I watched Megalopolis and was struck by how shallow its ideas of architecture were. For something that presumably animates the entire film, the concept of this new utopia seemed to be plant-shaped buildings connected by a moving walkway - the kind that you might find in any airport. Maybe I missed something, or the true genius of the vision went over my head.
In any event, that got me thinking about real world architecture. After a visit to the Getty Center, I realized that there's something futuristic about the vision for that building. On the way back to my car, I thought, for a fleeting moment, that I could be heading to a home not so different from the Getty center - with travertine walls, sculpture and fountains, benches for contemplation of art or philosophy. Of course, my one-bedroom in Glendale is nothing close to the Getty Center, but that idea - that one day everything could look like this - seemed to be implicit in the design of the Getty Center.
That's pretty consistent with my understanding of modernism - everyone and their brother wanted to make the "Home of Tomorrow TM" with the basic understanding that today's luxury good would be ubiquitous tomorrow.
I don't get the same feeling from most buildings, but particularly newer ones. Take SoFi Stadium, also in Los Angeles. I felt like I was walking through a newly built stadium, but one that made no claim on immortality. I don't think that's a function of the building's purpose - Grand Central in New York isn't a museum like the Getty Center, but manages to convey a much clearer idea of progress than SoFi Stadium does.
So my question - what newer (post-2000) buildings make you hopeful for the future? If you've seen Megalopolis, did those buildings do the trick? Does anyone know of a one-bedroom for rent in LA with travertine walls?
In a recent article, the Washington Post documented the multiple instances of immigration fraud that Elon Musk and his brother used to stay in the US illegally while they were supposed to be students. The DoJ's Office of Immigration Litigation should investigate this because a person can be denaturalized (i.e. have their citizenship revoked) if it’s discovered that the person obtained it through fraud or misrepresentation.
The reasons for denaturalization can be that...
The person lied on their application or during the interview — This includes providing false information about criminal history, hiding significant facts, or failing to disclose relevant details, like involvement in illegal activities or affiliations with certain organizations.
Or committed fraud — This could be entering the U.S. or obtaining permanent residency under false pretenses, then later becoming a naturalized citizen.
I am skeptical that you or anyone else here would be seriously proposing "denaturalizing" a US citizen of over twenty years and with native-born children, because they lied on a visa application and/or exceeded the limits of that visa, if it were anyone other than Elon Musk. OK, we've probably got some people who would sign up for it if it were e.g. Ilhan Omar, but no. Just no.
This is the same sort of thing as e.g. "Lock Her Up!" w/re Hillary's Emails. This is not how we do things in the United States of America, and I am absolutely opposed to changing that.
The rule of law of is supposed to apply to all Americans equally. However, I guess a billionaire gets a pass. And his native-born children couldn't be denaturalized because, under the 14th Amendment, they're natural citizens. Denaturalization only applies to immigrants who violate US immigration law by lying on their visa and citizenship applications. As far as I know, Ilhan Omar didn't lie on any of her immigration documents. So she wouldn't be eligible for denaturalization, either.
The law as it *actually* applies to all Americans not named "Elon Musk", is that once you are naturalized as a US citizen, you are not denaturalized unless you are a literal Nazi, terrorist, drug lord, or the like. Seriously, check out the record on actual denaturalization.
"Rule of Law" means that Elon Musk gets the same treatment. And since he's not literally a Nazi, he doesn't get denaturalized even if he *did* lie on his visa application.
The thing you're looking for, where everybody technically commits three felonies a day and the prosecutors sensibly ignore all of that but when we decide someone is the Wrong Sort of Person then all we have to do is find the crime he (and about a million other people) committed yesterday and throw the book at him, that's not rule of law. That's behavior suited for an Ayn Rand or George Orwell villain.
And I really shouldn't be hoping to see you on the receiving end of that sort of treatment, but I kind of am.
> This is not how we do things in the United States of America
And who are you to decide that? America is what the people want it to be, and the people want closed borders and mass deportation. Of course, Elon wouldn't be one of the people getting deported, seeing as he's in Trump's good graces. And also he's white. And rich.
What riles me about Musk is his arrogance that the rules are for us and not for him. He calls his working while having a student visa a legal gray area. It's not. It's quite clear that a student visa is for studying and only allows for work-study related to one's degree. Musk dropped out a week after classes started. Meanwhile, there are a few tens of thousands of college students in the US whose parents brought them into the country illegally—who grew up here—but will potentially face deportation once they graduate. DACA only offers limited relief from deportation, with no guarantee they can stay. How many potentially successful entrepreneurs are we discarding? How about it, John, since we're stretching the rules for Musk, why not stretch the rules for legitimate college students? But DACA is in Trump's sights, and Elon has become a fervent supporter of The Donald's immigration policies.
Another one of those inconsequential little laws that Musk may have broken is the Logan Act. By is his own admission that he's been in communication with Putin (post-sanctions) about "space-related matters." Funny how Ukraine got shut out of that space-related matter called Starlink. Harris's Attorney General should have the DoJ investigate his ass. Of course, if Trump wins, Musk will get sweetheart deals from the US government.
i have a Trump-related question. I’m posing it separately in the hopes of avoiding having answers to my question get swamped by debate.
I know many democrats who are genuinely terrified of Trump winning. The say he will actually do all the worst and wildest stuff he’s just talked about doing so far, because he will quickly install appointees everywhere, and that he will then be essentially a dictator, jailing those prominent people who speak out against him or taking legal action against them, etc etc. I would like to know what impediments there are to this happening.
Last night I googled “impediments to Trump ruining country” and every single hit I got was about how Trump is for sure going to ruin the country. A typical one was a Washington Post article “A Trump Dictatorship is Increasingly Inevitable.” Inevitability doesn’t *come* in degrees. WTF?
For instance, what impediments are there to Trump’s bringing some charge against Chuck Schumer, winning the case, and getting the guy locked up for a few years? So one thing I wonder about is about legal constraints.
Another is practical constraints. For instance the logistics of rounding up 10 million or so undocumented immigrants seems pretty daunting. Who rounds them up? Where do you put them til they are shipped out? How do you transport them back to where they came from? What do you do if their country of origin won’t take them back? For that and for other proposed Trump plans, it seems to me you need staff who are not only willing to carry out such plans, but are also very good at the logistics involved. Seems likely potential Trump appointees are carefully vetted for loyalty, but not for skills (to vet for skills, you need skillful people).
A third is resistance by local governments. What happens if the government of a blue state objects strongly to some Trump plan being carried out? Seems like many things require the cooperation of local officials. Wouldn’t some states refuse to cooperate in carrying out plans they are strongly opposed to? Would Massachuetts, for example, help round up the undocumented immigrants in its state? And then there would be some sort of legal fight about that, but surely it would drag on for a long time.
Here’s and old article from the Economist about this. I think it depends on the cards he’s dealt: he already has a majority on the Supreme Court, if he also has both houses of Congress he can run the board.
The meticulous, ruthless preparations for a second Trump term:
Among many other problems with this, the fact that a Supreme Court justice was nominated by George Bush does not mean that Donald Trump in any way owns them, It's not even clear that he "owns" all of the judges he himself nominated.
That seems about right, There's essentially zero possibility of Trump building the sort of power base he'd need to bulldoze the 22nd Amendment in four years. The real danger is that a cabal of *competent* wannabe fascists (or whatever) will attach themselves to the Trump administration and build something nasty for themselves.
Which is sort of what Project 2025 seems to be aiming at, but if the result is something Trump-centered then it probably doesn't survive Trump leaving office and if it's not Trump-centered then Trump will probably kill it while he's still in office. It's not impossible that the as-yet-unnamed American Hitler will be able to thread that needle in the next four years, so we're going to want to keep up the whole Eternal Vigilance thing, but it's not something I'm terribly worried about.
Thanks for your read John. Re-asked my question on new open thread, and practically nobody was able to address it -- all went into political rage meltdown. It's really scary how unable to think straight most people are about the election.
Jane's Law of Politics states that "The followers of the party in power are smug and arrogant. The followers of the party out of power are deranged and insane." This has always seemed a sound guide to me. But at the moment, the Democrats don't seem to see themselves as being in power.
Which is understandable, as their incumbent is a senile lame duck and their candidate is a lightweight who is trailing in the polls. But it means that we get deranged insanity all around.
Not to sound ungrateful, but — this isn’t what I was asking for. It’s less hysterical in tone than the stuff I found with my google, but it’s mainly an accounting of the nature of the preparations for Trump’s second term, how thorough they are etc (so more of what I was finding in my googlelast night), plus speculation about what steps he’d take in different areas.
I can’t believe there are no impediments to Trump doing exactly what he wants. Why the fuck is it so hard to find an article about it, even an article that’s mistaken about impediments? Is there nobody thinking about this subject? Is the entire press unwilling to write about this subject? Maybe nobody wants to publish an article about it because it will irritate Trump supporters, and undermine efforts to terrify everyone else into voting for Harris?
See, this shit is part of why I don’t vote. It’s too hard to get the real picture.
Alarming stuff is everywhere. The problem is finding anything else. it’s not that I’m convinced that having Trump in office is no big deal because he’ll be blocked in everything he tries. I’m just convinced that there are some things that are blockable, some contests of cleverness and will be would not win, some steps he could not take because he’s dumb and chaotic, and staff he’s brought on board my not be highly competent in carrying out big messy projects, etc etc. I cannot find any articles about what he will or might have trouble accomplishing due to legal constraints, or practical ones, or resistance from various groups (including many businesses who rely on undocumented immigrants for labor). it’s like all the journalists, and also you, are under some
spell. I ask for info on impediments to some Trump projects, I get articles about reasons to be alarmed. Yes I ALREADY KNOW the case for
alarm. How could I possibly not? It’s everywhere. I would like to read the case against being sure life as we know it in the US will be completely destroyed during 4 years
of Trump because “he will be able to do anything he wants.”
...I don't know what to tell you, man. "Legal constraints" are only relevant if the parties involved actually respect the law. Now, the real impediment in such a scenario would be the military, but them trying to assert authority over the government would probably trigger a civil war, which is... pretty bad.
But say what you will about Trump, he has been very honest about his intentions, sympathies, and character. None of his supporters can claim in good conscience that they didn't know what they were getting themselves into.
It is truly awful life-advice to tell people they need to focus enough of their energy on politics to truly understand both candidates and vote to the best of their ability. That is a recipe for misery. Which means most people *don't* know what they're getting into, because they have actual lives to live. With real people around them, doing fun things. Unlike some of us here.
This camp, we have 32 projects covering many different topics. We recommend having a look at the projects to see which ones interest you. But you also have the option of filling out a generic application for all the projects at once.
I like the stats, but don't like the statements "you should do X to maximize your chances".
For example: "The data suggest that for the best chance of a prize, you should identify as a man." The sounds like trans men are over-represented among the winners.
Suggestion for Scott: can you do another defined section at the bottom of the board for election threads for the next couple of weeks, just to keep all that stuff in one place?
Seemed to work well for Ukraine when that topic was at its hottest.
At least one section for "arguments why Trump is actually awesome and everything you believe about him is wrong", because we have too many of those here recently.
Yeah, I get it. If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then you can easily score a lot of contrarian points by insisting that it is totally not a duck, but a space alien from the seventh dimension who only pretends to be a duck to fool the mainstream sheeple. But it was already done hundred times and at this point it is boring.
Yeah, wokeness sucks, Harris sucks, etc. No argument against that. None of that makes your delusions about Trump being secretly awesome any more realistic.
Trump is not at all like Hitler. It is a ridiculous argument that falls apart at the slightest scrutiny:
a) he does not run a campaign on racism. If you actually watch the campaigning he does (rather than cherry-picked out-of-context snippets) then you see this clear fact. The republicans are campaigning mostly on the economy, with tertiary campaigning on reducing ILLEGAL immigration, a peace-through-strength foreign policy, and increased manufacturing and energy investment.
b) his rhetoric (unlike the democrats') is not incendiary. it is actually far more mellow than his rhetoric in previous years... e.g., compare this years Al Smith dinner to previous ones.
c) he does not have the popular or the party support to act like Hitler
d) he is (far) too old to act like Hitler.
The ones damaging democracy are actually the democrats. Rather than campaign on actual issues (like the republicans are doing), they are actively mischaracterizing their opponents. Joe Biden is on record saying "Lock Trump Up." Jailing political opponents is the action of a dictator. Most of the democrat campaign is falsely characterizing their political opponent as Hitler. Obviously, this characterization insights violence and political instability. He has already been targeted by two assassinations.
You can see that he is explicitly asked about a scenario where a) he wins the election and b) people don't accept that and there is a "non-peaceful election day."
I'm not sure that's an accurate summation of Trump's candidacy - the very first policy statement put out by Trump's 2016 campaign was entitled: "Statement by Donald J. Trump Statement on Preventing Muslim Immigration". The first sentence was "Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on." Link here: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-donald-j-trump-statement-preventing-muslim-immigration
That's pretty clear religious discrimination. There's no way you could ever get away with something like that in a job posting - if tomorrow Microsoft said that they'd no longer accept Muslim job applicants, they'd be sued into oblivion.
Moreover, the entire reason Donald Trump became a Republican celebrity is because he was the most famous person to say that Barack Obama was not born in the United States of America, but was instead a Kenyan Muslim. Who, presumably, would not have been allowed to enter the country under Trump's proposed total and complete shutdown on all Muslims entering.
He literally said "we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now" in reference to crimes committed by immigrants. If that doesn't qualify as racist I'm not sure what would.
>tertiary campaigning on reducing ILLEGAL immigration
Yeah, so tertiary that they were handing out "Mass Deportations Now" signs at the RNC. So tertiary that Vance and Trump both spent a news cycle sharing a Facebook rumor about Haitians eating cats. (Also, the Haitians in Springfield are LEGAL immigrants, and they still got targeted. I do not believe for a second that a Trump presidency would be careful and discriminating about which immigrants it gets rid of.)
>his rhetoric (unlike the democrats') is not incendiary
"The enemy within" and "poisoning the blood of our country" and "mass deportations now" and "they're eating the cats and dogs" are all more extreme and incendiary than "build the wall" was in 2016.
>he does not have the popular or the party support to act like Hitler
The Heritage Foundation has been working hard to change that - both having a plan ready to go for 2025 and preparing a list of people they can hire to make it happen. I would not have a lot of hope that Trump will be reined in by the "deep state" in 2025 like he was in 2017-2020.
Attempting to reduce Illegal immigration is in no way racist. By definition, illegal immigrants should be not be in the country, if you have any respect for the rule of law...
The Democrats are pulling out all of the rhetorical stops to try to get Trump not elected. Hitler comparisons shows they're really scraping the bottom of the barrel. It's the Godwin's law of politics.
People have also been pointing out the problems with Trump's policies, it just doesn't get as much airtime as him talking about how much he wants to be a dictator, for obvious reasons. For instance, his proposed tax plan would add more than twice as much to the deficit as Harris's, and also would cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans while raising them on the poorest.
He also seems to think that tariffs are paid by the country exporting the goods instead of the Americans importing them.
I am totally fine with people pointing out economic concerns. That is a valid campaigning. Calling some Hitler is not a valid way of campaigning. It erodes trust in media, it polarizes the political parties, it (like all crying wolf) erodes and weakens the terms for then actually do apply. It is just such a bad approach.
A hilarious CNN clip showed Trump calling Harris a "Communist-Fascist-Socialist" multiple times. Finally, we see Harris saying yes when CNN asks her do you agree with General Mark Milley's opinion that Trump is fascist. As a Leftie, I don't think comparing Trump to Hitler is valid. Hitler was much smarter than Trump and wasn't cognitively impaired until after he retreated to his bunker.
Essay by: Phillip Bump October 24, 2024 Washington Post
If we look at it in the abstract, it’s easy to see the genesis of the comparisons.
A political leader whose popularity is driven by his personality more than his detailed policy proposals. Someone who casts a small segment of the population as dangerous and demands they be rounded up and deported. A leader who responded to losing an election by working fervently to overturn those election results, spreading false claims and stoking an anger that culminated in an attack on his country’s legislature. A leader who has endorsed the idea of replacing a nonpartisan governmental bureaucracy with loyalists. Someone who excoriates the press as dishonest, describes his political opponents as enemies worse than foreign adversaries, and is surrounded by voices that amplify and cheer his most extreme rhetoric.
No, Donald Trump is not Adolf Hitler. He has, happily, not engaged in either the systematized slaughter of a population or launched an effort to subjugate the world.
But, as a number of his former top aides have said in recent weeks, he views the constraints of democracy with disdain and embraces an approach to power that checks the boxes of fascism. Oh, and according to his former chief of staff John F. Kelly, Trump also offered praise for the German dictator and the way he managed his military.
For many of those surrounding Trump, particularly those who recognize that his reelection means their own empowerment, it is horrible to suggest that Trump is akin to history’s most infamous, hated leader. At times, the claim is that the former president’s critics and the left are saying that Trump somehow is Hitler — a rhetorical leap intended to heighten the idea that any such historical comparisons are ridiculous. The left is equating Trump with history’s greatest monster! Can you believe how unhinged they are?
And: Can you believe how dangerous they are? Since the attempt on Trump’s life in July, he and his allies have blamed anti-Trump rhetoric for the threats he has faced. There’s an obvious political utility here: If they can make some of his critics more cautious about what they say, they’ve restricted the amount of criticism that surrounds Trump. But for those primed to view any comparison to fascist or authoritarian leaders as unwarranted, the hostility that might accompany such comparisons may seem like little more than an effort to stir up hate.
The irony of this concern emerging among supporters of a candidate who is relentlessly focused on disparaging and lying about immigrants to the United States should not be ignored.
Trump’s supporters are mostly focused on a straw man, a Trump critic who says he is Hitler or who makes comparisons to Hitler that are inherently ludicrous. Consider the interview that right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt conducted with Trump on Thursday morning. Hewitt was once a standard conservative commentator, one focused on national security issues. But he’s become increasingly sycophantic in his regular conversations with Trump, failing to press the former president on questions that demand obvious follow-ups.
Were Hewitt conducting an interview with a Democrat who approached politics in the manner outlined in the second paragraph of this article — if, say, Barack Obama’s former chief of staff had warned that the former president didn’t respect American democracy and praised Hitler — it is easy to predict how an Obama-Hewitt interview might go. But that is not how the Hewitt-Trump interview went.
“Why do some people hate you so much?” he asked Trump. “I mean, Trump Derangement Syndrome is a real thing. I’ve run into it. We saw it online repeatedly. The stuff they call you, the Hitler stuff, the fascist stuff. … Why do you destabilize people this way?” Trump’s connection was staticky, so it was a bit hard to understand his first comments. But then he offered a response.
“I have a tendency to win. It’s a nice thing. And that bothers people,” Trump said. “Sometimes I play a little bit rough, but they play rough. They are rough and vicious people. They are vicious people. They’re dirty people. They’ve weaponized government. They’ve weaponized everything and actually made me more popular. It’s hard to believe.”
So in response to a question centered on the ridiculousness of the idea that Trump’s politics mirror fascism, Trump describes his opponents as “vicious” and “dirty” and makes a false claim about how the Biden administration has “weaponized” the government — as manifested, for example, in the special counsel bringing charges against Trump for attempting to subvert the 2020 election. Which are the sorts of things autocrats say.
Trump’s supporters don’t want to address the central issue, which is that Trump’s approach to power much more closely resembles an autocratic, fascist leader than an American, democratic one. So they highlight the word “Hitler” in the same way that they at times highlight the word “racist”: as a way of suggesting that their opponents are once again hyperventilating without reason and lifting up the most damaging rhetoric they can muster, regardless of how applicable it might be. The benefit of doing so is that they then don’t have to address the underlying criticisms and concerns.
Godwin’s Law holds that any online debate will, if it continues long enough, eventually involve a comparison to Hitler or Nazi Germany in an effort to score the ultimate point. What Trump’s allies are doing is declaring the debate to have been “Godwinned” from the outset. They’re suggesting that his critics are making an unfair comparison in hopes of skipping all the intermediary discussion.
There are two points worth reinforcing here.
The first is that the most immediate round of comparisons to Hitler was driven not by left-wing paranoia about a second Trump term. It was driven, instead, by Trump’s own words, as relayed by his former chief of staff. It’s Trump who praised Hitler’s control over his generals and Trump who said Hitler did good things, according to Kelly, a retired four-star general. Those were comments he offered reluctantly, apparently doing so only after Trump suggested that the military should be used against any of the “enemy within” should there be unrest on Election Day.
