One June 4th, Biden issued a proclamation banning asylum claims from illegal immigrants at the southern border. However, I can't seem to find any information about what actually happened. Did it get blocked in court? Have border encounters gone down?
- Illegals claiming asylum were turned away if the 7 day rolling average exceeded 2500 per day, and the "ban" was rescinded if that average dropped below 1500 per day.
- The ACLU sued the Biden admin for this, but didn't seek an injunction, so it should still be in effect.
I assume they don't bother updating until after the end of the month. I couldn't find anything separating the type of encounter either; asylum seekers just get lumped into the total.
Something really weird is going on on Twitter. When I go to https://twitter.com/patio11 (Patrick McKenzie's twitter), I can view the most recent few tweets normally, but as soon as I scroll down to a certain tweet (the one which I think is about turning society off and then on again though it always refreshes too fast for me to actually read it), the page immediately refreshes (with the same url) before I can read anything, and the new page (despite having the same url) only shows older tweets starting July 19th, with no way to see the most recent tweets again. The only way to go back is to close the tab and open a new tab with the same url (which has the same behavior as before).
I tested this in both Chrome and Firefox, and tried disabling ad blocker too, but it still happens. Additionally, it still happens if I use the "x.com" url instead of "twitter.com". I've never seen this behavior before, and when I check other people on Twitter, it's all normal with no weird refresh and tweet hiding.
Yes. I tried it in an incognito window, but when you aren't logged in, it won't even display recent tweets at all. Logged out users only get a random selection of unordered tweets from years ago, rendering it completely unusable.
(1) The Yemen-based Houthis strike central Israel - in particular Tel Aviv, near the US embassy - for the first time since they entered the war in November. This is both a political first - no other non-Gazan armed group struck Tel Aviv before -, and a technological first for the Houthis pointing at improving capabilities. The Houthis have previously focused only on harassing civilian Red Sea and Indian Ocean shipping, the drones and missiles they fired at Israel targeted Eilat and tended to be shot by US navy, the IDF, and the occasional Egyptian fighter jets over Sinai.
(2) The ICJ ruled that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem is unlawful. This is already the consensus, but the ICJ's ruling is the latest confirmation in a long string. This case is separate from the genocide case opened by South Africa in late December of 2023, it was opened in January of 2023 by the Palestinian Authority. It has since garnered the attention of many states and representatives from Luxemburg to Namibia. The ICJ's ruling is advisory and non-binding, but it's valuable because it bolsters the anti-settlement camp and serves as legal grounding for more Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction behavior from increasingly more European trading and defense partners of Israel.
Thanks! While I may not be as sympathetic to the Hamas cause as you are, I appreciate your opinions. Unfortunately, as long as Israeli hostages are being held by Hamas, I don't think the Netanyahu governement will have the motivation to cease hostilities in Gaza. And they'll continue to ignore the ICJ. Oh well.
Very appreciated, but "Sympathetic to the Hamas cause" doesn't sound like an accurate way to describe my beliefs, unless you're using it as a shorthand for "wants Palestinians to not die and have nice things", in which case... yes, it's technically true, in the same sense that Netanyahu's cause is "wants Jews to not die and have nice things", which would lead us to conclude that anyone who doesn't hate Jews is automatically sympathetic to Netanyahu's cause, i.e. that a sizable portion of Jewish Israelis hate Jews and don't want them to have nice things.
Different definitions for the same word. Jihadis "love" Muslims and so they want them to be an Übermensch group that rules the world, I "love" Muslims and so I want them to wake up to the fact that Islam is bad fanfic plagiarized and translated into Arabic from slightly better Hebrew stories.
> And they'll continue to ignore the ICJ
As expected. The hope is that *other* states won't ignore the ICJ, or at any rate the European ones (who seem to assign a lot of legitimacy and respect to international institutions). Those states will then **force** Israel to care about the ICJ, because they will withhold weapons, trade deals, academic partnership, travel, cultural participation (e.g. sports), and so on.
This is roughly similar to how if a normal court judges you to be guilty of something, you may very well lift your feet and say "Ohh I don't care about this court, I'm nonchalant", but guess who cares about the court? The police, your (future) employer(s), your bank(s), your university, your landlord, etc... All of them would force you to care about the court.
Yes, I apologize for mischaracterizing your position. I'm of the plague-on-both-their-houses school of thought. Yes, it would be good thing if the Palestinians could have a chunk of land and a nation-state to call their own. And I acknowledge that Israel has the right to exist. And I wish that Jewish fundies weren't actively grabbing Palestinian land on the west bank, and I wish that Hamas and Hezbollah weren't actively engaged in asymmetric warfare against Israel. Considering that Hamas can't bring itself to hand back the remaining hostages — and thus remove Netanyahu's figleaf of an excuse for attacking Gaza — I don't think Hamas really gives a shit about the people of Gaza except as human shields and as recruits for long-term future struggle against Israel. And Israel is helping them with that latter goal. It took almost two hundred years for the Crusader Kingdoms to be pushed out that area. I suspect Hamas is playing a long game. But unlike Saladin, they don't have the support of most of the key players in the Arab world. I predict a stalemate of violence for at least the next century.
Apparently members of the public had noticed the shooter on the roof a couple of minutes before he actually fired. They notified the police, but somehow the cops weren't able to act on the warning quickly enough.
The organization responsible for security in the area where the gunman fired from was the local police. Maybe small-town police just aren't that competent, at least when they have to deal with threats beyond speeders and the local drunks.
Nobody is competent outside their area of competence.
Preventing assassinations isn't within the local police's area of competence, which is why the US has the US Secret Service, which gets to sit around all day and think about possible assassination scenarios and how to prevent them.
If the local police had a role to play here, it should have been getting told by the Secret Service to stand on the top of the roof. Or heck, at the bottom of the ladder leading up to the roof.
I'm worried that I might have prediabetes, but going to a doctor is inconvenient. Is there an easy way to track your glucose levels at home? I seem to recall someone talking about this in a previous open thread.
Walgreen's has an inexpensive glucose meter and fairly inexpensive test strips. Of course, you'll need to stick your finger and draw a drop of blood. I suggest that instead of using the tip of your finger, you use the side of your finger and squeezing out a drop of blood, because bruises on the tips of your fingers hurt when you use a keyboard. As a Type I diabetic let me give you some insights into blood glucose behavior...
1. If you're not producing enough insulin, you'll notice that after eating carbs you're blood glucose levels will start to rise about fifteen minutes after eating them, and they'll rise over the subsequent hour. AFAICT, from my experience, there's not all that much difference between low glycemic carbs and high glycemic carbs. Low glycemic carbs may stretch out your blood glucose rise over another extra half hour or so.
2. Also check your blood glucose levels beginning after 4 hours after eating, and finish up around 7 hours. I've noticed that the proteins and fats start to increase my blood glucose levels about five hours after eating them.
3. Alchohol has another six-hour blood glucose effect. If you're drinking wine or booze, check your BG starting about 5 hours after consuming them.
Last year, I am in person at my doctor's surgery, talking to the reception...
Me: Well, I'm not diagniosed with diabetes but I occasionally check with a blood glucose meter to se if dsub-clinical hypoglycaemia is getting any worse, but this time the meter is givin me some stupid error message I don;t understand and I was wondering if you could book me in with the nurse to test it properly.
Receptionist: I don;t think we've got a slot for months.
My doctor (overhearing, from across the room): Test them right now.
(I'm not sure if that was a warning sign or not, but shortly after my thyroid failed ... and one of the many knock on effects I have from the thyroid condition is anemia, which will probably show up even on a blood glucose meter)
My blood glucose was in fact ok .. but then a couple of months later I had rapid weight loss and heat intolerance ->more extensive blood tests get done -> grave's disease diagnosis
There definitely is, and I don't think any of the supplies you need for doing it are prescription only. Not sure though. Just thought I'd tell you some info I just ran across: There's a supplement called I think Berberine that reduces blood sugar. People talk about it as a natural alternative to metformin. The person who told me about it is well-educated, skeptical of "alternative medicine" and not one to just believe hype, so the stuff may actually be pretty good. I recommend you look into it to see if it's safe and effective.
I recently graduated from my undergrad with a degree in philosophy, and through my time studying, I had a strange repeated experience which I'm wondering if anybody else can relate to or knows what it is called. Multiple times during my undergrad, I would have an idea I believed was clever and worth writing about and I would find a way to work it into whatever writing asignments I had going. Then after submitting the paper writing a term paper, I would encounter the same idea somewhere else, albeit much better articulated and with layers of depth I had not anticipated.
The first time I noticed this, was in an Ethics course with a professor who mainly specialized in Ancients, and I remember thinking that there was something seriously epistemically wrong with his positions. I wrote a term paper, which he hated, on moral relativism, which he called sophistry, but I was convinced was more nuanced and complex than he was willing to admit. The paper itself wasn't good, but I thought the idea was at least interesting. Lo and behold, the next semester, I encountered Foucault, who had essentially anticipated and expressed exactly what I was trying to get at, although he would have gotten a better grade on his term paper. I have since abandoned Foucault, but the experience of independently arriving at a preexisting theory or idea remained.
Over time, as I read more, I found that the ideas I hoped were mine were more and more recent, sometimes even published this century, though this might just be a byproduct of reading newer material. It really is rewarding finding yourself naturally drawn along the intellectual path previously tried by great thinkers. I find this encouraging, maybe one day I will catch-up with the Zeitgeist and actually manage to have an original thought I'm not holding my breath. Is there a word for this? (other than naivete)
In most disciplines, the big historical discoveries or developments are 'deterministic': if you re-did the entire history of that field of study with different researchers, in different institutions, the same principles would be discovered in roughly the same order. See https://measureformeasure.co/blog/multiple-discoveries/.
This means that, if you have learned the precursor ideas, and are helped along by the fact that the later concepts are so to speak "in the water supply", you may semi-independently rediscover later thinkers' ideas. I had this experience when I took a class on history of economics and noticed that my way of thinking about the principles of economics was *very* close to that of the early neoclassical economists.
I'll reply with an experience that I had yesterday.
I was at a meeting, and attempting through my ADD, my wonderful current excuse, to pay attention. A guy was talking about something that had nothing to do with me and my gaze drifted over to a fully maxed-out whiteboard full of boxes and erasable lines with acronyms that all have something or other to do with my job but I couldn't tell you what. (Well you might wonder how he keeps a job through this kind of haze. You wouldn't be the only one.)
To get back to my story, my gaze for no apparent reason lit on one of the hundreds of boxed acronyms. it was OTTI, I remember. I don't know what it means any more than you do. It's amazing how much work you can do in the computer field without knowing anything at all. Anyway. A second later--so it seemed to me--the person said that same acronym, OTTI. I was amazed, and now the meeting was gone (for me if not for them), and phenomenology was now paramount.
Is it possible, like one of my pet hypotheses points out, that a certain part of consciousness travels backward in time, priming me to look at potentially useful things just before they are to become useful? Or is it a simpler idea, instead of breaking all the laws of physics, that my verbal processing is slower than my visual processing, but some of that verbal processing is still taking place, such that my eyes were directed to the OTTI box before I consciously understood that I was hearing those same letters? Thanks to the style of thinking I've absorbed from reading this blog I would have to give the weight of evidence to the latter hypothesis. But one thing true of either one is this: your brain processing has some curious and subtle ways about it that are past understanding. And I love that. Too bad about the meeting.
I got a bonus at work that same day. I think I'm way better at paying attention than I used to be, mainly as a function of how often I notice and correct my attention this year. But how did this ever work for my previous 30 year career? Somewhere up here I have a brain, and it's quite a gift, and I cherish it, broken as it is.
I absolutely agree that there is more going on in your brain than you are aware of consciously. I suppose that is why we spend so much of our lives trying to understand ourselves.
I don't have a word for this, but I think that it's a reasonably common occurrence - certainly as an undergrad I had the same experience of anticipating in homework assignments the topic of a future lecture or course. Something you notice as you study an area more deeply (at least in subjects like maths, philosophy, physics) is that there really aren't that many fundamental ideas in any particular topic of study. The basic principles occur again and again, developed and elaborated in different ways.
When you are being trained in critical thinking it's natural to look for flaws in a theory, and to anticipate how to respond to those flaws. It's certainly satisfying to find that someone published the same idea that you had, and that it became part of the history of the subject. If your lecturers were good, they likely were scaffolding you toward the next developments in your subject without making an overt deal about it. You also have the benefit of hindsight - you probably don't cherish so fondly the ideas you had that turned out to be wrong!
As an arts major, I love being mentioned in the same sentence as math and physics. I would not give any credit to this lecturer, in particular, given the fact that there were obvious decades-old flaws in the arguments he put forward. I would have liked to have been pointed in the right direction; it would have saved me a terrible essay, and I would have figured out what was wrong with my idea earlier. Instead, I remember him saying something to the effect of: "This is why we shouldn't teach young men Nitzsche."
Philosophy, maths and physics are to a large part based on axiomatic systems and deductions from those axioms. Newton's Laws allow you to predict (non-relativistic) motion, for example, and Maxwell's Laws allow you to work out how electricity flows in a circuit. Admittedly, some parts of philosophy (Plato, Aquinas, Descartes, Russell, Heidegger, etc.) fit better into this type of framework than others (Nietzsche, Weil, etc.)
Your lecturer provoked a reaction in you, which is something. One of the most effective lecturers I had as an hummed and mumbled under his breath and pushed an acetate with a triangle on it around on an overhead projector for 12 weeks (he must have done other things, but this is what I remember, it happened in every class ), but at the end of the semester I somehow had a solid grasp of basic group theory. Another told horrible jokes, deliberately miswrote formulae on the board and then inspected everyone's notes to see who was 'writing down shite', but at the end I knew basic statistics. I have a lot of respect for both of these lecturers (now long retired) but that was in the era before teaching evaluations. It couldn't be done today.
If I have a point, maybe it's that your evaluation of the lecturer is too harsh. I'm a lecturer now, for what it's worth, and expectations have changed since I was an undergraduate. I think it's that I expected to have to go to the library and read and think. We were told explicitly that the notes we took in lectures were not sufficient to pass the exam at the end of the semester (there was minimal continuous assessment back then). I wouldn't get away with that policy now... this is not to say that things were better then than they are now, only different.
Recently graduated? Just a heads up, expect to have an occasional dream in the next couple years where you are still an undergrad and realize you have a final exam for a class you forgot to attend class for the entire term.
Mine is that I technically didn't graduate because I forgot or didn't see the message to show up in a particular place at a particular time, or didn't fill out the right form, or something like that.
I suspect it’s part Baader Meinhoff ( wouldn’t have named it without the earlier reply) and partly it’s just learning.
I had several experiences much like that when studying electronics. Having learned something new, I’d think a new to me idea for a circuit and excitedly show it to an instructor, to inevitably get the feedback “that’s the right idea, and here is why we don’t do it that way, here is how it’s really done”.
I think it’s inevitable and desirable that when learning we are thinking similar thoughts to those who tread the path before us.
In follow up to that, it probably also depends on how your learning flows. I learned electronics in a well structured post secondary environment. So one week I’d be introduced to power amps and feedback, and then rush ahead to ideas of how to apply them. And not surprisingly I was headed in the right direction but simplistic in my approaches.
I learned most of computer programming independently, and was often reading material far ahead of my abilities. I can’t really recall the same experiences of learning a new thing and then jumping ahead to previously unknown to me applications of those ideas. I generally already knew where things were going before I knew how they got there.
That sounds right. I especially like someone else's response that it is likely baked into the lesson planning if it is any good. Your thoughts on learning in general are well put.
I like the water-supply analogy and, indeed, your other alternative explanations. I've heard authors, philosophers, and especially artists (Rick Ruban) express the feeling that the ideas they express aren't necessarily their own; they simply happen to be the ones that get there first. In reality, new ideas are being pulled from the collective unconscious or cultural superstructure. However, you want to think about it.
Two big pieces of news related to Biden being pushed to drop out as Dem nominee, and then I'll add a third new fact which could add to that momentum.
(1) Rep. Adam Schiff just called for Biden to step down as the POTUS nominee. That is big because Schiff is viewed as one of the party's rising stars and is now the presumptive new U.S. Senator from the largest blue state.
(2) "Nearly two-thirds of Democrats say President Joe Biden should withdraw from the presidential race and let his party nominate a different candidate, according to a new poll, sharply undercutting his post-debate claim that “average Democrats” are still with him even if some “big names” are turning on him." Ooooof
He's describing having watched the recording of Biden's speech yesterday to the NAACP's national convention, i.e. a large room full of key Dem supporters/influencers. I plan to watch some of that myself this evening. For now I'll just predict that if Singal's description proves accurate it will become pretty devastating to Biden at this juncture. Many of the people in that room have the ears of lots of top Dem officeholders and/or party officials. Also the link is right there for anybody to watch the recording themselves, and/or for easy sharing by people who were in the room, etc.
I doubt it. Too easy for the truth to leak out. My rule of thumb is WYSIWYG as a starting point unless I have strong indications to the contrary. Has been working well so far.
Garrison Keillor on Midwestern sanctimonious bullies and cheap piety:
“It’s the Midwest, a culture that places a high value on modesty and self-deprecation, avoids irony, follows the rules and gives rule-breakers a sidelong look, keeps complaint to a minimum, prizes loyalty, and is well-practiced at ignoring flamboyance and foolishness and pretense.
But sanctimonious bullies thrive here, too. At the Tchaikovsky ballet, a woman comes onstage to remind us to turn our phones off and she says, “We wish to acknowledge that the land we are on was taken from the Dakotah people,” and we all bow our heads at this cheap piety.
There are people devoting their lives to education, health care, justice, among impoverished people, and this simpleton enjoys a little glow from reading a line off an index card. She might as well say, “We acknowledge that the nondegradable plastics that come with our concession products are causing damage to the planet that our children will inherit.”
Huh. I'm not Midwestern, but I have a dim sense of the type of "Midwestern sanctimonious bully" that he mentions. Although I'm not sure how much of that is due to listening to Prairie Home Companion in my childhood, so it's possible my entire concept sprang from his mind. ;-) If they hold true to bully-type, some of them will adapt to changing social norms, and get their kicks from manipulation of whatever system is present. Maybe some have adapted to wokeness?
In this piece, he seems to have a sense of bitterness and alienation, which I don't recall being in his oeuvre previously. But I suppose that's to be expected given his cancellation back in 2017-2018? (Regardless of the truth of the allegations.)
Maybe you or someone else here can explain the appeal of Prairie Home Companion for me? I'm not in the NPR target demographic so I never tuned in, but a couple of times I was at the home of people who obviously listened to it religiously. What I heard was vaguely mildly amusing but never actually funny enough to generate a laugh - I just didn't get it.
I only got little bits of it when I was a kid, and I think a lot of the humor was fairly subtle. It's like pointing out a quirk of human behavior, and exaggerating it slightly, and raising an eyebrow at the audience.
It helps if you've had enough exposure to Midwestern culture to recognize that those were the stereotypical quirks of real people; my parents grew up in Milwaukee and Might As Well Have Been Lake Wobegon, so I got that.
And I definitely appreciated that they didn't feel the need to hammer home every joke, though I can see how if you don't have the cultural referents to catch most of the jokes en passant it would be rather underwhelming.
He got caught in the frenzy that forced Al Franken out of the senate for an alleged kiss during a skit rehearsal. Keillor was angry for a while but seems to have put that behind him.
In a recent post Keillor said he truly believes that Donald Trump can become a humble and kind man.
For Garrison it’s not dark yet but it’s getting there and he is just saying what he feels needs saying.
Keillor is just saying the obvious, of course, but this public shaming over land ownership that's so fashionable is sadly petulant -- like so much of regressive-progressive dogma.
If you perform in a ballet, your intent is presumably to entertain the audience, and presuming the ballet is performed well and for an appropriate audience, they will probably be entertained. Entertainment is a good thing, even if less so than e.g. education, and it is good that people feel a "little glow" from doing a good thing - particularly when it took commitment, effort, and skill to do so.
If you perform a land acknowledgement, what is the intent? If it's to help the Dakotah people, well, helping the Dakotah people would be a very good thing, and something you should normally feel very good about, but in this case you are absolutely going to fail at that objective. How good should you feel about a half-assed zero-effort failure?
If the intent of your land acknowledgement is to make your audience feel good about themselves in spite of their not having helped the Dakotah people or whatnot, then that's not really a good thing and you probably shouldn't feel any sort of glow for that either.
Assuming that's the case, which is not required by the wording, then why are we talking about people devoting their lives to activities? How many of those can you fit into the window of time where you're waiting for people to turn off their cell phones before a Tchaikovski ballet starts? Is the implication that she shouldn't be there at all? If so, then should ANYBODY be there? Shouldn't the ballerinas be out devoting their lives to justice? Shouldn't the audience?
But the main problem is, this section is the thing it complains about. The article is about the nostalgia of visiting Home Town Minnesota and remembering his roots; this section is an anomaly, there for the primary purpose of complaining about a land acknowledgement. (I'm not sure why Gunflint quoted it on its own). But complaining about land acknowledgements is the conservative equivalent of land acknowledgements. There are people dedicating themselves to education, healthcare, justice, but I get the impression Garrison Keller felt a little "glow" from this addition.
I think Keillor was being sincere in pointing out that the acknowledgment was merely performative and was tipping his hat to people who are doing the hard and often thankless work of helping descendants of displaced Natives.
The guy is 81 with an implanted defibrillator. I'll be surprised if he lives to see 2025. He's got little to prove at this point. I've been following him for years - decades really - and he's definitely not a conservative crank.
In the case of the venue in question – Northrop Auditorium, University of Minnesota campus in Minneapolis, acknowledgment down to tribal level, besides not really being helpful, is historically difficult. Native possession of that location was going back and forth between Ojibwas and Dakotas right up to Minnesota statehood.
Bonus puzzle: How were lightbulbs changed in the Northrup Auditorium’s 29’ tall 19’ wide Close Encounter UFO descending on Devil’s Tower shaped chandelier changed?
In particular, it's the sort of glow you get from kidding yourself that you're doing anything at all for the Dakotah people with your empty words-- an error which performing in a ballet is a lot less likely to lead you into.
I have heard it said on here that the mainstream media has consistently lied to us about Biden’s age-related competence. I took a keen interest in the 2020 primaries, and Biden’s age was very much a part of the media discussion during the primary season, at least in the New York Times. Cognitive decline isn't mentioned explicitly, but in my opinion our fear of old age is inherently a fear of cognitive decline amongst other things. So I’ve gone back over some articles from around that time, and present them here. I do believe the media is sometimes (perhaps often) manipulative. Therein lies the danger of counter-manipulation. “You are being Lied To; Listen to me instead”.
1.In early 2020, the New York Times ran a series of interviews with the candidates. In Joe Biden's interview, age is raised as an issue several times.
JW: Do you think it’s legitimate for voters to be concerned about people in their later 70s running for the highest office in the world?
[Biden:] Sure, just like it’s legitimate for people to ask about whether you’re mature enough when you’re 35. I’m not joking. I mean, I went through the same thing when I was 29 years old. Well, wait a minute, are you old enough? And so, it’s totally legitimate.
Binyamin Appelbaum: So we have a 35-year-old limit. Should we have one at the top end too?The Times Debatable newsletter recently considered a range of perspectives on whether the presidency should have an age limit.
No.
BA: Should there be a top? Why not?
Because why would you? Show me where it’s been a problem.
BA: Why 35 then?
Thirty-five ——
JW: Well, President Reagan ——
Well, look, guys. I think you guys are engaging in ageism here. Now look, all kidding aside, I don’t think they’re — the voters will be able to make a judgment. You’ll make a judgment whether or not you think I have all my cognitive capability, I’m physically capable, and I have the energy to do the job. And so.
(…)
KK: Since you just called yourself the old guy — Jimmy Carter has said that he wouldn’t be up for the job of the presidency at age 80. He’s obviously experienced the job, and lived the job. How do you respond to comments like that? Are you too old to be running for president?
Watch me. Watch me. All this stuff about lack of energy. Come get in the bus with me, 16 hours a day, 10 days in a row. Come see me.
(…)
BA: Would you pick a running mate over the age of 70?
Yeah, sure I would. No, what I’m going to have to do is to balance just like anybody balances. I’m going to make sure that whoever is picked as vice president, where I’m the nominee, everyone thinks is able to, if I drop dead tomorrow, would be able to take over. Look, the idea that somebody who is 60 can’t be diagnosed with stage-four glioblastoma is no different than the idea someone at 77 won’t be diagnosed with a terminal disease.
BA: But you mentioned your adherence to science before. You surely know that the odds increase with age.
Yeah, they do. They do. But they don’t increase like they did. We’re in a situation where things are fundamentally different than they were 20 years ago.
2. As a result of these interviews, Elizabeth Warren & Amy Klobuchar were endorsed. Age was explicitly mentioned as a reason not to endorse either Biden or Sanders.
Mr. Sanders would be 79 when he assumed office, and after an October heart attack, his health is a serious concern.
What’s more, Mr. Biden is 77. It is time for him to pass the torch to a new generation of political leaders.
3. Despite the NYT non-endorsement, Biden wins the nomination and the NYT goes on to damage control mode, endorsing Biden as the only alternative to Trump. Even so, it finds room for feint praise.
Mr. Biden is aware that he no longer qualifies as a fresh face and has said that he considers himself a bridge to the party’s next generation of leaders.
Mr. Biden isn’t a perfect candidate and he wouldn’t be a perfect president. But politics is not about perfection.
4. Alongside the Endorsement, NYT also run a series of opinion columns making the case for the various primary candidates. So popular is Biden among the Liberal elite on NYT that the only columnist willing to write on his behalf is Ross Douthat. Even so he can't avoid the elephant in the room.
This combination — plus, let’s be frank, Biden’s fumbling, wavering, I’m-too-old-for-this persona — explains why it’s so hard to find passionate supporters of the former vice president among pundits and commentators, real-world activists and Twitter agitators. To choose Biden over the more interesting options, over Bernie Sanders and Mike Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg, is to choose the past over the future(.)
5. One phrase that sticks in my mind from the time of the NYT endorsement is some serious feint praise for Biden from the NYT editorial board. These people really didn't want him to be the nominee. The quote is hard to find, this is second hand from Michael Brendan Dougherty:
I also have to give credit to the makers of The Weekly for taking the mickey out of the panel of philosopher kings. By the end, the editorial board had talked about how, though they were reassured by Joe Biden’s apparent vigor and health, they found that the case for him was essentially that he’s “a warm body” that can beat Trump.
> I have heard it said on here that the mainstream media has consistently lied to us about Biden’s age-related competence.
I have a slightly different claim: I feel lied to, and the mainstream media also feels lied to, about cognitive decline that has happened to Joe Biden since 2021 (and seems most likely to have happened in 2023-24). Gatekeepers in the administration assured the media, primary voters, and potential primary candidates that Joe Biden was fine when he was (and is) very much not fine. Media members assured the public, were made to look like fools or liars, and since the debate have been doubling down on cognitive decline coverage out of embarrassment and anger.
Fair. Political journalists are basically dependent on politicians for information and if you don't print what they want they can make life hard for you. I've no sympathy, journalists could have spent their career working in homeless shelters, but I think it's worth taking into account when apportioning trust.
Question: Does this coverage differ significantly from the coverage from a month ago, before the debate, when his age was frequently cited as a concern (not because of his health, oh no, but because of the perception of voters, while amply criticizing everybody bringing up the issue for ageism - my wife is pissed about that, incidentally, the political exploitation of the idea of ageism has seriously undermined the case against ageism more generally), but the possibility of cognitive decline was consistently dismissed as right-wing propaganda?
Look back at 2020 with fresh eyes. Don't just look for what the media said (as, just like a month ago, what is important is not so much what it was saying as what it -wasn't- saying), look at Biden's campaign, how it engaged - using the excuse of COVID - in careful control over Biden's public/media exposure. This is the stuff that concerned people about Biden's mental capacity, and the playbook never changed, only tightened up, right up until his debate performance.
If Biden's cognitive state is a relatively new problem, you should be able to find some delineating line, some point at which his staffers started secluding him from the public. Instead, you'll find that they've been doing that all along. You'll find cases in speeches when Biden complains in public about his handlers controlling what he says. Biden reading out loud the instructions he's supposed to be following. Biden getting notes about what he should be doing, and then getting confused and doing something else.
"There's no way we could have known" is just absurd when other people *did* know. "Well, they were wrong then, they just accidentally became right in the intervening time" is just plain absurd. The evidence "they" used to arrived at this conclusion didn't just start appearing six months ago, it has been steadily building up over the last five-ish years; the type of evidence didn't change, either. The only thing that changed is that he had a single performance that was so obviously and publicly bad that it stopped being viable to pretend everything is fine.
>Does this coverage differ significantly from the coverage from a month ago, before the debate?
I believe so, because it's more unvarnished - I assume Biden benefitted from some partisan bias as soon as he became the nominee, and more so as president. But he most definitely didn't enjoy the same bias prior to nomination - NYT clearly thought he was a bumbling old fool.
>what is important is not so much what [the media] was saying as what it -wasn't- saying
I agree, but I fear we're doomed to interpret that silence differently - I believe fear of cognitive decline is present implicitly in any discussion about a person's age.
>This is the stuff that concerned people about Biden's mental capacity, and the playbook never changed, only tightened up, right up until his debate performance.
The 2020 primary season was conducted normally up to mid-March, so people had a pretty good chance to take a look at Biden up to that point. If there had been evidence of cognitive decline it would have been in the interest of his rival candidates and less-than-sympathetic media to present it. As it is all they could do was present him as a bumbling old fool, and that wasn't enough. People like a bit of bumbling in a politician sometimes - Boris Johnson, Bush jnr.
As for the election campaign proper, the Dems were the lockdown party, so any Dem candidate would have had less exposure than normal during the 2020 election. So really I'm not sure what we can conclude from that.
>You'll find cases in speeches when Biden complains in public about his handlers controlling what he says. Biden reading out loud the instructions he's supposed to be following. Biden getting notes about what he should be doing, and then getting confused and doing something else.
These things are compatible with Biden being a capable but cantankerous politician who doesn't like campaigning. Like it or not a lot of special advisers treat politicians as children to boss around. Biden was mocked on SNL for telling long, rambling, politically incorrect stories. So they will have had to rein him in for reasons besides old age and I'm sure he hated it.
>"There's no way we could have known" is The evidence "they" used to arrived at this conclusion didn't just start appearing six months ago, it has been steadily building up over the last five-ish years; the type of evidence didn't change, either. The only thing that changed is that he had a single performance that was so obviously and publicly bad that it stopped being viable to pretend everything is fine.
I agree it couldn't just have happened before the debate. The issue has been building for a while, I just think it's a foggy business and the public evidence is patchy and open to interpretation. Is that because some people in the media are pulling the wool over our eyes? Probably, and those individuals deserve to lose their jobs, I just think a full spectrum distrust of the media is a cure worse than the disease.
In 2020, the coverage was "Biden will almost certainly not be fit for a second term in office, but he's almost certainly not going to even run. But can we get the guy to commit to that?"
In 2022, the coverage was "Biden will almost certainly not be fit for a second term, and OMG it looks like he's going to be the nominee by default. Shouldn't we have a backup plan?"
In early 2022, the coverage was "Biden will almost certainly be our(*) nominee and there's no backup plan. There's nothing we can do about this, so I don't want to think about this. Can we just not talk about this?"
Now, the coverage is in flux but shifting towards "Biden is almost certainly not fit for a second term, and we can't not talk about this because it's right out their on national television for everyone to see. What are we going to *do* about this?"
I don't think there's any great mystery as to why these shifts occurred, nor any nefarious hidden motive at work.
* We're talking about the MSM here, so yes, he's their nominee
I broadly agree. The motives I have in mind are some mixture of partisanship, personal loyalty to the Dems, preserving ongoing access to the White House, and in this case Stop Trump.
I do remember a lot of trial balloons being floated last year, arguing for an open primary. But Biden was just really insistent on running again and at the time it wasn't obvious he would lose (he only fell behind in the polls this spring).
I think we probably mostly disagree about the last sentence.
And that probably comes down to frequency; my distrust has been building for a long time, over a lot of different issues, so "full spectrum distrust of the media" is well-warranted. Objectively considering it, if this is your first exposure to this kind of thing, yeah, complete distrust in the media probably seems like an overreaction.
If you're in the boat, I guess just keep in mind this incident going forward, minding that the media is probably going to be on their best behavior for the next few months, and see if they deserve the trust.
"Complete distrust of the media" is indeed an overreaction. Skepticism is a great defense, and not just with the media. It's a lot more trustworthy to hear something from someone they would rather not say that to hear something they want to say.
I consume liberal media sources, and listen to, though usually dismiss, things that align with liberal interests. But sometimes they report things that do not reflect well in a liberal light, and those I am much more confident in being accurately reported.
I don't quite get it. You're saying the media will say stuff they DON'T want to get out, to mislead me? I don't see how that would further their goals. Surely they would lose the audience they currently pander to in that case?
I guess I'm thinking back to the Iraq war in the noughties. Although there was some political opposition in the UK, Labour and the Tories were united for the war, and the MSM (not the right-wing press!) pushed back, came under a lot of pressure and were proved right. The BBC can still be woke and so on but it's important to compartmentalise. Like do we not trust the weather forecast? "A thing is in truth as it is in being" - reporting on who's in or out in Washington is a more nebulous thing than other topics, it should be taken with a pinch of salt. Other journalists writing about other more stable topics for the same outlet can still be believed.
Yes, I'd say if you're trusting the weather forecast, in a significant sense you're still not paying attention. You can probably trust that what they report is accurate, mind, but that doesn't mean the reporting itself is trustworthy.
The problem is that it isn't just what they report on, it is what they choose -not- to report on, something which is as nebulous as nebulous gets. If 99% of the facts say X, and 1% of the facts say Y, well, the truthfulness of the reporting becomes more questionable.
I cannot help but think that "noughties" should be "naughties" as "nought" means "naught" but I don't know it was a licentious enough decade to be worthy of that term.
Somebody please tell me this is all fake rumours and not something the Democratic machine is really planning to do, because I cannot believe they would be this stupid.
It didn't work out for them when it was Hillary's turn, and right now? After the questions raised about Biden's capability to be president and who is really holding the reins of power? The party that is so big on "democracy" just ripping up their own rulebook and imposing their anointed leader? If this is a plan by Dr. Jill or Hunter, who are the ones alleged to be gatekeeping access to Biden and advising him to cling on like a barnacle, it's damn foolish.
"The Democratic National Committee is quietly steaming ahead with plans to technically nominate President Biden weeks before the party's convention next month, Axios has learned.
Why it matters: It's the latest effort by Biden's team to stamp out the Democratic rebellion that's been pushing for the president to step aside since his bad performance in the June 27 debate.
- Once Biden receives votes from a majority of the nearly 4,000 delegates, it will become exceedingly difficult to remove him from atop the Democratic presidential ticket.
- The DNC's current plan is to train state party chairs next week on how to conduct the electronic voting in a secure way. The window for voting is likely to open on July 29 and conclude by Aug. 5, according to people familiar with the matter.
- If the working plan for a "virtual roll call" holds, Biden just has to outlast his party's critics for about two more weeks.
- For the 81-year-old Biden, time finally may be on his side.
What they're saying: "We look forward to nominating Joe Biden through a virtual roll call and celebrating with fanfare together in Chicago in August alongside the 99 percent of delegates who are supporting the Biden-Harris ticket," Jamie Harrison, the chairman of the DNC, told Axios is a statement.
"We have not announced or finalized any schedules yet," a DNC spokesperson said."
Vote rigging? Us? No, no! We're just "training" people on how to conduct the voting in a "secure way" so that Joe gets the nod unopposed, and any other result is not acceptable.
At this point I think they're cutting their losses; putting somebody else up to lose against Trump doesn't really gain them anything.
If Biden loses, they can just pin the blame on Biden for refusing to step down, but if they replace Biden with one of their rising stars, and that rising star loses (which given everything seems fairly likely, not least because none of their "rising stars" are actually ready for the big game) - then that star is tarnished for failing to beat one of the least popular presidents in history, AND a large number of Democrats will blame the party for throwing away the chance at victory by kicking Biden to the curb.
They might have slightly better odds of winning if they replace Biden, but it's a very risky maneuver with very little upside to the specific individuals who would be making that choice. I doubt any of his potential replacements want to run in this particular race, either.
Thing is, for the "blame Biden" strategy to work, they have to go along with "what could we do, our hands were tied, Joe Wouldn't Go".
That isn't possible to do when the party machine is pulling strokes like this to make it a done deal *before* the convention that We're Still Ridin' With Biden.
I can see the problem where "Joe is the scapegoat and fall guy, so that means we need him to still be the nominee, but there are now rumblings of discontent within the party so we have to lock it down that it's him and nobody else" is the plan, but then they both have to (1) make sure to be standing around wringing their hands on the night when (fingers crossed, they hope) he loses with the line "what could we do, Joe Wouldn't Go" *and* (2) do their damnedest to make sure nobody rocks the boat over nominating him. They don't want to waste one of the prospective stars, but what's wrong with throwing Kamala under the bus to get her to take the fall? Unless, of course, she realises she's being set up and refuses to play along.
If this report is true, I don't know how they expect to get away with "we could do nothing" when anyone can say "but didn't you set it up so that the convention was presented with a fait accompli?"
I was under the impression that there were enough primaries favoring Biden that the primary results can plausibly be pointed to as more-or-less constraining.
From the way the prediction markets are running, it looks like Trump has about 70-75% chance of winning. Biden and Harris split most of the remainder. My guess is that whoever is picked as the Democratic nominee will pick up the sum of those chances, for something like a 75:25 Trump:Democrat odds or so.
( In fairness, a good chunk of what the Democrats are facing is probably from the 8%-9% inflation spike, which the POTUS had only very limited control over. )
As a USAian, given how the first debate went, perhaps I should be agitating for Tiger Woods to moderate the next one... :-)
A: No, Ohio changed that rule and everybody understood they were going to change the rule.
B: So what? Ohio is now a thoroughly red state; Kamala Harris's odds of victory are not meaningfully reduced if her name is not on the Ohio ballot. The Democratic party is better off with a candidate whose name is on the ballot in 49 states and can win 30 of them, than one whose name is on the ballot in 50 states and can win only 20 of them.
The only thing that matters is whether Kamala Harris (or whoever) has a better chance of winning the states which can plausibly be won by a Democratic candidate, which does not include Ohio. That's not a no-brainer: Kamala is a weak candidate and anyone else would be starting from zero. But Ohio's got nothing to do with it.
Seemingly that was the reasoning, but Ohio has now set a later date:
"Zoom out: In late May, the Democratic National Committee announced plans to nominate its ticket via a virtual roll call weeks before the party's convention in Chicago, which starts Aug. 19. But they didn't provide a firm date.
- The DNC's stated reason for front-running the nomination — Ohio's Aug. 7 deadline for ballot access — is no longer relevant because Ohio changed its law. The state's new deadline is Sept. 1.
- Internally, DNC officials rarely mention Ohio as the reason to push forward with an earlier date, according a Democratic official who's been briefed on the planning.
- "This election comes down to nothing less than saving our democracy from a man who has said he wants to be a dictator on 'day one,' " Harrison said in his statement.
- "So we certainly are not going to leave the fate of this election in the hands of MAGA Republicans in Ohio that have tried to keep President Biden off of the general election ballot."
Yeah, now they're going to democratically take everybody else off the ballot 🙄 Which I really hope is not the case, because "the fix is in" doesn't look good any time and especially not when this is in the case of a guy about whose election there were allegations of mysterious boxes of ballots turning up out of thin air in places where it looked like he was behind.
Before anyone can go "Election denial!", no, I'm not claiming that really happened. I'm saying there were *allegations* of the results being 'helped along' by partisan vote-counting centres.
Never mind the admitted "shadow campaign". Okay, that may sound slightly sinister, but don't worry - we only did it to protect democracy! Yeah, we may describe it as a "conspiracy" but conspiracies are only bad when the other lot do them!
"The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors. The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.
Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result. “The untold story of the election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation,” says Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program."
What's that saying - if voting changed anything, they'd abolish it?
All I ask is that they list the nominee's closest dozen "advisors", "aides", "speechwriters", etc.
With President Bush #2 we got to know Mr. Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc. and their contributions daily. Since the regressive Left is keen on transparency, they should at least tell us about Ron Klain, Anita Dunn, Jeffrey D. Zients, Steve Ricchetti, Mike Donilon, Jen O'Malley Dillon, and Bruce Reed, for starters.
"AI augmentations and video renderings could serve to smooth out these bumps while allowing the Biden campaign to effectively disseminate true information about the state of our democracy and the Biden administration’s accomplishments."
Let's just fake up the candidate's appearance, voice, and speech-making. Trust us, we only have your best interests at heart. Why do you even need to see a physical guy in the flesh, anyway? This is the modern way of doing things. We're just.... smoothing out the bumps.
Um, isn't the whole idea of choosing a VP to "balance the ticket" pretty much the most ridiculous of all the ridiculous things that make up modern politics? The *entire point* of a Vice President is continuity in case of unforseen disaster. The only logical form of that is someone as similar as possible to the President.
But instead, they always give it someone very different to the President. They give a reward to an out-of-power faction *not* by giving that faction an actual concrete share of power, but by giving them a lottery ticket for "complete power, in the unlikely event of a catastrophe". They thereby *deliberately* make fundamental policy directions dependent on the most primitive, meaningless and undemocratic basis possible: random fluctuations in one person's phiysical health. Oh, and they thereby *directly incentivise* assasinating the President, by anyone in said faction or who prefers said faction to the dominant one.
This doesn't apply to the likes of Cheney and possibly Palin who may have acted as effective co-President (the Diocletianic Tetrarchy suggests this might actually be a good system, rival factions included). But for everyone else, I can barely think of how you could design a worse system.
>But for everyone else, I can barely think of how you could design a worse system.<
You didn't see the pre-12th Amendment VPs then. It used to be whoever got the second-most votes became Vice President. So imagine if Biden won the presidency and Trump became Vice President. That's what President John Adams and Vice President Thomas Jefferson was. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_Thomas_Jefferson
Well the VP can also be seen as a countering force to extremist actions by the president. Just look at the last election where Trump tried to use fake electors [1] to stay in power, but was stopped by Mike Pence (which is why he has to pick a different VP now). The VP can also force the president to step down using the 25th amendment. If I thought there was a risk that Trump would do crazy things again, I would appreciate it if he "balanced the ticket" with someone who would stop him if he did crazy things.
Principal agent problem. The main point of a VP is inheritance, but he's picked by the president, who would be dead or retired by the time the VP inherited, so the presidential candidate picks one based on (perceived) electoral effects on his own campaign.
I think it's signalling, so in that sense it's not supposed to have a practical justification.
In a way, it's old-fashioned identity politics. The candidate is one type of person, and so to raise enthusiasm from a different segment of the electorate, the veep needs to be from that segment too. Different regions of the country, different backgrounds, races, sexes, whatever. It's a limited one-time signal, so it has value. It says, "I consider *your* votes important, so I'm putting one of *you* right up here on the stage with me." In cases like W. Bush and Obama, part of the idea was to signal, "I may be inexperienced, but I know I'm inexperienced, and I'm taking steps to remedy that."
I think it's hard to go from a state of pure signalling, back to ground reality. And I agree that, given the actual function of the VP, using it for signaling purposes is like taking some scissors and cutting your seat belts into pretty shapes.
>The *entire point* of a Vice President is continuity in case of unforseen disaster. The only logical form of that is someone as similar as possible to the President.
That might be the entire point* of a VP, but it is not the entire point of a candidate for VP. The point of a candidate for VP is to help the ticket win.
*It isn't the entire point, of course. Depending on the administration, a VP can play an important role negotiating with Congress, or re foreign policy (Biden is an obvious example when he was VP)
9 out of 45 presidents have been promoted to the office from VP. With this succession happening 20% of the time, the VP becoming president should be taken seriously as a scenario. Lincoln (Republican) appointed Johnson (Democrat) as VP to balance his ticket, and that was such a disaster no one has done it since.
Possibly, candidates only evaluate the VP pick as something to help them win the election in the first place. The succession isn't going to ever matter if you don't get elected president in the first place. In a close election, picking a VP that so much as locks in a single contested state is probably more valuable than picking one who would be a competent successor. After all, politicians aren't known for their long term thinking tendencies.
Vance has five letters, much like Trump, and Pence. Which got me thinking, Obama and Biden also have five letters. Bush has four letters. Kaine, Kemp, Gore, Kerry, Nixon, Ford, they're all short names. The longest names of recent Presidents and Vice Presidents are in the six to seven letter range like Clinton and Reagan and Kennedy.
What happened to all the long names? Eisenhower, Roosevelt, Cleveland, Buchanan, van Buren, Jefferson, Washington? My theory: bumper stickers.
Douglas Adams' Long Dark Teatime of the Soul (sequel to Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, both remarkable works, not least for their tendency to give you the punchline of a joke in chapter 2 and the setup of the joke in the last chapter, such that you can read the books ten times and continue to find new jokes you had never noticed before) has some commentary suggesting that the ideal PR name is a long first name and a short last name. In the book, it has a Stephen King analogue, with a very similar name.
So Douglas Adams seems like he would have agreed with your bumper sticker theory, at least if a throwaway line in an oft-forgotten book is taken as representative.
Well half of those long names are non-Anglo names, so the answer to your question is probably the same as the answer to "why are there less obviously-foreign-heritage presidents as in the past?" Excepting Obama for whom that was a central part of his whole image and whose last name helpfully doesn't sound too foreign or weird.
If you meant 'Anglo' as in the common adjective 'Anglo-Saxon,' then they're actually all Anglo names since the term encompasses a certain amount of Celtic/Germanic/Dutch ancestry.
Conspiracy theories seem to be flying on social media, after the recent shooting at Trump. Some people are emotionally vulnerable to conspiracy theories anyway. After the seemingly reality-distorting pandemic, even more so. A talented con artist would know how to take advantage of this situation.
It has previously been said that conspiracy theorists like to assume that the conspiracy is competent, so we have conspiracy theories about assasins that succeed, but not ones that failed.
We seem to be seeing a counterexample here, in that Trump survived but we still have conspiracy theories.
Presumably, the conspiracy theorist needs to explain explain why the conspirators missed on purpose. (Alternatives, such as and really existing conspiracy would fail occasionally, are less attractive to the conspiratorial imagination)
The conspiracy theorist doesn't need to explain why they "missed on purpose" just that there was a plot to kill him (which was a wind's breath from succeeding)
Depends what kind of conspiracy theorist you are. Anti-Trump conspiracy theorists want to believe that Trump is liable for whatever happened, which means they need to explain how he managed to fake himself getting shot. (Blood bag in the pocket, easy, duck down and apply it to the face).
Pro-Trump conspiracy theorists have an easier time, they can point to the ridiculously easy access that the shooter had to the nearest rooftop and the fact that the Secret Service supposedly had eyes on the guy for half an hour but waited until he took a shot before they did anything. The least-crazy version of the theory would allege that while they didn't actively work with Crooks in any way, they did deliberately decide to take it slowly with the whole protection thing, and perhaps they'd been deliberately leaving weak spots in their security for savvy potential assassins to discover.
Not to mention the absurd levels of incompetence, such that even some libertarians who think the government can't do anything right are like "That's a little too incompetent to be believable".
Should this be shouted from (flat and appropriately positioned) rooftops? :-)
More seriously, even _really, really_ extreme incompetence is all too believable. And there have been allegations of incompetence in the Secret Service going back years.
Oh, sure. Unless SS agents start dying, I'm going with "incompetence". If SS agents start shooting themselves in the head with full-length shotguns, however, I'm revising my opinion there.
>If SS agents start shooting themselves in the head with full-length shotguns, however, I'm revising my opinion there.
True! IIRC, the traditional example was someone who was so depressed about losing a Mafia Don's money that he shot himself. In the back of the head. Three times. At _some_ point, one does become suspicious... Many Thanks!
On the other hand, truth is stranger than fiction, and there really have been people who committed suicide by shooting themselves with large guns and/or multiple times.
One guy shot himself in the chest with a shotgun and still lived.
Unfairly dismissive. Situational Awareness is alarmist but it's not "doomerist". There is a difference, an alarmist thinks there is something wrong and that it's fixable, a doomerist thinks that all hope is lost, you would be extraordinarily lucky to be able to narrowly get away with your skin. A nuclear alarmist in 1944 will correctly anticipate the Cold War and call for early sanctions and non-proliferation treaties against Russia, a nuclear doomerist will start imagining Post-Nuclear-Armageddon and/or argue that space colonies are all what will remain of humanity.
Situational Awareness is wrong but it's wrong in a very detailed, carefully reasoned, and interesting way. You can certainly do worse than reading it to know in intimate detail why the people you disagree with think in a way that makes them disagree with you. "Doomerism" is very inaccurate for a document that literally handwaves away alignment as "We will muddle through, fingers crossed" and "Hopefully we manage to enlist the AGIs to help us align the superintelligences because we would be so fucked if we couldn't hahaha". The author has a sidenote where he waves a disparaging tweet from Eliezer Yudkowsky as pedigree that he is not a doomerist.
Perhaps one of the most obvious way that Situational is wrong is how it handwaves away the Data Wall, that is, why LLMs are so hilariously sample-inefficient and how we would probably run out of Internet before they reach honest-to-god AGI. He handwaves this away mainly in 2 ways:
1- By saying that we're "Hobbling" current LLMs, we impose many unrealistic standards that not even the most genius human academic or intellectual is expected to pass: You have to answer correctly on the first try, your answer must take no longer than a few seconds or minutes at most and it must fit within roughly 1000 word or so, you're not allowed to use tools, etc... It's an interesting thought, but I don't think it can explain the full breadth of LLM performance and I don't think it's a safe foundation to build an argument that calls for unprecedented USA's mass-industrialization upon.
2- By saying that Reinforcement Learning is going to save the day. I love and adore RL but saying "This technique from the literal 1950s is going to solve the most salient obstacle in the path of Neural Networks achieving AGI" without satisfactory details is just prime handwaving. The most detailed he ever gets is that LLM researchers will figure out the equivalent of "Self-Play", the trick that enables game AIs to utterly demolish humans. LLMs will "dream", or "fantasize internally", about tasks they were never given, and this will improve their problem-solving capacity.
Overall, Situational strikes me as one of those 1950s and 1960s ultra-detailed works that envisions how we will conquer Mars and have nuclear energy too cheap to meter. They were very right technically, the few places they were wrong on are not fatal to the entire plan. You could take one of those works **today** and pass it through a committee of experts to adapt it for modern tech (e.g. Massively better computers and communication) then immediately adopt it as a plan of action and it would work. You could have a colonized Mars in 50 years and energy too cheap to meter in 30 if you wanted them hard enough.
But that's not what happened, and that's what Situational ultimately fails to grasp. For all the repeated invocations of the "People in SF are so insiders with much situational awareness and oh did you know what the rumors say and the internal labs bro", Situational doesn't have situational awareness. He repeatedly compares AI to nuclear bombs, but Physicists went from "Lol what even is an atom" to a self-sustaining nuclear explosion in about 45 to 50 years, 60 max, with visible incremental progress in the same direction every year. AI experts have been ringing the "ANYTIME NOW" bell far too often since they started working in the 1950s, it's already 70+ years now, they already exceeded the time budget Nuclear Physics was achieved on.
I guess a counterexample to the above is Flight. Flight is an extremely old dream, and many people claimed to be on the cusp of achieving it before the final Jackpot (which was kinda pathetic and very non-promising when it came in the 1900s). I don't know, if I was an investor or policy maker, Situational won't quite convince me to invest a USA-worth of money and infrastructure yet. But it's very well-researched and not obviously wrong at all, and it made me view both AI alarmists and doomerists with a bit more seriousness than before.
I'm not a Trump supporter, but I wanted to say I like J.D. Vance for VP. "Why?", you might ask. IDK, mostly he seems still fresh and uncorrupted by the politics of it all.
I would sincerely like more to hear about this. I have heard friends say (and generally share the opinion) that Vance is completely amoral and corrupt.
In this view, Vance will say or do anything to gain power. He'll praise Donald Trump, who he knows is bad. His past statements about Donald Trump were true and it's hard for liberals like me to imagine that he would become a true convert (since, to us, there's nothing to convert to). Vance is completely bought by Peter Thiel, his benefactor. He used to advocate for understanding (Hillbilly Elegy) but since he started running for Senate, he uses rhetoric as divisive and as anyone in politics.
What's the argument that Vance has taken any stance, since running for Senate, that isn't maximally partisan? Any evidence that he has a moral compass? I'd sincerely love to believe that he's not just a smart, amoral opportunist. The best case here is he can be Harry Truman, another politician with a corrupt origin story who ended up being a good president.
Not necessarily for what it says, but at least for the fact that he seems to understand the field well enough to come up with a meaningful policy on his own, in comparison to other politicians who struggle even to remember the talking points on the subject that they've been briefed with.
It's plausible he's uncorrupted. My hope is that he's a "rational self interest" sociopath; much harder to corrupt, more likely to try to follow through with his promises.
Edit: Also, more likely to pivot / "change his mind".
Yeah, well, appearing fresh and uncorrupted is a good look. Ingenues, you know? I'm sure the handlers recommend it to all who haven't spent so much time in the public eye that nobody's going to believe for a second that they have an intact hymen on any part of their body or mind.
I'm reminded of a bit from the biography of James Tiptree, Jr.:
> It didn't help that her first great love ended in disaster. In "Dead Birds," ... she wrote that "Adele," the daughter of family friends, had been "a thin, magically gawky girl with a Hepburn-Garbo face of extraordinary sensuality and a quiet, secret voice." Adele was a year older than Alice and had a "reputation," though Alice refused to believe it.
> "I saw her in groups, slouching on a hassock with her tan arms around her long legs, her hair falling down on one side, listening quietly. [. . . ] When I talked to her I said the wrong thing; my clothes were different from the boys she laughed with. I spent hours thinking of what I would say to her. I wanted to marry her. [. . . ] I wanted to spend all my life looking at her, listening to her chuckle."
> Finally Alice got to be alone with Adele, on the couch in a ladies' restroom at a party. They sat close together; Alice felt Adele's hair brush her cheek and was "paralysed with love." But when Adele spoke, it was to ask her if she'd ever been with two men at once. Adele had, and it was wonderful. She would never make love to just one again.
> Alice had profoundly wanted to believe that the girl she admired was also a virgin, that within her beauty she, too, sheltered a shy, solitary intensity. Now Alice's own crush felt tainted and perverse. Then, as Alice was still trying to take in her friend's words, Adele became violently sick to her stomach. The vomiting went on and on, while Alice held her friend's head, until "there were phone calls to people I didn't know, and she went away, or was taken. A very short while later she was dead of septic abortion."
I read his book when it came out. I was moved by it. I think now that he was simply writing that memoir to enter politics. All wannabe-politicians do that. His becoming a Trump sycophant makes him rather suspect to me now.
I almost wonder whether the book was partly him probing to see if the Democratic Party had space for someone like him, and when the late 2010s showed that there wasn't, he decided to become whatever it would take to gain power with the Republicans.
He spent five years being strongly and publicly critical of Trump personally as well as of key MAGA policy preferences, to in a matter of months publicly embracing Trump and becoming an across the board MAGA policy cheerleader, so as to win a GOP primary and then election to the Senate. "Uncorrupted" is an odd choice of descriptor for such a politician....for me "weathervane" is the kindest word that comes to mind.
Yeah, I've been trying to spend zero time looking at the news. I read his book several years ago. And I agree with most of what he says. So two thumbs up in my book, and if there was ever a year where I could claim I was voting for the VP. This is it! (the big question is will my daughter buy this argument ?, "I voted for the VP and not the P.") Also a veteran.
And I should finally add, that here I am X years later, thinking I might vote for Trump. We are all allowed to change our minds.
If he was criticizing the Republican candidate to get ahead among Republicans, that's a very non-obvious way to achieve that goal. If he's a sycophant then he's a sycophant with incredible foresight.
So I observed Tisha B'Av yesterday. Your calendar may have said it was the 9th of Tammuz, but, after careful observance of the moon, I have determined that the observence of ''Adar Bet'' this year by some Jews was in error.
I was hoping for some clarity on relevant points of my life from the fast, but all I got was "Biden must resign".
Even if you were wrong and it was in fact the 9th of Tammuz, that's still a good date on which to observe a fast marking the fall of Jerusalem. See Jeremiah 52:6.
Yup, after all that "we will listen* shtick they "set their faces towards Mitzrayim (in fairness I am currently in the Sinai Desert https://youtu.be/zGx_nFV8MxM ).
Ditto for the people who came to Zachariah for magical answers to their 'halacha" question and we're therefore unable to accept his simple instruction that they listen to the prophets of old.
P.S. If my videos resonate with you please get in touch. Most Orthodox Jews are blind lemmings but the language for a utopian world is best expressed in their/our language. I'm trying to make a radically positive change in the world היום* הם בקולי תשמעו".
If you're above to hear it I desperately need your passion and partnership.
I'm not Jewish, nor do I fast for religious reasons, but my personal experience with fasts is that the clarity kicks in around day 3, along with the ketosis.
Careful observance of the moon varies from one location to the next. Before they started calculating the calendar ahead of time, different Jewish communities found that their calendars fell in and out of sync with each other every month.
Crooks was spotted 30 minutes before the shooting, on a roof, and considered a suspicious person even before then.
Trump was speaking for about 10 minutes before the shooting started.
I totally why the snipers didn't just kill him on sight, you need to verify you're not shooting one of your own and them returning fire. But simply holding off on letting Trump go up there would give you time to figure this out.
This is feeling like the Challenger explosion where people had bad feelings but no one wanted to call it off, for reasons.
Or, no one could imagine someone *actually* shooting at the former President. That would be insane.
Interesting. Wonder why they didn't dispatch someone to go check him out. Or just give one of the snipers a heads-up to keep the guy in their sights (literally) and shoot him if he pulls out a gun.
They did dispatch someone. A cop hoisted another cop over the edge of the roof to see what was going on, the would-be assasin pointed his rifle at that cop, who let go of the roof, and fell off. Immediately thereafter, the would-be assasin fired at Trump. Also, I think the snipers were likely given a heads up, as I think the southern team (behind Trump to his left) rotated north towards the would-be assasin minutes before the shooting.
The building he was on top of, seems to have been the building the local police department was using for their command center at the time. I am not making this up.
Very likely the initial USSS response to seeing a sniper on top of that particular building was "someone go tell Barney Fife to stop playing Rambo before he gets hurt", and they weren't going to shoot anyone until they had confirmation that it wasn't just an idiot local cop.
Why the local cops didn't bother to secure the roof of their own command center, is another question for which there are not enough facepalms in the world to form a proper response.
According to the Secret Service Director Cheatle, there were no security forces on that roof because they thought the slope was too severe. You can't make this stuff up.
Grrr. One of the components of the security system of my _house_ is a bunch of motion sensors. If I, as a retiree, can afford them, I think they should be cheap enough for both the Secret Service and the local cops to sprinkle them around.
Is it just me, or does the profile for the would-be Trump assassin look *exactly* like what you would expect in a school shooter? A loner with an excessive interest in guns and explosives, a bit of a loser, came to school in camo pants, bullied, little obvious motivation beyond this...
At this point, I would not be surprised if his motivation was merely "I will show them all!"
(Which would be a relief - out of all the shooters one might imagine, he's got to be the one of the least polarizing possible. Imagine if it had been a Muslim or a leftist activist!)
Almost all assassins who aren't certifiably insane fit the profile of school shooters: losers. Lee Harvey Oswald was thrice court martialed while in the Marines (once for shooting himself in the elbow) and was constantly moving from job to job, accomplishing nothing. Czolgosz was an unmarried and unemployed recluse living with his parents.
I did say “almost”! Booth is the obvious exception. I’m not familiar with Sirhan Sirhan, but Princip was definitely a loser. Rejected by the military for being too weak, no girlfriend, and living off money from his peasant father while failing his classes.
"A colleague who worked with Crooks at the nursing home and who asked not to be named described him in an interview as “the sweetest guy.” Just this week, the colleague said, the two of them worked together to find an easier way for nursing home residents to open ranch dressing packets, an act the colleague said was indicative of how caring Crooks was.
“These stupid ranch packets in the kitchen — no one can ever open them,” said the colleague, who also went to high school with Crooks. “Earlier this week he was helping me with a bunch of sick old ladies (to) put ranch on their salads.”
Crooks, the colleague said, never expressed political views at work and wasn’t “a radical.” They added: “It’s hard seeing everything that’s going on online because he was a really, really good person that did a really bad thing, and I just wish I knew why.”
There's still some polarization there. He has ties to both parties (registered to vote as a Republican, but had donated to a Democratic organization), so both sides can claim he was working for the other.
I have decided, after a bit of research, that phonics is bullshit and I don't like it. I think the root of this dislike comes from the fact that phonics teaches an essentially false model of the domain. Downstream from that are all the concrete complaints I've heard from actual parents (their kids still make weird mistakes at far too late an age, their kids have basic gaps in knowledge) and teachers (there are more exceptions to the rules than examples of them, you're confusing children who already know a bit of reading but haven't learned your rules.)
So I got to thinking, what would a version of phonics look like that pushed a true and accurate model of linguistics?
My first thought is that we don't try to hide the irregularity of the English language, and instead we make a feature of it. If English is in truth a collection of disparate sub-systems that all got merged and fused together as they also changed over time, then that's the story we tell our kids.
So to take for example the phrase "highly illogical", which is the first phrase any rationalist kid needs to be able to read and write:
I would say the prefixes and suffixes "-ly", "-il" and "-al" are three atoms ("phonemes"?) a child should be taught, because then he can break the words down into modifiers + the roots "high" and "logic".
Then would it make sense for "igh" to be an atom? On the grounds that this construction is used in Old Saxon (I'm making that up because I don't know) where it's always pronounced the same way, and is entirely distinct from "i"+"gh", where the "gh" atom might have come from eg Norse and is (predictably) pronounced an entirely different way.
So the child recognises "h"+"igh" and knows how to say "high", and then does something similar for "logic" which is also made up of atoms written in a third colour/style/whatever, because they hail from Ancient Greek this time.
I saw a Biblaridion vid a while ago explaining that irregular verbs got that way because they started out as constructions of regular aux verbs, which then got contracted and fused together, then the language changed around them but, no longer fitting the pattern, they stayed the same shape.
This is kind of what I want to do with the whole English language: extract out the true "rules of the game", then use them to build back the complete picture.
One could argue that this kind of backstory is completely irrelevant to the goal of just memorising a big vocabulary and will only add to the stack of shit to memorise.
I completely disagree because for me and anyone who thinks like me, seeing these glimpses of logic and backstory make the subject more interesting, more satisfying, and easier to get to grips with. I would argue it's easier to remember big coherent bundles of information than a smaller number of separate, context-free facts.
Anyway, does anyone have thoughts on how you could break English down in this way? I'm relaxing the requirement that it be "easy for kids" because it can only cut off interesting areas of discussion.
Montessori has a very different approach. Firstly, it uses letters made of sandpaper so kids get a feel for the shapes. That's step 1. And they teach writing before reading. They also use something called bobbooks. And start with cursive.
In case you want to learn deeply about this, I recommend Angeline Lillard's book. She's a cognitive science professor in Virginia.
> Do we have to teach children about electron clouds instead of giving them the 2-8 orbits?
No, stop going easy on the little fuckers, they should be learning about harmonic representations of spherical functions first.
Quite genuinely, this is a good example. It would have done me no harm as a child to be shown a bunch of funny little shapes and told how electrons were allowed to live in the lobes.
It would have given some background to the (otherwise completely irregular and bonkers) 2-8-8-18 sequence and just knowing it was there would have made the subject feel deeper and more coherent to me.
Dull and incurious kids would have been under no obligation to pay attention to it.
>Quite genuinely, this is a good example. It would have done me no harm as a child to be shown a bunch of funny little shapes and told how electrons were allowed to live in the lobes.
Right up until they watch an isolated atom get put in a magnetic field and m-sub-l becomes a good quantum number... :-)
But I don't think you're going to find any tool that will let a child intuit their way through The Chaos. Learning English is a mess because English is a mess.
While some people evidently disagree, I still say that knowing why there's Chaos, and having a general feeling for the way Chaos behaves, goes a long way towards making me more comfortable when I have to learn all its proceeds.
I learned to read from phonics. I still believe it's a good start, and I didn't have trouble with transitioning to English having weird spelling.
How did you learn to read?
It's possible that pushing phonics too hard is a mistake, but whole-word was such a disaster for me that I don't think I could have learned to read at all from it.
What proportion of English text is phonetic?
I agree that knowing the historical structure behind spelling is good, but I don't have a feeling for when or how it should be introduced.
I honestly don't remember, I think I could read at age three, but definitely I could read by four and a half. I think it was probably whole-word, if that's what it's called, because it would have been my grandmother and my father teaching me.
I imagine it was that because I did have trouble with words I'd never heard pronounced, where I could pick up the meaning from context but had no idea how to say them. And splitting them into parts didn't help, for years I thought "awry" was pronounced "awe-ree" not "ah-rye" because I split the word into the halves of "aw" and "ry".
I'm going to make the completely unsubstantiated claim that all of English is phonetic, it just doesn't look that way because there are multiple different phonetic languages all sitting next to each other, sharing the same symbols.
I'd rather like to know if this is true. I'm getting quite invested in it as a model right now.
If true, then you could pull out every constituent language and place them all side by side, then give every single phoneme a unique symbol, you'd end up with a single phonetic language.
Then there's a mapping between the assigned unique symbol and the token we use to write it down (made of one or more alphabet characters).
This feels very similar to what phonics is trying to do - except phonics gives you a small, efficient set phonemes to learn (and lies about the model) and what I'm talking about leads to a hugely redundant set of phonemes where there's multiple ways to make the same sound and multiple matches for the same token. Which is how English really works.
> How did you learn to read?
It would have been whole-word, but I don't remember the early days. I just read and read and read.
Are you fluent in any other language? The reason I asked is that once you learn a "truly" phonetic language (e.g., German), you'd know English is definitely not phonetic (at least, not anymore) if the word is to have any useful meaning, where pronunciation is closely mapped to the alphabet (there are always exceptions, but English is a one giant exception pile).
I remember both learning to read and my child learning to read. Both never used phonics, I guess it just was "whole words".
Obviously English as it stands is not phonetic. My contention was that English could be thought of as a collection of languages that *are* phonetic.
For this you would need to let go of the idea that one letter/diphong = one sound, which I think is a fair thing to do. If you allow your "phonemes" to be "eau", "ette", etc then French almost becomes phonetic. All "phonetic" means in this sense is a predictable one-to-one mapping between n-letter tokens and spoken sounds.
If you have a word for that you prefer more than "phonetic" then feel free to sub it in.
If English can indeed be thought of in this way, I might learn something interesting by following that line of thought. For example, we might find a rule that any word which contains old English-isms like "igh" never also contains Greek or Latin -isms in the same root. But they're probably fair game to add on in modifiers (like "isms"). I don't know if this rule is accurate but it feels like it could be to me.
Exceptions aren't the enemy, they lead to new rules and better models. I am more interested in thinking about why there are exceptions and how they come about, than simply going, "there's always exceptions" and stopping there.
I see. What you're doing is quite interesting, but probably calls for a different word because "phonetic" will keep confusing people. One thing I'd like to point out that there are variations in "mapping" of English spelling to pronunciation that don't seem to relate to the word's origins? Like "read" ("ee" or "eh" depending on the tense) or "bow" ("ou" or "au" depending on the meaning; etc. The screwy thing about English is that you never quite know from looking at a word how to pronounce it; "quay" being a perfect example of such.
At this point I must admit that I'm not a linguist, and somebody who actually has some relevant background may provide better feedback.
I can visualise an app that displayed text and showed you the "tokens" that made up a word, possibly also with a little timeline of how that word and/or its tokens have changed over history.
My belief is that they'll be very few "pure" exception words, and most things will follow from a set of rules that make sense once you can see them laid out. (There might be more rules than you think, and the "rule" might look like "1700s vowel shift: 'o' becomes 'e' after this point" rather than a nice simple Theory of Everything; but still a damn sight more structured than the "English just has exceptions" free-for-all that everyone else likes to allege.)
That's an article of faith though, since I don't know the rules myself.
> At this point I must admit that I'm not a linguist
No, nor am I, which is why I'm talking about it not making it myself. I had hoped that one might show interest in this post and chime in, but what can you do.
German has a much better phonetic system than English, but English is still phonetic. English has rules with exceptions; it's not just random letters thrown together. Knowing the rules alone will have you pronouncing most words more or less right.
Ok I agree it's not an either/or, and following basic rules gets you in the ballpark in English, but I still insist that the exceptions pile in English is huge. And sometimes it does feel like "random letters thrown together"! I give you the town of Worcestershire, MA, as a perfect example :-)
A lot of the weird spelling in English comes from English pronunciation changing. For example, the k in knight used to be voiced, and the gh represented a sound we don't have anymore. All those silent Es at the end of words used to be voiced. Moon, blood, and good used to all have the same vowel sound.
As you said, the main other source of weird spelling is words borrowed from other languages and using spelling that made sense in that language. But we often don't pronounce those words as the other language does, so we're not really using their systems. For example, the French pronunciation of lieutenant isn't like any English speaker says it.
I don't see any value in teaching this stuff to small children just learning to read; it would just be added confusion. "Here is what the letters sound like, and here are the exceptions" is the tried and true method. Other methods never end up working as well.
I’m a biologist working for a small cryopreservation startup in the UK. We use advanced cryoprotectants to produce pre-made frozen cell plates with the goal of increasing the efficiency of in vitro research. The idea is that instead of scientists using their valuable time to do routine cell culture maintenance tasks, we make the cells and ship them to where they’re needed, increasing the productivity of scientists through the division of labour.
We also use these cryoprotectants for blood banking. We can currently produce units of thawed red blood cells with a higher haemoglobin content than traditional methods allow. Alternatively, the properties of these cryoprotectants allow us to make these units available much faster than traditional methods, with comparable haemoglobin content.
But our start-up is very small and we’re in need of extra funding to develop and promote the adoption of this technology. I’m wondering how I could get in touch with people who might be interested in funding this work? It seems like the sort of thing that might have been good for an ACX grant but there won’t be another one of those for a while.
As far as I can tell, the venture capital industry operates mostly by contacts chains, so the best way to get a hearing before anyone who can do anything is to consider whether any of you know anyone (friends, relatives, college buddies, whatever...) who deals with anything financial. If you do, approach them, and ask them for introductions to people they know who are closer to the VC industry than they are.
If you really truly know no one like that and are still a very small operation, you might try applying to a startup accellerator like Y Combinator. If they accept you, they will introduce you to all sorts of VCs who might be interested in investing with you.
If YC is out for some reason, there are other similar outfits.
Finally, it is quite common for the early stages of small companies to be funded literally by investments from friends and family, with professional investors stepping up later when the company is more mature and can show some results. Do you have any friends or older relatives who are flush?
So savagery vs. innocence. In a modern setting, savagery might best be symbolized by internet commenters. A deep need to dominate others, a reflexive - almost mindless, except it's embodied in (to the best of our knowledge) creatures that have free will - desire to dominate and subjugate another poster, despite (or because of) the meaningless of the "fight". Many such cases.
Innocence, though, is harder to find. I always imagine kelp as innocent. But arguments that a plant, same as a lion, still ruthlessly causes needless pain abound. Rocks, maybe? Gravity might be a better choice. Any physical force. Perhaps a concrete example of those forces for symbolic reasons. Ocean waves.
What else? What might you choose to symbolize the two extremes?
I have a background in research and want to test "woo"-tech devices that claim to use mystical electrical fields or magical glass to improve your life / sleep quality. But I've gotten no responses from emailing them through their respective websites and have not found any employee emails on the usual sites. Has anyone had experience with this?
I also don't really understand why they don't respond — if it works, I post that and they get buyers. Are the companies not interested in the publicity, or they don't believe it actually works, or what?
My first thought was if they have an image of scientists as sneering, closed minded know-it-alls, and you approach wearing the tribal colours of a scientist, they could be turned off before they even give it time to engage.
That's without getting into any self-defense mechanisms built into the theories themselves - eg for stuff like reiki, "it doesn't work if you don't believe in it". In situations like that I can imagine your questions and tests are like an antimeme that could destroy their own ability to benefit from whatever it is.
I can't say for sure, but I expect these companies know they are doing a scam.
As such, they have no interest in having their devices tested. Neither have they an interest in being reachable for any reason, by customer or non- alike, except for I want to give you money but can't".
#2. Looking forward to this: whatever it is. I'm a Don Juan enthusiast. Alas, particular targets of its satire are now sometimes difficult to identify. But themes like Byron's scorn for Europe's reconstituted monarchies (and their toadies) and his ironic comprehension of almost every passion (and its end) buoy-up every Canto. Then scenes like Don Juan hiding in Julia's bed while she berates her jealous husband (Canto I), or refusing to eat his Pastor (Canto II), or bursting into tears when the Sultana of Constantinople offers herself on a couch (Canto V) are comic drama of the first order.
Surprisingly, Nigeria is a little less dense than the United Kingdom and a little more dense than Germany; it just happens to be far larger than either. If you combined the UK with France and Germany you'd have an area roughly as large and as populous as Nigeria.
Nigeria's always been populous. It used to be the second most populous British dependency (behind India). It's got to do with fertile soil, good river access, some ports, etc. It's long been a center of city-states, various states, a few empires, etc. Kind of similar to Indonesia in that regard.
Their birthrate is decreasing, but from my uneducated look at the country it looks like they've reached a stage of civilization where the biggest reduction in mortality has been achieved (knowledge of germs and basic sanitation/healthcare) but stalled for a long enough time below first-world living standards and mitigated the anti-natal forces that come with it, eg demystification of the world (ie, maintenance of strong traditional/religious beliefs), gender equality, geographic mobility and urbanization, etc.
The Niger Delta has the most fertile soil in Africa, so great for agriculture. You'll notice that most of the other countries in Africa surround Nigeria because of the delta. Nigeria also has a lot of oil, which has probably been more detrimental than good for the population because the corrupt government takes all the profits, but the industry may have helped increase the population, I'm not sure.
All you need to do is take a minute to look at Reddit and past media coverage or even some posters here to see that many on the left really do see Trump as a fascist, literally Hitler, etc etc etc. If you genuinely believe such things, you should logically believe that killing him is not only warranted, but to be abetted or at the least encouraged. Yet not nearly as many people have come out in support of the assassination attempt. Is this just a simple case of people generally not being very consistent in their beliefs? Or are a lot of people hiding their applause?
For what it's worth, I think a lot of the pearl-clutching surrounding Trump's hilariously minor injury is just an expression of "America just didn't use to have those vibes guys !!!" indignation, rather than any actual concern about Trump, or any realistic concern for "Democracy" or "Rule of Law".
Imagine if a Billionaire saw a violent fight in his classy hotel suite, he would be very upset about the blood getting on the carpet, and about the general status of his reputation when the news gets out.
Judging from the 1960s and the 1970s, American institutional and political machinery seems more than capable of withstanding an assassination of a former president. In the 1960s the same machinery withstood an assassination of a current president, right after the most intense nuclear standoff of the entire Cold War, and right before an actual hot war that saw devastating casualties and massive loss of American international legitimacy. The USA is not a fragile beast, This Bad Boy Can Fit So Many Fucking Crises Into Its Political Institutions https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/387/189/3bf.png.
For that matter, American institutional machinery can easily handle Trump too. Trump's alarmists make the consistent mistake of assuming he is remotely honest. He Is Not. He is quite adequately modeled as an advertisement machine, the truth value of his claims - that he will build massive Mexico-USA walls, or make the USA leave NATO, or turn the USA into a de facto monarchy/dictatorship - is in the same general vicinity as "There are hot single milfs in your area, click here to smash !1!1!1" or "CONGRATULATION! you won an iPhone 69 Pro Max, click here for more details" or "This MAGIC cream will make your cock bigger and better, click here for more".
Trump is a non-general-purpose computer (an ASIC [1]) running a very simple (in principle) algorithm :
Until death {
let P be the set of people you want things from
foreach person in P {
tell person what they want to hear
}
}
Sometimes he does an optimization when P is very large: he partitions it into relatively homogenous smaller sets P_1, ..., P_n, and then tells each subset in bulk what the entire subset wants (so that he won't have to loop over every single person). Sometimes the subsets are still not homogenous enough, in that case he resorts to using relatively simple but ambiguous wishy-washy encodings of promises such that every person in the subset will interpret the same claim as the (different) things they want to hear all at the same time.
That's it. Trump is entirely compressible to the 3 bytes representing RGB Orange + the above algorithm + a simplistic sampling distribution over an English dictionary favoring words like "Tremendous" and "Beautiful" disproportionally. Give or take a few creepy sexual comments about his daughter. Trump is at most a few megabytes, maybe 10 if we're generous. He is not programmable, for good or for ill.
Some misguided people look at Trump and think "He's an idiot, but I can fix him. With his Charisma and my smarts I will make him do what I want". Those people make the classic mistake of thinking Trump is programmable, Trump is not programmable, he can't be used to do anything except the above algorithm. He is a whore whose job is telling a customer his cock is good and big and tremendous and beautiful in exchange for the customer's green paper, or votes.
Trump assassinated or not, Trump 47th president or not, the USA will just keep zombie-walking through the inevitable entropy-driven decline that all states and all organization and all complex structure in the universe before, during, and after it have suffered through. Trump is just an amusing sideshow. Trump can't do 1/10 of the things people fear he would do, if his life depended on it.
It would be a good thing if he's assassinated, because I feel like I'm losing IQ points unsustainably rapidly every time I hear or see him. I can't understand why American media has such a rock-hard erection for what's - realistically - just an old and not a very good-looking male whore. But all things considered, he is just a slightly dumber and more obnoxious (in the teenage sense) American politician, he objectively didn't make America behave much differently than it usually does during 2016-2020.
So meh, I very much wish the next assassination attempt would be more competent, but that's because he annoys the fuck out of me.
>That's it. Trump is entirely compressible to the 3 bytes representing RGB Orange + the above algorithm + a simplistic sampling distribution over an English dictionary favoring words like "Tremendous" and "Beautiful" disproportionally. Give or take a few creepy sexual comments about his daughter. Trump is at most a few megabytes, maybe 10 if we're generous. He is not programmable, for good or for ill.
So Trump "Can be replaced by a very small shell script"? :-) [and thanks for the source code, further up in your comment!]
I really like your analogizing Trump to the
>the same general vicinity as "There are hot single milfs in your area, click here to smash !1!1!1"
inbox and popup messages. Yeah, Trump is of comparable depth and plausibility.
I do suggest looking at him as comic relief, rather than as an irritant. Perhaps think of him as _misspelled_ spam messages?
edit: I expect to always remember Trump as the POTUS who recommended looking into "injecting disinfectant". AFAIK, _that_ was unique to Trump. Sigh. How many neurons does it take to grasp the concept that mainlining Clorox is not a good idea?
>>It would be a good thing if he's assassinated, because I feel like I'm losing IQ points unsustainably rapidly every time I hear or see him. I can't understand why American media has such a rock-hard erection for what's - realistically - just an old and not a very good-looking male whore. But all things considered, he is just a slightly dumber and more obnoxious (in the teenage sense) American politician, he objectively didn't make America behave much differently than it usually does during 2016-2020.
>>So meh, I very much wish the next assassination attempt would be more competent, but that's because he annoys the fuck out of me.
Speaking as I guy who lives in the US, can I get some confirmation that this was meant as a joke? I know that's formalistic, and I get feeling like a politician (and Trump in particular) is annoying and brings IQs down every time he opens his mouth, and I agree that the US has strong institutions that can *slaps car* withstand a lot of crises, but we have people right now looking around for reinforcement for their pet theories:
(a) that Trump being shot would be an objective good for the USA and it's bad the shooter missed (toxic left); or, conversely,
(b) that lots of people on the other side believe (a) and people on the right need to view their left-leaning fellow Americans as violent, dangerous, and willing to kill or cheer for killers in the name of their politics (toxic right).
The US has strong institutions that can and have weathered a lot of partisan tensions in the past, but stuff like this is still the opposite of helpful, even if meant in jest - all the more so if some fringey-type mistakes it (whether willfully or earnestly) as having been serious.
This will probably be helpful: I don't live in the US and I don't have the US citizenship. I have never voted in a US election. My sentiments on Trump don't reflect anyone in the US, left, right, center, forwards, backwards, whatever.
I'm a pure-bred non-US noble savage who found Trump's dumbassery and the internet's constant obsession with his attention whoring attitude just 1 gram too much.
> can I get some confirmation that this was meant as a joke
I legitimately mean it 100%. I'm a vegetarian and I would never kill another soul unprovoked or condone killing souls unprovoked, I feel guilt when ants keep harassing my skin and force me to swat them away from my arm, but I would be very glad if somebody *else* were to pick up a weapon and give Trump's his sorely needed cup of lead.
Why no guilt? For one thing he's a former US president, which makes him a mass murderer, piece of shit, scum by default. For another thing he is quite literally a criminal, by the boring legal definition and not just the trivially true moral one. For a third thing he is an annoying 77 years old barely-alive blob of organic material who has repeatedly nodded and winked at the possibility that he could unleash violence if he pleases, so maybe he (and we) shouldn't cry too hard when somebody else unleashes violence on him before he does.
I get that the opinion is transgressive, but I actually think there is a very good argument to be made that **wishing** Trump death is not immoral, all things considered. The only reason not to do so is the pragmatic reason you mentioned, upholding the peace and civility of political shitflinging in the great US of A.
I agree that the US wouldn't have descended into madness if the attempt had succeeded nor will it if he wins the election. Not so sure about Trump not being at all malleable though. He's changed many of his opinions, though who's to say anyone else had anything to do with it.
>I very much wish the next assassination attempt would be more competent, but that's because he annoys the fuck out of me.
Are you sure it isn't because Trump would be very very bad for Gazans? (And conversely, very very good for the Israeli right)
> Are you sure it isn't because Trump would be very very bad for Gazans?
No one has 100% error-proof access to their own internal motivation, but I think no, that's not really relevant to my reasons for despising Trump. The 95%+ displaced Gazans has seen enough due to Biden in 9 months, and will see more in the next 6 months, that Trump will not contribute meaningfully to it if he enters the White House next January. The Gaza war is already unsustainable because of the South Lebanon front and the consequently abandoned Israeli North. By either a ceasefire that concludes the murderous rage or a declared war on Lebanon that forcibly pulls the IDF, the war on Gaza will probably end before the end of this year. Trump being a piece of shit, the most damage he could do is delaying and worsening the post-war reconstruction and/or the reconciliation, but that's insult next to the injury of the war.
As a matter of fact, Trump's antics could be very very bad for the Israeli right too. For one thing, expensive military aid is one of his favorite pet peeves. He supports Israel when it's a cheap thing like moving an embassy or using "Palestinian" as an insult. Actual money though? Not that much.
Tangentially, the USA has slightly more Jews than Israel, and every time they do something that isn't throwing themselves at Trump's feet, he launches into a rant about how they're ungrateful little shits and how he's the most Pro-Israel president in the history of the multiverse so how could they not give him their votes just HOW DARE they. This is just an illustration of how long the list of reasons people would want Trump out of office (preferably via being dead) for, and how the plight of Gazans is relatively at the bottom of that list next to others.
That's about the level of IQ I would expect, so do go for it my little buddy.
> the most annoying commenter on this site
The most shining compliment I ever get is your ilk being upset by me. Thank you. I live for this. More is coming.
> he's gonna tell Bibi to "Let 'er Rip"
I also heard he is gonna build you (like, you in particular) a castle in the sky with 72 angels giving you constant blowjobs. He is gonna tell Hamas to come crawling to DC with all hostages alive even the ones that have already died and they're gonna do it out of sheer TREMENDOUS respect for his big beautiful American balls. Trump is going to get you ponies and many many iron domes and big walls and Mexico is going to pay for it.
It will be the biggest and most beautiful presidencies ever. They have never done any presidency like this in the history of presidencies. Hamas will start screaming "God Bless 'Murica" in their bombings instead of Allah Akbar.
Utterly hilarious. Your type is such that every time one of you is upset and can find no words for a retort, you reach for a good ol' "Haha KHAMAS go boom and that must make you so MAD".
Oh Nooooo, not the heckin Hamaserenos. Please, killing Hamas neks makes me so maaad, pleeeeeaaaase stop taunting me with dead Hamas leadership, it plucks away at my heart strings.
But worry not, the mysterious dark arts of Anarchism is just one click away. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/special/index. Read, so that one day you can retort with initelligent insults that won't embarrass you more than me.
> Deif
The IDF hasn't yet announced his death by the way, and the guy survived 7 assassination attempts before, since the late 1990s. The IDF are not angels, but you're definitely the Fool rushing in where everyone is having second thoughts about whether to tread.
It's a little late now to try to pretend that *he's* the one who's butthurt here when you've already told him that you think he's the "most annoying" person on the board, and that you're voting for Trump just to try to upset him.
If you oppose Trump because he is undermining democracy and the rule of law, then undermining democracy and the rule of law in an attempt to stop him defeats the entire purpose. This isn't exactly rocket science, and the trollish gotcha attempts are really tiresome.
>If you oppose Trump because he is undermining democracy and the rule of law
That's an understatement for how evil many people genuinely seem to think he is. I think even my literally Hitler hyperbole is more accurate than your characterization.
I don't know if I count as being someone who thinks Trump is "a fascist" or "literally Hitler," but I do think that given his efforts to thwart the peaceful transfer of power in 2020 there is an unacceptable chance that he refuses to yield it if it is given again. I'd put it low, somewhere between 4%~8%, but that's unacceptably high for a democracy, and a stark contrast with Biden, who despite his many flaws I am 100% confident will peacefully transition power if he loses an election.
I'd assume that doesn't make me one of the people you're talking about here, but I'd nevertheless offer my own thoughts as a barometer. I do think Trump is an unacceptable threat to American democracy and we'd be foolish to elect him given his past behavior. But killing him to thwart his election is basically an act of killing the republic to save the republic. It gets you nowhere. And that's before you get into the possibility of reprisals and reciprocal violence, which is very real in a heavily armed country. We already have nutcases doing school shootings - all they have to do is decide to shoot at leaders instead.
So while I'm sure there are a small number of people "hiding their applause," I don't think it's a natural jump from "Trump is a fascist" to "Trump should be assassinated" the way you seem to be implying, so I think the lack of applause (quiet or otherwise) for the attempt you are notng isn't a result of an inconsistency of beliefs but rather a sign that people so foolishly partisan as to be genuinely pro-assassinations are an extreme outlier and few in number.
>So while I'm sure there are a small number of people "hiding their applause," I don't think it's a natural jump from "Trump is a fascist" to "Trump should be assassinated" the way you seem to be implying
Maybe not, but I'm still far from convinced that most people have arrived at "political violence is bad, mkay" out of a well-reasoned weighing of the costs of political violence. Rather, it seems to me one of those social taboos that people hold instinctually more than rationally, and such taboos are usually held in the background without much thought to how they interact with their other beliefs.
I think assassinating Hitler in 1931 is something that's only warranted by what we know in retrospect. Assassinating Hitler in 1935 or 1939 is a completely different matter.
Also, Germany in 1931 was already a shitshow, with lots of street violence and attempted coups. So assassinating Hitler in 1931 would be a lot less destabilizing than assassinating someone today.
Why do people think that abortion doctors are literally participating in Holocaust condemn abortion doctor murderers? Why do people who think that government tyranny has to be fought violently if needed and that Waco was a prime example of government tyranny condemn Tim McVeigh for concretely fighting the government due to Waco? People in a stable country do not usually approve of direct action of this sort no matter what they say and can see that it will generally be vastly counterproductive.
It's possible to have both beliefs like "abortion is approximately infanticide" alongside other beliefs like "assassination and terrorism are very bad ways to enact political change." Or even "assassination and terrorism would be morally acceptable ways to end mass abortion if they would work, but they wouldn't accomplish the goal."
I mean, yes, lots of people engage in hyperbole so that every single Republican running for office is a racist, fascist, woman-hating monster and every Democrat running for office is a closet socialist who hates intact families and Christians, and they don't really believe any of that nonsense. But you can have real beliefs about some policies or ideas being evil or destructive, and still not want to assassinate or bomb anyone over it.
People absolutely think that. I'm not sure what you mean by "well-credentialed", but e.g. the current Speaker of the House of Representatives, the third-highest official in the US government, has said that and almost certainly believes it. People with Ph.D.s, say and believe it.
It is frankly difficult to imagine someone opposed to abortion and *not* considering its practitioners to be engaged in a Holocaust, except by way of cognitive dissonance. Either a fetus is morally a person or it isn't. If it is, then we've killed way more than a holocaust's worth of innocent people, and in many cases we've basically done it for convenience.
Individual women and their doctors, with the OP focusing on the doctors as the supposed perpetrators of a holocaust-level atrocity. And enough of our society has stepped up to provide them with legal cover and logistical support that *if* there's anything to be guilty about, the guilt would be spread far and wide.
Blaming the doctors but not the women makes no moral sense, but it's obviously politically pragmatic for anyone who wants to actually stop abortion.
I can believe it. But the sleight of hand here is that the comparison is between one person doing a lot of harm over the term of a presidency and many thousands of people doing harm over several decades. I'm not sure the logic of "kill this person to prevent Hitler 2.0" applies to the latter, though I'm sure plenty of anti-abortion types do silently approve of such actions.
If you believe fetuses are babies, the abortion doctors have murdered like 65 million babies since Roe v. Wade. Every abortion doctor is a serial killer who the state has decided to pointedly ignore and will never face justice. Yet even pro-life people generally do not believe in lone gunman type solutions to it.
I don't think Trump is Hitler, but also, people calling their political opponents Nazis is super common. People repeatedly called Obama a Nazi, and Bush before him.
In fact people called Obama the antichrist, and I heard some people argue that the Book of Revelations is mistranslated and actually mentions Obama by name as the antichrist!
EDIT: Looked this up and it was actually Satan, and Luke 10:18. KJV says "And he said unto them, I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven." - the argument was that the part recorded as "lightning fall from heaven" was really "Barack Obama".
“No ma’am. He’s a decent man, a family man that I just happen to have disagreements with.”
cf.
“He doesn’t have a birth certificate. He may have one, but there’s something on that, maybe religion, maybe it says he is a Muslim,” Trump told Fox News in 2011. “I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t want that.”
I'll never forget the day when my seemingly normal friend in highschool turned to me and asked me whether I thought Obama's lips looked blue, and then seeing my confusion, explained that the antichrist's lips are supposed to be blue, implying that he thought Obama was the antichrist.
"Does Barack Obama’s ring carry a sinister message? The idea that his ring carried an Islamic message was debunked when a photo revealed that was not the message on the ring. What that photo revealed was even more sinister than an Islamic message. It revealed a Satanic association of Biblical importance. Displayed on Obama’s ring are two coiled serpents. Many verses in the Bible refer to Satan as a serpent; starting in the Garden of Eden in Genesis, and moving to the church at Pergamos, in Revelation."
Well, I guess this proves that Catholics and the Catholic Church are indeed servants of Satan and the Antichrist, because there's a Tolkien connection here! The ring of Barahir:
"The Ring of Barahir, originally the Ring of Felagund, was an Elven artifact that was originally given by Finrod Felagund to Barahir and was kept by the Edain as an heirloom in the later Ages.
The ring had the shape of two serpents with emerald eyes, one devouring and the other supporting a crown of golden flowers, the emblem of the House of Finarfin."
Wait - could Obama's ring possibly be... the ring of Barahir????
"No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State."
I think there may be a loophole here where Obama, being the rightful King of Gondor and Arnor, isn't *receiving* anything from a foreign sovereign because he *is* the sovereign. You'd need to consult a true expert on anarcho-monarchy, though.
Is Trump a threat to democracy? Well, one of the main purposes of modern democracy is the peaceful transfer of power. Trump did not allow for that. When he lost the election, he threw such a tantrum that power did not transfer peacefully. Americans literally -- and not just in the internet sense of literally -- died on Capitol Hill.
Is Trump a threat to democracy? No. He is someone who has already carried through with that threat.
Killing him would make you him, and that's what most people want to avoid.
"Americans literally -- and not just in the internet sense of literally -- died on Capitol Hill"
What point are you making with this statement? A couple of people died of heart attacks because they were so excited, and another unarmed woman was murdered by police and no one cared because she was white. That about sums it up, right?
I mean, he did legit try to find some way to stay in power after losing an election, which is one of many reasons he won't be getting my vote in November.
Human beings are a poltroonish species. They are terrified of standing out from the herd and saying the wrong thing. As soon as they noticed that they're supposed to condemn the shooting the tripped over themselves to do so. Positively pathetic.
HL Mencken is no longer around so I reanimated him briefly for comment
Animals in general are poltroonish. I watched as some African tribesmen waltzed slowly up to a lion's kill, with the pride all around. As they got closer, the lions got nervous, and once one decided to flee, it wasn't long before the rest did. The tribesmen hacked off a large chunk of meat, and left.
The courageous examples in nature aren't necessarily great examples. Insects often are courageous: a mosquito risks its life to suck your blood, and if it gets swatted...there are millions more.
I do not doubt that all living organisms experience fear. Insects are pretty easy to demonstrate. If you attempt to kill one, it tries to avoid it. Or do you think insects are all like, "Whatever, if I die, so what?"
Yah, but humans like to imagine that they are members of an individualistic (rather than herdish) species of especially brave specimens.
We ain't.
Mencken has a nice little piece about trying to find that most defining trait of the species and he comes up with "cowardice".
While granting his motivational bias, it's worth reminding people how little their opinions are actually their own (see also his hilariously brilliant intro to "In Defense of Women").
I think people condemned the shooting because it was horribly wrong not because saying so was now expected of them. Why do you seem to have so little faith in basic human decency?
Why are you too cowardly to say the obvious truth? Or perhaps even to allow yourself to see it? The OP is correct, NUMEROUS people said they wished Trump were assassinated, so much so that no one even needs to explain (except perhaps to you) the now-common "time traveller" joke.
Your pseudo bravery is cowardice par excellence. Bravo!
Alice jokes about seeing her political opponents assassinated, but it's just a joke, she knows it would be horrible in practice.
Bob jokes about seeing his political opponents assassinated, but has never really thought about how horrible it would be in practice until he sees it almost happen.
Charlie jokes about seeing his political opponents assassinated, and he really wants it to happen. But then he sees it almost happen and he changes his mind, that would be horrible.
Dave jokes about seeing his political opponents assassinated, and he really wants it to happen. But then it nearly happens, and everyone around him is saying how horrible it is, so he goes along with them.
Eddie jokes about seeing his political opponents assassinated, and he really wants it to happen. But then it nearly happens, and everyone around him is saying how horrible it is, but Eddie still wants it to happen and he says so. He is retweeted by Libsoftiktok and loses his job.
I think there's more Alices than any other category.
Most expressed political views have social consequences for the person expressing them, but no consequences for the speaker if they're wrong or even disastrous. This is one more. Lots of people will say some dumb thing about wishing Trump or Biden would be shot, very few have thought through how much worse the country becomes when that sort of thing happens very often.
In person, I've heard a couple of friends say that they wish the assassin hadn't missed, and they're not evil or nuts, just fairly left, but not as left as the zeitgeist of my city. Even I, after a beer too many, said something kinda close, although in retrospect I think I was referencing Monty Python as much as anything, and I wish I hadn't said it. And you know I'm very ambivalent about Trump.
Naming them is likely to cause trouble, because that is considered doxxing. I've seen people on social media I frequent making comments about "pity the shooter missed", "I'm good with a gun, I wouldn't miss" and the likes. These weren't jokes, a lot of people do hate Trump and believe all the hysteria about literal Hitler, Fourth Reich, Project 2025, he'll round up gays and minorities, the Supreme Court made it legal for the president to kill political rivals and so forth.
Am I going to list off names and link to them? I'm crazy, not stupid!
As the famed Richard Hannania has said, you can think Trump is a fascist that is bad for democracy (not quoting him exactly at all here), and think political assassinations are even worse for democracy.
Imo America would be A LOT better off if Trump suddenly had a heart attack mid-debate, and probably worst off if he had been assassinated that day (political tension, civil war?, etc).
Most Republican before Trump were depicted by most media outlets as bad but not quite so bad that they needed to be assassinated. I think it's fair to say that the tenor of much of the ink spilled about Trump has been much worse than that. Not commenting on the merits of such beliefs. And I've noted at least a few people have been logically consistent in this, both on Xitter and Reddit.
"Donald Trump’s threats to democracy – including his promise to govern as a dictator on “day one” and his refusal to abide by the norm of a peaceful transition of power – are often called unprecedented."
"Trump is planning a second term that is nothing more than a revenge tour: Deploy the Insurrection Act to crush dissent, turn the Justice Department into a personal weapon to imprison government officials who previously investigated or prosecuted him, persecute former aides who turned against him, pardon himself and his lieutenants, and loot the government to enrich himself and his flailing businesses.
In case anybody has missed his autocratic plans, Trump promoted a video this week about “the creation of a unified Reich” if he is elected.
Even this social media callout to Hitler generated a generally tepid response from the press, like one from an ABC reporter who only dared to say that it was “not normal” for presidential candidates to share “references to Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler.”
"Trans people have been a target of the Trump administration from the get-go.Almost immediately after Trump took office in 2017, the administration rolled back an Obama-era memo directing schools to protect trans students from discrimination. That July, Trump announced his decision to ban trans people from serving in the military. In May 2018, the administration went after trans prisoners, too,deciding that, in most cases, trans people should be housed according to their assigned sex at birth. This summer, the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed a rule that would allow homeless shelters that receive federal funding to house trans people according to their birth-assigned sex."
"Former President Donald Trump vowed in a video released Tuesday that, if he is re-elected, he will punish doctors who provide gender-affirming care to minors and push schools to “promote positive education about the nuclear family” and “the roles of mothers and fathers” as part of a wide-ranging set of policies to use federal power to target transgender people."
"A sweeping proposal for how Donald Trump should handle a second term in office has sparked concern for its implications on the role of federal government and its calls to eliminate a number of basic human rights.
The 2025 Presidential Transition Project, more commonly known as Project 2025, released a 900-page manifesto last year titled "Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise." The policy guidebook — compiled by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation in partnership with more than 100 other conservative organizations — lays out a far-right, Christian nationalist vision for America that would corrode the separation of church and state, replace nonpartisan government employees with Trump loyalists and bolster the president's authority over independent agencies.
...Project 2025 establishes a framework for guiding the federal government through a biblical lens. Across nearly 1,000 pages, the mandate pushes an unpopular interpretation of the Christian agenda that would target reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ people and people of color by effectively erasing mention of all related terms, protections and troublesome historical accounts.
Though the mandate accuses the "woke" left of infringing on people's religious freedoms, its policies are rooted in a singular, extremist view of how society should function based on its authors' own Christian nationalist values. It repeatedly calls for the punishment, even imprisonment, of people who do not conform to the think tank's platform."
" Donald Trump is promising to nationalize such efforts. He doesn’t just want to surveil, miseducate, and repress children who are exploring their emerging identities. He wants to interfere in the private lives of millions of adults, revoking freedoms that any pluralistic society should protect."
I could go on, but I think I'd hit Substack's comment limits, and I haven't even searched for "sexism" and "racism".
Simply saying "I strongly disagree worth what you've posted" would make you look a lot more online-savvy and a bit less emotional, and would havr the added value of being a true statement about the world.
He's not a troll. Not saying I agree with him but the media has portrayed him as some sort of inhuman monster. Jan 6 and so forth. It's a reasonable perspective to take.
When you say this ‘literally Hitler’ thing what do you mean? I’ve seen the actual phrase exactly 4 times. 1 from your post, 2 more from people on ACX saying this is what Democrats say, okay that makes 3. Number 4 is Donald Trump Jr saying that’s what Democrats say.
I have never, ever heard an actual Democrat say this.
Do you mean it in some figurative sense?
Like when they say “When Trump talks about migrants poisoning the blood of America he *sounds* like Hitler?
If that’s what you mean it’s not the same as saying he is ‘literally Hitler’. BTW that *does* sound like Hitler. But it does not mean Trump is ‘literally Hitler’.
"I have never, ever heard an actual Democrat say this."
And there's lots of things I've never, ever heard people in my circles say, but that does not mean real people don't say them. It's a weak argument, Gunflint, often derided as the Pauline Kael one:
“Pauline Kael famously commented, after the 1972 Presidential election, ‘I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.'”
Are "comparisons to Hitler" close enough to saying "Trump is Hitler?" That's a genuinely debatable question, but I don't think saying "Adolf Hitler did this, and now look, Donald Trump is doing the same thing" is innocuous:
"Two powerful House Democrats have invoked Adolf Hitler’s actions in Germany and the treatment of Jews during World War I and in the 1920s to warn against the direction the US is moving in, with both saying Donald Trump’s presidency presents an unprecedented threat to democracy."
I have to love the spin these guys put on it; 'if you say someone or something is like the Gestapo, you are using the language of Nazis! and so you must at the least like Nazis, if you're not a Nazi yourself!'
"Donald Trump told Republican donors at his Florida resort this weekend that President Joe Biden is running a “Gestapo administration,” the latest example of the former president employing the language of Nazi Germany in his campaign rhetoric."
"Facing criticism for repeatedly harnessing rhetoric once used by Adolf Hitler to argue that immigrants entering the U.S. illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump insisted he had no idea that one of the world’s most reviled and infamous figures once used similar words. The Nazi dictator spoke of impure Jewish blood “poisoning” Aryan German blood to dehumanize Jews and justify the systemic murder of millions during the Holocaust."
I see your feelings have been hurt. I’m guessing it’s because I called you out on your gloating and inflammatory factually false meme at the end of the last thread. Sorry about your feelings but even Trump, to his credit, has told his people to cut the incendiary post assassination attempt rhetoric.
You’ve responded to almost every comment I made in this thread except for the one where I told you that Vance is probably an earnest Catholic and an almost certain earnest Catholic - Ross Douthat - is praying for his friend Vance and the country.
anon123 cleared up the ‘literally Hitler’ thing is slangy hyperbole.
My fee-fees aren't hurt, apart from what you've said about not being on social media. I see instances of Z, you turn around and go "Well nobody *I* know says that!" with the strong implication that therefore, nobody is in fact saying Z and furthermore I must be lying.
Gee, thanks.
You're not on social media, so you probably *don't* hear/read people saying Z. I hang around various places, for different reasons, and I do hear/read people saying Z. It's rather tedious to get told "don't believe your lying eyes", but whatever.
I agree, Newsweek and Time have gone downhill since their glory days, but they're still not quite trash yet.
"A new poll has laid bare how many voters believe the conspiracy theories swirling around the attempted assassination of Donald Trump over the weekend.
One third of those who support Trump's Democratic presidential rival Joe Biden said they believe the attack may have been staged and had never been intended to kill the former president. That equates to a little over 33 percent. And even some of Trump's own supporters believe the same thing, with around 12 percent suspecting the event was planned, according to the poll conducted by Morning Consult, an American business intelligence company."
Sorry, "literally X" is internet slang that's meant to be hyperbolic. To translate in a more literal way, it's apparent to me that significant numbers of people really do believe Trump is a unique threat who will end democracy and usher in a dark period of Nazi-lite authoritarian rule.
I think the people who fear Trump is a danger to the Republic are thinking about Trump on January 6 saying “If Mike Pence does the right thing we will win”.
These people include Mike Pence himself, Trump’s VP,Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, Adam Kinzinger and Chris Christie. All of these people are Republicans. These are only the ones who were among those willing to say this was absolutely wrong and completely un-American out loud.
None of them want Trump assassinated. The only person we know for sure who wanted this is a 20 year old Pennsylvanian.
IDK if C-SPAN has archives but listening to an open comment session Monday morning the first caller opened with: "well, you know what I think would have been best for the country, would have been if the bullet had been just 2 inches over..." At that point he was cut off by the host saying nopenopenopenope we don't promote violence... :P
Is the republic not worth killing a single would-be tyrant to protect?
Honestly I view Trump and Biden as mostly indistinguishable, and both morally worthy of death for the killing they've signed off on abroad. The inconsistency galls.
I dislike both Trump and Biden, albeit for different reasons. In a nutshell: Trump because of the look-into "injecting disinfectant" (common sense, _please_ !). Biden because of pushing for more DEI (could we kindly treat people on their _individual_ merits???).
As it is, I'll hold my nose and vote for whichever better supports Israel, as well as I can tell just before the election. (better thought of as voting against the other one)
The problem with this idea is that tyrants don't act on their own. Tyrannical systems give the most power to a single dictator, but they require broad support to overthrow the existing government structure. Caesar, and many of the tin pot emperors in the later empire, had literal armies backing them up. You could go back in time and kill Hitler or Stalin, but what about Himmler and Goering and Yagoda and Beria? Killing one man doesn't stop the communist overthrow of the Tsardom, nor does it change the chaotic circumstances in Wiemar Germany that led to the rise of the Nazis.
Similarly, killing Trump wouldn't change the fact that a large number of Americans feel the elite ruling the country are completely disconnected from their interests.
Probably, but you're unlikely to end up killing a single man. The killing of Caesar, for example, started a second civil war which still ended up with a despot at the lead. Which may still be justified if the threat of tyranny is sufficiently probable and severe -- even a civil war and/or a more run-of-the-mill dictatorship would probably have been better for 1930 Germany than Nazism and the Second World War -- but you should be aware of the actual tradeoff before you make your choice.
>None of them want Trump assassinated. The only person we know for sure who wanted this is a 20 year old Pennsylvanian.
I agree with the first sentence. I don't agree with the second. There are many who wanted it under a pseudonym and at least a few who lost their jobs after being stupid enough to say it using their real names. Google Cassandra Oleson.
I also said in my first post that most leftists, at least publicly, do not support assassinating Trump. I'm leaning to people just not being very logically consistent.
anon123 explained that literally Hitler is hyperbole on the internet, so if I'm shooting, metaphorically, to describe Trump accurately on this medium it seems I need to adjust for the cyber-distortion and say literally Hitler to accurately describe the wannabee tyrant that is Trump
I don't think Trump has the anger to be Hitler but sure he's Mussolini or would be if he could. So sure he's at least a wannabe fascist, but I'm optimistic that he can't get the military on his side and actually seize absolute power.
Some argue the recent SCOTUS ruling about immunity gives the POTUS dictatorial power but I'm not that pessimistic. If so, we're already fucked and it's too late.
That complaint about giving POTUS dictatorial power will be refined if Mr. Biden, Ms. Harris, or whoever the Democrats nominate keeps them in power. "Dictatorial" will become Affirmative, and everyone will be quite pleased with their cleverness.
Agree - dangerous buffoon, Mussolini-style, seems far closer to the mark.
Trump won't make the U.S. into Nazi Germany, but he might make it into a Hungary, an illiberal democracy where only one election outcome is possible. SCOTUS will obviously support anything he wants to do at this point.
