthy, in a rich neighborhood, went to private schools all his life, graduated from an Ivy. He has family members who are judges and college professors. By any material marker of class, Trump is in the upper one.
Now, I agree with you that Trump didn't radically change his personality for political reasons, since even in his unguarded moments he talks about grabbing women's pussies and things like that. But personality is not the same as class. It's not like he never had an opportunity to learn gentility, or even basic civility.
To add to the small sample on QAnon: My next door neighbor (in a nondescript suburban town in New Jersey) got totally hooked on QAnon and changed his whole life around it -- leaving his family, moving to a new place, etc.
I am kinda surprised and frustrated about how Soleimani thing went exactly as Trump wanted and predicted it to go - Soleimani dead, Iran postured and fumed and did nothing at the end - and Scott is still interpreting it as him being right on Trump being bumbling extremist that doesn't know what he's doing and Scott being right, despite predicting it all wrong.
It seems to be a pattern on Middle East and Trump at least. Trump moves US embassy to Jerusalem - everybody is like "this will cause WW3". Trump is saying "nothing will happen". Nothing happens. Everybody is like "well, the idiot got lucky this time".
Trump eliminates major Iranian terrorist chief. Everybody is like "this will cause WW3". Trump is saying "nothing will happen". Nothing happens. Everybody is like "well, the idiot got lucky this time".
Trump cuts aid to Palestinians. Everybody is like "this will bury any chance of peace in Middle East". Trump is saying "you'll see it won't". Then Trump makes several Arab countries to sign peace with Israel and tell Palestinians "you annoyed us for so long, it's time for a chance in our relationships". Everybody is like "well, the idiot got lucky this time".
Trump says he'll kick ISIS's ass. Everybody is like "nah, it's impossible, it's another unwinnable quagmire". Then Trump proceeds to kick ISIS's ass and eliminate it as a player in Middle East. Everybody is like "well, the idiot got lucky this time".
I'm just wondering how many times the idiot has to get lucky before the highly learned rationalist intellectuals start to recognize the pattern? I guess with Trump out we will never know.
I'm not sure what you mean by "most people". Most people in PA would hope for Israel being destroyed and those pesky Jews disappear. Most people in Israel would hope for the nightmare to stop and Israel to remain secure, while not caring too much about what happens to Palestinians. Most people in Europe would hope for any deal that the newspapers tell them is ok so they can forget about it. Most people in Iran - who knows what they'd want, nobody cares about it anyway as they can't decide anything about Iranian policies. There are a lot of "most people" who want very different things. I think what you mean by "most people" however is "myself and my peer circle". In that case, I may alleviate your concern - there's still no peace in the Middle East, and what Trump has done is one small - though incredibly important, but still small - step towards it. A step that Biden is already started undoing, by showering Palestinian with money with no commitment to not use it for terror - in fact, with explicit message that they don't care whether they use it or not, as the official reason for Trump stopping it was exactly this usage, and by telling the nations that signed peace with Israel that Biden is not intending to honor any commitments Trump made to them.
Of course, stopping showering Palestinians with American money is not the same as "beating them down" - and even though some parts there, like Hamas, is long overdue for a thorough beating down, it is not happening and probably is not going to happen anytime soon. Especially given how hostile is the new US administration to Israel. So there's no peace, neither bad one nor good one, and probably won't be any time soon.
Israel could crush the Palestinians if they wanted to. They could push them into the sea. But they don't want to because they are a liberal democracy. They just want to be safe from terror attacks.
God forbid. After 70 years of diaspora every trace of competence among the Palestinian people has long ago emigrated somewhere else. They work in Saudi, in the US, even in Israel. The only people left in the camps are so deficient in general competence any state they ran would be a festering sore, a place as dysfunctional as Somalia, and a similar haven for piracy, terrorist gangs, and similar evils. You have only to look at that wretched hive of scum and villainy that is the Gaza Strip.
If I had my druthers, I'd have the West Bank (sans Jewish settlements) annexed by Jordan, and all the Palestinians become Jordanian citizens whether they will or no. At least then they'd be part of a modestly functional state and could work out their moira with better hope for success. But the Jordanians are no fools, they long ago renounced any claim to the West Bank and would never agree to take the Palestinians. No other Arab state will, in fact -- they know damn well those who are worth having have already emigrated.
I'm afraid both Palestinians and Jordanians remember what the words "Black September" mean, so this wouldn't be an acceptable solution for them. I wish it was as easy to solve as just giving the land to some Arab state. Nobody wants this blazing toxic radioactive dump of a problem on their balance sheet - they all want it on Israel's.
I think most people actually living in the Middle East are hoping for a peace that addresses issues completely unrelated to the Palestinians. The vast majority of the deaths in Middle Eastern conflicts over the past decade, have been neither Palestinians nor Israelis. Ditto most of the new refugees, most of the conflicts with the potential for spilling across international borders and turning into hot wars, etc.
But you said "people on Middle East issues", which is broader and vaguer than just the people living in the Middle East, so maybe. "People on Middle East issues" includes an awful lot of people around the world who e.g. read newspaper articles about strife in the Middle East, wish the Middle East were at peace, might throw some votes at the politician who is seen as accomplishing that. Most of these people aren't going to put a whole lot of time into studying a complex subject, and remembering that time back in the 20th century when it mostly was Palestinians vs. Israelis is easier than understanding the enormous mostly not-Palestinian mess that is the 21st century Middle Eastern conflict(s).
I don't remember anybody saying it was unwinnable in principle, but I've heard a lot of people saying Trump can't win it and won't win it (or it would not be won while he's in power - there's always the "post hoc/propter hoc" question), because he's a bumbling idiot. It seems to be a very consistent pattern of underestimating him and when he proves the under-estimators wrong, claiming he's just got lucky this one time.
To be fair, if CNN and the rest of the neoliberal / neoconservative "center" had their way it *would* have taken ten years. A decade-long war makes for a lot more appropriations money, refugees and sensational headlines than a quick victory.
What positive did the killing of Soleimani achieve? The clear negative was the shoot down of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 and 176 deaths (Iran's fault, but still a consequence). What was the tangible benefit, other than the satisfaction of killing the guy?
Terrorist chief being dead and no longer producing further acts of terror is a very positive thing. It also showed Iran that attacks on US citizens and US military from Iran side are not going to be tolerated - and I think Iran got the message, despite all the fuming rhetoric and show-offs that followed.
I am not sure how murdering a plane-full of Iranians and Canadians (with some Ukrainians too), done by idiotic mistake of Iranian army, figures in the calculus - nobody could have known Iranians are going to do that, so putting this as a consequence that Trump must have predicted makes absolutely no sense.
When people starting shooting at each other, unpredictable bad stuff can happen. Airliner being shot down by panicked soldiers is not certainly a usual occurrence but it has happened a bunch of times before, including in Iran. But either way, if I'm counting positive vs. negative outcomes, I have to count this on the ledger as negative.
If someone can point to a concrete good thing that has happened (e.g. power of Iranian militias in Iraq has withered) I'd count that on the ledger, but I haven't seen it.
There's a huge difference between claiming "unpredictable stuff may happen" - which is a hopeless banality that is known to everybody successfully graduating a kindergarten - and assigning responsibility for a very specific unpredictable thing that happened. If we assign all murderous actions of Iranians as negatives toward any action agains Iranian terrorists, the only possible conclusion would be that the only positive action would be immediate surrender - in this case, they wouldn't have the reason to murder Canadians, right? This counting makes absolutely no sense - the blame on terrorist acts lies on terrorists, not on somebody who tries to stop them.
I already specified the concrete good - eliminating a high-ranked terrorist, which disrupts terrorist infrastructure and operation capabilities, and deterring Iranians from further attacks, like embassy bombings and attacks on us military. If you're going to ignore it and repeatedly ask to provide you what has already been provided - it becomes willful ignorance at this stage.
This seems like a double standard- you say that since the risks of Trump's actions that people were worried about didn't materialize, they can't just write off his success as "well he got lucky". But then when Ivan is pointing out a real negative consequence, you're writing it off as unpredictable: "well he got unlucky."
It seems to me that either you ignore all expectations and predictions and focus on what actually happened, in which case the plane being shot down was a result of the strike, or you evaluate based on reasonable expectations in advance. In the latter case you can't discount the concerns about escalation just because they didn't end up happening.
I didn't say "he got unlucky". I said random unpredictable events that have no causal relationship with somebody's actions can not be presented as arguments against taking that actions, especially post-factum. It's like saying building World Trade Center was a stupid decision because it was destroyed by terrorists and that cost many lives. It's not that I am saying the architect of WTC "got unlucky" - it's that I am saying a possibility of terrorist attack should not have been the part of his decision process, and thus blaming him for not predicting it would be nonsensical. Such as blaming Trump for Iranians being murderous idiots unable to distinguish a passenger plane from a cruise missile. It's not a question of luck, it's a question of assigning retrospective blame to somebody who had nothing to do with it.
"Terrorist chief being dead and no longer producing further acts of terror is a very positive thing."
This reminds me of the world's most dangerous job - being Al Qaeda's number 2. Famously, the US killed quite a few people that the US, at least, called Al Qaeda's second in command. It never seemed to do much.
As for the plae being shot down, when tensions rise, accidents rise. Killing Soleimani absolutely raised the chances of an accident. It didn't HAVE to happen, it easily could NOT have happened. But yes, duh, it was more likely after killing him then if he hadn't been. And that was entirely forseeable.
For the record, it was #3, the #2 (Zawahiri) is like the only old timer still alive. Al Qaeda didn't really have a #3 so they could just say anyone vaguely important they killed was #3.
>Terrorist chief being dead and no longer producing further acts of terror is a very positive thing.
How many terrorist acts did Qassem Soleimani produce, with how many casualties, in the year before his death? How many terrorist acts did Esmail Ghaani produce, with how many casualties, in the past year?
If the answer is "I don't know who Esmail Ghaani is; he hasn't been in the news so he can't be that bad", then I'm guessing you didn't know who Qassem Soleimani was on 2 January 2020, so that's not a good measure. If you're going to kill a foreign leader, the metric isn't "how much badness is that leader responsible for, vs. the hypothetical case where his office remains vacant and no badness happens", but the real case where the office is filled with someone probably very like the one you just killed but with an extra mandate to avenge a martyr.
There are circumstances where it is worth deliberately killing a specific foreign leader. Yamamoto and Heydrich were unusually competent, and they were killed at a time when their nations were involved in high-intensity wars where their successors wouldn't have time to regroup and settle in to their new roles. But more often than not, killing the guy who leads the organization doing Bad Stuff, either makes no difference or makes things worse.
He was pretty high up in the IRGC and apparently quite competent. You should read his Wikipedia entry, even the operations he was known to have run or assisted were pretty impactful.
Maybe killing Soleimani achieved nothing. Or maybe it prevented a great deal of grief and unrest in the world. It's impossible to know for sure, on account of our inability to peer across the multiverse and see what would have happened in the alternate reality where he was allowed to live.
An interesting book on adjacent topic: https://ronenbergman.com/rise-and-kill-first-the-book/ It is the history of Mossad's targeted assassination program, and after tracing the consequences of it - which the author does with great skill - many times one wonders - the course of events certainly changed, did it change for the best? Was there other, better way? Very hard to know.
Yes, it is. But for what it's worth I remember the 1972 Munich Olympics, and it did modestly impress me that such a thing was never even attempted again.
re: Soleimani, the issue was never, "The median outcome is WWIII". The issue is "Why roll the dice and risk a small chance of WWIII for marginal (if any) gain?"
That sounds suspiciously like Pascal Mugging. Since any action against Iran has potential (albeit tiny) chance of causing WW3, the only prudent case of action, on this logic, is to never take any action against Iran - or any other country - whatever they do. I don't think it is a sane way to conduct politics - even though there are people who may disagree. I think isolationist movement still exist - though I believe their ideas that if US isolates itself from the rest of the world, the rest of the world would stop affect it to be thoroughly stupid. I must admit though I have a vested interest in it - if US and UK remained isolationist during WW2, I would probably never have been born, neither would my parents.
Overtly and publicly assassinating a high-ranking member of the civilian military with a fucking missile is not "any action". It was brazen and provocative. It provoked a literal military response against US forces. I'm not talking about butterfly effects here.
It wasn't "any action", but your logic is applicable to any action - any action has "a small chance" of triggering the conflict, and since WW3 is so bad, we better not to take any action at all, because no benefit would be ever worth the infinite risk of WW3.
Literal military attack on US forces happened before Soleimani was killed. And also literal military attack on US embassy. And also literal military attacks on US allies. And also literal military attacks on several ships in Persian Gulf. And of course actions of Soleimani in previous years earned this many times over - and Soleimani is an individual officially designated as supporter of terrorism (though "supporter" is a very weak word to describe his real role as major organized and instigator - it's like saying Trotsky was a "supporter" of revolution is Russia).
The attack was not entirely unprovoked - Americans and allies hand recently been killed by Soleimani backed terrorists (who he was meeting at the time of his death). Also, he was banned from being in Iraq.
So killing him was an escalation, but so was him coming to Iraq in the first place.
Kinda, sorta, maybe. Iran *is* a Russian ally, and while Russia obviously has better things to do than go charging into WW3 over an assassination, it's certainly a brinkman's move.
(As are Putin's assassinations. But I think everyone agrees that Putin's assassinations are brinkmanship.)
It's true that Trump has proved remarkably effective at getting his way with regard to terrorists and other hostiles in the Middle East. But it has usually involved him pressuring someone and bullying them into a corner- in other words, acting like an imperialist or colonialist.
You shouldn't be too hard on Scott- not every rationalist is going to have every idea- they have to learn from each other. Probably someone *has* realized that Trump has been effective... they just aren't willing to say so. Sad or shameful ideas tend not to get shared very widely.
Iran 'did nothing' because they panicked and shot down a passenger plan and killed 176 civilians.
It's real tough to front to the global community and to yourself that you were wronged and that a counterattack is justified and that you deserve recompense after shooting down a fucking 737.
Interesting theory, which is unfortunately is contradicted by the fact that the Iranian retaliatory strike, pompously named "Operation Martyr Soleimani", had been executed before the unfortunate plane accident, and was carefully designed to look very pugilistic while not causing any serious harm or casualties. Iranians, of course, claimed there was dozens of US casualties (of which there were none), but nobody is surprised by them lying. It is possible that if they didn't have committed this catastrophic blunder, they may have performed more simulated attacks and claimed hundreds, or why be modest - thousands of US casualties, but as long as they are imaginary, that'd be the end of it anyway.
Yeah I thought it was kind of weird Scott even imagining it was conceivable the Iranians would go to war over Suleimani. With the United States, forsooth? The Iranians aren't *stupid*. That would be an extremely short war. The Iranians aren't going to go to war with the United States over *anything* short of the USMC rolling APCs and M1A1s into Tehran. It's not like everyone in the Middle East didn't pay close attention to what happened to Saddam Hussein's feared Revolutionary Guard when they got in the way of the 3rd Infantry Division on its way to Baghdad. Who wants to end up so many pieces of badly burnt toast that don't even slow the infidel's tanks down below the posted speed limit?
A rational fear would be that the Iranians would boost their support for assorted terrorism, but if one assumes they already have that dial turned up to 11, then that isn't actually a big threat. Anyway, that's the assumption the Israelis have acted under -- that if the Iranians *could* do more to encourage terrorism against their enemies, they already would, so there's no real risk in doing what you need to do. So far, it seems to have worked just fine. Mossad has committed any number of acts of war against Iran, and the Iranian response has been completely toothless.
I think Trump has an unique quality that otherwise rational people when talking about him abandon for some reason their rationality and start ascribing him some magical evil powers. Scott described some examples of that in his article, but hasn't avoided the curse himself. I mean, really - Trump causing WW3? One can't seriously believe it. I've read predictions of something like Trump could order to nuke Russia just because he supposedly didn't like something that was said about him - from otherwise adult people! We have so much motivated reasoning here if we could mine bitcoins from it we would all be millionaires. And when I read things like "maybe it's my liberal bias" I am nodding so hard my neck starts to hurt.
It's hardly unique to Trump. I wish it were. But as far as I can tell, the *only* people we have in politics these days are avatars of Jesus Christ or Adolf Hitler, although who is which is a subject of great debate.
Before the advent of TDS, I thought BDS (not the anti-semitic one, the anti-Bush one) was bad. Little did I know. I'm watching US politics for a while now, and it is true that every prominent Republican that ever had a chance of becoming a president has been declared literally Hitler, and the tradition comes directly from the times when Hitler himself was literally Hitler, and FDR himself compared Republicans to him. I'm not sure how they managed to conduct politics before that, but I think they had something too.
But still, I don't think it was as bad as literally seeing Nazi codes in numerical statistics and seriously claiming the opposing politician would literally kill all humans on Earth any second just because of momentary whim. It's some other level of detachment from reality - and beyond all hope, I still hope down in my soul this is performative and not serious, even though my brain tells me to abandon this hope.
Well, we have to wait until the present scourge has abated to find out. During the Black Death otherwise rational people burned Jews and gypsies. People do nutty things when faced with what they think are (at least somewhat) existential threats and no clear enemy. I don't think our psychologies are well-adapted to abstract threats *other* than social threats, so we kind of map every abstract threat we can't really grasp onto a social threat, and start immediately seeking out social enemies. It would be fascinating, if I were a xenobiologist from Mars.
>Yeah I thought it was kind of weird Scott even imagining it was conceivable the Iranians would go to war over Suleimani.
Did you miss the part where Iran launched a salvo of ballistic missiles against a US military base over Soleimani? And placed their air defenses on high alert against what they expected would be a prompt American counter(counter)attack? The first part is literally an act of war, and the second part strongly suggests a willingness to accept escalation of that war.
I don't know why you add the word "ballistic" as if it makes the missile bigger or scarier. A rock is a "ballistic" missile. These were dinky little things, about as far from a true ICBM (or even IRBM) as...well, a rock is from a bullet from an M2.
There were even some indications at the time that the Iranians were being somewhat careful to ensure that their attack, pathetic as it already was, militarily, ran little risk of *actually killing* any American soldiers. I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that it was a "retaliation" designed for domestic consumption, and calibrated with care to *avoid* the possibility that the Americans would actually launch a real war. All nations have a tolerance level below which "acts of war" do not *actually* result in war, and are dealt with some other lower-level way. Examples abound, even in that area of the world. And the Iranians have, more than most nations, made a study of just how far they can push it before they risk a general conflagration. If nothing else, they wouldn't be in the biz of sponsoring terrorism if they *didn't* think they could make that calculation accurately.
Putting such air defenses as Iran has on "high alert" is (1) of essentially zero tactical benefit to them, versus the Americans, or the Israelis, or indeed any First-World air force, and (2) means zip about their willingness to stomach a real fight. They would do that as a matter of course, the same way the US bumps up Defcon when some civilian airliner they're almost 100% sure is innocent wanders into a no-no zone. It's just plain operational readiness.
>I don't know why you add the word "ballistic" as if it makes the missile bigger or scarier.
It kind of does. Ballistic missiles are strategic missiles, used only for deep strikes against high-value targets, a planned offensive act. This property is shared by cruise missiles, and if the Iranians had launched a cruise missile attack the significance would be the same. But it would be silly to say "Iran launched a ballistic and/or cruise missile attack..." when in fact Iran launched a ballistic missile.
"Missiles" generally are mostly things like antitank or antiaircraft missiles, tactical weapons that might well be used by people defending themselves against a tank or aircraft that is immediately attacking them. Even air-to-surface missiles like the Hellfire that took out Soleimani, are often used defensively e.g. to provide close air support to friendly ground forces under attack.
A "missile attack" may be a small-scale defensive response to a threat. A *ballistic* missile attack, is pretty much always someone who isn't in immediate danger deciding to kill a bunch of people a few hundred or thousand kilometers away because it serves their strategic goal. And if it was meant as a non-lethal warning shot, try firing a non-lethal warning shot from a rifle at a police officer sometime; see how long you live, or how the jury feels about deciding who's the dangerous violent criminal when the shooting stops.
Were there actually non-racists who marched at Charlottesville? If not, the ‘clarification’ that he wasn’t referring to Nazis is inaccurate and bespeaks lying/bullshitting/ignorance.
Yeah, I chafe a bit at the people who try to parse Trump's words and say he never supported the (literal) hate groups who rallied in Charlottesville. I live in Charlottesville and witnessed the events first hand. If you showed up there somehow under the impression that this was not in fact a white supremacist/facist rally then it should have become immediately apparent that you misjudged the situation and left. It wasn't at all subtle. To try and pretend like it was a demonstration that just had a few bad apples is willfully ignorant.
Certainly, but then the claim should *be* that Trump was being willfully ignorant by pretending it was a demonstration made up of decent people with a handful of Neo-Nazis mingled in. Trump obfuscating about whether some people who support him are Nazis is very different from the ‘strong hypothesis’ that he was openly supporting the Nazis.
I feel like that is splitting hairs. Of course he is not going to openly say "yes I support Nazis" (nor do I think he actually does), but he gave the distinct impression to THEM that he does. And it is not an unreasonable inference to draw. Theses people aren't stupid, they know the POTUS can't give them explicit support. But by dissembling and hedging I think a reasonable person would interpret that as some level of support.
Except he literally said "I condemn Nazis", and people parsed his words as "well, that's his secret code for saying he supports Nazis". But worst of all, after that they go around and claim he literally said "I support Nazis" and when called out on it, they answer "well, he couldn't directly say he supports them, so he said the opposite, but we all know he meant the opposite of what he said!". Sigh...
This is the classic Trump tactic though. The Proud Boys took the message "Stand back and stand by" as a message of SUPPORT. It doesn't matter that Trump literally just condemned them, Trump constantly used confusing messages to signal secret support to these types of people.
This is the classic anti-Trump tactic though. If the explicit evidence doesn't support the narrative, there is always a dog whistle to be found that shows what Trump supposedly truly meant.
Yet I never see any attempt to do the same for the other side. Surely there are at least some Biden supporters who expect some far-left things from him.
Sure, saying things like "I condemn Nazis" and having the press interpret it as "he is dogwhistling the Nazis that he supports them" is classical Trump tactics. He is doing it all the time - he is saying one thing, the press reports he said the opposite and all the "rational intellectuals" echo-chamber it into "well, we know he didn't literally say it but he sure meant it, even when he said the opposite!". Very classic. And when you point out he literally didn't say it, the classic tactic of Trump is for "rational intellectuals" to claim he is just confusing them on purpose to send secret signals.
The funniest thing here is that those same people that try to find "secret signals" in everything are then laughing at QAnon people as being irrational. I guess mirrors aren't a thing in their world.
Alternatively, Trump sends confusing messages because he talks in word salad all the time, and everyone interprets the resulting words in whatever way suits their agenda.
That is true and bad! I want to clarify that I think Scott gives Trump too much benefit of the doubt about the intentionality of his covert racism and of his attempts to woo the alt-rights.
However, I think *covert* is the operative word (isn't that what the whole "dogwhistle" idea is all about in the first place? that it's a secret?!), and so share Scott's annoyance at the "openly racist" meme.
Scott's reply to this is to CTRL+F for a woman (Michelle Piercy) claiming to have been a regular conservative. If you then take the Herculean step of googling her, you will find the "conservative group" she attended with was called "American Warrior Revolution." If you google *them*, you will find their leader on Facebook advocating for the lynching of a black state legislator.
The reason I was able to find all this is because there has already been an extensive online back-and-forth on the argument of "look, this one woman claimed to be a regular conservative" because it was taken in sum and substance from a PragerU video.
Or just realizing that the median American opinion would be shamed by Twitter blue checks because they're further left than even the most left-wing congressional district. Most people wouldn't give a damn.
Being piled on by Twitter should be a badge of honor, if anything. Sullivan asked what accounts for Askhenazi Jew overrepresentation in elite fields, if not genetics, which none of the people "dunking" on him could answer.
"Sullivan asked what accounts for Askhenazi Jew overrepresentation in elite fields, if not genetics, which none of the people "dunking" on him could answer."
I'd start with the hypothesis "Ashkenazi Jews tend to value education" and go from there. This is the part I've never gotten about Sullivan, Charles Murray, etc. Why aren't they looking at culture, which still coherently defines subgroups, and skipping to genetics, which have been thoroughly homogenized by travel over the past 200 years? It's not a parsimonious explanation.
No, Scott's reply is to show that the NYT wrote down that a regular conservative was present. So for Trump to believe that regular conservatives were present, he had to believe a source no more far-right than the NYT.
The general line Scott takes of bending over backwards to give Trump a level of charity that he'd never give you is baffling. It was mostly white nationalists at Charlottesville and the ones who weren't are a rounding error. We can get lost in the weeds of what makes you a white nationalist, or what Trump believed at the time about who was protesting... but *he* doesn't care about such distinctions. By the time you've figured out what the hell he meant, he's onto the next topic.
On January 6, when Trump held his last rally of the 2020 campaign and a bunch of his audience, fired up by his speech, breached security and entered the Capitol, I was done being charitable. Oh fine, Trump said "peacefully" and I'm sure he thinks this means he has no responsibility for what happens afterwards, but that doesn't mean anyone else can't hold him responsible. I take him seriously, not literally.
So on some level, "You Are Still Crying Wolf" makes a good point. We spend all this time arguing about whether Trump is a racist (or a Russian asset) and it's just a distraction from the unambiguous awfulness.
"The general line Scott takes of bending over backwards to give Trump a level of charity that he'd never give you is baffling."
I think I can speak to at least part of this.
Trump is terrible. At this point, nothing say to me is very likely to convince me that Trump is not terrible. The details of my model of Trump are continually updating, but my overall orientation toward him is quite overdetermined, and was when most of this happened.
If the media tells me Trump refused to condemn Nazis, and then I see video of Trump condemning Nazis, the video does not redeem Trump for me. Likewise, I'm not very concerned with the prospect of being fair to Trump. If you *did* unfairly accuse him of X, well, I'm not the fairness-to-Donald-Trump police.
And I think, for a lot of people, that about wraps it up. After all, I've just said I'm not worried on Donald Trump's behalf, so, provided the media and Trump are the only relevant agents in this picture, that ought to settle the matter.
But they're not.
People in the media who inaccurately reported the literal content of Trump's statements lied *to me*. Even if we *entirely* grant that what Trump *actually* said was every bit *as bad*, their reporting of it was frequently *inaccurate*.
It didn't have to be this way- if they wanted to avoid getting into the weeds of his actual, literal claims, they *could* have issued reports reading "Trump Says Something We Think Should Outrage You, Be Outraged Now" without including any comment on the contend of Trump's utterances. That would have been very silly, but it would have been less of a stick-in-the-eye to people who care about accuracy on axes orthogonal to "how-outraged-should-I-be".
Which leaves me feeling *very strongly* that it's important to carefully log what Trump *actually said* and compare it to what various sources *say* he said- because I need to know which of those are news sources and which are "news sources". Which can, admittedly, look like trying to be charitable to Trump. I think it can even degenerate into that, if you're not careful. But Trump isn't the point; the point is, *I'm trying to see the world clearly* and *I don't like being lied to*.
Arguing, "Yes, but Trump said X, which is just as bad!" is only relevant if I'm trying to decide how to feel about *Trump*.
I never voted for Trump and never would (except if he ran against Kang and Kodo, I guess), but I was absolutely INFURIATED by the constant lying by the media about him, particularly when they were accusing him of lying! If you're going to run a story about how someone is a liar, shouldn't you make at least a strong attempt not to lie yourself?
Add to that the sudden explosion of (poor) editorializing inserted into the middle of so-called news articles and the descent of the media is complete.
This is very much how I feel about the situation as well. I have often found myself "defending Trump" to people who only read mildly liberal/left sources and have no idea they are being lied to. I hate defending Trump, because I would like to spend some time criticizing him as well - but that area is taken and I care a lot more about truthful criticism than lying to develop a narrative.
> The general line Scott takes of bending over backwards to give Trump a level of charity that he'd never give you is baffling.
The real issue here is not Trump, in my view, but the larger picture.
Why is Charlottesville even talked about, unlike so many other tiny demonstrations by extremists? Because it fit a media agenda. That same media agenda is why they lie about Trump, ignore incidents that don't fit their agenda, 'frame' events very differently depending on whether it fits their agenda, etc, etc.
The end result is a huge disinformation campaign that creates the kind of absurd beliefs that Scott highlighted.
Trump is gone now, but this system of disinformation persists.
For what it's worth, I can see a difference between people who just want statues of civil war leaders to stay up and people who believe in Nazism. I wouldn't call the former "very fine people" but they aren't nearly as dangerous.
**THERE WAS NO STATUE PROTEST! IT WAS ALL NEO-NAZIS!**
There was the tiki torch "Jews Will Not Replace Us" rally one night, and then the violent clash with antifa the next day. At no time was there any significant plausibly-deniable Southern heritage contingent, or if there was I've never seen any record of it.
Trump was praising people who did not exist, or if they did, weren't in Charlottesville that day. The most charitable take I can give is that he was just dangerously misinformed about the nature of what was going on there, and talking out of his ass like he always does. But as I said above, I'm done being charitable.
What's wrong with advocating for the lynching of a legislator? That seems like good ol' vigorous American populism. I've heard any number of legislators' necks proposed for the noose, of both parties, black, white, brown or yellow. I may have even thought approvingly of the idea in passing myself.
I suppose if you have evidence that this particular legislator was proposed for hanging *just because he was black* as opposed to because he was a legislator (which seems crime enough in itself), you might want to present that.
The question is not whether there were in fact any non-racists marching with the Neo-Nazis at Charlottesville. The question is whether Trump claimed there were.
The quote provided by Scott shows that Trump *claimed* he was not speaking about the white supremacists and Nazis, and that he was referring to an ill-defined group of "young people" who were also there, instead. This shows that Trump was, at worst, trying to keep “moderate racists” happy, but that importantly, he did so while maintaining plausible deniability about whether he was excusing them *as* racists, or saying they *weren't* racists.
Thus, it fits Scott's main thesis that Trump was not "openly" supporting white-supremacy.
Why wouldn't there have been? The rally was in support of a perfectly sensible cause, against the destruction of a state of... whoever, it doesn't really matter. If I'd lived in Charlottesville I might well have been there myself.
The issue is, even if it was 10,000 people even mildly right of center and one fringe lunatic, the media would have claimed it was a far right neo-nazi rally. You have to take all of this with the context that the national media in the U.S. is essentially the propaganda arm of one political party.
Okay, so even though it was a white supremacist rally, that doesn't count because the media would have called them white supremacist even if they weren't? To me the thing that makes the rally white supremacist isn't that the media said so, it's that it was planned and publicized by white supremacists, the marchers chanted white supremacist slogans, etc.
My point was - if you hear from the national media that the non-left wing participants in a rally are fascists / nazis / white supremacists, all that means is that their beliefs can be anywhere from slightly right of center, to far right. It wouldn't give you any more information than that.
But what does that have to do with the price of tea in China? I didn't bring up the media, you did, just like you brought up this hypothetical 10,000-person rally. Are you saying this particular rally, this Charlottesville rally, was *not* a white supremacist rally? Are you saying you don't know?
> the change in race relations 2017-2021 will be less negative/more positive than the change 2009-2016
Maybe I'm just totally confused by simple arithmetic, but why is this evaluation based on change in the score rather than the raw score itself? If the percent of blacks who thought race relations were good declined (from 46% to 36%) during the Trump, isn't that just another way of saying that race relations were *more* negative? Sure it didn't decline as quickly as it did from Bush to Obama, but it's still a decline.
I think the point is that if race relations deteriorated by the same amount during Trump's tenure as during Obama's tenure, then Trump isn't having a uniquely negative impact on race relations. That said, I don't really think it's a useful comparison because you're comparing eight Obama years to four Trump years.
If you compare 4 years to 4 years (2014-2017, 2017-2020, both inclusive), it still looks okay for trump by the metric given. 2014-2017 looks like it's 60->46 (-14), and 2017-2020 is 46->36 (-10).
However, I think the metric chosen, the rate of change in percentage who think race relations are very or somewhat good, might be bogus.
On the extremes, the metric doesn't work. If a president were to tank the current 36% down to 15%, then any president who followed them, no matter what they did, wouldn't be worse by this metric. After all, 36->15 is -21, and the worst the next president could possibly do is 15->0 (only -15).
I think that phenomenon already will appear at larger percents. I would guess that it takes more extreme events to move the percent from 46% to 36% than it took it to reduce it from 60% to 46% in the first place. I don't know how to quantify this, but I am pretty convinced that you can't just compare those two differences directly.
Either ratio, or ratio of odds, seems better to me for measuring changes of a fraction.
36/46 is about .78, and 46/60 is about .76.
For the odds measure we would have to compute (36/64)/(46/54) and (46/54)/(60/40), or better yet, use the number who actually gave the opposite number in the denominator, rather than lumping in the "don't know"s.
Here's the data for those years in that chart (apologies if the formatting is bad, there's no preview or edit button, and no obvious way to insert a table):
Year Very+ Somewhat+ Somewhat- Very- No Opinion
2020 4 32 29 34 1
2016 7 42 29 21 0
2013 8 58 24 9 1
Note, I had to compromise on the years. Data's only available for 2008, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2020. Since Scott used 2017, I suspect he guessed at the data from the interpolated graph, which seems a little suspect. I'll stick to the nearest years I can that have data. "No opinion" answers were consistently 1% or less, so it turns out that doesn't really change much.
That gives us 2013-2016 as ((7+42)/(29+21))/((8+58)/(24+9)) = 0.49
For 2016-2020, that gives us ((4+32)/(29+34))/((7+42)/(29+21)) = 0.58
They have written there "For results based on sample of 300 non-Hispanic black adults, the maximum margin of sampling error is ±7 percentage points.".
I've gotta say a n=300 poll doesn't instill me with massive confidence, and that's just for the 2020 data. It's quite possible the previous years have even worse sample sizes. If we were to assume the sampling error were also up to 7% for the 2016 data, the then the difference of less than 14% could fall entirely in sampling error.
In conclusion, measuring the ratio of odds does seem to agree with Scott's prediction, but I don't think it's all that meaningful given the relatively small sample size and the fact that it doesn't cover a few key years around change of president.
Tabstops did not give pretty spacing for my table, so it looks bad. You'll just have to imagine it's pretty, or go hunt it down on the gallop page Scott linked.
The prediction is not about the percent, but about the rate of change (about the derivative of the percent). If you look at the chart for the poll linked, it's easy to see this as the slope on the trendline they graph. The prediction was that the trend wouldn't become even more negative.
Why is this the right thing to predict on? Well, the argument wasn't that Trump would heal existing race relations issues, but rather than he would not accelerate their deterioration further. It seems quite plausible that race relations would have continued to deteriorate under any president, given the prevailing trend-line, but the narrative of the time really was that Trump would lead to unprecedented overt racism, far worse than the previous years.
I do agree with you that it's a dubious metric to predict on for a few reasons.
Most notably, the trend can't really be linear forever, and near the fringes, I entirely expect it to start to flatten out.
For example, if under Biden, it went from "36% of black adults think race relations are bad" to "15% of black adults think race relations are bad", you could make the same prediction (it won't decrease as much) with 100% confidence, since the number obviously can't go below 0%. I think that slightly extreme example helps to illustrate that some percent changes may be more important than others. Going from 50% to 40% probably requires less drastic perceived issues than going from 10% to 0%, even though they're both the same percent total change.
I think Scott gets this prediction right based on how he worded it. I think you're on to something that this isn't a great prediction though, and I'm reasonably convinced that comparing the rate of change on that graph isn't really all that sensical.
> Well, the argument wasn't that Trump would heal existing race relations issues, but rather than he would not accelerate their deterioration further.
I think the implicit assumption here that I'd been missing is something like "a presidency has control over the acceleration of the race relation score, but not directly over the race relation score itself". If this is true, then it makes sense to judge the presidency based on change in slope rather than change in absolute number.
I can see how that assumption *might* be true, but it's not obvious that it really is. Is there good writing on the dynamics of race relations that would attest to that?
> a presidency has control over the acceleration of the race relation score, but not directly over the race relation score itself
I think the assumption is more than the president is one factor, but there are many factors. Since the president is not the only factor, you can't judge it just based on the score, and you have to just sort-of assume the other factors remain constant. Which is obviously dubious, at best. In my mind, this is pretty similar to judging a president by the performance of the economy. Sure, they have some influence over it, but there are other important factors outside of their control, and a healthy dose of dumb luck mixed in too.
The assumption that the president does have some control here, though, is one that I do think other pundits and the media at the time were making, and Scott's prediction was contextualized by that.
At the time Scott made these predictions, it was repeated by some pundits that voting in Trump would embolden white supremacists, etc etc, which I would expect race relations to measure. The claim by the media and pundits did seem to be that this specific president would have an impact on race relations.
Also there seems to be an assumption that the race relation score will tend to have constant velocity (ie spiraling downward or cycling upward, for example) unless acted upon. This seems like it could be reasonable, but why can't we rule out default-stable (even stably negative) race relations?
> As soon as rioters got in the Capitol, Trump tweeted that this wasn't what he wanted and they should leave.
What tweet is this referring to? This wasn't my recollection, and I can't find any source matching it?
I can find a tweet soon after they stormed the capitol saying "Stay peaceful!". This is *not* remotely comparable to "I don't want this, and you all should leave", and I can't fathom that interpretation. Trump's video statement (which sounds more like the quote above) came long after the riot had been fully and totally quelled by the authorities.
I was baffled reading that whole section of the post, so it made me question whether my recollection was off. If Trump had immediately tweeted "I don't want this, you all need to go home immediately" once they stormed the capitol, I'd feel quite differently about his culpability in the incident! (At least, his intent regarding it). But I can't find what you're referring to. What are the quotes for the tweets you're using?
I'll also note that the other reason this version of events is somewhat confusing to me is that I was snooping around various Trump communities at the time (in fascination/horror), and... well they absolutely thought he was encouraging it! And when the *video* dropped that night, they were quite devastated by what they felt was a betrayal. Of course, their opinions on what Trump believes aren't exactly reliable, but that's at least the source of the memory of that day.
So, what am I missing? What were the statements/tweets/actions from Trump that seemed to have the serious intention of doing his best to send the rioters home?
This was slightly over two hours after the break-in. He tweeted three times between the break-in and this, and none of those tweets told people to leave.
Indeed, one of them said ""Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution." One would have to be pretty stupid to consider that benign, given that Pence was inside the Capitol while it was being occupied.
Thanks. I've edited it to say that he first tweeted that people should stay peaceful and respect Capitol police, then later released a video telling them to leave.
It currently says "then released". This was two hours later; I think "then later released" or "eventually released" would give a more accurate picture.
Even that ignores the "did nothing at all with the power of the Executive branch at his fingertips for two hours" which is just a crazy thing to leave out of the framing.
Isn't this grotesquely dishonest when Trump's first tweet was actually "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution." and as a direct result of this tweet people still in the Capitol building started chanting "Hang Mike Pence".
A truthful telling of the story is that Trump initially increased tempers on twitter and only after Capitol police had the situation under control and it was clear congress and the VP was safe, did he ask people to stay peaceful, respect Capitol police, and then hours later release a video.
Timeline
2:12 p.m.: The first rioter enters the Capitol through the broken window,[83] opening a door for others.
2:24 p.m.: President Trump tweets,
"Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!"
2:26 p.m.: Trump calls Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), having misdialed Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL). Lee passes his phone to Tuberville, who informs Trump that Pence had just been evacuated from the Senate chamber. “I said ‘Mr President, they've taken the Vice President out. They want me to get off the phone, I gotta go’,” he recounted to reporters of his call.
That 2:26 call by the way, was to convince Tuberville to delay the vote further. Giuliani made a similar misdial at a similar time and left a message.
In the first 14 minutes of rioters breaching Capitol Hill, Trump's two known actions were to throw Mike Pence under the bus and dial the wrong number while trying to contact the Senator from Alabama. On this call, Trump learns that the VP is safe.
Simultaneously
2:26 p.m.: After receipt of a call from DC Mayor Muriel E. Bowser indicating that DoD had refused to send assistance to the U.S. Capitol, the Public Safety Secretary of Virginia, Brian Moran, dispatches the Virginia State Police to the US capitol as permitted by mutual aid agreement with DC.[91]
Ten minutes later Trump decides to tweet
2:38 p.m.: President Trump tweets,
"Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!"[64]
Actions speak a lot louder than words, Scott. Stop carrying water for a fascist.
Got it. Yeah, this is the crux of the divergence between us. If not for his actions *during* the riot itself, then I would be willing to believe that Trump was simply carelessly egging on his supporters, and while he wanted some angry demonstration, he was horrified to see the nut jobs take things too far and storm the capitol itself.
But I simply cannot square that narrative with his actual actions during the riot! His supporters were inside the capitol for *several hours*. There was obvious public pressure on him to tell his supporters to stop, go home, because surely he doesn't intend for them to storm the capitol? And yet... he did no such thing. It was only hours after it was fully quelled that he finally made that statement.
He uses Twitter to chime in on every little issue. If he saw his supporters violently storm the capitol, supporters who genuinely believed they were following his guidance, I struggle to construct a version of events where he was against what they were doing, but still chose not to say anything of the sort.
To be clear, I'm not litigating his premeditation of how it played out, because I don't think we have the evidence to wade into that quagmire. I'm just referring to how he felt about the storming of the capitol *as it happened*.
What's the alternative version of events? As they violently storm the capitol, he stays totally quiet because... []. I don't know how to fill in that blank. Like, the obvious narrative is that whatever his ultimate intentions, he liked that his supporters were "fighting" for him (it fits with his effort to get Pence to throw out the election ballots, even if that had little chance of success).
But what's the alternative? Are there folks who believe that Trump was staunchly opposed to what the rioters were doing, but stayed quiet in the moment? I mean this as genuine question, because the coverage of the events that I saw were from the mainstream liberal outlets, and the more far-gone Trump supporting groups, both of which absolutely agree that he was in support of the rioters in the moment (and of course turned on them when they failed, for obvious reasons).
I think this question is well-framed and would be interested to hear responses from Scott and others who have landed on the "no coup" side of the fence.
The riot in the Capitol had no way to be a coup, because there was no plausible path for them to take power or put Trump back into power. They could and did terrify a bunch of congressmen and policemen, but there was no victory condition. Suppose they took the whole congress hostage--how does that keep Trump in office? Suppose they mobbed a bunch of congressmen and killed a couple? Again, how does that keep Trump in office?
It's not actually a game of capture the flag. If your mob takes over the Capitol, you don't get to pass any legislation or decide to accept or reject the reported results of the election or appoint a new president. You just get to vandalize the capitol and maybe get someone shot, and then you go home and get arrested for rioting in the Capitol and go to jail.
So, okay, explain to me: Trump says that if Pence throws out the votes, Trump gets to win. So why wouldn't rioters who believe Trump, also believe that if they intimidate Pence to throw out the votes (or kill him and he gets replaced by a VP who will do so), then that's a victory condition according to them?
That's what Trump told them, that there is a path to victory and it all depends on getting Pence and Congress to do what Trump wanted them to do.
That this wouldn't plausibly happen doesn't matter. An attempted coup is an attempted coup even if it was a stupid attempted coup. And as I've said elsewhere, it was an attempted coup already from the moment Trump asked Pence to throw out the votes, the rioters were just supporting Trump in this attempt, but it'd have still be an attempted coup even if there were no rioters at all.
Is it "an attempted coup" if just one guy with an AR-15 storms the Capitol? Or would that be a lone nutcase committing a crime? How about a group of 5 charging the Senate? Does it change if they get to shoot a Senator or two before getting mown down?
Normally we only call things "coups" (attempted or not) if they have at least a snowball's chance in Hell of prevailing. Otherwise we call it random lunacy and/or criminality.
That 200 excited supporters with maybe a dozen hand weapons between them could topple the entire freaking United States government is a tale only Robert Ludlum could make credible.
If Pence had done what Trump wanted, it might have caused a constitutional crisis, but it would not have been a coup. A coup is not the same thing as a legal-but-sketchy move to try to keep power.
It is though. That's how power works. In the scenario where the mob takes over the Capitol and winds up killing the VP and a few high profile members of congress, the nation is in absolute disarray. Trump claims some nebulous emergency powers to delay the transition (he can't legally do this but does it anyway) and hey, he actually won the election anyway so this is the fair and right and legal thing to do (he says).
People challenge this. Trump calls them cheaters. His mob calls them cheaters. It goes to the Supreme Court. Another 'Stop the Steal' rally occurs which is similarly underpoliced. Members of the Supreme Court either see the writing on the wall and drop the case or don't see the writing on the wall and are summarily executed by yet another fascist mob.
Is this enough to secure Trump as a dictator? I don't know. Widespread counterprotests ensue along with the now expected egregious police brutality to quell them. Trump passes an executive order making protest a felony and fascists fash up all the protestors and a good number of democratic legislators as well under vague 'incitement' laws in the order.
Trump might be able to stay in office if Congress refuses to certify the election results from some States with improperly-held elections which happened to vote in-favor of Biden..
Of course there was a plausible path: kill or terrify Congressmen until there were enough votes to certify the alternate electoral slates that Republicans had been shouting about for months. Of course it wouldn't be popular, but it would add a legal argument for legitimacy on top of the voter-fraud argument for popular legitimacy, and most of the people powerful enough to fight back would be conveniently lying in pools of their own blood.
My actual model is that Trump's an extremely self-centered narcissist who cares about other people *mostly* as props for his ego, *possibly* excepting his family.
My actual model of his information sources is that he was thoroughly bubbled- that he'd rooted out anyone around him who'd tell him stuff he didn't want to hear.
That model wouldn't be "horrified to see the nut jobs take things too far." There's an argument that he'd see what was happening as mostly symbolic- I don't think there was anyone around him, at that point, who'd say "Holy shit, this is a big deal! You need to do something about this!" I kind of believe that argument, but without much confidence and it's not a crux for me.
That model is *entirely* consistent with being happy his supporters were fighting for him. I'd call that the default outcome, and it fits well with the hypothesis sketched above.
I think he failed to act when he had an affirmitive duty to act, probably for reasons that were extremely petty. To the extent that this was deliberate, which I think it very likely was, I think it was probably a violation of his oath of office.
(I mean, as I read it, it definitely *was* a failure to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States [...] to the best of [his] ability.") So it *was* a violation of his oath of office, full stop. But I read this as a *very* demanding oath, one which all modern Presidents have violated, and I've noticed that other people disagree with me about this. They seem to think "to the best of my ability" does not actually mean "to the extent that I possibly can," but rather something more convenient, some other standard which an actual human being might meet. Under their reading, I think the relevance of the oath in this particular case becomes much more ambiguous. I do apologize for the digression, but I don't wish to give the impression I think the situation is ambiguous: it seems to me Trump quite clearly violated the oath-as-written.)
I wouldn't call this a "coup."
There's a great big space between "Trump means well, but tragically fails to quell the riot while emoting appropriately" and "Trump attempts to execute a coup". There's "Trump inappropriately sits by and lets things happen." If your model of Trump mostly precludes meaning well or emoting appropriately, the choice is more between the latter two.
I think a lot of people feel like what Trump did was *really seriously bad, you guys*, and it's just *awkward* not to have a word that encapsulates that badness. So they feel around for the closest one that fits, and use that, even if it's not *exactly* right. I know people like this in meatspace, people I'm pretty sure *wouldn't* have used the word "coup" to describe this if it happened in a storybook, or a history book, somewhere far away where their emotions weren't engaged. And I *do* think there should be someone saying either, "Well, not technically," or else clarifying that yes, this *is* how they intend to define the word from here on out, in *all* contexts.
Trump made various attempts to stay in office that involved trying to get people who arguably had the legal authority to somehow change or revisit the election outcome to do so in his favor. Part of this involved spreading a set of claims about massive election fraud that, as best I can tell, was nonsense. (Though to be fair, Trump and his operation were inept enough that it is possible there *was* evidence of fraud that could have helped him, but they couldn't get it together enough to do anything with it.) This was all the kind of very bad stuff that made him a poor choice to put in a position of power and trust.
But that's not a coup. Lying to his supporters about election fraud isn't a coup. Trying (ineptly) to strong-arm election officials and Republican congressmen and VP Pence into reversing the election result somehow isn't a coup. Inciting a riot that got some poor gullible lady killed isn't a coup. They're all bad things, but most bad things a president can do to try to stay in power aren't coups.
Would it have been a coup if Mike Pence had done what Trumpists wanted and re-elected Trump? Seems like a pointlessly fine line to draw on the coup spectrum.
He made that video long after frantic phone calls from Pence and McCarthy and only Biden went on TV calling for him to make a statement. He refused to call in the National Guard. Pence led that effort, which is technically illegal because the VP is not in the chain of command.
Well, you're sort of correct, and Scott is sort of correct. See here (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56004916) for the full timeline, but the order of tweets from him after the riots breached the capitol grounds was was:
2:14p - "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done..." [Rioters reportedly began chanting for Pence's head shortly after this tweet.]
3:13p - "I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence!..."
4:17p - [A video that starts with] "I know your pain, I know you're hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us...But you have to go home now..." [and ends with] "We love you, you're very special...But go home, and go home in peace."
6p - "These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!"
Shortly thereafter, his account was suspended.
In my opinion, the 6p tweet is the most damning. At the time, it felt tailor-made to encourage protestors to regroup for further attacks while buying everyone some time with a thin veneer of "But no violence though [wink, wink]!"
He was definitely speaking out of both sides of his mouth that day. Who knows where he actually stood?
One thing is clear, though: If you start with the assumption that he really did want the violence to end and the bad actors to go home, he displayed perhaps the least competence ever exhibited by someone in a position of power with that sort of goal in that sort of situation.
To me, he seemed to suffer from a pathological need to keep all his options open, up to and including gratefully accepting a shiny new dictatorship from the bloody hands of a violent coup leader.
"To me, he seemed to suffer from a pathological need to keep all his options open, up to and including gratefully accepting a shiny new dictatorship from the bloody hands of a violent coup leader."
Ugh i'm really conflicted on this post. I realize you can't address 100% of every controversy around trump in your assessent of prediction post trump presidency. But it's hard for me to square your statement about white supremacists in his administration with the separation of children at the border and his disgusting, horrible comments about charlottesville.
I did address the Charlottesville thing. I feel like the border thing is kind of stretch to attribute to white supremacy - again, I admit he's a horrible person, but you can't just say that anything bad someone does is evidence they're a Nazi doing that bad thing to promote white supremacy.
The architect and fiercest defender of the border separations was Stephen Miller, right? Is there any doubt that he's an out-and-out white supremacist?
But Biden and Obama had the same policy on child separation, unless you think all three were/are white supremacists it leaves you in a difficult position.
Obama's policy was not the same. His was for minors who there was a credible reason to believe we're trafficking victims. Stephen Miller's explicit goal was family separation as a form of deterrence.
Without necessarily disagreeing with the conclusion, I'm not sure about the reasoning around "the most racist-sounding comments anyone was able to get out of Trump". Just because those two are the two the media ran with, doesn't necessarily mean that they're the worst.
This is counterintuitive and insane and I can't possibly explain the mechanism. You would think that the (by all indiciations, strongly anti-Trump) media would take the worst thing he'd ever said or done and beat *that* to death. But in individual non-Trump instances where I know what's going on, this often seems not to be the case. Instead, headlines and articles will lead with what I see as an unnecessarily weak case --- weak enough, and unnecessarily enough, that I'm tempted to call it "deliberately weak". (Of course, this may be "deliberately" in some vague cultural evolution sense.)
A recent example is the sexual harassment allegations against Cuomo. (I'll ignore the argument that COVID-related allegations are more serious and should have dominated, since people of different political faiths can reasonably disagree about that.) I recall seeing exactly one headline that contained an actual quote. It's this (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/01/nyregion/cuomo-harassment-anna-ruch.html) NYT article, which accuses Cuomo of an unwanted advance at a wedding. The quote in the headline is "can I kiss you?"
Without having read into allegations in detail, I have no reason to doubt that Cuomo did some abhorrent things. That incident, even, seems like (in context and with more information) his behavior was likely entirely inappropriate. But that makes it *that much stranger* that the quote they went with is "Can I kiss you?" --- in and of itself, pretty much the most bland and least offensive thing possible.
So in this context, I could easily write a paragraph like the one you wrote, saying in essence "Cuomo can't have said anything bad, because the best the news could come up with was 'can I kiss you', which is pathetic." This leads me to distrust that reasoning.
There's another example, where I personally know details --- a high school teacher who openly and fairly horrible harassed students in class. This was in public, in broad daylight, everyone knew it and talked about it, etc etc etc. When the news finally covered this, the most extreme and obvious stories (I don't want to write nominally non-public details here, sorry) were omitted!
So to apply this stuff to Trump. Trump did not, in fact, institute interment camps at which hundreds of thousands of muslims were imprisoned. (This was in line with my main worries post-election, although I count certain immigration policies as correct predictions. Hey, I'm not as honest as you are.) But *suppose he had*. Would that have been in the news, non-stop, for 4 years? Suppose he had said: "I call on my supporters to work to eliminate the islamist threat", or some other openly-calling-for-violence thing along those lines. I'm not sure that that would have occupied as much media attention as, for example, that highschooler in DC with an awkward/obnoxious smile.
Again, I can't put my finger on the mechanism. Media time seems to be preferentially spent not on the bad things, but on the controversial things, so that unequivocally bad things get less attention than tea-leaf-reading exercises.
In conclusion: I would not take the fact that the media focused mainly on some particularly pathetic quotes as a sign that there were no substantially worse quotes.
> Again, I can't put my finger on the mechanism. Media time seems to be preferentially spent not on the bad things, but on the controversial things, so that unequivocally bad things get less attention than tea-leaf-reading exercises.
Media is probably driven by controversy and divisiveness. If everyone agrees that something is bad or good, people don't yell at each other online, share the links, drive clicks, etc. I think it fits the data fairly well.
Correction: Prediction 2 does not mean that you thought there was only a 50% chance of Trump getting the Republican nomination. It means that you thought that there was only a 50% chance of Trump getting the Republican nomination *conditioned on Republicans winning the Presidency in 2020*. It seems fairly reasonable to assume that the Republicans would have had a smaller chance of winning with Trump than with somebody else, and thus, your implied confidence that Trump won the Republican nomination could well have been more than 50% (though no more than 80%).
12:53 p.m.: Rioters overwhelm police along the outer perimeter west of the Capitol building, pushing aside temporary fencing. Some protesters immediately follow, while others, at least initially, remain behind and admonish the others: "Don't do it. You're breaking the law."[74] By 1:03 p.m., a vanguard of rioters have overrun three layers of barricades and have forced police officers to the base of the west Capitol steps.[71]
1:59 p.m.: Chief Sund receives the first reports that rioters had reached the Capitol's doors and windows and were trying to break in.[83]
2:05 p.m.: Kevin Greeson is declared dead after suffering a heart attack outdoors on the Capitol grounds.[84]
2:11 p.m.: Rioter Dominic Pezzola breaks a window on the northwest side of the Capitol with a plastic shield.[83]
2:12 p.m.: The first rioter enters the Capitol through the broken window,[83] opening a door for others.[71]
2:24 p.m.: President Trump tweets,
"Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!"[64]
2:26 p.m.: Trump calls Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), having misdialed Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL). Lee passes his phone to Tuberville, who informs Trump that Pence had just been evacuated from the Senate chamber. “I said ‘Mr President, they've taken the Vice President out. They want me to get off the phone, I gotta go’,” he recounted to reporters of his call.[90]
2:38 p.m.: President Trump tweets,
"Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!"[64]
3:13 p.m.: President Trump tweets,
"I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!"[64]
4:17 p.m.: Trump uploads a video to his Twitter denouncing the riots, but maintaining the false claims that the election was stolen.[64] This was one of three takes, with the "most palatable option" chosen by White House aides for distribution.[97]
If we're talking about the same video, it includes the lines:
“I know your pain, I know your hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election and everyone knows it, especially the other side. But you have to go home now, we have to have peace, we have to have law and order, we have to respect our great people in law and order. We don’t want anybody hurt. It’s a very tough period of time. There’s never been a time like this where such a thing happened where they could take it away from all of us. From me, from you, from our country. This was a fraudulent election, but we can’t play into the hands of these people. We have to have peace. So, go home. We love you, you’re very special. You’ve seen what happens, you see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel. But go home, and go home in peace.”
I think this qualifies as telling the rioters to stop rioting and leave. Obviously it is a terrible statement in many other ways and should have been more condemnatory, but it's telling them to follow the law and leave, which is inconsistent with it being a deliberate coup.
This was two hours and three tweets after the first break-in. (An earlier version of this comment said the riot had been quelled at that point, but the timeline shows that to be false.)
BTW I think you are right about many other things in this post and in particular "You Are Still Crying Wolf" was correct. I just think you're mischaracterizing this particular incident.
Are you going to ignore the *hours* before he said anything of the sort, and that in fact the first thing he tweeted after the rioters were breaking in, was not something in condemnation of them, but rather in condemnation of Mike Pence, at which point the rioters started shouting "Hang Mike Pence" (after reading Trump's tweet over megaphone)? Is it so easy for Trump to cover his ass for your sake, by making some noise of condemnation HOURS later, while not doing anything to defend and protect the constitution that he was sworn to uphold?
He bashed Pence, he praised the rioters, and he even said "Remember this day". He LOVED the riot, and he DID attempt a coup by asking Pence to just throw out the results of the election, becoming the first president in US history who refused to surrender power peacefully.
> Trump absolutely did not tweet that the rioters should leave the Capitol, something that any normal person would have done immediately
Why would any normal person have done that?
"Occupying" government buildings has been seen as a legitimate protest tactic in the US for decades. How could Trump have predicted that these standards would all turn on a dime the moment that it was his side doing the occupation?
For the record, I don't think protesters of any stripe should go round "occupying" places, blocking streets or otherwise inconveniencing people, but it's hard to argue that it's okay for some but not for others.
Any normal *president* would say that people occupying the Capitol should leave. Tolerating violent attacks on government buildings (let alone the legislative branch at a time when numbers 2 through four of the line of succession were present) is outside the range of normal presidential behavior.
AFAICT Sanders substantially changed his political positioning from "specifically economic-class-based progressivism somewhat skeptical of identity politics" in 2016 to "maximally progressive on all axes" in 2020. It seems plausible to attribute the increasing share of racial minority groups among his supporters to that shift. So insofar as you made a prediction there, arguably it was implicitly conditional on something that didn't happen (that Sanders himself would stay constant, though the political environment might shift around him).
"A pessimistic take is that race has become so emotionally charged that everyone including me has crazy beliefs, which makes me a more biased judge and lets me award myself points more shamelessly than I would do anywhere else."
I'll be honest, my opinion is that this pessimistic take is more accurate than the optimistic one. I think tons of people attacking you on your Trump-racist takes in hyperbolic terms has led you to getting rather defensive when it comes to this topic.
Here's some examples, in my mind.
1. "Stand back and stand by" is very different then "stand down", I'm honestly not sure why you're conflating them. What Trump says means "don't do anything yet, but be ready to".
2. What's the citation for Trump immediately telling his supporters to stop on January 6th? He eventually did, after it was all over, but my memory, of all the reporting afterword, was that Republican congresspeople were begging him to do so and he kept on refusing. I'd be happy to be corrected on this!
3. Charlottesville. I can't claim to know that literally EVERY single person chanting "The Jews will not replace us" was, like, in the KKK or some other organization, but I also don't think I would ever say that there were "good people" who did so. As shambibble says, even Michelle Piercy, mentioned in the post, is/was part of a group whose leader advocates lynching.
I agree that people were way too worried in late 2016/early 2017 that Trump would lead an ethnic cleansing! I agree that your post at that time had some good points about that! But, again, maybe because of how people reacted, you've always been kind of defensive about this issue. Because of that, I don't trust your self-assessment.
1. Even if you think that the shift from "stand down" to "stand back" is meaningful, it only happened after Trump unequivocally condemned white supremacists twice, and it was only applied to the Proud Boys and not the white supremacists. I think the general reporting of this as "Trump refuses to condemn white supremacists" was extremely dishonest, and that even if I'm wrong about how to interpret the Proud Boy comments there's no way I'm as wrong as they were.
3. I think you're having to back down from "everyone at that protest was a literal Nazi" to "someone at that protest was part of a group whose leader made a racist comment". Yes, everyone there was way on the right, I think that's compatible with Trump saying some of them were good people. I think some people in eg Hamas, the Chinese Communist Party, etc can all be good people, even though they're all affiliated with terrible groups.
1) Saying "sure" is not actually condemning. "Are you willing to apologize?" "Sure" is not apologizing; saying "I'm sorry" is apologizing. Similarly, saying "sure" you're willing to condemn white supremacists is, in my mind, very different then saying "I condemn white supremacists". I'm not saying he was encouraging them! Saying "Sure" is better then nothing! But then saying "stand back" kinda negates that.
2) As has been pointed out a few times in this thread, he only posted that video after the riot at the capital was over. In my post, I even said he did condemn after it was over. In your post, you said "as soon as the rioters got into the Capital", which, again, as far as I know is false. The timing does matter; if you plan a bank robbery with people, but condemn it and say people should get out of the bank AFTER they've been arrested, it's not exactly evidence that you didn't think the should rob the bank.
3) Maybe I was unclear; I don't think "everyone at that protest was a literal Nazi". I agree that people in Hamas, or the Chinese Communist Party, or even literal Nazis can be good people. People are complicated. But if I see a bunch of people loudly praising the Great Leap Forward, and my reaction is to say "there are some good people there", most people aren't going to take it as a philosophical "any large group of people will have some good people in it". Most people will understand it as me agreeing with the Great Leap Forward, or at least that I'm trying to get the support of people who do.
I think you're underselling the situation with "someone at that protest was part of a group whose leader made a racist comment".
The woman who you specifically picked out as an example of someone who might be one of the "very fine people" is a member of a group whose leader explicitly endorsed the lynching of a black congressman. It's not quite an actual death threat, but it's way, way beyond a "racist comment". To me, that's enough to exclude the members of the American Warrior Revolution from the list of very fine people. If that's the least objectionable protestor we can find, I'm comfortable with condemning everyone at the protest.
Some of your commentary here about "stand back and stand by" makes me wonder if you are not familiar with the expression "stand by". Have you not watched many movies involving police or military? Serious question.
This actually reminded me of a third use of this phrase in addition to those mentioned elsewhere. It's not uncommon for a superior to say "stand by" to a subordinate as a preface to getting reamed out or as a way to threaten future punishment, as in, "I want you to do <thing>. And if you fail to do it or refuse, stand by (it's going to be bad for you)"
Your WBUR source supports Dieb's recollection, not yours. You wrote that "When his plan for angry supporters chanting turned into angry supporters rioting and getting into the Capitol, he was clearly against this and tried to stop it." Your link, though, is clear that "as the far-right extremists breached the U.S. Capitol — halting the Electoral College vote count — Trump issued a restrained call for peace, but did not urge supporters to disperse." In other words, a significant amount of time passed between the breach and the videotaped statement which was the first unambiguous statement that the protesters should leave.