The second is that one of the first people to compare Trump to Hitler was Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), now Trump’s running mate. What changed since Vance offered that comparison in 2016 isn’t how Trump approaches politics. It’s how willing Vance has become to acquiesce to that approach.
There just aren't a lot of historical figures that Americans are familiar with. If I said that Trump was going to be another Edward Longshanks, I doubt anyone would understand what I meant by the comparison. (Edward signed the Edict of Expulsion, resulting in the mass deportation of Jews, without mass slaughter a la Hitler).
The point of comparison is to connect what someone already knows to something they're seeing in real time. If Americans only know a few historical figures - Hitler, Gandhi, Lincoln - then you have to sacrifice accuracy for comprehension.
The problem I have with the idea of Trump as white supremacist is that, from the outside in its foreign policy, the US acts like a white supremacist country. If it proclaimed that it had that ideology not much would change in its alliances (white Europe, NATO, the five eyes), its paternalistic attitude to central and South America with the threat of invasion for countries that don’t toe the line, the wars against Arabs and the general fear of a rising China (or Asia in general).
There are some differences in foreign policy perhaps relative to a 19C European power, less interest in Africa - which was late to colonialism anyway - and a philo semitism that didn’t exist on the European powers (except perhaps Britain).
What Trump is, is an American nationalist, not an “internationalist” - which is just code word for imperialism. The rules based international order is a hard sell if you are ignoring the rules yourself.
This is the classic approach of the democrats: paint your opponents as bigoted, racist, sexist, etc... Because obviously, the democrats can never be wrong.
It is the same rhetoric they used for defund the police (e.g., if you criticize the rioting, or this insane policy then you must be racist). It is the same rhetoric they use on trans-issues (e.g., JK Rowling must be motivated by hate, rather than a genuine concern for women). Etc...
They are the ones using inflammatory rhetoric (while simultaneously criticizing the republicans for this tactic?!). What could be more inflammatory than a) saying your opponent is Hitler and b) saying that "the fate of democracy is at stake."
That last point is interesting; the full context of JD Vance's opinion on Trump is "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?" And I honestly don't think his opinion of Trump has really changed since then. But look at it this way: do you REALLY want to bet against Hitler, considering how that turned out last time?
Of course, the most obvious difference between Trump and Hitler is that Trump is old. Really old. Even if he plans on removing term limits, I highly doubt it's going to take more than 4 years for him to keel over or lose his mind. At which point, Vance will be next in line, and he can finish what Trump started, just more competently.
In the video he talking about exactly the same issues he talked about in the VP Debate (concern for the working class, and desire for more manufacturing). His whole policy stick is two issues: more support for families (and their values), and more support for industry. You can clearly trace these concerns back to his upbringing in a manufacturing-heavy, poverty-ridden, low-social-capital environment. He care about helping people.
If you actually listen to what he says, you see that he is MORE MODERATE than most republicans. For example, Ben Shapiro has criticized JD Vance for being TOO OPEN to pro-choice, and TOO OPEN to social-support policies.
...I wasn't intending to slander him. He's a pragmatist, and I respect that. Still, it's hard to argue that he's a moderate, and I don't know why you'd want him to be moderate, considering how little establishment conservatives have actually accomplished.
If I listen to what he says, consistently over time, I can't help but noticing that he used to say that Donald J. Trump was "reprehensible", "idiotic", and yes, "America's Hitler". Now he's Donald J. Trump's partner in whatever reprehensible, idiotic, possibly Hitlerian schemes the man gets up to. And he aims the rhetorical attacks, against Donald Trump's enemies (i.e. his own former allies). So that does seem like a teensy weensy bit of an inconsistency that might bear looking into.
What I *don't* care about are his object-level views on industrial policy or family values or any other such thing. I'd care about those with a Joe Biden, or a Kamala Harris or a Nikki Haley. But if someone proposes to elect a man they believe might be an American Hitler and is at best a second Nixon, as a means of securing object-level political gains, then that person is simply not to be trusted.
I just don't buy this Hitler perspective, at all. I think you can easily explain JD Vance as initially being persuaded that Trump is Hitler-esk, and then VD Vance taking a closer look, and realizing that that was a false characterization.
How is that odd? 50% of voters don't have a problem with Trump. The fact that one of those voters is JD Vance is hardly surprising. Lots and lots of people who were initially negative towards Trump have changed their mind.
The two biggest data points to emerge on Donald Trump since Vance's initial assessment are, A: the fact that he really sucks at using Presidential power to accomplish his goals within the limits of the law, and B: he actually is willing to attempt a coup d'état to extend and expand that power. Fortunately, the "really sucks at using Presidential power" bit extended to his coup-plotting aptitude.
But anyone who thought Trump was plausibly Hitlerian in 2016, is not going to think that is *less* plausible in 2021 or later. If you thought he was only plausibly rather than certainly Hitler up front, sure, maybe you might think that is more-plausible-but-still-not-certain today. Or if you were certain Trump was *not* an American Hitler, say because you believe the "American Hitler" thing is always and only liberal elite bedwetting, then maybe you're still sure he's not another Hitler.
Neither of those are J.D. Vance. Either he was lying when he said he though Trump might be the American Hitler then, no better than one of those liberal elite bedwetters really, or he's OK with possibly being on Team Hitler now that Maybe Hitler has offered him a sufficiently high-ranking position on the team.
“Vance has said he considers Yarvin a friend and has cited his writings in connection with his plan to fire a significant number of civil servants during a potential second Trump administration.”
I am 100% burned out with coding. Yesterday I caught myself having stared into space for over ten minutes doing nothing but thinking the phrase "and at that point we can do the thing" on loop over and over again. I cannot realistically expect to finish the project I've promised to finish before Christmas, not when it feels like I have the IQ of warm rice pudding. I've lost an entire day today trying to "reboot" by taking time off to do other things - work on writing, walk about in parks, etc - but I've sat back down and nope, still pudding. This is both boring and highly stressful at the same time. I don't see any way forward.
What Anon said. But also, next time, don't make promises about things that are out of your control (note: that includes everything). Really, the lesson is to make fewer promises, not to be harder on yourself.
Schedule a psychiatrist's appointment. Do this ASAP, as there's usually high lead time, especially for new patients.
FWIW, while burnout is a treatable issue on its own, it's often linked to depression or ADHD. A good psych will help you figure out if one or both of those are in play (keep in mind that depression may not manifest as the classic "I'm sad all the time," but rather as "I'm just really tired and kinda bored").
If you're planning a death march till Christmas, this is a bad idea, and you should plan time for breaks. It takes more than a day to reset! At the verty least, take a couple of three– or four-day weekends. Maybe you could add days to the already-long Thanksgiving weekend?
If the schedule itself is unrealistic, raise that with your stakeholders as soon as you can. Even if they're assholes, they will appreciate honest communication more than a late-December surprise.
Remember that you can always quit.
Hang in there! Burnout sucks, and it happens more than people are willing to talk about, but there area strategies that can help you. Most of all, don't be your own slave-driver, and don't keep using Try Harder on an approach that isn't working. Good luck!
A note of caution about ADHD: if someone gives you adderall or some other upper right now, it will probably help a lot. Adderall improves mood, energy and focus for almost everybody. I’m not a bit ADD-ish and I love how adderall takes me feel. I keep a little around to help with difficult tasks, but not much. It’s too enjoyable to be safe for me.
If you have genuine, wiring-problem ADHD, you have had it all your life. The diagnosis makes sense only if you’ve had worse problems than
others your age alll your life with staying focused on a task, keeping your attention on movies, books and what people saying etc.
As for depression, watch out for shrinks who think everybody has Prozac Deficiency Disorder. if you have clearly been depressed at other times in your life, and this feels the same way, then OK maybe it’s depression. but if it feels
like burnout to you, maybe it really is. Not many people are wired to be able to sit and do programming all day, you may not be one of those who are. Also, be aware that it is very common for antidepressants to reduce your interest in sex and your ability to do the act, and also common for the to cause weight gain.
Like, yeah, sometimes I stare at the screen all day and nothing comes out. Part of the process.
Have you considered buying a fleece men's robe, throwing it in the dryer with fabric softener, then stripping neeked, wearing just the robe, and then listening to asmr while you try to code? Like, maximal comfiness?
I've been searching in vain for an SSC article, where the hero finds three boxes with statements engraved on them (along the lines of "this box doesn't contain the sword", "one of the other two boxes has a false statement on it" etc), solves the riddle to find which box the sword should be in, is absolutely baffled when the sword turns out not to be in that box, and has it explained to him by the king / the setter of the puzzle that there's no reason the sword has to be in the box that the puzzle suggests it is in. I've tried in vain on "readscottalexander.com", but the nearest I've found has been "the logician and the God-emperor", and I'm now starting to wonder if it was instead in an SSC adjacent space or in comments somewhere. Can anyone shed some light on this?
You die and the gods tell you you have to live another life but this time you get to choose your character in terms of the Big 5 Personality Traits. You choose each on a 1-10 scale, which is arithmetic, so the average is in the middle, you nerds.
Isn't it obvious what to choose? Do we all have the same ideal personality or not? Seems to me it's as follows:
Extroversion: 7 or 8. Extroverts are happier. Maybe don't go to 10 because that seems vapid.
Openness to Experience: 10. What do you have to lose? It's already an extra life.
Neuroticism: 1. Who wants anxiety?
Conscientiousness: Hard 8. Hard to succeed without this, but I don't want to take it all the way because I want some independence from social pressure.
Agreeableness: 5 or 6. I don't want to be disagreeable because that way lies loneliness. But you can't be cool if you are too agreeable, so I want to be somewhere in the middle.
1) In the 2016 election, it was the norm for a large percentage of Trump supporters to be closeted to avoid social repercussions. When he won, democrats were shocked! *Gasp* Where did all these Trump voters come from? In recent months, there's been a "movement" of it becoming socially acceptable to openly support Trump; publicly supporting him is no longer the mark of death. On top of this, aside from people simply no longer being closeted, a lot of people have actually *converted* to being pro-Trump. The number of MAGA defectors could outnumber all these new born-again Trumpers, but if not, doesn't that simply mean that Trump will win?
2) If you look at the comments across social media platforms - from my observation, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube go (so almost the entirety of social media), support for Trump is almost near-universal. People in the comments love him, and you even see people supporting him in the comments sections of posts by left-leaning accounts (MSNBC, for example. There are no pro-Kamala comments under the posts of any right wing accounts). They can't all be bots. Again, doesn't this indicate a strong overall preference for Trump?
More and more, I am under the impression that the average American supports Trump and that Kamala is more akin to the titular character in Weekend at Bernie's with a public perception bolstered largely by PR. Or perhaps it's me who's falling for the Trump propaganda (1 and 2 above?)...
1) I don't buy that Trump supporters in 2016 were closeted. What happened was Trump's popularity in 2016 grew throughout the year and many Republicans changed their minds the closer it got to the election. Most Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz supporters became Trump supporters by election day. The Trump voters were never closeted, they just didn't realize that a Trump sexuality existed until October.
2) Don't make the mistake of thinking those you know are representative of the population. It's a common mistake, but people reading ACX shouldn't make it. Your personal network is the opposite of a random sample.
The only objective evidence we have regarding the election are polls and prediction markets. The polls look 50/50 and supposedly the prediction markets have been skewed by a single whale betting many millions on Trump. So much for prediction markets...
2) I'm not implying my personal network. I'm referring to the comments sections under popular posts from various types of accounts with lots of followers (media outlets, public figures, lifestyle, pop culture, etc.), generally which are politics-oriented but also often are not.
I agree that the polls must be the only real resource for predicting the outcome, but there's a cognitive dissonance for me because of what I see in large numbers online. Perhaps I'm only seeing a small sample of overall public opinion that is representing itself as something more, however.
OK, I just went to the Washington Post's Facebook page. That counts, right? A major media outlet's page on a major social media platform with "lots of followers". Scrolled down to the most recent post that mentioned Donald Trump in the headline, and read the comments.
192 of them, at the time I checked. Of which, thirteen were unambiguously pro-Trump or anti-Kamala/"The Left", and another six ambiguously so. Just under 10% of the total. Almost all of the rest were unambiguously anti-Trump or pro-Kamala.
I therefore conclude that the claim, "social media support for Trump is near universal", is completely wrong, and that anyone making such a claim should not be taken seriously.
> I'm not implying my personal network. I'm referring to the comments sections under popular posts from various types of accounts with lots of followers (media outlets, public figures, lifestyle, pop culture, etc.), generally which are politics-oriented but also often are not.
I don't know about facebook, but Instagram actively orders comments in a way that you see first those that The Algorithm thinks you'll like more, so there can be two different echo-chambers within the same comments' section.
Fwiw, it's totally possible that they are all bots. Put another way, you're operating from an assumption that because there's many of them they must not all be bots and some potentially significant fraction must be human, but I don't think that has to be the case
1) You called Trump voters closeted. That implies to me a hidden sexuality, but I am being facetious.
2) It still sounds like a biased sample.
I think the odds are about 50/50, but the thing is we will never know. Whoever wins will seem inevitable in retrospect. Those who predicted the winner would win will seem like good prognosticators even though all they won was a coin flip.
If you're at all familiar with the Warhammer 40K universe and like to read science fiction novels, I think you might like "Day of Ascension" by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It is about a young girl who is part of a secret religious society who are awaiting their day of deliverance by angels from on high. No point in dancing around it: the society is a Genestealer cult, and the angels are a Tyranid hive fleet.
It would be very interesting to hear how much of the experience and mindset Tchaikovsky describe are in common with a more mundane messianic religious upbringing.
Does anyone here commute by bike? I commute to the office (largely by choice), which is 11 bike miles from home, which at my pace is about an hour each way. Voluntarily sinking two hours into the commute is something I only end up doing a few times a year. I've thought about upgrading to an e-bike so that I can be faster (which might make me willing to do it more often), but find the idea of doubling my speed to be slightly terrifying. Is this rational? My commute currently is a mixture of ~4 miles of paved bike trail (mixed use, so there's pedestrians there too), ~3 miles of mixed use crushed limestone, and ~4 miles of riding on the side of the road (mostly, but not entirely, small residential roads) -- so there's not much car avoidance, a bit of pedestrian slalom, and definitely potential for slipping on a wet patch.
It is rational to be nervous about the speed; however, the absolute speed of an e-bike is not scary! Like going downhill on a normal bike, it just feels faster, but controlled. Additionally, because e-bikes are heavier, most have large disk brakes which have good stopping power. In the US e-bikes can't provide power beyond 20mph, which is fast, but a speed most recreational road bikers achieve easily. Other countries have other limits, but I think they are usually under 25mph. You will be traveling at human speeds even if its double your current speed.
It *can* take time to get used to the acceleration when starting from a full stop. You quickly get used to it though. Kind of like driving someone else's car it takes a very short time to figure out the quirks. The acceleration is the part I love the most - more than the top speed. It lets you easily get across intersections well ahead of car traffic which feels much safer and saves a lot of time as you are less likely to get caught at the next light.
Most (all?) quality e-bikes will allow you to select how much power the motor gives you. So you can scale up. When I first got mine I spent a while at level 1 of 4 and after a couple weeks felt totally fine at 4 all the time.
There are two styles of e-bike power train. One augments the power you are providing. So the harder you push on the pedals, the more power it will give you. This feels like you suddenly became a lot stronger and fitter, which is nice. The other style will give a constant amount of power when you are pedaling or activating an accelerator (usually on the handle bars like a motorcycle). So you just go faster until you get to the speed you have selected then have to pedal hard to go faster. Most are moving to the first style, but it's personal preference.
e-bikes are much heavier and most have their weight down low near the ground. This makes them much *safer*. The low center of gravity and upright riding position reduces the chance of tipping over or sliding (like in the wet patch scenario you mention). In pedestrians traffic I can be tricky to maneuver, but a lot of commuter e-bikes have smaller tires which allow for tighter turn radiuses so you can weave more easily. You also wont need to focus on pedaling as much so you can focus on what's ahead of you in the road.
Definitely try to test ride one! Many cities have a groups that promote e-bikes and bike commuting. Members may be willing to let you test ride a bike. My small college town has an e-bike lending library where anyone can request to use an e-bike. A good bike shop will definitely let you test ride some options and should be able to provide advice on which bike is best for you (if they don't, don't shop there).
I haven't tried. Probably could. I can go faster than 20, but the motor just wont help beyond that. Down hill I can hit 30 and on flats I am usually at 22 or so. My city is very hilly. Im going up or down a pretty steep hill most of the time. Probably 10% of time is spent on flat-ish ground and thats usually in traffic so intersections and lights are the limit on speed, not the bike.
The gearing is also a limit. Its has 7 speeds but the highest gear ratio is pretty low compared to a non-e-bike gear set. It's also a cargo bike that weighs >60 pounds and I usually have my kids with me. They tend to not like going too fast because the wind blows in their face too much. Basically it's a minivan, not a sports car. I'd like to get an e-bike just for my self and with that, top speed would be important.
Thank you for the detailed reply! This is helpful. The season is all but over here in Minnesota, but this convinced me to look into this more in spring.
Sure thing. I saw you mentioned the bike shop near you rents e-bikes in the summer. They may still let you rent them if the weather is nice (I am sure they would love the revenue if it's not ski season yet!). Good luck, I hope it works for your situation. Getting an e-bike made bike riding feel like it did when I was a kid - just fun and relaxing and not a chore.
It's not scary once you ride it, not at all. Get an ebike
For some reason my ebike doesn't go faster than my max speed on a regular bike, but it's way less effort. Living in jersey. Have a folding regular and also electric brompton bike. Take whichever I feel like on the day.
I'm not sure I'm following: of course it's not scarier if you're not going faster than you would on your regular bike? My problem is that for bike-riding to make sense from a scheduling perspective, it needs to be about 2x faster than I can ride my regular bike.
You might be a woman. I might be athletic. I might have an unusual electric bike.
My 'experience' it that if I pedal my electric bike hard it doesn't 'add' anything.
The electric bike makes it super easy to go from 0 to x miles with minimal input, and to climb hills. On flat ground I think there's some max speed above which it doesn't keep 'spinning' and my max speed on a non-electric is roughly that.
This is my experience too. If someone is using a bike for transportation (and not recreation) I don't see any reason for them to not get an e-bike if they can afford it. They are better in almost every way than a normal bike as a transportation method.
I commute by bike either side of a train ride, and the second half of my commute is in London. I use a folding e-bike, and it's great - it means even on the worst days I will still catch my train, and if I have to trek across London to catch a different one, I can do that easily.
Would getting an e-bike actually double your speed? It definitely increases mine, but I'm not sure it doubles it. Have you tried riding one? Can you rent one for a day and see how you like it?
Well, my speed is slow -- as mentioned in the post, I average 11mph; the day I took a detour and was running late and had to average 12mph was exhausting. So doubling, or close to it, feels achievable.
For some reason I hadn't thought of renting as a serious option, but it looks like the bike shop next to me does rent them, at least in season. (They're a bike shop in summer and ski shop in winter, which I think means that they're currently gloomily looking outside at +25C and sunny and wondering how they're supposed to sell skis in this weather.)
In the UK, ebike speed is supposed to be limited to 15mph*. Mine therefore only boosts up to about 15mph, so you wouldn't get a doubling out of it from 11mph. I don't know if you have the same limits, though.
*Obviously lots of people use cheap ones which don't have that limit, but I wanted a reliable bike that wouldn't explode ;)
One of my brothers was a techy for the Arizona DOT. When Phoenix started putting bike racks on the outside of buses they had to create an area in one of their buildings to keep all the bikes that people forgot to retrieve when they got off the bus.
There is a website called GovDeals that administers property auctions for government agencies. Lots of police departments and colleges auctioning off all the bikes they recover. You can get some pretty good deals too. (also a lot of auctions for dell laptops and PCs no one wants :D )
Given that most of the countries that are members of NATO don't border the Atlantic Ocean, I think the organization's name should be changed. What do you think a good alterative is now, given the geography and purpose of it?
Since the parallels between the modern USA and ancient Athens abound, I think it would be fun to rename NATO to be a league, akin to the Delian League.
The Delian League was named after Delos because that's where they made the agreement. Here, the North Atlantic Treaty was signed in Washington, so maybe the Washingtonian League.
But that loses the weird quirk that Delos wasn't really a major member of the Delian league - if we zoom out a bit, a treaty that preceded NATO was signed in Brussels, so maybe the Brusselian League?