He's not smart enough and lacks the attention span, understanding of history, etc., to be a real fascist. He has certainly been popular among actual no-kidding unashamed fascists, however, what I've heard and read of their internal communications over the last nine years suggests to me that they know full well what he is and isn't, and they value him because he is viscerally appealing to the kinds of people who make up a fascist constituency--speaks their language, shares their grievances and what have you.
I've also heard Trump described as having the attention span of a butterfly... Though with Biden's debate performance, it might be grimly amusing to watch the two of them take a test of attention span, side by side...
>1. It is entirely consistent to prefer that ideas you disagree with be defeated democratically.
I was referring to the widespread sentiment that Trump is going to kill democracy, not to people who merely disagree with him. I really don't think I was exaggerating much when I noted significant numbers of people think Trump is "literally Hitler".
>2. It is consistent to realize extreme actions typically cause public sentiment to swing in the opposite direction. Whoever fires first loses.
If that's the case, how did the pre-Trump Republican party ever exist? His supporters didn't materialize out of nowhere in 2016. Why didn't they launch a coup against the Chamber of Commerce types all by themselves? I simply don't buy the "there's nothing special about Trump" argument.
The same way socialists don't take over the Democrat party. There are only two viable choices since going third party splits the vote and loses, so a milquetoast candidate from your party winning is better than the other party winning. The party apparatus tries to balance pleasing the radical constituency with broad electability in the public. It's not like the MAGA crowd and hardline conservatives appeared spontaneously after Trump ran for office; they had to already be there for his campaign to be viable. They were generally sidelined by the more moderate factions of the Republican party. See the Tea Party during Obama's first term.
> "anti-deepstate" is a red herring though, since that was something *generated* by Trump as an excuse for failing to get much done.
Have to disagree with this. The Deep State* was a core component of the MAGA platform during the 2016 election. Conservatives saw the entrenchment of their ideological rivals in the federal administrative agencies as a dire political threat. Thus the catchphrase "Drain the Swamp" that was ubiquitous during the 2016 campaign. Considering that Trump was illegally surveilled and falsely painted as a Russian agent for years by the FBI, I would have to say it's a pretty good excuse too.
*As an aside - I note the most conspiracy theory sounding term of the lexicon also became the most popular, compare to permanent bureaucracy or administrative state which describe the same thing as the deep state.
Although, granted, plenty of those points are non-specific to Fascism. "Cult of Tradition" and "Rejection of Modernism"? That's literally Middle Eastern Islamism to a T.
> Mussolini, never any consistent policy besides this street theatre.
Technically-speaking, that just proves that Fascism lies on an orthogonal dimension to Policy, call it "Style". Just like Democracy, in fact. You could have a Liberal Democracy, an Islamic Democracy, a racist Democracy, a war-like Democracy, a secular Democracy. "Democracy" just denotes a particular style of settling questions, but not any specific answer. Although in practice nobody ever uses "Fascist Communist", the term doesn't strike me as an oxymoron. I think the Khmer Rouge would qualify.
You might dismissively call Fascism's rituals "Theatre", but remember that Democracy sounds like a pretty big theatre from the POV of its opponents too, and for pretty valid reasons. The "Theatre" is the visible rituals of a social process for bestowing political legitimacy.
Man I'll be honest. The latest twitter cycle has just reminded me that I have absolutely no idea how people can say they support Trump and democracy at the same time (I have to beat this dead horse one more time bc I saw some rationalists on twitter talking about this).
I get some people here are monarchists, a few more are fine with illiberalism, and a few more are fully bought in to every single Biden conspiracy theory, but other than those, Trump supporters are becoming ever more baffling to me.
Arguments:
1) Trump tried to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, by getting Pence to certify the fake electors, and sent people to the Capitol to put pressure on them so that the issue could be sent back to house so they could vote, and since Republicans had more state delegates he could have won. This is not a secret, Trump mentioned this in his January 6th speech, and the Eastman memo outline *very clearly* the legal framework of how this could have worked.
2) Trump is now in essence a demi-god. He holds complete domination of the Republican party, and everyone is lock-and-step with him. If Agenda 47 or Project 2025 are to be taken at their word, this would include removing everyone not completely ideologically aligned with the President from the executive branch, and give the President significantly more power to influence the actions taken by different agencies. Hell, JD Vance said in February he would be willing to certify Trump's fake electors if it were up to him.
3) Republicans in the senate failed the country in 2020 by not impeaching Trump for the *only* stated reason that he was already out of office. Now, the Supreme Court has stated that the President has immunity for core actions. I do think it's possible I'm overreacting to this one in particular, but it is scary. Plausibly the only reason that his conversation with Pence pressuring him to certify fake electors possibly doesn't fall under a core power is because Pence was doing a role that was assigned to him by Congress. Otherwise, as a core power, you wouldn't be able to use that as EVIDENCE against Trump, in his TRIAL. I am afraid that they will somehow convince the court that enough actions from January 6th count as core duties that you can't use them as evidence, and as such the whole insurrection case doesn't go forward (of course, disregarding the possibility he wins beforehand and just pardons himself)
4) So you have the perfect storm of someone with a cult of personality, who doesn't care about institutions, who doesn't care about democracy, who was not impeached by Trump for flimsy reasons, who was plausibly protected by the Supreme Court in this ruling, who is filling the executive with his goons. Please feel free to criticize any of this if I'm missing anything.
5) For the record, I'd put the chance of America becoming an authoritarian hellhole with Trump winning at at most 4-5% (operationalized in the form of there not being free and fair elections in 2028) , but there's a much higher chance of democratic institutions being damaged permanently, in America and in the world (above 60% chance for all of reversing progress in climate change, ending legal protections for trans people, ending aid to Ukraine, more illiberal governments around the world, etc)
I am no fan of Trump and won't be voting for him. But to answer your question, there are a lot of Trump voters (and moderates, like myself) that see the democratic party as extremely authoritarian and anti-democratic. Whether it is worse than Trump is hard to gauge and I'm not knowledgeable enough about the election stuff and Jan 6th have a strong opinion.
Ways that democrats/progressives are authoritarian and anti-democratic:
1. COVID vaccine mandates: this is an issue many Trump voters are still extremely angry about, for good reason. And many of them turned down vaccines at great personal cost: I met an airline pilot recently who turned down millions in career earnings because he refused the vaccine and considered people who went along with it akin to Germans who went along with the Nazis. Incidentally also takes the wind out of the sails of pro-choice arguments.
2. Social media censorship: secretly forcing social media companies to deplatform users who say things that are against the state's perceived interest, like suggesting the possibility of covid lab leak. 20 years ago this would have been huge news, absolutely insane for this to happen in a democracy.
4. Generally criticizing freedom of speech as a value, and support for dishonesty if it furthers the democrat or progressive cause. (personally I think this is increasingly endemic not just in both parties but in general life, an increasingly cynical, low trust environment among everyone, but that's off topic)
5. Support for communism and hatred of capitalism. You don't see this from politicians much but it is very common on social media, and would be viewed as authoritarian by Trump voters, though I'm aware that social media communists don't see themselves as statist at all.
6. Second amendment issues. They want to take our guns. Big one for Trump voters.
7. Using courts to attack Trump. I'm not an expert here but I can tell you that Trump voters see these as politically motivated attacks.
8. And finally, liberals are no fun. Progressives and democrats have become culturally extremely intolerant: a party of sanctimonious, screeching, judgmental narcs and tattletales. Where 'read the room' is a common, unironic scold to conform. Where family relationships, or really any relationship other than pure atomized individualism is problematic. Where seeking power and domination over others by claiming mental illness or victimhood is pathological. Where everyone goes to therapy and obsesses about their trauma.
Maybe that last one is not about authoritarianism but it is still annoying.
The state’s highest court didn’t agree, siding with attorneys for six Colorado Republican and unaffiliated voters who argued that it was nonsensical to imagine that the framers of the amendment, fearful of former confederates returning to power, would bar them from low-level offices but not the highest one in the land.
>siding with attorneys for six Colorado Republican and unaffiliated voters
Yeah, this is weird. I looked at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, and their website doesn't show any clear party affiliation, though they mostly seem to be bringing lawsuits against Trump people. Do you see a GOP affiliation somewhere on the site ( https://www.citizensforethics.org/ ) ?
Thank you for acknowledging the monarchists. It's nice to be seen from time to time.
It's gobsmacking that VP pick Vance is influenced by Curtis Yarvin *and apparently even personal friends with him*.
I thought we all agreed this (ACX, EY, Moldbug, grey tribe, etc) was just 300 people reading the same few blogs, and next thing I know a bunch of folks I've been reading for ten or fifteen years are the most influential people around.
Oddly, I am a people person. I am introverted, sure, and a mathematician by training, but I am empathetic and political and just generally interested in the well being of people around me.
Libertarianism appealed to me at an earlier stage of my life, but at some point I decided it was hyper focused on a narrow process instead of outcomes. I think this is true of all the political ideologies, by the way. So, even more oddly, libertarianism is the part of Yarvin's work that I left behind.
The reason I kept monarchy, loosely, is because I don't think... *points at everything*... I don't think people work this way. The totalizing nature of democratized politics is bad for human brains and bad for social fabric, and either it no longer produces added value, or maybe it never did (in the sense that maybe the industrial revolution would have happened anyway under more authoritarian government systems with more state capacity).
Cynically, I would say people don't want community so much as they want their beliefs shoved down everyone else's throats. Government is the perfect vehicle to do this. Then when the libertarians point out maybe having an omnipotent central government is a bad idea, it never seems to occur to these people that their ideological enemies are perfectly capable of using the same vehicle against them.
John, I would challenge you to provide an example of something specific in a Yarvin piece that you found half right, or interesting but wrong, as a sort of proof-of-work that you really engaged with his writing at some point. It seems to me to be the low bar for comments that add value to the thread.
For clarity for anyone abroad reading, the house did impeach Trump, and the Senate then voted to acquit him - so this isn’t an assertion that OP got the entire legislative body wrong when he said “the Senate failed,” it’s just making the semantic point that saying “not impeaching” is technically inaccurate and the correct phrasing is something like “not convicting of an impeachable offense.”
Each can decide for themselves the degree to which this “undermines credibility.”
"Trump tried to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, by getting Pence to certify the fake electors, and sent people to the Capitol to put pressure on them so that the issue could be sent back to house so they could vote"
Sending matters back for a vote is pretty weaksauce on the "coup" attempt. Real dictators and generalissimos don't bother with votes, they seize power and make themselves the ultimate authority. If you're telling me Trump wanted a vote on did he win the election, that sounds rather democratic to my ears.
In the first place, "if I win, I win, but if I lose, we have a second vote" is not a proposition made more democratic by the presence of a second vote.
Besides that, the second "vote" Trump was seeking wasn't a recount or a do-over of elections in the states he narrowly lost. He was seeking to replace the results of the election with a party-lines vote in the house, where Republicans had a majority. "If I lose, we toss the election results and replace them with a vote of 435 elites, the majority of whom are on my team" - it's very much *not* the kind of thing we should mistake for democracy in action.
Frankly, it's a bit revealing, when comparing to actually disputed election results like Bush v. Gore in 2000, that Trump went this route through the House rather than pushing for a recount. If he genuinely thought he won, I'd expect him to pursue recounts, but if he made an effort in that direction it seems to have been pretty short-lived.
>Real dictators and generalissimos don't bother with votes
AFTER they gain power. But they often gain power democratically. Hitler is an obvious example.
>If you're telling me Trump wanted a vote on did he win the election, that sounds rather democratic to my ears.
When a Presidential election is sent to the House, the question is not "who won?" It is "who do you choose as President?" And, when an election is sent to the House each state delegation gets one vote. Which means that Trump was guaranteed to win. So, trying to replace an election by voters with an election you are guaranteed to win, based on a voting system that ignores the principle of "one person, one vote," does not in fact sound very democratic.
> AFTER they gain power. But they often gain power democratically. Hitler is an obvious example.
*Technically speaking*, Hitler was never democratically elected. But there are certainly plenty of other examples of strongmen and dictators coming to power via the ballot box. Even Putin was elected and still pretends to hold elections even now.
Well, he THOUGHT he was guaranteed to win. It was 27 R states, one of them was represented by Liz Cheney, and I can imagine 5-10% of Republicans crossover voting, which would probably be enough. So he might still have lost.
Democratic institutions in Ukraine have already been damaged horribly(is it permanent? Who knows if the dictatorship survives without the war as an excuse, but it's certainly gone at the moment) and there are Ukrainians sitting in prison right now for their opposition to the country's foreign policy.
If you really want an answer then I'll say that Trump's reaction to his 2020 loss was certainly not his best moment. It's a mark against him, in my book.
But what was the end result? Some frivolous lawsuits and a mostly-peaceful protest where nothing even caught fire? If you hate dumb lawsuits and you hate dumb protests then you're going to hate the other guys too.
In the end, Trump's strengths outweigh his weaknesses, at least in the universe of possible candidates for the President of the United States right now.
>In the end, Trump's strengths outweigh his weaknesses, at least in the universe of possible candidates for the President of the United States right now.
> But what was the end result? Some frivolous lawsuits and a mostly-peaceful protest where nothing even caught fire?
No, that's not what the end result was. The end result was a coup attempt. The "mostly peaceful protest" ended in people chanting "Hang Mike Pence" and getting shot, because the point of that "mostly peaceful protest" was to coerce Mike Pence to unilaterally throw out the electoral votes of seven states. Outline of the plot here: https://2cradle2grave.substack.com/p/january-6-was-a-coup-attempt
Morbid curiosity: Is this the lowest point relations of a USA president and vice-president have reached, or is there a historical example of an _even lower_ point?
It's the only time in US history a President has tried to use his powers like that. Possibly back before the VP and P were from the same party, they were really angy at each other, but I don't think Jefferson and Adams tried to kill each other or anything.
Consider the possibility that your perspective on Trump has been colored by the same media agencies that have been misleading you about Biden's cognitive state for the past few months at least, and reasonably likely the last five years.
He's not a particularly good man, but he's not nearly as interesting as you seem to think he is, and his rising string of victories over the past four years have arisen solely because of the hatred people have for him, time and time again. You profess to despise him, but what you're incapable of doing, the one thing that would have killed his chances over and over and over again - is just ignoring him. And so here he is again. You can thank your favorite media channels for that; the daily hour of hatred for Trump results in fantastic ratings for them, of course they didn't want him to go away.
He's a reality star, and you've let him play by reality TV rules.
Not sure about that, but I'm pretty sure the Republicans have immediately fumbled the ball with the Home Depot lady. I'm fascinated to see what happens next. Christ the hits just keep rolling this election season.
That video is silly, based on the title. Leaving aside that the administrative state existed long before Chevron was decided, lets try a hypothetical: Congress tells the FDA to regulate the negative health effects of smoking. The FDA determines that secondhand smoke contributes to X percent of cancer. So it promulgates a regulation to address that.
Cigarette companies sue, arguing 1) the statute only permits regulation of health effects to smokers themselves, not second parties, so it does not permit the FDA to address secondhand smoke; 2) the FDA erred in determining that secondhand smoke causes cancer; 3) the specific regulation does not properly address the problem
Under Chevron, courts would 1) defer to the FDA’s interpretation of the statute as long as it was not unreasonable; 2) defer to the FDA’s finding re cancer as long as it was not arbitrary and capricious; 3) defer to the FDA’s determination that the regulation properly addresses the problem as long as it is not arbitrary and capricious.
Now that Chevron is gone, the only thing different is #1: Courts do not have to defer to agency interpretations of statutes, but instead do so themselves
If it wouldn't have, then what's the concern? Some law professor wrote an incorrect opinion?
If it *would* have worked, and we were saved on the day only by Mike Pence's personal restraint, then shouldn't *that* be the big issue? If there's any possibility that this might work, shouldn't closing that legal loophole (by alternations to the Electoral Count Act, or the Constitution if necessary) have been the top legislative priority for the last four years?
The rules need to be clear, and clearly followed. Doing this sort of thing is bad, for that reason alone.
> If there's any possibility that this might work, shouldn't closing that legal loophole (by alternations to the Electoral Count Act, or the Constitution if necessary) have been the top legislative priority for the last four years?
One would certain-fucking-ly have hoped so. Having rules that are clear and clearly valid and easy to follow is a good in itself.
Pretty effectively actually, at least in terms of the Eastman scheme.
The Electoral Count Act of 2022:
-- Affirmatively states that the constitutional role of the Vice President, as the presiding officer of the joint meeting of Congress, is solely ministerial and that he or she does not have any power to solely determine, accept, reject, or otherwise adjudicate disputes over electors.
-- Raises the threshold to lodge an objection to electors to at least one-fifth of the duly chosen and sworn members of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. (Previously it took only one member of each chamber to formally object and bring the process to a halt.)
-- Identifies each state’s Governor, unless otherwise specified in the laws or constitution of a state in effect on Election Day, as responsible for submitting the certificate of ascertainment identifying that state’s electors.
-- Requires Congress to defer to slates of electors submitted by a state’s executive pursuant to the judgments of state or federal courts.
I think you overestimate the danger of permanent damage. To answer your question I think you have a post-algorithm “personalized facts” ecosystem. Trump supporters don’t see it as ushering in fascism, leaving the climate accords, and leaving Ukraine to the wolves. They see it as sticking it to the deep state and the woke elites, securing the border, and making peace with powerful nations instead of pearl clutching. Most don’t know any facts about January 6th. To the question “but we’ve been yelling facts at them for 8 years”, the woke globalists in the deep state and the media have been trying to gaslight them, telling them the economy is good, there’s no problem at the border, their kids can declare themselves another gender, they have to take a vaccine or they’ll lose their jobs…
In other words, a post-truth environment. They don’t even have directly contradictory facts. It’s a completely different reality.
I mean sure, for those people it makes sense, but ig I was imagining asking this to people that frequent this blog, who I'd hope would be better-informed but that still support Trump.
Of course, I'm noticing now that this probably comes from the bias that everybody has in that I think I'm right and if only people had the facts that I had they'd side with me. Still worth commenting though, I think.
Yeah, you only have to go over to DSL to get a peak into the right-wing media ecosystem. It's basically an alternate reality with few shared facts from this side of the aisle.
"a much higher chance of democratic institutions being damaged permanently, in America and in the world (above 60% chance for all of reversing progress in climate change, ending legal protections for trans people, ending aid to Ukraine, more illiberal governments around the world, etc)"
"Democratic institutions" seems to mean "the policy goals of the Democratic Party." You're quite right that there are few people who support this version of "democratic institutions" and Trump at the same time.
Specifically regarding the last point: do you not think Trump is more likely to support illiberal governments or do you think democracies and illiberalism aren't mutually exclusive?
The American overloading of the world "Liberal" bugs me. Can y'all just agree either to dump the use of the word "liberal" to mean "center-left" or to dump the use of the word "liberal" as in "liberal democracy"?
Anyway no I don't think Trump is more likely to support illiberal governments overall. In particular I think he'll take a harder line against China, the biggest and almost-most illiberal of them all.
Is the legal transfer of power a goal solely of the Democratic Party? You’ve put me in the uncomfortable position of defending that other guy’s cringe comment.
My personal impression was that the hysterics bring to mind someone who's terminally online and has purple hair with pronouns in their internet profiles and work email signature.
I did ask the question, but I feel compelled to say this feels like a bad reason. If you are only saying that's the image that comes to mind sure, but seems very much like a real life issue (i.e. not terminally online) that he wanted to disregard the results of the election.
This time around will be different. The Chevron doctrine no longer stands and the Federal Bureaucracy is much more vulnerable. Trump will not be surrounded by “old school “ Republicans who constrain him, and they (he and his crew) learned a lot from the last time.
I'm not sure what you're trying to argue here. Chevron takes power away from the bureaucracy, which Trump at least nominally controls, and gives it to the judiciary, which he doesn't. Chevron makes Trump's hand strictly weaker.
And it wasn't so much "old school Republicans" that constrained Trump last time around, but recalcitrant bureaucrats and the judiciary. Trump nominally controls the bureaucracy, but he can't really fire recalcitrant bureaucrats because Pendleton, and Chevron doesn't change that. The judiciary will enforce Pendleton, and through Chevron it will bind the bureaucracy closer to Congress's will than Trump's, and Trump doesn't even have a theoretical cause of action for firing judges.
There are things Trump can do with the bureaucracy and the judiciary against him, but in terms of "things are different", you're describing differences that will make it harder for Trump.
Ok. There were quite a few old school Republicans in his cabinet (Barr and Bolton come to mind, and I forget the name of sec of defense among others) who seemed to deflect some of his inclinations. The end of Chevron will certainly make it easier to challenge rules and regulations of the bureaucracy but you’re right that it doesn’t directly give him more clout. I certainly don’t think it hurts him. I don’t see it binding things more closely to Congress’ intent because it looks like one of the results of ex- Chevron is Congress is going to have to be more specific in their intentions if they don’t like what the court’s decide, so who knows how that goes. Depends on how Trump friendly Congress is I suppose.
Trump tried to fire a lot of people the last time he was president and I think he will have more luck this time.
I don’t see how any of this makes it harder for Trump, especially because the SC has shifted its center. I don’t really see the judiciary being against him in general. Some circuits lean liberal and some lean conservative.
I think Trump and his inner circle learned a lot from their last innings about how they can do things they would like to do and he has much more support in the GOP party than he did then. Anyone who was luke warm on him is gone or come around. That’s how I see it anyway. I am willing to be wrong.
>Elected politicians still having power is a conservative fantasy.
You may be right. If you are, though, that implies that the voters have essentially zero control. A government of the executive branch employees, by the executive branch employees, and for the executive branch employees may be many things, but a democratic reflection of the voters isn't one of them...
Ouch! Many Thanks! And since the individual rights are whatever the legal experts say they are, it simplifies down to purely an expertocracy. It derives its legitimacy from the credentials of its experts?
>Rather people pick a number of individual rights that matter to them and hold them sacred. They can be very different ones (abortion vs. guns etc.)
I'm not following just how the connection to your previous
>Democracy stopped meaning majority power long ago and now it means a combination of individual rights and expertocracy.
works.
Are you saying that
- "Democracy" means widely differing things to different people, depending on which individual rights those people are concerned about
or
- "Democracy" is generally accepted as strongly dependent on the protection of individual rights, albeit with wide disagreement over which rights are included
or
- You consider "democracy" to be strongly dependent on the recognition of individual rights, but view both the practice of government as not honoring these rights (but it should) and also, there are strong (popular? judicial?) disagreements about which rights are included.
I'm not following which are the views that you hold, which are ones you view the government as following in practice, and which are the ones you see as popularly supported. Clarification, please?
Why do so many people in the rationality community choose to work for startups, despite being highly intellectual and talented? If you aren't the founder you'll never make more money in a startup compared to FAANGs. Startups are almost always poorly organized, chaotic and subject to random fluctuations in the mood of the investors, founders and first customers. Everybody remembers the founder, some people remember the investor, almost nobody remembers employee #1 (let alone #10) unless the company grows to be the next Apple or Microsoft.
I can understand why someone would want to be a founder. I can understand wanting to work for FAANG. I can understand working for an American startup if you live in Spain or perhaps even a low-cost location in Nebraska or something. I can understand working for a startup if FAANGs reject you. But how did so many super talented people get convinced to work for a startup while living in Silicon Valley, SF or New York? Do people just not care about money all that much?
Working for large companies can be undesirable for the usual reasons (bureaucracy, lack of obvious impact). Trading lower pay for more interesting/enjoyable work is a good deal for some - effectively, you are "paying" to better enjoy the significant fraction of your life that you spend working. Working at a startup is less extreme in this regard than pursuing a PhD, which many rationalist types also do.
That said, you can also avoid the large company downsides by working for a small established company, which will probably be less chaotic than a startup. My impression is that software jobs of this type are rare; I feel fairly lucky in having found one.
I'm not in the rat community nor in Silicon Valley, SF or New York, but I wound up working at 5 startups over my software career. The first 4 were because that was the only job I could get - 1st was my first job out of college, employee #5, successful for 2 years. Next 3 were after being laid off because of downturn in the economy and jobs hard to find - 2nd employee #2, dead within a month. 3rd employee #4 dead within 2 months. 4th employee #5 the hero who made a key contribution, successful company, got laid off when the success meant they didn't need developers any more. 5th I failed retirement by working for a friend's startup, employee #3, dead after a year. If I had had a choice I likely would not have taken so many startup jobs, but I did have mixed success with them.
I do not yet work for a startup, but I worked for FAANGs, and I echo pozorvlak: they have brain melting bureaucracy and sometimes you find yourself filling out seventeen forms to do an almost empty job, and thirty six forms to try doing it a different and maybe better way. Very depressing.
I can only speak for myself, but: I currently work for a startup, having previously worked for two more (possibly three, depending on what you consider a startup). I've never worked for a FAANG, but I have worked for other large tech companies. My brain just *cannot handle* the work environment at large orgs, and I don't think that's because I worked for especially dysfunctional large companies or especially functional startups. I can handle "if you have a problem with X, talk to Jane"; I can't handle "if you have a problem with X, you could try filing a ticket with the team that maintains X but it will probably be ignored, so spider the org chart until you can work out who manages the X team (bear in mind that it's probably out of date!), then get your manager to hassle them". I like being able to take a wide-ranging view of the system and business instead of becoming hyper-specialised in one component. At large companies I reliably become depressed and burnt-out. I'm my household's sole breadwinner; I can't *afford* to become unable to work. Startups may pay less than FAANGs, but for me at least it's a much more sustainable work environment.
>Do people just not care about money all that much?
Leaving aside that none of those people are starving, there are other things that people value other than money. If you don't understand that people are not purely instrumentality rational, you won't be able to understand more important phenomena. https://www.ashutoshvarshney.net/s/Nationalism-Ethnic-Conflict-and-Rationality.pdf
a) I don't know how people do equity these days, but way back when, you could still make a bundle as an early employee.
b) Being part of a fast-moving, rapidly-growing company can be useful experience, especially if you think you might want to do the same sort of thing later.
c) At a good startup, the people around you will be good, too. And pressure can bring out good things in people. Becoming known in professional circles as a good or even just solid performer can help you find jobs later on.
d) To challenge yourself. Be all that you can be, etc.
> I don't know how people do equity these days, but way back when, you could still make a bundle as an early employee.
That stopped being true around 2010 once people figured out how to rig the cap table. Nowadays, only the execs and VCs make any meaningful money on an exit.
In 1990 David Foster Wallace wrote a famous essay ostensibly about television addiction and writers of American fiction. The premise is that fiction writers are both natural voyeurs and introverts and therefore end up watching too much TV because that allows them to watch others without being watched themselves. This behavior then influences what the fiction writers write, deleteriously. Notably, it makes them too ironic. Too much TV watching makes the writers cynical because what happens on TV is lame and ripe for ridicule, something the writers become skillful at and employ luxuriously.
According to Wallace, the problem with irony is that it is only useful critically, its only possible message is to say: isn't this dumb?
He doesn't quite spell it out, but he sure seems to associate irony with liberals and sincerity with conservatives. He goes so far as to suggest that truly gutsy fiction might be written by those unafraid to seem too conservative.
I had heard of this essay but only recently read it. Many consider it prescient, but I'm not so sure. As far as recent fiction goes, at least worldwide (have no idea what is going on with American fiction. Is it sexist to call it all chick-lit?) novelists such as Knausgaard and Ferrante are very sincere and unironic yet also are perceived as "on the left" politically to the extent one perceives them politically.
So is irony a liberal thing? If so, why? Is that truer in America than elsewhere?
I hadn't run across this before, but I agree with his general point that irony is unproductive and sterile.
I wouldn't associate it with the left or with liberals, though. Maybe they got a head start, just like China got a head start on covid-19. But by now it's infected all ideologies. I suspect that it has something to do with people who live their life removed from hands-on work, and that's more and more of us, including most of everyone's time spent on the Internet. But the left-leaning tilt of academia and the arts probably explains why irony is more associated with the left. Which of course isn't to say "all academia" or "all arts", as you point out.
Man, 1990 sure was a long, long time ago. We all see liberal sincerity constantly. As for conservatives, there aren't very many of those left, but the burn-it-all-down right wingers who replaced them / who they turned into don't appear to hesitate to use irony in their critiques of what they see as the pieties of the liberal establishment.
I think as liberal rituals become more and more a part of the "establishment" (Pride etc), you'll see more and more examples of public liberal sincerity without irony.
So I'm calling bullshit on the care trolls playing up the Biden cognitive decline story. I just watched his July 12th Detroit speech. Seems like he's got all his marbles, and he's a damn good orator. Better than anything I've seen from Trump (sharks and batteries and sinking boats, oh my!).
Biden was already way behind in the polls even before the debate. The debate was just the final nail in the coffin. And what has been seen can't be unseen.
I mean, I would be elated if Biden somehow got elected, but realistically, he has 0 chance of winning, and the best thing he can do for the country is drop out yesterday.
The impression I get is that people are referring to instances where he needs to interact with an interlocutor rather than reading off a teleprompter or giving a prepared speech.
Off topic, am I the only one who gets a strong sense that someone is being paid to post on comments sections when they write things like "damn good", "oh my!" and "Wow!" unironically?
Obviously you didn't bother to listen to his speech. These were quotes from the crowd shouting. I added my own wow at the end because he got his audience going. And if you watch him, he's not spending his time reading from a teleprompter. He's continually scanning the audience as he speaks. There may be one or more teleprompters in his field of vision, but if he's reading from them he's quite a speed reader.
Then of course, you had to add an hominem attack on me by calling me a shill. (Scott, where's my pay check?)
"Okay, this week we need someone to get Barack Obama back on the radar, really remind the base that Barack Obama is dangerous. Also, can we find someone to pump the new Lord of the Rings show? Engagement metrics are down."
"Sir, I've found someone who can do *both* with a *single comment*."
> Off topic, am I the only one who gets a strong sense that someone is being paid to post on comments sections when they write things like "damn good", "oh my!" and "Wow!" unironically?
I doubt that beowulf888 is actually getting paid to post here, I just think he's wandered in here from a different and worse section, one where they fancy they're being active mooks in the political battle rather than above-it-all commentators.
I'm not the comment police, people can comment however they want, but it's a weird contrast with the rest of the comments around here to see someone unironically cheerleading.
>it's a weird contrast with the rest of the comments around here to see someone unironically cheerleading.
I think you're right; it's the contrast with the high-and-mighty smartypants type of comments these parts. It also contrasts with the more absurdist flavour of above-it-all commenting on the seedier parts of the internet.
I have no problem with seeing Stewart slowly realising he's outdated, because the guy annoyed the hell out of me with his "here's my trenchant political commentary that you should take seriously - ha ha come on, this is a comedy show, don't take it seriously - okay, back to telling you why conservatives are monsters" act. You do current affairs or you do satire, you can't do both. You can mock the politics of the day for all sides, but you can't then be some kind of guru about What The Nation Needs, In All Sincerity.
Now time has moved on, and he's struggling with catching up to what is the Currently Approved Narrative? Good!
Yes, he's very good at reading a teleprompter. He's been doing that for 50 years and will probably still be good at it for a few hours after his heart stops beating. It's a highly-conditioned reflex activity for him. Watch him try to think on his feet. Watch the debate. He's clearly not there.
I think it's generally acknowledged that he does relatively well giving prepared speeches in rally mode, which involves speaking in a different sort of register and does not involve adversarial questions or quick thinking (and usually takes place in the daytime). So this isn't new, and its usefulness as to the question of his cognitive capacity for running the country.
I can't seem to find a wikipedia article on "rules vs principles". Is this because the distinction between them is considered vague enough to not merit an entry?
I would like to know how the distinction arose historically; google gemini (free version) that I asked only says it was indirectly there even in ancient Greece, and in modern times Ronald Dworkin "significantly developed" the distinction between them. But there are pre-Dworkin people like John Dewey who have made that distinction.
So how did that distinction evolve? Was that nuance forced by challenges that some aspect of modernization threw up?
Since I don't know the major names involved, let me summarize/adapt from what the free version of google gemini provides, listing some differences between rules and principles:
(i) Rules are specific and concrete (don't lie, select the candidate with the highest score), while principles are broad and general, typically vague (honesty, meritocracy).
(ii) Rules are tailored to desired outcomes in specific contexts, principles to underlying values/ethics in an abstract/universal setting.
(iii) Specificity means you either break the rule or don't, but principles may be realized in multiple ways; and you can tweak mechanisms realizing them to prevent Goodharting.
(iv) Usually someone else punishes you for breaking rules, for principles the drive is mostly internal.
[Edit: For instance, it bothers me much that when I set exams, students with the best combination of talent+diligence etc. are not the ones that score the highest. I am following established rules, still failing the principle. It thus seems important to me to make this distinction. My impression is that historically people didn't distinguish these consciously, since it is easier and lazier to conflate rules with principles -- perhaps the smarter section of the populace had a sense of the distinction but did not articulate it -- but at some point the distinction articulated itself. I would like to know the how and why of this process.]
Close: principals are the rules you choose to follow, and assign to yourself, in order to protect what you value. For example, I value honesty so I follow a principle of never telling a lie. Or I value honor, so I follow a principle of never breaking a promise.
I would say that principles are a kind of rule, much like a square is a kind of quadrilateral. It's a specific kind of rule, imposed by yourself on yourself for the purpose of preventing yourself from violating your own values.
Canada is once again a laggard in defence, spending only 1.38% of its GDP on defence, in defiance of a NATO guideline to spend at least 2%, a standard most NATO members meet. What should the rest of the alliance to get the slacker Canucks in line?
The main source of maple syrup are the sugar maple forests split between the United States and Canada. For every year Canada doesn't meet its defense obligation the US gets an equivalent percentage of the total forest until the Canadians are forced to buy it from an American state monopoly.
Us Canadians know that Americans are practically forced to keep us in their sphere of influence for the sake of their own prestige/superpower status, and that means they'll defend us if need be. I admit it's kind of manipulative to take advantage of a friend like this. Sorry, eh.
Realistically if Canada gets kicked out of NATO then Canada doesn't care. It's many orders of magnitude more likely that NATO will oblige Canadian troops to defend Europe than that it will oblige European troops to defend Canada. Geographically, Canada is the only thing that makes NATO a North Atlantic treaty rather than a US-Europe treaty. And it's also the only thing apart from a few polar bears that separates most of the US from most of Russia.
It's not often in international relations that Canada holds all the cards, but this is one of those situations.
So if war threatens the King of Canada, who happens to be staying at one of his many residences in the UK, would Canadian commandos swoop in to extract his majesty to Fortress Canada?
No. Canada has been capable of a separate foreign policy since 1917. When Britain declared war in 1914, Canada was automatically also at war, but Canada was a separate signatory to the treaty of Versailles. Canada entered war in 1939 one day after Britain, seemingly to make the point that it was Canada's decision.
The US should threaten to seize all the untapped water power in upper Ontario that the Canucks won't because they are too sensitive about First Nationers "rights", build the world's largest power station on the site and use it to accelerate AI.
But only if the power station has a little sign put up saying that acknowledges that it has been built on the unceded ancestral land of the Canadian people. It's only fair.
Question for those with deep math smarts. I”ll give the short version first, then some background. Companies doing high-frequency trading develop predictive algorithms that let them profit from their correct predictions. They develop the algorithms using the data from recent trades, which can be expressed as formulas, in which the variables are things like how fast something sold, in milliseconds, how fast it sold at a recent price that was x% higher or lower, how fast some related thing sold, how fast the prices of various things are rising or falling, etc. But there are a huge number of possible variables that might be predictors of whatever one wants to predict, and even if you were told which variables are predictors there are a huge number of equations that can describe how they predict: do you square the time or the price, or cube it, or use the ratio of it to something else, etc.
Formulas that predict changes in the market are then fed into a non-neural net form of machine learning called NES, Natural Evolution Strategy, and the result if the golden algorithm (but only if you fed it good formulas). So the question is, how does one search for what’s called the “signals,” the variables that have predictive power?
This question comes out of a talk I just had with someone who has been working in finance doing programming, but is interested in the intellectual challenge and possible financial rewards of the question I asked. The person and I were brainstorming about how to find formulas that predict trading in the near future. (I have no math beyond calculus one, and very lttle knowledge of the financial industry, but I like brainstorming).
So my questions are:
-First, do any of you math people have a view about this?
-My suggestion was that the person talk to a statistician who specializes in working with very messy data — maybe something involving biology or turbulent flow. Seemed to me like they would know techniques for extracting from it the variables with predictive power, and formulas that capture what they predict. Is that a useful suggestion?
-If not, what kind of statistician should the look for?
-If not a statistician, who the hell should they talk to?
I know someone who works for a high frequency trading company. Their profit comes from two things:
1) Super-fast connections to the stock exchange computer. They built their computers next to it so that they are a few milliseconds faster than everyone else. So, they pick up the signals that just everyone else also knows, but their cable is so short that their signal arrives faster.
2) They get paid by the stock exchange company for it. High-frequency trading also serves a purpose for the stock market: it provides liquidity and acts as counterpart for the bids/offers that other people take. That provides value, and the stock exchange company pays for it.
I don't know the exact formulas for 1), but I think they are very, very simple. Like: if there are many people who want to sell, probably the stock price goes down. I don't think it's much more fancy than that. I don't think they try to come up with sophisticated models that predict the market for more than a few milliseconds.
I don't know whether all high-frequency trading companies work like that, though.
> So the question is, how does one search for what’s called the “signals,” the variables that have predictive power?
I think allot of this is bullshit, but if I had to pick a "signal" outside the shitposting of wsb, id look at arbitrage between exchanges as a signal; i.e. when america is awake, an english speaking market is a stronger "signal" then an asian one, and you'd take the a weighted sum of the "order book" from exchanges based on the hour of day.
What people talk about using as signals is literally any- and every-thing "ais reading twitter","gme up, use as a signal to buy gold", and its very important to remember novice day traders lose money at rates worse then most casinos. Its a worthless term, its *good* to be confused what it means.
This is high frequency trading, though. Time of events is measured in milliseconds, and signals have to be things happening within a few milliseconds of a trade. I think that automatically precludes using wsj bullshit, stuff in the news, etc.
There are people stupid enough to auto download elon musk tweets that scan for cyptro currencies trickers and "sentiment analysis" ai's; thats "high frequency" and using "signals"
> So the question is, how does one search for what’s called the “signals,” the variables that have predictive power?
That is indeed the tricky part. You use a combination of mathematics and intuition. The mathematics is the easy part. Mathematics on its own only get you so far, because the whole field of quant finance is rife with multiple testing problems -- if you test enough arbitrarily-constructed signals then you'll surely find stuff that appears to work but doesn't. On the other hand, if you stick to the most intuitively obvious and sensible signals then you won't get anywhere because everyone uses those.
About finding things that appear to work but don’t —that comes up in social science research too, so I know a bit about it. If you do multiple t-tests, for instance, and a bunch of them make it at just about the .05 level of significance, then you can expect approx 5% of them to be false positives. There’s a stat you use in that situation to correct for the problem of multiple tests. It might be called Cohen’s D, and then again it may not, but anyhow there’s a way to correct for for that. Is that the math you had in mind? Or some other math?
I’d rephrase your question as, “How do you do blackbox machine learning on high dimensional inputs?” I think the term your friend is looking for is “Auto ML” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_machine_learning]. AutoML is about abstracting the standard approach ML devs take when modeling a problem. I don’t think your friend wants a statistician for advice, but a AutoML expert. I don't know anyone who actually uses NES in practice. Here are a few standard approaches:
The classic approach: Let’s assume you’re working with a simple linear model and thousands of inputs. So many you won’t ever actually mentally visualize them all. You then (as Jeffrey Soreff suggested) take the polynomial of them, I typically go to the 5th power, and also the inputs multiplied by each other. Then you get so many input variables that you can’t really work easily with it. So you can use a L1 weight regularization, which will force many of the weights to zero and any input with a zero you discard and only use the inputs with non-zero weights. You’ll have to tune the hyper-parameter for the L1 weight penalty because it’s easy to end up over-pruning. This is the standard advice, but I don’t really do it in practice. It works okay, but the following two options are better in practice. [https://scikit-learn.org/stable/auto_examples/linear_model/plot_logistic_l1_l2_sparsity.html]
A neural network: A NN can model a very large number of functions (if it’s infinitely wide it’s a universal approximator and if it’s infinitely deep it’s Turing Complete). In practice, it won’t be infinitely wide or deep, but still models a very large number of functions. The main challenge of working with neural nets in practice isn’t that it can’t model what you want it to model, rather the challenge is that it too easily overfits and models it in ways that don’t generalize. But a neural net is doing what your friend wants: take in a large number of blackbox inputs and then “test” a large number of functions with those inputs. Unlike the “classic approach” you don’t usually square/cube the inputs to a NN because you don’t have to. It’ll learn to do that if it needs to.
A non-neural net approach: I’d suggest a fun project is that your friend goes to sklearn and then makes a little tool where they take various preprocessing modules (Normalizer, StandardScaler, MinMaxScaler) and then make a Pipeline that treat the preprocessing step itself as a hyperparameter. Then have a series of sklearn models (eg, RandomForest, RidgeRegression, NaiveBayes) and treat the model itself as a hyper parameter. Alternatively, just assume that you’re going to use all of them, and what you’re learning is the ensemble. This might sound strange, but remember that AutoML is just automating the overall approach. This is more or less what DataRobot and a lot of other AutoML tools do. What’s fun and challenging about this approach is that your friend would build it to work with a couple datasets when developing it and then test it out on a completely different dataset that’s it’s never seen before.
Yep, I second this response. The data is too high dimensional, and too time-dependent, for a single person with regular computing resources to really do much. There's whole architectures of synthetic variables, hyperparameter tuning, variable selection, a suite of different modeling algorithms, and model drift monitoring and retuning going on at blazing fast speeds to actually do real algorithmic HFT these days.
What you want to actually do it right is a team of ML experts and mathematicians with financial domain expertise, and some serious (and geographically local to the HFT exchange) computing clusters.
For a _linear_ model, there are efficient multiple linear regression techniques https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_regression which can efficiently minimize the error in the model, even with many potentially important independent variables, going all the way back to
>the least squares method, which was published by Legendre in 1805, and by Gauss in 1809
For nonlinear models, the problem gets arbitrarily complicated :-(
For mildly nonlinear cases, one can extend multiple linear regression by adding powers and cross-products of the independent variables to the regression. E.g. if you have X, Y, and Z as your independent variables, you can add X^2, Y^2, Z^2, X*Y, Y*Z, X*Z to the regression as if they were independent variables - but if you start with N independent variables, you have N(N+1)/2 second order terms, O(N^3) third order terms and so on, so this becomes unreasonable very quickly.
Yes, I suggested linear regression, which I'm familiar with from social science statistics. The person said some of the relationships in the crucial formulas are non-linear -- they're u-shaped or s-shaped -- and then they added that non-linear stats get out of control fast. I think that was a less clear way of saying what you just said. My next thought was, maybe linear regression is still adequate if there aren't all that many non-linear relationships among the variables in the mass. I mean, it seems like your identification of the set of variable behaviors that have predictive power doesn't have to be perfect to get enough prediction out of the result to have an advantage. You can have some bad variables in your set, and be missing some good ones, and still have a set that works. Then I wondered if there was some math that allowed you to estimate what fraction of the variables in a big messy phenomenom are signals.
Also, I don't understand why neural net type machine learning does not work. Why can't you just train the machine on the last month's data? You can train a machine to recognise cancerous moles by just showing it a bunch of moles and telling it which are cancerous and which not, as I understand it. You don't have to tell it to look for certain characteristics, just keep having it look at moles and guess and the, find out if it's right or wrong, And at the end it will be very good at identifying the cancerous moles, but won't be able to tell you what its formula is. Isn't it sort of the same thing to show it a bunch of trades, some that made money and some that did not, and all the data around the trade, such as whether the price for the item went up or down -- and then after a while the machine can tell you, for any given possible trade, whether it will make money or not?
“ Why can't you just train the machine on the last month's data?”
Excellent question. The reason is that once you discover a signal in the past data it stops being useful. Because your / others using it arbitrages away the inefficiency that was the potentially profitable signal.
You see how it’s different from cancerous moles. Our discovery of their patterns doesn’t affect the moles, unlike trading patterns that get immediately affected by our attempts to trade them.
You mean all then high frequency trading firms are constantly tweaking their algorithms by analyzing the most recent trading data and using the info in it to get a predictive edge -- but all the firms are finding the same stuff, so doing that analysis doesn't get you an edge -- it just keeps them from having an edge over you? Yikes. The picture in my mind was manic and mechanistic enough without that. Just the idea of a bunch of computers competing for a one-millisecond edge and millions of tiny meaningless trades was creepy enough. So I have some questions:
-Do you know for a fact that you can't just feed the last month's data to a neural net and then use it to make a predictive algorithm today because everybody else is doing the same? Or is that just something you've reasoned out -- seems to you like it must be true? The reason I ask is that is not what the person that started me asking this question described. That person had been programming at a financial firm, not working on the predictive algorithm, but they told me that the algorithm was something their firm had acquired or built, and they talked about it as something that stayed the same for -- I dunno, months? And it was jealously guarded, like the formula for coke. And it was made up of hundreds of formulas, each about a tiny little matter: If sales of this stock does that, then the chance of some certain other thing happening rises by 10% -- lots of that shit.
-Also, if you're right, how the hell DO the high frequency traders keep pulling in money? Is it that they all pull in about the same amount, because they're all staying on top of the predictors equally well, so the firms that know how to use ML to mine the data for predictors just sort of split the money equally? Or are some firms better than others, and if so how DO they get a predictive advantage?
So I thought about an interesting kink to this situation. Everything in my previous comment is kind of regurgitating relatively straightforward knowledge about how markets operate. But these relatively new ML tools may create an interesting opportunity that may work well for people like your friend.
- The tools are new, and vary in their approaches
- The tools are expensive and nearly not as ubiquitous as "previous generation" tools are
- Therefore they may be able to find really complex inefficiencies that will not be quickly arbitraged out of existence, so they indeed may be able to profit from "last months' patterns" for awhile
Everybody else, not having these tools, will find their trading profits shrink further - the excess profits of the new kids on the block have to come from someone.
To your last question first because it's easy: commenter demost_ described how high-freq traders make money. The durable edge comes from location and execution speed, and most money is made in market-making activities, selling to buyers and buying from sellers and making "1/100 of a penny" on each transaction, but in insane volumes.
The manic and mechanistic picture in your mind is mostly correct - vast majority of trading is done by computer algos, this is really different from the markets, say, 20 years ago. Now, again, I wouldn't call it entirely meaningless, providing liquidity and price discovery is a useful service.
The most interesting question is indeed about the predictive algorithm:
- I do know that patterns get arbitraged out, this is a well-understood phenomenon in market analysis.
- Having said that, there still are patterns that persist because they are driven by factors that cannot be arbitraged; the most famous one that still looks to be going strong is the Presidential cycle (year 2 bad, year 3 good). You don't need a fancy algo for this one, but the time horizon is decades, not days, and it still is better to just cost-average into your 401k.
- The markets are so vast and chaotic, it is not surprising that someone may find a pattern that others haven't yet. But the space is ruthless, everyone is constantly looking for an edge, so outperformance may stop/reverse at any moment. You kind of never know if you're smart or lucky; moreover, since all traders combined are "the market", there must be those who's returns are above average.
Thank you for taking so much time to thoughtfuylly answer my questions. I think I have just one more.
Let’s say there’s a park marked off into squares by letters going E-W and numbers going N-S, and there’s a contest for who can most accurately predict how many people are in each Square (A 1, A2 ….N-17) on a given day. And there are macro things every body knows: More people are in the park in good weather, and during daylight. If there’s a well-publicized crime in the park attendance drops. Etc. And then there smaller-scale things it’s not hard to figure out: More people on the tennis court squares on weekends. Few on the little kid play equipment 1-3 pm, because they’s when little kids nap. If you observed closely you could find some more. Maybe few parents with young kids hang out near the basketball court because the guys playing always swear. So I think of those big, easy-to-find things as the things that can be taken advantage of by everybody, i.e. arbitraged out. If that’s all the contestants had to go on, then on contest day, everybody’s estimate of how many are in each square fill take into account the big obvious rules, so everybody will tie.
But surely there also exist tiny little regularities you’d never think of, and that occur for who knows what reason, and the only way to find them would be to systematically go through the populations of all the squares at all times on all days of the week in, let’s say, summer. So you could say, what else happens on average when the population of A1 goes up at 3 pm? And maybe you’d find that the populations of B3 and K7 go down 80% of the time when A1 goes up. Or that the ratio of B3 population to K7 population stays between 2:1 and 2: 1.6 70% of time. ETc ETc. Obviously the number of relationships like that you could check for is huge. And of those you found, some would be hust coincidence, and would not hold in any other time span, but others would be valid. All that make sense?
OK, so those little tiny regularities are the ones I have in mind, mainly because the person I talked with made clear that that was what his firm’s algorithm consisted of: hundreds of little regularities like my example, except about trades of course, that allowed them to make 1/100 of a cent a million times per day. So maybe something like (and I’m just making this up): On days when the avg price of a certain class of stock is 20% or more above average, then the biggest price discrepancies from which the firm can make money will be in *other* classes of stock, and 85% of them will be in the lowest-priced of those stocks. So it does seem to me that rules like this are in an entirely different class from the 0dd/even good/bad year rule you talked about, or other big obvious trends everybody knows. It seems like one company could come up with a good batch of little predictive formulas, and if the percent that were not true predictors wasn’t too high, the algorithm made out of the hundreds of little mostly right tiny rules would give them a substantial advantage, so long as other company’s batches of formulas were less good. Does that seem plausible to you?
And it does seem like training an AI to recognize whatever the magic configuration of tiny predictors is is the only way to come at it. So yeah your comment about the new ML tools seems right. Also, when I roam around reading this and that about ML, it seems like there are many varieties of it, and also many techniques for tweaking the AI the optimize its efficiency in a certain domain. And new tweaks are being invented all the time. So there’s lots of room for variation even off all companies are using ML.. The person who chooses the best variety of ML and tweaks it in the optimal way will get the best result. Also it seems like people who have done a lot of work with ML get sort like horse people are about horses: they just know lots of little stuff about how to get a result, lots of little tweaks and remedies. . “Oh, he shies when you pass that part of the trail. OK, he’s probably doing it because X, Here are 3 things to try.” I mean that people get good at AI-wrangling.
For those reasons, I feel hopeful about how my friend”s going to do. Just so you know, they’re not doing this on their own, with their own money. They talked their way into a job where that is what they will be working on — tweaking the algorithm. They’ve got a couple mos. before they start, and are studying and experimenting like mad so they will be up to the work. (I don’t want say anything much about this person because I am talking about them online, but suffice it to say there is very persuasive evidence that their ability to master this kind of material, and solve novel problems is extraordinarily high.)
>Then I wondered if there was some math that allowed you to estimate what fraction of the variables in a big messy phenomenom are signals.
Yup (if a linear model is reasonable). Basically, it comes down to what fraction of the variance of the predicted variable is accounted for by any specified one of the independent variables but this gets complicated (and beyond what I know!) when the independent variables are correlated. If they were all uncorrelated, I think it comes down to just the variance of the independent variable times the β, the coefficient of the independent variable. But if the independent variables are correlated (in the extreme case, collinear, linearly dependent, like temperature in both Fahrenheit and Celsius (as the web page mentioned)) then the solution for the linear model can basically pick either of them or any combination and it carries the same information.
[This is close to, but not quite the same as, the ANOVA package that you've probably encountered. I haven't used it myself. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_of_variance describes some of this, but phrased in terms of distinguishing two or more discrete groups rather than ascribing variance in a data set to (sets of) independent variables.]
>You can train a machine to recognise cancerous moles by just showing it a bunch of moles and telling it which are cancerous and which not, as I understand it. You don't have to tell it to look for certain characteristics, just keep having it look at moles and guess and the, find out if it's right or wrong, And at the end it will be very good at identifying the cancerous moles, but won't be able to tell you what its formula is. Isn't it sort of the same thing to show it a bunch of trades, some that made money and some that did not, and all the data around the trade, such as whether the price for the item went up or down -- and then after a while the machine can tell you, for any given possible trade, whether it will make money or not?
Yes, but note that these models have been hammered at with all the expertise the finance industry can buy, so they've probably tweaked every knob that can be tweaked on them - e.g. for the neural nets, numbers of layers, convergence rates, numbers or repetitions of the data set, tradeoffs between how many barely-plausible independent variables to add vs how intensively to fit to a smaller set of independent variables etc.
Actually the person I was talking with said they do not use neural nets. They *first* identify the signals,(how they do it my friend does not know), then they feed them into some sort of machine learning system that is NOT a neural set, and do a
process calle d the Natural
Evolution Strategy . Does that make any sense to you? They said it was described in Wikipedia but I did not look it up because I don’t have the background to understand it.
Many Thanks! This gets beyond my knowledge too. I see the Wikipedia page on Natural Evolution Strategy, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_evolution_strategy . At a _very_ abstract level it is again a version of trying to optimize the parameters of a model in order to maximize "fitness" (presumably equivalent to minimizing some measure of error).
> From the samples, NES estimates a search gradient on the parameters towards higher expected fitness. NES then performs a gradient ascent step along the natural gradient, a second order method which, unlike the plain gradient, renormalizes the update with respect to uncertainty. This step is crucial, since it prevents oscillations, premature convergence, and undesired effects stemming from a given parameterization. The entire process reiterates until a stopping criterion is met.
I can see why the more robust gradient is desirable, but I'm not following what is the exact difference fro the regular gradient and why it prevents the problems they describe with the regular gradient.
They use the derivative of the _log_ of the probability distribution with respect to the model parameters, rather than the derivative of the raw probability distribution. I can see that this would make the gradient descent e.g. insensitive to a scaling of the probability distribution. They say that it also gives
>the gradient direction is independent of the parameterization of the search distribution
which I can see is desirable, and I assume that they are correct about it, but I'm not following how that is derived.
I'm not an expert but I think looking for variables with predictive power is what every research scientist does, and it is hard. It's about formulating hypotheses based on hunches and testing them.
It's one of those: Where do ideas come from? questions. I don't think anyone knows the answer.
Sort of. There are, e.g., feature selection & dimensionality reduction algorithms that can be used to identify what signals (or combinations thereof) are useful inputs to actual predictive models, but they operate only on the dataset available (however large & noisy that may be); finding new data sources to feed the pipeline bottoms out with some manual decision eventually.
Ugh, no offense but honestly Philosophy of Consciousness is nothing but a honeypot for blowhards. There is no basis to speculate about it and what basis there is points obviously to it being the emergent result of some neural-computational process. Everything else is 100% woo. Who the hell reads these pretentious blowhards other than other blowhards who want to get in on the scam?
There's something to what you say about blowhards and the philosophy/science of consciousness. But if it's a solely a neural computational process why can't we explain how we get from a neuron firing to a model of consciousness that is testable?
It's a hard problem! We didn't know about atoms until a couple centuries ago but that didn't mean that matter was made of angels or whatever. God of the gaps type of arguments rarely age well.
But we're working on it. Eventually we'll get there.
And I've been wading through Curt Jaimungal's interview with Bernardo Kastrup —who argues for idealism. I'm definitely not a materialist. And I find some (but not all) of Kastrup's arguments convincing, but I'm not quite an idealist either. I guess I'm a Kantian Phenomenalist...
Why aren't you a materialist? Everything that we understand well enough to know how it works always, 100% of the time, has a materialist explanation. This includes many things that used to have non-materialist explanations. Doesn't that trend make you skeptical of non-materialism?
> Everything that we understand well enough to know how it works always, 100% of the time, has a materialist explanation.
I had a friend (now deceased) who was a High Energy Physicist (and who was not a materialist BTW). Somehow it came up in conversation that sometimes he'd get wacky results, and he would rerun the experiment to make sure they went away. If the wacky results disappeared, he was happy. I asked him why he didn't try to figure out why he got a wacky result. He laughed and said, "If it's not reproducible, it's not real." I said, "It doesn't necessarily follow that if it's not reproducible, it's not real." He replied that his grants and team members determined what was real. And chasing down why an experiment misfired was a waste of his accelerator time. Even so, I got the impression that he bought into the quantum idealism of Bohr and his crew, but he was practical about his research agenda. I would tease him about the Nobel Prizes he was missing out on because he accidentally detected some rare intermittent phenomenon. Half seriously, he replied that he wanted to retire without getting laughed at by his peers. Sensible fellow.
Like I said, I'm closest to a Kantian Phenomenalist. I don't deny there's a real reality out there, but we're not perceiving it. We perceive only a highly edited and redacted version of it. For instance, I hold a rose in my hand, I look at it and sniff it. I see color and sense a scent. Is the color that I perceive "real"? The petals are reflecting certain wavelengths of light, but the visual color we assign to wavelengths is determined by the rods and cones of our retinas. If our rods and cones vary from the norm for our species, we're color blind. And according to one of Scott's posts, there are some who claim to see more colors than normal because they have a mutation to their rods and cones. So quality of color isn't real outside our biological framework. Likewise, for scent. We assign the quality of sweetness to the rose's scent molecules, but that's meaningless in a materialist sense. Likewise, the scale of our perception is fine-tuned to our environment, but we are unable to perceive that the rose in reality is mostly composed of atoms arranged in a matrix around empty space. So I agree with Kastrup in that our consciousness is like a pilot flying a plane by IFR. The instruments on the console should not be mistaken for the world outside the plane.
Ok, all of what you just said is consistent with consciousness being a neural-computational process with noisy sensors connecting it to the world. Subjective experience is simply some complicated computational feedback loop: sweetness is when this neuron fires in this way and we associate it with nice things because the memory associations release dopamine. Or some such. Subjective experience is just some weird outgrowth of the way the brain monitors its own internal processes, and the only reason it's mysterious is because we haven't mapped it out yet. We will.
One of the problems is that for pretty much the entire history of science scientists have taken things that can't be quantified or measured and placed them in the domain of the mind. For example, beauty. You can't measure beauty, you can't weigh it, you can't quantify it ("This painting has 1.25 gigagoghs worth of beauty"), so it get's labeled as a subjective experience that is "in your mind" as opposed to "in the world." See also morality, qualia, and consciousness. It drew a bright line between the objective and material world and the subjective mental world. That worked really well: if you want to know how gravity works, or a chemical reaction, you focus on the objective aspects of it, as the subjective questions of whether gravity is "good" or "beautiful" don't help you learn how it works. You can just relegate those aspects of reality to the mind.
This works beautifully, until you suddenly try the same method on understanding the mind itself; now you have to deal with all those subjective aspects of reality that you relegated to the mind. It's a bit like cleaning the room by sweeping things under the rug, and then trying to clean under the rug by sweeping things under the rug. It doesn't work anymore.
The current materialist answer to this problem is to deny that things like morality, consciousness, beauty, etc, even exist at all. We may experience such things, but they are only illusions. We think we make choices, and are concious, and experience qualia, but that's a mistake. Which is not a satisfying answer (as C. S. Lewis once wrote, "I will never believe—more strictly I can’t believe—that one set of physical events could be, or make, a mistake about other sets"). What's worse is that everything we experience is experienced through the lens of the mind, so if the mind is an illusion, or is just the experience of a physical algorithm playing out, then how can I trust any of the scientific observations I have made that convinced me of materialism in the first place? Thoughts are not like physical events; they are "about" things, and they can be true or false. Yet if my thoughts are just physical events occurring in my brain, then how can they be about anything, or be true or false? Electrons moving across cells can't be "true" or "false" they just are, and one atom colliding with another isn't "about" anything, it just is.
So it's a bit of a bait and switch to say "Everything we understand has a materialist explanation, so the mind must have one too" when you only found a purely materialist explanation for everything else by taking all the aspects of the thing in question that can't be explained by materialism and filing it away under "the mind".
That doesn’t make much sense to me. There’s no violation in materialism in believing that we are conscious, or perceive qualia or make choices, or that even free will exists. Materialists just argue that’s happening in the brain, not in some other unexplained phenomenon.
Definitely not in the foot. Hence why most people, materialist or not, would prefer to be shot in the foot, not the brain.
How can an atom experience qualia? How can a process make a choice? How can the movement of an electron be beautiful, or true, or valid? Materialists have faith that even if it seems completely illogical, somehow all these things reduce to movements in the brain. Yet I don't see how it is logically possible. If all our beliefs are epiphenomenons produced by material processes, then they can't be true or false or valid or invalid. They just are, the way all physical processes are. Yet, materialism is one of those self same epiphenomenal beliefs with no truth value, so why should I believe it?
Aren't you just reducing so far you can't *see* any emergent forest for the trees, though? Even uncontroversial, fully materially measurable things?
The subatomic level isn't the right level to consider most attributes, and saying that you can't measure truth or beauty at the electron level doesn't say anything meaningful.
How can the movement of a photon of a certain wavelength be "red?"
How can the coordinated movements of a big enough collection of subatomic particles be "playing catch with your son?"
Yet the epiphenomenons of "red" and "playing catch with your son" are still useful and describe measurable, material things in the world.
How can a process make a choice? A flowchart or algorithm written by an expert can make a better choice than most, and literally billions of dollars of choices and real-world impacts are made this way every day.
If things like "processes making choices" impact real world decisions, outcomes, and actions every day, they are indeed real, and measurable. And if there are such things as "better" or "worse" decisions, it's because the better decisions are closer to "truth" and "intended outcomes" and things like that.
It's just a short jump from there to "justice" and "fame" and "beauty," and whatever else you want.
These are things that require a collection of minds perceiving and cooperating, but they are nonetheless real. Fame is measurable enough, and so is beauty, and so is justice. The right level to measure them isn't with a discrete instrument, but by polling or aggregating across many minds in a given group. Just like the right level to measure "playing catch with your son" isn't by detecting the subatomic particles involved, or the molecules or cells or organs involved, for that matter.
And actually, we probably CAN build an instrument for measuring those more abstract "collective opinion" things now. You don't think that GPT 5 or 6 will be able to give a 1-10 ranking in line with a "random sample of 10k people were given this media / scenario, and ranked the fame / beauty / justice as X on a 1-10 scale?" on any of those or other attributes? I'd definitely bet on this. So we can even build an impartial, objective detection instrument.
And materialism has no truth value?? The whole reason most people here adhere to it, is precisely because it makes more and better predictions than any other explanatory framework. "Making better predictions" is as close to "being closer to the truth" as you can *get*.
>This works beautifully, until you suddenly try the same method on understanding the mind itself; now you have to deal with all those subjective aspects of reality that you relegated to the mind.
I don't understand how that's a problem at all. Things like beauty and morality _aren't_ objectively definable. They're emergent processes. When the brain is perfectly modeled and understood we'll be able to point to neural processes that encode things like "beauty" but it won't be a unitary thing because everyone has a different internal representation of abstract concepts. It's like some primitive looking at porn on a laptop and then demanding to know where precisely inside the laptop the woman was. It's not a coherent question.
That's a statement taken on faith. You are a materialist, you don't yet know a materialist explanation for something, you have faith an explanation will be found. Others do not share your faith. Many of them don't see how a materalist explanation is possible.
Take, for example, truth or falsehood. Thoughts can be true or false, just as logic can be valid or invalid. Yet if our thoughts are reducible to the movement of electrons, how can they be true or false? The movement of electrons is not true or false, and atoms are not valid or invalid. Look at anything material, you won't find any veracity or validity within it. You can say "well the thought itself is an emergent process" but processes also are not true or false, or valid or invalid. Those subjective qualities do not exist in matter; yet they exist in our thoughts. That wasn't a problem when the thing we were studying was outside our mind, such as rocks or rockets, but when we study the mind itself we find a lot of elements that don't seem to be reducible to physical processes. For example, you might believe I am mistaken about materialism; yet how can a process be mistaken about anything?
You're conflating a physical process with the semantic content of that process. "True or false" is an abstraction that doesn't exist outside of a semantic system. The fact that semantic systems (like computers, like brains) have physical substrates which operate by rules which are independent of the semantic rules they produce is irrelevant. You're just failing to understand emergence.
In a sense this is true. However unlike a thermostat you're a nonlinear system which can operate on itself. You can also respond to complex external stimuli such as internet comments and respond to social incentives like praise or punishment. As such it is practical to model you as having free will, though in a strict physical sense you don't. But the people who punish or criticize you for doing things they disapprove of don't have free will either so it all balances out in the end.
That wasn't a straw man. It was a joke that cleverly gets to the heart of the issue. If materialism is false then why should you care about your brain.
If materialism is true, then how can you care about anything? Atoms do not care. Electrons do not care. Processes do not care. They are all that exists, therefore caring is an illusionary epiphenomenon that emerges from the processes in our neurons.
I don't care. I simply have the illusion that I do. I care because the atoms in my brain have been carefully designed by millennia of evolution in order to direct my limited cognitive resources towards things which have maximum salience to my survival. This gives me the subjective experience of negotiating a complex internal landscape of competing drives. None of this changes the fact that I'm nothing but a complicated deterministic computing machine that has zero freedom to choose its behaviors. But my programming makes me act like I think I can.
All of your arguments are word salad that equivocate between different levels of abstraction in a way that allows you to draw meaningless conclusions. Sparring with you is mildly entertaining but I'm going to stop responding to you pretty soon.
Well a literal straw man wouldn’t have a brain, despite what you see in the movies, so no?
I’m not sure why you think my argument is a straw man but that’s possibly because I don’t fully understand the immaterialist version of consciousness you believe in, so that’s one me. Perhaps.
The same question was asked of Sam "The Mind is an Illusion" Harris some years back. It's as much a strawmanly argument used against the materialists as it is against the idealists—because it ignores the fact that both idealists and materials can feel pain and fear the dissolution of consciousness. Furthermore, it doesn't get us any further down the road to answering what's going on with consciousness.
any good statistical election models you guys are keeping track? The 538 one seems hopelessly broken/useless. The one from the economist seems interesting and I'm not in a position to purchase a Nate Silver's subscription right now
Even if you don't have a subscription, Nate will often mention his current forecast numbers in his free posts. The last time he did was July 9th, where he mentioned that according to his forecast Biden had a 29% chance of winning.
I submit that it is somewhat of an exaggeration to say that the media is now aware that Biden has significantly declined cognitively
I thought it was just Matt Yglesias memeing but it turns out there were several major outlets that ran "cheapfake" stories to prime interpretations as the debate approached
I am cynical about the media's capability and motivation to report facts accurately but this seriously updated me. It is quite possible to not have really noticed Biden's gaffes, to let them slide off your existing perception and go on. But to watch the G7 video where Biden literally wanders off from the group photoshoot until a few of the other leaders actually corralled him, and then to run cover stories about cheapfake editing is shocking. You're not glancing off a potential reality here, you're driving into it perpendicularly with essentially no regard to the possibility of it being true
What epistemology could possibly have this effect? I think it's a simple algorithm:
Apologies to actual coders. How could you see Biden wrangling by fellow G7 leaders and write "cheapfake narrative"? Because the likelihood of truth was totally irrelevant compared to the factor of usefulness for Biden to be fine. This isn't a lie, this is an algorithm where truth is a marginal factor
Therefore, the media does not now know that Biden has declined. They know that it is now useful to liberal goals to observe that. The weighting of the likelihood of something being true will be adjusted - according to its usefulness
It's now useful because he can still be replaced. Rather than observing that Biden has declined, they are observing that Biden has declined to the point where it would improve the D's odds to replace him
If he remains the candidate they may advance to observing that it would be useful to redirect campaign efforts into Congressional races
I think you misunderstand what drives liberals. Liberals are continual worriers. Unlike Republicans, who will circle their wagons and defend their members to the end, Dems will throw their candidates to the wolves at any sign of scandal or disgrace. But no one on the Dem side has the chops to replace Biden as a candidate. Unfortunately, the Biden administration hasn't given Kamala Harris a higher-profile portfolio to put her in the public eye. Despite the cognitive tempests in the media teapots, Biden's post-debate numbers have recovered to where they were.
And the media, who are like five-year-old kids chasing a soccer ball, will be obsessing about the Trump assassination attempt for the next week or two. Trump may earn some sympathy points in the polls. But I expect this will fade as people listen to him blather on. And really there's no comparison between the two. Take a look at these excerpts from the speeches that Trump and Biden gave the same week. Other than Biden's speech impediment, he holds it together quite well.
In this one you can tell he’s giving a thumbs up to a different group of paratroopers. He still looks slow-moving, and I’d agree there’s something somewhat patronizing about how he’s treated by the others, but he clearly isn’t wandering off because he forgot where he was. I hadn’t seen that before and found the second perspective with a quick Google.
Does that change your thoughts on that particular example, or is that what you mean by cheapfake editing claims?
I got page not found but found a fantastic example on YouTube by France 24 doing a fact check on the video. I think it's representative without an additional angle as France 24 does not have that angle
In their version of the uncropped video you can additionally see one sky diver who is packing up his parachute and never looks up as Biden gives a thumbs up. Likely Biden had found a larger group there, some of whom did see him approach and interacted. It's not in the video, and they might have been all packing their parachutes - not a normal photoshoot item
Meanwhile the entire G7 group moves and shuffles towards Biden as Meloni brings him back into the location and orientation they were all in
France 24, with perfect confidence and aplomb, reports this as a clear debunking of an informationless cheapfake. This cannot be based on the facts they were in possession of, all they have is a diver who isn't looking! They didn't interact with the unedited video deeply enough to notice that. All they noticed is that they had enough information (there was an edit) to make a claim that would be plausible enough to others, and themselves, that would be useful
It can simultaneously be true that Biden has declined, and that people posted misleadingly clipped/cropped videos to try and show it.
As for the media, when there's a huge explosion of stories on a single subject in response to a public event, I think there's a dynamic going on where a lot of journos wanted to report on something but couldn't quite "get there". Then there's a public "hook" and the floodgates open everyone rushes to dump their story out.
Reminds me of when Trump Jr tweeted out copies of emails showing their attempts to collude with the Russian government in 2016, and a reporter said something like "I've been working on this story for a year, I could never quite get enough verification to run it, after all that work I can't believe he just tweeted it out".
Not that there hasn't been public reporting on this, especially from the WSJ and also around the time of Robert Hur's report.
This isn't unique to the left, let alone the American left. It's what happens when people prioritize "loyalty to the cause" and "winning" over "truth".
Yes, Biden's obvious senility is a huge indictment of the national news media. They were obviously being aggressively partisan in their coverage which has done direct damage to the country - at least to the extent that you consider having an openly senile incumbent as the Democratic Nominee to be damaging, which I do.
Another explanation: What is "obvious" to you not actually true. I am hardly a partisan, but it is impossible to have watched the NATO press conference and infer that he is "obviously senile." Which of course is different than the question of whether he is likely to be able to serve as President until January of 2029.
Sure, anything's possible. I'll happily take that bet. Maybe Biden is only pretending to be senile! Maybe all of the rumors and clips of him acting senile over the past 2 years was just Republican disinformation that only coincidentally happened to be right. Maybe the special prosecutor who declined to charge Biden over secret documents because he isn't mentally competent to defend himself was lying. I'm going with the parsimonious conclusion.
I think it's even more simple to say that sometimes he's senile and sometimes he's not, and even his closest associates can make mistakes about what he's going to be like over the next few hours. This explains the good performances, and the bad, and why all of his public appearances are so heavily scripted that even he (in his lucid moments) makes fun of it.
I don't actually think he's "senile", but minimally, his brain runs out of energy fast, and he needs more naps than he's getting. Probably he should have retired a few years back, and would have if he were in any other line of work.
Can we just say that he has some degree of senility, but he's not yet a central example of senility?
If your father/grandfather was performing like Biden then you wouldn't say he was senile, you'd say "Oh, he's still doing pretty well for his age". And Biden _is_ doing well for his age, most people his age have been dead for several years.
(Obviously he's not doing well enough to be President, and he certainly won't be by the time 2028 rolls around.)
As someone who thinks all politics is turd, I don't have a dog in this fight. But regarding gdannings complaint that you are not arguing in good faith, I'd just like to say I agree. You come across so angry and combative that one instantly feels like you are someone who is incapable of thinking or saying "you know I hadn't thought of that" or "that's a good point" or "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that."
Oh I'm definitely combative. That doesn't mean I'm either not arguing in good faith or am unwilling to make concessions when someone else makes a good point. For example, conceding that I'm combative.
Do you think it's even plausible that Biden isn't seriously mentally impaired? Didn't George Clooney recently tweet that he spent a whole day at a fundraiser with him and felt that his debate performance was representative? Haven't several people said similar things post-debate? Weren't there similar rumors circulating for months? It just doesn't strike me as plausible that all of those things are false.
I think it's unlikely that he's not mentally impaired, but not certain that he's not. But to me most politicians look impaired morally and in their intellectual capacity to grasp the issues they must master, so throwing in a little dementia is coals to Newcastle
One would hope that this would be a place where people could have good faith discussions. But if you are going to:
1. Construct strawman like "maybe he is pretending to be senile";
2. Completely ignore my reference to the NATO press conference; and
3. Perhaps most egregiously, use quotation marks around a phrase which a) does not appear in the special prosecutors report; and b) is not an accurate paraphrase of what the report did say (being incompetent to defend oneself is a very specific legal claim with specific criteria, and not remotely the same as what the prosecutor did say, which was that it would be hard to convince a jury that he acted willfully),
then perhaps I am mistaken. I hope not; I hope that most people here are not here to wage the culture war, but instead are interested in objectively discussing important questions lincluding those related to candidates' fitness for office, and how citizens an accurately assess said fitness.
1. That wasn't a strawman, it was hyperbolically illustrating the absurdity of non-parsimonious thinking.
2. Evidence that he doesn't act senile all of the time is not strong evidence that he is not, in fact, senile.
3. That wasn't intended to be a verbatim quote, apologies if you took it that way. It was just a stylistic choice to make it read more naturally. That sentence is directionally true and does not represent any substantive deception: the special prosecutor declined to prosecute because Biden is senile. "Elderly man with a poor memory" is the exact phrase. He also recounted that Biden had to be reminded of dates like his son's birthday. Hur found evidence of criminal wrongdoing but declined to prosecute solely because of Biden's mental capacity. I submit that this is qualitatively consistent with my original framing.
I admire your distaste for culture war and can only hope that your reaction to my previous comment wasn't an Isolated Demand For Rigor that you selectively apply to people whom you perceive to be politically opposed to you.
>Evidence that he doesn't act senile all of the time is not strong evidence that he is not, in fact, senile.
Yes, it is.
"Elderly man with a poor memory" is the exact phrase.
Right. And if that was honestly what you meant by "senile," then your initial claim is vastly weaker than you think it is.
>can only hope that your reaction to my previous comment wasn't an Isolated Demand For Rigor that you selectively apply to people whom you perceive to be politically opposed to you.
As it happens, I recently left a job with a non-profit organization whose mission I strongly support because of their propensity to make the same sort of claim that you made in your post.
The continuing degradation of trust in our society as a result is much worse than the fact that he's the nominee. The cover-up is worse than the crime.
Agreed, but this sort of partisan hackery has been going on for decades. At least now it's so out in the open that people can't pretend it isn't happening. NARRATOR VOICE: People will still pretend it isn't happening.
Yes, this is why I felt making this comment is quite useful. Previously I have been able to understand media bias in relation to myself, as I am often quite biased. But I cannot imagine myself seeing a video like the G7 wanderer and not just not incorporating it into my concept of Biden but actually running widespread cover stories leading up to the election about how such videos are meaningless cheapfakes
This is not "failing to adhere to the Platonic ideal of observing reality, just like me but perhaps moreso". This is "succeeding in achieving near perpendicularity to the Platonic ideal of observing reality"
I rarely discuss the morality of my own actions with in depth. That happened in a former Open Thread, on sperm donation. Since part of it was long after the thread's normal active dates, I think I might as well give it some visibility: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-333/comment/58888967 and parent comments.
Trump just announced JD Vance as his running mate on Truth Social. Interesting for a couple of reasons. He 39 years old and a freshman senator. Also announcing that on social media rather than at the convention may be a first.
> "If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there," he continued. "That is the legitimate way to deal with an election that a lot of folks, including me, think had a lot of problems in 2020. I think that's what we should have done."
To be clear, the "legitimate way" to deal with Pennsylvania sending you a slate of electors for Biden, and no slate of electors for Trump, is to certify their electoral vote is for Biden. Not to demand that they send you another slate and then having Congress "fight" over which one is proper.
I'm wondering how to take this - how religious is he? And more importantly, can we now get some good conspiracy theories going about the Horrid Popish Plot? All those Catholics on the Supreme Court, now a convert Papist as VP - is the Vatican puppeteering the White House????
I think he’s probably a pretty sincere Catholic. He was friends with Ross Douthat before he got into to politics and Ross is definitely a sincere adult convert Catholic.
I was just reading a round table analysis of the VP pick in the NYTs and Ross said he would be praying for his friend and the country.
As a 65-year-old, I'm taking the appointment of a 39-year-old as an _anti-gerontocratic_ plot! ( Not having any aspirations to public office myself, I support it. )
He married her before he converted, though. So how serious he is does remain a question. And I don't know how much his wife practices her faith, she could be "culturally Hindu".
Doubt. He was raised as an Evangelical and if it was for political points, he could have maintained that he is an Evangelical and the right would have been perfectly happy. I don’t think anyone on the right cares as long as you profess some form of Christianity. Converting to Catholicism doesn’t have any added political benefits compared to being an Evangelical. So I think it was a genuine conversion like that of Sohrab Armani.
To be fair, not really a downside, if you are a pro-natalist like Vance and can easily afford to raise multiple children. "Be fruitful and multiply" our God literally commands us.
On the other hand, I have always wondered why all the billionaires are happy with just 1-2 children. Having a hundred children(like some Arab sheikhs) means a tangible genetic legacy, that may even keep multiplying down the generations. Donating billions to charities doesn't even earn you any feel good brownie points anymore like in days of Carnegie and Rockefeller.
The Vatican, trying to cover up its own child sex abuse scandals, infiltrates the US government, using as leverage Trump's association with Jeffrey Epstein.
Clearly puppetmaster Bergoglio needs to hedge his bets. If Biden wins, he’s got a papist behind the big desk. If Trump wins, he has a voice in the big guy’s ear. And since no one expects either of them to listen to Francis, no one will suspect a thing.
On a more serious note, I think it’s interesting that as American evangelicals lose political influence, observant Roman Catholics seem to be holding on, at least at the level of officeholding. But perhaps the reverse is true of voting blocs? The whole thing is unclear to me.
I think it's more that Catholics are a single bloc (even if there are large internal differences) due to the hierarchical nature of the church. Protestants may be a larger share of the population, but they are divided up amongst different denominations.
Figures from 2015 which are badly outdated by now, but give a general indication of the religious make-up of the USA:
In 2015, Protestants (of all traditions) were 46.5% of the population and Catholics were 20.8%. The largest non-Christian faith was Judaism, at 1.9%. Atheist/agnostic/nothing in particular were 22.8%.
Within Protestantism, the single largest denomination is Baptist at 15.4%, with the Southern Baptists the largest in that cluster at 5.3%
If we want to look at that bogeyman of the liberals, the "Evangelicals" or "Religious Right", or the Christofascists as I see the current term seems to be, they make up 25.4%. Historic Black churches, which trend doctrinally conservative but vote Democratic, are 6.5%, and the mainline Protestants are 14.7%.
So Protestantism is numerically superior but divided amongst different denominations, hence "chaotic", while we Papists are all marching in lockstep to the dictates of the Vatican, hence "lawful" and thus, despite our smaller share of the population, more effective at implementing the Global Conspiracy 😁
Wait, which side is law and which is chaos? I figured that we evangelicals would be chaos, but that implies that the U.S. government is trending lawful over time, which feels… wrong.
I was mostly going by internal organization, so evangelicals would be chaos and Roman Catholics would be law?
Maybe for the government over time, some of the more organized American Protestant denominations would also count as lawful on net, and their shrinkage would counteract the Catholic rise? Episcopalians, Methodists, etc.
I saw something about that, and that seems to be a truncated version of a Tweet (rather like Sotomayor's bit about Seal Team 6 which I have now seen morphed into "The Supreme Court says the president (Trump) can legally kill his rivals").
Courtesy of TheMotte, where someone tracked it down:
"But I'm not surprised by Trump's rise, and I think the entire party has only itself to blame. We are, whether we like it or not, the party of lower-income, lower-education white people, and I have been saying for a long time that we need to offer those people SOMETHING (and hell, maybe even expand our appeal to working class black people in the process) or a demagogue would. We are now at that point. Trump is the fruit of the party's collective neglect. 3) I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler. How's that for discouraging?
The bit that is being publicised is the last part, "I go back and forth". I also note that some 'former room mate/former friend' released this 2016 Tweet, with friends like that, who needs enemies?
You say so, yet The Donald on the Logan Paul Podcast revealed himself to also be totally AGI-pilled (even ASI-pilled(!)), explaining the need for a massive nuclear energy build-out to meet the energy needed to beat China to it.
All the while, his VP JD posts on Xitter about the necessity for Open Source AI development.
I thought this was good and suggests they have competent people on staff, but I agree that I'm not aware of Biden or Harris saying similarly smart things on interviews etc.
Sure, I think a lot of grey-tribers are either crypto-blues or crypto-reds. I'm not sure if there's all that many true greys out there.
That said, Vance is definitely the most grey-adjacent person who is likely to be within shouting distance of actual political power in the US. The number of people who have even heard of Moldbug is tiny.
Of course depending on exactly what attack line the media settles on for Vance, the number of people who have heard of Moldbug may be about to skyrocket. Vance's association with weird Silicon Valley intellectual communities that are not reliably left-wing may be about to become the biggest issue in American politics. And while *we* might understand the difference between Astral Codex Ten and The Motte and Grey Enlightenment and Data Secrets Lox and Less Wrong, to an uninformed media herd these are all going to look like the same thing, and the attack line on Vance is going to lead right through here.
So yeah, the grey-adjacency of Vance is at best a very mixed blessing.
>Sure, I think a lot of grey-tribers are either crypto-blues or crypto-reds.
Given that crypto_currency_ enthusiasts are sometimes adjacent to the grey tribe, we might want to use some other terms for grey-but-kind-of-blue and grey-but-kind-of-red. For real confusion, we can have some communist reds in play too...
Boy, if Vance is the most grey-adjacent politician in the US that says horrible things about the grey tribe. He's about as protectionist as you can get, identifies more with Bernie Bros than with centrists (according to his Ross Douthat interview, Vance's words), and will suck Donald Trump's cock at the drop of a hat. Maybe that's close to where Moldbug is but I don't think it's where readers of this blog are.
bypass the paywall by either hitting X (stop download) after one second (generally works easy for the NYT tho may take a few tries to time it right) or take it to the internet archive ... geez, i hope you didn't click like i did on the archive link i didn't mean to type which just gave me ten thousand viruses when i clicked on it
Yep, we're just a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Unless you meant (1) the Rationalists (2) the Bay Area/Silicon Valley set (3) venture capitalists? I think there's some overlap between them, but there isn't complete identification.
I wasn't entirely sure did you mean the commentariat on here (I've seen criticisms of us and the site as being all far-right shills) or not.
Gunflint, I honestly do like you. You're every bit as stubborn, opinionated, and unwilling to un-dig your heels once they're dug in as I am, except on the opposite side of things. What is it Baudelaire says?
From one point of view, the primary criteria has now become "will potential assassins avoid killing Trump because his veep would be scarier", and IMO Vance might be the best option for that, given the candidate pool.
Vance is a relatively boring middle-of-the-road-Republican politician. I'd guess his relevant characteristics are "young" and "ex-never-Trumper-turned-pro-Trumper".
Yeah, I don't know what to think of Vance. I have some crazy feeling he ought to have picked Nikki, even if it's just for the optics of going against Biden/Harris with his own 'minority female VP' pick.
Well, we'll see what happens once the mud-slinging gets under way for the real campaign after today's RNC!
Nikki Haley was my favorite of the Republican field, not that any of them had a real chance against Trump. In a way, I viewed her as the "2020 Joe Biden" of the group - seasoned, moderate, and stable.
I suppose we'll see more of Vance now. I'd like to be proved wrong about him.
The guy made it through Yale law school as a conservative. He's probably got more ambition and will-to-power in his little toe than I have in my whole body.
He also somehow flitted from graduating Yale Law School in 2013 to being a principal at Thiel's firm by 2016, then founding his own firm by 2019, then becoming a Senator by 2022, while somehow finding the time to write a best-selling book along the way.
Trump probably believes victory is inevitable and this point and can pick someone purely for loyalty and submission (what he probably thinks he should have done the first time around).
On economic issues Vance is actually quite moderate, he was one of the few Republican politicians to join the picket line during the UAW strike. The MSM sees him as "extreme" and people like Mitt Romney as "moderate," swing voters in Pennsylvania might think the opposite is true, since they prioritize different issues.
Trump is 78, he's term-limited, and he has just discovered that he's not actually bulletproof. He's picking Vance as someone he can trust not to take the party back to the conventional Bush-McCain-Romney style of Republicanism once Trump is out of the picture.
If nothing else, I have to admire the fact that he's picking someone he believes would be a good President, rather than an airheaded Palin-Harris-Biden style bozo designed to "balance" the ticket.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and posit that a first order logic evaluator is not the way to model Trump's thinking on things.
(I think it's more likely, based on the phrasing - and an assumption that it's accurate - that Trump is thinking out loud, and then settling on not being against 22A, and that "go for another four years" means something other than a third term in Trump's mindscape.)
I think they probably added that part in after JohanL posted the link.
I think the original "third term" comment refers to his claim that he won last time, and is therefore the rightful president already, and is therefore currently running for his third term.
"he has just discovered that he's not actually bulletproof"
I dunno, seems more like he now feels the call of destiny as being miraculously spared. "Guy came *this close* to blowing my brains out, but just nicked my ear" is near enough bullet proof for general purposes.
Joe was experienced enough to know the ropes and have enough connections with both sides of the aisle, but wasn't going to overshadow Obama. Good choice to keep people within the party happy if they didn't get the nod for VP as a compromise candidate, and also as a "this man's experience balances out my lack of elected office".
Vance is, I think, a safe choice, which, in the current political climate, is probably the best kind of choice. As things stand this is Trump's election to lose, so he's going to want to avoid high-variance strategizing.
A news snippet that I was considering pasting into the "Details That You Should Include In Your Article On How We Should Do Something About Mentally Ill Homeless People" comments, but, since there is this new Open Thread, I'm pasting here:
(as per the NYT daily summary, for better or worse)
>After the Supreme Court said cities could remove homeless campers, some local leaders are preparing to crack down. “My hope is that we can clear them all,” London Breed, the Democratic mayor of San Francisco, said.
Nice to see the European LessWrong Community Weekend signal boost! Looking forward to seeing some other Astral Codex Ten commenters there.
Incidentally, I'm still trying to pick out a sci-fi short story to read in the blanket fort (as is tradition). I might do something I usually avoid and read one of mine, but that possibility aside, does someone here have a sci-fi short story they are super fond of, which is suitable for reading aloud (i.e. sentences aren't too complex, no mathematical expressions, no very abstract numbers people need to keep in their head and compare, et cetera), and would recommend I read that?
(I've pretty much exhausted Greg Egan at this point, minus some rounding errors of shorts I'm less fond of. I hear someone else read some Ted Chiang in my absence one year, though not sure what that was.)
It's shameless self promotion, but I'm working on a short story series about a man who discovers how to talk to a sentient ant colony. As for suitability to read aloud, I've been reading it aloud to my six year old and ten year old daughters, and captive audience that they are, they keep asking for the next one in the series:
Following up on this, I just read this, it is indeed cute, it has science in it (I'm not fussy about it not necessarily being the _hardest_ possible science!), and it's the candidate off the list for reading that I've put a definite checkmark next to. The diction's a touch weird, but that comes with the territory/context. Thanks again for the recommendation!
Of course!! Definitely some goofy sci Fi but I'm a sucker sometimes for older style implausible but cute stuff. Another one I liked (much more modern style tho) is last contact by Stephen Baxter
Thanks for this recommendation! I didn't end up reading Last Contact, but I did end up reading several of Baxter's short stories in the "First and Last Contacts" collection, and deciding that "The Children of Time" was a mood I was going for this particular LessWrong Community Weekend! So thank you for the indirect nudge toward it.
Pail of Air is still in my short list to read to people someday, though, in that if I hadn't come across The Children of Time by Baxter, I would *definitely* have read that one this time.
Bless you and thank you for the recommendations. :)
(I actually only read one other story this time, and it was one of my own, after much thinking about whether that was a fair use of anyone's time and much encouragement from acquaintances and friends at the weekend. I think it went well.)
I gave this a partial read and have a question you might have an opinion on. How would you suggest making the "i" and "I" distinctions unambiguous when reading aloud? The difference seems quite important.
You know I read it out loud to my gf recently. I tried drawing the distinction explicitly ("Big I" and "little i") but stopped after a few sentences. I didn't find that it confused the meaning. Just say "I".
You could also try reading it in a different tone, since 'i' and 'I' connote different characters. Thanks for reading my suggestion, I hope you like it! Something about that story really hit me in the feels.
"The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster might be a bit long to read out all at once, but it's the most stunningly prescient science fiction story I've encountered. It was written in 1909.
Plugging that into a word counter, yeah, I think that's too long, but I'll read it just for myself, for sure, because you've piqued my interest. Onto the pile it goes! Thanks for the link!
How about some Ray Bradbury and something from "The Martian Chronicles"? Yes, it's nothing approaching hard SF, yes it's dated, but there's still something there.
It might be an apposite choice, though, given that we are probably in the nascent stages of a pop machine created by LLMs. Though LLMs work on a higher level than Azciak, mutating and reprocessing previous cultural artefacts.
Ted Chiang has a short story collection numbering many more than one, so there is still room.
"Lifecycle of Software Objects" is an often neglected and under-recommended specimen of his, although it's rather long to be read out loud in one sitting by one person. For that matter, most "short stories" exceeding 20 or 30 pages are too long to actually recite out loud in a reasonable stretch of time.
If you're willing to go the "non-traditionally published" route, check out Exurb1a [1], he has "Orion's Arm transhumanism" vibe, mixed in with unorthodox philosophical leanings and influences, plus, he *is* writing the stories primarily for recitation, so the stories are naturally optimized for oral transmission. Excellent recommendations include (but by no means consist solely of) Bear and Goose at the End of Everything [2], Big Oxygen [3], and, in beautiful haughty-English poetry, The Rememberer [4].
(Edit): Oh, almost forgot, I Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter [5]. No, the author isn't doing what you think they're doing, whatever it is that you think they're doing, and whatever side you lie on in the great galactic Culture War. I loved it when it first came and I love it today, my position in the Culture War hardly constant between the 2 moments. One of the extremely few stories that I have actually gone back and re-read, I have a strict anti-rereading and anti-rewatching policy. It's Worth It.
I'll check out 'Lifecycle of Software Objects'! (Might have read it before and forgotten about it, let's see!)
Regarding Exurb1a, I'm sorry, where do I click to get those in text form? I preferentially don't watch videos, and even if I did I'm not sure how to read to people from one (I guess I could just... play it?). I see there's a transcript available, is that how I'd grab it?
Oi, that is much too long for a reading session, but I'll add it to the smaller pile of short stories to indulge in for my private enjoyment, for sure. Thanks a lot for the direct link!
Also, there are auto-transcript AI tools available, not necessary here since there is already a human-written one, but it's a useful fact to know in general.
Alicorn's stories tend to be a bit longer and more narratively complicated- I think I slightly preferred her older stories to her more recent ones, although it's been long enough that I can't remember any specific standout. Definitely lots of good stuff there, however.
I recommend any of QNTM's stories, which are collected in Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories (https://www.amazon.com/Valuable-Humans-Transit-Other-Stories-ebook/dp/B0BL24DFMW/). This is the author best known for the There Is No Antimemetics Division web series, though their other work is also great in the same way that Egan's and Chiang's work is great.
We did already read some of these, too! _The Frame-By-Frame_ and _I Don't Know, Timmy, Being God Is A Big Responsibility_, specifically. So good rec' in general, for sure. (I privately read the first two articles of _There Is No Antimemetics Division_ to some friends at a party recently, too.)
Guest Law's a long one, I'm guessing I'd need almost an hour for that one. Not that this disqualifies it. I'll give it a read, for sure! Thanks for the recommendation!
Anything specific in _The Forest of Time_ you'd recommend especially? (I assume you mean "The Forest of Time and Other Stories", not "The Forest of Time", which apparently also exists as a standalone novella! Though I can't seem to find that as an ebook on cursory glance, so the distinction's moot, I suppose. :D)
Yes, "The Forest of Time" is a great story, but too long for a read-aloud. :-) But "Grave Reservations" is quite fun and fairly short. "The Common Goal of Nature" could be good for some "Omelas"-type discussion, but it's fairly clear what will happen (at least I thought so). "The Feeders" is good, not futuristic as it's WWI; Flynn sometimes likes the "past is a foreign country" kinds of stories, as in the novel "Eifelheim" where the aliens are less alien to us than the medieval Germans. His "Sisters of the Sacred Heart" I like, but isn't exactly sci-fi. Creepy though. https://www.dappledthings.org/fiction/4739/the-sisters-of-the-sacred-heart
I tried to find Paul Carter's "The Last Objective" (very old, but it's a great story) but could only find an adaptation (much shortened, so it wouldn't be super-long for your purposes) into a radio show.
Added Silence Deep as Death to the pile to check out, and The Forest of Time as an eBook. Things don't need to be on the internet for free for me to grab 'em, it just makes an initial examination easier. Thanks a bunch for the links!
There are persistent, decades-long rumors of tunnels or a tunneling network beneath my city. It's been confirmed by enough normal/non whackadoodle people who've seen them over the years that I think there's something to it. All of the buildings downtown originally had much larger basements, which is an actual fact confirmed by blueprints or old building schematics we have of them. There are specific news stories from the mid-20th century about businesses like a bowling alley that were located in basements, that have now been sealed up. I've heard it explained that what people think are 'tunnels' are in fact interconnections between the various basements? And that this kind of thing was actually normal in the pre-20th century era? I'm in a quite old East Coast US city if that helps. My questions are:
1. Was it in fact normal to interconnect the basements of buildings in cities? If so, why?
2. Couldn't ground-penetrating radar reveal a tunnel network if it exists? Isn't that what that kind of radar is for, detecting buried pipes and utility lines before say a construction project?
To argue against the existence of a tunneling network- our city is sitting on solid ledge rock, which would have been a lot of work to tunnel- especially in the pre-20th century era. Hard to believe it'd be economic to dig tunnels for no reason
I am not sure about the US, but district heating systems are quite common in many European countries. If your city has those, then it also has a huge underground network. They are usually not publicly accessible, but it's possible to walk in them because technicians sometimes need to make inspections.
There are several cities in the US and Canada that have pedestrian tunnels connecting underground entrances to building in part of the downtown area. Looking over the list on Wikipedia's "Underground Cities" page, it looks like major subtypes include shopping mall complexes that extend under multiple city blocks, multi-building complexes with convenience connections (like the Empire State Plaza in NYC and the tunnels connecting various federal offices around the DC mall), and subway stations that connect to underground entrances of adjoining buildings.
There are rumors like this about washington DC. Some of them are true - there are tunnels, with subways even!, between many of the federal buildings. But they are not secret and used to make travel easier (of course there could be more secret ones).
Lots of universities have these same rumors because they often have real tunnels under buildings that are used for utilities, largely steam which can need big pipes. But the rumors are wrong about the nefarious purposes of the tunnels.
Ground penetrating radar, of the type I have seen, does appear to be very accurate or easy to read. Usually the output looks more like an ultrasound and needs a trained professional to read it. Even then, the conclusions aren't "there is X buried here", but more like "the could be something here that is different than the rest of the area".
No idea if connecting basements was common, but it's a plot point in the Baroque cycle by Neal Stephenson if you'd like to read some friction about such a thing.
I remember "exploring the steam tunnels" was something of a rite of passage when I was at UCLA. People would pass around hand-drawn maps and it was a constant game of finding new entrances before the school could lock them down. I once was able to travel all the way across campus exclusively using the tunnels and connections on the roofs.
I wonder if it's still possible to get down there, or if the administration was ever able to plug all the holes.
UCL over in the UK has a number of tunnels connecting the university buildings, presumably for utilities and transfer of material without having to go out on the street. They're not secret per se, but the administration leaves them unlabeled and off the maps so you have to be in the know to use them properly. I presume this is less to preserve the secret, and more to keep the horde of undergrads from gumming up the routes.
Just ran into Fred de Sam Lazaro outside my breakfast place. He’s a PBS News Hour regular doing thoughtful in depth reporting. I knew he lived in my neighborhood but first time we’ve actually crossed paths.
A rubric for rating book reviews next time around? I was rating them on an academic scale, where 7 is average, 5 is trash, and <5 is pretty much unused. But I'm not sure I was using the same scale as other review reviewers. Suggestion?
1 - This should not have been submitted. Low-effort troll or joke? Negative value.
3 - This is really bad, but probably was a legit attempt. Still a waste of time.
5 - Average. A college student or LLM could produce this. At least I know what the book is about.
7 - This is quite good. At least a few times surprisingly so.
9 - Amazing. Works very well on several levels. Book author would probably agree.
10 - This will change how a typical ACX reader thinks or acts in a good way.
I can't find a reference now, but I'd heard this is the common way of interpreting scales from 1-10 (at least in United States) and that if you ask large populations to rate [some average thing] from 1-10, it'll score around 7.
I assumed this is due to academia grading, but my assumption may be incorrect. There may be other reasons people settle on 7 as meaning "average." And given I can't find the reference, maybe I imagined it being the case. But if so, I really strongly imagined it.
I once talked to a psychologist who said that if you ask customers to rate you on a scale then they'll basically only use the upper portion of the scale, but that you can still extract useful information if you take that into account.
The video game industry is somewhat infamous for only using the upper part of the rating scale. Penny Arcade has joked that they use a "seven to nine" scale. I remember reading one time where a big-budget game was rated a 6 and it was a scandal and shortly afterward that reviewer was fired for allegedly-unrelated reasons.
I've seen several book authors complain that any rating less than 5 stars is effectively a downvote, because there's such a large number of books with an average rating higher than 4 stars that if you aren't one of them then you will effectively never be recommended.
I would speculate that inflated scales are due to a combination of
(1) people trying to be polite
(2) people exaggerating the goodness of anything that they publicly admit that they like, because liking a bad thing is low-status, and people have social instincts to protect their status
(3) actual corruption, where reviewers are compensated directly or indirectly for writing positive reviews (ranging from "reviewers know they'll stop getting privileged access to upcoming games if their reviews are negative" to "literal spambots that shill for their creators")
(4) feedback loops from all of the above that cause people to gradually re-calibrate their expectations higher and higher
I expect that partially mitigates reason #1 from my list, but psychology is messy. It turns out that there weren't a lot of secret ballots in the ancestral environment, and human instincts about self-presentation do not fully drop to zero just because you used a secret ballot.
I expect reasons #2 and #4 still apply with basically full force.
It would be interesting if people settle on 7 as average. A 1-10 scale makes me think first of grading a person on their looks. Even there there's the cultural "She's a 9 in Chicago but a 6 in LA" thinking.
I can remember in grade school when girls would ask their friends what they rated each other, and they would almost always rate their friends a 7. I think it was always meant to be complimentary but not *too* complimentary.
That sounds like a reasonable scale at first glance, and I like the idea of having some kind of rubric. I don't know how many scores reviews tend to get in the first round, but unless there's a significant critical mass, then getting rated by someone who's an unusually tough or an unusually generous grader would add quite a bit of noise to the scores.
Another idea I've had would be to calculate some kind of ELO-type ratings or a Condorcet ranking for reviews that get scored by people who have submitted scores on multiple entries, at least as a second signal for Scott to consider alongside the raw averages.
The simple argument is that those participating in a real-money market have "skin in the game" meaning they make more considered choices out of self-interest.
(Not about prediction markets specifically) I believe there's experimental evidence from psychology that people suddenly change their expressed confidence when they need to place a bet on something, compared to when they are advocating for something but won't personally lose anything if they're wrong. (This is speculated to be an evolutionary adaptation to make people better at persuasion by artificially inflating their internal felt-confidence while they are engaged in persuasion.)
That's a good question. There's a tremendous amount of theory that says it does, but I don't know to what extend there is evidence. I'm not an expert on the subject, maybe someone else can point to evidence.
The argument is the same as for every other case of "why should I believe a prediction market is accurate":
- If the poll is public knowledge, then people can use the information of the poll to inform their buying/selling behavior on the prediction market.
- If the poll really is more accurate than the prediction market (in a way that is legible to the public), then people can make money by placing bets on the prediction market that cause its results to move toward the results of the poll.
- In a sufficiently liquid/high-volume market, they will do so (because doing so makes them money) until the market is no longer worse than the poll.
Current prediction markets are not sufficiently liquid/high-volume for this to happen reliably, so currently a prediction market isn't necessarily more accurate than a poll. But the reason people think prediction markets have the potential to be cool is because of this general property: For any given source of info that you might think is a better predictor than the prediction market, a sufficiently liquid/high-volume prediction market will be corrected (by people placing bets that, in expectation, make them money) until the market has taken the extraneous source of info into account.
Or, as Scott puts it in the link above, "either prediction markets will be accurate, or you can get rich quick.”
It depends on what counts as "more accurate or useful". In the case of the USA presidential contest, I'm relying on the skill of prediction market participants to disentangle electoral college effects (swing states vs non-swing states, not-quite-proportional-to-population etc.) from raw polling numbers (which look like they are approximately intended to predict the popular vote).
Also, even if the contest _was_ purely a popular vote, the polls, plus an approximately known margin of error, translate into odds of victory via a cumulative density function, roughly erf((mean - 0.5)/sigma), so I'd be relying on the market to do that translation (though _that_ is simple enough that I could go ahead and do it, if it were the only wrinkle).
So, one of the more impressive application of LLMs I've seen is a site called WebSim (https://websim.ai/). It uses Claude 3.5 to generate fictional websites based on prompts or urls, which you can navigate like regular sites, clicking on links to generate new pages. Not actually useful for anything yet, but very fun to play with.
Here's the SSC subreddit, except in a universe where magic and supernatural creatures have recently returned to the world: https://websim.ai/c/dA3JpkVAKIYRu1UfR
Anyone here is into therapy/mental health/humanities/arts from a not purely analytical perspective (say has good access to their body/feelings/desire&fantasy inner life)?
Would love to connect.
I'm an ex-rationalist about to start my psychoanalytic training (to become a therapist), early on in exploring my interests in writing and humanities.
Would also appreciate any references to writers/bloggers/public intellectuals combining centrist/pragmatic/rationalist outlook with right-brain thinking/inner world and emotional awareness. So far most of the stuff I see is either very narrowly left-brained/analytical/purely technocratic, or very woke/progressive (or pure mystical-spiritual with more otherworldly interests), finding balanced perspectives has proved tricky so far. The Last Psychiatrist whom I'm yet to read might be a bit along these lines.
> Would also appreciate any references to writers/bloggers/public intellectuals combining centrist/pragmatic/rationalist outlook with right-brain thinking/inner world and emotional awareness. So far most of the stuff I see is either very narrowly left-brained/analytical/purely technocratic, or very woke/progressive (or pure mystical-spiritual with more otherworldly interests),
I dont think there much coherent content trying to navigate what rationalism offers/lacks without taking a hard swing into full panpyscheism
I consider myself a esoteric atheist and non reductionist physicist; losing my faith *hurt*, physics seems to be very real but I hate the rest of "the science"; if anyone wants to cc me for content/communitys for this world view id be interested
I think you’d find a lot of the people doing psychedelic-assisted therapy pretty simpatico. There’s an organization called Fluence that offers in person and online live courses in psychedelic-assisted therapy, including a couple courses on using psychedelics in psychoanalysis.
I'm quite curious about ppl who understand the relational/psychodynamic perspective and are exploring psychedelics (or meditation, or somatics).
I have that prejudice that too many of the alt-healing folk are way too ignorant of pretty much everything the therapy practitioner community learned for over a century, and as a result a bit hard to make sense of for me as in my perception they might go deep and thoughtful on bodily-perceptual stuff and ignore the "elephant in the room" of relational dynamics and individual character organization and maps of meaning and all that.
There are a lot of groups under the psychedelic umbrella -- it's sort of like the Democratic party. There are the woo people; there are people who do conventional, smartly designed treatment outcome research (and are so far finding psychedelics are a pretty powerful intervention, although that bubble may burst) ; there are people with conventional degrees who call their orientation psychoanalytic, though I do not know any of them so don't do whether their perspective is diluted by woo, cbt, or even acetone; and there are people who are very interested in psychedelics as a money magnet. The Fluence course I took was by one of the people who do treatment outcome research, and he was great. Very interested in inner experience, but had no particular model for it (not, for instance, the psychodynamic one).
You’re already subscribing to Sasha and you’ve been on a Jhourney retreat, so you’ve probably got access to the usual suspects on Twitter / X like Romeo Stevens and Nick Cammarata. There are many other folks with interests along similar lines, some of whom blog.
For public intellectuals, Sam Harris is for sure in this world.
Harris I should check out at one point. I know him from the meditation app but had a feeling he did engage philosophy/humanities more western civ tradition at least some?
tpot is an interesting scene. I've enjoyed it quite a lot when I was just turning towards this inner world stuff from my previous life. at this point though my interest waned notably: I don't feel the scene oft tends to go as deep and thoughtful as I'd like in general (compared to eg many rationalist scenes or say psychoanalytic talks), and to the extent it does it mostly does it in the direction of buddhism/meditation (which is fascinating, and I do have a maintenance kinda practice of like an hour-ish a day, but not quite the direction I'm most excited about atm, though I'm looking forward to returning to exploring it more one day), or a couple very narrow&specific things like IFS.
so I find myself curious about how they view things and enjoying occasional in-person convos with their practitioners I stumble upon during my voyages into NYC alt-healing scene, but not really continued interest in following their content, nor particularly constructive opportunities for online engagement.
sam harris is one of the extermists and when this debate comes up its often framed as between harris and petersons and the quote "metaphorical truth" on one side, while harris has claimed stuff like "consciousness doesn't exist"
Maybe this is not what you're looking for. Joe Navarro was one of the better authors when I was looking for books on body language. I believe he's a former FBI interrogator.
my thought on reading this: how does this compare with what alt-healing folks who are into somatics/bioenergetics and whatever other aspects of nonverbal communication have to say on this. would've loved to see one of theirs write a book review of this or smth.
I'm not sure if there's much overlap between the two, but I'm not deeply familiar with the alt-healing folks. If there was some overlap, I'd be interested.
I think the big takeaway from reading Navarro was to be humble in one's interpretations. Body language is somewhat idiosyncratic, so look for multiple signs pointing in the same direction. Establish some kind of mental baseline for an individual. You can detect anxiety from body language, but you don't know what that anxiety means without drilling down. This is why you need an interactive human to do interrogations. If they see anxiety where it shouldn't be, they can prod around to find out why it's there. But 'lie detection' does not exist, apart from the process mentioned.