Charlottesville was a Unite the Right rally. The idea behind the name ‘Unite the Right’ was that the more mainstream right ought to put aside their differences and make common cause with the alt-right to defend important causes, the original one being freedom of speech.
The very idea of it being a ‘Unite the Right’ rally was that it should include more than just the alt-right, more than just the explicitly pro-white right. I do no know the extent to which it did, but it did to some extent.
The ‘Unite the Right’ idea originated after conservative speakers were harassed or deplatformed from speaking at university campuses. Multiple strands of the right started to protest these events, and much of the right was leery of protesting alongside the alt-right, so the alt-right, seeing an opportunity to become more mainstream pushed the idea that the right should unite in defence of fundamental principles like free speech, claiming it was a tactical mistake to do otherwise, and that the ascendant left never disavowed its more extreme elements.
In the original protests by the right for free speech they came unarmed and were badly beaten by the armed antifa. Subsequently some on the right came armed but they were still beaten and routed by antifa. Collections for hospital bills were passed around. Eventually the right became more organised, came with shields and armour and got some of their ex-military guys to lay out a plan including alternate retreat routes etc.
For the Charlottesville rally they received a permit to march and to speak at a specific part of the park. However they were blocked from getting to where they needed to go by antifa, and couldn’t push through them. The police did nothing to disperse the left who were blocking a legal march. Since the right couldn’t get to where they were supposed to go they decided to go to a different part of the park. They didn’t have a permit for speaking at this part of the park so the police broke up their rally.
The one thing Eric Weinstein nails is Trumps ability to make a coin 'land on its side'. If it happens once, it could be due to chance. If it happens all of the time, then it is being done on purpose.
I like Weinstein's way of putting it. And letting your meaning be known while being ambiguous on paper is a trick one would learn after a lifetime of shady business surrounded by lawyers.
This subsumes my own observation that Trump tends to sort of apologize or denounce, then immediately walk it back in way that his supporters can interpret it as "not really though". See also Ilhan Omar's apologies for comments that deserved an unambiguous apology. "I meant what I said", "I meant what I said but phrased it poorly", or "that's not at all what I meant" are all better than these sorts of half-assed apologies.
I'm surprised that Soleimani is your Trump screwup of choice. Iran isn't in a position to cause WW3 - even if they do have nukes (which most people seem to still doubt), the damage would be severe but much smaller than, say, assassinating a Chinese general openly might cause. Also, if you look at how Iran would normally try to punish people for attacking them, they'd normally arrange retaliation though a certain Gen. Qasem Soleimani. He was a very well-chosen target for that reason alone.
The natural "Trump did far worse than he should have" reference is, of course, coronavirus. (Which you do mention later on, in fairness)
Yea, I found it a bit curious why that's so heavily weighted as a major screw-up. Maybe he's more high-ranking than some previous targets, but I can't tell why this was such a terrible geopolitical move over other various ME leaders / clerics / etc. that have been droned over the last ~20 years
I also feel compelled to weigh in on Trump's damage to institutions. I think you're vastly underestimating the amount of damage Trump did to the EPA. The EPA ended up more hamstrung and more heavily politicized under Trump than it had been under any previous President, especially in terms of climate research.
If you were a conservative or Republican you would probably consider that a major improvement. Obama increased the EPAs scope, which was seen as an initiation of a new conflict.
I have trouble faulting Trump for doing what both his supporters and his political allies would like him to do, that those same people would also do if they were in control.
The question was whether Trump had done meaningful damage to institutions, not whether that damage was a net positive for society. Obviously, if you don't believe in the value of an institution, doing damage to that institution isn't a bad thing for you. That doesn't mean that Trump didn't seriously damage the EPA.
If a bad institution is "damaged" (meaning, less effective or less structurally sound and in result less capable of their function), isn't that a good thing?
There are Democrats who are actively advocating "damaging" ICE and border control, as well as even normal police departments. Is that just as negative as the anti-Trump "he will damage institutions" criticism we are talking about?
> I also think events proved me right in saying that the media was going crazy in a particular way where they would read racism into anything.
You link ten pages in this paragraph. Two medium posts from people with less than 100 subscribers; one reddit post; one tweet screenshot; one article about something the DNC said; four articles about something people are saying on social media; and one article from a media organization expressing the sentiment of the link (an opinion piece from The New York Post).
This is a really weird group of things to collectively label as "the media". Did you mean "social media"?
This is what they call "dumpster diving", where one finds low-status representatives of a group saying the thing you want to say the group is saying, rather than actually finding any high-status members of the group saying that thing in a way that credibly speaks for the group.
The problem is that Scott has previously shown that when reading 'high-status' left texts he completely misreads the texts. I'm not sure how this problem is solvable beyond making Scott re-read things until he actually understands them.
Your comments are very see-through and it’s clear you’re still upset from Scott not sharing your view of Marxism.
I don’t know why I now get upset from reading your comments, haha, but could you please just spend your time working your communication and expository skills on things other than Marxism, and then write up a solid piece on Marxism? That’s just a suggestion I thought up in a minute, I’m sure there are better ways to achieve your goals than that.
I am not "upset", I am trying to correct him, as any rational person would. Remember that Scott Alexander has done things like attempted to name a fallacy after Marx, then refuse to back this up with any primary sources showing where Marx committed such a fallacy. He has also admitted that he only has a "gestalt" impression of Marx's positions. So when Scott talks about the "left" one wonders if he's actually done any of the hard work of reading people outside of his political tribe.
Could you please clarify what you hope to accomplish with your comments? If they’re to correct Scott, the way you’re going about it is ineffectual and destroying your credibility.
What would be a positive result you expect from your comments? That Scott reviews a Marxist work or?
I am merely discussing things with other people, sometimes I don't really hope to "accomplish" anything other than have an interesting conversation. I suppose a very good and positive result would be that Scott admits to the numerous mistakes he has made in this area.
'Reviewing' a Marxist work may not necessarily be productive as Scott Alexander has already shown that he doesn't read carefully when it comes to Marxist texts or texts about Marxism.
You don't "correct", you just contradict. 90% of your comments could be replaced with "Nuh-uh" and nothing of substance would be lost.
If you think someone is going to be swayed to your side by, every time they make a comment, replying with "no that's not true, you should read Marx"... please reconsider.
To the contrary, your interactions on this blog have *actively* worsened my opinions on Marxists. You're representing your cause badly, and if you really care about your cause, you should stop or take a different tact.
I work under Hitchens' "That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence" rule. In a previous thread you asked me for some Marx quotes that showed he was not in favor of utopian communes and I delivered.
And yeah, others just went viral on social media. The criteria I used was that I, who am not that much of a social media consumer and not really selecting for this stuff, came across it. I wasn't Googling "stupidest Trump conspiracy theories", these were things that showed up on my timeline.
This post is already 8000 words long and I didn't want to expand that paragraph into a long and involved case proving the exact extent to which the media covered all of these, but I think that case is there.
I respect your need and desire to keep yourself mentally healthy, but I'm disappointed to hear you won't be blogging on anything as controversial as "Trump and race" in the future. When the world has gone that far off the deep end, that's when we most need intelligent, rational people with an audience like you to stand strong and keep telling the truth.
Now, imagine thousands of smart, insightful, informed people considering making similarly sensible and careful comments about current moral panics that are nonsense, considering how many years of idiots screaming at them on Twitter they'll get, and just stepping back and leaving the world in its ignorance.
As far as I can tell, it's kind-of a component of moral panics that skepticism about the moral panic is commonly taken as evidence that you're on the side of the devils, for whichever devils we're supposed to hate/fear this time.
"the Capitol riots ..., with basically no links to organized white supremacy..."
Unless "organized" somehow invalidates this counter-point, it seems fair to mention that there was the little matter of the Confederate flag, which definitely freaked out some people.
RE: your monetary gains beating your self-grading: your grading system is treating all bets as equal. The markets don't. It's not at all surprising that a big win like buying Biden early swamped your mistakes. In a game with asymmetric payoffs you don't have to be right all that often.
It seems concerning, from a bias perspective, that you made so many mistakes in the same direction when grading your trump predictions.
Missing that white supremacies played a large role organizing and participating in the capitol riot. Misunderstanding the timeline of what happened. Failing to understand the difference between "stand down" and "stand by"... etc.
It really feels like you are consistently attempting to minimize how bad trump was (and thus show that you were right in your predictions).
"that the number of words in Homeland Security documents could be interpreted as a white supremacist code"
This is an extraordinarily misleading summary of the controversy. The issue wasn't just that the headline had 14 words, it was mainly that it started with "We must secure the" *and* was 14 words (and sounded weird, as if they were stretching it). "We must secure" is not a common phrase. There are very few results in a Google search, and almost all of them are on this controversy or the 14-words. If you set the time frame before that release, you have to go to the bottom of page three to find a non-Nazi reference (and that one starts with "why" - "Why we must secure"). Is there a single other case of an article titled "We Must Secure..." that is 14 words long that is not obviously referencing the Nazis (other than this one)? Obviously, Trump himself wasn't involved, but the idea that this definitely wasn't a reference is just absurd. And there were other issues as well, although less convincing (a weird use of the number 88 in the article, 14 points in the article, etc.).
There were only 13 points in the article - the number was inflated to 14 to make the conspiracy theory sound more plausible. The use of "88" for a statistic was a reference to a previous statistic finding that 88 of 100 people were in the relevant category. "Secure the border" is the standard terminology for securing the border. See https://www.businessinsider.com/conspiracy-theories-in-trump-era-political-arguments-2018-6
I did say those were the weaker points, but you are incorrect nevertheless. There were 14 points, one of them just didn't have a bullet point. "secure the border" is common - "we must secure" is not. Almost nobody talks like that, Scott.
It's fascinating how you both are cutting off all the parts that make this inconvenient. It's not that it says "we must" (as you just said), it's not that it says "secure the border" (as Scott just said), and it's not that it is 14 words (as Scott originally said). It's that it has all of these things together.
If you bother to do more than 2 seconds of research, you will quickly realize that headlines with "we must secure" are very rare, and ones that are 14-words seem to be non-existent (outside of this one case). It certainly could be a coincidence, but I would place it at least a 25% chance that it is not... which is worth investigating.
I'm not cutting off anything. While I think your entire conspiracy theorizing is silly, I was responding directly to your claim that prefixing a common phrase with "We must" is not common. It objectively is common.
Well, it's a good thing I didn't make that claim then.
"we must" with some phrases might be common. It is not with "secure the", as I have actually demonstrated.
"we must secure the": 307,000
"we have to secure the": 35,500,000
It sounds off, and is relatively rare. Almost all of those results seem to be on the actual 14-words or this DHS headline (indeed, due to Google's complicated search methodology, "we must secure the existence" actually comes up with more results than "we must secure the").
I hope I'm not being too uncharitable here, but you sound very much like you're trying to Release the Kraken and you've got the statistically implausible vote tallies to support it.
I think that article you linked wrongly summarizes the issue with the 14 points in the article (the italicized intro is not the same as a point in the article), but I actually agree with its main point:
"But is it so implausible that the headline's unfortunate structure is a coincidence?"
I don't think it's implausible that it's a coincidence. I just also don't see it as implausible that some low-level employee at the DHS decided to make a hidden Nazi joke and it got past their editors.
If you want to keep it, at least add that it had "we must secure" in it, which is the most important part.
I missed something. In what way is "We must secure" associated with Nazis, as opposed to modern-day white nationalists? As far as I can figure out the fourteen words were invented by a guy who wasn't born until 1938.
When calling people Nazis vs Neo-Nazis, perhaps. I don't see the big deal on that, since it's almost always clear in context (saying Christopher Cantwell or anyone else alive and active in the alt-right today is a Nazi does not make anyone think that they are people born before 1938 and in the Nazi Party). But all I was saying is that they may have been making a hidden Nazi joke, which I think trying to include 14/88 on a DHS release would qualify as.
Or, alternatively, find any other article in the world with "we must secure" as the first words in a 14-word headline.
By the way, Google search results for:
"we must secure the": 307,000
"we have to secure the": 35,500,000
"secure the border" may be the standard terminology, but you're ignoring the word "must" which is apparently used less than 1/100th of the time. I reiterate my claim that almost nobody talks like this.
All of that being true doesn't actually change the point. You state a worse version of the claim as evidence that people are making bad claims. If you think that the headline was not a reference to the 14 words that is one thing. I disagree, but there is subjective interpretation involved. However, to say that the wordcount was the only basis for the theory is to ignore the stronger argument. To ignore the stronger argument while using the weaker argument as evidence that people were being unreasonable is bad argumentation.
I agree that the headline having 14 words is very weak evidence. I think that the headline starting with "we must secure" is fairly weak evidence. I think the combination of the two is not weak evidence but pretty reasonable evidence. Again, you may disagree. But I'm not sure how you disagree with the claim that the combination of the wordcount and the first few words is significantly stronger evidence than the wordcount alone.
Kudos to you, Scott, for the hyper-rational take on yourself. I for one hope that you continue to talk about politics. Here's why: It's not just predictions that matter in analysis. Opening up avenues for new mental models from which to analyze/process political matters has its own intrinsic value.
You can derive conditional odds from unconditional odds. If B=>A, then P(B|A) = P(B)/P(A). So if prediction markets were giving Trump a 14% chance of winning the general election (B) at the same time they were giving him a 32% chance of winning the Republican nomination (A), you can infer that those prediction markets thought there was a 14%/32% = 44% chance of Trump winning the general election conditional on him winning the nomination.
There's a minor caveat, which is that here B does not strictly imply A, since you could imagine a world where Trump loses the Republican nomination and goes on to win the general election as a third party candidate. But I think it's safe to assume that this is a remote enough possibility that it had negligible impact on betting markets and it's impact on the calculation is much less than a rounding error.
> I was right. In the general election a year later, Trump did better than Romney had among non-white voters. He made large gains among blacks, Asians, and Latinos. The only ethnic group where he didn't gain at least 5% over Romney's numbers was whites. As I pointed out at the time, the narrative that Trump was especially appealing to white voters was bizarre and not truth-based, motivated primarily by a demand for racist Republicans on the part of increasingly woke narrative-consumers.
I'd argue that the improvement 2020 Trump showed over 2016 Trump, and 2016 Trump showed over 2012 Romney are more-or-less regression to the mean and that it's unwarranted to put too much emphasis on Trump's campaigning specifically for the trend. The numbers behind that are pretty subtle though, and it'll be easier after seeing a few more cycles of data. As an intuition pump though, I'd suggest that analyses of this type always seem to neglect to mention just how poor Romney's numbers were, and understanding why that is is important. But that's not really what I want to talk about today.
>1. Total hate crimes incidents as measured here will be not more than 125% of their 2015 value at any year during a Trump presidency, conditional on similar reporting methodology [confidence: 80%]
>Correct. In 2015, the FBI reported 5,850 hate crime incidents. In 2017, the highest-hate-crime year of the Trump presidency, the FBI reported 7,175. That's only a 23% increase, which is larger (but not much larger) than ordinary variation. I was slightly surprised by this because I vaguely remember checking how this prediction was doing a few years ago and seeing a large surge in hate crimes. But by the specific source I said I would use to resolve this, I was - just barely - right.
Total hate crime incidents in 2015 was 5,850; 2017 was 7,175; 2019 was 7,314. (2018 was 7,120 for the curious.) That gives a total of 125.026% of the 2015 value, meaning the prediction was incorrect.
That *still* leaves out 2020, which very much was a "year during a Trump presidency" regardless of an election that would result in a change in administration in January the following year. The data for 2020 can be expected ~Oct of this year, and if you want to go out on a limb and predict that it would be below the 125% threshold it'd be interesting, but ultimately irrelevant for the purposes of settling the prediction. (Also, I wouldn't envy your odds.)
>6. Race relations as perceived by blacks, as measured by this Gallup poll, will do better under Trump than they did under Obama (ie the change in race relations 2017-2021 will be less negative/more positive than the change 2009-2016) [confidence: 70%].
>Correct. Between 2008 and 2017, the percent of blacks who thought race relations were good declined from 61% to about 46%, ie 15 points. From 2017 to now, they declined from about 46% to 36%, ie 10 points. I'm not sure the end-of-2020 data is in yet, so there's still a chance for me to be proven wrong. And also, they ask some similar questions where Trump does worse than Obama later. Still, with the data I have and the resolution method I chose, it looks like provisionally I was right.
The specific number you're looking at is the White-Black relations combined Very/Somewhat good percentage among black adults, which was 61% mid 2008, 66% early-mid 2013, 62% August 2013, 51% mid 2015, 49% early-mid 2016, 40% late 2018, and 36% mid 2020. There aren't enough datapoints for precision, but if you're taking the closest point to the respective inaugurations that's a 12% under Obama and a 13% under Trump.
There is a significant issue here where you use an interpolated 2017 as Obama's endpoint but use 2020 as Trump's - and in direct contradiction to the original statement of the prediction. I see your qualifier about future data, but the 2017 interpolation is the unjustifiable part - you're explicitly attributing to Obama the period of time where e.g. Trump saw the sharpest decline in his approval ratings from an above-water beginning. If the timing of the surveys doesn't meet your standards then I would rather you toss the prediction entirely than fabricate a result, no matter how sensible it may seem to you.
Yeah, I think regression to the mean is a big part of it.
One thing to keep in mind is the incumbent effect. Trump is only the fourth incumbent prescient to lose in the last 100 years. If Trump had been running against an incumbent in 2016 he would've been crushed.
Incumbent effect is definitely huge - by the same logic, we can't give Bush '04 and Obama '12 "full credit" either. It's a hard question to disentangle how much of it is incumbents genuinely becoming more popular and how much of it is selection effects (which are further confounded by popular vote splits! (which would apply to both Republicans since Clinton!))... but I think we can all agree that Trump '20 gets stomped by Bush '04.
I'm not looking at the numbers right now but when I was looking at them I concluded that while Trump's improvement among black voters was probably just regression to the mean after Obama, his improvement among Hispanic voters is harder to explain that way. It depends on whether you think George W. Bush's anomolously good performance among Hispanics was specific to Bush or whether it represented some kind of new normal. Trump certainly did extremely well among Hispanics compared to other GOP candidates who weren't George W. Bush.
All relevant factors! IMO, the core problem is that presidential elections simply aren't frequent enough to get good data; "another Republican that isn't GWB and isn't running against Obama" means "no presidential candidate this generation". Aberrations are a majority of the dataset.
(Shooting from the hip I'd argue that Trump's general economic populism plus a lack of coherent social stances was a good strategy for the marginal Hispanic vote, that his policy specifics in '16 hurt him badly, and that his failure to deliver on that policy and pivot away to his fundamentals helped in '20, but that's all under-evidenced. And I always say Republicans should run on populism to get Hispanics, so it's not like I'm visibly updating on evidence anyway.)
(Also I'm interested if there might've been a Simpson's paradox where ex: a 70-30 against you looks bad whereas 60-40 looks better, but if you accomplished that shift by turning out the 55-45s you didn't really do yourself any favors.)
> Total hate crime incidents in 2015 was 5,850; 2017 was 7,175; 2019 was 7,314. (2018 was 7,120 for the curious.) That gives a total of 125.026% of the 2015 value, meaning the prediction was incorrect.
It's worth remembering that the recorded "hate crime" numbers for 2017 were inflated by one big weird outlier event - that autistic Israeli teen who used an autodialer to call in ~2000 hoax bomb threats. If you set that aside, hate crimes didn't increase at all in 2016-2017 relative to 2015.
The larger problem would seem to be salience/reporting bias. That is: once it became clear that discovering "hate crimes" was a good way for partisans to attack Trump, many more "hate crimes" were bound to be found even if the same sort of event (which often boils down to "some weirdo yelled nasty words at somebody else, who took offense") might not have gotten reported, signal-boosted or tallied in the same way in prior years.
"Regression to the mean" being possible with Trump in office seems to support the idea that Trump was not unusually bad and that minorities did not think of him as unusually bad.
If he were seen as a racist, then regression to the mean would not have happened.
"stand back and stand by" can also mean "hold back for now, but keep ready", I think. In fact, English is not my first language and that was the only meaning of "to stand by" I knew (from Star Wars, no less)
And if I understood the reaction correctly (the PB used "stand back and stand by" as merch), that's partly how they interpreted it, too.
Also, he didn't condemn them before, he promised to condemn them later - and then he only delivered if you interpret the statement as "stand down" instead of "keep ready".
(I deleted my other followup because I had phrased it worse)
Your interpretation of the phrase matches mine (as a native English speaker). Thing is, Trump is a terrible public speaker and people are often left trying to interpret what he's actually saying. Much like Nostradomus, we'll still be poring over transcripts of Trump hundreds of years from now trying to figure out WTF was going on. Scott's doing some of that here.
In this case, my interpretation is that Trump has been playing both sides the entire time:
To the right-wing extremists and the left, he played the super villain, telling them that "Mexicans are rapists (there might be some good people mixed among the rapists, but whatever)", "I like David Duke (sure, I have to publicly disavow him later, but still)", "stand ready, proud boys (could also mean 'stand down')", "we love you, capital rioters. You're very special. You are the revolution that happens when the good guys, the patriots, get stolen an election (also, I'm so humble, I don't even want you to fight for me, or I'm just covering my ass here)", while at the same time telling the more moderate parts that he was being unduly vilified for telling everyone "I am very concerned about immigrant crime (although there are many good people there)", "of course I denounce such a terrible man as David Duke (it just slipped my mind who that was)", "I mean for the proud boys to stand down, that's what I said from the beginning (I even said before that sure, that's what I was doing)", "The capitol riot was gruesome and everyone has to be brought to justice (I told them through the whole time, they had to stop this and go home, it's not my fault they didn't listen to me!)"
Politicians always have a public persona, it's not that hard to have two of them.
I probably have quite a lot of left-wing (not necessarily liberal) bias, though, so maybe take that into account - still, that is the best scenario I know.
The possible mistake in the dog-whistle theories (which this sounds... Kind of... Similar to me) are that they assume just because someone alludes to an extremist position, they have to actually hold that position. But Trump doesn't have to be a White Supremacist to ride on the wave of attention the easy to dismiss backlash against his statements that can be construed as alluding to White Supremacy (in my theory, on purpose), he can have the backlash without holding the positions. That's my best guess for that.
Something to add: Trump has been a reality tv star for years. I wouldn't assume he's as bad a public speaker as it seems to me, maybe he just speaks in a highly different style from any "serious person".
> As soon as rioters got in the Capitol, Trump tweeted that this wasn't what he wanted and they should leave.
This is not true. Via Wikipedia, rioters broke into the Capitol at 2:12pm.
At 2:47pm, Trump tweeted "Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!".
At 3:25pm, Trump tweeted "I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue".
At 4:22pm, Trump finally released a video where he tells his supporters to go home.
> When his plan for angry supporters chanting turned into angry supporters rioting and getting into the Capitol, he was clearly against this and tried to stop it.
I think "clearly against it" is kind of a stretch, considering he dragged his feet in doing anything about it when everyone else was telling him to do something about it, and he couldn't tell his supporters to stop without praising them effusively.
While you are right about the number of deportations going down under Trump, I think it's misleading to try and use that as a metric of how harsh Trump's immigration policies were. This is because it needs an implicit denominator of something like "number of people who were in a position to be deported" and AFAICT that denominator was also much smaller under Trump. Part of this is because overall demand for immigration continued what I understand is now a multi-decade decline, mostly because Mexico isn't as poor as it used to be. But part of this is because Trump forcibly kept many more people than Obama would have out of the country altogether, and whether you think this was a good or a bad thing, you should include it in an accounting of how anti-immigration his policies were.
Yes, I think a "percentage of asylum seekers and other potential immigrants turned away before entering the country" is an important factor. Not saying this is necessarily the case (I don't have the numbers), but if you wanted to have your talking points cake and eat it too, turning away far more immigrants while deporting fewer would be a great way to do it.
> I will still never predict anything this controversial again - it’s not worth the cost to my peace of mind.
I wonder if there's a good way to semi-anonymously publish something, such that the people who know you know that you did it, but the people who don't know you and just catch it as it virally spreads can't easily find your main contact info to annoy you about it. This wouldn't stop the torrent of anger and criticism, but maybe it could be directed at a different inbox that you can choose to put out of mind until you want to address it.
Re. your prediction that DT will not have been an openly racist POTUS with openly racist policies: You may have won the facts-on-the-ground question here, but the narrative I am surrounded by in Blue Bubble-land continues to say exactly the opposite. <i>Everyone knows</i> that DT was a white supremacist and supported white supremacists. So whether you wound up being right about what actually happened (I think you did), you are being drowned out by MSNBC, NPR, the AP, etc etc etc. I hope that you aren't too broken up by that. The myth has been enshrined in the national story by now and will be taught to children for generations to come, assuming there are any generations to come.
About QAnon - searching Twitter for that word is a terrible way to research it. Believers used other hashtags like #WWG1WGA, which was used by former NSA Director Michael Flynn. Also lots of hasthags about sex trafficking.
I started reading the _actual_ Qanon posts the other day, but there's something like ten thousand of them and I only got through the first couple of hundred before getting bored.
I am concerned that "Qanon supporter" is becoming yet another motte-and-bailey type term that is thrown around loosely to slur political opponents:, i.e. "You believe that the Democrats are engaged in some shady dealings, therefore you are a Qanon supporter, therefore you believe in satanic paedophile rituals"
I feel as if it highly misleading and frankly unhelpful to grade your overall Trump forecast based on the aggregate scoring of predictions made. This method is biased by the questions you did predict rather than all the things that happened of significance you didn't even think to mention. It also fails to measure the weight of each prediction made in comparison to each other.
Which is to say - in a general sense, I believed you failed to predict the essence of Trump's impact on the United States.
I am not an American. Prior to the election, while I strongly disliked Trump and thought he would be a terrible President, I was not overly concerned - for similar reasons to you and thought everyone else was overreacting.
I deserve an F for this forecast. Trump was far more damaging to your country than I ever could have thought possible. Trump's impact on American institutions, norms, polarization, shared understandings and sacred values is so extreme. Sure, Trump just exacerbated ongoing trends, but he materially impacted all of things - that no other counterfactual American leader would have done.
I was wrong. You were wrong. We failed to understand the consequence of Trump. The overreactors and alarmists got the essence more accurate than us.
Was Trump damaging to the country or was it the insane conspiracy theories and unfounded vitriol thrown out against him? I also had very negative expectations going into his presidency but the worst of it he was ultimately either uninterested in or unable to accomplish. Russiagate conspiracies flat out broke a lot of people - many I know personally. I (involuntarily) lost friends not for supporting Trump but for opposing Trump too softly and rejecting unfounded conspiracies. Meanwhile I made better friends with conservatives who didn't mind and frequently listened to critiques of Trump and non-conservative policy ideas.
>I deserve an F for this forecast. Trump was far more damaging to your country than I ever could have thought possible. Trump's impact on American institutions, norms, polarization, shared understandings and sacred values is so extreme. Sure, Trump just exacerbated ongoing trends, but he materially impacted all of things - that no other counterfactual American leader would have done.
I, uh, thought he did pretty well. (At least until the pandemic, where he did no better than the average European leader).
"The Republican Party has fundamentally changed to be a paranoid victimization-narrative-based party, in much the same way the Democrats did."
I'm interested in what evidence you have that the Democrats have done anything like this. My general impression of the past decade and a half of national politics doesn't seem to support that though. The Democrats have gone from focusing on health insurance access as the central goal to a much more general focus on wealth inequality and race relations, probably because they passed Obamacare and needed a next goal. But the Republicans have gone from focusing on cutting taxes and social security to just complaining about the Democrats. It's true that the one time the Republicans passed something under Trump was a tax cut, but they spent a *lot* of time complaining about Obamacare without doing anything about it. In the McConnell era the Republicans seem to have mostly given up on writing legislation, and have instead retreated to just vaguely complaining about Democrats. The Republicans do now seem to me to be a "paranoid victimization-narrative-based party", but I don't see any evidence that the Democrats are.
I'm guessing that you've confused left-Twitter for the Democrats. But even in the twittersphere, I just don't see evidence that the left is any more victimization-narrative-based than the right. Admittedly, I haven't particularly looked for this, but this really seems to me like you've noticed some problems with bits of the nearby outgroup, and haven't looked to see whether the same problem appears in a worse way with the farther group that doesn't even rise to the level of "outgroup". (In any case, these relevant Twitter groups aren't "Democrats" or "Republicans".)
>Looking over my history, I find that I did well when I was speculating on very high-level important events I'd been following closely, like who would win the election, and poorly on low-level things I tried to do math on, like how many times Trump would tweet in a given week. This is the opposite of what I originally expected - I'd thought more money and analysis would go into election predictions, and the small niche markets would be where you could eke out a gain. I think what probably happened is that the election markets attracted a lot of dumb money that I could beat, and the tweet markets were mostly semi-professional investors who were much better at mathematizing it than I was.
Full agreement. One can make an acceptable return in high-volume markets based on 'pure' engagement with the proposition, but I've found that as you get to the smaller, faster markets you get both more competent investors and outright market manipulation a la Goodhart's law. (In theory the observation that one can personally move the consensus price ought to be a useful tool, but in practice it's a good sign you're in shark-infested waters.)
Theoretically this might be addressable with larger markets that don't have PredictIt's caps, but in practice I'm skeptical prediction markets can organically produce good results with a mix of profit-maximizers and recreational bettors. If for no reason than simply because 'interest in a market' is not an independent variable.
I think it would save a lot of argument over definitions if you just rephrasesd
<quote>10: ~Autumn 2020 Semi-Prediction: There will not be a Trump coup (B)</quote>
to not use the word coup. (I.E. just explicitly say what you thought there would *not* be... for instance, maybe you were thinking 'a US military backed intervention' or something)
I agree that this would clarify things a lot, but the discourse itself hinged around the word "coup" in a way that's not really escape-able. With hindsight, I don't feel comfortable unpacking my own and other people's opinions further, since it would be too easy for all of us to unpack our opinions in the way that ended up justified by future events. Arguably I am doing that anyway, but I am doing it using the specific phrasing with which I remember thinking about it at the time.
In general, yes I agree, but like you said, you are arguably doing that anyway. If most objections to that prediction just come down to definitions of coup, then the discussion will just devolve into uninteresting motivated reasoning.
I think the bar for this clarification is even lower in this case, since this prediction is self reported, and was not registered anywhere.
Re: Marine LePen. The far right* has twice reached the knockout stage of the French presidential elections, and has twice failed abysmally. Too many people were ready to vote for any alternative. At the same time, the French establishment parties have shown that they have fewer and fewer ideas and less and less to offer anyone not already an insider, and their hold continues to weaken.
My guess is that the French establishment has about one more electoral cycle left in it before The Deluge hits. Maybe the plan is to hold out long enough for LePen to die or retire and then hope that her replacement is more tractable or less effective. At least that replacement will have some building to do.
Germany is where France was a few years ago – the populace there is seething with white hot rage, the establishment parties are unresponsive at best, but the alternatives are still too scary and declasse for solid citizens to contemplate. Germany's well-publicized history with far right alternatives makes this entirely understandable.
An interesting question would be what would have happened in French and German politics if Trump had lost in 2016. Trump, his buffoonery and manifest incompetence were the best election managers the European establishment could have asked for. “Vote for a populist and *this* Trump doofus is what you’ll get!” was their real slogan.
*note that "left and "right" in the contemporary US understanding of those terms, don't make much sense outside the context of contemporary USA-ian politics.
Surely by definition, anyone who actually gets 30%+ of the vote isn't "far left" or "far right", they're mainstream in that particular country.
It's interesting that in US terms, just about every country on Earth has a "far right" immigration policy in that they systematically deport anyone caught in the country illegally.
Not at all. He was a national *socialist* in both creed and action. He had much more in common with Stalin than with the far right institutions of his day -- the most revanchist aristocrats and churchmen who longed to bring back the Kaiser and a proper reverence for tithing and a "von" in your name.
Huh. Well, then, it's weird that he expressed hatred for communism as far back as Mein Kampf, that he formed a coalition government with those same revanchist aristocrats on the explicit promise of fighting the left, that he threw the communists into camps even before the Jews, that he purged the left-wing Nazis in the Night of Long Knives, and that the Nazi economic program involved privatizing industries instead of nationalizing them, increasing working hours rather than wages, etc. I know politics make strange bedfellows but all that seems much more consistent with a right-wing agenda.
No, it doesn't. Just because Lenin had Trotsky assassinated and Trotsky was left doesn't make Lenin right. The fear in Germans on which Hitler preyed was the fear of *International* Communism -- of Stalin pulling the strings in Germany. But he understood very well that the old right -- the aristocratic leadership represented by the Kaiser, the nobility, and the Church -- were in equal disrepute, that this is *why* communism was a serious political threat in Germany in the early 30s. His political genius was in donning all the parts of socialism that people liked -- the populism, the purging of the old aristocrats, the lining up of industry to serve the needs of the state (you're mistaken that he moved *towards* privatization, it was very much the other way around, cf. the many public works projects, the Autobahn, the Volkswagen, usw), the old-age pensions and public schooling, et cetera -- and then combine them with a fanatical nationalism that guaranteed that the hated Russians would never have influence.
I have family that were young in Germany when Hitler came to power, and they clearly saw him as coming from the socialist end of politics, and rejecting the old monarchist/aristocratic regime, only it was a thoroughly "German" socialism not beholden to Moscow.
I do realize the modern common tendency is to call Nazism "far right," but that's just brain-dead. It artificially separates populist socalist thuggocracies which have much in common, e.g. Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot, while failing completely to preserve the *useful* original left-right distinction that arose in the French Revolution, namely the distinction betweena taste for near-pure democracy and a faith in the common man, on the left, and the taste for heirarchical aristocratic governance and a faith in the educated/well-bred/wealthy man on the right.
I think your last paragraph just defined Donald Trump and Steve Bannon as left wing? Fascism was a reinvention of the right wing (just as Marxism was a reinvention of the left) that yoked populism to traditional conservatism's desire to return to a mythic past. Applying pre-industrial political categories to a post-industrial world is bound to lead us into error.
Stalin (not Lenin as you said; I assume this was just a mistake) killing Trotsky does not make him right-wing, I agree; he eliminated a rival to his control of a left-wing state. But what does that have to do with Hitler, who *allied* with the traditional right wing, persecuted and exterminated the communists and social democrats (but not, curiously, any right-wing figures!), and killed Rohm and Strasser and other figures *who had criticized him for being too friendly with Capital*? At every turn Hitler chose the right-wing rather than the left-wing option.
This was a wild ride and blast from the past. "You Are Still Crying Wolf" looks prescient by being basically not insane. I would think the biggest update to priors that anyone should take from this is that people always overestimate what a President can do, and the left is always underestimating its own cultural power. For example, even if Yglesias had his doubts that C'thulhu always swims left, could he perhaps have been a little more confident that the 21st century US doesn't suddenly swim to 19th century Russia?
Douthat has been commenting recently about the surprising value of low-information voters, and I think this is a good example. My mother is an independent who pays almost zero attention to politics until a week before the election and then votes mostly based on who sounds more sober and reasonable (she naturally voted against Trump twice). Yet she could have told you with certainty that mobs are not going to start beating up Jews with impunity. Yglesias, who was obsessively studying every last detail about Trump and the election, actually gained less than zero information about reality as a result of all his study -- he became less informed the more he studied Trump and Trumpism.
While Yglesias looks especially bad here, I agree with Douthat that the effect applies to all of us to some degree when we obsess over politics. And I'll add further that I would be prepared to bet that QAnon supporters are more politically engaged and read more about politics than the median Republican.
"Yglesias, who was obsessively studying every last detail about Trump and the election, actually gained less than zero information about reality as a result of all his study -- he became less informed the more he studied Trump and Trumpism."
This is a great point. People who go outside, interact with other normal people, and generally live their lives likely have a better handle on these sorts of things than people who obsess over them. In the case of Yglesias (who has had a bit of an awakening to woke craziness of late), he benefitted professionally to some degree by not really getting it. Better to have his imagined Trump to react to at Vox than the actual reality.
Here are where I graded Scott’s predictions differently:
>>1. Total hate crimes incidents as measured here will be not more than 125% of their 2015 value at any year during a Trump presidency, conditional on similar reporting methodology [confidence: 80%]
>Correct. In 2015, the FBI reported 5,850 hate crime incidents. In 2017, the highest-hate-crime year of the Trump presidency, the FBI reported 7,175.
>>4. Trump cabinet will be at least 10% minority [confidence: 90%], at least 20% minority [confidence: 70%], at least 30% minority [30%]. Here I’m defining “minority” to include nonwhites, Latinos, and LGBT people, though not women. Note that by this definition America as a whole is about 35% minority and Congress is about 15% minority.
>Incorrect. Based on this source, of 33 original Cabinet members, 3 were minorities, which is 9%. My weakest prediction - that at least a tenth would be minorities - was wrong, and obviously every stronger prediction was wrong too. I failed at a 90% prediction and am appropriately ashamed
>>6. Race relations as perceived by blacks, as measured by this Gallup poll, will do better under Trump than they did under Obama (ie the change in race relations 2017-2021 will be less negative/more positive than the change 2009-2016) [confidence: 70%].
>Correct. Between 2008 and 2017, the percent of blacks who thought race relations were good declined from 61% to about 46%, ie 15 points.
I’m not sure where Scott got 46% from - the closest poll to 2017 gives an answer of 49%, which narrowly resolves this to “Incorrect”. However, I point out that this poll hasn’t been taken frequently enough to give us a reliable answer - for example, the 2008 poll was taken before Obama’s election, and then not asked again until 2013 - and so I graded it **Ambiguous**.
>>7. Neither Trump nor any of his officials (Cabinet, etc) will endorse the KKK, Stormfront, or explicit neo-Nazis publicly, refuse to back down, etc, and keep their job [confidence: 99%].
>Correct.
While technically correct, I point out that Stephen Miller had emails leaked (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Miller_(political_advisor)#Leaked_emails) where he "enthusiastically pushed the views of white nationalist publications" without any hint of repercussion. I think this should cause us to update against Scott’s central claims.
Thanks. I've corrected the hate crime prediction - I mistakenly used the FBI's "single bias incidents" statistic instead of their total statistic.
The race relations statistic was based on interpolating the 2017 data point; enough people challenged me doing this that I've shifted it to indeterminate.
"The betting markets gave 14% unconditional odds but I don't think I can derive conditional odds from that."
Sure you can, since you say in #21 that the prediction markets gave the probability of Trump winning the nomination at 32%; by Bayes that gives us what we need:
Oh yeah, you're right. For some reason I always mix up Bayes Theorem and just the definition of conditional probability (the former does follow immediately from the latter)
Isn't there a kind of circularity in first being lenient on Trump (compared to others), then making predictions, and then grading them in a lenient way (compared to others)?
What's it supposed to prove, except that you are at least consistent?
I discuss this in a few places in the article - search "a pessimistic take" and "in retrospect, this is a hard prediction to grade"
This is why I tried to use as many hard and fast binary outcome predictions as possible. But I can't always do this - I still remember at the beginning of the Trump administration I was trying to make a bet with someone; they thought Trump would be a great president, I thought he would be terrible. It was really hard for us to find a way to operationalize this - there are lots of objective measures of the economy, but terrible presidents can preside over booming economies (eg Trump from 2017 - 2019) and good presidents over crashes. We considered using approval rating, but we both agreed that lots of people were too biased to change their mind even if Trump was extremely good or bad (in fact, Trump's approval rating at the end of his term was more or less the same as at the beginning). We ended up making some dumb economic bet which I won, barely, in an unsatisfying way.
I think this kind of thing makes it necessary to make qualitative predictions, even though the resolution naturally risks being biased. And in fact I gave some of my qualitative predictions As and others Fs, meaning that I at least wasn't infinitely biased. I agree this is inadequate but I don't know what else to do without having a qualitative oracle.
I really object to your grading of yourself on "Coup", for instance. By any standards, regardless on whether you think it's _exactly_ a coup or not, it was what came closest in _forever_ in that regard, on multiple fronts (legal, political, violent). Giving yourself a B in this situation strikes me as particularly weak. D, that seems reasonable - there was no *successful* coup, after all...
Disagree with your logic - there's a big difference between "closest we've come to" and "it actually happening". Arguably we came closer than ever to a war with Iran, but the prediction "Trump will start a war with Iran" would have resolved false.
It seems like some kind of logical fallacy to take the absolutely worst possible outcomes conceivable - a literal successful Coup d'État, literal concentration camps, literal expulsion of citizens, the administration literally coming out as Nazis - predict against them with a high confidence, and then say "see, it wasn't so bad, and I got my predictions right". Yes, sure, but let's say you're not just arguing against crazy people?
I agree all these things were stupid, but they were the stupid things that important people were saying and I was trying to argue against - see eg the paragraph including the Matt Yglesias quote.
I do agree about how even otherwise sensible people went pretty crazy. A podcaster I listen to for other stuff said (after the 2016 election) "I'm not trying to be alarmist, but I can't see how American democracy survives until the midterms."
I'm not sure you can properly evaluate the racism espoused by Trump without at least discussing comments like "shithole countries", "mexican" judges, and "Go back where you came from". If the prediction was limited such that only endorsing ethnic cleansing would satisfy the test, then I'm not sure it was a prediction worth making.
I think this is part of the reason we need to retire the word "racism" and replace it with a set of much more specific terms denoting the motley bunch of different meaning that "racism" elides over, e.g.
Racism1: You out-and-out hate members of race X. Boo, race X!
Racism2: You don't hate members of race X, but you think they are inferior to your own race.
Racism2.5: You don't hate members of race X, but you think they are inferior to your own race.
Racism3: You believe that different races of people have measurably different distributions of certain traits such as height, athletic ability and intelligence.
Racism4: You try to not be racist, but you're human and so you're subject to the sort of natural in-group bias that colours your opinions in some cases
Racism5: You believe that everybody should be treated differently depending on their race
Racism6: You believe that people should be treated the same regardless of their race
Racism7: You don't believe people should be judged by their race, but you do believe they should be judged by quality P, where quality P happens to be correlated with race.
and so forth, it would probably take a lot more effort to map out all the different meanings that the "R" word has acquired over its relatively short lifetime, but it would probably be a worthwhile activity.
One quibble or clarification on "Racism3." If something like height is indeed found to have a measurably different distribution by race over some broad enough population (let's say within the US), would it be "racist" to believe in its existence?
Or there existences are mutually exclusive / in conflict. If quality P happens to be correlated with race, in fact (which "Racism7" seems to imply), then those who believe in objective truth are automatically some form of racist based on "Racism3's" definition.
Scott's position on Trump's comments on Proud Boys can be summarized as "Trump clearly said 'Sure', so he has denounced white supremacists", while the general opinion on this can be summarized as "He should have said 'Yes, I unequivocally condemn white supremacists'. Using words that are weaker than that betray a sympathy for the alt-right".
I think Scott is wrong about this. But that might be an inability on his part to read cues rather than any nefarious motives. He is taking Trump at his word rather than placing him in context, and that causes him to see in a more sympathetic light than he deserves
Seems kind of ludicrous of me to say this though, considering I haven't made any money in prediction markets while Scott clearly has. I think Scott is better at understanding eventual outcomes than people's motives, probably because he understands that people's motives and eventual outcomes are fairly independent.
The 'general opinion' on that matter is just the highly biased interpretation of one of the most pro-democratic professions, journalists. They put that spin on it, while they spin completely differently when politicians they favor are ambiguous.
Stepping back a bit from the individual predictions, this exercise tends to undermine my confidence in the utility of making these kinds of predictions. The trouble is that assessing their truth value in many cases seems highly fraught, and maybe impossible.
That doesn't necessarily mean the exercise is worthless. I can see several possible benefits of going through a prediction exercise even if the outcome is hard to judge:
1. Being public about a prediction requires a certain clarity of thought, willingness to make a commitment, and accountability, even if the outcome is hard to judge. Even if I don't know whether Scott was correct in all of his predictions, I still have a very clear sense of what he believed to be true, and I was able to interrogate my own feelings on the same issues.
2. The predictor may get better over time at making predictions that are clearly falsifiable. In other words, formulating testable predictions might be a learnable skill as much as formulating accurate predictions.
3. The reasons why a prediction turns out to be hard to prove or falsify are often interesting in their own right, perhaps more so than the original prediction. In other words, if I think the future outcomes will be either A or not-A, and the reality turns out to be sort of A-ish or maybe just B, then probably I've just learned something about the way the world works!
All of that said, it still feels like the prediction exercise right now is failing to live up to its basic premise. The grading here is much closer to "I had an opinion and I think history supports my opinion" than it is to "I said X would happen and X did happen." And arguing that events show that you were right all along is...what everyone does all the time.
Weirdly, I think Scott is too harsh on himself for some of these (1 - 3) and too generous to himself on others (5). Of course, that has a lot to do with my own opinions on Trump's time in office, which is kind of the problem...
> Stepping back a bit from the individual predictions, this exercise tends to undermine my confidence in the utility of making these kinds of predictions. The trouble is that assessing their truth value in many cases seems highly fraught, and maybe impossible.
The main value of these sorts of predictions is in the intellectual exercise of making them, not the scoring of them.
In the context of the Blue Tribe freakout that occurred in 2016 following Trump's election, Scott's predictions thread was a breath of fresh air and a calming rational influence. I remember a lot of people making wild predictions about crazy things Trump _would_ do, and the intellectual exercise of having to sit down and say "Okay, what do I think is the actual probability that this crazy thing is going to happen?" is a very healthy one in that context.
On (sort of) the other side, I remember something that Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit said when Obama was elected in 2008. He said that the guy you support is never as good as you hope, and the guy you didn't support is never as bad as you fear. I think that's a really helpful message for both sides.
I don't want to be awful to you about "5: 11-16-2016: Trump won't be explicitly and openly white supremacist / won’t openly support the KKK etc / won't pursue especially racist policies (A)" but I think you are being atypically biased/gracious giving yourself an A here. While it's true Trump wasn't openly pro-KKK or white supremacist, he did pursue especially racist policies and was getting about as close to being openly pro-white-supremacy in his rhetoric while maintaining a level of deniability that was at best implausible.
For starters, the Muslim ban was an explicitly racist policy that no other Republican has ever pursued. That alone should be causing you to give yourself a B or C.
Beyond this, the FBI and many organizations have reported that membership in white supremacist organizations grew dramatically during the Trump presidency (55% by one measure). Sure, hate crimes didn't increase, but the growth in the membership of these organizations did and is clearly linked to Trump's rhetoric.
Then there's your claim that the Capitol Riots weren't tied to white supremacy - which isn't really true. A close look at many of the most active individuals in those riots (those who broke windows, broke through barricades etc.) had a large % from the Proud Boys.
Lastly, Trump's refusal to condemn white supremacy in the debate was just that. I don't understand why you are claiming that his 'sure' in the debate constituted a condemnation. He mumbles it while the question is still being asked and then avoids making any statement of condemnation. His statement on Proud Boys is ultimately so vague that it could be interpreted as either a condemnation or a statement of support (and Proud Boys interpreted it as supportive). In a situation like this, what every normal person and politician does is make a statement that is unequivocal and impossible to confuse. Trump very clearly avoids doing that. Not that this element is material to your argument, but it's very strange to me that you would classify this as anything but a refusal to condemn white supremacy.
I believe you take Trump at his word far too often.
As others have pointed out, Trump told the protesters to be peaceful, and yet he also told them ""We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore,".
He told the invaders to stop only after it was over, not during the protest.
Most damning of all though, Trump refused to call the national guard EVEN AS THE CAPITAL OF THE UNITED STATES WAS BEING TAKEN OVER. Senators were in the building!
Just because Trump says "No guys, its totally not a coup, don't hurt anyone", doesn't make it not a coup.
I don't actually know if Trump intentionally lead the protestors to storm the capital, but as others have said, it's abundantly obvious that Trump did nothing but egg them on and support them.
>Most damning of all though, Trump refused to call the national guard EVEN AS THE CAPITAL OF THE UNITED STATES WAS BEING TAKEN OVER. Senators were in the building!
"During the sit-in, the group of 50 activists from the Sunrise Movement demanded the California Democrat move forward with the Green New Deal. The protesters argued that the legislation is desperately needed as the country begins to feel the effects of climate change, citing intensifying wildfires in the senator's state."
Please don't conflate "they entered an area they weren't allowed in" with "A group of rioters broke into the capital, leading to 7 deaths, 15 seriously injured, and millions of dollars of damage"
Was a Sit-In where the national guard wasn't called really the best example you could have come up with?
Please don't give extremely misleading accounts of what happened.
1 unarmed protester was shot by police because she entered an area she was not allowed in.
1 police officer died of natural causes the night after the protest.
1 protester fell over and got stepped on in a crowd.
I'm pretty sure the other 4 were relatively old people who had heart attacks or similar medical emergencies from getting excited. At least one was not even part of the group breaking into the capitol, he had just attended the rally and was in the area.
I mean, counting the rioters' own deaths as evidence against them isn't especially sensible; at worst, that shades into victim-blaming (if I hold up a sign saying "Kim Jong Un is a fat tub of lard" in Pyongyang and get shot, that doesn't make me violent despite the fact that someone died at my protest), and at best, it's lumping together "victimising innocents" and "engaging in self-destruction".
"But it's really hard for me to come up with a narrative where someone trying to comprehend this honestly could see it as Trump endorsing the white supremacists who he had already condemned just seconds before.
Apparently these two events were the most racist-sounding comments anyone was able to get out of Trump in four years of being President. And they're pathetic. The slightest attempt to read the transcripts of what he was actually saying makes it super clear how pathetic they are. I think my implied prediction that Trump wouldn't make especially racist comments during his presidency proved correct."
It turns out that yes, Proud Boys did take it as Donald Trump supporting them. Why is that? This is the classic Trump tactic of using such wishy-washy language that everyone interprets it as they want to see it. It doesn't matter that Trump literally just condemned them, Trump constantly used confusing messages to signal secret support to these types of people. If Donald Trump really condemned them as you claim is obvious, then why did they continue to support him?
4. Trump cabinet will be at least 10% minority [confidence: 90%], at least 20% minority [confidence: 70%], at least 30% minority [30%]. Here I’m defining “minority” to include nonwhites, Latinos, and LGBT people, though not women. Note that by this definition America as a whole is about 35% minority and Congress is about 15% minority.
I think your mistake here was betting on 10% minority when, excluding fractional people, 10% minority would be 4/33 = 12%
I can't believe I'm saying this and I apologize to you as I know it will stress you out to do this but....... I actually think you should stil sometimes blog about current events and politics as you are the only person who sees data honestly and writes sanely. - The mainstream media is a complete dumpster fire (as you detailed in this post) and there is no-one who writes about this stuff honestly and in a mostly non-partisan way other than you. I"m sorry, I know that's too much pressure to put on your and it's not fair that the world is such a fucking mess that all this responsiblity falls on you.
I think I would much sooner see Scott blog about the big overarching issues than the details on specific politicians. There are lots of relatively honest and mostly non-partisan people out there - check out ArcDigi or Areo for a start.
sadly I think how people react to Trump and how the media fails to report accurately on him or anything regarding any 'conservative' sadly.... are big overarching issues. The complete failure of the mainstream media to be useful, relevant, or accurate, is a "big overarching issue" that has threads in alot of what SSC talks about anyway including the much discussed tribe post.
> I think my argument that you shouldn't vote for Trump because he would violently destroy useful institutions ended up kind of falling flat.
I'm trying to square this with the Capitol riot. Do you believe the riot didn't construe an attempt to destroy an institution, or is it just that regardless of intent, he didn't succeed in destroying anything on that day?
More generally, I'd say "the big lie" (the fabricated claim of election fraud) seems to be doing long-lasting damage to democratic institutions -- this is going to fuel a generation of newly-emboldened voting rights restrictions. Is it the lack of jackboots-on-the-streets violence that is causing you to mark down your prediction here, or perhaps "damage" < "destroy" on these institutions?
In summary I think you're understating the damage that Trump inflicted, but I'm not sure if this is just because you're marking yourself more strictly than I'd mark you, or if you actually disagree on the degree of harm.
I'd also point to the surprising (to me) vaccine hesitancy in conservative areas, which suggests the problems with turning distrust of the CDC and adoption of safety precautions into core conservative positions.
I expect people would be less likely to believe what you term "the big lie" if any attempt to enforce basic anti-fraud measures wasn't derided as racist "voting rights restrictions."
> "There’s a vicious cycle where the lack of intelligent conservatives guts the system of think tanks that produce the sort of studies and analyses which convince smart people to become conservative, which in turn makes there even fewer intelligent conservatives, and so on. In the end, intellectuals won’t just vote Democrat; they’ll shift their personal views further to the left to fit in."
Not exactly. Of course, it's obvious that Trump made lots of blue upper-middle class people more leftist. However, I suspect that that Scott doesn't see any difference between "smart" and "upper-middle-class" and uses the terms interchangeably. In reality, though, lots of smart conservatives, smart religious people, smart working class people etc went way to the right during Trump.
On Suleimani, my initial reaction was similar - that this is a massive and reckless escalation of conflict. However I have had a hard time reckoning with Mike Huemer's take on it:
I think it's pretty easy to figure out why Trump didn't get many of his policies enacted, and that's because he probably didn't care that much about them. He's a pretty classic (although very severe!) grandiose narcissist, and their main goal and need is attention and admiration/adoration. This differentiates them from sociopaths, who are much more interested in the power/money/sex combo and don't much care who likes them aside from how that impacts their ability to get the combo.
So during the campaign he said pretty much whatever made the crowds roar in approval and got him attention in the media. Once in power, he couldn't be bothered to focus on actual policy, way too much like work for not that much adoration. He also had a great deal of trouble keeping competent people working with/around him, a common problem for narcs. They prefer sycophants and make life very hard for the competent. Even if he isn't that smart about actual politics, policy etc, if he were interested, he could get others to work on that stuff, then he could sign off. Just not that interested, and not that easy for the Republicans who were actually interested to push around. 'You're not the boss of me!' is the usual response to trying to push a narc, even to do something useful or in their own best interest.
As a largely libertarian leaning person this was honestly one of his more appealing qualities - he and his administrations complete disinterest in regulation (or at least writing it).
Trump's major interest seemed to be holding onto control of the DoJ, so that corruption in his administration would not be investigated. He may not have cared about many of the traditional tasks of governing, but he cared a lot about this.
There are a couple of major things you failed to mention that surprise me. First, the zero-tolerance policy at the border that caused an unprecedented number of child/parent separations in a short timespan, with, we later learned, no plan or even adequate record-keeping for reuniting them. This is...very very bad. It seems worth at least a mention when you're making sweeping claims about "how much damage" the Trump administration did.
Second, there's an active QAnon supporter in Congress now. This seems relevant to your miss on the relative impact of QAnon.
I'd say Trump was pretty clear and consistent about his anti-war position, but he did very well to avoid being manipulated into a war by the usual sorts of people.
Those same sorts of people did, at least, force him to abandon some of his other plans to withdraw US troops from places like Germany and South Korea which really ought to be paying for their own darn defence.
Trump increased sanctions on Syria, Venezuela, and Russia, expanded NATO, continued military presence in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan (though partially withdrew from Syria and paved the way for withdrawal from Afghanistan) and approved sales of anti-tank weapons to Ukraine. I was much more optimistic on Trump's foreign policy than what ended up happening; see my comments on Scott's posts.
I know we all want to thumb our nose at our critics, but the self-congratulations here on race relations during the Trump presidency seems super unwarranted. Explicit racism and white supremacist groups became part of mainstream discourse and culture - including in rallies like in Charlottesville ending in death - for the first time in my lifetime, resurrecting a brand of explicitly race-baiting, if not simply racist, politics that I thought was dead.
You give yourself wins on these predictions only by narrowly defining your terms, I'd say to the point that some of them are unrecognizable from what seems was the likely intent when they were made. This is a fine tactic if you're arguing for a payout from a betting house, but when evaluating your own analyses it seems unwise, and here used to mask weaknesses in the analysis that you do not want to face up to..
Brave of you to come back to politics. I hope the comments aren’t too stressful for you.
Granted, you had a lot of links to go through, but it’s pretty disingenuous to cite The Hill’s “Deportations lower under Trump administration than Obama: report” if you read past the headline. It says that Obama deported more because it targeted the easy deportation cases, whereas Trump targeted all of them. Trump’s slowness, in other words, was not due to lack of ambition.
On your election prediction mistakes, you are simply not cynical enough. Beto, Warren (and Harris) had visible personality flaws that interfered with their ability to campaign. Beto was frankly an airhead who was big on dreams and light on plans. Warren’s naïve idealism was strong enough to force some mistakes, though of the three she had the fewest embarrassments. Harris has a talking style more suited to backroom politics and has no talent in connecting with crowds at all. Biden and Sanders lacked those flaws, though I would have expected their health issues to weigh them down more. Netanyahu, meanwhile, is 1, an incumbent, and 2, heavily focused on in-group-based politics, and those are two things you should never bet against without a really good reason.
As to why Democrats are so insistent on pegging Trump as a racist: people have been suspecting Trump of being a racist long before they heard his policies (see here: https://youtu.be/TrsUFF7FAOw?t=186). He has a background of bigoted and shady/criminal behavior that Bush, McCain, Romney et al. simply didn’t. You could argue that the Muslim ban and family separation aren’t all that different from Guantanamo and the Patriot Act, but nonetheless Democrats assume, via confirmation bias but not entirely wrongly, that those policies come from a place of bigotry, not ideology. I consider Bush's recent halo effect to be small proof of this theory.
Their (Our) refusal to take Trump at his word after Charlottesville also makes more sense if you know the Democratic trope of dog whistling. The idea that Republicans commonly give winks and nods to racism has been around since the 60s. Trump’s denials just look like an amped up version of this, giving nods to terrorist racism instead of the garden variety. His insistence on delaying to “get all the information” sounds like an excuse, and his delays and halfhearted (“sure”) and boilerplate deliveries seem like proof that he doesn’t take bigotry seriously – a common symptom among bigots. Moreover everyone already believes Trump is racist, and if he wanted to discourage that belief he would speak up on his own about it rather than waiting to be asked.
I think you’re too soft on Jan. 6 being a coup. Sure, it was very unlikely to succeed, but partisanship runs very deep these days and Trump could get a *lot* of mileage out of that. More importantly, if there was a plan to overthrow the government, it was not one that absolutely needed to succeed, and Trump has faced no consequences I know of for trying. Most coups take multiple attempts, and this one could be seen as a dry run. Practice.
"also makes more sense if you know the Democratic trope of dog whistling"
There is no such thing as right-wing dogwhistling in America, only leftwing dogwhistling. Leftists have a great deal of institutional power; race realists have none whatsoever, not even among the electorate.
"Moreover everyone already believes Trump is racist, and if he wanted to discourage that belief he would speak up on his own about it rather than waiting to be asked."
I mean, he did. "Platinum plan", "I love Hispanics", etc.
Trump pardoned precisely zero January 6 trespassers, despite a complete lack of consequences for him if he did so. He was not on their side.
Was there really going to be a lack of consequences? Apparently he reconsidered pardoning the likes of Assange and Snowden because some Republican senators threatened to vote against him in the "attempted coup" impeachment trial.
"complete lack of consequences" if he pardoned them? Utter nonsense. He might have gotten convicted in the impeachment trial, and it would have hurt any 2024 Trump campaign.
> At some point you just have to admit everyone went crazy for a few years and seeing started seeing Nazis in trees and rocks and grilled cheese sandwiches and Trump was an especially tempting target.
Given the extent to which people invested effort in completely destroying the lives of me and many of my friends, for no reason other than we were _insufficiently condemnatory_ of Trump, this particular passage stings especially hard.
"Oh yeah, I guess people just went crazy for a bit and yknow things happen, but you still have a job now and they're not crazy any more so no harm no foul right? Boys will be boys, and liberals will be liberals, what are you gonna do?"
"We went a bit overboard and kinda burned some witches, let's forget it all now and all be friends again? No hard feelings, until the next witch burning season?"
AFAICS Scott is trying to make the claim "the Nazi-hunting was lunacy" (as contradiction to the social media narrative of "the Nazi-hunting was weeding out actual Nazis"). It appears that you agree with this. I am not sure why you are upset.
[epistemic status: just a stream of consciousness]
Despite trump's many negative qualities, I held my nose and voted for him in both general elections, because he was the only candidate who didn't want to turn the US into Brazil demographically ASAP. The continued existence of my people as a majority in their homeland is a very high priority terminal value, the same as it is for most jews. Hopefully we get a better candidate next time, who accomplishes more while offending less. It takes a bit of an asshole to break a taboo, so it was inevitable that the taboo-breaker would be a bit of an asshole. Moloch (and media oligarchs) shouldn't set up stupid taboos and double standards that say self-determination is only bad when applied to white people. If Moloch sets up a dumb taboo against what is obviously in the interest of a large block of people, Moloch summons an asshole to lead them in breaking that taboo.
If my great great grandchildren could be born into any position within my country, what sort of country would I want it to be? Among other things, probably one that is demographically more like Norway than Zimbabwe (most people agree, as revealed by real estate prices, but few have the intellectual or testicular fortitude to admit it). People have large positive or negative externalities on each other as a function of their behavioral genetics, IQ, culture, and productivity (but the second two are downstream of the first two). The qualities of a country flow from the aggregate of the qualities of the people in it. It is against the interest of everyone in a country and their posterity to import undesirable people, such as most muslim refugees (NAXALT blah blah). Democrats largely only support it because of a happy death spiral around "diversity" and needing more votes to compensate for leftists' extremely low relative fertility (I call it the ship of Theseus strategy to distinguish it from the weak-men and straw-men that have gone by the name of the great replacement).
My preferred solution to the political turmoil in the US would be splitting it up into an Archipelago where anyone can just choose which system to live under by voting with their feet instead of arguing over it. But that will probably never happen, so the best I can do is push back against the EU's attempts to enforce woke orthodoxy upon less-woke Eastern European countries (by e.g. fining them for not taking in enough alleged refugees) and oppose any attempts at consolidation in the sovereignty industry which would reduce the customers' options.
Within any given city, the whiter areas tend to be more expensive. The overall price level of a city is due to supply and demand, and immigration obviously increases the latter.
Not true in NYC though. Even if you ignore Staten Island because it's basically a suburb. Downtown Manhattan is more expensive than Uptown. Maybe if you get into the super nitty gritty you could say that West Village is the most expensive part of downtown and maybe the whitest?
That's all irrelevant though - immigration isn't driving up NYC real estate, it's young people out of college that want to live in the city due to its dynamism.
I mean most jews support the continued existence of Israel as a majority-jewish and jewish-run state, regardless of the status of whichever country they actually live in. AKA zionism. White nationalism can be steelmanned as essentially the same thing as zionism, but applied to European Christians.
apparently my great grandfather helped found the zionist movement. It feels... kind of racist to me. Why does it matter which country (an artificial, human, construct) has a certain percentage of a certain race? (also an artificial human construct).