It is common, though not universal, for oceans to be defined as including the seas which connect to that ocean. If "North Atlantic" includes the North Baltic, Mediterranean, and Black Seas, then almost all of NATO is adjacent to the North Atlantic. And I believe that was the intended understanding when NATO was formed, incorporating Mediterranean powers like Italy and Greece.
Moreover, the alliance doesn't need to be centered on the North Atlantic for the name to be accurate. It's the Organization established by the North Atlantic Treaty, not the Treaty Organization for the North Atlantic.
(hat-tip Kristian, Gunflint and GlacierCow for bringing it to my attention)
I suggest reading the whole thing, but the key parts:
"Here is the question Democrats have floundered in answering this year: If Donald Trump is so dangerous, then how come the consequences of his presidency weren’t worse? There is this gap between the unfit, unsound, unworthy man Democrats describe and the memories that most Americans have of his presidency, at least before the pandemic. If Donald Trump is so bad, why were things so good? Why were they at least OK?
There is an answer to this question: It’s that as president, Trump was surrounded by inhibitors. In 2020 the political scientist Daniel Drezner published a book titled “The Toddler in Chief.” The core of the book was over 1,000 instances Drezner collected in which Trump is described, by those around him, in terms befitting an impetuous child.
These quotes about Trump abound, given on the record or on background, to various biographers and reporters. Some of them are later disputed, as the staffer realized the consequences of what they said. But there are reams and reams of them. For every one I offer here, I could give you a dozen more.
In 2017 his deputy chief of staff, Katie Walsh, described working with President Trump as “trying to figure out what a child wants.” Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, said — quote — “I’m sick of being a wet nurse for a 71-year-old.” James Mattis, Trump’s first secretary of defense, and John Kelly, later his chief of staff, often described themselves like babysitters; they made a pact to never be overseas at the same time, lest Trump do something truly deranged.
Here’s the title of a 2017 article in Politico: “White House aides lean on delays and distraction to manage Trump.” The first paragraph reads, “As White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus mused to associates that telling President Donald Trump no was usually not an effective strategy. Telling him ‘next week’ was often the better idea.”
In 2018, The New York Times published a bombshell Op-Ed by an anonymous member of the Trump administration who said he, a Republican, was part of the internal resistance to Donald Trump, in which — quote — “many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.” That author later revealed himself to be Miles Taylor, the chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security...
The Trump administration was rife with this sort of thing. In 2019 a senior national security official told CNN’s Jake Tapper, “Everyone at this point ignores what the president says and just does their job. The American people should take some measure of confidence in that.”
During his presidency, Trump repeatedly proposed firing Patriot missiles at suspected drug labs in Mexico. He mused about launching nuclear weapons at other countries, and in one very strange case, at a hurricane. He has talked often and insistently on his desire to turn the machinery of the government against his domestic political enemies. He talked often about pulling out of NATO. He mused about the efficacy of untested or dangerous treatments for Covid. In 2020, during the protests following George Floyd’s murder, Trump raged at his staff, demanding they turn the full force of the military against the protesters. Here’s Mark Esper, who served as Trump’s secretary of defense, on “60 Minutes”:
Mark Esper: I thought that we’re at a different spot now, where he’s going to finally give a direct order to deploy paratroopers into the streets of Washington, D.C., and I’m thinking with weapons and bayonets. And this would be horrible.
Norah O’Donnell: What specifically was he suggesting that the U.S. military should do to these protesters?
Esper: He says, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” And he is suggesting that that’s what we should do, that we should bring in the troops and shoot the protesters.
...The best argument you can make about Trump’s first term is that there was a constructive tension between his disinhibition and the constraints of the staff and the bureaucracy and the institutions that surrounded him. Yes, some of his ideas were bad, dangerous and unconstitutional. But those mostly didn’t happen: They were stopped by his aides, by the so-called deep state, by the courts, by civil society.
And the way he pushed, the way he didn’t constrain himself to what other presidents would have done or said, maybe that led to changes that — at least if you agree with him — were positive. Changes that wouldn’t have happened under another president: tariffs on China, a sharp drop in border crossings, NATO allies spending more on defense.
But now the people around Trump have spent four years plotting to dismantle everything that stopped Trump the first time. That’s what Project 2025, and the nearly 20,000 résumés it reportedly vetted, is really all about. That’s what Trump’s inner circle is spending its time and energy doing. Don Jr. told The Wall Street Journal, “We want people who are actually going to follow the president, the duly elected president, not act as sort of unelected officials that know better, because they don’t know better.” He went on to say, “We’re doing a lot with vetting. My job is to prevent those guys.”
...The thing to see here is that Trump’s supporters want to have it both ways: They point to what didn’t happen in his first term as proof that the same or worse would not happen in his second term. But they themselves are trying to remove everything that stopped Trump’s worst impulses from becoming geopolitical or constitutional crises."
I guess my hesitation is that we don't know the baseline for any of this. How often did other presidents ask for stupid/unworkable/unconstitutional things?
And there are two reasons to think Trump would still say more "dumb" things than other presidents that don't necessarily mean he would actually do more dumb things. 1) He speaks off the cuff a lot, often in low status ways, even when he actually does know what he's talking about, and 2) He was never in politics at any level before becoming president, so he didn't know the lingo. Obama may have asked "what are our options?" or something, where Trump asks a dumb more specific question "can we just shoot them?" Neither one may have had a good grasp of the specifics but one asks in a silly way. Obama's advisors may never have known that he was also thinking "can we just shoot them" in his head, because he's smoother about that stuff. Given some of the evil things Obama did in his administration, I have trouble doubting that he could be thinking similarly to Trump on some level. He ordered the death of American citizens without due process. Is that better or worse than asking about shooting protestors but then not following through? Did Obama ask a lot more questions but his administration liked him so they didn't report on the weird/insane/illogical things he said? Who knows.
I've had very intelligent bosses who asked very dumb questions, but ended up making mostly good decisions with or without advisement. Just about everyone who dealt with them directly was very concerned about what they were going to be asked to do, until the point they got asked to do mostly reasonable things or could make suggestions and then the boss agreed.
I'm not saying Trump fits that criteria, but I am also not convinced he doesn't.
I agree with cxs5. This is a variant of tu quoque (appeal to hypocrisy) and is probably also special pleading.
That is to say:
- you admit that this is bad behavior, and even if Obama or whoever was doing the same thing (he wasn't) that doesn't make the bad behavior less bad. Note that no one has ever claimed Kamala, the actual alternative, has done something remotely similar, so by your own standards this should be an easy choice to vote against Trump.
- this is likely special pleading, in that if anyone else said "just shoot them" you'd probably not be as lenient. Yes, I can construct a hypothetical scenario where this is actually just a twist of language and Trump (the UPenn educated billionaire) didn't realize how that would come across. But I'm a Bayesian; Occam's razor suggests that he really does mean something more akin to "just shoot them". You have to jump through many more hoops to explain why this is actually a special case where he doesn't mean the explicit semantic meaning of his words.
Also, a cultural artifact on this board is that we are frequently cajoled to take people's statements at face value. A belief in 'dog whistles' is generally derided - if someone says they believe in states rights, you accept that as a belief in states rights and are considered to be acting in bad faith if you accuse them of saying one thing while meaning another.
Except when someone whose name rhymes with Tonald Drump says "just shoot them." When that happens we're all supposed to put on our rationalization hats and do our best to come up with whatever alternate meaning, in the most favorable light, might have made this statement mean something less crazy, be comparable to something other leaders have said, just be "Drump being Drump" rhetoric we should 'take seriously but not literally,' etc, etc.
It makes you a crazy bad faith lib to read alternate subtexts into his statements right up until that subtext is necessary to make them more palatable/forgivable, at which point you're a crazy bad faith lib if you don't.
I legitimately cannot believe what I'm reading right now. This comment is beyond absurd it's mindblowing to me that I'm reading something like this on ACX and not some pro Trump forum or twitter.
There's been a lot of completely misinformed takes here regarding Trump and his (lack of) policies, but this one sent me over the edge. I'm going to be harsh here because I thinks it's warranted. I never comment here, and I'll take the ban, but I have to say something to this, if only for the sake of anyone else reading this comment. (I'm 50/50 on if the person I'm replying to is a russian/generic troll or a serious person)
What in the FUCK are you talking about???? If you're not a troll, I seriously think you need to re-examine your thought process. What a disgustingly anti-american mindset.
In what world do you read ""Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” And he is suggesting that that’s what we should do, that we should bring in the troops and shoot the protesters." and think, "hmmm, well maybe its just the way he talks... maybe its just his phrasing you know?"
What the fuck? WHO MAKES EXCUSES FOR THIS BEHAVIOR?? And to compare it to Obama killing a US citizen in Yemen, as if this is even remotely similar? You seriously want to equate the President of the United States wanting to DEPLOY TROOPS TO SHOOT US CITIZENS DEMONSTRATING THEIR FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHT TO PROTEST to drone striking a KNOWN TERRORIST who we were ACTIVELY AT WAR WITH IN ANOTHER COUNTRY. (By the way I'm sure you have no clue what you're talking about, but for everyone else reading, Obama did this ONLY AFTER seeking direct white house legal council a year before. He didn't just ask to do this off the cuff one day because this particular guy annoyed him or have his personal lawyers write up some hackjob legal workaround a-la Jan. 6.)
And to make excuses for this among a whole slew of other INSANE things Trump has said and done is just... wow. You're asking for some "baseline", as if ANY OTHER PRESIDENT has EVER asked for nuking other countries, launching missiles at Mexico, SHOOTING PROTESTING AMERICANS!! If ANY other president was like this, the whole world would hear about it, just as they are right now, with Trump. I think you full well fucking know the "baseline".
At best you're just a troll and I've wasted my time, or at worst, you're the type of anti-american loser enabling people like Trump to exist.
Do you think people seeing all the anti-DT nonsense recently, feel analogously?
One of the traditions of rationalist circles is to muscle past the repulsion long enough to notice it's not one-sided. Politics is the mindkiller, and all that.
I'm not sure. I certainly feel that I put a lot of effort into being objective, but there's probably nothing I could say to convince another person on the internet. If it helps, I'm a long term conservative and don't like Harris. Self-diagnosed: I probably have a bias to believe the worst of politicians generally.
My perception of DT supporters is that (some/many/most?) love the reaction from his opponents. Is that not true?
Could you point me to someone you think is otherwise intelligent who is posting anti-DT nonsense? Do you feel symmetrically mind-killed this election season?
I agree that *some* DT supporters love the reaction from opponents. But so what? So do some KH supporters.
The point of a rationalist forum is to be able to slough those crowds off.
"someone you think is otherwise intelligent who is posting anti-DT nonsense" - I wouldn't use those words, but I see some of it in ACX, yes. "[He ] is incredibly, terribly, awfully, disgustingly bad, an obnoxious sleaze of a man" was one recent unproductive jab I saw. Another was a comment darkly hinting that Trump and Vance are like Hitler, and the distinguishing feature is only that Trump is "old" (and Vance is not).
I don't feel mindkilled in the same way. I feel like I'm watching the same old mudslinging, and feeling frustrated because it's on a forum that ought to know better. I've posted comments that nominally defend Trump here, but I've tried to be careful not to be mindkilled about them, and they're all consistent with me having my own concerns about the guy - inexperience, incapacity to gain experience, and tendency to antagonize all the people he'd need to get anything practical done are probably my big three. To be fair, they probably don't manifest to others, because when others make those arguments here, I just silently nod and see no reason to reply.
End of the day, I'd *really* like to see a viable alternative to Trump - but I recognize that that's not the choice I'm being given.
This is clearly unconstitutional. If his staff was supportive and therefore didn't leak the details of the conversation, I don't think that makes it any better.
Is that better or worse than asking about bombing something in Mexico? Clinton actually carried it out. How do we know if one is acceptable but another is not?
Bush ordered the torture of prisoners, including many who were not known to have committed any crimes (and quite a few who were later found to have never been involved).
Which of these things is better than what Trump suggested, but didn't actually end up doing? Which of these things is fine, while Trump is beyond the pale?
I'm perfectly fine with saying that *all* of these things are bad, including what Trump was suggesting. I'm having a hard time with "Trump is bad, clearly different from a normal president" when we *know* that all other recent presidents have done similar or worse things than what Trump even asked about. Like, what's the worst thing that Trump actually did? We're comparing things he's accused of talking about to things actually done by other presidents, and I'm not sure Trump is the one who comes out looking the worst there. We don't even know what Bush or Obama may have talked about. If they were willing to actually do some of the evil things we know about, I don't have much confidence they didn't also ask about some even worse things. In fact, I'd be very surprised if neither of them asked about bombing locations in Mexico. That's an obvious consideration when the cartels have grown as powerful as they have, given our actions dealing with other enemies of the US around the world.
Also, I'm quite certain Kennedy, Eisenhower, LBJ, Nixon, and maybe Reagan all contemplated nuking foreign countries. Every president from 1945 until at least the 90s had to have contemplated at least the MAD scenario with the Soviet Union.
>So, Obama ordered the intentional killing of a 16-year-old US citizen in a non combat zone
It is hard to take you seriously when the very first thing you say is untrue. The ACLU's own complaint makes it clear that he was not intentionally killed. "Even in the context of an armed conflict, government officials must comply with the requirements of distinction and proportionality and take all feasible measures to protect bystanders. Upon information and belief, Samir Khan was killed
because Defendants failed to take such measures." This is common knowledge.
Are you going to use that to dismiss the other examples, including Obama ordering the death of that kid's father? I hadn't looked into the case in a while, but remember it being reported as also intentional, but the father definitely was. And although the father was almost certainly guilty of terrorism, he was still a US citizen and had a right to a trial and sentencing before execution.
That kid's father was killed as part of a Congressionally approved armed conflict against an organization of which he was an active member. It was no more an "execution" than any other death during war and US citizens do not have a special right to trial before being killed in an armed conflict.
Cute, but I do see OP's point here. There's a tendency among some to try to weaponize rationalist approaches to normalize Trump's abnormal behavior.
Trump does something that a fairly broad consensus of people would consider weird or crazy - he foments a not-quite-not-a-failed-coup, suggests shooting patriot missiles at Mexico, or talks about immigrants poisoning the blood of the nation... and if you're the kind of person who believes that behavior to be disqualifying for a potential President, and say so, his defenders will oft retort "Well who knows? Maybe *all* Presidents wanted to overturn the elections they lost and shoot patriot missiles at Mexico. Before I will accept this behavior as disqualifying you'll have to prove to me that behind closed doors everyone else wasn't just doing it too."
This is more of an argument that obfuscates than a legitimate challenge. It's a defense that can be offered at all times for anything. We could learn that Trump tried to strangle a foreign diplomat, or that Hillary Clinton served a roasted baby to guests in the Clinton White House, or any other number of obviously insane things, and their defenders can *always* just shrug and say "well who knows, LBJ seems like he might've strangled a diplomat or two, and how do we no for certain that Eleanor Roosevelt or Jacki O never served baby?"
It's understanding, at a certain point, to become frustrated with the whole "prove to me that no other emperor has ever gone naked" defense when you're seeing the guy clearly parading about without any pantaloons.
I think the sheer number of former Trump staff who have turned against him so hard tells us a lot. That gives us some indirect sense of the baseline, since there's no precedent for this level of public repudiation from former senior officials.
Contrast that with what you say about your former bosses who asked dumb questions. You aren't now trashing them for that, just the opposite!
I wouldn't assume that Harris could give a correct account of the Constitution and we know Biden didn't. (https://www.factcheck.org/2008/10/constitutional-queries-about-the-vp-debate/). Politicians pretend, with the assistance of speechwriters and teleprompters, to be well educated but their real expertise is in getting elected.
It was Biden who said “When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’"". When the stock market crashed, Hoover was president and national television a decade or so in the future.
Very true, and fair. One thing that both sides agree about is that the career bureaucrats (or Deep State, or Cathedral) all hate Trump. From my perspective, probably yours too, it's hard to tell if how they talk about him is a bit "chicken or egg" and they hate him because he's bad or they say he's bad because they hate him.
I suspect there's aspects of both, which is why I want some sort of non-Trump comparison to look at. If Trump is 20% worse than most presidents, that should lead to legitimate criticism against him, but that's not catastrophic or even really worrisome. If he's 100% worse that could explain the negativity, but 100% more of a low baseline may not be too bad. If he's 10X worse, then I would likely agree he's a loose cannon and bad in office.
You are also ignoring the incentives. Trump has such domination within conservative circles that it is very costly for conservatives to criticize him. I know the right-wing talking point that these people are trying to curry favor at DC cocktail parties or something, but, for example, Mike Pence and John Bolton are never going to get love on the left side of the aisle, no matter what they say about Trump.
It's really worth trying to estimate a baseline of "how many people are predisposed to say bad things", and then check reality to see how far it is from your baseline.
I think when non politicians like Rex Tillerson, or one-time avowed Trumpists like Steve Bannon, say that he's unfit for office, he probably is.
(I'm open to hearing why, for eg, Tillerson and Bannon are actually part of the deep state. But if you can't really justify that, I think at some point you have to bite the bullet that, no, he really does just suck, and even though it makes you see red your enemies might just be right about this one)
I have very little doubt that Trump is less experienced in politics and far less reasonable about how he approaches issues. I can definitely see him suggesting we send patriot missiles to attack Mexican cartels or whatever.
But, like, every president since at least Clinton has bombed places in nominally friendly countries. Specifically he had cruise missiles launched at a Sudanese medicine factory. Can you give me an explanation of which one is okay, and which one isn't? What metrics should we use to determine if one is okay but not another? If the answer is that all are not okay, then why hate on Trump specifically?
You're shifting the goal posts. The original point was that one measure of Trump's unique badness is the volume of people who have worked with him who have said he is bad. You responded with a justification for why those people may have reason to dislike him outside of his actual policies, and I responded that that's looking the other way.
Assume for a moment that the presidency is a black box. We don't know what goes on because it's classified, all we can see on the other side is some subset of actions taken and some subset of opinions shared by other people on the inside. We can argue all we want about the actions taken -- and many people do -- but at the end of the day it's very hard to understand those actions because we don't see how behind the veil of how they are justified. But the opinions are easily evaluated, and it's very very clear that Trump has an anomalously high rate of people who have worked with him, people who originally supported him, who come away thinking that he is a danger to those around him and a danger to the country. You're welcome to discard all that information, but at some point I think you just need to bite that you think you know better than people who have been in the room, and personally that's wild to me
Lots of online people have argued, Richard Hanania is a good example, that all the good stuff Trump talks about will happen and all the bad stuff won’t, because the system will prevent it or because he’ll get distracted.
That feeds into exactly Klein’s point, though- for that to happen, you’d be relying on the people around Trump to rein in his excesses.
Only the new team around him has spent the last 4 years working to prevent exactly that dynamic from emerging again - see e.g. Kleins quit from Don Jr:
“We want people who are actually going to follow the president, the duly elected president, not act as sort of unelected officials that know better, because they don’t know better.” “We’re doing a lot with vetting. My job is to prevent those guys.”
A number of my good friends and family have been surprised about my decision to support
@realDonaldTrump
for president. They have been surprised because my political giving history has been mostly to Democrats, my voting registration has typically been Democrat (in NY, you must be registered to the party in order to vote in the primary, and usually the Republican candidate has no chance to win), and many of our philanthropic initiatives have supported issues that are consistent with Democratic priorities.
Three months ago, when I endorsed Trump on the day of the first assassination attempt, I promised to share my thinking about why I came to this conclusion in a future more detailed post. I intend to do so in possibly more than one post, with the first, this one, explaining the actions and policies of the Biden/Harris administration and Democratic Party that were the catalysts for my losing total confidence in the administration and the Party.
To be clear, my decision to vote for Trump is not an endorsement of everything he has done or will do because he is an imperfect man. Unlike a marriage or a business partnership where there are effectively unlimited alternatives, in this election, we have only two viable choices. Of the two, I believe that Trump is by far the superior candidate despite his flaws and mistakes he has made in the past.
While the 33 actions I describe below are those of the Democratic Party and the Biden/Harris administration, they are also the actions and policies that unfortunately our most aggressive adversaries would likely implement if they wanted to destroy America from within, and had the ability to take control of our leadership.