I wonder if you'd mind mentioning what does "ex-rationalist" mean to you, compared to what you as a rationalist were? It never seemed to me like it was a metaphysical statement one can go back on, but I would say that as a rationalist-adjacent.
I use the word, as wambs do, as a somewhat imprecise symbolization of what community's (or, the few rat communities' I've seen up close enough) attitudes seem to be, not as having a strictly logical definition.. said I as a preamble, but it actly gets at one of the hearts of the matter: I tend to put more emphasis on symbolization (="recognition", complex situation -> single thought/concept grasping it, one of the types of (more right-brained one might say) cognitions human brain can do) over concept manipulation as rat community seems to me to do, and this is a pretty representative division hinting at much larger battles dealing with similar stuff: left brain vs right brain, external view vs judgment, science vs judgment, science vs hermeneutics, logical positivism vs I dunno who actly represents the other side there, very rational white tradition vs jewish kabbalistic/psychoanalysis cognitive-emotional integration vs eastern more purely embodied/spiritual and less logical stance. I haven't explored the history of these schisms at all, but guess I've seen some pictures hinting at the depth of that abyss.
Another angle that's quite relevant here is the turn/split within psychoanalysis (and other therapy traditions) between "one person psychology" vs "two person psychology", the change of perspective from the one where paternalistic therapist "sees through" the patient objectively, to the one where we admit we're all deeply soaked in our subjectivities and being able to really see even one other person's outlook takes dozens and hundreds of hours of analytic conversation, and objective reality or even shared reality in matters of human heart and social issues is quite a tenuous and not even always useful notion.
You can call this a shift of emphasis from early Yudkowsky, from "we see the world 90% objectively with 10% bias we can eliminate" to "90% of how we see the world (purely materialistic stuff aside) is about us not about the world, so better dive deeply into understanding our own heart and subjectivity to at least have a bit more perspective".
I do CBT, but I'm not hating on you for thinking it's cold and stupid. I used to think that too. But it's not, or at least can be done in a way that's not. Ask me questions about the the subject if you like.
your "analytical perspective vs feelings-based perspective" is a great topic of its own, sounds like "left brain vs right brain" to me, I think iain mcgilchrist is a (somewhat left-brained) canonical ref on this, which I haven't read yet (and not sure I will anytime soon, it felt to me from how he's talked about that he's more of a "sell left-brainiacs on right brain" than pushing the frontier of full-brain usage and attuning to one's non-logical intelligences that I'm more into at this point), I've internalized this stuff from twitter discourse, from psychoanalytic stuff, well maybe mostly from my own personal/spiritual development.
left=analytical brain is just half the brain, ignore the less explicit but more powerful right-brain bayesian inference machine at your peril ;)
have you read Jon Shedler or Nancy McWilliams summaries of research on psychodynamic therapy effectiveness? I don't think it's even fair at this point to say CBT is strongly preferred by the scientific consensus at this point, unless you go with some naive "more studies = better" and not adjust for academia's bias re what to study on this. Their read of the literature that I endorse at my current state of knowledge is that mostly psychodynamic stuff is as efficient, it seems might be more efficient when longer-term outcomes are measured, that the consensus is "common factors" that actly look quite psychodynamic in nature and the consensus can be read as implicitly somewhat pro-psychodynamic. and that's not even getting to the "left brain vs right brain" and difficulties with "operationalizing what matters" and just overall limited supply of really good and thought-out long-term studies on this.
I'm looking into the possibility of transitioning from my current SE job at a relatively large tech company to a more AI related job, possibly in a supporting engineering role. If anyone here is in the field and willing to talk to me about what's it's like and what might be needed I'd love to get in touch at iz8162k23 at gmail.
So, like most people, I have read a lot of pundits on the "should/will Biden drop out" issue, but I have not heard anyone discuss the incentives that indicate that, even if he decided to drop out, he would not say so now, because:
1. His decision might affect Trump's choice of VP, so it would be dumb to say anything until after the RNC.
2. Dropping out now = media coverage dominated by intra-Dem politics, bios of all the prospective nominees, etc, which means less coverage of the latest Trump crazy statements and policy proposals that they want suburban moms, etc, to hear about.
3. Dropping out now adds uncertainty re what US Middle East policy will be in the future, which is inimical to resolution to ongoing Israel/Hamas negotiations.
4. Dropping out on eve of the Dem convention = more likely whomever he endorses will get the nomination = he can more likely extract a promise in exchange (eg NATO ambassador or the like).
There are probably others. My point is that all of this seems obvious to me, but no one I read has mentioned it. If anyone knows someone who has talked about this, I would like to know who it is, so I can follow them.
PS: Note also that there is no way Biden was going to announce in April 2023 that he was not running, even if he were so inclined, because that would have told Russia, "in 2 yrs you are guaranteed to have a President who is less pro-Ukraine than the current one. (Not to mention the disadvantages of being a lame duck for almost two years).
Maybe the Ukraine point would be a big deal to Biden specifically, but otherwise that seems like a terrible reason not to announce that you're dropping out ahead of time. If you're going to drop out, do it when your party and the country can hold a normal election process. That should far outweigh a potentially small effect on a single foreign policy topic.
Well, yeah, it is particularly a big deal for Biden specifically, but I see it as a big deal for everyone. It not just "a single foreign policy topic; rather, it is arguably the single most important current policy issue, foreign or domestic. The extent to which a large power succeeds in forcibly annexing all or a large part of its neighbor could have global ramifications for decades.
Sure, let's assume that's the case. Biden failing to announce that he's not running has improved Trump's odds of winning, so it actually increases the uncertainty in US policy towards Ukraine. The bigger a deal one thinks Ukraine is, the more Biden should have tried to ensure a Democratic win in the 2024 election, which I don't think he has. He's run a conservative and not very active campaign while behind in the polls.
>Biden failing to announce that he's not running has improved Trump's odds of winning,
That was hardly clear in April of 2023.
Moreover, to be clear, my point is that any Democratic President would also likely be less pro-Ukraine than Biden, given Biden's history with Ukraine. Hence, an announcement that he is not running would, as I said, told Russia, "in 2 yrs you are guaranteed to have a President who is less pro-Ukraine than the current one." Hence, that would decrease any pressure on Russia to settle the conflict and hence vastly increase the chances that the war would continue for at least 2 years past April of 2023.
>Biden failing to announce that he's not running has improved Trump's odds of winning,
That was hardly clear in April of 2023.
Moreover, to be clear, my point is that any Democratic President would likely be less pro-Ukraine than Biden, given Biden's history with Ukraine. Hence, an announcement that he is not running would, as I said, told Russia, "in 2 yrs you are guaranteed to have a President who is less pro-Ukraine than the current one." Hence, that would decrease any pressure on Russia to settle the conflict and hence vastly increase the chances that the war would continue for at least 2 years past April of 2023.
>2. Dropping out now = media coverage dominated by intra-Dem politics, bios of all the prospective nominees, etc, which means less coverage of the latest Trump crazy statements and policy proposals that they want suburban moms, etc, to hear about.
As a voter, the current _low_ coverage of e.g. Harris is a problem. I have less of an idea of even her declared positions (let alone what she would actually do) than of Biden's. ( My default position, is "A pox on both their houses." )
I've been arguing the same thing for a while. If I were Biden a plan to withdraw, there is no way that I would announce it before the convention. I don't see what good would come of it.
One more thing that I’d add to your excellent list is that the announcement along with the nomination of someone decent would cause the biggest cheer in Democratic Convention history. They would get a massive media boost and support just at the crucial moment.
You obviously have a point (apart from the PS which is a bit too far-fetched: Based on that logic, no US president would ever announce that they do not plan to run for a second term).
My impression is that few pundits (= people who write about the US election for a living) mention your point about Biden's incentive structure since they live by clicks, and once they make a post/article/essay saying " it is rational for Biden to wait until short before the Democratic National Convention to announce that he steps back, if that is indeed what he plans to do" , they have nothing else they can write on the topic in the upcoming months, except to repeat "wait and see."
In short, since you are interested in incentive structures: The incentive structure facing pundits (and mass media more generally) suggests that they will not mention that Biden's incentive structure is to wait until short before the Democratic National Convention to announce if he steps back (and in the meantime that it is rational for him to insist that he does not).
>apart from the PS which is a bit too far-fetched: Based on that logic, no US president would ever announce that they do not plan to run for a second term).
But, none of them ever do!
And Ukraine is a special case, given Biden's history there. I can't think of a single other instance in which a decision not to run would have that type of effect on a key issue.
Edit: PS: October 7 is too late. There would be ballot access issues in many, if not most, states.
>Three days after meeting with Califano and McPherson, Johnson announced that "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President."
Given October 7, a Democratic primary would've been a shit show as candidates try to triangulate between the activist pro-Palestine class and the establishment pro-Israel donors. Combine that with tax-the-rich and DEI promises for domestic programs and whoever survived would be painted by Trump as a pro-terrorism Marxist.
Re Ukraine, my point was not just about Trump. It was about every possible Democratic nominee. Given Biden's history re Ukraine, dating to when he was VP, he is likely to be more pro-Ukraine than any Democratic replacement.
Re the Middle East, whether our policy is good, bad or indifferent is irrelevant. What is relevant, from the perspectives of both Israel and Hamas, is that current policy is known, and Trump’s policy is more or less known. If Biden drops out, then both Israel and Hamas have to try to discern what policy might be under several potential nominees. The smart thing for both would be to wait and see who the actual nominee is, so there will be no current agreement.
Update regarding carbon sequestration via dumping olivine sand in open sea:
TLDR: I'm trying to start a carbon selling company and claim some EU or NL funds doing so, but with no experience of carbon sequestration, carbon markets or starting a company for that matter.
I first heard about this here in a post, and it really intrigued me. I read and thought about this in this past year whenever it crossed my mind. I found about Vesta and read what they put on their website. I'm from Turkey but living in the Netherlands for quite some time and am a citizen, but not very fluent in the language and these facts will matter later in this post.
Lately I saw on the news the national council of science or something like that advised that carbon sequestration, including via olivine is desirable. I did some research and found out there are indeed some support from national and EU level funds for companies doing this. I also knew from being a dork that there were parts of Turkey where olivine mines would exist, and after researching that I found there indeed are. I communicated with one (via a gmail address, so I probably didn't come across very professional) and they say they'll sell olivine sand to me around 20$ a ton.
Taking into account the price of carbon or EU/NL subsidies it sounds like there's a business there while also helping the planet.
Things still to figure out: what kind of company or nonprofit I should form? Which funds/programmes/etc to apply and how? Where to dump the olivine sand for maximum carbon capture (warm, sunny and high saline or the opposite), and where to dump it for easiest environmental permits (eastern Mediterranean or Atlantic ocean? Which countries' EEZ)? Also, how to take those permits? And how to license eventually sell the carbon credits that I'll hopefully create?
I contacted RvO (Netherlands Enterprise Agency) if they can answer those questions and waiting for replies. I found out in the meantime is that every year applications there for subsidies happen in the month of September. I'm hoping to figure my stuff until then and able to catch the batch of 2024.
I'm not posting this to ask for help or support (not that I don't need it) but just to let the community know that I'm trying to do something on this front. If something happens I'll write in another open thread. Just let me know if I'm doing something apparently stupid from your point of view and I seem to be not aware of that.
There was an article in a recent issue of Science News about this - might have something useful for you. It was more about putting it on land than water, and using more substances than just olivine sand. Mentioned several organizations which are doing it currently.
Usual candidates for 'where to put it' are areas with natural agitation by sand and water (the beach or shore), or else spread out on cropland, where rain, plants and plowing will also ensure gradual conversion to carbonate.
In your case I would say one of the main requirements is that it should be near a railhead.
I don't know whether any direct air carbon capture startups are active in the EU, but if so you could reach out to them and find out whether they can use your material. The ten or so companies that I follow in the US have a variety of ideas about 'what do I do with this CO2 that I pulled from the air?', but at least a couple of them want to combine their CO2 with alkaline minerals or dross of various kinds. Blue Planet, for example. Now, *possibly* natural olivine rock doesn't meet their requirements, but it seems worth checking into.
Where I found is near the sea, so I'm exploring if it's as efficient to spread out on shallow seas where salinity, seawater temperature and sunlight is ample. I hope carbon licensing works like that as well. Otherwise it'll be too difficult to do it on scale. If I had a huge fertilizer company I'd just mix it with fertilizer so it'll be spread on fields but where I stand if sea thing doesn't work I'll probably not be able to do this.
There are a lot of VCs that are interested in investing in carbon sequestration. Even if you aren't ready to raise money, they can be good to talk to because they will probably have good advice on the carbon markets side, since other companie in their portfolio will have had to figure that out
My problem is, I don't know any VCs and I don't know how to get ahold of them. I also never spoke to one so I wouldn't know how to discuss my issue with them. Maybe this comment here would be of interest to one.
Well the secret in a situation like this is to use the most powerful and important tool in the entrepreneur's tool box. Just try some shit. Google VCs that invest in cleantech, look up who backed other carbon sequestration companies, search for cleantech accelerator programs. Then send them all an email. Ask ChatGPT to help you write it if you need to.
You might want to apply for funds because money's always nice. But carbon credits are a market mechanism. Effectively you remove carbon from the atmosphere (through whatever mechanism), get it verified by the relevant agencies, and they give you a credit which you can sell on an exchange. If the price of credits (which are commodified) is higher than the price you paid to generate the credit then you make a profit. If it isn't you make a loss.
If I were you then I'd go around to Turkish exporters to the EU (specifically in cement, iron, steel, aluminum, fertilizer, certain chemicals, and electricity) and explain to them that unless they start offsetting the carbon released by their processes their tariffs to export to the EU are going up under the new Carbon Border Adjustment rules. They could buy credits on the open market and hope that the floating price makes sense. But you have access to Turkish mines and do whatever process. You're willing to take block orders at a fixed, below market price and handle all the paperwork they need to prove they actually did the carbon credits. But they have to buy in bulk for a set period of time (say a year).
They'll like this because it insulates them from fluctuations on the carbon credit market. You'll like it because it gets you consistent revenue you can use to invest in the carbon capture process and big, steady contracts. Then you generate as many credits as you can and sell the excess on the open market.
Thank you for your insightful reply. That's a bit of a different point of view than I had but makes sense. Still, I'm a bit reluctant about doing business with big Turkish businesses because they tend to play rough and rule of law in Turkey right now is influenced heavy by who you know or whose son-in-law you are or whatever. On the other hand I have a cousin working for Shell TR so maybe they need carbon credits and I can sell to them without getting shoved around in the process.
About selling to companies yearly with fixed (below market) prices makes perfect sense though, and they need not be Turkish companies anyway. I'm hoping the RvO will help me with finding customers though. Being a technical person whole career, I have no sales game of my own.
I would aim for more small and medium exporters. I also wouldn't incorporate in Turkey. If you have Dutch citizenship I'd incorporate there and have the purchase contracts be Dutch. If they try to not pay then you can sue them in Dutch court and because they're exporters to the EU if they don't comply the EU has all kinds of legal pressure to bring against them. And Dutch courts are pretty good in my experience.
They might help you. But any startup like this is going to be about sales. You need to find partners that will supply you at good prices, dump it in the sea for a fair price, and who can buy the credits on the other end. A lot depends on getting your production costs lower in part through things like bulk buying and your preferential access to the Turkish market.
a) am curious about the rate of occurrence, given that it's massively underdiagnosed and I'm not confident current estimates about occurrence rate were performed well
b) am curious about how it associates with various other things
c) think it would be nice to publicize the condition, given that it's very easy to never realize that one has this despite it being a pretty different visual experience than most people apparently have
Re this part: "It's perfectly OK (at least with me) for the government to pay social security benefits or send military aid to Ukraine. But that is not investing in things that will yield income in the future." I am a little surprised that you do not note that there might be a difference between a deficit that results from tax cuts and a deficit that results from increased spending on infrastructure or education or R&D or whatever (depending on what people spend their tax cuts on)
After the assassination attempt on Trump, he said that his life was saved by the hand of God.
Let us accept that as true. The real question, if so, is whether it was the act of a merciful God, who wanted to preserve the life of the means of our salvation? or the act of a just God who wanted to prepare the agent of the destruction we sinners so richly deserve?
Me? I just don't know. As Lincoln said: "The Almighty has His own purposes".
The answer is that that's a false dichotomy: God is both just and merciful, and he destroys our corporal bodies only to make us repent and save our everlasting souls.
I guess you had to ban LearningHebrewHatesIsrael but it's a shame.
First of all I get it. Not only was (new-name) LearnsHebrewHatesIP pro-assassination but (excepting his imagination of Yahweh's hell - source?) he sounded serious too. Not serious enough to do it himself of course but you know he kind of sounded like he really really wanted Trump dead.
Even so, while I obviously agree that anyone who feels so strongly about something so silly as a president is making a very unfortunate error for themselves and their emotions, it should be fine to "wish" for whatever you like and to say so.
I support the ban because obviously that sort of talk ends up spiraling with back talk and eventually leads to a whole lot of hate among real people who can hear each other (rather than for Trump or dead-dude who can not) and actually cause a great deal of unhappiness even if it's just about what I regard as fighting over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
In addition, I think you had to do it not just for the good of anyone who might get caught up in it, but for the tone of the whole platform if that kind of thing is allowed.
And finally, considering how badly people behave on the internet that would not surprise me if his own colorful wishes ended up with bad people counting you personally as responsible for allowing it and not banning him for it, and using it as a cudgle against you who definitely doesn't deserve it (not that he would but he seems to be cool with whatever response might come from that comment).
At the same time, as you can see from the above I don't take it all that seriously and I think that you don't take it all that seriously either (other than for its potentially deleterious second-hand effects), so, while a ban makes a lot of sense (based at least on the criteria of the local snitches) I think he's also someone worth having around and that therefore perhaps has been for a shorter period I don't know what periods you usually use but I would think a week or a month if need be.
This isn't because I found that particular comment something that anyone in the world really needs to read but because I remember when he showed up shortly after October 7th last year. He was very angry and very violent but I realized that he was also sincere.
And sincere people can grow.
I wrote him at some length not expressly dealing with the accusations or hatreds or whatnot but pointing out that he seems to not have all the information or to have considered all the perspectives but would probably want to do so.
He seemed logic-based rather than team-based, *even if he was* shouting for the bloody murder of one particular team.
It's true that he's more colorful and passionate than most but (from the admittedly limited number of comments of his that I have read) he seems to be someone who actually cares. About people and about truth, and about checking his presumptions in his own head so that he can change them if rationality and heart recommend him doing so.
Anyhow, the commentariot here is a diverse bunch. But while I can't say that I've learned much information about the outside world from those comments of his that I've read, I do feel like I learned about him enough for him to distinguish himself here as a good bloke whose passion doesn't only fire outward, but also inward. In other words, a (loud but) humble fellow.
That's a rare quality.
It may be a quality more highly represented here than on the general internet, but even here it's rare.
He even went so far as to change his nom when he realized that Jews/Israelis aren't the devils he thought they were and that their enemies aren't quite so innocent as he had priorly felt.
That's an impressive thing. It's humility.
Anyway, he seemed like one of those few dudes on the internet who might turn into a publicly helpful high quality person given some time to explore and grow.
If this is an epitaph, so be it, but I liked him (even at his most genocidal against my own tribe and self) so I wish him well.
>By fucking Allah, I'm so ready for this Attention Succubus to finally disappear.
Patience. Trump is 78. You will get your wish. If he is elected - presidents get good medical care, but the job _is_ stressful, and tends to reduce the lifespans of those holding the office...
Yeah, let's just shoot everybody we hate, that's not going to be a problem at all.
But then you don't get to complain when the bad guys do another bomb attack or raid or fire off rockets at the people you like, because they're just doing what you want to do - getting rid of those they hate the fastest way they know how.
Trump is to humans as shit is to food. He is refuse. The world would be better if everyone would shoot the likes of Trump.
It's not like we're denying him the fucking coming springs, he is 77. May the next guy to try to put him out of his misery be successful in this most holy of missions.
Relax, dude. He’s not a saint, but neither is he the Antichrist. He will probably be the next POTUS, and if you want peace in the Middle East, that’s probably a good thing.
As you say, he's 77. Death is coming nearer without any need to rush it by murder.
Holy of missions? Remember that when you are on your own deathbed, gasping for one more second of life, how you wished death on others and death by violence, at that.
Nit - Trump is now 78. Hmm, https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html gives the life expectancy of a 78 year old USAian male as 9 years, so he has better than 50:50 odds of finishing his term (if the stress and medical care cancel each other) - but not by that much...
Alternatively an investigatory God, who is laying open Trump's soul in Job-like fashion? Let's wait and see how Trump actually reacts.
Right now there's a lot of noise from people who want him to turn out one way or another, but putting real-life fanfic head-canon aside, current indications seem like he's basically the same as he was last week?
Either way it doesn't really matter. If you accept that God exists then even if his intentions are to destroy us then you can't argue that we don't deserve it. God is the ultimate truth, you don't argue with that.
Me I think God is sick of progressives and wants to send a plague just for them.
Oh so much this. Trump is often best taken seriously, but not literally. He means that he's grateful for it and doesn't ascribe his survival to his own prowess, but to Providence/luck/what have you. That's all.
In 99% of cases, I agree with you. And it may not even be true humility--he knows that *his audience doesn't want him to brag here*. Because there's a fixed pattern for this sort of thing (narrowly escaping death)--you attribute your survival to luck, the hand of fate, divine intervention, *anything except yourself*. And since his base is particularly religious...divine intervention it is.
It does *not* mean he actually necessarily believes that God personally intervened. It's just a fixed phrase for "I got lucky". One that drives hyper-literalists, hard-core anti-theists, and those inclined to uncharitably interpret his words (the latter of which represents a huge swath of society) nuts.
Do you know that back in the day he would phone the society columnists at NYC papers and pretend to be someone else calling to say great things about Trump? They all got onto it after a while, but really? Who does that? He is constantly claiming to be the only man that can fix difficult problems. I guess you could say he is merely aspirational but there is a difference between being charitable and being a complete sucker. I think at the end of the day the only reason he won't destroy the country is the country won't let him, when push comes to shove. Hopefully he will do some good while he's in office...but whether he does or not he is going to claim he did.
Anyway, we are due for a change and this is the change we are getting. BTW, we are all sent by God.
"Hello. Have you heard about this guy Trump, Donald J. Trump? He is a great individual, just a great individual, runs such an impressive real estate empire like none you've ever seen. And he associates with just the best people, the best people, from everywhere. You just have to look into this wonderful, sociable person, Donald Trump, Donald J. Trump."
The ear is the organ through which the speech of others enters our mind. A wound in the ear symbolizes a failure to listen to others, and a tendency to put oneself ahead of other people. In other words, pride.
I've published a book. Or rather, republished. The short memoirs of Thomas Brown has been out of print in the over 260 years since its original publication in 1760. Thomas Brown was a 16 year-old soldier in the French and Indian War who was severely wounded and taken prisoner . He endured three years of "uncommon sufferings" and wrote his brief personal narrative when he returned home. It is an exciting, if horrifying, drama of human suffering and stoicism in the face of danger.
I know early American and frontier history isn't normally something that has much crossover with this community, but I hope you will consider purchasing a copy and learning about something unique that you would not normally have been exposed to.
Our small team put a lot of work into this little passion project of ours.
Also, like everyone else here, I now have a substack. It'll mostly exist to complement whatever work we're able to do with the "publishing company." If you're interested in learning about something completely different, I encourage you to subscribe.
I read this one some time ago, I think in a book of Indian captivity narratives, and there was always puzzled by exactly how [spoilers] Brown escapes the clutches of the French. I just went back and looked, and one moment he's working as a servant (essentially forced labor) for a French family in Montreal, and then he says simply "when Col. Schuyler was coming away, I came with him to Albany."
Based on wikipedia entries, I assume Col. Schuyler is Peter Schuyler, who was captured by the French and released in a prisoner exchange. But how did Brown get to go with him? Wikipedia also says that Schuyler "paid the ransom for approximately 114 of his former men from captivity in Quebec with his own money," but Brown wouldn't have been one of Schuyler's men. Did he just get swept up in the ransoming?
If this is all covered in the introduction of your edition, and your answer is, "read my book," well, fair enough!
Without revealing too much of the narrative, for those who've purchased the book, here's our footnote on the matter:
"Colonel Peter Schuyler (1707-1762) was a member of the famous Schuyler family of New York and New Jersey. At the start of the French and Indian War he was given command over New Jersey's forces. He was captured at the fall of Fort Oswego in 1756, paroled in October 1757, recalled from parole in July 1758, then released for good in November 1758. Schuyler reportedly paid the ransom and secured the release of over 100 English prisoners, apparently including Thomas Brown."
Understanding is that Schuyler paid for the freedom of as many English prisoners as he could, not just those who were formerly under his command.
But your confusion is justified. Brown is very nonchalant about the event and provides no context for the reader on Schuyler.
I've gone back and forth on it. Part of me wants to embrace the old-fashioned nature of the subject matter and lean into print. But that's probably silly. For now I've got some stock I want to sell off, but once I start on that I may offer a digital version. No Amazon presence yet. Honestly other than a few museums/historic sites this is the first place I've announced it.
In the wake of the assassination attempt on Trump I expect there to be a lot of debate over what role Trump's opponents rhetoric played in motivating the shooter. This will go on regardless of what we learn about the shooter's motivations, and I think it's still a useful conversation to have.
My take -- we absolutely do *not* want to legally prevent people from calling their political opponents dictators-in-waiting, or claiming that democracy hangs in the balance, because it may someday be the case that these things are true, and people need to be able to say so.
But, if you are going to engage in that kind of rhetoric, you shouldn't do so lightly, and you definitely shouldn't do so dishonestly. It is entirely unsurprising that someone might use violence to prevent a dictator from coming to power and ending democracy, if they truly believe that to be the case.
If those of Trump's opponents that were using that kind of language prior to Saturday really believed it, they should continue to say it. And if they never believed it in the first place then they should be criticized and pay some reputational/political price for their dishonesty.
(For the record, I strongly oppose Trump and I'm worried about a second term, but I don't think he'll become a dictator if he wins)
Any arguments for controlling speech fall flat because your just shooting the messenger
Let the anger out, we will need a political revival where I dont ***want*** to comment of where they are getting the drugs and blood to pump into biden. Call for assassination early and often, it will give the secret service data to track for how much resources to allocate day to day; while letting out steam from the collaspe of this era, and maybe there will be honest non violent solutions I can trust in between.
Question: If calling a political opponent a "threat to democracy" is unacceptably heated rhetoric, what about calling your opponents "un-humans" and calling the next election a fight to "save western civilization"?
Or how about declaring that you are in the middle of a "second American Revolution"? Or saying that your opponents are a "global theocracy"?
(All of those were said at the Heritage Foundation conference a week ago.)
Or what if a candidate makes a speech that incites a riot, one which leads to an attack on the seat of government and multiple deaths? Is that better or worse than inciting a lone gunman?
As others have pointed out, it's foolish to grade a party's rhetoric based on who happened to roll a 1 on the Nutjob Dice this year. But if you insist on doing so, the Republicans have been rolling those dice for longer and more often, and they already rolled a 1 four years ago. The idea that "threat to democracy" is rhetoric which is uniquely beyond the pale is laughable.
I think it’s fine to call Trump a threat to democracy, based on Jan 6.
A lot of conservatives, though, including myself, basically agree with some form of the “save Western civilisation” or “American revolution” rhetoric.
We strongly oppose the decolonisation narrative that has been pushed on us, as well as the notion that Western civilisation is somehow morally corrupt because slavery (which Western countries did not invent, but which they were the first to abolish.)
We want to go back to a time where George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were revered across both sides of the aisle as heroes, not criticised for being slave owners (given moral progress and considering them relative to their times, this makes about as much sense as criticising them for not knowing how to drive a car.)
If you don’t understand these things, you will never understand Trump’s appeal, and never understand why people would consider voting for him. A lot of people in the leftist bubble just genuinely do not understand these things. I feel sorry for them.
He didn’t, as far as I’m aware, but he has been demonised by the far left for holding attitudes that were progressive for his time but are racist by 2024 standards. That’s why I used the “knowing how to drive a car” analogy
As far as I can tell, Lincoln is mostly attacked for fighting against Native Americans early in his career. Which was also a fair for its day thing of course, but the far left won't hear that.
Slavery was an issue of debate in writing the Constitution, and they knowingly compromised to keep the South, including the 3/5 representation, prohibiting the end of the slave trade for 20 years, and including a fugitive slave clause. So I don't think we can honestly say it was just a given. It was a dirty compromise, and they knew it. We can still respect great historical figures while also acknowledging their shortcomings. I also think the 1619 project goes overboard.
Beyond Trump, I wish we had a conservative side that defined themselves by more than opposing DEI, tax cuts, and going back in time to some golden age. The Republicans need a real platform.
I also think discourse in this country is pretty broken. The far right and far left are defining the debate too much. There's plenty of room for agreement and working together in the middle, but we're not taking advantage of it. We could be working on building more housing and energy and otherwise making America stronger, and instead we're letting the culture war distract us from the work that will make all of us better off.
> There's plenty of room for agreement and working together in the middle, but we're not taking advantage of it
The ironic part is that Biden's term saw a sharp increase in bipartisanship in congress. I was actually surprised, since I expected a repeat of the Obama years where the Republicans stonewalled everything.
I think at least some things were successes, and, I think, bipartisan ones. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act I _do_ see this as making America stronger. TSMC is a great company, but it would be nice to not have all advanced chip fabrication on the other side of the Pacific.
Agree. Actually I think the Republicans do have a real platform this time round. They have a lot of smart people who have signed on to work with Trump. See Project 2025
Project 2025 is run by people who *used* to work for Trump. I presume most of them would be happy to be part of a second Trump administration, but I don't think they've been invited. And Trump has already written his draft of the 2024 Republican platform, which will almost certainly be adopted this week. It bears very little resemblance to Project 2025, it is barely a platform and even less a policy document, and it says basically "Donald Trump is awesome and will do many awesome things, but not things that would frighten moderate swing voters who might be persuaded to vote for Donald Trump".
Project 2025 is all about policy, but it's a wish list by a bunch of wannabees. And it's not clear that any of those wannabees will have anything to offer Donald Trump on January 21.
But of course it is ridiculous to compare Trump to Hitler. His politics are not even far right; he takes criticism from the right for his stance on abortion. In fact they are basically the mainstream centrist Democrat platform from, oh, about 30 years ago, when Trump was a registered Democrat (incidentally he also bears resemblance to Bill Clinton for his attitude towards women).
Trump has an inflated opinion of himself and speaks in hyperbole. Hitler killed six million Jews and started the bloodiest war in history. These are not the same thing. The media has been exaggerating the dangers of a second Trump presidency for awhile now, and Hitler comparisons are an example of why trust in the media is rapidly falling off.
Every election since 2004 being called by one or both sides "the most important election of our lifetime" has turned into an extra long set-up of Boy Who Cried Wolf. I certainly don't think the lazy, undisciplined, elderly Trump is an existential threat. He'd be a lame duck the second he walked in. His foreign policy (being mostly what lame duck presidents get to spend their time on) was unpolished and brash in appearance but cautious in practice. He had ample opportunity in 2020 to seize enormous power either in response to covid (with liberal media types begging him to nationalize the production of factories, a key element of fascist economic policy) or in response to the protests at the urging of his own side. He is just too much of a normie boomer civic nationalist flag-waver to really do anything too radical.
But if Biden DID think Trump was a uniquely existential threat to American democracy, then it would probably have behooved him not to have said that the mild-mannered and reasonable center-right Mitt Romney was gonna put black folks "back in chains". And if someday there really IS a candidate who might tear down the democratic system from within, nobody is going to believe it, because every election of their life was treated as existential by the parties and the media goes along with it for ratings.
It's hard to unilaterally disarm over this, you don't want the other side running to the polls while your side sits at home because it wasn't very important, but it's also very hard to keep credibly saying these elections are world-shakingly important as we get older and notice our daily lives never change that much or change in any particular direction based on a D or R holding the White House. At some point, a temperature reset back to the level of, let's say, the 2000 election during the debates: lockboxes and fuzzy math. Imagine there'd been no butterfly ballots, and a clean but close win for Bush. Yes social security solvency and education policy are important, and people were indeed upset about No Child Left Behind... but nobody's getting shot over that, normies aren't crying at home watching election returns over that, and people aren't living as if having the wrong person in the White House is damaging their soul.
I generally agree, but if we look at GWB in particular, the real impacts to focus on are the Iraq War ($1T plus in spending and somewhere on the order of 500k Iraqis dead as a result) and PEPFAR (up to 25 million lives saved in Africa). The temperature does need to come down, and presidents especially get far too much praise and blame for the economy, which they can barely affect. But sometimes they do make big, life and death decisions.
I agree they do, although to Americans only really the US economy affects our daily lives, we're pretty insulated from the misadventures of our leaders abroad. My point there, why I specified "during the debates" is that prior to the ballot controversy, 9/11 and Iraq, that election was not treated as being particularly world-shaking by the media or voters. Nobody in the young internet was talking as if they'd have a meltdown if their guy lost. The rabble rousers in media were even comparatively tame, with Rush Limbaugh mostly still going on about the crooked Clinton regime and dinging Gore for wanting to regulate everything, and the lefties just making fun of Bush for his past drug problem or then-current Texas cowboy persona.
Any president could end up with a 9/11 on their watch, but how consequential a term turns out to be isn't related to how intense we felt before the election, and the winner's response to a crisis doesn't necessarily reflect what they said during the campaign. Bush was famously against "nation-building" until circumstances talked him into 2 prolonged attempts at it, if I had thought there would be a 9/11 and I had a more isolationist bent, Bush would've seemed like a great choice on election day 2000. Both his primary opponent and his general election opponent had been supporters of US involvement in the Balkans, and he'd criticized it. And conversely, if you had cared about foreign humanitarian aid, you probably would've voted for Gore who had written a book about environmental threats across the globe.
Yeah, predicting actual performance is hard to say the least, and it would be great if we could be a little more humble in our predictions about what candidates will do as president.
As far as Trump being a normie goes, I hope you're right, but stuff like Jan. 6 still gives me more than a little pause. In my mind, that alone should easily make him unelectable, but the electorate apparently doesn't agree with me.
I annoyed some people over here by calling the 2022 Swedish election unusually unimportant. With the party configuration as it is, the options were a moderate center-right government or a moderate centre-left government.
That said, American democracy is clearly on the line here, which is not usually the case. Electing Romney would have meant four years of Romney. Electing Trump might mean anything - he already attempted one coup, after all.
Trump, like the baby with the xylophone, has neither the ability nor the intent, nor even the ability to FORM the intent, for something like that. He wanted Mike Pence not to certify the election... ok? And what was gonna happen then? A few days later when there's still no more evidence, and nobody with the levers of actual power has rallied to Trump's side, what then? How is it a "coup" attempt without any ability to seize power? It's not 1804, a set of fake electors isn't going to fool anybody, you don't have to send an investigator down to Arizona by covered wagon to find out why you got two envelopes from down there.
That wasn't a coup attempt, it was a hissy fit by a toddler, that everyone knew was a hissy fit by a toddler, and nobody was ever going to give him any candy no matter how long he held his breath and his face turned red. The country wasn't in danger, democracy wasn't in danger, it was a big giant nothingburger, and to this day I am simply baffled beyond belief at how sheltered and naive and innocent all these poor little sensitive liberal arts grads in the media must be to think that THAT was what a coup attempt looks like.
Lack of power to make it so is a terrible reason to not consider it a possible coup attempt. The Beer Hall Putsch didn't have the means to take power either. There is a long list of silly coup attempts in history. I think Jan. 6's significance will remain a subject of debate, but dismissing it outright isn't credible, in my opinion.
>Every election since 2004 being called by one or both sides "the most important election of our lifetime" has turned into an extra long set-up of Boy Who Cried Wolf.
Agreed. (Maybe a fairly large fraction of the time before that as well?)
BTW, the private sector version of this is that at most (all?) of the annual all-hands state-of-the-company meetings that I've attended, the CEO said "This year is a turning point for our industry." or words to that effect. It would be much more believable if they only said that 1 year out of 5 and said "This year is business as usual." for the other 4.
I've always despised the narrative that people are responsible for how the lowest common denominator of the population interprets their statements. The whole deal with Sarah Palin and the crosshairs comes to mind. If someone is deranged enough to try and assassinate people they disagree with, the rhetoric around their target being dangerous is not the problem. It is not the burden of the rest of society to coddle their fragile minds.
The Gabby Giffords shooting immediately came to my mind. In that case, jumped to the conclusion that the shooter was motivated by the Palin ad, but in the end it turned out the shooter was a lunatic. It may be the case that the guy who tried to shoot Trump wasn't motivated by politics at all and was instead a delusional lunatic who thought Trump secretly implanted an alien parasite in his brain, or something.
But I still think it's worth taking this moment to discuss how people should talk about their political opponents, and that is what I was mostly trying to comment on in my post.
I disagree that all would-be assassins are necessarily deranged and that rhetoric has no impact. The possibility that your rhetoric could play a partial** role in motivating violent actions isn't a reason to be silent, but it is a reason to be honest. And if you were being dishonest, you should be criticized for it.
**I want to be clear that I am in no way equating words and actions or trying to reduce political violence down to a single, or even dominant, cause.
It's early days, so take this with a large pinch of salt, but I've read that the shooter had a reputation for being very conservative in high school, and was a registered Republican, but had also donated to Democrat political causes. IOW, it's quite possible he didn't really have a coherent political view, and his motivations were primarily apolitical (mental disorder, wanted to become famous, something like that).
All American presidential assassins, except for John Wilkes Booth, can be categorized into either lunatics or losers.
Lunatics: Charles J. Guiteau (Garfield), John Hinckley Jr (Reagan), John Schrank (Teddy Roosevelt), Richard Lawrence (Jackson), Samuel Byck (Nixon),
Losers: Leon Czolgosz (McKinley), Lee Harvey Oswald (JFK), Arthur Bremer (Nixon), Giuseppe Zangara (FDR), Squeaky Fromme (Ford), Sara Jane Moore (Ford).
The losers have a better track record of success, which I suppose shouldn't be surprising to anyone.
We had a two-year deep investigation into Trump as Russian agent that...does not look very good in retrospect. We've had multiple impeachments. We had the entire January 6th issue which...has not proven terribly persuasive to voters. We've had multiple legal prosecutions and one conviction on a financial crime no one really cares about. I mean, rhetoric is a thing but Democrats have consistently acted like Trump is a would-be fascist in multiple situations with clear legal and law enforcement consequences.
As far as I can tell, most Democrats sincerely want Trump imprisoned or dead because they think he's trying to destroy democracy in America. They just want it done through official channels, not an assassin's bullet. I mean, I get being concerned about rhetoric but...Trump got convicted a month ago. Changes to rhetoric won't make a difference when the actions are this loud.
>So you agree it's a crime. Do you not believe in the rule of law?
"“Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed? We want them broken. You’d better get it straight that it’s not a bunch of boy scouts you’re up against. We’re after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you’d better get wise to it. There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted—and you create a nation of lawbreakers—and then you cash in on guilt. Now that’s the system, Mr. Rearden, that’s the game, and once you understand it, you’ll be much easier to deal with.”
- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Is that the "Rule of Law" you want us to believe in?
Because the only thing that stops the contemporary United States of America of having that sort of mockery of "Rule of Law", is a well established policy about not enforcing the law 95+% of the time and in a reasonably understood manner. And the things Trump has been convicted of, have until recently been solidly in that 95%.
It's the white-collar equivalent of locking someone up for jaywalking. And when some county sheriff locks up the local opposition candidate or muckracking journalist for jaywalking, the proper response isn't "He should have used the crosswalk, Yay Rule of Law!", it's making sure you have an adequate supply of torches and pitchforks.
There's a very, *very* short list of politicians that I'd vote for Donald Trump over. But Alvin Bragg is one of them, if we imagine them running for the same office. And for that matter, so is anyone who could only win the presidency over Trump's literal dead body. We don't select our leaders by assassination, and we don't choose them by selective prosecution either.
I do, which is why, like all Democrats deeply concerned about the rule of law, I demand Bill Clinton be convicted for perjury, Joe Biden be investigated for raping Tara Reade, and both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden face civil suits for improper handling of classified documents.
Wait, it’s almost like Democrats aren’t actually deeply concerned about the rule of law.
Maybe it’s that we have norms in addition to laws and one of the norms is “don’t prosecute your political opponents for stupid BS, even if it is technically against the law.”
Democrats have allowed their hatred for Trump to blind them to this. And it will cost them electorally.
I very much believe in the rule of law, which is why it drives me up the wall to see it abused. "Let's fire sixty cases at a political rival so our side can look good" is not law, it's brigandage.
They tried getting him on fraud charges, where even the banks alleged to have been cheated by the fake mortgage application never bothered bringing a case, and banks are not famous for their merciful attitude towards letting money owed to them go.
So we got the campaign finances charge, which I still don't understand, because it seems to be "we're charging you with paying hush money - which is fine, or must be fine, because we're not going after Stormy Daniels for blackmailing you - out of the wrong bank account. See, if you just put it down as a legitimate campaign expense, it would have been fine - unless you had done that, then we would be charging you for doing that".
Get the guy for something serious, not "this is ordinarily a misdemeanour but we're going to inflate it to a felony, but we're also not going to go after the other political campaigns which have played fast and loose with campaign finance laws".
I'm not a lawyer, nor did I follow the hush money prosecution super closely, but from what I heard from sources I generally trust, I'm not sure that Trump actually did commit a felony. Being convicted of one and committing one are two separate things.
My understanding is that what Trump did would normally be misdemeanors, but because they were done to cover up another crime, they got elevated to felonies. But the NY DA didn't even specify the underlying crime in advance, which seems sketchy as hell. And once he did, it wasn't a violation of NY state law, it was a violation of federal campaign finance law. And not only that, but the feds declined to prosecute Trump for it. And *then*, the NY DA used some other legal tricks to come up with 35 separate convictions for what was really one underlying offense.
I dunno, that all just seems very...dubious to me. I'm not at all convinced that the convictions would survive appeal. But let's be honest, the point was never to come up with a case that would actually send Trump to jail, the point was to damage him politically. Ironically, but somewhat predictably, it had the opposite effect.
Like I said, I'm not an expert here, so if anything I said was wrong please correct me.
Well he can appeal it and if it’s bogus he will win out, because our legal system isn’t that screwed up. The thing is we in New York City really hate him because we’ve had him around for a while.
Kinda no. Like, I know this isn't asked in good faith but...I feel like our democracy isn't healthy enough for firm rule of law right now.
In retrospect, investigating the Hillary servers in 2015 was a big mistake. I think it's unambiguous that Hillary broke the law but the end result was a massive escalation of lawfare against Trump, epitomized by the fact that ongoing intelligence investigations by the CIA and FBI were central to the 2016 and 2020 elections which is just....extremely bad, no matter where you stand. Having a firm rule of law kinda requires healthy institutions and trust.
Like, when Xi Jinping iced Bo Xilai in China...I'm sure Bo Xilai was corrupt but that's not why he got iced, that was an excuse for political persecution. Firm rule of law requires everyone to trust that the law is being applied fairly...which no one does at this point.
So...abandon it, at least in the firm case for leading politicians. If there's no way to prosecute a major politician on either side without half the country going into revolt...maybe don't prosecute them. Just as a practical matter.
Because, I mean, you caught Trump on a minor financial crime. This is Washington DC. Do you really think the overwhelming majority of politicians haven't committed any crimes, especially given especially broad definitions of crimes? Can and should Trump convict any Democrat he can? That seems...bad.
My beef with Hillary about those damn servers is not so much breaking the law, it's that any of us who have worked in any kind of public service job - or hell, even private business - know damn well we would have been crucified if we did anything remotely similar with work data and the whole regime of security and confidentiality and privacy we are obliged to work under.
The big freakin' boss of an entire government department just pissing all over the basic procedures the greenest Grade III newbie would have hammered into them was not a good look for someone campaigning on "I'm so experienced and such a great public servant".
I didn't want her up in court, I did want her to get hit with the same penalties as any other civil/public servant who screwed around with work data would have been hit.
Let's not forget Anthony bloody Weiner using his wife's laptop for his sexting, the same laptop she was using for work-related emails, which is what kicked off the entire re-opening of the FBI investigation in the first place. Fudge me, if I did anything like that, I would have been *slaughtered* in the job when I was working in a public service/local government role.
"On September 21, 2016, the Daily Mail published an article claiming that Weiner had engaged in sexting with a 15-year-old girl. It's not known how the Daily Mail learned of this incident as in the Daily Mail article the girl's father says he did not contact the police and this article was used as reason for the FBI and NYPD to begin investigating Weiner. Devices owned by Weiner and Abedin were seized as part of the investigation into this incident. Emails pertinent to the Hillary Clinton email controversy were discovered on Weiner's laptop, prompting FBI Director James Comey to reopen that investigation late into the 2016 US presidential election. Hillary Clinton has cited Comey's decision as one reason why she lost the election to Donald Trump."
These are the people that were Hillary's closest confidants, or at least Huma was, and this was the level of faffing around they were doing. You remember, the people telling us they were the adults in the room and should be trusted with the power to make war if elected?
What is your opinion of the prosecution of Hunter Biden?
"Do you really think the overwhelming majority of politicians haven't committed any crimes, especially given especially broad definitions of crimes? Can and should Trump convict any Democrat he can?"
I think people, especially politicians, should be investigated and prosecuted for crimes they commit. Regardless of their political affiliation.
At least two democrat representatives are under investigation right now for financial crimes. I don't see any evidence that Biden is looking to pardon them (though he is well within his rights to. However Trump pardoned multiple political cronies for crimes they were convicted of.
My point in responding to your comment is that your imply the Trump investigations are only politically motivated and not occurring because the prosecutors and grand juries (where relevant) believe they have evidence of a crime. But Biden has basically no history of using his political power against his opponents or to benefit his allies; yet Trump does. So if we are worried about using political power against our political opponents, there is a lot more evidence that Trump will do that (including his own statements that he wants to). I dislike both Biden and Trump, but ones seems eager to commit crimes and disregard any rules that he doesn't like.
Probably a bad idea to prosecute Hunter. I mean, I know what would happen to me if I was on tape smoking crack but...throwing the immediate family of presidents into jail requires a bit more political stability than we have. Best of my understanding, Hunter isn't going to jail and that's probably for the best.
But, as for political prosecution, Hillary Clinton for the email scandal and Joe Biden for document retention were investigated by the FBI but no charges were filed because, explicitly in both cases, the people in charge exercised their discretion. Right now, that's probably for the best...but that same discretion must be extended to Trump. It would be a phenomenally bad idea for Trump to instruct the FBI to reopen and pursue the document case against Biden...but Trump beat his lawsuit fair and square. Biden didn't.
And, all things considered, these are minor. The FBI has been forced to publicly apologize for wiretapping Trump tower during the 2016 election and lying, sorry, "misleading" the FISA court in order to do so. Has the FBI ever lied to a federal judge in order to wiretap a Democratic presidential nominee and then publicize harmful information during and after the election? (1) Can you understand why Republicans might be skeptical of the decisions of law enforcement agencies to pursue one party and exercise discretion for another?
Hunter got prosecuted on gun charges, didn't he? Given that he's a known druggie and, eh, enjoyer of the companionship of ladies of negotiable affection and that alleged images of his private parts were all over the Internet, plus there's a current story about his illegitimate kid with another lady of negotiable affection where the mother is plainly trying to lever more money out of the family, on balance I think "yeah, good call".
"After falling in love with the east coast on a school trip, Ms Roberts moved to Washington DC to study crime scene investigation after abandoning her basketball career.
She met Hunter in late 2016 when she and a friend were invited to an after party at his Rosemont Seneca office in the Swedish Embassy.
The former vice president’s son was smoking crack in a pair of boxers covered in parrots. The pair embarked on a yearlong entanglement during which Ms Roberts claims they both professed their love to one another, although she says now he may not have meant it.
In her memoir, Out of the Shadows, which will be released next month, Ms Roberts, 33, details everything from watching Hunter dance on a pole in the gentlemen’s club where she worked, to whisking her off to his father’s Virginia home with his sister-in-law turned girlfriend Hallie Biden – and then there was the time he scarred her by dropping a crack pipe on her chest."
Hunter may not have meant his pledges of undying true love? Say it's not so! Do not disillusion me that romance is dead!
Though hang on, what the heck was Hunter doing in the Swedish Embassy? Are rents so high in DC even the embassies are having to rent out rooms?
>Firm rule of law requires everyone to trust that the law is being applied fairly...which no one does at this point.
Very much agreed. Weirdly, my impression is that, in a nutshell, Trump threatened to weaponize the justice system, "Lock her up!", while the left actually did weaponize it.
"At the federal level, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) bans the interstate sale or distribution of raw milk. All milk sold across state lines must be pasteurized and meet the standards of the US Pasteurized Milk Ordinance.
According to U.S. Federal Regulation 21 CFR § 1240.61, “No person shall cause to be delivered into interstate commerce or shall sell, otherwise distribute, or hold for sale or other distribution after shipment in interstate commerce any milk or milk product in final package form for direct human consumption unless the product has been pasteurized.”
Maybe the charges were dropped because there wasn't enough evidence to get a prosecution? Or if people take a plea that doesn't result in a felony conviction, which is common, that still a punishment and could be disastrous for someone's life. I dont think these events are good evidence of our nations reverence for the rule of law.
It will be appealed and will likely end up in the SC which is a fine outcome for Trump because the clock will run out. Thomas sent the memo, if you know what I mean. I don’t think a majority of the SC will agree with him if and when the time comes. John Durham was appointed by William Barr in precisely the same way, so this argument is a slim reed in my opinion.
I have to say, I am surprised at how many people here believe this is all political persecution
The classified documents case looks like it plausibly could be a real case, though I think it's a bad idea to actually put high-level political leadership in jail for misuse of classified documents other than selling them to the Chinese or something. (We don't want the political leadership of every security agency to be afraid if they cross the bureaucracy, they can be sent to prison once their guy is out of office.)
The other three cases against Trump seem to me obvious politically-motivated prosecutions.
I think these cases are pretty damaging to the Democrats' message that Trump is a danger to democracy. I mean, Trump tried to keep power after losing an election and lied to the world about the election being stolen, so he is a legit danger to democracy. But trying to put the opposition leader in jail on bullshit charges is also a danger to democracy. When the story was "Republicans try to play sketchy legal games to keep power despite whatever the voters may want," that was a good reason to vote against Trump. When the story is "both parties try to play sketchy legal games to keep power despite whatever the voters may want," it's not much of an argument to vote for Biden.
>When the story is "both parties try to play sketchy legal games to keep power despite whatever the voters may want," it's not much of an argument to vote for Biden.
Seconded. And there was also an attempt by the left (but, in fairness, opposed by some Democrats) to keep Trump off the primary ballots in two states. I don't trust _either_ the right _or_ the left to honor the lowest level feature of a democracy, that _voters_ decide who holds offices.
Well, it's a tiny bit convenient that all these cases just suddenly dropped at the time when he was going forward for a second run, on top of places trying to make it illegal for voters to vote for their choice of guy by not allowing his name on ballots.
Begins to look a little bit like political persecution. Though I am vastly amused by the "HE IS A CONVICTED FELON!" blustering on social media, it's a bit grasping at straws.
I am sure that there are lots of memes; that is part of the problem.
The convenience nostrum has a problem; the crimes he is accused of were allegedly committed right at the end and just after his first term. They did not just "suddenly drop." When would it have been more convenient to investigate these things? The National Archive tried for the better part of a year to get those papers back from him while he gave them the run around. What were they supposed to do? Just say "Screw it, let him keep them. He's Donald Trump and he was sent by God to save us."
2. It took a while to break the cone of silence around the events of Jan 6th. If Pence had not bailed on him he might well have gotten away with it. The proposition that he did not do anything wrong boggles my mind.
John Dunham was appointed by Bill Barr to investigate "Russia-gate" in precisely the same way Jack Smith was appointed. Thomas is like his own private Idaho.
This is "fascist" not in the political science meaning of that term, but in the more common internet meaning of "someone I disagree with about politics."
The classified documents case didn't even get to the merits, Cannon threw it out on the theory that the special counsel was improperly appointed, which is fishy. If the actual evidence against Trump got to be presented in court, it would look pretty bad. But probably wouldn't change many voter's minds.
I basically agree with this - I'd add a couple of points:
- when people say (in reaction to this or other events) "everyone needs to tone down the rhetoric", 99% of the time they really mean that *other* people should tone it down but they have no intention to do the same. A cynical explanation is that they think amped-up rhetoric is effective and they want to kneecap the "other side"
- I am against *calls to political violence* specifically, but "tone down the rhetoric" is too vague. Especially if it means "something that might inspire someone to commit violence". By that standard, people on the right saying "tone down the rhetoric", who are saying in the same breath that Biden is responsible for this (e.g. by calling trump a threat to democracy) are themselves guilty, because "Biden is responsible for this" is also something that might inspire someone to commit violence!
- Trump once retweeted something saying "the only good democrat is a dead democrat", made fun of Paul Pelosi, called for people to attack protesters at his rallies and he'd pay their legal bills, thinks the January 6 people are heroes, repeatedly has called for people he doesn't like to be tried for treason ...
- I believe trump is a threat to democracy. I'll just note that this was a very common view after January 6, for which trump is totally unapologetic, and the only thing that has really changed is that time has passed and we all become habituated to once-unthinkable events.
- I don't think Trump is Hitler. But ... if tomorrow I uncovered Trump's secret plan to be like Hitler ... obviously I would say so!
This apparently is out of context. No one was calling for anyone's death. The original person was saying democrats are "politically dead", whatever that means.
If you're going to take any sort of stance against "harsh rhetoric" then I think you have to be against this sort of thing as well - walking right up to the line, wink-wink-nudge-nudge, and trying to give yourself plausible deniability.
If Chuck Schumer said a week ago "President Trump should be KILLED!!!!! ... you know, at the polls", you better believe people would be making hay about it!
Now maybe this guy just got rhetorically out over his skis in the moment, and then realized it and tried to dial it back ... but I doubt it given your link also says he's called for Democratic lawmakers to be executed for treason. Seems like it's a habit of his.
And either way that doesn't excuse Trump's retweet!
Biden said, “I have one job, and that’s to beat Donald Trump. I’m absolutely certain I’m the best person to be able to do that. So, we’re done talking about the debate. It’s time to put Trump in a bullseye."
Rhetoric is just words. Some may interpret what Biden said as dangerous, but I consider that interpretation to be dumb and faulty. If Chuck Schumer said Trump should be killed...at the polls, then it's kind of tasteless, but no one ought to claim Schumer was saying (hint, hint) that Trump should actually be killed.
Further, Trump RETWEETED the comment. Is retweeting the same as originating the comment? Even if it is, Trump would have meant it in a physically harmless context. Everything Trump says is hyperbole*.
Bullseye thing seems clearly less violent than "the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat" - "bullseye" has a lot of non-violent meanings, but "the only good X is a dead X" in my experience usually really does mean killing.
I think the ur-example is "the only good Indian is a dead Indian", allegedly said by Philip Sheridan who really did take part in wars of brutality against Native Americans, and was understood by everyone literally. He denied saying it, which I think shows how extreme people saw it even back then.
"Further, Trump RETWEETED the comment"
It looks like the retweeted tweet is now deleted so it's hard to tell, but IMO that makes it worse. Like I said before - people can get rhetorically heated in the moment and dial it back (seems like that might've happened here), and can have more context, but retweeting you don't have that excuse, and often the context isn't there you're just retweeting that bad thing.
The alleged shooter Thomas Crooks was a registered (and actual) Republican and wore a T-Shirt from 2nd amendment absolutist youtuber "Demolition Ranch" , i.e. a gun nut and leader of a network of gun nut influencers. More to the point, Trump himself joked (?) that he would be "dictator for a day" on reassuming office. So where do you draw the line between Trump and his opponents? Because Democrats alone on the other side wouldn't cut it.
I haven't seen reporting on him being an "actual" Republican. But being registered as a Republican isn't in-and-of-itself all that odd. Pennsylvania has closed primary elections, meaning you have to be registered with the political party whose primary you are voting in. Some people register just so they can vote for or against a particular primary candidate with no intention of voting for that person in a general election.
From what I hear, every major elected official in Butler County PA is Republican. I've lived in single-party counties like that in the exurbs and rural counties, you always vote in the primary that matters for local elections. The voter registration probably has nothing to do with national politics.
For example, Kentucky is full of registered Democrats voting for Republican federal candidates, because for decades local politics were controlled by Dems, all the local officeholders were Dems, and regardless of your national-issue politics no person who was serious and actually wanted to hold a local office would run as a Republican. The Dem primary is where the local elections are decided, and then you vote for whoever for President and Senator in November.
It appears this was a Republican one-party county, their DA said it was about 65/35, so duh of course you register Republican. Also, if you're insecure and bullied and such, you might do it to try and fit in. Or if you have some secret shame you aren't open about, and just want to look like you're outwardly conforming to the most common beliefs in your community, great for that too.
Sure, it's all circumstantial speculation at this point. The picture I'm getting though is that of an ultra-liberal gun nut who took the 2nd ammendment seriously in one of its original intentions: To defend the country from political tyranny which he recognized in Trump. If he supported the Republican party, then because they're the pro-gun party. If he donated to ActBlue as reported, then because the Democrats they support represent liberal values better than the Republicans, on the whole.
We are all products of bias. The picture I'm getting is of a far-right gun nut who either:
1) decided Trump wasn't far-right enough on issues like abortion
2) was suicidal and simply saw an opportunity for suicide by SS squad while he could also prove his increased marksmanship to the highschool shooting team that rejected him because Trump happened to come right to his small town
I think 2 is most likely. That the shooter didn't have to travel at all to make his assassination attempt leads me to believe he wouldn't have bothered if the rally hadn't been nearby. His familiarity with the territory can explain why he knew he could get on the roof. Perhaps he would have shot up something else locally if the rally hadn't come to town.
(1) Strikes me as very unlikely -- even if he thinks Trump isn't sufficiently anti-abortion (which lots of people do), it's hard to think of any plausible alternative candidates who'd be notable firmer on the issue, so shooting him wouldn't achieve much.
I keep reading Democrats claim the ActBlue donation was made by a different, much older person with the same name, which seems plausible given the only way anyone would know that such a donation was made is to search for his name on a list. The shooter was 17 when the donation was made and it's pretty rare for 17-year-olds to make political donations. But who knows.
It would be unusual for a *randomly selected* 17 year old to be politically interested enough to make a donation with his allowance, sure. But a 17 year old who would come to attempt political murder 3 years later?
I find it hard to believe someone couldn't join a gun club because he is a bad shot. He would be accepted to improve his skills, in that case. Maybe he wouldn't be allowed to join if he is unsafe?
He didn't make his high-school shooting team, but he was recently a member of a gun club, the head of which has made public statements condemning his actions. (According to what I read somewhere, which could of course, like anything else, be a fabrication.)
I mean yeah, the USA cherish quite a few gun-related traditions, and I'm sure their connoiseurs would be more qualified than I to correctly categorize this particular act. Still, I believe "young white man showing his bullies who's the real alpha male" lies typically in the domain of shool/office/mall mass shootings, not assassinations of high-ranking political figures.
Though I will also accept the plot twist that the shooter didn't actually fail to kill his intended target.
The shooter also apparently donated $15 to a leftist PAC in the last election, which is very strange on two levels. One, what kind of 17 year old teenager donates money to politicians? And why would anyone bother to donate a measly sum like $15? I expect the investigation will reveal that the guy was very weird.
1. Republican who lost a bet and had to donate to $15 because Biden actually got sworn in or something.
2. Democrat who registered cross-party to vote against Trump in primary.
3. Something else
Everything so far feels like "school shooter who got a chance at something bigger."
My big question is how he figured out he *could* show up at this event and find a building. Do people regularly try to get on buildings for sight advantage and he found a crack? Did someone blab about the security situation and he overheard? Did he just show up at random and got lucky?
An ex-first-lady once came to an event at a place where I worked. A fundraiser, I think. (I didn’t actually attend.) We had it looking its best of course. The SS came a day or two before and covered all the windows with paper, which didn’t look very nice.
He was a local so he likely knew there were flat-roof buildings around.
Which also points to an interesting thing - only a complete amateur could have pulled this off. What professional would plan to just climb a flat-roof shed within a convenient shooting distance/position? This would "obviously" be covered by the very Secret total Service super-competent security people, right? right???
But the amateur just sees a convenient building, climbs it, and only a last-second head turn by Trump denies the success.
Oh it's again the luck of an amateur. Nobody bothered to check/monitor The! Police! Staging! Ground! because who in the right mind would chose that as the shooting position. But Crooks didn't know it was The PSG, so he just went there.
Don't get me wrong, I think this was a massive security lapse, it's just that a pro would not count on one in the planning.
Yeah, it seems inconceivable that there is an unsecured rooftop that close to the event. 130 yards is nothing in terms of shooting, and Trump is very lucky to still be alive. I expect ex-Presidents get less protection than active ones, but it still seems inexcusable. For reference, I talked to a guy who was in the Secret Service during Bush Sr. - Clinton, and he told me 1000 yard security perimeters were common.
There is video on Reddit showing random bystanders spotting him climbing up the roof and informing law enforcement. It looks like a colossal screw-up so far.
AP has a report of a local cop climbing up and then retreating once Crooks aimed a rifle at him, which (I guess) was just a few seconds before the shooting. I'd like to compare to what we've got on video.
It seems a lot of people knew there was a guy with a gun but there was no way to rapidly get this information to the Secret Service agents that could move Trump off-stage.
I believe I saw a Discord commenter posting an image (salt accordingly) that it was actually a different Thomas Crook, age 60-something, who made the donation, which would simplify the partisan affiliation side of things. Doesn't much affect the overall conclusion of "shooter was random crazy idiot", though.
Thomas Matthew Crooks' father was "Matthew Crooks" and was apparently an active Democrat. I wonder, given that one has a middle name that's the same as the other's first name, if there's any potential for confusion between father and son.
The Democrats are not acting like they believe Trump will become a dictator. They're acting like Trump is an opportunity to move left. They've actively supported pro-Trump candidates since they think they'll be easier to beat and this gives them more space for a further left agenda.
This means one of two things. Option one: the Democrats are incompetent to the point they think promoting fascist politicians is a good way to combat fascism. Option two: the Democrats are lying and do not genuinely believe Trump is Hitler but think it's a useful narrative to get centrists on their side without making policy concessions. And I think it varies from person to person but that regardless they deserve a severe hit to reputation for it.
I also think is a better explanation for the progressives falling in line behind Biden than the conservative idea they're getting everything they want out of Biden. I think they have a higher proportion of people who think Trump is a literal fascist and they're genuinely acting like it. Which means supporting Biden or really anyone who's not Trump.
I think trump is to disconnected form reality to be anything in particular, but a lot of his dudes are fascist enough and the party that accreted around him is definitely ur-fascist enough that I would pick bidens rotten corpse over trump. Shit, I would take Romney over trump. If Dubbya is the only R in living memory I would not pick over trump.
So I'll go with the lukewarm neolib centrist legalistic asshole that the D's put forward; at least they won't make collective bargaining or miscegenation illegal or some shit.
Yeah. See, even where I disagree I respect that you and people like you are not lying. I do think that (eg) Schumer and Biden are lying because they are not acting like people who believe what you do. Because if they did then what you're saying (more or less) is the logical response. Likewise if I thought there was a real chance of Stalin getting into power I'd vote for AOC or whoever over them.
If you really think Le Pen is Hitler (or whatever equivalent) then the French Communists dutifully marching behind Macron is the correct response. Anything less and I don't think you're serious. (Though I also don't fault them for negotiating the concessions they did. I don't demand they suspend politics. Just that they treat it like they're fighting Hitler and are willing to compromise to keep him out of office.)
ETA: I also think anyone who thinks voting in an election or engaging in democratic politics has no effect is fundamentally unserious. Which disqualifies segments of the DSA and Twitter left though not AOC herself.
Heck, I'd even take *Mike Pence* over Trump! I disagree with Pence about basically everything political, but at least he won't try to overthrow the government.
The Democrats aren't even replacing their obviously unpopular candidate in Biden. Some who prioritize winning elections are, but plenty of them don't seem to have that priority.
If they go after Biden and fail their career is over.
To which I'd ask the same question of the various Republicans who didn't want their own careers destroyed by stopping Trump: so what? Surely you can do something after politics.
In another context, that would be called "victim blaming". 'Oh, so you're saying that because she wore that sexy dress, she deserved to be raped?"
Not that you're the only one; on a radio show this morning in my own country they had two American people on to talk about the assassination attempt (I think one was FBI or ex-FBI, I wasn't listening that closely), and the professor lady went full-on "well if he didn't want to be shot he shouldn't have made us shoot him".
What about the people at the rally who got shot? It's their fault for being Trump supporters?
I think this is the ultimate end of the "punch a Nazi" rhetoric that has been going around for a few years now.
Yeah. Progressivism/wokeness is collapsing under the weight of its own moral nihilism. Maybe God really did save Trump, insofar as He interests Himself in human affairs
You don’t think so? Far right parties are gaining across Europe, DEI bureaucracies are being abolished in red states across the US. In my country (Australia) a proposal to give the Indigenous extra rights (the Voice) was demolished at the polls 60-40 last year.
I'm not saying there have been no victories, and they're well worth celebrating, but the long defeat continues.
The Australian referendum was certainly a victory, as are the anti-DEI measures in Texas and Florida (the most prominent of the "red states"), but I think you're overstating the "far right" gains in Europe: I'm not convinced the parties called that are really all that far to the right, that their gains in the polls will translate to actual wins (it didn't in France, where it seemed most likely), and further, if the deep state in Europe in anywhere near as entrenched as it is in America, electoral victories won't matter all that much.
"My take -- we absolutely do *not* want to legally prevent people from calling their political opponents dictators-in-waiting, or claiming that democracy hangs in the balance
...
If those of Trump's opponents that were using that kind of language prior to Saturday really believed it, they should continue to say it"
I agree and will make a stronger statement. If they really believe that Trump is or will be a new Hitler then they should applaud the shooter and call for more. And maybe be willing to try themselves. Because Hitler was that bad. Germany (and Europe) would have been better off even having a civil war in the early 1930s than it was after holding WW2.
No one will ever again be a new Hitler. No two dictators are the same.
If you believe someone to be capable of becoming an evil dictator of some sort, to be moral you must first wait until that person exhibits signs of evil dictatorship enough that it is morally correct to kill them. Good luck with that. "Evil dictators" have the support of enough of the populace that they can maintain power, until they get overthrown. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Saying Trump will try to be an authoritarian or a dictator is not the same as saying he will be like Hitler.
Just as a practical matter, applauding political violence puts a target on the backs of all politicians. So if some Democrat said, Trump should be assassinated, that’s like inviting the other side to come shoot at him.
It's possible that people believe the risk of Trump becoming a second Hitler is high enough to say so loudly, while still harboring enough doubt that they don't want to engage in preemptive violence.
Oh my, the hubris of it all. You have no idea which future will be better, and by what right do you take away the choice from the millions of people who support him and want to vote for him. Violence is very rarely the right option.
If the choice of those millions only affected them, sure, then I'd agree you have no moral right to interfere. But if it DOES, by raising your taxes, taking your guns, inhibiting your ability to "women's health" your babies, deporting/jailing your friends, etc., I hold that to be a pretty solid basis for a right to try to stop them.
Such an attempt is highly unlikely to succeed, and basically guaranteed to end in one's death. I would strongly advise against it on practical grounds. On MORAL grounds, … call it "undemocratic" if you like, but I don't believe that majorities have a right to infringe on individual liberties, and thwarting attempts to do so is the right of free men.
Wow, I'm as libertarian as the next guy. But going around saying that trying to kill people is OK. No! Your rights end where your fist hits my face. And a bullet to the head is much more than a fist to the face. Again I say No! Not in my America. But you get to vote here too.
I think that's wrong for a lot of reasons, the main one being that not every wannabe-dictator actually succeeds and murders millions of people. "I am very afraid of what this person might do" is not a great reason for preemptive violence.
If a hypothetical future US President actually started doing terrible things and there was nothing stopping him, then you would have a better argument for justified violence. Otherwise anybody's fears will get somebody killed.
Thing is, we've had Trump in power already. It's not like "who is this guy called Adolf and why does he want political office?", we know what Trump is like as president.
Yes, there's a lot of scare-mongering about Project 2025! I think it's about as realistic as scare-mongering about "if the Democrats get elected they'll institute socialism, because look at the DSA manifesto!"
We don’t know what he’s like with fanatically loyal appointees. 40 of his senior advisors and cabinet secretaries, including his own vice president, have said they will not vote for him. Don’t you think that information matters?
The January 6 plot was foiled in part because the acting Attorney General refused to go along with his desire for them to say the election was fraudulent. He wanted to fire him and elevate a loyalist (who had already drafted a letter to that effect), but several senior DOJ attorneys said they would resign if he did that. This time around he will not have those obstacles standing in his way.
Was the DSA manifesto written primarily by former (or current) Democratic White House staff?
It's possible Trump is telling the truth when he says he has no idea who's behind Project 2025, but if so that says some very unflattering things about the current state of his brain since most of those people worked in his administration.
Trump's never been much of a policy guy, and he certainly hasn't gotten any sharper as he's gotten older, but if he's reelected *somebody* is going to be making policy in his administration, and even if he doesn't end up hiring the exact Project 2025 people again it tells us a lot about the kind of people he hires.
Including his current press secretary and former director of personnel. They’ve already said the Project 2025 leadership will be merge with Trump’s transition team in August.
I tried to be as specific as I could about believing that "Trump is or will be a new Hitler" rather than just a generic/vanilla dictator.
I think that people who believe that Trump will be (or is) a new dictator should continue to say that. And I believe that people who believe that Trump is another Hitler should say *that*. And I believe that people who think that Trump is another Hitler should be actively cheering on his assassination and doing what they can to achieve it. I find it inconsistent to believe that Trump is Hitler and also, given how bad Hitler was, be in favor of leaving him alive.
I see where you're coming from, but I think there are a lot more downsides to endorsing political violence than to people having inconsistent rhetoric.
Trump is *NOT* Hitler, nor does he have any chance to become a dictator. IMHO those who think like this need to be talked of the ledge... Trump is most likely going to be prez. again, and we will all be fine.
Mark was engaging in hypotheticals. He wasn’t saying that Trump is a new Hitler but that the people who believe it should in fact act on it. The Stephen king novel The Dead Zone is about a guy who sees the future (legitimately as it’s a King movie) and has to stop a populist getting elected, a man who would bring nuclear Armageddon if elected. At no time in the novel are we encouraged to believe he’s the bad guy.
And of course not, ending one life rather than millions is moral.
Anyway I don’t think Trump is a dictator in waiting but if people do think that then assassination becomes morally viable. Not that anybody is clairvoyant. It’s basically the trolley.
So back to the rhetoric - I wouldn’t ban that kind of speech but on the other hand maybe journalists should be careful.
Your company manufactures trolleys. You foresee someday one of the trolleys going out of control, and either killing one person or five people, depending on which track it's on.
So you should prevent your company from making any more trolleys?
A lot of the comments on the homelessness post are a bit disturbing to me. Either lots of people are sloppily mixing up "homeless people", "mentally ill homeless people" and "homeless people (whether mentally ill or not) who commit crimes"...or a lot of people want to see one or both of the first two categories somehow locked up? Maybe I'm misunderstanding but that's what a lot of the comments seem to say.
If it is the latter...what the hell? If someone is homeless then that's not anyone else's business, right, if you're a capitalist? If someone wants/needs to sleep on public land...uh, I kind of thought that in a free country public land is the property of *everyone*, not of the government? The hostility to the homeless, *not* along the lines of "the government doesn't owe you a free house" but more "the government should *force* you to get a house or lock you up" is frankly terrifying. Where have all the libertarians on this blog gone?
As a conservative who wants to see laws consistently enforced and crimes consistently punished, I can't stand people dealing with dangerous homeless people *not* by saying "punish crimes consistently" but by saying something to the effect of "lock up the mentally ill homeless, criminal or not". Even if you don't care about liberty for its own sake (which you obviously should), it also makes the worst advertisment possible for basic law-and-order conservatism.
Mentally ill people who have been properly determined to be a threat to themselves or others are *supposed* to be locked up - or their mental illness effectively treated, but Scott has already addressed the difficulty of doing that without locking them up in the process.
A rigorous taxonomy would allow for the possibility of people who are mentally ill enough to be unable to maintain housing but in a way that doesn't make them dangerous to others. I think that's an edge case, but OK, read "mentally ill homeless" as "threateningly mentally ill homeless" and dot the i's when you make that determination. Then lock them up, or find a way to effectively treat their mental illness without locking them up, or lock them up while looking for a way to treat their mental illness without keeping them locked up.
Probably don't lock them up in the same place that you lock the sane, evil criminals. But also don't put a city's worth of innocent people in danger because you feel bad about locking up dangerous people that you don't have any better options for.
I'm merely libertarian-adjacent, but... I think it's clear that the current approach is not working. That is, none of the currently politically acceptable approaches works. The central thrust of Scott's piece was that he didn't want people pointing out the problem with proposing a solution. Therefore, we got a lot of proposals that weren't politically acceptable for one reason or another.
In a vague sense, one of the foundations of libertarianism is that people have the right to be treated as rational actors who pursue their long-term interest. What happens when this obviously isn't true? Do we have ways to remove that right from them? Obviously we have some, but in practice they don't seem effective enough.
The other area I'd focus on is externalities. A small percentage of the homeless produce a massive amount of negative externalities for everyone around them. How should this be dealt with in a libertarian way?
"I think it's clear that the current approach is not working. "
It's important to define what you think the current approach is. Because i agree the current approach isn't working but there are a lot of things that people can define as the current approach.
"A small percentage of the homeless produce a massive amount of negative externalities for everyone around them. How should this be dealt with in a libertarian way?"
Depends what the externalities are. We (as a society) have a defined set of externalities that we have decided are not acceptable. Some are referred to as "misdemeanors" and usually result in fines. Others are "felonies" and usually result in jail time. I am not sure why we need to create new unacceptable externalities that only apply to a set of people we deem undesirable.
> It's important to define what you think the current approach is.
Actually, I go hard the other direction on this. The "current approach" is literally what we are doing right now. Verbal definitions are only useful insofar as they actually describe it. I could not possibly sum up all the various approaches in just my municipality in a Substack comment; I'm saying that the approaches themselves are empirically not good enough, because of what I see (and smell and hear) when I leave my home.
> I am not sure why we need to create new unacceptable externalities that only apply to a set of people we deem undesirable.
For the same reason we need to create laws about dumping pollution into rivers? There's a loophole, it gets exploited at scale, and now there's a new problem. If the current approach works, why is there a problem? Since you seem to think the current laws are sufficient, perhaps you think the problem lies in our failure to enforce them?
The "set of people we deem undesirable" is not really a category in my thinking here. It's more a set of behaviors, which tend to be symptoms of a few major problems, and so forth.
Homeless people in certain cities (San Francisco from all I keep hearing on social media from people I have no reason to doubt are from there lol) are constantly throwing rocks and feces at passerbies, making living in the city horrible. They should just be imprisoned or go to mental facilities, but for some reason DAs don't want to prosecute this type of crime.
>If it is the latter...what the hell? If someone is homeless then that's not anyone else's business, right, if you're a capitalist?
That doesn't follow at all. Homelessness produces many externalities and society has every reason to care about those. "Public land" is at the disposal of the government and the government does what society instructs it to do through the political process. If that process says "my desire to be free of eyesores and panhandlers outweighs your desire to camp on the street" then it becomes illegal. There's nothing anti-liberty or anti-law-and-order about that.
"Liberty" doesn't defend homelessness just as it doesn't defend me if I choose to drive through a neighborhood at 2am on a 500w loudspeaker. As the old saying goes, your right to swing your fist ends at the end of my nose. Many of our noses are tired of smelling the homeless encampments that we walk past every day on our way to work. I 100% endorse treating the homeless as criminals.
Your wording confuses me but I'll try to infer your meaning. Yes, the externalities someone exports to their environment change when they're homeless vs if they're not. For starters they sleep somewhere I potentially have to step over them.
If you have to step over someone because they are sitting on the sidewalk and refuse to move, is that the same externality?
My goal is only to understand if it's truly the externalities that are the problem or if the person doing the externalities plays a factor. I personally don't think a just society should change its rules based on the person committed the act. The act itself is what should matter.
No, it's obviously not the same. The homeless create all kind of negative externalities: they smell, they shit on the street, they panhandle, they yell aggressively at pedestrians, they start fires, they commit petty crimes, they break into empty buildings, and they're eyesores. Many of these acts are criminal in isolation and can be prosecuted just like any other crime.
Nothing about being anti-homeless requires abandoning a fair and impartial legal system. The only thing we care about are the criminal acts. However those acts are committed disproportionately by a particular class of person. It's therefore only rational to optimize a part of the justice system to deal effectively with that population, just like we have special legislation designed to deal with drug addicts.
This really drives home to me how sloppy people are being with their statements: your comment above says you endorse treating the homeless as criminals, which I find horrifyingly tyrannical, and this comment says you only care about zealously punishing criminal acts, which I 100% agree with. And you're speaking as though these two statements are the same!
So which is it: it's a crime to be homeless (wtf?) or being homeless gives you no right to get away with crimes (indisputably reasonable)? And more importantly, why do so many people seem to think the difference between these doesn't matter????
My take on the issue is that there are two very distinct groups of homeless. First are the temporary homeless who lost their jobs or had their husband leave them or whatever. These people need affordable housing and temporary shelters. The shelters should and could be easily funded within the budget constraints of large cities or states. Housing cost is best addressed through deregulation, which should be not just free but in the long run, revenue enhancing.
The real problem with homelessness though is the highly observable minority which set up tents wherever they please, and are obviously mentally challenged and/or under the influence. I see these people on a daily basis (at the beaches and parks of California), and they can easily be addressed by requiring them to go to the above mentioned shelters. Absent doing this they should be arrested if and when they violate the law (and it should be illegal to set up a tent on a commercial or residential sidewalk). Authorities should then decide what type of facility they should be sent to.
I do care about liberty. I also care about law and order and civil society. The key problem is not that housing has become more unaffordable, it is that the authorities of some cities have decided to allow panhandling, open drug use, camping wherever and petty crime. I can easily see this in my choice of which beach to surf at. Those beaches where authorities look the other way are overrun with poop-on-the-sidewalk derelicts. Those which don’t look the other way don’t have even a slight problem. And these jurisdictions are right next to each other.
The problem is solved by getting the political will to actually address it rather than fuel it. My question isn’t why are there more homeless, it is why are so many people electing authorities which actively feed the problem?
I found the comments on that thread very interesting. I certainly have libertarian leanings, and live in a rural area with cold winters, so I interact with approximately zero homeless people regularly. I assume a lot of people on this blog are leftists, and also live in densely urban areas with lots of homeless, like SF and NYC. And these were also, not coincidentally, the people calling for the harshest treatment of the homeless. Which I can't help but find ironic.
It's not that strange. As Colleen McCullough observed in The Thorn Birds:
“We all have contempt for whatever there's too many of. Out here it's sheep, but in the city it's people. Down in the city they don't know how the other half lives, and they can afford the luxury of doting on their animals as if they were children. Out here [in the Australian Outback] it's different. You'll never see man, woman or child in need of help go ignored out here, yet in the city those same people who dote on their pets will completely ignore a cry of help from a human being. ”
I mean, McCullough's characters were describing early 20th century cities of the Industrial Revolution, but I think the observation about "undesirable" people in general holds. City people in 2024 will indeed dote on their pets (and strays!) while studiously ignoring the guy delusionally screaming at nothing.
Street beggars? Well, the poor we will have with us always.
People who are mentally ill and/or on drugs, shitting in public in the streets, hassling people, and being aggressive if not actually violent? Gosh, why on earth do we stupid squares feel that it's our business to be able to walk down the street in public without the threat of someone undergoing a psychotic break stabbing us?
The locking up is involuntary commitment, for those who can't or don't want to stay on medication and who will otherwise be in a revolving door of "go crazy enough to be brought in by the cops, stay long enough in hospital to get stabilised, get released, go off meds, go crazy enough to be brought in by the cops". For those people, some kind of asylum would be better than living in a tent on the side of the street with the risk of disease, accident, and crime from other homeless/thrill killers.
It is not, and it should not be, "throw 'em in jail and forget about 'em".
If California took the billions of dollars set aside for the problem over the last few years and spent it on shelters, asylums and prisons (whichever are appropriate), then they would still have money left over fund a couple of miles of high speed rail to Bakersfield (or is it out of Bakersfield?).
We already forked over the money. The question is what did authorities do with that money?
Yep, see my previous comment on another thread about "let's take the getting up to one trillion dollars per year San Francisco is pumping into homelessness and do a trial version of the 'prison' asylum" 😀
What I want (all I want, I think) is a very clear non-negotiable condition of "convicted of/pled guilty to an actual offence" before any commitment, locking up, or mandatory medicating takes place. And that explicit precondition is *missing* from most of these comments and it's ambiguously missing from yours as well.
Shitting in the street, or threatening or harassing* someone, can be the "crime". As long as *having done that is proven*. Otherwise...um, we don't have freedom anymore. It's as simple as that.
If you do mean that, fine. Please just spell it out.
(*I'm very iffy on this--will it be defined in a way that doesn't include "maginalising my identity" or some shit? I'm not clear on whether "harrassment" is an actual crime in most places or not and even what it means.)
Yes, I'd be in favor of that, especially if there was some sort of evaluation that could funnel some people into a part of the system that was more about treating mental health disorders.
But realistically, how long will you lock someone up for shitting on the street? How much bureaucracy and processing will it require? Right now the answer seems to be "too much for it to be worthwhile", and so no one bothers. But that bureaucracy and processing is in place precisely to protect our rights, so reducing it is still movement in an anti-liberty direction.
I think if the person is legitimately mentally ill, has been in and out of hospital, has prescriptions for medication which they are not taking for whatever reason, and has been brought in yet again to the hospital by the cops becauxse they were walking naked in the middle of the street during rush hour, we can sorta kinda guesstimate they may have a teeny-weeny problem and might benefit from some involuntary commitment.
Not that I want to rush to judgement over crazy naked people nearly getting themselves and others killed, you understand.
I'm not trying to be annoying, but I still think you haven't answered my question. Do they need to have been formally found guilty of something for this to happen?
If not...I just don't know how you or anyone think this is acceptable. According to Scott it's "all vibes" whether someone gets "brought in". Do you not find that terrifying? What if someone is in a liberal area and "misgenders" someone and happens by chance to have an official mental illness and so can be "brought in" and involuntary committed by the progressive local cops? And there's no free speech violation, because no one said misgendering is a crime, just that it's an obvious sign of this person's "anti-social" mental illness?
This is a recipe for every kind of totalitarian tyranny, and the lack of pushback by people here to this proposal (and/or actual current state of affairs!!!) is utterly horrifying.
Well, I do appreciate you making the liberals the bad guys in this hypothetical, usually it's "those durn conservatives will lock up all the [women/minorities/gays] if this gets passed!"
"Do they need to have been formally found guilty of something for this to happen?"
Hmmm, interesting point. If I see someone lying in the street with their arm chopped off and bleeding out, I suppose I *could* call an ambulance, but then again, I'm not a medical professional of any kind and have no basis on which to formally assess what is going on. Maybe, for all I know, they are perfectly fine! Let's convene a panel of expert opinion before we do anything hasty like "get the bleeding person with the missing arm off the street and into a hospital for treatment" so we can formally find them guilty of needing medical attention.
Can you *please* stop with the fucking sarcasm and actually address my question in good faith? Or at least just say say you're not going to address it?
I keep explaining what bothers me, I give examples of why it's worrying, you thank me for the example but don't engage with it and just continue with the mocking sarcasm.
Incidentally, I find it odd but I guess unsurprising that despite most of my comments here being in a conservative direction I'm somehow coded as a leftist for suggesting that being homeless shouldn't be a crime. I guess a lot of conservatives operate on the exact same principle as the left does: "people's rights matter, but only when it's people I like".
I'm willing to gamble on how much space there is in an asylum for me if I accidentally misgender a trans person *after* all of the screaming-at-a-lamp-post-naked types have been safely contained there.
Panhandlers. That's what we used to call these folks, and that's who I want locked up (or fined out of existence). I don't want to get hounded for cash by sketchy people several times a day, every day. Is this really so unreasonable?
Note that these guys would need to suck off a couple city counselors before they could so much as get permission to open up a hotdog stand - but they're also allowed to loiter in front of businesses and harass *every single passerby - every day*
"right to attempt to survive" - listen to yourself. Half these people are junkies - the other half are obese. They're *parasites* who are nothing but a consistent public nuisance, and any reasonable society would not cede the commons to them.
So its not that they are panhandling that you have an issue with its that they are "parasites". You probably should just be upfront with that and not hide behind this panhandling fiction.
So why did you bring up that they may be junkies or be obese? And why did you call them parasites? If the harassment is what actually bothers you, that should be enough, t shouldn't matter who does it?
"Mentally ill homeless people", especially the sunset of those who have the kinds of mental illness that incline them to antisocial behavior, are disproportionately visible compared to the rest of the homeless population.
For one thing, they're far more likely to be unsheltered and visibly homeless and homeless for extended periods of time. IIRC, the large majority of people who experience homelessness are only unhoused for days or weeks at a time, and most homeless people at any given time have access to some kind of shelter (couch surfing, public or charity shelters, sleeping in a vehicle or at work, and some statistics count staying at a hotel or motel as homelessness if you don't have a permanent residence). If you're sleeping indoors and have access to facilities for bathing and laundry, then only people who know the details of your situation are likely to notice that you're homeless.
Another factor is that people notice and remember stuff that disturbs them a lot more than they remember any given random stranger. If someone is unhinged or criminal, that's going to stick in people's minds a lot more.
Yeah, we need to separate "poor people who are having a hard time keeping a fixed address" from "crazy people who can't care for themselves properly." The first group needs cheaper housing and shelters; the second group needs to be in an insane asylum.
The problem with "punishing crimes" is that it leaves a giant loophole for people who aggressively harass passerby every day but don't quite rise to the level of actual crime that carries a prison sentence (occasionally these are the same people who one day randomly shove people onto the subway tracks).
They prevent 100% of the recidivism that would have happened were the criminals not imprisoned. Rehabilitation has always been a fanciful goal of the justice system. It's nothing but wishful thinking. Crime is committed by bad people. By the time they reach the justice system they can't be helped, all you can do is try to keep them from doing damage. That's exactly why Three Strikes exists. It's an excellent policy.
I think it is already, at least in the form of catch-all misdemeanors like Disorderly Conduct or Disturbing the Peace. The problem is that protecting petty misdemeanors takes up a lot of resources for not a lot of direct payoff, so police and prosecutors often don't bother.
Arrests for disorderly conduct could be used as a way to shove people with untreated mental illness at some kind of health care or social services that can help manage their condition, but that's contingent on there being something useful to shove them at. Scott's post did a better job than I could of cataloging the shortcomings of the current system.
Im reading short stories by D.H. Lawrence for the first time. They’re really good! One way to characterize him is that he writes a lot of cultural anthropology about 1920s beta males and domineering matriarchs. I was surprised to find this topic in all the short stories. Anyone else ever read him? I’ve only read about 11 short stories so far.
"I was surprised to find this topic in all the short stories."
There is a *ton* of authorial self-insertion in Lawrence's works. You should check out the film adaptations of his works by Ken Russell who is, let's say, idiosyncratic:
12 % on Ukrainian victory (down from 14 % on February 12, 2024).
I define Ukrainian victory as either a) Ukrainian government gaining control of the territory it had not controlled before February 24 without losing any similarly important territory and without conceding that it will stop its attempts to join EU or NATO, b) Ukrainian government getting official ok from Russia to join EU or NATO without conceding any territory and without losing de facto control of any territory it had controlled before February 24 of 2022, or c) return to exact prewar status quo ante.
42 % on compromise solution that both sides might plausibly claim as a victory (unchanged from February 12, 2024).
46 % on Ukrainian defeat (up from 44 % on February 12, 2024).
I define Ukrainian defeat as Russia getting what it wants from Ukraine without giving any substantial concessions. Russia wants either a) Ukraine to stop claiming at least some of the territories that were before war claimed by Ukraine but de facto controlled by Russia or its proxies, or b) Russia or its proxies (old or new) to get more Ukrainian territory, de facto recognized by Ukraine in something resembling Minsk ceasefire(s)* or c) some form of guarantee that Ukraine will became neutral, which includes but is not limited to Ukraine not joining NATO. E.g. if Ukraine agrees to stay out of NATO without any other concessions to Russia, but gets mutual defense treaty with Poland and Turkey, that does NOT count as Ukrainian defeat.
Discussion:
This update is brought to you by, ugh, developments on the US political scene (pls DO NOT make comments below your designated place to argue about those, thanks). It is imho evident that current events increase Trump’s chances of return to the White House and also that Trump’s return would be bad news for Ukraine.
* Minsk ceasefire or ceasefires (first agreement did not work, it was amended by second and since then it worked somewhat better) constituted, among other things, de facto recognition by Ukraine that Russia and its proxies will control some territory claimed by Ukraine for some time. In exchange Russia stopped trying to conquer more Ukrainian territory. Until February 24 of 2022, that is.
So would you now support the US putting substantial pressure on Ukraine to accept a peace that formally cedes substantial parts of its occupied territories to Russia so long as there are firm security guarantees?
So, I am not an American and I get that whether American support for Ukraine is in the US national interest is debatable.
One thing that is clear however is that putting external pressure on Ukraine to moderate its demands emboldens Russia to impose harsher conditions, since if Putin knows that external actors won’t help Ukraine to free its territory, downside risk of his aggression is capped.
This is different from whether Ukraine itself should moderate its demands, from the point of their own national interest (imho they should).
>One thing that is clear however is that putting external pressure on Ukraine to moderate its demands emboldens Russia to impose harsher conditions, since if Putin knows that external actors won’t help Ukraine to free its territory, downside risk of his aggression is capped.
I hadn't considered that angle. It makes a lot of sense to someone who's more or less given up on deciding which side is winning - one thing I've taken away from this mess is that too much information can be as bad as too little, especially when much of the information is filtered through people with a keen interest in the outcome. Maybe it could be done with the utmost of secrecy? Then again, that seems to be difficult in democracies, even without taking into consideration that it would be Trump.
That lines up pretty well with my understanding of the conflict, although I can't imagine a scenario where Ukraine wins without a third party directly intervening, i.e. boots on the ground. I think if the Russian run on Kiev in the beginning of the war had been successful, they would have claimed the Donbass states and a buffer zone around Crimea and called it a day. Now, I expect the Russians are going to try and take everything they currently occupy. Putin keeps saying that he is open to peace negotiations, but what that really means is no Ukraine in NATO, disarmament and denazification, ceding occupied territory, etc. So Putin doesn't want an actual negotiation, he wants a surrender.
I don't understand the second clause of your Ukrainian victory condition b). "without losing de facto control of any territory it had controlled before February 24 of 2022". They have already lost control of such territory. Do you mean that they *regain* the territory lost since 24/02/2022?
I am not sure that I understand your misunderstanding, I am afraid :-).
If, e.g., there would be an agreement tomorrow that Ukraine is immediately accepted into EU and NATO but it has to accept that all its internationally recognized territory currently under Russian occupation, I would not count that as an Ukrainian victory, but as a compromise.
My misunderstanding is that you write "without losing de facto control" in your Ukraine victory condition b), which seems to be the literal meaning of "boots on the ground" as opposed to the legal claim.
For example, Ukraine has had de facto control over Mariupol prior to 2022, and has since then lost it. What does it mean for Ukraine to not "lose de facto control" over Mariupol in order to achieve victory condition b), in addition to not giving up their claim on it and joining EU/NATO?
Or do you mean *Russia* does not have to concede de facto control over Mariupol?
I am still not sure if I understand, but what about this:
If Putin says: "I agree with an immediate ceasefire based on current line of control, and you are ok to join NATO and EU right now, if you wish", and such a ceasefire it is then implemented, I would not count that as an Ukrainian victory, mainly because I don't think that EU and NATO would be willing to let Ukraine join them in that situation.
Id prefer mcafee(that assassination attempt went different tho); but I *like* the loud mouth causing chaos
The right wing just exists, isnt evil, and really realy tired of being treated so poorly; I'd vote for rock/child/rabbit wolf/meth head over anyone who was in the room for anything "bipartisan" over the pass decades, fuck the wars, the money printing( that didnt go to me) and just endless big worthless law books
A lot of it is tribal, I think. To a first approximation there are roughly an equal number of blue and red people and a small number of gray/purple people in the USA. Blue people always vote for Democrats (plus other Blue Tribe stuff) and red people always vote for Republicans (plus other Red Tribe stuff) and it's the gray people the presidential candidates are fighting over the hardest.
(I'm a gray voter personally but I am actually thinking about sitting out this election as I'm not sure I will like either party's candidate this time around...)
They belief that approximately all of the people and institutions who tell them that there is no good reason to vote for Trump, that they should simply never vote for Trump, have been systematically lying to them about everything political or politics-adjacent for a decade or two, minimum.
They are entirely correct in this belief. Unfortunately, that leaves most of them with few good sources of information about what to do next. They have to trust someone, and Donald Trump is legitimately good at promoting the idea that he's the one you can trust, the one that will call out and stand against all the people you already know have been lying to you for decades.
Re: the first link, the graph just says that apprehensions are up. That could mean there are more people crossing and the same proportion are being caught, or that there is a higher proportion being caught, or something else.
The third graph in your link suggests how to interpret it. It only goes up to 2020, but by their model it seems like apprehension rate correlates strongly with less illegal immigrant entries rather than more.
Many Thanks! But, as you said, the third graph only goes up to 2020, so using it to compare Biden and Trump policies doesn't really help much. If the apprehension rate really was 89% in 2019, as per the model, then the increase in apprehensions from 2019 to 2023 in the second graph (approximately a doubling) can't be due to a further increase in apprehension _rate_, since there was only 11% headroom above the claimed 89% in 2019. It would have to be due to an increase in crossing _attempts_ - and _that_ is what I've heard attributed to the political change from Trump to Biden. Ideally, of course, we would want to know how the number of successful crossing attempts changed, but we can't very well know the number of successful evasions of the border patrol, and I haven't seen a nice crisp presentation of how many people were ultimately released by the border patrol into the United States, either for pending asylum claims or other reasons.
The clinkers for me are Biden's disrespect for the Supreme Court and his intransigence about racist 'affirmative action'. His fawning over queer rights is just sad.
From what I have observed with people I know who like him it's about the fact that he loudly fights for his team and doesn't talk down to the people at his rallies. For people who feel threatened by progressives or that large parts of rural america is looked down upon he can be appealing. He is like a bulldog who will insult and rage against people you don't like.
He was the first national politician to be known for opposing wokeness? (Or probably more accurately, as wokeness developed, it defined itself against him, and vice versa.)
Also, he's a political outsider, and has been willing to notice things that politicians pretend they don't notice, and say things that politicians don't publicly say. Which, to be clear, is not inherently good, and sometimes very bad. But it can be quite appealing to people who feel disconnected from politicians.
I think very little of this is actually about who Trump is, as a person. It's who he's against, and that he's actually willing to be against them. So there's a lot of actively-brewing mythology surrounding him, similar in that respect to Obama in 2008. People project their desire for hope and change onto him. Facts about Trump don't matter as much as the platonic ideal of Trump.
They're sick of the insanity of progressivism? Sick of being told that women can be born with penises, or that it's white people's fault that blacks are stupid and violent, or that it's racist to care about your culture, or that the concept of merit is discriminatory. I mean, if you honestly can't understand how it would be possible to be opposed to that then you really need to consider how your ideological blinders distort your perception of reality. I'm no fan of Trump but there has to be something seriously wrong with you if you think the Dems are immune to criticism.
What specifically about voting for Trump would ameliorate any of those things you mentioned? You just listed a bunch of attitudes and opinions, most of which are far outside the government's control. Do you think Trump will make progressives less progressive and stop saying the things you don't like to hear?
Or do you expect specific actions? If so, which actions, specifically? And, crucially - did any of those things happen during the first Trump administration?
Yes, the president can actually make substantive changes that can affect the culture. For starters Trump probably won't put trannies on the white house xmas card, or appoint them to cabinet positions. People care about that. If there's a SCOTUS vacancy he won't close his eyes and pick "a woman of color" like Biden did. SCOTUS appointments are probably the most far-reaching legacy that a president can leave, actually. If Trump hadn't gotten 3 appointments then Roe v Wade probably wouldn't have been overturned.
Plus there's just 4 years of the most powerful person in the world having an ideology that's opposed to wokeism. No one gets more media coverage. That matters. That means 4 years of not having to listen to the President spout nonsense about structural racism or putting "minority-owned business" requirements on giant spending bills. Yes, the president matters. I'm sort of shocked that you're confused about that.
I'm not 'confused' and I'll ask you not to assume what I'm actually thinking based on just honest questions.
Close examination of history shows that cultural attitudes often move _counter_ to the Presidency. Consider: when Obama expressed concerns about the Trayvon Martin shooting, it actually caused a huge amount of backlash that sharpened race relations. When Trump introduced draconian restrictions on migrants, it _increased_ sympathy for them in polls.
And let me ask you: do you honestly think progressivism was weaker in 2020 than it was in 2016? I don't think that's clear at all. It was the BLM-related riots that did far more than anything else to weaken it. Many people feel that wokism has been in decline during the Biden administration in a way that it wasn't during Trump's.
So yes, the President matters, but I think the evidence doesn't point as clearly in the way that you think.
Now, if you want Supreme Court appointees, that's a whole different question. But I don't see how the tokenism you talk about comes in. Trump passed over many well-qualified men and appointed a woman, and she still chose to overturn Roe. Biden could have nominated any number of white men, but it's a lock that they would not have voted that way. If you want to get annoyed at tokenism, you certainly can, but that has no real impact on the Court's long term decision making.
"And let me ask you: do you honestly think progressivism was weaker in 2020 than it was in 2016?"
Not directed at me, but I would say:
1. Yes, in my experience about half of people think wokeness peaked in 2016, the other half that it peaked around 2020/2021. I think the former are right regarding the media and the internet and the explicit rhetoric of politicians (e.g. Hillary Clinton used wordslike "intersectionality"; has Biden ever done that?) which is what drives the whole thing. See here https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-online-culture for a clear media decline (at least the gender form) after Trump's win. The trends started in the media take a while to spread through the broader society, which explains the latter group's perception. But that driver's seat started moving (gradually) away from wokeness earlier.
2. Even if all of society and media was still getting more woke or more progressive during Trump's first term, the derivative may have declined. I think it did substantially: looking through archived online discussions, the difference between January 2013 progressive culture and January 2016 progressive culture was unbelievable, and nothing like that rate of change happened after Trump, if there was even a clear increase at all.
3. Even if *that's* not the case, the question I would ask is: do you honestly think progressivism was not absurdly stronger in 2016 than it 2012? Do you honestly think it wouldn't have been inconceivably stronger in 2020-in-the-timeline-where-Clinton-won than it was in 2020-our-timeline? With a President who actually uses words like intersectional in speeches? Even if republican wins don't reverse progressivism, I think it's undeniable that democrat wins advance it. Trump winning stopped wokeness simply by meaning Hillary didn't.
4. Yes, there are backlashes (e.g. Tea Party to Obama, BLM to Trump) but I think these are greatly outweighed by the frontlashes, for want a better word. In addition to the points above that the culture does shift substantially in the direction of the president, there's also the multitute of actual laws and policies that an administration implements, many of which get a fraction of the attention of the loud cultural movements but have innumerable -on-the-ground effects on society.
5. Finally, a point made many times in the comments to Scott's 2016 post endorsing Clinton (partly on the grounds that Trump would make the left stronger): this implies progressives should be voting for Trump. If you're right that culture moves opposite to the president, all wokeists who care most about culture should want Trump to win this year. Those people should have been mourning Biden's win in 2020 as a blow to social justice and a victory for the right. The fact that they never do this, even those of them who advance the backlash theory of why conservatives shouldn't vote for Trump, shows they don't actually believe it.
"In recognition that advancing equity is a generational commitment that will require sustained federal leadership and partnership with all communities, President Biden signed Executive Order 14091 on February 16, 2023. The President’s second Executive Order on equity directs the Federal Government to further build equity into the everyday business of government and continue the work to make the promise of America real for everyone, including rural communities, communities of color, Tribal communities, LGBTQI+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex) individuals, people with disabilities, women and girls, and communities impacted by persistent poverty."
"The strategy also adopts an intersectional approach that considers the barriers and challenges faced by those who experience intersecting and compounding forms of discrimination and bias related to gender, race, and other factors, including sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, disability, age, and socioeconomic status. This includes addressing discrimination and bias faced by Black, Latino, and Indigenous and Native American people, Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders, and other people of color."
Thank you for the substantive reply. Great points.
I want to zoom in on points 4 & 5, because I think they set crucial context here. I think there is a very key difference between electing a leader because you want to change people's minds and electing a leader because you want specific policies and actions. My purpose here is mostly to question people who lead with "I like Trump because I hate progressive attitudes in culture," because I believe this to be a dodgy metric by which to pick one's leaders.
If you prioritize someone who will sign Republican legislation (i.e. tax cuts and maybe spending cuts) and who will nominate conservative SCOTUS judges, then it's obviously a no-brainer. But you can have that without the cultural change. In fact, I would argue that's what the first Trump admin brought us: that it had only a marginal net effect on culture relative to existing trends, but huge impact on concrete decision making (i.e. helping secure the end of Roe, the TCJA, etc.).
So when someone says that pushing back on progressive culture is their _first_ reason to vote Trump, I think in many cases that is not a very well-thought-out opinion.
That statement does not apply to you, though - whether I agree or disagree you've clearly put some thought into it, and I respect that a lot.
Regarding your final point - here are some thoughts of mine. Even if you believe the backlash theory, it doesn't necessarily follow that you would want to use that as a voting guide, for multiple reasons. Chiefly, of course, would be the reason that you actually care about concrete decisions in the short-term rather than public opinion in the long-term. Another thing is that most people are really just voting for a sense of personal satisfaction - the nice brain chemicals associated with "my side is winning."
In other words, the fact that people don't vote according to backlash theory is not, in my eyes anyway, evidence that they don't truly believe it. But it's a good point nonetheless.
Yes, culture is complicated. I don't think anyone can predict where it will head, but people have a reasonable belief that the president can affect it. Whether or not they're right isn't exactly the point. There's a reasonable expectation that they could be and that's all that's necessary to explain voter preferences. And I just flat-out disagree with your object-level assertion that the president makes no difference, though I agree that that difference is hard to predict. When one candidate is pro-woke and one is anti-woke, it makes sense to vote for the explicitly anti-woke one if you dislike wokeism. That doesn't seem controversial to me.
>If you want to get annoyed at tokenism, you certainly can, but that has no real impact on the Court's long term decision making.
I don't know what point you're making here, but the Court's long-term behavior is predictably dependent on the appointments that presidents make. The Court overturned Roe and struck down affirmative action. That only happened because Trump appointed 3 conservative justices. That matters, it's predictable, and people care about it, so if your question is "How can a vote for Trump possibly effect wokeism" then pointing to SCOTUS is a definitive reply.
>And let me ask you: do you honestly think progressivism was weaker in 2020 than it was in 2016?
No, but that's because of demographic factors IMO and does not depend on political leadership. Woke was coming before Trump and would have increased anyway. But opposition to woke is also much higher now and part of that is enabled by Maga-adjacent people. Plus I think there's a solid argument to be made that woke exploded because of anti-Trump hysteria in a way that was self-sabotaging, so in that sense electing Trump was an effective though indirect counter to wokeism.
I WANT the President to close his eyes when picking a Justice. Just have the resumes for likely candidates read to him. Justice should be color-blind. Affirmative Action is wrong on the Supreme Court as much as at Harvard.
Biden announced "I don't know who the next justice will be but it will be a woman of color." That's overt racism and the person he appointed was borderline retarded. I want the president to pick the smartest, best educated, most highly-qualified jurist who aligns with his ideological leanings. Picking randomly is a terrible idea. The person needs to be smart and experienced.
I don't mean choose randomly. I mean "close your eyes" or "put the candidate behind a curtain" so that race doesn't enter into it. Actually, I think we are in agreement.
My question is more about priorities - and about people being honest about why they are voting.
Imagine, if you will, a Trump who decided not to lean into social conservatism. It's not that hard to imagine - before 2016 he was nobody's idea of a Southern Baptist. He once celebrated transgender contestants in Miss America, for example. Say that he decided to stay in that vein, but in other senses remained a solid Republican who would sign tax cuts, appoint Federalist judges, etc.
On the D side, imagine someone who would push back on wokeness. Someone like Joe Manchin, say, who would loudly break from progressives on things like official language, or who would roll back protections for transgender students. But who would otherwise be a regular old tax-and-spend Democrat.
Would today's Trump supporters, in that hypothetical, support Not-Woke Manchin over Social-Libertine Trump? Would you, for that matter?
I think some percentage of the population might genuinely switch votes, but that they would be a small slice. I think most people like Trump because at the end of the day they want Republican policies on traditional fiscal matters and things like that. I think a lot of people talk about progressivism - and voting against it - as a way to signal tribal solidarity.
But if you actually treat marginal things - like whether the Deputy Secretary of so-and-so uses they/them pronouns - as if that's the most important aspect of the election, then I'm curious about your decision making process.
>On the D side, imagine someone who would push back on wokeness. Someone like Joe Manchin, say, who would loudly break from progressives on things like official language, or who would roll back protections for transgender students. But who would otherwise be a regular old tax-and-spend Democrat.
Roughly speaking, yes I'd vote for Manchin. To be more precise, I have no desire to have _protections_ rolled back for transgender people. What I want to see stopped is DEI-driven anti-meritocratic policies, like the ones from the Biden administration that I gave the url for in my earlier comment.
Bluntly: I'm 65 and retired. I'm out of the job market, so only indirectly affected by anti-white-and-asian DEI bigotry. But I _do_ need the electric power grid to keep working, along with the rest of our industrial civilization. I do _not_ want what amount to racial set-asides to ram incompetent people into positions where they damage our infrastructure.
edit: Again, I don't like either candidate, or, for that matter, either major party.
I damn well would vote for Joe Manchin were I an American because he is exactly the kind of old-fashioned working-class Democrat politician before the pivot to appealing to college-educated and 'let's go ahead on social liberalisation because that is cheap, easy, and will get us popularity'.
And don't forget "because we don't want to waste time with minor problems like rural poverty when I have *real problems* like people being allowed to disagree with my latest gender identity!"
I honestly can't think of a more disgusting flaunting of affluence and privilege that currently exists, and when you remember that the *entire mainstream left is like this right now* support for Trump ceases to be the slightest mystery.