What's wrong with us all just interbreeding? Isn't zionism saying, we jews want to have our own country, because we as a race deserve our own nation? I mean, at what point does a race of people (arbitrarily drawn) deserve a city block, town, city, state, country, or continent?
I'm atheist - do atheists 'deserve' their own country?
If a bunch of atheists want to get together and buy an island and found their own country on it, they should absolutely be allowed to do that. Likewise any other tribe of people that wants to found their own community.
Assuming you are right on race and IQ. Wouldn't you want to live in a white country even more? In such a country your "superior white genes" would be a scarce resource. The demand for doctors grows linearly with the total population. The higher the nonwhite population, the more white people get to persue carreeers in well-paying fields. Whereas even in a white ethnostate you need someone to clean the toilets. given that there are no "mudskins"to do it for them, the Aryan Übermensch will have to do it himself. You may be rught that the GDP per capita might take a hit if you import low IQ people, but the GDP per capita of the high-IQ segment of the population will rise.
I must stress i do not actually accept the race-IQ link, but even if i did, that wouldnt change my policy prescriptions.
Depends what you value. I'd prefer to live in a country where doctors are not scarce - reduced demands on the medical system mean I'm less likely to fall through the cracks. I'd also prefer to live in a country where crime is low, and we *know* that lowering IQ causes increased violent crime (this was the leaded petrol fiasco).
To reverse Milton, Will apparently thinks it better to serve in Heaven than reign in Hell, and I agree on that preference point. That does, of course, leave the factual point in contention.
your choice of words is strawmanny in terms of associating race-IQ stuff with nazis. All the countries who fought against the nazis (except Stalin's USSR) also believed in race differences in intelligence (and a more correct form of it, without the nazis' weird hyperborean shit and esoteric mysticism) see https://jaymans.wordpress.com/jaymans-race-inheritance-and-iq-f-a-q-f-r-b/
The economic benefits of comparative advantage could easily be swamped by the downsides of a dumber hive mind. Worse institutions, worse culture, worse language, lower academic standards, more crime. Empirically we see that intelligent people born in the third world tend to want to emigrate to the US because they see more opportunity here. They earn more here than they earn in their home country. So clearly the relative scarcity of intelligence to other factors of production doesn't benefit the intelligent as much as the hive mind aspects hurt. All knowledge is highly cumulative so one guy working alone in the middle of nowhere can't get much done -- scientific advancement requires standing on the shoulders of giants, so you need a critical mass of intelligence in an area to have enough giants to stand on. Somebody born in the year 900 with an IQ of 200 couldn't have become a Leonardo da Vinci because there was nobody else around doing similar things to learn from. This predicts that rates of scientific progress should be extremely sensitive to small changes in average IQ -- and indeed we see that scientific advances were distributed extremely unevenly within europe, with some countries achieving an order of magnitude more than their slightly lower IQ neighbors. The scientific revolution and industrial revolution probably occurred when and where they did because human intelligence reached a critical mass in northwest europe. The Romans never had an industrial revolution because they never quite got smart enough because they lacked a strong religious taboo to prevent the elites from using contraception. It's easy for genetic changes to raise or lower IQ by one point per generation depending on malthusian conditions, contraception use among the elites, etc.
What I'm really taking away from this is the legal principle, "No one shall be judge in his own cause," and analogously the necessity of peer review in scientific publication, and a fortiori to both, the kind of adversarial collaboration promoted on SSC. Several of the grading choices appear highly contentious and selective about the facts, and one in particular seems to be an extreme error in interpretation. When predictions are being inferred after the fact from long texts, and especially when the evaluation criteria are super vague, that's when the rational choice is to leave the judgement to others.
Consequently, the prediction market results are best part of this post. And I think it's worth noticing that the prediction market bets did not cover issues similar to those Scott spent the most words defending. Perhaps the solution, then, to overall-bad arguments like these is to find a way to get them onto the prediction markets!
I take your overall point about Proud Boys, but telling a group to 'stand by' is very different from telling them to stand down. Charitably, Trump might have had a slip of the tongue, but as President he should be judged harshly on the words he speaks and those were irresponsible words at best and sinister at worst. I don't understand why you see them as equivalent to 'stand down' or a condemnation.
I think what people miss about that whole exchange is simply that *Trump hates being seen to be told what to do.* You could ask him to condemn throwing innocent newborn babies into the mouth of Hell, and if he felt he was being pressured to do so, he'd find it uncomfortable. "Sure, whatever you want, I just want to *make you happy*. Who am I condemning again?"
It might have been a slip of the tongue, but sometimes a slip of the tongue reveals what someone is actually thinking even when they're trying to hide it. Still, Trump isn't exactly very articulate or precise with his words, I could easily imagine him thinking that "stand by" is just another way to say "stand down".
I raised an eyebrow at your account of Trump’s Charlottesville comments, which seem too charitable to me (you didn’t mention that he condemned the violence on both sides too, even though only one side killed someone), but I reminded myself that I’m biased on this point. At your account of his behavior on 1/6, though, my eyebrow goes through the roof. The idea that Trump didn’t want the Capitol incursion to happen and was unhappy when it did flies in the face of several things we know. We know that the White House wouldn’t give authorization for the DC National Guard to come to the Capitol until Pence did it himself. We know that internal reports were that Trump was delighted by footage of the riot. We know that he told Kevin McCarthy on the phone, while McCarthy was under lockdown with the rest of Congress, “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are angrier about the election than you are.” We know that his staffers said they had to work to find a statement he would agree to give, and that the one he did deliver included the line “we love you.” We know that he tweeted that “this is what happens” when an election is stolen and that people would remember this day the rest of their lives. I don’t mind saying this wasn’t a coup and that he didn’t try to engineer it, but the idea that he sincerely tried to stop it, or that he didn’t like it, is risible.
There was a lot of equivalence on both sides. Some reasonable people, some unreasonable people. The fact that in this particular case only the right-wing side who happened to successfully murder someone doesn't change the fundamentals, any more than it does when the more murderous side was flipped in Portland a few months later ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killings_of_Aaron_Danielson_and_Michael_Reinoehl )
"Stand back and stand by" implies "stand by for further instructions" which is something that you would say to an ally or a subordinate or a co-conspirator. That's why it appeared troubling to listeners.
Scott, With reference to your 'crying wolf' piece you wrote: "I will still never predict anything this controversial again - it’s not worth the cost to my peace of mind."
I do not live in the USA but I have Muslim relatives who do. I was a bit anxious about what their fate would be until the day I read your 'crying wolf' post. Please accept my grateful thanks for writing this post, even though it came with huge personal cost.
Right-wing terrorist attacks have grown to dominate domestic terror threats. I don't see how you can give yourself kudos for claiming that Trump didn't embolden the far right, when the far right clearly became more emboldened under Trump.
The linked paper defines terrorism as "the deliberate use—or threat—of violence by non-state actors in order to achieve political goals and create a broad psychological impact", which seems as reasonable a definition as any.
According to Figure 1, there were zero incidents of left wing terrorism inn 2020. This means that, for instance, this incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Occupied_Protest in which a group of armed leftists took six blocks of a city hostage and made political demands, was not classified as a terrorist attack. I wonder how they would have classified it if it had been a right-wing rather than left-wing militia.
Regarding #1, It's true that it is not a uniquely Trump phenomenon, but the extent to which Republicans have lost minority voters and gained white voters relative to 2000 & 2004 still seems really significant. Trump only improved with Hispanic & Asian voters relative to Romney, but otherwise is the same or worse than all the other years. He "improved" with black voters in 2016 just by matching the baseline of Republicans not running against Obama. Since black turnout declined in 2016 did he persuade new voters or did some low information voters who were gonna turn out for the first black president not turn out for Hillary Clinton?
You could say the significance of Trump is that his focus on immigration allowed him to solidify the racial polarization of the electorate without running against a black candidate.
> extent to which Republicans have lost minority voters and gained white voters relative to 2000 & 2004 still seems really significant
The Republican perspective on this would be: What do you expect? The Democrats have spent the last twenty years running a race-baiting campaign to demonise, shame and disenfranchise white people (especially white men) in the hopes of building an "everyone else" coalition that they can control.
Trump surprised me, too, in the end, with what you have described as a surprising lack of competence. (The narcissism that eventually pissed off the Coulter wing of the party did not surprise me, but then my default assumption is that absolutely anybody who seeks the US Presidence is a profound narcissist at best, and probably at least a little antisocial.)
I thought long and hard about this, trying to refine it, because in some areas he still appeared very competent (in a political sense). For example, he was *very* good at avoiding the taint of scandal that took down many of his underlings. He managed to have the correct combination of amnesia, plausible deniability, and throwing people under the bus that prevented any of the more serious failures from damaging him seriously. I was most impressed, in the end, with the fact that the whole Robert Mueller investigation came up essentially empty-handed. The Democrats poured unlimited resources and will into that, and Mueller himself is a deeply corrupt twister who absolutely would have delivered if he could -- but he couldn't. To me, that bespeaks an unusual level of caution by Trump early on, the canniness to insulate himself from what was going on down below in e.g. the way that Nixon famously failed to do. (I should perhaps add that the hypothesis that Trump was a Russian stooge were always brain-dead in my opinion, but normally running a very fine-toothed comb through an operation as big as a Presidential campaign will turn up *some* damaging squalor -- e.g. Hillary and her silly server -- and I gave Trump high marks on his political acumen that it did not.)
And yet...all that you say about his inability to deliver on his promises to his supporters -- which I think is (along with the bad optics of COVID) what cost him the 2020 election, since if you dive into the demographics you find the fatal trend was his loss of support among non-colleged educated working-class whites, the same people who put him over the top in 2016. To the extent I understand those people, they noticed that Trump had delivered only a tax cut to business and a lot of red-meat rhetoric, but on immigration, "The Wall," jobs, China, pretty much bupkis.
So what's up with that? How is it that he displayed strong political savvy but couldn't get some very basic crap done he'd promised, and which (initially at least) was popular enough to get him elected in 2016?
My conclusion after a while is that Trump *is* competent -- but only at those things that are essentially a sole proprietorship, on which everything hangs on the guy at the top. That works in Vegas/Atlantic City high-stakes real estate deals, maybe, and it certainly works to win an election. But it does NOT work in running the Federal Government. It simply *can't* be run by the guy at the top by himself. That guy *must* be able to hire a bunch of people who are both competent and whom he trust, and who trust him and will generally execute his vision.
In the end, Trump couldn't do this. He got a lot of very competent people to volunteer to come work with him initially, but somehow he just couldn't keep them. They left, and usually under such bad terms that they despised the man later. In short, Trump just can't make and keep friends. He's fine at relating to people in very large crowds, but I gather he's just too big of an asshole one-on-one, even to people who mostly share his ambitions and goals, to be able to build the kind of oligarchical structure necessary to run something as vast as the Federal Government. Toward the end it became kind of pathetic, he was clearly reaching for second-stringers, and then even further down, as it became clear nobody who wasn't a nutcase or cynically in it for himself was willing to work for the man.
Interestingly, he never seemed to resent this fact, which means I think he must be used to it.
It's funny you mention his real-estate business because that has gone through failure after failure, as have most of his other endeavors. His run on the Apprentice is the only money-maker of his I can think of that didn't end in bankruptcy, a fraud lawsuit, etc.
Well, I'm not attaching a *lot* of weight to that, because high-stakes real estate deals attached to gambling and hotels are kind of like that. It's a boom-n-bust biz in general. I mean, real estate itself is, commercial real estate more so, and resort commercial real estate triply so.
But...yes, I do wonder if he was awesome at swinging some crazy miracle deal -- which is kind of what the buying and selling is about -- but then couldn't manage to hire good managers to actually *run* the hotels and businesses once he had them. Even if you're mostly a flipper, you do need to run properties in between your deals, and for that -- you need employees, allies, people with whom you can work. He just seems like the ultimate loner, like nothing works unless it entirely rests on his performance. The reality TV show was probably his natural milieu.
Steve Wynn—who was a Trump friend and backer—told a story of playing golf with Trump and Trump complaining that he didn't know what was going wrong with his Atlantic City casinos, he didn't know how to turn things around. Wynn said something like, "Spend three days there just talking to everyone who reports to you, find out what's going wrong and what they need to succeed." Wynn said that Trump's face fell and it was obvious he didn't want to do that and wasn't going to. So that may be support for your hypothesis.
What sucks here is that the thing you got the most right (and is thus the most valuable) is also on the most forbidden topic where you took a personal risk to have a (contrary) opinion. But in some ways that seems like a general pattern of useful punditry. The easiest way to make a great prediction is to bet against the most obviously stupid herd beliefs, but it is the obviously stupid herd beliefs which induce the strongest defense mechanism when challenged.
TBH it's not just the "number of words" in that Homeland Security document that reminds of The Fourteen Words; I think it's extremely unlikely that was just a coincidence.
Scott, what would it look like if there were a realm of meaning that you did not understand? As in, you were missing a sense?
Perhaps it would look like people getting angry at you for the things you say on certain topics. Perhaps it would look like people behaving irrationally towards you for reasons you could never grasp.
Perhaps those people are behaving rationally, they are just possessed of a sense that you do not yourself have access to.
I don't know if there is a kind way to say this. I have heard it said that Rationalists held truth above the ego. It has not been true in my experience of them.
> Trump said the Proud Boys should "stand back and stand by", which as far as I can tell is equivalent to "stand down"
When I heard those words for the first time the visceral sense of anger and dread I experienced was alarming. I understood that something like the Capitol Riot was inevitable. The fact that you are unable to perceive the meaning of "stand back and stand by" and why it was alarming is very, very telling.
> Apparently these two events were the most racist-sounding comments anyone was able to get out of Trump in four years of being President.
Notice you are confused! That was one of the most shocking moments, yes! If you weren't shocked, notice you are confused!
You need an editor. You need someone you can trust to point out where gaps in your perception show up in your writing.
Because they do. As someone who has been a fan: the gaps in your perception show up in your writing. All writers have gaps in their perception of some manner or another which an editor can help with.
Trump's supporters also get angry at people who say certain things, and may sometimes appear to be behaving irrationally. Are those of us who aren't able to understand their behavior "missing a sense"?
I mean, Haidt would say so. He divides the moral foundations into "care/harm", "liberty/oppression", "fairness/cheating", "loyalty/betrayal", "authority/subversion" and "sanctity/degradation"; WEIRDs generally have a strengthened version of the first, weaker versions of the last three, and particularly a crippled version of sanctity/degradation.
Haidt wrote in 2012, and SJ has definitely picked up strong components of loyalty/betrayal and sanctity/degradation since then (which is mostly what you'd expect from it bleeding WEIRDs into the Grey Tribe while starting to pull in non-WEIRDs as a new orthodoxy), although it still largely rejects authority/subversion.
The question is, of course, whether those senses are good.
I think that's a good insight, and relevant, but I don't think it's a "sense" in the same, er, sense as that suggested by the OP. One is putatively a reality tracking sense, like sight or hearing, whereas the other is a moral sensibility that dictates preferences *about* reality.
I think the OP is probably sincerely meant, but share other commenters' irritation with it. "I have strong feelings about X, which constitute strong evidence that should inform *your* predictions about X" is usually tiresome, outside a handful of toy examples. "I am drawing inferences about X, using a process I'm not going to explain to you but which I *am* going to criticize you for not independently instantiating," likewise.
If you *know* why you feel strongly that X, you should explain that to others instead of complaining that they don't "get it." If you *don't* know, it's not clear why *your* feeling that X are more accurate than other peoples' feeling that ~X. I mean, it shouldn't be clear to *you*, and you shouldn't expect it to be clear to *other* people.
There's a reason I put focus on Scott's communicated confusion ("Apparently" reads to me very much as confusion). This isn't as much about my feeling X and other people feeling ~X. Normally when people disagree they can come to a common understanding on why one believes X and the other believes Y. But Scott doesn't seem to understand why these things blow up on him.
This isn't moral sensibilities, either. I have little doubt that if Scott could perceive the fascism he would condemn it.
This is a failure to understand the communication between the authoritarian and his mob. How do you communicate around gaps in communication?
I don't know. But in the difference between "Stand back and stand by" and "Stand down" there is something that to one group of people is completely obvious, and to another group of people is, apparently, interpolating over static.
It very much reminds me of those cognition variations like those who experience their thoughts as words and those who don't.
I think the situation is more symmetrical than you seem to be supposing. I agree that some people see something in Trump's utterances that looks fascist, and other people don't see this thing. And I agree that, *if you assume the thing is actually there*, this points to some foundational processing deficit on the part of those who don't see the thing. But human processing is inherently assembling patterns out of very noisy data, and we *know* that one very common failure mode is assembling the data into a pattern that's not actually there.
This is, pace your comment, a really quite foundational difference in perceptions, but the *depth* of that difference doesn't give us any reason to favor one side over the other.
I mean, you're right that, since your perspective conflicts with Scott's, *at most* one of you can be right. But this isn't *actually* an argument the one who's right is you; we need something else to break the symmetry, beyond the mere fact of disagreement.
And... the asymmetries I *do* see kind of favor Scott, here. Where there's an asymmetric payoff to making type 1 vs type 2 errors, we expect people to develop biases to maximize value. In plainer language, if there's a big, dangerous threat that *might* exist, it's often very dangerous to overlook it but merely inconvenient to falsely detect it.
I don't know you, personally, but I think a lot of people who see this thing would feel kind of embarrassed if it turned out not to be there. On the other hand, *failing* to see it, if it *were* there, seems like the stuff of nightmares. Assuming everyone here's being honest in communicating their emotional reactions, Scott seems mildly bemused that people are going a little crazy here, whereas his critics seem to feel like it's *crucially important* that people are missing this big, obvious, incredibly dangerous thing. That emotional dynamic should cause us to update in favor of Scott, at least a little.
Which isn't to say there couldn't be other factors which bias the dynamic in the other direction! The classical way of resolving this is to make predictions, and see if they come true. But predicting things is almost always noisy- hard to do with certainly even if your model is *right*, because your model only mirrors *part* of the world. So Scott having made some incorrect predictions should cause me to update heavily against his model, provided I have *another* model available that made similar predictions and got them all right.
They do have to be *advance* predictions, though- retrodiction gives people way too much wiggle room. And they have to be precise enough that they *could* be falsified, in the counterfactual world where the model that generated them was false.
Do you have anything like that? Any source that made better *concrete* predictions about Trump *beforehand*, of a similar level of specificity? ("Trump will do bad things" doesn't fit these criteria, both because it's too vague to be falsifiable and because it's not actually in tension with Scott's model, which in fact *did* predict Trump would do bad things.")
>That emotional dynamic should cause us to update in favor of Scott, at least a little.
This is Vizzini-ing. Rationalist tic.
There were a whole lot of people talking about how they were shocked, but not surprised on 1/6. I get the feeling those of you who were actually surprised have yet to really understand that there isn't epistemic doubt anymore. Your doubt about this is not something I can solve.
Like: two groups of people batter back and forth about whether or not the president is fascist for four years while a third group of people ignores politics. That third group of people saw 1/6 happen. You're still living in 2020. This is 2021. Trump sent a mob at the Capitol.
It wasn't a false positive. The fact that you are still living in a world where you have to think about whether or not the people yelling about the danger of a man who questioned the validity of the elections had a point is the perceptual problem we're trying to talk across.
I don't know how to tell you which politicians to trust but you should start by not trusting the ones who openly agitate against the validity of their own country's elections. It was like you people couldn't read what was on the tin with Trump. Strangest thing. Community of the blind.
You'd have to answer that for yourself. For me, the difference is that I'm not confused by the anger of Trump supporters or surprised by how they behave.
Is this in response to my request for advance predictions? It looks like it's supposed to be, but I don't get it; either one of the people who shares your sense of this managed to *use* that insight to make better predictions than Scott, who lacks that sense, or they didn't. As I *think* I've made clear, I am not aware of it if they have, but I haven't read everything. You also haven't read everything (er, I'm assuming,) but you've presumably read things I haven't read. I'm asking whether any of those things is a set of predictions that plausibly outperforms Scott's. I can't answer for myself whether you've read anything like that, since I'm, uh, not you?
Like, I can definitely imagine us disagreeing about marginal cases- if someone came *close* to Scott's record, but missed different questions, for instance, I could imagine you rating them higher than Scott and me rating them a little lower. And you saying, "Look, you have to evaluate how important those questions are for yourself." But I *would* need to see them first before I could evaluate them.
Maybe threads like that are so common in your filter bubble that it's hard for you to believe I haven't run across them independently? All I can say to that is that bubbles are really strong, and I actually haven't. I've heard lots of people prophesying doom in really vague terms- seriously, irritatingly vague, it's like they were *trying* to be unfalsifiable- and some people making *concrete* predictions of doom that turned out to be wrong. Also, lots of people predicting Trump would be terrible on immigration- but that wasn't actually in much doubt, in my bubble, and Scott also got it right.
I'm... starting to sound a little disingenuous to my own ears, at this point, so I'm gonna risk being tactless: If there really is a critically important factor here which you can see and I can't, I *definitely* wanna know about that. But critically important factors *matter*- practically by definition: they impact other things, things which I *can* see.
If I was saying, "Show me where you, personally, have outpredicted Scott," that would be really petty and unfair of me! Also not very truth-oriented- most people don't write down their predictions, even if their models are good. But if *nobody's* managed to parlay this insight into better predictions- if *none* of the people who *aren't* blind the way you're describing stopped to write down what they thought was going to happen before it did- do you see how that would be *really* surprising?
I don't completely agree with Scott- I *do* see some difference between "stand down" and "stand by". I think that *could* have been a flubbed line, or it *could* have been Trump trying to be noncommital and keep his options open- I think he has a consistent, high-level heuristic to do that when he possibly can- or it *could* have been Trump trying not to look weak by letting the moderator push him around- I think Trump *also* has a consistent, high-level heuristic not to do what people tell him to. I'm not defending it as innocent- I think it was weaselly politician-behavior. But I don't see *fascism*. I don't see the very specific thing which you think you do see.
And, while I'm being blunt- I feel like it's kind of... rude?... to tell people they're being straight-up blind, that they have a cognitive blindspot keeping them from seeing [specific true-and-important-thing] and then offer literally zero evidence that they *can* see. Like, assuming you're *right*, what do you think is going to happen here?
When I imagine the world where you're *right*, it feels like you're kind of... dangling a shiny object over a paraplegic while discoursing about them being unable to stand up and take it. And it's not your *job* to fetch me shiny objects- the fact that I can't reach doesn't mean you're *obligated* to get it for me, or hand me a crutch. But maybe you shouldn't be going "GEE, IF ONLY YOU DIDN'T HAVE THAT HANDICAP YOU COULD REACH THIS NEAT TOY. SHAME YOU CAN'T JUST STAND UP AND TAKE IT, ISN'T IT?" The *premise* of your comment is that Scott *can't*- and I guess *I* can't- just stand up and take it. That we're handicapped in a way that keeps us from seeing this true, important thing which *you* can see.
And if one of us asks you if you maybe have a crutch we can borrow- something *concrete* we could lean on that *would* let us reach the thing- well, handing out crutches isn't your job, there's no guarantee you even have one handy. So it's okay if the answer is "no."
But I think it's kind of *not* okay- at any rate, it's not okay with *me*- if the answer is "You'd have to answer that for yourself." You don't *seem* cruel- I don't get the sense you're *enjoying* this, or doing it to be mean- but I literally can't see how you could possibly think that would help. I just kind of talked myself into being mad at you, and I *think* what did it was that my agent-modeling software kept trying to cough up a plausible set of helpful motivations, and it's been dry-firing for the last ten minutes. I don't see how you possibly expected this to help, and I don't know if that means I'm being stupid or if you really *were* being a jerk.
I'm not sure this is kind, but it's true and it seems necessary, at least as much as anything else I could say. I'm never completely sure how to interpret the "necessary" criterion, It's not a low-effort swipe, not gratuitous, and definitely on-topic, so I think it's as necessary as blog comments are in the general span of things.
I am not sure that it's wise, which isn't a listed criterion but still seems worth considering. But I'm not sure that it's *unwise*, and I always use honesty as a tiebreaker, and it is definitely that.
If you *did* mean well- if you *were* trying to help- I don't regret the algorithms that generated this response, but I regret not being smart enough to be able see how.
So I read and responded to your other comment before I saw this one. In this one you're wrestling with a lot of the complexities of navigating this kind of conversation just from the perspective of etiquette. I appreciate that.
I don't have all the answers. I'll tell you my motivations, though.
Scott is a good writer with a perspective the world needs more of with a stability and kindness that could have his best work ahead of him. Scott is discrediting himself with essays on politics that show a lack of familiarity with the subject matter, and the solution really is run essays by a decent editor.
I prefer a world in which Scott produces essays that don't alienate the leftist portion of his fanbase.
The question is whether your familiarity with the subject matter is extra knowledge about reality, extra knowledge about an orthodox-but-false model of reality (Scott: "But every legitimate archbishop disagrees with this particular heresy"), or extra bellyfeel of a given moral outlook.
Wow, that's as close to the definition of "Gaslighting" from the movie as you can be. You're literally missing some kind of obvious sense that all the decent folk have, Scott! There must be something wrong with you!
You're using a lot of words I didn't say. I didn't say those words on purpose.
But you know, I understand why you feel that way. It's rough talking about these things, and Rationalists aren't better at it than any other group of people.
"When I heard those words for the first time the visceral sense of anger and dread I experienced was alarming."
Oh you poor thing! I hope you went to your doctor, did they recommend you a good anti-acid and anxiolytic? Better be careful with the latter, my own GP told me they're habit-forming!
Perhaps you should cut back on TV watching if it's affecting you so badly, you don't want to permanently damage your blood pressure.
You are Still Crying Wolf was how I discovered SSC and the rationality community in general, so I really appreciate you being willing to speak up. I was really questioning my sanity when so many of my smart college educated friends were posting (deadly serious) about how Trump was going to usher in an era of Nazi style fascism and I just couldn't understand it... I used to think humans were mostly rational creatures but I've learned a lot in the past few years that has been really helpful in understanding the world. So thank you!!
Regarding the increase in hate crime, the % increase in incidents motivated by anti-Asian, Arab, or Hispanic bias is still striking. Almost half of the race/ethnicity-based incidents are anti-black, which already had a high baseline in 2015, increased by 10-15% while anti-Arab incidents increased 2.75x and anti-Hispanic events increased by 42% in 2017. Anti-arab incidents simmer down in 2019 but continue to stay high for the latter in 2019. It will be interesting to see anti-Asian incidents in 2020. The numbers are in the hundreds, so after statistical testing, the increases might not be "statistically significant," but the trend by groups is there IMO.
Generally I think you're right about the white supremacy hype. I bought in to those concerns for sure in 2015 and 2016 and there was no explicit fascist movement in the U.S.
But I also think the blowback - the literally claiming you were a Nazi and blatant attacks on you and your integrity, have given you a bit of a blind spot here.
Trump is not a white supremacist (we'll just use the phrase "white supremacist" to mean "somebody who intends to enforce a culture of white supremacy") but he had absolutely no problem accepting the support of white supremacists. And while everything he said and did during his tenure in office had a thin coating of plausible deniability, he did signal to white supremacists.
I can't imagine a world in which telling a group to "stand down" is the same as telling them to "stand down and stand by." One implies "stop doing your stuff" and the other implies "stop doing your stuff...for now." It seems uncontroversially obvious to me that this was a dog whistle, and not a particularly subtle one.
I feel exactly the same way about the statements beginning with the phrase "we must secure."
There's a textual reading of all this stuff that has no white supremacist meaning, coupled with a reasonable second meaning that does. Maybe that happens once or twice, but it happened repeatedly throughout Trump's four years in office.
Do I think that's because Trump was a secret Nazi who wanted to burn minorities in ovens? No. I think for decades, the mainstream press has made a blood sport of asking questions meant to separate moderate GOP voters and the GOP's crazy base. They enjoy, e.g. taking some fringe conspiracy theory, putting it in the news like it's part of the GOP platform, upping the volume on it, and then asking GOP candidates to comment. They love watching Romney squirm because he's sold himself as a reasonable and moderate alternative to Obama, but now he has to either say that Obama is a Muslim or lose support in the primary.
Trump just barrels through that mess - which is a huge part of his appeal. "Do you agree with these white supremacist groups we're artificially inflating as a major threat or are you sane?"
"Screw you, there's no way to answer that question that doesn't hurt me, even if I tell the Proud Boys to stand down that will just be used as proof that I have the ability to do that, so I ain't playing. No, I'm not a white supremacist but if white supremacists will vote for me I'll take their votes just like every other politician alive. Spin that, b***ches."
I have no patience with this - it emboldens dangerous nutjobs, normalizes saying white supremacy things, and will actually harm the country. I know that the media is manipulating the GOP to make them into villains it is just to fight, but I can't help it. They are now villains it is just to fight.
And reading statements at a surface level, assuming the good intent of the speaker, should be the default - finding secret signals in the statements of public figures is psychotic behavior. But shouldn't good Bayesian thinking say "hey if he just happens to ape Nazi symbolism in service to non-nazi causes a lot, but it appears to be innocent every time, maybe I should adjust towards the dog whistle hypothesis a bit"?
Anyway, I understand if you censor your thoughts, predictions, and opinions based on what the internet might think. I certainly do, all the time, almost impulsively. There are real consequences for saying unpopular things - interpersonally, politically, career-wise. But if you are willing to keep having controversial opinions and making controversial predictions, you will in fact make the world a better place.
A soft coup, sometimes referred to as a silent coup, is a coup d'état without the use of violence, but based on a conspiracy or plot that has as its objective the taking of state power by partially or wholly legal means, in order to facilitate an exchange of political leadership and in some cases also of the current institutional order.
I don't know if I'd agree with your assessment that there were no links to white supremacy in the 6/1 Capitol attack - there were multiple white supremacist groups present that day, including the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Nick Fuentes and assoc., Rise Above Movement, Anticom, and Three Percenters. You might argue that these groups aren't *primarily* white supremacist or that they describe themselves in other terms, but at *best* they're well known to have supremacist/anti-diversity sentiments.
I think tarring all of them with the same "white supremacist" brush is a mistake. They're all heavily, violently anti-SJ, certainly, but the Wikipedia articles don't show anything solid on Proud Boys, Oath Keepers or Three Percenters (there's at least a bit on all the rest).
There's a rather large amount of middle ground between full-blown intersectionality and full-blown white supremacism.
I'm not very comfortable with dangerous far-right groups being given a "middle ground" where it's like well, they go to events with racists, ally with racist groups, and use racist language, but they SAY they're not racist... At least the Three Percenters publicly claimed regret for their participation at Charlottesville, but that's not the strongest defense ever - anyone who followed the Unite the Right planning online knew what it was going to be.
The most obvious analogy for Charlottesville and similar things is to pride parades - a bunch of different groups with radically-varying ideologies and deviations from orthodoxy, marching together because they all *do* deviate from orthodoxy and want to make it common knowledge that said orthodoxy isn't universally-accepted.
And I mean, if you want to say there's no excuse for ever allying with white supremacists, fine. If you want to say that these groups are violent militias, I'm right there with you. But completely eliding these sort of distinctions is foolish - particularly when your entire initial point was "these groups are all white supremacists".
No, PRIDE parades (rainbows, love, unicorns, inclusiveness, free hugs, dancing) are NOT "the most obvious analogy for Charlottesville".
They are the exact, polar opposite of hate, swastikas, exclusiveness, anger, violence and driving cars into people to murder them.
There are so many unbelievably outlandish comments in this thread (which itself gets Trump wrong as others have pointed out) but this one takes the cake.
> There’s a vicious cycle where the lack of intelligent conservatives guts the system of think tanks that produce the sort of studies and analyses which convince smart people to become conservative, which in turn makes there even fewer intelligent conservatives, and so on.
As far as I'm aware, there is not a significant IQ slant to liberals or conservatives. (Undecideds are noticeably dumber than everyone else.) Rather, what's gutting the system of think tanks is a lack of *academic* conservatives.
I think there are two things that are getting conflated here: empirical claims which, if true, could be politically convenient for racists, and normative claims that one should be in favour of discriminating against individuals on the basis of their race.
In that speech, it sounds like Trump is making the claim that a harsh environment creates a selection pressure for hardiness, and therefore Minnesotans are hardy because they are well-adapted to the harsh environment of Minnesota (whether because, being mostly Nordics, they were already well-adapted to the comparable climate of Scandinavia, or because of selection pressure on them after they had arrived in North America isn't clear).
That's not an obviously-crazy claim, depending on how much time there has been to allow selection pressures to exert themselves (or at least, one would have to be a dogmatic blank-slatist to insist that it couldn't possibly have some truth to it), but there is nothing about that claim that would lead to a "and therefore we should discriminate against people of other races on the basis of their race". The idea that it's possible for different groups of humans to be differently well-adapted to a particular environment is an idea that it would be difficult to build any coherent racist theory *without* (i.e. the idea that human populations differ genetically is an idea that could be politically convenient for racists), but that doesn't mean that support for racial discrimination is a logically necessary conclusion.
Separately: even if that is what Trump believes, and it's what he was trying to convey in the speech, isn't making that point in the context of discussing immigration policy...racist?
"isn't making that point in the context of discussing immigration policy...racist? "
That's my point exactly: it *is* racist in the sense of "empirical claims which, if true, could be politically convenient for racists", but it is not racist in the sense of "be[ing] in favour of discriminating against individuals on the basis of their race" - at least within the existing polity. There is a very important difference between "we should racially discriminate against the people of Somalian origin who are already here, who came here as refugees" and "empirically, the people who came here from Somalia are *on average* less productive citizens, more likely to be on welfare and/or involved in crime, and we should be more careful about vetting people from Somalia who want to move to Minnesota to make sure that the ones we are letting in are in fact likely to be good citizens".
(This does not depend on any hereditarian claim - it's perfectly possible to believe that a) Somalians are relatively culturally dysfunction compared to old-stock Minnesotans, and that that disparity is downstream of environmentally-caused cultural dysfunction in Somalia - though it is also compatible with hereditarian beliefs.)
The claim you are implicitly making seems to be: even if different countries have different numbers of people who can be expected to make good citizens, for whatever reason, it is unethical to take likelihood-of-being-a-good-citizen into account when deciding who to let into the country if that would produce racial disparity. Is that a fair description?
Either way, I don't have the skills in Trumpomancy to guess what exactly he means by racehorse theory. For what it's worth, artifical selection on racehorses for speed, and natural selections on humans for hardiness in adaptation to a harsh environment with cold winters, are still selection pressures doing what selection pressures do: altering the relative frequency of different alleles within a gene pool, and still have the same end result: a population better adapted to those selection pressures, whether those pressures are imposed consciously by humans or naturally by the environment.
I would be willing to grant Trump a full 5% instead of 3%, the extra 2% being allotted to him aggressively tweeting at Powell to keep the money printers on, an instinct that was probably selfish but ultimately correct. In theory the president can only fire the Fed chair "for cause" but I'm sure Powell didn't feel like rolling the dice at SCOTUS.
Please, Scott, please stop commenting on politics. It makes you sound so ignorant!
People get mad at you because you skew every single thing in the most favorable to the Trump-y direction. You don't need to this! But you seem incapable of doing anything else when you talk about this. What are you getting your news from Daily Caller and Breitbart?
You want to argue that the GOP should take inspiration from Trump/Bannonism and turn it into something better, fine. You want to argue that liberals and anti-racists go too far on some corner of the Internet, also fine. But please don't attempt to touch base with reality, you are on a different planet.
-Trump had destroyed institutions
-children in cages, revoking DACA, blanket visa ban on Nigerians, these are some racist policies.
- How are young people more totalitarian, because they tell at you on Twitter? Young liberals are advocating for HR-1 and other pro-democracy measures.
- Jan 6th was an attempted coup. Is it exculpatory that it was so sloppy?
- Stephen Miller was found to be coordinating with explicitly white supremacists websites, kept his job.
- We have GOP house members forming "Anglo-saxon" culture events.
If you want to argue Trump's obvious white-supremacist racism is unimportant or overblown, fine, but you don't have to deny it exists.
To be a white supremacist by any reasonable definition, you need to be actively in favour of supremacy for white people. I am not convinced that Trump qualifies. But it's possible for someone to not be a white supremacist but also think that combatting white supremacism is not always-and-everywhere the most important priority. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Trump falls into that camp. It's possible that white supremacists, though real, represent a tiny fraction of the population and are so far from the levers of power that there are many other things that are more important to worry about, and that the only reason people are freaking out about them is because the media ecosystem is fuelling a moral panic, with white supremacists occupying a role not unlike that occupied by witches in more traditionally religious eras.
On that analysis, it's possible for Trump to work on the same team as some people with hardline anti-immigrationist views on immigration issues but not to share the whole worldview of those people, and without any expectation that Trump would seriously try to drag the country back to the Jim Crow era.
(It's also worth considering that, given that most humans are tribal creatures, you don't have to be motivated by bigotry to worry that in a country with no clear majority ethnic group, democracy breaks down as a mistake-theorist means of deciding the best policies for the country, and simply becomes a conflict-theorist ethnic headcount. Also, given that most humans are motivated to some degree by economic concerns, and given that accepting large numbers of low-skilled immigrants who compete with the existing working class will tend to lower wages for the working class while providing cheaper labour for the subset of the rich who employ them, it's worth considering that attemting to smear all opposition to increased immigration as evil is effectively a sort of economic warfare by the blue tribe against the red tribe, and that if you are on team red, it's possible to oppose measure that will impoverish you personally without being motivated by sheer irrational hatred).
Edited to add: although I am unconvinced that white supremacists political activists have any significant sway in the USA right now, I am at least somewhat worried that the ethnonarcissism being pushed by the blue team risks reinvigorating the very demon they claim to be fighting. The critical race theory, Kendi / DiAngelo types are basically offering a proposition that goes: there is no middle ground where we will allow people to keep their identity small on questions of race; we will do our best to ensure that everyone is forced to choose between siding with race-obsessed ideologues who love white people, and siding with race-obsessed ideologues who hate white people.
On that basis, had it been allowed to stand, I think that one can reasonably believe that Trump's ban on the use of federal funds to push CRT could have been a bulwark against the reinvigoration of white ethnonarcissism *even if Trump himself is not as perfectly uncontaminated by adjacency to disreputable racial ideologues* as one would hope.
A lot of the CRT-laws are like 90% banal and good, but then overreach and make it impossible to even discuss racism in a historical or contemporary context.
Unless you've got a kid going to one of those weird rich-people private schools actually teaching racist non-sense under the guise of CRT, I see it as mostly a passing fad online.
And I reiterate my earlier point - look at the people recently empowered on the right (Trump, McConnell, McCarthy) vs the left (Biden, Schumer, Pelosi).
I'm not a subscriber to Yglesias, so I can't read the link, but ... well, I hope you're right about it being a passing fad. But the fact that CRT training was being provided by the federal government prior to the ban is at least an indicator that the rot has spread far.
At least I would hope we can both agree that to the degree that children and young adults are being indoctrinated into an ideology that holds that any aggregate differences in social outcomes between racial groups must be the result of discrimination, that is a thing very much worth avoiding?
(One of the more outrageous instances of racial hysteria recently, not a CRT training incident per se, but one that could only happen if CRT-like ideology was in the water supply, was the Georgetown Law School hysteria, where a teacher, not realizing her conversation was still being recorded, observed with some obvious distress that her black students tend to cluster at the bottom of her class, someone shared the video and whipped up anger about it, and the university sided with the mob and fired the teacher for alleged racism, even though she is very clearly stating a fact that she wishes were not the case, and wishes she could remedy - and they also punished the guy she was in a conversation with for not contradicting her. That had damn well better be an isolated incident, but if sacrificing the effort to promote competence in highly-demanding professions in order to appease race-obsessed crybullies has become the norm, then civilisation is in some danger. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R33C7FrsJYc )
Huh, I wish Substack made it a little clearer what links would world.
I would just point out the existence of people who have gone "too far" with allegations of racism does not prove the Trump administration is not racist, or doesn't have racist motives for doing horrible things.
If I were to speculate on the failure mode that Scott is operating on it's exactly that. The is why alt-right website like to begin their arguments with whataboutism.
Racism is bad! And it's also really bad when it's the White House.
I may undercut my own point, but I will say something on that video.
I wouldn't say firing her is necessarily an appropriate response, but I would say she does not have the pro-active attitude her prestigious school expects. Does she believe its her primary job to test the students or to educate the students? Educating is first priority. I'm occasionally teacher myself actually. I teach in a unique situation, where student do come into my classroom with a mixture of undergraduate, graduate, professional experience; it is my job not to hide those differences in preparation but it is my job to pro-actively overcome them. So I try to be responsive to any student under-performing by providing extra instructional time and training resources for under-prepared students. That's what is expected of me. At the end of the class, I want to certify that everyone who passes has a certain level of knowledge and training that the next teacher can rely on, or industry professionals can rely on.
In the video she says "Come on" which seems to mean "you are disappointing me" and later she is talking about "some good ones". I take that to reflect the perspective that the underperformance of her black students is entirely their fault, and she has nothing in her power to change that. I'm not saying they are at the bottom of class because of anything she did anything racist - rather I think she has been trained to ignore race-gaps in performance that are inconvenient for her and for the university. In her perspective, I imagine she feels frustrated to have been set-up in this situation by the university, under-prepared black students who when graded-fairly she has to mark down.
But that the university accepts their students with the expectation that they achieve and expects teachers to be instrumental in that. When she sees a consistent pattern of under-performance, the problem I see is not that she acknowledged it but that she isn't interested in doing anything pro-active. If I'm the teacher in that situation, I want to understand what these students are missing when they step into my classroom and how I can give them the support to respond to that. Her pedagogy style is not racist exactly, its antiquated. She does not care about fixing a persistent problem. The first mission of the university is trying to educate and train everyone that is in the classroom. She cannot be expected to close all achievement gaps herself, but she is expected to participate in an inclusive educational environment and not just pass the buck. In conclusion, I don't think she is some racist that needs to be run out of town, but I do get what she said that made people upset.
And yes, there are over-achieving students who also should not be ignored. I was one myself. But I see the classroom as about certifying knowledge, and what is really of value to the over-achieving students are those opportunities to seek out projects beyond the classroom. Those projects which relate to the real world or mimic the ruthless meritocracy of the real world. Some students are ready can seek those out before they leave the school, and some need the training first. But there is no sparing students from meritocracy and that it is not the purpose of inclusive education to do so.
Okay sure, but I think what you are showing is how useless it is to restrict ones analysis of "white supremacy as a set of influential ideas" only to active proponents of explicit white supremacy that don't face any public sanctions.
Kids in cages is a real thing that happened. That's not a moral panic. If I call that "a tiny bit of white supremacism but mostly about other things" then, it shows a tiny bit of white supremacism is absolutely worth freaking out about. I'm astonished Scott thinks the "take away" from four years of Trump was it was four year of crying wolf, when what happened was an unmitigated disaster by any sensible account.
Although I agree there exists liberals who are overactive with charges of racism, I do think it's useful to have a word that mean "if you keep going that way, it will be even more racist and even more harmful". When in the same piece Scott calls the left/liberals "totalitarian" because there really are some loud bossy people on the left who lean that way, this feels like a totally bad faith argument on his part. (Scott's supposed to be the king of good faith argumentation, I was sincere when I said he should stop himself!) But the fundamental asymmetry is that Trump was president for the GOP, Obama and Biden were president for the Dems. If the rule is, "it's not enough to find crazy people online, crazy people are only worth worrying about when what they do matters" - well I think we got a real problem here. If someone want's to say the terrible things that Trump did was totally incidental to the fact that he also racist, well I think that's a little bit convenient but it's really not worth fighting for.
I hear what you are saying about racism being not necessary to explain tribalistic cruel anti-immigrant views. But here's the thing, I'm also a mistake theorist. Racist partisan attitudes is a failure mode of human thinking that not only is leading to bad governance, but it's threatening our system of democracy where sometimes we don't have as bad governance. The fact that the Trump administration is not only racist, but ignorant, cruel, delusional is not in the least bit exculpatory. None of us really know exactly the right way to rehabilitate the GOP from this toxic constellation - maybe you have to educate first so that the cruel racism falls away, or maybe you pull out the racism first and the partisan delusions fall away - but if we're trying to solve the problem by listing all the mistakes, the fact that the tribalism is reinforced by racism (which has historically been very bad) feels relevant. Anti-immigrant sentiments doesn't have to be motivated by explicit bigotry, but it might be occasionally useful to have some of that terminology for the pushback we receive when trying to dislodge it.
Do I have to point out the reality, virtually undisputed by economists, that immigration is in fact very good for the country? for the very people who oppose it? That the elderly who are worried about who will pay for their retirement healthcare will in fact be helped by the influx of young labor and stronger tax base? That the working class living in areas with collapsing population could make use of the boost to agriculture and manufacturing. That the those alienated by highly educated secular elites with small families might find some kindred spirits across the border and world over? When ideology is this self-destructive, let's call it a mistake and work on fixing it. I don't have patience for dumb conspiracy theories about covid or misinformation climate change being represented as scientific fact - by the same token, I don't have any sentimentality about partisans espousing anti-immigrant views. A neutral promoter of truth should be freaking out about the Trump administration.
I'm not sure I follow - the kids in cages is a real phenomenon, i.e. the Trump administration did keep young people attempting to cross the border illegally in holding facilities, but I'm not convinced that it's an outrage; correct me on the details if I've misunderstood here, but I gather that he wasn't doing anything terribly different from what the Obama administration before him, or the Biden administration after him was doing - but something about that guy just seems *absolutely break people's brains* such that they accuse him of being a top-tier tyrant even though he didn't actually do anything noticeably outside of the mainstream for a Republican president, including not deporting significantly more illegal immigrants than his predecessor.
I'm also not sure how it's presumptively white supremacist to enforce immigration laws. Sure, it *could* be, but that's something you would need to argue for.
And I'm also not sure that the 'economists all agree that immigration is good' is something that can be left un-argued-for either. There's a good chance that it is good for the rich but bad for the working class in the short term, and even if it is 'good' for the working class in the long term, that doesn't necessarily preclude that it is only 'good' in terms of 'you have access to more consumer goods at lower prices, but at the cost of significant damage to your ability to earn an independent living, live in a high-trust community among people you share a culture with, etc.' ... and if some people would prefer not to make that trade-off, I can't see any good reason to condemn them unless one were to hold that everyone in the world has a presumptive right to become a citizen of your country. I mean, aren't we all the time hearing about how the white working class now have declining life-expectancy, sky-high suicide rates and an epidemic of opioid overdoses, something that doesn't tend to happen to prosperous, well-adjusted people?
(Granted, a fair fraction of that will also be due to outsourcing rather than immigration, but that too is an issue that Trump campigned on)
The aging population thing is, I'll grant you a tricky one, and presumably one that needs to be solved by every country that has combined the Demographic Transition with modern healthcare that extends people's lifespan well beyond their healthspan. I will admit I do not know what is the ultimate cause of the fact that people in most developed countries are not having enough children to reproduce themselves (I was reading recently an article suggesting that an 1877 obscenity trial for publication of information about contraception caused enough of a cultural shift to put a dent in British fertility - https://www.elfac.org/what-makes-people-have-babies-the-link-between-cultural-values-and-fertility-rates/ ) ... but to the degree that a lot of people have fewer children than they say they ideally want, it's at least not obvious that 'bring in lots of people from abroad' is a better solution than 'try to make family formation more affordable and high-status again'.
But either way, if you are opposed to the people who think that, for them, high immigration has more costs than benefits, even if you are right that they are beholden to a self-destructive ideology, the onus is on you to persuade them, and to at least take seriously the possibility that they might have valid reasons for their preferences, even if they are not your preferences.
You don't seem to know that the Trump administration was separating children from their parents at the border. The point of that policy is to inflict maximum pain on asylum claimants before the legitimacy of their asylum claim can be assessed. This is what the Trump administration itself said about it. That has not been the Obama nor the Biden administration policy. Obama administration also piloted a program in asylum claimants did not have to be detained they just had to show up voluntarily to their asylum hearings (which might sound like a disaster, except they were doing just that), which Trump dismantled. Inflicting unnecessary pain on an innocent group of people with the same ethnicity, I guess we don't have to call that racist, but we should treat it with contempt whatever it might be. Regardless of the dubious morality of cracking down immigration, children in cages is specifically wholly unnecessary cruelty.
Actually all three administrations can be criticized for falling short of their legal commitment to process legitimate asylum claims, but Trump administration was the most lawless of them all. This is not just enforcing the law. Trump administration was consistently getting in trouble with the courts for flouting existing legal precedents (not just new challenges by activists), and in no way represents a minimal legal exposure approach to immigration. It more closely represented a maximum legal exposure approach, which I would not call solemnly and neutrally enforcing the law.
Pro-family social policies help a lot of things, but so do immigration policies. I'm in favor of both. Speaking of Matt Yglesias, this is what One Billion Americans is about. But the real point is that the economic arguments people use against immigration are not actually true (immigrants bring in money, make public and private services more affordable). The correct policy on immigration (let's use the average economist) is well outside of the political consensus in Washington (but since when has that stopped a rationalist), but if one side is leaning into wrongness and the other side is leaning away from it I think we should acknowledge it.
Separately, I think the other arguments people make against immigration usually aren't justifiable on ethical grounds (just imagine saying everything said to justify excluding Mexicans, said in service of justifying Jim Crow-era segregation).
I'm all for persuading, I never said it should be forbidden to espouse anti-immigrant views in public. What I would say it isn't defensible. It seems bad that Scott won't acknowledge that it's bad. Is Scott out of his expertise or is he refusing to publicly criticize it out of a dubious commitment to avoid taking a partisan stand? Either way, it's not a great topic area for him.
I've not really attempted a case for immigration here, only asserted it's robust and made a skeleton outline. I can recommend some more books, but they are easy enough to find.
Re: '..."stand back and stand by", which as far as I can tell is equivalent to "stand down"...'
It really, really isn't equivalent. Stand by is an instruction to do nothing but maintain readiness. If you tell a soldier to stand by and their weapon will remain in their hands, at the ready. "Prepare to receive further instructions" is implicit in an order to stand by. You're standing by _for_ something. Trump telling Proud Boys to "stand by" is telling them "don't do anything...yet. I will tell you at the appropriate time what to do", which is not reassuring for anyone to hear, especially I'm the light of the capitol riot later.
Stand Down is more decisive, it basically means "go off duty". If you tell a soldier to stand down, they're going to assume they've been dismissed and go do whatever off-duty stuff they have.
Maybe Trump just mis-spoke, or maybe he just didn't know the difference. After all, you're a pretty smart dude and you're publicly posting that they're equivalent. On the other hand, Trump was currently president of the united states, receiving all kinds of status updates and meetings where military types would tell him things like "We have four F-18s on standby", and surely he didn't take that to mean that they had four planes not-fueled and not-armed, not-ready to not-go.
tl;dr they're not equivalent, one means "wait for my signal" and the other means "go home", Trump said the wrong one and while it's possible it was an accident, it's also possible it wasn't, and even if it was an accident it's a negligent one, unfitting for a commander-in-chief.
You're wrong about the Charlottesville thing. Here is what he said:
"Q: You said there was hatred and violence on both sides?
Trump: I think there is blame on both sides. You look at both sides. I think there is blame object both on both sides. I have no doubt about it. You don't have doubt about it either. If you reported it accurately, you would say that the neo-Nazis started this thing. They showed up in Charlottesville. Excuse me. They didn't put themselves down as neo-Nazis. You had some very bad people in that group. You also had some very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group -- excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down, of to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.
George Washington was a slave owner. Was George Washington a slave owner? So will George Washington now lose his status? Are we going to take down -- excuse me. Are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? You like him. Good. Are we going to take down his statue. He was a major slave owner. Are we going to take down his statue? It is fine. You are changing history and culture.
You had people and i'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists. They should be condemned totally. You had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists. The press has treated them absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people but you also had troublemakers and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats. You had a lot of bad people in the other group too.
Q: You were saying the press has treated white nationalists unfairly?
Trump: No, no. There were people in that rally. I looked the night before. If you look, there were people protesting very quietly the taking down taking down the statue of Robert E. Lee. I am sure there were some bad ones.
The following day, it looked like they had some rough, bad people, neo-Nazis, white nationalists, whatever you want to call them. You had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest and very legally protest. I don't know if you know, they had a permit. The other group didn't have a permit.
So I only tell you this. There are two sides to a story. I thought what took place was horrible moment for our country, a horrible moment. But there are two sides to the country.
Does anybody have a final question? Do you have an infrastructure question? "
He is drawing a distinction between people who were there on Saturday, and people who were there "the night before." He even specified that the people he was praising had a permit. Only one group had a permit for Friday, and it was the people carrying tiki torches chanting "Jews will not replace us."
"But Prediction 2 suggests I thought there was only a 50% chance Trump would win the Republican nomination. In retrospect that was way too low. I think I genuinely should feel embarrassed about this one - I put myself in the Republican Party's shoes and imagined I would reject Trump, ignoring all the evidence that actual Republicans liked him quite a lot and would probably continue to do so."
To be fair, Trump not winning the Republican nomination could also come from:
* Trump hates being President; doesn't run again.
* Trump is impeached and convicted; can't run again.
* Trump is old and in poor health; doesn't run again.
These had more than 0% chance, and much more than 0% mindshare, in Feb 2018. I think it would've been reasonable for you to have those account for 10%-25% of the 50% chance of Trump not winning the nomination.
(Though also, your two predictions don't actually entail a 50% chance of him not winning the nomination. The likelihood of a GOP win would presumably differ between running Trump vs running someone else.)
I don't agree with your statements about Trump and racism, but I can see where you're coming from and at least understand your arguments. I cannot say the same about your position on the Capitol riots.
40% of the rioters went there right from Trump's rally, and his final words were a call for them to "fight like hell" or they'd lose their country.
According to actual people in the White House, Trump watched the rioters break into the Capitol building with "delight" and "glee". He did eventually call for peace through a tweet, but well over an hour later, after it was clear the rioters had failed to do anything effective, and reportedly only because people were telling him he would be held responsible otherwise. It is ridiculous to say that waiting until a coup has failed, and ONLY THEN choosing to denounce it, is somehow discouraging it.
One of the first things the rioters did was build a gallows and start a chant calling for Mike Pence to hanged, and Trump's literal first response after they broke into the Capitol building was to tweet out that Mike Pence had failed him and the country, so it's not like he couldn't have put a call for peace (and not what could easily be read as an incitement to kill his Vice President) earlier.
Meanwhile, in the riot itself, bombs had been placed in DC, which were luckily found and disarmed, but would have exploded just fine if we weren't lucky. The rioters were calling for senators to be killed, were heard explicitly saying they wanted to find and kill them while in the Capitol building, and had brought zip-tie handcuffs and restraints just in case they found someone they could hold captive. The fact of the matter is, we as a country came about a minute from seeing live-streamed executions of politicians.
Just because a coup was performed with the same incompetence we saw in so many aspects of the Trump administration and ultimately failed doesn't make it any less of an attempted coup.
Also, you said that Trump's only other plan was to "challenge the election results a lot," and that completely ignores the direct pressure he put on Republican election officials to just fraudulently change the vote tallies, like the actual recorded call to Raffensperger where he tells him to just find 11,000 votes.
"In this case Iran decided it wasn't worth picking a fight, but that was their good decision, not Trump's."
I'm not sure what you're imagining here: open war with Iran at this point would obviously be extremely bad for Iran and not particularly bad for the US. And the future is only growing worse with Iranian development of missiles and nuclear weapons.
I guess I think that if you think an event of this scale (killing this one senior guy) might trigger open war with Iran =>
then you have to think open war with Iran is highly triggerable =>
and therefore highly likely to happen at some point for some reason (with so many tensions with and open fronts against Iran anyway) =>
and if you think open war with Iran is highly likely in, say, the next few decades -- surely it's better it happen now (before Iran finishes its nuclear and missile development projects) rather than in a decade's time?
A world in which any Iranian leader who isn't sufficiently obsequious to the United States is liable to be drone-striked out of existence, is *also* extremely bad for Iran. Bad for the Iranian government, at least. And if we take it as axiomatic that Iran shall never substantially retaliate for drone-strikes because War Would Be Very Bad, then the drone strikes won't stop with Soleimani.
If your enemy is on a path that leads inevitably to A: war or B: things that are about as bad for you as war but much more pleasant to your enemy, the rational move is usually war as quickly as practical. If there's a chance of a third option, then there's a good chance that getting there means taking option B off the table by convincingly signalling a willingness to wage war. If you're not sure, you signal willingness to wage war and see what happens.
I mostly agree with you here, but I do think "stand back and stand by" is not equivalent to "stand down" - to me it sounds more like "stand down (possibly because I'm being forced to say this) but be ready to stand up for me soon" - the "stand by" part is weird and not just temporary as you say but a bit of an active endorsement.
The left media has definitely been hysterical and dishonest at times and taken Trump's words out of context and wrangled them to suit their purpose.
But I am not sure about cause and effect here -- *if* the left had not been so hysterical in the first place, maybe Trump would have been more explicitly racist etc? I would guess that this kind of policing is what at least somewhat forces Trump&co to not be explicitly KKK supporting.
I mean, the primary reason regarding Trump's own position is presumably ideological differences between Trump-the-man and the KKK. He's chauvinist, but I don't think he's personally a white supremacist.
Leaving that aside, though, I think a bigger check on Trump than the progressive media was the conservative media - the former didn't actually have any room to step up their rhetoric against him, but the latter had plenty of room to punish him for going too far beyond their own positions.
"But I am not sure about cause and effect here -- *if* the left had not been so hysterical in the first place, maybe Trump would have been more explicitly racist etc? I would guess that this kind of policing is what at least somewhat forces Trump&co to not be explicitly KKK supporting."
Eh. That seems like a bit of a self-flattering way to never have to admit one was wrong.
Scott, I miss the much stricter enforcement of commenting courtesy at SSC. Too many interlocutors here are unreasonably rude and arrogant. I’m here for reasoned insight, the occasional surprisingly effective contrarianism, and general intellectual honesty. The negations of those you can get anywhere.
I just want to say that *You Are Still Crying Wolf* was the first post of yours I read. I was really impressed by it and that I've been reading ever since. Please keep up the good work.
I don't know if it's demographic differences or what, but the number of explicit support of QAnon that I observed within my greater network (mostly right-wing Kentuckians), suggests to me that it was much more than a moral panic. Especially paired with the fact that I know these people to be armed.
This meant that it was very hard for him to get anything "positive" (i.e. doing things he wanted to do) done.
However, he was pretty good at doing damage to institutions. This is, I think, greatly underestimated; a lot of people quit or were forced out who were good at their jobs, and the CDC and other disease control agencies were just the most obvious manifestation of that. His response to hurricanes was also quite bad, especially the one in Puerto Rico; he was very bad at dealing with disasters because he surrounded himself with morons and was bad at what he did. His response to wildfires was also quite poor.
The agencies that largely escaped his attention (like NASA) did okay, and the NWS and NOAA were not so badly affected, but FEMA had funds taken away from it for various pet projects. Other, more "political" agencies like the State Department and Homeland Security, were much, much more negatively affected, with many experts leaving.
The fact that he was investigated because it was believed to be credible that he was a Russian intelligence asset speaks volumes, and his behavior towards Russia cost us a lot of people in intelligence.
Crime went up significantly over the course of his presidency as well, and he did a very poor job of dealing with BLM and that whole mess.
Indeed, his reaction to radicalization was extremely poor in general, as was his incompetence at dealing with both Russia and China.
He caused the US considerable reputational damage, and he did back out of the TPP, which was a huge blunder as well.
The thing is, Trump had very strong authoritarian tendencies, but he was an incompetent buffoon. He was, in fact, dangerous, but he was also very low on the competence tree, which meant that he was not very good at getting things done that he wanted to do. He did, however, serve to radicalize the Republican party, and was intensely anti-intellectual, and he did damage to the US government's institutions.
People who thought he was going to turn the US into a white nationalist state just didn't understand Trump to begin with. He was indeed racist, but he was racist like a racist relative - actually hurting someone because of their race? He's not that. He's not a Klansman.
He just was prejudiced and stupid and bigoted. His travel ban on various random countries for no actual reason was a good example of that.
That was the sort of thing people SHOULD have expected, but thinking he would support Klansmen was just dumb.
Trump was really awful at things in exactly the way that people should have expected. People just made him into something he wasn't.
I read through a good amount of the comments and didn't find anyone explaining the economy doing better than expected.
What Trump did was macroeconomics 101, specifically deficit-spending. What you do is you pump money into the economy on loan. Since the government is so big, it can stimulate the entire economy like that. Every politician knows they can do this, but they don't because the debt has to be paid back at some point, requiring future tax-increases. And usually other politicians and voters complain about how much you're increasing the debt.
Keynesian economics says that deficit spending is ok during a downturn to revive the economy, but Trump did this pre-covid already. This is generally considered a bad idea because you're reducing your capacity to take on new debt when the recession eventually comes. So the recession will be worse, a) because the economy was artificially inflated, leading to a bigger correction, and b) because you can't afford to borrow much more money.
The jury is still out on how this will end. We got lucky that this is such an unusual recession. That allowed big interventions without the usual stops. So we did not end up with a reduced ability to deal with the next recession. (Except that with Trump in power that first stimulus package was unusually bad, doing very little about the virus, mostly helping the stock market) But we did end up in uncharted territory in terms of the amount of debt. Keynes would have said that when the economy was good, we should have decreased the debt to not run into this. We got short-term benefits of an improved economy from 2017 to 2019 but got a new debt-problem to deal with for many years to come.
"Stand back and stand by" is nothing like "Stand down" Scott. I was going to save this blog to favourites based on Coleman Hughes recommendation but anyone who can make that statement is disingenuous. "Stand back and stand by" means prepare for me to give you instructions - which is exactly what happened.
> that he was some kind of bizarre "clown genius" or "drunken master" type whose apparent bumbling was just him playing so many levels above the rest of us that we couldn't understand it. I think something like this might be true for his ability to speak to the Republican base
Hah, no. I've been saying for years that what Trump does is trivially easy.
He listens to his echo chamber — Twitter, Facebook, Fox News, private parties — and then, whatever he hears there, so long as it appeals to his personal taste, he treats as fact and repeats it to everyone to the best of his recollection (which often isn't very good).
This entirely explains his popularity with his base. Aside from Republicans naturally gravitating toward the opinions of their president, most of his base participates in similar echo chambers, so from the beginning they sat up and took notice that Trump said things they mostly believed already. That's why they voted for him and that's why their support for him never wavered.
Trump is no different than any rando commenting prolifically on YouTube videos, just with some business sense from his business experience; his skillset is the skillset of the used car salesman applied to national politics. Truly a man of the people: his everyman naiveté is his whole appeal.