These are the 33:
(1) open the borders to millions of immigrants who were not screened for their risk to the country, dumping them into communities where the new immigrants overwhelm existing communities and the infrastructure to support the new entrants, at the expense of the historic residents,
(2) introduce economic policies and massively increase spending without regard to their impact on inflation and the consequences for low-income Americans and the increase in our deficit and national debt,
(3) withdraw from Afghanistan, abandoning our local partners and the civilians who worked alongside us in an unprepared, overnight withdrawal that led to American casualties and destroyed the lives of Afghani women and girls for generations, against the strong advice of our military leadership, and thereafter not showing appropriate respect for their loss at a memorial ceremony in their honor,
(4) introduce thousands of new and unnecessary regulations in light of the existing regulatory regime that interfere with our businesses’ ability to compete, restraining the development of desperately needed housing, infrastructure, and energy production with the associated inflationary effects,
(5) modify the bail system so that violent criminals are released without bail,
(6) destroy our street retailers and communities and promote lawlessness by making shoplifting (except above large thresholds) no longer a criminal offense,
(7) limit and/or attempt to limit or ban fracking and LNG so that U.S. energy costs increase substantially and the U.S. loses its energy independence,
(8) promote DEI ideologies that award jobs, awards, and university admissions on the basis of race, sexual identity and gender criteria, and teach our students and citizens that the world can only be understood as an unfair battle between oppressors and the oppressed, where the oppressors are only successful due to structural racism or a rigged system and the oppressed are simply victims of an unfair system and world,
(9) educate our elementary children that gender is fluid, something to be chosen by a child, and promote hormone blockers and gender reassignment surgeries to our youth without regard to the longer-term consequences to their mental and physical health, and allow biological boys and men to compete in girls and women's sports, depriving girls and women of scholarships, awards, and other opportunities that they would have rightly earned otherwise,
(10) encourage and celebrate massive protests and riots that lead to the burning and destruction of local retail and business establishments while at the same time requiring schools to be shuttered because of the risk of Covid-19 spreading during large gatherings,
(11) encourage and celebrate anti-American and anti-Israel protests and flag burning on campuses around the country with no consequences for the protesters who violate laws or university codes and policies,
(12) allow antisemitism to explode with no serious efforts from the administration to quell this hatred,
(13) mandate vaccines that have not been adequately tested nor have their risks been properly considered compared with the potential benefits adjusted for the age and health of the individual, censoring the contrary advice of top scientists around the world,
(14) shut down free speech in media and on social media platforms that is inconsistent with government policies and objectives,
(15) use the U.S., state, and local legal systems to attack and attempt to jail, take off the campaign trail, and/or massively fine candidates for the presidency without regard to the merits or precedential issues of the case,
(16) seek to defund the police and promote anti-police rhetoric causing a loss of confidence in those who are charged with protecting us,
(17) use government funds to subsidize auto companies and internet providers with vastly more expensive, dated and/or lower-quality technology when greatly superior and cheaper alternatives are available from companies that are owned and/or managed by individuals not favored by the current administration,
(18) mandate in legislation and otherwise government solutions to problems when the private sector can do a vastly better, faster, and cheaper job,
(19) seek to ban gas-powered cars and stoves without regard to the economic and practical consequences of doing so,
(20) take no serious actions when 45 American citizens are killed by terrorists and 12 are taken hostage,
(21) hold back armaments and weaponry from our most important ally in the Middle East in the midst of their hostage negotiations, hostages who include American citizens who have now been held for more than one year,
(22) eliminate sanctions on one of our most dangerous enemies enabling them to generate $150 billion+ of cash reserves from oil sales, which they can then use to fund terrorist proxy organizations who attack us and our allies. Exchange five American hostages held by Iran for five Iranians plus $6 billion of cash in the worst hostage negotiation in history setting a disastrous and dangerous precedent,
(23) remove known terrorist organizations from the terrorist list so we can provide aid to their people, and allow them to shoot rockets at U.S. assets and military bases with little if any military response from us,
(24) lie to the American people about the cognitive health of the president and accuse those who provide video evidence of his decline of sharing doctored videos and being right wing conspirators,
(25) do nothing about the deteriorating health of our citizens driven by the food industrial complex, the fraudulent USDA food pyramid, and the inclusion of ingredients in our food that are banned by other countries around the world which are more protective of their citizens,
(26) do nothing about the proliferation of new vaccines that are not properly analyzed for their risk versus the potential benefit for healthy children who are mandated to receive them,
(27) do nothing about the continued exemption from liability for the pharma industry that has led to a proliferation of mandatory vaccines for children without considering the potential cumulative effects of the now mandated 72-shot regime,
(28) convince our minority youth that they are victims of a rigged system and that the American dream is not available to them,
(29) fail to provide adequate Secret Service protection for alternative presidential candidates,
(30) litigate to prevent alternative candidates from getting on the ballot, and take other anti-competitive steps including threatening political consultants who wish to work for alternative candidates for the presidency, and limit the potential media access for other candidates by threatening the networks' future access to the administration and access to 'scoops' if they platform an alternative candidate,
(31) select the Democratic nominee for president in a backroom process by undisclosed party leaders without allowing Americans to choose between candidates in an open primary,
(32) choose an inferior candidate for the presidency when other much more qualified candidates are available and interested to serve,
(33) litigate to make it illegal for states to require proof of citizenship, voter ID, and/or residence in order to vote at a time when many Americans have lost confidence in the accuracy and trustworthiness of our voting system.
Just picking a few that jumped out at me at random.
>(3) withdraw from Afghanistan, abandoning our local partners and the civilians who worked alongside us in an unprepared, overnight withdrawal that led to American casualties and destroyed the lives of Afghani women and girls for generations, against the strong advice of our military leadership, and thereafter not showing appropriate respect for their loss at a memorial ceremony in their honor,
Remind me again who it was that started the withdrawal from Afghanistan? There was no option that didn't destroy the lives of Afghani women and girls, aside from "stay there forever," and if Biden had decided to halt the withdrawal I suspect Ackman would be panning him just as hard for trapping us in a forever war.
>(12) allow antisemitism to explode with no serious efforts from the administration to quell this hatred,
And you think the guy who just said "Hitler did some good things" and said that the crowds chanting "Jews will not replace us" included some "very fine people" is going to *decrease* antisemitism?
>(14) shut down free speech in media and on social media platforms that is inconsistent with government policies and objectives,
Trump has a pattern of attacking the media far more intensely - he just tweeted about how CNBC should lose their broadcast license.
>(25) do nothing about the deteriorating health of our citizens driven by the food industrial complex, the fraudulent USDA food pyramid, and the inclusion of ingredients in our food that are banned by other countries around the world which are more protective of their citizens,
And to prevent this, you suggest electing the Republicans, who are of course famous for wanting to *increase* regulations, especially on nanny-state topics like what you're allowed to eat and drink.
I'm sorry, all of these range from "false" to "vague" to "a problem but you're using it to advocate for the guy who is even worse on that issue."
> ...said that the crowds chanting "Jews will not replace us" included some "very fine people" is going to *decrease* antisemitism?
Look, it's the große Lüge in its natural habitat! Somehow Trump can explicitly say that he isn't talking about the white nationalists and the neo-nazis, and yet people still insinuate he was talking about the white nationalists and the neo-nazis with the fine people remark. I believe Scott even had a post about this, or something adjacent. Trump says and does plenty of stupid and awful things, as is self-evident. You don't need to repeat made up nonsense about how he's also a super nazi racist.
ETA: I feel like I've critiqued several of your posts lately and don't want to only come across as negative. So I'll add that (3) is on point; there is a legitimate criticism of Biden that he could have handled the withdrawal better. But he did *actually* withdraw the US from Afghanistan, something Trump initiated but never actually did. Bush and Obama deserve most of the blame anyway. And (25), pointing to the Republicans as the party to regulate food health is pretty funny.
Biden didn't explicitly support the pro-Hamas crowd, and his Israel stance is generally pretty moderate, along the lines of "I support Israel but would prefer fewer war crimes." But the OP thinks that the simple fact that the anti-semites on the left to feel emboldened is enough to condemn him. I think if you're applying this logic fairly, you have to notice that the racists, neo-nazis, and anti-semites on the right felt very emboldened by a Trump presidency.
You could instead just admit that a President isn't personally responsible for every facet of the culture wars, but in that case you should let Biden slide on this as well.
> You could instead just admit that a President isn't personally responsible for every facet of the culture wars, but in that case you should let Biden slide on this as well.
That was more or less the gist of my comments in the rest of this thread. Judging the candidates on whichever extremists 'feel emboldened' by them is stupid. Which is why the Charlottesville speech bothers me. Trump excluded the extremists from his "very fine people" line in the preceding sentence, but it still gets used to tar him as supporting nazis.
I'm willing to take a weaker stance that imo is still getting at beleester's larger point: Trump himself may not be a Nazi racist, but Nazi racists feel empowered under him, and that will of course make racial polarity (including anti semitism) much worse. I'm happy to provide evidence of racist Nazis saying things like "Trump brought our ideas into the mainstream"
I don't want to empower Nazi racists, so I'm voting for the other person
I don't want to empower Hamasnik racists who want to genocide Israel, so I'm voting for Trump.
That sounds stupid doesn't it? I can't believe I'm agreeing with Paul, but this is ridiculous. There are only two real parties in the US. Radicals and nutjobs pick whichever one they think is going to give them a better chance than the other. Trump no more wants to create the Fourth Reich than Harris wants to push the Israelis into the sea. I judge the candidates based on what they actually say and do, not whatever limpets attach themselves at the far fringes of their constituency.
I think my response to Paul below basically summarizes my response to your point as well (it's the same point):
- yes, you shouldnt judge a candidate based on JUST which fringe supports them
- that said, you are coming into a conversation specifically about racial tension and are surprised we are discussing the likely racial tension outcomes from one of the major candidates
At this point I think both you and Paul are engaged in 'whataboutism', which btw is totally fair. We can weight the comparative outcomes of whether Trump or Kamala are more likely to increase racial tension based on which fringes support them. But I want to point out that both you and Paul also are agreeing with the throughline -- that is, Trump DOES have the support of racist Nazis, that his presidency will embolden said racist Nazis, and the only question at hand is whether that is better or worse than embolding [insert left fringe]
I don't think it's a meaningful criteria though. Nazis supporting Trump only requires that they perceive a Trump presidency to be marginally more favorable to their cause than a Harris presidency. It does not mean a Trump presidency would in fact do anything to increase the amount of Nazism in the country. As Nazis clearly have very stupid ideas, I am inclined to actively not care what they think.
By that argument, you should also vote against the person who brought communist ideas into the mainstream - assuming of course you're against communist ideas.
Which is really an argument against the argument of assessing a candidate by whichever 0.002% of the population you can find with the wackiest ideas, that will realistically have 0% chance of being catered to by that candidate, regardless of what that group thinks about the acceptance of their wacky ideas.
- first, I have a lot of reasons for disliking Trump. That he empowers racist Nazis is one drop in a very large bucket. Broadly, though, I agree with you that you shouldn't evaluate a candidate based on JUST which fringe supports him/her. That said, the specific question in this post is about whether or not Trump's rhetoric or election will increase racial tension, and I think it will. Maybe there are other reasons to like Trump, but if the reason you like Trump is because you think he will turn DOWN the racial tension temperature, I got a bridge to sell you.
- second, I think your claim is that the fringe left wing is as bad as racist Nazis? I'm open to hearing that argument, but I think it's a tough fence to climb, sorry.
ETA: third point: if Marx was on the ballot I'd vote against him, but he isn't. I think Kamala is much farther from / more antagonistic to her fringe than Trump is to his.
I'm not claiming Trump will turn down racial tension. I'm claiming *no* candidate will turn down racial tension. Moreover, I'm claiming Harris will have no better effect on racial tension than Trump, because the candidate in office is having only a minor effect on racial tension on the US.
Ergo, racial tension is not a reason to choose one candidate over another, and anyone for whom that pops up as a first-level reason to determine their pick could probably stand to revisit that.
Even if you have serious disagreements with Harris's policy positions, why would you want to install a person in the White House who is obviously suffering from severe cognitive decline? I really can't understand your thinking. IANAMD, but doesn't his behavior fit the definition of Lewy Body Dementia? (https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/lewy-body-dementia/symptoms-causes/syc-20352025)
I await your refuttal of his cognitive decline (examples below)...
Of course, he is capable of honoring memorable people like Arnold Palmer. After he did a rambling 10+ minute monologue about Palmer, he finished it by praising the size of Palmer's penis. Note: earlier this election cycle, Trump claimed he could drive a ball down the fairway further than Palmer (sorry, can't find the video for that one), so Trump did show some humbleness by praising Palmer's package.
Of course, there's Trump's avid appreciation of music — where instead of taking questions he stood around and swayed on stage for many minutes. He's a lot more low-energy now than in 2021 when he was still President and boogying to YMCA...
And let's not forget, during that classic speech on the important issue of a sinking ships (and the hazards of boat batteries), when he told us that he'll always take death by electrocution over death by sharks.
And then there's his obsession with the late great Hannibal Lecter—mentioned in many of his speeches, but this is his best tribute to his old friend...
>Even if you have serious disagreements with Harris's policy positions, why would you want to install a person in the White House who is obviously suffering from severe cognitive decline?
There seems to be one right now and things are alright.
Well, I'm not american, so I don't have a guy here (though I admit my sympathies lie with the right). But the notion that Biden is currently less cognitively impaired that Trump seems ridiculous, given what we've seen of both of them so far.
And that's basically the point, you've had a guy who barely seems there siting as president for quite some time, and things have gone on as usual, so if Trump is also declining fast, well that even seems like a good thing, makes him easier to work around.
This is obviously not an argument most people like, because Democrats don't want to admit that they've been running Weekend at Bernie's for some time now (why is Biden unfit to run, but fit to be sitting president?), and Republicans have been claiming you should vote for Trump because he's not an empty suit like Biden and Kamala largely have been and will probably continue to be, so you can't just admit Trump just might become that soon enough.
You say it's obvious that Biden is cognitively impaired? Look at the videos I posted. The difference between Trump and Biden is obvious. Biden always has talked in the slow methodical manner that you see in the video, and it's because of a speech impediment.
And if you're not American, why do you think you have the knowledge to comment intelligently on American politics? BTW, what is your nationality?
>And if you're not American, why do you think you have the knowledge to comment intelligently on American politics?
I mean, why not? We have the internet, grandpa, pretty much the same information is available globally. It's not like we're discussing the intricacies of on the ground operations in key battleground states.
>BTW, what is your nationality?
Russ...err... Argentinian. Argentinian is what I meant to say!
In a nutshell: "I am voting for Trump because I am now quite conservative." I mean, the concerns he identifies, and the language he uses, pretty much define what it means to be on the right of the political spectrum. There is nothing wrong with being on the right, but there is nothing new or interesting about it.
Of course, it is also possible that this is all a rationalization. But that isn't very interesting, either.
Re (33), the usual argument is that electoral frauds that can’t be scaled up to large numbers of votes don’t matter, so the optimum level f security is pretty low.
> electoral frauds that can’t be scaled up to large numbers of votes don’t matter
What does scaling up mean in this context?
It's hard for one person to cast tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots, but it's trivially easy for tens of thousands of people to cast tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots (or steal other people's ballots out of the mail, or whatever).
It is virtually impossible for tens of thousands of people to engage in any coordinated action without blabbing that fact far and wide enough that everyone knows they are doing it.
And if it's not coordinated, then sure, maybe ten thousand people will each independently decide to e.g. send mail-in ballots for their parents or spouses who died just before election day, but half of them will be Democrats and half will be Republicans and it won't much matter.
I guess the question would be, what's the fewest number of conspirators needed to change a vote outcome by the necessary number, in this case low five digits?
If they have access to the voter roles to get names and access to the ballot creation process, the number might be very low. Single digit, possibly even a lone person, if they had all of the access. If the office in charge of elections were interested in doing this, it might even be trivial. Don't purge the roles of people who are dead or left the state, print their ballots as normal but don't mail them out, fill them out as you like, and then collect them as if they had been sent in from the actual voter. That would take a good bit of work for a small team to accomplish, but it's certainly not impossible and doesn't require a massive conspiracy that would get outed.
Other methods would be to go to nursing homes, mental hospitals, and other locations where it's normal for service workers to help people carry out their business. This would not be a single digit number, but dozens or low hundreds at most could pull this off. They ask someone sympathetic at the facility if they can talk to the residents about voting, nominally get some kind of approval on the voting choices, and "help" the resident fill out their ballot.
I'm not saying that any of these things necessarily happened or would be easy, but a motivated group could definitely pull it off.
If the vote leader had a commanding lead, like Biden in CA or NY, then that's probably fine. Given the very small sizes of the differences in some states that mattered in both 2016 and 2020, that's not particularly reassuring.
US history is full of voting situations where the final outcome was determined statewide by less than 1,000 votes (Florida in 2000 comes to mind). Organized fraud that remains undetected and moves low five-digit votes seems eminently possible. Especially if the means of detecting fraud is not implemented or followed. 2020 was a perfect storm in a lot of ways, because covid was either a good reason or a good cover for getting rid of a lot of oversight, depending on your perspective.
as far as I know, the Biden admin hasn't done anything to systematically strengthen institutions, including improve election transparency, efficiency, security, or legitimacy. That is a big disappointment.
Consistent with that, you might care about electronic voting machines, because “hacker changes a number inside a computer” includes big changes to the number.
Which is why we don't trust any one computer to tell us who won an election. Hacking a thousand airgapped voting machines scattered across a hundred precincts, without getting caught even once, is a much less practical plan. And hacking the one vote-counting machine that will give us the early returns on election night but be verified by a hand recount a few days later when the loser complains, doesn't accomplish much either.
Seeing otherwise intelligent people being dumb is making me depressed this election cycle.
Let's pick item 2, national finances, that is probably the closest to Ackman's field (though stock picking and activist investing actually has almost nothing to do with macro economics.) He seems unaware that Trump's economic policies led to a massive increase in the federal deficit, even though there was no underlying economic need for fiscal stimulus (pre-pandemic). A lot of other things can be argued with nuance, but this was pure fiscal irresponsibility.
I don't know with high confidence. To me, whether pandemic stimulus was optimal in 2021 is clearly in the realm of debatable. I'm a deficit hawk and have a bias against that stimulus.
Isn't it kind of strange that green subsidies and incentives have ended up unlocking (or may unlock) multiple potentially revolutionary technologies - (Solar, EVs, synthetic hydrocarbons)?
It's because they allow us to break out of a local optima - and I think this suggests there's lots more such techs out there. I call these techs 'Qattara Depression Technologies'
I would be interested in reading Scott respond to this post Against Steelmanning by economist Noah Smith. He even mentions the Ivermectin discussion Scott had here as an example of why it's bad.
I like a lot of Noah's posts, and it was dumb for the Washington Post to ask him to make the case for Trump's economic policy proposals (instead of someone that actually supports those proposals), but that article was very bad and quite a bummer to boot.
I responded here :https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/against-steelmanning/comment/73820118 - the gist of it is that nothing Noah complains about is a problem inherent to steelmanning. For example, he worries "Steelmanning can easily turn into strawmanning". The problem here is, of course, strawmanning. The same issue plagues each of his objections.
We need some guide on what is and what isn't steelmanning, because obviously different people understand it differently.
As I see it, the point of steelmanning is to *find the truth*, for my own benefit. If my opponent's opinions are 90% crap and 10% truth, I want to be able to extract that true part, without accepting the rest... as opposed to rejecting everything, or converting and accepting everything, which would be the default human reactions.
What steelmanning is not:
- being "fair" to my opponent (except insofar as being fair to my opponent helps me find the truth);
- pretending that my opponent's arguments are 100% true or sane;
- providing free advertising for my opponent.
What would it mean to "steelman a policy proposal"? If it means saying that 90% of its consequences are bad, but 10% are good... that still sounds like a good reason to reject the proposal. And maybe to design a completely different policy proposal that might achieve those good 10% in a different way. It does not mean talking nicely about the policy proposal as it is.
Any idea will have tradeoffs - good sides and bad sides. The catch is that those sides won't always be evident for free. There's no database where you can "select sides where idea=X sort by badness" and just go down the list; one typically has to exert effort hunting.
Because of that effort requirement, it's tempting for people to look at an idea in terms of its appeal to their intuition. If it's appealing, they exert effort to look for the good sides, and when it's time to exert effort looking for the bad, well, why would anyone go out of their way to talk themselves out of something they believe is good?
The idea of steelmanning a policy proposal is the same as that of steelmanning any idea - arguing for it as if you were its proponent, with the implication that you would have gone out of your way to find the good sides of that proposal (or the bad sides of the alternatives), as opposed to only exerting that effort in the direction you wanted a priori.