Honest question: when you describe this pivot, what specifics do you have in mind? I'm open to the idea that the Biden admin has actually been a sneakily leftist one, but to my mind the most consequential decisions they've made have been pretty bog-standard Democrat moves, like the Inflation Reduction Act, the student debt silliness, nominating KBJ, etc.
The closest thing to a substantial progressive policy decision that comes to mind is the Admin's stance on Title IX and transgender students. Beyond that, a lot of it seems to be things like "the Assistant Secretary of so-and-so uses they/them pronouns." Things that generate a lot of vibes-based anger but which seem insubstantial to me.
I ask because, circa 2020, Joe Biden _was_ seen as exactly the kind of old-fashioned Democrat we're speaking of. Certainly leftists were not celebrating him then. (And they haven't really started since). To now say that we must elect Biden to fight the left, it suggests that one of these things is true:
1) The Biden admin actually has been more progressive than expected. (This seems to be your stance? I'm open to it but curious on the details, as I mentioned).
2. The Biden admin has been more or less centrist, as expected, but people are still alarmed enough about wokeness that this isn't enough, and that someone who is an active opponent is seen as necessary.
3. Public opinion has moved thermostatically rightward, such that 2020's centrism is 2024's radicalism.
4. I'm just wrong it's something else entirely.
(Edit: I suppose there's another possibility, that it's more about fears of what a future Biden admin would do, especially one in which the centrist guy in the center is senile and being managed by lefty staff.)
(For what it's worth, as someone who thinks most arguments about wokeness - on both sides - are a sideshow that involve 10x more heat than light .... I would pick Manchin too.)
I am no fan either, and would never vote for him, but I think this answer really hits the nail on the head. Conservatives see the nation as spinning out in a crazy direction and are grasping for someone whom they believe can fight back. The extreme left obviously gets unhinged by Trump, reinforcing the belief that this is the guy they fear and thus the very one needed to oppose them.
Trump is the reactive response to the far left. I wish it wasn’t so, but honestly I am not sure which is poison is worse for America. I am pretty sure we could do a lot better though. We live in interesting times.
They call it an Anti-vote. But it only works when you have one distasteful candidate. When both are a sorry-ass choice, it doesn't work. Your choices are to either write in someone with character like Liz Cheney or Jeff Flake or you refuse to vote. Welcome to American-style democracy.
I mean, any Republican candidate or potential candidate gets called "literally Hitler" by the more edge tendencies in the Democratic party. When Nikki Haley was in the running, there were Democrat supporters who were not "pick her as the sane alternative to Trump", they were "she's as bad as Trump, she's a racist etc. etc."
Poor old Mittens Romney got the Mormon Theocrat Literally Hitler treatment. So if you're a Republican voter, may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. Trump doesn't care about you calling him names, he'll fight back on that and be every bit as brash and annoying and not roll over and bare his belly for "oh please like me, like me!" to the set of people who genuinely think the Republican Party, and their supporters, should all just vanish into thin air.
Why do alternative Democratic candidates poll only moderately better than Biden? (Whereas alternative Republican candidates poll vastly better than Trump)
The Dems have a shallow bench, without anyone with charisma -- like Obama (Remember, he started as a moderate);
I think it's true that Trump is the only one confronting the genderfied Woke, the suburban anarchists and Hamas supporters and their monumental nonsense. No one else is saying The world isn't flat, or sexually disoriented.
If I was American I'd almost certainly vote for Trump in the general election. His personality definitely scares me and seems like a threat to democracy. But nowhere as much of a threat to democracy as the left is, considering things like:
1. The "depolicing" stuff I'm hearing about is terrifying and I can't imagine a more extreme rejection of democracy than deliberately not enforcing the laws enacted by the people
2. I see magnitudes more progressives self-identifying as communists than I see conservatives self-identifying as fascists. Two unspeakably murderous ideologies, one is being widely embraced and one isn't. Unless I'm misperceiving this, it looks like an open and shut case.
3. Trump wants the most divisive moral issue of our time to be deceided democratically, Biden does not.
4. Suppression of free discussion and debate is almost entirely by the left at the moment and has been for a while.
5. The democrats deliberately sabotaged the No Labels independent campaign. Which is not only the most undemocratic thing you could possibly do, it also means the only non-democrat option is, by their own making, Trump.
I don't know how anyone can say "Trump is a threat to democracy, vote Biden" with a straight face.
(However, I can't for the life of me understand GOP primary voters choosing Trump over Haley or Destantis. Surely if you're a moderate republican you'd want Haley, if you're a conservative you'd want Desantis. Why would anyone want someone who has no clear or consistent principles and just makes things up and spews nonsense half the time? Apparently it's a class thing? Caring about actual positions and principles is so middle class, real Americans only want vibes? Utterly inconprehensible to me, any explanation would be appreciated.
No Labels self-sabotaged because, revealed preferences, they cared more about not letting Trump get into office (for basically the same reason that anyone who cares about our institutions doesn't want Trump in office).
#1 is not happening anywhere in the US. There has been absolutely no "depolicing" happening.
is #2 based on anything more than your impressions? the Democratic party's platform is pretty far from anything a true communist or socialist politician would promote. Meanwhile the republic platform is pretty much one of Christian Nationalism and moves that way more or more of the time - many Republican politicians have explicitly said that they are Christian Nationalists and David Duke (head of the KKK) endorsed trump during Trumps first election.
What issue is #3 about? Abortion? Does he really want it decided by states or does he just support whatever will get him elected? He used to be vocally pro choice.
#4, not sure what to tell you but just look at the changes Republican states are making to school curriculums for examples of state suppression of speech.
#5 -> I dont know enough to comment.
"I don't know how anyone can say "Trump is a threat to democracy, vote Biden" with a straight face." He regularly expresses wanting to do undemocratic actions if he takes office.
Just a nitpick, but the state laws in question seem like they are restricting the actions of public schools within the state. Surely the state government can decide what its agents are to say in public as part of their official duties.
<i>#1 is not happening anywhere in the US. There has been absolutely no "depolicing" happening.</i>
There's a vocal contingent on the left who very much do want it to happen. Surely, if you think a particular policy will be extremely harmful, it's OK to vote against it before it's actually implemented?
There's a vocal contingent who want depolicing, but the actual depolicing that has happened in the US seems to be some mix of budgeting/hiring problems leading to too few policemen on the force and occasional instances of the police retreating to the donut shops when there's a large outcry about (typically) some trigger-happy white cop shooting some black criminal.
There's a vocal contingent on the right who think we should repeal the Civil Rights Act and cut all aid to Israel, does that mean it's going to happen?
However, Defund the Tax Police is a lot bigger on the right, to the point where it *acutally happened* and didn't get rolled back like the few half-hearted attempts at defending local police did.
The official Democratic platform isn't socialist, just as the official Republican platform isn't some Christian theology. (The official platform has *removed* talk of abortion.)
If they are your outgroup, though, you don't look at the official platform. You look at what people associated with them say and figure "oh, they all want that, they're just too cowardly to *really* say it."
Democratic politicians don't think they'll be dead or hunted to extinction if there's a Republican trifecta. They're just getting ready for 2026 and 2028.
Anecditally sample n=2, Seattle and NYC have seen a reduction in policing in the past few years that really accelerated when Abolish movement came to the fore. There's markedly more dangerous situations in Seattle than there used to be. And I'm NYC there's a lot more petty crime like illegal scooters, people driving while high, people blowing red lights etc. NYC is not as bad as it was in the 90s but it's trending that direction.
It's confusing to see people posting about their local PD getting armored vehicles and but at the same time almost getting killed on the Brooklyn bridge by illegal scooters (cops ignore them at both end of the bridge).
I don't think this contradicts your 1st point but it's evidence of at least a slight shift away from enforcement.
"As the City continues to strategize ways to address next year’s $240 million budget deficit, PubliCola reports that a new agreement between Seattle and its largest police union, the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG), will carve out funding for raises of up to 23% for entry-level officers. [...] The effects of the shortfall can already be felt — Mayor Bruce Harrell initiated a hiring freeze for all City departments excluding police, ..."
In both cities, they have tight budgets yet continue to devote more and more money to police departments. Then the police do a bad job, but this is somehow the fault of people calling for less money to the police?
Don't think I'll convince anyone, but a brief response to some of these:
1. I am opposed to "depolicing" (though sympathetic to some of their views - the police often act pretty free of democratic accountability in many cities and IMO their reactions to particular protests are often politically motivated) but it's not Biden's view or the view of most Democrats, in fact Biden's budget plans always call for more funding of the police.
2. The self-identified communist group hates Biden and most elected Democrats, so voting for Biden isn't voting for them.
More broadly, I think people view self-identified communists are naive to the oppression of communists, unlike self-identified fascists/nazis who actively support it. Most (thought not all) self-identified communists will say that they don't want gulags and "true communism has never been tried" or something, but self-identified fascists fly the flag of nazi Germany and fully embrace the anti-Jewish stuff. Plus ...
3. Not sure what exactly you're referring to, but if it is abortion, Biden is running on passing a law via Congress to protect abortion access, and the Republican platform position is that the 14th amendment applies to fetuses which, if taken to its logical conclusion, would mean a court-imposed nationwide ban on abortion (in basically all cases).
More generally, I don't like the idea of the Supreme Court deciding these issues but both parties try to push that lever. If today you proposed taking as much policymaking out of the Courts as possible, it would be Democrats in favor and Republicans opposed (not that the roles wouldn't switch of control of the Court switched).
4. I don't think this is true at the moment. Elon Musk (trump supporter) owns twitter, has censored on behalf of conservatives/foreign countries/whoever pays him, and the most recent outburst of "cancel culture" was against pro-Palestinian people. Tiktok has been algorithmically boosting trump ever since he came out against banning it (in a reversal of his prior view, after an investor gave him money).
5. I don't know what you mean by "sabotage". They opposed it ... but I don't think anyone is obligated to support any third party bid just to support the idea of third parties. Do you think that if Republicans thought a particular 3rd party would hurt them, they wouldn't try to undercut it?
As for non-democratic options ... it's Democrats' fault that the main non-Democratic option is Trump? I can think of another party whose fault that is...
> But the liberal agenda basically IS communist, even for those that call it by another name: provide for the homeless, provide for the elderly, provide for the unemployed, and never mind how any of that is paid for.
That’s nothing like communism. It’s not even socialism. Maybe it’s at best lukewarm social democracy. Actually in practise it’s something that centrist, centre right and far right (as in nationalist) parties agree on.
1. If Biden is actually giving the police MORE funding and reaping the benefits of calls to de-fund the police, then more power to him, I suppose, for a Machiavellian act to keep order while satisfying the public. But the "police" isn't "the FBI", and if I'm not mistaken, the President has no power over the funding of state-level and lower police.
2. Sure, some crazy people are pro-fascism, and Republicans with any sense ignore them, while Democrats vilify them. They should not be taken seriously. But the liberal agenda basically IS communist, even for those that call it by another name: provide for the homeless, provide for the elderly, provide for the unemployed, and never mind how any of that is paid for.
3. I think abortion is what is meant, and though I'm not sure it's the MOST divisive issue currently (though Democrats want to make it out to be), I'm alarmed that no one (even the Supreme Court, apparently) considers the 10th amendment. The Constitution doesn't say anything about abortion, so it's up to the states. It also says nothing about murder, and I think murder is a STATE crime, though I have no explanation for kidnapping being a federal crime.
4. Google and Facebook seem to be favoring Democrats; Twitter (X) is important (though less so now, I think) but it isn't the only tool of free debate, and Google is arguably the most important. Yet they are publicly-held private companies, and should be allowed to do, mostly, what they want. Both parties are apparently opposed to Tiktok, as Trump originally proposed banning it.
5. I have no opinion on any No Labels campaign without researching it.
I suspect, from talking to others, that Nikki Haley would have been the one most likely to win over the most voters in the general election, but Trump had the largest iron-clad support in the Republican party base, and seemed likely to win against Biden, even if the race were close this time. Comparing the Trump presidency to the Biden presidency, it's hard to see why someone would choose Biden, even before the debate.
Re the first - what exactly is the Machiavellian act? He says he wants to fund the police, he's doing it ... OK then. He isn't "reaping the benefits of calls to de-fund the police" - it's an unpopular slogan associated with people on his side, and I'm sure he wishes nobody had ever said it. Also, the federal government can provide funds for states earmarked for certain purposes.
Re the second - you can't simultaneously say that communism should be seen as evil on par with the Nazis and not as merely misguided, and also that providing for the elderly et al is communism. Whatever labels you want to use, people don't view social security and the Holocaust as morally equivalent.
Re Tiktok, trump isn't opposed to it anymore. He changed his tune after a Tiktok investor gave him a big donation.
"Comparing the Trump presidency to the Biden presidency, it's hard to see why someone would choose Biden, even before the debate."
Not sure why I'm even arguing this as we won't agree, but the economy is pretty good right now, inflation is low, unemployment is low, people's assessment of their own personal economic situation is good. China isn't doing so great and we are increasingly pushing back against them. There's bad situations in the Middle East and East Europe but, without making this comment too long, I don't think those are Biden's fault. Meanwhile 2020 is commonly seen as the worst, most chaotic year for the country in a long time, and trump abused the powers of his office, got worse over time, and then tried to overturn the election on the way out, in an act so bad that even Republicans thought he should be prosecuted over it. And he repeatedly threatened Jewish people.
I haven't heard anything about Biden's stance on de-funding the police, and assume it is correct he has increased funding policing agencies in some way. Likewise, I haven't heard that he is denouncing the movement, either, and it is that that I consider Machiavellian: supporting his political movement, and thus pacifying them, while also not actually doing what they want.
I made no comparison of fascism to communism, just note that wealth redistribution is central to communism, and is also central to liberal policies. Perhaps some far right people are in favor of fascism, but one can be conservative and not fascist. Can one be liberal and not in favor of social security and welfare wealth redistribution?
Biden got a TikTok account in February. As long as it exists, why not use it as a tool? Neither candidate has dismissed the national security concerns.
Until the pandemic, the economy was better than it is now. Is this in dispute? Inflation was lower, and unemployment was lower. To be fair, I lay the blame of inflation on Trump for replacing Yellen with Powell for no good reason (and perhaps Yellen would have raised interest rates sooner, but who knows?). The President has little control over the economy in general; though the President can slow the economy, he/she cannot improve it, only create conditions under which it can improve.
I agree the Middle East and East Europe aren't Biden's fault, and think they would likely still have happened if Trump were still in office. But I don't agree that Trump was responsible for the pandemic (the largest issue of 2020), abuse of powers, or threatening the Jewish people. My impression of the election result was more that he simply never conceded, which was childish, but I don't have enough credible information about overturning the election, only lots of unanswered questions.
"I haven't heard anything about Biden's stance on de-funding the police, and assume it is correct he has increased funding policing agencies in some way. Likewise, I haven't heard that he is denouncing the movement, either, and it is that that I consider Machiavellian: supporting his political movement, and thus pacifying them, while also not actually doing what they want."
But he has been on record supporting funding the police. In 2020 he ran on funding the police *more* than Republicans!
"I made no comparison of fascism to communism, just note that wealth redistribution is central to communism, and is also central to liberal policies. Perhaps some far right people are in favor of fascism, but one can be conservative and not fascist. Can one be liberal and not in favor of social security and welfare wealth redistribution?"
You can say wealth redistribution is common between liberals and communists, but there are things that are common between fascists and conservatives (at least the vast majority, hard to ever say 100% about anything). Nationalism, opposition to communism, idea of an intellectual elite that is opposed to the interest of "true" members of the nation, being really into masculinity as an important virtue for leaders and seeing the opposition as feminine/weak, etc.
But either way, what's the argument here, you support trump because liberals support wealth redistribution and communists put people in gulags? Problem with this, among other things, is that trump also supports wealth redistribution to some degree, as do all viable politicians in the US.
"Biden got a TikTok account in February. As long as it exists, why not use it as a tool? Neither candidate has dismissed the national security concerns."
Not sure what this has to do with the fact that Biden signed a bill to ban it, trump opposed that bill.
"Until the pandemic, the economy was better than it is now. Is this in dispute? Inflation was lower, and unemployment was lower."
Maybe marginally, but I don't see what that has to do with anything. You say (and I agree) that "the economy is good/bad under President X, therefore they did a good/bad job" is wrong. And if it's right, then there's no reason to exclude 2020 (and nothing else).
"But I don't agree that Trump was responsible for the pandemic (the largest issue of 2020), abuse of powers, or threatening the Jewish people."
I don't think he's responsible for the pandemic, but he is responsible for the federal government's chaotic response, and deaths were higher in the US than most developed countries. For abuse of powers, I'll refer to both impeachments to start, and he personally threatened the Jews on Twitter.
"reaping the benefits of calls to de-fund the police," Why has Biden ever called for defunding the police? Historically he has been extremely pro police (just as every national politician has, regardless of party).
"Sure, some crazy people are pro-fascism, and Republicans with any sense ignore them, "
Multiple republican congressman have explicitly stated they are Christian Nationalists.
"provide for the homeless, provide for the elderly, provide for the unemployed"
Jesus also advised at least one rich person to give up all he had and give it to the poor. Maybe that would be good for the short-term, but not for the long-term.
There's nothing wrong with being a Christian Nationalist. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, even if it is that fascism is a good idea. I do have a problem, however, with anyone ensuring I become a Christian Nationalist, or support what they want.
I think many people miss the point on supporting those who cannot provide for themselves. Conservatives aren't against doing this. In fact, they do want to support those who need it, but not faceless people, and especially not people masquerading as needy but aren't. The government is kind of bad at distinguishing genuine needs from those that fit needs on paper, as no set of rules can encompass accurately what they ought to do.
Why do people vote in general? I can think of two reasons: (1) to signal affiliation/identity & (2) out of an altruistic sense of duty. It then seems natural for a US voter who doesn't want to be associated with leftism and who thinks that leftist rule is going to be bad for their country to vote for Trump.
80%+ of Trump voters backed Romney and McCain, they vote for the GOP because they want lower taxes and are sceptical of government bureaucracies. Also some variety of agreeing with the GOP on school choice, guns, abortion, oil extraction, immigration etc
They want lower taxes AND lower spending. That's compatible with at least attempting to lower the deficit. But I AM concerned that it will be awfully tough to get a handle on the deficit before it actually becomes a problem.
It isn't yet a problem because the government can just borrow money from itself right now. The Fed bought trillions of mortgage bonds and treasury bills...on credit. I don't know how long we can continue to operate that way.
This argument always cracks me up. No one in America takes the deficit seriously. If they did, our government wouldn't consistently spend 150%+ of its revenue every single year. If the government inevitably is going to spend itself into financial oblivion, wanting to be taxed less is not some outlandish proposition.
Depends on the "they". Lots of people want contradictory things, and also lots of people want to cut taxes and cut spending to compensate, with various degrees of realism in their plans.
I think he's a strong man respected by foreign leaders (relative to Biden), and if he's president it's less likely Taiwan will be invaded, I think he might negotiate a deal where Ukraine loses territory in exchange for lasting peace, and Israel is given the space to establish deterrence
I think he will moderate policy on immigration and abortion closer to that of median voter
Center of power seems to be with the elite class, he might be a counterweight on both culture and policy that creates a sense that everyone is to some extent 'represented'
Reasons against:
He doesn't have principles he is willing to sacrifice self interest for, including democratic norms and values
Trump isn't repsected by foreign leaders, he is seen as a man willing to put his own interests above that of his nation. As a result he's easily manipulated by flattery, and plenty of leaders have realised that.
"I think he's a strong man respected by foreign leaders (relative to Biden), and if he's president it's less likely Taiwan will be invaded, I think he might negotiate a deal where Ukraine loses territory in exchange for lasting peace, and Israel is given the space to establish deterrence"
I believe you are dead wrong about this part. Trump is a weak man's idea of what a strong man should look like, and actual strong men know better. I'm pretty sure most of our allies' leadership sees him as an untrustworthy buffoon, and most of our adversaries see him as an exploitable chump.
I will also note the conspicuous lack of foreign policy victories in his first term, that would have depended on foreign perception of Trump's strength. Yes, he could do things like set in motion the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and many people will see that as a win, but it's not a win that requires e.g. the Taliban to see Trump as a strong leader and back down. He promised that his strong leadership and diplomacy would lead to the "denuclearization" of North Korea; Kim Jong Un played him for a fool and North Korea went right on building nukes (now on ICBMs that can reach any target in the United States). He ended the nuclear arms deal with Iran promising that his strong leadership and diplomacy would get us a better deal with Iran, and he got nothing. We don't know if Iran is building nukes now, but there's nothing but their own forebearance stopping them.
What am I missing? Where is the evidence that Trump is perceived by foreign leaders as strong? Biden, at least gets credit for building the coalition that stopped the invasion of Ukraine dead in its tracks and drove it halfway back to the border in 2022.
Trump, I am fairly certain, will try to impose a deal where Ukraine surrenders a third of its country in exchange for a "peace" that will last a few years as Russia regroups and rearms to conquer and ethnically cleanse the rest of Ukraine. That will greatly increase the odds of China trying to invade Taiwan, and there's a significant chance it will lead do direct war between NATO and Russia if Russia then thinks it's safe to move on the Baltics.
Yeah. I understand the model you're working with. I've just seen enough empirical evidence to believe there's something he understands about psychology of dictators and militant groups I/we do not.
1) He killed Qasem Soleimani, and that established credible deterrance with Iran.
2) He moved embassy to jersualem, abraham accords, two significant steps towards isolating the palestinians from the rest of the non-iran-axis arab world, making it clear to the dictators in the region it wasn't in their interest to support them. Hamas' only theory of the case, and it is correct, for how they destroy Israel which is their primary goal, is to spark a regional conflict. US leadership makes that less feasible/likely and under Trump it was better
3) Re Ukraine/Taiwan, realistically Russia/China care way, way more about those territories than we do. Ukranians are willing to die in huge numbers, I don't know about Taiwanese. In any case, Trumps general instability ('you don't know what I'm going to do, don't test me') was our only hope of staving off conflict, because the predictable 'cards on the table' game theory outcome is invasion of Ukraine and Taiwan. (I think Putin severely underestimated Ukraine, as did I think rest of the world, but there was no credible way to convince him of that without the experience of invasion).
4) Re. North Korea I really, really don't know anything about the situation. I just had a vague impression that their leader was saying a bunch of rhetoric threatening people, Trump said he's the best person ever and is magical and cool, and he stopped doing that.
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All of this is about the past, and I think Trump's advantage was primarily in preventing Ukraine invasion. Trump also caused NATO to significantly spend more money because he made it clear the US would not backstop them on its own, which was good. However Biden was clearly way better at coalition building (and who knows, Trump might've thought Zelensky didn't help him win the election and hold a massive grudge).
In the future, I would expect:
Trump to bring the conflict to an end by forcing Ukraine to give up territory it cannot recapture and cannot politically convince its people to stop fighting for. I don't know if this is a lasting peace, but I would expect Putin to have learned by now more war is not in his interest, NATO/Ukraine is stronger than he thinks. There are few good options now, unfortunately. Both Ukraine and Russia are exhausted and willing to fight causing the deaths of many, many more people.
1. The response to killing Qasem Soleimani was Iran hitting a US military base with a dozen or so precision-guided ballistic missiles, of which we were able to shoot down none whatsoever because the commander-in-chief hadn't bothered to deploy any missile defenses, and for which US responded with harsh language and minor financial inconveniences. Then COVID happened and everybody focused elsewhere for a couple years. This does not look like "credible deterrence" to me. And the bit where Iran would be rendered unwilling or incapable of waging proxy wars against US interests, really doesn't seem to have happened.
2) Moving an embassy may be the right diplomatic or political move. But it doesn't require that anyone see POTUS as being a strong leader, and isn't evidence that anyone sees POTUS as a strong leader.
3) Deterrence works best when there's no ambiguity. "Mutual Assured Destruction", not "Maybe we'll destroy you, or maybe we'll let you win". In the case of Ukraine or Taiwan, we're not going to bomb Moscow or Beijing over that; the most we can plausibly do is ensure that every relevant weapon toe Arsenal of Democracy can provide is delivered to people who will use them to utterly annihilate the invasion force. And that's enough. It's also pretty much what the Biden administration actually did in early 2022(*), which lets him credibly promise the same w/re Taiwan.
Trump's signalling that he might *not* support Ukraine or Taiwan against invasion adds unpredictability, but it's strictly worse as a deterrence strategy. And your belief that if Trump had been in power Russia would never have invaded Ukraine, is an unproven counterfactual. It reflects your belief that Trump is and is seen as a strong leader, but it is not evidence that Putin actually sees him as such.
4) I know an awful lot about the situation with North Korea. I spent several years of my life working pro bono to help understand and if possible mitigate the North Korean nuclear threat. And then I watched Donald Trump piss it all away. You can find some of that written up in the SSC archives if you care. Yes, Kim Jong Un modulated his words and his tone in response to Trump's posturing, but he did so in a way that increased North Korea's stature on the world stage and at least marginally weakened the alliance structure against him.
Looking at deeds rather than words, North Korea on Donald Trump's watch went from a nation with maybe a couple dozen Hiroshima-scale atom bombs and clunky missiles that could probably deliver them as far as Japan, to a nation with probably 50+ nuclear weapons including thermonuclear warheads on road-mobile ICBMs capable of striking targets anywhere in CONUS. And possibly a prototype ballistic missile submarine. Donald Trump did nothing to stop this.
Nowhere am I seeing any evidence that any foreign leader perceives Donald Trump as particularly "strong", an in the Iran and North Korea cases he seems to have failed to accomplish any of the things a genuinely strong leader might have. My expectations regarding the foreign-policy impact of a second Trump term is frankly dismal.
re deterrence and ambiguity: if your opponent knows exactly where your boundaries are, you can be certain he'll scoot right up to those boundaries and plant himself there. If he doesn't have a clear idea of your decision process, you have more options to respond.
Added to this is that politics is fluid, and scooting over a boundary and receiving no response diminishes respect.
I think the biggest thing I disagree with is: 'deterrence works best when it is not ambiguous'
Democracies simply cannot credibly unambiguously commit to anything their voters wouldn't support.
Americans don't support going to war with China over Taiwan. They don't support risking nuclear war with Russia.
Trump is seen as unpredictable. There was a complete cultural shift in Iranian politics after he killed Suleimani, which was unexpected, and they didn't through their proxies attack Israel until after he was out of power.
With Biden at the helm, especially after the mechanical incompetence of the Afghanistan withdrawal, world expectation was that we wouldn't do much more to support Ukraine or Taiwan than we would the Kurds or Afghans.
> if he's president it's less likely Taiwan will be invaded
This one seems REALLY implausible to me. In terms of direct statements Biden has sounded significantly more willing to defend Taiwan than the average US President, while Trump is much less.
Meanwhile Trump's pro-Russia attitude in Ukraine seems much more likely to encourage China to make a similar move against Taiwan than Biden's hardline stance against international aggression.
Diff between respect and fear. Foreign govts dont respect Trump, but they do fear a perceived irrational narcissist. Maybe less fear now - they prob figured that the standard strategy will work: say you love him as many times as possible (or more), and throw a big parade.
"He doesn't have principles he is willing to sacrifice self interest for"
Bro is literally dodging bullets and risking jail time to run for President. He's absolutely willing to self-sacrifice - it's up to you whether you believe he's doing it for the reasons he says he is.
He's a lot more likely to end up in jail if he doesn't run for President. The charges against him were already in the pipeline and would mostly have kept going if he sat out the 2024 election cycle, but if he runs and wins, he can quash any pending federal charges or investigations against himself, and state prosecutions against him.become a lot more difficult to pursue. And just running makes it a lot easier for him to fundraise to get his legal bills paid in the meantime -- while he has a lot of assets, he also seems to have a lot of liabilities and not a lot of liquidity in his personal/business finances.
There's also a question of what constitutes self-interest. If he really, really likes the pomp and power of being President, that still counts as a self-interested reason. Granted, really wanting to be President is a common failing among high-level politicians, but Trump strikes me worse than most in terms of personal power-seeking at all.costs.
You'd have to diverge the timeline from before 2021 in order to make that remotely plausible. Noone would ever agree to let Trump off scott free post Jan 6.
Imagine you saw some other country, say Mexico or Turkey, where the opposition leader was being prosecuted until he agreed to cease seeking office, and then the charges were dropped. What would you think about that country? Because that's what >50% of voters would be thinking about our own country after that corrupt deal.
I think there's a really plausible timeline where the Democrats don't try to prosecute Trump for anything and he just fucks off to Mar-A-Lago instead of running for President again.
You'd have to diverge the timeline from before 2021 in order to make that remotely plausible. Noone would ever agree to let Trump off scott free post Jan 6.
I think he wants status and power and cool factor of being president, and in general being a cultural icon. And is willing to place himself in physical danger for that. I meant that there isn't any policy, that, were it in his personal interest to have a different view on, he wouldn't change, and I think that's an undesirable quality in a leader for a variety of reasons.
Well, I don’t know, but it was given as a reason to vote for Trump.
The Russians see NATO as an instrument of American power, so if Trump withdraws from NATO, I think Putin will see Trump as someone who made a massive own goal.
The Supreme Court isn't democratic and doesn't answer to voter preferences. They don't set policy, they judge policy w/r/t the constitution. I both think abortion should be legal and think Roe was a terrible precedent. I'm glad it was overturned and look forward to each state legislating abortion policy in accordance with the democratic preferences of their populace.
>"Respected by foreign leaders" is hard to check specifically, but in a lot of countries Biden is viewed more favorably than Trump
Yeah, in high school kids preferred the senile algebra teacher who gave everyone A's too. Being popular and being good aren't necessarily related. The US is the big dog in the world. Other leaders don't have to like us. Maybe they prefer Biden because he's a senile pushover.
Ok. The median voter cares preferentially for who will do the right thing for national interests and those aren't always aligned with global interests. I also don't trust other leaders' ability to distinguish between "who is nicer to me" and "who is better". But sure, being aggressively unpopular can be bad for US interests if it gives other nations a Shelling point to unite against us. But I still think that the only thing that matters there is realpolitik and even Trump's unpopularity can't change America's overwhelming economic and military might. We have the big stick, that's all that matters.
I'm not sure what position you're arguing against here. I put a link to that poll to note that it was evidence that Biden was more respected globally than Trump, in response to someone asserting the opposite (with the caveat I noted above about how I can't really measure "leaders" specifically).
I'm not sure how this responds to anything I said specifically. I'm merely pointing out that President Trump doesn't seem to have brought policy in this area closer to what the median voter wanted.
Yeah, the median voter gets a little confusing when you think in terms of state and EC votes, and also when you distinguish laws that will be imposed on your state from laws that you think should be imposed on/for other states.
If Trump opposes any federal laws on abortion in favor of leaving it to the states, then he's probably automatically closer to the median voter (in terms of what laws will be imposed on their state) than taking a position that the federal government should either impose legal abortion on all states or ban abortion on all states. The median voter in Missouri and the median voter in New York have rather different positions on the issue.
OTOH, if we're talking about laws to be imposed on everyone outside your state, that's inherently about federal laws or constitutional amendments. But then, the impact of the median voter only matters in battleground states--an extra million voters in New York or California who are strongly pro-choice doesn't affect it at all, since those states are not in play.
This seems to make sense as an objection only if you entirely reject federalism. If you consider Texas and California as not entirely identical, as political entities, then Trump moved policy closer to the median voter _within each state_.
The first part is true (mostly; Trump actually did push the GOP to moderate on abortion, although his successful court appointmens meant actual national policy moved further away due to him).
I think the second is addressing the wrong question: people may like Biden, but they don't respect him/his foreign policy (the Iranians and their various paramilitaries in particular seem to have concluded they have free rein to shut down the red sea and shoot missiles at Israel or American troops in the area without worrying about consequences).
Why do you consider moving closer to the median voter on immigration/abortion to be a good thing? I would've thought most people would want policy to move closer to their beliefs regardless of where they stand in relation to the median.
I think it is unsustainable and unhealthy in long run for policies to deviate too far from median voter in a democracy, on issues they deeply care about, immigration and abortion being good examples. These are simple values based questions everyone is qualified on.
If you want an economic answer, I can link you to the graph of real median household income. Correlation =/= causation, but most people are clever enough to realize that the best time of their life economically (and without a decrease, the hedonic setpoint being what it is) was under his presidency. There's a trillion arguments both ways about whether he caused it or not, but... well, it's the sort of argument that has never changed minds.
One of the big reasons I try to say this answer first is for the same reason Scott wrote "Against Murderism" – yeah, a decent percent of his voters are probably not game theory optimal agents, but there are genuine reasons to vote for him outside of hatred.
I think it has been over since the debate. People seeing Biden struggle like that punctured a lot of narratives. I am not excited to continue to watch this train wreck. I'm skeptical that the assassination attempt changed anyones mind. If biden was suddenly shot at and pumped his fist in front of a flag would people flip to support biden? Or for that matter desantis during the primary? A lot of this stuff is not logical though so who knows.
Eh. Let's wait a few weeks. Maybe Trump will do something stupid, or a video of him acting like an ass will pop up, or something else that takes the shine off. Maybe one of his supporters does something with a body count, and Trump screws up the PR. We've got months to go.
I don't think it's especially more joever than it was before (Gerald Ford survived two assassination attempts and still lost reelection), assassination attempts don't usually have a sustained influence. Otoh this was pretty joever already anyway and this probably makes it slightly more (unless it makes Trump go react in some completely nuts way that actually costs him votes).
I think the most important impact of the assassination attempt will be that it has greatly reduced the social cost of publicly switching sides from Biden to Trump, so that it will no longer be outside the Overton Window in a lot of places to be obviously pro-Trump. Combine this with a lot of previously quiet people now deciding that this is the moment to be brave and declare themselves for Trump, and I think the effect of this is actually going to be quite significant.
At this stage I just want to see everyone's crazy predictions. Will the Martians land on the White House lawn next week? Who knows? Anything can happen in the next half hour!
Voter memories are short, there's a lot of time left. By the "vibes" theory of politics it might truly be over, but the vibes theory is not the best, imho.
Eh, I'm not too sure – the economy has been doing wonderfully recently, with real incomes growing. The larger problem is that the economy has been doing wonderfully but president Biden has not managed to attribute it to him in the minds of voters. The fundamentals are improving, but his polling keeps slipping.
I'm not sure how to reconcile "the economy has been doing wonderfully recently" with Søren's post below, but that may have something to do with the polling.
You mean the "What’s the average number of job applications one has to send out to get one good new job on average?" That number has been in multiple tens for as long as I'm alive and tracking (which, frankly, isn't that long, but still); and the specific slowing down of tech sector isn't economy writ large and certainly isn't the kind of economy that influences the majority of swing waters (in famous Yglesias' pitch, "median voter didn't go to college").
I expect it to have something of an impact when HR departments get stereotyped/pattern-matched as progressive-leaning, though - "the Democrats are gatekeeping your next promotion/raise/career shift, etc." can be a negative even if they're waving the vast majority through (for the converse, "the racists won't consider your application" I would assume to have a similar chilling effect on minority applications to businesses with racist reputations, or applications generally to the extent businesses get stereotyped/pattern-matched as racist).
I mean, exactly. I'm not saying that fundamentals are bad. I'm saying that they haven't made a dent in people's opinion of Biden so far and are unlikely to jump up and do that suddenly.
Oh, sorry. Yes, that's my opinion as well, then. Biden may have been a great president (or he may have gotten lucky and been president for an economic recovery that would've happened anyways), but either way he does not seem able to capture credit for it. I would guess that the job of being president and the job of running for president require different skillsets to some degree.
the intervening filters (social media, conspiracy theories, deliberate misinfo propaganda on both sides, and the reality of a low info/low engagement electorate) mean there is almost no connection between policy (which elites still control) and politics (now largely entertainment/horse race. Politicians everywhere are unable to gain credit for their achievements (real or not). See Martin Gurri for much better on this.
Wow that's a lot of cope. If you're gonna go that far it'd be much more likely that Trump dies in the next 2 months (natural causes or not), both parties hit the reset button, and Newsom defeats Haley. Biden is openly senile and replacing him this late makes the Dems look like disorganized fools. Americans simply won't vote for someone with dementia and Trump was ahead anyway. I'm sorry but as long as he still has a pulse Trump is going to win.
Oh I'm not exactly dancing a jig over this election either. It's kind of like Alien vs Predator: no matter who wins, we lose. _Probably_ every generation feels this way at some point, but man it's hard to convince myself that this isn't uniquely bad.
>It's kind of like Alien vs Predator: no matter who wins, we lose.
Seconded!
>but man it's hard to convince myself that this isn't uniquely bad.
The debate was fascinating. Biden could not reliably complete his own sentences. Almost all of the best/worst/most/least statements that Trump made were false. Mumbler v Liar. And the present and former POTUS, debating who should be the next POTUS, spent part of the debate arguing about _golf_. I think "uniquely bad" is a reasonable assessment.
What’s the average number of job applications one has to send out to get one good new job on average? I’m hearing figures in the hundreds. Curious since I’m at about 50 in my new job hunt and haven’t heard a peep back from 90% and a “no” from the other 10% so far.
If you haven't gotten any interviews or at least phone calls 50 applications is enough to indicate your either doing something wrong or are unlucky, but yeah 100s sounds right.
That said while have attempted the application process enough to have a feel for it almost all of my jobs have come from either my actual network or being actively recruited off of linkedin and other sites that let you post resumes.
Tangential to the question, but as a software engineer, I used to get LinkedIn messages from recruiters a few times a week. Now I may get one every few months, with more paid messages for things like franchise "opportunities". This is all after the big company layoffs, and so I expect the market is more difficult now.
But I agree you should have someone look over your resume to see what others think. Perhaps it should stand out more. Perhaps you need keyword help, so you aren't rejected by an AI before anyone notices. Perhaps you need to highlight specific technologies people are looking for.
My experience (as a programmer in central europe) is the following: very few applications are needed, maybe around 10. I myself sent out around 20 (and was invited to about 5 interviews until I landed my current job). I sent about 5 application for the job before that. 2 of my last 4 fulltime-jobs I eventually found via recruiters on xing. On the other side I sometimes do technical assessments of applicants, and we hire about 25% of the people we interview.
I guess, that people who sent out hundreds of applications, either have some obvious red flags, or look for a job in a very bad market.
If you have a friend in HR or management, you may want to ask them to look at your application. Maybe you wrote something innocent there, that would become a red flag in the eyes of HR. Also don't be afraid to ask for feedback. If they gave you a "no" or ghost you, you have nothing to lose when asking for feedback. Ask for feedback via phone or personally. People usually don't want to give you their reasoning in writing.
Don't think as the company is a monolith, and instead think about the individuals involved in the process. The HR-persons must say "yes, this person checks all the checkboxes and raises none of the usual red flags" after reading your CV. The engineer must say "yes, they know what they are talking about, and I would like to work with them tomorrow" after doing an assessment with you. The manager must say "yes, our company can not afford not to hire them" after doing the interview with them. Match your style to the person you are in contact with. Think about what this individual is looking for, and then sell it to them.
Also have a look at glassdoor. They have some statistics about your industry and maybe about the specific companies, you send applications to.
If you're good with a good resume then probably just one. I have a friend who's a top-tier software engineer, currently a midlevel manager at a big company. He tests the waters every couple years for fun and has a 100% success rate. He's currently waiting for an offer from one of the big AI companies (one of OpenAI's direct competitors) which he'll probably take.
It's meant to be Søren "Soarin'" Kierkegaard but Substack makes that display as Søren \"Soarin'\" Kierkegaard with the escaped quotes in emails. Very annoying, so I removed the quotes, but it _still_ displays the escapes in Apple inboxes (but not Google). Don't know what Substack's problem is but I'll play around and fix it eventually.
It really depends if it's from a relatively standing start (which for me took over 125) Vs being an established and known figure in your sub sector (as I am now, a decade+ later), in which case it can easily be single digits, because recruiters/companies go to you directly.
When I was at Google over a decade ago, the numbers I was hearing was the company had 1-2 thousand applications received, several hundred of which reached the phone screen level and were presumably qualified on paper, for each new hire. Google very probably had a much worse than typical ratio, being a highly visible place to apply to and also having an extremely high hiring bar, but things are reputed to have gotten worse in the meantime.
Since COVID, I have sent out one application personally. I got a final-round interview out of it but did not receive an offer.
What field? What level within the field? How narrow are your goals/needs? What does "good" mean? etc.
Or alternatively, I think what you're actually asking is, "How many job applications do I need to send out to get a job offer that would look appealing to me?" This is a very hard question to answer without additional context, even if one were a recruiter or headhunter.
There's a huge power law here. If you're a strong candidate for what you're applying for, you can just apply to a handful of good companies and wait to hear back. If you're average, you just gotta keep shooting shots
I recently wrote an essay called "Reconsidering Dopamine" about a journal article that looks at the function of dopamine in the rat auditory system and its apparent role in dampening error signals in a predictive processing model. I used that as a springboard to talk about how this might explain some of the stuff we kinda-sorta know about in psychiatry and neurobiology regularly.
I'm sharing it here because I know there are a lot of people in the ACX audience who are really interested in predictive processing and probably know a whole lot more about it than I do, and I'm hoping that those of you who come upon this can critique some of my very uninformed conclusions.
Very beautiful theory! I do like the part on neuropathologies. Yes, I know, it's all very speculative, but it does fit together neatly.
I may be a bit more careful to rely too much on a single article. In the end, it's only two experiments, so there will be tons of other explanations which fit the outcomes well. I have read quite a few papers where the theory fit nicely with the experiments of that paper, but not with experiments from other papers. But that's more of a general disclaimer that more research is needed, and I guess we are pretty much on the same page here.
Economists seem to be fashion again, paraded as great minds with the ultimate understanding of the human condition (as homo economicus) all this beyond mere mortals with their common sense beliefs.
Whatever happened to the humility post 2008. Wasn’t there some talk about doing better.
What are you talking about? The vitriol directed at economics from the left has not changed, and the mainstream could not care less. Rat-adjacent readers don't turn up their nose at them but that's always been true.
The viriol directed at economists from the right certainly hasn't abated. And frankly it's a good thing it hasn't, because non-loony among them are the only ones aside from a few of us on the center/left who have actually noticed that the massive monetary accommodation and fiscal overstimulus of the pandemic era, conceived and executed with such hubris by the best and the brightest economists that the field had to offer, using the latest sophisticated models of economic behavior, created inflation of a severity not seen in a half century--oh and also, by the by, drove a housing mania worse than the one in the early 2000s and made wealth disparity wider than it's been in modem history.
Who do you think staffs the Fed and develops the models that the FOMC uses to set policy, and that failed so spectacularly to predict the outcome of the unprecedented quantitative easing and interest rate repression that the Committee put into practice? What do you think Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan, who between the two of them conceived of some of the worst modern Fed policies, are?
The Fed staffs the Fed, not some blob collective dubbed "the economists".
Bernanke and Greenspan were a mixed bag and were certainly Economists, but obviously they don't believe the same things. To the extent that you have a bias and conception as to how to formulate Fed policy, it's been filtered through some Economist, and the rest comes out of your ass.
Playing the game and learning about these things in depth is "doing Economics", you aren't operating in a different sphere.
The Fed employs hundreds of economists to do research and analysis and develop models and present the same to the members of the Federal Open Market Committee, several of whom are themselves economists. That's what "the Fed's decisions over the pandemic [have] to do with Economists": quite a lot. There's the answer to your implied question.
I’m talking about the rise of celebrity economists again, from Caplan to Hanson, Noah Smith and so on. To be fair Noah at least acknowledges the flaws in macro economics.
Are you confusing a general trend of experts in a wide variety of fields achieving internet fame, with a specific trend of experts in a narrow field achieving internet fame, and treating this specific trend as significant in a way it obviously isn't once the general trend is taken into account?
Because, like, there has also been a notable recent uptick in, to pick a subject I sometimes enjoy, celebrity tinkerers - people who achieve internet fame by repairing household objects.
What "rise"? I haven't noticed folks like Caplan & Hanson being much more famous now than they were in the past (Hanson is doing more youtube conversations with niche figures in UFOlogy or AI doom). Noah Smith hasn't been an academic economist for quite some time, I think he's just a pundit now.
What do folks think of Bryan Johnson's work and ideas?
Wealthy man who's working on personal longevity, releasing information about what he's doing and how it's worked out, and selling food and supplements.
'Rich man is scared shitless by realisation of own mortality' is no new thing, but I suppose previously we hadn't reached the peak of "medical snakeoil hucksters willing to part a fool from his money"; former generations had to rely on cinnabar and gold as Magic Immortality Cures, now we have SCIENCE!!!! to dose you up on New Magic Immortality Cures:
And for all his boasting about how he's reversed aging here and is better than 18 years old there, if you look at this photo of him and his son, you see the cruel truth of the difference between genuine youth and maturing body:
I'm not sure what age Johnson is aiming for. He certainly doesn't look as young as his son, though the more interesting question is whether he looks better than he did five or ten years ago.
I'm interested in whether he's found some useful approaches, not whether the weirdest things he does can be mocked.
I'm seen a picture of his typical meal. I didn't examine it closely, but it wasn't pureed. Maybe he was eating pureed food at some point.
But he is using "better than an 18/20 year old" as his metrics, including things that strongly point to he thinks he's not just slowing down, but reversing aging (grey hair not grey anymore).
So I do think he's trying for "now I look 18 again".
Thanks. A lot of this kind of stuff is Woo but that particular site sounds interesting.
One thing I’ve done for my longevity recently is drink more coffee, which is unusual for an ageing britisher.
Still needs must, and it’s a decent beverage. I’m waiting in anticipation for doctors to see cadburys chocolate as the ultimate life enhancer, along with dry cider.
After a few years drinking chocolate, especially Cadbury's, you'll probably look as old as Methuselah in his final days! That's because it is riddled with nauseating amounts of sugar, which is well-known to accelerate ageing if taken to excess.
I'd have thought one's best bet at maintaining a youthful health and appearance is simply to confine protein input to tuna. Aren't there sprightly Japanese centenarians who don't look a day over 50, and can walk up a mountain without pausing, because they've eaten sea food all their lives?
Their banter is funnier than most, and it's interesting that they've also got some stuff about aphantasia-- so I hit both the topics with my first two posts.
However, their material about Johnson is about conflict between him and his ex-girlfriend. He does come off badly, and I have less trust in him, but it didn't address his work on longevity.
Now I'm wondering if there's anyone independently testing his food and suppliments.
I wonder if aphantasia is a static part of someone, for example if you take DMT are there people who *don't* hallucinate anything? I believe I had aphantasia but after doing copious amounts of DMT and hallucinating a lot I can now visualize to a low level. Especially after I went psychotic, in that state I could willingly visualize anything with my eyes open and it would overlap my vision but after coming down I can still visualize a bit but not to that degree.
I can provide acideotal evidence of this. I experience photic sneeze reflex/ACHOO syndrome and if I feel like I am on the cusp of sneezing from anything, I can push it over the line by visualizing looking into bright sunlight.
Part of your brain has a definite idea of what Hobbits look like, but you're not a skilled enough artist to translate that impulse into a definite image. All you can do is look at existing images and recognize that they don't hit the right emotional buttons for you. This is probably analogous to never being able to find anyone who can make spaghetti like mom could: you have a definite idea of what it's supposed to taste like but you don't know enough about cooking to effectively describe what it is. If you were a highly-trained chef you probably could!
> t turns out that if you can visualize, visualizing affects your eyes, so visualizing a bright light means your pupils contract.
That sounds really cool, and I'd love to see a big study exploring it more. But my [ cool sounding social science result that was found through p-hacking or publication bias and thus won't replicate ] alarm is blaring.
Interesting. I don't think I visualize in the way some people are able to, but I have trouble wrapping my head around just what they are experiencing. Some people say that when they visualize an apple, they have a very specific sense of what an apple looks like (complete with whether someone's taken a bite out of it), but that it does not rise to the level of a visual hallucination. They say it it's an actual visual experience, but when I push them they say it's not akin to hallucinating. But other people say they "see" an apple there, and seem to tell me that it is akin to a hallucination.
I have no hint of a visual experience when I think of what an apple looks like. People then wonder how I can describe an apple to someone else, or draw one. My answer is that I have a concept of an apple, but when I think about it is more verbal -- I can describe the shape, the color, etc, and I can use a pencil to transfer that to a page. So am I actually visualizing the way some people are? I don't know!
Maybe the way I hold the idea of apple in my mind is related to the fact that I have a very active inner monologue. I also feel like I can hold the idea of music in my head pretty clearly -- the concepts of pitch, volume, etc. I can carry on entire conversations with myself and "listen" to a song. But it definitely is not a an auditory experience in the same way that actually hearing music is, i.e. I would never describe it as an auditory hallucination. But maybe it comes closer to what some people experience when they visualize something?
I wonder if I have any auditory-related physiological responses when I "hear" things in my mind?
The thing that irritates me about "conspiracy theories" is not the hypothesis of a conspiracy, but the absolute certainty that a conspiracy is responsible for something even if alternative explanations seem more plausible.
If someone proposed a conspiracy theory and then added "I assign a 20% probability that this happened", I would often be okay with that because... strange things happen, who knows. But a typical conspiracy theorist will call you naive and brainwashed for even considering alternative explanations. For example, a conspiracy theory will assume that thousands of random unimportant people are on someone's payroll, even if their behavior can be easily explained by everyone following their selfish incentives.
Basically, conspiracy theorists seem to have this model of the world where people following their incentives is something unheard of, so if thousands of people do something that seems like an obvious thing anyone in their situation would do, clearly the CIA or Soros must be involved. Even if you propose a mixed model, where e.g. the CIA or Soros started something, but then thousands or millions of people have joined it for selfish reasons, the conspiracy theorists will insist that every single one of those thousands or millions must be on the payroll. Well, maybe not the anonymous randos, but definitely anyone who is not a completely anonymous rando.
For example, consider the Euromaidan. Is it possible that CIA did something? Yes, it is definitely possible. But is it also possible that millions of Ukrainians have some information about what life is like in EU, and what life is like in Russia (they have borders with both, so it's not some distant lands they are speculating about; they can watch the TV, many of them understand the languages, the ones living near the border often have relatives on the other side) and many of them concluded that they would rather live in the former than in the latter? In my opinion, that's a fucking obvious conclusion that any sane person would make in their place... but for the sake of debate, let's assume that only 50% of those who considered this question have made that choice. That's still enough to have a perfectly natural explanation for what happened.
I don't have a problem with the hypothesis that CIA is somehow responsible for the spark that started the explosion. I have a problem with the hypothesis that the entire explosion was manufactured by CIA; that there was no flammable material there unless CIA brought it. Apparently some people never heard about Holodomor (or maybe they believe it is American propaganda?), or never heard about the 1991 referendum, so they assume that the idea that Ukrainians want to be independent from Russia must be some recent invention that CIA pays them to say.
At that moment, it's like looking outside during winter, noticing the snow on the streets, and concluding that Jews did it. The problem is not that Jews are incapable of shoveling the snow. The problem is that there is a perfectly natural explanation and you decided to ignore it, because the conspiracy theory makes a cool story.
A lot of conspiracy theories flounder on "What is the gain?" question. What is the gain for Big Tobacco to cover up harmful effects of smoking? An obvious one, their profits might well stand or fall on this issue. What is the gain for pharma companies to cover up for vaccines? The same. (This doesn't alone imply that vaccines are harmful, though or indeed smoking, either - you need vastly more studies for that!)
What is the gain for public health authorities to cover up for vaccines? Well, that's far less obvious - they don't really derive direct benefits either way, one usually needs some bigger conspiracy where they are consciously killing or sterilizing people, and then you'd need explanation for why they are doing that and even if you were doing some sort of a "benign" population control thing to keep population numbers down for the environment wouldn't there be far less risky strategies, and so on.
There are benefits for the American security system for regime change in Ukraine during EuroMaidan, so them serving as the soruce shouldn't be dismissed immediately, but many other actors derived even more direct benefit (such as the Ukrainian opposition figures replacing Yanukovich and his government), so it's unclear how much one *needs* CIA to explain what happened.
"Conspiracy Theory" is a short pointer to a long list of bad epistemic practices. Those bad epistemic practices are *typically* done by people who love seeing conspiracies everywhere, but they're orthogonal to the conspiracy dimension.
The bad epistemic practices include but are not limited to:
(1) Motivated reasoning, especially morally-motivated reasoning. M. Alice dislikes Jews, instead of being honest and saying, "I don't like Jews because they don't look like my ethnicity" or "I don't like Jews because they're typically a closed ingroup that doesn't mix with outsiders", M. Alice chooses to believe Jews caused 9/11 to have an objective reason to hate Jews. Motivated reasoning can occur without moral undertones, but mixing the "Is" and the "Ought" like that is the most egregious case.
(2) Thinking that credentialed experts are necessarily wrong or inferior.
(3) Relatedly to (2), thinking that information is "available" and reasoning from them is always "easy". Google always suffices, there is never any tacit procedural knowledge locked inside people's brain and not recorded anywhere, there is never any need to examine primary sources and cross-check different information. In history there is never any need to go to offline-only archives or examine archaeology and architecture (which sometimes needs expensive travel), or learn the ancient, extinct languages involved. In Math and Physics, there is never any need to grasp abstract and highly non-biologically-familiar ideas like entities defined solely by their behavior and/or relation to each other, reasoning from natural language description and artistic illustrations is always enough.
In short: Natural language - specifically the one you were born with - is All You Need, and Google and everyday reasoning is All You Need. Any other cognitive tool or intellectual framework invented by experts is false, gate-keeping, unnecessary.
(4) Relatedly to (2), thinking that every attempt at vigorous disagreement or even outright unfair dismissal (which happens normally in all professions among equals) is an expression of malice aimed at suppressing the idea being dismissed or disagreed with
(5) Torturing individual pieces of data to forcibly connect and give a pre-ordained conclusion, while sweeping contradicting pieces of data under the rug or artificially assigning them lower weights and different interpretations.
(6) Placing undue plausibility on story-like conclusions and privileging narratively-pleasing explanations. There is a single mastermind behind all of those massive events. There is a certain group that have continuity across history and caused a lot of unrelated historical events. Plans never go wrong. Motivations never change. Continuity gets preserved across centuries. Secrets never leak and if they do, there is a single source and it is the one telling the story right now.
(7) Always thinking in high stakes. The conspiracy is never about a boring thing like a corporate manager falsifying a product in a launch demo (e.g. Steve Jobs) or a government misrepresenting its achievements via subtle statistics games. It's always massive wars, sweeping societal changes, pyramids, aliens, space.
You can imagine how those epistemological sins can be all perpetrated even if what you're thinking about is not a conspiracy. Religion is not typically called a conspiracy but it popular (non-philosophical) religious thinking echoes all of the above points. Perhaps conspiracies have a special vibe to it that makes a human brain especially vulnerable to falling into those sins, but they're technically orthogonal to the conspiratorial aspect.
Conversely, you can imagine a conspiracy theorist who uses OSINT, hacks into IoT devices and satellites to gather data, uses databases, programming, data science, and mathematical models. Cross-checks conclusions with other conclusions, publishes conclusions, is open to criticism and feedback, etc... This is the kind of guy who would have discovered COVID in early January 2020 or even December 2019, and even if he/she arrived at a superficially-outrageous conclusion like "Obama is a Jewish lizard" you would be lying if you claim you won't download all the PDFs and the Python notebooks to see what made him/her think like that.
I was looking for something like improper scientific reasoning: anything confirming the theory obviously confirms it, but if it doesn't, it's ignored, or worse, it's spun into a new level of the conspiracy covering it up.
No matter what that guy you work with who claims to have Cliffy Claven-like knowledge of every event in the history of mankind says, 9/11 was not an inside job.
What you say about the moon landing and suspicions in Soviet aligned countries is pretty interesting. People living there had more reasons to suspect a fake than those in the West.
I’ll probably catch a matinee showing of this related rom com today.
Genuine conspiracies do happen in history, but conspiracy *theories* have almost always been wrong. At least in the modern Western world; I'm not entirely confident about extending that to all of history. But I think the contemporary West is the appropriate reference case here.
Remember, in order to count as a conspiracy theory, it has to first be a conspiracy (a secret organized effort to commit a serious crime or similarly abhorrent act), and it also has to be a *theory*. There has to be a significant period in which people advanced the theory that this nefarious thing was happening, but that was not generally accepted as true. Neither an unknown conspiracy nor an unambiguously revealed one is a "conspiracy theory".
So things like MK Ultra or the Tuskegee experiments don't count - they went directly from things nobody but the participants suspected, to things everyone knew were true, with only about as much time in between as the NYT needed to dot the i's and cross the t's. And by that standard, there aren't many examples that actually did turn out to be true, even though there have been many conspiracies that were either never discovered or unambiguously revealed.
The mental process that leads to advancing and persistently supporting a claim of conspiracy, without the sort of evidence that would lead to an investigation quickly confirming the claim, is generally the result of logical fallacy, wishful thinking, and/or actual mental illness.
Since most people intuitively understand this, successfully casting your opponent as a "conspiracy theorist" is a very effective way to win an argument. If you can make it stick. But that's why people try.
Another major sign of a theory that is likely to be false is requiring large numbers of people to somehow perfectly coordinate without any leaks, even when they're likely to have different agendas. Or just large numbers of people in general. Also epistemic closure - any evidence against the theory is interpreted as evidence for the theory instead.
> And what I am trying to argue is that assuming that when someone promised something, and some unknown person did that thing, it was the one who promised it, is not bad epistemology
Well first off, you need to figure out who actually "promised" what. To put it charitably, this is a highly nonstandard usage of the word "promise".
What is a promise? Well, let's look for example at what Trump promised.
There are a lot of things that Trump unambiguously promised - "build the wall and make Mexico pay for it", "drain the swamp", etc. Everyone would agree that these were promises.
Then there are some things that are more debatable. For example, did Trump "promise" to put Clinton in jail? Personally, I'd say that wasn't a promise, but at the very least, it was something he said repeatedly and unambiguously, so it's at least colorable.
Now, did Trump promise to go around injecting bleach into people? No reasonable person would agree that he "promised" to do that, despite the fact that he famously once made a comment that sounded somewhat like that.
Trawling through months of speeches to find a single comment, which, when taken out of context, sounds vaguely like what happened later on is *very definitely not* a promise. And to argue otherwise just makes it seem like you decided on the conclusion first and are reasoning backwards from there, looking for whatever thread of justification you can find.
Even if the US was going to do something like that, they wouldn't announce it in a single highly ambiguous comment months beforehand like that. This is the kind of Nostradamus-style reasoning that gives conspiracy theorists a bad name.
Biden was clearly talking about sanctions here. Even if the US had been responsible, his comment would have had nothing to do with it and you'd have been right only by chance.
The line is "what do you want me to do about it?" I care as much about what the CIA is up to as I do about whether Ethel at the grocery store really told you that your coat looked like roadkill.
If you have kids, who are getting vaccines, you should probably pay attention to whether vaccines are harmful. I'm an adult who's had several dozen, and am cheap and avoid them anyway; I don't care if it's true. Whether it's true or false changes nothing about my behavior.
Draw it such that it encompasses as many of your political enemies' beliefs as possible while excluding as many of your political tribe's beliefs as possible.
I can't help you with drawing a bright line; like a lot of stuff in the world, it's fuzzy in many dimensions.
But as to why it has a negative connotation? The world can be thought of as a giant collection of data points (that's just one possible abstraction, of course), and if you ignore most of them and selectively focus on the rest, it's possible to create any picture you want by connecting the dots with lines. In that sense, conspiracy theories are like a Rorschach blot test, telling us what's going on inside the person's head. If you want to avoid this, you'll need to act like a scientist (albeit, not a particularly good sort), and have solid-sounding independent reasons for all the exclusions and inclusions you make, and have evidence that can't be explained by other means. Most people who come up with conspiracy theories are unintelligent enough or mentally ill enough that they can't manage this, and don't even realize that it's important. Some do realize that it's important, but can't calmly and rationally document the details in a way that makes sense to others.
And there's a big trap here, which is that even if everything the conspiracy theorist says is true, and even if all their methods are rational, they're still screwed. Because as you say, the whole thing is low status, and people dismiss it easily, and trying to tell people the truth and being consistently ignored is a great way to *become* crazy.
And the result is that one way or another, most of them are nuts, and become more so the more of their life gets taken over by the theory.
You don't draw the line, you evaluate each claim on its own merits dynamically. You live in an informational ecosystem with hostile agents and every fixed strategy can be exploited.
This is not a WW2 situation, but an American Civil War situation. The Russians see Ukraine like the North - trying to take back an integral part of the nation occupied by traitors. The Ukrainians see themselves like the South - their own proud nation who wants to be free to set its own path.
Of course, like the ACW, this is also a battle of economic systems between upstart and existing powers, and as such a battle of foreign proxies as well.
"The Russians will be in Warsaw by April, and Paris by August if we don't stop the evil Putler from remaking the CCCP" is just a propaganda line by one of the proxies with interests in the region.
The Russians see Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia as part of Russia the same way they see Ukraine as part of Russia. And there's no way for them to go into Riga without being at war with Warsaw and Paris.
Except they don't, not in the way they view Ukraine. You may argue Putin has covert geopolitical goals on the baltic states, but he certainly doesn't say anything of the sort.
Meanwhile, he's thoughtfully written out an essay on his interpretation of the Russian nation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Historical_Unity_of_Russians_and_Ukrainians). I mean believe it or not but that's the propaganda line they're going with so it may as well be true (Russians will see it through that lens, at least.
If Russia had invaded Ukraine in 1991, you might have had a point. But in real life, Ukraine had been an independent country for 30 years with Russia's blessing and even treaties guaranteeing Ukraine's security as an independent country.
This is an extremely disingenuous attempt at analogy and you know it.
30 years is not that long. It's been 10 since the Crimea annexation - and that's what this started with. This war has been going on for 10 years already, first only in areas significantly more Russian.
The relevant point is that it is it is infinitely longer than the Confederacy, which had *never* existed as an independent country before the war, let alone made treaties with the north.
The Confederacy also never had its own language, so there's that, too.
Whether or not the Southern States were sovereign and independent is what the war was fought over. The States saw themselves as -independent sovereigns, part of a common cultural heritage that went back hundreds of years (Virginians and New Englanders were practically two different ethnic groups).
Also - Ukraine barely does have it's own language. Russian and Ukrainian are mutually intelligible.
Oh, good grief. Are you at all familiar with the events of 1941?
Putin is probably, in this respect, similar to Stalin. If he gets a "peace" deal with Ukraine, he'll insist on no NATO membership or military assistance as a part of the deal. Then, like Stalin, he'll get down to the serious business of rebuilding his army for the next war.
If, a year or two later while he is still rebuilding his army, Russia is invaded by Germany and all of Germany's allies, then like Stalin before him I expect Putin will set aside his Ukrainian ambitions to fight the greater threat. But, like Stalin, he'll eventually get a piece of Ukraine for his troubles.
If Stalin, er, Putin, gets a peace deal with Ukraine and *isn't* seriously invaded by someone else in the next few years, we *know* what he will do because we've seen that play out in 2015-2021. Except, it's likely that Putin will skip the part where he tries to take control by political subversion, because that plan went out the door with Poroshenko and even more so with the Battle of Kyiv.
Delay isn't a worthless result. He's not getting any younger. If we can get a decade of "peace", the problem has a good chance of disappearing on its own.
You seem to be assuming that Putin's replacement will be better than Putin. This seems foolishly optimistic, particularly as Putin has been purging the Russian political scene of anyone we would see as "better than Putin".
Breaking international agreements and gulags and starving populations into submission are all bad, but they’re different things - almost every leader in history may beat out Stalin when it comes to the latter two, but it doesn’t mean they won’t do the first.
Stalin didn't attack Finland again because Hitler refused to go along with it. Then when Hitler attacked the USSR Finland joined. Finland attacked with them and the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union got involuntarily hosted military bases and permanent influence over Finland in the peace settlement. I do think that if Ukraine were willing to concede a Finland like deal Ukraine could end the war. That means loss of territory, permanent Russian influence over Ukraine, and military limits. This is more or less what Putin has asked for. The west wants a South Korea like deal. This is what the current fighting is about.
Though additionally: Finland has always been semi-independent even during the days of the Grand Duchy of Finland. It's never been Slavic and Russia has never tried to eliminate their identity or denied their existence as a separate people. Ukraine has had a very different experience.
It's hard to accept, but yes, at this point it's not implausible to say that Putin is worse than Stalin.
Here's the list of treaties guaranteeing Ukraine's sovereignity and territorial integrity, all flushed down the toilet by Putin (and, to be fair, the feckless cowardly Western leaders, the sorry lot of them):
1991: Treaty among Russia, Ukraine, and Belarussia that effectively dissolved the USSR, and creating the new countries in their existing administrative borders (but see 2003 below)
1994: Budapest Memorandum
2003: Border agreement between Russia and Ukraine. The often-mentioned "1991 borders" for Ukraine is a convenient shorthand, but a legal fiction - the administrative border was ill-defined in 1991, and it took until 2003 to finalize it. Think about it - it was Putin who signed off on the Ukraine-Russia border, and that of course included Crimea as a part of Ukraine.
For the purpose of this discussion, agreed. And that is indeed where Putin is clearly worse. As JohanL pointed out, Stalin was a bit of a stickler for international agreements, and, by many accounts, did not believe his own intelligence warning him of an impeding German attack because he didn't think his friend Adolf would break the treaty.
Putin thinks sticking to agreements is for losers.
This is my big problem with arguing based solely on historical analogies -- you can come up with all sorts of contradictory advice based on what analogy you choose.
Is the Ukraine war like WW2, with Putin as Hitler? Then obviously we need to stop him now, because he'll never stop on his own, and every concession just makes him harder to beat later on.
Is the war like the Winter War, with Russia as the USSR and the Ukraine as Finland? Then the Ukrainians should put up enough resistance to show they're not an easy target (which they've already done), then make some concessions to gain peace while they've still got a strong enough army to provide them with leverage in the negotiations.
Is the war like WW1? Then it's not really any of our business, and NATO should probably avoid getting involved for fear of escalating a local war into a civilisation-wrecking catastrophe.
(FWIW, I've always found the idea that concessions in the Ukraine will inevitably lead Putin to invade the rest of Europe to be overblown. Ukraine is, for historical/cultural/ideological reasons, a particularly sore spot for Russia, so I think it more plausible that Putin would countenance intervention there that he wouldn't countenance for other European countries.)
It's over, opponent. I have depicted you as Hitler and me as the Allies. Surrender at once.
<BEN SHAPIRO>
So let's imagine, for the sake of argument, that you're Hitler. There is plenty of arguments to support this, for one, I don't approve of your goals, and I don't approve of Hitler's goals, surely that's more than enough common ground between you and Hitler? In any case, you may grant that you're Hitler for the purely hypothetical reason of exploring the purely hypothetical consequences were that to be actually true.
If you're Hitler, and I'm opposing you, that would surely mean that I'm the Allies. It's inevitable, right? I MUST be either De Gaulle or Churchill or Roosevelt or Stalin or Mao, flawless people who fought Hitler, the Most Moral a̶r̶m̶y̶ People in the Universe, really.
It now follows that you're both defeated as a matter of fact, policy, and morality. Everyone wants you defeated, Hitler - who was just like you - was defeated, and you're just like Hitler, therefore you are defeated, but that must mean I'm victorious. So I'm right.
The problem is not that peace, per se, is impossible, but that the specific peace deals Russia is currently proposing are obviously poison pills.
For example, if Russia was to say "agree to cede the currently-occupied territories, and in return we will stop all attacks on further Ukrainian territory and not block an EU/NATO bid", that would be a plausible peace deal. Depending on the specifics and broader situation, I could even imagine supporting a bit of arm-twisting to get Ukraine to agree to it. But the peace deals that Putin has suggested thus far involve the vast demilitarization of Ukraine and putting it out of reach of any alliance network, which would make them highly vulnerable to another attack. Finland has universal 18-60 conscription, with everyone either serving a brief term or spending time in prison, so it's not an easy target for Russia or the Soviet Union.
Ukraine would be a neutral state, so no NATO, there would be a limit on the size of its military forces (more or less the same as they had before the invasion) and a number of countries, including the US and the UK would offer security guarantees. Even the status of Crimea would have to be negotiated after 10 to 15 years. I can't find it in the articles I've linked above but Ukrainian negotiators said Russia was willing to go back to the Feb 23 line at that time.
Note that this treaty was compatible with improving the effectiveness of the Ukrainian army (you can cycle a lot of people through a 250k peacetime army) and placing large numbers of NATO troops and materiel on the border to make the security guarantees more concrete and deterring the *potential* future aggression.
> Russia, stunned by the fierce resistance Ukraine was putting up, seemed open to such a deal, but eventually balked at its critical component: an arrangement binding other countries to come to Ukraine’s defense if it were ever attacked again.
> [...]
> To the Ukrainians’ dismay, there was a crucial departure from what Ukrainian negotiators said was discussed in Istanbul. Russia inserted a clause saying that all guarantor states, including Russia, had to approve the response if Ukraine were attacked. In effect, Moscow could invade Ukraine again and then veto any military intervention on Ukraine’s behalf — a seemingly absurd condition that Kyiv quickly identified as a dealbreaker.
These also sound like poison pills asking for an easy go of round two. Beyond which, April 2022 was a different time; the longer a war has gone on, the harder it is to end.
This clause appears in one of the drafts (the April one). Your claim was that "the peace deals that Putin has suggested thus far involve the vast demilitarization of Ukraine and putting it out of reach of any alliance network, which would make them highly vulnerable to another attack."
My point is that it's not true for some of the drafts discussed in 2022.
Agreed. Putin has repeatedly stated he is ready for peace talks at any time. But if you look at the specifics of what that actually means, he is practically calling for the total surrender of Ukraine. Putin wants them to cede all occupied territory, demilitarize and stay out of NATO, and denazify - whether this means getting rid of bona fide fascists or just people the Russians find inconvenient is left as an exercise to the reader. I don't know that the Russians actually want to occupy the entirety of Ukraine - the western half of the country is far less culturally and politically Russian. Probably a Ukrainian rump state that the Russians de facto (but not de jure) control as a buffer against NATO is the preferred outcome for them.
>whether this means getting rid of bona fide fascists or just people the Russians find inconvenient is left as an exercise to the reader
"Nazi" means something very different in Russia than it does in the West. In the postwar west, the defining feature of Nazi-ism is murdering six million Jews, with a side order of "Oh, yeah, and trying to conquer Europe was bad too". In Russia, the defining feature of Nazi-ism is a willingness to wage bloody war against Russia. Which, to be fair, they've got good reason to care about more than they do the Holocaust or the invasion of Poland.
But when a Russian says "deNazify", they mean getting rid of everyone who was involved with the last war against Russia, or who they think might be part of the next one. Their political views are irrelevant.
I don't think anyone called the Afghans or the Chechens Nazis.
Not to deny the existence of Russian state mythology built around the Soviet victory over the Third Reich, but in the specific context of Ukraine, there's also the unpleasant fact that far-right groups (Right Sector, primarily) were the main muscle in the square during the Maidan Revolution. For years afterward, far-right militias (Azov, primarily) carried much of the fight against the separatists in the East, and politically resisted Zelensky's early-and-soon-abandoned attempts at reconciliation out there. And now, by necessity, Azov (rebranded as the 3rd Assault Brigade) are lionised again as prestigious badasses because the Ukrainian military is doing everything it can think of to up recruitment. And, sure enough, they parade around with their wolf's-hooks and Celtic crosses, and openly venerate Melnyk, Bandera, and other WWII-era Actual Nazis, and help make Putin's case for him. In officially sanctioned Russian discourse – so, like, on Solovyov, or whatever – 'Banderist' is more or less interchangeable with 'Nazi', and that part is not all that inaccurate.
To be clear, I don't think Putin actually cares. He isn't doing much about Russian neo-Nazis, he certainly didn't care when European neo-Nazis met (and amused themselves with paramilitary training) in St Petersburg in the 2010s, and he didn't care when the Rusich fraction of Wagner LARPed as Nazis, either. But many Russians genuinely still feel strongly about this, and the actual Army's ethos is bound up in it, and so the label resonates.
To a Russian, or at least a revanchist Russian imperialist, Ukraine *is* Russia. A part of Russia where puppets of the West have been killing good Russians since 2014 at least.
From what I gathered, Putin's terms weren't for a *peace treaty*, but for a *ceasefire*, during which the actual peace treaty were to be negotiated. And yes, that's as utterly insane and ridiculous as it sounds: Ukraine was supposed to give up basically all of its political and military capital, and vast regions that aren't even occupied by Russian forces, before any negotiations would even begin.
After the Winter War, though, Stalin at least queried Germany on whether they would have approval for a second round (before Operation Barbarossa started and when Soviet Union and Germany were still formally pals).
After 1945, of course, Soviet Union did not really have a need to attack any more of the European countries, but there was a real danger of Finland following the same road as the (other) Eastern European countries to being a People's Republic, and many of the steps on that road were taken, but due to a combination of things that still cause a lot of controversy in Finnish historiography, the final steps weren't taken and going Communist was averted.
One thing a lot of people don't realize about Stalin is that he had an odd, legalistic respect for international treaties. He waited until the Japanese non-aggression had expired until declaring war, even though absolutely no-one would have been bothered if he just ignored it. His forces evacuated significant parts of Europe because he had agreed to it in advance. This is probably a partial explanation about the extremely poor initial response to Barbarossa as well - THEY HAD A DEAL!!
None of this holds true for Putin. Deals are meaningless to him, utterly empty - just ask Prigozhin oh wait you can't.
(There's a wonderful attributed Stalin quote about why he didn't take over Finland: "Who wants to keep a hedgehog in his pocket?")
Or even just one with a more sensible set of priorities. The war isn't merely evil, it's *stupid*. At this point, no-one in their right mind can think it was a good idea to initiate it, and the large majority people in Russia would like it to go away.
I think puzzles (with the right difficulty level) are good for this. I'm enjoying the Giiker Super Slide at the moment. It's easy enough that I can do it when I'm tired, but difficult enough that I still get a sense of satisfaction from completing a level.
I've been there. For be at least it becomes a lot more. The cheap dopamine craving takes over the rest of my life quickly. The only way out that works (for a while), is cold turkey quit all activities I know are cheap dopamine and replace them with healthy activities. I have found a full night's sleep to be the most critical element of having the self control to stick to this. Others are a packed to do list, and some things that are not a death spiral of cheap dopamine, like listening to podcasts or exercise
Get a content blocker. What you're doing isn't random easy useless shit, it's online shit. People who are smart enough to have been figuring out the cure for various cancers have been making fuck tons of money for several decades by figuring out ways to attach suction cups to your eyeballs. Virtually everyone wastes some time online scrolling thru displays of consumer goods, genitals, videos etc. It's like living in a goddam food court. We were never meant to have available to us the promise of effortless stimulation and entertainment, and we get disregulated when we are carrying a device purporting to deliver that in our pockets.
We'd probably be doing better overall if the internet really did deliver that. But what it's really good at delivering the feeling that you're going to find some absolutely wonderful stimulation and entertainment if you scroll just a bit more.
You may be more susceptible than most to the internet's suction, but I think you're wrong to think the main cause is your love of cheap dopamine. I think the main cause is the internet. Block the fucker. Block it a lot. Read some articles by people who cut way back on their online time for inspiration and tips.. Consider something like a 2 week backpacking trip without a phone.
Well the first question is what do you WANT to do about it? We've got "sleep more", what else? Sounds like you want to do chores faster; why? What's filling that time once they're done?
One way to break from cheap dopamine is investing in more complex dopamine. The brain wants to do things, it's trying to turn the videos into an activity. Give it an activity and it'll calm down. Start an exercise program, with a solid end goal. Learn a new recipe and try to cook it. Pick your favorite Youtube video, and try to figure out a blueprint for your own version of it. Anything that isn't passive absorption.
Lots of cravings weaken once you stop indulging them. Give your phone to a family member for the week. You'll probably be crawling up the walls for a bit, but you'll figure out something else to do by the time you get it back.
1. Have you tried meditation? Daily mindfulness meditation, about 15-20 min. Maybe try it first thing in the morning, I don't know what your schedule is like, just pick the time of day you are most likely to meditate consistently with no distractions. There are lots of guides/resources if you google "mindfulness meditation" or go to your local bookstore.
Why do I recommend this?
If you meditate consistently for a while, you'll start to notice a space between the desire for something (masturbation, YouTube, whatever) and the acting on that desire. As Viktor Frankl wrote, "between stimulus and response there is a space, and in that space is the freedom to act." It's like physical exercise - if you just do it a couple of times, it does nothing, but if you do it consistently over some period of time, you will start to notice a difference.
2. Also, a time-honored way to fight cravings is to remove the stimulus. Can you just... choose not to carry your phone with you to the bathroom or kitchen? If you leave your phone in the living room while you're cooking in the kitchen, you will then have to physically leave the kitchen to mess around on your phone, and that tiny bit of extra activation energy may be enough to stop you.
3. Lastly, sometimes the longing *FOR* something is stronger than aversion. Try reframing it in your mind, rather than "I wish I didn't spend so much time on my phone," ask yourself, "what COULD I do if I had that extra time/energy?" Go on some dates and possibly meet the love of your life, really excel at work, find a better job, take up an awesome hobby, whatever? And then use that to motivate you.
One June 4th, Biden issued a proclamation banning asylum claims from illegal immigrants at the southern border. However, I can't seem to find any information about what actually happened. Did it get blocked in court? Have border encounters gone down?
- Illegals claiming asylum were turned away if the 7 day rolling average exceeded 2500 per day, and the "ban" was rescinded if that average dropped below 1500 per day.
- The ACLU sued the Biden admin for this, but didn't seek an injunction, so it should still be in effect.
I see the data here only goes up to June. https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-land-border-encounters Is this a case where there's just a long lag in the data and we can't actually see the results?
I assume they don't bother updating until after the end of the month. I couldn't find anything separating the type of encounter either; asylum seekers just get lumped into the total.
Something really weird is going on on Twitter. When I go to https://twitter.com/patio11 (Patrick McKenzie's twitter), I can view the most recent few tweets normally, but as soon as I scroll down to a certain tweet (the one which I think is about turning society off and then on again though it always refreshes too fast for me to actually read it), the page immediately refreshes (with the same url) before I can read anything, and the new page (despite having the same url) only shows older tweets starting July 19th, with no way to see the most recent tweets again. The only way to go back is to close the tab and open a new tab with the same url (which has the same behavior as before).
I tested this in both Chrome and Firefox, and tried disabling ad blocker too, but it still happens. Additionally, it still happens if I use the "x.com" url instead of "twitter.com". I've never seen this behavior before, and when I check other people on Twitter, it's all normal with no weird refresh and tweet hiding.
WTF is going on?
Are you logged into X?
Yes. I tried it in an incognito window, but when you aren't logged in, it won't even display recent tweets at all. Logged out users only get a random selection of unordered tweets from years ago, rendering it completely unusable.
Somehow news of the upcoming Netflix series "Terminator Zero" eluded me until today. It's an anime series of eight episodes. Available August 29.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminator_Zero
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvXbAQOpocQ
TIL that a theory very similar to Scott’s thrive/survive theory of the political spectrum seems to be quite popular in anthropology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regality_theory
Big deal developments in the War on Gaza:
(1) The Yemen-based Houthis strike central Israel - in particular Tel Aviv, near the US embassy - for the first time since they entered the war in November. This is both a political first - no other non-Gazan armed group struck Tel Aviv before -, and a technological first for the Houthis pointing at improving capabilities. The Houthis have previously focused only on harassing civilian Red Sea and Indian Ocean shipping, the drones and missiles they fired at Israel targeted Eilat and tended to be shot by US navy, the IDF, and the occasional Egyptian fighter jets over Sinai.
(2) The ICJ ruled that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem is unlawful. This is already the consensus, but the ICJ's ruling is the latest confirmation in a long string. This case is separate from the genocide case opened by South Africa in late December of 2023, it was opened in January of 2023 by the Palestinian Authority. It has since garnered the attention of many states and representatives from Luxemburg to Namibia. The ICJ's ruling is advisory and non-binding, but it's valuable because it bolsters the anti-settlement camp and serves as legal grounding for more Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction behavior from increasingly more European trading and defense partners of Israel.
From https://icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/186/186-20240719-adv-01-00-en.pdf, page 81:
> (3) By eleven votes to four,
[The court] Is of the opinion that the State of Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian
Territory is unlawful
---
> (4) By eleven votes to four,
[The court] Is of the opinion that the State of Israel is under an obligation to bring to an end its unlawful
presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as rapidly as possible
---
> (5) By fourteen votes to one,
[The court] Is of the opinion that the State of Israel is under an obligation to cease immediately all new
settlement activities, and to evacuate all settlers from the Occupied Palestinian Territory
---
> (6) By fourteen votes to one,
[The court] Is of the opinion that the State of Israel has the obligation to make reparation for the damage
caused to all the natural or legal persons concerned in the Occupied Palestinian Territory
---
> (7) By twelve votes to three,
[The court] Is of the opinion that all States are under an obligation not to recognize as legal the situation
arising from the unlawful presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and
not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by the continued presence of the
State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory
---
> (8) By twelve votes to three,
[The court] Is of the opinion that international organizations, including the United Nations, are under an
obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence of the State of
Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory
---
> (9) By twelve votes to three,
[The court] Is of the opinion that the United Nations, and especially the General Assembly, which
requested this opinion, and the Security Council, should consider the precise modalities and further
action required to bring to an end as rapidly as possible the unlawful presence of the State of Israel
in the Occupied Palestinian Territories
Thanks! While I may not be as sympathetic to the Hamas cause as you are, I appreciate your opinions. Unfortunately, as long as Israeli hostages are being held by Hamas, I don't think the Netanyahu governement will have the motivation to cease hostilities in Gaza. And they'll continue to ignore the ICJ. Oh well.
Very appreciated, but "Sympathetic to the Hamas cause" doesn't sound like an accurate way to describe my beliefs, unless you're using it as a shorthand for "wants Palestinians to not die and have nice things", in which case... yes, it's technically true, in the same sense that Netanyahu's cause is "wants Jews to not die and have nice things", which would lead us to conclude that anyone who doesn't hate Jews is automatically sympathetic to Netanyahu's cause, i.e. that a sizable portion of Jewish Israelis hate Jews and don't want them to have nice things.
Different definitions for the same word. Jihadis "love" Muslims and so they want them to be an Übermensch group that rules the world, I "love" Muslims and so I want them to wake up to the fact that Islam is bad fanfic plagiarized and translated into Arabic from slightly better Hebrew stories.
> And they'll continue to ignore the ICJ
As expected. The hope is that *other* states won't ignore the ICJ, or at any rate the European ones (who seem to assign a lot of legitimacy and respect to international institutions). Those states will then **force** Israel to care about the ICJ, because they will withhold weapons, trade deals, academic partnership, travel, cultural participation (e.g. sports), and so on.
This is roughly similar to how if a normal court judges you to be guilty of something, you may very well lift your feet and say "Ohh I don't care about this court, I'm nonchalant", but guess who cares about the court? The police, your (future) employer(s), your bank(s), your university, your landlord, etc... All of them would force you to care about the court.
Yes, I apologize for mischaracterizing your position. I'm of the plague-on-both-their-houses school of thought. Yes, it would be good thing if the Palestinians could have a chunk of land and a nation-state to call their own. And I acknowledge that Israel has the right to exist. And I wish that Jewish fundies weren't actively grabbing Palestinian land on the west bank, and I wish that Hamas and Hezbollah weren't actively engaged in asymmetric warfare against Israel. Considering that Hamas can't bring itself to hand back the remaining hostages — and thus remove Netanyahu's figleaf of an excuse for attacking Gaza — I don't think Hamas really gives a shit about the people of Gaza except as human shields and as recruits for long-term future struggle against Israel. And Israel is helping them with that latter goal. It took almost two hundred years for the Crusader Kingdoms to be pushed out that area. I suspect Hamas is playing a long game. But unlike Saladin, they don't have the support of most of the key players in the Arab world. I predict a stalemate of violence for at least the next century.
In honor of the immortal Bob Newhart, here's a Bob Newhart Show script I wrote:
https://themanchegancandidate.substack.com/p/terror-at-14-12-feet
The guy was a gem. A comedian that made people laugh without being mean spirited.
The New York Times has an interesting video analysis of the minutes leading up to the Trump shooting.
https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000009576871/trump-shooting-assassination-attempt.html
Apparently members of the public had noticed the shooter on the roof a couple of minutes before he actually fired. They notified the police, but somehow the cops weren't able to act on the warning quickly enough.
The organization responsible for security in the area where the gunman fired from was the local police. Maybe small-town police just aren't that competent, at least when they have to deal with threats beyond speeders and the local drunks.
Looks like there is more to this story than I realized.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/20/us/politics/trump-rally-police-secret-service-shooting.html
Nobody is competent outside their area of competence.
Preventing assassinations isn't within the local police's area of competence, which is why the US has the US Secret Service, which gets to sit around all day and think about possible assassination scenarios and how to prevent them.
If the local police had a role to play here, it should have been getting told by the Secret Service to stand on the top of the roof. Or heck, at the bottom of the ladder leading up to the roof.
The organization responsible for security is the secret service.
I'm worried that I might have prediabetes, but going to a doctor is inconvenient. Is there an easy way to track your glucose levels at home? I seem to recall someone talking about this in a previous open thread.
Walgreen's has an inexpensive glucose meter and fairly inexpensive test strips. Of course, you'll need to stick your finger and draw a drop of blood. I suggest that instead of using the tip of your finger, you use the side of your finger and squeezing out a drop of blood, because bruises on the tips of your fingers hurt when you use a keyboard. As a Type I diabetic let me give you some insights into blood glucose behavior...
1. If you're not producing enough insulin, you'll notice that after eating carbs you're blood glucose levels will start to rise about fifteen minutes after eating them, and they'll rise over the subsequent hour. AFAICT, from my experience, there's not all that much difference between low glycemic carbs and high glycemic carbs. Low glycemic carbs may stretch out your blood glucose rise over another extra half hour or so.
2. Also check your blood glucose levels beginning after 4 hours after eating, and finish up around 7 hours. I've noticed that the proteins and fats start to increase my blood glucose levels about five hours after eating them.
3. Alchohol has another six-hour blood glucose effect. If you're drinking wine or booze, check your BG starting about 5 hours after consuming them.
https://www.walgreens.com/store/c/walgreens-premium-true-metrix-self-monitoring-blood-glucose-meter/ID=prod6234625-product
Just go to a pharmacist and buy a blood glucose meter.
Last year, I am in person at my doctor's surgery, talking to the reception...
Me: Well, I'm not diagniosed with diabetes but I occasionally check with a blood glucose meter to se if dsub-clinical hypoglycaemia is getting any worse, but this time the meter is givin me some stupid error message I don;t understand and I was wondering if you could book me in with the nurse to test it properly.
Receptionist: I don;t think we've got a slot for months.
My doctor (overhearing, from across the room): Test them right now.
(I'm not sure if that was a warning sign or not, but shortly after my thyroid failed ... and one of the many knock on effects I have from the thyroid condition is anemia, which will probably show up even on a blood glucose meter)
My blood glucose was in fact ok .. but then a couple of months later I had rapid weight loss and heat intolerance ->more extensive blood tests get done -> grave's disease diagnosis
There definitely is, and I don't think any of the supplies you need for doing it are prescription only. Not sure though. Just thought I'd tell you some info I just ran across: There's a supplement called I think Berberine that reduces blood sugar. People talk about it as a natural alternative to metformin. The person who told me about it is well-educated, skeptical of "alternative medicine" and not one to just believe hype, so the stuff may actually be pretty good. I recommend you look into it to see if it's safe and effective.
I recently graduated from my undergrad with a degree in philosophy, and through my time studying, I had a strange repeated experience which I'm wondering if anybody else can relate to or knows what it is called. Multiple times during my undergrad, I would have an idea I believed was clever and worth writing about and I would find a way to work it into whatever writing asignments I had going. Then after submitting the paper writing a term paper, I would encounter the same idea somewhere else, albeit much better articulated and with layers of depth I had not anticipated.
The first time I noticed this, was in an Ethics course with a professor who mainly specialized in Ancients, and I remember thinking that there was something seriously epistemically wrong with his positions. I wrote a term paper, which he hated, on moral relativism, which he called sophistry, but I was convinced was more nuanced and complex than he was willing to admit. The paper itself wasn't good, but I thought the idea was at least interesting. Lo and behold, the next semester, I encountered Foucault, who had essentially anticipated and expressed exactly what I was trying to get at, although he would have gotten a better grade on his term paper. I have since abandoned Foucault, but the experience of independently arriving at a preexisting theory or idea remained.
Over time, as I read more, I found that the ideas I hoped were mine were more and more recent, sometimes even published this century, though this might just be a byproduct of reading newer material. It really is rewarding finding yourself naturally drawn along the intellectual path previously tried by great thinkers. I find this encouraging, maybe one day I will catch-up with the Zeitgeist and actually manage to have an original thought I'm not holding my breath. Is there a word for this? (other than naivete)
In most disciplines, the big historical discoveries or developments are 'deterministic': if you re-did the entire history of that field of study with different researchers, in different institutions, the same principles would be discovered in roughly the same order. See https://measureformeasure.co/blog/multiple-discoveries/.
This means that, if you have learned the precursor ideas, and are helped along by the fact that the later concepts are so to speak "in the water supply", you may semi-independently rediscover later thinkers' ideas. I had this experience when I took a class on history of economics and noticed that my way of thinking about the principles of economics was *very* close to that of the early neoclassical economists.
I'll reply with an experience that I had yesterday.
I was at a meeting, and attempting through my ADD, my wonderful current excuse, to pay attention. A guy was talking about something that had nothing to do with me and my gaze drifted over to a fully maxed-out whiteboard full of boxes and erasable lines with acronyms that all have something or other to do with my job but I couldn't tell you what. (Well you might wonder how he keeps a job through this kind of haze. You wouldn't be the only one.)
To get back to my story, my gaze for no apparent reason lit on one of the hundreds of boxed acronyms. it was OTTI, I remember. I don't know what it means any more than you do. It's amazing how much work you can do in the computer field without knowing anything at all. Anyway. A second later--so it seemed to me--the person said that same acronym, OTTI. I was amazed, and now the meeting was gone (for me if not for them), and phenomenology was now paramount.
Is it possible, like one of my pet hypotheses points out, that a certain part of consciousness travels backward in time, priming me to look at potentially useful things just before they are to become useful? Or is it a simpler idea, instead of breaking all the laws of physics, that my verbal processing is slower than my visual processing, but some of that verbal processing is still taking place, such that my eyes were directed to the OTTI box before I consciously understood that I was hearing those same letters? Thanks to the style of thinking I've absorbed from reading this blog I would have to give the weight of evidence to the latter hypothesis. But one thing true of either one is this: your brain processing has some curious and subtle ways about it that are past understanding. And I love that. Too bad about the meeting.
I got a bonus at work that same day. I think I'm way better at paying attention than I used to be, mainly as a function of how often I notice and correct my attention this year. But how did this ever work for my previous 30 year career? Somewhere up here I have a brain, and it's quite a gift, and I cherish it, broken as it is.
I absolutely agree that there is more going on in your brain than you are aware of consciously. I suppose that is why we spend so much of our lives trying to understand ourselves.
I don't have a word for this, but I think that it's a reasonably common occurrence - certainly as an undergrad I had the same experience of anticipating in homework assignments the topic of a future lecture or course. Something you notice as you study an area more deeply (at least in subjects like maths, philosophy, physics) is that there really aren't that many fundamental ideas in any particular topic of study. The basic principles occur again and again, developed and elaborated in different ways.
When you are being trained in critical thinking it's natural to look for flaws in a theory, and to anticipate how to respond to those flaws. It's certainly satisfying to find that someone published the same idea that you had, and that it became part of the history of the subject. If your lecturers were good, they likely were scaffolding you toward the next developments in your subject without making an overt deal about it. You also have the benefit of hindsight - you probably don't cherish so fondly the ideas you had that turned out to be wrong!
As an arts major, I love being mentioned in the same sentence as math and physics. I would not give any credit to this lecturer, in particular, given the fact that there were obvious decades-old flaws in the arguments he put forward. I would have liked to have been pointed in the right direction; it would have saved me a terrible essay, and I would have figured out what was wrong with my idea earlier. Instead, I remember him saying something to the effect of: "This is why we shouldn't teach young men Nitzsche."
Philosophy, maths and physics are to a large part based on axiomatic systems and deductions from those axioms. Newton's Laws allow you to predict (non-relativistic) motion, for example, and Maxwell's Laws allow you to work out how electricity flows in a circuit. Admittedly, some parts of philosophy (Plato, Aquinas, Descartes, Russell, Heidegger, etc.) fit better into this type of framework than others (Nietzsche, Weil, etc.)
Your lecturer provoked a reaction in you, which is something. One of the most effective lecturers I had as an hummed and mumbled under his breath and pushed an acetate with a triangle on it around on an overhead projector for 12 weeks (he must have done other things, but this is what I remember, it happened in every class ), but at the end of the semester I somehow had a solid grasp of basic group theory. Another told horrible jokes, deliberately miswrote formulae on the board and then inspected everyone's notes to see who was 'writing down shite', but at the end I knew basic statistics. I have a lot of respect for both of these lecturers (now long retired) but that was in the era before teaching evaluations. It couldn't be done today.
If I have a point, maybe it's that your evaluation of the lecturer is too harsh. I'm a lecturer now, for what it's worth, and expectations have changed since I was an undergraduate. I think it's that I expected to have to go to the library and read and think. We were told explicitly that the notes we took in lectures were not sufficient to pass the exam at the end of the semester (there was minimal continuous assessment back then). I wouldn't get away with that policy now... this is not to say that things were better then than they are now, only different.
Recently graduated? Just a heads up, expect to have an occasional dream in the next couple years where you are still an undergrad and realize you have a final exam for a class you forgot to attend class for the entire term.
https://sigforum.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/320601935/m/5500055054/p/1
Mine is that I technically didn't graduate because I forgot or didn't see the message to show up in a particular place at a particular time, or didn't fill out the right form, or something like that.
Oh no. It’s broken quite differently here in the US. In fact each state, and within each state, each district…
Perhaps Tolstoy said it best, “All functional schools are alike; each broken school is broken in its own way.”
haha I've had this one before during summer break.
Just remember to wear pants!
I suspect it’s part Baader Meinhoff ( wouldn’t have named it without the earlier reply) and partly it’s just learning.
I had several experiences much like that when studying electronics. Having learned something new, I’d think a new to me idea for a circuit and excitedly show it to an instructor, to inevitably get the feedback “that’s the right idea, and here is why we don’t do it that way, here is how it’s really done”.
I think it’s inevitable and desirable that when learning we are thinking similar thoughts to those who tread the path before us.
In follow up to that, it probably also depends on how your learning flows. I learned electronics in a well structured post secondary environment. So one week I’d be introduced to power amps and feedback, and then rush ahead to ideas of how to apply them. And not surprisingly I was headed in the right direction but simplistic in my approaches.
I learned most of computer programming independently, and was often reading material far ahead of my abilities. I can’t really recall the same experiences of learning a new thing and then jumping ahead to previously unknown to me applications of those ideas. I generally already knew where things were going before I knew how they got there.
That sounds right. I especially like someone else's response that it is likely baked into the lesson planning if it is any good. Your thoughts on learning in general are well put.
I like the water-supply analogy and, indeed, your other alternative explanations. I've heard authors, philosophers, and especially artists (Rick Ruban) express the feeling that the ideas they express aren't necessarily their own; they simply happen to be the ones that get there first. In reality, new ideas are being pulled from the collective unconscious or cultural superstructure. However, you want to think about it.
Two big pieces of news related to Biden being pushed to drop out as Dem nominee, and then I'll add a third new fact which could add to that momentum.
(1) Rep. Adam Schiff just called for Biden to step down as the POTUS nominee. That is big because Schiff is viewed as one of the party's rising stars and is now the presumptive new U.S. Senator from the largest blue state.
(2) "Nearly two-thirds of Democrats say President Joe Biden should withdraw from the presidential race and let his party nominate a different candidate, according to a new poll, sharply undercutting his post-debate claim that “average Democrats” are still with him even if some “big names” are turning on him." Ooooof
https://apnews.com/article/biden-trump-poll-drop-out-debate-democrats-59eebaca6989985c2bfbf4f72bdfa112
(3) Check out the free-subscriber portion of this new Substack post from Jesse Singal:
https://substack.com/inbox/post/146718184
He's describing having watched the recording of Biden's speech yesterday to the NAACP's national convention, i.e. a large room full of key Dem supporters/influencers. I plan to watch some of that myself this evening. For now I'll just predict that if Singal's description proves accurate it will become pretty devastating to Biden at this juncture. Many of the people in that room have the ears of lots of top Dem officeholders and/or party officials. Also the link is right there for anybody to watch the recording themselves, and/or for easy sharing by people who were in the room, etc.
And now Covid. C’mon man!
I have to wonder if this is a face saving way to step aside. Not very charitable but that’s where my thoughts take me.
I doubt it. Too easy for the truth to leak out. My rule of thumb is WYSIWYG as a starting point unless I have strong indications to the contrary. Has been working well so far.
Garrison Keillor on Midwestern sanctimonious bullies and cheap piety:
“It’s the Midwest, a culture that places a high value on modesty and self-deprecation, avoids irony, follows the rules and gives rule-breakers a sidelong look, keeps complaint to a minimum, prizes loyalty, and is well-practiced at ignoring flamboyance and foolishness and pretense.
But sanctimonious bullies thrive here, too. At the Tchaikovsky ballet, a woman comes onstage to remind us to turn our phones off and she says, “We wish to acknowledge that the land we are on was taken from the Dakotah people,” and we all bow our heads at this cheap piety.
There are people devoting their lives to education, health care, justice, among impoverished people, and this simpleton enjoys a little glow from reading a line off an index card. She might as well say, “We acknowledge that the nondegradable plastics that come with our concession products are causing damage to the planet that our children will inherit.”
https://garrisonkeillor.substack.com/p/a-trip-back-home-to-get-my-bearings
Huh. I'm not Midwestern, but I have a dim sense of the type of "Midwestern sanctimonious bully" that he mentions. Although I'm not sure how much of that is due to listening to Prairie Home Companion in my childhood, so it's possible my entire concept sprang from his mind. ;-) If they hold true to bully-type, some of them will adapt to changing social norms, and get their kicks from manipulation of whatever system is present. Maybe some have adapted to wokeness?
In this piece, he seems to have a sense of bitterness and alienation, which I don't recall being in his oeuvre previously. But I suppose that's to be expected given his cancellation back in 2017-2018? (Regardless of the truth of the allegations.)
Maybe you or someone else here can explain the appeal of Prairie Home Companion for me? I'm not in the NPR target demographic so I never tuned in, but a couple of times I was at the home of people who obviously listened to it religiously. What I heard was vaguely mildly amusing but never actually funny enough to generate a laugh - I just didn't get it.
I remember (decades ago) Homer Simpson listening to him and growling at the radio: "Be funny!"
The only joke they did that made me laugh out loud:
Where do you think interest rates are headed?
If you want an answer to that question you’ll have to ask Yellen.
I SAID WHERE DO YOU THINK…
Some people regarded it as bohemian/hippie chic.
Don’t ask me. I never got it either but it was a thing.
I only got little bits of it when I was a kid, and I think a lot of the humor was fairly subtle. It's like pointing out a quirk of human behavior, and exaggerating it slightly, and raising an eyebrow at the audience.
> It's like pointing out a quirk of human behavior, and exaggerating it slightly, and raising an eyebrow at the audience.
Yeah, gentle, satirical exaggeration.
A college pal performed on PHC once. His brother and cousins were musically inclined and all third generation Finns.
They performed Finnish folk music on the show.
It helps if you've had enough exposure to Midwestern culture to recognize that those were the stereotypical quirks of real people; my parents grew up in Milwaukee and Might As Well Have Been Lake Wobegon, so I got that.
And I definitely appreciated that they didn't feel the need to hammer home every joke, though I can see how if you don't have the cultural referents to catch most of the jokes en passant it would be rather underwhelming.
You betcha.
He got caught in the frenzy that forced Al Franken out of the senate for an alleged kiss during a skit rehearsal. Keillor was angry for a while but seems to have put that behind him.
In a recent post Keillor said he truly believes that Donald Trump can become a humble and kind man.
For Garrison it’s not dark yet but it’s getting there and he is just saying what he feels needs saying.
And the author is a simpleton who gets a little glow from castigating the woke.
Simpletons all the way down, it seems.
I disagree.
Keillor is just saying the obvious, of course, but this public shaming over land ownership that's so fashionable is sadly petulant -- like so much of regressive-progressive dogma.
The problem I have with this quote is that after
>There are people devoting their lives to education, health care, justice, among impoverished people, and this simpleton enjoys a little glow from<
You can put almost anything. Such as >performing in a Tchaikovsky ballet<, or >writing an article for the Internet<.
If you perform in a ballet, your intent is presumably to entertain the audience, and presuming the ballet is performed well and for an appropriate audience, they will probably be entertained. Entertainment is a good thing, even if less so than e.g. education, and it is good that people feel a "little glow" from doing a good thing - particularly when it took commitment, effort, and skill to do so.
If you perform a land acknowledgement, what is the intent? If it's to help the Dakotah people, well, helping the Dakotah people would be a very good thing, and something you should normally feel very good about, but in this case you are absolutely going to fail at that objective. How good should you feel about a half-assed zero-effort failure?
If the intent of your land acknowledgement is to make your audience feel good about themselves in spite of their not having helped the Dakotah people or whatnot, then that's not really a good thing and you probably shouldn't feel any sort of glow for that either.
Hmm, don't get that logic at all. He's referring to a particular sanctimonious or self-righteous type of "glow".
And he's entirely correct, except that there is nothing particular or specific to the Midwest about it.
Assuming that's the case, which is not required by the wording, then why are we talking about people devoting their lives to activities? How many of those can you fit into the window of time where you're waiting for people to turn off their cell phones before a Tchaikovski ballet starts? Is the implication that she shouldn't be there at all? If so, then should ANYBODY be there? Shouldn't the ballerinas be out devoting their lives to justice? Shouldn't the audience?
But the main problem is, this section is the thing it complains about. The article is about the nostalgia of visiting Home Town Minnesota and remembering his roots; this section is an anomaly, there for the primary purpose of complaining about a land acknowledgement. (I'm not sure why Gunflint quoted it on its own). But complaining about land acknowledgements is the conservative equivalent of land acknowledgements. There are people dedicating themselves to education, healthcare, justice, but I get the impression Garrison Keller felt a little "glow" from this addition.
I think Keillor was being sincere in pointing out that the acknowledgment was merely performative and was tipping his hat to people who are doing the hard and often thankless work of helping descendants of displaced Natives.
The guy is 81 with an implanted defibrillator. I'll be surprised if he lives to see 2025. He's got little to prove at this point. I've been following him for years - decades really - and he's definitely not a conservative crank.
In the case of the venue in question – Northrop Auditorium, University of Minnesota campus in Minneapolis, acknowledgment down to tribal level, besides not really being helpful, is historically difficult. Native possession of that location was going back and forth between Ojibwas and Dakotas right up to Minnesota statehood.
https://www.minnpost.com/mnopedia/2014/05/last-dakota-ojibwe-battle-shakopee-1858/
Edit:
Bonus puzzle: How were lightbulbs changed in the Northrup Auditorium’s 29’ tall 19’ wide Close Encounter UFO descending on Devil’s Tower shaped chandelier changed?
https://www.archantiques.com/chandeliers/enormous-29-foot-tall-theater-chandelier
Guerr Fghqrag Hgvyvgl Jbexref jbhyq tb vagb gur nggvp nobir vg naq ybjre vg gb jvguva rnfl ernpu jvgu n unaq penaxrq jvaqynff. Nsgre gur ohyof jrer ercynprq gurl jbhyq penax vg onpx gb vgf bevtvany cbfvgvba.
In particular, it's the sort of glow you get from kidding yourself that you're doing anything at all for the Dakotah people with your empty words-- an error which performing in a ballet is a lot less likely to lead you into.
I have heard it said on here that the mainstream media has consistently lied to us about Biden’s age-related competence. I took a keen interest in the 2020 primaries, and Biden’s age was very much a part of the media discussion during the primary season, at least in the New York Times. Cognitive decline isn't mentioned explicitly, but in my opinion our fear of old age is inherently a fear of cognitive decline amongst other things. So I’ve gone back over some articles from around that time, and present them here. I do believe the media is sometimes (perhaps often) manipulative. Therein lies the danger of counter-manipulation. “You are being Lied To; Listen to me instead”.
1.In early 2020, the New York Times ran a series of interviews with the candidates. In Joe Biden's interview, age is raised as an issue several times.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/17/opinion/joe-biden-nytimes-interview.html
JW: Do you think it’s legitimate for voters to be concerned about people in their later 70s running for the highest office in the world?
[Biden:] Sure, just like it’s legitimate for people to ask about whether you’re mature enough when you’re 35. I’m not joking. I mean, I went through the same thing when I was 29 years old. Well, wait a minute, are you old enough? And so, it’s totally legitimate.
Binyamin Appelbaum: So we have a 35-year-old limit. Should we have one at the top end too?The Times Debatable newsletter recently considered a range of perspectives on whether the presidency should have an age limit.
No.
BA: Should there be a top? Why not?
Because why would you? Show me where it’s been a problem.
BA: Why 35 then?
Thirty-five ——
JW: Well, President Reagan ——
Well, look, guys. I think you guys are engaging in ageism here. Now look, all kidding aside, I don’t think they’re — the voters will be able to make a judgment. You’ll make a judgment whether or not you think I have all my cognitive capability, I’m physically capable, and I have the energy to do the job. And so.
(…)
KK: Since you just called yourself the old guy — Jimmy Carter has said that he wouldn’t be up for the job of the presidency at age 80. He’s obviously experienced the job, and lived the job. How do you respond to comments like that? Are you too old to be running for president?
Watch me. Watch me. All this stuff about lack of energy. Come get in the bus with me, 16 hours a day, 10 days in a row. Come see me.
(…)
BA: Would you pick a running mate over the age of 70?
Yeah, sure I would. No, what I’m going to have to do is to balance just like anybody balances. I’m going to make sure that whoever is picked as vice president, where I’m the nominee, everyone thinks is able to, if I drop dead tomorrow, would be able to take over. Look, the idea that somebody who is 60 can’t be diagnosed with stage-four glioblastoma is no different than the idea someone at 77 won’t be diagnosed with a terminal disease.
BA: But you mentioned your adherence to science before. You surely know that the odds increase with age.
Yeah, they do. They do. But they don’t increase like they did. We’re in a situation where things are fundamentally different than they were 20 years ago.
2. As a result of these interviews, Elizabeth Warren & Amy Klobuchar were endorsed. Age was explicitly mentioned as a reason not to endorse either Biden or Sanders.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/19/opinion/amy-klobuchar-elizabeth-warren-nytimes-endorsement.html
Mr. Sanders would be 79 when he assumed office, and after an October heart attack, his health is a serious concern.