In 2016 I didn't understand how appealing a man like this could be, nor did I understand Democrats' structural disadvantage in the electoral college. Lessons I won't soon forget.
Like many others here I see when I control+F for "stand by", I'd really like to see a clarification added for that point. For reference I'm an Australian (i.e. it's no direct danger to me if he implemented death squads) and don't think Trump definitely intended to say "stand by". Even so, hearing it caused me to massively update my predictions of the likelihood of civil unrest verging on some kind of modern liberal democracy version of a coup (e.g. bloodless but forcible spoiling of a crucial count) during the election, and absolutely nothing like other supposed gaffes like "fine people on both sides" which I generally ignored.
Catching up with this after a couple weeks or so. I'm really enjoying Mantic Mondays. A lot of humility implied in addressing a question along the lines of "does a self-imposed C grade justify continued political punditry?" For some reason this reminds me of a conversation with a philosophy prof I met while my oldest was touring colleges. We got to chatting and I mentioned liking the ways that philosophy intersects with science, from the Greeks to Popper and the importance of falsifiability in science. He mentioned in passing that it's very difficult to know what the falsifiability points at. There are layers upon layers when we make meaning. Anyway, I admire the effort it takes to think carefully about the layers of meaning implicit in these predictions, and in the act of making predictions.
In measuring Trump's explicitly racist policies, I feel Scott is mistaken to ignore pardoning criminals like Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a cruel human rights abuser who was convicted of contempt of court for defying a court order to stop racially profiling Latinos, and Navy Seal Eddie Gallagher, who butchered captured ISIS militants and Iraqi civilians alike.
"When his plan for angry supporters chanting turned into angry supporters rioting and getting into the Capitol, he was clearly against this and tried to stop it." - no he didn't. He watched the carnage on TV for hours while ignoring calls from his fellow Republicans. Eventually someone convinced him to call in reinforcements. I think that whole episode can totally reasonably be described as a coup - I can't even imagine what would have ensued if Mike Pence had done the thing his voter base really wanted him to do, and refused to certify the election.
Yeah, this sounds right to me. I'd go so far as to say “Racist policies not related to immigration” is a bit of an “eargreyish”-style convenient-coinage.
I'd agree with this if my impression of the discourse at the time was that people anticipated that Trump would be unable to enact racist policies unrelated to immigration. If the people around you spoke and thought as though we could count on the Constitution to restrain Trump from doing anything else bad-and-race-related, that's plausibly a crux- an aspect of your experience which, if I shared it, would cause me to agree with you.
However, it's a very poor description of *my* experience. I saw quite a lot of people expressing really a lot of race-related anxiety about Trump, quite apart from immigration concerns. That means I can't really believe Scott created the category he was responding to, and it's hard for me to believe he exaggerated its prominence in the discourse.
Yeah, to be honest, from what I remembered, all the talk I heard of the possibility of Trump-sanctioned racist policies would have been immigration-based (albeit potentially so wide-ranging as to affect people who by any sane metric haven't counted as "immigrants" in two generations).
There was worry that garden-variety, non-lawful racist abuse would skyrocket as a result of Trump-supporting police *turning a blind eye* to it, and things like that, but I don't think that should be expressed as "non-immigration based Trump policies".
The context though is that immigration in the West is so far to the left compared to the rest of the world. One insightful comment a few years ago was that when people were freaking out about Le Pen, the actual most restrictive leader immigration-wise was elected in South Korea's Moon. In Asia, Japan and South Korea are extremely restrictive immigration wise and Singapore very explicitly has ethnic quotas in order to keep demographic balance. In the West, we've decided as a culture, that even if the population is to electorally choose to restrict immigration, every facet of society should fight tooth and nail to preven that from happening.
That is because the major part of progressive discourse is that only whites can be racist, so bringing up Korea or Japan is counterproductive. They don't even call Chinese racists, despite believing that they perpetrate a literal genocide.
China has refined racism to the point where they practice racism against other people whom the rest of the world calls "Chinese." That they discriminate mostly based on language, though naturally skin color plays into it as well. Did you know all white men are billionaires, want Chinese mistresses, and are enormously well-hung? My coworkers in Shanghai thought nothing of telling me these things "everyone knows" about white people. Never mind what they said about Africans.
Yeah - if they'd gone from 61% to 30% under Obama, then it would have been literally impossible to do worse by this metric, which seems pretty questionable. "Factor of change in the favorable/unfavorable ratio" seems like a natural choice; by that metric, 2008/2017/2020 ratios are 1.56 / 0.85 / 0.56, for which Obama shrinks by a factor of 1.83 and Trump by a factor of 1.51. (So the conclusion is the same in the end.)
One thing I’ve gotta mention on institutions: you gave yourself a D for guessing Trump’s impact on them, but from what people like Michael Lewis have written, Trump totally ignored/purposely tore down a lot of governmental institutions, and our terrible early response to COVID was, in large part, due to decisions Trump made in early 2017 upon taking office. So I’d give yourself a higher grade there.
Can you link me to more information on how institutional screwups by Trump were related to the bad coronavirus response?
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/16/how-michael-caputo-shook-up-hhs-416632
Also, pulling CDC people out of China, something Biden criticized all the way back in October 2019. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-cdc-exclusiv-idUSKBN21C3N5
The thing about this line of argumentation is that the US Covid performance, in terms of things like deaths per capita, seems to be somewhere towards the middle of the pack among Western countries, including ones that didn't have a Trump-like "institution-wrecking" figure.
Maybe the US could have been a top-tier country on Covid without Trump, maybe not, but to me, "institution-wrecking" sounds like, I don't know, canceling the CDC. There wouldn't have been a Fauci if the alarmist vision of Trump came true.
While Trump certainly didn't help matters, my sense is that a lot of the complaints about Trump on Covid are failing to account for the degree to which the President's power is limited and America's failures are mostly civilizational.
Autocrats don't announce their intentions. Instead, the hollow out institutions from within. It's not like Hitler called a press conference to announce the Final Solution, or that Putin announced plans to run phony elections.
And BTW those western countries also rely on the CDC's early warning system in China, just like they did with Ebola and Zika. That's part of the reason the CDC was the most respected in the world.
Hitler didn't call a press conference to announce the Final Solution, but the Nazi party official platform in 1920 included the sentence: "No Jew, therefore, may be a member of the nation," and the Nuremburg laws of 1935 criminialized sex or marriage with Jews and stripped them of their citizenship (after a series of run-ups to this level of prohibition from 1932-35). Not in any kind of veiled or coded way: "Marriages between Jews and citizens of German or related blood are forbidden," is the (translated) text of the law.
One particularly terrible part of liberals being desperate to equate Trump with Nazis over the last 5 or so years has been, amazingly, them downplaying all the horrible shit that the Nazis did.
America had a number of advantages over European countries—we got cases and community spread later and we’re richer—so applying a high standard is appropriate.
America is also much more obese than most of those countries, which carries high susceptibility to COVID
This also mostly ignores the development of and purchasing decisions related to the vaccine, which the US and UK have embarrassed the rest of the West regarding, and requires updating some priors on Brexit.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/ lists the USA as 14th out of 153 nations in terms of covid deaths per capita, which is a long way from the middle of the pack.
You really really can't compare the US with most of those nations who don't have the ability to create good statistics at all. Russia for example has far greater excess mortality than their listed Covid deaths would indicate.
I don't know, Canada had (until recently) about 3x fewer Covid deaths and 3.75x fewer cases than the U.S., even though the virus survives better in cold weather / indoors / less sunlight. And the U.S. had an anomalous period from July to September 2020 when it was affected much worse than other developed countries:
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Confirmed+cases&Interval=Cumulative&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=USA~GBR~CAN~DEU~ITA~FRA~SWE~NOR~NLD~CHE~ESP
It has been argued that European countries have higher risk because their cities are packed more tightly with people, which also helps explain the severity of Covid in NYC. If this is true then Canada seems like a good point of comparison due to having similar city designs with similar suburban sprawl.
This is such a jaw-dropping question (I know you had a busy 2020, but still) that I imagine it must be setting up a very boutique interpretation of "institutional screw-ups." Like if one makes the obvious point about the disbanding of the dedicated NSC pandemic team in 2018, would it fall asunder because Trump probably would've just ignored them like he did the various fragmented agencies the authority fell to?
My main criticisms for Trump's pandemic response had been his terrible optics (ie tweeting that he didn't think masks mattered), his failure to close borders early, his failure to release stockpiles of things that states needed, and his failure to pressure the FDA to approve tests faster. Honorable mention for terrible patchwork shelter-in-place policies although I don't know if that's something he could have fixed or if states rights let them ignore the president on these kinds of things anyway. None of these seemed like the result of destroyed institutions. DJ's answers and your answer are helpful, though I'm surprised you're surprised I needed reminding about this - I don't think Michael Caputo is a household name or Trump's disbanding of the NSC pandemic team was especially covered (although in retrospect I think I had heard about it earlier).
In general I would prefer you not make fun of me for admitting ignorance and asking for information, because that disincentivizes me to to try to learn more about things I might be behind the curve on.
The stockpiles were certainly an institutional failure. Here's a Washington Post article from 2018 about Trump's decision to move it out from under CDC authority: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/04/24/inside-the-secret-u-s-stockpile-meant-to-save-us-all-in-a-bioterror-attack/
Multiple quotes from experts and Congress concerned that the CDC made the most sense and that the new administrative structure would politicize it, a consequence that Jared Kushner did his damnedest to explicitly realize when he claimed in a cringey press conference that it wasn't meant for the states and then had website's description altered to conform with his assessment.
I'm definitely not trying to shame you, but I gotta say I'm surprised you spoke so confidently about institutions and now plead ignorance. Michael Caputo is one of dozens of Trump operatives who sabotaged institutions throughout the government.
Some other examples:
* Trump firing FIVE inspectors general after the impeachment (the previous record for a president is one, by Obama, and the guy he fired was very old and acting bizarrely, as if he had dementia). The IG regime was created specifically in response to Nixon's abuses of power.
* EPA director Scott Pruitt being under 15(!) investigations before he finally resigned
* By the end of his term, something like five of of Trump's senior defense & intelligence appointees were "acting," meaning they were not confirmed by the Senate. One of them appears to have been involved in delaying the National Guard on January 6. Another was fired after he told the truth that the elections were not stolen. William Barr resigned for a similar reason.
* After the first impeachment, every senior official who did their Constitutional duty and testified before Congress was fired or, in the case of Vindman, denied military promotion.
* Relatedly, before the first impeachment Trump refused to allow *anyone* in his administration to submit to Congressional oversight, something no president has ever done.
* He was only the second president ever to fire an FBI director. The first was Bill Clinton firing William Sessions, and that only came after clear and convincing evidence that Sessions was using government aircraft for personal errands.
I could name at least a dozen more, but just remember: the first rule of institutional sabotage is you don't talk about institutional sabotage.
It seems to me that any good-faith attempt to fix the US's institutions (which I hope we can all agree need some serious work) would look like an attempt to "sabotage" them to anyone who doesn't want that to happen.
Not at all. In the seventies after Nixon there were massive overhauls to the FBI, the CIA, the IRS etc. The Church Committee in particular. Among other things the Congressional intelligence oversight committees were created. Before that Congress had almost zero visibility. Inspectors General were created during that period and expanded multiple times over the next 25 years.
Any further info on the Inspector General dementia thing? Sounds interesting but can't find anything about it online.
Trump closed borders much earlier than Canada. At the time, Canadians were dumbstruck that could even be in consideration. Now in hindsight, closing them earlier was obviously the correct move, and I wish my country had not been so quick to judge it as xenophobic.
Trump didn't close borders with all countries until months in. Travel with Europe was open long after it spread there. US citizens returning were not quarantined on arrival.
Ultimately the buck stops on the Resolute desk!
I don't recall US boarders ever being closed in any meaningful sense. There were additional restrictions in place for travel from various places at various times, but "closed"? Never.
What is your country? The US certainly did not judge it as xenophobic.
His optics were terrible, and his bully-pulpit leadership disastrous, but I think the other things he either did OK on, no worse or better than anyone else, or did OK. Borders were closed in the US pretty promptly, about the same time as they were in Italy (which had more warning), and much earlier than most other European countries -- indeed, Trump got shit for that from Democrats at the time because they thought he was trying to whip up fear and loathing of China.
There's zip he could have done about the state-level responses, as federalism gives the Feds very little control in this area (which always surprises everyone every time FEMA proves *not* to be The Avengers on steroids when natural disaster strikes). Disaster response is a state and local thing, and they hold onto that right and power quite jealously. There's *no* governor, red or blue, who would've stood for Trump, or the CDC, or any gol-darned Washington chair-polisher telling them what to do. He certainly could have organized and cheerled from DC better, and his treatment of the Federal publich health team was a disgrace, a four-alarm clusterfuck. But there's nothing at all he could have done to make Kristi Noem or Ron DeSantis lock their states down, or change Gavin Newsom's plans.
Quite honestly, I think it would have taken an *extraordinary* leader of men to get the American response much better than it was. You have only to look at all the other Western nations -- pretty much none of them did noticeably better, except those few in very unusual circumstances (e.g. Australia and New Zealand), to which contributed unique geographic situations *and* a cultural and political homogeneity that was far out of reach for any American politician. I cannot see Hillary Clinton doing any better job at the nuts and bolts, although she would certainly have presided over less of a clown-car circus at the Federal level.
The borders weren't closed, they were closed for non-citizens, which is very different.
Why is it *very* different? It's certainly no different than what every other country did. And would you seriously propose simply marooning every overseas American, with no warning, no recourse, for the following year? This would have been completely untenable politically. No politician at all could propose that and get the enabling legislation. For that matter, enforcement would be profoundly difficult anyway -- you have perhaps heard of our difficulties sealing the US-Mexico border, despite several hundred miles of tall fence, spotlights, barbed wire, trained guards...?
I'm pretty sure if Trump tried to close borders to citizens, we'd have another impeachment on the record. He was called racist for preventing those that have zero right to come in from coming in. I can't imagine what he'd be called if he had tried to block those that have the full legal right.
"Trump got shit for that from Democrats at the time because they thought he was trying to whip up fear and loathing of China."
Cite?
"There's zip he could have done about the state-level responses"
Well, if you define "state-level responses" as "responses that the federal government can't influence", that's true by definition. But there's absolutely more he could have done.
> his failure to close borders early
Seriously? While all the press has been calling him racist for having covid-based travel restrictions, and all the leftist politicians called for going to celebrate to Chinatown and hugging everybody around to show we're not like the racist Trump - it's Trump's fault alone for not doing enough to close the borders?
"While all the press has been calling him racist for having covid-based travel restrictions"
Cite?
"and all the leftist politicians called for going to celebrate to Chinatown and hugging everybody around"
All?
Who was making "fun" of you here?
I think his greatest failure by far was his failure to provide leadership to the states. States cannot close their borders. Accordingly, having piecemeal shutdowns on a per-state basis is akin to having families quarantine alphabetically and in sequence for 5 weeks each.
Pointless.
States could at least do basic things like stop putting sick people into nursing homes and develop robust medical protocols to guard the most vulnerable instead. Not only they did not - the people who thoroughly bungled that are praised by the media and actually awarded prizes for their "leadership". And yet, it's somehow Trump's fault of leadership. There was no leadership possible with all Dem leadership hating Trump guts and doing everything possible to obstruct his every move, no matter what. He could close the borders (which he was called a racist by Dems when he tried) earlier, but he couldn't force the state govs to do anything, and if he tried, they'd probably do the opposite just to spite him.
"Not only they did not - the people who thoroughly bungled that are praised by the media and actually awarded prizes for their "leadership"."
Cite?
"There was no leadership possible with all Dem leadership hating Trump guts and doing everything possible to obstruct his every move, no matter what."
That's a bunch of paranoid victim complex bullshit. Dems didn't oppose Trump for the sake of opposing Trump, they opposed him because he had bad idea after bad idea, and pretending otherwise is bad faith propaganda used to excuse Trump's incompetence.
"He could close the borders (which he was called a racist by Dems when he tried) earlier"
No, he wasn't.
Actually, I would guess they probably can. There's not a lot a state can't do on an emergency basis, when it's plausibly justified by public health concerns. Few state constitutions contain anything equivalent to the Tenth Amendment, so in principle their police power is unlimited.
I doubt the assorted supreme courts would put up with it indefinitely of course -- but then, quite a lot of the pandemic measures fall into this category. Having the governor close businesses by fiat or order people not to venture from home without a shred of enabling legislation is no less an infringement on state and Federal civil liberties than preventing Arizonans from freely crossing into California.
But I agree hardly any state *would* without the encouragement and assistance of the Federal government. If nothing else, it's impractical, they don't have border guards. But the Feds *could* have, for example, shut down nonessential passenger and airline and rail travel, and deployed Federal resources to help control highways.
Whether that would have had an impact is a very interesting question. The Chinese experience strongly suggests it might have been the single most effective thing to do, but that's a big extrapolation from murky data, so who knows?
I think calling whatever comes out of CCP "data" is giving it way too much credit. Statistics has always been a form of non-scientific fiction in communist dictatorships, and I don't see why CCP would make an exception in this particular case.
This was my major frustration throughout last spring and summer. (By Fall, I was resigned.) The plan for basically everything was, "leave it to the states", but states can't effectively squash an outbreak because they can't regulate interstate commerce! They're not good at coordinating on things like this. (This is why we have a Federal government...)
So from everything to data collection and reporting standards to testing protocols to "opening" and "closing" plans, you had a confusing mishmash of regulations and information. Coordination and leadership were utterly lacking.
I'd suggest the NSC reorganization was linked to the bad response:
>In 2018, Trump fired Tom Bossert, whose job as homeland security adviser on the NSC included coordinating the response to global pandemics. Bossert was not replaced. Last year, Rear Adm. Tim Ziemer, the NSC's senior director for global health security and biodefense, left the council and was not replaced. Dr. Luciana Borio, the NSC's director for medical and biodefense preparedness, left in May 2018 and was also not replaced.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/trump-cuts-national-security-staff-may-hurt-coronavirus-response-say-n1143656
Oh come on. What exactly would an intact NSC have done to make a damn bit of difference? We're a a full 14 months into the pandemic *now*, with enormously greater information about it, a raft of powerful vaccines, better treatment ideas, much better scientific info about how it spreads -- and what is the NSC doing that is any bit of good? Cases have been soaring in Michigan -- what has been done about that by the NSC? If they would've been effective 14 months ago, why, they should be twice as effective now, with what we've learned. I'm not seeing it.
So far as I can tell, the *only* clearly and seriously effective response to COVID was developing a vaccine extremely rapidly. (Maybe some of the public health hokey pokey -- lockdowns, mask mandates, et cetera -- was useful, and maybe it was marginal, and it will take years of research to know which it is.) That was largely a private effort, except insofar as (1) we should give credit to the NIH and friends for funding the basic research 25 years ago that made the technology available when it was needed, and (2) it probably helped that the Federal Government was willing to guarantee a huge pot of revenue to Pfizer, Moderna, J&J et cetera if they invested in the vaccine. One can give the Trump Administration some credit for that, but on the other hand it was kind of a no-brainer and enjoyed bipartisan support I imagine.
Can't see any mention of this, so I'll throw in a link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2020/09/18/usps-covid-19-coronavirus-plan-to-send-every-household-face-masks-how-the-white-house-stopped-it/?sh=7096c1c16b2a
The Forbes article summarizes some WaPo reporting. The gist is: the USPS had a plan in April to mail every American household multiple reusable masks. The White House spiked it, supposedly to prevent panic. (In April!) This was back when the Surgeon General was demonstrating how to make masks out of t-shirts.
How big a difference would this have made to pandemic trajectories? I have no idea. But I think there was a lot of stuff like this.
Is this in reference to getting rid of the "pandemic prevention team" of the CDC? That's the main thing I remember people talking about along these lines.
Also putting incompetent political sycophants into leadership positions there.
Robert Redfield was an incompetent political sycophant? Everything I've read suggests that he was a talented and generally respected scientist and administrator, highly regarded for his previous work on HIV/AIDS. And the failings of the CDC under his tenure look like the typical failings of otherwise-competent bureaucrats subject to the Iron Law, not incompetent political sycophancy.
The pre-COVID CDC was too low profile and too far from Trump's core interests to attract Trump's attention, or to be a valuable prize for his sycophants. It looks like he may have appointed one "sycophant" when filling out the offices in 2017, Brenda Fitzgerald, but then mostly lost interest when Fitzgerald went down in a scandal a few months later.
Michael Caputo is the obvious name here.
Politico: "But since Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign official with no medical or scientific background, was installed in April as the Health and Human Services department's new spokesperson, there have been substantial efforts to align the reports with Trump's statements, including the president's claims that fears about the outbreak are overstated, or stop the reports altogether."
If Trump was appointing competent technocrats to actually *lead* the CDC, etc, and Trumpist sycophants to brag about it, then that's much less damning than the original claim that Trump was appointing the sycophants to the leadership positions.
And in any event, the media seems to have had no trouble routing around the Trumpists and going to e.g. Anthony Fauci for their messaging. Fauci having served in the same position under every president from Ronald Reagan on down, I think it's unlikely that he's anybody's sycophant (except maybe his own).
Possibly, but it's not about bragging - it's about deliberately sabotaging the CDC:s work in the interest of better PR for the president.
I think that's pretty damning?
In that case, not CDC exactly, but definitely using sycophants to water down the truth to support the president.
I'm no fan of Trump but Scott and others specifically pan his pandemic response. It's not clear to me what the counterfactual would be? What would a Clinton administration have done differently that would have made a material difference in the course of the pandemic? It's hard to believe that the FDA under Clinton would have been less risk-averse allowing a vaccine to be administered earlier, and it seems Macron can be seen as an ideological stand-in for Clinton, but France's experience with the pandemic hasn't been noticeably better than the US. Not to say that Trump made good decisions here, but just that it's not clear that Clinton would have made better ones.
She wouldn't have tweeted things like LIBERATE MICHIGAN!
The winning move was to close borders earlier and lock down for the six weeks or whatever that was necessary, at the start of the pandemic, to eliminate the virus. Clinton wouldn't have closed the borders earlier, so what was needed was a Super Trump of some kind.
She would've closed them sooner because she would've had better information. She would've had better information because she wouldn't have cut two thirds of the CDC observation staff in China, something Biden criticized all the way back in 2019.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-cdc-exclusiv-idUSKBN21C3N5
The only reason the travel bans happened at all is because Trump's assistant national security advisor had backchannel contacts in China from his days as a reporter covering SARS.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/transcript-matt-pottinger-on-face-the-nation-february-21-2021/
She might have wanted to close the borders, but the howls of outrage from the right would have overwhelmed any such attempt.
I think the border thing is super hard to say. I could argue either she would have delayed even longer closing the border, since a bit part of the 2016 election was about how border control is racist. Or could have been a Nixon to China moment and the national press would have been more accepting of the "good guys" doing something like that.
A hard border-closing response would've led to a different pandemic in the US, but I'm not real convinced that it would've led to a substantially better one by the numbers. We aren't New Zealand. We weren't going to keep Coronavirus out of here forever. Canada and Mexico were both hit hard, and even if they hadn't been, you can't actually shut down the borders all that hard for all that long -- you're inevitably going to have a lot of exceptions to the rule for a variety of reasons (like citizens coming home), and something is going to break through.
Where the peaks in the graphs were would've looked different, but does pushing the first peak back a couple of months actually lead to a different result? The vulnerable people would've still been there to get infected and die.
That would do precisely nothing. US borders - especially the southern border - is hugely porous, and hoping it can be airtight closed for six weeks (why six? who knows) is pure magic fairy tale. Probably not even for six minutes. Moreover, by the time US politicians realized what is happening, enough people carrying the virus were in to make "eliminating the virus" absolutely impossible.
Thailand had less than 100 deaths, despite the porous border with Burma. China had less than 10K, despite the porous border with Russia and Burma.
China stats are so thoroughly fake that discussing any numbers from there as actual numerical data makes no sense.
There is something strange and as yet inexplicable going on with COVID in East Asia. There are even papers being written about it:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7403102/
Similar weirdness is going on Africa: the entire *continent* is reporting a mere 4.4 million cases and 120,000 deaths (and if we leave out South Africa it's 2.9 million cases and 65,000 deaths). Nigeria (population 200 million) is reporting a mere 2,000 deaths to date, which is approximately what the US has reported for the state of Idaho (population 1.7 million).
Of course, it could be utterly hopeless reporting, or...something else. This disease has a lot of seriously weird results.
With COVID, especially in poorer countries, if something seems weird the first place to look is testing/data collection and reporting.
Africa heavily skews young and older people die more of COVID. Also, it's poor enough that people with preexisting conditions are probably dead of something else.
That was not the winning move and lockdowns have had no effect. The data on this is quite clear.
I have to admit I'm disappointed that a long post all about rationality and data based decision making has a comments section filled with people who believe lockdowns and masks work when you can simply look at the case curves for different countries and see that there is no correlation. Or you can read studies that do that analysis more rigorously of course, but it's not really necessary.
Trump's COVID response was actually pretty good and I have often found myself wishing we had a Trump-like politician where me and my family live in Europe. He correctly ascertained that Fauci was full of it and brought in someone a lot more rational and with better integrity, not that voters rewarded him for it. He correctly realised that it wasn't as dangerous as was being made out. He correctly understood that lockdowns have terribly severe costs. His big mistakes were when he tried to follow the advice being given by his advisors, prior to realising that they weren't actually experts in what they claimed to be. Most of the world hasn't got anywhere close to that point yet!
"you can simply look at the case curves for different countries and see that there is no correlation. Or you can read studies that do that analysis more rigorously of course, but it's not really necessary."
CIte?
"Trump's COVID response was actually pretty good"
Refusing to let a ship dock because you don't want to "increase the numbers" is pretty good? Holding superspreader event after superspreader event is pretty good? Claiming that 85% of people who wear masks get COVID is pretty good?
"He correctly ascertained that Fauci was full of it"
How so?
"and brought in someone a lot more rational and with better integrity"
Who?
"He correctly realised that it wasn't as dangerous as was being made out."
He was correct in claiming that it was no worse than the flu? Just how dangerous was it being made out and by whom?
"He correctly understood that lockdowns have terribly severe costs."
Everyone realized that.
"His big mistakes were when he tried to follow the advice being given by his advisors, prior to realising that they weren't actually experts in what they claimed to be."
Can you be more explicit?
For example https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eclinm.2020.100464 and obviously “the case curves” cite themselves.
Re: Trump. By “pretty good” I should probably have written better. I mean it in some very specific ways better than other countries. This does not mean good in an absolute sense. His response looks good only relative to the disastrous responses by other leaders who by and large failed to get to grips with the very poor quality of expert advice they were being given. In my eyes,Trump replacing Fauci with Atlas was a big success, one big enough to offset many other mistakes. Blaming politicians for listening to bad advice is fine, but it’s not fair to criticise them for that right at the start. No leader can be expected to understand which obscure advisors are reliable at the start of a crisis. Not understanding it after a year though, is much harder to forgive. Trump is one of very few world leaders who successfully saw through their state epidemiologist and he does deserve credit for that. Perhaps you aren’t aware that Fauci has admitted to lying to the public (for the greater good as he sees it) TWICE now - this is a pattern for him. I think any advisor who routinely admits lying in order to manipulate the public is by any definition “full of it”. And that’s just the ones he admitted. Look at his response to Texas not diverging from lockdown states - he has started to claim that in the states still in lockdown everyone is ignoring the law. That’s delusional.
WRT the specific decisions you mention, I am very skeptical about “superspreader” events because so many of them happened and again, case curves did not inflect. Most obviously the US election. That wasn’t a huge surprise because as already mentioned, in fact the data doesn’t seem to reliably support any strong connection to how much contact people have. There’s just no correlation. It’s as if what we do has no impact at all (except maybe vaccines).
Re: flu. There are IFR meta-studies that place IFR in range of a strong seasonal flu, and of course for the under 70s it’s far below, it’s not even comparable. Flu kills children and young people at rates that are statistically meaningful, COVID basically doesn’t.
Re: lockdown costs. It’s not obvious everyone does realize that. Go read the literature and try to find any discussion of costs vs benefits from epidemiologists. When I did this exercise I couldn’t find any. Even a paper that claimed to be a cost/benefit analysis declined, in the end, to actually do such a thing because the value of a life would have been controversial.
"For example https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eclinm.2020.100464 and obviously “the case curves” cite themselves."
The first result I got when I google “lockdown effect on covid” was https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7293850/ “The lockdown, one of the social isolation restrictions, has been observed to prevent the COVID-19 pandemic”. So reading the studies on lockdowns does not, in fact, lead to the clear conclusion that they were ineffective. And you didn't give any support for your claim that simply looking at case curves proves your position.
“I mean it in some very specific ways better than other countries.”
If you just mean that you can cherry-pick some bad policies of other countries, that's not saying much.
“His response looks good only relative to the disastrous responses by other leaders”
But the US is one of the worst countries in the world, so no, Trump's response does not look good compared to other countries.
“In my eyes,Trump replacing Fauci with Atlas was a big success,”
How so? The death rate at the end of Atlas' tenure was more than twice what it was at the beginning. He advocated “rising up” against the government in response to COVID restrictions and claimed that masks don't work.
“Perhaps you aren’t aware that Fauci has admitted to lying to the public”
Cite? Also, Trump admitted to deliberately misrepresenting COVID to “stop panic”.
“I think any advisor who routinely admits lying in order to manipulate the public is by any definition “full of it”.”
Twice isn't “routinely”, as opposed to Trump, who DOES routinely lie.
“WRT the specific decisions you mention, I am very skeptical about “superspreader” events because so many of them happened and again, case curves did not inflect.”
Trump causing a few hundred people to get COVID isn't going to be a large effect on the overall numbers, but it's still a horrible example to set.
“in fact the data doesn’t seem to reliably support any strong connection to how much contact people have.”
That's just false.
“There are IFR meta-studies that place IFR in range of a strong seasonal flu”
Yet another claim that needs a cite. Unless you're including the 1918 pandemic in the category of “strong seasonal flu”, in which case this is wildly misleading. Also, COVID is more infectious than the flu. COVID has killed around half a million Americans in a year. That quite simply is not “basically the flu”. Period. There is no justification for claiming otherwise.
“Go read the literature and try to find any discussion of costs vs benefits from epidemiologists.”
Cost versus benefits of lockdowns is more of an economic issue than an epidemiological one. I was able to very easily find cost-benefit articles, for instance http://www.sfu.ca/~allen/LockdownReport.pdf . A cost/benefit analysis is indeed difficult to do. That just supports the idea that quantitative cost/benefit analyses not being more common is not indicative of lack of concern.
I think partly this is optics (Trump conspicuously serving as an anti-role model by denying the importance of the pandemic and of shelter-in-place measures), part of this is various little things like refusing to release federal stockpiles that should have been released, and part of this is things that yes, a Clinton administration would have gotten wrong too, but which I'm still angry about.
Trump did the one thing right that really matters, get plenty of vaccines to jab in people's arms.
The best counterfactual is probably to look at the EU, which has Clintonesque leaders, who messed up big time.
US deaths per million is about 1750. Good enough for 15th globally and that's if you count some silly micronations like Montenegro and Gibraltar.
It's a similar to Spain and Portugal but just shy of double Germany (962).
If the US had it's shit together enough to result in a similar response to the EU average there would have been 150-250k fewer deaths. Crazy!
By the end of it, European rates will climb up higher. Barring a huge, huge disaster, not enough to get Germany to U.S. levels, but still will be closer.
I think that culture and state choices accounts for most of the differences. Your comment has zero actual policy proposals for what Trump could have copied from other nations with better results, which would have made a major impact.
Though he doesn’t seem to have developed a plan for doing the jabbing.
That's a state-level responsibility and having a plan without the vaccines is useless, while it is fairly trivial to 'plan' if you have plenty of vaccines.
As a EU resident, I'd gladly offer a trade where we get your huge supply of vaccines and you get our 'wonderful' plans.
I didn't say anything about Europe having a better plan. But, like, Biden announced yesterday that everyone 16 and up is vaccine-eligible now. How could he have done that if it's a state level responsibility?
Trump didn't get vaccines, scientists did. And the EU has lower deaths than the US, so how did they "mess up big time"?
Can you point me to the huge production facilities at universities that produce the vaccines for free and give them to the states?
Excess mortality differs greatly inside the US and is way higher in the north-east, so you can't blame that on the federal government. The US is similar to the EU, in that states decide on lock down measures and such. I also think that culture and luck has a huge impact.
But ultimately, without large-scale vaccinations, the vaccine will just stay around for a very long time, regardless of the lock down measures. Vaccinations are the only way out.
The federal US and EU government have both taken control of vaccine procurement (including funding production facilities, signing contracts and choosing to allow/ban exports). The US is clearly doing much better both before and after Trump left office, suggesting that it wasn't Biden who fixed things. The incompetent EU decided to sign huge contracts with the very inexperienced Astra-Zeneca, who offered extremely cheap vaccines, but who happen to not be very good at scaling up. And they exported a lot of their production out of the EU, despite the EU funding these facilities. In the entire US, 16+ are now eligible. In The Netherlands, we are still vaccinating only the elderly and at-risk groups.
"Can you point me to the huge production facilities at universities that produce the vaccines for free and give them to the states?"
That rather looks like a straw man.
"Excess mortality differs greatly inside the US and is way higher in the north-east, so you can't blame that on the federal government."
That's a non sequitur, both in that it doesn't address what I said, and that the second part of the sentence doesn't follow from the first..
"The US is clearly doing much better both before and after Trump left office, suggesting that it wasn't Biden who fixed things."
If Biden isn't responsible, it's an odd coincidence that the turn around happened right around when he took office. And Trump didn't have any hesitation about taking credit for the low unemployment that happened to occur during his presidency. He can't have it both ways.
There's the institutional issues baked into the US that predate Trump, but downplaying the threat of covid (at the time when his leadership was the most necessary--early February-March) was something that Clinton very significantly wouldn't have done.
Why do you think that ? Emmanuel Macron is probably the closest thing to the Democrats Europe has to offer, and he was downplaying the threat as late as March 7. (Sadly I can't find a link in English, but he went to see a play on March 7. with the explicit intention of "Encouraging people to go out despite the crisis".
"early February-March) was something that Clinton very significantly wouldn't have done."
Of course she would have done it (though maybe not as insistently as Trump).
https://www.today.com/video/dr-fauci-on-coronavirus-fears-no-need-to-change-lifestyle-yet-79684677616
None of the things you said are true. Trump was an excellent role model. You claim he resisted social distancing and shelter-in-place measures, but here is a quote from March 11th:
"In particular, we are strongly advising that nursing homes for the elderly suspend all medically unnecessary visits. In general, older Americans should also avoid nonessential travel in crowded areas. My administration is coordinating directly with communities with the largest outbreaks, and we have issued guidance on school closures, social distancing and reducing large gatherings. Smart action today will prevent the spread of the virus tomorrow."
And you claim he denied its importance, but if that's true, why would he declare a state of emergency on March 13th:
"To unleash the full power of the federal government in this effort today, I’m officially declaring a national emergency. The action I am taking will open up access to up to $50 billion of, very importantly — very important and a large amount of money for states and territories and localities in our shared fight against this disease. And in furtherance of the order, I’m urging every state to set up emergency operation centers effectively immediately. You’re going to be hearing from some of the largest companies and greatest retailers and medical companies in the world. I’m also asking every hospital in this country to activate its emergency preparedness plan so that they can meet the needs of Americans everywhere."
He was also pro-mask. Here is two direct quotes from July 21st:
"And we’re asking everybody that when you are not able to socially distance, wear a mask. Get a mask. Whether you like the mask or not, they have an impact. They’ll have an effect and we need everything we can get."
"I carry the mask. I went into Walter Reed Hospital the other day. I have the mask right here and I carry it, and I will use it gladly, no problem with it. And I’ve said that. And I say, if you can use the mask, when you can, use the mask, if you’re close to each other, if you’re in a group. I would put it on when I’m in a group. If I’m in an elevator and there were other people with me, including like security people, it’s not their fault. They have to be in the elevator. I want to protect them also. I put on a mask. I have no problem with the masks. I view it this way. Anything that potentially can help and that certainly can potentially help is a good thing. I have no problem. I carry it. I wear it. You saw me wearing it a number of times and I’ll continue."
...
I don't believe any of this, of course. I pieced it together with Google to be a contrarian smart-ass. Any reasonable person who followed Trump can see past the self-contradiction and occasional willingness to read Presidential-sounding scripts (usually while sniffling a lot and pivoting between a left and right teleprompter) and accurately assess what he really believes and demonstrated to his followers in his off-the-cuff remarks at rallies (their new hoax!) and tweets (LIBERATE MICHIGAN). You don't have to be a super-allist to suss the difference between Rally Trump and Podium Trump; it's usually pretty clear to both his followers and his detractors. And like you said, the optics do matter.
The relevance of this example to your racial apologia is left as an exercise for the reader.
I agree, I felt Scott relied too heavily on official quotes and not enough on subtext for some of these conclusions. An example is the capitol riot. Yes, Trump did eventually tweet for his supporters to stand down. However, that was several hours after they first breached the capitol.
Trump's silence during that time is significant; his supporters had illegally broken into a government building with the 'goal' (although that word implies too much forethought) of contesting the results of an election that he lost, and he was willing to wait several hours before saying anything to stop it. This is the behavior of someone who, if not actively hoping for an insurrection, is at least open to the idea of it. I understand that Scott is looking for objectivity, but only looking at official statements misses a big part of the picture.
Perhaps I'm being uncharitable, it just seems odd to give himself a B on his coup prediction. A legitimate coup attempt would require Trump to fully commit to it and open himself up to immediate legal punishment if it failed.
Also I think the race section should have mentioned the George Floyd protests and subsequent police responses. Don't know how Scott would grade Trump's response, but at the very least it seems like one of the most important race-related events to occur during Trump's presidency.
"Any person with sufficiently biased priors can see past the obvious evidence negating them to continue believing in their priors, it's obvious, read the -- subtext". This is ridiculous, frankly you remind me of string theorists constantly trying to defend their untenable positions.
shambibble clearly said " Any reasonable person who followed Trump". That is clearly a reference to EVIDENCE, not priors, and you are being dishonest in pretending otherwise. And if Trump made pro-mask statements sometime and anti-mask statements other times, it is legitimate to characterize him as standing in the way of masks. If someone is accused of being racist, compiling a list of times where they were not actively engaged in racist activity doesn't counter the charge.
“My priors are trump is racist so anytime he makes a statement that can vaguely be interpreted as racist, it is obviously his racism and anytime he makes a statement EXPLICITLY CONDEMNING RACISM, his reasonable supporters will discard it as false propaganda, so I shall too.” Can you see the ridiculousness of your logic? If you want examples of Trump explicitly condemning racism, Scott has linked to many examples and yet examples of Trump being racist is what? “ Fine people on both sides” - He condemned white supremacy just a sentence before, so he genuinely believed that there were people who were simply protesting taking down of statues. “they are rapists, thieves and some I assume are good people” - He genuinely believes immigrants cause crime. “Shithole countries” —He believes those countries are actually bad, nothing to do with race. Can you see why your priors are so clearly binding you? I’m not going to continue this conversation if you’re just gonna argue that I’m wrong without considering any charitable explanations of Trump.
I think it's plausible that Clinton would have generally driven a more coordinated federal response. Contact tracing was never seriously attempted in the US; perhaps federal leadership here could have ringfenced infections.
Likewise, Trump actively advocated for doing less testing, because he thought that the case numbers were only going up because we were doing more testing. It seems very likely that Clinton would have pushed federal funding for more tests, and more testing would have potentially allowed us to respond quicker to the successive waves of infection.
Many other countries that locked down hard also gave generous economic stimulus; for example paying partial salaries for furloughed workers. It seems at least directionally likely that the US would have experienced less lockdown fatigue (and therefore potentially had a lower R) if at the margin fewer people were forced to work in unsafe jobs.
The US has managed to politicize mask-wearing in a way that is quite exceptional for developed countries. Unclear to what extent this would have happened without Trump, but at least directionally, he was pushing the public away from evidence-based medicine in a way that was harmful.
As you say I think it's likely that "Project Warp Speed" would have gone down differently. I can see a world where the Very Serious People oppose handing a huge check to pharma companies, and so we got fewer doses by this time -- as happened in the EU. However there is a huge difference between the Democratic establishment (i.e. Clinton's wing of the Democratic party, not AOC's) and the European left in terms of the degree of basic faith in capitalism; it doesn't seem implausible that the Democrats would be OK with a "vaccine new deal" to hire furloughed employees as contact tracers and set up a speculative fund for vaccine development. I could easily imagine the Democrats spending more on their version of "Warp Speed".
+1
> Contact tracing was never seriously attempted in the US; perhaps federal leadership here could have ringfenced infections
The Australian experience was that contact tracing plus limited lockdowns can work if there's low (single digit) cases per day, and that contact tracing can scale to dozens of cases a day in conjunction with serious lockdown.
It's not that great beyond that point though. Contact tracing teams take time to build and scale out, and they only catch some fraction of potential infectees.
As part of a serious plan for eradication it works great, but throwing "more contact tracing" into the US coronavirus situation wouldn't make much difference.
"As part of a serious plan for eradication it works great, but throwing "more contact tracing" into the US coronavirus situation wouldn't make much difference."
Denmark, Norway, Finland, and South Korea suggest otherwise.
Worth pointing out that Pfizer was not part of Operation Warp Speed. They were EU funded.
Other vaccines may have been delayed but, regardless of US involvement, the Pfizer timeline would remain unchanged.
You are spreading misinformation. See: https://www.cbs58.com/news/fact-checking-the-battle-for-credit-over-pfizers-vaccine-announcement
By almost every metric, the U.S. delivered more aid and stimulus to its citizens than did any other country. The "European countries gave out much more money" meme is a progressive lie (surprise!)
A couple of things:
1. I'm not sure that "France's experience with the pandemic hasn't been noticeably better than the US" is supported by data. Here's excess mortality for both countries: https://www.dropbox.com/s/pfwflov8vnjczbi/2021-04%20France-vs-US-excess-mortality.png?dl=0
(from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores)
2. Of course it's impossible to know if a Clinton White House would have implemented any positive actions that would have improved things, and I think it's fair to argue that perhaps it wouldn't have. But it seems clear that a Clinton White House would have resulted in far fewer negative actions that exacerbated the pandemic in the US (nearly all of which come down to Tweeting, honestly).
Clinton's pandemic response would have been to send the VP to the Wuhan wet market to eat bat soup as a show of anti-racism and solidarity with the AAPI community.
Yes. Bingo. Remember this, anyone?
https://khn.org/morning-breakout/white-house-pushes-back-against-states-ebola-quarantine-policies/
Not necessarily. The current condition of the woke media landscape is in part a reaction to Trumpism, which indeed is one of the reasons Trumpism is bad, and the early dismissals of COVID by liberal media outlets were partly a reaction to Trump's anti-China rhetoric/policies. If Clinton had been elected in 2016, Vox in early 2020 would have looked somewhat different - exactly how different, it's hard to say.
Isn't the arrow of causality reversed there, in which Trumpism arose in reaction to a media landscape that was becoming increasingly woke?
One reinforced the other. I would model it as a feedback loop (admittedly one that got started long before Trump), not an arrow.
"and the early dismissals of COVID by liberal media outlets were partly a reaction to Trump's anti-China rhetoric/policies"
No; epidemiologists were just as worthless in 2014.
"France's experience with the pandemic hasn't been noticeably better than the US"
France has had 1,573 deaths per million. The US has had 1,762. That's 12% higher. 62k extra deaths. Sure seems noticeable to me.
"our terrible early response to COVID was, in large part, due to decisions Trump made in early 2017 upon taking office. So I’d give yourself a higher grade there."
Did state governments do much better than Trump?
I'm having a hard time reconciling "When the Capitol riots happened, with basically no links to white supremacy" with the number of subsequent arrests of people in explicitly white supremacist organisations, wearing "six million was not enough" shirts, etc.
If ten percent of a room is wearing explicitly Nazi ideology on their shirts, I am not mollified by the other 90%. Ten percent nazis is a lot.
20 Nazis attempting to seize power by overthrowing an election is a shit fuck ton.
Why? Do you think Nazis are superhuman?
I think 20 Nazis – and Nazis today – are shit, not a "shit fuck ton".
(Modern) Nazis, and similar extremists of all persuasions and linear directionalities, are almost entirely edgy LARP-ing; not significant threats to basically anyone.
Why do you think nazis are not dangerous?
20 human bodies are certainly scary. But even 20 physically peak humans are not really a match for the power of the American state, or the sub-governments beneath it. I think the person you are responding to does not really see Nazis as dangerous because the state has a high interest in ensuring no one uses violence except itself, even if it's slow to react.
A single human body in the right place at the right time is more than sufficient. Given the stated, explicit goals of Nazis, any proximity to the levers of power is unacceptable.
Meh – I just don't see much of any evidence that Nazis – today, in 2021 – are even as dangerous as eco-terrorists or street gangs.
I don't even consider Nazi ideology to be particularly dangerous – in part because of 'memetic allergies', but also because there are LOTS of ideologies that seem at least as dangerous.
I think it's much more likely that millions would be murdered by a 'communist' (or socialist) revolution than a Nazi 'coup'.
I would posit that 20 Nazis are not *dangerous enough that we should freak out about it* if: they represent a tiny minority of the population that has no widespread public support and no conceivable means of leveraging their way to institutional power (the Capitol riots do not count as such because, even if a non-zero fraction of them were Nazis, as far as I can tell, they were an undisciplined rabble who bumbled into the legistative building and caused some chaos, but had no hope of actually swinging the outcome of the election in the real world).
Doesn't mean you shouldn't personally avoid them if you are of one of the demographics that Nazis get het up about, but it does mean that a Nazi takeover shouldn't be anywhere near the top of your list of potential threats to the USA that you ought to expend mental energy worrying about.
Yes, there's an armed gunman in your house. Yes, he's explicitly there with the intent to do harm. Yes he's a Nazi and your roommate is Jewish.
But he tripped on the stairs and his gun jammed so why are you freaking out?
I prefer to freak out *before* the maximally bad outcome occurs, thank you very much.
Nazis – in 2021 – are not objectively dangerous.
_Maybe_ they're slightly more dangerous than median people (or men). But they definitely seem much less dangerous than nation-state militaries, government police, private security, { revolutionaries / freedom fighters / terrorists }, drug cartels, organized crime members, etc..
I'm not even sure Nazis – again, today – are even as dangerous as neighborhood street gangs.
Why DO you think Nazis are dangerous – again, today?
Your second paragraph is a list of groups that have never stormed the capitol to interrupt the peaceful transition of power. (Ok the British did burn the white house down, but I think that's the exception that proves the rule in this case).
My list, of Nazis, is one very visible subgroup of the group that did, stay with me here, storm the capitol to interrupt the peaceful transition of power.
That is why I think nazis are dangerous. Because they have demonstrated means, motive, and ability to storm the capitol to interrupt the peaceful transition of power. In a way that no other group in human history has outside of wartime.
That # is just wrong. There are 400 people who have actually been charged and probably somewhat more who were involved. Additionally most Nazi's know that showing up in their full regalia doesn't win any political battles.
800 people entered the capitol.
https://forward.com/fast-forward/461761/fact-check-the-6-million-wasnt-enough-shirt-wasnt-from-the-capitol-siege/
My mistake, that shirt was from a different protest in DC by the same group just on a different day. I was actually thinking of "Camp Auschwitz" which was definitely there on the 7th.
There were also some very prominent confederate flags. I know there are plenty of people who are going to say that a confederate flag isn't a symbol of white supremacy, but it pretty literally is a symbol of white supremacy.
Only in the same way that the United States flag is a symbol of white supremacy.
If you took a random sample of people displaying US flags, and a random sample of people displaying Confederate flags, I have 99% confidence than the Confederate-flag-displaying sample would contain at least 2x the proportion of white supremacists.
I think that's true, but also not really what I'm getting at. The proportions could be exactly the same, and the Confederate flag would still be the banner adopted by a group of states who were literally fighting to preserve thee institution of slavery.
Sure, but correlation is a terrible condition to use here. If you take a random sample of people displaying US flags, and a random sample of people displaying Tennessee flags, I have 99% confidence that the Tennessee-flag-displaying sample would contain at least 2x the proportion of white supremacists.
This isn't because the Tennessee flag is a hate symbol. It's because there are more white supremacists per capita in Tennessee than in the US. Similarly, the Confederate flag correlation could be adequately explained by their being more white supremacists in the former Confederacy. Which... is almost certainly true, though I was unable to find solid evidence.
The US flag wasn't adopted by a set of breakaway states who declared war specifically to defend the right of white people to own black people as property.
Also the right of black people to own black people as property, don't forget, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Ellison
Wait, uh..... wasn't it, though? I mean, one could argue that the British were not interfering with the colonists' slave arrangements, and so the war wasn't over that. But it is worth noting at the US flag was adopted by a set of breakaway states who not only owned black people as property, and not only immediately encoded this state of affairs into law post-breakaway, but encoded in their *founding Constitution*
The confederate battle flag was not especially popular until the fifties, when states like my home state of Georgia started incorporating it into their state flags as an f-you to civil rights protests.
Do you think this was the context in which it was used when the Dukes of Hazzard (1979) put it on the roof of their car?
Do you think this was the context in which it was used when Johnny Cash performed on The Muppet Show in front of both the US and Confederate flags?
The answer is: no, it went through a period of being an innocuous symbol of regional pride for a region.
I've edited this to say "organized white supremacy", but I think my point is basically correct, and something like - if white supremacy had suddenly stopped existing in 2016, the Capitol riots probably would have happened the exactly the same way they did in our world, plus or minus a t-shirt slogan.
What evidence would separate "organized white supremacy" from "white supremacy" for you?
I would take a step back and say "What exactly is the definition of white supremacy?" These words keep getting thrown around and I'm not even sure exactly what they mean. And I know they keep getting confused with "White Nationalism" which is a different concept.
What distinctions would you like that definition to draw that are meaningful in context?
I don't know, I haven't even heard a specific definition for what it means at all. It seems to be a term that's awfully slippery in its definition.
In particular, we have the distinction that 'supremacy' could mean someone thinks that white people are, as a factual matter, the best sort of people, or it could mean that someone thinks that white people ought, as a normative matter, to have special legal privileges that other people don't get.
I don't know how much overlap there is between the two groups. I suppose "White people are the best, and will tend to come out on top in any fair competition, so therefore they don't need any special privileges, just equal opportunities" is a coherent position that one could take, which, although such a person might disagree with a traditional liberal on the factual question, would mean that they would still support the same policy proposals as the traditional liberals. It's the ethnonarcissists of the "we want special privileges for our race" type that I'd be more worried about - especially since the current zeitgeist is heavily boosting various non-white ethnonarcissists, which I can only imagine will make recruiting much easier for the white ethnonarcissists.
I thought the "6 million not enough" reports turned out to be a hoax.
Actual shirt worn by an actual Proud Boy at an actual protest in DC.
Different day.
I also have to weigh in on institutions. If you consider "faith in the accuracy and fairness of the election system" as an institution (which I do), Trump has done a *lot* of damage to that institution and may have irreparably harmed it (40%), to the point that sometime in the next 12 years, there will be another violent election-fairness protest similar in scope to January 6th, 2021.
We had 4 straight years of "Russia stole the elections. Trump is a manchurian candidate puppet president. Stacey Abrams is the real governor of Georgia. Asking to see an ID is Jim Crow." All thanks to the Resistance crowd.
The elections were a joke and will only continue to become moreso with the passage of time until the whole house of cards collapses.
Just to steel-man one particular arrow in your opponents' quiver, there, the argument is not that asking for ID (i.e., confirming the identity of voters) is a kind of voter suppression. It's that, for example, refusing to let someone vote at all, or throwing out a vote rather than making it provisional, in a situation where someone doesn't have ID, is a kind of suppression. It's a nuance that doesn't make for great soundbites, but if you're going to die on that hill you should at least be aware of the actual problem people have with these kinds of laws. Progressives don't want voter fraud to be easier, I promise.
On that last note: I don't know that I know of a single progressive who thinks voter fraud is even possible in a real sense. The response I see nearly 100% of the time to accusations of voter fraud is that we've looked for it in the past, didn't find it, and that any accusations of voter fraud are thus just super-silly.
I'm not really all that sure if it's wrong or right, but if you don't believe voter fraud ever happens in any kind of significant way, I'm not sure "wants fraud to be easier/harder" even parses - of course you don't want any kind of requirements to vote that might be effective; since voter fraud is fake and any restriction that might catch it would have collateral damage in non-fake voters not being able to vote, it's a cost without a benefit.
I suspect the causality might be the other way around here. It's not that they think voter fraud doesn't happen so they don't want voter ID, it's that they don't want voter ID to they think voter fraud doesn't happen. Motivated reasoning.
To my way of thinking, if the opportunity and motivation for fraud exist, then fraud will happen.
How many cases of voter fraud would have been prevented by voter ID laws?
What would be a good Fermi estimate?
The main source of voter fraud is presumably people voting in the name of people that they know won't be voting for themselves. The least egregious (but still very illegal) version would be casting a vote in the name of an elderly relative who is too decrepit to vote on their own; the most egregious would be to somehow obtain a list of too-decrepit-to-vote people and send a mob of party operatives to vote for them.
Typical turnout is about 50%, so there's another 50% of voters whose identities are up for grabs. What fraction of these people will have a vote cast in their name? I'd guesstimate somewhere on the order of one in a thousand, which means 150,000 votes.
Somewhat relatedly, this recent study https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/morse/files/1p1v.pdf attempted to estimate the prevalence of double-voting and came out with an estimate of one in four thousand. This is a head-scratcher though; if one in four thousand people double-votes, then why aren't one in four thousand people getting convicted of double voting once the state tallies up the lists of all the people who have voted?
Also found near the top of this rabbit hole was this claim of a thousand double-votes in Georgia in June and August 2020 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/08/us/politics/georgia-double-voting.html ; I haven't been able to find any follow-up articles about any of these people being prosecuted.
To be fair, you're not talking about conversations about voter fraud as a concept, you're talking about conversations about widespread anti-Trump voter fraud in the 2020 election, which is a very specific thing.
Ask your progressive friends if they think voter fraud is possible in the abstract and they will, I would wager, largely say "of course". Many of them will point to the handful of people who have been identified who *did* commit voter fraud in 2020 by attempting to vote twice, all of whom (to my knowledge) allocated those double votes to Mr. Trump.
But more importantly, people who have thought seriously about voters' rights issues are well-aware of the history of voter fraud in this and other countries, and I haven't talked to any who are as blind as you're implying.
I'm sure they would answer in the abstract that voter fraud is potentially an abstract thing that could potentially happen. But it's meaningless in a practical sense (and applying, of course, to the people I've talked to) for a couple reasons, in ascending order of what I think is importance:
1. They never encounter voter fraud or potential voter fraud they will acknowledge. This is pretty convoluted, of course: is it just the particular cases being particularly weak, as you say? Is it on party lines? Is it everything? This is the weak question.
2. I think the strongest evidence for them not believing in potential voter fraud is the implication of what I talked about above - there's no level of fraud-prevention I've ever seen them be OK with. This sounds like an exaggeration but I've never seen any proposed preventative measure they didn't portray as a racist plot to disempower PoC.
Bear in mind my usual personal stance is that I don't necessarily think there's a ton of voter fraud, or at least not that I could credibly point to/prove. So I'm at a similar balance point to them, or at least more similar than you'd think; I don't think we should do tons and tons of restrictive things.
Just to engage with point number two for a minute, are you saying that all progressives that you're aware of are *for* eliminating all fraud prevention measures in the voting system, such as confirming residency, preventing double-votes being counted, and paper ballot backups?
There are examples of vote fraud that are widely acknowledged because they've been prosecuted. Here are two:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/us/texas-woman-voter-fraud.html
https://www.npr.org/2019/07/30/746800630/north-carolina-gop-operative-faces-new-felony-charges-that-allege-ballot-fraud
The Republicans are doing it to suppress the urban vote. Urban voters are mostly the people who don't have photo ID.
The Republicans get upset when people start pushing for everyone to have ID. If they cared about fraud, they'd be in favor of it. They are instead opposed.
Indeed, they were opposed to securing the election before the 2020 election. Mitch McConnell stopped the voting security bill in Congress. Mitch has been opposed to bills that do things like force electronic voting machines to leave paper trails.
Collusion was confirmed. Biden just sanctioned Russia for it.
Well, that proves something, I guess.
The Mueller report document scads of evidence of collusion, and the Senate Intel report documented even more. What the Mueller report did not prove was conspiracy. However the Mueller report also says that their investigation was severely hampered by potential witnesses like Manafort and Papadopoulos lying and deleting evidence, such as text messages.
In Papadopoulos' case, his lies prevented them from being able to question Joseph Mifsud, the guy who told him Russia had Hillary's emails. Mifsud disappeared not long after Papadopoulos was arrested.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/russiagate-is-wmd-times-a-million
Let me know when they find those pesky Iraqi WMDs.
You cited an article that was written nearly a month *before* the Mueller report was even released. Great source.
Yeah, this whataboutism is really just not true at all. I'm sure you want it to be true, but these aren't mainstream opinions. I'm a progressive. All my friends are progressive. No one I know believe any of these things as you've stated them. Here a some things that many progressives do actually believe:
1. There was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Mueller found the same thing, so this is hardly the stuff of conspiracy.
2. The purpose of voter ID laws is to make it more difficult for Democratic-leaning voter blocs to vote. There are many, many examples of Republicans explicitly admitting this, so again, not exactly a conspiracy conspiracy. Plus if you know anything about the actual history of voting in the United States, you kind of have to be trying hard to not understand what is going on with these laws.
"There was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. "
No.
"Mueller found the same thing, so this is hardly the stuff of conspiracy."
No.
OK. But on the other hand...maybe yes?
Tell ya what. How about you go read the Mueller report's extensive documentation of ties between Trump campaign officials, surrogates, and family members and Russia and let us know what you find. And since you'll find absolutely nothing to be concerned about, spend a few minutes reflecting on how you would feel if, say, Barack Obama had done the same things. And then after concluding that there's no validity to that comparison at all, come back here and post some more insightful one-word rejoinders.
Ready? Go!
"How about you go read the Mueller report's extensive documentation of ties between Trump campaign officials, surrogates, and family members and Russia"
"Ties" are not "collusion". I'm Russian myself; I did not collude with anything.
Attention: the above poster is a BlueAnon turd. Do not engage logically or its head will explode.
I actually had to google blueanon. Wow, you could not be more wildly off-base on that one. I'm temperamentally pretty much the exact opposite of a conspiracy theorist. I'm also pretty good with logic, so if I see any in your posts, I will happily consider it.
Well, the purpose of things like moter-voter laws and laws that permit "farming" of ballots (where 3rd parties collect ballots en mass to deliver them) is to make it easier for Democratic-leaning voter blocs to achieve higher turnout. Not asking for IDs in a place with a massive illegal population -- e.g. California, Texas -- certainly does at least make it easier for certain kinds of fraud, too, and the direction it goes isn't hard to guess.
Both sides angle for rules that gerrymander the election to favor their voters. Duh. They have for centuries. This is nothing new, and anyone who clutches pearls at *either* side trying to skate right up to the line of illegality and/or political suicide is either dreadfully naive or a tool. That's the way politics has worked, has always worked, will always work.
The best we can do is try to set some crude and easily enforceable ground rules that hold the hanky-panky to a dull roar. Sure, in close elections some skulduggery might bump it one way or the other -- but it's a *close* election, which means the electorate is kind of divided on which way it goes anyway, so maybe it doesn't matter too much -- any amount of chance events could've tipped it, too. What we *don't* want is for *non-close* elections to be able to be pushed into bullshit outcomes, the kind of East Germany thing where 80% of the people hate the State but mirabile dictu the ruling party always gets 99% of the vote.
Well, if you don't see an ethical difference between making it easier for people to vote and making it harder for them to vote, I'm not totally sure what to say. I guess I might point out that the practical barriers and disincentives to voting fall much harder on certain demographics. I might also point out America's grotesque and ongoing history of disenfranchisement, which again is not exactly randomly distributed. (I myself only recently learned of the existence of white primaries, to take only the most egregious example.)
Also your claim about "both sides" isn't really as true as you think. Democrats are much more likely when in power in state legislatures to push for good governance approaches such as non-partisan districting boards. I am not claiming that Democrats are angels -- angels have a hard time getting elected -- but your handwaving that "everyone does it" is just a form of "dreadful naïveté" passing as insight.
(And yes, the partisan valence of much of this vote suppression flipped in the middle of the last century, but it has always been the same people getting screwed.)
Finally, the types of voter fraud you are alleging, such as non-citizens voting, has never been found at any sort of meaningful scale, despite the incredibly strong incentives that Republicans have to unearth it. It is, as they say, fake news. We are not East Germany. You might want to put down those pearls.
Alas, it's not a question in *either* case of making it easier or harder for "people" to vote -- because "people" aren't all identical. Indeed, that's the reason the Democrats favor one and the Republican favor the other. Requiring voter ID makes it harder for Democrat constituencies to vote (or so they say), but doesn't affect Republican constituencies (or so they say). Ballot farming makes it easier for Democrats to accumulate votes, while not affecting Republican voter turnout much. And so forth.
Surely you must know this. (Which makes your opening paragraph appear to me either naive or disingenuous.) There wouldn't *be* partisan rancor over the issue if it affected all "people" identically. It's precisely because it doesn't that the parties are at odds over it.
That's leaving aside the fact that, no, I do *not* in fact think making it easier for people to vote is a priori always a good thing. We could let criminals and children under 15, vote, too, or those who are mentally incompetent, or the imaginary friends of children to vote. We could let people vote as many times as they like. This would all increase the vote totals, but would not be an improvement. Votes are not of equal quality, so to speak. That's why we restrict voters to those over 18, those not serving time for felonies, et cetera. If we could further restrict the vote to people willing to spend more time and effort studying the issues and candidates, I think that would be a good thing. So, no, the proposition that "anything that makes it easier to vote is good" does not strike me as logical or healthy for the Republic, more along the lines of a mindless slogan that mistakenly identifies wider participation with more meaningful participation, which is as silly and dangerous as thinking that if two ounces of rum per person makes the party go, why then two fifths each should be even better.
Democrats are more likely to push for good governance? On what do you base that? They're just inherently better people? Something in the water they drink at conventions, is it? I'm sorry, as an unsupported assertion this doesn't even pass the laugh test with me, and you have adduced zero empirical evidence.
That there has *never* been large-scale voting fraud is an assertion that is quite ahistorical. Perhaps you want to read up on so-called "machine politics?" Ask yourself how Harry Truman got to be Senator? Look into the suspicions of what the Daley machine did for JFK in Chicago in 1960?