You're right that it doesn't include "talking nicely" about the proposal. Talking nicely has nothing to do with it, and anyone who thinks that that's what steelmanning is is missing the entire point, which is to find whatever evidence there is in its favor.
I read Noah's article as far as the paywall would let me, which included "it could lead to strawmanning" because you naturally won't be good at assessing an idea you're against, and "it could lead to sanewashing" - which only works if one starts from the assumption that one was right to begin with, aka begging the question.
I suppose Noah makes a good argument that he might be *personally* bad at steelmanning his opposition, given that he (IMO) wasn't even that effective at steelmanning his own side.
I'm not a paid subscriber, so I only have read the beginning sections. I thought the claim about steelmanning turning into strawmanning was a useful point of caution, but not convincing as a reason to not steelman.
I wonder if he includes this point:
In a political campaign, there are two questions before the voters: (a) what policies to pursue and (b) who is trusted to lead. In the US system for national elections, only (b) is directly asked. In this system, effectively and convincingly describing and arguing for a policy set is a signal of fitness to lead. By steelmanning a weak policy presentation, you are distorting this signal.
This might be deeper in his section on sanewashing. Linking my idea and sanewashing, I would say a difference between steelmanning and sanewashing is that steelmanning is good tool for refining ideas, while sanewashing is giving credit to a person that they don't deserve.
I finally get the deeply uncanny feeling of the Berenstain/Mandela Effect. Does anyone else have distinct memories of the word “anemone” actually being “anenome”? I would swear that it has been pronounced “an-enemy” my entire life until reading “anemone” very recently. I’m not willing to give much credence to a split-universe or matrix glitch thing, so why does this happen, neurologically? How hard is it for a phonemic neural bit to just get flipped?
Oddly enough, I remember having this exact same thought about the word "anemone" a few years back. It may be due to the movie Finding Nemo (note: highest-selling DVD of all time - that's how popular it was) and its sole responsibility for the word entering the lexicon for many young people in the early 2000s. Saying "anemone" was a meme back then due to this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZ1KDf3O-qU. Kids often pronounce weird words wrongly, and perhaps that is what happened here, the mispronunciation sticking through adulthood for many (how often do we talk about ocean flora?).
I don't know, but how horrible that we live in a world where some random young man, minding his own business at a football game, can suddenly have thousands of people picking apart his (ultimately unremarkable either way) looks.
Please post a photo of yourself so the world can criticise your looks.
Yes, his facial proportions are somewhat out of the ordinary, but most people are out of the ordinary in some way. He is unremarkable in the sense that he is neither remarkably attractive nor remarkably ugly, he won't win a beauty contest but he also isn't doomed to a life of inceldom. He reminds me of any number of perfectly ordinary young men that I have known, except most of them never randomly had thousands of internet strangers bullying them for their flaws.
People aren't roasting him because he's ugly, they're roasting him because his face is extremely out of the ordinary. Just being ugly isn't even worthy of scorn or recognition. When people see something out of the ordinary, they are going to comment on it. That's just how the brain works, it responds heavily to novel stimuli.
Most of the time when you see someone with unusual facial features, though, you're too polite to mention it. I don't walk down the street saying "OH GODDAMN THAT WOMAN HAS AN UNUSUALLY POINTY CHIN LOOK AT HER".
For some reason, though, social media has broken that.
The basic idea is that it may not be worth it try to get rid of building restraints across an entire city. For one thing, some powerful residents may put up a very strong fight against it in certain neighborhoods. For another, you might succeed in knocking down some regulations only to be stymied by others.
It's more efficient and effective to choose your battles and work with local officials to determine which areas of the city are most conducive to ending all building restrictions and labeling them Density Zones. This approach has been referred to as "going vertical instead of horizontal".
It occurs to me that the result here is still "zoning", but it's a much smarter approach to zoning. In many cities and neighborhoods, a vocal minority is enough to veto a building project. But if you provide that neighborhood financial support (federal subsidies) to allow more building, it can be easy to find more local supporters than detractors.
The financial support of the federal government gives localities capital that can be used to build infrastructure to support the resulting increase in population density.
The question is: why? Why ruin perfectly nice places that people have paid their entire life's savings to buy into, for the benefit of people who could just go live somewhere else?
They've just announced plans to do this kind of thing in my city, and I'm pretty angry/depressed about the whole thing https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/fifty-new-areas-getting-fast-tracked-high-rise-apartments-here-s-where-20241019-p5kjmb.html ... charming historic walkable suburban shopping strips are going to be bulldozed and replaced by canyons of brand new steel-and-glass apartment buildings. And for what? So that property developers can get rich, so that the city can add another four million people that it doesn't need, so that the economy can continue to be propped up by an immigration ponzi scheme. They want to take a city of four million and turn it into a city of nine million by 2050. And nobody ever says what's going to happen after 2050, it's not like the politicians of 2050 are going to be any more restrained than those of 2024.
Tbf if Melvin doesn't have kids and he's decided to never move again, he's voting in his personal economic interest. I just assume most people factor in longer term interests (eg kids/grand kids, or just relative health of the housing market)
> so that the city can add another four million people that it doesn't need
By that metric, your city already does not need the first 4M it has got. It would be perfectly happy as a sleepy farming village with 200 people. Yet you did not offer that village the courtesy if leaving it in peace, so why should the next 4M leave you in peace in turn?
The reason for why in the USA is the following (from the linked post):
"U.S. housing costs are out of control. The median home for sale was rarely more than four times the median household income throughout the 1980s and 1990s. But by 2022, it had risen to nearly six times. Renters have not fared better. In 1980, around one third of renters were cost burdened, meaning they spent 30 percent or more of their income on housing. Fully half of renters are cost burdened today.
The main reason housing is too expensive is that we don’t build nearly enough of it. The most recent estimates from Freddie Mac place the national shortfall at a staggering 3.8 million housing units. This gaping hole in the country’s housing supply negatively impacts nearly every aspect of American life, reducing economic growth and hindering workers and families from achieving the lives they desire."
I know, I know, but I've already read that book! It's not the one. :)
I watched Megalopolis and was struck by how shallow its ideas of architecture were. For something that presumably animates the entire film, the concept of this new utopia seemed to be plant-shaped buildings connected by a moving walkway - the kind that you might find in any airport. Maybe I missed something, or the true genius of the vision went over my head.
In any event, that got me thinking about real world architecture. After a visit to the Getty Center, I realized that there's something futuristic about the vision for that building. On the way back to my car, I thought, for a fleeting moment, that I could be heading to a home not so different from the Getty center - with travertine walls, sculpture and fountains, benches for contemplation of art or philosophy. Of course, my one-bedroom in Glendale is nothing close to the Getty Center, but that idea - that one day everything could look like this - seemed to be implicit in the design of the Getty Center.
That's pretty consistent with my understanding of modernism - everyone and their brother wanted to make the "Home of Tomorrow TM" with the basic understanding that today's luxury good would be ubiquitous tomorrow.
I don't get the same feeling from most buildings, but particularly newer ones. Take SoFi Stadium, also in Los Angeles. I felt like I was walking through a newly built stadium, but one that made no claim on immortality. I don't think that's a function of the building's purpose - Grand Central in New York isn't a museum like the Getty Center, but manages to convey a much clearer idea of progress than SoFi Stadium does.
So my question - what newer (post-2000) buildings make you hopeful for the future? If you've seen Megalopolis, did those buildings do the trick? Does anyone know of a one-bedroom for rent in LA with travertine walls?
In a recent article, the Washington Post documented the multiple instances of immigration fraud that Elon Musk and his brother used to stay in the US illegally while they were supposed to be students. The DoJ's Office of Immigration Litigation should investigate this because a person can be denaturalized (i.e. have their citizenship revoked) if it’s discovered that the person obtained it through fraud or misrepresentation.
The reasons for denaturalization can be that...
The person lied on their application or during the interview — This includes providing false information about criminal history, hiding significant facts, or failing to disclose relevant details, like involvement in illegal activities or affiliations with certain organizations.
Or committed fraud — This could be entering the U.S. or obtaining permanent residency under false pretenses, then later becoming a naturalized citizen.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/10/26/elon-musk-immigration-status/
I am skeptical that you or anyone else here would be seriously proposing "denaturalizing" a US citizen of over twenty years and with native-born children, because they lied on a visa application and/or exceeded the limits of that visa, if it were anyone other than Elon Musk. OK, we've probably got some people who would sign up for it if it were e.g. Ilhan Omar, but no. Just no.
This is the same sort of thing as e.g. "Lock Her Up!" w/re Hillary's Emails. This is not how we do things in the United States of America, and I am absolutely opposed to changing that.
The rule of law of is supposed to apply to all Americans equally. However, I guess a billionaire gets a pass. And his native-born children couldn't be denaturalized because, under the 14th Amendment, they're natural citizens. Denaturalization only applies to immigrants who violate US immigration law by lying on their visa and citizenship applications. As far as I know, Ilhan Omar didn't lie on any of her immigration documents. So she wouldn't be eligible for denaturalization, either.
The law as it *actually* applies to all Americans not named "Elon Musk", is that once you are naturalized as a US citizen, you are not denaturalized unless you are a literal Nazi, terrorist, drug lord, or the like. Seriously, check out the record on actual denaturalization.
"Rule of Law" means that Elon Musk gets the same treatment. And since he's not literally a Nazi, he doesn't get denaturalized even if he *did* lie on his visa application.
The thing you're looking for, where everybody technically commits three felonies a day and the prosecutors sensibly ignore all of that but when we decide someone is the Wrong Sort of Person then all we have to do is find the crime he (and about a million other people) committed yesterday and throw the book at him, that's not rule of law. That's behavior suited for an Ayn Rand or George Orwell villain.
And I really shouldn't be hoping to see you on the receiving end of that sort of treatment, but I kind of am.
> This is not how we do things in the United States of America
And who are you to decide that? America is what the people want it to be, and the people want closed borders and mass deportation. Of course, Elon wouldn't be one of the people getting deported, seeing as he's in Trump's good graces. And also he's white. And rich.
I'm surprised to see the white canard here, of all places. I thought it was dying in general, but then here it is. So thanks for that.
What riles me about Musk is his arrogance that the rules are for us and not for him. He calls his working while having a student visa a legal gray area. It's not. It's quite clear that a student visa is for studying and only allows for work-study related to one's degree. Musk dropped out a week after classes started. Meanwhile, there are a few tens of thousands of college students in the US whose parents brought them into the country illegally—who grew up here—but will potentially face deportation once they graduate. DACA only offers limited relief from deportation, with no guarantee they can stay. How many potentially successful entrepreneurs are we discarding? How about it, John, since we're stretching the rules for Musk, why not stretch the rules for legitimate college students? But DACA is in Trump's sights, and Elon has become a fervent supporter of The Donald's immigration policies.
Another one of those inconsequential little laws that Musk may have broken is the Logan Act. By is his own admission that he's been in communication with Putin (post-sanctions) about "space-related matters." Funny how Ukraine got shut out of that space-related matter called Starlink. Harris's Attorney General should have the DoJ investigate his ass. Of course, if Trump wins, Musk will get sweetheart deals from the US government.
i have a Trump-related question. I’m posing it separately in the hopes of avoiding having answers to my question get swamped by debate.
I know many democrats who are genuinely terrified of Trump winning. The say he will actually do all the worst and wildest stuff he’s just talked about doing so far, because he will quickly install appointees everywhere, and that he will then be essentially a dictator, jailing those prominent people who speak out against him or taking legal action against them, etc etc. I would like to know what impediments there are to this happening.
Last night I googled “impediments to Trump ruining country” and every single hit I got was about how Trump is for sure going to ruin the country. A typical one was a Washington Post article “A Trump Dictatorship is Increasingly Inevitable.” Inevitability doesn’t *come* in degrees. WTF?
For instance, what impediments are there to Trump’s bringing some charge against Chuck Schumer, winning the case, and getting the guy locked up for a few years? So one thing I wonder about is about legal constraints.
Another is practical constraints. For instance the logistics of rounding up 10 million or so undocumented immigrants seems pretty daunting. Who rounds them up? Where do you put them til they are shipped out? How do you transport them back to where they came from? What do you do if their country of origin won’t take them back? For that and for other proposed Trump plans, it seems to me you need staff who are not only willing to carry out such plans, but are also very good at the logistics involved. Seems likely potential Trump appointees are carefully vetted for loyalty, but not for skills (to vet for skills, you need skillful people).
A third is resistance by local governments. What happens if the government of a blue state objects strongly to some Trump plan being carried out? Seems like many things require the cooperation of local officials. Wouldn’t some states refuse to cooperate in carrying out plans they are strongly opposed to? Would Massachuetts, for example, help round up the undocumented immigrants in its state? And then there would be some sort of legal fight about that, but surely it would drag on for a long time.
Here’s and old article from the Economist about this. I think it depends on the cards he’s dealt: he already has a majority on the Supreme Court, if he also has both houses of Congress he can run the board.
The meticulous, ruthless preparations for a second Trump term:
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2023/07/13/the-meticulous-ruthless-preparations-for-a-second-trump-term
from The Economist
Among many other problems with this, the fact that a Supreme Court justice was nominated by George Bush does not mean that Donald Trump in any way owns them, It's not even clear that he "owns" all of the judges he himself nominated.
I found this.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/28/a-trump-dictatorship-is-possible-but-not-in-four-years-00137949
What's your opinion of this?
That seems about right, There's essentially zero possibility of Trump building the sort of power base he'd need to bulldoze the 22nd Amendment in four years. The real danger is that a cabal of *competent* wannabe fascists (or whatever) will attach themselves to the Trump administration and build something nasty for themselves.
Which is sort of what Project 2025 seems to be aiming at, but if the result is something Trump-centered then it probably doesn't survive Trump leaving office and if it's not Trump-centered then Trump will probably kill it while he's still in office. It's not impossible that the as-yet-unnamed American Hitler will be able to thread that needle in the next four years, so we're going to want to keep up the whole Eternal Vigilance thing, but it's not something I'm terribly worried about.
Thanks for your read John. Re-asked my question on new open thread, and practically nobody was able to address it -- all went into political rage meltdown. It's really scary how unable to think straight most people are about the election.
Jane's Law of Politics states that "The followers of the party in power are smug and arrogant. The followers of the party out of power are deranged and insane." This has always seemed a sound guide to me. But at the moment, the Democrats don't seem to see themselves as being in power.
Which is understandable, as their incumbent is a senile lame duck and their candidate is a lightweight who is trailing in the polls. But it means that we get deranged insanity all around.
Not to sound ungrateful, but — this isn’t what I was asking for. It’s less hysterical in tone than the stuff I found with my google, but it’s mainly an accounting of the nature of the preparations for Trump’s second term, how thorough they are etc (so more of what I was finding in my googlelast night), plus speculation about what steps he’d take in different areas.
I can’t believe there are no impediments to Trump doing exactly what he wants. Why the fuck is it so hard to find an article about it, even an article that’s mistaken about impediments? Is there nobody thinking about this subject? Is the entire press unwilling to write about this subject? Maybe nobody wants to publish an article about it because it will irritate Trump supporters, and undermine efforts to terrify everyone else into voting for Harris?
See, this shit is part of why I don’t vote. It’s too hard to get the real picture.
Here’s something more alarming from one of the best journalists to cover Trump the first time.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/if-trump-wins-2024-election-1235096091/
Alarming stuff is everywhere. The problem is finding anything else. it’s not that I’m convinced that having Trump in office is no big deal because he’ll be blocked in everything he tries. I’m just convinced that there are some things that are blockable, some contests of cleverness and will be would not win, some steps he could not take because he’s dumb and chaotic, and staff he’s brought on board my not be highly competent in carrying out big messy projects, etc etc. I cannot find any articles about what he will or might have trouble accomplishing due to legal constraints, or practical ones, or resistance from various groups (including many businesses who rely on undocumented immigrants for labor). it’s like all the journalists, and also you, are under some
spell. I ask for info on impediments to some Trump projects, I get articles about reasons to be alarmed. Yes I ALREADY KNOW the case for
alarm. How could I possibly not? It’s everywhere. I would like to read the case against being sure life as we know it in the US will be completely destroyed during 4 years
of Trump because “he will be able to do anything he wants.”
...I don't know what to tell you, man. "Legal constraints" are only relevant if the parties involved actually respect the law. Now, the real impediment in such a scenario would be the military, but them trying to assert authority over the government would probably trigger a civil war, which is... pretty bad.
But say what you will about Trump, he has been very honest about his intentions, sympathies, and character. None of his supporters can claim in good conscience that they didn't know what they were getting themselves into.
It is truly awful life-advice to tell people they need to focus enough of their energy on politics to truly understand both candidates and vote to the best of their ability. That is a recipe for misery. Which means most people *don't* know what they're getting into, because they have actual lives to live. With real people around them, doing fun things. Unlike some of us here.
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Some visualizations of stats about Nobel prize winners.
https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-024-02897-2/index.html
Looks best on desktop. The mobile presentation is absolute garbage.
I like the stats, but don't like the statements "you should do X to maximize your chances".
For example: "The data suggest that for the best chance of a prize, you should identify as a man." The sounds like trans men are over-represented among the winners.
Suggestion for Scott: can you do another defined section at the bottom of the board for election threads for the next couple of weeks, just to keep all that stuff in one place?
Seemed to work well for Ukraine when that topic was at its hottest.
I wish he'd go back to no-politics threads with an occasional thread that allowed political discussion.
At least one section for "arguments why Trump is actually awesome and everything you believe about him is wrong", because we have too many of those here recently.
Yeah, I get it. If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then you can easily score a lot of contrarian points by insisting that it is totally not a duck, but a space alien from the seventh dimension who only pretends to be a duck to fool the mainstream sheeple. But it was already done hundred times and at this point it is boring.
Yeah, wokeness sucks, Harris sucks, etc. No argument against that. None of that makes your delusions about Trump being secretly awesome any more realistic.
Trump is not at all like Hitler. It is a ridiculous argument that falls apart at the slightest scrutiny:
a) he does not run a campaign on racism. If you actually watch the campaigning he does (rather than cherry-picked out-of-context snippets) then you see this clear fact. The republicans are campaigning mostly on the economy, with tertiary campaigning on reducing ILLEGAL immigration, a peace-through-strength foreign policy, and increased manufacturing and energy investment.
b) his rhetoric (unlike the democrats') is not incendiary. it is actually far more mellow than his rhetoric in previous years... e.g., compare this years Al Smith dinner to previous ones.
c) he does not have the popular or the party support to act like Hitler
d) he is (far) too old to act like Hitler.
The ones damaging democracy are actually the democrats. Rather than campaign on actual issues (like the republicans are doing), they are actively mischaracterizing their opponents. Joe Biden is on record saying "Lock Trump Up." Jailing political opponents is the action of a dictator. Most of the democrat campaign is falsely characterizing their political opponent as Hitler. Obviously, this characterization insights violence and political instability. He has already been targeted by two assassinations.
For context, the democrats are characterizing Trump mainly based of this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kmmx1zQCQds&t=492.
You can see that he is explicitly asked about a scenario where a) he wins the election and b) people don't accept that and there is a "non-peaceful election day."
I'm not sure that's an accurate summation of Trump's candidacy - the very first policy statement put out by Trump's 2016 campaign was entitled: "Statement by Donald J. Trump Statement on Preventing Muslim Immigration". The first sentence was "Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on." Link here: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-donald-j-trump-statement-preventing-muslim-immigration
That's pretty clear religious discrimination. There's no way you could ever get away with something like that in a job posting - if tomorrow Microsoft said that they'd no longer accept Muslim job applicants, they'd be sued into oblivion.
Moreover, the entire reason Donald Trump became a Republican celebrity is because he was the most famous person to say that Barack Obama was not born in the United States of America, but was instead a Kenyan Muslim. Who, presumably, would not have been allowed to enter the country under Trump's proposed total and complete shutdown on all Muslims entering.
>he does not run a campaign on racism.
He literally said "we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now" in reference to crimes committed by immigrants. If that doesn't qualify as racist I'm not sure what would.
>tertiary campaigning on reducing ILLEGAL immigration
Yeah, so tertiary that they were handing out "Mass Deportations Now" signs at the RNC. So tertiary that Vance and Trump both spent a news cycle sharing a Facebook rumor about Haitians eating cats. (Also, the Haitians in Springfield are LEGAL immigrants, and they still got targeted. I do not believe for a second that a Trump presidency would be careful and discriminating about which immigrants it gets rid of.)
>his rhetoric (unlike the democrats') is not incendiary
"The enemy within" and "poisoning the blood of our country" and "mass deportations now" and "they're eating the cats and dogs" are all more extreme and incendiary than "build the wall" was in 2016.