What’s more, Mr. Biden is 77. It is time for him to pass the torch to a new generation of political leaders.
3. Despite the NYT non-endorsement, Biden wins the nomination and the NYT goes on to damage control mode, endorsing Biden as the only alternative to Trump. Even so, it finds room for feint praise.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/06/opinion/joe-biden-2020-nytimes-endorsement.html
Mr. Biden is aware that he no longer qualifies as a fresh face and has said that he considers himself a bridge to the party’s next generation of leaders.
Mr. Biden isn’t a perfect candidate and he wouldn’t be a perfect president. But politics is not about perfection.
4. Alongside the Endorsement, NYT also run a series of opinion columns making the case for the various primary candidates. So popular is Biden among the Liberal elite on NYT that the only columnist willing to write on his behalf is Ross Douthat. Even so he can't avoid the elephant in the room.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/opinion/sunday/joe-biden-2020.html
This combination — plus, let’s be frank, Biden’s fumbling, wavering, I’m-too-old-for-this persona — explains why it’s so hard to find passionate supporters of the former vice president among pundits and commentators, real-world activists and Twitter agitators. To choose Biden over the more interesting options, over Bernie Sanders and Mike Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg, is to choose the past over the future(.)
5. One phrase that sticks in my mind from the time of the NYT endorsement is some serious feint praise for Biden from the NYT editorial board. These people really didn't want him to be the nominee. The quote is hard to find, this is second hand from Michael Brendan Dougherty:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/new-york-times-presidential-endorsements-arrogance-philosopher-kings/
I also have to give credit to the makers of The Weekly for taking the mickey out of the panel of philosopher kings. By the end, the editorial board had talked about how, though they were reassured by Joe Biden’s apparent vigor and health, they found that the case for him was essentially that he’s “a warm body” that can beat Trump.
> I have heard it said on here that the mainstream media has consistently lied to us about Biden’s age-related competence.
I have a slightly different claim: I feel lied to, and the mainstream media also feels lied to, about cognitive decline that has happened to Joe Biden since 2021 (and seems most likely to have happened in 2023-24). Gatekeepers in the administration assured the media, primary voters, and potential primary candidates that Joe Biden was fine when he was (and is) very much not fine. Media members assured the public, were made to look like fools or liars, and since the debate have been doubling down on cognitive decline coverage out of embarrassment and anger.
Fair. Political journalists are basically dependent on politicians for information and if you don't print what they want they can make life hard for you. I've no sympathy, journalists could have spent their career working in homeless shelters, but I think it's worth taking into account when apportioning trust.
Question: Does this coverage differ significantly from the coverage from a month ago, before the debate, when his age was frequently cited as a concern (not because of his health, oh no, but because of the perception of voters, while amply criticizing everybody bringing up the issue for ageism - my wife is pissed about that, incidentally, the political exploitation of the idea of ageism has seriously undermined the case against ageism more generally), but the possibility of cognitive decline was consistently dismissed as right-wing propaganda?
Look back at 2020 with fresh eyes. Don't just look for what the media said (as, just like a month ago, what is important is not so much what it was saying as what it -wasn't- saying), look at Biden's campaign, how it engaged - using the excuse of COVID - in careful control over Biden's public/media exposure. This is the stuff that concerned people about Biden's mental capacity, and the playbook never changed, only tightened up, right up until his debate performance.
If Biden's cognitive state is a relatively new problem, you should be able to find some delineating line, some point at which his staffers started secluding him from the public. Instead, you'll find that they've been doing that all along. You'll find cases in speeches when Biden complains in public about his handlers controlling what he says. Biden reading out loud the instructions he's supposed to be following. Biden getting notes about what he should be doing, and then getting confused and doing something else.
"There's no way we could have known" is just absurd when other people *did* know. "Well, they were wrong then, they just accidentally became right in the intervening time" is just plain absurd. The evidence "they" used to arrived at this conclusion didn't just start appearing six months ago, it has been steadily building up over the last five-ish years; the type of evidence didn't change, either. The only thing that changed is that he had a single performance that was so obviously and publicly bad that it stopped being viable to pretend everything is fine.
Thanks for the reply.
>Does this coverage differ significantly from the coverage from a month ago, before the debate?
I believe so, because it's more unvarnished - I assume Biden benefitted from some partisan bias as soon as he became the nominee, and more so as president. But he most definitely didn't enjoy the same bias prior to nomination - NYT clearly thought he was a bumbling old fool.
>what is important is not so much what [the media] was saying as what it -wasn't- saying
I agree, but I fear we're doomed to interpret that silence differently - I believe fear of cognitive decline is present implicitly in any discussion about a person's age.
>This is the stuff that concerned people about Biden's mental capacity, and the playbook never changed, only tightened up, right up until his debate performance.
The 2020 primary season was conducted normally up to mid-March, so people had a pretty good chance to take a look at Biden up to that point. If there had been evidence of cognitive decline it would have been in the interest of his rival candidates and less-than-sympathetic media to present it. As it is all they could do was present him as a bumbling old fool, and that wasn't enough. People like a bit of bumbling in a politician sometimes - Boris Johnson, Bush jnr.
As for the election campaign proper, the Dems were the lockdown party, so any Dem candidate would have had less exposure than normal during the 2020 election. So really I'm not sure what we can conclude from that.
>You'll find cases in speeches when Biden complains in public about his handlers controlling what he says. Biden reading out loud the instructions he's supposed to be following. Biden getting notes about what he should be doing, and then getting confused and doing something else.
These things are compatible with Biden being a capable but cantankerous politician who doesn't like campaigning. Like it or not a lot of special advisers treat politicians as children to boss around. Biden was mocked on SNL for telling long, rambling, politically incorrect stories. So they will have had to rein him in for reasons besides old age and I'm sure he hated it.
>"There's no way we could have known" is The evidence "they" used to arrived at this conclusion didn't just start appearing six months ago, it has been steadily building up over the last five-ish years; the type of evidence didn't change, either. The only thing that changed is that he had a single performance that was so obviously and publicly bad that it stopped being viable to pretend everything is fine.
I agree it couldn't just have happened before the debate. The issue has been building for a while, I just think it's a foggy business and the public evidence is patchy and open to interpretation. Is that because some people in the media are pulling the wool over our eyes? Probably, and those individuals deserve to lose their jobs, I just think a full spectrum distrust of the media is a cure worse than the disease.
In 2020, the coverage was "Biden will almost certainly not be fit for a second term in office, but he's almost certainly not going to even run. But can we get the guy to commit to that?"
In 2022, the coverage was "Biden will almost certainly not be fit for a second term, and OMG it looks like he's going to be the nominee by default. Shouldn't we have a backup plan?"
In early 2022, the coverage was "Biden will almost certainly be our(*) nominee and there's no backup plan. There's nothing we can do about this, so I don't want to think about this. Can we just not talk about this?"
Now, the coverage is in flux but shifting towards "Biden is almost certainly not fit for a second term, and we can't not talk about this because it's right out their on national television for everyone to see. What are we going to *do* about this?"
I don't think there's any great mystery as to why these shifts occurred, nor any nefarious hidden motive at work.
* We're talking about the MSM here, so yes, he's their nominee
I broadly agree. The motives I have in mind are some mixture of partisanship, personal loyalty to the Dems, preserving ongoing access to the White House, and in this case Stop Trump.
I do remember a lot of trial balloons being floated last year, arguing for an open primary. But Biden was just really insistent on running again and at the time it wasn't obvious he would lose (he only fell behind in the polls this spring).
I think we probably mostly disagree about the last sentence.
And that probably comes down to frequency; my distrust has been building for a long time, over a lot of different issues, so "full spectrum distrust of the media" is well-warranted. Objectively considering it, if this is your first exposure to this kind of thing, yeah, complete distrust in the media probably seems like an overreaction.
If you're in the boat, I guess just keep in mind this incident going forward, minding that the media is probably going to be on their best behavior for the next few months, and see if they deserve the trust.
"Complete distrust of the media" is indeed an overreaction. Skepticism is a great defense, and not just with the media. It's a lot more trustworthy to hear something from someone they would rather not say that to hear something they want to say.
I consume liberal media sources, and listen to, though usually dismiss, things that align with liberal interests. But sometimes they report things that do not reflect well in a liberal light, and those I am much more confident in being accurately reported.
This strategy works right up until it is widely adopted, at which point you're going to get misled again.
I don't quite get it. You're saying the media will say stuff they DON'T want to get out, to mislead me? I don't see how that would further their goals. Surely they would lose the audience they currently pander to in that case?
I guess I'm thinking back to the Iraq war in the noughties. Although there was some political opposition in the UK, Labour and the Tories were united for the war, and the MSM (not the right-wing press!) pushed back, came under a lot of pressure and were proved right. The BBC can still be woke and so on but it's important to compartmentalise. Like do we not trust the weather forecast? "A thing is in truth as it is in being" - reporting on who's in or out in Washington is a more nebulous thing than other topics, it should be taken with a pinch of salt. Other journalists writing about other more stable topics for the same outlet can still be believed.
Yes, I'd say if you're trusting the weather forecast, in a significant sense you're still not paying attention. You can probably trust that what they report is accurate, mind, but that doesn't mean the reporting itself is trustworthy.
The problem is that it isn't just what they report on, it is what they choose -not- to report on, something which is as nebulous as nebulous gets. If 99% of the facts say X, and 1% of the facts say Y, well, the truthfulness of the reporting becomes more questionable.
I cannot help but think that "noughties" should be "naughties" as "nought" means "naught" but I don't know it was a licentious enough decade to be worthy of that term.
Somebody please tell me this is all fake rumours and not something the Democratic machine is really planning to do, because I cannot believe they would be this stupid.
It didn't work out for them when it was Hillary's turn, and right now? After the questions raised about Biden's capability to be president and who is really holding the reins of power? The party that is so big on "democracy" just ripping up their own rulebook and imposing their anointed leader? If this is a plan by Dr. Jill or Hunter, who are the ones alleged to be gatekeeping access to Biden and advising him to cling on like a barnacle, it's damn foolish.
https://www.axios.com/2024/07/16/biden-dnc-vote-nomination-states-2024-election
"The Democratic National Committee is quietly steaming ahead with plans to technically nominate President Biden weeks before the party's convention next month, Axios has learned.
Why it matters: It's the latest effort by Biden's team to stamp out the Democratic rebellion that's been pushing for the president to step aside since his bad performance in the June 27 debate.
- Once Biden receives votes from a majority of the nearly 4,000 delegates, it will become exceedingly difficult to remove him from atop the Democratic presidential ticket.
- The DNC's current plan is to train state party chairs next week on how to conduct the electronic voting in a secure way. The window for voting is likely to open on July 29 and conclude by Aug. 5, according to people familiar with the matter.
- If the working plan for a "virtual roll call" holds, Biden just has to outlast his party's critics for about two more weeks.
- For the 81-year-old Biden, time finally may be on his side.
What they're saying: "We look forward to nominating Joe Biden through a virtual roll call and celebrating with fanfare together in Chicago in August alongside the 99 percent of delegates who are supporting the Biden-Harris ticket," Jamie Harrison, the chairman of the DNC, told Axios is a statement.
"We have not announced or finalized any schedules yet," a DNC spokesperson said."
Vote rigging? Us? No, no! We're just "training" people on how to conduct the voting in a "secure way" so that Joe gets the nod unopposed, and any other result is not acceptable.
At this point I think they're cutting their losses; putting somebody else up to lose against Trump doesn't really gain them anything.
If Biden loses, they can just pin the blame on Biden for refusing to step down, but if they replace Biden with one of their rising stars, and that rising star loses (which given everything seems fairly likely, not least because none of their "rising stars" are actually ready for the big game) - then that star is tarnished for failing to beat one of the least popular presidents in history, AND a large number of Democrats will blame the party for throwing away the chance at victory by kicking Biden to the curb.
They might have slightly better odds of winning if they replace Biden, but it's a very risky maneuver with very little upside to the specific individuals who would be making that choice. I doubt any of his potential replacements want to run in this particular race, either.
Thing is, for the "blame Biden" strategy to work, they have to go along with "what could we do, our hands were tied, Joe Wouldn't Go".
That isn't possible to do when the party machine is pulling strokes like this to make it a done deal *before* the convention that We're Still Ridin' With Biden.
I can see the problem where "Joe is the scapegoat and fall guy, so that means we need him to still be the nominee, but there are now rumblings of discontent within the party so we have to lock it down that it's him and nobody else" is the plan, but then they both have to (1) make sure to be standing around wringing their hands on the night when (fingers crossed, they hope) he loses with the line "what could we do, Joe Wouldn't Go" *and* (2) do their damnedest to make sure nobody rocks the boat over nominating him. They don't want to waste one of the prospective stars, but what's wrong with throwing Kamala under the bus to get her to take the fall? Unless, of course, she realises she's being set up and refuses to play along.
If this report is true, I don't know how they expect to get away with "we could do nothing" when anyone can say "but didn't you set it up so that the convention was presented with a fait accompli?"
I was under the impression that there were enough primaries favoring Biden that the primary results can plausibly be pointed to as more-or-less constraining.
From the way the prediction markets are running, it looks like Trump has about 70-75% chance of winning. Biden and Harris split most of the remainder. My guess is that whoever is picked as the Democratic nominee will pick up the sum of those chances, for something like a 75:25 Trump:Democrat odds or so.
( In fairness, a good chunk of what the Democrats are facing is probably from the 8%-9% inflation spike, which the POTUS had only very limited control over. )
As a USAian, given how the first debate went, perhaps I should be agitating for Tiger Woods to moderate the next one... :-)
I thought they were forced into doing this because Ohio set a very early deadline for getting on their ballot or something?
A: No, Ohio changed that rule and everybody understood they were going to change the rule.
B: So what? Ohio is now a thoroughly red state; Kamala Harris's odds of victory are not meaningfully reduced if her name is not on the Ohio ballot. The Democratic party is better off with a candidate whose name is on the ballot in 49 states and can win 30 of them, than one whose name is on the ballot in 50 states and can win only 20 of them.
The only thing that matters is whether Kamala Harris (or whoever) has a better chance of winning the states which can plausibly be won by a Democratic candidate, which does not include Ohio. That's not a no-brainer: Kamala is a weak candidate and anyone else would be starting from zero. But Ohio's got nothing to do with it.
Seemingly that was the reasoning, but Ohio has now set a later date:
"Zoom out: In late May, the Democratic National Committee announced plans to nominate its ticket via a virtual roll call weeks before the party's convention in Chicago, which starts Aug. 19. But they didn't provide a firm date.
- The DNC's stated reason for front-running the nomination — Ohio's Aug. 7 deadline for ballot access — is no longer relevant because Ohio changed its law. The state's new deadline is Sept. 1.
- Internally, DNC officials rarely mention Ohio as the reason to push forward with an earlier date, according a Democratic official who's been briefed on the planning.
- "This election comes down to nothing less than saving our democracy from a man who has said he wants to be a dictator on 'day one,' " Harrison said in his statement.
- "So we certainly are not going to leave the fate of this election in the hands of MAGA Republicans in Ohio that have tried to keep President Biden off of the general election ballot."
Yeah, now they're going to democratically take everybody else off the ballot 🙄 Which I really hope is not the case, because "the fix is in" doesn't look good any time and especially not when this is in the case of a guy about whose election there were allegations of mysterious boxes of ballots turning up out of thin air in places where it looked like he was behind.
Before anyone can go "Election denial!", no, I'm not claiming that really happened. I'm saying there were *allegations* of the results being 'helped along' by partisan vote-counting centres.
Never mind the admitted "shadow campaign". Okay, that may sound slightly sinister, but don't worry - we only did it to protect democracy! Yeah, we may describe it as a "conspiracy" but conspiracies are only bad when the other lot do them!
https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/
"The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors. The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.
Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result. “The untold story of the election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation,” says Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program."
What's that saying - if voting changed anything, they'd abolish it?
All I ask is that they list the nominee's closest dozen "advisors", "aides", "speechwriters", etc.
With President Bush #2 we got to know Mr. Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc. and their contributions daily. Since the regressive Left is keen on transparency, they should at least tell us about Ron Klain, Anita Dunn, Jeffrey D. Zients, Steve Ricchetti, Mike Donilon, Jen O'Malley Dillon, and Bruce Reed, for starters.
I prefer this strategy from a 2016 Hillary campaign staffer:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/opinion-joe-biden-campaign-ai_n_668482b9e4b038babc7d56f2
Just use AI fakes to convince the public that Joe is still fit for office. After all, the stakes are too high, we could lose democracy!
>in the currently under-regulated electoral landscape
...what does that even mean?
It goes down so smoothly, doesn't it?
"AI augmentations and video renderings could serve to smooth out these bumps while allowing the Biden campaign to effectively disseminate true information about the state of our democracy and the Biden administration’s accomplishments."
Let's just fake up the candidate's appearance, voice, and speech-making. Trust us, we only have your best interests at heart. Why do you even need to see a physical guy in the flesh, anyway? This is the modern way of doing things. We're just.... smoothing out the bumps.
Um, isn't the whole idea of choosing a VP to "balance the ticket" pretty much the most ridiculous of all the ridiculous things that make up modern politics? The *entire point* of a Vice President is continuity in case of unforseen disaster. The only logical form of that is someone as similar as possible to the President.
But instead, they always give it someone very different to the President. They give a reward to an out-of-power faction *not* by giving that faction an actual concrete share of power, but by giving them a lottery ticket for "complete power, in the unlikely event of a catastrophe". They thereby *deliberately* make fundamental policy directions dependent on the most primitive, meaningless and undemocratic basis possible: random fluctuations in one person's phiysical health. Oh, and they thereby *directly incentivise* assasinating the President, by anyone in said faction or who prefers said faction to the dominant one.
This doesn't apply to the likes of Cheney and possibly Palin who may have acted as effective co-President (the Diocletianic Tetrarchy suggests this might actually be a good system, rival factions included). But for everyone else, I can barely think of how you could design a worse system.
>But for everyone else, I can barely think of how you could design a worse system.<
You didn't see the pre-12th Amendment VPs then. It used to be whoever got the second-most votes became Vice President. So imagine if Biden won the presidency and Trump became Vice President. That's what President John Adams and Vice President Thomas Jefferson was. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_Thomas_Jefferson
Well the VP can also be seen as a countering force to extremist actions by the president. Just look at the last election where Trump tried to use fake electors [1] to stay in power, but was stopped by Mike Pence (which is why he has to pick a different VP now). The VP can also force the president to step down using the 25th amendment. If I thought there was a risk that Trump would do crazy things again, I would appreciate it if he "balanced the ticket" with someone who would stop him if he did crazy things.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot
Principal agent problem. The main point of a VP is inheritance, but he's picked by the president, who would be dead or retired by the time the VP inherited, so the presidential candidate picks one based on (perceived) electoral effects on his own campaign.
I think it's signalling, so in that sense it's not supposed to have a practical justification.
In a way, it's old-fashioned identity politics. The candidate is one type of person, and so to raise enthusiasm from a different segment of the electorate, the veep needs to be from that segment too. Different regions of the country, different backgrounds, races, sexes, whatever. It's a limited one-time signal, so it has value. It says, "I consider *your* votes important, so I'm putting one of *you* right up here on the stage with me." In cases like W. Bush and Obama, part of the idea was to signal, "I may be inexperienced, but I know I'm inexperienced, and I'm taking steps to remedy that."
I think it's hard to go from a state of pure signalling, back to ground reality. And I agree that, given the actual function of the VP, using it for signaling purposes is like taking some scissors and cutting your seat belts into pretty shapes.
A lot of the time, when people think they're craving power, they're just craving status.
The VP usually doesn't have a lot of power, but he does have quite a lot of status.
>The *entire point* of a Vice President is continuity in case of unforseen disaster. The only logical form of that is someone as similar as possible to the President.
That might be the entire point* of a VP, but it is not the entire point of a candidate for VP. The point of a candidate for VP is to help the ticket win.
*It isn't the entire point, of course. Depending on the administration, a VP can play an important role negotiating with Congress, or re foreign policy (Biden is an obvious example when he was VP)
Given a close election, you want somebody who will bring in that extra .5% of the vote.
9 out of 45 presidents have been promoted to the office from VP. With this succession happening 20% of the time, the VP becoming president should be taken seriously as a scenario. Lincoln (Republican) appointed Johnson (Democrat) as VP to balance his ticket, and that was such a disaster no one has done it since.
Possibly, candidates only evaluate the VP pick as something to help them win the election in the first place. The succession isn't going to ever matter if you don't get elected president in the first place. In a close election, picking a VP that so much as locks in a single contested state is probably more valuable than picking one who would be a competent successor. After all, politicians aren't known for their long term thinking tendencies.
Vance has five letters, much like Trump, and Pence. Which got me thinking, Obama and Biden also have five letters. Bush has four letters. Kaine, Kemp, Gore, Kerry, Nixon, Ford, they're all short names. The longest names of recent Presidents and Vice Presidents are in the six to seven letter range like Clinton and Reagan and Kennedy.
What happened to all the long names? Eisenhower, Roosevelt, Cleveland, Buchanan, van Buren, Jefferson, Washington? My theory: bumper stickers.
Douglas Adams' Long Dark Teatime of the Soul (sequel to Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, both remarkable works, not least for their tendency to give you the punchline of a joke in chapter 2 and the setup of the joke in the last chapter, such that you can read the books ten times and continue to find new jokes you had never noticed before) has some commentary suggesting that the ideal PR name is a long first name and a short last name. In the book, it has a Stephen King analogue, with a very similar name.
So Douglas Adams seems like he would have agreed with your bumper sticker theory, at least if a throwaway line in an oft-forgotten book is taken as representative.
Thelonius Monk, Phineas Gage, Sissela Bok, and Diziet Sma are good examples.
I once ran across the name Venkataramana Bhat. Is that better?
Well half of those long names are non-Anglo names, so the answer to your question is probably the same as the answer to "why are there less obviously-foreign-heritage presidents as in the past?" Excepting Obama for whom that was a central part of his whole image and whose last name helpfully doesn't sound too foreign or weird.
If you meant 'Anglo' as in the common adjective 'Anglo-Saxon,' then they're actually all Anglo names since the term encompasses a certain amount of Celtic/Germanic/Dutch ancestry.
Conspiracy theories seem to be flying on social media, after the recent shooting at Trump. Some people are emotionally vulnerable to conspiracy theories anyway. After the seemingly reality-distorting pandemic, even more so. A talented con artist would know how to take advantage of this situation.
It has previously been said that conspiracy theorists like to assume that the conspiracy is competent, so we have conspiracy theories about assasins that succeed, but not ones that failed.
We seem to be seeing a counterexample here, in that Trump survived but we still have conspiracy theories.
Presumably, the conspiracy theorist needs to explain explain why the conspirators missed on purpose. (Alternatives, such as and really existing conspiracy would fail occasionally, are less attractive to the conspiratorial imagination)
The bullet hit his ear.
The conspiracy theorist doesn't need to explain why they "missed on purpose" just that there was a plot to kill him (which was a wind's breath from succeeding)
Depends what kind of conspiracy theorist you are. Anti-Trump conspiracy theorists want to believe that Trump is liable for whatever happened, which means they need to explain how he managed to fake himself getting shot. (Blood bag in the pocket, easy, duck down and apply it to the face).
Pro-Trump conspiracy theorists have an easier time, they can point to the ridiculously easy access that the shooter had to the nearest rooftop and the fact that the Secret Service supposedly had eyes on the guy for half an hour but waited until he took a shot before they did anything. The least-crazy version of the theory would allege that while they didn't actively work with Crooks in any way, they did deliberately decide to take it slowly with the whole protection thing, and perhaps they'd been deliberately leaving weak spots in their security for savvy potential assassins to discover.
Almost like the conveniently botched shooting is arranged.
It wasn't "botched." It came very close to killing Trump.
A weirdly ambiguous event doesn't help.
Not to mention the absurd levels of incompetence, such that even some libertarians who think the government can't do anything right are like "That's a little too incompetent to be believable".
Reminds me of the questions about why there was no security at the capitol on Jan 6th.
Should this be shouted from (flat and appropriately positioned) rooftops? :-)
More seriously, even _really, really_ extreme incompetence is all too believable. And there have been allegations of incompetence in the Secret Service going back years.
Oh, sure. Unless SS agents start dying, I'm going with "incompetence". If SS agents start shooting themselves in the head with full-length shotguns, however, I'm revising my opinion there.
Yup.
>If SS agents start shooting themselves in the head with full-length shotguns, however, I'm revising my opinion there.
True! IIRC, the traditional example was someone who was so depressed about losing a Mafia Don's money that he shot himself. In the back of the head. Three times. At _some_ point, one does become suspicious... Many Thanks!
On the other hand, truth is stranger than fiction, and there really have been people who committed suicide by shooting themselves with large guns and/or multiple times.
One guy shot himself in the chest with a shotgun and still lived.
How did "situational awareness" become a codeword for AI doomerism? Was it all just due to that one paper people were talking about recently?
Yes - it's just the latest AI Singularity fanfic.
Unfairly dismissive. Situational Awareness is alarmist but it's not "doomerist". There is a difference, an alarmist thinks there is something wrong and that it's fixable, a doomerist thinks that all hope is lost, you would be extraordinarily lucky to be able to narrowly get away with your skin. A nuclear alarmist in 1944 will correctly anticipate the Cold War and call for early sanctions and non-proliferation treaties against Russia, a nuclear doomerist will start imagining Post-Nuclear-Armageddon and/or argue that space colonies are all what will remain of humanity.
Situational Awareness is wrong but it's wrong in a very detailed, carefully reasoned, and interesting way. You can certainly do worse than reading it to know in intimate detail why the people you disagree with think in a way that makes them disagree with you. "Doomerism" is very inaccurate for a document that literally handwaves away alignment as "We will muddle through, fingers crossed" and "Hopefully we manage to enlist the AGIs to help us align the superintelligences because we would be so fucked if we couldn't hahaha". The author has a sidenote where he waves a disparaging tweet from Eliezer Yudkowsky as pedigree that he is not a doomerist.
Perhaps one of the most obvious way that Situational is wrong is how it handwaves away the Data Wall, that is, why LLMs are so hilariously sample-inefficient and how we would probably run out of Internet before they reach honest-to-god AGI. He handwaves this away mainly in 2 ways:
1- By saying that we're "Hobbling" current LLMs, we impose many unrealistic standards that not even the most genius human academic or intellectual is expected to pass: You have to answer correctly on the first try, your answer must take no longer than a few seconds or minutes at most and it must fit within roughly 1000 word or so, you're not allowed to use tools, etc... It's an interesting thought, but I don't think it can explain the full breadth of LLM performance and I don't think it's a safe foundation to build an argument that calls for unprecedented USA's mass-industrialization upon.
2- By saying that Reinforcement Learning is going to save the day. I love and adore RL but saying "This technique from the literal 1950s is going to solve the most salient obstacle in the path of Neural Networks achieving AGI" without satisfactory details is just prime handwaving. The most detailed he ever gets is that LLM researchers will figure out the equivalent of "Self-Play", the trick that enables game AIs to utterly demolish humans. LLMs will "dream", or "fantasize internally", about tasks they were never given, and this will improve their problem-solving capacity.
Overall, Situational strikes me as one of those 1950s and 1960s ultra-detailed works that envisions how we will conquer Mars and have nuclear energy too cheap to meter. They were very right technically, the few places they were wrong on are not fatal to the entire plan. You could take one of those works **today** and pass it through a committee of experts to adapt it for modern tech (e.g. Massively better computers and communication) then immediately adopt it as a plan of action and it would work. You could have a colonized Mars in 50 years and energy too cheap to meter in 30 if you wanted them hard enough.
But that's not what happened, and that's what Situational ultimately fails to grasp. For all the repeated invocations of the "People in SF are so insiders with much situational awareness and oh did you know what the rumors say and the internal labs bro", Situational doesn't have situational awareness. He repeatedly compares AI to nuclear bombs, but Physicists went from "Lol what even is an atom" to a self-sustaining nuclear explosion in about 45 to 50 years, 60 max, with visible incremental progress in the same direction every year. AI experts have been ringing the "ANYTIME NOW" bell far too often since they started working in the 1950s, it's already 70+ years now, they already exceeded the time budget Nuclear Physics was achieved on.
I guess a counterexample to the above is Flight. Flight is an extremely old dream, and many people claimed to be on the cusp of achieving it before the final Jackpot (which was kinda pathetic and very non-promising when it came in the 1900s). I don't know, if I was an investor or policy maker, Situational won't quite convince me to invest a USA-worth of money and infrastructure yet. But it's very well-researched and not obviously wrong at all, and it made me view both AI alarmists and doomerists with a bit more seriousness than before.
I have no idea at all what is going on here, but my gosh. This election campaigning is the bounty of gifts 😁
https://x.com/stillgray/status/1812977575335239830
I'm not a Trump supporter, but I wanted to say I like J.D. Vance for VP. "Why?", you might ask. IDK, mostly he seems still fresh and uncorrupted by the politics of it all.
I would sincerely like more to hear about this. I have heard friends say (and generally share the opinion) that Vance is completely amoral and corrupt.
In this view, Vance will say or do anything to gain power. He'll praise Donald Trump, who he knows is bad. His past statements about Donald Trump were true and it's hard for liberals like me to imagine that he would become a true convert (since, to us, there's nothing to convert to). Vance is completely bought by Peter Thiel, his benefactor. He used to advocate for understanding (Hillbilly Elegy) but since he started running for Senate, he uses rhetoric as divisive and as anyone in politics.
What's the argument that Vance has taken any stance, since running for Senate, that isn't maximally partisan? Any evidence that he has a moral compass? I'd sincerely love to believe that he's not just a smart, amoral opportunist. The best case here is he can be Harry Truman, another politician with a corrupt origin story who ended up being a good president.
People here might find his AI policy refreshing https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/17/technology/vance-ai-regulation.html
Not necessarily for what it says, but at least for the fact that he seems to understand the field well enough to come up with a meaningful policy on his own, in comparison to other politicians who struggle even to remember the talking points on the subject that they've been briefed with.
It's plausible he's uncorrupted. My hope is that he's a "rational self interest" sociopath; much harder to corrupt, more likely to try to follow through with his promises.
Edit: Also, more likely to pivot / "change his mind".
Yeah, well, appearing fresh and uncorrupted is a good look. Ingenues, you know? I'm sure the handlers recommend it to all who haven't spent so much time in the public eye that nobody's going to believe for a second that they have an intact hymen on any part of their body or mind.
I'm reminded of a bit from the biography of James Tiptree, Jr.:
> It didn't help that her first great love ended in disaster. In "Dead Birds," ... she wrote that "Adele," the daughter of family friends, had been "a thin, magically gawky girl with a Hepburn-Garbo face of extraordinary sensuality and a quiet, secret voice." Adele was a year older than Alice and had a "reputation," though Alice refused to believe it.
> "I saw her in groups, slouching on a hassock with her tan arms around her long legs, her hair falling down on one side, listening quietly. [. . . ] When I talked to her I said the wrong thing; my clothes were different from the boys she laughed with. I spent hours thinking of what I would say to her. I wanted to marry her. [. . . ] I wanted to spend all my life looking at her, listening to her chuckle."
> Finally Alice got to be alone with Adele, on the couch in a ladies' restroom at a party. They sat close together; Alice felt Adele's hair brush her cheek and was "paralysed with love." But when Adele spoke, it was to ask her if she'd ever been with two men at once. Adele had, and it was wonderful. She would never make love to just one again.
> Alice had profoundly wanted to believe that the girl she admired was also a virgin, that within her beauty she, too, sheltered a shy, solitary intensity. Now Alice's own crush felt tainted and perverse. Then, as Alice was still trying to take in her friend's words, Adele became violently sick to her stomach. The vomiting went on and on, while Alice held her friend's head, until "there were phone calls to people I didn't know, and she went away, or was taken. A very short while later she was dead of septic abortion."
I read his book when it came out. I was moved by it. I think now that he was simply writing that memoir to enter politics. All wannabe-politicians do that. His becoming a Trump sycophant makes him rather suspect to me now.
I almost wonder whether the book was partly him probing to see if the Democratic Party had space for someone like him, and when the late 2010s showed that there wasn't, he decided to become whatever it would take to gain power with the Republicans.
He spent five years being strongly and publicly critical of Trump personally as well as of key MAGA policy preferences, to in a matter of months publicly embracing Trump and becoming an across the board MAGA policy cheerleader, so as to win a GOP primary and then election to the Senate. "Uncorrupted" is an odd choice of descriptor for such a politician....for me "weathervane" is the kindest word that comes to mind.
Yeah, I've been trying to spend zero time looking at the news. I read his book several years ago. And I agree with most of what he says. So two thumbs up in my book, and if there was ever a year where I could claim I was voting for the VP. This is it! (the big question is will my daughter buy this argument ?, "I voted for the VP and not the P.") Also a veteran.
And I should finally add, that here I am X years later, thinking I might vote for Trump. We are all allowed to change our minds.
If he was criticizing the Republican candidate to get ahead among Republicans, that's a very non-obvious way to achieve that goal. If he's a sycophant then he's a sycophant with incredible foresight.
So I observed Tisha B'Av yesterday. Your calendar may have said it was the 9th of Tammuz, but, after careful observance of the moon, I have determined that the observence of ''Adar Bet'' this year by some Jews was in error.
I was hoping for some clarity on relevant points of my life from the fast, but all I got was "Biden must resign".
Perhaps I need to do a two-day fast.
Even if you were wrong and it was in fact the 9th of Tammuz, that's still a good date on which to observe a fast marking the fall of Jerusalem. See Jeremiah 52:6.
Yup, after all that "we will listen* shtick they "set their faces towards Mitzrayim (in fairness I am currently in the Sinai Desert https://youtu.be/zGx_nFV8MxM ).
Ditto for the people who came to Zachariah for magical answers to their 'halacha" question and we're therefore unable to accept his simple instruction that they listen to the prophets of old.
P.S. If my videos resonate with you please get in touch. Most Orthodox Jews are blind lemmings but the language for a utopian world is best expressed in their/our language. I'm trying to make a radically positive change in the world היום* הם בקולי תשמעו".
If you're above to hear it I desperately need your passion and partnership.
Rabbi Moshe Rudner
I'm not Jewish, nor do I fast for religious reasons, but my personal experience with fasts is that the clarity kicks in around day 3, along with the ketosis.
Originally the fast may have been from the 7th to the 10th.
In any case, presuming you're serious, would you regard that as a Karaite take?
(See my short video from the final Karaite Yom Kippur service in Istanbul here https://ydydy.substack.com/p/jonah-and-the-whale-an-astonishing )
Careful observance of the moon varies from one location to the next. Before they started calculating the calendar ahead of time, different Jewish communities found that their calendars fell in and out of sync with each other every month.
https://www.wpxi.com/news/local/alleged-trump-shooter-spotted-by-law-enforcement-nearly-30-minutes-before-shots-fired-sources-say/Q6GIK5RP6RBY5PHIMYBNXRTEBI/
Crooks was spotted 30 minutes before the shooting, on a roof, and considered a suspicious person even before then.
Trump was speaking for about 10 minutes before the shooting started.
I totally why the snipers didn't just kill him on sight, you need to verify you're not shooting one of your own and them returning fire. But simply holding off on letting Trump go up there would give you time to figure this out.
This is feeling like the Challenger explosion where people had bad feelings but no one wanted to call it off, for reasons.
Or, no one could imagine someone *actually* shooting at the former President. That would be insane.
These discussions add to the environment of conspiracy theories we find ourselves in.
Interesting. Wonder why they didn't dispatch someone to go check him out. Or just give one of the snipers a heads-up to keep the guy in their sights (literally) and shoot him if he pulls out a gun.
They did dispatch someone. A cop hoisted another cop over the edge of the roof to see what was going on, the would-be assasin pointed his rifle at that cop, who let go of the roof, and fell off. Immediately thereafter, the would-be assasin fired at Trump. Also, I think the snipers were likely given a heads up, as I think the southern team (behind Trump to his left) rotated north towards the would-be assasin minutes before the shooting.
The building he was on top of, seems to have been the building the local police department was using for their command center at the time. I am not making this up.
Very likely the initial USSS response to seeing a sniper on top of that particular building was "someone go tell Barney Fife to stop playing Rambo before he gets hurt", and they weren't going to shoot anyone until they had confirmation that it wasn't just an idiot local cop.
Why the local cops didn't bother to secure the roof of their own command center, is another question for which there are not enough facepalms in the world to form a proper response.
According to the Secret Service Director Cheatle, there were no security forces on that roof because they thought the slope was too severe. You can't make this stuff up.
Grrr. One of the components of the security system of my _house_ is a bunch of motion sensors. If I, as a retiree, can afford them, I think they should be cheap enough for both the Secret Service and the local cops to sprinkle them around.
Turning away from politics, "Tasting History" and a Tudor-era strawberry tart and the history of strawberries:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJQaPvExfto
Just a thought on the LessWrong meetup- I'd avoid hosting a conference in Wannsee if it were me. Google 'Wannsee conference' if you don't know why.
But it is the European branch of the conspiracy, where else would they have it? Neutral Switzerland?
Is it just me, or does the profile for the would-be Trump assassin look *exactly* like what you would expect in a school shooter? A loner with an excessive interest in guns and explosives, a bit of a loser, came to school in camo pants, bullied, little obvious motivation beyond this...
At this point, I would not be surprised if his motivation was merely "I will show them all!"
(Which would be a relief - out of all the shooters one might imagine, he's got to be the one of the least polarizing possible. Imagine if it had been a Muslim or a leftist activist!)
Almost all assassins who aren't certifiably insane fit the profile of school shooters: losers. Lee Harvey Oswald was thrice court martialed while in the Marines (once for shooting himself in the elbow) and was constantly moving from job to job, accomplishing nothing. Czolgosz was an unmarried and unemployed recluse living with his parents.
John Wilkes Booth was very far from being a loser. Gavrilo Princip and Sirhan Sirhan don't strike me as losers.
I did say “almost”! Booth is the obvious exception. I’m not familiar with Sirhan Sirhan, but Princip was definitely a loser. Rejected by the military for being too weak, no girlfriend, and living off money from his peasant father while failing his classes.
Not exactly. Said one co-worker about him:
"A colleague who worked with Crooks at the nursing home and who asked not to be named described him in an interview as “the sweetest guy.” Just this week, the colleague said, the two of them worked together to find an easier way for nursing home residents to open ranch dressing packets, an act the colleague said was indicative of how caring Crooks was.
“These stupid ranch packets in the kitchen — no one can ever open them,” said the colleague, who also went to high school with Crooks. “Earlier this week he was helping me with a bunch of sick old ladies (to) put ranch on their salads.”
Crooks, the colleague said, never expressed political views at work and wasn’t “a radical.” They added: “It’s hard seeing everything that’s going on online because he was a really, really good person that did a really bad thing, and I just wish I knew why.”
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/14/us/trump-rally-gunman-thomas-crooks-invs/index.html
There's still some polarization there. He has ties to both parties (registered to vote as a Republican, but had donated to a Democratic organization), so both sides can claim he was working for the other.
Both claims are weak, though. One small donation as a 17 year old. Registered and voted once. This isn't exactly a dedicated partisan!
I have "rebelling against Trump-loving parents" as my current theory, but I've hopped through a lot of theories in the past 3 days.
Isn't he about the right age for the onset of schizophrenia?
Phonics thread!
I have decided, after a bit of research, that phonics is bullshit and I don't like it. I think the root of this dislike comes from the fact that phonics teaches an essentially false model of the domain. Downstream from that are all the concrete complaints I've heard from actual parents (their kids still make weird mistakes at far too late an age, their kids have basic gaps in knowledge) and teachers (there are more exceptions to the rules than examples of them, you're confusing children who already know a bit of reading but haven't learned your rules.)
So I got to thinking, what would a version of phonics look like that pushed a true and accurate model of linguistics?
My first thought is that we don't try to hide the irregularity of the English language, and instead we make a feature of it. If English is in truth a collection of disparate sub-systems that all got merged and fused together as they also changed over time, then that's the story we tell our kids.
So to take for example the phrase "highly illogical", which is the first phrase any rationalist kid needs to be able to read and write:
I would say the prefixes and suffixes "-ly", "-il" and "-al" are three atoms ("phonemes"?) a child should be taught, because then he can break the words down into modifiers + the roots "high" and "logic".
Then would it make sense for "igh" to be an atom? On the grounds that this construction is used in Old Saxon (I'm making that up because I don't know) where it's always pronounced the same way, and is entirely distinct from "i"+"gh", where the "gh" atom might have come from eg Norse and is (predictably) pronounced an entirely different way.
So the child recognises "h"+"igh" and knows how to say "high", and then does something similar for "logic" which is also made up of atoms written in a third colour/style/whatever, because they hail from Ancient Greek this time.
I saw a Biblaridion vid a while ago explaining that irregular verbs got that way because they started out as constructions of regular aux verbs, which then got contracted and fused together, then the language changed around them but, no longer fitting the pattern, they stayed the same shape.
This is kind of what I want to do with the whole English language: extract out the true "rules of the game", then use them to build back the complete picture.
One could argue that this kind of backstory is completely irrelevant to the goal of just memorising a big vocabulary and will only add to the stack of shit to memorise.
I completely disagree because for me and anyone who thinks like me, seeing these glimpses of logic and backstory make the subject more interesting, more satisfying, and easier to get to grips with. I would argue it's easier to remember big coherent bundles of information than a smaller number of separate, context-free facts.
Anyway, does anyone have thoughts on how you could break English down in this way? I'm relaxing the requirement that it be "easy for kids" because it can only cut off interesting areas of discussion.
Montessori has a very different approach. Firstly, it uses letters made of sandpaper so kids get a feel for the shapes. That's step 1. And they teach writing before reading. They also use something called bobbooks. And start with cursive.
In case you want to learn deeply about this, I recommend Angeline Lillard's book. She's a cognitive science professor in Virginia.
Interesting, cheers for that.
>I think the root of this dislike comes from the fact that phonics teaches an essentially false model of the domain.<
What other domains are you applying this to? Do we have to teach children about electron clouds instead of giving them the 2-8 orbits?
You're currently solving a solved problem, everyone here has successfully learned to read English.
(All English language discussions invoke The Chaos. https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html)
> Do we have to teach children about electron clouds instead of giving them the 2-8 orbits?
No, stop going easy on the little fuckers, they should be learning about harmonic representations of spherical functions first.
Quite genuinely, this is a good example. It would have done me no harm as a child to be shown a bunch of funny little shapes and told how electrons were allowed to live in the lobes.
It would have given some background to the (otherwise completely irregular and bonkers) 2-8-8-18 sequence and just knowing it was there would have made the subject feel deeper and more coherent to me.
Dull and incurious kids would have been under no obligation to pay attention to it.
>Quite genuinely, this is a good example. It would have done me no harm as a child to be shown a bunch of funny little shapes and told how electrons were allowed to live in the lobes.
Right up until they watch an isolated atom get put in a magnetic field and m-sub-l becomes a good quantum number... :-)
Well, in that case I'll throw in the Great Vowel Shift. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift
But I don't think you're going to find any tool that will let a child intuit their way through The Chaos. Learning English is a mess because English is a mess.
Cheers for that.
While some people evidently disagree, I still say that knowing why there's Chaos, and having a general feeling for the way Chaos behaves, goes a long way towards making me more comfortable when I have to learn all its proceeds.
Just going to make sure you followed the first link and saw the poem.
"Wholly, holly, signal, signing,
Same, examining, but mining,
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far."
I did indeed.
Isn't your approach the wrong one, just trying to think really hard about the concept?
While actual studies of actual students suggest that it *does* work better? Aren't such empirical studies the far stronger approach?
> for me and anyone who thinks like me, seeing these glimpses of logic and backstory make the subject more interesting
> I'm relaxing the requirement that it be "easy for kids" because it can only cut off interesting areas of discussion.
Which is it? Phonics is bullshit? Or for you personally there would have been better methods?
This thread reads like you believe you are way smarter than everyone else, and therefor we should teach reading differently for everyone.
I can't really see any value in engaging you in this direction.
I learned to read from phonics. I still believe it's a good start, and I didn't have trouble with transitioning to English having weird spelling.
How did you learn to read?
It's possible that pushing phonics too hard is a mistake, but whole-word was such a disaster for me that I don't think I could have learned to read at all from it.
What proportion of English text is phonetic?
I agree that knowing the historical structure behind spelling is good, but I don't have a feeling for when or how it should be introduced.
"How did you learn to read?"
I honestly don't remember, I think I could read at age three, but definitely I could read by four and a half. I think it was probably whole-word, if that's what it's called, because it would have been my grandmother and my father teaching me.
I imagine it was that because I did have trouble with words I'd never heard pronounced, where I could pick up the meaning from context but had no idea how to say them. And splitting them into parts didn't help, for years I thought "awry" was pronounced "awe-ree" not "ah-rye" because I split the word into the halves of "aw" and "ry".
From an internet wit:
“If tomb is pronounced toom and womb is pronounced woom, shouldn’t bomb be pronounced boom?”
Can’t argue with the logic!
49 years old, I started with phonics, English is my first language. TIL how to pronounce awry.
I did always think that was a strange word.
I will pronounce "banal" like "anal" until I die.
No, no. There is a ‘B’ sound at the beginning.
Yes. a joke.
> What proportion of English text is phonetic?
I'm going to make the completely unsubstantiated claim that all of English is phonetic, it just doesn't look that way because there are multiple different phonetic languages all sitting next to each other, sharing the same symbols.
I'd rather like to know if this is true. I'm getting quite invested in it as a model right now.
If true, then you could pull out every constituent language and place them all side by side, then give every single phoneme a unique symbol, you'd end up with a single phonetic language.
Then there's a mapping between the assigned unique symbol and the token we use to write it down (made of one or more alphabet characters).
This feels very similar to what phonics is trying to do - except phonics gives you a small, efficient set phonemes to learn (and lies about the model) and what I'm talking about leads to a hugely redundant set of phonemes where there's multiple ways to make the same sound and multiple matches for the same token. Which is how English really works.
> How did you learn to read?
It would have been whole-word, but I don't remember the early days. I just read and read and read.
Are you fluent in any other language? The reason I asked is that once you learn a "truly" phonetic language (e.g., German), you'd know English is definitely not phonetic (at least, not anymore) if the word is to have any useful meaning, where pronunciation is closely mapped to the alphabet (there are always exceptions, but English is a one giant exception pile).
I remember both learning to read and my child learning to read. Both never used phonics, I guess it just was "whole words".
I think you're not seeing what I'm seeing.
Obviously English as it stands is not phonetic. My contention was that English could be thought of as a collection of languages that *are* phonetic.
For this you would need to let go of the idea that one letter/diphong = one sound, which I think is a fair thing to do. If you allow your "phonemes" to be "eau", "ette", etc then French almost becomes phonetic. All "phonetic" means in this sense is a predictable one-to-one mapping between n-letter tokens and spoken sounds.
If you have a word for that you prefer more than "phonetic" then feel free to sub it in.
If English can indeed be thought of in this way, I might learn something interesting by following that line of thought. For example, we might find a rule that any word which contains old English-isms like "igh" never also contains Greek or Latin -isms in the same root. But they're probably fair game to add on in modifiers (like "isms"). I don't know if this rule is accurate but it feels like it could be to me.
Exceptions aren't the enemy, they lead to new rules and better models. I am more interested in thinking about why there are exceptions and how they come about, than simply going, "there's always exceptions" and stopping there.
I see. What you're doing is quite interesting, but probably calls for a different word because "phonetic" will keep confusing people. One thing I'd like to point out that there are variations in "mapping" of English spelling to pronunciation that don't seem to relate to the word's origins? Like "read" ("ee" or "eh" depending on the tense) or "bow" ("ou" or "au" depending on the meaning; etc. The screwy thing about English is that you never quite know from looking at a word how to pronounce it; "quay" being a perfect example of such.
At this point I must admit that I'm not a linguist, and somebody who actually has some relevant background may provide better feedback.
I can visualise an app that displayed text and showed you the "tokens" that made up a word, possibly also with a little timeline of how that word and/or its tokens have changed over history.
My belief is that they'll be very few "pure" exception words, and most things will follow from a set of rules that make sense once you can see them laid out. (There might be more rules than you think, and the "rule" might look like "1700s vowel shift: 'o' becomes 'e' after this point" rather than a nice simple Theory of Everything; but still a damn sight more structured than the "English just has exceptions" free-for-all that everyone else likes to allege.)
That's an article of faith though, since I don't know the rules myself.
> At this point I must admit that I'm not a linguist
No, nor am I, which is why I'm talking about it not making it myself. I had hoped that one might show interest in this post and chime in, but what can you do.
German has a much better phonetic system than English, but English is still phonetic. English has rules with exceptions; it's not just random letters thrown together. Knowing the rules alone will have you pronouncing most words more or less right.
> Knowing the rules alone will have you pronouncing most words more or less right.
This is what I'm after. Care to list the rules?
I allege that most exceptions are actually the result of deeper/older rules, which it would interest me to know.
Ok I agree it's not an either/or, and following basic rules gets you in the ballpark in English, but I still insist that the exceptions pile in English is huge. And sometimes it does feel like "random letters thrown together"! I give you the town of Worcestershire, MA, as a perfect example :-)
Not to mention the County in England that pre-dates it.
How is that an exception?
"Wuss-ster". Say it like it is spelled out. Easy-peasy, lemon squeezy!
A lot of the weird spelling in English comes from English pronunciation changing. For example, the k in knight used to be voiced, and the gh represented a sound we don't have anymore. All those silent Es at the end of words used to be voiced. Moon, blood, and good used to all have the same vowel sound.
As you said, the main other source of weird spelling is words borrowed from other languages and using spelling that made sense in that language. But we often don't pronounce those words as the other language does, so we're not really using their systems. For example, the French pronunciation of lieutenant isn't like any English speaker says it.
I don't see any value in teaching this stuff to small children just learning to read; it would just be added confusion. "Here is what the letters sound like, and here are the exceptions" is the tried and true method. Other methods never end up working as well.
This site is still unusable on mobile. I'm typing this at two characters per second due to lag.
It seems to depend on time of day.
I’m a biologist working for a small cryopreservation startup in the UK. We use advanced cryoprotectants to produce pre-made frozen cell plates with the goal of increasing the efficiency of in vitro research. The idea is that instead of scientists using their valuable time to do routine cell culture maintenance tasks, we make the cells and ship them to where they’re needed, increasing the productivity of scientists through the division of labour.
We also use these cryoprotectants for blood banking. We can currently produce units of thawed red blood cells with a higher haemoglobin content than traditional methods allow. Alternatively, the properties of these cryoprotectants allow us to make these units available much faster than traditional methods, with comparable haemoglobin content.
But our start-up is very small and we’re in need of extra funding to develop and promote the adoption of this technology. I’m wondering how I could get in touch with people who might be interested in funding this work? It seems like the sort of thing that might have been good for an ACX grant but there won’t be another one of those for a while.
https://www.cryologyx.com/
As far as I can tell, the venture capital industry operates mostly by contacts chains, so the best way to get a hearing before anyone who can do anything is to consider whether any of you know anyone (friends, relatives, college buddies, whatever...) who deals with anything financial. If you do, approach them, and ask them for introductions to people they know who are closer to the VC industry than they are.
If you really truly know no one like that and are still a very small operation, you might try applying to a startup accellerator like Y Combinator. If they accept you, they will introduce you to all sorts of VCs who might be interested in investing with you.
https://www.ycombinator.com/
If YC is out for some reason, there are other similar outfits.
Finally, it is quite common for the early stages of small companies to be funded literally by investments from friends and family, with professional investors stepping up later when the company is more mature and can show some results. Do you have any friends or older relatives who are flush?
So savagery vs. innocence. In a modern setting, savagery might best be symbolized by internet commenters. A deep need to dominate others, a reflexive - almost mindless, except it's embodied in (to the best of our knowledge) creatures that have free will - desire to dominate and subjugate another poster, despite (or because of) the meaningless of the "fight". Many such cases.
Innocence, though, is harder to find. I always imagine kelp as innocent. But arguments that a plant, same as a lion, still ruthlessly causes needless pain abound. Rocks, maybe? Gravity might be a better choice. Any physical force. Perhaps a concrete example of those forces for symbolic reasons. Ocean waves.
What else? What might you choose to symbolize the two extremes?
Savagery is the commenters, innocence is the web page.
What’s an AI agent?
I'd say, something artificial that proactively attempts to acheive a goal, trying intelligently in different ways to hustle to reach that goal.
There aren't any that work yet.
A marketing term
I have a background in research and want to test "woo"-tech devices that claim to use mystical electrical fields or magical glass to improve your life / sleep quality. But I've gotten no responses from emailing them through their respective websites and have not found any employee emails on the usual sites. Has anyone had experience with this?
I also don't really understand why they don't respond — if it works, I post that and they get buyers. Are the companies not interested in the publicity, or they don't believe it actually works, or what?
Since these don't work and are utter scams (and the companies pushing them know it), why on *Earth* would they want to have them tested?
>I don't really understand why they don't respond
My first thought was if they have an image of scientists as sneering, closed minded know-it-alls, and you approach wearing the tribal colours of a scientist, they could be turned off before they even give it time to engage.
That's without getting into any self-defense mechanisms built into the theories themselves - eg for stuff like reiki, "it doesn't work if you don't believe in it". In situations like that I can imagine your questions and tests are like an antimeme that could destroy their own ability to benefit from whatever it is.
I can't say for sure, but I expect these companies know they are doing a scam.
As such, they have no interest in having their devices tested. Neither have they an interest in being reachable for any reason, by customer or non- alike, except for I want to give you money but can't".
Have you just tried buying the devices?
#2. Looking forward to this: whatever it is. I'm a Don Juan enthusiast. Alas, particular targets of its satire are now sometimes difficult to identify. But themes like Byron's scorn for Europe's reconstituted monarchies (and their toadies) and his ironic comprehension of almost every passion (and its end) buoy-up every Canto. Then scenes like Don Juan hiding in Julia's bed while she berates her jealous husband (Canto I), or refusing to eat his Pastor (Canto II), or bursting into tears when the Sultana of Constantinople offers herself on a couch (Canto V) are comic drama of the first order.
Random question: why is Nigeria so populous?
Because it's quite big, and quite densely populated.
It's not as densely populated as you might think though, it's 58th on this list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density -- obviously many of the denser places are geographically tiny, but others (like, notably, India) are big.
Surprisingly, Nigeria is a little less dense than the United Kingdom and a little more dense than Germany; it just happens to be far larger than either. If you combined the UK with France and Germany you'd have an area roughly as large and as populous as Nigeria.
Nigeria's always been populous. It used to be the second most populous British dependency (behind India). It's got to do with fertile soil, good river access, some ports, etc. It's long been a center of city-states, various states, a few empires, etc. Kind of similar to Indonesia in that regard.
Their birthrate is decreasing, but from my uneducated look at the country it looks like they've reached a stage of civilization where the biggest reduction in mortality has been achieved (knowledge of germs and basic sanitation/healthcare) but stalled for a long enough time below first-world living standards and mitigated the anti-natal forces that come with it, eg demystification of the world (ie, maintenance of strong traditional/religious beliefs), gender equality, geographic mobility and urbanization, etc.
River and soil.
say more?
The Niger Delta has the most fertile soil in Africa, so great for agriculture. You'll notice that most of the other countries in Africa surround Nigeria because of the delta. Nigeria also has a lot of oil, which has probably been more detrimental than good for the population because the corrupt government takes all the profits, but the industry may have helped increase the population, I'm not sure.
All you need to do is take a minute to look at Reddit and past media coverage or even some posters here to see that many on the left really do see Trump as a fascist, literally Hitler, etc etc etc. If you genuinely believe such things, you should logically believe that killing him is not only warranted, but to be abetted or at the least encouraged. Yet not nearly as many people have come out in support of the assassination attempt. Is this just a simple case of people generally not being very consistent in their beliefs? Or are a lot of people hiding their applause?
For what it's worth, I think a lot of the pearl-clutching surrounding Trump's hilariously minor injury is just an expression of "America just didn't use to have those vibes guys !!!" indignation, rather than any actual concern about Trump, or any realistic concern for "Democracy" or "Rule of Law".
Imagine if a Billionaire saw a violent fight in his classy hotel suite, he would be very upset about the blood getting on the carpet, and about the general status of his reputation when the news gets out.
Judging from the 1960s and the 1970s, American institutional and political machinery seems more than capable of withstanding an assassination of a former president. In the 1960s the same machinery withstood an assassination of a current president, right after the most intense nuclear standoff of the entire Cold War, and right before an actual hot war that saw devastating casualties and massive loss of American international legitimacy. The USA is not a fragile beast, This Bad Boy Can Fit So Many Fucking Crises Into Its Political Institutions https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/387/189/3bf.png.
For that matter, American institutional machinery can easily handle Trump too. Trump's alarmists make the consistent mistake of assuming he is remotely honest. He Is Not. He is quite adequately modeled as an advertisement machine, the truth value of his claims - that he will build massive Mexico-USA walls, or make the USA leave NATO, or turn the USA into a de facto monarchy/dictatorship - is in the same general vicinity as "There are hot single milfs in your area, click here to smash !1!1!1" or "CONGRATULATION! you won an iPhone 69 Pro Max, click here for more details" or "This MAGIC cream will make your cock bigger and better, click here for more".
Trump is a non-general-purpose computer (an ASIC [1]) running a very simple (in principle) algorithm :
Until death {
let P be the set of people you want things from
foreach person in P {
tell person what they want to hear
}
}
Sometimes he does an optimization when P is very large: he partitions it into relatively homogenous smaller sets P_1, ..., P_n, and then tells each subset in bulk what the entire subset wants (so that he won't have to loop over every single person). Sometimes the subsets are still not homogenous enough, in that case he resorts to using relatively simple but ambiguous wishy-washy encodings of promises such that every person in the subset will interpret the same claim as the (different) things they want to hear all at the same time.
That's it. Trump is entirely compressible to the 3 bytes representing RGB Orange + the above algorithm + a simplistic sampling distribution over an English dictionary favoring words like "Tremendous" and "Beautiful" disproportionally. Give or take a few creepy sexual comments about his daughter. Trump is at most a few megabytes, maybe 10 if we're generous. He is not programmable, for good or for ill.
Some misguided people look at Trump and think "He's an idiot, but I can fix him. With his Charisma and my smarts I will make him do what I want". Those people make the classic mistake of thinking Trump is programmable, Trump is not programmable, he can't be used to do anything except the above algorithm. He is a whore whose job is telling a customer his cock is good and big and tremendous and beautiful in exchange for the customer's green paper, or votes.
Trump assassinated or not, Trump 47th president or not, the USA will just keep zombie-walking through the inevitable entropy-driven decline that all states and all organization and all complex structure in the universe before, during, and after it have suffered through. Trump is just an amusing sideshow. Trump can't do 1/10 of the things people fear he would do, if his life depended on it.
It would be a good thing if he's assassinated, because I feel like I'm losing IQ points unsustainably rapidly every time I hear or see him. I can't understand why American media has such a rock-hard erection for what's - realistically - just an old and not a very good-looking male whore. But all things considered, he is just a slightly dumber and more obnoxious (in the teenage sense) American politician, he objectively didn't make America behave much differently than it usually does during 2016-2020.
So meh, I very much wish the next assassination attempt would be more competent, but that's because he annoys the fuck out of me.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application-specific_integrated_circuit
>That's it. Trump is entirely compressible to the 3 bytes representing RGB Orange + the above algorithm + a simplistic sampling distribution over an English dictionary favoring words like "Tremendous" and "Beautiful" disproportionally. Give or take a few creepy sexual comments about his daughter. Trump is at most a few megabytes, maybe 10 if we're generous. He is not programmable, for good or for ill.
So Trump "Can be replaced by a very small shell script"? :-) [and thanks for the source code, further up in your comment!]
I really like your analogizing Trump to the
>the same general vicinity as "There are hot single milfs in your area, click here to smash !1!1!1"
inbox and popup messages. Yeah, Trump is of comparable depth and plausibility.
I do suggest looking at him as comic relief, rather than as an irritant. Perhaps think of him as _misspelled_ spam messages?
edit: I expect to always remember Trump as the POTUS who recommended looking into "injecting disinfectant". AFAIK, _that_ was unique to Trump. Sigh. How many neurons does it take to grasp the concept that mainlining Clorox is not a good idea?
>>It would be a good thing if he's assassinated, because I feel like I'm losing IQ points unsustainably rapidly every time I hear or see him. I can't understand why American media has such a rock-hard erection for what's - realistically - just an old and not a very good-looking male whore. But all things considered, he is just a slightly dumber and more obnoxious (in the teenage sense) American politician, he objectively didn't make America behave much differently than it usually does during 2016-2020.
>>So meh, I very much wish the next assassination attempt would be more competent, but that's because he annoys the fuck out of me.
Speaking as I guy who lives in the US, can I get some confirmation that this was meant as a joke? I know that's formalistic, and I get feeling like a politician (and Trump in particular) is annoying and brings IQs down every time he opens his mouth, and I agree that the US has strong institutions that can *slaps car* withstand a lot of crises, but we have people right now looking around for reinforcement for their pet theories:
(a) that Trump being shot would be an objective good for the USA and it's bad the shooter missed (toxic left); or, conversely,
(b) that lots of people on the other side believe (a) and people on the right need to view their left-leaning fellow Americans as violent, dangerous, and willing to kill or cheer for killers in the name of their politics (toxic right).
The US has strong institutions that can and have weathered a lot of partisan tensions in the past, but stuff like this is still the opposite of helpful, even if meant in jest - all the more so if some fringey-type mistakes it (whether willfully or earnestly) as having been serious.
This will probably be helpful: I don't live in the US and I don't have the US citizenship. I have never voted in a US election. My sentiments on Trump don't reflect anyone in the US, left, right, center, forwards, backwards, whatever.
I'm a pure-bred non-US noble savage who found Trump's dumbassery and the internet's constant obsession with his attention whoring attitude just 1 gram too much.
> can I get some confirmation that this was meant as a joke
I legitimately mean it 100%. I'm a vegetarian and I would never kill another soul unprovoked or condone killing souls unprovoked, I feel guilt when ants keep harassing my skin and force me to swat them away from my arm, but I would be very glad if somebody *else* were to pick up a weapon and give Trump's his sorely needed cup of lead.
Why no guilt? For one thing he's a former US president, which makes him a mass murderer, piece of shit, scum by default. For another thing he is quite literally a criminal, by the boring legal definition and not just the trivially true moral one. For a third thing he is an annoying 77 years old barely-alive blob of organic material who has repeatedly nodded and winked at the possibility that he could unleash violence if he pleases, so maybe he (and we) shouldn't cry too hard when somebody else unleashes violence on him before he does.
I get that the opinion is transgressive, but I actually think there is a very good argument to be made that **wishing** Trump death is not immoral, all things considered. The only reason not to do so is the pragmatic reason you mentioned, upholding the peace and civility of political shitflinging in the great US of A.
I agree that the US wouldn't have descended into madness if the attempt had succeeded nor will it if he wins the election. Not so sure about Trump not being at all malleable though. He's changed many of his opinions, though who's to say anyone else had anything to do with it.
>I very much wish the next assassination attempt would be more competent, but that's because he annoys the fuck out of me.
Are you sure it isn't because Trump would be very very bad for Gazans? (And conversely, very very good for the Israeli right)
> Are you sure it isn't because Trump would be very very bad for Gazans?
No one has 100% error-proof access to their own internal motivation, but I think no, that's not really relevant to my reasons for despising Trump. The 95%+ displaced Gazans has seen enough due to Biden in 9 months, and will see more in the next 6 months, that Trump will not contribute meaningfully to it if he enters the White House next January. The Gaza war is already unsustainable because of the South Lebanon front and the consequently abandoned Israeli North. By either a ceasefire that concludes the murderous rage or a declared war on Lebanon that forcibly pulls the IDF, the war on Gaza will probably end before the end of this year. Trump being a piece of shit, the most damage he could do is delaying and worsening the post-war reconstruction and/or the reconciliation, but that's insult next to the injury of the war.
As a matter of fact, Trump's antics could be very very bad for the Israeli right too. For one thing, expensive military aid is one of his favorite pet peeves. He supports Israel when it's a cheap thing like moving an embassy or using "Palestinian" as an insult. Actual money though? Not that much.
Tangentially, the USA has slightly more Jews than Israel, and every time they do something that isn't throwing themselves at Trump's feet, he launches into a rant about how they're ungrateful little shits and how he's the most Pro-Israel president in the history of the multiverse so how could they not give him their votes just HOW DARE they. This is just an illustration of how long the list of reasons people would want Trump out of office (preferably via being dead) for, and how the plight of Gazans is relatively at the bottom of that list next to others.
I'm voting Trump because you're the most annoying commenter on this site and Trump said he's gonna tell Bibi to "Let 'er Rip"
Maybe he's just telling me what I want to hear though ;)
That's about the level of IQ I would expect, so do go for it my little buddy.
> the most annoying commenter on this site
The most shining compliment I ever get is your ilk being upset by me. Thank you. I live for this. More is coming.
> he's gonna tell Bibi to "Let 'er Rip"
I also heard he is gonna build you (like, you in particular) a castle in the sky with 72 angels giving you constant blowjobs. He is gonna tell Hamas to come crawling to DC with all hostages alive even the ones that have already died and they're gonna do it out of sheer TREMENDOUS respect for his big beautiful American balls. Trump is going to get you ponies and many many iron domes and big walls and Mexico is going to pay for it.
It will be the biggest and most beautiful presidencies ever. They have never done any presidency like this in the history of presidencies. Hamas will start screaming "God Bless 'Murica" in their bombings instead of Allah Akbar.
I'm sorry you're so upset, I know Deif was a big loss for you guys. To cheer you up, you're invited to my aerial blowjob castle! We're serving latkes.
Utterly hilarious. Your type is such that every time one of you is upset and can find no words for a retort, you reach for a good ol' "Haha KHAMAS go boom and that must make you so MAD".
Oh Nooooo, not the heckin Hamaserenos. Please, killing Hamas neks makes me so maaad, pleeeeeaaaase stop taunting me with dead Hamas leadership, it plucks away at my heart strings.
But worry not, the mysterious dark arts of Anarchism is just one click away. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/special/index. Read, so that one day you can retort with initelligent insults that won't embarrass you more than me.
> Deif
The IDF hasn't yet announced his death by the way, and the guy survived 7 assassination attempts before, since the late 1990s. The IDF are not angels, but you're definitely the Fool rushing in where everyone is having second thoughts about whether to tread.
Word count in this thread so far
SamR71: 64
LearnsHebrewHatesJews: 1074
Incredible - can we get to 1500?
It's a little late now to try to pretend that *he's* the one who's butthurt here when you've already told him that you think he's the "most annoying" person on the board, and that you're voting for Trump just to try to upset him.
bro no one asked
If you oppose Trump because he is undermining democracy and the rule of law, then undermining democracy and the rule of law in an attempt to stop him defeats the entire purpose. This isn't exactly rocket science, and the trollish gotcha attempts are really tiresome.
>If you oppose Trump because he is undermining democracy and the rule of law
That's an understatement for how evil many people genuinely seem to think he is. I think even my literally Hitler hyperbole is more accurate than your characterization.
I don't know if I count as being someone who thinks Trump is "a fascist" or "literally Hitler," but I do think that given his efforts to thwart the peaceful transfer of power in 2020 there is an unacceptable chance that he refuses to yield it if it is given again. I'd put it low, somewhere between 4%~8%, but that's unacceptably high for a democracy, and a stark contrast with Biden, who despite his many flaws I am 100% confident will peacefully transition power if he loses an election.
I'd assume that doesn't make me one of the people you're talking about here, but I'd nevertheless offer my own thoughts as a barometer. I do think Trump is an unacceptable threat to American democracy and we'd be foolish to elect him given his past behavior. But killing him to thwart his election is basically an act of killing the republic to save the republic. It gets you nowhere. And that's before you get into the possibility of reprisals and reciprocal violence, which is very real in a heavily armed country. We already have nutcases doing school shootings - all they have to do is decide to shoot at leaders instead.
So while I'm sure there are a small number of people "hiding their applause," I don't think it's a natural jump from "Trump is a fascist" to "Trump should be assassinated" the way you seem to be implying, so I think the lack of applause (quiet or otherwise) for the attempt you are notng isn't a result of an inconsistency of beliefs but rather a sign that people so foolishly partisan as to be genuinely pro-assassinations are an extreme outlier and few in number.
>So while I'm sure there are a small number of people "hiding their applause," I don't think it's a natural jump from "Trump is a fascist" to "Trump should be assassinated" the way you seem to be implying
Maybe not, but I'm still far from convinced that most people have arrived at "political violence is bad, mkay" out of a well-reasoned weighing of the costs of political violence. Rather, it seems to me one of those social taboos that people hold instinctually more than rationally, and such taboos are usually held in the background without much thought to how they interact with their other beliefs.
I think assassinating Hitler in 1931 is something that's only warranted by what we know in retrospect. Assassinating Hitler in 1935 or 1939 is a completely different matter.
Also, Germany in 1931 was already a shitshow, with lots of street violence and attempted coups. So assassinating Hitler in 1931 would be a lot less destabilizing than assassinating someone today.
Why do people think that abortion doctors are literally participating in Holocaust condemn abortion doctor murderers? Why do people who think that government tyranny has to be fought violently if needed and that Waco was a prime example of government tyranny condemn Tim McVeigh for concretely fighting the government due to Waco? People in a stable country do not usually approve of direct action of this sort no matter what they say and can see that it will generally be vastly counterproductive.
It's possible to have both beliefs like "abortion is approximately infanticide" alongside other beliefs like "assassination and terrorism are very bad ways to enact political change." Or even "assassination and terrorism would be morally acceptable ways to end mass abortion if they would work, but they wouldn't accomplish the goal."
I mean, yes, lots of people engage in hyperbole so that every single Republican running for office is a racist, fascist, woman-hating monster and every Democrat running for office is a closet socialist who hates intact families and Christians, and they don't really believe any of that nonsense. But you can have real beliefs about some policies or ideas being evil or destructive, and still not want to assassinate or bomb anyone over it.
>Why do people think that abortion doctors are literally participating in Holocaust
Do people think that? Have well-credentialed people who think that been wheeled out by news outlets ad nauseum to send out such messages? etc etc
I don't think the comparison works. Maybe it's because I don't consume Finnish media.
People absolutely think that. I'm not sure what you mean by "well-credentialed", but e.g. the current Speaker of the House of Representatives, the third-highest official in the US government, has said that and almost certainly believes it. People with Ph.D.s, say and believe it.
It is frankly difficult to imagine someone opposed to abortion and *not* considering its practitioners to be engaged in a Holocaust, except by way of cognitive dissonance. Either a fetus is morally a person or it isn't. If it is, then we've killed way more than a holocaust's worth of innocent people, and in many cases we've basically done it for convenience.
I really would like to point out that “we” haven’t done it. Individual women have done it, and they have done it for their own reasons.
Individual women and their doctors, with the OP focusing on the doctors as the supposed perpetrators of a holocaust-level atrocity. And enough of our society has stepped up to provide them with legal cover and logistical support that *if* there's anything to be guilty about, the guilt would be spread far and wide.
Blaming the doctors but not the women makes no moral sense, but it's obviously politically pragmatic for anyone who wants to actually stop abortion.
I can believe it. But the sleight of hand here is that the comparison is between one person doing a lot of harm over the term of a presidency and many thousands of people doing harm over several decades. I'm not sure the logic of "kill this person to prevent Hitler 2.0" applies to the latter, though I'm sure plenty of anti-abortion types do silently approve of such actions.
@Chastity as well
> Do people think that?
? ??
If you believe fetuses are babies, the abortion doctors have murdered like 65 million babies since Roe v. Wade. Every abortion doctor is a serial killer who the state has decided to pointedly ignore and will never face justice. Yet even pro-life people generally do not believe in lone gunman type solutions to it.
I don't think Trump is Hitler, but also, people calling their political opponents Nazis is super common. People repeatedly called Obama a Nazi, and Bush before him.
In fact people called Obama the antichrist, and I heard some people argue that the Book of Revelations is mistranslated and actually mentions Obama by name as the antichrist!
EDIT: Looked this up and it was actually Satan, and Luke 10:18. KJV says "And he said unto them, I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven." - the argument was that the part recorded as "lightning fall from heaven" was really "Barack Obama".
The last Republican Profile in Courage
2008
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JIjenjANqAk
“He’s an Arab”
“No ma’am. He’s a decent man, a family man that I just happen to have disagreements with.”
cf.
“He doesn’t have a birth certificate. He may have one, but there’s something on that, maybe religion, maybe it says he is a Muslim,” Trump told Fox News in 2011. “I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t want that.”
I'll never forget the day when my seemingly normal friend in highschool turned to me and asked me whether I thought Obama's lips looked blue, and then seeing my confusion, explained that the antichrist's lips are supposed to be blue, implying that he thought Obama was the antichrist.
"the argument was that the part recorded as "lightning fall from heaven" was really "Barack Obama".
This is so insane that it must be a spoof, though I should be cautious because there is a lot of craziness out there.
Okay, looked that up and yes, it's genuine. My jaw remains dropped because I can't believe my lying eyes, but someone really did write that.
https://www.everand.com/book/386724786/Satan-as-Barack-Obama
Even better, somebody wrote a book about the sinister symbolism of a ring Obama wore?
https://www.amazon.com/Obamas-Ring-Satan-Will-Clark/dp/1483946355
"Does Barack Obama’s ring carry a sinister message? The idea that his ring carried an Islamic message was debunked when a photo revealed that was not the message on the ring. What that photo revealed was even more sinister than an Islamic message. It revealed a Satanic association of Biblical importance. Displayed on Obama’s ring are two coiled serpents. Many verses in the Bible refer to Satan as a serpent; starting in the Garden of Eden in Genesis, and moving to the church at Pergamos, in Revelation."
Well, I guess this proves that Catholics and the Catholic Church are indeed servants of Satan and the Antichrist, because there's a Tolkien connection here! The ring of Barahir:
"The Ring of Barahir, originally the Ring of Felagund, was an Elven artifact that was originally given by Finrod Felagund to Barahir and was kept by the Edain as an heirloom in the later Ages.
The ring had the shape of two serpents with emerald eyes, one devouring and the other supporting a crown of golden flowers, the emblem of the House of Finarfin."
Wait - could Obama's ring possibly be... the ring of Barahir????
Obama being an elf would explain a lot. Especially the delay in producing a birth certificate, and his prowess at basketball.
Can't be an elf because the ring was handed down through the mortal line of the kings of Arnor.
So he's possibly a descendant of Aragorn!
OK, part elf. :-)
Hope (estel) and change, uniting his elven and mortal natures.
So does that mean his ears are half-pointy? :-)
( And can that be distinguished from Vulcan heritage? :-) )
>Displayed on Obama’s ring are two coiled serpents.
I have no idea if he has a ring with any such symbol, but, if he did, my guess would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caduceus
Come to think of it - could it be an ancient and malign symbol ... of the affordable care act? :-)
"No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State."
I think there may be a loophole here where Obama, being the rightful King of Gondor and Arnor, isn't *receiving* anything from a foreign sovereign because he *is* the sovereign. You'd need to consult a true expert on anarcho-monarchy, though.
Truth the SAME as fiction: https://unsongbook.com/interlude-%D7%A9-obama/
Is Trump a threat to democracy? Well, one of the main purposes of modern democracy is the peaceful transfer of power. Trump did not allow for that. When he lost the election, he threw such a tantrum that power did not transfer peacefully. Americans literally -- and not just in the internet sense of literally -- died on Capitol Hill.
Is Trump a threat to democracy? No. He is someone who has already carried through with that threat.
Killing him would make you him, and that's what most people want to avoid.
"Americans literally -- and not just in the internet sense of literally -- died on Capitol Hill"
What point are you making with this statement? A couple of people died of heart attacks because they were so excited, and another unarmed woman was murdered by police and no one cared because she was white. That about sums it up, right?
I mean, he did legit try to find some way to stay in power after losing an election, which is one of many reasons he won't be getting my vote in November.
Human beings are a poltroonish species. They are terrified of standing out from the herd and saying the wrong thing. As soon as they noticed that they're supposed to condemn the shooting the tripped over themselves to do so. Positively pathetic.
HL Mencken is no longer around so I reanimated him briefly for comment
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/some-thoughts-are-better-left-unsaid
Animals in general are poltroonish. I watched as some African tribesmen waltzed slowly up to a lion's kill, with the pride all around. As they got closer, the lions got nervous, and once one decided to flee, it wasn't long before the rest did. The tribesmen hacked off a large chunk of meat, and left.
The courageous examples in nature aren't necessarily great examples. Insects often are courageous: a mosquito risks its life to suck your blood, and if it gets swatted...there are millions more.
Courage requires the capacity to experience fear, which I very much doubt that insects have.
I do not doubt that all living organisms experience fear. Insects are pretty easy to demonstrate. If you attempt to kill one, it tries to avoid it. Or do you think insects are all like, "Whatever, if I die, so what?"
Yah, but humans like to imagine that they are members of an individualistic (rather than herdish) species of especially brave specimens.
We ain't.
Mencken has a nice little piece about trying to find that most defining trait of the species and he comes up with "cowardice".
While granting his motivational bias, it's worth reminding people how little their opinions are actually their own (see also his hilariously brilliant intro to "In Defense of Women").
I think people condemned the shooting because it was horribly wrong not because saying so was now expected of them. Why do you seem to have so little faith in basic human decency?
Why are you too cowardly to say the obvious truth? Or perhaps even to allow yourself to see it? The OP is correct, NUMEROUS people said they wished Trump were assassinated, so much so that no one even needs to explain (except perhaps to you) the now-common "time traveller" joke.
Your pseudo bravery is cowardice par excellence. Bravo!
"I hate her! I wish she were dead!"
Said multiple times, in "Throw Momma From The Train". SOMEONE in the movie thought he meant it.
What does bravery or cowardice even have to with this? I honestly can’t make any sense of what you are saying.
Assassinating a lawful candidate for office or calling for their assassination is simply and obviously wrong.
There's a few different positions here.
Alice jokes about seeing her political opponents assassinated, but it's just a joke, she knows it would be horrible in practice.
Bob jokes about seeing his political opponents assassinated, but has never really thought about how horrible it would be in practice until he sees it almost happen.
Charlie jokes about seeing his political opponents assassinated, and he really wants it to happen. But then he sees it almost happen and he changes his mind, that would be horrible.
Dave jokes about seeing his political opponents assassinated, and he really wants it to happen. But then it nearly happens, and everyone around him is saying how horrible it is, so he goes along with them.
Eddie jokes about seeing his political opponents assassinated, and he really wants it to happen. But then it nearly happens, and everyone around him is saying how horrible it is, but Eddie still wants it to happen and he says so. He is retweeted by Libsoftiktok and loses his job.
I think there's more Alices than any other category.
I agree, but with you had substituted Eve for Eddie, as you already have Alice and Bob as characters, and Eve is more traditional for this role.
At least, in discussions about computer security.
+1
Most expressed political views have social consequences for the person expressing them, but no consequences for the speaker if they're wrong or even disastrous. This is one more. Lots of people will say some dumb thing about wishing Trump or Biden would be shot, very few have thought through how much worse the country becomes when that sort of thing happens very often.
I agree, and also, there are a lot more people who want Trump dead than want him assassiniated.
> NUMEROUS people said they wished Trump were assassinated
Name some.
In person, I've heard a couple of friends say that they wish the assassin hadn't missed, and they're not evil or nuts, just fairly left, but not as left as the zeitgeist of my city. Even I, after a beer too many, said something kinda close, although in retrospect I think I was referencing Monty Python as much as anything, and I wish I hadn't said it. And you know I'm very ambivalent about Trump.
How did we get to this point? Rhetorical question
Naming them is likely to cause trouble, because that is considered doxxing. I've seen people on social media I frequent making comments about "pity the shooter missed", "I'm good with a gun, I wouldn't miss" and the likes. These weren't jokes, a lot of people do hate Trump and believe all the hysteria about literal Hitler, Fourth Reich, Project 2025, he'll round up gays and minorities, the Supreme Court made it legal for the president to kill political rivals and so forth.
Am I going to list off names and link to them? I'm crazy, not stupid!
I’m not on social media. People making comments like that need a visit from law enforcement.
As the famed Richard Hannania has said, you can think Trump is a fascist that is bad for democracy (not quoting him exactly at all here), and think political assassinations are even worse for democracy.
Imo America would be A LOT better off if Trump suddenly had a heart attack mid-debate, and probably worst off if he had been assassinated that day (political tension, civil war?, etc).
+1
Most Republican before Trump were depicted by most media outlets as bad but not quite so bad that they needed to be assassinated. I think it's fair to say that the tenor of much of the ink spilled about Trump has been much worse than that. Not commenting on the merits of such beliefs. And I've noted at least a few people have been logically consistent in this, both on Xitter and Reddit.
You're playing a bullshit game. The media wasn't calling for him to be assassinated.
You're right. He's a threat to democracy, authoritarian, racist, hates women, hates Muslims, hates gays, hates trans people.. did I forget anything?
Yeah, but what are his *bad* points?
That you're a troll. Do you think you aren't? Do you believe what you just wrote? If not, you are the definition of a troll.
Are you denying that such opinions have been published in the media?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/20/trump-threat-democracy-precedents
"Donald Trump’s threats to democracy – including his promise to govern as a dictator on “day one” and his refusal to abide by the norm of a peaceful transition of power – are often called unprecedented."
https://theintercept.com/2024/05/25/media-trump-danger-democracy/
"Trump is planning a second term that is nothing more than a revenge tour: Deploy the Insurrection Act to crush dissent, turn the Justice Department into a personal weapon to imprison government officials who previously investigated or prosecuted him, persecute former aides who turned against him, pardon himself and his lieutenants, and loot the government to enrich himself and his flailing businesses.
In case anybody has missed his autocratic plans, Trump promoted a video this week about “the creation of a unified Reich” if he is elected.
Even this social media callout to Hitler generated a generally tepid response from the press, like one from an ABC reporter who only dared to say that it was “not normal” for presidential candidates to share “references to Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler.”
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/8/26/21374948/trump-second-term-lgbtq-people
"Trans people have been a target of the Trump administration from the get-go.Almost immediately after Trump took office in 2017, the administration rolled back an Obama-era memo directing schools to protect trans students from discrimination. That July, Trump announced his decision to ban trans people from serving in the military. In May 2018, the administration went after trans prisoners, too,deciding that, in most cases, trans people should be housed according to their assigned sex at birth. This summer, the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed a rule that would allow homeless shelters that receive federal funding to house trans people according to their birth-assigned sex."
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-vows-stop-gender-affirming-care-minors-re-elected-president-rcna68461
"Former President Donald Trump vowed in a video released Tuesday that, if he is re-elected, he will punish doctors who provide gender-affirming care to minors and push schools to “promote positive education about the nuclear family” and “the roles of mothers and fathers” as part of a wide-ranging set of policies to use federal power to target transgender people."
https://people.com/what-is-project-2025-inside-far-right-plan-trump-presidency-8622964
"A sweeping proposal for how Donald Trump should handle a second term in office has sparked concern for its implications on the role of federal government and its calls to eliminate a number of basic human rights.
The 2025 Presidential Transition Project, more commonly known as Project 2025, released a 900-page manifesto last year titled "Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise." The policy guidebook — compiled by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation in partnership with more than 100 other conservative organizations — lays out a far-right, Christian nationalist vision for America that would corrode the separation of church and state, replace nonpartisan government employees with Trump loyalists and bolster the president's authority over independent agencies.
...Project 2025 establishes a framework for guiding the federal government through a biblical lens. Across nearly 1,000 pages, the mandate pushes an unpopular interpretation of the Christian agenda that would target reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ people and people of color by effectively erasing mention of all related terms, protections and troublesome historical accounts.
Though the mandate accuses the "woke" left of infringing on people's religious freedoms, its policies are rooted in a singular, extremist view of how society should function based on its authors' own Christian nationalist values. It repeatedly calls for the punishment, even imprisonment, of people who do not conform to the think tank's platform."
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/01/trump-lgbtq-transgender-community-protections/676139/
" Donald Trump is promising to nationalize such efforts. He doesn’t just want to surveil, miseducate, and repress children who are exploring their emerging identities. He wants to interfere in the private lives of millions of adults, revoking freedoms that any pluralistic society should protect."
I could go on, but I think I'd hit Substack's comment limits, and I haven't even searched for "sexism" and "racism".
>you're a troll
Simply saying "I strongly disagree worth what you've posted" would make you look a lot more online-savvy and a bit less emotional, and would havr the added value of being a true statement about the world.
He's not a troll. Not saying I agree with him but the media has portrayed him as some sort of inhuman monster. Jan 6 and so forth. It's a reasonable perspective to take.
When you say this ‘literally Hitler’ thing what do you mean? I’ve seen the actual phrase exactly 4 times. 1 from your post, 2 more from people on ACX saying this is what Democrats say, okay that makes 3. Number 4 is Donald Trump Jr saying that’s what Democrats say.
I have never, ever heard an actual Democrat say this.
Do you mean it in some figurative sense?
Like when they say “When Trump talks about migrants poisoning the blood of America he *sounds* like Hitler?
If that’s what you mean it’s not the same as saying he is ‘literally Hitler’. BTW that *does* sound like Hitler. But it does not mean Trump is ‘literally Hitler’.
"I have never, ever heard an actual Democrat say this."
And there's lots of things I've never, ever heard people in my circles say, but that does not mean real people don't say them. It's a weak argument, Gunflint, often derided as the Pauline Kael one:
https://www.commentary.org/john-podhoretz/the-actual-pauline-kael-quote%E2%80%94not-as-bad-and-worse/
“Pauline Kael famously commented, after the 1972 Presidential election, ‘I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.'”
Are "comparisons to Hitler" close enough to saying "Trump is Hitler?" That's a genuinely debatable question, but I don't think saying "Adolf Hitler did this, and now look, Donald Trump is doing the same thing" is innocuous:
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/20/politics/james-clyburn-trump-hitler-comparison/index.html
"Two powerful House Democrats have invoked Adolf Hitler’s actions in Germany and the treatment of Jews during World War I and in the 1920s to warn against the direction the US is moving in, with both saying Donald Trump’s presidency presents an unprecedented threat to democracy."
I have to love the spin these guys put on it; 'if you say someone or something is like the Gestapo, you are using the language of Nazis! and so you must at the least like Nazis, if you're not a Nazi yourself!'
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/with-gestapo-comment-trump-adds-to-numerous-past-nazi-germany-references
"Donald Trump told Republican donors at his Florida resort this weekend that President Joe Biden is running a “Gestapo administration,” the latest example of the former president employing the language of Nazi Germany in his campaign rhetoric."
Here's "Trump is copying Hitler's speeches":
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-says-he-didnt-know-his-immigration-rhetoric-echoes-hitler-thats-part-of-a-broader-pattern
"Facing criticism for repeatedly harnessing rhetoric once used by Adolf Hitler to argue that immigrants entering the U.S. illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump insisted he had no idea that one of the world’s most reviled and infamous figures once used similar words. The Nazi dictator spoke of impure Jewish blood “poisoning” Aryan German blood to dehumanize Jews and justify the systemic murder of millions during the Holocaust."
I see your feelings have been hurt. I’m guessing it’s because I called you out on your gloating and inflammatory factually false meme at the end of the last thread. Sorry about your feelings but even Trump, to his credit, has told his people to cut the incendiary post assassination attempt rhetoric.
You’ve responded to almost every comment I made in this thread except for the one where I told you that Vance is probably an earnest Catholic and an almost certain earnest Catholic - Ross Douthat - is praying for his friend Vance and the country.
anon123 cleared up the ‘literally Hitler’ thing is slangy hyperbole.
Okay, want me to respond to this?
My fee-fees aren't hurt, apart from what you've said about not being on social media. I see instances of Z, you turn around and go "Well nobody *I* know says that!" with the strong implication that therefore, nobody is in fact saying Z and furthermore I must be lying.
Gee, thanks.
You're not on social media, so you probably *don't* hear/read people saying Z. I hang around various places, for different reasons, and I do hear/read people saying Z. It's rather tedious to get told "don't believe your lying eyes", but whatever.
Take it away, the Eagles:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PTEqZURh4o
EDIT: Here's some more of that "Nobody *I* know ever said that!" for ya, Gunflint:
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-shooting-assassination-conspiracy-theory-staged-biden-poll-1925723
I agree, Newsweek and Time have gone downhill since their glory days, but they're still not quite trash yet.
"A new poll has laid bare how many voters believe the conspiracy theories swirling around the attempted assassination of Donald Trump over the weekend.
One third of those who support Trump's Democratic presidential rival Joe Biden said they believe the attack may have been staged and had never been intended to kill the former president. That equates to a little over 33 percent. And even some of Trump's own supporters believe the same thing, with around 12 percent suspecting the event was planned, according to the poll conducted by Morning Consult, an American business intelligence company."
Don’t read anything into this beyond I thought you would be interested. Douthat again.
Donald Trump, Man of Destiny
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/15/opinion/donald-trump-assassination-destiny.html?unlocked_article_code=1.7k0.JUyx.g_7dwyAZSLhn&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb
> Well nobody *I* know says that!" with the strong implication that therefore, nobody is in fact saying Z and furthermore I must be lying.
I’m as certain as I can be of just about anything that you weren’t lying.
I didn’t say it, think it, or mean to imply it.
No, I understand, thanks. It just made me feel like "this guy denies everything I'm saying, does he think I'm making it up or lying?"
We're good, though, in this period of Peace and Unity post-assassination 😁
Sorry, "literally X" is internet slang that's meant to be hyperbolic. To translate in a more literal way, it's apparent to me that significant numbers of people really do believe Trump is a unique threat who will end democracy and usher in a dark period of Nazi-lite authoritarian rule.
Thanks. That had me confused for a while.
I think the people who fear Trump is a danger to the Republic are thinking about Trump on January 6 saying “If Mike Pence does the right thing we will win”.
These people include Mike Pence himself, Trump’s VP,Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, Adam Kinzinger and Chris Christie. All of these people are Republicans. These are only the ones who were among those willing to say this was absolutely wrong and completely un-American out loud.
None of them want Trump assassinated. The only person we know for sure who wanted this is a 20 year old Pennsylvanian.
IDK if C-SPAN has archives but listening to an open comment session Monday morning the first caller opened with: "well, you know what I think would have been best for the country, would have been if the bullet had been just 2 inches over..." At that point he was cut off by the host saying nopenopenopenope we don't promote violence... :P
Good for the host. Really bad for the caller. How did we get here?
Is the republic not worth killing a single would-be tyrant to protect?
Honestly I view Trump and Biden as mostly indistinguishable, and both morally worthy of death for the killing they've signed off on abroad. The inconsistency galls.
I dislike both Trump and Biden, albeit for different reasons. In a nutshell: Trump because of the look-into "injecting disinfectant" (common sense, _please_ !). Biden because of pushing for more DEI (could we kindly treat people on their _individual_ merits???).
As it is, I'll hold my nose and vote for whichever better supports Israel, as well as I can tell just before the election. (better thought of as voting against the other one)
The problem with this idea is that tyrants don't act on their own. Tyrannical systems give the most power to a single dictator, but they require broad support to overthrow the existing government structure. Caesar, and many of the tin pot emperors in the later empire, had literal armies backing them up. You could go back in time and kill Hitler or Stalin, but what about Himmler and Goering and Yagoda and Beria? Killing one man doesn't stop the communist overthrow of the Tsardom, nor does it change the chaotic circumstances in Wiemar Germany that led to the rise of the Nazis.
Similarly, killing Trump wouldn't change the fact that a large number of Americans feel the elite ruling the country are completely disconnected from their interests.
Probably, but you're unlikely to end up killing a single man. The killing of Caesar, for example, started a second civil war which still ended up with a despot at the lead. Which may still be justified if the threat of tyranny is sufficiently probable and severe -- even a civil war and/or a more run-of-the-mill dictatorship would probably have been better for 1930 Germany than Nazism and the Second World War -- but you should be aware of the actual tradeoff before you make your choice.
> Is the republic not worth killing a single would-be tyrant to protect?
No.
If that is important to you, they are certainly distinguishable.
https://airwars.org/research/us-airstrikes-fell-to-historic-low-in-2022-despite-fresh-operations/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/01/us/biden-drone-strikes.html
>None of them want Trump assassinated. The only person we know for sure who wanted this is a 20 year old Pennsylvanian.
I agree with the first sentence. I don't agree with the second. There are many who wanted it under a pseudonym and at least a few who lost their jobs after being stupid enough to say it using their real names. Google Cassandra Oleson.
I also said in my first post that most leftists, at least publicly, do not support assassinating Trump. I'm leaning to people just not being very logically consistent.
I’m not on social media beyond ACX and Slow Boring comments. I’m glad Cassandra lost her job.
I think he would if he could. He's literally Hitler.
anon123 explained that literally Hitler is hyperbole on the internet, so if I'm shooting, metaphorically, to describe Trump accurately on this medium it seems I need to adjust for the cyber-distortion and say literally Hitler to accurately describe the wannabee tyrant that is Trump
I don't think Trump has the anger to be Hitler but sure he's Mussolini or would be if he could. So sure he's at least a wannabe fascist, but I'm optimistic that he can't get the military on his side and actually seize absolute power.
Some argue the recent SCOTUS ruling about immunity gives the POTUS dictatorial power but I'm not that pessimistic. If so, we're already fucked and it's too late.
That complaint about giving POTUS dictatorial power will be refined if Mr. Biden, Ms. Harris, or whoever the Democrats nominate keeps them in power. "Dictatorial" will become Affirmative, and everyone will be quite pleased with their cleverness.
Agree - dangerous buffoon, Mussolini-style, seems far closer to the mark.
Trump won't make the U.S. into Nazi Germany, but he might make it into a Hungary, an illiberal democracy where only one election outcome is possible. SCOTUS will obviously support anything he wants to do at this point.
He's not smart enough and lacks the attention span, understanding of history, etc., to be a real fascist. He has certainly been popular among actual no-kidding unashamed fascists, however, what I've heard and read of their internal communications over the last nine years suggests to me that they know full well what he is and isn't, and they value him because he is viscerally appealing to the kinds of people who make up a fascist constituency--speaks their language, shares their grievances and what have you.
It's a good thing Trump is so lazy and unimaginative.
I've also heard Trump described as having the attention span of a butterfly... Though with Biden's debate performance, it might be grimly amusing to watch the two of them take a test of attention span, side by side...
I'm disappointed that "Cadorna was an idiot" didn't like to https://acoup.blog/2021/10/08/collections-luigi-cadorna-was-the-worst/
Sure, everyone is inconsistent in their beliefs... or maybe they are just smart enough to know when to be inconsistent. but also
1. It is entirely consistent to prefer that ideas you disagree with be defeated democratically.
and
2. It is consistent to realize extreme actions typically cause public sentiment to swing in the opposite direction. Whoever fires first loses.
>1. It is entirely consistent to prefer that ideas you disagree with be defeated democratically.
I was referring to the widespread sentiment that Trump is going to kill democracy, not to people who merely disagree with him. I really don't think I was exaggerating much when I noted significant numbers of people think Trump is "literally Hitler".
>2. It is consistent to realize extreme actions typically cause public sentiment to swing in the opposite direction. Whoever fires first loses.
That would be hiding their applause.
<quote>I really don't think I was exaggerating much</quote>
That doesn't really change the sentiment that it is better to defeat it democratically than with extremism.
<quote>That would be hiding their applause.</quote>
No, the opposite. It would be them realizing there is nothing to applaud, since such a move weakens support for them.
If that's the case, how did the pre-Trump Republican party ever exist? His supporters didn't materialize out of nowhere in 2016. Why didn't they launch a coup against the Chamber of Commerce types all by themselves? I simply don't buy the "there's nothing special about Trump" argument.
The same way socialists don't take over the Democrat party. There are only two viable choices since going third party splits the vote and loses, so a milquetoast candidate from your party winning is better than the other party winning. The party apparatus tries to balance pleasing the radical constituency with broad electability in the public. It's not like the MAGA crowd and hardline conservatives appeared spontaneously after Trump ran for office; they had to already be there for his campaign to be viable. They were generally sidelined by the more moderate factions of the Republican party. See the Tea Party during Obama's first term.
> That said, I don't fully understand the nature of the demand Trump might be meeting (aside from anti-woke and anti-deepstate ideas?)
I'm not a good person to ask, not exactly being a Trumpist myself, but I think a big part of Trump's appeal was anti-elitism as well.
"anti-deepstate" is a red herring though, since that was something *generated* by Trump as an excuse for failing to get much done.
> "anti-deepstate" is a red herring though, since that was something *generated* by Trump as an excuse for failing to get much done.
Have to disagree with this. The Deep State* was a core component of the MAGA platform during the 2016 election. Conservatives saw the entrenchment of their ideological rivals in the federal administrative agencies as a dire political threat. Thus the catchphrase "Drain the Swamp" that was ubiquitous during the 2016 campaign. Considering that Trump was illegally surveilled and falsely painted as a Russian agent for years by the FBI, I would have to say it's a pretty good excuse too.
*As an aside - I note the most conspiracy theory sounding term of the lexicon also became the most popular, compare to permanent bureaucracy or administrative state which describe the same thing as the deep state.
My impression from Primo Levi's experiences, was that surviving Mussolini was far easier than surviving Hitler.
I don't see you mentioning Umberto Eco's famous 14 points https://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list-of-the-14-common-features-of-fascism.html.
Although, granted, plenty of those points are non-specific to Fascism. "Cult of Tradition" and "Rejection of Modernism"? That's literally Middle Eastern Islamism to a T.
> Mussolini, never any consistent policy besides this street theatre.
Technically-speaking, that just proves that Fascism lies on an orthogonal dimension to Policy, call it "Style". Just like Democracy, in fact. You could have a Liberal Democracy, an Islamic Democracy, a racist Democracy, a war-like Democracy, a secular Democracy. "Democracy" just denotes a particular style of settling questions, but not any specific answer. Although in practice nobody ever uses "Fascist Communist", the term doesn't strike me as an oxymoron. I think the Khmer Rouge would qualify.
You might dismissively call Fascism's rituals "Theatre", but remember that Democracy sounds like a pretty big theatre from the POV of its opponents too, and for pretty valid reasons. The "Theatre" is the visible rituals of a social process for bestowing political legitimacy.
Man I'll be honest. The latest twitter cycle has just reminded me that I have absolutely no idea how people can say they support Trump and democracy at the same time (I have to beat this dead horse one more time bc I saw some rationalists on twitter talking about this).
I get some people here are monarchists, a few more are fine with illiberalism, and a few more are fully bought in to every single Biden conspiracy theory, but other than those, Trump supporters are becoming ever more baffling to me.
Arguments:
1) Trump tried to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, by getting Pence to certify the fake electors, and sent people to the Capitol to put pressure on them so that the issue could be sent back to house so they could vote, and since Republicans had more state delegates he could have won. This is not a secret, Trump mentioned this in his January 6th speech, and the Eastman memo outline *very clearly* the legal framework of how this could have worked.
2) Trump is now in essence a demi-god. He holds complete domination of the Republican party, and everyone is lock-and-step with him. If Agenda 47 or Project 2025 are to be taken at their word, this would include removing everyone not completely ideologically aligned with the President from the executive branch, and give the President significantly more power to influence the actions taken by different agencies. Hell, JD Vance said in February he would be willing to certify Trump's fake electors if it were up to him.
3) Republicans in the senate failed the country in 2020 by not impeaching Trump for the *only* stated reason that he was already out of office. Now, the Supreme Court has stated that the President has immunity for core actions. I do think it's possible I'm overreacting to this one in particular, but it is scary. Plausibly the only reason that his conversation with Pence pressuring him to certify fake electors possibly doesn't fall under a core power is because Pence was doing a role that was assigned to him by Congress. Otherwise, as a core power, you wouldn't be able to use that as EVIDENCE against Trump, in his TRIAL. I am afraid that they will somehow convince the court that enough actions from January 6th count as core duties that you can't use them as evidence, and as such the whole insurrection case doesn't go forward (of course, disregarding the possibility he wins beforehand and just pardons himself)
4) So you have the perfect storm of someone with a cult of personality, who doesn't care about institutions, who doesn't care about democracy, who was not impeached by Trump for flimsy reasons, who was plausibly protected by the Supreme Court in this ruling, who is filling the executive with his goons. Please feel free to criticize any of this if I'm missing anything.
5) For the record, I'd put the chance of America becoming an authoritarian hellhole with Trump winning at at most 4-5% (operationalized in the form of there not being free and fair elections in 2028) , but there's a much higher chance of democratic institutions being damaged permanently, in America and in the world (above 60% chance for all of reversing progress in climate change, ending legal protections for trans people, ending aid to Ukraine, more illiberal governments around the world, etc)
I am no fan of Trump and won't be voting for him. But to answer your question, there are a lot of Trump voters (and moderates, like myself) that see the democratic party as extremely authoritarian and anti-democratic. Whether it is worse than Trump is hard to gauge and I'm not knowledgeable enough about the election stuff and Jan 6th have a strong opinion.
Ways that democrats/progressives are authoritarian and anti-democratic:
1. COVID vaccine mandates: this is an issue many Trump voters are still extremely angry about, for good reason. And many of them turned down vaccines at great personal cost: I met an airline pilot recently who turned down millions in career earnings because he refused the vaccine and considered people who went along with it akin to Germans who went along with the Nazis. Incidentally also takes the wind out of the sails of pro-choice arguments.
2. Social media censorship: secretly forcing social media companies to deplatform users who say things that are against the state's perceived interest, like suggesting the possibility of covid lab leak. 20 years ago this would have been huge news, absolutely insane for this to happen in a democracy.
3. Universities requiring progressive loyalty oaths for job applicants: 100% authoritarian.
4. Generally criticizing freedom of speech as a value, and support for dishonesty if it furthers the democrat or progressive cause. (personally I think this is increasingly endemic not just in both parties but in general life, an increasingly cynical, low trust environment among everyone, but that's off topic)
5. Support for communism and hatred of capitalism. You don't see this from politicians much but it is very common on social media, and would be viewed as authoritarian by Trump voters, though I'm aware that social media communists don't see themselves as statist at all.
6. Second amendment issues. They want to take our guns. Big one for Trump voters.
7. Using courts to attack Trump. I'm not an expert here but I can tell you that Trump voters see these as politically motivated attacks.
8. And finally, liberals are no fun. Progressives and democrats have become culturally extremely intolerant: a party of sanctimonious, screeching, judgmental narcs and tattletales. Where 'read the room' is a common, unironic scold to conform. Where family relationships, or really any relationship other than pure atomized individualism is problematic. Where seeking power and domination over others by claiming mental illness or victimhood is pathological. Where everyone goes to therapy and obsesses about their trauma.
Maybe that last one is not about authoritarianism but it is still annoying.
9. Trying to take Trump (whatever one thinks of him, he's a major candidate) off the primary ballots in two states.
[This was a leftist action, but not a Democratic Party action. As Level 50 Lapras pointed out in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prediction-markets-suggest-replacing/comment/60895959 Gavin Newsom opposed this, to his credit]
In any event, the attempt was an attempt to thwart the voters, an anti-democratic action by the left.
The case in Colorado was brought by some Republicans, not Democrats.
Many Thanks! I'm confused.
One article describing one phase of the attempt to remove Trump from the ballot, https://apnews.com/article/trump-insurrection-14th-amendment-2024-colorado-d16dd8f354eeaf450558378c65fd79a2# described the group bringing the suit:
>The left-leaning group that brought the Colorado case, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, hailed the ruling.
and, indeed, they are separate from the Democratic Party, though I would expect a left-leaning group to be generally aligned with Democrats.
From the article you linked to:
The state’s highest court didn’t agree, siding with attorneys for six Colorado Republican and unaffiliated voters who argued that it was nonsensical to imagine that the framers of the amendment, fearful of former confederates returning to power, would bar them from low-level offices but not the highest one in the land.
Many Thanks!
>siding with attorneys for six Colorado Republican and unaffiliated voters
Yeah, this is weird. I looked at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, and their website doesn't show any clear party affiliation, though they mostly seem to be bringing lawsuits against Trump people. Do you see a GOP affiliation somewhere on the site ( https://www.citizensforethics.org/ ) ?
Thank you for acknowledging the monarchists. It's nice to be seen from time to time.
It's gobsmacking that VP pick Vance is influenced by Curtis Yarvin *and apparently even personal friends with him*.
I thought we all agreed this (ACX, EY, Moldbug, grey tribe, etc) was just 300 people reading the same few blogs, and next thing I know a bunch of folks I've been reading for ten or fifteen years are the most influential people around.
Oddly, I am a people person. I am introverted, sure, and a mathematician by training, but I am empathetic and political and just generally interested in the well being of people around me.
Libertarianism appealed to me at an earlier stage of my life, but at some point I decided it was hyper focused on a narrow process instead of outcomes. I think this is true of all the political ideologies, by the way. So, even more oddly, libertarianism is the part of Yarvin's work that I left behind.
The reason I kept monarchy, loosely, is because I don't think... *points at everything*... I don't think people work this way. The totalizing nature of democratized politics is bad for human brains and bad for social fabric, and either it no longer produces added value, or maybe it never did (in the sense that maybe the industrial revolution would have happened anyway under more authoritarian government systems with more state capacity).
Cynically, I would say people don't want community so much as they want their beliefs shoved down everyone else's throats. Government is the perfect vehicle to do this. Then when the libertarians point out maybe having an omnipotent central government is a bad idea, it never seems to occur to these people that their ideological enemies are perfectly capable of using the same vehicle against them.
This is very well put, thanks.
It just proves that Curtis Yarvin is short on good ideas; says almost nothing about libertarianism.
John, I would challenge you to provide an example of something specific in a Yarvin piece that you found half right, or interesting but wrong, as a sort of proof-of-work that you really engaged with his writing at some point. It seems to me to be the low bar for comments that add value to the thread.
>"Republicans in the senate failed the country in 2020 by not impeaching Trump for the *only* stated reason that he was already out of office."
Only the House can impeach; the Senate decides whether to convict. Getting such details wrong undermines credibility.
For clarity for anyone abroad reading, the house did impeach Trump, and the Senate then voted to acquit him - so this isn’t an assertion that OP got the entire legislative body wrong when he said “the Senate failed,” it’s just making the semantic point that saying “not impeaching” is technically inaccurate and the correct phrasing is something like “not convicting of an impeachable offense.”
Each can decide for themselves the degree to which this “undermines credibility.”
"Trump tried to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, by getting Pence to certify the fake electors, and sent people to the Capitol to put pressure on them so that the issue could be sent back to house so they could vote"
Sending matters back for a vote is pretty weaksauce on the "coup" attempt. Real dictators and generalissimos don't bother with votes, they seize power and make themselves the ultimate authority. If you're telling me Trump wanted a vote on did he win the election, that sounds rather democratic to my ears.