Perhaps what you meant to say is that you don't think it exists in the 21st century, at least on a wide scale. Maybe. But how would we know? The powerful incentives of which you speak are not by themselves sufficient to guarantee discovery. You would need money, a lot of it, and you would need to figure out some way to gain information from a segment of the population (illegal voters) that by definition are very reluctant to talk to strangers. You might as well assert that the extent of child pornography ought to be very well known, since normal people have a very strong motivation to discover any of it that might exist.
I don't myself think there *is* enough illegal voting to swing elections, personally, as it happens. (And I think Republicans are more interested in demagoguing the issue than finding out.) But I'm aware that's just a wild guess, and that in truth nobody really knows.
It's not an unsupported assertion. You just don't care. It's not hard to learn about the modern history of gerrymandering, which changed in nature in the last few decades with the advent of much more granular voter data. This enabled much more targeted strategies of vote dilution, and yes, it was a lopsided partisan effort. It's not really a secret at all that these efforts have primarily been driven by Republicans. Can you really not be aware of this?
If you don't like the idea that this is because one party is better than the other, then feel free to chalk it up to electoral incentives. Republicans face shrinking demographics and Democrats growing demographics, so one party naturally favors disenfranchisement.
Also, personally, the notion that some political parties are worse than others doesn't strike me as so strange. It's a (simplified) commonplace that more liberal politicians are motivated by the notion that government should help people, and conservative ones are motivated by the notion that government can't or shouldn't help people. This draws different types of people into politics with different types of motivations.
Or to take an example closer to home: I believe that people are in fact more or less identical with regard to their right to access to vote. You, I now understand, are one of these democracy skeptics who believe that only "high-quality" votes should count. I take this as strong evidence that my principles and motivations are better than yours. It's not simply that we differ on marginal tax rates or foreign policy or something where we can all politely disagree. You hold odious opinions.
(For the record, I think a strong case exists for allowing people younger than 18 to vote, and there is no good case at all for denying the vote to felons. Also, this "in truth no one really knows" bullshit is just total cowardice on your part. This topic has been investigated endlessly. The child pornography analogy is so egregiously stupid that I'm pretty sure your own vote couldn't possibly pass your test for quality.)
Your second point feels like saying “Some highways were built to screw over urban blacks, so we can conclude all highways are bad.”
Obviously some voter laws are going to be aimed at suppressing democratic voters, and we have evidence of it sometimes happening in the past, but that’s pretty different than a general conclusion about them.
Except Russia did interfere in the 2016 elections. Without said interference, given how close the election was, there's a good chance Trump would have lost.
It's simply objective fact that the Russians have been attacking the US via propaganda. The far left and the far right have both been influenced.
Bernie Sanders was also boosted by the Russians. So was BLM. So were antivaxxers.
Russia has been making our problems worse.
It's not a made-up issue; we have caught them doing it, and the US intel agencies all agreed this happened.
Trump's campaign even reached out to Russia for help, and Trump asked Russia for help on national TV. "Russia, if you're listening".
You seem to have a short memory.
The idea that Trump was a Russian asset was investigated by US intelligence and the FBI.
And the ID thing is complicated. I don't have an issue with people presenting ID to vote. The problem is that the Republicans are opposed to any sort of national ID card, which is necessary for such. Right now, we just use drivers' licenses, but if you don't drive, you don't have one of those, and most people don't travel internationally so don't have passports.
If the Republicans were like "We want to issue national ID cards and make it a requirement for in-person voting and registering to vote" I'd be 100% on board with that. But if you start bringing up national ID cards, they get upset.
Same thing would have happened had Trump won re-election.
> that sometime in the next 12 years, there will be another violent election-fairness protest similar in scope to January 6th, 2021
Yes, just as there was in 2016, although the media narrative around that one was different. https://edition.cnn.com/2017/01/19/politics/trump-inauguration-protests-womens-march/index.html
Perhaps, and this is very very speculative, but perhaps the media narrative was different because the womens march didn't violently break into the capitol during a joint session whilst chanting "hang Mike Pence".
Perhaps.
How many cops died as a result of the Women's March?
You may want to adjust your metric: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56810371
"Due to privacy laws, Dr Diaz is unable to say whether the officer had any pre-existing medical conditions. However, he did acknowledge the policeman's role in the events, telling the Washington Post: 'All that transpired played a role in his condition.'"
Apologies, should have phrased my comment better: you might conside using a broader metric such as "injured" to avoid having your argument dismissed/complicated by the counterpush against the "beaten to death" narrative inaccuracy.
I didn't say anyone was beaten to death; I stand by my comment.
2017 was not the highest, 2019 was. Total of 7,314 incidents, good for 125.03% of 2015:
https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2019/topic-pages/tables/table-1.xls
Thanks! I'm not sure how I got this wrong - I wrote most of this piece in 2020 and it's possible that 2019 wasn't out yet? I'll double check this and if it proves true I'll edit that section.
Edit: Looks like I was looking at only single-bias incidents and when you add multiple-bias incidents you're right.
I'm also unsure how you're scoring your sixth "Wolf" prediction. You seem to be counting 2017 as part of both the Trump and Obama years; there simply isn't a data point for it as far as I can tell. Given the point you were trying to make, I would think 2008-2016 and 2016-2020 makes the most sense as a measure, which would mean positive black views of race relations declined 12 points under obama (61-49) and and 13 points under Trump (49-36).
Intuitively it feels odd to me to compare eight years of Obama to 4 years of Trump. For example, if we think there's a general trend of declining race relations, then we would almost always end up thinking the four-year candidate was better for race relations than the eight-year one. I think it'd be interesting to compare the first four years of Obama to the first four years of Trump.
But perhaps I misunderstand how best to do it. It's not an area that I have any expertise in.
I had extensive problems with Scott's predictions and let him know about it in the comments but those have been deleted. Basically he set himself up to "successfully" disprove the argument "Trump is an outright racist" by making predictions more geared to disprove "Trump will successfully pursue ethnic cleansing."
But the predictions are what they are. I'm now more irritated that he's giving himself 9/10 when from my view it's more like 7/10, with all of his sub-90% predictions whiffing. This speaks to a mis-calibration.
+1 to all points, including prior comments that were deleted.
Clarification: I also had comments to that effect deleted (but not for no reason tbf, there's an argument for topic relevance). I can't speak to any details of shambibble's specific deleted posts.
"Basically he set himself up to "successfully" disprove the argument "Trump is an outright racist" by making predictions more geared to disprove "Trump will successfully pursue ethnic cleansing.""
According to this post, his position was not that Trump was not racist, but that he wasn't in league with the KKK and openly encouraging racist attacks, etc. etc.?
I am talking about his "Wolf" post, not this one. As I said in the comments at the time, it basically reduced to a semantic dispute about how "open" (not "outright," I misremembered) one's racism has to be before using the term "openly racist" was justified as a descriptor.
To the extent Trump contradicted himself a lot and occasionally managed to read saccharine Presidential-sounding stuff off a teleprompter, he is uniquely suited to the sort of cherry-flavored charity pie being baked here. It's the same thing that permits Scott to gamely claim Trump was against the riots because of his belated "go home" tweet several hours after the fact, once it became apparent Pence and Congress had successfully evacuated and they wouldn't accomplish anything but make people mad.
But ultimately this boils down to questions of media bias which aren't really an interesting debate to me and haven't gotten more interesting since. What I didn't like about the bets was only two of them really went to the question of "open" racism: the cabinet bet (which would go to his personal prejudices as the cabinet-picker) and the bet about no subordinates endorsing "the KKK, Stormfront, etc" (the biggest gimme of the lot).
The bets about public attitudes are meaningless because the President is not a dictator of public opinion. Even if the race relations number *was* unambiguous I could easily spin a story where it wasn't Trump's fault, it was the gosh-darned media's reaction to him! The bets about demographics and registries are similarly meaningless because the President is not a dictator; Woodrow Wilson was "openly racist" by any reasonable definition and yet the non-white population did not go down during his Presidency. The bets on gay marriage, registries, and internment were essentially bets on the Supreme Court, not Trump.
I tried to follow the grading scheme from the original post, which was comparing 2008-2016 to 2017-2021. There was no data point for 2017, so I took a number halfway between the 2016 and 2018 value, which was 44.5.
It didn't occur to you that taking a number halfway between the 2016 and 2018 value is assuming your conclusion?
I mean, it sucks that I have to do it, but do you have a better idea for how to interpolate that?
Well it seems the very least you could do is weight your interpolation because the 2016 data point was in Jun-Jul of that year, five months before the election, while the 2018 data point was in Nov-Dec of that year, 24 months after it.
Or you could just call it no-bet, like you would if the FBI had changed its methodology in prediction 1. It's pretty suspect to be awarding yourself the W based on assuming a constant slope when the bet is essentially about whether the slope will change at a given point, particularly when you already loaded the terms for yourself by comparing four years to eight.
Don't interpolate polling data. Scrub the prediction entirely if you've decided the sampling times aren't good enough, but the alternative is *literally* fabricating results.
Seems like you should just use the 2016 poll, because:
1) you're trying to separate what happened under Obama from what happened under Trump, and Trump (and issues surrounding Trump) could have a large effect on the results of any poll that was conducted after Trump was elected. So using a 2017 or 2018 poll would misattribute a Trump effect to Obama.
2) your original post predicted "the change in race relations 2017-2021 will be less negative/more positive than the change 2009-2016", which taken at face value implies that you will use the 2016 poll to measure the Obama change. (It's less clear how this applies to the change under Trump, since we don't have a 2017 poll or a 2021 poll.)
>I wrote most of this piece in 2020 and it's possible that 2019 wasn't out yet?
Extremely plausible, the data is usually published ~Oct the following year. (2019 was 2020-11-16, I think.) The preliminary reports come out much sooner, but are piecemeal and then you don't have an apples-to-apples comparison.
Would it overly stretch the definition of 'coup' to include Trump's political/media strategy to overturn the election results? It seems that his efforts, including Giuliani and Powell's disinformation campaign and the pressure put on republican state officials, much more credibly threatened our constitutional order than the capitol riot did.
My understanding is that the term 'coup' can be applied to any illegal usurpation of political power, though in practice I understand if dropping the violence requirement blurs too many important lines
> Would it overly stretch the definition of 'coup' to include Trump's political/media strategy to overturn the election results?
Would it overly stretch the definition of "coup" to include Biden's strategy of having Democrat-controlled states change their voting methods at the last minute to allow millions of highly dubious votes?
(The answer to both of these questions, by the way, is yes.)
Which votes were dubious?
Correct, except that your second example is fictional.
*Democratic
I am also weirded out by the frequent use of "Democrat" where "Democratic" would be appropriate. But I think "Democrat-controlled" parses fine.
Well, we use the adjective form in similar hyphenated phrases—"British-made cars," for instance. Melvin's other comments make me doubt the use of "Democrat" is a coincidence.
In the universe where your premises are correct, yes, it might be a fair use of the term. I'm not convinced we inhabit that universe, however.
"the pressure put on republican state officials"
What was this pressure? Are you talking about the call to the Georgia officials? In my opinion that call was completely misrepresented everywhere in the media. I read the transcript and didn't see anything inappropriate at all.
The officials involved seemed to find it inappropriate, given that they leaked it to the press. But really, you don't see a problem with a president calling up a Secretary of State, saying that he won an election and he wants the SoS to make a finding to that effect? Am I misstating what happened?
I was primarily referring to the calls to Georgia officials (I disagree that it wasn't inappropriate), as well as the pressure on at least the Michigan state legislature (e.g. that famous meeting at the white house). I suspect you could easily find statements and actions of Trump or his campaign 'pressuring' the Republican-controlled Arizona, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania legislatures.
In practice a political/media strategy and $3 will get you a cup of coffee -- not succeed in replacing a government. For the latter, you need a division or two of disciplined troops, or at least a few million irregulars and the strong support of enough people with money and connections to lubricate the process considerably, maybe turn over a TV station or two to your brownshirts, supply cash for buying rifles.
And frankly anybody who imagines Trump's *actual purpose* with all the Release-the-Kraken! bullshit after the election is naive. Trump knew on Wednesday morning he had zero chance of overturning the election. But what he *also* had was monster debts and $400 million in loans coming due real soon, plus the possibility of any number of lawsuits held in abeyance while he was POTUS.
*All* of the post-election frenzy and drama was, I am sorry to say, bait to lure 70 million bitterly-disappointed MAGAs to pour out their life savings to Save the Dream. It totally worked, too. I recall reading the man raked in $250 million in completely free donations -- which he can use for any purpose at all -- between Election Day and the Inaugural. I am sure that did a great deal to ease his financial problems, and I think that was the *only* actual real purpose. It was a con that would make Bernie Madoff green with envy, all perfectly legal, too.
That's reasonable, though I am a little conflicted. Could an activity still be a 'coup', or 'attempted coup', if the damage it seeks to deal to constitutional rule occurs as a side effect of its primary motive?
No, and I strongly resist the watering down of such strong words. *That* debasement of language is much more dangerous than any of the political damage I've seen lately. People throw around extremely potent words these days -- coup, fascist, racist, revolution -- without taking thought of what it does to our discourse to be unable to distinguish between, say, what happened in the Capitol on 6 January 2021 and what happened in Petrograd on 7 November 1917. People carelessly lump making nasty blowjob jokes about Kamala Harris with a bunch of hooded guys yanking a sharecropper out of his shack and hanging him on a tree. And so on.
This is is madness, and the debasement of the essential currency of understanding and compromise -- the words we use -- is doing far more to destroy our civil institutions than anything any ordinarily corrupt politician is doing. And we are doing it to *ourselves*. We have lost all sense of restraint and proportion, and we very foolishly take for granted that we can deeply alienate the 40% of the country that isn't on our side on every point and nothing much bad will ever happen. One can only speculate that it is too far from 1861-65 for anyone to fully grasp how dangerous that delusion can be. I would have thought the 580,000 COVID deaths that can probably at least half be traced to substantial disunion and a failure to work together would also be a good warning. But apparently not.
I agree that concept creep can, and often does get in the way of important conversation. I think you might have misinterpreted my intentions; I am not trying to equivocate Trump's action with, say, the 18 Brumaire coup or your Russian example. That said, I don't find it unreasonable to contemplate a broader spectrum of constitutional harm, when evaluating Scott's prediction regarding a 'Trump coup. On that point, your argument is well taken.
Yes, agreed. I suppose I tend to view Trump as more a symptom than a cause though. If the Republic was debauched, I don't think The Donald overpowered her, I think she gave herself willingly, and we should examine our broader selves more carefully to find out why (and how). I think the tendency (on both right and left) to just pile it all on Trump, treat him like some demiurge that made 70 million of us go mad in one way, and another 70 million go mad in another way, is sadly reflective of a broader tendency that Americans have been exhibiting to become more like spectators at the gladiatorial games of politics, cheering the heroes and booing the bums, and less like sober citizen participants who fell the weight of res publica personally.
I get what you mean, though I am sometimes uncomfortable with treating Trump as this implacable sociological phenomenon. I can't quite articulate how, but there seems to be a tension between acknowledging the social and economic forces pushing our Republic into the arms of populists like Trump, and respecting the agency, and complex motivations of these voters.
In my life, it is usually my coastal academia friends that wring their hands seeking to explain Trump through the plight of rural America, and the degradation of our information diet. My father in law, a farmer in Kansas, is less subtle: "Of course Jerry would vote for Trump. Jerry's an asshole".
Like you, I dislike the heroes vs. bums narrative in our politics, to use your phrasing, but I have grown equally distrustful of grand socio-historical narratives, which I think fail to treat people as agents, and genuinely hold them to account. I realize this isn't very constructive.
(reposted because my first paragraph needed editing)
If A is a side-effect of B, B didn't seek to do A. Likewise, "attempting to accidentally do X" doesn't seem especially well-founded as a concept (see: "attempted manslaughter").
I'd call tainting an office/process for personal monetary gain corruption, not a coup.
I wish I could edit out the word 'seek' from my comment, but fair enough regarding corruption vs. 'coup'
>"stand back and stand by", which as far as I can tell is equivalent to "stand down"
This seems to me to be pretty dramatically false. I think the connotations of "Stand down" are "no action needed" while the connotations of "stand back and stand by" are "no action needed this very second but prepare for imminent action". The two statements are not equivalent but rather pretty close to being opposites.
I'm actually not sure what to make of Trump here: his grasp of language is so weak that I think it's certainly possible that he meant to say "stand down" and then Trumpbrain happened and something else came out (we see this again and again from Trump).
But I think it's pretty misleading to say that Trump's words taken at face value are equivalent to "stand down". Rather, Trump's words taken at face value say prepare for action. The room for debate is around whether Trump's words should be taken at face value.
I don't think Trump personally harbors white supremacist ideology, but I strongly agree: the connotations of "stand by" are definitely "prepare for further action."
This isn't necessarily strong evidence, but the Proud Boys themselves definitely took it that way: https://twitter.com/ByMikeBaker/status/1311130735584051201
My guess about what happened is that Trump likes it when people like him, pretty much regardless of who, and he let that show.
Yes, I score trump as not very racist, but very open to courting, supporting, defending, and working with anyone who he calculates will increase his power or the likelihood he gains power, up to and including the most racist people that exist.
It's worth remembering that Martin Luther King, Jr. was fond of saying he was much angrier at white people who [paraphrasing] "looked the other way" than with rally-attending KKK members.
To me, Trump was not a KKK member, he was the most powerful, most potently signal-boosting "look the other way" person ever, and that had disastrous effects, in terms of race relations and in terms of tons of other things.
I think Trump saw that many of his supporters were being unfairly attacked as horrible people, and felt the need to defend them. Perhaps this occasionally spilled over into defending people who were being not-unfairly attacked.
Odd that he never saw fit to clarify.
Why would he? Is Trump someone who clarifies without prompting or without being in a situation where he may face backlash? I don't really get that impression.
It's possible that he didn't know who the Proud Boys were, and Biden did some 5D chess move to suggest the very group that would be least beneficial to Trump no matter how he answered. And actually, I'd be willing to believe that Biden made such a choice. But in the context of the lead-up, the only reasonable response from Trump should have been flat condemnation. And as ignorant as he is, I'd give him 50-50 of knowing exactly who the Proud Boys were, given their connection to Roger Stone.
As for what Trump meant in this response, I'd like to point out that Trump only makes sense in audio, not in transcript. You have to listen to his voice inflection and which words he emphasizes. There is no doubt in my mind that he was signalling to them "I'm on your side", perhaps phrasing it in such a way as to retain some plausible deniability.
This is what i never understood about accusations of TDS. It seemed for every leftist that was accused of uncharitably interpreting the former presidents words, there was a white nationalist making the same interpretation. So even if it was a mis interpretation, it is *both* his detractors *and* his followers making it.
There are probably 100-1000 times as many leftists convinced of these interpretations as there even *are* white nationalists in the US.
ok, we can change it to 'for every 1000... there is 1...'. I don't think that changes the main point.
If the white nationalists are saying 'this guy really speaks to us', then even if he is not trying to speak to them, or doing in unintentionally, it is at least an honest mistake to think 'he is speaking to white nationalists'; and i don't think you need to be suffering from any sort of derangement to think that.
If someone is acusing leftists of suffering from TDS, they also need to be acusing white nationalists of suffering from TDS.
I've never met a white nationalist irl, though, and I can't recall ever conversing with one online. (Though it's not like I give people a political alignment quiz before I talk to them, so maybe I have without knowing it?)
If you think organized white nationalists are a rounding error, it would make sense not to factor their opinions into your communication style.
I don't know what Trump was actually thinking- and I doubt it was anything good- but I'd have mostly ignored white nationalists if I'd been in his shoes, and it wouldn't be because I was secretly courting them. It would be because I think they're a bunch of fringe nuts that aren't actually relevant (Crux!).
perhaps you think white nationalists > organized white nationalists.
we just had 2 elections in a row decided by rounding errors
There was at least one commenter on the old SSC who was. I might count Steve Sailer, who still comments here, but I don't follow him and that may not represent his views.
I think it's very important that the Proud Boys took it as an endorsement. What is the purpose of a condemnation if the target of that condemnation sees it as a message of support?
Agree here. Why did he add "stand by"? When I watched the debate live, it felt like an egregious addition to his statement. He skirted around the question and then added a phrase that seemed to indicate "I want you to stay around for the future".
To emphasise my point, we can look at definitions.
If you look at the definition of "stand down" on Google you get: "relax after being ready or alert. Ex: no further action was required and all units stood down" (slight formatting change my own)
If you look at the definition of "stand by" on Google you get "a person or thing ready to be deployed immediately, especially if needed as backup in an emergency." (you get slightly different things depending on whether you go with standby or stand by, but the basic point emerges either way).
I'm dodging the Trump interpretation here, but I think it's important to be clear that the two statements are not, when straightforwardly ready, anything like equivalent.
I don't feel the connotations of "stand by" are quite as clear-cut as that. The phrase has two common idiomatic meanings in English*; one is "Await my signal," but another is, "Take no active part in events around you", as in, "He stood by helplessly as the house burned."
In context (paired with "stand back", contrasting with "stand down"), I certainly see why people draw the conclusions they do, but I don't think the other interpretation of the phrase is inadmissible. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if ambiguity were just what Trump was going for—not a coded call to arms, but simply a phrase that could be construed in more than one direction, in the [vain] hope that it would thereby avoid alienating any supporters of his. Straining to avoid even the smallest commitment that might offend a supporter strikes me as consistent with Trump's conduct throughout his term of office.
*https://www.dictionary.com/browse/standby
Fair point.
That said, I'm not entirely convinced that this is a standard use of the imperative "stand by" which I think is basically always used to mean "be prepared for action" rather than "do nothing". Certainly I think it would be fair to say "be prepared for action" is the more normal reading of that imperative.
But my main concern is with Scott's confidence here: I think he needs to be a lot more open to the fact that there's something much more concerning in "stand by" than "stand down", at least if we read Trump as meaning what he says. The two are not equivalent in the way that matters in this context.
Again, I don't feel it's quite as cut-and-dried as you (Lester and Dan) make it out to be. Here's a recent magazine article that includes the sentence, "But he ordered his men to stand by, to let the tide of people push up to the gate and pass through." There the phrase describes an order whose thrust is for men to refrain from involvement that they might otherwise have undertaken, and the sentence reads quite naturally to me.
That said, I certainly don't think that "stand by" makes a *good* choice of words in this context for someone who merely wants to say, "Don't get involved" without any sort of subtext, and you presumably agree that Trump must have felt at least that he could plausibly contend that they meant that, so I'm not sure our positions are really that far apart in any way that matters.
PS: accidentally left out the link to the article I referred to: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/after-the-fall-revisiting-1989-in-a-new-age-of-walls/
This isn't in the imperative voice (as it would be if the article read: He turned to his men and gave an order, "stand by."). I continue to think it would be really unusual to use "stand by" in the imperative to mean anything other than "be prepared for action".
To belabour the point (I hope it's not condescending to do so; I'm aiming for clarity, not condescension): the fact that it describes an order doesn't mean it's in the imperative voice and so doesn't make it a counterexample to my claim.
I should be clear so that it doesn't look like I'm shifting goalposts; the internet is big and I'm sure someone must have used "stand by" in the imperative voice it to mean "stand down" but my guess is that that usage is extremely rare, except in venues where we might think it's just a misunderstanding (like, say, badly written fanfiction).
But I agree that we mostly agree. I accept that I was guilty of basically what I'm worried about in Scott's own writing (I acted overly confident about the meaning of the words). And I _think_ we agree that "stand by" at least has importantly different senses to "stand down" in a way that makes it relevant that Trump said the former rather than the latter (where "relevant" isn't intended to be committing to any particular view of what Trump meant)
P.S. For my own sanity, I now need to be heading to bed rather than staring at internet comment threads. Just wanted to say thanks for the thoughtful replies (I didn't want it to look like I was rage quitting on the discussion, if you now send a further reply and get nothing in response :P)
"Stand by" as the imperative is really *both* a direction to be ready to act *and* a directive to not act until ordered.
Like, if Alice suggests doing X, Bob tells her to "stand by", and then without further communication from Bob Alice does X, Alice isn't obeying Bob.
I agree that "stand by" =/= "stand down", but it certainly includes "don't keep going" (a weaker direction than "stand down").
I think the past tense is important in your example though. "Stand by" generally means "don't take action but be available and ready if needed." So if you say someone "stood by" then the implication is that they didn't take action for the entire duration of the incident. When talking about future events, "stand by" is pretty clearly a command to be ready to take action. I don't think there is any way to interpret it as "stand down" in the sense of "go home and don't get involved ever"
Written out like that it looks like it's obviously meant to send some subtle message, but I watched the debate live and to me it seemed like more of a verbal stumble than anything else. He didn't even say "stand back and stand by," it was more along the lines of "Stand back- a- stand by."
I interpreted it as a response to the recent-at-the-time incident where a bunch of Trump supporters drove through Portland in trucks spraying pepper spray around - trying to say "stop doing that" without outright criticizing his own supporters or looking weak by saying what Biden and the moderator were trying to get him to say.
I agree that there's lot of room for Trump interpretation here.
What I'm worried about is Scott's comments:
>Trump said the Proud Boys should "stand back and stand by", which as far as I can tell is equivalent to "stand down", the specific thing Wallace kept trying to make him say even though he had already condemned everybody.
>I'm trying as hard as I can to be charitable - maybe people thought Trump should have followed Wallace's exact wording and said "Stand down" instead of the more temporary-sounding "Stand back and stand by"?
The two phrases are in no way equivalent. People are being picky about wording _because it dramatically changes the meaning_ (not because they're nitpicking). And "stand by" isn't merely temporary, it explicitly suggests that the proud boys should be prepared to act.
I think there are plenty of reasons to think that we shouldn't just interpret Trump in the most obvious way here. I think there's a debate to be had. But my issue is that the way Scott framed things makes it sound like there's _isn't_ a debate to be had and rather like it's just clear that there's nothing wrong in Trump's words here (and that people are just being weirdly nitpicky to think otherwise). I don't think this take on things is accurate.
Agreed. This is a bizarre oversight given that Scott says he's "trying as hard as [he] can to be charitable" to the claim that this statement endorsed white supremacy.
*My* problem with this whole discussion is that we're treating it like a prepared statement where the speaker considered implications before saying it, which it clearly wasn't, 'cos he changed his mind about what to say halfway through saying it.
So while I'm really hesitant to make this kind of argument, in fact I'd *agree* with the proposition that there is no discussion to be had here - in my opinion this is one step down from trying figure out what Bush was trying to communicate by puking on the Prime Minister of Japan.
It doesn't sound like a verbal stumble. To me it sounded rehearsed. The omission of the 'd' sound in "Stand back an' stand by" is a very normal pronunciation of 'and'.
This is spot on. Apparently Scott wasn't familiar with the meaning of "stand by" (maybe most of us know it from ear books / movies?), which led to a really bad take here.
I hope he adds a correction.
(I saw this piece when a friend texted me "I can't believe Scott's take on the Trump proud boys debate moment. I don't understand how anyone can in good faith think 'stand back and stand by' = 'stand down'". Reading the piece, I had to conclude that Scott didn't know how "stand by" is used.)
*war books and movies
A person who is able enough to become President says something, that thing is received with obvious shock and an immediate attempt to clarify, and the people he's addressing interpret it in a way consistent with his overall campaign themes... That, to me, cannot be taken as a verbal gaffe or slip-up.
Seconding this. "Stand back and stand by" is almost the opposite of "stand down". ("Almost" only because I might be having a brainfart.)
+1 (I wish we still had upvotes...)
The best and funniest demonstration of this point is the meme:
Her: Denounce your hoes.
Me: All my hoes stand back and stand by.
This paired with the clear weasel-wording around this softest of soft ball questions ("sure I WOULD denounce white supremacy" obv allows the addendum "but I'm not gonna") to me was exactly the problem. Trump was asked to condemn WS in no uncertain terms and in response he used very uncertain terms.
It’s irrelevant anyway, because the Proud Boys are not white nationalists or white supremacists. I think Biden knew this, knew that Trump knew it, and knew that the public had been fooled into thinking they are, which is why he jumped in with ‘Proud Boys’, like the cynical politician he is, to put Trump in a bind.
"During the 2016 - 2020 period, I quadrupled my money on InTrade." Do you mean PredictIt? Intrade died in March 2013.
Incidentally, as far as near war, what about NK? https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/09/16/daily-202-us-came-much-closer-war-with-north-korea-2017-than-public-knew-trump-told-woodward/ (I was very concerned at the time because of how Trump was talking about how 'Obama' almost went to war with NK; Trump is constantly engaged in projection, has a particular chip on his shoulder about Obama, and most of what he says about his enemies he says because it's what *he* wants to or would do...)
Yes, I did mean PredictIt. Old habits die hard.
Yeah, the Korea crisis was at least as big a deal as the Iran one. And Trump's hawkishness actually worked out pretty well for all concerned (Pyongyang got pushed away from Beijing and toward Seoul, which is a huge step toward Korean reunification), but that's hardly a refutation of "high variance".
I agree you deserve an A for You Are Still Crying Wolf. But I think you overstated your success for the debate / Proud Boys moment. Rewatching the video it really did seem like he was reluctant to do a full and unambiguous condemnation. By late 2020 it increasingly seemed like he was willing to play footsie with white nationalist -adjacent groups. "Stand back and stand by" really is weaker than "stand down".
Honest question: are the Proud Boys a white supremacist organization? If they're not, then I could imagine Trump not wanting to alienate them (or to use your words, play footsie with them). I was under the impression that they were a group of rowdy anti-progressives who like to get in fights at protests and have opinions about masturbation. Are they explicitly racist, in a way analogous to the KKK or other white supremacist organizations?
They describe themselves as pro-western culture rather than pro-white, and for a while they were led by a non-white man named Enrique Tarrio. Still, I describe them as white nationalist adjacent. It seems quite possible that all the pro-western stuff is heard as a dog whistle for many members, consciously or subconsciously.
There is a case that an organisation that is clearly racist but has deliberately chosen language that avoids being explicitly racist is not racist in the narrow, explicit sense that Scott has chosen to talk about here.
And that the fact that the racist organisations of 2021 lie about racism when the racist organisations of 1961 didn't does, itself, say something about the change in racism.
The famous Lee Atwater quote about how the language for talking about race has changed (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_8E3ENrKrQ) has the obvious interpretation that they have the same attitudes as ever, but also the important one that the language has had to change. That might not say anything about the attitudes of the people saying this stuff - but it says something about the people listening.
It's often said that Trump stopped using the dog whistle and used a foghorn, but I'm not at all convinced that is true. He's not a subtle speaker, but he did continue to use coded language about race. He didn't use the n-word once while on-mic, for instance. And he spent a lot of time on mic, with all those unscripted rally speeches.
They recently had a schism which led to the formation on a new, _explicitly_ white supremacist group. This suggests that at least some of their members didn't think they were white supremacist (or at least not enough).
The name of the new faction, and I really want to emphasize that I am not making this up in an attempt at satire - really, I'm not - seriously - is Proud Goys. See https://www.newsweek.com/proud-boys-based-stickman-enrique-tarrio-goys-1546597 for one news article about this.
As always, the strongest argument against white supremacy is white supremacists.
This moment in the debate was clearly a softball from the moderator.
Biden interrupted and sort of muddied the waters, but it seems quite clear that the moderator was saying, "In the past, people have accused you of being a racist because you wouldn't make a presidential-sounding condemnation of racists. Would you like a do-over?"
And Trump didn't refuse, exactly, but he passed on the mile-wide opening being offered to him.
The way he handled that exchange was pretty far from an embrace of white nationalism, as Scott says, but it was nowhere near a condemnation. It was more of a Trumpian version of "no comment".
He straddled a direct question in an amazingly obtuse, muddy, animated, confusing way, which allows his supporters (and Scott 😉) to carefully parse his language and claim he was staying neutral or pointing in a certain direction, in much the same way that a mathematician could analyze footage of one of those wacky-waving-inflatable-arms-guys in front of a car dealership, do some integral calculus, and say, "I am confident it was pointing, on average, NNE at 15° above horizontal, meaning actually directing traffic to the competitor across the street."
> This moment in the debate was clearly a softball from the moderator.
I interpret it as the exact opposite; it was a trap designed to get the headline "Trump refuses to denounce Neo Nazis".
It happened a few times over the course of his Presidency; Trump is the kind of guy who hates having words put in his mouth so it works great on him. You just keep asking him again and again if he'll denounce such-and-such until you eventually find a combination of words that he doesn't parrot back, and you report that was "Trump refuses to denounce Neo Nazis".
Yes, the reason why Trump gave a sarcastic "sure" was because he has always been resistant to repeating slogans and affirming articles of faith, because if he did so he would be submitting to his political adversaries' frame. So "condemning" "white supremacist groups" in order to prove that he is not a "racist" would amount to saying that his opponents' perception that he was a "racist" for not having "condemned" them was justified. "Do you condemn white supremacy" is a Milgram question: http://johnsanilac.com/w/milgram-questions/
There are a million ways to explicitly and unambiguously denounce Neo Nazis without having to parrot anything. And on occasion he has done so. But he can't resist basically saying "but not really" after. I'm with Scott in the belief that Trump isn't much more racist than the average 70 year old. But also he has a really, really hard time condemning anyone who supports him.
It's not a softball. It's a media trick to keep asking the same question, because nearly everyone hates giving exactly the same answer each time, so you tend to get an array of answers, allowing you to cherry pick to support the desired narrative.
Also, 'just asking' the question works to cement a belief in the minds of people who already feel inclined to that belief. So it's a good propaganda tool.
When a Dutch politician did answer exactly the same, they called him a robot. So it's a hard trick for politicians to evade without looking bad.
The Trump campaign actually made a pretty smart move by putting Trumps condemnations in a single video, which made the media look really bad to those inclined to distrust the media: https://youtu.be/Bd0cMmBvqWc
Funny that all the nazis didn't believe him.
Where is your evidence for that? Did Trump support among Nazi's increase?
Scott gives some evidence that it didn't.
Why would an *increase* be the appropriate measure? If Nazis believed Trump was disavowing them, surely we would expect to see fewer (or zero) Nazi symbols next to Trump flags/at Trump-aligned protests/storming the Capitol/etc.
Nazis have an incentive to present a relatively popular mainstream political figure as their ally in order to seem more relevant and mainstream. The press has an incentive to present someone slightly to their right as Nazi-adjacent in order to tar Trump. They have a symbiotic relationship. Funny how the press thinks its worth helping Nazis in order to pwn Trump.
I suppose my position is that if he wanted to say, "I refuse to have words put into my mouth, so no. But here is my sincere and informed take on racism, white supremacists, and whether it's fair to assume The Proud Boys are racists or white supremacists,..." I would have very much appreciated and respected that.
Instead, what he did was to say something ambiguous. His detractors interpreted it based on their assumptions, and his supporters interpreted it based on theirs.
It is impossible to be 100% confident in either interpretation, but I have a big problem with your stance, and to some extent with Scott's, because you're both doing the exact same thing anti-Trumpists do with the same moment: Take something mealy-mouthed and inarticulate that Trump said, assign 100% confidence to your interpretation, and imply that any other interpretation is automatically unfair. "How could you possibly misunderstand his perfectly clear words!"
Instead, we should all be saying things like, "I'd say that there's a 60% chance Trump was avoiding outright condemnation of the Proud Boys because he wanted their support regardless of their status re: racism, a 5% chance he is actually a white supremacist at heart, a 25% chance he is just too dumb to answer the question effectively, and a 10% chance he is sincerely very anti-white-supremacists and wishes he could have communicated that better but got flustered in the moment. (And a 0% chance he answered as well as anyone in his position could have 😉).
To be fair, Trump is not a "here is my sincere, carefully-thought-out position on a set of sensitive and complex issues" kind of guy. He has never answered a question in that way and never will.
I think your probabilities all turn very heavily on your priors. We didn't all start with the same priors (I thought Trump was a terrible choice for president but almost certainly not white supremacist), and so we can easily arrive at very different probabilities.
> you're both doing the exact same thing anti-Trumpists do with the same moment: Take something mealy-mouthed and inarticulate that Trump said, assign 100% confidence to your interpretation, and imply that any other interpretation is automatically unfair.
This is a completely unfair portrayal of my comment(s). I never argued that my interpretation is certain to be the truth, but merely that it is a perfectly plausible interpretation, if not the most likely, that is completely dismissed by many.
I strongly stand by my claim that the interpretation by those who think that it is beyond doubt that Trump has some secret pro-Nazi agenda that he is advancing in a very smart way by making a ton of anti-white supremacy statements, but where he intentionally adds in some dog whistles that are part of some secret plan, is conspiracy thinking.
> Instead, we should all be saying things like, "I'd say that there's a 60% chance Trump was avoiding outright condemnation of the Proud Boys because [...]
You are actually ignoring all kinds of possibilities, including very obvious ones, like that his goal could be to move past this topic to talk about things that he was actually interested in talking about, that he misheard when the Biden and the moderator/other debater talked at the same time, that he doesn't know whether or disagrees that the Proud Boys are all that racist, etc.
The ease by which many of his opponents not merely demand, but seem to take it for granted that Trump should be constantly denouncing white supremacy, with an inhuman amount of perfection, while no similar demands get made of Biden, just creates a very strong perception on my part that people are rationalizing their prejudices.
He only condemned white supremacy 38 times during 4 years? What a racist!
I know people who can condemn white supremacy 38 times during 1 hour on Twitter.
"was clearly a softball".
What level of delusion do you have to be on to actually believe this? Amazing. It was clearly not meant as a softball (listen to Wallace's tone) and the fact that you think anyone chosen as a moderator of a Presidential debate would give a Republican a "softball" in the year 2020 means you probably shouldn't be allowed behind a wheel (as you are clearly not lucid).
Bear in mind the Proud Boys did a summit with Black Lives Matter on this exact subject. If the Proud Boys are a "white supremacist adjacent" organization, then Black Lives Matter is WS-adjacent-adjacent.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/blm-group-proud-boys-stand-together-at-salt-lake-city-press-conference/ar-BB19BHpA
"White supremacist adjacent" is a beautiful phrase here--it's a perfect motte into which to retreat.
If they want to improve their image and no longer be seen as racist, it might help if they would stop flashing the white power hand sign at every photo op.
Excuse me, you have used the discredited vvhite supremacist letter 'W' no less than three times in your post. I realize it didn't become a vvhite supremacist symbol until I made it up just novv, but you're going to have to stop using it if you no longer vvish to be seen as racist.
It is important to not hallucinate racism, and I agree that happens sometimes. I assure you that is not the case here. To use your analogy, it'd be like if everyone thought my club was racist, so in response me and all the other members decided to start and end every sentence with the letter "w" to trigger the libs.
I urge you to take a look at what transpires every time these people gather, who they choose to hang out with, and their criminal records. True, most of it isn't about race, but some of it definitely is. The rest is, as far as I can gather, street brawls for their own sake.
Frankly, *that's exactly what I'd do*. Isn't this part of what pride marches are about? "You say we're sexual degenerates - well, hey, here we are marching around in BDSM gear, what now?" If you're being kafkatrapped, double down. If you tell a non-conformist not to do something, he's going to do it twice as hard to call your bluff and make you look ridiculous to onlookers.
I'm not arguing the PBs aren't a bunch of violent jackasses - they are. But calling them white supremacists when it's blatantly obvious to anyone who has read their website or seen a photo of a group of them that they aren't makes them look good while at the same time damaging society's ability to make sane decisions. It's not like there's nothing else to get them on - call them sexist, for instance, which they'll freely admit they are!
Just in case anyone didn't click through:
"A Salt Lake chapter of the Proud Boys gathered at Washington Square Wednesday night to try and change the narrative that they’re racist.
They appeared with Jacarri Kelley, the leader of Black Lives Matter, Northern Utah. It’s a chapter that’s unaffiliated with Black Lives Matter Utah, headed by Alexis Scott."
If the Northern Utah chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and the Zionist Organization of American hold a joint event, it doesn't mean that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is solved. It means that the Northern Utah SJP and ZOA are (unsurprisingly) rather confused.
They are pretty proud of their racism. It's not subtle. They don't quite go to the extent of the KKK, but racism is at the core of their movement. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/proud-boys
I don't really trust the SPLC these days, they have a history of tarring individuals and groups as racist that clearly aren't. You only get so many mistakes before you lose public credibility. And the post you linked clearly states that they officially deny that they are a racist organization, so they're certainly not explicitly white supremacist if that's the case.
They include a number of examples in the Proud Boys' own words. I don't know how anyone can read those statements and conclude that they're not a racist organization.
There's also the fact that the Proud Boys were extremely excited by Trump's response and turned that "stand by" comment into rallying cry. You could argue that the Proud Boys can do whatever they want, Trump has no control over them, and nothing they do affect the substance of Trump's comments. Or you could argue that carefully parsing the literal meaning of his words ignores a ton of context, nuance, and shading, and the reaction of these hate groups provides a strong clue that something is going on here.
Are the Proud Boys a hate group? I know little about them but I thought I read they defend Trump supporters from antifa at rallies? Are there incidents of hate crimes?
One of many violent incidents:
https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2019/08/6-indicted-on-charges-related-to-may-day-brawl-at-portland-bar.html
Whether they tend to target minorities, I don't know. I have heard they do but don't have the data. They definitely are strongly opposed to antifa, which is basically defined as anyone who opposes them. If nobody shows up to oppose them, they will attack the nearest journalist (https://twitter.com/PDXzane/status/1309945564922961920) or roam the streets to find anyone who looks antifa enough. The narrative from antifa is that if they don't show up to fight, the PB will inevitably find someone to fight, and that person won't be as prepared.
If you have the patience for the New Yorker (which makes ACX look like Reader's Digest), here is a view into the antifa side of the story:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/02/trump-antifa-movement-portland
As for whether PB is a hate group, I'd call them alt-light. Their leader is not white. But they don't mind mingling with explicitly white supremacist groups. There will be the occasional 6MWE t-shirt. They like to flash the white-power hand sign, but I'm guessing if you called them on it they'd say it's just to trigger the libs. They officially say they are not racist. There was an attempt to schizm off a sub-group (Proud Goys) that is explicitly neo-Nazi.
I am somehow unable to link directly to the part of the PDXzane tweet thread showing the attack on the journalist. Just ctrl-F search "kicks him in the face".
Yes, "stand down" and "stand by" are not remotely the same thing. The difference may well not have been intentional on Trump's part, but the difference is there, and Trump's more unhinged supporters seem to have been just as aware of it as opponents. Mind you, minute verbal analysis probably isn't the best way to interpret Trump's manner of speech, but I'm disappointed in Scott for not acknowledging this.
Trump did attempt a coup, when he tried to get Pence to throw the votes out on January 6th. That wasn't an attempted *military* coup (since Trump didn't have the support of the military in this), but it was still an attempted coup in the sense of a blatantly unconstitutional attempt to seize power for himself. It was *arguably* a coup before then, when he blatantly tried to overturn the results of the elections, but where I'm concerned it became inarguably one when he just asked his own vice president to just throw out the results, regardless of what courts, states, legislature, or pretty much every other institution in the country said.
As for Trump's racism, he told four people of color, political opponents of his, to "go back to their countries", even though three of four of them were born in the United States. He called the coronavirus "Kung Flu". I mean these may not seem as much, but only because the man's a fucking clown who keeps saying vile thing after vile thing, so they don't seem out of the ordinary for him! But that's hardly an excuse.
The coup prediction is turning into an argument over definitions. Scott should rephrase what he thought he was predicting without using the word 'coup'.
Agreed. Trump waited hours after the Capitol was under siege to make a very tepid tweet. I don't understand taking the words of his tweet at face value while ignoring the context. His supporters know damn well he has to make public statements sometimes for appearances. I don't believe for a second Trump's weak, late tweet for the mob to leave had any impact or was sincere by Trump.
Maybe it'd be useful to distinguish between attempting a coup yourself, and not interfering when others attempt a coup on your behalf.
It was a coup attempt the moment he asked Pence to throw out the votes.
Agree. First there was legal maneuvering that bordered on a coup attempt, but the courts smacked it down good and hard. Then there was a non-violent but illegal push to have Republican officials "find" vote and evidence of fraud, as well as throwing out completely legitimate results, as well as the pressure on Pence; this also failed due to these people not wanting to do what Trump did. Then, finally, there was the actually violent coup attempt where mobs presumably intended to force the Senate to vote for Trump at gunpoint and were only minutes away from it.
It's ridiculous for Scott to give himself a B for predicting "No Coup" when nothing like it has been attempted in over a century. "Hey, there was no successful coup, just like I predicted" is a silly standard.
(Similarly, it seems kinda silly to give yourself a good rating for making several 99% predictions that there would essentially be no actual government mass-murder or expulsions of American citizens...)
"Bordered on a coup attempt" ~= "trending toward significance"
If you say "there won't be a coup attempt," and then there's no coup attempt but the president tries some (clownishly ineffectual) legal manuvering to try to stay in office despite losing the election, your prediction was correct. How else could you possibly grade that statement?
I'd grade it as cherry-picking. Scott counted the ineffectual court maneuvers but selectively ignored the multiple genuinely illegal efforts to undo the election.
"there was a non-violent but illegal push to have Republican officials "find" vote and evidence of fraud"
Is this the Georgia phone call again? Read the transcript, I didn't see anything remotely close to being illegal or even inappropriate.
"there was the actually violent coup attempt where mobs presumably intended to force the Senate to vote for Trump at gunpoint and were only minutes away from it."
Is this actually true? They couldn't have done it at gunpoint as you say, as no firearms were brought inside the Capitol. If they intended to do this, why leave all their firearms outside and at the hotel? What's the evidence that supports this interpretation?
There was any number of pushing to have Republican officials invalidate the actual vote.
Also, it's not exactly a stretch to make the interpretation that you're protesting against an important vote in Congress, and then you storm Congress, you do it in order to be able to change the outcome of the vote through violence. How else would the whole thing accomplish anything?
The Courts facilitated a coup. See: PA Supreme Court going out of their way to ensure that Trump wasn't allowed to win the State.
Re: "go back to your country"
Is there no way in which the comment originates in the crude way someone from a low social class may speak?
Trump isn't from a low social class.
He certainly speaks like someone who is.
That's very different! It kind of removes the exculpatory element!
You misunderstand me, I'm doubting that he's part of the upper class based on how he talks. I don't think that's a complete act either, he doesn't seem to have radically altered his personality based strictly on wanting to win as a conservative populist.
This feels kind of bizarre, since it's not like we don't know Trump's background. (Unless there's a strain of Trump Birtherism I'm not familiar with: "Trump really grew up in the Bronx!") He grew up wealthy, in a rich neighborhood, went to private schools all his life, graduated from an Ivy. He has family members who are judges and college professors. By any material marker of class, Trump is in the upper one.
Now, I agree with you that Trump didn't radically change his personality for political reasons, since even in his unguarded moments he talks about grabbing women's pussies and things like that. But personality is not the same as class. It's not like he never had an opportunity to learn gentility, or even basic civility.
To add to the small sample on QAnon: My next door neighbor (in a nondescript suburban town in New Jersey) got totally hooked on QAnon and changed his whole life around it -- leaving his family, moving to a new place, etc.
See https://www.reddit.com/r/QAnonCasualties/
I am kinda surprised and frustrated about how Soleimani thing went exactly as Trump wanted and predicted it to go - Soleimani dead, Iran postured and fumed and did nothing at the end - and Scott is still interpreting it as him being right on Trump being bumbling extremist that doesn't know what he's doing and Scott being right, despite predicting it all wrong.
It seems to be a pattern on Middle East and Trump at least. Trump moves US embassy to Jerusalem - everybody is like "this will cause WW3". Trump is saying "nothing will happen". Nothing happens. Everybody is like "well, the idiot got lucky this time".
Trump eliminates major Iranian terrorist chief. Everybody is like "this will cause WW3". Trump is saying "nothing will happen". Nothing happens. Everybody is like "well, the idiot got lucky this time".
Trump cuts aid to Palestinians. Everybody is like "this will bury any chance of peace in Middle East". Trump is saying "you'll see it won't". Then Trump makes several Arab countries to sign peace with Israel and tell Palestinians "you annoyed us for so long, it's time for a chance in our relationships". Everybody is like "well, the idiot got lucky this time".
Trump says he'll kick ISIS's ass. Everybody is like "nah, it's impossible, it's another unwinnable quagmire". Then Trump proceeds to kick ISIS's ass and eliminate it as a player in Middle East. Everybody is like "well, the idiot got lucky this time".
I'm just wondering how many times the idiot has to get lucky before the highly learned rationalist intellectuals start to recognize the pattern? I guess with Trump out we will never know.
I'm not sure what you mean by "most people". Most people in PA would hope for Israel being destroyed and those pesky Jews disappear. Most people in Israel would hope for the nightmare to stop and Israel to remain secure, while not caring too much about what happens to Palestinians. Most people in Europe would hope for any deal that the newspapers tell them is ok so they can forget about it. Most people in Iran - who knows what they'd want, nobody cares about it anyway as they can't decide anything about Iranian policies. There are a lot of "most people" who want very different things. I think what you mean by "most people" however is "myself and my peer circle". In that case, I may alleviate your concern - there's still no peace in the Middle East, and what Trump has done is one small - though incredibly important, but still small - step towards it. A step that Biden is already started undoing, by showering Palestinian with money with no commitment to not use it for terror - in fact, with explicit message that they don't care whether they use it or not, as the official reason for Trump stopping it was exactly this usage, and by telling the nations that signed peace with Israel that Biden is not intending to honor any commitments Trump made to them.
Of course, stopping showering Palestinians with American money is not the same as "beating them down" - and even though some parts there, like Hamas, is long overdue for a thorough beating down, it is not happening and probably is not going to happen anytime soon. Especially given how hostile is the new US administration to Israel. So there's no peace, neither bad one nor good one, and probably won't be any time soon.
Israel could crush the Palestinians if they wanted to. They could push them into the sea. But they don't want to because they are a liberal democracy. They just want to be safe from terror attacks.
God forbid. After 70 years of diaspora every trace of competence among the Palestinian people has long ago emigrated somewhere else. They work in Saudi, in the US, even in Israel. The only people left in the camps are so deficient in general competence any state they ran would be a festering sore, a place as dysfunctional as Somalia, and a similar haven for piracy, terrorist gangs, and similar evils. You have only to look at that wretched hive of scum and villainy that is the Gaza Strip.
If I had my druthers, I'd have the West Bank (sans Jewish settlements) annexed by Jordan, and all the Palestinians become Jordanian citizens whether they will or no. At least then they'd be part of a modestly functional state and could work out their moira with better hope for success. But the Jordanians are no fools, they long ago renounced any claim to the West Bank and would never agree to take the Palestinians. No other Arab state will, in fact -- they know damn well those who are worth having have already emigrated.
I'm afraid both Palestinians and Jordanians remember what the words "Black September" mean, so this wouldn't be an acceptable solution for them. I wish it was as easy to solve as just giving the land to some Arab state. Nobody wants this blazing toxic radioactive dump of a problem on their balance sheet - they all want it on Israel's.
I think most people actually living in the Middle East are hoping for a peace that addresses issues completely unrelated to the Palestinians. The vast majority of the deaths in Middle Eastern conflicts over the past decade, have been neither Palestinians nor Israelis. Ditto most of the new refugees, most of the conflicts with the potential for spilling across international borders and turning into hot wars, etc.
But you said "people on Middle East issues", which is broader and vaguer than just the people living in the Middle East, so maybe. "People on Middle East issues" includes an awful lot of people around the world who e.g. read newspaper articles about strife in the Middle East, wish the Middle East were at peace, might throw some votes at the politician who is seen as accomplishing that. Most of these people aren't going to put a whole lot of time into studying a complex subject, and remembering that time back in the 20th century when it mostly was Palestinians vs. Israelis is easier than understanding the enormous mostly not-Palestinian mess that is the 21st century Middle Eastern conflict(s).
Who said the war against ISIS was unwinnable?
I don't remember anybody saying it was unwinnable in principle, but I've heard a lot of people saying Trump can't win it and won't win it (or it would not be won while he's in power - there's always the "post hoc/propter hoc" question), because he's a bumbling idiot. It seems to be a very consistent pattern of underestimating him and when he proves the under-estimators wrong, claiming he's just got lucky this one time.
I distinctly remember CNN projecting in 2015 that it would take 10 years to clean up ISIS. Trump('s appointee Mattis) achieved it in one.
To be fair, if CNN and the rest of the neoliberal / neoconservative "center" had their way it *would* have taken ten years. A decade-long war makes for a lot more appropriations money, refugees and sensational headlines than a quick victory.
What positive did the killing of Soleimani achieve? The clear negative was the shoot down of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 and 176 deaths (Iran's fault, but still a consequence). What was the tangible benefit, other than the satisfaction of killing the guy?
At the very least, demoralizing members of the IRGC seems good.
Soleimani was apparently a capable leader, and that’s not fungible.
Terrorist chief being dead and no longer producing further acts of terror is a very positive thing. It also showed Iran that attacks on US citizens and US military from Iran side are not going to be tolerated - and I think Iran got the message, despite all the fuming rhetoric and show-offs that followed.
I am not sure how murdering a plane-full of Iranians and Canadians (with some Ukrainians too), done by idiotic mistake of Iranian army, figures in the calculus - nobody could have known Iranians are going to do that, so putting this as a consequence that Trump must have predicted makes absolutely no sense.
When people starting shooting at each other, unpredictable bad stuff can happen. Airliner being shot down by panicked soldiers is not certainly a usual occurrence but it has happened a bunch of times before, including in Iran. But either way, if I'm counting positive vs. negative outcomes, I have to count this on the ledger as negative.
If someone can point to a concrete good thing that has happened (e.g. power of Iranian militias in Iraq has withered) I'd count that on the ledger, but I haven't seen it.
There's a huge difference between claiming "unpredictable stuff may happen" - which is a hopeless banality that is known to everybody successfully graduating a kindergarten - and assigning responsibility for a very specific unpredictable thing that happened. If we assign all murderous actions of Iranians as negatives toward any action agains Iranian terrorists, the only possible conclusion would be that the only positive action would be immediate surrender - in this case, they wouldn't have the reason to murder Canadians, right? This counting makes absolutely no sense - the blame on terrorist acts lies on terrorists, not on somebody who tries to stop them.
I already specified the concrete good - eliminating a high-ranked terrorist, which disrupts terrorist infrastructure and operation capabilities, and deterring Iranians from further attacks, like embassy bombings and attacks on us military. If you're going to ignore it and repeatedly ask to provide you what has already been provided - it becomes willful ignorance at this stage.
This seems like a double standard- you say that since the risks of Trump's actions that people were worried about didn't materialize, they can't just write off his success as "well he got lucky". But then when Ivan is pointing out a real negative consequence, you're writing it off as unpredictable: "well he got unlucky."
It seems to me that either you ignore all expectations and predictions and focus on what actually happened, in which case the plane being shot down was a result of the strike, or you evaluate based on reasonable expectations in advance. In the latter case you can't discount the concerns about escalation just because they didn't end up happening.
I didn't say "he got unlucky". I said random unpredictable events that have no causal relationship with somebody's actions can not be presented as arguments against taking that actions, especially post-factum. It's like saying building World Trade Center was a stupid decision because it was destroyed by terrorists and that cost many lives. It's not that I am saying the architect of WTC "got unlucky" - it's that I am saying a possibility of terrorist attack should not have been the part of his decision process, and thus blaming him for not predicting it would be nonsensical. Such as blaming Trump for Iranians being murderous idiots unable to distinguish a passenger plane from a cruise missile. It's not a question of luck, it's a question of assigning retrospective blame to somebody who had nothing to do with it.
"Terrorist chief being dead and no longer producing further acts of terror is a very positive thing."
This reminds me of the world's most dangerous job - being Al Qaeda's number 2. Famously, the US killed quite a few people that the US, at least, called Al Qaeda's second in command. It never seemed to do much.
As for the plae being shot down, when tensions rise, accidents rise. Killing Soleimani absolutely raised the chances of an accident. It didn't HAVE to happen, it easily could NOT have happened. But yes, duh, it was more likely after killing him then if he hadn't been. And that was entirely forseeable.
For the record, it was #3, the #2 (Zawahiri) is like the only old timer still alive. Al Qaeda didn't really have a #3 so they could just say anyone vaguely important they killed was #3.
Fair enough! My memory must have been off.
>Terrorist chief being dead and no longer producing further acts of terror is a very positive thing.
How many terrorist acts did Qassem Soleimani produce, with how many casualties, in the year before his death? How many terrorist acts did Esmail Ghaani produce, with how many casualties, in the past year?
If the answer is "I don't know who Esmail Ghaani is; he hasn't been in the news so he can't be that bad", then I'm guessing you didn't know who Qassem Soleimani was on 2 January 2020, so that's not a good measure. If you're going to kill a foreign leader, the metric isn't "how much badness is that leader responsible for, vs. the hypothetical case where his office remains vacant and no badness happens", but the real case where the office is filled with someone probably very like the one you just killed but with an extra mandate to avenge a martyr.
There are circumstances where it is worth deliberately killing a specific foreign leader. Yamamoto and Heydrich were unusually competent, and they were killed at a time when their nations were involved in high-intensity wars where their successors wouldn't have time to regroup and settle in to their new roles. But more often than not, killing the guy who leads the organization doing Bad Stuff, either makes no difference or makes things worse.
He was pretty high up in the IRGC and apparently quite competent. You should read his Wikipedia entry, even the operations he was known to have run or assisted were pretty impactful.
Maybe killing Soleimani achieved nothing. Or maybe it prevented a great deal of grief and unrest in the world. It's impossible to know for sure, on account of our inability to peer across the multiverse and see what would have happened in the alternate reality where he was allowed to live.
An interesting book on adjacent topic: https://ronenbergman.com/rise-and-kill-first-the-book/ It is the history of Mossad's targeted assassination program, and after tracing the consequences of it - which the author does with great skill - many times one wonders - the course of events certainly changed, did it change for the best? Was there other, better way? Very hard to know.
Yes, it is. But for what it's worth I remember the 1972 Munich Olympics, and it did modestly impress me that such a thing was never even attempted again.
re: Soleimani, the issue was never, "The median outcome is WWIII". The issue is "Why roll the dice and risk a small chance of WWIII for marginal (if any) gain?"
That sounds suspiciously like Pascal Mugging. Since any action against Iran has potential (albeit tiny) chance of causing WW3, the only prudent case of action, on this logic, is to never take any action against Iran - or any other country - whatever they do. I don't think it is a sane way to conduct politics - even though there are people who may disagree. I think isolationist movement still exist - though I believe their ideas that if US isolates itself from the rest of the world, the rest of the world would stop affect it to be thoroughly stupid. I must admit though I have a vested interest in it - if US and UK remained isolationist during WW2, I would probably never have been born, neither would my parents.
Overtly and publicly assassinating a high-ranking member of the civilian military with a fucking missile is not "any action". It was brazen and provocative. It provoked a literal military response against US forces. I'm not talking about butterfly effects here.
It wasn't "any action", but your logic is applicable to any action - any action has "a small chance" of triggering the conflict, and since WW3 is so bad, we better not to take any action at all, because no benefit would be ever worth the infinite risk of WW3.
Literal military attack on US forces happened before Soleimani was killed. And also literal military attack on US embassy. And also literal military attacks on US allies. And also literal military attacks on several ships in Persian Gulf. And of course actions of Soleimani in previous years earned this many times over - and Soleimani is an individual officially designated as supporter of terrorism (though "supporter" is a very weak word to describe his real role as major organized and instigator - it's like saying Trotsky was a "supporter" of revolution is Russia).
The attack was not entirely unprovoked - Americans and allies hand recently been killed by Soleimani backed terrorists (who he was meeting at the time of his death). Also, he was banned from being in Iraq.
So killing him was an escalation, but so was him coming to Iraq in the first place.
A US vs Iran war is a bad thing, but it's not WW3. We weren't going to end up in a war with Russia or China, just potentially Iran.
Kinda, sorta, maybe. Iran *is* a Russian ally, and while Russia obviously has better things to do than go charging into WW3 over an assassination, it's certainly a brinkman's move.
(As are Putin's assassinations. But I think everyone agrees that Putin's assassinations are brinkmanship.)
It's true that Trump has proved remarkably effective at getting his way with regard to terrorists and other hostiles in the Middle East. But it has usually involved him pressuring someone and bullying them into a corner- in other words, acting like an imperialist or colonialist.
You shouldn't be too hard on Scott- not every rationalist is going to have every idea- they have to learn from each other. Probably someone *has* realized that Trump has been effective... they just aren't willing to say so. Sad or shameful ideas tend not to get shared very widely.
Iran 'did nothing' because they panicked and shot down a passenger plan and killed 176 civilians.
It's real tough to front to the global community and to yourself that you were wronged and that a counterattack is justified and that you deserve recompense after shooting down a fucking 737.
Interesting theory, which is unfortunately is contradicted by the fact that the Iranian retaliatory strike, pompously named "Operation Martyr Soleimani", had been executed before the unfortunate plane accident, and was carefully designed to look very pugilistic while not causing any serious harm or casualties. Iranians, of course, claimed there was dozens of US casualties (of which there were none), but nobody is surprised by them lying. It is possible that if they didn't have committed this catastrophic blunder, they may have performed more simulated attacks and claimed hundreds, or why be modest - thousands of US casualties, but as long as they are imaginary, that'd be the end of it anyway.
Yeah I thought it was kind of weird Scott even imagining it was conceivable the Iranians would go to war over Suleimani. With the United States, forsooth? The Iranians aren't *stupid*. That would be an extremely short war. The Iranians aren't going to go to war with the United States over *anything* short of the USMC rolling APCs and M1A1s into Tehran. It's not like everyone in the Middle East didn't pay close attention to what happened to Saddam Hussein's feared Revolutionary Guard when they got in the way of the 3rd Infantry Division on its way to Baghdad. Who wants to end up so many pieces of badly burnt toast that don't even slow the infidel's tanks down below the posted speed limit?
A rational fear would be that the Iranians would boost their support for assorted terrorism, but if one assumes they already have that dial turned up to 11, then that isn't actually a big threat. Anyway, that's the assumption the Israelis have acted under -- that if the Iranians *could* do more to encourage terrorism against their enemies, they already would, so there's no real risk in doing what you need to do. So far, it seems to have worked just fine. Mossad has committed any number of acts of war against Iran, and the Iranian response has been completely toothless.
I think Trump has an unique quality that otherwise rational people when talking about him abandon for some reason their rationality and start ascribing him some magical evil powers. Scott described some examples of that in his article, but hasn't avoided the curse himself. I mean, really - Trump causing WW3? One can't seriously believe it. I've read predictions of something like Trump could order to nuke Russia just because he supposedly didn't like something that was said about him - from otherwise adult people! We have so much motivated reasoning here if we could mine bitcoins from it we would all be millionaires. And when I read things like "maybe it's my liberal bias" I am nodding so hard my neck starts to hurt.