>he does not have the popular or the party support to act like Hitler
The Heritage Foundation has been working hard to change that - both having a plan ready to go for 2025 and preparing a list of people they can hire to make it happen. I would not have a lot of hope that Trump will be reined in by the "deep state" in 2025 like he was in 2017-2020.
Attempting to reduce Illegal immigration is in no way racist. By definition, illegal immigrants should be not be in the country, if you have any respect for the rule of law...
Then you need to make it clearer that it's only the illegal immigrants who eat cats. Otherwise people might get confused.
>Joe Biden is on record saying "Lock Trump Up."
So, is this post satire, did you sleep through the entire 2016 campaign, or do you just have the world's biggest double standard?
The Democrats are pulling out all of the rhetorical stops to try to get Trump not elected. Hitler comparisons shows they're really scraping the bottom of the barrel. It's the Godwin's law of politics.
Why is it that compared to previous years, MORE minorities are voting for Trump than previous republican candidates?!
Why is it that, in contrast to the democrats, the republicans are not campaigning based on tarring their opponents, but instead based on policy?
Simple: Trump is not Hitler.
People have also been pointing out the problems with Trump's policies, it just doesn't get as much airtime as him talking about how much he wants to be a dictator, for obvious reasons. For instance, his proposed tax plan would add more than twice as much to the deficit as Harris's, and also would cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans while raising them on the poorest.
He also seems to think that tariffs are paid by the country exporting the goods instead of the Americans importing them.
Noah Smith has a good rundown on the economic problems: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/realistically-how-much-damage-could
I am totally fine with people pointing out economic concerns. That is a valid campaigning. Calling some Hitler is not a valid way of campaigning. It erodes trust in media, it polarizes the political parties, it (like all crying wolf) erodes and weakens the terms for then actually do apply. It is just such a bad approach.
A hilarious CNN clip showed Trump calling Harris a "Communist-Fascist-Socialist" multiple times. Finally, we see Harris saying yes when CNN asks her do you agree with General Mark Milley's opinion that Trump is fascist. As a Leftie, I don't think comparing Trump to Hitler is valid. Hitler was much smarter than Trump and wasn't cognitively impaired until after he retreated to his bunker.
https://x.com/i/status/1849906117075403235
No Trump is not literally Hitler. So what is he?
Essay by: Phillip Bump October 24, 2024 Washington Post
If we look at it in the abstract, it’s easy to see the genesis of the comparisons.
A political leader whose popularity is driven by his personality more than his detailed policy proposals. Someone who casts a small segment of the population as dangerous and demands they be rounded up and deported. A leader who responded to losing an election by working fervently to overturn those election results, spreading false claims and stoking an anger that culminated in an attack on his country’s legislature. A leader who has endorsed the idea of replacing a nonpartisan governmental bureaucracy with loyalists. Someone who excoriates the press as dishonest, describes his political opponents as enemies worse than foreign adversaries, and is surrounded by voices that amplify and cheer his most extreme rhetoric.
No, Donald Trump is not Adolf Hitler. He has, happily, not engaged in either the systematized slaughter of a population or launched an effort to subjugate the world.
But, as a number of his former top aides have said in recent weeks, he views the constraints of democracy with disdain and embraces an approach to power that checks the boxes of fascism. Oh, and according to his former chief of staff John F. Kelly, Trump also offered praise for the German dictator and the way he managed his military.
For many of those surrounding Trump, particularly those who recognize that his reelection means their own empowerment, it is horrible to suggest that Trump is akin to history’s most infamous, hated leader. At times, the claim is that the former president’s critics and the left are saying that Trump somehow is Hitler — a rhetorical leap intended to heighten the idea that any such historical comparisons are ridiculous. The left is equating Trump with history’s greatest monster! Can you believe how unhinged they are?
And: Can you believe how dangerous they are? Since the attempt on Trump’s life in July, he and his allies have blamed anti-Trump rhetoric for the threats he has faced. There’s an obvious political utility here: If they can make some of his critics more cautious about what they say, they’ve restricted the amount of criticism that surrounds Trump. But for those primed to view any comparison to fascist or authoritarian leaders as unwarranted, the hostility that might accompany such comparisons may seem like little more than an effort to stir up hate.
The irony of this concern emerging among supporters of a candidate who is relentlessly focused on disparaging and lying about immigrants to the United States should not be ignored.
Trump’s supporters are mostly focused on a straw man, a Trump critic who says he is Hitler or who makes comparisons to Hitler that are inherently ludicrous. Consider the interview that right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt conducted with Trump on Thursday morning. Hewitt was once a standard conservative commentator, one focused on national security issues. But he’s become increasingly sycophantic in his regular conversations with Trump, failing to press the former president on questions that demand obvious follow-ups.
Were Hewitt conducting an interview with a Democrat who approached politics in the manner outlined in the second paragraph of this article — if, say, Barack Obama’s former chief of staff had warned that the former president didn’t respect American democracy and praised Hitler — it is easy to predict how an Obama-Hewitt interview might go. But that is not how the Hewitt-Trump interview went.
“Why do some people hate you so much?” he asked Trump. “I mean, Trump Derangement Syndrome is a real thing. I’ve run into it. We saw it online repeatedly. The stuff they call you, the Hitler stuff, the fascist stuff. … Why do you destabilize people this way?” Trump’s connection was staticky, so it was a bit hard to understand his first comments. But then he offered a response.
“I have a tendency to win. It’s a nice thing. And that bothers people,” Trump said. “Sometimes I play a little bit rough, but they play rough. They are rough and vicious people. They are vicious people. They’re dirty people. They’ve weaponized government. They’ve weaponized everything and actually made me more popular. It’s hard to believe.”
So in response to a question centered on the ridiculousness of the idea that Trump’s politics mirror fascism, Trump describes his opponents as “vicious” and “dirty” and makes a false claim about how the Biden administration has “weaponized” the government — as manifested, for example, in the special counsel bringing charges against Trump for attempting to subvert the 2020 election. Which are the sorts of things autocrats say.
Trump’s supporters don’t want to address the central issue, which is that Trump’s approach to power much more closely resembles an autocratic, fascist leader than an American, democratic one. So they highlight the word “Hitler” in the same way that they at times highlight the word “racist”: as a way of suggesting that their opponents are once again hyperventilating without reason and lifting up the most damaging rhetoric they can muster, regardless of how applicable it might be. The benefit of doing so is that they then don’t have to address the underlying criticisms and concerns.
Godwin’s Law holds that any online debate will, if it continues long enough, eventually involve a comparison to Hitler or Nazi Germany in an effort to score the ultimate point. What Trump’s allies are doing is declaring the debate to have been “Godwinned” from the outset. They’re suggesting that his critics are making an unfair comparison in hopes of skipping all the intermediary discussion.
There are two points worth reinforcing here.
The first is that the most immediate round of comparisons to Hitler was driven not by left-wing paranoia about a second Trump term. It was driven, instead, by Trump’s own words, as relayed by his former chief of staff. It’s Trump who praised Hitler’s control over his generals and Trump who said Hitler did good things, according to Kelly, a retired four-star general. Those were comments he offered reluctantly, apparently doing so only after Trump suggested that the military should be used against any of the “enemy within” should there be unrest on Election Day.
The second is that one of the first people to compare Trump to Hitler was Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), now Trump’s running mate. What changed since Vance offered that comparison in 2016 isn’t how Trump approaches politics. It’s how willing Vance has become to acquiesce to that approach.
So it is with the right writ large.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/24/trump-kelly-hitler/
There just aren't a lot of historical figures that Americans are familiar with. If I said that Trump was going to be another Edward Longshanks, I doubt anyone would understand what I meant by the comparison. (Edward signed the Edict of Expulsion, resulting in the mass deportation of Jews, without mass slaughter a la Hitler).
The point of comparison is to connect what someone already knows to something they're seeing in real time. If Americans only know a few historical figures - Hitler, Gandhi, Lincoln - then you have to sacrifice accuracy for comprehension.
Sacrificing any and all accuracy results in comprehension of a lie.
Sure - the same way high school students get taught physics where bodies are perfectly rigid and air resistance is negligible.
Everyone knows that's not a true depiction of the world. But something doesn't have to be true to be useful.
It's true in physics; why not politics?
The problem I have with the idea of Trump as white supremacist is that, from the outside in its foreign policy, the US acts like a white supremacist country. If it proclaimed that it had that ideology not much would change in its alliances (white Europe, NATO, the five eyes), its paternalistic attitude to central and South America with the threat of invasion for countries that don’t toe the line, the wars against Arabs and the general fear of a rising China (or Asia in general).
There are some differences in foreign policy perhaps relative to a 19C European power, less interest in Africa - which was late to colonialism anyway - and a philo semitism that didn’t exist on the European powers (except perhaps Britain).
What Trump is, is an American nationalist, not an “internationalist” - which is just code word for imperialism. The rules based international order is a hard sell if you are ignoring the rules yourself.
This is the classic approach of the democrats: paint your opponents as bigoted, racist, sexist, etc... Because obviously, the democrats can never be wrong.
It is the same rhetoric they used for defund the police (e.g., if you criticize the rioting, or this insane policy then you must be racist). It is the same rhetoric they use on trans-issues (e.g., JK Rowling must be motivated by hate, rather than a genuine concern for women). Etc...
They are the ones using inflammatory rhetoric (while simultaneously criticizing the republicans for this tactic?!). What could be more inflammatory than a) saying your opponent is Hitler and b) saying that "the fate of democracy is at stake."
That last point is interesting; the full context of JD Vance's opinion on Trump is "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?" And I honestly don't think his opinion of Trump has really changed since then. But look at it this way: do you REALLY want to bet against Hitler, considering how that turned out last time?
Of course, the most obvious difference between Trump and Hitler is that Trump is old. Really old. Even if he plans on removing term limits, I highly doubt it's going to take more than 4 years for him to keel over or lose his mind. At which point, Vance will be next in line, and he can finish what Trump started, just more competently.
I don't understand this constant slandering of JD Vance.
He seems remarkably consistent over time. Here is video of him from 8 years ago, far before he went into politics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEy-xTbcr2A&ab_channel=TED
In the video he talking about exactly the same issues he talked about in the VP Debate (concern for the working class, and desire for more manufacturing). His whole policy stick is two issues: more support for families (and their values), and more support for industry. You can clearly trace these concerns back to his upbringing in a manufacturing-heavy, poverty-ridden, low-social-capital environment. He care about helping people.
If you actually listen to what he says, you see that he is MORE MODERATE than most republicans. For example, Ben Shapiro has criticized JD Vance for being TOO OPEN to pro-choice, and TOO OPEN to social-support policies.
...I wasn't intending to slander him. He's a pragmatist, and I respect that. Still, it's hard to argue that he's a moderate, and I don't know why you'd want him to be moderate, considering how little establishment conservatives have actually accomplished.
If I listen to what he says, consistently over time, I can't help but noticing that he used to say that Donald J. Trump was "reprehensible", "idiotic", and yes, "America's Hitler". Now he's Donald J. Trump's partner in whatever reprehensible, idiotic, possibly Hitlerian schemes the man gets up to. And he aims the rhetorical attacks, against Donald Trump's enemies (i.e. his own former allies). So that does seem like a teensy weensy bit of an inconsistency that might bear looking into.
What I *don't* care about are his object-level views on industrial policy or family values or any other such thing. I'd care about those with a Joe Biden, or a Kamala Harris or a Nikki Haley. But if someone proposes to elect a man they believe might be an American Hitler and is at best a second Nixon, as a means of securing object-level political gains, then that person is simply not to be trusted.
I just don't buy this Hitler perspective, at all. I think you can easily explain JD Vance as initially being persuaded that Trump is Hitler-esk, and then VD Vance taking a closer look, and realizing that that was a false characterization.
How is that odd? 50% of voters don't have a problem with Trump. The fact that one of those voters is JD Vance is hardly surprising. Lots and lots of people who were initially negative towards Trump have changed their mind.
A vote is not equal to full endorsement(no problem with), not even close.
The two biggest data points to emerge on Donald Trump since Vance's initial assessment are, A: the fact that he really sucks at using Presidential power to accomplish his goals within the limits of the law, and B: he actually is willing to attempt a coup d'état to extend and expand that power. Fortunately, the "really sucks at using Presidential power" bit extended to his coup-plotting aptitude.
But anyone who thought Trump was plausibly Hitlerian in 2016, is not going to think that is *less* plausible in 2021 or later. If you thought he was only plausibly rather than certainly Hitler up front, sure, maybe you might think that is more-plausible-but-still-not-certain today. Or if you were certain Trump was *not* an American Hitler, say because you believe the "American Hitler" thing is always and only liberal elite bedwetting, then maybe you're still sure he's not another Hitler.
Neither of those are J.D. Vance. Either he was lying when he said he though Trump might be the American Hitler then, no better than one of those liberal elite bedwetters really, or he's OK with possibly being on Team Hitler now that Maybe Hitler has offered him a sufficiently high-ranking position on the team.
Did you know Vance is pals with Yarvin?
“Vance has said he considers Yarvin a friend and has cited his writings in connection with his plan to fire a significant number of civil servants during a potential second Trump administration.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/18/jd-vance-world-view-sources-00168984
I am 100% burned out with coding. Yesterday I caught myself having stared into space for over ten minutes doing nothing but thinking the phrase "and at that point we can do the thing" on loop over and over again. I cannot realistically expect to finish the project I've promised to finish before Christmas, not when it feels like I have the IQ of warm rice pudding. I've lost an entire day today trying to "reboot" by taking time off to do other things - work on writing, walk about in parks, etc - but I've sat back down and nope, still pudding. This is both boring and highly stressful at the same time. I don't see any way forward.
What Anon said. But also, next time, don't make promises about things that are out of your control (note: that includes everything). Really, the lesson is to make fewer promises, not to be harder on yourself.
Related: https://www.readthesequences.com/Planning-Fallacy
Schedule a psychiatrist's appointment. Do this ASAP, as there's usually high lead time, especially for new patients.
FWIW, while burnout is a treatable issue on its own, it's often linked to depression or ADHD. A good psych will help you figure out if one or both of those are in play (keep in mind that depression may not manifest as the classic "I'm sad all the time," but rather as "I'm just really tired and kinda bored").
If you're planning a death march till Christmas, this is a bad idea, and you should plan time for breaks. It takes more than a day to reset! At the verty least, take a couple of three– or four-day weekends. Maybe you could add days to the already-long Thanksgiving weekend?
If the schedule itself is unrealistic, raise that with your stakeholders as soon as you can. Even if they're assholes, they will appreciate honest communication more than a late-December surprise.
Remember that you can always quit.
Hang in there! Burnout sucks, and it happens more than people are willing to talk about, but there area strategies that can help you. Most of all, don't be your own slave-driver, and don't keep using Try Harder on an approach that isn't working. Good luck!
A note of caution about ADHD: if someone gives you adderall or some other upper right now, it will probably help a lot. Adderall improves mood, energy and focus for almost everybody. I’m not a bit ADD-ish and I love how adderall takes me feel. I keep a little around to help with difficult tasks, but not much. It’s too enjoyable to be safe for me.
If you have genuine, wiring-problem ADHD, you have had it all your life. The diagnosis makes sense only if you’ve had worse problems than
others your age alll your life with staying focused on a task, keeping your attention on movies, books and what people saying etc.
As for depression, watch out for shrinks who think everybody has Prozac Deficiency Disorder. if you have clearly been depressed at other times in your life, and this feels the same way, then OK maybe it’s depression. but if it feels
like burnout to you, maybe it really is. Not many people are wired to be able to sit and do programming all day, you may not be one of those who are. Also, be aware that it is very common for antidepressants to reduce your interest in sex and your ability to do the act, and also common for the to cause weight gain.
Sounds about right.
Like, yeah, sometimes I stare at the screen all day and nothing comes out. Part of the process.
Have you considered buying a fleece men's robe, throwing it in the dryer with fabric softener, then stripping neeked, wearing just the robe, and then listening to asmr while you try to code? Like, maximal comfiness?
I've been searching in vain for an SSC article, where the hero finds three boxes with statements engraved on them (along the lines of "this box doesn't contain the sword", "one of the other two boxes has a false statement on it" etc), solves the riddle to find which box the sword should be in, is absolutely baffled when the sword turns out not to be in that box, and has it explained to him by the king / the setter of the puzzle that there's no reason the sword has to be in the box that the puzzle suggests it is in. I've tried in vain on "readscottalexander.com", but the nearest I've found has been "the logician and the God-emperor", and I'm now starting to wonder if it was instead in an SSC adjacent space or in comments somewhere. Can anyone shed some light on this?
"The Parable of the Dagger"?
https://www.readthesequences.com/The-Parable-Of-The-Dagger
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLVrQTd-OHI
Thanks so much - that was exactly the one I was thinking of.
You die and the gods tell you you have to live another life but this time you get to choose your character in terms of the Big 5 Personality Traits. You choose each on a 1-10 scale, which is arithmetic, so the average is in the middle, you nerds.
Isn't it obvious what to choose? Do we all have the same ideal personality or not? Seems to me it's as follows:
Extroversion: 7 or 8. Extroverts are happier. Maybe don't go to 10 because that seems vapid.
Openness to Experience: 10. What do you have to lose? It's already an extra life.
Neuroticism: 1. Who wants anxiety?
Conscientiousness: Hard 8. Hard to succeed without this, but I don't want to take it all the way because I want some independence from social pressure.
Agreeableness: 5 or 6. I don't want to be disagreeable because that way lies loneliness. But you can't be cool if you are too agreeable, so I want to be somewhere in the middle.
What would you choose?
I’d agree with that but bump up agreeableness to 7/8.
Conscientiousness is the most clearly valuable, the others are more a matter of taste.
I would recreate myself as exactly as I could.
Which would be something of a crapshoot because I've never taken one of those Big 5 Personality tests.
1) In the 2016 election, it was the norm for a large percentage of Trump supporters to be closeted to avoid social repercussions. When he won, democrats were shocked! *Gasp* Where did all these Trump voters come from? In recent months, there's been a "movement" of it becoming socially acceptable to openly support Trump; publicly supporting him is no longer the mark of death. On top of this, aside from people simply no longer being closeted, a lot of people have actually *converted* to being pro-Trump. The number of MAGA defectors could outnumber all these new born-again Trumpers, but if not, doesn't that simply mean that Trump will win?
2) If you look at the comments across social media platforms - from my observation, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube go (so almost the entirety of social media), support for Trump is almost near-universal. People in the comments love him, and you even see people supporting him in the comments sections of posts by left-leaning accounts (MSNBC, for example. There are no pro-Kamala comments under the posts of any right wing accounts). They can't all be bots. Again, doesn't this indicate a strong overall preference for Trump?
More and more, I am under the impression that the average American supports Trump and that Kamala is more akin to the titular character in Weekend at Bernie's with a public perception bolstered largely by PR. Or perhaps it's me who's falling for the Trump propaganda (1 and 2 above?)...
Oh boy
People who comment under news stories are a self-selected bunch.
My responses to your points:
1) I don't buy that Trump supporters in 2016 were closeted. What happened was Trump's popularity in 2016 grew throughout the year and many Republicans changed their minds the closer it got to the election. Most Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz supporters became Trump supporters by election day. The Trump voters were never closeted, they just didn't realize that a Trump sexuality existed until October.
2) Don't make the mistake of thinking those you know are representative of the population. It's a common mistake, but people reading ACX shouldn't make it. Your personal network is the opposite of a random sample.
The only objective evidence we have regarding the election are polls and prediction markets. The polls look 50/50 and supposedly the prediction markets have been skewed by a single whale betting many millions on Trump. So much for prediction markets...
1) What do you mean by Trump sexuality?
2) I'm not implying my personal network. I'm referring to the comments sections under popular posts from various types of accounts with lots of followers (media outlets, public figures, lifestyle, pop culture, etc.), generally which are politics-oriented but also often are not.
I agree that the polls must be the only real resource for predicting the outcome, but there's a cognitive dissonance for me because of what I see in large numbers online. Perhaps I'm only seeing a small sample of overall public opinion that is representing itself as something more, however.
OK, I just went to the Washington Post's Facebook page. That counts, right? A major media outlet's page on a major social media platform with "lots of followers". Scrolled down to the most recent post that mentioned Donald Trump in the headline, and read the comments.
192 of them, at the time I checked. Of which, thirteen were unambiguously pro-Trump or anti-Kamala/"The Left", and another six ambiguously so. Just under 10% of the total. Almost all of the rest were unambiguously anti-Trump or pro-Kamala.