In the first place, "if I win, I win, but if I lose, we have a second vote" is not a proposition made more democratic by the presence of a second vote.
Besides that, the second "vote" Trump was seeking wasn't a recount or a do-over of elections in the states he narrowly lost. He was seeking to replace the results of the election with a party-lines vote in the house, where Republicans had a majority. "If I lose, we toss the election results and replace them with a vote of 435 elites, the majority of whom are on my team" - it's very much *not* the kind of thing we should mistake for democracy in action.
Frankly, it's a bit revealing, when comparing to actually disputed election results like Bush v. Gore in 2000, that Trump went this route through the House rather than pushing for a recount. If he genuinely thought he won, I'd expect him to pursue recounts, but if he made an effort in that direction it seems to have been pretty short-lived.
>Real dictators and generalissimos don't bother with votes
AFTER they gain power. But they often gain power democratically. Hitler is an obvious example.
>If you're telling me Trump wanted a vote on did he win the election, that sounds rather democratic to my ears.
When a Presidential election is sent to the House, the question is not "who won?" It is "who do you choose as President?" And, when an election is sent to the House each state delegation gets one vote. Which means that Trump was guaranteed to win. So, trying to replace an election by voters with an election you are guaranteed to win, based on a voting system that ignores the principle of "one person, one vote," does not in fact sound very democratic.
> AFTER they gain power. But they often gain power democratically. Hitler is an obvious example.
*Technically speaking*, Hitler was never democratically elected. But there are certainly plenty of other examples of strongmen and dictators coming to power via the ballot box. Even Putin was elected and still pretends to hold elections even now.
Well, he was no less democratically elected than any other leader of a plurality party in a parliamentary system who is named Prime Minister.
> Which means that Trump was guaranteed to win.
Well, he THOUGHT he was guaranteed to win. It was 27 R states, one of them was represented by Liz Cheney, and I can imagine 5-10% of Republicans crossover voting, which would probably be enough. So he might still have lost.
Democratic institutions in Ukraine have already been damaged horribly(is it permanent? Who knows if the dictatorship survives without the war as an excuse, but it's certainly gone at the moment) and there are Ukrainians sitting in prison right now for their opposition to the country's foreign policy.
If you really want an answer then I'll say that Trump's reaction to his 2020 loss was certainly not his best moment. It's a mark against him, in my book.
But what was the end result? Some frivolous lawsuits and a mostly-peaceful protest where nothing even caught fire? If you hate dumb lawsuits and you hate dumb protests then you're going to hate the other guys too.
In the end, Trump's strengths outweigh his weaknesses, at least in the universe of possible candidates for the President of the United States right now.
>In the end, Trump's strengths outweigh his weaknesses, at least in the universe of possible candidates for the President of the United States right now.
Aren’t you an Australian national?
> But what was the end result? Some frivolous lawsuits and a mostly-peaceful protest where nothing even caught fire?
No, that's not what the end result was. The end result was a coup attempt. The "mostly peaceful protest" ended in people chanting "Hang Mike Pence" and getting shot, because the point of that "mostly peaceful protest" was to coerce Mike Pence to unilaterally throw out the electoral votes of seven states. Outline of the plot here: https://2cradle2grave.substack.com/p/january-6-was-a-coup-attempt
>people chanting "Hang Mike Pence"
Morbid curiosity: Is this the lowest point relations of a USA president and vice-president have reached, or is there a historical example of an _even lower_ point?
It's the only time in US history a President has tried to use his powers like that. Possibly back before the VP and P were from the same party, they were really angy at each other, but I don't think Jefferson and Adams tried to kill each other or anything.
Good point! I hadn't even thought about the times before P & VP were from the same party. Many Thanks!
Consider the possibility that your perspective on Trump has been colored by the same media agencies that have been misleading you about Biden's cognitive state for the past few months at least, and reasonably likely the last five years.
He's not a particularly good man, but he's not nearly as interesting as you seem to think he is, and his rising string of victories over the past four years have arisen solely because of the hatred people have for him, time and time again. You profess to despise him, but what you're incapable of doing, the one thing that would have killed his chances over and over and over again - is just ignoring him. And so here he is again. You can thank your favorite media channels for that; the daily hour of hatred for Trump results in fantastic ratings for them, of course they didn't want him to go away.
He's a reality star, and you've let him play by reality TV rules.
Real Trumpism has never been tried!
Not sure about that, but I'm pretty sure the Republicans have immediately fumbled the ball with the Home Depot lady. I'm fascinated to see what happens next. Christ the hits just keep rolling this election season.
The same court that gave presidents immunity also neutered most of the Executive Branch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoJZu_EaDeM
That video is silly, based on the title. Leaving aside that the administrative state existed long before Chevron was decided, lets try a hypothetical: Congress tells the FDA to regulate the negative health effects of smoking. The FDA determines that secondhand smoke contributes to X percent of cancer. So it promulgates a regulation to address that.
Cigarette companies sue, arguing 1) the statute only permits regulation of health effects to smokers themselves, not second parties, so it does not permit the FDA to address secondhand smoke; 2) the FDA erred in determining that secondhand smoke causes cancer; 3) the specific regulation does not properly address the problem
Under Chevron, courts would 1) defer to the FDA’s interpretation of the statute as long as it was not unreasonable; 2) defer to the FDA’s finding re cancer as long as it was not arbitrary and capricious; 3) defer to the FDA’s determination that the regulation properly addresses the problem as long as it is not arbitrary and capricious.
Now that Chevron is gone, the only thing different is #1: Courts do not have to defer to agency interpretations of statutes, but instead do so themselves
In your view was the Eastman memo (full text here https://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2021/images/09/20/eastman.memo.pdf) legally sound? If the VP had pulled off that particular set of jiggery-pokery would it have legally worked?
If it wouldn't have, then what's the concern? Some law professor wrote an incorrect opinion?
If it *would* have worked, and we were saved on the day only by Mike Pence's personal restraint, then shouldn't *that* be the big issue? If there's any possibility that this might work, shouldn't closing that legal loophole (by alternations to the Electoral Count Act, or the Constitution if necessary) have been the top legislative priority for the last four years?
> would it have legally worked?
The rules need to be clear, and clearly followed. Doing this sort of thing is bad, for that reason alone.
> If there's any possibility that this might work, shouldn't closing that legal loophole (by alternations to the Electoral Count Act, or the Constitution if necessary) have been the top legislative priority for the last four years?
One would certain-fucking-ly have hoped so. Having rules that are clear and clearly valid and easy to follow is a good in itself.
The Electoral Count Act was, in fact, changed. How effectively, in the circumstances of 2021, I can't be sure.
That's great! I'm glad to finally be hearing about it. :-)
Pretty effectively actually, at least in terms of the Eastman scheme.
The Electoral Count Act of 2022:
-- Affirmatively states that the constitutional role of the Vice President, as the presiding officer of the joint meeting of Congress, is solely ministerial and that he or she does not have any power to solely determine, accept, reject, or otherwise adjudicate disputes over electors.
-- Raises the threshold to lodge an objection to electors to at least one-fifth of the duly chosen and sworn members of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. (Previously it took only one member of each chamber to formally object and bring the process to a halt.)
-- Identifies each state’s Governor, unless otherwise specified in the laws or constitution of a state in effect on Election Day, as responsible for submitting the certificate of ascertainment identifying that state’s electors.
-- Requires Congress to defer to slates of electors submitted by a state’s executive pursuant to the judgments of state or federal courts.
Thanks!
I think you overestimate the danger of permanent damage. To answer your question I think you have a post-algorithm “personalized facts” ecosystem. Trump supporters don’t see it as ushering in fascism, leaving the climate accords, and leaving Ukraine to the wolves. They see it as sticking it to the deep state and the woke elites, securing the border, and making peace with powerful nations instead of pearl clutching. Most don’t know any facts about January 6th. To the question “but we’ve been yelling facts at them for 8 years”, the woke globalists in the deep state and the media have been trying to gaslight them, telling them the economy is good, there’s no problem at the border, their kids can declare themselves another gender, they have to take a vaccine or they’ll lose their jobs…
In other words, a post-truth environment. They don’t even have directly contradictory facts. It’s a completely different reality.
"I think you overestimate the danger of permanent damage. To answer your question I think you have a post-algorithm “personalized facts” ecosystem. "
I think the biggest lie we all hold is that its the other side that is the problem.
I mean sure, for those people it makes sense, but ig I was imagining asking this to people that frequent this blog, who I'd hope would be better-informed but that still support Trump.
Of course, I'm noticing now that this probably comes from the bias that everybody has in that I think I'm right and if only people had the facts that I had they'd side with me. Still worth commenting though, I think.
Yeah, you only have to go over to DSL to get a peak into the right-wing media ecosystem. It's basically an alternate reality with few shared facts from this side of the aisle.
"a much higher chance of democratic institutions being damaged permanently, in America and in the world (above 60% chance for all of reversing progress in climate change, ending legal protections for trans people, ending aid to Ukraine, more illiberal governments around the world, etc)"
"Democratic institutions" seems to mean "the policy goals of the Democratic Party." You're quite right that there are few people who support this version of "democratic institutions" and Trump at the same time.
Specifically regarding the last point: do you not think Trump is more likely to support illiberal governments or do you think democracies and illiberalism aren't mutually exclusive?
The American overloading of the world "Liberal" bugs me. Can y'all just agree either to dump the use of the word "liberal" to mean "center-left" or to dump the use of the word "liberal" as in "liberal democracy"?
Anyway no I don't think Trump is more likely to support illiberal governments overall. In particular I think he'll take a harder line against China, the biggest and almost-most illiberal of them all.
I was using it here to mean liberal democracy. He could take a stricter line against China, but it seem to be at the cost of appeasing Russia.
Also Hungary and Israel.
Is the legal transfer of power a goal solely of the Democratic Party? You’ve put me in the uncomfortable position of defending that other guy’s cringe comment.
I certainly don't endorse Trump's election denial goon marches.
Do you know about the Easton memo and the electors’ scheme?
why do you think it's cringe 😆😆 i want honest feedback seriously
My personal impression was that the hysterics bring to mind someone who's terminally online and has purple hair with pronouns in their internet profiles and work email signature.
I did ask the question, but I feel compelled to say this feels like a bad reason. If you are only saying that's the image that comes to mind sure, but seems very much like a real life issue (i.e. not terminally online) that he wanted to disregard the results of the election.
This time around will be different. The Chevron doctrine no longer stands and the Federal Bureaucracy is much more vulnerable. Trump will not be surrounded by “old school “ Republicans who constrain him, and they (he and his crew) learned a lot from the last time.
I'm not sure what you're trying to argue here. Chevron takes power away from the bureaucracy, which Trump at least nominally controls, and gives it to the judiciary, which he doesn't. Chevron makes Trump's hand strictly weaker.
And it wasn't so much "old school Republicans" that constrained Trump last time around, but recalcitrant bureaucrats and the judiciary. Trump nominally controls the bureaucracy, but he can't really fire recalcitrant bureaucrats because Pendleton, and Chevron doesn't change that. The judiciary will enforce Pendleton, and through Chevron it will bind the bureaucracy closer to Congress's will than Trump's, and Trump doesn't even have a theoretical cause of action for firing judges.
There are things Trump can do with the bureaucracy and the judiciary against him, but in terms of "things are different", you're describing differences that will make it harder for Trump.
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-hasnt-changed-but-the-gop-has-14ba7c49?st=8fbb4l9cku4cytp&reflink=share_mobilewebshare
This captures the spirit of my argument.
Ok. There were quite a few old school Republicans in his cabinet (Barr and Bolton come to mind, and I forget the name of sec of defense among others) who seemed to deflect some of his inclinations. The end of Chevron will certainly make it easier to challenge rules and regulations of the bureaucracy but you’re right that it doesn’t directly give him more clout. I certainly don’t think it hurts him. I don’t see it binding things more closely to Congress’ intent because it looks like one of the results of ex- Chevron is Congress is going to have to be more specific in their intentions if they don’t like what the court’s decide, so who knows how that goes. Depends on how Trump friendly Congress is I suppose.
Trump tried to fire a lot of people the last time he was president and I think he will have more luck this time.
I don’t see how any of this makes it harder for Trump, especially because the SC has shifted its center. I don’t really see the judiciary being against him in general. Some circuits lean liberal and some lean conservative.
I think Trump and his inner circle learned a lot from their last innings about how they can do things they would like to do and he has much more support in the GOP party than he did then. Anyone who was luke warm on him is gone or come around. That’s how I see it anyway. I am willing to be wrong.
>Elected politicians still having power is a conservative fantasy.
You may be right. If you are, though, that implies that the voters have essentially zero control. A government of the executive branch employees, by the executive branch employees, and for the executive branch employees may be many things, but a democratic reflection of the voters isn't one of them...
Ouch! Many Thanks! And since the individual rights are whatever the legal experts say they are, it simplifies down to purely an expertocracy. It derives its legitimacy from the credentials of its experts?
Many Thanks! I'm confused. When you write
>Rather people pick a number of individual rights that matter to them and hold them sacred. They can be very different ones (abortion vs. guns etc.)
I'm not following just how the connection to your previous
>Democracy stopped meaning majority power long ago and now it means a combination of individual rights and expertocracy.
works.
Are you saying that
- "Democracy" means widely differing things to different people, depending on which individual rights those people are concerned about
or
- "Democracy" is generally accepted as strongly dependent on the protection of individual rights, albeit with wide disagreement over which rights are included
or
- You consider "democracy" to be strongly dependent on the recognition of individual rights, but view both the practice of government as not honoring these rights (but it should) and also, there are strong (popular? judicial?) disagreements about which rights are included.
I'm not following which are the views that you hold, which are ones you view the government as following in practice, and which are the ones you see as popularly supported. Clarification, please?
Why do so many people in the rationality community choose to work for startups, despite being highly intellectual and talented? If you aren't the founder you'll never make more money in a startup compared to FAANGs. Startups are almost always poorly organized, chaotic and subject to random fluctuations in the mood of the investors, founders and first customers. Everybody remembers the founder, some people remember the investor, almost nobody remembers employee #1 (let alone #10) unless the company grows to be the next Apple or Microsoft.
I can understand why someone would want to be a founder. I can understand wanting to work for FAANG. I can understand working for an American startup if you live in Spain or perhaps even a low-cost location in Nebraska or something. I can understand working for a startup if FAANGs reject you. But how did so many super talented people get convinced to work for a startup while living in Silicon Valley, SF or New York? Do people just not care about money all that much?
Working for large companies can be undesirable for the usual reasons (bureaucracy, lack of obvious impact). Trading lower pay for more interesting/enjoyable work is a good deal for some - effectively, you are "paying" to better enjoy the significant fraction of your life that you spend working. Working at a startup is less extreme in this regard than pursuing a PhD, which many rationalist types also do.
That said, you can also avoid the large company downsides by working for a small established company, which will probably be less chaotic than a startup. My impression is that software jobs of this type are rare; I feel fairly lucky in having found one.
I'm not in the rat community nor in Silicon Valley, SF or New York, but I wound up working at 5 startups over my software career. The first 4 were because that was the only job I could get - 1st was my first job out of college, employee #5, successful for 2 years. Next 3 were after being laid off because of downturn in the economy and jobs hard to find - 2nd employee #2, dead within a month. 3rd employee #4 dead within 2 months. 4th employee #5 the hero who made a key contribution, successful company, got laid off when the success meant they didn't need developers any more. 5th I failed retirement by working for a friend's startup, employee #3, dead after a year. If I had had a choice I likely would not have taken so many startup jobs, but I did have mixed success with them.
I do not yet work for a startup, but I worked for FAANGs, and I echo pozorvlak: they have brain melting bureaucracy and sometimes you find yourself filling out seventeen forms to do an almost empty job, and thirty six forms to try doing it a different and maybe better way. Very depressing.
I can only speak for myself, but: I currently work for a startup, having previously worked for two more (possibly three, depending on what you consider a startup). I've never worked for a FAANG, but I have worked for other large tech companies. My brain just *cannot handle* the work environment at large orgs, and I don't think that's because I worked for especially dysfunctional large companies or especially functional startups. I can handle "if you have a problem with X, talk to Jane"; I can't handle "if you have a problem with X, you could try filing a ticket with the team that maintains X but it will probably be ignored, so spider the org chart until you can work out who manages the X team (bear in mind that it's probably out of date!), then get your manager to hassle them". I like being able to take a wide-ranging view of the system and business instead of becoming hyper-specialised in one component. At large companies I reliably become depressed and burnt-out. I'm my household's sole breadwinner; I can't *afford* to become unable to work. Startups may pay less than FAANGs, but for me at least it's a much more sustainable work environment.
The 2 most dysfunctional companies I ever worked for were also the 2 largest.
Thank you, this explains it perfectly for me.
>Do people just not care about money all that much?
Leaving aside that none of those people are starving, there are other things that people value other than money. If you don't understand that people are not purely instrumentality rational, you won't be able to understand more important phenomena. https://www.ashutoshvarshney.net/s/Nationalism-Ethnic-Conflict-and-Rationality.pdf
a) I don't know how people do equity these days, but way back when, you could still make a bundle as an early employee.
b) Being part of a fast-moving, rapidly-growing company can be useful experience, especially if you think you might want to do the same sort of thing later.
c) At a good startup, the people around you will be good, too. And pressure can bring out good things in people. Becoming known in professional circles as a good or even just solid performer can help you find jobs later on.
d) To challenge yourself. Be all that you can be, etc.
> I don't know how people do equity these days, but way back when, you could still make a bundle as an early employee.
That stopped being true around 2010 once people figured out how to rig the cap table. Nowadays, only the execs and VCs make any meaningful money on an exit.
> Being part of a fast-moving, rapidly-growing company can be useful experience
It can also be *fun*. And satisfying - you can have a much greater effect on the trajectory of the product and business at a small company.
In 1990 David Foster Wallace wrote a famous essay ostensibly about television addiction and writers of American fiction. The premise is that fiction writers are both natural voyeurs and introverts and therefore end up watching too much TV because that allows them to watch others without being watched themselves. This behavior then influences what the fiction writers write, deleteriously. Notably, it makes them too ironic. Too much TV watching makes the writers cynical because what happens on TV is lame and ripe for ridicule, something the writers become skillful at and employ luxuriously.
According to Wallace, the problem with irony is that it is only useful critically, its only possible message is to say: isn't this dumb?
He doesn't quite spell it out, but he sure seems to associate irony with liberals and sincerity with conservatives. He goes so far as to suggest that truly gutsy fiction might be written by those unafraid to seem too conservative.
I had heard of this essay but only recently read it. Many consider it prescient, but I'm not so sure. As far as recent fiction goes, at least worldwide (have no idea what is going on with American fiction. Is it sexist to call it all chick-lit?) novelists such as Knausgaard and Ferrante are very sincere and unironic yet also are perceived as "on the left" politically to the extent one perceives them politically.
So is irony a liberal thing? If so, why? Is that truer in America than elsewhere?
I hadn't run across this before, but I agree with his general point that irony is unproductive and sterile.
I wouldn't associate it with the left or with liberals, though. Maybe they got a head start, just like China got a head start on covid-19. But by now it's infected all ideologies. I suspect that it has something to do with people who live their life removed from hands-on work, and that's more and more of us, including most of everyone's time spent on the Internet. But the left-leaning tilt of academia and the arts probably explains why irony is more associated with the left. Which of course isn't to say "all academia" or "all arts", as you point out.
Man, 1990 sure was a long, long time ago. We all see liberal sincerity constantly. As for conservatives, there aren't very many of those left, but the burn-it-all-down right wingers who replaced them / who they turned into don't appear to hesitate to use irony in their critiques of what they see as the pieties of the liberal establishment.
I think as liberal rituals become more and more a part of the "establishment" (Pride etc), you'll see more and more examples of public liberal sincerity without irony.
So I'm calling bullshit on the care trolls playing up the Biden cognitive decline story. I just watched his July 12th Detroit speech. Seems like he's got all his marbles, and he's a damn good orator. Better than anything I've seen from Trump (sharks and batteries and sinking boats, oh my!).
https://youtu.be/uE7mDPX_jmk
He had the crowd in the palm of his hand. They started chanting _Don't You Quit!_ and _We Got Your Back!_ Wow!
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1988/06/19
Go ahead and call it out as loudly as you want while messy reality runs right past you and into a second Trump administration.
Biden was already way behind in the polls even before the debate. The debate was just the final nail in the coffin. And what has been seen can't be unseen.
I mean, I would be elated if Biden somehow got elected, but realistically, he has 0 chance of winning, and the best thing he can do for the country is drop out yesterday.
The impression I get is that people are referring to instances where he needs to interact with an interlocutor rather than reading off a teleprompter or giving a prepared speech.
Off topic, am I the only one who gets a strong sense that someone is being paid to post on comments sections when they write things like "damn good", "oh my!" and "Wow!" unironically?
So, I haven't heard an apology from you for implying I'm a shill and that my opinions can be purchased by Scott.
I get it, you do it for free. I apologize for not recognizing you as a bona fide ridin' with Biden enthusiast.
Thanks! I appreciate that. I wish I *could* make money from being a lefty curmudgeon, though.
Obviously you didn't bother to listen to his speech. These were quotes from the crowd shouting. I added my own wow at the end because he got his audience going. And if you watch him, he's not spending his time reading from a teleprompter. He's continually scanning the audience as he speaks. There may be one or more teleprompters in his field of vision, but if he's reading from them he's quite a speed reader.
Then of course, you had to add an hominem attack on me by calling me a shill. (Scott, where's my pay check?)
beowulf888 is being sarcastic, I recognise the impulse because I indulge in it myself 😀
If someone is paying people to write in Scott's comment sections, hook me up with them because I have no objection to getting money out of my ranting!
"Okay, this week we need someone to get Barack Obama back on the radar, really remind the base that Barack Obama is dangerous. Also, can we find someone to pump the new Lord of the Rings show? Engagement metrics are down."
"Sir, I've found someone who can do *both* with a *single comment*."
/s
> Off topic, am I the only one who gets a strong sense that someone is being paid to post on comments sections when they write things like "damn good", "oh my!" and "Wow!" unironically?
I doubt that beowulf888 is actually getting paid to post here, I just think he's wandered in here from a different and worse section, one where they fancy they're being active mooks in the political battle rather than above-it-all commentators.
I'm not the comment police, people can comment however they want, but it's a weird contrast with the rest of the comments around here to see someone unironically cheerleading.
>it's a weird contrast with the rest of the comments around here to see someone unironically cheerleading.
I think you're right; it's the contrast with the high-and-mighty smartypants type of comments these parts. It also contrasts with the more absurdist flavour of above-it-all commenting on the seedier parts of the internet.
I'll let the Daily Show talk about Biden. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9LZXheHddI
Jon Stewart is beginning to resemble Awkward Smiling Old Guy in all those memes.
https://www.pinatafarm.com/memegenerator/3c8625ec-4bfe-427a-84a3-00e74e7b9122
I have no problem with seeing Stewart slowly realising he's outdated, because the guy annoyed the hell out of me with his "here's my trenchant political commentary that you should take seriously - ha ha come on, this is a comedy show, don't take it seriously - okay, back to telling you why conservatives are monsters" act. You do current affairs or you do satire, you can't do both. You can mock the politics of the day for all sides, but you can't then be some kind of guru about What The Nation Needs, In All Sincerity.
Now time has moved on, and he's struggling with catching up to what is the Currently Approved Narrative? Good!
> I have no problem with seeing Stewart slowly realising he's outdated, because the guy annoyed the hell out of me
I know. You were recently complaining about a joke he did over 15 years ago.
Maybe it took me 15 years to process the joke, did you ever consider that?
You should be nicer to us old codgers whose brains ain't working too good no more, after all you'll be voting for one in November!
Yes, he's very good at reading a teleprompter. He's been doing that for 50 years and will probably still be good at it for a few hours after his heart stops beating. It's a highly-conditioned reflex activity for him. Watch him try to think on his feet. Watch the debate. He's clearly not there.
>and will probably still be good at it for a few hours after his heart stops beating
LOL! Many Thanks!
I think it's generally acknowledged that he does relatively well giving prepared speeches in rally mode, which involves speaking in a different sort of register and does not involve adversarial questions or quick thinking (and usually takes place in the daytime). So this isn't new, and its usefulness as to the question of his cognitive capacity for running the country.
(I'm senile and forgot to end my sentence)
...is therefore limited.
I can't seem to find a wikipedia article on "rules vs principles". Is this because the distinction between them is considered vague enough to not merit an entry?
I would like to know how the distinction arose historically; google gemini (free version) that I asked only says it was indirectly there even in ancient Greece, and in modern times Ronald Dworkin "significantly developed" the distinction between them. But there are pre-Dworkin people like John Dewey who have made that distinction.
So how did that distinction evolve? Was that nuance forced by challenges that some aspect of modernization threw up?
Rules are about what you DO; principles are about what you VALUE?
Since I don't know the major names involved, let me summarize/adapt from what the free version of google gemini provides, listing some differences between rules and principles:
(i) Rules are specific and concrete (don't lie, select the candidate with the highest score), while principles are broad and general, typically vague (honesty, meritocracy).
(ii) Rules are tailored to desired outcomes in specific contexts, principles to underlying values/ethics in an abstract/universal setting.
(iii) Specificity means you either break the rule or don't, but principles may be realized in multiple ways; and you can tweak mechanisms realizing them to prevent Goodharting.
(iv) Usually someone else punishes you for breaking rules, for principles the drive is mostly internal.
[Edit: For instance, it bothers me much that when I set exams, students with the best combination of talent+diligence etc. are not the ones that score the highest. I am following established rules, still failing the principle. It thus seems important to me to make this distinction. My impression is that historically people didn't distinguish these consciously, since it is easier and lazier to conflate rules with principles -- perhaps the smarter section of the populace had a sense of the distinction but did not articulate it -- but at some point the distinction articulated itself. I would like to know the how and why of this process.]
Close: principals are the rules you choose to follow, and assign to yourself, in order to protect what you value. For example, I value honesty so I follow a principle of never telling a lie. Or I value honor, so I follow a principle of never breaking a promise.
I would say that principles are a kind of rule, much like a square is a kind of quadrilateral. It's a specific kind of rule, imposed by yourself on yourself for the purpose of preventing yourself from violating your own values.
Good definition, thank you!
Canada is once again a laggard in defence, spending only 1.38% of its GDP on defence, in defiance of a NATO guideline to spend at least 2%, a standard most NATO members meet. What should the rest of the alliance to get the slacker Canucks in line?
Relentlessly mock the Canadian Forces as small timers. Play on their insecurity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Canadian_Navy#/media/File:HMCS_St._John's_(FFH_340)_off_Charleston,_South_Carolina_(USA),_on_23_August_2010.jpg
Have you SEEN these doofy things?! And they only have TWELVE? Little leagues.
And they named their nuclear reactors "CANDU". CAN. DU. It's just completely unserious up there. America's hat, man, America's hat.
Can Canada make up the missing 0.62% by supplying NATO poutine MRE rations? :-)
Trump would obviously invite Russia to invade them, like he already has with Europe.
I don't think this is a good idea.
On the contrary, Canadian "Independence" is a fable better left in the 20th C.
The main source of maple syrup are the sugar maple forests split between the United States and Canada. For every year Canada doesn't meet its defense obligation the US gets an equivalent percentage of the total forest until the Canadians are forced to buy it from an American state monopoly.
Us Canadians know that Americans are practically forced to keep us in their sphere of influence for the sake of their own prestige/superpower status, and that means they'll defend us if need be. I admit it's kind of manipulative to take advantage of a friend like this. Sorry, eh.
Realistically if Canada gets kicked out of NATO then Canada doesn't care. It's many orders of magnitude more likely that NATO will oblige Canadian troops to defend Europe than that it will oblige European troops to defend Canada. Geographically, Canada is the only thing that makes NATO a North Atlantic treaty rather than a US-Europe treaty. And it's also the only thing apart from a few polar bears that separates most of the US from most of Russia.
It's not often in international relations that Canada holds all the cards, but this is one of those situations.
Is Canada obliged to defend The King should the UK get in a shooting war?
It is obliged to defend the King of Canada, who is a separate legal entity from the King of the United Kingdom. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Pakistani_war_of_1947%E2%80%931948 (note who reigned in each Dominion at the time).
So if war threatens the King of Canada, who happens to be staying at one of his many residences in the UK, would Canadian commandos swoop in to extract his majesty to Fortress Canada?
No. Canada has been capable of a separate foreign policy since 1917. When Britain declared war in 1914, Canada was automatically also at war, but Canada was a separate signatory to the treaty of Versailles. Canada entered war in 1939 one day after Britain, seemingly to make the point that it was Canada's decision.
It was a week later. Britain declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939. Canada did so on September 10, 1939.
Good question!
The US should threaten to seize all the untapped water power in upper Ontario that the Canucks won't because they are too sensitive about First Nationers "rights", build the world's largest power station on the site and use it to accelerate AI.
Are you going to invade *both* Canada and Mexico all at once now? This will end well...
But only if the power station has a little sign put up saying that acknowledges that it has been built on the unceded ancestral land of the Canadian people. It's only fair.
Offer to trade parts of Canada to Russia in exchange for Ukraine? 31% sounds about right...
Question for those with deep math smarts. I”ll give the short version first, then some background. Companies doing high-frequency trading develop predictive algorithms that let them profit from their correct predictions. They develop the algorithms using the data from recent trades, which can be expressed as formulas, in which the variables are things like how fast something sold, in milliseconds, how fast it sold at a recent price that was x% higher or lower, how fast some related thing sold, how fast the prices of various things are rising or falling, etc. But there are a huge number of possible variables that might be predictors of whatever one wants to predict, and even if you were told which variables are predictors there are a huge number of equations that can describe how they predict: do you square the time or the price, or cube it, or use the ratio of it to something else, etc.
Formulas that predict changes in the market are then fed into a non-neural net form of machine learning called NES, Natural Evolution Strategy, and the result if the golden algorithm (but only if you fed it good formulas). So the question is, how does one search for what’s called the “signals,” the variables that have predictive power?
This question comes out of a talk I just had with someone who has been working in finance doing programming, but is interested in the intellectual challenge and possible financial rewards of the question I asked. The person and I were brainstorming about how to find formulas that predict trading in the near future. (I have no math beyond calculus one, and very lttle knowledge of the financial industry, but I like brainstorming).
So my questions are:
-First, do any of you math people have a view about this?
-My suggestion was that the person talk to a statistician who specializes in working with very messy data — maybe something involving biology or turbulent flow. Seemed to me like they would know techniques for extracting from it the variables with predictive power, and formulas that capture what they predict. Is that a useful suggestion?
-If not, what kind of statistician should the look for?
-If not a statistician, who the hell should they talk to?
I know someone who works for a high frequency trading company. Their profit comes from two things:
1) Super-fast connections to the stock exchange computer. They built their computers next to it so that they are a few milliseconds faster than everyone else. So, they pick up the signals that just everyone else also knows, but their cable is so short that their signal arrives faster.
2) They get paid by the stock exchange company for it. High-frequency trading also serves a purpose for the stock market: it provides liquidity and acts as counterpart for the bids/offers that other people take. That provides value, and the stock exchange company pays for it.
I don't know the exact formulas for 1), but I think they are very, very simple. Like: if there are many people who want to sell, probably the stock price goes down. I don't think it's much more fancy than that. I don't think they try to come up with sophisticated models that predict the market for more than a few milliseconds.
I don't know whether all high-frequency trading companies work like that, though.
> So the question is, how does one search for what’s called the “signals,” the variables that have predictive power?
I think allot of this is bullshit, but if I had to pick a "signal" outside the shitposting of wsb, id look at arbitrage between exchanges as a signal; i.e. when america is awake, an english speaking market is a stronger "signal" then an asian one, and you'd take the a weighted sum of the "order book" from exchanges based on the hour of day.
What people talk about using as signals is literally any- and every-thing "ais reading twitter","gme up, use as a signal to buy gold", and its very important to remember novice day traders lose money at rates worse then most casinos. Its a worthless term, its *good* to be confused what it means.
This is high frequency trading, though. Time of events is measured in milliseconds, and signals have to be things happening within a few milliseconds of a trade. I think that automatically precludes using wsj bullshit, stuff in the news, etc.
There are people stupid enough to auto download elon musk tweets that scan for cyptro currencies trickers and "sentiment analysis" ai's; thats "high frequency" and using "signals"
> So the question is, how does one search for what’s called the “signals,” the variables that have predictive power?
That is indeed the tricky part. You use a combination of mathematics and intuition. The mathematics is the easy part. Mathematics on its own only get you so far, because the whole field of quant finance is rife with multiple testing problems -- if you test enough arbitrarily-constructed signals then you'll surely find stuff that appears to work but doesn't. On the other hand, if you stick to the most intuitively obvious and sensible signals then you won't get anywhere because everyone uses those.
About finding things that appear to work but don’t —that comes up in social science research too, so I know a bit about it. If you do multiple t-tests, for instance, and a bunch of them make it at just about the .05 level of significance, then you can expect approx 5% of them to be false positives. There’s a stat you use in that situation to correct for the problem of multiple tests. It might be called Cohen’s D, and then again it may not, but anyhow there’s a way to correct for for that. Is that the math you had in mind? Or some other math?
I’d rephrase your question as, “How do you do blackbox machine learning on high dimensional inputs?” I think the term your friend is looking for is “Auto ML” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_machine_learning]. AutoML is about abstracting the standard approach ML devs take when modeling a problem. I don’t think your friend wants a statistician for advice, but a AutoML expert. I don't know anyone who actually uses NES in practice. Here are a few standard approaches:
The classic approach: Let’s assume you’re working with a simple linear model and thousands of inputs. So many you won’t ever actually mentally visualize them all. You then (as Jeffrey Soreff suggested) take the polynomial of them, I typically go to the 5th power, and also the inputs multiplied by each other. Then you get so many input variables that you can’t really work easily with it. So you can use a L1 weight regularization, which will force many of the weights to zero and any input with a zero you discard and only use the inputs with non-zero weights. You’ll have to tune the hyper-parameter for the L1 weight penalty because it’s easy to end up over-pruning. This is the standard advice, but I don’t really do it in practice. It works okay, but the following two options are better in practice. [https://scikit-learn.org/stable/auto_examples/linear_model/plot_logistic_l1_l2_sparsity.html]
A neural network: A NN can model a very large number of functions (if it’s infinitely wide it’s a universal approximator and if it’s infinitely deep it’s Turing Complete). In practice, it won’t be infinitely wide or deep, but still models a very large number of functions. The main challenge of working with neural nets in practice isn’t that it can’t model what you want it to model, rather the challenge is that it too easily overfits and models it in ways that don’t generalize. But a neural net is doing what your friend wants: take in a large number of blackbox inputs and then “test” a large number of functions with those inputs. Unlike the “classic approach” you don’t usually square/cube the inputs to a NN because you don’t have to. It’ll learn to do that if it needs to.
A non-neural net approach: I’d suggest a fun project is that your friend goes to sklearn and then makes a little tool where they take various preprocessing modules (Normalizer, StandardScaler, MinMaxScaler) and then make a Pipeline that treat the preprocessing step itself as a hyperparameter. Then have a series of sklearn models (eg, RandomForest, RidgeRegression, NaiveBayes) and treat the model itself as a hyper parameter. Alternatively, just assume that you’re going to use all of them, and what you’re learning is the ensemble. This might sound strange, but remember that AutoML is just automating the overall approach. This is more or less what DataRobot and a lot of other AutoML tools do. What’s fun and challenging about this approach is that your friend would build it to work with a couple datasets when developing it and then test it out on a completely different dataset that’s it’s never seen before.
Yep, I second this response. The data is too high dimensional, and too time-dependent, for a single person with regular computing resources to really do much. There's whole architectures of synthetic variables, hyperparameter tuning, variable selection, a suite of different modeling algorithms, and model drift monitoring and retuning going on at blazing fast speeds to actually do real algorithmic HFT these days.
What you want to actually do it right is a team of ML experts and mathematicians with financial domain expertise, and some serious (and geographically local to the HFT exchange) computing clusters.
I understand all this only in a limited kind of way, but am pretty sure it’s an awesome answer. Thank you!
Yes, you want a statistician.
For a _linear_ model, there are efficient multiple linear regression techniques https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_regression which can efficiently minimize the error in the model, even with many potentially important independent variables, going all the way back to
>the least squares method, which was published by Legendre in 1805, and by Gauss in 1809
For nonlinear models, the problem gets arbitrarily complicated :-(
For mildly nonlinear cases, one can extend multiple linear regression by adding powers and cross-products of the independent variables to the regression. E.g. if you have X, Y, and Z as your independent variables, you can add X^2, Y^2, Z^2, X*Y, Y*Z, X*Z to the regression as if they were independent variables - but if you start with N independent variables, you have N(N+1)/2 second order terms, O(N^3) third order terms and so on, so this becomes unreasonable very quickly.
Thank you.!
Yes, I suggested linear regression, which I'm familiar with from social science statistics. The person said some of the relationships in the crucial formulas are non-linear -- they're u-shaped or s-shaped -- and then they added that non-linear stats get out of control fast. I think that was a less clear way of saying what you just said. My next thought was, maybe linear regression is still adequate if there aren't all that many non-linear relationships among the variables in the mass. I mean, it seems like your identification of the set of variable behaviors that have predictive power doesn't have to be perfect to get enough prediction out of the result to have an advantage. You can have some bad variables in your set, and be missing some good ones, and still have a set that works. Then I wondered if there was some math that allowed you to estimate what fraction of the variables in a big messy phenomenom are signals.
Also, I don't understand why neural net type machine learning does not work. Why can't you just train the machine on the last month's data? You can train a machine to recognise cancerous moles by just showing it a bunch of moles and telling it which are cancerous and which not, as I understand it. You don't have to tell it to look for certain characteristics, just keep having it look at moles and guess and the, find out if it's right or wrong, And at the end it will be very good at identifying the cancerous moles, but won't be able to tell you what its formula is. Isn't it sort of the same thing to show it a bunch of trades, some that made money and some that did not, and all the data around the trade, such as whether the price for the item went up or down -- and then after a while the machine can tell you, for any given possible trade, whether it will make money or not?
“ Why can't you just train the machine on the last month's data?”
Excellent question. The reason is that once you discover a signal in the past data it stops being useful. Because your / others using it arbitrages away the inefficiency that was the potentially profitable signal.
You see how it’s different from cancerous moles. Our discovery of their patterns doesn’t affect the moles, unlike trading patterns that get immediately affected by our attempts to trade them.
You mean all then high frequency trading firms are constantly tweaking their algorithms by analyzing the most recent trading data and using the info in it to get a predictive edge -- but all the firms are finding the same stuff, so doing that analysis doesn't get you an edge -- it just keeps them from having an edge over you? Yikes. The picture in my mind was manic and mechanistic enough without that. Just the idea of a bunch of computers competing for a one-millisecond edge and millions of tiny meaningless trades was creepy enough. So I have some questions:
-Do you know for a fact that you can't just feed the last month's data to a neural net and then use it to make a predictive algorithm today because everybody else is doing the same? Or is that just something you've reasoned out -- seems to you like it must be true? The reason I ask is that is not what the person that started me asking this question described. That person had been programming at a financial firm, not working on the predictive algorithm, but they told me that the algorithm was something their firm had acquired or built, and they talked about it as something that stayed the same for -- I dunno, months? And it was jealously guarded, like the formula for coke. And it was made up of hundreds of formulas, each about a tiny little matter: If sales of this stock does that, then the chance of some certain other thing happening rises by 10% -- lots of that shit.
-Also, if you're right, how the hell DO the high frequency traders keep pulling in money? Is it that they all pull in about the same amount, because they're all staying on top of the predictors equally well, so the firms that know how to use ML to mine the data for predictors just sort of split the money equally? Or are some firms better than others, and if so how DO they get a predictive advantage?
So I thought about an interesting kink to this situation. Everything in my previous comment is kind of regurgitating relatively straightforward knowledge about how markets operate. But these relatively new ML tools may create an interesting opportunity that may work well for people like your friend.
- The tools are new, and vary in their approaches
- The tools are expensive and nearly not as ubiquitous as "previous generation" tools are
- Therefore they may be able to find really complex inefficiencies that will not be quickly arbitraged out of existence, so they indeed may be able to profit from "last months' patterns" for awhile
Everybody else, not having these tools, will find their trading profits shrink further - the excess profits of the new kids on the block have to come from someone.
To your last question first because it's easy: commenter demost_ described how high-freq traders make money. The durable edge comes from location and execution speed, and most money is made in market-making activities, selling to buyers and buying from sellers and making "1/100 of a penny" on each transaction, but in insane volumes.
The manic and mechanistic picture in your mind is mostly correct - vast majority of trading is done by computer algos, this is really different from the markets, say, 20 years ago. Now, again, I wouldn't call it entirely meaningless, providing liquidity and price discovery is a useful service.
The most interesting question is indeed about the predictive algorithm:
- I do know that patterns get arbitraged out, this is a well-understood phenomenon in market analysis.
- Having said that, there still are patterns that persist because they are driven by factors that cannot be arbitraged; the most famous one that still looks to be going strong is the Presidential cycle (year 2 bad, year 3 good). You don't need a fancy algo for this one, but the time horizon is decades, not days, and it still is better to just cost-average into your 401k.
- The markets are so vast and chaotic, it is not surprising that someone may find a pattern that others haven't yet. But the space is ruthless, everyone is constantly looking for an edge, so outperformance may stop/reverse at any moment. You kind of never know if you're smart or lucky; moreover, since all traders combined are "the market", there must be those who's returns are above average.
Thank you for taking so much time to thoughtfuylly answer my questions. I think I have just one more.
Let’s say there’s a park marked off into squares by letters going E-W and numbers going N-S, and there’s a contest for who can most accurately predict how many people are in each Square (A 1, A2 ….N-17) on a given day. And there are macro things every body knows: More people are in the park in good weather, and during daylight. If there’s a well-publicized crime in the park attendance drops. Etc. And then there smaller-scale things it’s not hard to figure out: More people on the tennis court squares on weekends. Few on the little kid play equipment 1-3 pm, because they’s when little kids nap. If you observed closely you could find some more. Maybe few parents with young kids hang out near the basketball court because the guys playing always swear. So I think of those big, easy-to-find things as the things that can be taken advantage of by everybody, i.e. arbitraged out. If that’s all the contestants had to go on, then on contest day, everybody’s estimate of how many are in each square fill take into account the big obvious rules, so everybody will tie.
But surely there also exist tiny little regularities you’d never think of, and that occur for who knows what reason, and the only way to find them would be to systematically go through the populations of all the squares at all times on all days of the week in, let’s say, summer. So you could say, what else happens on average when the population of A1 goes up at 3 pm? And maybe you’d find that the populations of B3 and K7 go down 80% of the time when A1 goes up. Or that the ratio of B3 population to K7 population stays between 2:1 and 2: 1.6 70% of time. ETc ETc. Obviously the number of relationships like that you could check for is huge. And of those you found, some would be hust coincidence, and would not hold in any other time span, but others would be valid. All that make sense?
OK, so those little tiny regularities are the ones I have in mind, mainly because the person I talked with made clear that that was what his firm’s algorithm consisted of: hundreds of little regularities like my example, except about trades of course, that allowed them to make 1/100 of a cent a million times per day. So maybe something like (and I’m just making this up): On days when the avg price of a certain class of stock is 20% or more above average, then the biggest price discrepancies from which the firm can make money will be in *other* classes of stock, and 85% of them will be in the lowest-priced of those stocks. So it does seem to me that rules like this are in an entirely different class from the 0dd/even good/bad year rule you talked about, or other big obvious trends everybody knows. It seems like one company could come up with a good batch of little predictive formulas, and if the percent that were not true predictors wasn’t too high, the algorithm made out of the hundreds of little mostly right tiny rules would give them a substantial advantage, so long as other company’s batches of formulas were less good. Does that seem plausible to you?
And it does seem like training an AI to recognize whatever the magic configuration of tiny predictors is is the only way to come at it. So yeah your comment about the new ML tools seems right. Also, when I roam around reading this and that about ML, it seems like there are many varieties of it, and also many techniques for tweaking the AI the optimize its efficiency in a certain domain. And new tweaks are being invented all the time. So there’s lots of room for variation even off all companies are using ML.. The person who chooses the best variety of ML and tweaks it in the optimal way will get the best result. Also it seems like people who have done a lot of work with ML get sort like horse people are about horses: they just know lots of little stuff about how to get a result, lots of little tweaks and remedies. . “Oh, he shies when you pass that part of the trail. OK, he’s probably doing it because X, Here are 3 things to try.” I mean that people get good at AI-wrangling.
For those reasons, I feel hopeful about how my friend”s going to do. Just so you know, they’re not doing this on their own, with their own money. They talked their way into a job where that is what they will be working on — tweaking the algorithm. They’ve got a couple mos. before they start, and are studying and experimenting like mad so they will be up to the work. (I don’t want say anything much about this person because I am talking about them online, but suffice it to say there is very persuasive evidence that their ability to master this kind of material, and solve novel problems is extraordinarily high.)
Many Thanks!
>Then I wondered if there was some math that allowed you to estimate what fraction of the variables in a big messy phenomenom are signals.
Yup (if a linear model is reasonable). Basically, it comes down to what fraction of the variance of the predicted variable is accounted for by any specified one of the independent variables but this gets complicated (and beyond what I know!) when the independent variables are correlated. If they were all uncorrelated, I think it comes down to just the variance of the independent variable times the β, the coefficient of the independent variable. But if the independent variables are correlated (in the extreme case, collinear, linearly dependent, like temperature in both Fahrenheit and Celsius (as the web page mentioned)) then the solution for the linear model can basically pick either of them or any combination and it carries the same information.
[This is close to, but not quite the same as, the ANOVA package that you've probably encountered. I haven't used it myself. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_of_variance describes some of this, but phrased in terms of distinguishing two or more discrete groups rather than ascribing variance in a data set to (sets of) independent variables.]
>You can train a machine to recognise cancerous moles by just showing it a bunch of moles and telling it which are cancerous and which not, as I understand it. You don't have to tell it to look for certain characteristics, just keep having it look at moles and guess and the, find out if it's right or wrong, And at the end it will be very good at identifying the cancerous moles, but won't be able to tell you what its formula is. Isn't it sort of the same thing to show it a bunch of trades, some that made money and some that did not, and all the data around the trade, such as whether the price for the item went up or down -- and then after a while the machine can tell you, for any given possible trade, whether it will make money or not?
Yes, but note that these models have been hammered at with all the expertise the finance industry can buy, so they've probably tweaked every knob that can be tweaked on them - e.g. for the neural nets, numbers of layers, convergence rates, numbers or repetitions of the data set, tradeoffs between how many barely-plausible independent variables to add vs how intensively to fit to a smaller set of independent variables etc.
Sending all this on to my friend. Thanks so much.
Actually the person I was talking with said they do not use neural nets. They *first* identify the signals,(how they do it my friend does not know), then they feed them into some sort of machine learning system that is NOT a neural set, and do a
process calle d the Natural
Evolution Strategy . Does that make any sense to you? They said it was described in Wikipedia but I did not look it up because I don’t have the background to understand it.
Many Thanks! This gets beyond my knowledge too. I see the Wikipedia page on Natural Evolution Strategy, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_evolution_strategy . At a _very_ abstract level it is again a version of trying to optimize the parameters of a model in order to maximize "fitness" (presumably equivalent to minimizing some measure of error).
> From the samples, NES estimates a search gradient on the parameters towards higher expected fitness. NES then performs a gradient ascent step along the natural gradient, a second order method which, unlike the plain gradient, renormalizes the update with respect to uncertainty. This step is crucial, since it prevents oscillations, premature convergence, and undesired effects stemming from a given parameterization. The entire process reiterates until a stopping criterion is met.
I can see why the more robust gradient is desirable, but I'm not following what is the exact difference fro the regular gradient and why it prevents the problems they describe with the regular gradient.
They use the derivative of the _log_ of the probability distribution with respect to the model parameters, rather than the derivative of the raw probability distribution. I can see that this would make the gradient descent e.g. insensitive to a scaling of the probability distribution. They say that it also gives
>the gradient direction is independent of the parameterization of the search distribution
which I can see is desirable, and I assume that they are correct about it, but I'm not following how that is derived.
I'm not an expert but I think looking for variables with predictive power is what every research scientist does, and it is hard. It's about formulating hypotheses based on hunches and testing them.
It's one of those: Where do ideas come from? questions. I don't think anyone knows the answer.
Well I think high frequency traders have algorithms which automatically do that somehow. I think OP is asking about how those work.
Pretty sure algorithms do not do that.
Sort of. There are, e.g., feature selection & dimensionality reduction algorithms that can be used to identify what signals (or combinations thereof) are useful inputs to actual predictive models, but they operate only on the dataset available (however large & noisy that may be); finding new data sources to feed the pipeline bottoms out with some manual decision eventually.
"102. One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means." (https://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html)
Here's a survey of theories of consciousness, all two hundred plus of them. I bet they're all wrong. ;-)
_A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications_
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079610723001128
Ugh, no offense but honestly Philosophy of Consciousness is nothing but a honeypot for blowhards. There is no basis to speculate about it and what basis there is points obviously to it being the emergent result of some neural-computational process. Everything else is 100% woo. Who the hell reads these pretentious blowhards other than other blowhards who want to get in on the scam?
Prescient comment. Check out the latest guest post and the comments going on about how it doesn't address 'the hard problem'
There's something to what you say about blowhards and the philosophy/science of consciousness. But if it's a solely a neural computational process why can't we explain how we get from a neuron firing to a model of consciousness that is testable?
It's a hard problem! We didn't know about atoms until a couple centuries ago but that didn't mean that matter was made of angels or whatever. God of the gaps type of arguments rarely age well.
But we're working on it. Eventually we'll get there.
And I've been wading through Curt Jaimungal's interview with Bernardo Kastrup —who argues for idealism. I'm definitely not a materialist. And I find some (but not all) of Kastrup's arguments convincing, but I'm not quite an idealist either. I guess I'm a Kantian Phenomenalist...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAB21FAXCDE
Why aren't you a materialist? Everything that we understand well enough to know how it works always, 100% of the time, has a materialist explanation. This includes many things that used to have non-materialist explanations. Doesn't that trend make you skeptical of non-materialism?
Also...
> Everything that we understand well enough to know how it works always, 100% of the time, has a materialist explanation.
I had a friend (now deceased) who was a High Energy Physicist (and who was not a materialist BTW). Somehow it came up in conversation that sometimes he'd get wacky results, and he would rerun the experiment to make sure they went away. If the wacky results disappeared, he was happy. I asked him why he didn't try to figure out why he got a wacky result. He laughed and said, "If it's not reproducible, it's not real." I said, "It doesn't necessarily follow that if it's not reproducible, it's not real." He replied that his grants and team members determined what was real. And chasing down why an experiment misfired was a waste of his accelerator time. Even so, I got the impression that he bought into the quantum idealism of Bohr and his crew, but he was practical about his research agenda. I would tease him about the Nobel Prizes he was missing out on because he accidentally detected some rare intermittent phenomenon. Half seriously, he replied that he wanted to retire without getting laughed at by his peers. Sensible fellow.
Like I said, I'm closest to a Kantian Phenomenalist. I don't deny there's a real reality out there, but we're not perceiving it. We perceive only a highly edited and redacted version of it. For instance, I hold a rose in my hand, I look at it and sniff it. I see color and sense a scent. Is the color that I perceive "real"? The petals are reflecting certain wavelengths of light, but the visual color we assign to wavelengths is determined by the rods and cones of our retinas. If our rods and cones vary from the norm for our species, we're color blind. And according to one of Scott's posts, there are some who claim to see more colors than normal because they have a mutation to their rods and cones. So quality of color isn't real outside our biological framework. Likewise, for scent. We assign the quality of sweetness to the rose's scent molecules, but that's meaningless in a materialist sense. Likewise, the scale of our perception is fine-tuned to our environment, but we are unable to perceive that the rose in reality is mostly composed of atoms arranged in a matrix around empty space. So I agree with Kastrup in that our consciousness is like a pilot flying a plane by IFR. The instruments on the console should not be mistaken for the world outside the plane.
Ok, all of what you just said is consistent with consciousness being a neural-computational process with noisy sensors connecting it to the world. Subjective experience is simply some complicated computational feedback loop: sweetness is when this neuron fires in this way and we associate it with nice things because the memory associations release dopamine. Or some such. Subjective experience is just some weird outgrowth of the way the brain monitors its own internal processes, and the only reason it's mysterious is because we haven't mapped it out yet. We will.
The last two sentences do concisely represent a very common faith.
Agreed. It's well-founded, but of course could be wrong. I'd bet heavily that it isn't.
One of the problems is that for pretty much the entire history of science scientists have taken things that can't be quantified or measured and placed them in the domain of the mind. For example, beauty. You can't measure beauty, you can't weigh it, you can't quantify it ("This painting has 1.25 gigagoghs worth of beauty"), so it get's labeled as a subjective experience that is "in your mind" as opposed to "in the world." See also morality, qualia, and consciousness. It drew a bright line between the objective and material world and the subjective mental world. That worked really well: if you want to know how gravity works, or a chemical reaction, you focus on the objective aspects of it, as the subjective questions of whether gravity is "good" or "beautiful" don't help you learn how it works. You can just relegate those aspects of reality to the mind.
This works beautifully, until you suddenly try the same method on understanding the mind itself; now you have to deal with all those subjective aspects of reality that you relegated to the mind. It's a bit like cleaning the room by sweeping things under the rug, and then trying to clean under the rug by sweeping things under the rug. It doesn't work anymore.
The current materialist answer to this problem is to deny that things like morality, consciousness, beauty, etc, even exist at all. We may experience such things, but they are only illusions. We think we make choices, and are concious, and experience qualia, but that's a mistake. Which is not a satisfying answer (as C. S. Lewis once wrote, "I will never believe—more strictly I can’t believe—that one set of physical events could be, or make, a mistake about other sets"). What's worse is that everything we experience is experienced through the lens of the mind, so if the mind is an illusion, or is just the experience of a physical algorithm playing out, then how can I trust any of the scientific observations I have made that convinced me of materialism in the first place? Thoughts are not like physical events; they are "about" things, and they can be true or false. Yet if my thoughts are just physical events occurring in my brain, then how can they be about anything, or be true or false? Electrons moving across cells can't be "true" or "false" they just are, and one atom colliding with another isn't "about" anything, it just is.
So it's a bit of a bait and switch to say "Everything we understand has a materialist explanation, so the mind must have one too" when you only found a purely materialist explanation for everything else by taking all the aspects of the thing in question that can't be explained by materialism and filing it away under "the mind".
That doesn’t make much sense to me. There’s no violation in materialism in believing that we are conscious, or perceive qualia or make choices, or that even free will exists. Materialists just argue that’s happening in the brain, not in some other unexplained phenomenon.
Definitely not in the foot. Hence why most people, materialist or not, would prefer to be shot in the foot, not the brain.
How can an atom experience qualia? How can a process make a choice? How can the movement of an electron be beautiful, or true, or valid? Materialists have faith that even if it seems completely illogical, somehow all these things reduce to movements in the brain. Yet I don't see how it is logically possible. If all our beliefs are epiphenomenons produced by material processes, then they can't be true or false or valid or invalid. They just are, the way all physical processes are. Yet, materialism is one of those self same epiphenomenal beliefs with no truth value, so why should I believe it?
Aren't you just reducing so far you can't *see* any emergent forest for the trees, though? Even uncontroversial, fully materially measurable things?
The subatomic level isn't the right level to consider most attributes, and saying that you can't measure truth or beauty at the electron level doesn't say anything meaningful.
How can the movement of a photon of a certain wavelength be "red?"
How can the coordinated movements of a big enough collection of subatomic particles be "playing catch with your son?"
Yet the epiphenomenons of "red" and "playing catch with your son" are still useful and describe measurable, material things in the world.
How can a process make a choice? A flowchart or algorithm written by an expert can make a better choice than most, and literally billions of dollars of choices and real-world impacts are made this way every day.
If things like "processes making choices" impact real world decisions, outcomes, and actions every day, they are indeed real, and measurable. And if there are such things as "better" or "worse" decisions, it's because the better decisions are closer to "truth" and "intended outcomes" and things like that.
It's just a short jump from there to "justice" and "fame" and "beauty," and whatever else you want.
These are things that require a collection of minds perceiving and cooperating, but they are nonetheless real. Fame is measurable enough, and so is beauty, and so is justice. The right level to measure them isn't with a discrete instrument, but by polling or aggregating across many minds in a given group. Just like the right level to measure "playing catch with your son" isn't by detecting the subatomic particles involved, or the molecules or cells or organs involved, for that matter.
And actually, we probably CAN build an instrument for measuring those more abstract "collective opinion" things now. You don't think that GPT 5 or 6 will be able to give a 1-10 ranking in line with a "random sample of 10k people were given this media / scenario, and ranked the fame / beauty / justice as X on a 1-10 scale?" on any of those or other attributes? I'd definitely bet on this. So we can even build an impartial, objective detection instrument.
And materialism has no truth value?? The whole reason most people here adhere to it, is precisely because it makes more and better predictions than any other explanatory framework. "Making better predictions" is as close to "being closer to the truth" as you can *get*.
I don't often agree with you FLWAB, but I stand with you 100 percent on this.
>This works beautifully, until you suddenly try the same method on understanding the mind itself; now you have to deal with all those subjective aspects of reality that you relegated to the mind.
I don't understand how that's a problem at all. Things like beauty and morality _aren't_ objectively definable. They're emergent processes. When the brain is perfectly modeled and understood we'll be able to point to neural processes that encode things like "beauty" but it won't be a unitary thing because everyone has a different internal representation of abstract concepts. It's like some primitive looking at porn on a laptop and then demanding to know where precisely inside the laptop the woman was. It's not a coherent question.
Everything is materialist, even consciousness.
>Everything is materialist, even consciousness
That's a statement taken on faith. You are a materialist, you don't yet know a materialist explanation for something, you have faith an explanation will be found. Others do not share your faith. Many of them don't see how a materalist explanation is possible.
Take, for example, truth or falsehood. Thoughts can be true or false, just as logic can be valid or invalid. Yet if our thoughts are reducible to the movement of electrons, how can they be true or false? The movement of electrons is not true or false, and atoms are not valid or invalid. Look at anything material, you won't find any veracity or validity within it. You can say "well the thought itself is an emergent process" but processes also are not true or false, or valid or invalid. Those subjective qualities do not exist in matter; yet they exist in our thoughts. That wasn't a problem when the thing we were studying was outside our mind, such as rocks or rockets, but when we study the mind itself we find a lot of elements that don't seem to be reducible to physical processes. For example, you might believe I am mistaken about materialism; yet how can a process be mistaken about anything?
You're conflating a physical process with the semantic content of that process. "True or false" is an abstraction that doesn't exist outside of a semantic system. The fact that semantic systems (like computers, like brains) have physical substrates which operate by rules which are independent of the semantic rules they produce is irrelevant. You're just failing to understand emergence.
I tend to ask people who are not materialist on consciousness whether they would prefer to be shot in the head or the foot.
To which I would reply, "How can a physical process like myself make a choice?"
The same way a thermostat decides to turn the heat on: a complex deterministic process that is initiated by an environmental input.
It is as you say, I have as much choice in the matter as the thermostat does.
In a sense this is true. However unlike a thermostat you're a nonlinear system which can operate on itself. You can also respond to complex external stimuli such as internet comments and respond to social incentives like praise or punishment. As such it is practical to model you as having free will, though in a strict physical sense you don't. But the people who punish or criticize you for doing things they disapprove of don't have free will either so it all balances out in the end.
My response to you would be, does it take a straw man to make a straw man fallacy?
That wasn't a straw man. It was a joke that cleverly gets to the heart of the issue. If materialism is false then why should you care about your brain.
If materialism is true, then how can you care about anything? Atoms do not care. Electrons do not care. Processes do not care. They are all that exists, therefore caring is an illusionary epiphenomenon that emerges from the processes in our neurons.
I don't care. I simply have the illusion that I do. I care because the atoms in my brain have been carefully designed by millennia of evolution in order to direct my limited cognitive resources towards things which have maximum salience to my survival. This gives me the subjective experience of negotiating a complex internal landscape of competing drives. None of this changes the fact that I'm nothing but a complicated deterministic computing machine that has zero freedom to choose its behaviors. But my programming makes me act like I think I can.
All of your arguments are word salad that equivocate between different levels of abstraction in a way that allows you to draw meaningless conclusions. Sparring with you is mildly entertaining but I'm going to stop responding to you pretty soon.
Well a literal straw man wouldn’t have a brain, despite what you see in the movies, so no?
I’m not sure why you think my argument is a straw man but that’s possibly because I don’t fully understand the immaterialist version of consciousness you believe in, so that’s one me. Perhaps.
The same question was asked of Sam "The Mind is an Illusion" Harris some years back. It's as much a strawmanly argument used against the materialists as it is against the idealists—because it ignores the fact that both idealists and materials can feel pain and fear the dissolution of consciousness. Furthermore, it doesn't get us any further down the road to answering what's going on with consciousness.
Here's my COVID update for the past two epidemiological weeks (epi weeks 27 and 28). I'm wondering if this summer wave isn't losing steam...
https://x.com/beowulf888/status/1812919567888621924
any good statistical election models you guys are keeping track? The 538 one seems hopelessly broken/useless. The one from the economist seems interesting and I'm not in a position to purchase a Nate Silver's subscription right now
Nate has the paid one, the economist's model closely tracks his. lates numbers are around 75-25
Even if you don't have a subscription, Nate will often mention his current forecast numbers in his free posts. The last time he did was July 9th, where he mentioned that according to his forecast Biden had a 29% chance of winning.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/biden-has-a-weak-hand
I submit that it is somewhat of an exaggeration to say that the media is now aware that Biden has significantly declined cognitively
I thought it was just Matt Yglesias memeing but it turns out there were several major outlets that ran "cheapfake" stories to prime interpretations as the debate approached
I am cynical about the media's capability and motivation to report facts accurately but this seriously updated me. It is quite possible to not have really noticed Biden's gaffes, to let them slide off your existing perception and go on. But to watch the G7 video where Biden literally wanders off from the group photoshoot until a few of the other leaders actually corralled him, and then to run cover stories about cheapfake editing is shocking. You're not glancing off a potential reality here, you're driving into it perpendicularly with essentially no regard to the possibility of it being true
What epistemology could possibly have this effect? I think it's a simple algorithm:
FOR each FactRelevantToLiberalGoals
IsTrue = (LikelihoodofTruth * .1) * FactorofUsefulness
Apologies to actual coders. How could you see Biden wrangling by fellow G7 leaders and write "cheapfake narrative"? Because the likelihood of truth was totally irrelevant compared to the factor of usefulness for Biden to be fine. This isn't a lie, this is an algorithm where truth is a marginal factor
Therefore, the media does not now know that Biden has declined. They know that it is now useful to liberal goals to observe that. The weighting of the likelihood of something being true will be adjusted - according to its usefulness
But how could it be useful to liberal goals to have the public thinking Biden has declined?
It's now useful because he can still be replaced. Rather than observing that Biden has declined, they are observing that Biden has declined to the point where it would improve the D's odds to replace him
If he remains the candidate they may advance to observing that it would be useful to redirect campaign efforts into Congressional races
I think you misunderstand what drives liberals. Liberals are continual worriers. Unlike Republicans, who will circle their wagons and defend their members to the end, Dems will throw their candidates to the wolves at any sign of scandal or disgrace. But no one on the Dem side has the chops to replace Biden as a candidate. Unfortunately, the Biden administration hasn't given Kamala Harris a higher-profile portfolio to put her in the public eye. Despite the cognitive tempests in the media teapots, Biden's post-debate numbers have recovered to where they were.
https://www.npr.org/2024/07/12/nx-s1-5036518/biden-trump-poll
And the media, who are like five-year-old kids chasing a soccer ball, will be obsessing about the Trump assassination attempt for the next week or two. Trump may earn some sympathy points in the polls. But I expect this will fade as people listen to him blather on. And really there's no comparison between the two. Take a look at these excerpts from the speeches that Trump and Biden gave the same week. Other than Biden's speech impediment, he holds it together quite well.
https://www.tiktok.com/@meidastouch/video/7390410547264507179
Meanwhile, the Dems will find something else to worry about. And Republicans will concern troll their fears.
Sorry for the Facebook link but worth pointing out that media spin goes both ways. Here’s another angle on the G7 corralling:
https://www.facebook.com/NBCNews/videos/360608387044971
In this one you can tell he’s giving a thumbs up to a different group of paratroopers. He still looks slow-moving, and I’d agree there’s something somewhat patronizing about how he’s treated by the others, but he clearly isn’t wandering off because he forgot where he was. I hadn’t seen that before and found the second perspective with a quick Google.
Does that change your thoughts on that particular example, or is that what you mean by cheapfake editing claims?
I got page not found but found a fantastic example on YouTube by France 24 doing a fact check on the video. I think it's representative without an additional angle as France 24 does not have that angle
In their version of the uncropped video you can additionally see one sky diver who is packing up his parachute and never looks up as Biden gives a thumbs up. Likely Biden had found a larger group there, some of whom did see him approach and interacted. It's not in the video, and they might have been all packing their parachutes - not a normal photoshoot item
Meanwhile the entire G7 group moves and shuffles towards Biden as Meloni brings him back into the location and orientation they were all in
France 24, with perfect confidence and aplomb, reports this as a clear debunking of an informationless cheapfake. This cannot be based on the facts they were in possession of, all they have is a diver who isn't looking! They didn't interact with the unedited video deeply enough to notice that. All they noticed is that they had enough information (there was an edit) to make a claim that would be plausible enough to others, and themselves, that would be useful
https://youtu.be/O-0zT4VN-dw?si=OckpR9aIkm-k9WUs
If anything is more important to you than honesty, you’ll lie to advance that subgoal.
This includes honesty with yourself, about your motivations and reasons for acting.
I don’t think a person can avoid lying to themselves unless they are scrupulously careful about not lying to others.
It can simultaneously be true that Biden has declined, and that people posted misleadingly clipped/cropped videos to try and show it.
As for the media, when there's a huge explosion of stories on a single subject in response to a public event, I think there's a dynamic going on where a lot of journos wanted to report on something but couldn't quite "get there". Then there's a public "hook" and the floodgates open everyone rushes to dump their story out.
Reminds me of when Trump Jr tweeted out copies of emails showing their attempts to collude with the Russian government in 2016, and a reporter said something like "I've been working on this story for a year, I could never quite get enough verification to run it, after all that work I can't believe he just tweeted it out".
Not that there hasn't been public reporting on this, especially from the WSJ and also around the time of Robert Hur's report.
This isn't unique to the left, let alone the American left. It's what happens when people prioritize "loyalty to the cause" and "winning" over "truth".
Yes, Biden's obvious senility is a huge indictment of the national news media. They were obviously being aggressively partisan in their coverage which has done direct damage to the country - at least to the extent that you consider having an openly senile incumbent as the Democratic Nominee to be damaging, which I do.
Another explanation: What is "obvious" to you not actually true. I am hardly a partisan, but it is impossible to have watched the NATO press conference and infer that he is "obviously senile." Which of course is different than the question of whether he is likely to be able to serve as President until January of 2029.
Sure, anything's possible. I'll happily take that bet. Maybe Biden is only pretending to be senile! Maybe all of the rumors and clips of him acting senile over the past 2 years was just Republican disinformation that only coincidentally happened to be right. Maybe the special prosecutor who declined to charge Biden over secret documents because he isn't mentally competent to defend himself was lying. I'm going with the parsimonious conclusion.
I think it's even more simple to say that sometimes he's senile and sometimes he's not, and even his closest associates can make mistakes about what he's going to be like over the next few hours. This explains the good performances, and the bad, and why all of his public appearances are so heavily scripted that even he (in his lucid moments) makes fun of it.
I don't actually think he's "senile", but minimally, his brain runs out of energy fast, and he needs more naps than he's getting. Probably he should have retired a few years back, and would have if he were in any other line of work.
Can we just say that he has some degree of senility, but he's not yet a central example of senility?
If your father/grandfather was performing like Biden then you wouldn't say he was senile, you'd say "Oh, he's still doing pretty well for his age". And Biden _is_ doing well for his age, most people his age have been dead for several years.
(Obviously he's not doing well enough to be President, and he certainly won't be by the time 2028 rolls around.)
> Can we just say that he has some degree of senility, but he's not yet a central example of senility?
Yeah, I'd sign on to that, assuming a colloquial definition of "senility" as "age-related decline". He's not what he used to be.
As someone who thinks all politics is turd, I don't have a dog in this fight. But regarding gdannings complaint that you are not arguing in good faith, I'd just like to say I agree. You come across so angry and combative that one instantly feels like you are someone who is incapable of thinking or saying "you know I hadn't thought of that" or "that's a good point" or "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that."
Oh I'm definitely combative. That doesn't mean I'm either not arguing in good faith or am unwilling to make concessions when someone else makes a good point. For example, conceding that I'm combative.
Do you think it's even plausible that Biden isn't seriously mentally impaired? Didn't George Clooney recently tweet that he spent a whole day at a fundraiser with him and felt that his debate performance was representative? Haven't several people said similar things post-debate? Weren't there similar rumors circulating for months? It just doesn't strike me as plausible that all of those things are false.
I think it's unlikely that he's not mentally impaired, but not certain that he's not. But to me most politicians look impaired morally and in their intellectual capacity to grasp the issues they must master, so throwing in a little dementia is coals to Newcastle
One would hope that this would be a place where people could have good faith discussions. But if you are going to:
1. Construct strawman like "maybe he is pretending to be senile";
2. Completely ignore my reference to the NATO press conference; and
3. Perhaps most egregiously, use quotation marks around a phrase which a) does not appear in the special prosecutors report; and b) is not an accurate paraphrase of what the report did say (being incompetent to defend oneself is a very specific legal claim with specific criteria, and not remotely the same as what the prosecutor did say, which was that it would be hard to convince a jury that he acted willfully),
then perhaps I am mistaken. I hope not; I hope that most people here are not here to wage the culture war, but instead are interested in objectively discussing important questions lincluding those related to candidates' fitness for office, and how citizens an accurately assess said fitness.
1. That wasn't a strawman, it was hyperbolically illustrating the absurdity of non-parsimonious thinking.
2. Evidence that he doesn't act senile all of the time is not strong evidence that he is not, in fact, senile.
3. That wasn't intended to be a verbatim quote, apologies if you took it that way. It was just a stylistic choice to make it read more naturally. That sentence is directionally true and does not represent any substantive deception: the special prosecutor declined to prosecute because Biden is senile. "Elderly man with a poor memory" is the exact phrase. He also recounted that Biden had to be reminded of dates like his son's birthday. Hur found evidence of criminal wrongdoing but declined to prosecute solely because of Biden's mental capacity. I submit that this is qualitatively consistent with my original framing.
I admire your distaste for culture war and can only hope that your reaction to my previous comment wasn't an Isolated Demand For Rigor that you selectively apply to people whom you perceive to be politically opposed to you.
>Evidence that he doesn't act senile all of the time is not strong evidence that he is not, in fact, senile.
Yes, it is.
"Elderly man with a poor memory" is the exact phrase.
Right. And if that was honestly what you meant by "senile," then your initial claim is vastly weaker than you think it is.
>can only hope that your reaction to my previous comment wasn't an Isolated Demand For Rigor that you selectively apply to people whom you perceive to be politically opposed to you.
As it happens, I recently left a job with a non-profit organization whose mission I strongly support because of their propensity to make the same sort of claim that you made in your post.
The continuing degradation of trust in our society as a result is much worse than the fact that he's the nominee. The cover-up is worse than the crime.
Agreed, but this sort of partisan hackery has been going on for decades. At least now it's so out in the open that people can't pretend it isn't happening. NARRATOR VOICE: People will still pretend it isn't happening.
Yes, this is why I felt making this comment is quite useful. Previously I have been able to understand media bias in relation to myself, as I am often quite biased. But I cannot imagine myself seeing a video like the G7 wanderer and not just not incorporating it into my concept of Biden but actually running widespread cover stories leading up to the election about how such videos are meaningless cheapfakes
This is not "failing to adhere to the Platonic ideal of observing reality, just like me but perhaps moreso". This is "succeeding in achieving near perpendicularity to the Platonic ideal of observing reality"
I rarely discuss the morality of my own actions with in depth. That happened in a former Open Thread, on sperm donation. Since part of it was long after the thread's normal active dates, I think I might as well give it some visibility: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-333/comment/58888967 and parent comments.
Trump just announced JD Vance as his running mate on Truth Social. Interesting for a couple of reasons. He 39 years old and a freshman senator. Also announcing that on social media rather than at the convention may be a first.
Another important fact about JD Vance is he says that if he was in Mike Pence's position, he would have supported the Jan 6 coup attempt.
Is he (a lawyer) one to say such unnecessary things that make him look bad to all sane people? Please provide a reference. What were his exact words?
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/jd-vance-defends-trump-claims-invoking-jean-carroll/story?id=106925954
> "If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there," he continued. "That is the legitimate way to deal with an election that a lot of folks, including me, think had a lot of problems in 2020. I think that's what we should have done."
To be clear, the "legitimate way" to deal with Pennsylvania sending you a slate of electors for Biden, and no slate of electors for Trump, is to certify their electoral vote is for Biden. Not to demand that they send you another slate and then having Congress "fight" over which one is proper.
an assassination attempt should probably move up the decision to name a successor
Seconded
I was reminded by reading it on another site that Vance is Catholic, seems he converted a while back.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/j-d-vance-becomes-catholic/
I'm wondering how to take this - how religious is he? And more importantly, can we now get some good conspiracy theories going about the Horrid Popish Plot? All those Catholics on the Supreme Court, now a convert Papist as VP - is the Vatican puppeteering the White House????
https://www.churchpop.com/content/images/wordpress/2016/01/6-1.jpg
I think he’s probably a pretty sincere Catholic. He was friends with Ross Douthat before he got into to politics and Ross is definitely a sincere adult convert Catholic.
I was just reading a round table analysis of the VP pick in the NYTs and Ross said he would be praying for his friend and the country.
As a 65-year-old, I'm taking the appointment of a 39-year-old as an _anti-gerontocratic_ plot! ( Not having any aspirations to public office myself, I support it. )
His wife is a Hindu, which I take to be a hopeful sign the Catholic stuff is all for show.
He married her before he converted, though. So how serious he is does remain a question. And I don't know how much his wife practices her faith, she could be "culturally Hindu".
<mild snark>
Maybe there is some reasonable mapping (many to many???) between Hindu pantheon gods and Catholic saints? :-)
</mild snark>
Doubt. He was raised as an Evangelical and if it was for political points, he could have maintained that he is an Evangelical and the right would have been perfectly happy. I don’t think anyone on the right cares as long as you profess some form of Christianity. Converting to Catholicism doesn’t have any added political benefits compared to being an Evangelical. So I think it was a genuine conversion like that of Sohrab Armani.
Converting to Catholicism has some pretty big downsides too, like goodbye contraception.
To be fair, not really a downside, if you are a pro-natalist like Vance and can easily afford to raise multiple children. "Be fruitful and multiply" our God literally commands us.
On the other hand, I have always wondered why all the billionaires are happy with just 1-2 children. Having a hundred children(like some Arab sheikhs) means a tangible genetic legacy, that may even keep multiplying down the generations. Donating billions to charities doesn't even earn you any feel good brownie points anymore like in days of Carnegie and Rockefeller.
Pretty sure Musk has more than one or two children.
Oooh, let me try...
The Vatican, trying to cover up its own child sex abuse scandals, infiltrates the US government, using as leverage Trump's association with Jeffrey Epstein.
“…is the Vatican puppeteering the White House?”
Clearly puppetmaster Bergoglio needs to hedge his bets. If Biden wins, he’s got a papist behind the big desk. If Trump wins, he has a voice in the big guy’s ear. And since no one expects either of them to listen to Francis, no one will suspect a thing.
On a more serious note, I think it’s interesting that as American evangelicals lose political influence, observant Roman Catholics seem to be holding on, at least at the level of officeholding. But perhaps the reverse is true of voting blocs? The whole thing is unclear to me.
> I think it’s interesting that as American evangelicals lose political influence, observant Roman Catholics seem to be holding on
Sounds like standard D&D Law vs. Chaos?
I think it's more that Catholics are a single bloc (even if there are large internal differences) due to the hierarchical nature of the church. Protestants may be a larger share of the population, but they are divided up amongst different denominations.
Figures from 2015 which are badly outdated by now, but give a general indication of the religious make-up of the USA:
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/
In 2015, Protestants (of all traditions) were 46.5% of the population and Catholics were 20.8%. The largest non-Christian faith was Judaism, at 1.9%. Atheist/agnostic/nothing in particular were 22.8%.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/05/12/appendix-b-classification-of-protestant-denominations/
Within Protestantism, the single largest denomination is Baptist at 15.4%, with the Southern Baptists the largest in that cluster at 5.3%
If we want to look at that bogeyman of the liberals, the "Evangelicals" or "Religious Right", or the Christofascists as I see the current term seems to be, they make up 25.4%. Historic Black churches, which trend doctrinally conservative but vote Democratic, are 6.5%, and the mainline Protestants are 14.7%.
So Protestantism is numerically superior but divided amongst different denominations, hence "chaotic", while we Papists are all marching in lockstep to the dictates of the Vatican, hence "lawful" and thus, despite our smaller share of the population, more effective at implementing the Global Conspiracy 😁
Joking aside, it's impressive.
I hope that’s in a two-axis alignment system!
Wait, which side is law and which is chaos? I figured that we evangelicals would be chaos, but that implies that the U.S. government is trending lawful over time, which feels… wrong.
I was mostly going by internal organization, so evangelicals would be chaos and Roman Catholics would be law?
Maybe for the government over time, some of the more organized American Protestant denominations would also count as lawful on net, and their shrinkage would counteract the Catholic rise? Episcopalians, Methodists, etc.
I think the fact that he called Trump "America's Hitler" and now supports him probably clinched it.
I saw something about that, and that seems to be a truncated version of a Tweet (rather like Sotomayor's bit about Seal Team 6 which I have now seen morphed into "The Supreme Court says the president (Trump) can legally kill his rivals").
Courtesy of TheMotte, where someone tracked it down:
"But I'm not surprised by Trump's rise, and I think the entire party has only itself to blame. We are, whether we like it or not, the party of lower-income, lower-education white people, and I have been saying for a long time that we need to offer those people SOMETHING (and hell, maybe even expand our appeal to working class black people in the process) or a demagogue would. We are now at that point. Trump is the fruit of the party's collective neglect. 3) I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler. How's that for discouraging?
The bit that is being publicised is the last part, "I go back and forth". I also note that some 'former room mate/former friend' released this 2016 Tweet, with friends like that, who needs enemies?
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/15/politics/kfile-jd-vance-comments-trump/index.html
<mild snark>
Has Senator Vance expressed any opinion on Dante's view about the uncommitted https://davidbruceblog.wordpress.com/2015/04/16/where-do-the-neutral-and-the-uncommitted-go-in-the-afterlife/ :-)
</mild snark>
Gathering up the never-trump vote!
Trump picks Vance, the known Moldbug-reading, seed-oil-avoiding, friend of Thiel and pmarca, two days after Elon endorses Trump.
Fellow Grey Tribers, patriots are in control, trust the plan.
<mild snark>
>seed-oil-avoiding
Is there a specific phobia named for omega-6 fatty acid avoidance? Or would that be considered ... inflammatory? :-)
</mild snark>
fucking e/accs. Smart enough to acquire power, but not smart enough to think clearly about issues. Pretty much the definition of "mid"
You say so, yet The Donald on the Logan Paul Podcast revealed himself to also be totally AGI-pilled (even ASI-pilled(!)), explaining the need for a massive nuclear energy build-out to meet the energy needed to beat China to it.
All the while, his VP JD posts on Xitter about the necessity for Open Source AI development.
What's Kamala's AI policy, again?
Yep, this seems like more evidence for my point ("Smart enough to acquire power, but not smart enough to think clearly about issues.").
Seems pretty based to me
If Biden or Kamala have said anything similarly informed I'm all ears
I thought this was good and suggests they have competent people on staff, but I agree that I'm not aware of Biden or Harris saying similarly smart things on interviews etc.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2023/10/30/executive-order-on-the-safe-secure-and-trustworthy-development-and-use-of-artificial-intelligence/
I’m pretty gray, but I consider these ppl to be crypto reds. No one I trust there
Sure, I think a lot of grey-tribers are either crypto-blues or crypto-reds. I'm not sure if there's all that many true greys out there.
That said, Vance is definitely the most grey-adjacent person who is likely to be within shouting distance of actual political power in the US. The number of people who have even heard of Moldbug is tiny.
Of course depending on exactly what attack line the media settles on for Vance, the number of people who have heard of Moldbug may be about to skyrocket. Vance's association with weird Silicon Valley intellectual communities that are not reliably left-wing may be about to become the biggest issue in American politics. And while *we* might understand the difference between Astral Codex Ten and The Motte and Grey Enlightenment and Data Secrets Lox and Less Wrong, to an uninformed media herd these are all going to look like the same thing, and the attack line on Vance is going to lead right through here.
So yeah, the grey-adjacency of Vance is at best a very mixed blessing.
Nit:
>Sure, I think a lot of grey-tribers are either crypto-blues or crypto-reds.
Given that crypto_currency_ enthusiasts are sometimes adjacent to the grey tribe, we might want to use some other terms for grey-but-kind-of-blue and grey-but-kind-of-red. For real confusion, we can have some communist reds in play too...
If you think that's bad wait til the NYT realizes JD also follows BAP on Twitter
That one is harder to explain to the normies tho
I look forward to the mainstreaming of BAP followed by the inevitable nude bodybuilder uprising on the National Mall.
Don't diss nudists, they're the only law-abiding folks in San Francisco! 😁
https://sfstandard.com/2024/07/11/nudists-save-tourist-attack-castro/
https://hoodline.com/2024/07/video-of-nudists-stopping-blowtorch-attack-on-tourist-in-castro-becomes-widespread-in-san-francisco/
Boy, if Vance is the most grey-adjacent politician in the US that says horrible things about the grey tribe. He's about as protectionist as you can get, identifies more with Bernie Bros than with centrists (according to his Ross Douthat interview, Vance's words), and will suck Donald Trump's cock at the drop of a hat. Maybe that's close to where Moldbug is but I don't think it's where readers of this blog are.
He also came out in support of Jan 6. That's as red as you could possibly get, redder than a lot of establishment Republicans even.
Is the full text of the Douthat interview available anywhere (without paying for a National Review subscription)?
What J.D. Vance Believes
In a long conversation, the first-term senator from Ohio talks about Trump, populism, the 2020 election, Ukraine and the Republican V.P. slot.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/13/opinion/jd-vance-interview.html?unlocked_article_code=1.7k0._ZX9.AlyFzZOGA5Qp&smid=em-share
Don't know about the National Review, but here's an interview Douhat did with Vance in 2019 after his baptism:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/j-d-vance-becomes-catholic/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/13/opinion/jd-vance-interview.html
bypass the paywall by either hitting X (stop download) after one second (generally works easy for the NYT tho may take a few tries to time it right) or take it to the internet archive ... geez, i hope you didn't click like i did on the archive link i didn't mean to type which just gave me ten thousand viruses when i clicked on it
I see Cade Metz was much too kind and charitable in his assessment.
Yep, we're just a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Unless you meant (1) the Rationalists (2) the Bay Area/Silicon Valley set (3) venture capitalists? I think there's some overlap between them, but there isn't complete identification.
> Yep, we're just a wretched hive of scum and villainy
That’s not even close to what he said or what I meant. You do this putting words in people’s mouths thing a lot. It’s a cheap trick.
I wasn't entirely sure did you mean the commentariat on here (I've seen criticisms of us and the site as being all far-right shills) or not.
Gunflint, I honestly do like you. You're every bit as stubborn, opinionated, and unwilling to un-dig your heels once they're dug in as I am, except on the opposite side of things. What is it Baudelaire says?
https://fleursdumal.org/poem/099
"— Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!"
Though of course I know it from Eliot, not Baudelaire:
https://wasteland.windingway.org/poem#76
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying, “Stetson!
“You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men.
“Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!
“You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”
From one point of view, the primary criteria has now become "will potential assassins avoid killing Trump because his veep would be scarier", and IMO Vance might be the best option for that, given the candidate pool.
Vance is a relatively boring middle-of-the-road-Republican politician. I'd guess his relevant characteristics are "young" and "ex-never-Trumper-turned-pro-Trumper".
I don't think we know what Vance actually is, only what he's pretending to be at the moment.
>I don't think we know what Vance actually is, only what he's pretending to be at the moment.
I'm going to go out on a limb and rule out that Vance is actually a lizard-person. :-)
I dunno, after a year spent in Thiel's regeneration tanks, who knows what unearthly biology animates him? :-)
Much appreciated! And with Thiel's Silicon Valley links, perhaps limiting the possibilities to just "biology" is overly restrictive... :-)
Yeah, I don't know what to think of Vance. I have some crazy feeling he ought to have picked Nikki, even if it's just for the optics of going against Biden/Harris with his own 'minority female VP' pick.
Well, we'll see what happens once the mud-slinging gets under way for the real campaign after today's RNC!
Nikki Haley was my favorite of the Republican field, not that any of them had a real chance against Trump. In a way, I viewed her as the "2020 Joe Biden" of the group - seasoned, moderate, and stable.
I suppose we'll see more of Vance now. I'd like to be proved wrong about him.
Which suggests it is rather silly to claim that Vance is scarier.
The guy made it through Yale law school as a conservative. He's probably got more ambition and will-to-power in his little toe than I have in my whole body.
He also somehow flitted from graduating Yale Law School in 2013 to being a principal at Thiel's firm by 2016, then founding his own firm by 2019, then becoming a Senator by 2022, while somehow finding the time to write a best-selling book along the way.
People with no fixed discernible ethics are pretty fucking scary.
That's, like, 95% of people.
Dumb move if trying to win 2024. Vance doesn't bring anyone to the GOP ticket that wasn't already in it.
If Trump just likes someone who butters him up, he made a great pick.
Trump probably believes victory is inevitable and this point and can pick someone purely for loyalty and submission (what he probably thinks he should have done the first time around).
On economic issues Vance is actually quite moderate, he was one of the few Republican politicians to join the picket line during the UAW strike. The MSM sees him as "extreme" and people like Mitt Romney as "moderate," swing voters in Pennsylvania might think the opposite is true, since they prioritize different issues.
Trump is 78, he's term-limited, and he has just discovered that he's not actually bulletproof. He's picking Vance as someone he can trust not to take the party back to the conventional Bush-McCain-Romney style of Republicanism once Trump is out of the picture.
If nothing else, I have to admire the fact that he's picking someone he believes would be a good President, rather than an airheaded Palin-Harris-Biden style bozo designed to "balance" the ticket.
Trump is already trying to get a third term for himself.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/18/trump-at-nra-convention-floats-a-three-term-presidency-00158786
That article says he isn't.
It says he does both.
Once you've contradicted yourself, either path is open.
And as also linked there:
'“We are going to win four more years,” Trump said at a rally in Oshkosh, Wisconsin on Monday. “And then after that, we’ll go for another four years"'
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/18/politics/donald-trump-third-term-2024/index.html
I'm going to go out on a limb here and posit that a first order logic evaluator is not the way to model Trump's thinking on things.
(I think it's more likely, based on the phrasing - and an assumption that it's accurate - that Trump is thinking out loud, and then settling on not being against 22A, and that "go for another four years" means something other than a third term in Trump's mindscape.)
I think they probably added that part in after JohanL posted the link.
I think the original "third term" comment refers to his claim that he won last time, and is therefore the rightful president already, and is therefore currently running for his third term.
"he has just discovered that he's not actually bulletproof"
I dunno, seems more like he now feels the call of destiny as being miraculously spared. "Guy came *this close* to blowing my brains out, but just nicked my ear" is near enough bullet proof for general purposes.
I suspect Obama picked Biden because he didn't want people to say about him what they said about Bush - that his VP was the one running the show.
Nah, it was for single most common reason in a VP pick - foreign policy experience when you don't have it yourself.
Joe was experienced enough to know the ropes and have enough connections with both sides of the aisle, but wasn't going to overshadow Obama. Good choice to keep people within the party happy if they didn't get the nod for VP as a compromise candidate, and also as a "this man's experience balances out my lack of elected office".
I thought it was mostly identity politics; didn't want to lose working-class whites.
Same here. Obama was young and inexperienced and intellectual and black; Joe was the opposite of all those things.
Vance is, I think, a safe choice, which, in the current political climate, is probably the best kind of choice. As things stand this is Trump's election to lose, so he's going to want to avoid high-variance strategizing.
A news snippet that I was considering pasting into the "Details That You Should Include In Your Article On How We Should Do Something About Mentally Ill Homeless People" comments, but, since there is this new Open Thread, I'm pasting here:
(as per the NYT daily summary, for better or worse)
>After the Supreme Court said cities could remove homeless campers, some local leaders are preparing to crack down. “My hope is that we can clear them all,” London Breed, the Democratic mayor of San Francisco, said.
The website of the far out initiative has been down for many days. Whats going on?
https://faroutinitiative.com/ is still up
Nice to see the European LessWrong Community Weekend signal boost! Looking forward to seeing some other Astral Codex Ten commenters there.
Incidentally, I'm still trying to pick out a sci-fi short story to read in the blanket fort (as is tradition). I might do something I usually avoid and read one of mine, but that possibility aside, does someone here have a sci-fi short story they are super fond of, which is suitable for reading aloud (i.e. sentences aren't too complex, no mathematical expressions, no very abstract numbers people need to keep in their head and compare, et cetera), and would recommend I read that?
(I've pretty much exhausted Greg Egan at this point, minus some rounding errors of shorts I'm less fond of. I hear someone else read some Ted Chiang in my absence one year, though not sure what that was.)
It's shameless self promotion, but I'm working on a short story series about a man who discovers how to talk to a sentient ant colony. As for suitability to read aloud, I've been reading it aloud to my six year old and ten year old daughters, and captive audience that they are, they keep asking for the next one in the series:
https://www.fortressofdoors.com/we-trade-with-ants-a-short-story-series/
Thanks! I don't think the symbols make this good material to read aloud, though. But I'll read it on my own time, for sure.
Pail of air by fritz leiber! Cute story and if you're reading it in a blanket fort it seems like a perfect fit!
Following up on this, I just read this, it is indeed cute, it has science in it (I'm not fussy about it not necessarily being the _hardest_ possible science!), and it's the candidate off the list for reading that I've put a definite checkmark next to. The diction's a touch weird, but that comes with the territory/context. Thanks again for the recommendation!
Of course!! Definitely some goofy sci Fi but I'm a sucker sometimes for older style implausible but cute stuff. Another one I liked (much more modern style tho) is last contact by Stephen Baxter
Thanks for this recommendation! I didn't end up reading Last Contact, but I did end up reading several of Baxter's short stories in the "First and Last Contacts" collection, and deciding that "The Children of Time" was a mood I was going for this particular LessWrong Community Weekend! So thank you for the indirect nudge toward it.
Pail of Air is still in my short list to read to people someday, though, in that if I hadn't come across The Children of Time by Baxter, I would *definitely* have read that one this time.
Bless you and thank you for the recommendations. :)
(I actually only read one other story this time, and it was one of my own, after much thinking about whether that was a fair use of anyone's time and much encouragement from acquaintances and friends at the weekend. I think it went well.)
That's a good sized one! Will check it out, for sure. Thanks for the recommendation!
Patsy Cline Sings Sweet Dreams to the Universe:
http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/patsy-cline-sings-sweet-dreams-to-the-universe/
It's not too long and I found it quirkily beautiful and elegiac. It kind of reminds me of some of Scott's more sentimental fiction, or later Bradbury.
I gave this a partial read and have a question you might have an opinion on. How would you suggest making the "i" and "I" distinctions unambiguous when reading aloud? The difference seems quite important.
You know I read it out loud to my gf recently. I tried drawing the distinction explicitly ("Big I" and "little i") but stopped after a few sentences. I didn't find that it confused the meaning. Just say "I".
That's good to know! Added to my list, will read more thoroughly soon. Thanks for the recommendation!
You could also try reading it in a different tone, since 'i' and 'I' connote different characters. Thanks for reading my suggestion, I hope you like it! Something about that story really hit me in the feels.
I clicked the link and heard nothing. No Play button, nothing.
That's because it's a short story. The title is "Patsy Cline Sings Sweet Dreams to the Universe."
Fantastic voice. They could loose the strings and it would be better overall though.
Glad you liked it! What do you mean by the strings?
The violin(s)at the start. This one actually isn’t over instrumented as much as a lot of her songs.
Oh I thought you meant the story, as in he has a fantastic literary voice. LOL. But sure, I love Patsy too. An all-time great.
"The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster might be a bit long to read out all at once, but it's the most stunningly prescient science fiction story I've encountered. It was written in 1909.
https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/Machine_stops.pdf
Plugging that into a word counter, yeah, I think that's too long, but I'll read it just for myself, for sure, because you've piqued my interest. Onto the pile it goes! Thanks for the link!
How about some Ray Bradbury and something from "The Martian Chronicles"? Yes, it's nothing approaching hard SF, yes it's dated, but there's still something there.
"-And The Moon Be Still As Bright":
https://genius.com/Ray-bradbury-june-2001-and-the-moon-be-still-as-bright-annotated
I don't mind dated! That can be a fun change of pace. I'll check this out, thank you. :D
You say you've practically exhausted Egan, but have you checked off the list my all time favorite and most prophetic Egan story, Worthless? http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/worth.htm
It's not my one of my favourites, sorry. I do appreciate the inquisitive poke at specific Egan stories, though! :)
It might be an apposite choice, though, given that we are probably in the nascent stages of a pop machine created by LLMs. Though LLMs work on a higher level than Azciak, mutating and reprocessing previous cultural artefacts.
Ted Chiang has a short story collection numbering many more than one, so there is still room.
"Lifecycle of Software Objects" is an often neglected and under-recommended specimen of his, although it's rather long to be read out loud in one sitting by one person. For that matter, most "short stories" exceeding 20 or 30 pages are too long to actually recite out loud in a reasonable stretch of time.
If you're willing to go the "non-traditionally published" route, check out Exurb1a [1], he has "Orion's Arm transhumanism" vibe, mixed in with unorthodox philosophical leanings and influences, plus, he *is* writing the stories primarily for recitation, so the stories are naturally optimized for oral transmission. Excellent recommendations include (but by no means consist solely of) Bear and Goose at the End of Everything [2], Big Oxygen [3], and, in beautiful haughty-English poetry, The Rememberer [4].
(Edit): Oh, almost forgot, I Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter [5]. No, the author isn't doing what you think they're doing, whatever it is that you think they're doing, and whatever side you lie on in the great galactic Culture War. I loved it when it first came and I love it today, my position in the Culture War hardly constant between the 2 moments. One of the extremely few stories that I have actually gone back and re-read, I have a strict anti-rereading and anti-rewatching policy. It's Worth It.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/@Exurb1a
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N5lgUgAQ-g
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKouPOhh_9I
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hS_AXRRnIzM
[5] https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/2020-01-15-fall-isexuallyidentifyasanattackhelicopter.html
I'll check out 'Lifecycle of Software Objects'! (Might have read it before and forgotten about it, let's see!)
Regarding Exurb1a, I'm sorry, where do I click to get those in text form? I preferentially don't watch videos, and even if I did I'm not sure how to read to people from one (I guess I could just... play it?). I see there's a transcript available, is that how I'd grab it?
Thanks for the recommendations!
You can read the Ted Chiang story online and free here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20101211104349/http://subterraneanpress.com/index.php/magazine/fall-2010/fiction-the-lifecycle-of-software-objects-by-ted-chiang/
Oi, that is much too long for a reading session, but I'll add it to the smaller pile of short stories to indulge in for my private enjoyment, for sure. Thanks a lot for the direct link!
> where do I click to get those in text form
Paste the URL here https://www.downloadyoutubesubtitles.com/.
Also, there are auto-transcript AI tools available, not necessary here since there is already a human-written one, but it's a useful fact to know in general.
Thanks!
Also, Richard Ngo (https://www.narrativeark.xyz/), Sprague Grundy (https://sprague-grundy.github.io/short_stories/), and Alicorn (https://alicorn.elcenia.com/stories/stories.shtml) have some great rationalist-adjacent stories published online.
Any particular ones you'd recommend, or just "all of it"?
Ngo's The Ants and the Grasshopper (https://www.narrativeark.xyz/p/the-ants-and-grasshopperhtml) is a classic- though a bit short. His most recent two stories are also quite good.
Dying to Know (https://sprague-grundy.github.io/dying_to_know/) by SGS was a standout for me in his work, along with maybe Two Games (https://sprague-grundy.github.io/two_games/).
Alicorn's stories tend to be a bit longer and more narratively complicated- I think I slightly preferred her older stories to her more recent ones, although it's been long enough that I can't remember any specific standout. Definitely lots of good stuff there, however.
Thanks! I'll check out those deep links, for sure.
I recommend any of QNTM's stories, which are collected in Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories (https://www.amazon.com/Valuable-Humans-Transit-Other-Stories-ebook/dp/B0BL24DFMW/). This is the author best known for the There Is No Antimemetics Division web series, though their other work is also great in the same way that Egan's and Chiang's work is great.
We did already read some of these, too! _The Frame-By-Frame_ and _I Don't Know, Timmy, Being God Is A Big Responsibility_, specifically. So good rec' in general, for sure. (I privately read the first two articles of _There Is No Antimemetics Division_ to some friends at a party recently, too.)
"Guest Law" by John Wright? Really great world-building in such a short story. http://scifiwright.com/2018/11/guest-law/
Or something from Michael Flynn's "The Forest of Time"?
Guest Law's a long one, I'm guessing I'd need almost an hour for that one. Not that this disqualifies it. I'll give it a read, for sure! Thanks for the recommendation!
Anything specific in _The Forest of Time_ you'd recommend especially? (I assume you mean "The Forest of Time and Other Stories", not "The Forest of Time", which apparently also exists as a standalone novella! Though I can't seem to find that as an ebook on cursory glance, so the distinction's moot, I suppose. :D)
Yes, "The Forest of Time" is a great story, but too long for a read-aloud. :-) But "Grave Reservations" is quite fun and fairly short. "The Common Goal of Nature" could be good for some "Omelas"-type discussion, but it's fairly clear what will happen (at least I thought so). "The Feeders" is good, not futuristic as it's WWI; Flynn sometimes likes the "past is a foreign country" kinds of stories, as in the novel "Eifelheim" where the aliens are less alien to us than the medieval Germans. His "Sisters of the Sacred Heart" I like, but isn't exactly sci-fi. Creepy though. https://www.dappledthings.org/fiction/4739/the-sisters-of-the-sacred-heart
If "Guest Law" is too long, Wright also has "Silence Deep as Death" http://scifiwright.com/2018/10/21905/
I tried to find Paul Carter's "The Last Objective" (very old, but it's a great story) but could only find an adaptation (much shortened, so it wouldn't be super-long for your purposes) into a radio show.
https://tangentonline.com/oldtimeradio/dimension-x-qthe-last-objectiveq-by-paul-a-carter/
Added Silence Deep as Death to the pile to check out, and The Forest of Time as an eBook. Things don't need to be on the internet for free for me to grab 'em, it just makes an initial examination easier. Thanks a bunch for the links!
There are persistent, decades-long rumors of tunnels or a tunneling network beneath my city. It's been confirmed by enough normal/non whackadoodle people who've seen them over the years that I think there's something to it. All of the buildings downtown originally had much larger basements, which is an actual fact confirmed by blueprints or old building schematics we have of them. There are specific news stories from the mid-20th century about businesses like a bowling alley that were located in basements, that have now been sealed up. I've heard it explained that what people think are 'tunnels' are in fact interconnections between the various basements? And that this kind of thing was actually normal in the pre-20th century era? I'm in a quite old East Coast US city if that helps. My questions are:
1. Was it in fact normal to interconnect the basements of buildings in cities? If so, why?
2. Couldn't ground-penetrating radar reveal a tunnel network if it exists? Isn't that what that kind of radar is for, detecting buried pipes and utility lines before say a construction project?
To argue against the existence of a tunneling network- our city is sitting on solid ledge rock, which would have been a lot of work to tunnel- especially in the pre-20th century era. Hard to believe it'd be economic to dig tunnels for no reason
I am not sure about the US, but district heating systems are quite common in many European countries. If your city has those, then it also has a huge underground network. They are usually not publicly accessible, but it's possible to walk in them because technicians sometimes need to make inspections.
Maybe they were developed in Prohibition? Is your city a port that was used for smuggling?
I have seen that in a few places in NYC. The 21 Club for instance, and Ratners, where Meyer Lansky used to hang.
There are several cities in the US and Canada that have pedestrian tunnels connecting underground entrances to building in part of the downtown area. Looking over the list on Wikipedia's "Underground Cities" page, it looks like major subtypes include shopping mall complexes that extend under multiple city blocks, multi-building complexes with convenience connections (like the Empire State Plaza in NYC and the tunnels connecting various federal offices around the DC mall), and subway stations that connect to underground entrances of adjoining buildings.
The children yearn for the mines
Haha!
There are rumors like this about washington DC. Some of them are true - there are tunnels, with subways even!, between many of the federal buildings. But they are not secret and used to make travel easier (of course there could be more secret ones).
Lots of universities have these same rumors because they often have real tunnels under buildings that are used for utilities, largely steam which can need big pipes. But the rumors are wrong about the nefarious purposes of the tunnels.
Ground penetrating radar, of the type I have seen, does appear to be very accurate or easy to read. Usually the output looks more like an ultrasound and needs a trained professional to read it. Even then, the conclusions aren't "there is X buried here", but more like "the could be something here that is different than the rest of the area".
No idea if connecting basements was common, but it's a plot point in the Baroque cycle by Neal Stephenson if you'd like to read some friction about such a thing.
I remember "exploring the steam tunnels" was something of a rite of passage when I was at UCLA. People would pass around hand-drawn maps and it was a constant game of finding new entrances before the school could lock them down. I once was able to travel all the way across campus exclusively using the tunnels and connections on the roofs.
I wonder if it's still possible to get down there, or if the administration was ever able to plug all the holes.
UCL over in the UK has a number of tunnels connecting the university buildings, presumably for utilities and transfer of material without having to go out on the street. They're not secret per se, but the administration leaves them unlabeled and off the maps so you have to be in the know to use them properly. I presume this is less to preserve the secret, and more to keep the horde of undergrads from gumming up the routes.
Just ran into Fred de Sam Lazaro outside my breakfast place. He’s a PBS News Hour regular doing thoughtful in depth reporting. I knew he lived in my neighborhood but first time we’ve actually crossed paths.
https://www.minnpost.com/business/2015/08/my-story-indian-immigrant/
A rubric for rating book reviews next time around? I was rating them on an academic scale, where 7 is average, 5 is trash, and <5 is pretty much unused. But I'm not sure I was using the same scale as other review reviewers. Suggestion?
1 - This should not have been submitted. Low-effort troll or joke? Negative value.
3 - This is really bad, but probably was a legit attempt. Still a waste of time.
5 - Average. A college student or LLM could produce this. At least I know what the book is about.
7 - This is quite good. At least a few times surprisingly so.
9 - Amazing. Works very well on several levels. Book author would probably agree.
10 - This will change how a typical ACX reader thinks or acts in a good way.
To me a 1-10 scale implies clearly that 5-6 should be average. If it's meant to be some weird academic scale Scott should say that.
I can't find a reference now, but I'd heard this is the common way of interpreting scales from 1-10 (at least in United States) and that if you ask large populations to rate [some average thing] from 1-10, it'll score around 7.
I assumed this is due to academia grading, but my assumption may be incorrect. There may be other reasons people settle on 7 as meaning "average." And given I can't find the reference, maybe I imagined it being the case. But if so, I really strongly imagined it.
I once talked to a psychologist who said that if you ask customers to rate you on a scale then they'll basically only use the upper portion of the scale, but that you can still extract useful information if you take that into account.
The video game industry is somewhat infamous for only using the upper part of the rating scale. Penny Arcade has joked that they use a "seven to nine" scale. I remember reading one time where a big-budget game was rated a 6 and it was a scandal and shortly afterward that reviewer was fired for allegedly-unrelated reasons.
I've seen several book authors complain that any rating less than 5 stars is effectively a downvote, because there's such a large number of books with an average rating higher than 4 stars that if you aren't one of them then you will effectively never be recommended.
I would speculate that inflated scales are due to a combination of
(1) people trying to be polite
(2) people exaggerating the goodness of anything that they publicly admit that they like, because liking a bad thing is low-status, and people have social instincts to protect their status
(3) actual corruption, where reviewers are compensated directly or indirectly for writing positive reviews (ranging from "reviewers know they'll stop getting privileged access to upcoming games if their reviews are negative" to "literal spambots that shill for their creators")
(4) feedback loops from all of the above that cause people to gradually re-calibrate their expectations higher and higher
The book review voting here is by secret ballot so it seems like that psychology wouldn't apply?
I expect that partially mitigates reason #1 from my list, but psychology is messy. It turns out that there weren't a lot of secret ballots in the ancestral environment, and human instincts about self-presentation do not fully drop to zero just because you used a secret ballot.
I expect reasons #2 and #4 still apply with basically full force.
It would be interesting if people settle on 7 as average. A 1-10 scale makes me think first of grading a person on their looks. Even there there's the cultural "She's a 9 in Chicago but a 6 in LA" thinking.
I can remember in grade school when girls would ask their friends what they rated each other, and they would almost always rate their friends a 7. I think it was always meant to be complimentary but not *too* complimentary.
I think people instinctively interpret a 0-10 scale more like a -5 to 5 scale.
5 (i.e. 0) then seems like it should mean "I feel neutral about this", with anything below 5 having a negative valence.
Assuming any actively terrible entries have been screened out before the review process, we would expect the remaining entries to average about a 7.
For what it's worth, I think of it somewhat like a 0-100% grade on a test, where 50% is quite bad but also much better than a 10%.
That sounds like a reasonable scale at first glance, and I like the idea of having some kind of rubric. I don't know how many scores reviews tend to get in the first round, but unless there's a significant critical mass, then getting rated by someone who's an unusually tough or an unusually generous grader would add quite a bit of noise to the scores.
Another idea I've had would be to calculate some kind of ELO-type ratings or a Condorcet ranking for reviews that get scored by people who have submitted scores on multiple entries, at least as a second signal for Scott to consider alongside the raw averages.
Could someone make the argument that a prediction market is more accurate or useful than a poll in predicting people's likely choices?
The simple argument is that those participating in a real-money market have "skin in the game" meaning they make more considered choices out of self-interest.
Pollsters also get paid more based on a reputation for accuracy.
Is there evidence that this improves outcomes?