It's hardly unique to Trump. I wish it were. But as far as I can tell, the *only* people we have in politics these days are avatars of Jesus Christ or Adolf Hitler, although who is which is a subject of great debate.
Before the advent of TDS, I thought BDS (not the anti-semitic one, the anti-Bush one) was bad. Little did I know. I'm watching US politics for a while now, and it is true that every prominent Republican that ever had a chance of becoming a president has been declared literally Hitler, and the tradition comes directly from the times when Hitler himself was literally Hitler, and FDR himself compared Republicans to him. I'm not sure how they managed to conduct politics before that, but I think they had something too.
But still, I don't think it was as bad as literally seeing Nazi codes in numerical statistics and seriously claiming the opposing politician would literally kill all humans on Earth any second just because of momentary whim. It's some other level of detachment from reality - and beyond all hope, I still hope down in my soul this is performative and not serious, even though my brain tells me to abandon this hope.
Well, we have to wait until the present scourge has abated to find out. During the Black Death otherwise rational people burned Jews and gypsies. People do nutty things when faced with what they think are (at least somewhat) existential threats and no clear enemy. I don't think our psychologies are well-adapted to abstract threats *other* than social threats, so we kind of map every abstract threat we can't really grasp onto a social threat, and start immediately seeking out social enemies. It would be fascinating, if I were a xenobiologist from Mars.
>Yeah I thought it was kind of weird Scott even imagining it was conceivable the Iranians would go to war over Suleimani.
Did you miss the part where Iran launched a salvo of ballistic missiles against a US military base over Soleimani? And placed their air defenses on high alert against what they expected would be a prompt American counter(counter)attack? The first part is literally an act of war, and the second part strongly suggests a willingness to accept escalation of that war.
I don't know why you add the word "ballistic" as if it makes the missile bigger or scarier. A rock is a "ballistic" missile. These were dinky little things, about as far from a true ICBM (or even IRBM) as...well, a rock is from a bullet from an M2.
There were even some indications at the time that the Iranians were being somewhat careful to ensure that their attack, pathetic as it already was, militarily, ran little risk of *actually killing* any American soldiers. I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that it was a "retaliation" designed for domestic consumption, and calibrated with care to *avoid* the possibility that the Americans would actually launch a real war. All nations have a tolerance level below which "acts of war" do not *actually* result in war, and are dealt with some other lower-level way. Examples abound, even in that area of the world. And the Iranians have, more than most nations, made a study of just how far they can push it before they risk a general conflagration. If nothing else, they wouldn't be in the biz of sponsoring terrorism if they *didn't* think they could make that calculation accurately.
Putting such air defenses as Iran has on "high alert" is (1) of essentially zero tactical benefit to them, versus the Americans, or the Israelis, or indeed any First-World air force, and (2) means zip about their willingness to stomach a real fight. They would do that as a matter of course, the same way the US bumps up Defcon when some civilian airliner they're almost 100% sure is innocent wanders into a no-no zone. It's just plain operational readiness.
>I don't know why you add the word "ballistic" as if it makes the missile bigger or scarier.
It kind of does. Ballistic missiles are strategic missiles, used only for deep strikes against high-value targets, a planned offensive act. This property is shared by cruise missiles, and if the Iranians had launched a cruise missile attack the significance would be the same. But it would be silly to say "Iran launched a ballistic and/or cruise missile attack..." when in fact Iran launched a ballistic missile.
"Missiles" generally are mostly things like antitank or antiaircraft missiles, tactical weapons that might well be used by people defending themselves against a tank or aircraft that is immediately attacking them. Even air-to-surface missiles like the Hellfire that took out Soleimani, are often used defensively e.g. to provide close air support to friendly ground forces under attack.
A "missile attack" may be a small-scale defensive response to a threat. A *ballistic* missile attack, is pretty much always someone who isn't in immediate danger deciding to kill a bunch of people a few hundred or thousand kilometers away because it serves their strategic goal. And if it was meant as a non-lethal warning shot, try firing a non-lethal warning shot from a rifle at a police officer sometime; see how long you live, or how the jury feels about deciding who's the dangerous violent criminal when the shooting stops.
Re: Good People on Both Sides
Were there actually non-racists who marched at Charlottesville? If not, the ‘clarification’ that he wasn’t referring to Nazis is inaccurate and bespeaks lying/bullshitting/ignorance.
Yeah, I chafe a bit at the people who try to parse Trump's words and say he never supported the (literal) hate groups who rallied in Charlottesville. I live in Charlottesville and witnessed the events first hand. If you showed up there somehow under the impression that this was not in fact a white supremacist/facist rally then it should have become immediately apparent that you misjudged the situation and left. It wasn't at all subtle. To try and pretend like it was a demonstration that just had a few bad apples is willfully ignorant.
Certainly, but then the claim should *be* that Trump was being willfully ignorant by pretending it was a demonstration made up of decent people with a handful of Neo-Nazis mingled in. Trump obfuscating about whether some people who support him are Nazis is very different from the ‘strong hypothesis’ that he was openly supporting the Nazis.
I feel like that is splitting hairs. Of course he is not going to openly say "yes I support Nazis" (nor do I think he actually does), but he gave the distinct impression to THEM that he does. And it is not an unreasonable inference to draw. Theses people aren't stupid, they know the POTUS can't give them explicit support. But by dissembling and hedging I think a reasonable person would interpret that as some level of support.
Except he literally said "I condemn Nazis", and people parsed his words as "well, that's his secret code for saying he supports Nazis". But worst of all, after that they go around and claim he literally said "I support Nazis" and when called out on it, they answer "well, he couldn't directly say he supports them, so he said the opposite, but we all know he meant the opposite of what he said!". Sigh...
This is the classic Trump tactic though. The Proud Boys took the message "Stand back and stand by" as a message of SUPPORT. It doesn't matter that Trump literally just condemned them, Trump constantly used confusing messages to signal secret support to these types of people.
This is the classic anti-Trump tactic though. If the explicit evidence doesn't support the narrative, there is always a dog whistle to be found that shows what Trump supposedly truly meant.
Yet I never see any attempt to do the same for the other side. Surely there are at least some Biden supporters who expect some far-left things from him.
Sure, saying things like "I condemn Nazis" and having the press interpret it as "he is dogwhistling the Nazis that he supports them" is classical Trump tactics. He is doing it all the time - he is saying one thing, the press reports he said the opposite and all the "rational intellectuals" echo-chamber it into "well, we know he didn't literally say it but he sure meant it, even when he said the opposite!". Very classic. And when you point out he literally didn't say it, the classic tactic of Trump is for "rational intellectuals" to claim he is just confusing them on purpose to send secret signals.
The funniest thing here is that those same people that try to find "secret signals" in everything are then laughing at QAnon people as being irrational. I guess mirrors aren't a thing in their world.
Alternatively, Trump sends confusing messages because he talks in word salad all the time, and everyone interprets the resulting words in whatever way suits their agenda.
That is true and bad! I want to clarify that I think Scott gives Trump too much benefit of the doubt about the intentionality of his covert racism and of his attempts to woo the alt-rights.
However, I think *covert* is the operative word (isn't that what the whole "dogwhistle" idea is all about in the first place? that it's a secret?!), and so share Scott's annoyance at the "openly racist" meme.
Scott's reply to this is to CTRL+F for a woman (Michelle Piercy) claiming to have been a regular conservative. If you then take the Herculean step of googling her, you will find the "conservative group" she attended with was called "American Warrior Revolution." If you google *them*, you will find their leader on Facebook advocating for the lynching of a black state legislator.
The reason I was able to find all this is because there has already been an extensive online back-and-forth on the argument of "look, this one woman claimed to be a regular conservative" because it was taken in sum and substance from a PragerU video.
Being taken in by PragerU seems pretty embarrassing.
Substack money makes it very difficult to be embarrassed, as Andrew Sullivan is currently proving on Twitter.
Or just realizing that the median American opinion would be shamed by Twitter blue checks because they're further left than even the most left-wing congressional district. Most people wouldn't give a damn.
Being piled on by Twitter should be a badge of honor, if anything. Sullivan asked what accounts for Askhenazi Jew overrepresentation in elite fields, if not genetics, which none of the people "dunking" on him could answer.
"Sullivan asked what accounts for Askhenazi Jew overrepresentation in elite fields, if not genetics, which none of the people "dunking" on him could answer."
I'd start with the hypothesis "Ashkenazi Jews tend to value education" and go from there. This is the part I've never gotten about Sullivan, Charles Murray, etc. Why aren't they looking at culture, which still coherently defines subgroups, and skipping to genetics, which have been thoroughly homogenized by travel over the past 200 years? It's not a parsimonious explanation.
No, Scott's reply is to show that the NYT wrote down that a regular conservative was present. So for Trump to believe that regular conservatives were present, he had to believe a source no more far-right than the NYT.
This article was written days after his comments; it references them.
I didn't argue that Trump got his beliefs from the NYT. I argued that he didn't need any sources more far-right than the NYT.
The general line Scott takes of bending over backwards to give Trump a level of charity that he'd never give you is baffling. It was mostly white nationalists at Charlottesville and the ones who weren't are a rounding error. We can get lost in the weeds of what makes you a white nationalist, or what Trump believed at the time about who was protesting... but *he* doesn't care about such distinctions. By the time you've figured out what the hell he meant, he's onto the next topic.
On January 6, when Trump held his last rally of the 2020 campaign and a bunch of his audience, fired up by his speech, breached security and entered the Capitol, I was done being charitable. Oh fine, Trump said "peacefully" and I'm sure he thinks this means he has no responsibility for what happens afterwards, but that doesn't mean anyone else can't hold him responsible. I take him seriously, not literally.
So on some level, "You Are Still Crying Wolf" makes a good point. We spend all this time arguing about whether Trump is a racist (or a Russian asset) and it's just a distraction from the unambiguous awfulness.
"The general line Scott takes of bending over backwards to give Trump a level of charity that he'd never give you is baffling."
I think I can speak to at least part of this.
Trump is terrible. At this point, nothing say to me is very likely to convince me that Trump is not terrible. The details of my model of Trump are continually updating, but my overall orientation toward him is quite overdetermined, and was when most of this happened.
If the media tells me Trump refused to condemn Nazis, and then I see video of Trump condemning Nazis, the video does not redeem Trump for me. Likewise, I'm not very concerned with the prospect of being fair to Trump. If you *did* unfairly accuse him of X, well, I'm not the fairness-to-Donald-Trump police.
And I think, for a lot of people, that about wraps it up. After all, I've just said I'm not worried on Donald Trump's behalf, so, provided the media and Trump are the only relevant agents in this picture, that ought to settle the matter.
But they're not.
People in the media who inaccurately reported the literal content of Trump's statements lied *to me*. Even if we *entirely* grant that what Trump *actually* said was every bit *as bad*, their reporting of it was frequently *inaccurate*.
It didn't have to be this way- if they wanted to avoid getting into the weeds of his actual, literal claims, they *could* have issued reports reading "Trump Says Something We Think Should Outrage You, Be Outraged Now" without including any comment on the contend of Trump's utterances. That would have been very silly, but it would have been less of a stick-in-the-eye to people who care about accuracy on axes orthogonal to "how-outraged-should-I-be".
Which leaves me feeling *very strongly* that it's important to carefully log what Trump *actually said* and compare it to what various sources *say* he said- because I need to know which of those are news sources and which are "news sources". Which can, admittedly, look like trying to be charitable to Trump. I think it can even degenerate into that, if you're not careful. But Trump isn't the point; the point is, *I'm trying to see the world clearly* and *I don't like being lied to*.
Arguing, "Yes, but Trump said X, which is just as bad!" is only relevant if I'm trying to decide how to feel about *Trump*.
I agree with all of this.
I never voted for Trump and never would (except if he ran against Kang and Kodo, I guess), but I was absolutely INFURIATED by the constant lying by the media about him, particularly when they were accusing him of lying! If you're going to run a story about how someone is a liar, shouldn't you make at least a strong attempt not to lie yourself?
Add to that the sudden explosion of (poor) editorializing inserted into the middle of so-called news articles and the descent of the media is complete.
This is very much how I feel about the situation as well. I have often found myself "defending Trump" to people who only read mildly liberal/left sources and have no idea they are being lied to. I hate defending Trump, because I would like to spend some time criticizing him as well - but that area is taken and I care a lot more about truthful criticism than lying to develop a narrative.
> The general line Scott takes of bending over backwards to give Trump a level of charity that he'd never give you is baffling.
The real issue here is not Trump, in my view, but the larger picture.
Why is Charlottesville even talked about, unlike so many other tiny demonstrations by extremists? Because it fit a media agenda. That same media agenda is why they lie about Trump, ignore incidents that don't fit their agenda, 'frame' events very differently depending on whether it fits their agenda, etc, etc.
The end result is a huge disinformation campaign that creates the kind of absurd beliefs that Scott highlighted.
Trump is gone now, but this system of disinformation persists.
For what it's worth, I can see a difference between people who just want statues of civil war leaders to stay up and people who believe in Nazism. I wouldn't call the former "very fine people" but they aren't nearly as dangerous.
**THERE WAS NO STATUE PROTEST! IT WAS ALL NEO-NAZIS!**
There was the tiki torch "Jews Will Not Replace Us" rally one night, and then the violent clash with antifa the next day. At no time was there any significant plausibly-deniable Southern heritage contingent, or if there was I've never seen any record of it.
Trump was praising people who did not exist, or if they did, weren't in Charlottesville that day. The most charitable take I can give is that he was just dangerously misinformed about the nature of what was going on there, and talking out of his ass like he always does. But as I said above, I'm done being charitable.
What's wrong with advocating for the lynching of a legislator? That seems like good ol' vigorous American populism. I've heard any number of legislators' necks proposed for the noose, of both parties, black, white, brown or yellow. I may have even thought approvingly of the idea in passing myself.
I suppose if you have evidence that this particular legislator was proposed for hanging *just because he was black* as opposed to because he was a legislator (which seems crime enough in itself), you might want to present that.
The question is not whether there were in fact any non-racists marching with the Neo-Nazis at Charlottesville. The question is whether Trump claimed there were.
The quote provided by Scott shows that Trump *claimed* he was not speaking about the white supremacists and Nazis, and that he was referring to an ill-defined group of "young people" who were also there, instead. This shows that Trump was, at worst, trying to keep “moderate racists” happy, but that importantly, he did so while maintaining plausible deniability about whether he was excusing them *as* racists, or saying they *weren't* racists.
Thus, it fits Scott's main thesis that Trump was not "openly" supporting white-supremacy.
Yes.
No
Why wouldn't there have been? The rally was in support of a perfectly sensible cause, against the destruction of a state of... whoever, it doesn't really matter. If I'd lived in Charlottesville I might well have been there myself.
Presumably not chanting "Jews will not replace us," though?
The issue is, even if it was 10,000 people even mildly right of center and one fringe lunatic, the media would have claimed it was a far right neo-nazi rally. You have to take all of this with the context that the national media in the U.S. is essentially the propaganda arm of one political party.
Okay, so even though it was a white supremacist rally, that doesn't count because the media would have called them white supremacist even if they weren't? To me the thing that makes the rally white supremacist isn't that the media said so, it's that it was planned and publicized by white supremacists, the marchers chanted white supremacist slogans, etc.
My point was - if you hear from the national media that the non-left wing participants in a rally are fascists / nazis / white supremacists, all that means is that their beliefs can be anywhere from slightly right of center, to far right. It wouldn't give you any more information than that.
But what does that have to do with the price of tea in China? I didn't bring up the media, you did, just like you brought up this hypothetical 10,000-person rally. Are you saying this particular rally, this Charlottesville rally, was *not* a white supremacist rally? Are you saying you don't know?
One of the speakers led a call and response chant of "What did Hitler do wrong?" (Response: "NOTHING!")
> the change in race relations 2017-2021 will be less negative/more positive than the change 2009-2016
Maybe I'm just totally confused by simple arithmetic, but why is this evaluation based on change in the score rather than the raw score itself? If the percent of blacks who thought race relations were good declined (from 46% to 36%) during the Trump, isn't that just another way of saying that race relations were *more* negative? Sure it didn't decline as quickly as it did from Bush to Obama, but it's still a decline.
I think the point is that if race relations deteriorated by the same amount during Trump's tenure as during Obama's tenure, then Trump isn't having a uniquely negative impact on race relations. That said, I don't really think it's a useful comparison because you're comparing eight Obama years to four Trump years.
If you compare 4 years to 4 years (2014-2017, 2017-2020, both inclusive), it still looks okay for trump by the metric given. 2014-2017 looks like it's 60->46 (-14), and 2017-2020 is 46->36 (-10).
However, I think the metric chosen, the rate of change in percentage who think race relations are very or somewhat good, might be bogus.
On the extremes, the metric doesn't work. If a president were to tank the current 36% down to 15%, then any president who followed them, no matter what they did, wouldn't be worse by this metric. After all, 36->15 is -21, and the worst the next president could possibly do is 15->0 (only -15).
I think that phenomenon already will appear at larger percents. I would guess that it takes more extreme events to move the percent from 46% to 36% than it took it to reduce it from 60% to 46% in the first place. I don't know how to quantify this, but I am pretty convinced that you can't just compare those two differences directly.
Either ratio, or ratio of odds, seems better to me for measuring changes of a fraction.
36/46 is about .78, and 46/60 is about .76.
For the odds measure we would have to compute (36/64)/(46/54) and (46/54)/(60/40), or better yet, use the number who actually gave the opposite number in the denominator, rather than lumping in the "don't know"s.
Here's the data for those years in that chart (apologies if the formatting is bad, there's no preview or edit button, and no obvious way to insert a table):
Year Very+ Somewhat+ Somewhat- Very- No Opinion
2020 4 32 29 34 1
2016 7 42 29 21 0
2013 8 58 24 9 1
Note, I had to compromise on the years. Data's only available for 2008, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2020. Since Scott used 2017, I suspect he guessed at the data from the interpolated graph, which seems a little suspect. I'll stick to the nearest years I can that have data. "No opinion" answers were consistently 1% or less, so it turns out that doesn't really change much.
That gives us 2013-2016 as ((7+42)/(29+21))/((8+58)/(24+9)) = 0.49
For 2016-2020, that gives us ((4+32)/(29+34))/((7+42)/(29+21)) = 0.58
This seems in-line with the ratio too.
Let's dig up the actual data this is based on though before we draw a conclusion... https://news.gallup.com/file/poll/318971/200902RaceRelations.pdf
They have written there "For results based on sample of 300 non-Hispanic black adults, the maximum margin of sampling error is ±7 percentage points.".
I've gotta say a n=300 poll doesn't instill me with massive confidence, and that's just for the 2020 data. It's quite possible the previous years have even worse sample sizes. If we were to assume the sampling error were also up to 7% for the 2016 data, the then the difference of less than 14% could fall entirely in sampling error.
In conclusion, measuring the ratio of odds does seem to agree with Scott's prediction, but I don't think it's all that meaningful given the relatively small sample size and the fact that it doesn't cover a few key years around change of president.
Tabstops did not give pretty spacing for my table, so it looks bad. You'll just have to imagine it's pretty, or go hunt it down on the gallop page Scott linked.
The prediction is not about the percent, but about the rate of change (about the derivative of the percent). If you look at the chart for the poll linked, it's easy to see this as the slope on the trendline they graph. The prediction was that the trend wouldn't become even more negative.
Why is this the right thing to predict on? Well, the argument wasn't that Trump would heal existing race relations issues, but rather than he would not accelerate their deterioration further. It seems quite plausible that race relations would have continued to deteriorate under any president, given the prevailing trend-line, but the narrative of the time really was that Trump would lead to unprecedented overt racism, far worse than the previous years.
I do agree with you that it's a dubious metric to predict on for a few reasons.
Most notably, the trend can't really be linear forever, and near the fringes, I entirely expect it to start to flatten out.
For example, if under Biden, it went from "36% of black adults think race relations are bad" to "15% of black adults think race relations are bad", you could make the same prediction (it won't decrease as much) with 100% confidence, since the number obviously can't go below 0%. I think that slightly extreme example helps to illustrate that some percent changes may be more important than others. Going from 50% to 40% probably requires less drastic perceived issues than going from 10% to 0%, even though they're both the same percent total change.
I think Scott gets this prediction right based on how he worded it. I think you're on to something that this isn't a great prediction though, and I'm reasonably convinced that comparing the rate of change on that graph isn't really all that sensical.
> Well, the argument wasn't that Trump would heal existing race relations issues, but rather than he would not accelerate their deterioration further.
I think the implicit assumption here that I'd been missing is something like "a presidency has control over the acceleration of the race relation score, but not directly over the race relation score itself". If this is true, then it makes sense to judge the presidency based on change in slope rather than change in absolute number.
I can see how that assumption *might* be true, but it's not obvious that it really is. Is there good writing on the dynamics of race relations that would attest to that?
> a presidency has control over the acceleration of the race relation score, but not directly over the race relation score itself
I think the assumption is more than the president is one factor, but there are many factors. Since the president is not the only factor, you can't judge it just based on the score, and you have to just sort-of assume the other factors remain constant. Which is obviously dubious, at best. In my mind, this is pretty similar to judging a president by the performance of the economy. Sure, they have some influence over it, but there are other important factors outside of their control, and a healthy dose of dumb luck mixed in too.
The assumption that the president does have some control here, though, is one that I do think other pundits and the media at the time were making, and Scott's prediction was contextualized by that.
At the time Scott made these predictions, it was repeated by some pundits that voting in Trump would embolden white supremacists, etc etc, which I would expect race relations to measure. The claim by the media and pundits did seem to be that this specific president would have an impact on race relations.
Also there seems to be an assumption that the race relation score will tend to have constant velocity (ie spiraling downward or cycling upward, for example) unless acted upon. This seems like it could be reasonable, but why can't we rule out default-stable (even stably negative) race relations?
And it's not even clear that the decline slowed, since 10% over 4 years, starting from a lower base percentage, is faster than 15% over 8 years.
Error: for "Maciej Ceglowski" read "Zeynep Tufecki".
I think I'm right here - it was an argument by Maciej made on Zeynep's blog.
You are absolutely right and I should have been more careful, apologies!
What is the calculation for the 5% number? Wapo article shows support went from 20 to 21 which sounds like 5%?
Which 5% number are you talking about?
<quote>The only ethnic group where he didn't gain at least 5% over Romney's numbers was whites. </quote>
You're right, I meant (and have edited it to say) "five percentage points)
> As soon as rioters got in the Capitol, Trump tweeted that this wasn't what he wanted and they should leave.
What tweet is this referring to? This wasn't my recollection, and I can't find any source matching it?
I can find a tweet soon after they stormed the capitol saying "Stay peaceful!". This is *not* remotely comparable to "I don't want this, and you all should leave", and I can't fathom that interpretation. Trump's video statement (which sounds more like the quote above) came long after the riot had been fully and totally quelled by the authorities.
I was baffled reading that whole section of the post, so it made me question whether my recollection was off. If Trump had immediately tweeted "I don't want this, you all need to go home immediately" once they stormed the capitol, I'd feel quite differently about his culpability in the incident! (At least, his intent regarding it). But I can't find what you're referring to. What are the quotes for the tweets you're using?
I'll also note that the other reason this version of events is somewhat confusing to me is that I was snooping around various Trump communities at the time (in fascination/horror), and... well they absolutely thought he was encouraging it! And when the *video* dropped that night, they were quite devastated by what they felt was a betrayal. Of course, their opinions on what Trump believes aren't exactly reliable, but that's at least the source of the memory of that day.
So, what am I missing? What were the statements/tweets/actions from Trump that seemed to have the serious intention of doing his best to send the rioters home?
You're right, it was a video, not a tweet. The video said “I know your pain, I know you’re hurt,” Trump said. “But you have to go home now, we have to have peace. We have to have law and order, we have to respect our great people in law and order.”" See https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/06/trump-tells-capitol-rioters-to-go-home-now-but-still-calls-the-election-stolen.html
This was slightly over two hours after the break-in. He tweeted three times between the break-in and this, and none of those tweets told people to leave.
Indeed, one of them said ""Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution." One would have to be pretty stupid to consider that benign, given that Pence was inside the Capitol while it was being occupied.
Thanks. I've edited it to say that he first tweeted that people should stay peaceful and respect Capitol police, then later released a video telling them to leave.
It currently says "then released". This was two hours later; I think "then later released" or "eventually released" would give a more accurate picture.
Even that ignores the "did nothing at all with the power of the Executive branch at his fingertips for two hours" which is just a crazy thing to leave out of the framing.
s/ignores/minimizes/
Isn't this grotesquely dishonest when Trump's first tweet was actually "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution." and as a direct result of this tweet people still in the Capitol building started chanting "Hang Mike Pence".
A truthful telling of the story is that Trump initially increased tempers on twitter and only after Capitol police had the situation under control and it was clear congress and the VP was safe, did he ask people to stay peaceful, respect Capitol police, and then hours later release a video.
Timeline
2:12 p.m.: The first rioter enters the Capitol through the broken window,[83] opening a door for others.
2:24 p.m.: President Trump tweets,
"Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!"
2:26 p.m.: Trump calls Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), having misdialed Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL). Lee passes his phone to Tuberville, who informs Trump that Pence had just been evacuated from the Senate chamber. “I said ‘Mr President, they've taken the Vice President out. They want me to get off the phone, I gotta go’,” he recounted to reporters of his call.
That 2:26 call by the way, was to convince Tuberville to delay the vote further. Giuliani made a similar misdial at a similar time and left a message.
In the first 14 minutes of rioters breaching Capitol Hill, Trump's two known actions were to throw Mike Pence under the bus and dial the wrong number while trying to contact the Senator from Alabama. On this call, Trump learns that the VP is safe.
Simultaneously
2:26 p.m.: After receipt of a call from DC Mayor Muriel E. Bowser indicating that DoD had refused to send assistance to the U.S. Capitol, the Public Safety Secretary of Virginia, Brian Moran, dispatches the Virginia State Police to the US capitol as permitted by mutual aid agreement with DC.[91]
Ten minutes later Trump decides to tweet
2:38 p.m.: President Trump tweets,
"Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!"[64]
Actions speak a lot louder than words, Scott. Stop carrying water for a fascist.
Got it. Yeah, this is the crux of the divergence between us. If not for his actions *during* the riot itself, then I would be willing to believe that Trump was simply carelessly egging on his supporters, and while he wanted some angry demonstration, he was horrified to see the nut jobs take things too far and storm the capitol itself.
But I simply cannot square that narrative with his actual actions during the riot! His supporters were inside the capitol for *several hours*. There was obvious public pressure on him to tell his supporters to stop, go home, because surely he doesn't intend for them to storm the capitol? And yet... he did no such thing. It was only hours after it was fully quelled that he finally made that statement.
He uses Twitter to chime in on every little issue. If he saw his supporters violently storm the capitol, supporters who genuinely believed they were following his guidance, I struggle to construct a version of events where he was against what they were doing, but still chose not to say anything of the sort.
To be clear, I'm not litigating his premeditation of how it played out, because I don't think we have the evidence to wade into that quagmire. I'm just referring to how he felt about the storming of the capitol *as it happened*.
What's the alternative version of events? As they violently storm the capitol, he stays totally quiet because... []. I don't know how to fill in that blank. Like, the obvious narrative is that whatever his ultimate intentions, he liked that his supporters were "fighting" for him (it fits with his effort to get Pence to throw out the election ballots, even if that had little chance of success).
But what's the alternative? Are there folks who believe that Trump was staunchly opposed to what the rioters were doing, but stayed quiet in the moment? I mean this as genuine question, because the coverage of the events that I saw were from the mainstream liberal outlets, and the more far-gone Trump supporting groups, both of which absolutely agree that he was in support of the rioters in the moment (and of course turned on them when they failed, for obvious reasons).
I think this question is well-framed and would be interested to hear responses from Scott and others who have landed on the "no coup" side of the fence.
The riot in the Capitol had no way to be a coup, because there was no plausible path for them to take power or put Trump back into power. They could and did terrify a bunch of congressmen and policemen, but there was no victory condition. Suppose they took the whole congress hostage--how does that keep Trump in office? Suppose they mobbed a bunch of congressmen and killed a couple? Again, how does that keep Trump in office?
It's not actually a game of capture the flag. If your mob takes over the Capitol, you don't get to pass any legislation or decide to accept or reject the reported results of the election or appoint a new president. You just get to vandalize the capitol and maybe get someone shot, and then you go home and get arrested for rioting in the Capitol and go to jail.
So, okay, explain to me: Trump says that if Pence throws out the votes, Trump gets to win. So why wouldn't rioters who believe Trump, also believe that if they intimidate Pence to throw out the votes (or kill him and he gets replaced by a VP who will do so), then that's a victory condition according to them?
That's what Trump told them, that there is a path to victory and it all depends on getting Pence and Congress to do what Trump wanted them to do.
That this wouldn't plausibly happen doesn't matter. An attempted coup is an attempted coup even if it was a stupid attempted coup. And as I've said elsewhere, it was an attempted coup already from the moment Trump asked Pence to throw out the votes, the rioters were just supporting Trump in this attempt, but it'd have still be an attempted coup even if there were no rioters at all.
Is it "an attempted coup" if just one guy with an AR-15 storms the Capitol? Or would that be a lone nutcase committing a crime? How about a group of 5 charging the Senate? Does it change if they get to shoot a Senator or two before getting mown down?
Normally we only call things "coups" (attempted or not) if they have at least a snowball's chance in Hell of prevailing. Otherwise we call it random lunacy and/or criminality.
That 200 excited supporters with maybe a dozen hand weapons between them could topple the entire freaking United States government is a tale only Robert Ludlum could make credible.
If Pence had done what Trump wanted, it might have caused a constitutional crisis, but it would not have been a coup. A coup is not the same thing as a legal-but-sketchy move to try to keep power.
"It's not actually a game of capture the flag."
It is though. That's how power works. In the scenario where the mob takes over the Capitol and winds up killing the VP and a few high profile members of congress, the nation is in absolute disarray. Trump claims some nebulous emergency powers to delay the transition (he can't legally do this but does it anyway) and hey, he actually won the election anyway so this is the fair and right and legal thing to do (he says).
People challenge this. Trump calls them cheaters. His mob calls them cheaters. It goes to the Supreme Court. Another 'Stop the Steal' rally occurs which is similarly underpoliced. Members of the Supreme Court either see the writing on the wall and drop the case or don't see the writing on the wall and are summarily executed by yet another fascist mob.
Is this enough to secure Trump as a dictator? I don't know. Widespread counterprotests ensue along with the now expected egregious police brutality to quell them. Trump passes an executive order making protest a felony and fascists fash up all the protestors and a good number of democratic legislators as well under vague 'incitement' laws in the order.
Trump might be able to stay in office if Congress refuses to certify the election results from some States with improperly-held elections which happened to vote in-favor of Biden..
Of course there was a plausible path: kill or terrify Congressmen until there were enough votes to certify the alternate electoral slates that Republicans had been shouting about for months. Of course it wouldn't be popular, but it would add a legal argument for legitimacy on top of the voter-fraud argument for popular legitimacy, and most of the people powerful enough to fight back would be conveniently lying in pools of their own blood.
My actual model is that Trump's an extremely self-centered narcissist who cares about other people *mostly* as props for his ego, *possibly* excepting his family.
My actual model of his information sources is that he was thoroughly bubbled- that he'd rooted out anyone around him who'd tell him stuff he didn't want to hear.
That model wouldn't be "horrified to see the nut jobs take things too far." There's an argument that he'd see what was happening as mostly symbolic- I don't think there was anyone around him, at that point, who'd say "Holy shit, this is a big deal! You need to do something about this!" I kind of believe that argument, but without much confidence and it's not a crux for me.
That model is *entirely* consistent with being happy his supporters were fighting for him. I'd call that the default outcome, and it fits well with the hypothesis sketched above.
I think he failed to act when he had an affirmitive duty to act, probably for reasons that were extremely petty. To the extent that this was deliberate, which I think it very likely was, I think it was probably a violation of his oath of office.
(I mean, as I read it, it definitely *was* a failure to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States [...] to the best of [his] ability.") So it *was* a violation of his oath of office, full stop. But I read this as a *very* demanding oath, one which all modern Presidents have violated, and I've noticed that other people disagree with me about this. They seem to think "to the best of my ability" does not actually mean "to the extent that I possibly can," but rather something more convenient, some other standard which an actual human being might meet. Under their reading, I think the relevance of the oath in this particular case becomes much more ambiguous. I do apologize for the digression, but I don't wish to give the impression I think the situation is ambiguous: it seems to me Trump quite clearly violated the oath-as-written.)
I wouldn't call this a "coup."
There's a great big space between "Trump means well, but tragically fails to quell the riot while emoting appropriately" and "Trump attempts to execute a coup". There's "Trump inappropriately sits by and lets things happen." If your model of Trump mostly precludes meaning well or emoting appropriately, the choice is more between the latter two.
I think a lot of people feel like what Trump did was *really seriously bad, you guys*, and it's just *awkward* not to have a word that encapsulates that badness. So they feel around for the closest one that fits, and use that, even if it's not *exactly* right. I know people like this in meatspace, people I'm pretty sure *wouldn't* have used the word "coup" to describe this if it happened in a storybook, or a history book, somewhere far away where their emotions weren't engaged. And I *do* think there should be someone saying either, "Well, not technically," or else clarifying that yes, this *is* how they intend to define the word from here on out, in *all* contexts.
+1
Trump made various attempts to stay in office that involved trying to get people who arguably had the legal authority to somehow change or revisit the election outcome to do so in his favor. Part of this involved spreading a set of claims about massive election fraud that, as best I can tell, was nonsense. (Though to be fair, Trump and his operation were inept enough that it is possible there *was* evidence of fraud that could have helped him, but they couldn't get it together enough to do anything with it.) This was all the kind of very bad stuff that made him a poor choice to put in a position of power and trust.
But that's not a coup. Lying to his supporters about election fraud isn't a coup. Trying (ineptly) to strong-arm election officials and Republican congressmen and VP Pence into reversing the election result somehow isn't a coup. Inciting a riot that got some poor gullible lady killed isn't a coup. They're all bad things, but most bad things a president can do to try to stay in power aren't coups.
Would it have been a coup if Mike Pence had done what Trumpists wanted and re-elected Trump? Seems like a pointlessly fine line to draw on the coup spectrum.
He made that video long after frantic phone calls from Pence and McCarthy and only Biden went on TV calling for him to make a statement. He refused to call in the National Guard. Pence led that effort, which is technically illegal because the VP is not in the chain of command.
Well, you're sort of correct, and Scott is sort of correct. See here (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56004916) for the full timeline, but the order of tweets from him after the riots breached the capitol grounds was was:
2:14p - "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done..." [Rioters reportedly began chanting for Pence's head shortly after this tweet.]
3:13p - "I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence!..."
4:17p - [A video that starts with] "I know your pain, I know you're hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us...But you have to go home now..." [and ends with] "We love you, you're very special...But go home, and go home in peace."
6p - "These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!"
Shortly thereafter, his account was suspended.
In my opinion, the 6p tweet is the most damning. At the time, it felt tailor-made to encourage protestors to regroup for further attacks while buying everyone some time with a thin veneer of "But no violence though [wink, wink]!"
He was definitely speaking out of both sides of his mouth that day. Who knows where he actually stood?
One thing is clear, though: If you start with the assumption that he really did want the violence to end and the bad actors to go home, he displayed perhaps the least competence ever exhibited by someone in a position of power with that sort of goal in that sort of situation.
To me, he seemed to suffer from a pathological need to keep all his options open, up to and including gratefully accepting a shiny new dictatorship from the bloody hands of a violent coup leader.
But how would this have led to a dictatorship? A mob of the president's supporters can't appoint a dictator.
A mob of supporters appointing a dictator is literally how every dictatorship starts.
Isn't it usually a military coup?
"To me, he seemed to suffer from a pathological need to keep all his options open, up to and including gratefully accepting a shiny new dictatorship from the bloody hands of a violent coup leader."
I agree with this characterization.
Also, well said! (Sorry for the double-post. Didn't we have an edit button at one point?)
We don't have an edit button, but we can delete our own posts.
Thanks! Much appreciated.
Ugh i'm really conflicted on this post. I realize you can't address 100% of every controversy around trump in your assessent of prediction post trump presidency. But it's hard for me to square your statement about white supremacists in his administration with the separation of children at the border and his disgusting, horrible comments about charlottesville.
I did address the Charlottesville thing. I feel like the border thing is kind of stretch to attribute to white supremacy - again, I admit he's a horrible person, but you can't just say that anything bad someone does is evidence they're a Nazi doing that bad thing to promote white supremacy.
What's the least-obviously-racist thing that you interpret as promoting white supremacy?
The architect and fiercest defender of the border separations was Stephen Miller, right? Is there any doubt that he's an out-and-out white supremacist?
A Jewish man with a non-white wife.
https://www.npr.org/2019/11/26/783047584/leaked-emails-fuel-calls-for-stephen-miller-to-leave-white-house
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/18/us/politics/stephen-miller-white-nationalism.html
https://www.businessinsider.com/stephen-miller-latino-classmate-friends-2017-10
None of that makes him a white supremacist
Well, sorry not to have met your exacting standards.
But Biden and Obama had the same policy on child separation, unless you think all three were/are white supremacists it leaves you in a difficult position.
Obama did not have the same policy on child separation. Trump implemented a no tolerance policy that split up children. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_administration_family_separation_policy
At least for Biden this seems to be strictly wrong: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/feb/25/glenn-beck/no-biden-not-separating-families-entering-country/
Obama's policy was not the same. His was for minors who there was a credible reason to believe we're trafficking victims. Stephen Miller's explicit goal was family separation as a form of deterrence.
Without necessarily disagreeing with the conclusion, I'm not sure about the reasoning around "the most racist-sounding comments anyone was able to get out of Trump". Just because those two are the two the media ran with, doesn't necessarily mean that they're the worst.
This is counterintuitive and insane and I can't possibly explain the mechanism. You would think that the (by all indiciations, strongly anti-Trump) media would take the worst thing he'd ever said or done and beat *that* to death. But in individual non-Trump instances where I know what's going on, this often seems not to be the case. Instead, headlines and articles will lead with what I see as an unnecessarily weak case --- weak enough, and unnecessarily enough, that I'm tempted to call it "deliberately weak". (Of course, this may be "deliberately" in some vague cultural evolution sense.)
A recent example is the sexual harassment allegations against Cuomo. (I'll ignore the argument that COVID-related allegations are more serious and should have dominated, since people of different political faiths can reasonably disagree about that.) I recall seeing exactly one headline that contained an actual quote. It's this (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/01/nyregion/cuomo-harassment-anna-ruch.html) NYT article, which accuses Cuomo of an unwanted advance at a wedding. The quote in the headline is "can I kiss you?"
Without having read into allegations in detail, I have no reason to doubt that Cuomo did some abhorrent things. That incident, even, seems like (in context and with more information) his behavior was likely entirely inappropriate. But that makes it *that much stranger* that the quote they went with is "Can I kiss you?" --- in and of itself, pretty much the most bland and least offensive thing possible.
So in this context, I could easily write a paragraph like the one you wrote, saying in essence "Cuomo can't have said anything bad, because the best the news could come up with was 'can I kiss you', which is pathetic." This leads me to distrust that reasoning.
There's another example, where I personally know details --- a high school teacher who openly and fairly horrible harassed students in class. This was in public, in broad daylight, everyone knew it and talked about it, etc etc etc. When the news finally covered this, the most extreme and obvious stories (I don't want to write nominally non-public details here, sorry) were omitted!
So to apply this stuff to Trump. Trump did not, in fact, institute interment camps at which hundreds of thousands of muslims were imprisoned. (This was in line with my main worries post-election, although I count certain immigration policies as correct predictions. Hey, I'm not as honest as you are.) But *suppose he had*. Would that have been in the news, non-stop, for 4 years? Suppose he had said: "I call on my supporters to work to eliminate the islamist threat", or some other openly-calling-for-violence thing along those lines. I'm not sure that that would have occupied as much media attention as, for example, that highschooler in DC with an awkward/obnoxious smile.
Again, I can't put my finger on the mechanism. Media time seems to be preferentially spent not on the bad things, but on the controversial things, so that unequivocally bad things get less attention than tea-leaf-reading exercises.
In conclusion: I would not take the fact that the media focused mainly on some particularly pathetic quotes as a sign that there were no substantially worse quotes.
Good point. It reminded me of Toxoplasma of Rage: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
> Again, I can't put my finger on the mechanism. Media time seems to be preferentially spent not on the bad things, but on the controversial things, so that unequivocally bad things get less attention than tea-leaf-reading exercises.
Media is probably driven by controversy and divisiveness. If everyone agrees that something is bad or good, people don't yell at each other online, share the links, drive clicks, etc. I think it fits the data fairly well.
Correction: Prediction 2 does not mean that you thought there was only a 50% chance of Trump getting the Republican nomination. It means that you thought that there was only a 50% chance of Trump getting the Republican nomination *conditioned on Republicans winning the Presidency in 2020*. It seems fairly reasonable to assume that the Republicans would have had a smaller chance of winning with Trump than with somebody else, and thus, your implied confidence that Trump won the Republican nomination could well have been more than 50% (though no more than 80%).
"As soon as rioters got in the Capitol, Trump tweeted that this wasn't what he wanted and they should leave."
Trump absolutely did not tweet that the rioters should leave the Capitol, something that any normal person would have done immediately. Excerpts from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2021_storming_of_the_United_States_Capitol including all of Trump's tweets.
12:53 p.m.: Rioters overwhelm police along the outer perimeter west of the Capitol building, pushing aside temporary fencing. Some protesters immediately follow, while others, at least initially, remain behind and admonish the others: "Don't do it. You're breaking the law."[74] By 1:03 p.m., a vanguard of rioters have overrun three layers of barricades and have forced police officers to the base of the west Capitol steps.[71]
1:59 p.m.: Chief Sund receives the first reports that rioters had reached the Capitol's doors and windows and were trying to break in.[83]
2:05 p.m.: Kevin Greeson is declared dead after suffering a heart attack outdoors on the Capitol grounds.[84]
2:11 p.m.: Rioter Dominic Pezzola breaks a window on the northwest side of the Capitol with a plastic shield.[83]
2:12 p.m.: The first rioter enters the Capitol through the broken window,[83] opening a door for others.[71]
2:24 p.m.: President Trump tweets,
"Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!"[64]
2:26 p.m.: Trump calls Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), having misdialed Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL). Lee passes his phone to Tuberville, who informs Trump that Pence had just been evacuated from the Senate chamber. “I said ‘Mr President, they've taken the Vice President out. They want me to get off the phone, I gotta go’,” he recounted to reporters of his call.[90]
2:38 p.m.: President Trump tweets,
"Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!"[64]
3:13 p.m.: President Trump tweets,
"I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!"[64]
4:17 p.m.: Trump uploads a video to his Twitter denouncing the riots, but maintaining the false claims that the election was stolen.[64] This was one of three takes, with the "most palatable option" chosen by White House aides for distribution.[97]
If we're talking about the same video, it includes the lines:
“I know your pain, I know your hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election and everyone knows it, especially the other side. But you have to go home now, we have to have peace, we have to have law and order, we have to respect our great people in law and order. We don’t want anybody hurt. It’s a very tough period of time. There’s never been a time like this where such a thing happened where they could take it away from all of us. From me, from you, from our country. This was a fraudulent election, but we can’t play into the hands of these people. We have to have peace. So, go home. We love you, you’re very special. You’ve seen what happens, you see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel. But go home, and go home in peace.”
I think this qualifies as telling the rioters to stop rioting and leave. Obviously it is a terrible statement in many other ways and should have been more condemnatory, but it's telling them to follow the law and leave, which is inconsistent with it being a deliberate coup.
This was two hours and three tweets after the first break-in. (An earlier version of this comment said the riot had been quelled at that point, but the timeline shows that to be false.)
I believe OPs issue is not that he didn't say that, but with the 'as soon as' part.
BTW I think you are right about many other things in this post and in particular "You Are Still Crying Wolf" was correct. I just think you're mischaracterizing this particular incident.
Are you going to ignore the *hours* before he said anything of the sort, and that in fact the first thing he tweeted after the rioters were breaking in, was not something in condemnation of them, but rather in condemnation of Mike Pence, at which point the rioters started shouting "Hang Mike Pence" (after reading Trump's tweet over megaphone)? Is it so easy for Trump to cover his ass for your sake, by making some noise of condemnation HOURS later, while not doing anything to defend and protect the constitution that he was sworn to uphold?
He bashed Pence, he praised the rioters, and he even said "Remember this day". He LOVED the riot, and he DID attempt a coup by asking Pence to just throw out the results of the election, becoming the first president in US history who refused to surrender power peacefully.
"And Brutus is an honorable man...."
> Trump absolutely did not tweet that the rioters should leave the Capitol, something that any normal person would have done immediately
Why would any normal person have done that?
"Occupying" government buildings has been seen as a legitimate protest tactic in the US for decades. How could Trump have predicted that these standards would all turn on a dime the moment that it was his side doing the occupation?
For the record, I don't think protesters of any stripe should go round "occupying" places, blocking streets or otherwise inconveniencing people, but it's hard to argue that it's okay for some but not for others.
Any normal *president* would say that people occupying the Capitol should leave. Tolerating violent attacks on government buildings (let alone the legislative branch at a time when numbers 2 through four of the line of succession were present) is outside the range of normal presidential behavior.
AFAICT Sanders substantially changed his political positioning from "specifically economic-class-based progressivism somewhat skeptical of identity politics" in 2016 to "maximally progressive on all axes" in 2020. It seems plausible to attribute the increasing share of racial minority groups among his supporters to that shift. So insofar as you made a prediction there, arguably it was implicitly conditional on something that didn't happen (that Sanders himself would stay constant, though the political environment might shift around him).
Don't forget that time he accepted an endorsement from Joe Rogan.
"A pessimistic take is that race has become so emotionally charged that everyone including me has crazy beliefs, which makes me a more biased judge and lets me award myself points more shamelessly than I would do anywhere else."
I'll be honest, my opinion is that this pessimistic take is more accurate than the optimistic one. I think tons of people attacking you on your Trump-racist takes in hyperbolic terms has led you to getting rather defensive when it comes to this topic.
Here's some examples, in my mind.
1. "Stand back and stand by" is very different then "stand down", I'm honestly not sure why you're conflating them. What Trump says means "don't do anything yet, but be ready to".
2. What's the citation for Trump immediately telling his supporters to stop on January 6th? He eventually did, after it was all over, but my memory, of all the reporting afterword, was that Republican congresspeople were begging him to do so and he kept on refusing. I'd be happy to be corrected on this!
3. Charlottesville. I can't claim to know that literally EVERY single person chanting "The Jews will not replace us" was, like, in the KKK or some other organization, but I also don't think I would ever say that there were "good people" who did so. As shambibble says, even Michelle Piercy, mentioned in the post, is/was part of a group whose leader advocates lynching.
I agree that people were way too worried in late 2016/early 2017 that Trump would lead an ethnic cleansing! I agree that your post at that time had some good points about that! But, again, maybe because of how people reacted, you've always been kind of defensive about this issue. Because of that, I don't trust your self-assessment.
1. Even if you think that the shift from "stand down" to "stand back" is meaningful, it only happened after Trump unequivocally condemned white supremacists twice, and it was only applied to the Proud Boys and not the white supremacists. I think the general reporting of this as "Trump refuses to condemn white supremacists" was extremely dishonest, and that even if I'm wrong about how to interpret the Proud Boy comments there's no way I'm as wrong as they were.
2. The citation is https://www.wbur.org/news/2021/01/06/go-home-trump-supporters-us-capitol-transcript
3. I think you're having to back down from "everyone at that protest was a literal Nazi" to "someone at that protest was part of a group whose leader made a racist comment". Yes, everyone there was way on the right, I think that's compatible with Trump saying some of them were good people. I think some people in eg Hamas, the Chinese Communist Party, etc can all be good people, even though they're all affiliated with terrible groups.
https://twitter.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1317122552225951744
1) Saying "sure" is not actually condemning. "Are you willing to apologize?" "Sure" is not apologizing; saying "I'm sorry" is apologizing. Similarly, saying "sure" you're willing to condemn white supremacists is, in my mind, very different then saying "I condemn white supremacists". I'm not saying he was encouraging them! Saying "Sure" is better then nothing! But then saying "stand back" kinda negates that.
2) As has been pointed out a few times in this thread, he only posted that video after the riot at the capital was over. In my post, I even said he did condemn after it was over. In your post, you said "as soon as the rioters got into the Capital", which, again, as far as I know is false. The timing does matter; if you plan a bank robbery with people, but condemn it and say people should get out of the bank AFTER they've been arrested, it's not exactly evidence that you didn't think the should rob the bank.
3) Maybe I was unclear; I don't think "everyone at that protest was a literal Nazi". I agree that people in Hamas, or the Chinese Communist Party, or even literal Nazis can be good people. People are complicated. But if I see a bunch of people loudly praising the Great Leap Forward, and my reaction is to say "there are some good people there", most people aren't going to take it as a philosophical "any large group of people will have some good people in it". Most people will understand it as me agreeing with the Great Leap Forward, or at least that I'm trying to get the support of people who do.
> Saying "sure" is not actually condemning.
This is the kind of silly nitpicking that proves the point, IMO.
I think you're underselling the situation with "someone at that protest was part of a group whose leader made a racist comment".
The woman who you specifically picked out as an example of someone who might be one of the "very fine people" is a member of a group whose leader explicitly endorsed the lynching of a black congressman. It's not quite an actual death threat, but it's way, way beyond a "racist comment". To me, that's enough to exclude the members of the American Warrior Revolution from the list of very fine people. If that's the least objectionable protestor we can find, I'm comfortable with condemning everyone at the protest.
Look, I'm not a native speaker, but *surely* "stand down" means "cut this shit out" while "stand by" means "be ready for further instructions"?
Evidence the coin did not land on heads is not proof it landed on tails.
Some of your commentary here about "stand back and stand by" makes me wonder if you are not familiar with the expression "stand by". Have you not watched many movies involving police or military? Serious question.
Yeah... Imagine watching this clip
https://youtu.be/v4pobX0ZnXI?t=77
with Ed Harris saying "Stand-By Captain"
This actually reminded me of a third use of this phrase in addition to those mentioned elsewhere. It's not uncommon for a superior to say "stand by" to a subordinate as a preface to getting reamed out or as a way to threaten future punishment, as in, "I want you to do <thing>. And if you fail to do it or refuse, stand by (it's going to be bad for you)"
must be a regional thing, i dont think i have heard that usage
Your WBUR source supports Dieb's recollection, not yours. You wrote that "When his plan for angry supporters chanting turned into angry supporters rioting and getting into the Capitol, he was clearly against this and tried to stop it." Your link, though, is clear that "as the far-right extremists breached the U.S. Capitol — halting the Electoral College vote count — Trump issued a restrained call for peace, but did not urge supporters to disperse." In other words, a significant amount of time passed between the breach and the videotaped statement which was the first unambiguous statement that the protesters should leave.
Charlottesville was a Unite the Right rally. The idea behind the name ‘Unite the Right’ was that the more mainstream right ought to put aside their differences and make common cause with the alt-right to defend important causes, the original one being freedom of speech.
The very idea of it being a ‘Unite the Right’ rally was that it should include more than just the alt-right, more than just the explicitly pro-white right. I do no know the extent to which it did, but it did to some extent.
The ‘Unite the Right’ idea originated after conservative speakers were harassed or deplatformed from speaking at university campuses. Multiple strands of the right started to protest these events, and much of the right was leery of protesting alongside the alt-right, so the alt-right, seeing an opportunity to become more mainstream pushed the idea that the right should unite in defence of fundamental principles like free speech, claiming it was a tactical mistake to do otherwise, and that the ascendant left never disavowed its more extreme elements.
In the original protests by the right for free speech they came unarmed and were badly beaten by the armed antifa. Subsequently some on the right came armed but they were still beaten and routed by antifa. Collections for hospital bills were passed around. Eventually the right became more organised, came with shields and armour and got some of their ex-military guys to lay out a plan including alternate retreat routes etc.
For the Charlottesville rally they received a permit to march and to speak at a specific part of the park. However they were blocked from getting to where they needed to go by antifa, and couldn’t push through them. The police did nothing to disperse the left who were blocking a legal march. Since the right couldn’t get to where they were supposed to go they decided to go to a different part of the park. They didn’t have a permit for speaking at this part of the park so the police broke up their rally.
Regarding (3) the chanting of “Jews will not replace us” was done by white nationalists the night before the actual Charlottesville rally.
The one thing Eric Weinstein nails is Trumps ability to make a coin 'land on its side'. If it happens once, it could be due to chance. If it happens all of the time, then it is being done on purpose.
I like Weinstein's way of putting it. And letting your meaning be known while being ambiguous on paper is a trick one would learn after a lifetime of shady business surrounded by lawyers.
This subsumes my own observation that Trump tends to sort of apologize or denounce, then immediately walk it back in way that his supporters can interpret it as "not really though". See also Ilhan Omar's apologies for comments that deserved an unambiguous apology. "I meant what I said", "I meant what I said but phrased it poorly", or "that's not at all what I meant" are all better than these sorts of half-assed apologies.
I'm surprised that Soleimani is your Trump screwup of choice. Iran isn't in a position to cause WW3 - even if they do have nukes (which most people seem to still doubt), the damage would be severe but much smaller than, say, assassinating a Chinese general openly might cause. Also, if you look at how Iran would normally try to punish people for attacking them, they'd normally arrange retaliation though a certain Gen. Qasem Soleimani. He was a very well-chosen target for that reason alone.
The natural "Trump did far worse than he should have" reference is, of course, coronavirus. (Which you do mention later on, in fairness)
Yea, I found it a bit curious why that's so heavily weighted as a major screw-up. Maybe he's more high-ranking than some previous targets, but I can't tell why this was such a terrible geopolitical move over other various ME leaders / clerics / etc. that have been droned over the last ~20 years
I also feel compelled to weigh in on Trump's damage to institutions. I think you're vastly underestimating the amount of damage Trump did to the EPA. The EPA ended up more hamstrung and more heavily politicized under Trump than it had been under any previous President, especially in terms of climate research.
If you were a conservative or Republican you would probably consider that a major improvement. Obama increased the EPAs scope, which was seen as an initiation of a new conflict.
I have trouble faulting Trump for doing what both his supporters and his political allies would like him to do, that those same people would also do if they were in control.
The question was whether Trump had done meaningful damage to institutions, not whether that damage was a net positive for society. Obviously, if you don't believe in the value of an institution, doing damage to that institution isn't a bad thing for you. That doesn't mean that Trump didn't seriously damage the EPA.
If a bad institution is "damaged" (meaning, less effective or less structurally sound and in result less capable of their function), isn't that a good thing?
There are Democrats who are actively advocating "damaging" ICE and border control, as well as even normal police departments. Is that just as negative as the anti-Trump "he will damage institutions" criticism we are talking about?
> I also think events proved me right in saying that the media was going crazy in a particular way where they would read racism into anything.
You link ten pages in this paragraph. Two medium posts from people with less than 100 subscribers; one reddit post; one tweet screenshot; one article about something the DNC said; four articles about something people are saying on social media; and one article from a media organization expressing the sentiment of the link (an opinion piece from The New York Post).
This is a really weird group of things to collectively label as "the media". Did you mean "social media"?
This is what they call "dumpster diving", where one finds low-status representatives of a group saying the thing you want to say the group is saying, rather than actually finding any high-status members of the group saying that thing in a way that credibly speaks for the group.
Please see my comment below.
You should try reading Marx again instead of browsing r/socialism.
I like David French's term "nutpicking."
The problem is that Scott has previously shown that when reading 'high-status' left texts he completely misreads the texts. I'm not sure how this problem is solvable beyond making Scott re-read things until he actually understands them.
Your comments are very see-through and it’s clear you’re still upset from Scott not sharing your view of Marxism.
I don’t know why I now get upset from reading your comments, haha, but could you please just spend your time working your communication and expository skills on things other than Marxism, and then write up a solid piece on Marxism? That’s just a suggestion I thought up in a minute, I’m sure there are better ways to achieve your goals than that.
I am not "upset", I am trying to correct him, as any rational person would. Remember that Scott Alexander has done things like attempted to name a fallacy after Marx, then refuse to back this up with any primary sources showing where Marx committed such a fallacy. He has also admitted that he only has a "gestalt" impression of Marx's positions. So when Scott talks about the "left" one wonders if he's actually done any of the hard work of reading people outside of his political tribe.
Could you please clarify what you hope to accomplish with your comments? If they’re to correct Scott, the way you’re going about it is ineffectual and destroying your credibility.
What would be a positive result you expect from your comments? That Scott reviews a Marxist work or?
I am merely discussing things with other people, sometimes I don't really hope to "accomplish" anything other than have an interesting conversation. I suppose a very good and positive result would be that Scott admits to the numerous mistakes he has made in this area.
'Reviewing' a Marxist work may not necessarily be productive as Scott Alexander has already shown that he doesn't read carefully when it comes to Marxist texts or texts about Marxism.
You don't "correct", you just contradict. 90% of your comments could be replaced with "Nuh-uh" and nothing of substance would be lost.
If you think someone is going to be swayed to your side by, every time they make a comment, replying with "no that's not true, you should read Marx"... please reconsider.
To the contrary, your interactions on this blog have *actively* worsened my opinions on Marxists. You're representing your cause badly, and if you really care about your cause, you should stop or take a different tact.
I work under Hitchens' "That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence" rule. In a previous thread you asked me for some Marx quotes that showed he was not in favor of utopian communes and I delivered.
Apparently the definition of rationality is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.
I'm quite happy with the results I've been getting here.
One of the examples I gave was the homeland security document. This was covered by eg Vice, Buzzfeed, Salon, and Business Insider (https://www.vice.com/en/article/88aa84/why-im-suing-dhs-for-the-14-words-emails-it-refuses-to-release https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/blakemontgomery/homeland-security-statement-theory https://www.salon.com/2018/07/06/did-trump-administration-send-a-coded-signal-to-neo-nazis-maybe-not-but-is-that-reassuring/ https://www.businessinsider.com/conspiracy-theories-in-trump-era-political-arguments-2018-6). The Trump / Mount Rushmore story ran on ABC, NBC, and the Guardian (https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trump-s-mount-rushmore-fireworks-show-fourth-july-attack-indigenous-ncna1232827
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-mount-rushmore-controversy-fireworks-personal-fascination/story?id=71595321
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/25/trump-mount-rushmore-fourth-of-july-native-americans). The Bill de Blasio anti-Semitism allegations got covered in Wall Street Journal, NYT, and Israeli media (https://www.wsj.com/articles/de-blasios-message-to-jews-11588266378
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/opinion/bill-de-blasio-jewish-funeral.html
https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/the-blatant-anti-semitism-of-bill-de-blasio/).
And yeah, others just went viral on social media. The criteria I used was that I, who am not that much of a social media consumer and not really selecting for this stuff, came across it. I wasn't Googling "stupidest Trump conspiracy theories", these were things that showed up on my timeline.
This post is already 8000 words long and I didn't want to expand that paragraph into a long and involved case proving the exact extent to which the media covered all of these, but I think that case is there.
Wait, Budapest is in Hungary. Why is the 2009 Budapest rally included among the American neo-nazi marches?
I thought it was a useful marker for the general size of Nazi rallies.
I respect your need and desire to keep yourself mentally healthy, but I'm disappointed to hear you won't be blogging on anything as controversial as "Trump and race" in the future. When the world has gone that far off the deep end, that's when we most need intelligent, rational people with an audience like you to stand strong and keep telling the truth.
Now, imagine thousands of smart, insightful, informed people considering making similarly sensible and careful comments about current moral panics that are nonsense, considering how many years of idiots screaming at them on Twitter they'll get, and just stepping back and leaving the world in its ignorance.
As far as I can tell, it's kind-of a component of moral panics that skepticism about the moral panic is commonly taken as evidence that you're on the side of the devils, for whichever devils we're supposed to hate/fear this time.
+1.
I have no solution to this, but if one were to exist locating it would be a *very* effective cause area.
Solution:
1. Be comfortable living alone with no real friends.
2. Be kind and helpful to your physical neighbors.
"the Capitol riots ..., with basically no links to organized white supremacy..."
Unless "organized" somehow invalidates this counter-point, it seems fair to mention that there was the little matter of the Confederate flag, which definitely freaked out some people.
RE: your monetary gains beating your self-grading: your grading system is treating all bets as equal. The markets don't. It's not at all surprising that a big win like buying Biden early swamped your mistakes. In a game with asymmetric payoffs you don't have to be right all that often.
It seems concerning, from a bias perspective, that you made so many mistakes in the same direction when grading your trump predictions.
Missing that white supremacies played a large role organizing and participating in the capitol riot. Misunderstanding the timeline of what happened. Failing to understand the difference between "stand down" and "stand by"... etc.
It really feels like you are consistently attempting to minimize how bad trump was (and thus show that you were right in your predictions).
"that the number of words in Homeland Security documents could be interpreted as a white supremacist code"
This is an extraordinarily misleading summary of the controversy. The issue wasn't just that the headline had 14 words, it was mainly that it started with "We must secure the" *and* was 14 words (and sounded weird, as if they were stretching it). "We must secure" is not a common phrase. There are very few results in a Google search, and almost all of them are on this controversy or the 14-words. If you set the time frame before that release, you have to go to the bottom of page three to find a non-Nazi reference (and that one starts with "why" - "Why we must secure"). Is there a single other case of an article titled "We Must Secure..." that is 14 words long that is not obviously referencing the Nazis (other than this one)? Obviously, Trump himself wasn't involved, but the idea that this definitely wasn't a reference is just absurd. And there were other issues as well, although less convincing (a weird use of the number 88 in the article, 14 points in the article, etc.).
There were only 13 points in the article - the number was inflated to 14 to make the conspiracy theory sound more plausible. The use of "88" for a statistic was a reference to a previous statistic finding that 88 of 100 people were in the relevant category. "Secure the border" is the standard terminology for securing the border. See https://www.businessinsider.com/conspiracy-theories-in-trump-era-political-arguments-2018-6
I did say those were the weaker points, but you are incorrect nevertheless. There were 14 points, one of them just didn't have a bullet point. "secure the border" is common - "we must secure" is not. Almost nobody talks like that, Scott.
Saying "We must" before a politician's preferred policy alternative is incredibly mundane, as 2 seconds worth of googling will demonstrate.
It's fascinating how you both are cutting off all the parts that make this inconvenient. It's not that it says "we must" (as you just said), it's not that it says "secure the border" (as Scott just said), and it's not that it is 14 words (as Scott originally said). It's that it has all of these things together.