I therefore conclude that the claim, "social media support for Trump is near universal", is completely wrong, and that anyone making such a claim should not be taken seriously.
> I'm not implying my personal network. I'm referring to the comments sections under popular posts from various types of accounts with lots of followers (media outlets, public figures, lifestyle, pop culture, etc.), generally which are politics-oriented but also often are not.
I don't know about facebook, but Instagram actively orders comments in a way that you see first those that The Algorithm thinks you'll like more, so there can be two different echo-chambers within the same comments' section.
Fwiw, it's totally possible that they are all bots. Put another way, you're operating from an assumption that because there's many of them they must not all be bots and some potentially significant fraction must be human, but I don't think that has to be the case
1) You called Trump voters closeted. That implies to me a hidden sexuality, but I am being facetious.
2) It still sounds like a biased sample.
I think the odds are about 50/50, but the thing is we will never know. Whoever wins will seem inevitable in retrospect. Those who predicted the winner would win will seem like good prognosticators even though all they won was a coin flip.
If you're at all familiar with the Warhammer 40K universe and like to read science fiction novels, I think you might like "Day of Ascension" by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It is about a young girl who is part of a secret religious society who are awaiting their day of deliverance by angels from on high. No point in dancing around it: the society is a Genestealer cult, and the angels are a Tyranid hive fleet.
It would be very interesting to hear how much of the experience and mindset Tchaikovsky describe are in common with a more mundane messianic religious upbringing.
Does anyone here commute by bike? I commute to the office (largely by choice), which is 11 bike miles from home, which at my pace is about an hour each way. Voluntarily sinking two hours into the commute is something I only end up doing a few times a year. I've thought about upgrading to an e-bike so that I can be faster (which might make me willing to do it more often), but find the idea of doubling my speed to be slightly terrifying. Is this rational? My commute currently is a mixture of ~4 miles of paved bike trail (mixed use, so there's pedestrians there too), ~3 miles of mixed use crushed limestone, and ~4 miles of riding on the side of the road (mostly, but not entirely, small residential roads) -- so there's not much car avoidance, a bit of pedestrian slalom, and definitely potential for slipping on a wet patch.
I highly recommend an e-bike.
It is rational to be nervous about the speed; however, the absolute speed of an e-bike is not scary! Like going downhill on a normal bike, it just feels faster, but controlled. Additionally, because e-bikes are heavier, most have large disk brakes which have good stopping power. In the US e-bikes can't provide power beyond 20mph, which is fast, but a speed most recreational road bikers achieve easily. Other countries have other limits, but I think they are usually under 25mph. You will be traveling at human speeds even if its double your current speed.
It *can* take time to get used to the acceleration when starting from a full stop. You quickly get used to it though. Kind of like driving someone else's car it takes a very short time to figure out the quirks. The acceleration is the part I love the most - more than the top speed. It lets you easily get across intersections well ahead of car traffic which feels much safer and saves a lot of time as you are less likely to get caught at the next light.
Most (all?) quality e-bikes will allow you to select how much power the motor gives you. So you can scale up. When I first got mine I spent a while at level 1 of 4 and after a couple weeks felt totally fine at 4 all the time.
There are two styles of e-bike power train. One augments the power you are providing. So the harder you push on the pedals, the more power it will give you. This feels like you suddenly became a lot stronger and fitter, which is nice. The other style will give a constant amount of power when you are pedaling or activating an accelerator (usually on the handle bars like a motorcycle). So you just go faster until you get to the speed you have selected then have to pedal hard to go faster. Most are moving to the first style, but it's personal preference.
e-bikes are much heavier and most have their weight down low near the ground. This makes them much *safer*. The low center of gravity and upright riding position reduces the chance of tipping over or sliding (like in the wet patch scenario you mention). In pedestrians traffic I can be tricky to maneuver, but a lot of commuter e-bikes have smaller tires which allow for tighter turn radiuses so you can weave more easily. You also wont need to focus on pedaling as much so you can focus on what's ahead of you in the road.
Definitely try to test ride one! Many cities have a groups that promote e-bikes and bike commuting. Members may be willing to let you test ride a bike. My small college town has an e-bike lending library where anyone can request to use an e-bike. A good bike shop will definitely let you test ride some options and should be able to provide advice on which bike is best for you (if they don't, don't shop there).
Is it especially difficult to remove the governor on yours? Surely you'd want the ability to go faster than 20mph if you needed to
I haven't tried. Probably could. I can go faster than 20, but the motor just wont help beyond that. Down hill I can hit 30 and on flats I am usually at 22 or so. My city is very hilly. Im going up or down a pretty steep hill most of the time. Probably 10% of time is spent on flat-ish ground and thats usually in traffic so intersections and lights are the limit on speed, not the bike.
The gearing is also a limit. Its has 7 speeds but the highest gear ratio is pretty low compared to a non-e-bike gear set. It's also a cargo bike that weighs >60 pounds and I usually have my kids with me. They tend to not like going too fast because the wind blows in their face too much. Basically it's a minivan, not a sports car. I'd like to get an e-bike just for my self and with that, top speed would be important.
Thank you for the detailed reply! This is helpful. The season is all but over here in Minnesota, but this convinced me to look into this more in spring.
Sure thing. I saw you mentioned the bike shop near you rents e-bikes in the summer. They may still let you rent them if the weather is nice (I am sure they would love the revenue if it's not ski season yet!). Good luck, I hope it works for your situation. Getting an e-bike made bike riding feel like it did when I was a kid - just fun and relaxing and not a chore.
It's not scary once you ride it, not at all. Get an ebike
For some reason my ebike doesn't go faster than my max speed on a regular bike, but it's way less effort. Living in jersey. Have a folding regular and also electric brompton bike. Take whichever I feel like on the day.
I'm not sure I'm following: of course it's not scarier if you're not going faster than you would on your regular bike? My problem is that for bike-riding to make sense from a scheduling perspective, it needs to be about 2x faster than I can ride my regular bike.
You might be a woman. I might be athletic. I might have an unusual electric bike.
My 'experience' it that if I pedal my electric bike hard it doesn't 'add' anything.
The electric bike makes it super easy to go from 0 to x miles with minimal input, and to climb hills. On flat ground I think there's some max speed above which it doesn't keep 'spinning' and my max speed on a non-electric is roughly that.
This is my experience too. If someone is using a bike for transportation (and not recreation) I don't see any reason for them to not get an e-bike if they can afford it. They are better in almost every way than a normal bike as a transportation method.
I commute by bike either side of a train ride, and the second half of my commute is in London. I use a folding e-bike, and it's great - it means even on the worst days I will still catch my train, and if I have to trek across London to catch a different one, I can do that easily.
Would getting an e-bike actually double your speed? It definitely increases mine, but I'm not sure it doubles it. Have you tried riding one? Can you rent one for a day and see how you like it?
Well, my speed is slow -- as mentioned in the post, I average 11mph; the day I took a detour and was running late and had to average 12mph was exhausting. So doubling, or close to it, feels achievable.
For some reason I hadn't thought of renting as a serious option, but it looks like the bike shop next to me does rent them, at least in season. (They're a bike shop in summer and ski shop in winter, which I think means that they're currently gloomily looking outside at +25C and sunny and wondering how they're supposed to sell skis in this weather.)
In the UK, ebike speed is supposed to be limited to 15mph*. Mine therefore only boosts up to about 15mph, so you wouldn't get a doubling out of it from 11mph. I don't know if you have the same limits, though.
*Obviously lots of people use cheap ones which don't have that limit, but I wanted a reliable bike that wouldn't explode ;)
One of my brothers was a techy for the Arizona DOT. When Phoenix started putting bike racks on the outside of buses they had to create an area in one of their buildings to keep all the bikes that people forgot to retrieve when they got off the bus.
There is a website called GovDeals that administers property auctions for government agencies. Lots of police departments and colleges auctioning off all the bikes they recover. You can get some pretty good deals too. (also a lot of auctions for dell laptops and PCs no one wants :D )
Given that most of the countries that are members of NATO don't border the Atlantic Ocean, I think the organization's name should be changed. What do you think a good alterative is now, given the geography and purpose of it?
Since the parallels between the modern USA and ancient Athens abound, I think it would be fun to rename NATO to be a league, akin to the Delian League.
The Delian League was named after Delos because that's where they made the agreement. Here, the North Atlantic Treaty was signed in Washington, so maybe the Washingtonian League.
But that loses the weird quirk that Delos wasn't really a major member of the Delian league - if we zoom out a bit, a treaty that preceded NATO was signed in Brussels, so maybe the Brusselian League?
It is common, though not universal, for oceans to be defined as including the seas which connect to that ocean. If "North Atlantic" includes the North Baltic, Mediterranean, and Black Seas, then almost all of NATO is adjacent to the North Atlantic. And I believe that was the intended understanding when NATO was formed, incorporating Mediterranean powers like Italy and Greece.
Moreover, the alliance doesn't need to be centered on the North Atlantic for the name to be accurate. It's the Organization established by the North Atlantic Treaty, not the Treaty Organization for the North Atlantic.
I didn't know that! That fact definitely shifts my thinking.
Team America: World Police?
Obviously it's Global Defense Initiative
But who will be in charge now that James Earl Jones has passed away?
Here are some of the best alternative names I found on the internet:
European-American Treaty Organization
Alliance of Democratic States (or Nations)
Western Alliance
My own ideas:
Global Democratic Alliance
Democratic Defensive Alliance (or Pact)
Of those, "Western Alliance" would be my preference, in recognition of NATO being the successor group to the Western Allies of WW2.
I actually like it the least since the "W" prevents the acronym version of the name from rolling off the tongue like "NATO" does.
"Western Alliance" could be abbreviated as "wall". (Though it looks janky if you type it with the correct capitalization: "WAll".
Since there have been so many pro-Trump posts here this week, I thought I'd counter with an anti-Trump one. I'm simply going to quote from a recent Ezra Klein piece, because it nails the biggest argument for not voting for Trump: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/22/opinion/donald-trump-ezra-klein-podcast.html?unlocked_article_code=1.UE4.MCvf.XdZVFj4McLdX&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
(hat-tip Kristian, Gunflint and GlacierCow for bringing it to my attention)
I suggest reading the whole thing, but the key parts:
"Here is the question Democrats have floundered in answering this year: If Donald Trump is so dangerous, then how come the consequences of his presidency weren’t worse? There is this gap between the unfit, unsound, unworthy man Democrats describe and the memories that most Americans have of his presidency, at least before the pandemic. If Donald Trump is so bad, why were things so good? Why were they at least OK?
There is an answer to this question: It’s that as president, Trump was surrounded by inhibitors. In 2020 the political scientist Daniel Drezner published a book titled “The Toddler in Chief.” The core of the book was over 1,000 instances Drezner collected in which Trump is described, by those around him, in terms befitting an impetuous child.
These quotes about Trump abound, given on the record or on background, to various biographers and reporters. Some of them are later disputed, as the staffer realized the consequences of what they said. But there are reams and reams of them. For every one I offer here, I could give you a dozen more.
In 2017 his deputy chief of staff, Katie Walsh, described working with President Trump as “trying to figure out what a child wants.” Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, said — quote — “I’m sick of being a wet nurse for a 71-year-old.” James Mattis, Trump’s first secretary of defense, and John Kelly, later his chief of staff, often described themselves like babysitters; they made a pact to never be overseas at the same time, lest Trump do something truly deranged.
Here’s the title of a 2017 article in Politico: “White House aides lean on delays and distraction to manage Trump.” The first paragraph reads, “As White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus mused to associates that telling President Donald Trump no was usually not an effective strategy. Telling him ‘next week’ was often the better idea.”
In 2018, The New York Times published a bombshell Op-Ed by an anonymous member of the Trump administration who said he, a Republican, was part of the internal resistance to Donald Trump, in which — quote — “many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.” That author later revealed himself to be Miles Taylor, the chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security...
The Trump administration was rife with this sort of thing. In 2019 a senior national security official told CNN’s Jake Tapper, “Everyone at this point ignores what the president says and just does their job. The American people should take some measure of confidence in that.”
During his presidency, Trump repeatedly proposed firing Patriot missiles at suspected drug labs in Mexico. He mused about launching nuclear weapons at other countries, and in one very strange case, at a hurricane. He has talked often and insistently on his desire to turn the machinery of the government against his domestic political enemies. He talked often about pulling out of NATO. He mused about the efficacy of untested or dangerous treatments for Covid. In 2020, during the protests following George Floyd’s murder, Trump raged at his staff, demanding they turn the full force of the military against the protesters. Here’s Mark Esper, who served as Trump’s secretary of defense, on “60 Minutes”:
Mark Esper: I thought that we’re at a different spot now, where he’s going to finally give a direct order to deploy paratroopers into the streets of Washington, D.C., and I’m thinking with weapons and bayonets. And this would be horrible.
Norah O’Donnell: What specifically was he suggesting that the U.S. military should do to these protesters?
Esper: He says, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” And he is suggesting that that’s what we should do, that we should bring in the troops and shoot the protesters.
...The best argument you can make about Trump’s first term is that there was a constructive tension between his disinhibition and the constraints of the staff and the bureaucracy and the institutions that surrounded him. Yes, some of his ideas were bad, dangerous and unconstitutional. But those mostly didn’t happen: They were stopped by his aides, by the so-called deep state, by the courts, by civil society.
And the way he pushed, the way he didn’t constrain himself to what other presidents would have done or said, maybe that led to changes that — at least if you agree with him — were positive. Changes that wouldn’t have happened under another president: tariffs on China, a sharp drop in border crossings, NATO allies spending more on defense.
But now the people around Trump have spent four years plotting to dismantle everything that stopped Trump the first time. That’s what Project 2025, and the nearly 20,000 résumés it reportedly vetted, is really all about. That’s what Trump’s inner circle is spending its time and energy doing. Don Jr. told The Wall Street Journal, “We want people who are actually going to follow the president, the duly elected president, not act as sort of unelected officials that know better, because they don’t know better.” He went on to say, “We’re doing a lot with vetting. My job is to prevent those guys.”
...The thing to see here is that Trump’s supporters want to have it both ways: They point to what didn’t happen in his first term as proof that the same or worse would not happen in his second term. But they themselves are trying to remove everything that stopped Trump’s worst impulses from becoming geopolitical or constitutional crises."
I guess my hesitation is that we don't know the baseline for any of this. How often did other presidents ask for stupid/unworkable/unconstitutional things?
And there are two reasons to think Trump would still say more "dumb" things than other presidents that don't necessarily mean he would actually do more dumb things. 1) He speaks off the cuff a lot, often in low status ways, even when he actually does know what he's talking about, and 2) He was never in politics at any level before becoming president, so he didn't know the lingo. Obama may have asked "what are our options?" or something, where Trump asks a dumb more specific question "can we just shoot them?" Neither one may have had a good grasp of the specifics but one asks in a silly way. Obama's advisors may never have known that he was also thinking "can we just shoot them" in his head, because he's smoother about that stuff. Given some of the evil things Obama did in his administration, I have trouble doubting that he could be thinking similarly to Trump on some level. He ordered the death of American citizens without due process. Is that better or worse than asking about shooting protestors but then not following through? Did Obama ask a lot more questions but his administration liked him so they didn't report on the weird/insane/illogical things he said? Who knows.
I've had very intelligent bosses who asked very dumb questions, but ended up making mostly good decisions with or without advisement. Just about everyone who dealt with them directly was very concerned about what they were going to be asked to do, until the point they got asked to do mostly reasonable things or could make suggestions and then the boss agreed.
I'm not saying Trump fits that criteria, but I am also not convinced he doesn't.
I agree with cxs5. This is a variant of tu quoque (appeal to hypocrisy) and is probably also special pleading.
That is to say:
- you admit that this is bad behavior, and even if Obama or whoever was doing the same thing (he wasn't) that doesn't make the bad behavior less bad. Note that no one has ever claimed Kamala, the actual alternative, has done something remotely similar, so by your own standards this should be an easy choice to vote against Trump.
- this is likely special pleading, in that if anyone else said "just shoot them" you'd probably not be as lenient. Yes, I can construct a hypothetical scenario where this is actually just a twist of language and Trump (the UPenn educated billionaire) didn't realize how that would come across. But I'm a Bayesian; Occam's razor suggests that he really does mean something more akin to "just shoot them". You have to jump through many more hoops to explain why this is actually a special case where he doesn't mean the explicit semantic meaning of his words.
Also, a cultural artifact on this board is that we are frequently cajoled to take people's statements at face value. A belief in 'dog whistles' is generally derided - if someone says they believe in states rights, you accept that as a belief in states rights and are considered to be acting in bad faith if you accuse them of saying one thing while meaning another.
Except when someone whose name rhymes with Tonald Drump says "just shoot them." When that happens we're all supposed to put on our rationalization hats and do our best to come up with whatever alternate meaning, in the most favorable light, might have made this statement mean something less crazy, be comparable to something other leaders have said, just be "Drump being Drump" rhetoric we should 'take seriously but not literally,' etc, etc.
It makes you a crazy bad faith lib to read alternate subtexts into his statements right up until that subtext is necessary to make them more palatable/forgivable, at which point you're a crazy bad faith lib if you don't.
I legitimately cannot believe what I'm reading right now. This comment is beyond absurd it's mindblowing to me that I'm reading something like this on ACX and not some pro Trump forum or twitter.
There's been a lot of completely misinformed takes here regarding Trump and his (lack of) policies, but this one sent me over the edge. I'm going to be harsh here because I thinks it's warranted. I never comment here, and I'll take the ban, but I have to say something to this, if only for the sake of anyone else reading this comment. (I'm 50/50 on if the person I'm replying to is a russian/generic troll or a serious person)
What in the FUCK are you talking about???? If you're not a troll, I seriously think you need to re-examine your thought process. What a disgustingly anti-american mindset.
In what world do you read ""Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” And he is suggesting that that’s what we should do, that we should bring in the troops and shoot the protesters." and think, "hmmm, well maybe its just the way he talks... maybe its just his phrasing you know?"
What the fuck? WHO MAKES EXCUSES FOR THIS BEHAVIOR?? And to compare it to Obama killing a US citizen in Yemen, as if this is even remotely similar? You seriously want to equate the President of the United States wanting to DEPLOY TROOPS TO SHOOT US CITIZENS DEMONSTRATING THEIR FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHT TO PROTEST to drone striking a KNOWN TERRORIST who we were ACTIVELY AT WAR WITH IN ANOTHER COUNTRY. (By the way I'm sure you have no clue what you're talking about, but for everyone else reading, Obama did this ONLY AFTER seeking direct white house legal council a year before. He didn't just ask to do this off the cuff one day because this particular guy annoyed him or have his personal lawyers write up some hackjob legal workaround a-la Jan. 6.)
And to make excuses for this among a whole slew of other INSANE things Trump has said and done is just... wow. You're asking for some "baseline", as if ANY OTHER PRESIDENT has EVER asked for nuking other countries, launching missiles at Mexico, SHOOTING PROTESTING AMERICANS!! If ANY other president was like this, the whole world would hear about it, just as they are right now, with Trump. I think you full well fucking know the "baseline".
At best you're just a troll and I've wasted my time, or at worst, you're the type of anti-american loser enabling people like Trump to exist.
OP is not a troll. They have been posting here about diverse matters for a while.
I hope you don't get banned as this is (almost) exactly my feeling about all the pro-DT nonsense I'm seeing recently.
Do you think people seeing all the anti-DT nonsense recently, feel analogously?
One of the traditions of rationalist circles is to muscle past the repulsion long enough to notice it's not one-sided. Politics is the mindkiller, and all that.
I'm not sure. I certainly feel that I put a lot of effort into being objective, but there's probably nothing I could say to convince another person on the internet. If it helps, I'm a long term conservative and don't like Harris. Self-diagnosed: I probably have a bias to believe the worst of politicians generally.
My perception of DT supporters is that (some/many/most?) love the reaction from his opponents. Is that not true?
Could you point me to someone you think is otherwise intelligent who is posting anti-DT nonsense? Do you feel symmetrically mind-killed this election season?
"If it helps" - it's informative, so yes.
I agree that *some* DT supporters love the reaction from opponents. But so what? So do some KH supporters.
The point of a rationalist forum is to be able to slough those crowds off.