(Not about prediction markets specifically) I believe there's experimental evidence from psychology that people suddenly change their expressed confidence when they need to place a bet on something, compared to when they are advocating for something but won't personally lose anything if they're wrong. (This is speculated to be an evolutionary adaptation to make people better at persuasion by artificially inflating their internal felt-confidence while they are engaged in persuasion.)
That's a good question. There's a tremendous amount of theory that says it does, but I don't know to what extend there is evidence. I'm not an expert on the subject, maybe someone else can point to evidence.
If you haven't already, read Scott's FAQ here (especially section 2): https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prediction-market-faq
The argument is the same as for every other case of "why should I believe a prediction market is accurate":
- If the poll is public knowledge, then people can use the information of the poll to inform their buying/selling behavior on the prediction market.
- If the poll really is more accurate than the prediction market (in a way that is legible to the public), then people can make money by placing bets on the prediction market that cause its results to move toward the results of the poll.
- In a sufficiently liquid/high-volume market, they will do so (because doing so makes them money) until the market is no longer worse than the poll.
Current prediction markets are not sufficiently liquid/high-volume for this to happen reliably, so currently a prediction market isn't necessarily more accurate than a poll. But the reason people think prediction markets have the potential to be cool is because of this general property: For any given source of info that you might think is a better predictor than the prediction market, a sufficiently liquid/high-volume prediction market will be corrected (by people placing bets that, in expectation, make them money) until the market has taken the extraneous source of info into account.
Or, as Scott puts it in the link above, "either prediction markets will be accurate, or you can get rich quick.”
Of course, that all relies on the market being perfectly efficient, perfectly rational, and not being manipulated in any way for any reason.
The less any of those factors apply, the weaker your argument is for trusting the prediction market over the polls.
It depends on what counts as "more accurate or useful". In the case of the USA presidential contest, I'm relying on the skill of prediction market participants to disentangle electoral college effects (swing states vs non-swing states, not-quite-proportional-to-population etc.) from raw polling numbers (which look like they are approximately intended to predict the popular vote).
Also, even if the contest _was_ purely a popular vote, the polls, plus an approximately known margin of error, translate into odds of victory via a cumulative density function, roughly erf((mean - 0.5)/sigma), so I'd be relying on the market to do that translation (though _that_ is simple enough that I could go ahead and do it, if it were the only wrinkle).
So, one of the more impressive application of LLMs I've seen is a site called WebSim (https://websim.ai/). It uses Claude 3.5 to generate fictional websites based on prompts or urls, which you can navigate like regular sites, clicking on links to generate new pages. Not actually useful for anything yet, but very fun to play with.
Here's the SSC subreddit, except in a universe where magic and supernatural creatures have recently returned to the world: https://websim.ai/c/dA3JpkVAKIYRu1UfR
Anyone here is into therapy/mental health/humanities/arts from a not purely analytical perspective (say has good access to their body/feelings/desire&fantasy inner life)?
Would love to connect.
I'm an ex-rationalist about to start my psychoanalytic training (to become a therapist), early on in exploring my interests in writing and humanities.
Would also appreciate any references to writers/bloggers/public intellectuals combining centrist/pragmatic/rationalist outlook with right-brain thinking/inner world and emotional awareness. So far most of the stuff I see is either very narrowly left-brained/analytical/purely technocratic, or very woke/progressive (or pure mystical-spiritual with more otherworldly interests), finding balanced perspectives has proved tricky so far. The Last Psychiatrist whom I'm yet to read might be a bit along these lines.
> Would also appreciate any references to writers/bloggers/public intellectuals combining centrist/pragmatic/rationalist outlook with right-brain thinking/inner world and emotional awareness. So far most of the stuff I see is either very narrowly left-brained/analytical/purely technocratic, or very woke/progressive (or pure mystical-spiritual with more otherworldly interests),
I dont think there much coherent content trying to navigate what rationalism offers/lacks without taking a hard swing into full panpyscheism
maybe darkhorse maybe whataltthistory
https://www.experimental-history.com/ is more attempting to save science in general
----
I consider myself a esoteric atheist and non reductionist physicist; losing my faith *hurt*, physics seems to be very real but I hate the rest of "the science"; if anyone wants to cc me for content/communitys for this world view id be interested
I think you’d find a lot of the people doing psychedelic-assisted therapy pretty simpatico. There’s an organization called Fluence that offers in person and online live courses in psychedelic-assisted therapy, including a couple courses on using psychedelics in psychoanalysis.
thanks for the ref!
I'm quite curious about ppl who understand the relational/psychodynamic perspective and are exploring psychedelics (or meditation, or somatics).
I have that prejudice that too many of the alt-healing folk are way too ignorant of pretty much everything the therapy practitioner community learned for over a century, and as a result a bit hard to make sense of for me as in my perception they might go deep and thoughtful on bodily-perceptual stuff and ignore the "elephant in the room" of relational dynamics and individual character organization and maps of meaning and all that.
There are a lot of groups under the psychedelic umbrella -- it's sort of like the Democratic party. There are the woo people; there are people who do conventional, smartly designed treatment outcome research (and are so far finding psychedelics are a pretty powerful intervention, although that bubble may burst) ; there are people with conventional degrees who call their orientation psychoanalytic, though I do not know any of them so don't do whether their perspective is diluted by woo, cbt, or even acetone; and there are people who are very interested in psychedelics as a money magnet. The Fluence course I took was by one of the people who do treatment outcome research, and he was great. Very interested in inner experience, but had no particular model for it (not, for instance, the psychodynamic one).
I’m into that stuff and happy to connect.
You’re already subscribing to Sasha and you’ve been on a Jhourney retreat, so you’ve probably got access to the usual suspects on Twitter / X like Romeo Stevens and Nick Cammarata. There are many other folks with interests along similar lines, some of whom blog.
For public intellectuals, Sam Harris is for sure in this world.
Is that the kind of thing you’re looking for?
Harris I should check out at one point. I know him from the meditation app but had a feeling he did engage philosophy/humanities more western civ tradition at least some?
I'd love to hear more about you, dm'd.
tpot is an interesting scene. I've enjoyed it quite a lot when I was just turning towards this inner world stuff from my previous life. at this point though my interest waned notably: I don't feel the scene oft tends to go as deep and thoughtful as I'd like in general (compared to eg many rationalist scenes or say psychoanalytic talks), and to the extent it does it mostly does it in the direction of buddhism/meditation (which is fascinating, and I do have a maintenance kinda practice of like an hour-ish a day, but not quite the direction I'm most excited about atm, though I'm looking forward to returning to exploring it more one day), or a couple very narrow&specific things like IFS.
it's like they have their own "tech stack" largely distinct from anything mainstream therapy does (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37199917/#:~:text=Individual%20therapy%20remained%20the%20most,personal%20therapy%20at%20least%20once.), most of what mainstream academic science has to say, most of what philosophical&spiritual traditions beyond buddhism have to say.
so I find myself curious about how they view things and enjoying occasional in-person convos with their practitioners I stumble upon during my voyages into NYC alt-healing scene, but not really continued interest in following their content, nor particularly constructive opportunities for online engagement.
> Sam Harris is for sure in this world.
sam harris is one of the extermists and when this debate comes up its often framed as between harris and petersons and the quote "metaphorical truth" on one side, while harris has claimed stuff like "consciousness doesn't exist"
Maybe this is not what you're looking for. Joe Navarro was one of the better authors when I was looking for books on body language. I believe he's a former FBI interrogator.
thanks, this could be interesting.
my thought on reading this: how does this compare with what alt-healing folks who are into somatics/bioenergetics and whatever other aspects of nonverbal communication have to say on this. would've loved to see one of theirs write a book review of this or smth.
I'm not sure if there's much overlap between the two, but I'm not deeply familiar with the alt-healing folks. If there was some overlap, I'd be interested.
I think the big takeaway from reading Navarro was to be humble in one's interpretations. Body language is somewhat idiosyncratic, so look for multiple signs pointing in the same direction. Establish some kind of mental baseline for an individual. You can detect anxiety from body language, but you don't know what that anxiety means without drilling down. This is why you need an interactive human to do interrogations. If they see anxiety where it shouldn't be, they can prod around to find out why it's there. But 'lie detection' does not exist, apart from the process mentioned.
I wonder if you'd mind mentioning what does "ex-rationalist" mean to you, compared to what you as a rationalist were? It never seemed to me like it was a metaphysical statement one can go back on, but I would say that as a rationalist-adjacent.
I use the word, as wambs do, as a somewhat imprecise symbolization of what community's (or, the few rat communities' I've seen up close enough) attitudes seem to be, not as having a strictly logical definition.. said I as a preamble, but it actly gets at one of the hearts of the matter: I tend to put more emphasis on symbolization (="recognition", complex situation -> single thought/concept grasping it, one of the types of (more right-brained one might say) cognitions human brain can do) over concept manipulation as rat community seems to me to do, and this is a pretty representative division hinting at much larger battles dealing with similar stuff: left brain vs right brain, external view vs judgment, science vs judgment, science vs hermeneutics, logical positivism vs I dunno who actly represents the other side there, very rational white tradition vs jewish kabbalistic/psychoanalysis cognitive-emotional integration vs eastern more purely embodied/spiritual and less logical stance. I haven't explored the history of these schisms at all, but guess I've seen some pictures hinting at the depth of that abyss.
Another angle that's quite relevant here is the turn/split within psychoanalysis (and other therapy traditions) between "one person psychology" vs "two person psychology", the change of perspective from the one where paternalistic therapist "sees through" the patient objectively, to the one where we admit we're all deeply soaked in our subjectivities and being able to really see even one other person's outlook takes dozens and hundreds of hours of analytic conversation, and objective reality or even shared reality in matters of human heart and social issues is quite a tenuous and not even always useful notion.
You can call this a shift of emphasis from early Yudkowsky, from "we see the world 90% objectively with 10% bias we can eliminate" to "90% of how we see the world (purely materialistic stuff aside) is about us not about the world, so better dive deeply into understanding our own heart and subjectivity to at least have a bit more perspective".
I do CBT, but I'm not hating on you for thinking it's cold and stupid. I used to think that too. But it's not, or at least can be done in a way that's not. Ask me questions about the the subject if you like.
your "analytical perspective vs feelings-based perspective" is a great topic of its own, sounds like "left brain vs right brain" to me, I think iain mcgilchrist is a (somewhat left-brained) canonical ref on this, which I haven't read yet (and not sure I will anytime soon, it felt to me from how he's talked about that he's more of a "sell left-brainiacs on right brain" than pushing the frontier of full-brain usage and attuning to one's non-logical intelligences that I'm more into at this point), I've internalized this stuff from twitter discourse, from psychoanalytic stuff, well maybe mostly from my own personal/spiritual development.
left=analytical brain is just half the brain, ignore the less explicit but more powerful right-brain bayesian inference machine at your peril ;)
have you read Jon Shedler or Nancy McWilliams summaries of research on psychodynamic therapy effectiveness? I don't think it's even fair at this point to say CBT is strongly preferred by the scientific consensus at this point, unless you go with some naive "more studies = better" and not adjust for academia's bias re what to study on this. Their read of the literature that I endorse at my current state of knowledge is that mostly psychodynamic stuff is as efficient, it seems might be more efficient when longer-term outcomes are measured, that the consensus is "common factors" that actly look quite psychodynamic in nature and the consensus can be read as implicitly somewhat pro-psychodynamic. and that's not even getting to the "left brain vs right brain" and difficulties with "operationalizing what matters" and just overall limited supply of really good and thought-out long-term studies on this.
I'm looking into the possibility of transitioning from my current SE job at a relatively large tech company to a more AI related job, possibly in a supporting engineering role. If anyone here is in the field and willing to talk to me about what's it's like and what might be needed I'd love to get in touch at iz8162k23 at gmail.
So, like most people, I have read a lot of pundits on the "should/will Biden drop out" issue, but I have not heard anyone discuss the incentives that indicate that, even if he decided to drop out, he would not say so now, because:
1. His decision might affect Trump's choice of VP, so it would be dumb to say anything until after the RNC.
2. Dropping out now = media coverage dominated by intra-Dem politics, bios of all the prospective nominees, etc, which means less coverage of the latest Trump crazy statements and policy proposals that they want suburban moms, etc, to hear about.
3. Dropping out now adds uncertainty re what US Middle East policy will be in the future, which is inimical to resolution to ongoing Israel/Hamas negotiations.
4. Dropping out on eve of the Dem convention = more likely whomever he endorses will get the nomination = he can more likely extract a promise in exchange (eg NATO ambassador or the like).
There are probably others. My point is that all of this seems obvious to me, but no one I read has mentioned it. If anyone knows someone who has talked about this, I would like to know who it is, so I can follow them.
PS: Note also that there is no way Biden was going to announce in April 2023 that he was not running, even if he were so inclined, because that would have told Russia, "in 2 yrs you are guaranteed to have a President who is less pro-Ukraine than the current one. (Not to mention the disadvantages of being a lame duck for almost two years).
Maybe the Ukraine point would be a big deal to Biden specifically, but otherwise that seems like a terrible reason not to announce that you're dropping out ahead of time. If you're going to drop out, do it when your party and the country can hold a normal election process. That should far outweigh a potentially small effect on a single foreign policy topic.
Well, yeah, it is particularly a big deal for Biden specifically, but I see it as a big deal for everyone. It not just "a single foreign policy topic; rather, it is arguably the single most important current policy issue, foreign or domestic. The extent to which a large power succeeds in forcibly annexing all or a large part of its neighbor could have global ramifications for decades.
Sure, let's assume that's the case. Biden failing to announce that he's not running has improved Trump's odds of winning, so it actually increases the uncertainty in US policy towards Ukraine. The bigger a deal one thinks Ukraine is, the more Biden should have tried to ensure a Democratic win in the 2024 election, which I don't think he has. He's run a conservative and not very active campaign while behind in the polls.
>Biden failing to announce that he's not running has improved Trump's odds of winning,
That was hardly clear in April of 2023.
Moreover, to be clear, my point is that any Democratic President would also likely be less pro-Ukraine than Biden, given Biden's history with Ukraine. Hence, an announcement that he is not running would, as I said, told Russia, "in 2 yrs you are guaranteed to have a President who is less pro-Ukraine than the current one." Hence, that would decrease any pressure on Russia to settle the conflict and hence vastly increase the chances that the war would continue for at least 2 years past April of 2023.
>Biden failing to announce that he's not running has improved Trump's odds of winning,
That was hardly clear in April of 2023.
Moreover, to be clear, my point is that any Democratic President would likely be less pro-Ukraine than Biden, given Biden's history with Ukraine. Hence, an announcement that he is not running would, as I said, told Russia, "in 2 yrs you are guaranteed to have a President who is less pro-Ukraine than the current one." Hence, that would decrease any pressure on Russia to settle the conflict and hence vastly increase the chances that the war would continue for at least 2 years past April of 2023.
>2. Dropping out now = media coverage dominated by intra-Dem politics, bios of all the prospective nominees, etc, which means less coverage of the latest Trump crazy statements and policy proposals that they want suburban moms, etc, to hear about.
As a voter, the current _low_ coverage of e.g. Harris is a problem. I have less of an idea of even her declared positions (let alone what she would actually do) than of Biden's. ( My default position, is "A pox on both their houses." )
I've been arguing the same thing for a while. If I were Biden a plan to withdraw, there is no way that I would announce it before the convention. I don't see what good would come of it.
One more thing that I’d add to your excellent list is that the announcement along with the nomination of someone decent would cause the biggest cheer in Democratic Convention history. They would get a massive media boost and support just at the crucial moment.
You obviously have a point (apart from the PS which is a bit too far-fetched: Based on that logic, no US president would ever announce that they do not plan to run for a second term).
My impression is that few pundits (= people who write about the US election for a living) mention your point about Biden's incentive structure since they live by clicks, and once they make a post/article/essay saying " it is rational for Biden to wait until short before the Democratic National Convention to announce that he steps back, if that is indeed what he plans to do" , they have nothing else they can write on the topic in the upcoming months, except to repeat "wait and see."
In short, since you are interested in incentive structures: The incentive structure facing pundits (and mass media more generally) suggests that they will not mention that Biden's incentive structure is to wait until short before the Democratic National Convention to announce if he steps back (and in the meantime that it is rational for him to insist that he does not).
>apart from the PS which is a bit too far-fetched: Based on that logic, no US president would ever announce that they do not plan to run for a second term).
But, none of them ever do!
And Ukraine is a special case, given Biden's history there. I can't think of a single other instance in which a decision not to run would have that type of effect on a key issue.
Edit: PS: October 7 is too late. There would be ballot access issues in many, if not most, states.
>But, none of them ever do [announce that they do not plan to run for a second term]!
Lyndon B. Johnson was a special case:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_B._Johnson#1968_presidential_election
>Three days after meeting with Califano and McPherson, Johnson announced that "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President."
Also Polk, in advance. That one term was *ridiculously* effective.
Many Thanks!
Why waiting until Oct 7th specifically? That date might be significant for other reasons, but is there an independent reason for it to matter here?
You are right, I meant before the Democratic Party Convention, August 19th (edited).
...I would not put the probability that he steps back then at more than 50-50, though.
Given October 7, a Democratic primary would've been a shit show as candidates try to triangulate between the activist pro-Palestine class and the establishment pro-Israel donors. Combine that with tax-the-rich and DEI promises for domestic programs and whoever survived would be painted by Trump as a pro-terrorism Marxist.
Re Ukraine, my point was not just about Trump. It was about every possible Democratic nominee. Given Biden's history re Ukraine, dating to when he was VP, he is likely to be more pro-Ukraine than any Democratic replacement.
Re the Middle East, whether our policy is good, bad or indifferent is irrelevant. What is relevant, from the perspectives of both Israel and Hamas, is that current policy is known, and Trump’s policy is more or less known. If Biden drops out, then both Israel and Hamas have to try to discern what policy might be under several potential nominees. The smart thing for both would be to wait and see who the actual nominee is, so there will be no current agreement.
Interested in talking to you about this rgaster@incumetrics.com
About what?
Did you mean to post this as a reply to my post? I don't want to embarrass myself cold emailing you without being called to do so.
sorry this was a reply to e dincer on olivine sands
Update regarding carbon sequestration via dumping olivine sand in open sea:
TLDR: I'm trying to start a carbon selling company and claim some EU or NL funds doing so, but with no experience of carbon sequestration, carbon markets or starting a company for that matter.
I first heard about this here in a post, and it really intrigued me. I read and thought about this in this past year whenever it crossed my mind. I found about Vesta and read what they put on their website. I'm from Turkey but living in the Netherlands for quite some time and am a citizen, but not very fluent in the language and these facts will matter later in this post.
Lately I saw on the news the national council of science or something like that advised that carbon sequestration, including via olivine is desirable. I did some research and found out there are indeed some support from national and EU level funds for companies doing this. I also knew from being a dork that there were parts of Turkey where olivine mines would exist, and after researching that I found there indeed are. I communicated with one (via a gmail address, so I probably didn't come across very professional) and they say they'll sell olivine sand to me around 20$ a ton.
Taking into account the price of carbon or EU/NL subsidies it sounds like there's a business there while also helping the planet.
Things still to figure out: what kind of company or nonprofit I should form? Which funds/programmes/etc to apply and how? Where to dump the olivine sand for maximum carbon capture (warm, sunny and high saline or the opposite), and where to dump it for easiest environmental permits (eastern Mediterranean or Atlantic ocean? Which countries' EEZ)? Also, how to take those permits? And how to license eventually sell the carbon credits that I'll hopefully create?
I contacted RvO (Netherlands Enterprise Agency) if they can answer those questions and waiting for replies. I found out in the meantime is that every year applications there for subsidies happen in the month of September. I'm hoping to figure my stuff until then and able to catch the batch of 2024.
I'm not posting this to ask for help or support (not that I don't need it) but just to let the community know that I'm trying to do something on this front. If something happens I'll write in another open thread. Just let me know if I'm doing something apparently stupid from your point of view and I seem to be not aware of that.
There was an article in a recent issue of Science News about this - might have something useful for you. It was more about putting it on land than water, and using more substances than just olivine sand. Mentioned several organizations which are doing it currently.
Thank you very much for this
Usual candidates for 'where to put it' are areas with natural agitation by sand and water (the beach or shore), or else spread out on cropland, where rain, plants and plowing will also ensure gradual conversion to carbonate.
In your case I would say one of the main requirements is that it should be near a railhead.
I don't know whether any direct air carbon capture startups are active in the EU, but if so you could reach out to them and find out whether they can use your material. The ten or so companies that I follow in the US have a variety of ideas about 'what do I do with this CO2 that I pulled from the air?', but at least a couple of them want to combine their CO2 with alkaline minerals or dross of various kinds. Blue Planet, for example. Now, *possibly* natural olivine rock doesn't meet their requirements, but it seems worth checking into.
Where I found is near the sea, so I'm exploring if it's as efficient to spread out on shallow seas where salinity, seawater temperature and sunlight is ample. I hope carbon licensing works like that as well. Otherwise it'll be too difficult to do it on scale. If I had a huge fertilizer company I'd just mix it with fertilizer so it'll be spread on fields but where I stand if sea thing doesn't work I'll probably not be able to do this.
There are a lot of VCs that are interested in investing in carbon sequestration. Even if you aren't ready to raise money, they can be good to talk to because they will probably have good advice on the carbon markets side, since other companie in their portfolio will have had to figure that out
My problem is, I don't know any VCs and I don't know how to get ahold of them. I also never spoke to one so I wouldn't know how to discuss my issue with them. Maybe this comment here would be of interest to one.
Well the secret in a situation like this is to use the most powerful and important tool in the entrepreneur's tool box. Just try some shit. Google VCs that invest in cleantech, look up who backed other carbon sequestration companies, search for cleantech accelerator programs. Then send them all an email. Ask ChatGPT to help you write it if you need to.
You might want to apply for funds because money's always nice. But carbon credits are a market mechanism. Effectively you remove carbon from the atmosphere (through whatever mechanism), get it verified by the relevant agencies, and they give you a credit which you can sell on an exchange. If the price of credits (which are commodified) is higher than the price you paid to generate the credit then you make a profit. If it isn't you make a loss.
If I were you then I'd go around to Turkish exporters to the EU (specifically in cement, iron, steel, aluminum, fertilizer, certain chemicals, and electricity) and explain to them that unless they start offsetting the carbon released by their processes their tariffs to export to the EU are going up under the new Carbon Border Adjustment rules. They could buy credits on the open market and hope that the floating price makes sense. But you have access to Turkish mines and do whatever process. You're willing to take block orders at a fixed, below market price and handle all the paperwork they need to prove they actually did the carbon credits. But they have to buy in bulk for a set period of time (say a year).
They'll like this because it insulates them from fluctuations on the carbon credit market. You'll like it because it gets you consistent revenue you can use to invest in the carbon capture process and big, steady contracts. Then you generate as many credits as you can and sell the excess on the open market.
Thank you for your insightful reply. That's a bit of a different point of view than I had but makes sense. Still, I'm a bit reluctant about doing business with big Turkish businesses because they tend to play rough and rule of law in Turkey right now is influenced heavy by who you know or whose son-in-law you are or whatever. On the other hand I have a cousin working for Shell TR so maybe they need carbon credits and I can sell to them without getting shoved around in the process.
About selling to companies yearly with fixed (below market) prices makes perfect sense though, and they need not be Turkish companies anyway. I'm hoping the RvO will help me with finding customers though. Being a technical person whole career, I have no sales game of my own.
I would aim for more small and medium exporters. I also wouldn't incorporate in Turkey. If you have Dutch citizenship I'd incorporate there and have the purchase contracts be Dutch. If they try to not pay then you can sue them in Dutch court and because they're exporters to the EU if they don't comply the EU has all kinds of legal pressure to bring against them. And Dutch courts are pretty good in my experience.
They might help you. But any startup like this is going to be about sales. You need to find partners that will supply you at good prices, dump it in the sea for a fair price, and who can buy the credits on the other end. A lot depends on getting your production costs lower in part through things like bulk buying and your preferential access to the Turkish market.
Is there a mechanism for requesting a question/topic be put onto the ACX community survey?
I recently discovered I have visual snow (https://eyewiki.aao.org/Visual_Snow) and
a) am curious about the rate of occurrence, given that it's massively underdiagnosed and I'm not confident current estimates about occurrence rate were performed well
b) am curious about how it associates with various other things
c) think it would be nice to publicize the condition, given that it's very easy to never realize that one has this despite it being a pretty different visual experience than most people apparently have
I have two closely related posts this week on the relation of fiscal and monetary policies on growth.
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/income-wealth-and-debt
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/bracing-for-a-more-inflationary-world
Re this part: "It's perfectly OK (at least with me) for the government to pay social security benefits or send military aid to Ukraine. But that is not investing in things that will yield income in the future." I am a little surprised that you do not note that there might be a difference between a deficit that results from tax cuts and a deficit that results from increased spending on infrastructure or education or R&D or whatever (depending on what people spend their tax cuts on)
After the assassination attempt on Trump, he said that his life was saved by the hand of God.
Let us accept that as true. The real question, if so, is whether it was the act of a merciful God, who wanted to preserve the life of the means of our salvation? or the act of a just God who wanted to prepare the agent of the destruction we sinners so richly deserve?
Me? I just don't know. As Lincoln said: "The Almighty has His own purposes".
The answer is that that's a false dichotomy: God is both just and merciful, and he destroys our corporal bodies only to make us repent and save our everlasting souls.
Just not today, if You please.
And moves in mysterious ways…
He also opens windows when He closes doors.
Banned for this post.
I guess you had to ban LearningHebrewHatesIsrael but it's a shame.
First of all I get it. Not only was (new-name) LearnsHebrewHatesIP pro-assassination but (excepting his imagination of Yahweh's hell - source?) he sounded serious too. Not serious enough to do it himself of course but you know he kind of sounded like he really really wanted Trump dead.
(Unlike my own offering of simply giving Mencken a voice: https://ydydy.substack.com/p/some-thoughts-are-better-left-unsaid )
Even so, while I obviously agree that anyone who feels so strongly about something so silly as a president is making a very unfortunate error for themselves and their emotions, it should be fine to "wish" for whatever you like and to say so.
I support the ban because obviously that sort of talk ends up spiraling with back talk and eventually leads to a whole lot of hate among real people who can hear each other (rather than for Trump or dead-dude who can not) and actually cause a great deal of unhappiness even if it's just about what I regard as fighting over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
In addition, I think you had to do it not just for the good of anyone who might get caught up in it, but for the tone of the whole platform if that kind of thing is allowed.
And finally, considering how badly people behave on the internet that would not surprise me if his own colorful wishes ended up with bad people counting you personally as responsible for allowing it and not banning him for it, and using it as a cudgle against you who definitely doesn't deserve it (not that he would but he seems to be cool with whatever response might come from that comment).
At the same time, as you can see from the above I don't take it all that seriously and I think that you don't take it all that seriously either (other than for its potentially deleterious second-hand effects), so, while a ban makes a lot of sense (based at least on the criteria of the local snitches) I think he's also someone worth having around and that therefore perhaps has been for a shorter period I don't know what periods you usually use but I would think a week or a month if need be.
This isn't because I found that particular comment something that anyone in the world really needs to read but because I remember when he showed up shortly after October 7th last year. He was very angry and very violent but I realized that he was also sincere.
And sincere people can grow.
I wrote him at some length not expressly dealing with the accusations or hatreds or whatnot but pointing out that he seems to not have all the information or to have considered all the perspectives but would probably want to do so.
He seemed logic-based rather than team-based, *even if he was* shouting for the bloody murder of one particular team.
It's true that he's more colorful and passionate than most but (from the admittedly limited number of comments of his that I have read) he seems to be someone who actually cares. About people and about truth, and about checking his presumptions in his own head so that he can change them if rationality and heart recommend him doing so.
Anyhow, the commentariot here is a diverse bunch. But while I can't say that I've learned much information about the outside world from those comments of his that I've read, I do feel like I learned about him enough for him to distinguish himself here as a good bloke whose passion doesn't only fire outward, but also inward. In other words, a (loud but) humble fellow.
That's a rare quality.
It may be a quality more highly represented here than on the general internet, but even here it's rare.
He even went so far as to change his nom when he realized that Jews/Israelis aren't the devils he thought they were and that their enemies aren't quite so innocent as he had priorly felt.
That's an impressive thing. It's humility.
Anyway, he seemed like one of those few dudes on the internet who might turn into a publicly helpful high quality person given some time to explore and grow.
If this is an epitaph, so be it, but I liked him (even at his most genocidal against my own tribe and self) so I wish him well.
>By fucking Allah, I'm so ready for this Attention Succubus to finally disappear.
Patience. Trump is 78. You will get your wish. If he is elected - presidents get good medical care, but the job _is_ stressful, and tends to reduce the lifespans of those holding the office...
Yeah, let's just shoot everybody we hate, that's not going to be a problem at all.
But then you don't get to complain when the bad guys do another bomb attack or raid or fire off rockets at the people you like, because they're just doing what you want to do - getting rid of those they hate the fastest way they know how.
Trump is to humans as shit is to food. He is refuse. The world would be better if everyone would shoot the likes of Trump.
It's not like we're denying him the fucking coming springs, he is 77. May the next guy to try to put him out of his misery be successful in this most holy of missions.
Relax, dude. He’s not a saint, but neither is he the Antichrist. He will probably be the next POTUS, and if you want peace in the Middle East, that’s probably a good thing.
As you say, he's 77. Death is coming nearer without any need to rush it by murder.
Holy of missions? Remember that when you are on your own deathbed, gasping for one more second of life, how you wished death on others and death by violence, at that.
Nit - Trump is now 78. Hmm, https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html gives the life expectancy of a 78 year old USAian male as 9 years, so he has better than 50:50 odds of finishing his term (if the stress and medical care cancel each other) - but not by that much...
A lot of the stories of God saving someone physically is because they also need spiritual saving. (Unless you're put in an oven or lion's den.)
Alternatively an investigatory God, who is laying open Trump's soul in Job-like fashion? Let's wait and see how Trump actually reacts.
Right now there's a lot of noise from people who want him to turn out one way or another, but putting real-life fanfic head-canon aside, current indications seem like he's basically the same as he was last week?
Either way it doesn't really matter. If you accept that God exists then even if his intentions are to destroy us then you can't argue that we don't deserve it. God is the ultimate truth, you don't argue with that.
Me I think God is sick of progressives and wants to send a plague just for them.
God always sends a prophet first, who is necessarily ignored. Elon Musk I suppose in this case?
Him or Peter Thiel, though usually prophets never seem to be that successful.
Something something prophet loss ratio
Maybe a clever god who saw there was a good chance a near miss at a rally would give him an anxiety disorder that precluded in-person campaigning.
Let us leave it that he feels grateful for having survived, and not wade into the murky and stormy waters of theodicy.
I am with you on this.
Oh so much this. Trump is often best taken seriously, but not literally. He means that he's grateful for it and doesn't ascribe his survival to his own prowess, but to Providence/luck/what have you. That's all.
I don’t think he’s nearly as modest as you paint him..
In 99% of cases, I agree with you. And it may not even be true humility--he knows that *his audience doesn't want him to brag here*. Because there's a fixed pattern for this sort of thing (narrowly escaping death)--you attribute your survival to luck, the hand of fate, divine intervention, *anything except yourself*. And since his base is particularly religious...divine intervention it is.
It does *not* mean he actually necessarily believes that God personally intervened. It's just a fixed phrase for "I got lucky". One that drives hyper-literalists, hard-core anti-theists, and those inclined to uncharitably interpret his words (the latter of which represents a huge swath of society) nuts.
I guess this is the 1%.
Do you know that back in the day he would phone the society columnists at NYC papers and pretend to be someone else calling to say great things about Trump? They all got onto it after a while, but really? Who does that? He is constantly claiming to be the only man that can fix difficult problems. I guess you could say he is merely aspirational but there is a difference between being charitable and being a complete sucker. I think at the end of the day the only reason he won't destroy the country is the country won't let him, when push comes to shove. Hopefully he will do some good while he's in office...but whether he does or not he is going to claim he did.
Anyway, we are due for a change and this is the change we are getting. BTW, we are all sent by God.
I can just imagine the phone call:
"Hello. Have you heard about this guy Trump, Donald J. Trump? He is a great individual, just a great individual, runs such an impressive real estate empire like none you've ever seen. And he associates with just the best people, the best people, from everywhere. You just have to look into this wonderful, sociable person, Donald Trump, Donald J. Trump."
I did not know that but yeah, lol, very much on brand
The dragon being... Twitter? The impulse inside people for a leader who makes a visual display of being strong and vital?
A clipped ear is not a fatal wound.
Perhaps Trump is Antichrist Lite.
The ear is the organ through which the speech of others enters our mind. A wound in the ear symbolizes a failure to listen to others, and a tendency to put oneself ahead of other people. In other words, pride.
(This is all tongue in cheek, of course.)
You sure have a nose for making tongue in cheek comments about ears. I didn't have the stomach.
Footnote, please? :-)
This is great
The Ac from New Jersey, who just comes to town on the weekends.
Ah, good point.
I've published a book. Or rather, republished. The short memoirs of Thomas Brown has been out of print in the over 260 years since its original publication in 1760. Thomas Brown was a 16 year-old soldier in the French and Indian War who was severely wounded and taken prisoner . He endured three years of "uncommon sufferings" and wrote his brief personal narrative when he returned home. It is an exciting, if horrifying, drama of human suffering and stoicism in the face of danger.
I know early American and frontier history isn't normally something that has much crossover with this community, but I hope you will consider purchasing a copy and learning about something unique that you would not normally have been exposed to.
Our small team put a lot of work into this little passion project of ours.
https://frontierthesispress.com/
Also, like everyone else here, I now have a substack. It'll mostly exist to complement whatever work we're able to do with the "publishing company." If you're interested in learning about something completely different, I encourage you to subscribe.
https://frontierthesispress.substack.com/
I read this one some time ago, I think in a book of Indian captivity narratives, and there was always puzzled by exactly how [spoilers] Brown escapes the clutches of the French. I just went back and looked, and one moment he's working as a servant (essentially forced labor) for a French family in Montreal, and then he says simply "when Col. Schuyler was coming away, I came with him to Albany."
Based on wikipedia entries, I assume Col. Schuyler is Peter Schuyler, who was captured by the French and released in a prisoner exchange. But how did Brown get to go with him? Wikipedia also says that Schuyler "paid the ransom for approximately 114 of his former men from captivity in Quebec with his own money," but Brown wouldn't have been one of Schuyler's men. Did he just get swept up in the ransoming?
If this is all covered in the introduction of your edition, and your answer is, "read my book," well, fair enough!
Apologies for my late response here.
Without revealing too much of the narrative, for those who've purchased the book, here's our footnote on the matter:
"Colonel Peter Schuyler (1707-1762) was a member of the famous Schuyler family of New York and New Jersey. At the start of the French and Indian War he was given command over New Jersey's forces. He was captured at the fall of Fort Oswego in 1756, paroled in October 1757, recalled from parole in July 1758, then released for good in November 1758. Schuyler reportedly paid the ransom and secured the release of over 100 English prisoners, apparently including Thomas Brown."
Understanding is that Schuyler paid for the freedom of as many English prisoners as he could, not just those who were formerly under his command.
But your confusion is justified. Brown is very nonchalant about the event and provides no context for the reader on Schuyler.
Sweet! Thanks for clearing that up!
Just ordered a copy. Thanks for getting this out on paper!
Thank you!
>I know early American and frontier history isn't normally something that has much crossover with this community
I suspect that quite a few people over at datasecretslox.com would be interested.
True!
I've gone back and forth on it. Part of me wants to embrace the old-fashioned nature of the subject matter and lean into print. But that's probably silly. For now I've got some stock I want to sell off, but once I start on that I may offer a digital version. No Amazon presence yet. Honestly other than a few museums/historic sites this is the first place I've announced it.
In the wake of the assassination attempt on Trump I expect there to be a lot of debate over what role Trump's opponents rhetoric played in motivating the shooter. This will go on regardless of what we learn about the shooter's motivations, and I think it's still a useful conversation to have.
My take -- we absolutely do *not* want to legally prevent people from calling their political opponents dictators-in-waiting, or claiming that democracy hangs in the balance, because it may someday be the case that these things are true, and people need to be able to say so.
But, if you are going to engage in that kind of rhetoric, you shouldn't do so lightly, and you definitely shouldn't do so dishonestly. It is entirely unsurprising that someone might use violence to prevent a dictator from coming to power and ending democracy, if they truly believe that to be the case.
If those of Trump's opponents that were using that kind of language prior to Saturday really believed it, they should continue to say it. And if they never believed it in the first place then they should be criticized and pay some reputational/political price for their dishonesty.
(For the record, I strongly oppose Trump and I'm worried about a second term, but I don't think he'll become a dictator if he wins)
Any arguments for controlling speech fall flat because your just shooting the messenger
Let the anger out, we will need a political revival where I dont ***want*** to comment of where they are getting the drugs and blood to pump into biden. Call for assassination early and often, it will give the secret service data to track for how much resources to allocate day to day; while letting out steam from the collaspe of this era, and maybe there will be honest non violent solutions I can trust in between.
Question: If calling a political opponent a "threat to democracy" is unacceptably heated rhetoric, what about calling your opponents "un-humans" and calling the next election a fight to "save western civilization"?
Or how about declaring that you are in the middle of a "second American Revolution"? Or saying that your opponents are a "global theocracy"?
(All of those were said at the Heritage Foundation conference a week ago.)
Or what if a candidate makes a speech that incites a riot, one which leads to an attack on the seat of government and multiple deaths? Is that better or worse than inciting a lone gunman?
As others have pointed out, it's foolish to grade a party's rhetoric based on who happened to roll a 1 on the Nutjob Dice this year. But if you insist on doing so, the Republicans have been rolling those dice for longer and more often, and they already rolled a 1 four years ago. The idea that "threat to democracy" is rhetoric which is uniquely beyond the pale is laughable.
I think it’s fine to call Trump a threat to democracy, based on Jan 6.
A lot of conservatives, though, including myself, basically agree with some form of the “save Western civilisation” or “American revolution” rhetoric.
We strongly oppose the decolonisation narrative that has been pushed on us, as well as the notion that Western civilisation is somehow morally corrupt because slavery (which Western countries did not invent, but which they were the first to abolish.)
We want to go back to a time where George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were revered across both sides of the aisle as heroes, not criticised for being slave owners (given moral progress and considering them relative to their times, this makes about as much sense as criticising them for not knowing how to drive a car.)
If you don’t understand these things, you will never understand Trump’s appeal, and never understand why people would consider voting for him. A lot of people in the leftist bubble just genuinely do not understand these things. I feel sorry for them.
Wait, did Lincoln own slaves? I *think* that's untrue.
He didn’t, as far as I’m aware, but he has been demonised by the far left for holding attitudes that were progressive for his time but are racist by 2024 standards. That’s why I used the “knowing how to drive a car” analogy
As far as I can tell, Lincoln is mostly attacked for fighting against Native Americans early in his career. Which was also a fair for its day thing of course, but the far left won't hear that.
Slavery was an issue of debate in writing the Constitution, and they knowingly compromised to keep the South, including the 3/5 representation, prohibiting the end of the slave trade for 20 years, and including a fugitive slave clause. So I don't think we can honestly say it was just a given. It was a dirty compromise, and they knew it. We can still respect great historical figures while also acknowledging their shortcomings. I also think the 1619 project goes overboard.
Beyond Trump, I wish we had a conservative side that defined themselves by more than opposing DEI, tax cuts, and going back in time to some golden age. The Republicans need a real platform.
I also think discourse in this country is pretty broken. The far right and far left are defining the debate too much. There's plenty of room for agreement and working together in the middle, but we're not taking advantage of it. We could be working on building more housing and energy and otherwise making America stronger, and instead we're letting the culture war distract us from the work that will make all of us better off.
> There's plenty of room for agreement and working together in the middle, but we're not taking advantage of it
The ironic part is that Biden's term saw a sharp increase in bipartisanship in congress. I was actually surprised, since I expected a repeat of the Obama years where the Republicans stonewalled everything.
I think at least some things were successes, and, I think, bipartisan ones. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act I _do_ see this as making America stronger. TSMC is a great company, but it would be nice to not have all advanced chip fabrication on the other side of the Pacific.
Agree. Actually I think the Republicans do have a real platform this time round. They have a lot of smart people who have signed on to work with Trump. See Project 2025
Project 2025 is run by people who *used* to work for Trump. I presume most of them would be happy to be part of a second Trump administration, but I don't think they've been invited. And Trump has already written his draft of the 2024 Republican platform, which will almost certainly be adopted this week. It bears very little resemblance to Project 2025, it is barely a platform and even less a policy document, and it says basically "Donald Trump is awesome and will do many awesome things, but not things that would frighten moderate swing voters who might be persuaded to vote for Donald Trump".
Project 2025 is all about policy, but it's a wish list by a bunch of wannabees. And it's not clear that any of those wannabees will have anything to offer Donald Trump on January 21.
>If those of Trump's opponents that were using that kind of language prior to Saturday really believed it, they should continue to say it.
I mean, morally yes, strategically that may not be wise.
But of course it is ridiculous to compare Trump to Hitler. His politics are not even far right; he takes criticism from the right for his stance on abortion. In fact they are basically the mainstream centrist Democrat platform from, oh, about 30 years ago, when Trump was a registered Democrat (incidentally he also bears resemblance to Bill Clinton for his attitude towards women).
Trump has an inflated opinion of himself and speaks in hyperbole. Hitler killed six million Jews and started the bloodiest war in history. These are not the same thing. The media has been exaggerating the dangers of a second Trump presidency for awhile now, and Hitler comparisons are an example of why trust in the media is rapidly falling off.
Every election since 2004 being called by one or both sides "the most important election of our lifetime" has turned into an extra long set-up of Boy Who Cried Wolf. I certainly don't think the lazy, undisciplined, elderly Trump is an existential threat. He'd be a lame duck the second he walked in. His foreign policy (being mostly what lame duck presidents get to spend their time on) was unpolished and brash in appearance but cautious in practice. He had ample opportunity in 2020 to seize enormous power either in response to covid (with liberal media types begging him to nationalize the production of factories, a key element of fascist economic policy) or in response to the protests at the urging of his own side. He is just too much of a normie boomer civic nationalist flag-waver to really do anything too radical.
But if Biden DID think Trump was a uniquely existential threat to American democracy, then it would probably have behooved him not to have said that the mild-mannered and reasonable center-right Mitt Romney was gonna put black folks "back in chains". And if someday there really IS a candidate who might tear down the democratic system from within, nobody is going to believe it, because every election of their life was treated as existential by the parties and the media goes along with it for ratings.
It's hard to unilaterally disarm over this, you don't want the other side running to the polls while your side sits at home because it wasn't very important, but it's also very hard to keep credibly saying these elections are world-shakingly important as we get older and notice our daily lives never change that much or change in any particular direction based on a D or R holding the White House. At some point, a temperature reset back to the level of, let's say, the 2000 election during the debates: lockboxes and fuzzy math. Imagine there'd been no butterfly ballots, and a clean but close win for Bush. Yes social security solvency and education policy are important, and people were indeed upset about No Child Left Behind... but nobody's getting shot over that, normies aren't crying at home watching election returns over that, and people aren't living as if having the wrong person in the White House is damaging their soul.
I generally agree, but if we look at GWB in particular, the real impacts to focus on are the Iraq War ($1T plus in spending and somewhere on the order of 500k Iraqis dead as a result) and PEPFAR (up to 25 million lives saved in Africa). The temperature does need to come down, and presidents especially get far too much praise and blame for the economy, which they can barely affect. But sometimes they do make big, life and death decisions.
I agree they do, although to Americans only really the US economy affects our daily lives, we're pretty insulated from the misadventures of our leaders abroad. My point there, why I specified "during the debates" is that prior to the ballot controversy, 9/11 and Iraq, that election was not treated as being particularly world-shaking by the media or voters. Nobody in the young internet was talking as if they'd have a meltdown if their guy lost. The rabble rousers in media were even comparatively tame, with Rush Limbaugh mostly still going on about the crooked Clinton regime and dinging Gore for wanting to regulate everything, and the lefties just making fun of Bush for his past drug problem or then-current Texas cowboy persona.
Any president could end up with a 9/11 on their watch, but how consequential a term turns out to be isn't related to how intense we felt before the election, and the winner's response to a crisis doesn't necessarily reflect what they said during the campaign. Bush was famously against "nation-building" until circumstances talked him into 2 prolonged attempts at it, if I had thought there would be a 9/11 and I had a more isolationist bent, Bush would've seemed like a great choice on election day 2000. Both his primary opponent and his general election opponent had been supporters of US involvement in the Balkans, and he'd criticized it. And conversely, if you had cared about foreign humanitarian aid, you probably would've voted for Gore who had written a book about environmental threats across the globe.
Yeah, predicting actual performance is hard to say the least, and it would be great if we could be a little more humble in our predictions about what candidates will do as president.
As far as Trump being a normie goes, I hope you're right, but stuff like Jan. 6 still gives me more than a little pause. In my mind, that alone should easily make him unelectable, but the electorate apparently doesn't agree with me.
I annoyed some people over here by calling the 2022 Swedish election unusually unimportant. With the party configuration as it is, the options were a moderate center-right government or a moderate centre-left government.
That said, American democracy is clearly on the line here, which is not usually the case. Electing Romney would have meant four years of Romney. Electing Trump might mean anything - he already attempted one coup, after all.
You can say Trump "attempted a coup" if you'd also say that a baby flailing away at a toy xylophone "attempted to play Brahms Concerto No 2".
A coup attempt doesn't stop being one just because it was perpetrated by rank incompetents.
Just as there still was an assassination attempt on Trump even though only his ear got it.
Hitler's *first* coup attempt was also a piece of nonsense.
Trump, like the baby with the xylophone, has neither the ability nor the intent, nor even the ability to FORM the intent, for something like that. He wanted Mike Pence not to certify the election... ok? And what was gonna happen then? A few days later when there's still no more evidence, and nobody with the levers of actual power has rallied to Trump's side, what then? How is it a "coup" attempt without any ability to seize power? It's not 1804, a set of fake electors isn't going to fool anybody, you don't have to send an investigator down to Arizona by covered wagon to find out why you got two envelopes from down there.
That wasn't a coup attempt, it was a hissy fit by a toddler, that everyone knew was a hissy fit by a toddler, and nobody was ever going to give him any candy no matter how long he held his breath and his face turned red. The country wasn't in danger, democracy wasn't in danger, it was a big giant nothingburger, and to this day I am simply baffled beyond belief at how sheltered and naive and innocent all these poor little sensitive liberal arts grads in the media must be to think that THAT was what a coup attempt looks like.
Lack of power to make it so is a terrible reason to not consider it a possible coup attempt. The Beer Hall Putsch didn't have the means to take power either. There is a long list of silly coup attempts in history. I think Jan. 6's significance will remain a subject of debate, but dismissing it outright isn't credible, in my opinion.
>Every election since 2004 being called by one or both sides "the most important election of our lifetime" has turned into an extra long set-up of Boy Who Cried Wolf.
Agreed. (Maybe a fairly large fraction of the time before that as well?)
BTW, the private sector version of this is that at most (all?) of the annual all-hands state-of-the-company meetings that I've attended, the CEO said "This year is a turning point for our industry." or words to that effect. It would be much more believable if they only said that 1 year out of 5 and said "This year is business as usual." for the other 4.
I've always despised the narrative that people are responsible for how the lowest common denominator of the population interprets their statements. The whole deal with Sarah Palin and the crosshairs comes to mind. If someone is deranged enough to try and assassinate people they disagree with, the rhetoric around their target being dangerous is not the problem. It is not the burden of the rest of society to coddle their fragile minds.
The Gabby Giffords shooting immediately came to my mind. In that case, jumped to the conclusion that the shooter was motivated by the Palin ad, but in the end it turned out the shooter was a lunatic. It may be the case that the guy who tried to shoot Trump wasn't motivated by politics at all and was instead a delusional lunatic who thought Trump secretly implanted an alien parasite in his brain, or something.
But I still think it's worth taking this moment to discuss how people should talk about their political opponents, and that is what I was mostly trying to comment on in my post.
I disagree that all would-be assassins are necessarily deranged and that rhetoric has no impact. The possibility that your rhetoric could play a partial** role in motivating violent actions isn't a reason to be silent, but it is a reason to be honest. And if you were being dishonest, you should be criticized for it.
**I want to be clear that I am in no way equating words and actions or trying to reduce political violence down to a single, or even dominant, cause.
It's early days, so take this with a large pinch of salt, but I've read that the shooter had a reputation for being very conservative in high school, and was a registered Republican, but had also donated to Democrat political causes. IOW, it's quite possible he didn't really have a coherent political view, and his motivations were primarily apolitical (mental disorder, wanted to become famous, something like that).
All American presidential assassins, except for John Wilkes Booth, can be categorized into either lunatics or losers.
Lunatics: Charles J. Guiteau (Garfield), John Hinckley Jr (Reagan), John Schrank (Teddy Roosevelt), Richard Lawrence (Jackson), Samuel Byck (Nixon),
Losers: Leon Czolgosz (McKinley), Lee Harvey Oswald (JFK), Arthur Bremer (Nixon), Giuseppe Zangara (FDR), Squeaky Fromme (Ford), Sara Jane Moore (Ford).
The losers have a better track record of success, which I suppose shouldn't be surprising to anyone.
Same same, right?
Dude was Deffo political, but that doesn't mean that anything follows logically.
If it wasn't politics it could have been anything, and if it wasn't trump it could have been anyone.
Rhetoric?
We had a two-year deep investigation into Trump as Russian agent that...does not look very good in retrospect. We've had multiple impeachments. We had the entire January 6th issue which...has not proven terribly persuasive to voters. We've had multiple legal prosecutions and one conviction on a financial crime no one really cares about. I mean, rhetoric is a thing but Democrats have consistently acted like Trump is a would-be fascist in multiple situations with clear legal and law enforcement consequences.
As far as I can tell, most Democrats sincerely want Trump imprisoned or dead because they think he's trying to destroy democracy in America. They just want it done through official channels, not an assassin's bullet. I mean, I get being concerned about rhetoric but...Trump got convicted a month ago. Changes to rhetoric won't make a difference when the actions are this loud.
"one conviction on a financial crime no one really cares about"
So you agree it's a crime. Do you not believe in the rule of law?
>So you agree it's a crime. Do you not believe in the rule of law?
"“Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed? We want them broken. You’d better get it straight that it’s not a bunch of boy scouts you’re up against. We’re after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you’d better get wise to it. There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted—and you create a nation of lawbreakers—and then you cash in on guilt. Now that’s the system, Mr. Rearden, that’s the game, and once you understand it, you’ll be much easier to deal with.”
- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Is that the "Rule of Law" you want us to believe in?
Because the only thing that stops the contemporary United States of America of having that sort of mockery of "Rule of Law", is a well established policy about not enforcing the law 95+% of the time and in a reasonably understood manner. And the things Trump has been convicted of, have until recently been solidly in that 95%.
It's the white-collar equivalent of locking someone up for jaywalking. And when some county sheriff locks up the local opposition candidate or muckracking journalist for jaywalking, the proper response isn't "He should have used the crosswalk, Yay Rule of Law!", it's making sure you have an adequate supply of torches and pitchforks.
There's a very, *very* short list of politicians that I'd vote for Donald Trump over. But Alvin Bragg is one of them, if we imagine them running for the same office. And for that matter, so is anyone who could only win the presidency over Trump's literal dead body. We don't select our leaders by assassination, and we don't choose them by selective prosecution either.
I do, which is why, like all Democrats deeply concerned about the rule of law, I demand Bill Clinton be convicted for perjury, Joe Biden be investigated for raping Tara Reade, and both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden face civil suits for improper handling of classified documents.
Wait, it’s almost like Democrats aren’t actually deeply concerned about the rule of law.
Maybe it’s that we have norms in addition to laws and one of the norms is “don’t prosecute your political opponents for stupid BS, even if it is technically against the law.”
Democrats have allowed their hatred for Trump to blind them to this. And it will cost them electorally.
I very much believe in the rule of law, which is why it drives me up the wall to see it abused. "Let's fire sixty cases at a political rival so our side can look good" is not law, it's brigandage.
They tried getting him on fraud charges, where even the banks alleged to have been cheated by the fake mortgage application never bothered bringing a case, and banks are not famous for their merciful attitude towards letting money owed to them go.
So we got the campaign finances charge, which I still don't understand, because it seems to be "we're charging you with paying hush money - which is fine, or must be fine, because we're not going after Stormy Daniels for blackmailing you - out of the wrong bank account. See, if you just put it down as a legitimate campaign expense, it would have been fine - unless you had done that, then we would be charging you for doing that".
Get the guy for something serious, not "this is ordinarily a misdemeanour but we're going to inflate it to a felony, but we're also not going to go after the other political campaigns which have played fast and loose with campaign finance laws".
I'm not a lawyer, nor did I follow the hush money prosecution super closely, but from what I heard from sources I generally trust, I'm not sure that Trump actually did commit a felony. Being convicted of one and committing one are two separate things.
My understanding is that what Trump did would normally be misdemeanors, but because they were done to cover up another crime, they got elevated to felonies. But the NY DA didn't even specify the underlying crime in advance, which seems sketchy as hell. And once he did, it wasn't a violation of NY state law, it was a violation of federal campaign finance law. And not only that, but the feds declined to prosecute Trump for it. And *then*, the NY DA used some other legal tricks to come up with 35 separate convictions for what was really one underlying offense.
I dunno, that all just seems very...dubious to me. I'm not at all convinced that the convictions would survive appeal. But let's be honest, the point was never to come up with a case that would actually send Trump to jail, the point was to damage him politically. Ironically, but somewhat predictably, it had the opposite effect.
Like I said, I'm not an expert here, so if anything I said was wrong please correct me.
Well he can appeal it and if it’s bogus he will win out, because our legal system isn’t that screwed up. The thing is we in New York City really hate him because we’ve had him around for a while.
Kinda no. Like, I know this isn't asked in good faith but...I feel like our democracy isn't healthy enough for firm rule of law right now.
In retrospect, investigating the Hillary servers in 2015 was a big mistake. I think it's unambiguous that Hillary broke the law but the end result was a massive escalation of lawfare against Trump, epitomized by the fact that ongoing intelligence investigations by the CIA and FBI were central to the 2016 and 2020 elections which is just....extremely bad, no matter where you stand. Having a firm rule of law kinda requires healthy institutions and trust.
Like, when Xi Jinping iced Bo Xilai in China...I'm sure Bo Xilai was corrupt but that's not why he got iced, that was an excuse for political persecution. Firm rule of law requires everyone to trust that the law is being applied fairly...which no one does at this point.
So...abandon it, at least in the firm case for leading politicians. If there's no way to prosecute a major politician on either side without half the country going into revolt...maybe don't prosecute them. Just as a practical matter.
Because, I mean, you caught Trump on a minor financial crime. This is Washington DC. Do you really think the overwhelming majority of politicians haven't committed any crimes, especially given especially broad definitions of crimes? Can and should Trump convict any Democrat he can? That seems...bad.
My beef with Hillary about those damn servers is not so much breaking the law, it's that any of us who have worked in any kind of public service job - or hell, even private business - know damn well we would have been crucified if we did anything remotely similar with work data and the whole regime of security and confidentiality and privacy we are obliged to work under.
The big freakin' boss of an entire government department just pissing all over the basic procedures the greenest Grade III newbie would have hammered into them was not a good look for someone campaigning on "I'm so experienced and such a great public servant".
I didn't want her up in court, I did want her to get hit with the same penalties as any other civil/public servant who screwed around with work data would have been hit.
Let's not forget Anthony bloody Weiner using his wife's laptop for his sexting, the same laptop she was using for work-related emails, which is what kicked off the entire re-opening of the FBI investigation in the first place. Fudge me, if I did anything like that, I would have been *slaughtered* in the job when I was working in a public service/local government role.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Weiner_sexting_scandals#Criminal_conviction_and_divorce
"On September 21, 2016, the Daily Mail published an article claiming that Weiner had engaged in sexting with a 15-year-old girl. It's not known how the Daily Mail learned of this incident as in the Daily Mail article the girl's father says he did not contact the police and this article was used as reason for the FBI and NYPD to begin investigating Weiner. Devices owned by Weiner and Abedin were seized as part of the investigation into this incident. Emails pertinent to the Hillary Clinton email controversy were discovered on Weiner's laptop, prompting FBI Director James Comey to reopen that investigation late into the 2016 US presidential election. Hillary Clinton has cited Comey's decision as one reason why she lost the election to Donald Trump."
These are the people that were Hillary's closest confidants, or at least Huma was, and this was the level of faffing around they were doing. You remember, the people telling us they were the adults in the room and should be trusted with the power to make war if elected?
What is your opinion of the prosecution of Hunter Biden?
"Do you really think the overwhelming majority of politicians haven't committed any crimes, especially given especially broad definitions of crimes? Can and should Trump convict any Democrat he can?"
I think people, especially politicians, should be investigated and prosecuted for crimes they commit. Regardless of their political affiliation.
At least two democrat representatives are under investigation right now for financial crimes. I don't see any evidence that Biden is looking to pardon them (though he is well within his rights to. However Trump pardoned multiple political cronies for crimes they were convicted of.
My point in responding to your comment is that your imply the Trump investigations are only politically motivated and not occurring because the prosecutors and grand juries (where relevant) believe they have evidence of a crime. But Biden has basically no history of using his political power against his opponents or to benefit his allies; yet Trump does. So if we are worried about using political power against our political opponents, there is a lot more evidence that Trump will do that (including his own statements that he wants to). I dislike both Biden and Trump, but ones seems eager to commit crimes and disregard any rules that he doesn't like.
Probably a bad idea to prosecute Hunter. I mean, I know what would happen to me if I was on tape smoking crack but...throwing the immediate family of presidents into jail requires a bit more political stability than we have. Best of my understanding, Hunter isn't going to jail and that's probably for the best.
But, as for political prosecution, Hillary Clinton for the email scandal and Joe Biden for document retention were investigated by the FBI but no charges were filed because, explicitly in both cases, the people in charge exercised their discretion. Right now, that's probably for the best...but that same discretion must be extended to Trump. It would be a phenomenally bad idea for Trump to instruct the FBI to reopen and pursue the document case against Biden...but Trump beat his lawsuit fair and square. Biden didn't.
And, all things considered, these are minor. The FBI has been forced to publicly apologize for wiretapping Trump tower during the 2016 election and lying, sorry, "misleading" the FISA court in order to do so. Has the FBI ever lied to a federal judge in order to wiretap a Democratic presidential nominee and then publicize harmful information during and after the election? (1) Can you understand why Republicans might be skeptical of the decisions of law enforcement agencies to pursue one party and exercise discretion for another?
(1) https://www.npr.org/2020/01/11/795566486/fbi-apologizes-to-court-for-mishandling-surveillance-of-trump-campaign-adviser
Hunter got prosecuted on gun charges, didn't he? Given that he's a known druggie and, eh, enjoyer of the companionship of ladies of negotiable affection and that alleged images of his private parts were all over the Internet, plus there's a current story about his illegitimate kid with another lady of negotiable affection where the mother is plainly trying to lever more money out of the family, on balance I think "yeah, good call".
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2024/07/13/let-me-meet-my-grandpa-joe-biden-secret-grandchild/
"After falling in love with the east coast on a school trip, Ms Roberts moved to Washington DC to study crime scene investigation after abandoning her basketball career.
She met Hunter in late 2016 when she and a friend were invited to an after party at his Rosemont Seneca office in the Swedish Embassy.
The former vice president’s son was smoking crack in a pair of boxers covered in parrots. The pair embarked on a yearlong entanglement during which Ms Roberts claims they both professed their love to one another, although she says now he may not have meant it.
In her memoir, Out of the Shadows, which will be released next month, Ms Roberts, 33, details everything from watching Hunter dance on a pole in the gentlemen’s club where she worked, to whisking her off to his father’s Virginia home with his sister-in-law turned girlfriend Hallie Biden – and then there was the time he scarred her by dropping a crack pipe on her chest."
Hunter may not have meant his pledges of undying true love? Say it's not so! Do not disillusion me that romance is dead!
Though hang on, what the heck was Hunter doing in the Swedish Embassy? Are rents so high in DC even the embassies are having to rent out rooms?
>Firm rule of law requires everyone to trust that the law is being applied fairly...which no one does at this point.
Very much agreed. Weirdly, my impression is that, in a nutshell, Trump threatened to weaponize the justice system, "Lock her up!", while the left actually did weaponize it.
It's a shame they didn't get Trump on any serious violations of federal law, like transporting dirty eggs or possessing tiny spoons.
Making cheese with unpasteurised milk! Crossing state lines to sell raw milk - that's one he surely has violated, the fiend!
https://milk.procon.org/raw-milk-laws-state-by-state/
"At the federal level, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) bans the interstate sale or distribution of raw milk. All milk sold across state lines must be pasteurized and meet the standards of the US Pasteurized Milk Ordinance.
According to U.S. Federal Regulation 21 CFR § 1240.61, “No person shall cause to be delivered into interstate commerce or shall sell, otherwise distribute, or hold for sale or other distribution after shipment in interstate commerce any milk or milk product in final package form for direct human consumption unless the product has been pasteurized.”
Do you honestly think no one was prosecuted for their role in protests in 2020/2021?
Maybe the charges were dropped because there wasn't enough evidence to get a prosecution? Or if people take a plea that doesn't result in a felony conviction, which is common, that still a punishment and could be disastrous for someone's life. I dont think these events are good evidence of our nations reverence for the rule of law.
Latest decision in the law suits is that the classified documents case has been thrown out:
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cljy6yz1j6gt
I guess they'll just have to keep on hammering about the CONVICTED FELON - the felonies being "he paid blackmail out of the wrong account".
It will be appealed and will likely end up in the SC which is a fine outcome for Trump because the clock will run out. Thomas sent the memo, if you know what I mean. I don’t think a majority of the SC will agree with him if and when the time comes. John Durham was appointed by William Barr in precisely the same way, so this argument is a slim reed in my opinion.
I have to say, I am surprised at how many people here believe this is all political persecution
The classified documents case looks like it plausibly could be a real case, though I think it's a bad idea to actually put high-level political leadership in jail for misuse of classified documents other than selling them to the Chinese or something. (We don't want the political leadership of every security agency to be afraid if they cross the bureaucracy, they can be sent to prison once their guy is out of office.)
The other three cases against Trump seem to me obvious politically-motivated prosecutions.
I think these cases are pretty damaging to the Democrats' message that Trump is a danger to democracy. I mean, Trump tried to keep power after losing an election and lied to the world about the election being stolen, so he is a legit danger to democracy. But trying to put the opposition leader in jail on bullshit charges is also a danger to democracy. When the story was "Republicans try to play sketchy legal games to keep power despite whatever the voters may want," that was a good reason to vote against Trump. When the story is "both parties try to play sketchy legal games to keep power despite whatever the voters may want," it's not much of an argument to vote for Biden.
>When the story is "both parties try to play sketchy legal games to keep power despite whatever the voters may want," it's not much of an argument to vote for Biden.
Seconded. And there was also an attempt by the left (but, in fairness, opposed by some Democrats) to keep Trump off the primary ballots in two states. I don't trust _either_ the right _or_ the left to honor the lowest level feature of a democracy, that _voters_ decide who holds offices.
Well, it's a tiny bit convenient that all these cases just suddenly dropped at the time when he was going forward for a second run, on top of places trying to make it illegal for voters to vote for their choice of guy by not allowing his name on ballots.
Begins to look a little bit like political persecution. Though I am vastly amused by the "HE IS A CONVICTED FELON!" blustering on social media, it's a bit grasping at straws.
There's memes (of course) about it.
https://www.tiktok.com/@assalations/video/7375321350447156522?lang=en
https://x.com/ElginCharles/status/1310048453247066113
This has got to be one of the best, though:
https://www.complex.com/music/a/markelibert/50-cent-uses-donald-trump-many-men
I am sure that there are lots of memes; that is part of the problem.
The convenience nostrum has a problem; the crimes he is accused of were allegedly committed right at the end and just after his first term. They did not just "suddenly drop." When would it have been more convenient to investigate these things? The National Archive tried for the better part of a year to get those papers back from him while he gave them the run around. What were they supposed to do? Just say "Screw it, let him keep them. He's Donald Trump and he was sent by God to save us."
2. It took a while to break the cone of silence around the events of Jan 6th. If Pence had not bailed on him he might well have gotten away with it. The proposition that he did not do anything wrong boggles my mind.
"It took a while to break the cone of silence around the events of Jan 6th."
The Cone of Silence? I'm old enough that this was TV viewing when I was a kid:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWtPPWi6OMQ
That case getting thrown out actually convinced me that even if trump isn't a fascist, Republican insiders are.
What the fuck do you mean that you can't special council, but only if it's my guy?
According to Thomas in the presidential immunity case, there isn't a legal basis for special counsel to even exist as an office.
According to Thomas, children don't have First Amendment rights. Don't listen to Thomas.
John Dunham was appointed by Bill Barr to investigate "Russia-gate" in precisely the same way Jack Smith was appointed. Thomas is like his own private Idaho.
This is "fascist" not in the political science meaning of that term, but in the more common internet meaning of "someone I disagree with about politics."
The classified documents case didn't even get to the merits, Cannon threw it out on the theory that the special counsel was improperly appointed, which is fishy. If the actual evidence against Trump got to be presented in court, it would look pretty bad. But probably wouldn't change many voter's minds.
I basically agree with this - I'd add a couple of points:
- when people say (in reaction to this or other events) "everyone needs to tone down the rhetoric", 99% of the time they really mean that *other* people should tone it down but they have no intention to do the same. A cynical explanation is that they think amped-up rhetoric is effective and they want to kneecap the "other side"
- I am against *calls to political violence* specifically, but "tone down the rhetoric" is too vague. Especially if it means "something that might inspire someone to commit violence". By that standard, people on the right saying "tone down the rhetoric", who are saying in the same breath that Biden is responsible for this (e.g. by calling trump a threat to democracy) are themselves guilty, because "Biden is responsible for this" is also something that might inspire someone to commit violence!
- Trump once retweeted something saying "the only good democrat is a dead democrat", made fun of Paul Pelosi, called for people to attack protesters at his rallies and he'd pay their legal bills, thinks the January 6 people are heroes, repeatedly has called for people he doesn't like to be tried for treason ...
- I believe trump is a threat to democracy. I'll just note that this was a very common view after January 6, for which trump is totally unapologetic, and the only thing that has really changed is that time has passed and we all become habituated to once-unthinkable events.
- I don't think Trump is Hitler. But ... if tomorrow I uncovered Trump's secret plan to be like Hitler ... obviously I would say so!
"the only good democrat is a dead democrat"
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/president-trump-shares-video-of-supporter-saying-the-only-good-democrat-is-a-dead-democrat/
This apparently is out of context. No one was calling for anyone's death. The original person was saying democrats are "politically dead", whatever that means.
If you're going to take any sort of stance against "harsh rhetoric" then I think you have to be against this sort of thing as well - walking right up to the line, wink-wink-nudge-nudge, and trying to give yourself plausible deniability.
If Chuck Schumer said a week ago "President Trump should be KILLED!!!!! ... you know, at the polls", you better believe people would be making hay about it!
Now maybe this guy just got rhetorically out over his skis in the moment, and then realized it and tried to dial it back ... but I doubt it given your link also says he's called for Democratic lawmakers to be executed for treason. Seems like it's a habit of his.
And either way that doesn't excuse Trump's retweet!
Biden said, “I have one job, and that’s to beat Donald Trump. I’m absolutely certain I’m the best person to be able to do that. So, we’re done talking about the debate. It’s time to put Trump in a bullseye."
Rhetoric is just words. Some may interpret what Biden said as dangerous, but I consider that interpretation to be dumb and faulty. If Chuck Schumer said Trump should be killed...at the polls, then it's kind of tasteless, but no one ought to claim Schumer was saying (hint, hint) that Trump should actually be killed.
Further, Trump RETWEETED the comment. Is retweeting the same as originating the comment? Even if it is, Trump would have meant it in a physically harmless context. Everything Trump says is hyperbole*.
* Yes, this is hyperbole.
Bullseye thing seems clearly less violent than "the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat" - "bullseye" has a lot of non-violent meanings, but "the only good X is a dead X" in my experience usually really does mean killing.
I think the ur-example is "the only good Indian is a dead Indian", allegedly said by Philip Sheridan who really did take part in wars of brutality against Native Americans, and was understood by everyone literally. He denied saying it, which I think shows how extreme people saw it even back then.
"Further, Trump RETWEETED the comment"
It looks like the retweeted tweet is now deleted so it's hard to tell, but IMO that makes it worse. Like I said before - people can get rhetorically heated in the moment and dial it back (seems like that might've happened here), and can have more context, but retweeting you don't have that excuse, and often the context isn't there you're just retweeting that bad thing.
The alleged shooter Thomas Crooks was a registered (and actual) Republican and wore a T-Shirt from 2nd amendment absolutist youtuber "Demolition Ranch" , i.e. a gun nut and leader of a network of gun nut influencers. More to the point, Trump himself joked (?) that he would be "dictator for a day" on reassuming office. So where do you draw the line between Trump and his opponents? Because Democrats alone on the other side wouldn't cut it.
I haven't seen reporting on him being an "actual" Republican. But being registered as a Republican isn't in-and-of-itself all that odd. Pennsylvania has closed primary elections, meaning you have to be registered with the political party whose primary you are voting in. Some people register just so they can vote for or against a particular primary candidate with no intention of voting for that person in a general election.
From what I hear, every major elected official in Butler County PA is Republican. I've lived in single-party counties like that in the exurbs and rural counties, you always vote in the primary that matters for local elections. The voter registration probably has nothing to do with national politics.
For example, Kentucky is full of registered Democrats voting for Republican federal candidates, because for decades local politics were controlled by Dems, all the local officeholders were Dems, and regardless of your national-issue politics no person who was serious and actually wanted to hold a local office would run as a Republican. The Dem primary is where the local elections are decided, and then you vote for whoever for President and Senator in November.
It appears this was a Republican one-party county, their DA said it was about 65/35, so duh of course you register Republican. Also, if you're insecure and bullied and such, you might do it to try and fit in. Or if you have some secret shame you aren't open about, and just want to look like you're outwardly conforming to the most common beliefs in your community, great for that too.
He has been reported as being an "actual" conservative, and an outspoken one, according to his high school classmates.
https://www.inquirer.com/news/pennsylvania/thomas-matthew-crooks-trump-shooter-id-butler-20240714.html
That fits perfectly with his Republican voter registration and his fascination with guns.
The "primary voting" hypothesis is highly questionable because he didn't bother to vote in the 2024 presidential primary.
As for his $15 donation to ActBlue on inauguration day, there is speculation that this was the result of a bet he lost with a liberal classmate.
Sure, it's all circumstantial speculation at this point. The picture I'm getting though is that of an ultra-liberal gun nut who took the 2nd ammendment seriously in one of its original intentions: To defend the country from political tyranny which he recognized in Trump. If he supported the Republican party, then because they're the pro-gun party. If he donated to ActBlue as reported, then because the Democrats they support represent liberal values better than the Republicans, on the whole.
We are all products of bias. The picture I'm getting is of a far-right gun nut who either:
1) decided Trump wasn't far-right enough on issues like abortion
2) was suicidal and simply saw an opportunity for suicide by SS squad while he could also prove his increased marksmanship to the highschool shooting team that rejected him because Trump happened to come right to his small town
I think 2 is most likely. That the shooter didn't have to travel at all to make his assassination attempt leads me to believe he wouldn't have bothered if the rally hadn't been nearby. His familiarity with the territory can explain why he knew he could get on the roof. Perhaps he would have shot up something else locally if the rally hadn't come to town.
(1) Strikes me as very unlikely -- even if he thinks Trump isn't sufficiently anti-abortion (which lots of people do), it's hard to think of any plausible alternative candidates who'd be notable firmer on the issue, so shooting him wouldn't achieve much.
I keep reading Democrats claim the ActBlue donation was made by a different, much older person with the same name, which seems plausible given the only way anyone would know that such a donation was made is to search for his name on a list. The shooter was 17 when the donation was made and it's pretty rare for 17-year-olds to make political donations. But who knows.
It would be unusual for a *randomly selected* 17 year old to be politically interested enough to make a donation with his allowance, sure. But a 17 year old who would come to attempt political murder 3 years later?
Agree that changes the calculation. I suppose 20-year-olds who make assassination attempts are even rarer.
If I believe any of the stuff allegedly coming out about the shooter, he wasn't allowed join his school gun club because he was such a bad shot.
This could just be a case of a young guy going "I'll show them who's a bad shot!" and nothing deeper.
I find it hard to believe someone couldn't join a gun club because he is a bad shot. He would be accepted to improve his skills, in that case. Maybe he wouldn't be allowed to join if he is unsafe?
He didn't make his high-school shooting team, but he was recently a member of a gun club, the head of which has made public statements condemning his actions. (According to what I read somewhere, which could of course, like anything else, be a fabrication.)
I mean yeah, the USA cherish quite a few gun-related traditions, and I'm sure their connoiseurs would be more qualified than I to correctly categorize this particular act. Still, I believe "young white man showing his bullies who's the real alpha male" lies typically in the domain of shool/office/mall mass shootings, not assassinations of high-ranking political figures.
Though I will also accept the plot twist that the shooter didn't actually fail to kill his intended target.
That WOULD be an awesome twist.
The shooter also apparently donated $15 to a leftist PAC in the last election, which is very strange on two levels. One, what kind of 17 year old teenager donates money to politicians? And why would anyone bother to donate a measly sum like $15? I expect the investigation will reveal that the guy was very weird.
1. Republican who lost a bet and had to donate to $15 because Biden actually got sworn in or something.
2. Democrat who registered cross-party to vote against Trump in primary.
3. Something else
Everything so far feels like "school shooter who got a chance at something bigger."
My big question is how he figured out he *could* show up at this event and find a building. Do people regularly try to get on buildings for sight advantage and he found a crack? Did someone blab about the security situation and he overheard? Did he just show up at random and got lucky?
An ex-first-lady once came to an event at a place where I worked. A fundraiser, I think. (I didn’t actually attend.) We had it looking its best of course. The SS came a day or two before and covered all the windows with paper, which didn’t look very nice.
"Did he just show up at random and got lucky?"
He was a local so he likely knew there were flat-roof buildings around.
Which also points to an interesting thing - only a complete amateur could have pulled this off. What professional would plan to just climb a flat-roof shed within a convenient shooting distance/position? This would "obviously" be covered by the very Secret total Service super-competent security people, right? right???
But the amateur just sees a convenient building, climbs it, and only a last-second head turn by Trump denies the success.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/live-updates/donald-trump-rally-shooting-assassination-attempt?id=111916828&entryId=111959850
Um, so, the building he climbed on? It was the police staging ground.
I don't know what's going on any more.
Oh it's again the luck of an amateur. Nobody bothered to check/monitor The! Police! Staging! Ground! because who in the right mind would chose that as the shooting position. But Crooks didn't know it was The PSG, so he just went there.
Don't get me wrong, I think this was a massive security lapse, it's just that a pro would not count on one in the planning.
Yeah, it seems inconceivable that there is an unsecured rooftop that close to the event. 130 yards is nothing in terms of shooting, and Trump is very lucky to still be alive. I expect ex-Presidents get less protection than active ones, but it still seems inexcusable. For reference, I talked to a guy who was in the Secret Service during Bush Sr. - Clinton, and he told me 1000 yard security perimeters were common.
How often does someone even try something like this?
"Why was the roof unsecured" is a very important question.
But I'm also wondering "how did Crooks know about that unsecured roof?" Random? Casing over several weeks?
Yeh, that’s weirder. He seems to have no social profile really, for his age. He has to have posted something online though.
There is video on Reddit showing random bystanders spotting him climbing up the roof and informing law enforcement. It looks like a colossal screw-up so far.
AP has a report of a local cop climbing up and then retreating once Crooks aimed a rifle at him, which (I guess) was just a few seconds before the shooting. I'd like to compare to what we've got on video.
It seems a lot of people knew there was a guy with a gun but there was no way to rapidly get this information to the Secret Service agents that could move Trump off-stage.
I believe I saw a Discord commenter posting an image (salt accordingly) that it was actually a different Thomas Crook, age 60-something, who made the donation, which would simplify the partisan affiliation side of things. Doesn't much affect the overall conclusion of "shooter was random crazy idiot", though.
The Thomas Crook who donated used the 15102 zip code. Which is Bethel Park, where the 20 year old lives.
The form had the same street address as his voter registration. The address where cops have been for past 24+ hours.
The PAC, who has every incentive to disassociate with this, has been interviewed and commented and never said "no it's not that guy."
Thomas Matthew Crooks' father was "Matthew Crooks" and was apparently an active Democrat. I wonder, given that one has a middle name that's the same as the other's first name, if there's any potential for confusion between father and son.
I don't find that very strange at all. The answer is: a politically engaged one without a ton of money.
The Democrats are not acting like they believe Trump will become a dictator. They're acting like Trump is an opportunity to move left. They've actively supported pro-Trump candidates since they think they'll be easier to beat and this gives them more space for a further left agenda.
This means one of two things. Option one: the Democrats are incompetent to the point they think promoting fascist politicians is a good way to combat fascism. Option two: the Democrats are lying and do not genuinely believe Trump is Hitler but think it's a useful narrative to get centrists on their side without making policy concessions. And I think it varies from person to person but that regardless they deserve a severe hit to reputation for it.
I also think is a better explanation for the progressives falling in line behind Biden than the conservative idea they're getting everything they want out of Biden. I think they have a higher proportion of people who think Trump is a literal fascist and they're genuinely acting like it. Which means supporting Biden or really anyone who's not Trump.
That's me!
I think trump is to disconnected form reality to be anything in particular, but a lot of his dudes are fascist enough and the party that accreted around him is definitely ur-fascist enough that I would pick bidens rotten corpse over trump. Shit, I would take Romney over trump. If Dubbya is the only R in living memory I would not pick over trump.
So I'll go with the lukewarm neolib centrist legalistic asshole that the D's put forward; at least they won't make collective bargaining or miscegenation illegal or some shit.
Yeah. See, even where I disagree I respect that you and people like you are not lying. I do think that (eg) Schumer and Biden are lying because they are not acting like people who believe what you do. Because if they did then what you're saying (more or less) is the logical response. Likewise if I thought there was a real chance of Stalin getting into power I'd vote for AOC or whoever over them.
If you really think Le Pen is Hitler (or whatever equivalent) then the French Communists dutifully marching behind Macron is the correct response. Anything less and I don't think you're serious. (Though I also don't fault them for negotiating the concessions they did. I don't demand they suspend politics. Just that they treat it like they're fighting Hitler and are willing to compromise to keep him out of office.)
ETA: I also think anyone who thinks voting in an election or engaging in democratic politics has no effect is fundamentally unserious. Which disqualifies segments of the DSA and Twitter left though not AOC herself.
Dunno, I'm pretty sure my vote for president in Maryland this November will have zero effect.
I disagree. But also I said democratic politics. That includes things like organizing drives or whatever.
Heck, I'd even take *Mike Pence* over Trump! I disagree with Pence about basically everything political, but at least he won't try to overthrow the government.
The Democrats aren't even replacing their obviously unpopular candidate in Biden. Some who prioritize winning elections are, but plenty of them don't seem to have that priority.
If they go after Biden and fail their career is over.
To which I'd ask the same question of the various Republicans who didn't want their own careers destroyed by stopping Trump: so what? Surely you can do something after politics.
If saying it improves their chances of winning the election, why would they need to actually believe it?
To be honest.
??? I think the issue is the role _Trump's_ us-against-them rhetoric has created the environment for the assassination attempt.
In another context, that would be called "victim blaming". 'Oh, so you're saying that because she wore that sexy dress, she deserved to be raped?"
Not that you're the only one; on a radio show this morning in my own country they had two American people on to talk about the assassination attempt (I think one was FBI or ex-FBI, I wasn't listening that closely), and the professor lady went full-on "well if he didn't want to be shot he shouldn't have made us shoot him".
What about the people at the rally who got shot? It's their fault for being Trump supporters?
I think this is the ultimate end of the "punch a Nazi" rhetoric that has been going around for a few years now.
Yeah. Progressivism/wokeness is collapsing under the weight of its own moral nihilism. Maybe God really did save Trump, insofar as He interests Himself in human affairs
This is cope. There is no evidence of it collapsing.
You don’t think so? Far right parties are gaining across Europe, DEI bureaucracies are being abolished in red states across the US. In my country (Australia) a proposal to give the Indigenous extra rights (the Voice) was demolished at the polls 60-40 last year.
I'm not saying there have been no victories, and they're well worth celebrating, but the long defeat continues.
The Australian referendum was certainly a victory, as are the anti-DEI measures in Texas and Florida (the most prominent of the "red states"), but I think you're overstating the "far right" gains in Europe: I'm not convinced the parties called that are really all that far to the right, that their gains in the polls will translate to actual wins (it didn't in France, where it seemed most likely), and further, if the deep state in Europe in anywhere near as entrenched as it is in America, electoral victories won't matter all that much.
"My take -- we absolutely do *not* want to legally prevent people from calling their political opponents dictators-in-waiting, or claiming that democracy hangs in the balance
...
If those of Trump's opponents that were using that kind of language prior to Saturday really believed it, they should continue to say it"
I agree and will make a stronger statement. If they really believe that Trump is or will be a new Hitler then they should applaud the shooter and call for more. And maybe be willing to try themselves. Because Hitler was that bad. Germany (and Europe) would have been better off even having a civil war in the early 1930s than it was after holding WW2.
That's easy for you to say since you are unlikely to face retaliatory assassination attempts.
No one will ever again be a new Hitler. No two dictators are the same.
If you believe someone to be capable of becoming an evil dictator of some sort, to be moral you must first wait until that person exhibits signs of evil dictatorship enough that it is morally correct to kill them. Good luck with that. "Evil dictators" have the support of enough of the populace that they can maintain power, until they get overthrown. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Saying Trump will try to be an authoritarian or a dictator is not the same as saying he will be like Hitler.
Just as a practical matter, applauding political violence puts a target on the backs of all politicians. So if some Democrat said, Trump should be assassinated, that’s like inviting the other side to come shoot at him.
It's possible that people believe the risk of Trump becoming a second Hitler is high enough to say so loudly, while still harboring enough doubt that they don't want to engage in preemptive violence.
Oh my, the hubris of it all. You have no idea which future will be better, and by what right do you take away the choice from the millions of people who support him and want to vote for him. Violence is very rarely the right option.
If the choice of those millions only affected them, sure, then I'd agree you have no moral right to interfere. But if it DOES, by raising your taxes, taking your guns, inhibiting your ability to "women's health" your babies, deporting/jailing your friends, etc., I hold that to be a pretty solid basis for a right to try to stop them.
Huh? We live in a democracy, where we vote for people, and not everyone is going to be happy with the outcome of the vote.
So by your logic is it OK for someone afraid of another Biden presidency to go and shot him? That seems like a terrible view of the USA.
Such an attempt is highly unlikely to succeed, and basically guaranteed to end in one's death. I would strongly advise against it on practical grounds. On MORAL grounds, … call it "undemocratic" if you like, but I don't believe that majorities have a right to infringe on individual liberties, and thwarting attempts to do so is the right of free men.
Wow, I'm as libertarian as the next guy. But going around saying that trying to kill people is OK. No! Your rights end where your fist hits my face. And a bullet to the head is much more than a fist to the face. Again I say No! Not in my America. But you get to vote here too.
I think that's wrong for a lot of reasons, the main one being that not every wannabe-dictator actually succeeds and murders millions of people. "I am very afraid of what this person might do" is not a great reason for preemptive violence.
If a hypothetical future US President actually started doing terrible things and there was nothing stopping him, then you would have a better argument for justified violence. Otherwise anybody's fears will get somebody killed.
Thing is, we've had Trump in power already. It's not like "who is this guy called Adolf and why does he want political office?", we know what Trump is like as president.
Yes, there's a lot of scare-mongering about Project 2025! I think it's about as realistic as scare-mongering about "if the Democrats get elected they'll institute socialism, because look at the DSA manifesto!"
We don’t know what he’s like with fanatically loyal appointees. 40 of his senior advisors and cabinet secretaries, including his own vice president, have said they will not vote for him. Don’t you think that information matters?
The January 6 plot was foiled in part because the acting Attorney General refused to go along with his desire for them to say the election was fraudulent. He wanted to fire him and elevate a loyalist (who had already drafted a letter to that effect), but several senior DOJ attorneys said they would resign if he did that. This time around he will not have those obstacles standing in his way.
Was the DSA manifesto written primarily by former (or current) Democratic White House staff?
It's possible Trump is telling the truth when he says he has no idea who's behind Project 2025, but if so that says some very unflattering things about the current state of his brain since most of those people worked in his administration.
Trump's never been much of a policy guy, and he certainly hasn't gotten any sharper as he's gotten older, but if he's reelected *somebody* is going to be making policy in his administration, and even if he doesn't end up hiring the exact Project 2025 people again it tells us a lot about the kind of people he hires.
I thought the DSA was supposed to be more independent of the Democratic Party than Heritage is compared to the Republicans.
You thought right. IIRC >80% of the people writing Project 2025 actually worked in the Trump Administration.
Including his current press secretary and former director of personnel. They’ve already said the Project 2025 leadership will be merge with Trump’s transition team in August.
I tried to be as specific as I could about believing that "Trump is or will be a new Hitler" rather than just a generic/vanilla dictator.
I think that people who believe that Trump will be (or is) a new dictator should continue to say that. And I believe that people who believe that Trump is another Hitler should say *that*. And I believe that people who think that Trump is another Hitler should be actively cheering on his assassination and doing what they can to achieve it. I find it inconsistent to believe that Trump is Hitler and also, given how bad Hitler was, be in favor of leaving him alive.
I see where you're coming from, but I think there are a lot more downsides to endorsing political violence than to people having inconsistent rhetoric.
Trump is *NOT* Hitler, nor does he have any chance to become a dictator. IMHO those who think like this need to be talked of the ledge... Trump is most likely going to be prez. again, and we will all be fine.
Mark was engaging in hypotheticals. He wasn’t saying that Trump is a new Hitler but that the people who believe it should in fact act on it. The Stephen king novel The Dead Zone is about a guy who sees the future (legitimately as it’s a King movie) and has to stop a populist getting elected, a man who would bring nuclear Armageddon if elected. At no time in the novel are we encouraged to believe he’s the bad guy.
And of course not, ending one life rather than millions is moral.
Anyway I don’t think Trump is a dictator in waiting but if people do think that then assassination becomes morally viable. Not that anybody is clairvoyant. It’s basically the trolley.
So back to the rhetoric - I wouldn’t ban that kind of speech but on the other hand maybe journalists should be careful.
Your company manufactures trolleys. You foresee someday one of the trolleys going out of control, and either killing one person or five people, depending on which track it's on.
So you should prevent your company from making any more trolleys?
A lot of the comments on the homelessness post are a bit disturbing to me. Either lots of people are sloppily mixing up "homeless people", "mentally ill homeless people" and "homeless people (whether mentally ill or not) who commit crimes"...or a lot of people want to see one or both of the first two categories somehow locked up? Maybe I'm misunderstanding but that's what a lot of the comments seem to say.
If it is the latter...what the hell? If someone is homeless then that's not anyone else's business, right, if you're a capitalist? If someone wants/needs to sleep on public land...uh, I kind of thought that in a free country public land is the property of *everyone*, not of the government? The hostility to the homeless, *not* along the lines of "the government doesn't owe you a free house" but more "the government should *force* you to get a house or lock you up" is frankly terrifying. Where have all the libertarians on this blog gone?
As a conservative who wants to see laws consistently enforced and crimes consistently punished, I can't stand people dealing with dangerous homeless people *not* by saying "punish crimes consistently" but by saying something to the effect of "lock up the mentally ill homeless, criminal or not". Even if you don't care about liberty for its own sake (which you obviously should), it also makes the worst advertisment possible for basic law-and-order conservatism.
Mentally ill people who have been properly determined to be a threat to themselves or others are *supposed* to be locked up - or their mental illness effectively treated, but Scott has already addressed the difficulty of doing that without locking them up in the process.
A rigorous taxonomy would allow for the possibility of people who are mentally ill enough to be unable to maintain housing but in a way that doesn't make them dangerous to others. I think that's an edge case, but OK, read "mentally ill homeless" as "threateningly mentally ill homeless" and dot the i's when you make that determination. Then lock them up, or find a way to effectively treat their mental illness without locking them up, or lock them up while looking for a way to treat their mental illness without keeping them locked up.
Probably don't lock them up in the same place that you lock the sane, evil criminals. But also don't put a city's worth of innocent people in danger because you feel bad about locking up dangerous people that you don't have any better options for.
I'm merely libertarian-adjacent, but... I think it's clear that the current approach is not working. That is, none of the currently politically acceptable approaches works. The central thrust of Scott's piece was that he didn't want people pointing out the problem with proposing a solution. Therefore, we got a lot of proposals that weren't politically acceptable for one reason or another.
In a vague sense, one of the foundations of libertarianism is that people have the right to be treated as rational actors who pursue their long-term interest. What happens when this obviously isn't true? Do we have ways to remove that right from them? Obviously we have some, but in practice they don't seem effective enough.
The other area I'd focus on is externalities. A small percentage of the homeless produce a massive amount of negative externalities for everyone around them. How should this be dealt with in a libertarian way?
"I think it's clear that the current approach is not working. "
It's important to define what you think the current approach is. Because i agree the current approach isn't working but there are a lot of things that people can define as the current approach.
"A small percentage of the homeless produce a massive amount of negative externalities for everyone around them. How should this be dealt with in a libertarian way?"
Depends what the externalities are. We (as a society) have a defined set of externalities that we have decided are not acceptable. Some are referred to as "misdemeanors" and usually result in fines. Others are "felonies" and usually result in jail time. I am not sure why we need to create new unacceptable externalities that only apply to a set of people we deem undesirable.
> It's important to define what you think the current approach is.
Actually, I go hard the other direction on this. The "current approach" is literally what we are doing right now. Verbal definitions are only useful insofar as they actually describe it. I could not possibly sum up all the various approaches in just my municipality in a Substack comment; I'm saying that the approaches themselves are empirically not good enough, because of what I see (and smell and hear) when I leave my home.
> I am not sure why we need to create new unacceptable externalities that only apply to a set of people we deem undesirable.
For the same reason we need to create laws about dumping pollution into rivers? There's a loophole, it gets exploited at scale, and now there's a new problem. If the current approach works, why is there a problem? Since you seem to think the current laws are sufficient, perhaps you think the problem lies in our failure to enforce them?
The "set of people we deem undesirable" is not really a category in my thinking here. It's more a set of behaviors, which tend to be symptoms of a few major problems, and so forth.
Homeless people in certain cities (San Francisco from all I keep hearing on social media from people I have no reason to doubt are from there lol) are constantly throwing rocks and feces at passerbies, making living in the city horrible. They should just be imprisoned or go to mental facilities, but for some reason DAs don't want to prosecute this type of crime.
>If it is the latter...what the hell? If someone is homeless then that's not anyone else's business, right, if you're a capitalist?
That doesn't follow at all. Homelessness produces many externalities and society has every reason to care about those. "Public land" is at the disposal of the government and the government does what society instructs it to do through the political process. If that process says "my desire to be free of eyesores and panhandlers outweighs your desire to camp on the street" then it becomes illegal. There's nothing anti-liberty or anti-law-and-order about that.
"Liberty" doesn't defend homelessness just as it doesn't defend me if I choose to drive through a neighborhood at 2am on a 500w loudspeaker. As the old saying goes, your right to swing your fist ends at the end of my nose. Many of our noses are tired of smelling the homeless encampments that we walk past every day on our way to work. I 100% endorse treating the homeless as criminals.
"Homelessness produces many externalities and society has every reason to care about those."
Does that set of externalities change just because someone is homeless?
Your wording confuses me but I'll try to infer your meaning. Yes, the externalities someone exports to their environment change when they're homeless vs if they're not. For starters they sleep somewhere I potentially have to step over them.
If you have to step over someone because they are sitting on the sidewalk and refuse to move, is that the same externality?
My goal is only to understand if it's truly the externalities that are the problem or if the person doing the externalities plays a factor. I personally don't think a just society should change its rules based on the person committed the act. The act itself is what should matter.
No, it's obviously not the same. The homeless create all kind of negative externalities: they smell, they shit on the street, they panhandle, they yell aggressively at pedestrians, they start fires, they commit petty crimes, they break into empty buildings, and they're eyesores. Many of these acts are criminal in isolation and can be prosecuted just like any other crime.
Nothing about being anti-homeless requires abandoning a fair and impartial legal system. The only thing we care about are the criminal acts. However those acts are committed disproportionately by a particular class of person. It's therefore only rational to optimize a part of the justice system to deal effectively with that population, just like we have special legislation designed to deal with drug addicts.
This really drives home to me how sloppy people are being with their statements: your comment above says you endorse treating the homeless as criminals, which I find horrifyingly tyrannical, and this comment says you only care about zealously punishing criminal acts, which I 100% agree with. And you're speaking as though these two statements are the same!
So which is it: it's a crime to be homeless (wtf?) or being homeless gives you no right to get away with crimes (indisputably reasonable)? And more importantly, why do so many people seem to think the difference between these doesn't matter????
My take on the issue is that there are two very distinct groups of homeless. First are the temporary homeless who lost their jobs or had their husband leave them or whatever. These people need affordable housing and temporary shelters. The shelters should and could be easily funded within the budget constraints of large cities or states. Housing cost is best addressed through deregulation, which should be not just free but in the long run, revenue enhancing.
The real problem with homelessness though is the highly observable minority which set up tents wherever they please, and are obviously mentally challenged and/or under the influence. I see these people on a daily basis (at the beaches and parks of California), and they can easily be addressed by requiring them to go to the above mentioned shelters. Absent doing this they should be arrested if and when they violate the law (and it should be illegal to set up a tent on a commercial or residential sidewalk). Authorities should then decide what type of facility they should be sent to.
I do care about liberty. I also care about law and order and civil society. The key problem is not that housing has become more unaffordable, it is that the authorities of some cities have decided to allow panhandling, open drug use, camping wherever and petty crime. I can easily see this in my choice of which beach to surf at. Those beaches where authorities look the other way are overrun with poop-on-the-sidewalk derelicts. Those which don’t look the other way don’t have even a slight problem. And these jurisdictions are right next to each other.
The problem is solved by getting the political will to actually address it rather than fuel it. My question isn’t why are there more homeless, it is why are so many people electing authorities which actively feed the problem?
My own comment was basically pointing out that you could label a housing-and-rehabilitation program as a prison.
I found the comments on that thread very interesting. I certainly have libertarian leanings, and live in a rural area with cold winters, so I interact with approximately zero homeless people regularly. I assume a lot of people on this blog are leftists, and also live in densely urban areas with lots of homeless, like SF and NYC. And these were also, not coincidentally, the people calling for the harshest treatment of the homeless. Which I can't help but find ironic.
It's not that strange. As Colleen McCullough observed in The Thorn Birds:
“We all have contempt for whatever there's too many of. Out here it's sheep, but in the city it's people. Down in the city they don't know how the other half lives, and they can afford the luxury of doting on their animals as if they were children. Out here [in the Australian Outback] it's different. You'll never see man, woman or child in need of help go ignored out here, yet in the city those same people who dote on their pets will completely ignore a cry of help from a human being. ”
I mean, McCullough's characters were describing early 20th century cities of the Industrial Revolution, but I think the observation about "undesirable" people in general holds. City people in 2024 will indeed dote on their pets (and strays!) while studiously ignoring the guy delusionally screaming at nothing.
My dog will sometimes bark annoyingly or try to eat my shoes, but I've very sure she won't try to stab me or start screaming profanities at me.
Matthew Yglesias said something similar about the "homeless problem":
https://www.slowboring.com/p/americas-two-homelessness-problems
That's partly locked for subscribers (of which I am not), so here's a twitter thread for it:
https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1721497381177336245
Street beggars? Well, the poor we will have with us always.
People who are mentally ill and/or on drugs, shitting in public in the streets, hassling people, and being aggressive if not actually violent? Gosh, why on earth do we stupid squares feel that it's our business to be able to walk down the street in public without the threat of someone undergoing a psychotic break stabbing us?
The locking up is involuntary commitment, for those who can't or don't want to stay on medication and who will otherwise be in a revolving door of "go crazy enough to be brought in by the cops, stay long enough in hospital to get stabilised, get released, go off meds, go crazy enough to be brought in by the cops". For those people, some kind of asylum would be better than living in a tent on the side of the street with the risk of disease, accident, and crime from other homeless/thrill killers.
It is not, and it should not be, "throw 'em in jail and forget about 'em".
And are you willing the fork out the large sums for involuntary mental hospitals that won't turn into pits?
We did it in the 1950s, when the country was much poorer than it is now.
My jurisdiction is already spending about $100,000 per year per homeless person. That's not peanuts.
If California took the billions of dollars set aside for the problem over the last few years and spent it on shelters, asylums and prisons (whichever are appropriate), then they would still have money left over fund a couple of miles of high speed rail to Bakersfield (or is it out of Bakersfield?).
We already forked over the money. The question is what did authorities do with that money?
And are you willing the fork out the large sums for involuntary mental hospitals that won't turn into pits?
Yep, see my previous comment on another thread about "let's take the getting up to one trillion dollars per year San Francisco is pumping into homelessness and do a trial version of the 'prison' asylum" 😀
What I want (all I want, I think) is a very clear non-negotiable condition of "convicted of/pled guilty to an actual offence" before any commitment, locking up, or mandatory medicating takes place. And that explicit precondition is *missing* from most of these comments and it's ambiguously missing from yours as well.
Shitting in the street, or threatening or harassing* someone, can be the "crime". As long as *having done that is proven*. Otherwise...um, we don't have freedom anymore. It's as simple as that.
If you do mean that, fine. Please just spell it out.
(*I'm very iffy on this--will it be defined in a way that doesn't include "maginalising my identity" or some shit? I'm not clear on whether "harrassment" is an actual crime in most places or not and even what it means.)
Yes, I'd be in favor of that, especially if there was some sort of evaluation that could funnel some people into a part of the system that was more about treating mental health disorders.
But realistically, how long will you lock someone up for shitting on the street? How much bureaucracy and processing will it require? Right now the answer seems to be "too much for it to be worthwhile", and so no one bothers. But that bureaucracy and processing is in place precisely to protect our rights, so reducing it is still movement in an anti-liberty direction.
I think if the person is legitimately mentally ill, has been in and out of hospital, has prescriptions for medication which they are not taking for whatever reason, and has been brought in yet again to the hospital by the cops becauxse they were walking naked in the middle of the street during rush hour, we can sorta kinda guesstimate they may have a teeny-weeny problem and might benefit from some involuntary commitment.
Not that I want to rush to judgement over crazy naked people nearly getting themselves and others killed, you understand.
I'm not trying to be annoying, but I still think you haven't answered my question. Do they need to have been formally found guilty of something for this to happen?
If not...I just don't know how you or anyone think this is acceptable. According to Scott it's "all vibes" whether someone gets "brought in". Do you not find that terrifying? What if someone is in a liberal area and "misgenders" someone and happens by chance to have an official mental illness and so can be "brought in" and involuntary committed by the progressive local cops? And there's no free speech violation, because no one said misgendering is a crime, just that it's an obvious sign of this person's "anti-social" mental illness?
This is a recipe for every kind of totalitarian tyranny, and the lack of pushback by people here to this proposal (and/or actual current state of affairs!!!) is utterly horrifying.
Well, I do appreciate you making the liberals the bad guys in this hypothetical, usually it's "those durn conservatives will lock up all the [women/minorities/gays] if this gets passed!"
"Do they need to have been formally found guilty of something for this to happen?"
Hmmm, interesting point. If I see someone lying in the street with their arm chopped off and bleeding out, I suppose I *could* call an ambulance, but then again, I'm not a medical professional of any kind and have no basis on which to formally assess what is going on. Maybe, for all I know, they are perfectly fine! Let's convene a panel of expert opinion before we do anything hasty like "get the bleeding person with the missing arm off the street and into a hospital for treatment" so we can formally find them guilty of needing medical attention.
Can you *please* stop with the fucking sarcasm and actually address my question in good faith? Or at least just say say you're not going to address it?
I keep explaining what bothers me, I give examples of why it's worrying, you thank me for the example but don't engage with it and just continue with the mocking sarcasm.
Incidentally, I find it odd but I guess unsurprising that despite most of my comments here being in a conservative direction I'm somehow coded as a leftist for suggesting that being homeless shouldn't be a crime. I guess a lot of conservatives operate on the exact same principle as the left does: "people's rights matter, but only when it's people I like".
Let's not let perfect be the enemy of the good.
I'm willing to gamble on how much space there is in an asylum for me if I accidentally misgender a trans person *after* all of the screaming-at-a-lamp-post-naked types have been safely contained there.
Panhandlers. That's what we used to call these folks, and that's who I want locked up (or fined out of existence). I don't want to get hounded for cash by sketchy people several times a day, every day. Is this really so unreasonable?
Hear ye hear ye, people's right to attempt to survive ends where my right not to be mildly inconvenienced begins
yeschad.jpg
Note that these guys would need to suck off a couple city counselors before they could so much as get permission to open up a hotdog stand - but they're also allowed to loiter in front of businesses and harass *every single passerby - every day*
"right to attempt to survive" - listen to yourself. Half these people are junkies - the other half are obese. They're *parasites* who are nothing but a consistent public nuisance, and any reasonable society would not cede the commons to them.
So its not that they are panhandling that you have an issue with its that they are "parasites". You probably should just be upfront with that and not hide behind this panhandling fiction.
Don't put words in my mouth. What I said was I have an issue with sketchy people getting in my face begging me for money several times a day.
They aren't "people attempting to survive" - they are antisocial freaks degrading the commons.
So why did you bring up that they may be junkies or be obese? And why did you call them parasites? If the harassment is what actually bothers you, that should be enough, t shouldn't matter who does it?
If we lock up all the panhandlers, who will cook our food?
If we lock up all the panhandlers, who will pump gas for drivers trying to travel between Oklahoma and New Mexico?
This is suspiciously like a setup for one of them there "your mom" jokes...
I'm now getting the impression that no one understands my post.
I was riffing on it! :-)
Oh we got it.
"Mentally ill homeless people", especially the sunset of those who have the kinds of mental illness that incline them to antisocial behavior, are disproportionately visible compared to the rest of the homeless population.
For one thing, they're far more likely to be unsheltered and visibly homeless and homeless for extended periods of time. IIRC, the large majority of people who experience homelessness are only unhoused for days or weeks at a time, and most homeless people at any given time have access to some kind of shelter (couch surfing, public or charity shelters, sleeping in a vehicle or at work, and some statistics count staying at a hotel or motel as homelessness if you don't have a permanent residence). If you're sleeping indoors and have access to facilities for bathing and laundry, then only people who know the details of your situation are likely to notice that you're homeless.
Another factor is that people notice and remember stuff that disturbs them a lot more than they remember any given random stranger. If someone is unhinged or criminal, that's going to stick in people's minds a lot more.
Yeah, we need to separate "poor people who are having a hard time keeping a fixed address" from "crazy people who can't care for themselves properly." The first group needs cheaper housing and shelters; the second group needs to be in an insane asylum.
Just because a park is public land doesn't mean its purposes are incompatible with people living in it.
This is a way to get *less* public land and ruin what we've got (for a variety of reasons).
The problem with "punishing crimes" is that it leaves a giant loophole for people who aggressively harass passerby every day but don't quite rise to the level of actual crime that carries a prison sentence (occasionally these are the same people who one day randomly shove people onto the subway tracks).
So what do you propose doing with people who "aggressively harass passerby every day"?
Legally serious but lenient kid gloves with the people who knock them out.
Why can't you make aggressive harrassment a crime? It's the lack of due process in some of these proposals that worries me.
By all means deal with people as long as there's a predefined crime or misdemeanor they've been properly convicted of.
prisons are jammed, do not seem to prevent recidivism, and cost ~$30/k a year per person. Jail seems simply impractical
They prevent 100% of the recidivism that would have happened were the criminals not imprisoned. Rehabilitation has always been a fanciful goal of the justice system. It's nothing but wishful thinking. Crime is committed by bad people. By the time they reach the justice system they can't be helped, all you can do is try to keep them from doing damage. That's exactly why Three Strikes exists. It's an excellent policy.
Just to counter the negativity bias, "Over the 10-year period from 2011 to 2021, the U.S. correctional population declined 22%." (Source: https://www.ojp.gov/files/archives/pressreleases/2023/us-correctional-population-continued-decline-2021). So prisons aren't actually "jammed." Opponents of mass incarceration have actually been winning some battles.
I think it is already, at least in the form of catch-all misdemeanors like Disorderly Conduct or Disturbing the Peace. The problem is that protecting petty misdemeanors takes up a lot of resources for not a lot of direct payoff, so police and prosecutors often don't bother.
Arrests for disorderly conduct could be used as a way to shove people with untreated mental illness at some kind of health care or social services that can help manage their condition, but that's contingent on there being something useful to shove them at. Scott's post did a better job than I could of cataloging the shortcomings of the current system.
Im reading short stories by D.H. Lawrence for the first time. They’re really good! One way to characterize him is that he writes a lot of cultural anthropology about 1920s beta males and domineering matriarchs. I was surprised to find this topic in all the short stories. Anyone else ever read him? I’ve only read about 11 short stories so far.
"I was surprised to find this topic in all the short stories."
There is a *ton* of authorial self-insertion in Lawrence's works. You should check out the film adaptations of his works by Ken Russell who is, let's say, idiosyncratic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Russell
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARDQeNzXCXU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uThFKqwognk
any vibe checks on Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke? I liked it but am fairly ignorant of neuroscience. Does it hold?
So, this is another update to my long-running attempt at predicting the outcome of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Previous update is here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-315/comment/49366404.
12 % on Ukrainian victory (down from 14 % on February 12, 2024).
I define Ukrainian victory as either a) Ukrainian government gaining control of the territory it had not controlled before February 24 without losing any similarly important territory and without conceding that it will stop its attempts to join EU or NATO, b) Ukrainian government getting official ok from Russia to join EU or NATO without conceding any territory and without losing de facto control of any territory it had controlled before February 24 of 2022, or c) return to exact prewar status quo ante.
42 % on compromise solution that both sides might plausibly claim as a victory (unchanged from February 12, 2024).
46 % on Ukrainian defeat (up from 44 % on February 12, 2024).
I define Ukrainian defeat as Russia getting what it wants from Ukraine without giving any substantial concessions. Russia wants either a) Ukraine to stop claiming at least some of the territories that were before war claimed by Ukraine but de facto controlled by Russia or its proxies, or b) Russia or its proxies (old or new) to get more Ukrainian territory, de facto recognized by Ukraine in something resembling Minsk ceasefire(s)* or c) some form of guarantee that Ukraine will became neutral, which includes but is not limited to Ukraine not joining NATO. E.g. if Ukraine agrees to stay out of NATO without any other concessions to Russia, but gets mutual defense treaty with Poland and Turkey, that does NOT count as Ukrainian defeat.