If you bother to do more than 2 seconds of research, you will quickly realize that headlines with "we must secure" are very rare, and ones that are 14-words seem to be non-existent (outside of this one case). It certainly could be a coincidence, but I would place it at least a 25% chance that it is not... which is worth investigating.
I'm not cutting off anything. While I think your entire conspiracy theorizing is silly, I was responding directly to your claim that prefixing a common phrase with "We must" is not common. It objectively is common.
Well, it's a good thing I didn't make that claim then.
"we must" with some phrases might be common. It is not with "secure the", as I have actually demonstrated.
"we must secure the": 307,000
"we have to secure the": 35,500,000
It sounds off, and is relatively rare. Almost all of those results seem to be on the actual 14-words or this DHS headline (indeed, due to Google's complicated search methodology, "we must secure the existence" actually comes up with more results than "we must secure the").
Again, please do more than 2-seconds of research.
I hope I'm not being too uncharitable here, but you sound very much like you're trying to Release the Kraken and you've got the statistically implausible vote tallies to support it.
I’m not sure what you mean by this.
I think that article you linked wrongly summarizes the issue with the 14 points in the article (the italicized intro is not the same as a point in the article), but I actually agree with its main point:
"But is it so implausible that the headline's unfortunate structure is a coincidence?"
I don't think it's implausible that it's a coincidence. I just also don't see it as implausible that some low-level employee at the DHS decided to make a hidden Nazi joke and it got past their editors.
If you want to keep it, at least add that it had "we must secure" in it, which is the most important part.
I missed something. In what way is "We must secure" associated with Nazis, as opposed to modern-day white nationalists? As far as I can figure out the fourteen words were invented by a guy who wasn't born until 1938.
It's associated with neo-Nazis, not the original Nazi Party. 14 words + 88 (Heil Hitler).
Right. I think that Nazi vs Neo-Nazi is a distinction worth making.
When calling people Nazis vs Neo-Nazis, perhaps. I don't see the big deal on that, since it's almost always clear in context (saying Christopher Cantwell or anyone else alive and active in the alt-right today is a Nazi does not make anyone think that they are people born before 1938 and in the Nazi Party). But all I was saying is that they may have been making a hidden Nazi joke, which I think trying to include 14/88 on a DHS release would qualify as.
Or, alternatively, find any other article in the world with "we must secure" as the first words in a 14-word headline.
By the way, Google search results for:
"we must secure the": 307,000
"we have to secure the": 35,500,000
"secure the border" may be the standard terminology, but you're ignoring the word "must" which is apparently used less than 1/100th of the time. I reiterate my claim that almost nobody talks like this.
All of that being true doesn't actually change the point. You state a worse version of the claim as evidence that people are making bad claims. If you think that the headline was not a reference to the 14 words that is one thing. I disagree, but there is subjective interpretation involved. However, to say that the wordcount was the only basis for the theory is to ignore the stronger argument. To ignore the stronger argument while using the weaker argument as evidence that people were being unreasonable is bad argumentation.
I agree that the headline having 14 words is very weak evidence. I think that the headline starting with "we must secure" is fairly weak evidence. I think the combination of the two is not weak evidence but pretty reasonable evidence. Again, you may disagree. But I'm not sure how you disagree with the claim that the combination of the wordcount and the first few words is significantly stronger evidence than the wordcount alone.
Completely agree, and much better put than me.
Kudos to you, Scott, for the hyper-rational take on yourself. I for one hope that you continue to talk about politics. Here's why: It's not just predictions that matter in analysis. Opening up avenues for new mental models from which to analyze/process political matters has its own intrinsic value.
You can derive conditional odds from unconditional odds. If B=>A, then P(B|A) = P(B)/P(A). So if prediction markets were giving Trump a 14% chance of winning the general election (B) at the same time they were giving him a 32% chance of winning the Republican nomination (A), you can infer that those prediction markets thought there was a 14%/32% = 44% chance of Trump winning the general election conditional on him winning the nomination.
There's a minor caveat, which is that here B does not strictly imply A, since you could imagine a world where Trump loses the Republican nomination and goes on to win the general election as a third party candidate. But I think it's safe to assume that this is a remote enough possibility that it had negligible impact on betting markets and it's impact on the calculation is much less than a rounding error.
> I was right. In the general election a year later, Trump did better than Romney had among non-white voters. He made large gains among blacks, Asians, and Latinos. The only ethnic group where he didn't gain at least 5% over Romney's numbers was whites. As I pointed out at the time, the narrative that Trump was especially appealing to white voters was bizarre and not truth-based, motivated primarily by a demand for racist Republicans on the part of increasingly woke narrative-consumers.
I'd argue that the improvement 2020 Trump showed over 2016 Trump, and 2016 Trump showed over 2012 Romney are more-or-less regression to the mean and that it's unwarranted to put too much emphasis on Trump's campaigning specifically for the trend. The numbers behind that are pretty subtle though, and it'll be easier after seeing a few more cycles of data. As an intuition pump though, I'd suggest that analyses of this type always seem to neglect to mention just how poor Romney's numbers were, and understanding why that is is important. But that's not really what I want to talk about today.
>1. Total hate crimes incidents as measured here will be not more than 125% of their 2015 value at any year during a Trump presidency, conditional on similar reporting methodology [confidence: 80%]
>Correct. In 2015, the FBI reported 5,850 hate crime incidents. In 2017, the highest-hate-crime year of the Trump presidency, the FBI reported 7,175. That's only a 23% increase, which is larger (but not much larger) than ordinary variation. I was slightly surprised by this because I vaguely remember checking how this prediction was doing a few years ago and seeing a large surge in hate crimes. But by the specific source I said I would use to resolve this, I was - just barely - right.
Total hate crime incidents in 2015 was 5,850; 2017 was 7,175; 2019 was 7,314. (2018 was 7,120 for the curious.) That gives a total of 125.026% of the 2015 value, meaning the prediction was incorrect.
Data: https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2019/topic-pages/tables/table-1.xls
That *still* leaves out 2020, which very much was a "year during a Trump presidency" regardless of an election that would result in a change in administration in January the following year. The data for 2020 can be expected ~Oct of this year, and if you want to go out on a limb and predict that it would be below the 125% threshold it'd be interesting, but ultimately irrelevant for the purposes of settling the prediction. (Also, I wouldn't envy your odds.)
>6. Race relations as perceived by blacks, as measured by this Gallup poll, will do better under Trump than they did under Obama (ie the change in race relations 2017-2021 will be less negative/more positive than the change 2009-2016) [confidence: 70%].
>Correct. Between 2008 and 2017, the percent of blacks who thought race relations were good declined from 61% to about 46%, ie 15 points. From 2017 to now, they declined from about 46% to 36%, ie 10 points. I'm not sure the end-of-2020 data is in yet, so there's still a chance for me to be proven wrong. And also, they ask some similar questions where Trump does worse than Obama later. Still, with the data I have and the resolution method I chose, it looks like provisionally I was right.
The specific number you're looking at is the White-Black relations combined Very/Somewhat good percentage among black adults, which was 61% mid 2008, 66% early-mid 2013, 62% August 2013, 51% mid 2015, 49% early-mid 2016, 40% late 2018, and 36% mid 2020. There aren't enough datapoints for precision, but if you're taking the closest point to the respective inaugurations that's a 12% under Obama and a 13% under Trump.
(Data: https://news.gallup.com/file/poll/318971/200902RaceRelations.pdf)
There is a significant issue here where you use an interpolated 2017 as Obama's endpoint but use 2020 as Trump's - and in direct contradiction to the original statement of the prediction. I see your qualifier about future data, but the 2017 interpolation is the unjustifiable part - you're explicitly attributing to Obama the period of time where e.g. Trump saw the sharpest decline in his approval ratings from an above-water beginning. If the timing of the surveys doesn't meet your standards then I would rather you toss the prediction entirely than fabricate a result, no matter how sensible it may seem to you.
Yeah, I think regression to the mean is a big part of it.
One thing to keep in mind is the incumbent effect. Trump is only the fourth incumbent prescient to lose in the last 100 years. If Trump had been running against an incumbent in 2016 he would've been crushed.
Incumbent effect is definitely huge - by the same logic, we can't give Bush '04 and Obama '12 "full credit" either. It's a hard question to disentangle how much of it is incumbents genuinely becoming more popular and how much of it is selection effects (which are further confounded by popular vote splits! (which would apply to both Republicans since Clinton!))... but I think we can all agree that Trump '20 gets stomped by Bush '04.
I'm not looking at the numbers right now but when I was looking at them I concluded that while Trump's improvement among black voters was probably just regression to the mean after Obama, his improvement among Hispanic voters is harder to explain that way. It depends on whether you think George W. Bush's anomolously good performance among Hispanics was specific to Bush or whether it represented some kind of new normal. Trump certainly did extremely well among Hispanics compared to other GOP candidates who weren't George W. Bush.
All relevant factors! IMO, the core problem is that presidential elections simply aren't frequent enough to get good data; "another Republican that isn't GWB and isn't running against Obama" means "no presidential candidate this generation". Aberrations are a majority of the dataset.
(Shooting from the hip I'd argue that Trump's general economic populism plus a lack of coherent social stances was a good strategy for the marginal Hispanic vote, that his policy specifics in '16 hurt him badly, and that his failure to deliver on that policy and pivot away to his fundamentals helped in '20, but that's all under-evidenced. And I always say Republicans should run on populism to get Hispanics, so it's not like I'm visibly updating on evidence anyway.)
(Also I'm interested if there might've been a Simpson's paradox where ex: a 70-30 against you looks bad whereas 60-40 looks better, but if you accomplished that shift by turning out the 55-45s you didn't really do yourself any favors.)
"are more-or-less regression to the mean"
Not in 2020.
> Total hate crime incidents in 2015 was 5,850; 2017 was 7,175; 2019 was 7,314. (2018 was 7,120 for the curious.) That gives a total of 125.026% of the 2015 value, meaning the prediction was incorrect.
It's worth remembering that the recorded "hate crime" numbers for 2017 were inflated by one big weird outlier event - that autistic Israeli teen who used an autodialer to call in ~2000 hoax bomb threats. If you set that aside, hate crimes didn't increase at all in 2016-2017 relative to 2015.
The larger problem would seem to be salience/reporting bias. That is: once it became clear that discovering "hate crimes" was a good way for partisans to attack Trump, many more "hate crimes" were bound to be found even if the same sort of event (which often boils down to "some weirdo yelled nasty words at somebody else, who took offense") might not have gotten reported, signal-boosted or tallied in the same way in prior years.
"Regression to the mean" being possible with Trump in office seems to support the idea that Trump was not unusually bad and that minorities did not think of him as unusually bad.
If he were seen as a racist, then regression to the mean would not have happened.
Electoral politics might be a bit more complicated than "Racist: Y/N?"
I *want* to believe you're right...
:-P
"stand back and stand by" can also mean "hold back for now, but keep ready", I think. In fact, English is not my first language and that was the only meaning of "to stand by" I knew (from Star Wars, no less)
And if I understood the reaction correctly (the PB used "stand back and stand by" as merch), that's partly how they interpreted it, too.
Also, he didn't condemn them before, he promised to condemn them later - and then he only delivered if you interpret the statement as "stand down" instead of "keep ready".
(I deleted my other followup because I had phrased it worse)
Your interpretation of the phrase matches mine (as a native English speaker). Thing is, Trump is a terrible public speaker and people are often left trying to interpret what he's actually saying. Much like Nostradomus, we'll still be poring over transcripts of Trump hundreds of years from now trying to figure out WTF was going on. Scott's doing some of that here.
In this case, my interpretation is that Trump has been playing both sides the entire time:
To the right-wing extremists and the left, he played the super villain, telling them that "Mexicans are rapists (there might be some good people mixed among the rapists, but whatever)", "I like David Duke (sure, I have to publicly disavow him later, but still)", "stand ready, proud boys (could also mean 'stand down')", "we love you, capital rioters. You're very special. You are the revolution that happens when the good guys, the patriots, get stolen an election (also, I'm so humble, I don't even want you to fight for me, or I'm just covering my ass here)", while at the same time telling the more moderate parts that he was being unduly vilified for telling everyone "I am very concerned about immigrant crime (although there are many good people there)", "of course I denounce such a terrible man as David Duke (it just slipped my mind who that was)", "I mean for the proud boys to stand down, that's what I said from the beginning (I even said before that sure, that's what I was doing)", "The capitol riot was gruesome and everyone has to be brought to justice (I told them through the whole time, they had to stop this and go home, it's not my fault they didn't listen to me!)"
Politicians always have a public persona, it's not that hard to have two of them.
I probably have quite a lot of left-wing (not necessarily liberal) bias, though, so maybe take that into account - still, that is the best scenario I know.
The possible mistake in the dog-whistle theories (which this sounds... Kind of... Similar to me) are that they assume just because someone alludes to an extremist position, they have to actually hold that position. But Trump doesn't have to be a White Supremacist to ride on the wave of attention the easy to dismiss backlash against his statements that can be construed as alluding to White Supremacy (in my theory, on purpose), he can have the backlash without holding the positions. That's my best guess for that.
Something to add: Trump has been a reality tv star for years. I wouldn't assume he's as bad a public speaker as it seems to me, maybe he just speaks in a highly different style from any "serious person".
> As soon as rioters got in the Capitol, Trump tweeted that this wasn't what he wanted and they should leave.
This is not true. Via Wikipedia, rioters broke into the Capitol at 2:12pm.
At 2:47pm, Trump tweeted "Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!".
At 3:25pm, Trump tweeted "I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue".
At 4:22pm, Trump finally released a video where he tells his supporters to go home.
> When his plan for angry supporters chanting turned into angry supporters rioting and getting into the Capitol, he was clearly against this and tried to stop it.
I think "clearly against it" is kind of a stretch, considering he dragged his feet in doing anything about it when everyone else was telling him to do something about it, and he couldn't tell his supporters to stop without praising them effusively.
While you are right about the number of deportations going down under Trump, I think it's misleading to try and use that as a metric of how harsh Trump's immigration policies were. This is because it needs an implicit denominator of something like "number of people who were in a position to be deported" and AFAICT that denominator was also much smaller under Trump. Part of this is because overall demand for immigration continued what I understand is now a multi-decade decline, mostly because Mexico isn't as poor as it used to be. But part of this is because Trump forcibly kept many more people than Obama would have out of the country altogether, and whether you think this was a good or a bad thing, you should include it in an accounting of how anti-immigration his policies were.
Yes, I think a "percentage of asylum seekers and other potential immigrants turned away before entering the country" is an important factor. Not saying this is necessarily the case (I don't have the numbers), but if you wanted to have your talking points cake and eat it too, turning away far more immigrants while deporting fewer would be a great way to do it.
Given that the number of illegal aliens in the US is remains in the seven figures, the scale of the differences we're talking about seems trivial.
> I will still never predict anything this controversial again - it’s not worth the cost to my peace of mind.
I wonder if there's a good way to semi-anonymously publish something, such that the people who know you know that you did it, but the people who don't know you and just catch it as it virally spreads can't easily find your main contact info to annoy you about it. This wouldn't stop the torrent of anger and criticism, but maybe it could be directed at a different inbox that you can choose to put out of mind until you want to address it.
I'm pretty sure this can be done with asymmetric key cryptography.
Re. your prediction that DT will not have been an openly racist POTUS with openly racist policies: You may have won the facts-on-the-ground question here, but the narrative I am surrounded by in Blue Bubble-land continues to say exactly the opposite. <i>Everyone knows</i> that DT was a white supremacist and supported white supremacists. So whether you wound up being right about what actually happened (I think you did), you are being drowned out by MSNBC, NPR, the AP, etc etc etc. I hope that you aren't too broken up by that. The myth has been enshrined in the national story by now and will be taught to children for generations to come, assuming there are any generations to come.
About QAnon - searching Twitter for that word is a terrible way to research it. Believers used other hashtags like #WWG1WGA, which was used by former NSA Director Michael Flynn. Also lots of hasthags about sex trafficking.
I started reading the _actual_ Qanon posts the other day, but there's something like ten thousand of them and I only got through the first couple of hundred before getting bored.
I am concerned that "Qanon supporter" is becoming yet another motte-and-bailey type term that is thrown around loosely to slur political opponents:, i.e. "You believe that the Democrats are engaged in some shady dealings, therefore you are a Qanon supporter, therefore you believe in satanic paedophile rituals"
I feel as if it highly misleading and frankly unhelpful to grade your overall Trump forecast based on the aggregate scoring of predictions made. This method is biased by the questions you did predict rather than all the things that happened of significance you didn't even think to mention. It also fails to measure the weight of each prediction made in comparison to each other.
Which is to say - in a general sense, I believed you failed to predict the essence of Trump's impact on the United States.
I am not an American. Prior to the election, while I strongly disliked Trump and thought he would be a terrible President, I was not overly concerned - for similar reasons to you and thought everyone else was overreacting.
I deserve an F for this forecast. Trump was far more damaging to your country than I ever could have thought possible. Trump's impact on American institutions, norms, polarization, shared understandings and sacred values is so extreme. Sure, Trump just exacerbated ongoing trends, but he materially impacted all of things - that no other counterfactual American leader would have done.
I was wrong. You were wrong. We failed to understand the consequence of Trump. The overreactors and alarmists got the essence more accurate than us.
Should we take the results seriously and not literally?
Was Trump damaging to the country or was it the insane conspiracy theories and unfounded vitriol thrown out against him? I also had very negative expectations going into his presidency but the worst of it he was ultimately either uninterested in or unable to accomplish. Russiagate conspiracies flat out broke a lot of people - many I know personally. I (involuntarily) lost friends not for supporting Trump but for opposing Trump too softly and rejecting unfounded conspiracies. Meanwhile I made better friends with conservatives who didn't mind and frequently listened to critiques of Trump and non-conservative policy ideas.
>I deserve an F for this forecast. Trump was far more damaging to your country than I ever could have thought possible. Trump's impact on American institutions, norms, polarization, shared understandings and sacred values is so extreme. Sure, Trump just exacerbated ongoing trends, but he materially impacted all of things - that no other counterfactual American leader would have done.
I, uh, thought he did pretty well. (At least until the pandemic, where he did no better than the average European leader).
"The Republican Party has fundamentally changed to be a paranoid victimization-narrative-based party, in much the same way the Democrats did."
I'm interested in what evidence you have that the Democrats have done anything like this. My general impression of the past decade and a half of national politics doesn't seem to support that though. The Democrats have gone from focusing on health insurance access as the central goal to a much more general focus on wealth inequality and race relations, probably because they passed Obamacare and needed a next goal. But the Republicans have gone from focusing on cutting taxes and social security to just complaining about the Democrats. It's true that the one time the Republicans passed something under Trump was a tax cut, but they spent a *lot* of time complaining about Obamacare without doing anything about it. In the McConnell era the Republicans seem to have mostly given up on writing legislation, and have instead retreated to just vaguely complaining about Democrats. The Republicans do now seem to me to be a "paranoid victimization-narrative-based party", but I don't see any evidence that the Democrats are.
I'm guessing that you've confused left-Twitter for the Democrats. But even in the twittersphere, I just don't see evidence that the left is any more victimization-narrative-based than the right. Admittedly, I haven't particularly looked for this, but this really seems to me like you've noticed some problems with bits of the nearby outgroup, and haven't looked to see whether the same problem appears in a worse way with the farther group that doesn't even rise to the level of "outgroup". (In any case, these relevant Twitter groups aren't "Democrats" or "Republicans".)
Perhaps Scott wrote "the Democrats" and meant "the Left"?
I agree I am confusing left-twitter for the Democrats, and will edit that paragraph.
You should read some actual leftist material instead of "left-twitter". This will help you understand politics in more detail.
>Looking over my history, I find that I did well when I was speculating on very high-level important events I'd been following closely, like who would win the election, and poorly on low-level things I tried to do math on, like how many times Trump would tweet in a given week. This is the opposite of what I originally expected - I'd thought more money and analysis would go into election predictions, and the small niche markets would be where you could eke out a gain. I think what probably happened is that the election markets attracted a lot of dumb money that I could beat, and the tweet markets were mostly semi-professional investors who were much better at mathematizing it than I was.
Full agreement. One can make an acceptable return in high-volume markets based on 'pure' engagement with the proposition, but I've found that as you get to the smaller, faster markets you get both more competent investors and outright market manipulation a la Goodhart's law. (In theory the observation that one can personally move the consensus price ought to be a useful tool, but in practice it's a good sign you're in shark-infested waters.)
Theoretically this might be addressable with larger markets that don't have PredictIt's caps, but in practice I'm skeptical prediction markets can organically produce good results with a mix of profit-maximizers and recreational bettors. If for no reason than simply because 'interest in a market' is not an independent variable.
@Scott
I think it would save a lot of argument over definitions if you just rephrasesd
<quote>10: ~Autumn 2020 Semi-Prediction: There will not be a Trump coup (B)</quote>
to not use the word coup. (I.E. just explicitly say what you thought there would *not* be... for instance, maybe you were thinking 'a US military backed intervention' or something)
I agree that this would clarify things a lot, but the discourse itself hinged around the word "coup" in a way that's not really escape-able. With hindsight, I don't feel comfortable unpacking my own and other people's opinions further, since it would be too easy for all of us to unpack our opinions in the way that ended up justified by future events. Arguably I am doing that anyway, but I am doing it using the specific phrasing with which I remember thinking about it at the time.
In general, yes I agree, but like you said, you are arguably doing that anyway. If most objections to that prediction just come down to definitions of coup, then the discussion will just devolve into uninteresting motivated reasoning.
I think the bar for this clarification is even lower in this case, since this prediction is self reported, and was not registered anywhere.
Re: Marine LePen. The far right* has twice reached the knockout stage of the French presidential elections, and has twice failed abysmally. Too many people were ready to vote for any alternative. At the same time, the French establishment parties have shown that they have fewer and fewer ideas and less and less to offer anyone not already an insider, and their hold continues to weaken.
My guess is that the French establishment has about one more electoral cycle left in it before The Deluge hits. Maybe the plan is to hold out long enough for LePen to die or retire and then hope that her replacement is more tractable or less effective. At least that replacement will have some building to do.
Germany is where France was a few years ago – the populace there is seething with white hot rage, the establishment parties are unresponsive at best, but the alternatives are still too scary and declasse for solid citizens to contemplate. Germany's well-publicized history with far right alternatives makes this entirely understandable.
An interesting question would be what would have happened in French and German politics if Trump had lost in 2016. Trump, his buffoonery and manifest incompetence were the best election managers the European establishment could have asked for. “Vote for a populist and *this* Trump doofus is what you’ll get!” was their real slogan.
*note that "left and "right" in the contemporary US understanding of those terms, don't make much sense outside the context of contemporary USA-ian politics.
Surely by definition, anyone who actually gets 30%+ of the vote isn't "far left" or "far right", they're mainstream in that particular country.
It's interesting that in US terms, just about every country on Earth has a "far right" immigration policy in that they systematically deport anyone caught in the country illegally.
So, Hitler was not a far right candidate? Come now.
In the context of 1930s Germany, I guess he wasn't.
If your metric leads you to an absurd conclusion you should reevaluate it.
Not at all. He was a national *socialist* in both creed and action. He had much more in common with Stalin than with the far right institutions of his day -- the most revanchist aristocrats and churchmen who longed to bring back the Kaiser and a proper reverence for tithing and a "von" in your name.
Huh. Well, then, it's weird that he expressed hatred for communism as far back as Mein Kampf, that he formed a coalition government with those same revanchist aristocrats on the explicit promise of fighting the left, that he threw the communists into camps even before the Jews, that he purged the left-wing Nazis in the Night of Long Knives, and that the Nazi economic program involved privatizing industries instead of nationalizing them, increasing working hours rather than wages, etc. I know politics make strange bedfellows but all that seems much more consistent with a right-wing agenda.
No, it doesn't. Just because Lenin had Trotsky assassinated and Trotsky was left doesn't make Lenin right. The fear in Germans on which Hitler preyed was the fear of *International* Communism -- of Stalin pulling the strings in Germany. But he understood very well that the old right -- the aristocratic leadership represented by the Kaiser, the nobility, and the Church -- were in equal disrepute, that this is *why* communism was a serious political threat in Germany in the early 30s. His political genius was in donning all the parts of socialism that people liked -- the populism, the purging of the old aristocrats, the lining up of industry to serve the needs of the state (you're mistaken that he moved *towards* privatization, it was very much the other way around, cf. the many public works projects, the Autobahn, the Volkswagen, usw), the old-age pensions and public schooling, et cetera -- and then combine them with a fanatical nationalism that guaranteed that the hated Russians would never have influence.
I have family that were young in Germany when Hitler came to power, and they clearly saw him as coming from the socialist end of politics, and rejecting the old monarchist/aristocratic regime, only it was a thoroughly "German" socialism not beholden to Moscow.
I do realize the modern common tendency is to call Nazism "far right," but that's just brain-dead. It artificially separates populist socalist thuggocracies which have much in common, e.g. Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot, while failing completely to preserve the *useful* original left-right distinction that arose in the French Revolution, namely the distinction betweena taste for near-pure democracy and a faith in the common man, on the left, and the taste for heirarchical aristocratic governance and a faith in the educated/well-bred/wealthy man on the right.
I think your last paragraph just defined Donald Trump and Steve Bannon as left wing? Fascism was a reinvention of the right wing (just as Marxism was a reinvention of the left) that yoked populism to traditional conservatism's desire to return to a mythic past. Applying pre-industrial political categories to a post-industrial world is bound to lead us into error.
About Nazi privatization you're simply wrong; the Nazis undid Weimar Republic state ownership all over the country. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Nazi_Germany#Privatization_and_business_ties
Stalin (not Lenin as you said; I assume this was just a mistake) killing Trotsky does not make him right-wing, I agree; he eliminated a rival to his control of a left-wing state. But what does that have to do with Hitler, who *allied* with the traditional right wing, persecuted and exterminated the communists and social democrats (but not, curiously, any right-wing figures!), and killed Rohm and Strasser and other figures *who had criticized him for being too friendly with Capital*? At every turn Hitler chose the right-wing rather than the left-wing option.
This was a wild ride and blast from the past. "You Are Still Crying Wolf" looks prescient by being basically not insane. I would think the biggest update to priors that anyone should take from this is that people always overestimate what a President can do, and the left is always underestimating its own cultural power. For example, even if Yglesias had his doubts that C'thulhu always swims left, could he perhaps have been a little more confident that the 21st century US doesn't suddenly swim to 19th century Russia?
Douthat has been commenting recently about the surprising value of low-information voters, and I think this is a good example. My mother is an independent who pays almost zero attention to politics until a week before the election and then votes mostly based on who sounds more sober and reasonable (she naturally voted against Trump twice). Yet she could have told you with certainty that mobs are not going to start beating up Jews with impunity. Yglesias, who was obsessively studying every last detail about Trump and the election, actually gained less than zero information about reality as a result of all his study -- he became less informed the more he studied Trump and Trumpism.
While Yglesias looks especially bad here, I agree with Douthat that the effect applies to all of us to some degree when we obsess over politics. And I'll add further that I would be prepared to bet that QAnon supporters are more politically engaged and read more about politics than the median Republican.
"Yglesias, who was obsessively studying every last detail about Trump and the election, actually gained less than zero information about reality as a result of all his study -- he became less informed the more he studied Trump and Trumpism."
This is a great point. People who go outside, interact with other normal people, and generally live their lives likely have a better handle on these sorts of things than people who obsess over them. In the case of Yglesias (who has had a bit of an awakening to woke craziness of late), he benefitted professionally to some degree by not really getting it. Better to have his imagined Trump to react to at Vox than the actual reality.
In January, I posted a three-part post-mortem (https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/kzpov6/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_january_18/gka9ih4/) of “You Are Still Crying Wolf”. I concurred with the idea that the most extreme “Trump is literally the KKK”-type claims have been refuted. I rated Scott’s predictions mostly the same, although we got different answers on a few. However, I think YASCW attacks something of a weak-man (https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/kzpov6/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_january_18/gka9nea/) of the “Trump racism” case. And I went into Trump’s attempt to overturn the election (https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/kzpov6/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_january_18/gkaa6wq/), which while out of scope of YASCW specifically, is I think a refutation of a kind of “anti-anti-Trumpism” that the post is in the genre of.
---
Here are where I graded Scott’s predictions differently:
>>1. Total hate crimes incidents as measured here will be not more than 125% of their 2015 value at any year during a Trump presidency, conditional on similar reporting methodology [confidence: 80%]
>Correct. In 2015, the FBI reported 5,850 hate crime incidents. In 2017, the highest-hate-crime year of the Trump presidency, the FBI reported 7,175.
In 2019, this number was 7,314 (https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2019/topic-pages/incidents-and-offenses), which barely exceeds 125%, which would resolve this as **Incorrect**. (However, a commenter claimed there were significant chances in methodology (https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/kzpov6/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_january_18/gkan0nr/)).
>>4. Trump cabinet will be at least 10% minority [confidence: 90%], at least 20% minority [confidence: 70%], at least 30% minority [30%]. Here I’m defining “minority” to include nonwhites, Latinos, and LGBT people, though not women. Note that by this definition America as a whole is about 35% minority and Congress is about 15% minority.
>Incorrect. Based on this source, of 33 original Cabinet members, 3 were minorities, which is 9%. My weakest prediction - that at least a tenth would be minorities - was wrong, and obviously every stronger prediction was wrong too. I failed at a 90% prediction and am appropriately ashamed
I counted 22 members of Trump’s cabinet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_of_Donald_Trump), of which 4 were minorities (counting Alexander Acosta as Hispanic), or 18%, which passes 10% but fails 20% or 30%.
>>6. Race relations as perceived by blacks, as measured by this Gallup poll, will do better under Trump than they did under Obama (ie the change in race relations 2017-2021 will be less negative/more positive than the change 2009-2016) [confidence: 70%].
>Correct. Between 2008 and 2017, the percent of blacks who thought race relations were good declined from 61% to about 46%, ie 15 points.
I’m not sure where Scott got 46% from - the closest poll to 2017 gives an answer of 49%, which narrowly resolves this to “Incorrect”. However, I point out that this poll hasn’t been taken frequently enough to give us a reliable answer - for example, the 2008 poll was taken before Obama’s election, and then not asked again until 2013 - and so I graded it **Ambiguous**.
>>7. Neither Trump nor any of his officials (Cabinet, etc) will endorse the KKK, Stormfront, or explicit neo-Nazis publicly, refuse to back down, etc, and keep their job [confidence: 99%].
>Correct.
While technically correct, I point out that Stephen Miller had emails leaked (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Miller_(political_advisor)#Leaked_emails) where he "enthusiastically pushed the views of white nationalist publications" without any hint of repercussion. I think this should cause us to update against Scott’s central claims.
Thanks. I've corrected the hate crime prediction - I mistakenly used the FBI's "single bias incidents" statistic instead of their total statistic.
The race relations statistic was based on interpolating the 2017 data point; enough people challenged me doing this that I've shifted it to indeterminate.
For 23:
"The betting markets gave 14% unconditional odds but I don't think I can derive conditional odds from that."
Sure you can, since you say in #21 that the prediction markets gave the probability of Trump winning the nomination at 32%; by Bayes that gives us what we need:
P[Trump wins general] = P[Trump wins nomination AND Trump wins general] = P[Trump wins nomination] * P[Trumps wins general | Trump wins nomination]
-> 14% = 32% * P[Trumps wins general | Trump wins nomination]
-> P[Trumps wins general | Trump wins nomination] = 43.75%
Higher than your 20%. (Or you can do the same thing the other way to get your unconditional probability of Trump winning, 12%.)
(Original deleted version of this comment had a math error; hopefully this one doesn't too.)
Don't think that's Bayes so much as it is general probability maths.
Oh yeah, you're right. For some reason I always mix up Bayes Theorem and just the definition of conditional probability (the former does follow immediately from the latter)
Isn't there a kind of circularity in first being lenient on Trump (compared to others), then making predictions, and then grading them in a lenient way (compared to others)?
What's it supposed to prove, except that you are at least consistent?
I discuss this in a few places in the article - search "a pessimistic take" and "in retrospect, this is a hard prediction to grade"
This is why I tried to use as many hard and fast binary outcome predictions as possible. But I can't always do this - I still remember at the beginning of the Trump administration I was trying to make a bet with someone; they thought Trump would be a great president, I thought he would be terrible. It was really hard for us to find a way to operationalize this - there are lots of objective measures of the economy, but terrible presidents can preside over booming economies (eg Trump from 2017 - 2019) and good presidents over crashes. We considered using approval rating, but we both agreed that lots of people were too biased to change their mind even if Trump was extremely good or bad (in fact, Trump's approval rating at the end of his term was more or less the same as at the beginning). We ended up making some dumb economic bet which I won, barely, in an unsatisfying way.
I think this kind of thing makes it necessary to make qualitative predictions, even though the resolution naturally risks being biased. And in fact I gave some of my qualitative predictions As and others Fs, meaning that I at least wasn't infinitely biased. I agree this is inadequate but I don't know what else to do without having a qualitative oracle.
I really object to your grading of yourself on "Coup", for instance. By any standards, regardless on whether you think it's _exactly_ a coup or not, it was what came closest in _forever_ in that regard, on multiple fronts (legal, political, violent). Giving yourself a B in this situation strikes me as particularly weak. D, that seems reasonable - there was no *successful* coup, after all...
Disagree with your logic - there's a big difference between "closest we've come to" and "it actually happening". Arguably we came closer than ever to a war with Iran, but the prediction "Trump will start a war with Iran" would have resolved false.
It seems like some kind of logical fallacy to take the absolutely worst possible outcomes conceivable - a literal successful Coup d'État, literal concentration camps, literal expulsion of citizens, the administration literally coming out as Nazis - predict against them with a high confidence, and then say "see, it wasn't so bad, and I got my predictions right". Yes, sure, but let's say you're not just arguing against crazy people?
I agree all these things were stupid, but they were the stupid things that important people were saying and I was trying to argue against - see eg the paragraph including the Matt Yglesias quote.
I do agree about how even otherwise sensible people went pretty crazy. A podcaster I listen to for other stuff said (after the 2016 election) "I'm not trying to be alarmist, but I can't see how American democracy survives until the midterms."
Even at the time, that _was_ kinda alarmist...
I'm not sure you can properly evaluate the racism espoused by Trump without at least discussing comments like "shithole countries", "mexican" judges, and "Go back where you came from". If the prediction was limited such that only endorsing ethnic cleansing would satisfy the test, then I'm not sure it was a prediction worth making.
I think this is part of the reason we need to retire the word "racism" and replace it with a set of much more specific terms denoting the motley bunch of different meaning that "racism" elides over, e.g.
Racism1: You out-and-out hate members of race X. Boo, race X!
Racism2: You don't hate members of race X, but you think they are inferior to your own race.
Racism2.5: You don't hate members of race X, but you think they are inferior to your own race.
Racism3: You believe that different races of people have measurably different distributions of certain traits such as height, athletic ability and intelligence.
Racism4: You try to not be racist, but you're human and so you're subject to the sort of natural in-group bias that colours your opinions in some cases
Racism5: You believe that everybody should be treated differently depending on their race
Racism6: You believe that people should be treated the same regardless of their race
Racism7: You don't believe people should be judged by their race, but you do believe they should be judged by quality P, where quality P happens to be correlated with race.
and so forth, it would probably take a lot more effort to map out all the different meanings that the "R" word has acquired over its relatively short lifetime, but it would probably be a worthwhile activity.
One quibble or clarification on "Racism3." If something like height is indeed found to have a measurably different distribution by race over some broad enough population (let's say within the US), would it be "racist" to believe in its existence?
Looks like Racism 3 is the same as Racism 7, unless Racism 3 had a caveat that everyone must be treated the same regardless of any traits.
Or there existences are mutually exclusive / in conflict. If quality P happens to be correlated with race, in fact (which "Racism7" seems to imply), then those who believe in objective truth are automatically some form of racist based on "Racism3's" definition.
Fascinating. I love this paradigm for fixing the whole racism discussion. Would it actually help in twitter wars?
"you're restricting immigration! that's Racism1!", "No, they are just poor, which is Racism7, which isn't as bad."
"All cops are racism1!" "no, cops are racism4, in so far as it's helpful for their job" "racism4 leads to racism1 and is just as bad!"
I don't see it helping much.
Scott's position on Trump's comments on Proud Boys can be summarized as "Trump clearly said 'Sure', so he has denounced white supremacists", while the general opinion on this can be summarized as "He should have said 'Yes, I unequivocally condemn white supremacists'. Using words that are weaker than that betray a sympathy for the alt-right".
I think Scott is wrong about this. But that might be an inability on his part to read cues rather than any nefarious motives. He is taking Trump at his word rather than placing him in context, and that causes him to see in a more sympathetic light than he deserves
Seems kind of ludicrous of me to say this though, considering I haven't made any money in prediction markets while Scott clearly has. I think Scott is better at understanding eventual outcomes than people's motives, probably because he understands that people's motives and eventual outcomes are fairly independent.
The 'general opinion' on that matter is just the highly biased interpretation of one of the most pro-democratic professions, journalists. They put that spin on it, while they spin completely differently when politicians they favor are ambiguous.
Stepping back a bit from the individual predictions, this exercise tends to undermine my confidence in the utility of making these kinds of predictions. The trouble is that assessing their truth value in many cases seems highly fraught, and maybe impossible.
That doesn't necessarily mean the exercise is worthless. I can see several possible benefits of going through a prediction exercise even if the outcome is hard to judge:
1. Being public about a prediction requires a certain clarity of thought, willingness to make a commitment, and accountability, even if the outcome is hard to judge. Even if I don't know whether Scott was correct in all of his predictions, I still have a very clear sense of what he believed to be true, and I was able to interrogate my own feelings on the same issues.
2. The predictor may get better over time at making predictions that are clearly falsifiable. In other words, formulating testable predictions might be a learnable skill as much as formulating accurate predictions.
3. The reasons why a prediction turns out to be hard to prove or falsify are often interesting in their own right, perhaps more so than the original prediction. In other words, if I think the future outcomes will be either A or not-A, and the reality turns out to be sort of A-ish or maybe just B, then probably I've just learned something about the way the world works!
All of that said, it still feels like the prediction exercise right now is failing to live up to its basic premise. The grading here is much closer to "I had an opinion and I think history supports my opinion" than it is to "I said X would happen and X did happen." And arguing that events show that you were right all along is...what everyone does all the time.
Weirdly, I think Scott is too harsh on himself for some of these (1 - 3) and too generous to himself on others (5). Of course, that has a lot to do with my own opinions on Trump's time in office, which is kind of the problem...
> Stepping back a bit from the individual predictions, this exercise tends to undermine my confidence in the utility of making these kinds of predictions. The trouble is that assessing their truth value in many cases seems highly fraught, and maybe impossible.
The main value of these sorts of predictions is in the intellectual exercise of making them, not the scoring of them.
In the context of the Blue Tribe freakout that occurred in 2016 following Trump's election, Scott's predictions thread was a breath of fresh air and a calming rational influence. I remember a lot of people making wild predictions about crazy things Trump _would_ do, and the intellectual exercise of having to sit down and say "Okay, what do I think is the actual probability that this crazy thing is going to happen?" is a very healthy one in that context.
On (sort of) the other side, I remember something that Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit said when Obama was elected in 2008. He said that the guy you support is never as good as you hope, and the guy you didn't support is never as bad as you fear. I think that's a really helpful message for both sides.
I don't want to be awful to you about "5: 11-16-2016: Trump won't be explicitly and openly white supremacist / won’t openly support the KKK etc / won't pursue especially racist policies (A)" but I think you are being atypically biased/gracious giving yourself an A here. While it's true Trump wasn't openly pro-KKK or white supremacist, he did pursue especially racist policies and was getting about as close to being openly pro-white-supremacy in his rhetoric while maintaining a level of deniability that was at best implausible.
For starters, the Muslim ban was an explicitly racist policy that no other Republican has ever pursued. That alone should be causing you to give yourself a B or C.
Beyond this, the FBI and many organizations have reported that membership in white supremacist organizations grew dramatically during the Trump presidency (55% by one measure). Sure, hate crimes didn't increase, but the growth in the membership of these organizations did and is clearly linked to Trump's rhetoric.
Then there's your claim that the Capitol Riots weren't tied to white supremacy - which isn't really true. A close look at many of the most active individuals in those riots (those who broke windows, broke through barricades etc.) had a large % from the Proud Boys.
Lastly, Trump's refusal to condemn white supremacy in the debate was just that. I don't understand why you are claiming that his 'sure' in the debate constituted a condemnation. He mumbles it while the question is still being asked and then avoids making any statement of condemnation. His statement on Proud Boys is ultimately so vague that it could be interpreted as either a condemnation or a statement of support (and Proud Boys interpreted it as supportive). In a situation like this, what every normal person and politician does is make a statement that is unequivocal and impossible to confuse. Trump very clearly avoids doing that. Not that this element is material to your argument, but it's very strange to me that you would classify this as anything but a refusal to condemn white supremacy.
Also - right wing terrorism (most of which is white supremacist) grew dramatically under Trump
Did it? Or did the reporting/definition of it grow?
I believe you take Trump at his word far too often.
As others have pointed out, Trump told the protesters to be peaceful, and yet he also told them ""We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore,".
He told the invaders to stop only after it was over, not during the protest.
Most damning of all though, Trump refused to call the national guard EVEN AS THE CAPITAL OF THE UNITED STATES WAS BEING TAKEN OVER. Senators were in the building!
Just because Trump says "No guys, its totally not a coup, don't hurt anyone", doesn't make it not a coup.
I don't actually know if Trump intentionally lead the protestors to storm the capital, but as others have said, it's abundantly obvious that Trump did nothing but egg them on and support them.
>Most damning of all though, Trump refused to call the national guard EVEN AS THE CAPITAL OF THE UNITED STATES WAS BEING TAKEN OVER. Senators were in the building!
Was the National Guard called when this happened?
https://www.texastribune.org/2013/06/28/how-activists-yelled-abortion-bill-death/
Was the National Guard called when this happened?
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/468140-climate-protestors-occupy-pelosi-office-over-california-fires
Was anyone hurt in either of those events?
"During the sit-in, the group of 50 activists from the Sunrise Movement demanded the California Democrat move forward with the Green New Deal. The protesters argued that the legislation is desperately needed as the country begins to feel the effects of climate change, citing intensifying wildfires in the senator's state."
Please don't conflate "they entered an area they weren't allowed in" with "A group of rioters broke into the capital, leading to 7 deaths, 15 seriously injured, and millions of dollars of damage"
Was a Sit-In where the national guard wasn't called really the best example you could have come up with?
>7 deaths
Please don't give extremely misleading accounts of what happened.
1 unarmed protester was shot by police because she entered an area she was not allowed in.
1 police officer died of natural causes the night after the protest.
1 protester fell over and got stepped on in a crowd.
I'm pretty sure the other 4 were relatively old people who had heart attacks or similar medical emergencies from getting excited. At least one was not even part of the group breaking into the capitol, he had just attended the rally and was in the area.
I mean, counting the rioters' own deaths as evidence against them isn't especially sensible; at worst, that shades into victim-blaming (if I hold up a sign saying "Kim Jong Un is a fat tub of lard" in Pyongyang and get shot, that doesn't make me violent despite the fact that someone died at my protest), and at best, it's lumping together "victimising innocents" and "engaging in self-destruction".
Those protesters went through metal detectors!
Oh, and as an addendum to my post, you said this:
"But it's really hard for me to come up with a narrative where someone trying to comprehend this honestly could see it as Trump endorsing the white supremacists who he had already condemned just seconds before.
Apparently these two events were the most racist-sounding comments anyone was able to get out of Trump in four years of being President. And they're pathetic. The slightest attempt to read the transcripts of what he was actually saying makes it super clear how pathetic they are. I think my implied prediction that Trump wouldn't make especially racist comments during his presidency proved correct."
https://twitter.com/ByMikeBaker/status/1311130735584051201?s=20
It turns out that yes, Proud Boys did take it as Donald Trump supporting them. Why is that? This is the classic Trump tactic of using such wishy-washy language that everyone interprets it as they want to see it. It doesn't matter that Trump literally just condemned them, Trump constantly used confusing messages to signal secret support to these types of people. If Donald Trump really condemned them as you claim is obvious, then why did they continue to support him?
4. Trump cabinet will be at least 10% minority [confidence: 90%], at least 20% minority [confidence: 70%], at least 30% minority [30%]. Here I’m defining “minority” to include nonwhites, Latinos, and LGBT people, though not women. Note that by this definition America as a whole is about 35% minority and Congress is about 15% minority.
I think your mistake here was betting on 10% minority when, excluding fractional people, 10% minority would be 4/33 = 12%
I can't believe I'm saying this and I apologize to you as I know it will stress you out to do this but....... I actually think you should stil sometimes blog about current events and politics as you are the only person who sees data honestly and writes sanely. - The mainstream media is a complete dumpster fire (as you detailed in this post) and there is no-one who writes about this stuff honestly and in a mostly non-partisan way other than you. I"m sorry, I know that's too much pressure to put on your and it's not fair that the world is such a fucking mess that all this responsiblity falls on you.
I think I would much sooner see Scott blog about the big overarching issues than the details on specific politicians. There are lots of relatively honest and mostly non-partisan people out there - check out ArcDigi or Areo for a start.
sadly I think how people react to Trump and how the media fails to report accurately on him or anything regarding any 'conservative' sadly.... are big overarching issues. The complete failure of the mainstream media to be useful, relevant, or accurate, is a "big overarching issue" that has threads in alot of what SSC talks about anyway including the much discussed tribe post.
> I think my argument that you shouldn't vote for Trump because he would violently destroy useful institutions ended up kind of falling flat.
I'm trying to square this with the Capitol riot. Do you believe the riot didn't construe an attempt to destroy an institution, or is it just that regardless of intent, he didn't succeed in destroying anything on that day?
More generally, I'd say "the big lie" (the fabricated claim of election fraud) seems to be doing long-lasting damage to democratic institutions -- this is going to fuel a generation of newly-emboldened voting rights restrictions. Is it the lack of jackboots-on-the-streets violence that is causing you to mark down your prediction here, or perhaps "damage" < "destroy" on these institutions?
In summary I think you're understating the damage that Trump inflicted, but I'm not sure if this is just because you're marking yourself more strictly than I'd mark you, or if you actually disagree on the degree of harm.
I'd also point to the surprising (to me) vaccine hesitancy in conservative areas, which suggests the problems with turning distrust of the CDC and adoption of safety precautions into core conservative positions.
I expect people would be less likely to believe what you term "the big lie" if any attempt to enforce basic anti-fraud measures wasn't derided as racist "voting rights restrictions."
> "There’s a vicious cycle where the lack of intelligent conservatives guts the system of think tanks that produce the sort of studies and analyses which convince smart people to become conservative, which in turn makes there even fewer intelligent conservatives, and so on. In the end, intellectuals won’t just vote Democrat; they’ll shift their personal views further to the left to fit in."
Not exactly. Of course, it's obvious that Trump made lots of blue upper-middle class people more leftist. However, I suspect that that Scott doesn't see any difference between "smart" and "upper-middle-class" and uses the terms interchangeably. In reality, though, lots of smart conservatives, smart religious people, smart working class people etc went way to the right during Trump.
On Suleimani, my initial reaction was similar - that this is a massive and reckless escalation of conflict. However I have had a hard time reckoning with Mike Huemer's take on it:
https://fakenous.net/?p=1218
Is assassination good actually?
I think it's pretty easy to figure out why Trump didn't get many of his policies enacted, and that's because he probably didn't care that much about them. He's a pretty classic (although very severe!) grandiose narcissist, and their main goal and need is attention and admiration/adoration. This differentiates them from sociopaths, who are much more interested in the power/money/sex combo and don't much care who likes them aside from how that impacts their ability to get the combo.
So during the campaign he said pretty much whatever made the crowds roar in approval and got him attention in the media. Once in power, he couldn't be bothered to focus on actual policy, way too much like work for not that much adoration. He also had a great deal of trouble keeping competent people working with/around him, a common problem for narcs. They prefer sycophants and make life very hard for the competent. Even if he isn't that smart about actual politics, policy etc, if he were interested, he could get others to work on that stuff, then he could sign off. Just not that interested, and not that easy for the Republicans who were actually interested to push around. 'You're not the boss of me!' is the usual response to trying to push a narc, even to do something useful or in their own best interest.
As a largely libertarian leaning person this was honestly one of his more appealing qualities - he and his administrations complete disinterest in regulation (or at least writing it).
Trump's major interest seemed to be holding onto control of the DoJ, so that corruption in his administration would not be investigated. He may not have cared about many of the traditional tasks of governing, but he cared a lot about this.
There are a couple of major things you failed to mention that surprise me. First, the zero-tolerance policy at the border that caused an unprecedented number of child/parent separations in a short timespan, with, we later learned, no plan or even adequate record-keeping for reuniting them. This is...very very bad. It seems worth at least a mention when you're making sweeping claims about "how much damage" the Trump administration did.
Second, there's an active QAnon supporter in Congress now. This seems relevant to your miss on the relative impact of QAnon.
You had the capital to bet on Biden at 3.5 and you only put in a few thousand? You should have put in every penny you could.
I ran up against PredictIt's betting limit.
I say you were more correct than me on Trump and war (I expected Trump to be much more honest/less neocon than he was).
I'd say Trump was pretty clear and consistent about his anti-war position, but he did very well to avoid being manipulated into a war by the usual sorts of people.
Those same sorts of people did, at least, force him to abandon some of his other plans to withdraw US troops from places like Germany and South Korea which really ought to be paying for their own darn defence.
Trump increased sanctions on Syria, Venezuela, and Russia, expanded NATO, continued military presence in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan (though partially withdrew from Syria and paved the way for withdrawal from Afghanistan) and approved sales of anti-tank weapons to Ukraine. I was much more optimistic on Trump's foreign policy than what ended up happening; see my comments on Scott's posts.
I know we all want to thumb our nose at our critics, but the self-congratulations here on race relations during the Trump presidency seems super unwarranted. Explicit racism and white supremacist groups became part of mainstream discourse and culture - including in rallies like in Charlottesville ending in death - for the first time in my lifetime, resurrecting a brand of explicitly race-baiting, if not simply racist, politics that I thought was dead.
You give yourself wins on these predictions only by narrowly defining your terms, I'd say to the point that some of them are unrecognizable from what seems was the likely intent when they were made. This is a fine tactic if you're arguing for a payout from a betting house, but when evaluating your own analyses it seems unwise, and here used to mask weaknesses in the analysis that you do not want to face up to..
>Explicit racism and white supremacist groups became part of mainstream discourse and culture
You're assuming that the actual magnitude of an issue is exactly proportional to its prominence in "mainstream discourse and culture".
"explicit racism and white supremacist groups became part of mainstream discourse and culture"
Hm.
https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1376632752737505284
https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1375199982928736265
https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1326971997268611074
https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1278810058307010560
https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1278776983141388290
The discussion here would be more useful with a "block replies from users who willfully misinterpret the comment" button.
Why are the comments on this post so unusually and unexpectedly godawful? Is it because Trump as a subject naturally attracts godawful comments?
Brave of you to come back to politics. I hope the comments aren’t too stressful for you.
Granted, you had a lot of links to go through, but it’s pretty disingenuous to cite The Hill’s “Deportations lower under Trump administration than Obama: report” if you read past the headline. It says that Obama deported more because it targeted the easy deportation cases, whereas Trump targeted all of them. Trump’s slowness, in other words, was not due to lack of ambition.
On your election prediction mistakes, you are simply not cynical enough. Beto, Warren (and Harris) had visible personality flaws that interfered with their ability to campaign. Beto was frankly an airhead who was big on dreams and light on plans. Warren’s naïve idealism was strong enough to force some mistakes, though of the three she had the fewest embarrassments. Harris has a talking style more suited to backroom politics and has no talent in connecting with crowds at all. Biden and Sanders lacked those flaws, though I would have expected their health issues to weigh them down more. Netanyahu, meanwhile, is 1, an incumbent, and 2, heavily focused on in-group-based politics, and those are two things you should never bet against without a really good reason.
As to why Democrats are so insistent on pegging Trump as a racist: people have been suspecting Trump of being a racist long before they heard his policies (see here: https://youtu.be/TrsUFF7FAOw?t=186). He has a background of bigoted and shady/criminal behavior that Bush, McCain, Romney et al. simply didn’t. You could argue that the Muslim ban and family separation aren’t all that different from Guantanamo and the Patriot Act, but nonetheless Democrats assume, via confirmation bias but not entirely wrongly, that those policies come from a place of bigotry, not ideology. I consider Bush's recent halo effect to be small proof of this theory.
Their (Our) refusal to take Trump at his word after Charlottesville also makes more sense if you know the Democratic trope of dog whistling. The idea that Republicans commonly give winks and nods to racism has been around since the 60s. Trump’s denials just look like an amped up version of this, giving nods to terrorist racism instead of the garden variety. His insistence on delaying to “get all the information” sounds like an excuse, and his delays and halfhearted (“sure”) and boilerplate deliveries seem like proof that he doesn’t take bigotry seriously – a common symptom among bigots. Moreover everyone already believes Trump is racist, and if he wanted to discourage that belief he would speak up on his own about it rather than waiting to be asked.
I think you’re too soft on Jan. 6 being a coup. Sure, it was very unlikely to succeed, but partisanship runs very deep these days and Trump could get a *lot* of mileage out of that. More importantly, if there was a plan to overthrow the government, it was not one that absolutely needed to succeed, and Trump has faced no consequences I know of for trying. Most coups take multiple attempts, and this one could be seen as a dry run. Practice.
"also makes more sense if you know the Democratic trope of dog whistling"
There is no such thing as right-wing dogwhistling in America, only leftwing dogwhistling. Leftists have a great deal of institutional power; race realists have none whatsoever, not even among the electorate.
"Moreover everyone already believes Trump is racist, and if he wanted to discourage that belief he would speak up on his own about it rather than waiting to be asked."
I mean, he did. "Platinum plan", "I love Hispanics", etc.
Trump pardoned precisely zero January 6 trespassers, despite a complete lack of consequences for him if he did so. He was not on their side.
Was there really going to be a lack of consequences? Apparently he reconsidered pardoning the likes of Assange and Snowden because some Republican senators threatened to vote against him in the "attempted coup" impeachment trial.
"complete lack of consequences" if he pardoned them? Utter nonsense. He might have gotten convicted in the impeachment trial, and it would have hurt any 2024 Trump campaign.
Part of the problem is that we've seen a shift to "racist" being the most serious sort of badness.
> At some point you just have to admit everyone went crazy for a few years and seeing started seeing Nazis in trees and rocks and grilled cheese sandwiches and Trump was an especially tempting target.
Given the extent to which people invested effort in completely destroying the lives of me and many of my friends, for no reason other than we were _insufficiently condemnatory_ of Trump, this particular passage stings especially hard.
"Oh yeah, I guess people just went crazy for a bit and yknow things happen, but you still have a job now and they're not crazy any more so no harm no foul right? Boys will be boys, and liberals will be liberals, what are you gonna do?"
"We went a bit overboard and kinda burned some witches, let's forget it all now and all be friends again? No hard feelings, until the next witch burning season?"
AFAICS Scott is trying to make the claim "the Nazi-hunting was lunacy" (as contradiction to the social media narrative of "the Nazi-hunting was weeding out actual Nazis"). It appears that you agree with this. I am not sure why you are upset.
[epistemic status: just a stream of consciousness]
Despite trump's many negative qualities, I held my nose and voted for him in both general elections, because he was the only candidate who didn't want to turn the US into Brazil demographically ASAP. The continued existence of my people as a majority in their homeland is a very high priority terminal value, the same as it is for most jews. Hopefully we get a better candidate next time, who accomplishes more while offending less. It takes a bit of an asshole to break a taboo, so it was inevitable that the taboo-breaker would be a bit of an asshole. Moloch (and media oligarchs) shouldn't set up stupid taboos and double standards that say self-determination is only bad when applied to white people. If Moloch sets up a dumb taboo against what is obviously in the interest of a large block of people, Moloch summons an asshole to lead them in breaking that taboo.
If my great great grandchildren could be born into any position within my country, what sort of country would I want it to be? Among other things, probably one that is demographically more like Norway than Zimbabwe (most people agree, as revealed by real estate prices, but few have the intellectual or testicular fortitude to admit it). People have large positive or negative externalities on each other as a function of their behavioral genetics, IQ, culture, and productivity (but the second two are downstream of the first two). The qualities of a country flow from the aggregate of the qualities of the people in it. It is against the interest of everyone in a country and their posterity to import undesirable people, such as most muslim refugees (NAXALT blah blah). Democrats largely only support it because of a happy death spiral around "diversity" and needing more votes to compensate for leftists' extremely low relative fertility (I call it the ship of Theseus strategy to distinguish it from the weak-men and straw-men that have gone by the name of the great replacement).
My preferred solution to the political turmoil in the US would be splitting it up into an Archipelago where anyone can just choose which system to live under by voting with their feet instead of arguing over it. But that will probably never happen, so the best I can do is push back against the EU's attempts to enforce woke orthodoxy upon less-woke Eastern European countries (by e.g. fining them for not taking in enough alleged refugees) and oppose any attempts at consolidation in the sovereignty industry which would reduce the customers' options.
Real estate prices are significantly higher in London, New York and Paris than anywhere in Norway.
Within any given city, the whiter areas tend to be more expensive. The overall price level of a city is due to supply and demand, and immigration obviously increases the latter.
Not true in NYC though. Even if you ignore Staten Island because it's basically a suburb. Downtown Manhattan is more expensive than Uptown. Maybe if you get into the super nitty gritty you could say that West Village is the most expensive part of downtown and maybe the whitest?
That's all irrelevant though - immigration isn't driving up NYC real estate, it's young people out of college that want to live in the city due to its dynamism.
Also a lot of NIMBYs blocking new construction to expand the supply side of supply/demand.
??? most jews have a homeland where they are not the majority
I mean Israel.
in which part??? is your homeland norway or US?
I mean most jews support the continued existence of Israel as a majority-jewish and jewish-run state, regardless of the status of whichever country they actually live in. AKA zionism. White nationalism can be steelmanned as essentially the same thing as zionism, but applied to European Christians.
apparently my great grandfather helped found the zionist movement. It feels... kind of racist to me. Why does it matter which country (an artificial, human, construct) has a certain percentage of a certain race? (also an artificial human construct).
What's wrong with us all just interbreeding? Isn't zionism saying, we jews want to have our own country, because we as a race deserve our own nation? I mean, at what point does a race of people (arbitrarily drawn) deserve a city block, town, city, state, country, or continent?
I'm atheist - do atheists 'deserve' their own country?
If a bunch of atheists want to get together and buy an island and found their own country on it, they should absolutely be allowed to do that. Likewise any other tribe of people that wants to found their own community.
Assuming you are right on race and IQ. Wouldn't you want to live in a white country even more? In such a country your "superior white genes" would be a scarce resource. The demand for doctors grows linearly with the total population. The higher the nonwhite population, the more white people get to persue carreeers in well-paying fields. Whereas even in a white ethnostate you need someone to clean the toilets. given that there are no "mudskins"to do it for them, the Aryan Übermensch will have to do it himself. You may be rught that the GDP per capita might take a hit if you import low IQ people, but the GDP per capita of the high-IQ segment of the population will rise.
I must stress i do not actually accept the race-IQ link, but even if i did, that wouldnt change my policy prescriptions.
Depends what you value. I'd prefer to live in a country where doctors are not scarce - reduced demands on the medical system mean I'm less likely to fall through the cracks. I'd also prefer to live in a country where crime is low, and we *know* that lowering IQ causes increased violent crime (this was the leaded petrol fiasco).
To reverse Milton, Will apparently thinks it better to serve in Heaven than reign in Hell, and I agree on that preference point. That does, of course, leave the factual point in contention.
your choice of words is strawmanny in terms of associating race-IQ stuff with nazis. All the countries who fought against the nazis (except Stalin's USSR) also believed in race differences in intelligence (and a more correct form of it, without the nazis' weird hyperborean shit and esoteric mysticism) see https://jaymans.wordpress.com/jaymans-race-inheritance-and-iq-f-a-q-f-r-b/
The economic benefits of comparative advantage could easily be swamped by the downsides of a dumber hive mind. Worse institutions, worse culture, worse language, lower academic standards, more crime. Empirically we see that intelligent people born in the third world tend to want to emigrate to the US because they see more opportunity here. They earn more here than they earn in their home country. So clearly the relative scarcity of intelligence to other factors of production doesn't benefit the intelligent as much as the hive mind aspects hurt. All knowledge is highly cumulative so one guy working alone in the middle of nowhere can't get much done -- scientific advancement requires standing on the shoulders of giants, so you need a critical mass of intelligence in an area to have enough giants to stand on. Somebody born in the year 900 with an IQ of 200 couldn't have become a Leonardo da Vinci because there was nobody else around doing similar things to learn from. This predicts that rates of scientific progress should be extremely sensitive to small changes in average IQ -- and indeed we see that scientific advances were distributed extremely unevenly within europe, with some countries achieving an order of magnitude more than their slightly lower IQ neighbors. The scientific revolution and industrial revolution probably occurred when and where they did because human intelligence reached a critical mass in northwest europe. The Romans never had an industrial revolution because they never quite got smart enough because they lacked a strong religious taboo to prevent the elites from using contraception. It's easy for genetic changes to raise or lower IQ by one point per generation depending on malthusian conditions, contraception use among the elites, etc.
What I'm really taking away from this is the legal principle, "No one shall be judge in his own cause," and analogously the necessity of peer review in scientific publication, and a fortiori to both, the kind of adversarial collaboration promoted on SSC. Several of the grading choices appear highly contentious and selective about the facts, and one in particular seems to be an extreme error in interpretation. When predictions are being inferred after the fact from long texts, and especially when the evaluation criteria are super vague, that's when the rational choice is to leave the judgement to others.
Consequently, the prediction market results are best part of this post. And I think it's worth noticing that the prediction market bets did not cover issues similar to those Scott spent the most words defending. Perhaps the solution, then, to overall-bad arguments like these is to find a way to get them onto the prediction markets!
I take your overall point about Proud Boys, but telling a group to 'stand by' is very different from telling them to stand down. Charitably, Trump might have had a slip of the tongue, but as President he should be judged harshly on the words he speaks and those were irresponsible words at best and sinister at worst. I don't understand why you see them as equivalent to 'stand down' or a condemnation.
I think what people miss about that whole exchange is simply that *Trump hates being seen to be told what to do.* You could ask him to condemn throwing innocent newborn babies into the mouth of Hell, and if he felt he was being pressured to do so, he'd find it uncomfortable. "Sure, whatever you want, I just want to *make you happy*. Who am I condemning again?"
It might have been a slip of the tongue, but sometimes a slip of the tongue reveals what someone is actually thinking even when they're trying to hide it. Still, Trump isn't exactly very articulate or precise with his words, I could easily imagine him thinking that "stand by" is just another way to say "stand down".
I raised an eyebrow at your account of Trump’s Charlottesville comments, which seem too charitable to me (you didn’t mention that he condemned the violence on both sides too, even though only one side killed someone), but I reminded myself that I’m biased on this point. At your account of his behavior on 1/6, though, my eyebrow goes through the roof. The idea that Trump didn’t want the Capitol incursion to happen and was unhappy when it did flies in the face of several things we know. We know that the White House wouldn’t give authorization for the DC National Guard to come to the Capitol until Pence did it himself. We know that internal reports were that Trump was delighted by footage of the riot. We know that he told Kevin McCarthy on the phone, while McCarthy was under lockdown with the rest of Congress, “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are angrier about the election than you are.” We know that his staffers said they had to work to find a statement he would agree to give, and that the one he did deliver included the line “we love you.” We know that he tweeted that “this is what happens” when an election is stolen and that people would remember this day the rest of their lives. I don’t mind saying this wasn’t a coup and that he didn’t try to engineer it, but the idea that he sincerely tried to stop it, or that he didn’t like it, is risible.
> you didn’t mention that he condemned the violence on both sides too, even though only one side killed someone
Both sides committed violent acts, though, so I'm not sure what your point is.
You don't think that "on both sides" draws an equivalence? Along with the "very fine people on both sides"?
There was a lot of equivalence on both sides. Some reasonable people, some unreasonable people. The fact that in this particular case only the right-wing side who happened to successfully murder someone doesn't change the fundamentals, any more than it does when the more murderous side was flipped in Portland a few months later ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killings_of_Aaron_Danielson_and_Michael_Reinoehl )
"who happened to successfully murder someone"? Did the counter-protesters unsuccessfully attempt to murder anybody?
"Stand back and stand by" implies "stand by for further instructions" which is something that you would say to an ally or a subordinate or a co-conspirator. That's why it appeared troubling to listeners.
Scott, With reference to your 'crying wolf' piece you wrote: "I will still never predict anything this controversial again - it’s not worth the cost to my peace of mind."
I do not live in the USA but I have Muslim relatives who do. I was a bit anxious about what their fate would be until the day I read your 'crying wolf' post. Please accept my grateful thanks for writing this post, even though it came with huge personal cost.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/escalating-terrorism-problem-united-states
Right-wing terrorist attacks have grown to dominate domestic terror threats. I don't see how you can give yourself kudos for claiming that Trump didn't embolden the far right, when the far right clearly became more emboldened under Trump.
The linked paper defines terrorism as "the deliberate use—or threat—of violence by non-state actors in order to achieve political goals and create a broad psychological impact", which seems as reasonable a definition as any.
According to Figure 1, there were zero incidents of left wing terrorism inn 2020. This means that, for instance, this incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Occupied_Protest in which a group of armed leftists took six blocks of a city hostage and made political demands, was not classified as a terrorist attack. I wonder how they would have classified it if it had been a right-wing rather than left-wing militia.
Regarding #1, It's true that it is not a uniquely Trump phenomenon, but the extent to which Republicans have lost minority voters and gained white voters relative to 2000 & 2004 still seems really significant. Trump only improved with Hispanic & Asian voters relative to Romney, but otherwise is the same or worse than all the other years. He "improved" with black voters in 2016 just by matching the baseline of Republicans not running against Obama. Since black turnout declined in 2016 did he persuade new voters or did some low information voters who were gonna turn out for the first black president not turn out for Hillary Clinton?
You could say the significance of Trump is that his focus on immigration allowed him to solidify the racial polarization of the electorate without running against a black candidate.
> extent to which Republicans have lost minority voters and gained white voters relative to 2000 & 2004 still seems really significant
The Republican perspective on this would be: What do you expect? The Democrats have spent the last twenty years running a race-baiting campaign to demonise, shame and disenfranchise white people (especially white men) in the hopes of building an "everyone else" coalition that they can control.
Trump surprised me, too, in the end, with what you have described as a surprising lack of competence. (The narcissism that eventually pissed off the Coulter wing of the party did not surprise me, but then my default assumption is that absolutely anybody who seeks the US Presidence is a profound narcissist at best, and probably at least a little antisocial.)
I thought long and hard about this, trying to refine it, because in some areas he still appeared very competent (in a political sense). For example, he was *very* good at avoiding the taint of scandal that took down many of his underlings. He managed to have the correct combination of amnesia, plausible deniability, and throwing people under the bus that prevented any of the more serious failures from damaging him seriously. I was most impressed, in the end, with the fact that the whole Robert Mueller investigation came up essentially empty-handed. The Democrats poured unlimited resources and will into that, and Mueller himself is a deeply corrupt twister who absolutely would have delivered if he could -- but he couldn't. To me, that bespeaks an unusual level of caution by Trump early on, the canniness to insulate himself from what was going on down below in e.g. the way that Nixon famously failed to do. (I should perhaps add that the hypothesis that Trump was a Russian stooge were always brain-dead in my opinion, but normally running a very fine-toothed comb through an operation as big as a Presidential campaign will turn up *some* damaging squalor -- e.g. Hillary and her silly server -- and I gave Trump high marks on his political acumen that it did not.)
And yet...all that you say about his inability to deliver on his promises to his supporters -- which I think is (along with the bad optics of COVID) what cost him the 2020 election, since if you dive into the demographics you find the fatal trend was his loss of support among non-colleged educated working-class whites, the same people who put him over the top in 2016. To the extent I understand those people, they noticed that Trump had delivered only a tax cut to business and a lot of red-meat rhetoric, but on immigration, "The Wall," jobs, China, pretty much bupkis.
So what's up with that? How is it that he displayed strong political savvy but couldn't get some very basic crap done he'd promised, and which (initially at least) was popular enough to get him elected in 2016?
My conclusion after a while is that Trump *is* competent -- but only at those things that are essentially a sole proprietorship, on which everything hangs on the guy at the top. That works in Vegas/Atlantic City high-stakes real estate deals, maybe, and it certainly works to win an election. But it does NOT work in running the Federal Government. It simply *can't* be run by the guy at the top by himself. That guy *must* be able to hire a bunch of people who are both competent and whom he trust, and who trust him and will generally execute his vision.
In the end, Trump couldn't do this. He got a lot of very competent people to volunteer to come work with him initially, but somehow he just couldn't keep them. They left, and usually under such bad terms that they despised the man later. In short, Trump just can't make and keep friends. He's fine at relating to people in very large crowds, but I gather he's just too big of an asshole one-on-one, even to people who mostly share his ambitions and goals, to be able to build the kind of oligarchical structure necessary to run something as vast as the Federal Government. Toward the end it became kind of pathetic, he was clearly reaching for second-stringers, and then even further down, as it became clear nobody who wasn't a nutcase or cynically in it for himself was willing to work for the man.
Interestingly, he never seemed to resent this fact, which means I think he must be used to it.
It's funny you mention his real-estate business because that has gone through failure after failure, as have most of his other endeavors. His run on the Apprentice is the only money-maker of his I can think of that didn't end in bankruptcy, a fraud lawsuit, etc.
Well, I'm not attaching a *lot* of weight to that, because high-stakes real estate deals attached to gambling and hotels are kind of like that. It's a boom-n-bust biz in general. I mean, real estate itself is, commercial real estate more so, and resort commercial real estate triply so.
But...yes, I do wonder if he was awesome at swinging some crazy miracle deal -- which is kind of what the buying and selling is about -- but then couldn't manage to hire good managers to actually *run* the hotels and businesses once he had them. Even if you're mostly a flipper, you do need to run properties in between your deals, and for that -- you need employees, allies, people with whom you can work. He just seems like the ultimate loner, like nothing works unless it entirely rests on his performance. The reality TV show was probably his natural milieu.
Steve Wynn—who was a Trump friend and backer—told a story of playing golf with Trump and Trump complaining that he didn't know what was going wrong with his Atlantic City casinos, he didn't know how to turn things around. Wynn said something like, "Spend three days there just talking to everyone who reports to you, find out what's going wrong and what they need to succeed." Wynn said that Trump's face fell and it was obvious he didn't want to do that and wasn't going to. So that may be support for your hypothesis.
What sucks here is that the thing you got the most right (and is thus the most valuable) is also on the most forbidden topic where you took a personal risk to have a (contrary) opinion. But in some ways that seems like a general pattern of useful punditry. The easiest way to make a great prediction is to bet against the most obviously stupid herd beliefs, but it is the obviously stupid herd beliefs which induce the strongest defense mechanism when challenged.
This is a really good point, well said
TBH it's not just the "number of words" in that Homeland Security document that reminds of The Fourteen Words; I think it's extremely unlikely that was just a coincidence.
Scott, what would it look like if there were a realm of meaning that you did not understand? As in, you were missing a sense?
Perhaps it would look like people getting angry at you for the things you say on certain topics. Perhaps it would look like people behaving irrationally towards you for reasons you could never grasp.
Perhaps those people are behaving rationally, they are just possessed of a sense that you do not yourself have access to.
I don't know if there is a kind way to say this. I have heard it said that Rationalists held truth above the ego. It has not been true in my experience of them.
> Trump said the Proud Boys should "stand back and stand by", which as far as I can tell is equivalent to "stand down"
When I heard those words for the first time the visceral sense of anger and dread I experienced was alarming. I understood that something like the Capitol Riot was inevitable. The fact that you are unable to perceive the meaning of "stand back and stand by" and why it was alarming is very, very telling.
> Apparently these two events were the most racist-sounding comments anyone was able to get out of Trump in four years of being President.
Notice you are confused! That was one of the most shocking moments, yes! If you weren't shocked, notice you are confused!
You need an editor. You need someone you can trust to point out where gaps in your perception show up in your writing.
Because they do. As someone who has been a fan: the gaps in your perception show up in your writing. All writers have gaps in their perception of some manner or another which an editor can help with.
Trump's supporters also get angry at people who say certain things, and may sometimes appear to be behaving irrationally. Are those of us who aren't able to understand their behavior "missing a sense"?
I mean, Haidt would say so. He divides the moral foundations into "care/harm", "liberty/oppression", "fairness/cheating", "loyalty/betrayal", "authority/subversion" and "sanctity/degradation"; WEIRDs generally have a strengthened version of the first, weaker versions of the last three, and particularly a crippled version of sanctity/degradation.
Haidt wrote in 2012, and SJ has definitely picked up strong components of loyalty/betrayal and sanctity/degradation since then (which is mostly what you'd expect from it bleeding WEIRDs into the Grey Tribe while starting to pull in non-WEIRDs as a new orthodoxy), although it still largely rejects authority/subversion.
The question is, of course, whether those senses are good.
I think that's a good insight, and relevant, but I don't think it's a "sense" in the same, er, sense as that suggested by the OP. One is putatively a reality tracking sense, like sight or hearing, whereas the other is a moral sensibility that dictates preferences *about* reality.
I think the OP is probably sincerely meant, but share other commenters' irritation with it. "I have strong feelings about X, which constitute strong evidence that should inform *your* predictions about X" is usually tiresome, outside a handful of toy examples. "I am drawing inferences about X, using a process I'm not going to explain to you but which I *am* going to criticize you for not independently instantiating," likewise.
If you *know* why you feel strongly that X, you should explain that to others instead of complaining that they don't "get it." If you *don't* know, it's not clear why *your* feeling that X are more accurate than other peoples' feeling that ~X. I mean, it shouldn't be clear to *you*, and you shouldn't expect it to be clear to *other* people.
I don't think you grasp the depth of the problem.
There's a reason I put focus on Scott's communicated confusion ("Apparently" reads to me very much as confusion). This isn't as much about my feeling X and other people feeling ~X. Normally when people disagree they can come to a common understanding on why one believes X and the other believes Y. But Scott doesn't seem to understand why these things blow up on him.
This isn't moral sensibilities, either. I have little doubt that if Scott could perceive the fascism he would condemn it.
This is a failure to understand the communication between the authoritarian and his mob. How do you communicate around gaps in communication?
I don't know. But in the difference between "Stand back and stand by" and "Stand down" there is something that to one group of people is completely obvious, and to another group of people is, apparently, interpolating over static.
It very much reminds me of those cognition variations like those who experience their thoughts as words and those who don't.
I think the situation is more symmetrical than you seem to be supposing. I agree that some people see something in Trump's utterances that looks fascist, and other people don't see this thing. And I agree that, *if you assume the thing is actually there*, this points to some foundational processing deficit on the part of those who don't see the thing. But human processing is inherently assembling patterns out of very noisy data, and we *know* that one very common failure mode is assembling the data into a pattern that's not actually there.
This is, pace your comment, a really quite foundational difference in perceptions, but the *depth* of that difference doesn't give us any reason to favor one side over the other.
I mean, you're right that, since your perspective conflicts with Scott's, *at most* one of you can be right. But this isn't *actually* an argument the one who's right is you; we need something else to break the symmetry, beyond the mere fact of disagreement.
And... the asymmetries I *do* see kind of favor Scott, here. Where there's an asymmetric payoff to making type 1 vs type 2 errors, we expect people to develop biases to maximize value. In plainer language, if there's a big, dangerous threat that *might* exist, it's often very dangerous to overlook it but merely inconvenient to falsely detect it.
I don't know you, personally, but I think a lot of people who see this thing would feel kind of embarrassed if it turned out not to be there. On the other hand, *failing* to see it, if it *were* there, seems like the stuff of nightmares. Assuming everyone here's being honest in communicating their emotional reactions, Scott seems mildly bemused that people are going a little crazy here, whereas his critics seem to feel like it's *crucially important* that people are missing this big, obvious, incredibly dangerous thing. That emotional dynamic should cause us to update in favor of Scott, at least a little.
Which isn't to say there couldn't be other factors which bias the dynamic in the other direction! The classical way of resolving this is to make predictions, and see if they come true. But predicting things is almost always noisy- hard to do with certainly even if your model is *right*, because your model only mirrors *part* of the world. So Scott having made some incorrect predictions should cause me to update heavily against his model, provided I have *another* model available that made similar predictions and got them all right.
They do have to be *advance* predictions, though- retrodiction gives people way too much wiggle room. And they have to be precise enough that they *could* be falsified, in the counterfactual world where the model that generated them was false.
Do you have anything like that? Any source that made better *concrete* predictions about Trump *beforehand*, of a similar level of specificity? ("Trump will do bad things" doesn't fit these criteria, both because it's too vague to be falsifiable and because it's not actually in tension with Scott's model, which in fact *did* predict Trump would do bad things.")
>That emotional dynamic should cause us to update in favor of Scott, at least a little.
This is Vizzini-ing. Rationalist tic.
There were a whole lot of people talking about how they were shocked, but not surprised on 1/6. I get the feeling those of you who were actually surprised have yet to really understand that there isn't epistemic doubt anymore. Your doubt about this is not something I can solve.
Like: two groups of people batter back and forth about whether or not the president is fascist for four years while a third group of people ignores politics. That third group of people saw 1/6 happen. You're still living in 2020. This is 2021. Trump sent a mob at the Capitol.
It wasn't a false positive. The fact that you are still living in a world where you have to think about whether or not the people yelling about the danger of a man who questioned the validity of the elections had a point is the perceptual problem we're trying to talk across.
I don't know how to tell you which politicians to trust but you should start by not trusting the ones who openly agitate against the validity of their own country's elections. It was like you people couldn't read what was on the tin with Trump. Strangest thing. Community of the blind.
You'd have to answer that for yourself. For me, the difference is that I'm not confused by the anger of Trump supporters or surprised by how they behave.
Sure, and I'm not confused by journalists who get conspicuously upset about trivialities either--it's what drives their bottom line.
Alright, why are Trump supporters angry and why do they behave the way they do?
(I have my own opinions on this, but I feel a litmus test here is worthwhile.)
Is this in response to my request for advance predictions? It looks like it's supposed to be, but I don't get it; either one of the people who shares your sense of this managed to *use* that insight to make better predictions than Scott, who lacks that sense, or they didn't. As I *think* I've made clear, I am not aware of it if they have, but I haven't read everything. You also haven't read everything (er, I'm assuming,) but you've presumably read things I haven't read. I'm asking whether any of those things is a set of predictions that plausibly outperforms Scott's. I can't answer for myself whether you've read anything like that, since I'm, uh, not you?
Like, I can definitely imagine us disagreeing about marginal cases- if someone came *close* to Scott's record, but missed different questions, for instance, I could imagine you rating them higher than Scott and me rating them a little lower. And you saying, "Look, you have to evaluate how important those questions are for yourself." But I *would* need to see them first before I could evaluate them.
Maybe threads like that are so common in your filter bubble that it's hard for you to believe I haven't run across them independently? All I can say to that is that bubbles are really strong, and I actually haven't. I've heard lots of people prophesying doom in really vague terms- seriously, irritatingly vague, it's like they were *trying* to be unfalsifiable- and some people making *concrete* predictions of doom that turned out to be wrong. Also, lots of people predicting Trump would be terrible on immigration- but that wasn't actually in much doubt, in my bubble, and Scott also got it right.
I'm... starting to sound a little disingenuous to my own ears, at this point, so I'm gonna risk being tactless: If there really is a critically important factor here which you can see and I can't, I *definitely* wanna know about that. But critically important factors *matter*- practically by definition: they impact other things, things which I *can* see.
If I was saying, "Show me where you, personally, have outpredicted Scott," that would be really petty and unfair of me! Also not very truth-oriented- most people don't write down their predictions, even if their models are good. But if *nobody's* managed to parlay this insight into better predictions- if *none* of the people who *aren't* blind the way you're describing stopped to write down what they thought was going to happen before it did- do you see how that would be *really* surprising?
I don't completely agree with Scott- I *do* see some difference between "stand down" and "stand by". I think that *could* have been a flubbed line, or it *could* have been Trump trying to be noncommital and keep his options open- I think he has a consistent, high-level heuristic to do that when he possibly can- or it *could* have been Trump trying not to look weak by letting the moderator push him around- I think Trump *also* has a consistent, high-level heuristic not to do what people tell him to. I'm not defending it as innocent- I think it was weaselly politician-behavior. But I don't see *fascism*. I don't see the very specific thing which you think you do see.
And, while I'm being blunt- I feel like it's kind of... rude?... to tell people they're being straight-up blind, that they have a cognitive blindspot keeping them from seeing [specific true-and-important-thing] and then offer literally zero evidence that they *can* see. Like, assuming you're *right*, what do you think is going to happen here?
When I imagine the world where you're *right*, it feels like you're kind of... dangling a shiny object over a paraplegic while discoursing about them being unable to stand up and take it. And it's not your *job* to fetch me shiny objects- the fact that I can't reach doesn't mean you're *obligated* to get it for me, or hand me a crutch. But maybe you shouldn't be going "GEE, IF ONLY YOU DIDN'T HAVE THAT HANDICAP YOU COULD REACH THIS NEAT TOY. SHAME YOU CAN'T JUST STAND UP AND TAKE IT, ISN'T IT?" The *premise* of your comment is that Scott *can't*- and I guess *I* can't- just stand up and take it. That we're handicapped in a way that keeps us from seeing this true, important thing which *you* can see.
And if one of us asks you if you maybe have a crutch we can borrow- something *concrete* we could lean on that *would* let us reach the thing- well, handing out crutches isn't your job, there's no guarantee you even have one handy. So it's okay if the answer is "no."
But I think it's kind of *not* okay- at any rate, it's not okay with *me*- if the answer is "You'd have to answer that for yourself." You don't *seem* cruel- I don't get the sense you're *enjoying* this, or doing it to be mean- but I literally can't see how you could possibly think that would help. I just kind of talked myself into being mad at you, and I *think* what did it was that my agent-modeling software kept trying to cough up a plausible set of helpful motivations, and it's been dry-firing for the last ten minutes. I don't see how you possibly expected this to help, and I don't know if that means I'm being stupid or if you really *were* being a jerk.
I'm not sure this is kind, but it's true and it seems necessary, at least as much as anything else I could say. I'm never completely sure how to interpret the "necessary" criterion, It's not a low-effort swipe, not gratuitous, and definitely on-topic, so I think it's as necessary as blog comments are in the general span of things.
I am not sure that it's wise, which isn't a listed criterion but still seems worth considering. But I'm not sure that it's *unwise*, and I always use honesty as a tiebreaker, and it is definitely that.
If you *did* mean well- if you *were* trying to help- I don't regret the algorithms that generated this response, but I regret not being smart enough to be able see how.
So I read and responded to your other comment before I saw this one. In this one you're wrestling with a lot of the complexities of navigating this kind of conversation just from the perspective of etiquette. I appreciate that.
I don't have all the answers. I'll tell you my motivations, though.
Scott is a good writer with a perspective the world needs more of with a stability and kindness that could have his best work ahead of him. Scott is discrediting himself with essays on politics that show a lack of familiarity with the subject matter, and the solution really is run essays by a decent editor.
I prefer a world in which Scott produces essays that don't alienate the leftist portion of his fanbase.
The question is whether your familiarity with the subject matter is extra knowledge about reality, extra knowledge about an orthodox-but-false model of reality (Scott: "But every legitimate archbishop disagrees with this particular heresy"), or extra bellyfeel of a given moral outlook.
Wow, that's as close to the definition of "Gaslighting" from the movie as you can be. You're literally missing some kind of obvious sense that all the decent folk have, Scott! There must be something wrong with you!
Ah yes, the classic maximally rational theory of "everyone who acknowledges the potential of bias is gaslighting".
If someone accuses you of missing some kind of cognitive sense using your confusion as a single argument then it is indeed gaslighting, yes.
You're using a lot of words I didn't say. I didn't say those words on purpose.
But you know, I understand why you feel that way. It's rough talking about these things, and Rationalists aren't better at it than any other group of people.
Of course you do, you have an extra sense at your disposal.
That could very well be true!
"When I heard those words for the first time the visceral sense of anger and dread I experienced was alarming."
Oh you poor thing! I hope you went to your doctor, did they recommend you a good anti-acid and anxiolytic? Better be careful with the latter, my own GP told me they're habit-forming!
Perhaps you should cut back on TV watching if it's affecting you so badly, you don't want to permanently damage your blood pressure.
LMAO way to miss the point there, smug-nuts
Smug nuts? No, the only nuts for me are Wolong's Famous Nuts! https://www.reddit.com/r/CDrama/comments/m20s0a/wolongs_famous_nuts/
"They’re going to lean regressive, totalitarian, super-social-justice left.
I think this basically happened."
Evidence? Who are you talking about here?
You are Still Crying Wolf was how I discovered SSC and the rationality community in general, so I really appreciate you being willing to speak up. I was really questioning my sanity when so many of my smart college educated friends were posting (deadly serious) about how Trump was going to usher in an era of Nazi style fascism and I just couldn't understand it... I used to think humans were mostly rational creatures but I've learned a lot in the past few years that has been really helpful in understanding the world. So thank you!!
Regarding the increase in hate crime, the % increase in incidents motivated by anti-Asian, Arab, or Hispanic bias is still striking. Almost half of the race/ethnicity-based incidents are anti-black, which already had a high baseline in 2015, increased by 10-15% while anti-Arab incidents increased 2.75x and anti-Hispanic events increased by 42% in 2017. Anti-arab incidents simmer down in 2019 but continue to stay high for the latter in 2019. It will be interesting to see anti-Asian incidents in 2020. The numbers are in the hundreds, so after statistical testing, the increases might not be "statistically significant," but the trend by groups is there IMO.
Generally I think you're right about the white supremacy hype. I bought in to those concerns for sure in 2015 and 2016 and there was no explicit fascist movement in the U.S.
But I also think the blowback - the literally claiming you were a Nazi and blatant attacks on you and your integrity, have given you a bit of a blind spot here.
Trump is not a white supremacist (we'll just use the phrase "white supremacist" to mean "somebody who intends to enforce a culture of white supremacy") but he had absolutely no problem accepting the support of white supremacists. And while everything he said and did during his tenure in office had a thin coating of plausible deniability, he did signal to white supremacists.
I can't imagine a world in which telling a group to "stand down" is the same as telling them to "stand down and stand by." One implies "stop doing your stuff" and the other implies "stop doing your stuff...for now." It seems uncontroversially obvious to me that this was a dog whistle, and not a particularly subtle one.
I feel exactly the same way about the statements beginning with the phrase "we must secure."
There's a textual reading of all this stuff that has no white supremacist meaning, coupled with a reasonable second meaning that does. Maybe that happens once or twice, but it happened repeatedly throughout Trump's four years in office.
Do I think that's because Trump was a secret Nazi who wanted to burn minorities in ovens? No. I think for decades, the mainstream press has made a blood sport of asking questions meant to separate moderate GOP voters and the GOP's crazy base. They enjoy, e.g. taking some fringe conspiracy theory, putting it in the news like it's part of the GOP platform, upping the volume on it, and then asking GOP candidates to comment. They love watching Romney squirm because he's sold himself as a reasonable and moderate alternative to Obama, but now he has to either say that Obama is a Muslim or lose support in the primary.
Trump just barrels through that mess - which is a huge part of his appeal. "Do you agree with these white supremacist groups we're artificially inflating as a major threat or are you sane?"
"Screw you, there's no way to answer that question that doesn't hurt me, even if I tell the Proud Boys to stand down that will just be used as proof that I have the ability to do that, so I ain't playing. No, I'm not a white supremacist but if white supremacists will vote for me I'll take their votes just like every other politician alive. Spin that, b***ches."
I have no patience with this - it emboldens dangerous nutjobs, normalizes saying white supremacy things, and will actually harm the country. I know that the media is manipulating the GOP to make them into villains it is just to fight, but I can't help it. They are now villains it is just to fight.
And reading statements at a surface level, assuming the good intent of the speaker, should be the default - finding secret signals in the statements of public figures is psychotic behavior. But shouldn't good Bayesian thinking say "hey if he just happens to ape Nazi symbolism in service to non-nazi causes a lot, but it appears to be innocent every time, maybe I should adjust towards the dog whistle hypothesis a bit"?
Anyway, I understand if you censor your thoughts, predictions, and opinions based on what the internet might think. I certainly do, all the time, almost impulsively. There are real consequences for saying unpopular things - interpersonally, politically, career-wise. But if you are willing to keep having controversial opinions and making controversial predictions, you will in fact make the world a better place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_coup
A soft coup, sometimes referred to as a silent coup, is a coup d'état without the use of violence, but based on a conspiracy or plot that has as its objective the taking of state power by partially or wholly legal means, in order to facilitate an exchange of political leadership and in some cases also of the current institutional order.
I don't know if I'd agree with your assessment that there were no links to white supremacy in the 6/1 Capitol attack - there were multiple white supremacist groups present that day, including the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Nick Fuentes and assoc., Rise Above Movement, Anticom, and Three Percenters. You might argue that these groups aren't *primarily* white supremacist or that they describe themselves in other terms, but at *best* they're well known to have supremacist/anti-diversity sentiments.
I think tarring all of them with the same "white supremacist" brush is a mistake. They're all heavily, violently anti-SJ, certainly, but the Wikipedia articles don't show anything solid on Proud Boys, Oath Keepers or Three Percenters (there's at least a bit on all the rest).
There's a rather large amount of middle ground between full-blown intersectionality and full-blown white supremacism.
I'm not very comfortable with dangerous far-right groups being given a "middle ground" where it's like well, they go to events with racists, ally with racist groups, and use racist language, but they SAY they're not racist... At least the Three Percenters publicly claimed regret for their participation at Charlottesville, but that's not the strongest defense ever - anyone who followed the Unite the Right planning online knew what it was going to be.
The most obvious analogy for Charlottesville and similar things is to pride parades - a bunch of different groups with radically-varying ideologies and deviations from orthodoxy, marching together because they all *do* deviate from orthodoxy and want to make it common knowledge that said orthodoxy isn't universally-accepted.
And I mean, if you want to say there's no excuse for ever allying with white supremacists, fine. If you want to say that these groups are violent militias, I'm right there with you. But completely eliding these sort of distinctions is foolish - particularly when your entire initial point was "these groups are all white supremacists".
No, PRIDE parades (rainbows, love, unicorns, inclusiveness, free hugs, dancing) are NOT "the most obvious analogy for Charlottesville".
They are the exact, polar opposite of hate, swastikas, exclusiveness, anger, violence and driving cars into people to murder them.
There are so many unbelievably outlandish comments in this thread (which itself gets Trump wrong as others have pointed out) but this one takes the cake.
> There’s a vicious cycle where the lack of intelligent conservatives guts the system of think tanks that produce the sort of studies and analyses which convince smart people to become conservative, which in turn makes there even fewer intelligent conservatives, and so on.
As far as I'm aware, there is not a significant IQ slant to liberals or conservatives. (Undecideds are noticeably dumber than everyone else.) Rather, what's gutting the system of think tanks is a lack of *academic* conservatives.
The Trump comment that seems (to me) hardest to reconcile with anything other than racist ideology is the "good genes"/"racehorse theory" bit from his speech here: https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-campaign-rally-speech-bemidji-minnesota-transcript-september-18
I even asked a few Trump supporters I know if they could think of any non-racist interpretation, and came up empty.
I think there are two things that are getting conflated here: empirical claims which, if true, could be politically convenient for racists, and normative claims that one should be in favour of discriminating against individuals on the basis of their race.
In that speech, it sounds like Trump is making the claim that a harsh environment creates a selection pressure for hardiness, and therefore Minnesotans are hardy because they are well-adapted to the harsh environment of Minnesota (whether because, being mostly Nordics, they were already well-adapted to the comparable climate of Scandinavia, or because of selection pressure on them after they had arrived in North America isn't clear).
That's not an obviously-crazy claim, depending on how much time there has been to allow selection pressures to exert themselves (or at least, one would have to be a dogmatic blank-slatist to insist that it couldn't possibly have some truth to it), but there is nothing about that claim that would lead to a "and therefore we should discriminate against people of other races on the basis of their race". The idea that it's possible for different groups of humans to be differently well-adapted to a particular environment is an idea that it would be difficult to build any coherent racist theory *without* (i.e. the idea that human populations differ genetically is an idea that could be politically convenient for racists), but that doesn't mean that support for racial discrimination is a logically necessary conclusion.
Okay, how does that square with the term "racehorse theory"? Selection pressures on racehorses are not environmental in that sense.
Separately: even if that is what Trump believes, and it's what he was trying to convey in the speech, isn't making that point in the context of discussing immigration policy...racist?
"isn't making that point in the context of discussing immigration policy...racist? "
That's my point exactly: it *is* racist in the sense of "empirical claims which, if true, could be politically convenient for racists", but it is not racist in the sense of "be[ing] in favour of discriminating against individuals on the basis of their race" - at least within the existing polity. There is a very important difference between "we should racially discriminate against the people of Somalian origin who are already here, who came here as refugees" and "empirically, the people who came here from Somalia are *on average* less productive citizens, more likely to be on welfare and/or involved in crime, and we should be more careful about vetting people from Somalia who want to move to Minnesota to make sure that the ones we are letting in are in fact likely to be good citizens".
(This does not depend on any hereditarian claim - it's perfectly possible to believe that a) Somalians are relatively culturally dysfunction compared to old-stock Minnesotans, and that that disparity is downstream of environmentally-caused cultural dysfunction in Somalia - though it is also compatible with hereditarian beliefs.)
The claim you are implicitly making seems to be: even if different countries have different numbers of people who can be expected to make good citizens, for whatever reason, it is unethical to take likelihood-of-being-a-good-citizen into account when deciding who to let into the country if that would produce racial disparity. Is that a fair description?
Either way, I don't have the skills in Trumpomancy to guess what exactly he means by racehorse theory. For what it's worth, artifical selection on racehorses for speed, and natural selections on humans for hardiness in adaptation to a harsh environment with cold winters, are still selection pressures doing what selection pressures do: altering the relative frequency of different alleles within a gene pool, and still have the same end result: a population better adapted to those selection pressures, whether those pressures are imposed consciously by humans or naturally by the environment.
Scott Sumner (here: https://www.econlib.org/dont-anthropomorphize-the-economy/) - insists that economic performance is 3% the president and 97% everything else.
I would be willing to grant Trump a full 5% instead of 3%, the extra 2% being allotted to him aggressively tweeting at Powell to keep the money printers on, an instinct that was probably selfish but ultimately correct. In theory the president can only fire the Fed chair "for cause" but I'm sure Powell didn't feel like rolling the dice at SCOTUS.
Please, Scott, please stop commenting on politics. It makes you sound so ignorant!
People get mad at you because you skew every single thing in the most favorable to the Trump-y direction. You don't need to this! But you seem incapable of doing anything else when you talk about this. What are you getting your news from Daily Caller and Breitbart?
You want to argue that the GOP should take inspiration from Trump/Bannonism and turn it into something better, fine. You want to argue that liberals and anti-racists go too far on some corner of the Internet, also fine. But please don't attempt to touch base with reality, you are on a different planet.
-Trump had destroyed institutions
-children in cages, revoking DACA, blanket visa ban on Nigerians, these are some racist policies.
- How are young people more totalitarian, because they tell at you on Twitter? Young liberals are advocating for HR-1 and other pro-democracy measures.
- Jan 6th was an attempted coup. Is it exculpatory that it was so sloppy?
- Stephen Miller was found to be coordinating with explicitly white supremacists websites, kept his job.
- We have GOP house members forming "Anglo-saxon" culture events.
If you want to argue Trump's obvious white-supremacist racism is unimportant or overblown, fine, but you don't have to deny it exists.
I think it might help to look at it like this:
To be a white supremacist by any reasonable definition, you need to be actively in favour of supremacy for white people. I am not convinced that Trump qualifies. But it's possible for someone to not be a white supremacist but also think that combatting white supremacism is not always-and-everywhere the most important priority. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Trump falls into that camp. It's possible that white supremacists, though real, represent a tiny fraction of the population and are so far from the levers of power that there are many other things that are more important to worry about, and that the only reason people are freaking out about them is because the media ecosystem is fuelling a moral panic, with white supremacists occupying a role not unlike that occupied by witches in more traditionally religious eras.
(https://hwfo.substack.com/p/the-media-engine-of-chaos is very much worth reading for some blackpills on the incentive structure governing what becomes news)
On that analysis, it's possible for Trump to work on the same team as some people with hardline anti-immigrationist views on immigration issues but not to share the whole worldview of those people, and without any expectation that Trump would seriously try to drag the country back to the Jim Crow era.
(It's also worth considering that, given that most humans are tribal creatures, you don't have to be motivated by bigotry to worry that in a country with no clear majority ethnic group, democracy breaks down as a mistake-theorist means of deciding the best policies for the country, and simply becomes a conflict-theorist ethnic headcount. Also, given that most humans are motivated to some degree by economic concerns, and given that accepting large numbers of low-skilled immigrants who compete with the existing working class will tend to lower wages for the working class while providing cheaper labour for the subset of the rich who employ them, it's worth considering that attemting to smear all opposition to increased immigration as evil is effectively a sort of economic warfare by the blue tribe against the red tribe, and that if you are on team red, it's possible to oppose measure that will impoverish you personally without being motivated by sheer irrational hatred).
Edited to add: although I am unconvinced that white supremacists political activists have any significant sway in the USA right now, I am at least somewhat worried that the ethnonarcissism being pushed by the blue team risks reinvigorating the very demon they claim to be fighting. The critical race theory, Kendi / DiAngelo types are basically offering a proposition that goes: there is no middle ground where we will allow people to keep their identity small on questions of race; we will do our best to ensure that everyone is forced to choose between siding with race-obsessed ideologues who love white people, and siding with race-obsessed ideologues who hate white people.
On that basis, had it been allowed to stand, I think that one can reasonably believe that Trump's ban on the use of federal funds to push CRT could have been a bulwark against the reinvigoration of white ethnonarcissism *even if Trump himself is not as perfectly uncontaminated by adjacency to disreputable racial ideologues* as one would hope.
Critical race theory seems to be the moral panic.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/critical-race-theory
A lot of the CRT-laws are like 90% banal and good, but then overreach and make it impossible to even discuss racism in a historical or contemporary context.
Unless you've got a kid going to one of those weird rich-people private schools actually teaching racist non-sense under the guise of CRT, I see it as mostly a passing fad online.
And I reiterate my earlier point - look at the people recently empowered on the right (Trump, McConnell, McCarthy) vs the left (Biden, Schumer, Pelosi).
I'm not a subscriber to Yglesias, so I can't read the link, but ... well, I hope you're right about it being a passing fad. But the fact that CRT training was being provided by the federal government prior to the ban is at least an indicator that the rot has spread far.
At least I would hope we can both agree that to the degree that children and young adults are being indoctrinated into an ideology that holds that any aggregate differences in social outcomes between racial groups must be the result of discrimination, that is a thing very much worth avoiding?
(One of the more outrageous instances of racial hysteria recently, not a CRT training incident per se, but one that could only happen if CRT-like ideology was in the water supply, was the Georgetown Law School hysteria, where a teacher, not realizing her conversation was still being recorded, observed with some obvious distress that her black students tend to cluster at the bottom of her class, someone shared the video and whipped up anger about it, and the university sided with the mob and fired the teacher for alleged racism, even though she is very clearly stating a fact that she wishes were not the case, and wishes she could remedy - and they also punished the guy she was in a conversation with for not contradicting her. That had damn well better be an isolated incident, but if sacrificing the effort to promote competence in highly-demanding professions in order to appease race-obsessed crybullies has become the norm, then civilisation is in some danger. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R33C7FrsJYc )
Huh, I wish Substack made it a little clearer what links would world.
I would just point out the existence of people who have gone "too far" with allegations of racism does not prove the Trump administration is not racist, or doesn't have racist motives for doing horrible things.
If I were to speculate on the failure mode that Scott is operating on it's exactly that. The is why alt-right website like to begin their arguments with whataboutism.
Racism is bad! And it's also really bad when it's the White House.
I may undercut my own point, but I will say something on that video.
I wouldn't say firing her is necessarily an appropriate response, but I would say she does not have the pro-active attitude her prestigious school expects. Does she believe its her primary job to test the students or to educate the students? Educating is first priority. I'm occasionally teacher myself actually. I teach in a unique situation, where student do come into my classroom with a mixture of undergraduate, graduate, professional experience; it is my job not to hide those differences in preparation but it is my job to pro-actively overcome them. So I try to be responsive to any student under-performing by providing extra instructional time and training resources for under-prepared students. That's what is expected of me. At the end of the class, I want to certify that everyone who passes has a certain level of knowledge and training that the next teacher can rely on, or industry professionals can rely on.
In the video she says "Come on" which seems to mean "you are disappointing me" and later she is talking about "some good ones". I take that to reflect the perspective that the underperformance of her black students is entirely their fault, and she has nothing in her power to change that. I'm not saying they are at the bottom of class because of anything she did anything racist - rather I think she has been trained to ignore race-gaps in performance that are inconvenient for her and for the university. In her perspective, I imagine she feels frustrated to have been set-up in this situation by the university, under-prepared black students who when graded-fairly she has to mark down.
But that the university accepts their students with the expectation that they achieve and expects teachers to be instrumental in that. When she sees a consistent pattern of under-performance, the problem I see is not that she acknowledged it but that she isn't interested in doing anything pro-active. If I'm the teacher in that situation, I want to understand what these students are missing when they step into my classroom and how I can give them the support to respond to that. Her pedagogy style is not racist exactly, its antiquated. She does not care about fixing a persistent problem. The first mission of the university is trying to educate and train everyone that is in the classroom. She cannot be expected to close all achievement gaps herself, but she is expected to participate in an inclusive educational environment and not just pass the buck. In conclusion, I don't think she is some racist that needs to be run out of town, but I do get what she said that made people upset.
And yes, there are over-achieving students who also should not be ignored. I was one myself. But I see the classroom as about certifying knowledge, and what is really of value to the over-achieving students are those opportunities to seek out projects beyond the classroom. Those projects which relate to the real world or mimic the ruthless meritocracy of the real world. Some students are ready can seek those out before they leave the school, and some need the training first. But there is no sparing students from meritocracy and that it is not the purpose of inclusive education to do so.
Okay sure, but I think what you are showing is how useless it is to restrict ones analysis of "white supremacy as a set of influential ideas" only to active proponents of explicit white supremacy that don't face any public sanctions.
Kids in cages is a real thing that happened. That's not a moral panic. If I call that "a tiny bit of white supremacism but mostly about other things" then, it shows a tiny bit of white supremacism is absolutely worth freaking out about. I'm astonished Scott thinks the "take away" from four years of Trump was it was four year of crying wolf, when what happened was an unmitigated disaster by any sensible account.
Although I agree there exists liberals who are overactive with charges of racism, I do think it's useful to have a word that mean "if you keep going that way, it will be even more racist and even more harmful". When in the same piece Scott calls the left/liberals "totalitarian" because there really are some loud bossy people on the left who lean that way, this feels like a totally bad faith argument on his part. (Scott's supposed to be the king of good faith argumentation, I was sincere when I said he should stop himself!) But the fundamental asymmetry is that Trump was president for the GOP, Obama and Biden were president for the Dems. If the rule is, "it's not enough to find crazy people online, crazy people are only worth worrying about when what they do matters" - well I think we got a real problem here. If someone want's to say the terrible things that Trump did was totally incidental to the fact that he also racist, well I think that's a little bit convenient but it's really not worth fighting for.
I hear what you are saying about racism being not necessary to explain tribalistic cruel anti-immigrant views. But here's the thing, I'm also a mistake theorist. Racist partisan attitudes is a failure mode of human thinking that not only is leading to bad governance, but it's threatening our system of democracy where sometimes we don't have as bad governance. The fact that the Trump administration is not only racist, but ignorant, cruel, delusional is not in the least bit exculpatory. None of us really know exactly the right way to rehabilitate the GOP from this toxic constellation - maybe you have to educate first so that the cruel racism falls away, or maybe you pull out the racism first and the partisan delusions fall away - but if we're trying to solve the problem by listing all the mistakes, the fact that the tribalism is reinforced by racism (which has historically been very bad) feels relevant. Anti-immigrant sentiments doesn't have to be motivated by explicit bigotry, but it might be occasionally useful to have some of that terminology for the pushback we receive when trying to dislodge it.
Do I have to point out the reality, virtually undisputed by economists, that immigration is in fact very good for the country? for the very people who oppose it? That the elderly who are worried about who will pay for their retirement healthcare will in fact be helped by the influx of young labor and stronger tax base? That the working class living in areas with collapsing population could make use of the boost to agriculture and manufacturing. That the those alienated by highly educated secular elites with small families might find some kindred spirits across the border and world over? When ideology is this self-destructive, let's call it a mistake and work on fixing it. I don't have patience for dumb conspiracy theories about covid or misinformation climate change being represented as scientific fact - by the same token, I don't have any sentimentality about partisans espousing anti-immigrant views. A neutral promoter of truth should be freaking out about the Trump administration.
I'm not sure I follow - the kids in cages is a real phenomenon, i.e. the Trump administration did keep young people attempting to cross the border illegally in holding facilities, but I'm not convinced that it's an outrage; correct me on the details if I've misunderstood here, but I gather that he wasn't doing anything terribly different from what the Obama administration before him, or the Biden administration after him was doing - but something about that guy just seems *absolutely break people's brains* such that they accuse him of being a top-tier tyrant even though he didn't actually do anything noticeably outside of the mainstream for a Republican president, including not deporting significantly more illegal immigrants than his predecessor.
I'm also not sure how it's presumptively white supremacist to enforce immigration laws. Sure, it *could* be, but that's something you would need to argue for.
And I'm also not sure that the 'economists all agree that immigration is good' is something that can be left un-argued-for either. There's a good chance that it is good for the rich but bad for the working class in the short term, and even if it is 'good' for the working class in the long term, that doesn't necessarily preclude that it is only 'good' in terms of 'you have access to more consumer goods at lower prices, but at the cost of significant damage to your ability to earn an independent living, live in a high-trust community among people you share a culture with, etc.' ... and if some people would prefer not to make that trade-off, I can't see any good reason to condemn them unless one were to hold that everyone in the world has a presumptive right to become a citizen of your country. I mean, aren't we all the time hearing about how the white working class now have declining life-expectancy, sky-high suicide rates and an epidemic of opioid overdoses, something that doesn't tend to happen to prosperous, well-adjusted people?
(Granted, a fair fraction of that will also be due to outsourcing rather than immigration, but that too is an issue that Trump campigned on)
The aging population thing is, I'll grant you a tricky one, and presumably one that needs to be solved by every country that has combined the Demographic Transition with modern healthcare that extends people's lifespan well beyond their healthspan. I will admit I do not know what is the ultimate cause of the fact that people in most developed countries are not having enough children to reproduce themselves (I was reading recently an article suggesting that an 1877 obscenity trial for publication of information about contraception caused enough of a cultural shift to put a dent in British fertility - https://www.elfac.org/what-makes-people-have-babies-the-link-between-cultural-values-and-fertility-rates/ ) ... but to the degree that a lot of people have fewer children than they say they ideally want, it's at least not obvious that 'bring in lots of people from abroad' is a better solution than 'try to make family formation more affordable and high-status again'.
But either way, if you are opposed to the people who think that, for them, high immigration has more costs than benefits, even if you are right that they are beholden to a self-destructive ideology, the onus is on you to persuade them, and to at least take seriously the possibility that they might have valid reasons for their preferences, even if they are not your preferences.
You don't seem to know that the Trump administration was separating children from their parents at the border. The point of that policy is to inflict maximum pain on asylum claimants before the legitimacy of their asylum claim can be assessed. This is what the Trump administration itself said about it. That has not been the Obama nor the Biden administration policy. Obama administration also piloted a program in asylum claimants did not have to be detained they just had to show up voluntarily to their asylum hearings (which might sound like a disaster, except they were doing just that), which Trump dismantled. Inflicting unnecessary pain on an innocent group of people with the same ethnicity, I guess we don't have to call that racist, but we should treat it with contempt whatever it might be. Regardless of the dubious morality of cracking down immigration, children in cages is specifically wholly unnecessary cruelty.
Actually all three administrations can be criticized for falling short of their legal commitment to process legitimate asylum claims, but Trump administration was the most lawless of them all. This is not just enforcing the law. Trump administration was consistently getting in trouble with the courts for flouting existing legal precedents (not just new challenges by activists), and in no way represents a minimal legal exposure approach to immigration. It more closely represented a maximum legal exposure approach, which I would not call solemnly and neutrally enforcing the law.
Pro-family social policies help a lot of things, but so do immigration policies. I'm in favor of both. Speaking of Matt Yglesias, this is what One Billion Americans is about. But the real point is that the economic arguments people use against immigration are not actually true (immigrants bring in money, make public and private services more affordable). The correct policy on immigration (let's use the average economist) is well outside of the political consensus in Washington (but since when has that stopped a rationalist), but if one side is leaning into wrongness and the other side is leaning away from it I think we should acknowledge it.
Separately, I think the other arguments people make against immigration usually aren't justifiable on ethical grounds (just imagine saying everything said to justify excluding Mexicans, said in service of justifying Jim Crow-era segregation).
I'm all for persuading, I never said it should be forbidden to espouse anti-immigrant views in public. What I would say it isn't defensible. It seems bad that Scott won't acknowledge that it's bad. Is Scott out of his expertise or is he refusing to publicly criticize it out of a dubious commitment to avoid taking a partisan stand? Either way, it's not a great topic area for him.
I've not really attempted a case for immigration here, only asserted it's robust and made a skeleton outline. I can recommend some more books, but they are easy enough to find.
Re: '..."stand back and stand by", which as far as I can tell is equivalent to "stand down"...'
It really, really isn't equivalent. Stand by is an instruction to do nothing but maintain readiness. If you tell a soldier to stand by and their weapon will remain in their hands, at the ready. "Prepare to receive further instructions" is implicit in an order to stand by. You're standing by _for_ something. Trump telling Proud Boys to "stand by" is telling them "don't do anything...yet. I will tell you at the appropriate time what to do", which is not reassuring for anyone to hear, especially I'm the light of the capitol riot later.
Stand Down is more decisive, it basically means "go off duty". If you tell a soldier to stand down, they're going to assume they've been dismissed and go do whatever off-duty stuff they have.
Maybe Trump just mis-spoke, or maybe he just didn't know the difference. After all, you're a pretty smart dude and you're publicly posting that they're equivalent. On the other hand, Trump was currently president of the united states, receiving all kinds of status updates and meetings where military types would tell him things like "We have four F-18s on standby", and surely he didn't take that to mean that they had four planes not-fueled and not-armed, not-ready to not-go.
tl;dr they're not equivalent, one means "wait for my signal" and the other means "go home", Trump said the wrong one and while it's possible it was an accident, it's also possible it wasn't, and even if it was an accident it's a negligent one, unfitting for a commander-in-chief.
You're wrong about the Charlottesville thing. Here is what he said:
"Q: You said there was hatred and violence on both sides?
Trump: I think there is blame on both sides. You look at both sides. I think there is blame object both on both sides. I have no doubt about it. You don't have doubt about it either. If you reported it accurately, you would say that the neo-Nazis started this thing. They showed up in Charlottesville. Excuse me. They didn't put themselves down as neo-Nazis. You had some very bad people in that group. You also had some very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group -- excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down, of to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.
George Washington was a slave owner. Was George Washington a slave owner? So will George Washington now lose his status? Are we going to take down -- excuse me. Are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? You like him. Good. Are we going to take down his statue. He was a major slave owner. Are we going to take down his statue? It is fine. You are changing history and culture.
You had people and i'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists. They should be condemned totally. You had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists. The press has treated them absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people but you also had troublemakers and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats. You had a lot of bad people in the other group too.
Q: You were saying the press has treated white nationalists unfairly?
Trump: No, no. There were people in that rally. I looked the night before. If you look, there were people protesting very quietly the taking down taking down the statue of Robert E. Lee. I am sure there were some bad ones.
The following day, it looked like they had some rough, bad people, neo-Nazis, white nationalists, whatever you want to call them. You had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest and very legally protest. I don't know if you know, they had a permit. The other group didn't have a permit.
So I only tell you this. There are two sides to a story. I thought what took place was horrible moment for our country, a horrible moment. But there are two sides to the country.
Does anybody have a final question? Do you have an infrastructure question? "
He is drawing a distinction between people who were there on Saturday, and people who were there "the night before." He even specified that the people he was praising had a permit. Only one group had a permit for Friday, and it was the people carrying tiki torches chanting "Jews will not replace us."
Got to say, I really like the Trump-hair Mantis.
"But Prediction 2 suggests I thought there was only a 50% chance Trump would win the Republican nomination. In retrospect that was way too low. I think I genuinely should feel embarrassed about this one - I put myself in the Republican Party's shoes and imagined I would reject Trump, ignoring all the evidence that actual Republicans liked him quite a lot and would probably continue to do so."
To be fair, Trump not winning the Republican nomination could also come from:
* Trump hates being President; doesn't run again.
* Trump is impeached and convicted; can't run again.
* Trump is old and in poor health; doesn't run again.
These had more than 0% chance, and much more than 0% mindshare, in Feb 2018. I think it would've been reasonable for you to have those account for 10%-25% of the 50% chance of Trump not winning the nomination.
(Though also, your two predictions don't actually entail a 50% chance of him not winning the nomination. The likelihood of a GOP win would presumably differ between running Trump vs running someone else.)
I don't agree with your statements about Trump and racism, but I can see where you're coming from and at least understand your arguments. I cannot say the same about your position on the Capitol riots.
40% of the rioters went there right from Trump's rally, and his final words were a call for them to "fight like hell" or they'd lose their country.
According to actual people in the White House, Trump watched the rioters break into the Capitol building with "delight" and "glee". He did eventually call for peace through a tweet, but well over an hour later, after it was clear the rioters had failed to do anything effective, and reportedly only because people were telling him he would be held responsible otherwise. It is ridiculous to say that waiting until a coup has failed, and ONLY THEN choosing to denounce it, is somehow discouraging it.
One of the first things the rioters did was build a gallows and start a chant calling for Mike Pence to hanged, and Trump's literal first response after they broke into the Capitol building was to tweet out that Mike Pence had failed him and the country, so it's not like he couldn't have put a call for peace (and not what could easily be read as an incitement to kill his Vice President) earlier.
Meanwhile, in the riot itself, bombs had been placed in DC, which were luckily found and disarmed, but would have exploded just fine if we weren't lucky. The rioters were calling for senators to be killed, were heard explicitly saying they wanted to find and kill them while in the Capitol building, and had brought zip-tie handcuffs and restraints just in case they found someone they could hold captive. The fact of the matter is, we as a country came about a minute from seeing live-streamed executions of politicians.
Just because a coup was performed with the same incompetence we saw in so many aspects of the Trump administration and ultimately failed doesn't make it any less of an attempted coup.
Also, you said that Trump's only other plan was to "challenge the election results a lot," and that completely ignores the direct pressure he put on Republican election officials to just fraudulently change the vote tallies, like the actual recorded call to Raffensperger where he tells him to just find 11,000 votes.
"In this case Iran decided it wasn't worth picking a fight, but that was their good decision, not Trump's."
I'm not sure what you're imagining here: open war with Iran at this point would obviously be extremely bad for Iran and not particularly bad for the US. And the future is only growing worse with Iranian development of missiles and nuclear weapons.
I guess I think that if you think an event of this scale (killing this one senior guy) might trigger open war with Iran =>
then you have to think open war with Iran is highly triggerable =>
and therefore highly likely to happen at some point for some reason (with so many tensions with and open fronts against Iran anyway) =>
and if you think open war with Iran is highly likely in, say, the next few decades -- surely it's better it happen now (before Iran finishes its nuclear and missile development projects) rather than in a decade's time?
A world in which any Iranian leader who isn't sufficiently obsequious to the United States is liable to be drone-striked out of existence, is *also* extremely bad for Iran. Bad for the Iranian government, at least. And if we take it as axiomatic that Iran shall never substantially retaliate for drone-strikes because War Would Be Very Bad, then the drone strikes won't stop with Soleimani.
If your enemy is on a path that leads inevitably to A: war or B: things that are about as bad for you as war but much more pleasant to your enemy, the rational move is usually war as quickly as practical. If there's a chance of a third option, then there's a good chance that getting there means taking option B off the table by convincingly signalling a willingness to wage war. If you're not sure, you signal willingness to wage war and see what happens.
By chance, last night I read Scott's 10 year old post on Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianims: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9kcTNWopvXFncXgPy/intellectual-hipsters-and-meta-contrarianism
Much of the Trump disagreement - very much including this post and the comment section - seems to neatly fit into Scott's triad taxonomy:
Trump is good / Trump is bad / Trump is not actually as bad as you liberals think
Has Scott written anything about whether his own views on Trump may be meta-contrarianism, intentional or otherwise?
I mostly agree with you here, but I do think "stand back and stand by" is not equivalent to "stand down" - to me it sounds more like "stand down (possibly because I'm being forced to say this) but be ready to stand up for me soon" - the "stand by" part is weird and not just temporary as you say but a bit of an active endorsement.
The left media has definitely been hysterical and dishonest at times and taken Trump's words out of context and wrangled them to suit their purpose.
But I am not sure about cause and effect here -- *if* the left had not been so hysterical in the first place, maybe Trump would have been more explicitly racist etc? I would guess that this kind of policing is what at least somewhat forces Trump&co to not be explicitly KKK supporting.
I mean, the primary reason regarding Trump's own position is presumably ideological differences between Trump-the-man and the KKK. He's chauvinist, but I don't think he's personally a white supremacist.
Leaving that aside, though, I think a bigger check on Trump than the progressive media was the conservative media - the former didn't actually have any room to step up their rhetoric against him, but the latter had plenty of room to punish him for going too far beyond their own positions.
"But I am not sure about cause and effect here -- *if* the left had not been so hysterical in the first place, maybe Trump would have been more explicitly racist etc? I would guess that this kind of policing is what at least somewhat forces Trump&co to not be explicitly KKK supporting."
Eh. That seems like a bit of a self-flattering way to never have to admit one was wrong.
Scott, I miss the much stricter enforcement of commenting courtesy at SSC. Too many interlocutors here are unreasonably rude and arrogant. I’m here for reasoned insight, the occasional surprisingly effective contrarianism, and general intellectual honesty. The negations of those you can get anywhere.
I just want to say that *You Are Still Crying Wolf* was the first post of yours I read. I was really impressed by it and that I've been reading ever since. Please keep up the good work.
I don't know if it's demographic differences or what, but the number of explicit support of QAnon that I observed within my greater network (mostly right-wing Kentuckians), suggests to me that it was much more than a moral panic. Especially paired with the fact that I know these people to be armed.
Trump was extremely incompetent.
This meant that it was very hard for him to get anything "positive" (i.e. doing things he wanted to do) done.
However, he was pretty good at doing damage to institutions. This is, I think, greatly underestimated; a lot of people quit or were forced out who were good at their jobs, and the CDC and other disease control agencies were just the most obvious manifestation of that. His response to hurricanes was also quite bad, especially the one in Puerto Rico; he was very bad at dealing with disasters because he surrounded himself with morons and was bad at what he did. His response to wildfires was also quite poor.
The agencies that largely escaped his attention (like NASA) did okay, and the NWS and NOAA were not so badly affected, but FEMA had funds taken away from it for various pet projects. Other, more "political" agencies like the State Department and Homeland Security, were much, much more negatively affected, with many experts leaving.
The fact that he was investigated because it was believed to be credible that he was a Russian intelligence asset speaks volumes, and his behavior towards Russia cost us a lot of people in intelligence.
Crime went up significantly over the course of his presidency as well, and he did a very poor job of dealing with BLM and that whole mess.
Indeed, his reaction to radicalization was extremely poor in general, as was his incompetence at dealing with both Russia and China.
He caused the US considerable reputational damage, and he did back out of the TPP, which was a huge blunder as well.
The thing is, Trump had very strong authoritarian tendencies, but he was an incompetent buffoon. He was, in fact, dangerous, but he was also very low on the competence tree, which meant that he was not very good at getting things done that he wanted to do. He did, however, serve to radicalize the Republican party, and was intensely anti-intellectual, and he did damage to the US government's institutions.
People who thought he was going to turn the US into a white nationalist state just didn't understand Trump to begin with. He was indeed racist, but he was racist like a racist relative - actually hurting someone because of their race? He's not that. He's not a Klansman.
He just was prejudiced and stupid and bigoted. His travel ban on various random countries for no actual reason was a good example of that.
That was the sort of thing people SHOULD have expected, but thinking he would support Klansmen was just dumb.
Trump was really awful at things in exactly the way that people should have expected. People just made him into something he wasn't.
I read through a good amount of the comments and didn't find anyone explaining the economy doing better than expected.
What Trump did was macroeconomics 101, specifically deficit-spending. What you do is you pump money into the economy on loan. Since the government is so big, it can stimulate the entire economy like that. Every politician knows they can do this, but they don't because the debt has to be paid back at some point, requiring future tax-increases. And usually other politicians and voters complain about how much you're increasing the debt.
Keynesian economics says that deficit spending is ok during a downturn to revive the economy, but Trump did this pre-covid already. This is generally considered a bad idea because you're reducing your capacity to take on new debt when the recession eventually comes. So the recession will be worse, a) because the economy was artificially inflated, leading to a bigger correction, and b) because you can't afford to borrow much more money.
The jury is still out on how this will end. We got lucky that this is such an unusual recession. That allowed big interventions without the usual stops. So we did not end up with a reduced ability to deal with the next recession. (Except that with Trump in power that first stimulus package was unusually bad, doing very little about the virus, mostly helping the stock market) But we did end up in uncharted territory in terms of the amount of debt. Keynes would have said that when the economy was good, we should have decreased the debt to not run into this. We got short-term benefits of an improved economy from 2017 to 2019 but got a new debt-problem to deal with for many years to come.
"Stand back and stand by" is nothing like "Stand down" Scott. I was going to save this blog to favourites based on Coleman Hughes recommendation but anyone who can make that statement is disingenuous. "Stand back and stand by" means prepare for me to give you instructions - which is exactly what happened.
> that he was some kind of bizarre "clown genius" or "drunken master" type whose apparent bumbling was just him playing so many levels above the rest of us that we couldn't understand it. I think something like this might be true for his ability to speak to the Republican base
Hah, no. I've been saying for years that what Trump does is trivially easy.
He listens to his echo chamber — Twitter, Facebook, Fox News, private parties — and then, whatever he hears there, so long as it appeals to his personal taste, he treats as fact and repeats it to everyone to the best of his recollection (which often isn't very good).
This entirely explains his popularity with his base. Aside from Republicans naturally gravitating toward the opinions of their president, most of his base participates in similar echo chambers, so from the beginning they sat up and took notice that Trump said things they mostly believed already. That's why they voted for him and that's why their support for him never wavered.
Trump is no different than any rando commenting prolifically on YouTube videos, just with some business sense from his business experience; his skillset is the skillset of the used car salesman applied to national politics. Truly a man of the people: his everyman naiveté is his whole appeal.
In 2016 I didn't understand how appealing a man like this could be, nor did I understand Democrats' structural disadvantage in the electoral college. Lessons I won't soon forget.
I've only read bits and pieces of this, but...
> "stand back and stand by", which as far as I can tell is equivalent to "stand down"
"Stand by" means "get ready"!!
Like many others here I see when I control+F for "stand by", I'd really like to see a clarification added for that point. For reference I'm an Australian (i.e. it's no direct danger to me if he implemented death squads) and don't think Trump definitely intended to say "stand by". Even so, hearing it caused me to massively update my predictions of the likelihood of civil unrest verging on some kind of modern liberal democracy version of a coup (e.g. bloodless but forcible spoiling of a crucial count) during the election, and absolutely nothing like other supposed gaffes like "fine people on both sides" which I generally ignored.
Catching up with this after a couple weeks or so. I'm really enjoying Mantic Mondays. A lot of humility implied in addressing a question along the lines of "does a self-imposed C grade justify continued political punditry?" For some reason this reminds me of a conversation with a philosophy prof I met while my oldest was touring colleges. We got to chatting and I mentioned liking the ways that philosophy intersects with science, from the Greeks to Popper and the importance of falsifiability in science. He mentioned in passing that it's very difficult to know what the falsifiability points at. There are layers upon layers when we make meaning. Anyway, I admire the effort it takes to think carefully about the layers of meaning implicit in these predictions, and in the act of making predictions.
In measuring Trump's explicitly racist policies, I feel Scott is mistaken to ignore pardoning criminals like Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a cruel human rights abuser who was convicted of contempt of court for defying a court order to stop racially profiling Latinos, and Navy Seal Eddie Gallagher, who butchered captured ISIS militants and Iraqi civilians alike.
"When his plan for angry supporters chanting turned into angry supporters rioting and getting into the Capitol, he was clearly against this and tried to stop it." - no he didn't. He watched the carnage on TV for hours while ignoring calls from his fellow Republicans. Eventually someone convinced him to call in reinforcements. I think that whole episode can totally reasonably be described as a coup - I can't even imagine what would have ensued if Mike Pence had done the thing his voter base really wanted him to do, and refused to certify the election.
*coup attempt