Discussion:
This update is brought to you by, ugh, developments on the US political scene (pls DO NOT make comments below your designated place to argue about those, thanks). It is imho evident that current events increase Trump’s chances of return to the White House and also that Trump’s return would be bad news for Ukraine.
* Minsk ceasefire or ceasefires (first agreement did not work, it was amended by second and since then it worked somewhat better) constituted, among other things, de facto recognition by Ukraine that Russia and its proxies will control some territory claimed by Ukraine for some time. In exchange Russia stopped trying to conquer more Ukrainian territory. Until February 24 of 2022, that is.
So would you now support the US putting substantial pressure on Ukraine to accept a peace that formally cedes substantial parts of its occupied territories to Russia so long as there are firm security guarantees?
So, I am not an American and I get that whether American support for Ukraine is in the US national interest is debatable.
One thing that is clear however is that putting external pressure on Ukraine to moderate its demands emboldens Russia to impose harsher conditions, since if Putin knows that external actors won’t help Ukraine to free its territory, downside risk of his aggression is capped.
This is different from whether Ukraine itself should moderate its demands, from the point of their own national interest (imho they should).
>One thing that is clear however is that putting external pressure on Ukraine to moderate its demands emboldens Russia to impose harsher conditions, since if Putin knows that external actors won’t help Ukraine to free its territory, downside risk of his aggression is capped.
I hadn't considered that angle. It makes a lot of sense to someone who's more or less given up on deciding which side is winning - one thing I've taken away from this mess is that too much information can be as bad as too little, especially when much of the information is filtered through people with a keen interest in the outcome. Maybe it could be done with the utmost of secrecy? Then again, that seems to be difficult in democracies, even without taking into consideration that it would be Trump.
That lines up pretty well with my understanding of the conflict, although I can't imagine a scenario where Ukraine wins without a third party directly intervening, i.e. boots on the ground. I think if the Russian run on Kiev in the beginning of the war had been successful, they would have claimed the Donbass states and a buffer zone around Crimea and called it a day. Now, I expect the Russians are going to try and take everything they currently occupy. Putin keeps saying that he is open to peace negotiations, but what that really means is no Ukraine in NATO, disarmament and denazification, ceding occupied territory, etc. So Putin doesn't want an actual negotiation, he wants a surrender.
I don't understand the second clause of your Ukrainian victory condition b). "without losing de facto control of any territory it had controlled before February 24 of 2022". They have already lost control of such territory. Do you mean that they *regain* the territory lost since 24/02/2022?
I am not sure that I understand your misunderstanding, I am afraid :-).
If, e.g., there would be an agreement tomorrow that Ukraine is immediately accepted into EU and NATO but it has to accept that all its internationally recognized territory currently under Russian occupation, I would not count that as an Ukrainian victory, but as a compromise.
I am aware that this is a controversial definition and it tends to generate an endless pushback, but I stand by it, because my starting point is what Ukrainian government defines as its war goals (here: https://english.nv.ua/nation/president-zelenskyy-s-10-point-peace-formula-full-text-of-speech-to-g20-in-bali-50284154.html) and then I am subtracting a little from them to what I feel Ukrainian people would realistically thought of as a victory.
My misunderstanding is that you write "without losing de facto control" in your Ukraine victory condition b), which seems to be the literal meaning of "boots on the ground" as opposed to the legal claim.
For example, Ukraine has had de facto control over Mariupol prior to 2022, and has since then lost it. What does it mean for Ukraine to not "lose de facto control" over Mariupol in order to achieve victory condition b), in addition to not giving up their claim on it and joining EU/NATO?
Or do you mean *Russia* does not have to concede de facto control over Mariupol?
I am still not sure if I understand, but what about this:
If Putin says: "I agree with an immediate ceasefire based on current line of control, and you are ok to join NATO and EU right now, if you wish", and such a ceasefire it is then implemented, I would not count that as an Ukrainian victory, mainly because I don't think that EU and NATO would be willing to let Ukraine join them in that situation.
What would happen to e.g. Mariupol if Ukraine achieves victory b)? Would it remain under Russian control, or would it return to Ukrainian control?
It would be returned to Ukraine.
Why do people vote for Trump? What are their motivations?
Id prefer mcafee(that assassination attempt went different tho); but I *like* the loud mouth causing chaos
The right wing just exists, isnt evil, and really realy tired of being treated so poorly; I'd vote for rock/child/rabbit wolf/meth head over anyone who was in the room for anything "bipartisan" over the pass decades, fuck the wars, the money printing( that didnt go to me) and just endless big worthless law books
A lot of it is tribal, I think. To a first approximation there are roughly an equal number of blue and red people and a small number of gray/purple people in the USA. Blue people always vote for Democrats (plus other Blue Tribe stuff) and red people always vote for Republicans (plus other Red Tribe stuff) and it's the gray people the presidential candidates are fighting over the hardest.
(I'm a gray voter personally but I am actually thinking about sitting out this election as I'm not sure I will like either party's candidate this time around...)
They belief that approximately all of the people and institutions who tell them that there is no good reason to vote for Trump, that they should simply never vote for Trump, have been systematically lying to them about everything political or politics-adjacent for a decade or two, minimum.
They are entirely correct in this belief. Unfortunately, that leaves most of them with few good sources of information about what to do next. They have to trust someone, and Donald Trump is legitimately good at promoting the idea that he's the one you can trust, the one that will call out and stand against all the people you already know have been lying to you for decades.
In a nutshell, two reasons for opposing a Democratic Party nominee are
1) Approximate doubling of illegal immigration from Trump's term to Biden's, see https://usafacts.org/articles/what-can-the-data-tell-us-about-unauthorized-immigration/ eyeballing the second graph from 2016 to 2023
2) More explicit policies promoting Didn't Earn It. See https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/06/25/fact-sheet-president-biden-signs-executive-order-advancing-diversity-equity-inclusion-and-accessibility-in-the-federal-government/ _Nothing_ about even handedness or colorblindness or choosing people on individual merit!
On the other hand, Trump suggested looking into "injecting disinfectant" for Covid, which is, AFAIK, ... _unique_ amongst our presidents.
Re: the first link, the graph just says that apprehensions are up. That could mean there are more people crossing and the same proportion are being caught, or that there is a higher proportion being caught, or something else.
The third graph in your link suggests how to interpret it. It only goes up to 2020, but by their model it seems like apprehension rate correlates strongly with less illegal immigrant entries rather than more.
What is the best data we have on actual numbers of illegal immigrants in the US, and coming into the US per year?
Many Thanks! But, as you said, the third graph only goes up to 2020, so using it to compare Biden and Trump policies doesn't really help much. If the apprehension rate really was 89% in 2019, as per the model, then the increase in apprehensions from 2019 to 2023 in the second graph (approximately a doubling) can't be due to a further increase in apprehension _rate_, since there was only 11% headroom above the claimed 89% in 2019. It would have to be due to an increase in crossing _attempts_ - and _that_ is what I've heard attributed to the political change from Trump to Biden. Ideally, of course, we would want to know how the number of successful crossing attempts changed, but we can't very well know the number of successful evasions of the border patrol, and I haven't seen a nice crisp presentation of how many people were ultimately released by the border patrol into the United States, either for pending asylum claims or other reasons.
The clinkers for me are Biden's disrespect for the Supreme Court and his intransigence about racist 'affirmative action'. His fawning over queer rights is just sad.
>and his intransigence about racist 'affirmative action'.
Agreed. That's essentially the same thing as the Didn't Earn It policies. Many Thanks!
It's always been Affirmative Racism. President Johnson just changed the noun to make it seem more benign.
True! Many Thanks!
From what I have observed with people I know who like him it's about the fact that he loudly fights for his team and doesn't talk down to the people at his rallies. For people who feel threatened by progressives or that large parts of rural america is looked down upon he can be appealing. He is like a bulldog who will insult and rage against people you don't like.
That plus people really don't like inflation
He was the first national politician to be known for opposing wokeness? (Or probably more accurately, as wokeness developed, it defined itself against him, and vice versa.)
Also, he's a political outsider, and has been willing to notice things that politicians pretend they don't notice, and say things that politicians don't publicly say. Which, to be clear, is not inherently good, and sometimes very bad. But it can be quite appealing to people who feel disconnected from politicians.
I think very little of this is actually about who Trump is, as a person. It's who he's against, and that he's actually willing to be against them. So there's a lot of actively-brewing mythology surrounding him, similar in that respect to Obama in 2008. People project their desire for hope and change onto him. Facts about Trump don't matter as much as the platonic ideal of Trump.
They're sick of the insanity of progressivism? Sick of being told that women can be born with penises, or that it's white people's fault that blacks are stupid and violent, or that it's racist to care about your culture, or that the concept of merit is discriminatory. I mean, if you honestly can't understand how it would be possible to be opposed to that then you really need to consider how your ideological blinders distort your perception of reality. I'm no fan of Trump but there has to be something seriously wrong with you if you think the Dems are immune to criticism.
What specifically about voting for Trump would ameliorate any of those things you mentioned? You just listed a bunch of attitudes and opinions, most of which are far outside the government's control. Do you think Trump will make progressives less progressive and stop saying the things you don't like to hear?
Or do you expect specific actions? If so, which actions, specifically? And, crucially - did any of those things happen during the first Trump administration?
Yes, the president can actually make substantive changes that can affect the culture. For starters Trump probably won't put trannies on the white house xmas card, or appoint them to cabinet positions. People care about that. If there's a SCOTUS vacancy he won't close his eyes and pick "a woman of color" like Biden did. SCOTUS appointments are probably the most far-reaching legacy that a president can leave, actually. If Trump hadn't gotten 3 appointments then Roe v Wade probably wouldn't have been overturned.
Plus there's just 4 years of the most powerful person in the world having an ideology that's opposed to wokeism. No one gets more media coverage. That matters. That means 4 years of not having to listen to the President spout nonsense about structural racism or putting "minority-owned business" requirements on giant spending bills. Yes, the president matters. I'm sort of shocked that you're confused about that.
I'm not 'confused' and I'll ask you not to assume what I'm actually thinking based on just honest questions.
Close examination of history shows that cultural attitudes often move _counter_ to the Presidency. Consider: when Obama expressed concerns about the Trayvon Martin shooting, it actually caused a huge amount of backlash that sharpened race relations. When Trump introduced draconian restrictions on migrants, it _increased_ sympathy for them in polls.
And let me ask you: do you honestly think progressivism was weaker in 2020 than it was in 2016? I don't think that's clear at all. It was the BLM-related riots that did far more than anything else to weaken it. Many people feel that wokism has been in decline during the Biden administration in a way that it wasn't during Trump's.
So yes, the President matters, but I think the evidence doesn't point as clearly in the way that you think.
Now, if you want Supreme Court appointees, that's a whole different question. But I don't see how the tokenism you talk about comes in. Trump passed over many well-qualified men and appointed a woman, and she still chose to overturn Roe. Biden could have nominated any number of white men, but it's a lock that they would not have voted that way. If you want to get annoyed at tokenism, you certainly can, but that has no real impact on the Court's long term decision making.
"And let me ask you: do you honestly think progressivism was weaker in 2020 than it was in 2016?"
Not directed at me, but I would say:
1. Yes, in my experience about half of people think wokeness peaked in 2016, the other half that it peaked around 2020/2021. I think the former are right regarding the media and the internet and the explicit rhetoric of politicians (e.g. Hillary Clinton used wordslike "intersectionality"; has Biden ever done that?) which is what drives the whole thing. See here https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-online-culture for a clear media decline (at least the gender form) after Trump's win. The trends started in the media take a while to spread through the broader society, which explains the latter group's perception. But that driver's seat started moving (gradually) away from wokeness earlier.
2. Even if all of society and media was still getting more woke or more progressive during Trump's first term, the derivative may have declined. I think it did substantially: looking through archived online discussions, the difference between January 2013 progressive culture and January 2016 progressive culture was unbelievable, and nothing like that rate of change happened after Trump, if there was even a clear increase at all.
3. Even if *that's* not the case, the question I would ask is: do you honestly think progressivism was not absurdly stronger in 2016 than it 2012? Do you honestly think it wouldn't have been inconceivably stronger in 2020-in-the-timeline-where-Clinton-won than it was in 2020-our-timeline? With a President who actually uses words like intersectional in speeches? Even if republican wins don't reverse progressivism, I think it's undeniable that democrat wins advance it. Trump winning stopped wokeness simply by meaning Hillary didn't.
4. Yes, there are backlashes (e.g. Tea Party to Obama, BLM to Trump) but I think these are greatly outweighed by the frontlashes, for want a better word. In addition to the points above that the culture does shift substantially in the direction of the president, there's also the multitute of actual laws and policies that an administration implements, many of which get a fraction of the attention of the loud cultural movements but have innumerable -on-the-ground effects on society.
5. Finally, a point made many times in the comments to Scott's 2016 post endorsing Clinton (partly on the grounds that Trump would make the left stronger): this implies progressives should be voting for Trump. If you're right that culture moves opposite to the president, all wokeists who care most about culture should want Trump to win this year. Those people should have been mourning Biden's win in 2020 as a blow to social justice and a victory for the right. The fact that they never do this, even those of them who advance the backlash theory of why conservatives shouldn't vote for Trump, shows they don't actually believe it.
"Hillary Clinton used words like "intersectionality"; has Biden ever done that?"
I was going to joke that Joe thinks intersectionality is what you do when you come to a traffic light and it's turning red, but you made me curious.
I don't see that particular word, but there is the usual blah about "equity":
https://www.whitehouse.gov/equity/
"In recognition that advancing equity is a generational commitment that will require sustained federal leadership and partnership with all communities, President Biden signed Executive Order 14091 on February 16, 2023. The President’s second Executive Order on equity directs the Federal Government to further build equity into the everyday business of government and continue the work to make the promise of America real for everyone, including rural communities, communities of color, Tribal communities, LGBTQI+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex) individuals, people with disabilities, women and girls, and communities impacted by persistent poverty."
The nearest we get is a 2021 fact sheet:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/10/22/fact-sheet-national-strategy-on-gender-equity-and-equality/
"The strategy also adopts an intersectional approach that considers the barriers and challenges faced by those who experience intersecting and compounding forms of discrimination and bias related to gender, race, and other factors, including sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, disability, age, and socioeconomic status. This includes addressing discrimination and bias faced by Black, Latino, and Indigenous and Native American people, Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders, and other people of color."
Thank you for the substantive reply. Great points.
I want to zoom in on points 4 & 5, because I think they set crucial context here. I think there is a very key difference between electing a leader because you want to change people's minds and electing a leader because you want specific policies and actions. My purpose here is mostly to question people who lead with "I like Trump because I hate progressive attitudes in culture," because I believe this to be a dodgy metric by which to pick one's leaders.
If you prioritize someone who will sign Republican legislation (i.e. tax cuts and maybe spending cuts) and who will nominate conservative SCOTUS judges, then it's obviously a no-brainer. But you can have that without the cultural change. In fact, I would argue that's what the first Trump admin brought us: that it had only a marginal net effect on culture relative to existing trends, but huge impact on concrete decision making (i.e. helping secure the end of Roe, the TCJA, etc.).
So when someone says that pushing back on progressive culture is their _first_ reason to vote Trump, I think in many cases that is not a very well-thought-out opinion.
That statement does not apply to you, though - whether I agree or disagree you've clearly put some thought into it, and I respect that a lot.
Regarding your final point - here are some thoughts of mine. Even if you believe the backlash theory, it doesn't necessarily follow that you would want to use that as a voting guide, for multiple reasons. Chiefly, of course, would be the reason that you actually care about concrete decisions in the short-term rather than public opinion in the long-term. Another thing is that most people are really just voting for a sense of personal satisfaction - the nice brain chemicals associated with "my side is winning."
In other words, the fact that people don't vote according to backlash theory is not, in my eyes anyway, evidence that they don't truly believe it. But it's a good point nonetheless.
Yes, culture is complicated. I don't think anyone can predict where it will head, but people have a reasonable belief that the president can affect it. Whether or not they're right isn't exactly the point. There's a reasonable expectation that they could be and that's all that's necessary to explain voter preferences. And I just flat-out disagree with your object-level assertion that the president makes no difference, though I agree that that difference is hard to predict. When one candidate is pro-woke and one is anti-woke, it makes sense to vote for the explicitly anti-woke one if you dislike wokeism. That doesn't seem controversial to me.
>If you want to get annoyed at tokenism, you certainly can, but that has no real impact on the Court's long term decision making.
I don't know what point you're making here, but the Court's long-term behavior is predictably dependent on the appointments that presidents make. The Court overturned Roe and struck down affirmative action. That only happened because Trump appointed 3 conservative justices. That matters, it's predictable, and people care about it, so if your question is "How can a vote for Trump possibly effect wokeism" then pointing to SCOTUS is a definitive reply.
>And let me ask you: do you honestly think progressivism was weaker in 2020 than it was in 2016?
No, but that's because of demographic factors IMO and does not depend on political leadership. Woke was coming before Trump and would have increased anyway. But opposition to woke is also much higher now and part of that is enabled by Maga-adjacent people. Plus I think there's a solid argument to be made that woke exploded because of anti-Trump hysteria in a way that was self-sabotaging, so in that sense electing Trump was an effective though indirect counter to wokeism.
You keep assuming I’m saying things I’m not saying so I will bow out.
I WANT the President to close his eyes when picking a Justice. Just have the resumes for likely candidates read to him. Justice should be color-blind. Affirmative Action is wrong on the Supreme Court as much as at Harvard.
Biden announced "I don't know who the next justice will be but it will be a woman of color." That's overt racism and the person he appointed was borderline retarded. I want the president to pick the smartest, best educated, most highly-qualified jurist who aligns with his ideological leanings. Picking randomly is a terrible idea. The person needs to be smart and experienced.
I don't mean choose randomly. I mean "close your eyes" or "put the candidate behind a curtain" so that race doesn't enter into it. Actually, I think we are in agreement.
My question is more about priorities - and about people being honest about why they are voting.
Imagine, if you will, a Trump who decided not to lean into social conservatism. It's not that hard to imagine - before 2016 he was nobody's idea of a Southern Baptist. He once celebrated transgender contestants in Miss America, for example. Say that he decided to stay in that vein, but in other senses remained a solid Republican who would sign tax cuts, appoint Federalist judges, etc.
On the D side, imagine someone who would push back on wokeness. Someone like Joe Manchin, say, who would loudly break from progressives on things like official language, or who would roll back protections for transgender students. But who would otherwise be a regular old tax-and-spend Democrat.
Would today's Trump supporters, in that hypothetical, support Not-Woke Manchin over Social-Libertine Trump? Would you, for that matter?
I think some percentage of the population might genuinely switch votes, but that they would be a small slice. I think most people like Trump because at the end of the day they want Republican policies on traditional fiscal matters and things like that. I think a lot of people talk about progressivism - and voting against it - as a way to signal tribal solidarity.
But if you actually treat marginal things - like whether the Deputy Secretary of so-and-so uses they/them pronouns - as if that's the most important aspect of the election, then I'm curious about your decision making process.
>On the D side, imagine someone who would push back on wokeness. Someone like Joe Manchin, say, who would loudly break from progressives on things like official language, or who would roll back protections for transgender students. But who would otherwise be a regular old tax-and-spend Democrat.
Roughly speaking, yes I'd vote for Manchin. To be more precise, I have no desire to have _protections_ rolled back for transgender people. What I want to see stopped is DEI-driven anti-meritocratic policies, like the ones from the Biden administration that I gave the url for in my earlier comment.
Bluntly: I'm 65 and retired. I'm out of the job market, so only indirectly affected by anti-white-and-asian DEI bigotry. But I _do_ need the electric power grid to keep working, along with the rest of our industrial civilization. I do _not_ want what amount to racial set-asides to ram incompetent people into positions where they damage our infrastructure.
edit: Again, I don't like either candidate, or, for that matter, either major party.
I damn well would vote for Joe Manchin were I an American because he is exactly the kind of old-fashioned working-class Democrat politician before the pivot to appealing to college-educated and 'let's go ahead on social liberalisation because that is cheap, easy, and will get us popularity'.
100% agree, very well put.
And don't forget "because we don't want to waste time with minor problems like rural poverty when I have *real problems* like people being allowed to disagree with my latest gender identity!"
I honestly can't think of a more disgusting flaunting of affluence and privilege that currently exists, and when you remember that the *entire mainstream left is like this right now* support for Trump ceases to be the slightest mystery.
Agree
Honest question: when you describe this pivot, what specifics do you have in mind? I'm open to the idea that the Biden admin has actually been a sneakily leftist one, but to my mind the most consequential decisions they've made have been pretty bog-standard Democrat moves, like the Inflation Reduction Act, the student debt silliness, nominating KBJ, etc.
The closest thing to a substantial progressive policy decision that comes to mind is the Admin's stance on Title IX and transgender students. Beyond that, a lot of it seems to be things like "the Assistant Secretary of so-and-so uses they/them pronouns." Things that generate a lot of vibes-based anger but which seem insubstantial to me.
I ask because, circa 2020, Joe Biden _was_ seen as exactly the kind of old-fashioned Democrat we're speaking of. Certainly leftists were not celebrating him then. (And they haven't really started since). To now say that we must elect Biden to fight the left, it suggests that one of these things is true:
1) The Biden admin actually has been more progressive than expected. (This seems to be your stance? I'm open to it but curious on the details, as I mentioned).
2. The Biden admin has been more or less centrist, as expected, but people are still alarmed enough about wokeness that this isn't enough, and that someone who is an active opponent is seen as necessary.
3. Public opinion has moved thermostatically rightward, such that 2020's centrism is 2024's radicalism.
4. I'm just wrong it's something else entirely.
(Edit: I suppose there's another possibility, that it's more about fears of what a future Biden admin would do, especially one in which the centrist guy in the center is senile and being managed by lefty staff.)
Thanks for the honest answer!
(For what it's worth, as someone who thinks most arguments about wokeness - on both sides - are a sideshow that involve 10x more heat than light .... I would pick Manchin too.)
I am no fan either, and would never vote for him, but I think this answer really hits the nail on the head. Conservatives see the nation as spinning out in a crazy direction and are grasping for someone whom they believe can fight back. The extreme left obviously gets unhinged by Trump, reinforcing the belief that this is the guy they fear and thus the very one needed to oppose them.
Trump is the reactive response to the far left. I wish it wasn’t so, but honestly I am not sure which is poison is worse for America. I am pretty sure we could do a lot better though. We live in interesting times.
He's not Biden. Pretty simple.
They call it an Anti-vote. But it only works when you have one distasteful candidate. When both are a sorry-ass choice, it doesn't work. Your choices are to either write in someone with character like Liz Cheney or Jeff Flake or you refuse to vote. Welcome to American-style democracy.
I mean, any Republican candidate or potential candidate gets called "literally Hitler" by the more edge tendencies in the Democratic party. When Nikki Haley was in the running, there were Democrat supporters who were not "pick her as the sane alternative to Trump", they were "she's as bad as Trump, she's a racist etc. etc."
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskALiberal/comments/18grohq/why_should_i_dislike_nikki_haley/
Poor old Mittens Romney got the Mormon Theocrat Literally Hitler treatment. So if you're a Republican voter, may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. Trump doesn't care about you calling him names, he'll fight back on that and be every bit as brash and annoying and not roll over and bare his belly for "oh please like me, like me!" to the set of people who genuinely think the Republican Party, and their supporters, should all just vanish into thin air.
Why do alternative Democratic candidates poll only moderately better than Biden? (Whereas alternative Republican candidates poll vastly better than Trump)
The Dems have a shallow bench, without anyone with charisma -- like Obama (Remember, he started as a moderate);
I think it's true that Trump is the only one confronting the genderfied Woke, the suburban anarchists and Hamas supporters and their monumental nonsense. No one else is saying The world isn't flat, or sexually disoriented.
Trump has a mountain of specific negatives that Generic Republican does not.
The polls that count selected Trump as the candidate, so I'm not sure any other candidate DOES poll better.
Trump polls better among Republicans (who voted in the primary), other candidates like Haley poll vastly better among the electorate as a whole.
Because Trump is an anti-left protest vote. Biden is irrelevant to that.
If I was American I'd almost certainly vote for Trump in the general election. His personality definitely scares me and seems like a threat to democracy. But nowhere as much of a threat to democracy as the left is, considering things like:
1. The "depolicing" stuff I'm hearing about is terrifying and I can't imagine a more extreme rejection of democracy than deliberately not enforcing the laws enacted by the people
2. I see magnitudes more progressives self-identifying as communists than I see conservatives self-identifying as fascists. Two unspeakably murderous ideologies, one is being widely embraced and one isn't. Unless I'm misperceiving this, it looks like an open and shut case.
3. Trump wants the most divisive moral issue of our time to be deceided democratically, Biden does not.
4. Suppression of free discussion and debate is almost entirely by the left at the moment and has been for a while.
5. The democrats deliberately sabotaged the No Labels independent campaign. Which is not only the most undemocratic thing you could possibly do, it also means the only non-democrat option is, by their own making, Trump.
I don't know how anyone can say "Trump is a threat to democracy, vote Biden" with a straight face.
(However, I can't for the life of me understand GOP primary voters choosing Trump over Haley or Destantis. Surely if you're a moderate republican you'd want Haley, if you're a conservative you'd want Desantis. Why would anyone want someone who has no clear or consistent principles and just makes things up and spews nonsense half the time? Apparently it's a class thing? Caring about actual positions and principles is so middle class, real Americans only want vibes? Utterly inconprehensible to me, any explanation would be appreciated.
Democrats didn't sabotage No Labels.
No Labels self-sabotaged because, revealed preferences, they cared more about not letting Trump get into office (for basically the same reason that anyone who cares about our institutions doesn't want Trump in office).
#1 is not happening anywhere in the US. There has been absolutely no "depolicing" happening.
is #2 based on anything more than your impressions? the Democratic party's platform is pretty far from anything a true communist or socialist politician would promote. Meanwhile the republic platform is pretty much one of Christian Nationalism and moves that way more or more of the time - many Republican politicians have explicitly said that they are Christian Nationalists and David Duke (head of the KKK) endorsed trump during Trumps first election.
What issue is #3 about? Abortion? Does he really want it decided by states or does he just support whatever will get him elected? He used to be vocally pro choice.
#4, not sure what to tell you but just look at the changes Republican states are making to school curriculums for examples of state suppression of speech.
#5 -> I dont know enough to comment.
"I don't know how anyone can say "Trump is a threat to democracy, vote Biden" with a straight face." He regularly expresses wanting to do undemocratic actions if he takes office.
Just a nitpick, but the state laws in question seem like they are restricting the actions of public schools within the state. Surely the state government can decide what its agents are to say in public as part of their official duties.
<i>#1 is not happening anywhere in the US. There has been absolutely no "depolicing" happening.</i>
There's a vocal contingent on the left who very much do want it to happen. Surely, if you think a particular policy will be extremely harmful, it's OK to vote against it before it's actually implemented?
There's a vocal contingent who want depolicing, but the actual depolicing that has happened in the US seems to be some mix of budgeting/hiring problems leading to too few policemen on the force and occasional instances of the police retreating to the donut shops when there's a large outcry about (typically) some trigger-happy white cop shooting some black criminal.
There's a vocal contingent on the right who think we should repeal the Civil Rights Act and cut all aid to Israel, does that mean it's going to happen?
Defund the police is more tolerated by the mainstream left than repeal the Civil Rights Act is by the mainstream right.
However, Defund the Tax Police is a lot bigger on the right, to the point where it *acutally happened* and didn't get rolled back like the few half-hearted attempts at defending local police did.
That does not actually answer my question.
The official Democratic platform isn't socialist, just as the official Republican platform isn't some Christian theology. (The official platform has *removed* talk of abortion.)
If they are your outgroup, though, you don't look at the official platform. You look at what people associated with them say and figure "oh, they all want that, they're just too cowardly to *really* say it."
Democratic politicians don't think they'll be dead or hunted to extinction if there's a Republican trifecta. They're just getting ready for 2026 and 2028.
Anecditally sample n=2, Seattle and NYC have seen a reduction in policing in the past few years that really accelerated when Abolish movement came to the fore. There's markedly more dangerous situations in Seattle than there used to be. And I'm NYC there's a lot more petty crime like illegal scooters, people driving while high, people blowing red lights etc. NYC is not as bad as it was in the 90s but it's trending that direction.
It's confusing to see people posting about their local PD getting armored vehicles and but at the same time almost getting killed on the Brooklyn bridge by illegal scooters (cops ignore them at both end of the bridge).
I don't think this contradicts your 1st point but it's evidence of at least a slight shift away from enforcement.
Cops not doing their jobs is not de-policing. Bot departnement budgets and head counts continue to expend:
"The mayor said that not only would there be no police hiring freeze, but that 600 recruits were on the way. Libraries still face budget reductions."
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/10/nyregion/budget-adams-nypd.html
"As the City continues to strategize ways to address next year’s $240 million budget deficit, PubliCola reports that a new agreement between Seattle and its largest police union, the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG), will carve out funding for raises of up to 23% for entry-level officers. [...] The effects of the shortfall can already be felt — Mayor Bruce Harrell initiated a hiring freeze for all City departments excluding police, ..."
https://southseattleemerald.com/2024/04/09/amidst-an-impending-budget-shortfall-spd-entry-level-officers-may-see-a-raise-in-salary/
In both cities, they have tight budgets yet continue to devote more and more money to police departments. Then the police do a bad job, but this is somehow the fault of people calling for less money to the police?
Don't think I'll convince anyone, but a brief response to some of these:
1. I am opposed to "depolicing" (though sympathetic to some of their views - the police often act pretty free of democratic accountability in many cities and IMO their reactions to particular protests are often politically motivated) but it's not Biden's view or the view of most Democrats, in fact Biden's budget plans always call for more funding of the police.
2. The self-identified communist group hates Biden and most elected Democrats, so voting for Biden isn't voting for them.
More broadly, I think people view self-identified communists are naive to the oppression of communists, unlike self-identified fascists/nazis who actively support it. Most (thought not all) self-identified communists will say that they don't want gulags and "true communism has never been tried" or something, but self-identified fascists fly the flag of nazi Germany and fully embrace the anti-Jewish stuff. Plus ...
3. Not sure what exactly you're referring to, but if it is abortion, Biden is running on passing a law via Congress to protect abortion access, and the Republican platform position is that the 14th amendment applies to fetuses which, if taken to its logical conclusion, would mean a court-imposed nationwide ban on abortion (in basically all cases).
More generally, I don't like the idea of the Supreme Court deciding these issues but both parties try to push that lever. If today you proposed taking as much policymaking out of the Courts as possible, it would be Democrats in favor and Republicans opposed (not that the roles wouldn't switch of control of the Court switched).
4. I don't think this is true at the moment. Elon Musk (trump supporter) owns twitter, has censored on behalf of conservatives/foreign countries/whoever pays him, and the most recent outburst of "cancel culture" was against pro-Palestinian people. Tiktok has been algorithmically boosting trump ever since he came out against banning it (in a reversal of his prior view, after an investor gave him money).
5. I don't know what you mean by "sabotage". They opposed it ... but I don't think anyone is obligated to support any third party bid just to support the idea of third parties. Do you think that if Republicans thought a particular 3rd party would hurt them, they wouldn't try to undercut it?
As for non-democratic options ... it's Democrats' fault that the main non-Democratic option is Trump? I can think of another party whose fault that is...
> But the liberal agenda basically IS communist, even for those that call it by another name: provide for the homeless, provide for the elderly, provide for the unemployed, and never mind how any of that is paid for.
That’s nothing like communism. It’s not even socialism. Maybe it’s at best lukewarm social democracy. Actually in practise it’s something that centrist, centre right and far right (as in nationalist) parties agree on.
1. If Biden is actually giving the police MORE funding and reaping the benefits of calls to de-fund the police, then more power to him, I suppose, for a Machiavellian act to keep order while satisfying the public. But the "police" isn't "the FBI", and if I'm not mistaken, the President has no power over the funding of state-level and lower police.
2. Sure, some crazy people are pro-fascism, and Republicans with any sense ignore them, while Democrats vilify them. They should not be taken seriously. But the liberal agenda basically IS communist, even for those that call it by another name: provide for the homeless, provide for the elderly, provide for the unemployed, and never mind how any of that is paid for.
3. I think abortion is what is meant, and though I'm not sure it's the MOST divisive issue currently (though Democrats want to make it out to be), I'm alarmed that no one (even the Supreme Court, apparently) considers the 10th amendment. The Constitution doesn't say anything about abortion, so it's up to the states. It also says nothing about murder, and I think murder is a STATE crime, though I have no explanation for kidnapping being a federal crime.
4. Google and Facebook seem to be favoring Democrats; Twitter (X) is important (though less so now, I think) but it isn't the only tool of free debate, and Google is arguably the most important. Yet they are publicly-held private companies, and should be allowed to do, mostly, what they want. Both parties are apparently opposed to Tiktok, as Trump originally proposed banning it.
5. I have no opinion on any No Labels campaign without researching it.
I suspect, from talking to others, that Nikki Haley would have been the one most likely to win over the most voters in the general election, but Trump had the largest iron-clad support in the Republican party base, and seemed likely to win against Biden, even if the race were close this time. Comparing the Trump presidency to the Biden presidency, it's hard to see why someone would choose Biden, even before the debate.
Re the first - what exactly is the Machiavellian act? He says he wants to fund the police, he's doing it ... OK then. He isn't "reaping the benefits of calls to de-fund the police" - it's an unpopular slogan associated with people on his side, and I'm sure he wishes nobody had ever said it. Also, the federal government can provide funds for states earmarked for certain purposes.
Re the second - you can't simultaneously say that communism should be seen as evil on par with the Nazis and not as merely misguided, and also that providing for the elderly et al is communism. Whatever labels you want to use, people don't view social security and the Holocaust as morally equivalent.
Re Tiktok, trump isn't opposed to it anymore. He changed his tune after a Tiktok investor gave him a big donation.
"Comparing the Trump presidency to the Biden presidency, it's hard to see why someone would choose Biden, even before the debate."
Not sure why I'm even arguing this as we won't agree, but the economy is pretty good right now, inflation is low, unemployment is low, people's assessment of their own personal economic situation is good. China isn't doing so great and we are increasingly pushing back against them. There's bad situations in the Middle East and East Europe but, without making this comment too long, I don't think those are Biden's fault. Meanwhile 2020 is commonly seen as the worst, most chaotic year for the country in a long time, and trump abused the powers of his office, got worse over time, and then tried to overturn the election on the way out, in an act so bad that even Republicans thought he should be prosecuted over it. And he repeatedly threatened Jewish people.
I haven't heard anything about Biden's stance on de-funding the police, and assume it is correct he has increased funding policing agencies in some way. Likewise, I haven't heard that he is denouncing the movement, either, and it is that that I consider Machiavellian: supporting his political movement, and thus pacifying them, while also not actually doing what they want.
I made no comparison of fascism to communism, just note that wealth redistribution is central to communism, and is also central to liberal policies. Perhaps some far right people are in favor of fascism, but one can be conservative and not fascist. Can one be liberal and not in favor of social security and welfare wealth redistribution?
Biden got a TikTok account in February. As long as it exists, why not use it as a tool? Neither candidate has dismissed the national security concerns.
Until the pandemic, the economy was better than it is now. Is this in dispute? Inflation was lower, and unemployment was lower. To be fair, I lay the blame of inflation on Trump for replacing Yellen with Powell for no good reason (and perhaps Yellen would have raised interest rates sooner, but who knows?). The President has little control over the economy in general; though the President can slow the economy, he/she cannot improve it, only create conditions under which it can improve.
I agree the Middle East and East Europe aren't Biden's fault, and think they would likely still have happened if Trump were still in office. But I don't agree that Trump was responsible for the pandemic (the largest issue of 2020), abuse of powers, or threatening the Jewish people. My impression of the election result was more that he simply never conceded, which was childish, but I don't have enough credible information about overturning the election, only lots of unanswered questions.
> Until the pandemic, the economy was better than it is now. Is this in dispute? Inflation was lower, and unemployment was lower.
It depends on which metric you look at. For example, real average earnings are up over pre-pandemic and still growing (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=qozP).
So is the prime age labor force participation rate (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060).
"I haven't heard anything about Biden's stance on de-funding the police, and assume it is correct he has increased funding policing agencies in some way. Likewise, I haven't heard that he is denouncing the movement, either, and it is that that I consider Machiavellian: supporting his political movement, and thus pacifying them, while also not actually doing what they want."
But he has been on record supporting funding the police. In 2020 he ran on funding the police *more* than Republicans!
"I made no comparison of fascism to communism, just note that wealth redistribution is central to communism, and is also central to liberal policies. Perhaps some far right people are in favor of fascism, but one can be conservative and not fascist. Can one be liberal and not in favor of social security and welfare wealth redistribution?"
You can say wealth redistribution is common between liberals and communists, but there are things that are common between fascists and conservatives (at least the vast majority, hard to ever say 100% about anything). Nationalism, opposition to communism, idea of an intellectual elite that is opposed to the interest of "true" members of the nation, being really into masculinity as an important virtue for leaders and seeing the opposition as feminine/weak, etc.
But either way, what's the argument here, you support trump because liberals support wealth redistribution and communists put people in gulags? Problem with this, among other things, is that trump also supports wealth redistribution to some degree, as do all viable politicians in the US.
"Biden got a TikTok account in February. As long as it exists, why not use it as a tool? Neither candidate has dismissed the national security concerns."
Not sure what this has to do with the fact that Biden signed a bill to ban it, trump opposed that bill.
"Until the pandemic, the economy was better than it is now. Is this in dispute? Inflation was lower, and unemployment was lower."
Maybe marginally, but I don't see what that has to do with anything. You say (and I agree) that "the economy is good/bad under President X, therefore they did a good/bad job" is wrong. And if it's right, then there's no reason to exclude 2020 (and nothing else).
"But I don't agree that Trump was responsible for the pandemic (the largest issue of 2020), abuse of powers, or threatening the Jewish people."
I don't think he's responsible for the pandemic, but he is responsible for the federal government's chaotic response, and deaths were higher in the US than most developed countries. For abuse of powers, I'll refer to both impeachments to start, and he personally threatened the Jews on Twitter.
"reaping the benefits of calls to de-fund the police," Why has Biden ever called for defunding the police? Historically he has been extremely pro police (just as every national politician has, regardless of party).
"Sure, some crazy people are pro-fascism, and Republicans with any sense ignore them, "
Multiple republican congressman have explicitly stated they are Christian Nationalists.
"provide for the homeless, provide for the elderly, provide for the unemployed"
Jesus also supported these things too.
What's the definition of Christian Nationalist you are using here?
Jesus also advised at least one rich person to give up all he had and give it to the poor. Maybe that would be good for the short-term, but not for the long-term.
There's nothing wrong with being a Christian Nationalist. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, even if it is that fascism is a good idea. I do have a problem, however, with anyone ensuring I become a Christian Nationalist, or support what they want.
I think many people miss the point on supporting those who cannot provide for themselves. Conservatives aren't against doing this. In fact, they do want to support those who need it, but not faceless people, and especially not people masquerading as needy but aren't. The government is kind of bad at distinguishing genuine needs from those that fit needs on paper, as no set of rules can encompass accurately what they ought to do.
"Everyone is entitled to their opinion, even if it is that fascism is a good idea"
Why do you not feel this way with far left ideologies?
"I do have a problem, however, with anyone ensuring I become a Christian Nationalist, or support what they want."
Thats a core tenant of Christian Nationalism - making countries follow Christian Nationalism.
I, uh, what are you confused about?
Like, it's Trump, there's not a shortage of media or explainers about him. What's confusing?
Why do people vote in general? I can think of two reasons: (1) to signal affiliation/identity & (2) out of an altruistic sense of duty. It then seems natural for a US voter who doesn't want to be associated with leftism and who thinks that leftist rule is going to be bad for their country to vote for Trump.
80%+ of Trump voters backed Romney and McCain, they vote for the GOP because they want lower taxes and are sceptical of government bureaucracies. Also some variety of agreeing with the GOP on school choice, guns, abortion, oil extraction, immigration etc
They want lower taxes AND higher deficits?
They want lower taxes AND lower spending. That's compatible with at least attempting to lower the deficit. But I AM concerned that it will be awfully tough to get a handle on the deficit before it actually becomes a problem.
It isn't yet a problem because the government can just borrow money from itself right now. The Fed bought trillions of mortgage bonds and treasury bills...on credit. I don't know how long we can continue to operate that way.
This argument always cracks me up. No one in America takes the deficit seriously. If they did, our government wouldn't consistently spend 150%+ of its revenue every single year. If the government inevitably is going to spend itself into financial oblivion, wanting to be taxed less is not some outlandish proposition.
taxes are personal, deficits are someone else's problem. so yes.
Depends on the "they". Lots of people want contradictory things, and also lots of people want to cut taxes and cut spending to compensate, with various degrees of realism in their plans.
Reasons I'm considering to, in order of priority:
I think he's a strong man respected by foreign leaders (relative to Biden), and if he's president it's less likely Taiwan will be invaded, I think he might negotiate a deal where Ukraine loses territory in exchange for lasting peace, and Israel is given the space to establish deterrence
I think he will moderate policy on immigration and abortion closer to that of median voter
Center of power seems to be with the elite class, he might be a counterweight on both culture and policy that creates a sense that everyone is to some extent 'represented'
Reasons against:
He doesn't have principles he is willing to sacrifice self interest for, including democratic norms and values
He might reduce free trade significantly
He polarizes the country significantly
Trump isn't repsected by foreign leaders, he is seen as a man willing to put his own interests above that of his nation. As a result he's easily manipulated by flattery, and plenty of leaders have realised that.
He also sees himself as a brilliant dealmaker, and thus will jump at any attempt to make a peace deal, even if it's ludicrously unfair.
"I think he's a strong man respected by foreign leaders (relative to Biden), and if he's president it's less likely Taiwan will be invaded, I think he might negotiate a deal where Ukraine loses territory in exchange for lasting peace, and Israel is given the space to establish deterrence"
I believe you are dead wrong about this part. Trump is a weak man's idea of what a strong man should look like, and actual strong men know better. I'm pretty sure most of our allies' leadership sees him as an untrustworthy buffoon, and most of our adversaries see him as an exploitable chump.
I will also note the conspicuous lack of foreign policy victories in his first term, that would have depended on foreign perception of Trump's strength. Yes, he could do things like set in motion the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and many people will see that as a win, but it's not a win that requires e.g. the Taliban to see Trump as a strong leader and back down. He promised that his strong leadership and diplomacy would lead to the "denuclearization" of North Korea; Kim Jong Un played him for a fool and North Korea went right on building nukes (now on ICBMs that can reach any target in the United States). He ended the nuclear arms deal with Iran promising that his strong leadership and diplomacy would get us a better deal with Iran, and he got nothing. We don't know if Iran is building nukes now, but there's nothing but their own forebearance stopping them.
What am I missing? Where is the evidence that Trump is perceived by foreign leaders as strong? Biden, at least gets credit for building the coalition that stopped the invasion of Ukraine dead in its tracks and drove it halfway back to the border in 2022.
Trump, I am fairly certain, will try to impose a deal where Ukraine surrenders a third of its country in exchange for a "peace" that will last a few years as Russia regroups and rearms to conquer and ethnically cleanse the rest of Ukraine. That will greatly increase the odds of China trying to invade Taiwan, and there's a significant chance it will lead do direct war between NATO and Russia if Russia then thinks it's safe to move on the Baltics.
Yeah. I understand the model you're working with. I've just seen enough empirical evidence to believe there's something he understands about psychology of dictators and militant groups I/we do not.
1) He killed Qasem Soleimani, and that established credible deterrance with Iran.
2) He moved embassy to jersualem, abraham accords, two significant steps towards isolating the palestinians from the rest of the non-iran-axis arab world, making it clear to the dictators in the region it wasn't in their interest to support them. Hamas' only theory of the case, and it is correct, for how they destroy Israel which is their primary goal, is to spark a regional conflict. US leadership makes that less feasible/likely and under Trump it was better
3) Re Ukraine/Taiwan, realistically Russia/China care way, way more about those territories than we do. Ukranians are willing to die in huge numbers, I don't know about Taiwanese. In any case, Trumps general instability ('you don't know what I'm going to do, don't test me') was our only hope of staving off conflict, because the predictable 'cards on the table' game theory outcome is invasion of Ukraine and Taiwan. (I think Putin severely underestimated Ukraine, as did I think rest of the world, but there was no credible way to convince him of that without the experience of invasion).
4) Re. North Korea I really, really don't know anything about the situation. I just had a vague impression that their leader was saying a bunch of rhetoric threatening people, Trump said he's the best person ever and is magical and cool, and he stopped doing that.
-------
All of this is about the past, and I think Trump's advantage was primarily in preventing Ukraine invasion. Trump also caused NATO to significantly spend more money because he made it clear the US would not backstop them on its own, which was good. However Biden was clearly way better at coalition building (and who knows, Trump might've thought Zelensky didn't help him win the election and hold a massive grudge).
In the future, I would expect:
Trump to bring the conflict to an end by forcing Ukraine to give up territory it cannot recapture and cannot politically convince its people to stop fighting for. I don't know if this is a lasting peace, but I would expect Putin to have learned by now more war is not in his interest, NATO/Ukraine is stronger than he thinks. There are few good options now, unfortunately. Both Ukraine and Russia are exhausted and willing to fight causing the deaths of many, many more people.
Taking this point by point:
1. The response to killing Qasem Soleimani was Iran hitting a US military base with a dozen or so precision-guided ballistic missiles, of which we were able to shoot down none whatsoever because the commander-in-chief hadn't bothered to deploy any missile defenses, and for which US responded with harsh language and minor financial inconveniences. Then COVID happened and everybody focused elsewhere for a couple years. This does not look like "credible deterrence" to me. And the bit where Iran would be rendered unwilling or incapable of waging proxy wars against US interests, really doesn't seem to have happened.
2) Moving an embassy may be the right diplomatic or political move. But it doesn't require that anyone see POTUS as being a strong leader, and isn't evidence that anyone sees POTUS as a strong leader.
3) Deterrence works best when there's no ambiguity. "Mutual Assured Destruction", not "Maybe we'll destroy you, or maybe we'll let you win". In the case of Ukraine or Taiwan, we're not going to bomb Moscow or Beijing over that; the most we can plausibly do is ensure that every relevant weapon toe Arsenal of Democracy can provide is delivered to people who will use them to utterly annihilate the invasion force. And that's enough. It's also pretty much what the Biden administration actually did in early 2022(*), which lets him credibly promise the same w/re Taiwan.
Trump's signalling that he might *not* support Ukraine or Taiwan against invasion adds unpredictability, but it's strictly worse as a deterrence strategy. And your belief that if Trump had been in power Russia would never have invaded Ukraine, is an unproven counterfactual. It reflects your belief that Trump is and is seen as a strong leader, but it is not evidence that Putin actually sees him as such.
4) I know an awful lot about the situation with North Korea. I spent several years of my life working pro bono to help understand and if possible mitigate the North Korean nuclear threat. And then I watched Donald Trump piss it all away. You can find some of that written up in the SSC archives if you care. Yes, Kim Jong Un modulated his words and his tone in response to Trump's posturing, but he did so in a way that increased North Korea's stature on the world stage and at least marginally weakened the alliance structure against him.
Looking at deeds rather than words, North Korea on Donald Trump's watch went from a nation with maybe a couple dozen Hiroshima-scale atom bombs and clunky missiles that could probably deliver them as far as Japan, to a nation with probably 50+ nuclear weapons including thermonuclear warheads on road-mobile ICBMs capable of striking targets anywhere in CONUS. And possibly a prototype ballistic missile submarine. Donald Trump did nothing to stop this.
Nowhere am I seeing any evidence that any foreign leader perceives Donald Trump as particularly "strong", an in the Iran and North Korea cases he seems to have failed to accomplish any of the things a genuinely strong leader might have. My expectations regarding the foreign-policy impact of a second Trump term is frankly dismal.
* with some unfortunate backsliding later
re deterrence and ambiguity: if your opponent knows exactly where your boundaries are, you can be certain he'll scoot right up to those boundaries and plant himself there. If he doesn't have a clear idea of your decision process, you have more options to respond.
Added to this is that politics is fluid, and scooting over a boundary and receiving no response diminishes respect.
I think the biggest thing I disagree with is: 'deterrence works best when it is not ambiguous'
Democracies simply cannot credibly unambiguously commit to anything their voters wouldn't support.
Americans don't support going to war with China over Taiwan. They don't support risking nuclear war with Russia.
Trump is seen as unpredictable. There was a complete cultural shift in Iranian politics after he killed Suleimani, which was unexpected, and they didn't through their proxies attack Israel until after he was out of power.
With Biden at the helm, especially after the mechanical incompetence of the Afghanistan withdrawal, world expectation was that we wouldn't do much more to support Ukraine or Taiwan than we would the Kurds or Afghans.
> if he's president it's less likely Taiwan will be invaded
This one seems REALLY implausible to me. In terms of direct statements Biden has sounded significantly more willing to defend Taiwan than the average US President, while Trump is much less.
Meanwhile Trump's pro-Russia attitude in Ukraine seems much more likely to encourage China to make a similar move against Taiwan than Biden's hardline stance against international aggression.
Diff between respect and fear. Foreign govts dont respect Trump, but they do fear a perceived irrational narcissist. Maybe less fear now - they prob figured that the standard strategy will work: say you love him as many times as possible (or more), and throw a big parade.
"He doesn't have principles he is willing to sacrifice self interest for"
Bro is literally dodging bullets and risking jail time to run for President. He's absolutely willing to self-sacrifice - it's up to you whether you believe he's doing it for the reasons he says he is.
He’s running for president to *avoid* jail time.
He's a lot more likely to end up in jail if he doesn't run for President. The charges against him were already in the pipeline and would mostly have kept going if he sat out the 2024 election cycle, but if he runs and wins, he can quash any pending federal charges or investigations against himself, and state prosecutions against him.become a lot more difficult to pursue. And just running makes it a lot easier for him to fundraise to get his legal bills paid in the meantime -- while he has a lot of assets, he also seems to have a lot of liabilities and not a lot of liquidity in his personal/business finances.
There's also a question of what constitutes self-interest. If he really, really likes the pomp and power of being President, that still counts as a self-interested reason. Granted, really wanting to be President is a common failing among high-level politicians, but Trump strikes me worse than most in terms of personal power-seeking at all.costs.
I bet he could negotiate a deal where all charges, past and future, were dropped if he dropped out of the race. I also bet he wouldn't take that deal.
He isn't JUST running to avoid the charges.
You'd have to diverge the timeline from before 2021 in order to make that remotely plausible. Noone would ever agree to let Trump off scott free post Jan 6.
Imagine you saw some other country, say Mexico or Turkey, where the opposition leader was being prosecuted until he agreed to cease seeking office, and then the charges were dropped. What would you think about that country? Because that's what >50% of voters would be thinking about our own country after that corrupt deal.
I think that's a good way to think about this.
I think there's a really plausible timeline where the Democrats don't try to prosecute Trump for anything and he just fucks off to Mar-A-Lago instead of running for President again.
You'd have to diverge the timeline from before 2021 in order to make that remotely plausible. Noone would ever agree to let Trump off scott free post Jan 6.
I think he wants status and power and cool factor of being president, and in general being a cultural icon. And is willing to place himself in physical danger for that. I meant that there isn't any policy, that, were it in his personal interest to have a different view on, he wouldn't change, and I think that's an undesirable quality in a leader for a variety of reasons.
Might reduce free trade? Hasn’t he already promised to?
Do you really think people like Xi and Putin respect Trump?
I dont really think that the 'respect' we commoners have for people plays much of a role in the halls power Xi and Putin occupy.
Well, I don’t know, but it was given as a reason to vote for Trump.
The Russians see NATO as an instrument of American power, so if Trump withdraws from NATO, I think Putin will see Trump as someone who made a massive own goal.
The median voter thinks first-trimester abortions should be legal and Roe v. Wade shouldn't have been overturned: https://news.gallup.com/poll/506759/broader-support-abortion-rights-continues-post-dobbs.aspx
"Respected by foreign leaders" is hard to check specifically, but in a lot of countries Biden is viewed more favorably than Trump: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2024/06/11/globally-biden-receives-higher-ratings-than-trump/
The Supreme Court isn't democratic and doesn't answer to voter preferences. They don't set policy, they judge policy w/r/t the constitution. I both think abortion should be legal and think Roe was a terrible precedent. I'm glad it was overturned and look forward to each state legislating abortion policy in accordance with the democratic preferences of their populace.
>"Respected by foreign leaders" is hard to check specifically, but in a lot of countries Biden is viewed more favorably than Trump
Yeah, in high school kids preferred the senile algebra teacher who gave everyone A's too. Being popular and being good aren't necessarily related. The US is the big dog in the world. Other leaders don't have to like us. Maybe they prefer Biden because he's a senile pushover.
The specific poll question was who they have confidence in to do the right thing regarding world affairs.
Ok. The median voter cares preferentially for who will do the right thing for national interests and those aren't always aligned with global interests. I also don't trust other leaders' ability to distinguish between "who is nicer to me" and "who is better". But sure, being aggressively unpopular can be bad for US interests if it gives other nations a Shelling point to unite against us. But I still think that the only thing that matters there is realpolitik and even Trump's unpopularity can't change America's overwhelming economic and military might. We have the big stick, that's all that matters.
I'm not sure what position you're arguing against here. I put a link to that poll to note that it was evidence that Biden was more respected globally than Trump, in response to someone asserting the opposite (with the caveat I noted above about how I can't really measure "leaders" specifically).
"The median voter thinks first-trimester abortions should be legal and Roe v. Wade shouldn't have been overturned:"
Then they can vote for this in their own state? In what universe is California voters not having a say on Texas laws remotely undemocratic?
I'm not sure how this responds to anything I said specifically. I'm merely pointing out that President Trump doesn't seem to have brought policy in this area closer to what the median voter wanted.
Yeah, the median voter gets a little confusing when you think in terms of state and EC votes, and also when you distinguish laws that will be imposed on your state from laws that you think should be imposed on/for other states.
If Trump opposes any federal laws on abortion in favor of leaving it to the states, then he's probably automatically closer to the median voter (in terms of what laws will be imposed on their state) than taking a position that the federal government should either impose legal abortion on all states or ban abortion on all states. The median voter in Missouri and the median voter in New York have rather different positions on the issue.
OTOH, if we're talking about laws to be imposed on everyone outside your state, that's inherently about federal laws or constitutional amendments. But then, the impact of the median voter only matters in battleground states--an extra million voters in New York or California who are strongly pro-choice doesn't affect it at all, since those states are not in play.
This seems to make sense as an objection only if you entirely reject federalism. If you consider Texas and California as not entirely identical, as political entities, then Trump moved policy closer to the median voter _within each state_.
The first part is true (mostly; Trump actually did push the GOP to moderate on abortion, although his successful court appointmens meant actual national policy moved further away due to him).
I think the second is addressing the wrong question: people may like Biden, but they don't respect him/his foreign policy (the Iranians and their various paramilitaries in particular seem to have concluded they have free rein to shut down the red sea and shoot missiles at Israel or American troops in the area without worrying about consequences).
Why do you consider moving closer to the median voter on immigration/abortion to be a good thing? I would've thought most people would want policy to move closer to their beliefs regardless of where they stand in relation to the median.
> I would've thought most people would want policy to move closer to their beliefs regardless of where they stand in relation to the median.
Yes, but most people are close to the median.
I think it is unsustainable and unhealthy in long run for policies to deviate too far from median voter in a democracy, on issues they deeply care about, immigration and abortion being good examples. These are simple values based questions everyone is qualified on.
Yes, if only we could figure out their innermost secrets:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2WD1SJiRjo
One simple answer is that they prioritize entertainment in politics over policy.
If you want an economic answer, I can link you to the graph of real median household income. Correlation =/= causation, but most people are clever enough to realize that the best time of their life economically (and without a decrease, the hedonic setpoint being what it is) was under his presidency. There's a trillion arguments both ways about whether he caused it or not, but... well, it's the sort of argument that has never changed minds.
Edit: forgot the link, sorry: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N.
Many Thanks for the data!
One of the big reasons I try to say this answer first is for the same reason Scott wrote "Against Murderism" – yeah, a decent percent of his voters are probably not game theory optimal agents, but there are genuine reasons to vote for him outside of hatred.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/
So, uh, *now* - is it Joever?
Nothing's Joever till we say it is! Was it Joever when Putin became president of Ukraine?
I think it has been over since the debate. People seeing Biden struggle like that punctured a lot of narratives. I am not excited to continue to watch this train wreck. I'm skeptical that the assassination attempt changed anyones mind. If biden was suddenly shot at and pumped his fist in front of a flag would people flip to support biden? Or for that matter desantis during the primary? A lot of this stuff is not logical though so who knows.
He walked off stage last night the way an actor would walk off stage if the #1 thing they wanted to do was make you think they had Parkinson's.
I was in the "no it's not Parkinson's" camp before but now I'm a firm believer.
Eh. Let's wait a few weeks. Maybe Trump will do something stupid, or a video of him acting like an ass will pop up, or something else that takes the shine off. Maybe one of his supporters does something with a body count, and Trump screws up the PR. We've got months to go.
Ahh isn't Trump being an ass, his 'stick'. I'm planning on four more years of it. "Sit back and enjoy the show, wha, wha whaaa." (quoting the Beatles)
Yeah, Trump being an ass in a standard Trumpian way isn't going to change any votes at this late date.
I don't think it's especially more joever than it was before (Gerald Ford survived two assassination attempts and still lost reelection), assassination attempts don't usually have a sustained influence. Otoh this was pretty joever already anyway and this probably makes it slightly more (unless it makes Trump go react in some completely nuts way that actually costs him votes).
I think the most important impact of the assassination attempt will be that it has greatly reduced the social cost of publicly switching sides from Biden to Trump, so that it will no longer be outside the Overton Window in a lot of places to be obviously pro-Trump. Combine this with a lot of previously quiet people now deciding that this is the moment to be brave and declare themselves for Trump, and I think the effect of this is actually going to be quite significant.
See the Elon Musk endorsement, which seems under-emphasized in all the chaos.
He did that before shooting.
I don't think he did. If he did he didn't tweet about it (which seems unlike him).
Is a tweet still called a tweet on X?
You're right, it wasn't an endorsement. He was putting in considerable money, though.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2024/07/12/elon-musk-reportedly-donates-to-pro-trump-group-in-billionaires-starkest-political-move-yet/
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/elon-musk-donates-trump-super-pac-1235059581/
At this stage I just want to see everyone's crazy predictions. Will the Martians land on the White House lawn next week? Who knows? Anything can happen in the next half hour!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45NtEXv7DZs
Voter memories are short, there's a lot of time left. By the "vibes" theory of politics it might truly be over, but the vibes theory is not the best, imho.
Well, it's not like fundamentals are likely to jump up, either.
Eh, I'm not too sure – the economy has been doing wonderfully recently, with real incomes growing. The larger problem is that the economy has been doing wonderfully but president Biden has not managed to attribute it to him in the minds of voters. The fundamentals are improving, but his polling keeps slipping.
I'm not sure how to reconcile "the economy has been doing wonderfully recently" with Søren's post below, but that may have something to do with the polling.
You mean the "What’s the average number of job applications one has to send out to get one good new job on average?" That number has been in multiple tens for as long as I'm alive and tracking (which, frankly, isn't that long, but still); and the specific slowing down of tech sector isn't economy writ large and certainly isn't the kind of economy that influences the majority of swing waters (in famous Yglesias' pitch, "median voter didn't go to college").
I expect it to have something of an impact when HR departments get stereotyped/pattern-matched as progressive-leaning, though - "the Democrats are gatekeeping your next promotion/raise/career shift, etc." can be a negative even if they're waving the vast majority through (for the converse, "the racists won't consider your application" I would assume to have a similar chilling effect on minority applications to businesses with racist reputations, or applications generally to the extent businesses get stereotyped/pattern-matched as racist).
Fair enough, the best I can do is gesture at official federal figures.
I mean, exactly. I'm not saying that fundamentals are bad. I'm saying that they haven't made a dent in people's opinion of Biden so far and are unlikely to jump up and do that suddenly.
Oh, sorry. Yes, that's my opinion as well, then. Biden may have been a great president (or he may have gotten lucky and been president for an economic recovery that would've happened anyways), but either way he does not seem able to capture credit for it. I would guess that the job of being president and the job of running for president require different skillsets to some degree.
the intervening filters (social media, conspiracy theories, deliberate misinfo propaganda on both sides, and the reality of a low info/low engagement electorate) mean there is almost no connection between policy (which elites still control) and politics (now largely entertainment/horse race. Politicians everywhere are unable to gain credit for their achievements (real or not). See Martin Gurri for much better on this.
Wow that's a lot of cope. If you're gonna go that far it'd be much more likely that Trump dies in the next 2 months (natural causes or not), both parties hit the reset button, and Newsom defeats Haley. Biden is openly senile and replacing him this late makes the Dems look like disorganized fools. Americans simply won't vote for someone with dementia and Trump was ahead anyway. I'm sorry but as long as he still has a pulse Trump is going to win.
Personally, I'd like my presidential choices not to look like two guys arguing about the TV news at the old folks' home. But we get what we get.
Oh I'm not exactly dancing a jig over this election either. It's kind of like Alien vs Predator: no matter who wins, we lose. _Probably_ every generation feels this way at some point, but man it's hard to convince myself that this isn't uniquely bad.
>It's kind of like Alien vs Predator: no matter who wins, we lose.
Seconded!
>but man it's hard to convince myself that this isn't uniquely bad.
The debate was fascinating. Biden could not reliably complete his own sentences. Almost all of the best/worst/most/least statements that Trump made were false. Mumbler v Liar. And the present and former POTUS, debating who should be the next POTUS, spent part of the debate arguing about _golf_. I think "uniquely bad" is a reasonable assessment.
What’s the average number of job applications one has to send out to get one good new job on average? I’m hearing figures in the hundreds. Curious since I’m at about 50 in my new job hunt and haven’t heard a peep back from 90% and a “no” from the other 10% so far.
If you haven't gotten any interviews or at least phone calls 50 applications is enough to indicate your either doing something wrong or are unlucky, but yeah 100s sounds right.
That said while have attempted the application process enough to have a feel for it almost all of my jobs have come from either my actual network or being actively recruited off of linkedin and other sites that let you post resumes.
Tangential to the question, but as a software engineer, I used to get LinkedIn messages from recruiters a few times a week. Now I may get one every few months, with more paid messages for things like franchise "opportunities". This is all after the big company layoffs, and so I expect the market is more difficult now.
But I agree you should have someone look over your resume to see what others think. Perhaps it should stand out more. Perhaps you need keyword help, so you aren't rejected by an AI before anyone notices. Perhaps you need to highlight specific technologies people are looking for.
I am afraid I'm getting AI rejected for missing the right keywords now. I'll have to look into that angle.
My experience (as a programmer in central europe) is the following: very few applications are needed, maybe around 10. I myself sent out around 20 (and was invited to about 5 interviews until I landed my current job). I sent about 5 application for the job before that. 2 of my last 4 fulltime-jobs I eventually found via recruiters on xing. On the other side I sometimes do technical assessments of applicants, and we hire about 25% of the people we interview.
I guess, that people who sent out hundreds of applications, either have some obvious red flags, or look for a job in a very bad market.
If you have a friend in HR or management, you may want to ask them to look at your application. Maybe you wrote something innocent there, that would become a red flag in the eyes of HR. Also don't be afraid to ask for feedback. If they gave you a "no" or ghost you, you have nothing to lose when asking for feedback. Ask for feedback via phone or personally. People usually don't want to give you their reasoning in writing.
Don't think as the company is a monolith, and instead think about the individuals involved in the process. The HR-persons must say "yes, this person checks all the checkboxes and raises none of the usual red flags" after reading your CV. The engineer must say "yes, they know what they are talking about, and I would like to work with them tomorrow" after doing an assessment with you. The manager must say "yes, our company can not afford not to hire them" after doing the interview with them. Match your style to the person you are in contact with. Think about what this individual is looking for, and then sell it to them.
Also have a look at glassdoor. They have some statistics about your industry and maybe about the specific companies, you send applications to.
If you're good with a good resume then probably just one. I have a friend who's a top-tier software engineer, currently a midlevel manager at a big company. He tests the waters every couple years for fun and has a 100% success rate. He's currently waiting for an offer from one of the big AI companies (one of OpenAI's direct competitors) which he'll probably take.
Shouldn't it be "Soarin' Soren"? Adjectives go before nouns.
It's meant to be Søren "Soarin'" Kierkegaard but Substack makes that display as Søren \"Soarin'\" Kierkegaard with the escaped quotes in emails. Very annoying, so I removed the quotes, but it _still_ displays the escapes in Apple inboxes (but not Google). Don't know what Substack's problem is but I'll play around and fix it eventually.
Those bastards. Either way it's a cool username, though I still suggest writing it as Soarin Soren Kierkegaard.
I might just do that, sidestep the whole issue.
It really depends if it's from a relatively standing start (which for me took over 125) Vs being an established and known figure in your sub sector (as I am now, a decade+ later), in which case it can easily be single digits, because recruiters/companies go to you directly.
When I was at Google over a decade ago, the numbers I was hearing was the company had 1-2 thousand applications received, several hundred of which reached the phone screen level and were presumably qualified on paper, for each new hire. Google very probably had a much worse than typical ratio, being a highly visible place to apply to and also having an extremely high hiring bar, but things are reputed to have gotten worse in the meantime.
Since COVID, I have sent out one application personally. I got a final-round interview out of it but did not receive an offer.
Roughly 100 highly qualified applications as of ~1 year ago on the data engineering/science side, might be worse now.
What field? What level within the field? How narrow are your goals/needs? What does "good" mean? etc.
Or alternatively, I think what you're actually asking is, "How many job applications do I need to send out to get a job offer that would look appealing to me?" This is a very hard question to answer without additional context, even if one were a recruiter or headhunter.
There's a huge power law here. If you're a strong candidate for what you're applying for, you can just apply to a handful of good companies and wait to hear back. If you're average, you just gotta keep shooting shots
Varies wildly depending on the state of the job market. Right now it's pretty bad, I hear a lot of stories like this.
I’m in infosec, and by all accounts the tech job market is lousy right now after all the big company layoffs.
I recently wrote an essay called "Reconsidering Dopamine" about a journal article that looks at the function of dopamine in the rat auditory system and its apparent role in dampening error signals in a predictive processing model. I used that as a springboard to talk about how this might explain some of the stuff we kinda-sorta know about in psychiatry and neurobiology regularly.
I'm sharing it here because I know there are a lot of people in the ACX audience who are really interested in predictive processing and probably know a whole lot more about it than I do, and I'm hoping that those of you who come upon this can critique some of my very uninformed conclusions.
https://polypharmacy.substack.com/p/reconsidering-dopamine?r=5s3xs
Very beautiful theory! I do like the part on neuropathologies. Yes, I know, it's all very speculative, but it does fit together neatly.
I may be a bit more careful to rely too much on a single article. In the end, it's only two experiments, so there will be tons of other explanations which fit the outcomes well. I have read quite a few papers where the theory fit nicely with the experiments of that paper, but not with experiments from other papers. But that's more of a general disclaimer that more research is needed, and I guess we are pretty much on the same page here.
Economists seem to be fashion again, paraded as great minds with the ultimate understanding of the human condition (as homo economicus) all this beyond mere mortals with their common sense beliefs.
Whatever happened to the humility post 2008. Wasn’t there some talk about doing better.
Maybe it's in comparison to weather forecasters. I notice the forecasts are getting worse.
What are you talking about? The vitriol directed at economics from the left has not changed, and the mainstream could not care less. Rat-adjacent readers don't turn up their nose at them but that's always been true.
The viriol directed at economists from the right certainly hasn't abated. And frankly it's a good thing it hasn't, because non-loony among them are the only ones aside from a few of us on the center/left who have actually noticed that the massive monetary accommodation and fiscal overstimulus of the pandemic era, conceived and executed with such hubris by the best and the brightest economists that the field had to offer, using the latest sophisticated models of economic behavior, created inflation of a severity not seen in a half century--oh and also, by the by, drove a housing mania worse than the one in the early 2000s and made wealth disparity wider than it's been in modem history.
I don't see what the Fed's decisions over the pandemic has to do with Economists. They're as critical as anyone else about policy.
Who do you think staffs the Fed and develops the models that the FOMC uses to set policy, and that failed so spectacularly to predict the outcome of the unprecedented quantitative easing and interest rate repression that the Committee put into practice? What do you think Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan, who between the two of them conceived of some of the worst modern Fed policies, are?
The Fed staffs the Fed, not some blob collective dubbed "the economists".
Bernanke and Greenspan were a mixed bag and were certainly Economists, but obviously they don't believe the same things. To the extent that you have a bias and conception as to how to formulate Fed policy, it's been filtered through some Economist, and the rest comes out of your ass.
Playing the game and learning about these things in depth is "doing Economics", you aren't operating in a different sphere.
The Fed employs hundreds of economists to do research and analysis and develop models and present the same to the members of the Federal Open Market Committee, several of whom are themselves economists. That's what "the Fed's decisions over the pandemic [have] to do with Economists": quite a lot. There's the answer to your implied question.
Is there any reason for so aggressive a response?
I’m talking about the rise of celebrity economists again, from Caplan to Hanson, Noah Smith and so on. To be fair Noah at least acknowledges the flaws in macro economics.
You'd do well to stop projecting "aggression" onto others.
Are you confusing a general trend of experts in a wide variety of fields achieving internet fame, with a specific trend of experts in a narrow field achieving internet fame, and treating this specific trend as significant in a way it obviously isn't once the general trend is taken into account?
Because, like, there has also been a notable recent uptick in, to pick a subject I sometimes enjoy, celebrity tinkerers - people who achieve internet fame by repairing household objects.
What "rise"? I haven't noticed folks like Caplan & Hanson being much more famous now than they were in the past (Hanson is doing more youtube conversations with niche figures in UFOlogy or AI doom). Noah Smith hasn't been an academic economist for quite some time, I think he's just a pundit now.
What do folks think of Bryan Johnson's work and ideas?
Wealthy man who's working on personal longevity, releasing information about what he's doing and how it's worked out, and selling food and supplements.
https://www.bryanjohnson.com/
I think it's good that he's doing it. Some of the stuff seems like he's Goodhart's lawing it, like the botox injections to the penis.
Things I never knew, and frankly did not need to know: botox injections to the penis are a thing.
If you're at that point, just go ahead and get yourself plasticised like that creepy von Hagens uses with his specimens:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastination
EDIT: Oh for [expletive deleted]'s sake, the guy tracks his night-time erections as though this is something to boast about:
"Nighttime erections 179 min, better than ave 18 year old"
Guy is taking so many supplements and pills, he must rattle when he walks:
https://protocol.bryanjohnson.com/#step-2-supplements
'Rich man is scared shitless by realisation of own mortality' is no new thing, but I suppose previously we hadn't reached the peak of "medical snakeoil hucksters willing to part a fool from his money"; former generations had to rely on cinnabar and gold as Magic Immortality Cures, now we have SCIENCE!!!! to dose you up on New Magic Immortality Cures:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_alchemical_elixir_poisoning
And for all his boasting about how he's reversed aging here and is better than 18 years old there, if you look at this photo of him and his son, you see the cruel truth of the difference between genuine youth and maturing body:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/25/bryan-johnson-800m-baby-food-mortality
I'm not sure what age Johnson is aiming for. He certainly doesn't look as young as his son, though the more interesting question is whether he looks better than he did five or ten years ago.
I'm interested in whether he's found some useful approaches, not whether the weirdest things he does can be mocked.
I'm seen a picture of his typical meal. I didn't examine it closely, but it wasn't pureed. Maybe he was eating pureed food at some point.
But he is using "better than an 18/20 year old" as his metrics, including things that strongly point to he thinks he's not just slowing down, but reversing aging (grey hair not grey anymore).
So I do think he's trying for "now I look 18 again".
I don't think he's said he's achieved it.
Thanks. A lot of this kind of stuff is Woo but that particular site sounds interesting.
One thing I’ve done for my longevity recently is drink more coffee, which is unusual for an ageing britisher.
Still needs must, and it’s a decent beverage. I’m waiting in anticipation for doctors to see cadburys chocolate as the ultimate life enhancer, along with dry cider.
After a few years drinking chocolate, especially Cadbury's, you'll probably look as old as Methuselah in his final days! That's because it is riddled with nauseating amounts of sugar, which is well-known to accelerate ageing if taken to excess.
I'd have thought one's best bet at maintaining a youthful health and appearance is simply to confine protein input to tuna. Aren't there sprightly Japanese centenarians who don't look a day over 50, and can walk up a mountain without pausing, because they've eaten sea food all their lives?
Another dream ruined.
Blocked and Reported had an episode about him worth listening to.
https://www.blockedandreported.org/p/episode-199-was-the-naked-man-in
Their banter is funnier than most, and it's interesting that they've also got some stuff about aphantasia-- so I hit both the topics with my first two posts.
However, their material about Johnson is about conflict between him and his ex-girlfriend. He does come off badly, and I have less trust in him, but it didn't address his work on longevity.
Now I'm wondering if there's anyone independently testing his food and suppliments.
https://shadowoneboxing.wordpress.com/2024/07/02/objective-tests-for-aphantasia/
It turns out that if you can visualize, visualizing affects your eyes, so visualizing a bright light means your pupils contract.
What does this do to the NLP claim that everyone is visualizing all the time, but not everyone is conscious of it?
I wonder about my negative visualization? I can't visualize a Tolkien hobbit, but I'm convinced all illustrations are wrong.
>but I'm convinced all illustrations are wrong.<
Oh dammit, now I'm going to be visualizing Hobbits as Bad Box Art Megaman. https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/plo227/former_capcom_and_street_fighter_producer_wishes/
I wonder if aphantasia is a static part of someone, for example if you take DMT are there people who *don't* hallucinate anything? I believe I had aphantasia but after doing copious amounts of DMT and hallucinating a lot I can now visualize to a low level. Especially after I went psychotic, in that state I could willingly visualize anything with my eyes open and it would overlap my vision but after coming down I can still visualize a bit but not to that degree.
I can provide acideotal evidence of this. I experience photic sneeze reflex/ACHOO syndrome and if I feel like I am on the cusp of sneezing from anything, I can push it over the line by visualizing looking into bright sunlight.
Part of your brain has a definite idea of what Hobbits look like, but you're not a skilled enough artist to translate that impulse into a definite image. All you can do is look at existing images and recognize that they don't hit the right emotional buttons for you. This is probably analogous to never being able to find anyone who can make spaghetti like mom could: you have a definite idea of what it's supposed to taste like but you don't know enough about cooking to effectively describe what it is. If you were a highly-trained chef you probably could!
> t turns out that if you can visualize, visualizing affects your eyes, so visualizing a bright light means your pupils contract.
That sounds really cool, and I'd love to see a big study exploring it more. But my [ cool sounding social science result that was found through p-hacking or publication bias and thus won't replicate ] alarm is blaring.
Interesting. I don't think I visualize in the way some people are able to, but I have trouble wrapping my head around just what they are experiencing. Some people say that when they visualize an apple, they have a very specific sense of what an apple looks like (complete with whether someone's taken a bite out of it), but that it does not rise to the level of a visual hallucination. They say it it's an actual visual experience, but when I push them they say it's not akin to hallucinating. But other people say they "see" an apple there, and seem to tell me that it is akin to a hallucination.
I have no hint of a visual experience when I think of what an apple looks like. People then wonder how I can describe an apple to someone else, or draw one. My answer is that I have a concept of an apple, but when I think about it is more verbal -- I can describe the shape, the color, etc, and I can use a pencil to transfer that to a page. So am I actually visualizing the way some people are? I don't know!
Maybe the way I hold the idea of apple in my mind is related to the fact that I have a very active inner monologue. I also feel like I can hold the idea of music in my head pretty clearly -- the concepts of pitch, volume, etc. I can carry on entire conversations with myself and "listen" to a song. But it definitely is not a an auditory experience in the same way that actually hearing music is, i.e. I would never describe it as an auditory hallucination. But maybe it comes closer to what some people experience when they visualize something?
I wonder if I have any auditory-related physiological responses when I "hear" things in my mind?
They are all wrong. Hobbits are a type of goblin not humans with hairy feet.
I now believe this, and consider it an example of aggressive mimicry: they LOOK human to lure unsuspecting prey into their holes.
Even his own?
Yes. Nothing looks right.
The thing that irritates me about "conspiracy theories" is not the hypothesis of a conspiracy, but the absolute certainty that a conspiracy is responsible for something even if alternative explanations seem more plausible.
If someone proposed a conspiracy theory and then added "I assign a 20% probability that this happened", I would often be okay with that because... strange things happen, who knows. But a typical conspiracy theorist will call you naive and brainwashed for even considering alternative explanations. For example, a conspiracy theory will assume that thousands of random unimportant people are on someone's payroll, even if their behavior can be easily explained by everyone following their selfish incentives.
Basically, conspiracy theorists seem to have this model of the world where people following their incentives is something unheard of, so if thousands of people do something that seems like an obvious thing anyone in their situation would do, clearly the CIA or Soros must be involved. Even if you propose a mixed model, where e.g. the CIA or Soros started something, but then thousands or millions of people have joined it for selfish reasons, the conspiracy theorists will insist that every single one of those thousands or millions must be on the payroll. Well, maybe not the anonymous randos, but definitely anyone who is not a completely anonymous rando.
For example, consider the Euromaidan. Is it possible that CIA did something? Yes, it is definitely possible. But is it also possible that millions of Ukrainians have some information about what life is like in EU, and what life is like in Russia (they have borders with both, so it's not some distant lands they are speculating about; they can watch the TV, many of them understand the languages, the ones living near the border often have relatives on the other side) and many of them concluded that they would rather live in the former than in the latter? In my opinion, that's a fucking obvious conclusion that any sane person would make in their place... but for the sake of debate, let's assume that only 50% of those who considered this question have made that choice. That's still enough to have a perfectly natural explanation for what happened.
I don't have a problem with the hypothesis that CIA is somehow responsible for the spark that started the explosion. I have a problem with the hypothesis that the entire explosion was manufactured by CIA; that there was no flammable material there unless CIA brought it. Apparently some people never heard about Holodomor (or maybe they believe it is American propaganda?), or never heard about the 1991 referendum, so they assume that the idea that Ukrainians want to be independent from Russia must be some recent invention that CIA pays them to say.
At that moment, it's like looking outside during winter, noticing the snow on the streets, and concluding that Jews did it. The problem is not that Jews are incapable of shoveling the snow. The problem is that there is a perfectly natural explanation and you decided to ignore it, because the conspiracy theory makes a cool story.
A lot of conspiracy theories flounder on "What is the gain?" question. What is the gain for Big Tobacco to cover up harmful effects of smoking? An obvious one, their profits might well stand or fall on this issue. What is the gain for pharma companies to cover up for vaccines? The same. (This doesn't alone imply that vaccines are harmful, though or indeed smoking, either - you need vastly more studies for that!)
What is the gain for public health authorities to cover up for vaccines? Well, that's far less obvious - they don't really derive direct benefits either way, one usually needs some bigger conspiracy where they are consciously killing or sterilizing people, and then you'd need explanation for why they are doing that and even if you were doing some sort of a "benign" population control thing to keep population numbers down for the environment wouldn't there be far less risky strategies, and so on.
There are benefits for the American security system for regime change in Ukraine during EuroMaidan, so them serving as the soruce shouldn't be dismissed immediately, but many other actors derived even more direct benefit (such as the Ukrainian opposition figures replacing Yanukovich and his government), so it's unclear how much one *needs* CIA to explain what happened.
"Conspiracy Theory" is a short pointer to a long list of bad epistemic practices. Those bad epistemic practices are *typically* done by people who love seeing conspiracies everywhere, but they're orthogonal to the conspiracy dimension.
The bad epistemic practices include but are not limited to:
(1) Motivated reasoning, especially morally-motivated reasoning. M. Alice dislikes Jews, instead of being honest and saying, "I don't like Jews because they don't look like my ethnicity" or "I don't like Jews because they're typically a closed ingroup that doesn't mix with outsiders", M. Alice chooses to believe Jews caused 9/11 to have an objective reason to hate Jews. Motivated reasoning can occur without moral undertones, but mixing the "Is" and the "Ought" like that is the most egregious case.
(2) Thinking that credentialed experts are necessarily wrong or inferior.
(3) Relatedly to (2), thinking that information is "available" and reasoning from them is always "easy". Google always suffices, there is never any tacit procedural knowledge locked inside people's brain and not recorded anywhere, there is never any need to examine primary sources and cross-check different information. In history there is never any need to go to offline-only archives or examine archaeology and architecture (which sometimes needs expensive travel), or learn the ancient, extinct languages involved. In Math and Physics, there is never any need to grasp abstract and highly non-biologically-familiar ideas like entities defined solely by their behavior and/or relation to each other, reasoning from natural language description and artistic illustrations is always enough.
In short: Natural language - specifically the one you were born with - is All You Need, and Google and everyday reasoning is All You Need. Any other cognitive tool or intellectual framework invented by experts is false, gate-keeping, unnecessary.
(4) Relatedly to (2), thinking that every attempt at vigorous disagreement or even outright unfair dismissal (which happens normally in all professions among equals) is an expression of malice aimed at suppressing the idea being dismissed or disagreed with
(5) Torturing individual pieces of data to forcibly connect and give a pre-ordained conclusion, while sweeping contradicting pieces of data under the rug or artificially assigning them lower weights and different interpretations.
(6) Placing undue plausibility on story-like conclusions and privileging narratively-pleasing explanations. There is a single mastermind behind all of those massive events. There is a certain group that have continuity across history and caused a lot of unrelated historical events. Plans never go wrong. Motivations never change. Continuity gets preserved across centuries. Secrets never leak and if they do, there is a single source and it is the one telling the story right now.
(7) Always thinking in high stakes. The conspiracy is never about a boring thing like a corporate manager falsifying a product in a launch demo (e.g. Steve Jobs) or a government misrepresenting its achievements via subtle statistics games. It's always massive wars, sweeping societal changes, pyramids, aliens, space.
You can imagine how those epistemological sins can be all perpetrated even if what you're thinking about is not a conspiracy. Religion is not typically called a conspiracy but it popular (non-philosophical) religious thinking echoes all of the above points. Perhaps conspiracies have a special vibe to it that makes a human brain especially vulnerable to falling into those sins, but they're technically orthogonal to the conspiratorial aspect.
Conversely, you can imagine a conspiracy theorist who uses OSINT, hacks into IoT devices and satellites to gather data, uses databases, programming, data science, and mathematical models. Cross-checks conclusions with other conclusions, publishes conclusions, is open to criticism and feedback, etc... This is the kind of guy who would have discovered COVID in early January 2020 or even December 2019, and even if he/she arrived at a superficially-outrageous conclusion like "Obama is a Jewish lizard" you would be lying if you claim you won't download all the PDFs and the Python notebooks to see what made him/her think like that.
I was looking for something like improper scientific reasoning: anything confirming the theory obviously confirms it, but if it doesn't, it's ignored, or worse, it's spun into a new level of the conspiracy covering it up.
>Where to draw the line
No matter what that guy you work with who claims to have Cliffy Claven-like knowledge of every event in the history of mankind says, 9/11 was not an inside job.
What you say about the moon landing and suspicions in Soviet aligned countries is pretty interesting. People living there had more reasons to suspect a fake than those in the West.
I’ll probably catch a matinee showing of this related rom com today.
https://amp.theguardian.com/film/article/2024/jul/14/fly-me-to-the-moon-review-scarlett-johansson-channing-tatum-60s-space-race-romance-fails-to-launch
Genuine conspiracies do happen in history, but conspiracy *theories* have almost always been wrong. At least in the modern Western world; I'm not entirely confident about extending that to all of history. But I think the contemporary West is the appropriate reference case here.
Remember, in order to count as a conspiracy theory, it has to first be a conspiracy (a secret organized effort to commit a serious crime or similarly abhorrent act), and it also has to be a *theory*. There has to be a significant period in which people advanced the theory that this nefarious thing was happening, but that was not generally accepted as true. Neither an unknown conspiracy nor an unambiguously revealed one is a "conspiracy theory".
So things like MK Ultra or the Tuskegee experiments don't count - they went directly from things nobody but the participants suspected, to things everyone knew were true, with only about as much time in between as the NYT needed to dot the i's and cross the t's. And by that standard, there aren't many examples that actually did turn out to be true, even though there have been many conspiracies that were either never discovered or unambiguously revealed.
The mental process that leads to advancing and persistently supporting a claim of conspiracy, without the sort of evidence that would lead to an investigation quickly confirming the claim, is generally the result of logical fallacy, wishful thinking, and/or actual mental illness.
Since most people intuitively understand this, successfully casting your opponent as a "conspiracy theorist" is a very effective way to win an argument. If you can make it stick. But that's why people try.
Another major sign of a theory that is likely to be false is requiring large numbers of people to somehow perfectly coordinate without any leaks, even when they're likely to have different agendas. Or just large numbers of people in general. Also epistemic closure - any evidence against the theory is interpreted as evidence for the theory instead.
> And what I am trying to argue is that assuming that when someone promised something, and some unknown person did that thing, it was the one who promised it, is not bad epistemology
Well first off, you need to figure out who actually "promised" what. To put it charitably, this is a highly nonstandard usage of the word "promise".
What is a promise? Well, let's look for example at what Trump promised.
There are a lot of things that Trump unambiguously promised - "build the wall and make Mexico pay for it", "drain the swamp", etc. Everyone would agree that these were promises.
Then there are some things that are more debatable. For example, did Trump "promise" to put Clinton in jail? Personally, I'd say that wasn't a promise, but at the very least, it was something he said repeatedly and unambiguously, so it's at least colorable.
Now, did Trump promise to go around injecting bleach into people? No reasonable person would agree that he "promised" to do that, despite the fact that he famously once made a comment that sounded somewhat like that.
Trawling through months of speeches to find a single comment, which, when taken out of context, sounds vaguely like what happened later on is *very definitely not* a promise. And to argue otherwise just makes it seem like you decided on the conclusion first and are reasoning backwards from there, looking for whatever thread of justification you can find.
You're not exactly helping your case here.
Even if the US was going to do something like that, they wouldn't announce it in a single highly ambiguous comment months beforehand like that. This is the kind of Nostradamus-style reasoning that gives conspiracy theorists a bad name.
Biden was clearly talking about sanctions here. Even if the US had been responsible, his comment would have had nothing to do with it and you'd have been right only by chance.
The line is "what do you want me to do about it?" I care as much about what the CIA is up to as I do about whether Ethel at the grocery store really told you that your coat looked like roadkill.
If you have kids, who are getting vaccines, you should probably pay attention to whether vaccines are harmful. I'm an adult who's had several dozen, and am cheap and avoid them anyway; I don't care if it's true. Whether it's true or false changes nothing about my behavior.
Draw it such that it encompasses as many of your political enemies' beliefs as possible while excluding as many of your political tribe's beliefs as possible.
I can't help you with drawing a bright line; like a lot of stuff in the world, it's fuzzy in many dimensions.
But as to why it has a negative connotation? The world can be thought of as a giant collection of data points (that's just one possible abstraction, of course), and if you ignore most of them and selectively focus on the rest, it's possible to create any picture you want by connecting the dots with lines. In that sense, conspiracy theories are like a Rorschach blot test, telling us what's going on inside the person's head. If you want to avoid this, you'll need to act like a scientist (albeit, not a particularly good sort), and have solid-sounding independent reasons for all the exclusions and inclusions you make, and have evidence that can't be explained by other means. Most people who come up with conspiracy theories are unintelligent enough or mentally ill enough that they can't manage this, and don't even realize that it's important. Some do realize that it's important, but can't calmly and rationally document the details in a way that makes sense to others.
And there's a big trap here, which is that even if everything the conspiracy theorist says is true, and even if all their methods are rational, they're still screwed. Because as you say, the whole thing is low status, and people dismiss it easily, and trying to tell people the truth and being consistently ignored is a great way to *become* crazy.
And the result is that one way or another, most of them are nuts, and become more so the more of their life gets taken over by the theory.
You don't draw the line, you evaluate each claim on its own merits dynamically. You live in an informational ecosystem with hostile agents and every fixed strategy can be exploited.
This is not a WW2 situation, but an American Civil War situation. The Russians see Ukraine like the North - trying to take back an integral part of the nation occupied by traitors. The Ukrainians see themselves like the South - their own proud nation who wants to be free to set its own path.
Of course, like the ACW, this is also a battle of economic systems between upstart and existing powers, and as such a battle of foreign proxies as well.
"The Russians will be in Warsaw by April, and Paris by August if we don't stop the evil Putler from remaking the CCCP" is just a propaganda line by one of the proxies with interests in the region.
The Russians see Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia as part of Russia the same way they see Ukraine as part of Russia. And there's no way for them to go into Riga without being at war with Warsaw and Paris.
Except they don't, not in the way they view Ukraine. You may argue Putin has covert geopolitical goals on the baltic states, but he certainly doesn't say anything of the sort.
Meanwhile, he's thoughtfully written out an essay on his interpretation of the Russian nation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Historical_Unity_of_Russians_and_Ukrainians). I mean believe it or not but that's the propaganda line they're going with so it may as well be true (Russians will see it through that lens, at least.
If Russia had invaded Ukraine in 1991, you might have had a point. But in real life, Ukraine had been an independent country for 30 years with Russia's blessing and even treaties guaranteeing Ukraine's security as an independent country.
This is an extremely disingenuous attempt at analogy and you know it.
30 years is not that long. It's been 10 since the Crimea annexation - and that's what this started with. This war has been going on for 10 years already, first only in areas significantly more Russian.
The relevant point is that it is it is infinitely longer than the Confederacy, which had *never* existed as an independent country before the war, let alone made treaties with the north.
The Confederacy also never had its own language, so there's that, too.
Whether or not the Southern States were sovereign and independent is what the war was fought over. The States saw themselves as -independent sovereigns, part of a common cultural heritage that went back hundreds of years (Virginians and New Englanders were practically two different ethnic groups).
Also - Ukraine barely does have it's own language. Russian and Ukrainian are mutually intelligible.
> Ukraine barely does have it's own language. Russian and Ukrainian are mutually intelligible.
https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/a-map-of-lexical-distances-between-europes-languages/
Slavic languages are mutually intelligible to some degree. Russian and Ukrainian are not even the ones most similar to each other.
By the same logic, the list of nations that "barely have their own language" would include e.g. Italian.
Again, that might be somewhat analogous to Ukraine declaring independence in 1991, but not Russia going back on its word and invading 30 years later.
Putin is not willing to offer any reasonable peace terms. Perhaps if he is beaten badly enough, that will change.
Giving Putin all he wants in the name of "peace" is how we got Hitler and WW2.
Oh, good grief. Are you at all familiar with the events of 1941?
Putin is probably, in this respect, similar to Stalin. If he gets a "peace" deal with Ukraine, he'll insist on no NATO membership or military assistance as a part of the deal. Then, like Stalin, he'll get down to the serious business of rebuilding his army for the next war.
If, a year or two later while he is still rebuilding his army, Russia is invaded by Germany and all of Germany's allies, then like Stalin before him I expect Putin will set aside his Ukrainian ambitions to fight the greater threat. But, like Stalin, he'll eventually get a piece of Ukraine for his troubles.
If Stalin, er, Putin, gets a peace deal with Ukraine and *isn't* seriously invaded by someone else in the next few years, we *know* what he will do because we've seen that play out in 2015-2021. Except, it's likely that Putin will skip the part where he tries to take control by political subversion, because that plan went out the door with Poroshenko and even more so with the Battle of Kyiv.
Delay isn't a worthless result. He's not getting any younger. If we can get a decade of "peace", the problem has a good chance of disappearing on its own.
You seem to be assuming that Putin's replacement will be better than Putin. This seems foolishly optimistic, particularly as Putin has been purging the Russian political scene of anyone we would see as "better than Putin".
You didn't even mention the part where Stalin spent the first two years of WW2 secretly *allied* with Hitler.
I'm not even going to speculate about any secret deals between Putin and Scholz. Well, OK, I am, but not in public.
Breaking international agreements and gulags and starving populations into submission are all bad, but they’re different things - almost every leader in history may beat out Stalin when it comes to the latter two, but it doesn’t mean they won’t do the first.
Stalin didn't attack Finland again because Hitler refused to go along with it. Then when Hitler attacked the USSR Finland joined. Finland attacked with them and the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union got involuntarily hosted military bases and permanent influence over Finland in the peace settlement. I do think that if Ukraine were willing to concede a Finland like deal Ukraine could end the war. That means loss of territory, permanent Russian influence over Ukraine, and military limits. This is more or less what Putin has asked for. The west wants a South Korea like deal. This is what the current fighting is about.
Though additionally: Finland has always been semi-independent even during the days of the Grand Duchy of Finland. It's never been Slavic and Russia has never tried to eliminate their identity or denied their existence as a separate people. Ukraine has had a very different experience.
It's hard to accept, but yes, at this point it's not implausible to say that Putin is worse than Stalin.
Here's the list of treaties guaranteeing Ukraine's sovereignity and territorial integrity, all flushed down the toilet by Putin (and, to be fair, the feckless cowardly Western leaders, the sorry lot of them):
1991: Treaty among Russia, Ukraine, and Belarussia that effectively dissolved the USSR, and creating the new countries in their existing administrative borders (but see 2003 below)
1994: Budapest Memorandum
2003: Border agreement between Russia and Ukraine. The often-mentioned "1991 borders" for Ukraine is a convenient shorthand, but a legal fiction - the administrative border was ill-defined in 1991, and it took until 2003 to finalize it. Think about it - it was Putin who signed off on the Ukraine-Russia border, and that of course included Crimea as a part of Ukraine.
2010 Kharkiv agreement
All ignored in 2014 and onward.
The relevant question isn't "Is Putin worse than Stalin morally" but rather "Is Putin worse than Stalin at keeping treaties he has signed."
For the purpose of this discussion, agreed. And that is indeed where Putin is clearly worse. As JohanL pointed out, Stalin was a bit of a stickler for international agreements, and, by many accounts, did not believe his own intelligence warning him of an impeding German attack because he didn't think his friend Adolf would break the treaty.
Putin thinks sticking to agreements is for losers.
This is my big problem with arguing based solely on historical analogies -- you can come up with all sorts of contradictory advice based on what analogy you choose.
Is the Ukraine war like WW2, with Putin as Hitler? Then obviously we need to stop him now, because he'll never stop on his own, and every concession just makes him harder to beat later on.
Is the war like the Winter War, with Russia as the USSR and the Ukraine as Finland? Then the Ukrainians should put up enough resistance to show they're not an easy target (which they've already done), then make some concessions to gain peace while they've still got a strong enough army to provide them with leverage in the negotiations.
Is the war like WW1? Then it's not really any of our business, and NATO should probably avoid getting involved for fear of escalating a local war into a civilisation-wrecking catastrophe.
(FWIW, I've always found the idea that concessions in the Ukraine will inevitably lead Putin to invade the rest of Europe to be overblown. Ukraine is, for historical/cultural/ideological reasons, a particularly sore spot for Russia, so I think it more plausible that Putin would countenance intervention there that he wouldn't countenance for other European countries.)
You forgot another (risible, but somehow officially supported) analogy:
Is the Ukraine war like WW2, with Zelenskyy as Hitler?
Maybe reasoning by analogy is just...all junk?
It's over, opponent. I have depicted you as Hitler and me as the Allies. Surrender at once.
<BEN SHAPIRO>
So let's imagine, for the sake of argument, that you're Hitler. There is plenty of arguments to support this, for one, I don't approve of your goals, and I don't approve of Hitler's goals, surely that's more than enough common ground between you and Hitler? In any case, you may grant that you're Hitler for the purely hypothetical reason of exploring the purely hypothetical consequences were that to be actually true.
If you're Hitler, and I'm opposing you, that would surely mean that I'm the Allies. It's inevitable, right? I MUST be either De Gaulle or Churchill or Roosevelt or Stalin or Mao, flawless people who fought Hitler, the Most Moral a̶r̶m̶y̶ People in the Universe, really.
It now follows that you're both defeated as a matter of fact, policy, and morality. Everyone wants you defeated, Hitler - who was just like you - was defeated, and you're just like Hitler, therefore you are defeated, but that must mean I'm victorious. So I'm right.
</BEN SHAPIRO>
The problem is not that peace, per se, is impossible, but that the specific peace deals Russia is currently proposing are obviously poison pills.
For example, if Russia was to say "agree to cede the currently-occupied territories, and in return we will stop all attacks on further Ukrainian territory and not block an EU/NATO bid", that would be a plausible peace deal. Depending on the specifics and broader situation, I could even imagine supporting a bit of arm-twisting to get Ukraine to agree to it. But the peace deals that Putin has suggested thus far involve the vast demilitarization of Ukraine and putting it out of reach of any alliance network, which would make them highly vulnerable to another attack. Finland has universal 18-60 conscription, with everyone either serving a brief term or spending time in prison, so it's not an easy target for Russia or the Soviet Union.
There is a difference between proposals floated publicly and the real positions. We have some visibility into it thanks to the documents about the negotiations in 2022 (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/15/world/europe/ukraine-russia-ceasefire-deal.html, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/talks-could-have-ended-war-ukraine).
Ukraine would be a neutral state, so no NATO, there would be a limit on the size of its military forces (more or less the same as they had before the invasion) and a number of countries, including the US and the UK would offer security guarantees. Even the status of Crimea would have to be negotiated after 10 to 15 years. I can't find it in the articles I've linked above but Ukrainian negotiators said Russia was willing to go back to the Feb 23 line at that time.
Note that this treaty was compatible with improving the effectiveness of the Ukrainian army (you can cycle a lot of people through a 250k peacetime army) and placing large numbers of NATO troops and materiel on the border to make the security guarantees more concrete and deterring the *potential* future aggression.
From that article:
> Russia, stunned by the fierce resistance Ukraine was putting up, seemed open to such a deal, but eventually balked at its critical component: an arrangement binding other countries to come to Ukraine’s defense if it were ever attacked again.
> [...]
> To the Ukrainians’ dismay, there was a crucial departure from what Ukrainian negotiators said was discussed in Istanbul. Russia inserted a clause saying that all guarantor states, including Russia, had to approve the response if Ukraine were attacked. In effect, Moscow could invade Ukraine again and then veto any military intervention on Ukraine’s behalf — a seemingly absurd condition that Kyiv quickly identified as a dealbreaker.
These also sound like poison pills asking for an easy go of round two. Beyond which, April 2022 was a different time; the longer a war has gone on, the harder it is to end.
This clause appears in one of the drafts (the April one). Your claim was that "the peace deals that Putin has suggested thus far involve the vast demilitarization of Ukraine and putting it out of reach of any alliance network, which would make them highly vulnerable to another attack."
My point is that it's not true for some of the drafts discussed in 2022.
Agreed. Putin has repeatedly stated he is ready for peace talks at any time. But if you look at the specifics of what that actually means, he is practically calling for the total surrender of Ukraine. Putin wants them to cede all occupied territory, demilitarize and stay out of NATO, and denazify - whether this means getting rid of bona fide fascists or just people the Russians find inconvenient is left as an exercise to the reader. I don't know that the Russians actually want to occupy the entirety of Ukraine - the western half of the country is far less culturally and politically Russian. Probably a Ukrainian rump state that the Russians de facto (but not de jure) control as a buffer against NATO is the preferred outcome for them.
>whether this means getting rid of bona fide fascists or just people the Russians find inconvenient is left as an exercise to the reader
"Nazi" means something very different in Russia than it does in the West. In the postwar west, the defining feature of Nazi-ism is murdering six million Jews, with a side order of "Oh, yeah, and trying to conquer Europe was bad too". In Russia, the defining feature of Nazi-ism is a willingness to wage bloody war against Russia. Which, to be fair, they've got good reason to care about more than they do the Holocaust or the invasion of Poland.
But when a Russian says "deNazify", they mean getting rid of everyone who was involved with the last war against Russia, or who they think might be part of the next one. Their political views are irrelevant.
I don't think anyone called the Afghans or the Chechens Nazis.
Not to deny the existence of Russian state mythology built around the Soviet victory over the Third Reich, but in the specific context of Ukraine, there's also the unpleasant fact that far-right groups (Right Sector, primarily) were the main muscle in the square during the Maidan Revolution. For years afterward, far-right militias (Azov, primarily) carried much of the fight against the separatists in the East, and politically resisted Zelensky's early-and-soon-abandoned attempts at reconciliation out there. And now, by necessity, Azov (rebranded as the 3rd Assault Brigade) are lionised again as prestigious badasses because the Ukrainian military is doing everything it can think of to up recruitment. And, sure enough, they parade around with their wolf's-hooks and Celtic crosses, and openly venerate Melnyk, Bandera, and other WWII-era Actual Nazis, and help make Putin's case for him. In officially sanctioned Russian discourse – so, like, on Solovyov, or whatever – 'Banderist' is more or less interchangeable with 'Nazi', and that part is not all that inaccurate.
To be clear, I don't think Putin actually cares. He isn't doing much about Russian neo-Nazis, he certainly didn't care when European neo-Nazis met (and amused themselves with paramilitary training) in St Petersburg in the 2010s, and he didn't care when the Rusich fraction of Wagner LARPed as Nazis, either. But many Russians genuinely still feel strongly about this, and the actual Army's ethos is bound up in it, and so the label resonates.
To a Russian, or at least a revanchist Russian imperialist, Ukraine *is* Russia. A part of Russia where puppets of the West have been killing good Russians since 2014 at least.
From what I gathered, Putin's terms weren't for a *peace treaty*, but for a *ceasefire*, during which the actual peace treaty were to be negotiated. And yes, that's as utterly insane and ridiculous as it sounds: Ukraine was supposed to give up basically all of its political and military capital, and vast regions that aren't even occupied by Russian forces, before any negotiations would even begin.
After the Winter War, though, Stalin at least queried Germany on whether they would have approval for a second round (before Operation Barbarossa started and when Soviet Union and Germany were still formally pals).
After 1945, of course, Soviet Union did not really have a need to attack any more of the European countries, but there was a real danger of Finland following the same road as the (other) Eastern European countries to being a People's Republic, and many of the steps on that road were taken, but due to a combination of things that still cause a lot of controversy in Finnish historiography, the final steps weren't taken and going Communist was averted.
One thing a lot of people don't realize about Stalin is that he had an odd, legalistic respect for international treaties. He waited until the Japanese non-aggression had expired until declaring war, even though absolutely no-one would have been bothered if he just ignored it. His forces evacuated significant parts of Europe because he had agreed to it in advance. This is probably a partial explanation about the extremely poor initial response to Barbarossa as well - THEY HAD A DEAL!!
None of this holds true for Putin. Deals are meaningless to him, utterly empty - just ask Prigozhin oh wait you can't.
(There's a wonderful attributed Stalin quote about why he didn't take over Finland: "Who wants to keep a hedgehog in his pocket?")
Or even just one with a more sensible set of priorities. The war isn't merely evil, it's *stupid*. At this point, no-one in their right mind can think it was a good idea to initiate it, and the large majority people in Russia would like it to go away.
"It's worse than a crime, it's a mistake."
I think puzzles (with the right difficulty level) are good for this. I'm enjoying the Giiker Super Slide at the moment. It's easy enough that I can do it when I'm tired, but difficult enough that I still get a sense of satisfaction from completing a level.
I've been there. For be at least it becomes a lot more. The cheap dopamine craving takes over the rest of my life quickly. The only way out that works (for a while), is cold turkey quit all activities I know are cheap dopamine and replace them with healthy activities. I have found a full night's sleep to be the most critical element of having the self control to stick to this. Others are a packed to do list, and some things that are not a death spiral of cheap dopamine, like listening to podcasts or exercise
If you want it to change: read long fiction?
If you want a high dose in less time: meditate to high bpm meme-y music?
You might have ADHD. Talk to a psychiatrist.
Get a content blocker. What you're doing isn't random easy useless shit, it's online shit. People who are smart enough to have been figuring out the cure for various cancers have been making fuck tons of money for several decades by figuring out ways to attach suction cups to your eyeballs. Virtually everyone wastes some time online scrolling thru displays of consumer goods, genitals, videos etc. It's like living in a goddam food court. We were never meant to have available to us the promise of effortless stimulation and entertainment, and we get disregulated when we are carrying a device purporting to deliver that in our pockets.
We'd probably be doing better overall if the internet really did deliver that. But what it's really good at delivering the feeling that you're going to find some absolutely wonderful stimulation and entertainment if you scroll just a bit more.
You may be more susceptible than most to the internet's suction, but I think you're wrong to think the main cause is your love of cheap dopamine. I think the main cause is the internet. Block the fucker. Block it a lot. Read some articles by people who cut way back on their online time for inspiration and tips.. Consider something like a 2 week backpacking trip without a phone.
Get a girlfriend.
Well the first question is what do you WANT to do about it? We've got "sleep more", what else? Sounds like you want to do chores faster; why? What's filling that time once they're done?
One way to break from cheap dopamine is investing in more complex dopamine. The brain wants to do things, it's trying to turn the videos into an activity. Give it an activity and it'll calm down. Start an exercise program, with a solid end goal. Learn a new recipe and try to cook it. Pick your favorite Youtube video, and try to figure out a blueprint for your own version of it. Anything that isn't passive absorption.
Lots of cravings weaken once you stop indulging them. Give your phone to a family member for the week. You'll probably be crawling up the walls for a bit, but you'll figure out something else to do by the time you get it back.
1. Have you tried meditation? Daily mindfulness meditation, about 15-20 min. Maybe try it first thing in the morning, I don't know what your schedule is like, just pick the time of day you are most likely to meditate consistently with no distractions. There are lots of guides/resources if you google "mindfulness meditation" or go to your local bookstore.
Why do I recommend this?
If you meditate consistently for a while, you'll start to notice a space between the desire for something (masturbation, YouTube, whatever) and the acting on that desire. As Viktor Frankl wrote, "between stimulus and response there is a space, and in that space is the freedom to act." It's like physical exercise - if you just do it a couple of times, it does nothing, but if you do it consistently over some period of time, you will start to notice a difference.
2. Also, a time-honored way to fight cravings is to remove the stimulus. Can you just... choose not to carry your phone with you to the bathroom or kitchen? If you leave your phone in the living room while you're cooking in the kitchen, you will then have to physically leave the kitchen to mess around on your phone, and that tiny bit of extra activation energy may be enough to stop you.
3. Lastly, sometimes the longing *FOR* something is stronger than aversion. Try reframing it in your mind, rather than "I wish I didn't spend so much time on my phone," ask yourself, "what COULD I do if I had that extra time/energy?" Go on some dates and possibly meet the love of your life, really excel at work, find a better job, take up an awesome hobby, whatever? And then use that to motivate you.
Best wishes to you!