"someone you think is otherwise intelligent who is posting anti-DT nonsense" - I wouldn't use those words, but I see some of it in ACX, yes. "[He ] is incredibly, terribly, awfully, disgustingly bad, an obnoxious sleaze of a man" was one recent unproductive jab I saw. Another was a comment darkly hinting that Trump and Vance are like Hitler, and the distinguishing feature is only that Trump is "old" (and Vance is not).
I don't feel mindkilled in the same way. I feel like I'm watching the same old mudslinging, and feeling frustrated because it's on a forum that ought to know better. I've posted comments that nominally defend Trump here, but I've tried to be careful not to be mindkilled about them, and they're all consistent with me having my own concerns about the guy - inexperience, incapacity to gain experience, and tendency to antagonize all the people he'd need to get anything practical done are probably my big three. To be fair, they probably don't manifest to others, because when others make those arguments here, I just silently nod and see no reason to reply.
End of the day, I'd *really* like to see a viable alternative to Trump - but I recognize that that's not the choice I'm being given.
So, Obama ordered the intentional killing of a 16-year-old US citizen in a non combat zone. (https://www.aclu.org/video/aclu-ccr-lawsuit-american-boy-killed-us-drone-strike). Do we know what that conversation sounded like? Did Obama ask "can we just kill [the terrorists]?"
This is clearly unconstitutional. If his staff was supportive and therefore didn't leak the details of the conversation, I don't think that makes it any better.
Reagan was involved in Iran Contra (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair)
Clinton ordered the bombing of a medicine plant in the Sudan. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Shifa_pharmaceutical_factory#:~:text=The%20administration%20of%20President%20Bill,behind%20the%20embassy%20bombings%20and)
Is that better or worse than asking about bombing something in Mexico? Clinton actually carried it out. How do we know if one is acceptable but another is not?
Bush ordered the torture of prisoners, including many who were not known to have committed any crimes (and quite a few who were later found to have never been involved).
Which of these things is better than what Trump suggested, but didn't actually end up doing? Which of these things is fine, while Trump is beyond the pale?
I'm perfectly fine with saying that *all* of these things are bad, including what Trump was suggesting. I'm having a hard time with "Trump is bad, clearly different from a normal president" when we *know* that all other recent presidents have done similar or worse things than what Trump even asked about. Like, what's the worst thing that Trump actually did? We're comparing things he's accused of talking about to things actually done by other presidents, and I'm not sure Trump is the one who comes out looking the worst there. We don't even know what Bush or Obama may have talked about. If they were willing to actually do some of the evil things we know about, I don't have much confidence they didn't also ask about some even worse things. In fact, I'd be very surprised if neither of them asked about bombing locations in Mexico. That's an obvious consideration when the cartels have grown as powerful as they have, given our actions dealing with other enemies of the US around the world.
Also, I'm quite certain Kennedy, Eisenhower, LBJ, Nixon, and maybe Reagan all contemplated nuking foreign countries. Every president from 1945 until at least the 90s had to have contemplated at least the MAD scenario with the Soviet Union.
>So, Obama ordered the intentional killing of a 16-year-old US citizen in a non combat zone
It is hard to take you seriously when the very first thing you say is untrue. The ACLU's own complaint makes it clear that he was not intentionally killed. "Even in the context of an armed conflict, government officials must comply with the requirements of distinction and proportionality and take all feasible measures to protect bystanders. Upon information and belief, Samir Khan was killed
because Defendants failed to take such measures." This is common knowledge.
Are you going to use that to dismiss the other examples, including Obama ordering the death of that kid's father? I hadn't looked into the case in a while, but remember it being reported as also intentional, but the father definitely was. And although the father was almost certainly guilty of terrorism, he was still a US citizen and had a right to a trial and sentencing before execution.
This is the libertarian meme that refuses to die.
That kid's father was killed as part of a Congressionally approved armed conflict against an organization of which he was an active member. It was no more an "execution" than any other death during war and US citizens do not have a special right to trial before being killed in an armed conflict.
This is as settled as law can get.
> as if ANY OTHER PRESIDENT has EVER asked for nuking other countries
There is a silly rumor that Truman once suggested nuking Japan.
Cute, but I do see OP's point here. There's a tendency among some to try to weaponize rationalist approaches to normalize Trump's abnormal behavior.
Trump does something that a fairly broad consensus of people would consider weird or crazy - he foments a not-quite-not-a-failed-coup, suggests shooting patriot missiles at Mexico, or talks about immigrants poisoning the blood of the nation... and if you're the kind of person who believes that behavior to be disqualifying for a potential President, and say so, his defenders will oft retort "Well who knows? Maybe *all* Presidents wanted to overturn the elections they lost and shoot patriot missiles at Mexico. Before I will accept this behavior as disqualifying you'll have to prove to me that behind closed doors everyone else wasn't just doing it too."
This is more of an argument that obfuscates than a legitimate challenge. It's a defense that can be offered at all times for anything. We could learn that Trump tried to strangle a foreign diplomat, or that Hillary Clinton served a roasted baby to guests in the Clinton White House, or any other number of obviously insane things, and their defenders can *always* just shrug and say "well who knows, LBJ seems like he might've strangled a diplomat or two, and how do we no for certain that Eleanor Roosevelt or Jacki O never served baby?"
It's understanding, at a certain point, to become frustrated with the whole "prove to me that no other emperor has ever gone naked" defense when you're seeing the guy clearly parading about without any pantaloons.
Absolutely. I went to the easy sarcasm but I see the point too.
I think the sheer number of former Trump staff who have turned against him so hard tells us a lot. That gives us some indirect sense of the baseline, since there's no precedent for this level of public repudiation from former senior officials.
Contrast that with what you say about your former bosses who asked dumb questions. You aren't now trashing them for that, just the opposite!
Didn't Harris's office have 93% staff turnover over the past four years?
I saw Veep, so I'm not surprised. Are any of them saying she's unfit for office?
Or that she has no understanding of the US Constitution?
Or that she suggested the soldiers buried at Arlington are suckers and losers?
So far as the Arlington story, my memory is that one person who had been present said Trump said that, others who were present said he didn't.
I wouldn't assume that Harris could give a correct account of the Constitution and we know Biden didn't. (https://www.factcheck.org/2008/10/constitutional-queries-about-the-vp-debate/). Politicians pretend, with the assistance of speechwriters and teleprompters, to be well educated but their real expertise is in getting elected.
It was Biden who said “When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’"". When the stock market crashed, Hoover was president and national television a decade or so in the future.
Very true, and fair. One thing that both sides agree about is that the career bureaucrats (or Deep State, or Cathedral) all hate Trump. From my perspective, probably yours too, it's hard to tell if how they talk about him is a bit "chicken or egg" and they hate him because he's bad or they say he's bad because they hate him.
I suspect there's aspects of both, which is why I want some sort of non-Trump comparison to look at. If Trump is 20% worse than most presidents, that should lead to legitimate criticism against him, but that's not catastrophic or even really worrisome. If he's 100% worse that could explain the negativity, but 100% more of a low baseline may not be too bad. If he's 10X worse, then I would likely agree he's a loose cannon and bad in office.
You are also ignoring the incentives. Trump has such domination within conservative circles that it is very costly for conservatives to criticize him. I know the right-wing talking point that these people are trying to curry favor at DC cocktail parties or something, but, for example, Mike Pence and John Bolton are never going to get love on the left side of the aisle, no matter what they say about Trump.
It's really worth trying to estimate a baseline of "how many people are predisposed to say bad things", and then check reality to see how far it is from your baseline.
I think when non politicians like Rex Tillerson, or one-time avowed Trumpists like Steve Bannon, say that he's unfit for office, he probably is.
(I'm open to hearing why, for eg, Tillerson and Bannon are actually part of the deep state. But if you can't really justify that, I think at some point you have to bite the bullet that, no, he really does just suck, and even though it makes you see red your enemies might just be right about this one)
I have very little doubt that Trump is less experienced in politics and far less reasonable about how he approaches issues. I can definitely see him suggesting we send patriot missiles to attack Mexican cartels or whatever.
But, like, every president since at least Clinton has bombed places in nominally friendly countries. Specifically he had cruise missiles launched at a Sudanese medicine factory. Can you give me an explanation of which one is okay, and which one isn't? What metrics should we use to determine if one is okay but not another? If the answer is that all are not okay, then why hate on Trump specifically?
You're shifting the goal posts. The original point was that one measure of Trump's unique badness is the volume of people who have worked with him who have said he is bad. You responded with a justification for why those people may have reason to dislike him outside of his actual policies, and I responded that that's looking the other way.
Assume for a moment that the presidency is a black box. We don't know what goes on because it's classified, all we can see on the other side is some subset of actions taken and some subset of opinions shared by other people on the inside. We can argue all we want about the actions taken -- and many people do -- but at the end of the day it's very hard to understand those actions because we don't see how behind the veil of how they are justified. But the opinions are easily evaluated, and it's very very clear that Trump has an anomalously high rate of people who have worked with him, people who originally supported him, who come away thinking that he is a danger to those around him and a danger to the country. You're welcome to discard all that information, but at some point I think you just need to bite that you think you know better than people who have been in the room, and personally that's wild to me
Lots of online people have argued, Richard Hanania is a good example, that all the good stuff Trump talks about will happen and all the bad stuff won’t, because the system will prevent it or because he’ll get distracted.
That feeds into exactly Klein’s point, though- for that to happen, you’d be relying on the people around Trump to rein in his excesses.
Only the new team around him has spent the last 4 years working to prevent exactly that dynamic from emerging again - see e.g. Kleins quit from Don Jr:
“We want people who are actually going to follow the president, the duly elected president, not act as sort of unelected officials that know better, because they don’t know better.” “We’re doing a lot with vetting. My job is to prevent those guys.”
Here’s Bill Ackman (edited slightly for length)
A number of my good friends and family have been surprised about my decision to support
@realDonaldTrump
for president. They have been surprised because my political giving history has been mostly to Democrats, my voting registration has typically been Democrat (in NY, you must be registered to the party in order to vote in the primary, and usually the Republican candidate has no chance to win), and many of our philanthropic initiatives have supported issues that are consistent with Democratic priorities.
Three months ago, when I endorsed Trump on the day of the first assassination attempt, I promised to share my thinking about why I came to this conclusion in a future more detailed post. I intend to do so in possibly more than one post, with the first, this one, explaining the actions and policies of the Biden/Harris administration and Democratic Party that were the catalysts for my losing total confidence in the administration and the Party.
To be clear, my decision to vote for Trump is not an endorsement of everything he has done or will do because he is an imperfect man. Unlike a marriage or a business partnership where there are effectively unlimited alternatives, in this election, we have only two viable choices. Of the two, I believe that Trump is by far the superior candidate despite his flaws and mistakes he has made in the past.
While the 33 actions I describe below are those of the Democratic Party and the Biden/Harris administration, they are also the actions and policies that unfortunately our most aggressive adversaries would likely implement if they wanted to destroy America from within, and had the ability to take control of our leadership.
These are the 33:
(1) open the borders to millions of immigrants who were not screened for their risk to the country, dumping them into communities where the new immigrants overwhelm existing communities and the infrastructure to support the new entrants, at the expense of the historic residents,
(2) introduce economic policies and massively increase spending without regard to their impact on inflation and the consequences for low-income Americans and the increase in our deficit and national debt,
(3) withdraw from Afghanistan, abandoning our local partners and the civilians who worked alongside us in an unprepared, overnight withdrawal that led to American casualties and destroyed the lives of Afghani women and girls for generations, against the strong advice of our military leadership, and thereafter not showing appropriate respect for their loss at a memorial ceremony in their honor,
(4) introduce thousands of new and unnecessary regulations in light of the existing regulatory regime that interfere with our businesses’ ability to compete, restraining the development of desperately needed housing, infrastructure, and energy production with the associated inflationary effects,
(5) modify the bail system so that violent criminals are released without bail,
(6) destroy our street retailers and communities and promote lawlessness by making shoplifting (except above large thresholds) no longer a criminal offense,
(7) limit and/or attempt to limit or ban fracking and LNG so that U.S. energy costs increase substantially and the U.S. loses its energy independence,
(8) promote DEI ideologies that award jobs, awards, and university admissions on the basis of race, sexual identity and gender criteria, and teach our students and citizens that the world can only be understood as an unfair battle between oppressors and the oppressed, where the oppressors are only successful due to structural racism or a rigged system and the oppressed are simply victims of an unfair system and world,
(9) educate our elementary children that gender is fluid, something to be chosen by a child, and promote hormone blockers and gender reassignment surgeries to our youth without regard to the longer-term consequences to their mental and physical health, and allow biological boys and men to compete in girls and women's sports, depriving girls and women of scholarships, awards, and other opportunities that they would have rightly earned otherwise,
(10) encourage and celebrate massive protests and riots that lead to the burning and destruction of local retail and business establishments while at the same time requiring schools to be shuttered because of the risk of Covid-19 spreading during large gatherings,
(11) encourage and celebrate anti-American and anti-Israel protests and flag burning on campuses around the country with no consequences for the protesters who violate laws or university codes and policies,
(12) allow antisemitism to explode with no serious efforts from the administration to quell this hatred,
(13) mandate vaccines that have not been adequately tested nor have their risks been properly considered compared with the potential benefits adjusted for the age and health of the individual, censoring the contrary advice of top scientists around the world,
(14) shut down free speech in media and on social media platforms that is inconsistent with government policies and objectives,
(15) use the U.S., state, and local legal systems to attack and attempt to jail, take off the campaign trail, and/or massively fine candidates for the presidency without regard to the merits or precedential issues of the case,
(16) seek to defund the police and promote anti-police rhetoric causing a loss of confidence in those who are charged with protecting us,
(17) use government funds to subsidize auto companies and internet providers with vastly more expensive, dated and/or lower-quality technology when greatly superior and cheaper alternatives are available from companies that are owned and/or managed by individuals not favored by the current administration,
(18) mandate in legislation and otherwise government solutions to problems when the private sector can do a vastly better, faster, and cheaper job,
(19) seek to ban gas-powered cars and stoves without regard to the economic and practical consequences of doing so,
(20) take no serious actions when 45 American citizens are killed by terrorists and 12 are taken hostage,
(21) hold back armaments and weaponry from our most important ally in the Middle East in the midst of their hostage negotiations, hostages who include American citizens who have now been held for more than one year,
(22) eliminate sanctions on one of our most dangerous enemies enabling them to generate $150 billion+ of cash reserves from oil sales, which they can then use to fund terrorist proxy organizations who attack us and our allies. Exchange five American hostages held by Iran for five Iranians plus $6 billion of cash in the worst hostage negotiation in history setting a disastrous and dangerous precedent,
(23) remove known terrorist organizations from the terrorist list so we can provide aid to their people, and allow them to shoot rockets at U.S. assets and military bases with little if any military response from us,
(24) lie to the American people about the cognitive health of the president and accuse those who provide video evidence of his decline of sharing doctored videos and being right wing conspirators,
(25) do nothing about the deteriorating health of our citizens driven by the food industrial complex, the fraudulent USDA food pyramid, and the inclusion of ingredients in our food that are banned by other countries around the world which are more protective of their citizens,
(26) do nothing about the proliferation of new vaccines that are not properly analyzed for their risk versus the potential benefit for healthy children who are mandated to receive them,
(27) do nothing about the continued exemption from liability for the pharma industry that has led to a proliferation of mandatory vaccines for children without considering the potential cumulative effects of the now mandated 72-shot regime,
(28) convince our minority youth that they are victims of a rigged system and that the American dream is not available to them,
(29) fail to provide adequate Secret Service protection for alternative presidential candidates,
(30) litigate to prevent alternative candidates from getting on the ballot, and take other anti-competitive steps including threatening political consultants who wish to work for alternative candidates for the presidency, and limit the potential media access for other candidates by threatening the networks' future access to the administration and access to 'scoops' if they platform an alternative candidate,
(31) select the Democratic nominee for president in a backroom process by undisclosed party leaders without allowing Americans to choose between candidates in an open primary,
(32) choose an inferior candidate for the presidency when other much more qualified candidates are available and interested to serve,
(33) litigate to make it illegal for states to require proof of citizenship, voter ID, and/or residence in order to vote at a time when many Americans have lost confidence in the accuracy and trustworthiness of our voting system.
Just picking a few that jumped out at me at random.
>(3) withdraw from Afghanistan, abandoning our local partners and the civilians who worked alongside us in an unprepared, overnight withdrawal that led to American casualties and destroyed the lives of Afghani women and girls for generations, against the strong advice of our military leadership, and thereafter not showing appropriate respect for their loss at a memorial ceremony in their honor,
Remind me again who it was that started the withdrawal from Afghanistan? There was no option that didn't destroy the lives of Afghani women and girls, aside from "stay there forever," and if Biden had decided to halt the withdrawal I suspect Ackman would be panning him just as hard for trapping us in a forever war.
>(12) allow antisemitism to explode with no serious efforts from the administration to quell this hatred,
And you think the guy who just said "Hitler did some good things" and said that the crowds chanting "Jews will not replace us" included some "very fine people" is going to *decrease* antisemitism?
>(14) shut down free speech in media and on social media platforms that is inconsistent with government policies and objectives,
Trump has a pattern of attacking the media far more intensely - he just tweeted about how CNBC should lose their broadcast license.
>(25) do nothing about the deteriorating health of our citizens driven by the food industrial complex, the fraudulent USDA food pyramid, and the inclusion of ingredients in our food that are banned by other countries around the world which are more protective of their citizens,
And to prevent this, you suggest electing the Republicans, who are of course famous for wanting to *increase* regulations, especially on nanny-state topics like what you're allowed to eat and drink.
I'm sorry, all of these range from "false" to "vague" to "a problem but you're using it to advocate for the guy who is even worse on that issue."
> ...said that the crowds chanting "Jews will not replace us" included some "very fine people" is going to *decrease* antisemitism?
Look, it's the große Lüge in its natural habitat! Somehow Trump can explicitly say that he isn't talking about the white nationalists and the neo-nazis, and yet people still insinuate he was talking about the white nationalists and the neo-nazis with the fine people remark. I believe Scott even had a post about this, or something adjacent. Trump says and does plenty of stupid and awful things, as is self-evident. You don't need to repeat made up nonsense about how he's also a super nazi racist.
ETA: I feel like I've critiqued several of your posts lately and don't want to only come across as negative. So I'll add that (3) is on point; there is a legitimate criticism of Biden that he could have handled the withdrawal better. But he did *actually* withdraw the US from Afghanistan, something Trump initiated but never actually did. Bush and Obama deserve most of the blame anyway. And (25), pointing to the Republicans as the party to regulate food health is pretty funny.
Biden didn't explicitly support the pro-Hamas crowd, and his Israel stance is generally pretty moderate, along the lines of "I support Israel but would prefer fewer war crimes." But the OP thinks that the simple fact that the anti-semites on the left to feel emboldened is enough to condemn him. I think if you're applying this logic fairly, you have to notice that the racists, neo-nazis, and anti-semites on the right felt very emboldened by a Trump presidency.
You could instead just admit that a President isn't personally responsible for every facet of the culture wars, but in that case you should let Biden slide on this as well.
> You could instead just admit that a President isn't personally responsible for every facet of the culture wars, but in that case you should let Biden slide on this as well.
That was more or less the gist of my comments in the rest of this thread. Judging the candidates on whichever extremists 'feel emboldened' by them is stupid. Which is why the Charlottesville speech bothers me. Trump excluded the extremists from his "very fine people" line in the preceding sentence, but it still gets used to tar him as supporting nazis.
I'm willing to take a weaker stance that imo is still getting at beleester's larger point: Trump himself may not be a Nazi racist, but Nazi racists feel empowered under him, and that will of course make racial polarity (including anti semitism) much worse. I'm happy to provide evidence of racist Nazis saying things like "Trump brought our ideas into the mainstream"
I don't want to empower Nazi racists, so I'm voting for the other person
I don't want to empower Hamasnik racists who want to genocide Israel, so I'm voting for Trump.
That sounds stupid doesn't it? I can't believe I'm agreeing with Paul, but this is ridiculous. There are only two real parties in the US. Radicals and nutjobs pick whichever one they think is going to give them a better chance than the other. Trump no more wants to create the Fourth Reich than Harris wants to push the Israelis into the sea. I judge the candidates based on what they actually say and do, not whatever limpets attach themselves at the far fringes of their constituency.
I think my response to Paul below basically summarizes my response to your point as well (it's the same point):
- yes, you shouldnt judge a candidate based on JUST which fringe supports them
- that said, you are coming into a conversation specifically about racial tension and are surprised we are discussing the likely racial tension outcomes from one of the major candidates
At this point I think both you and Paul are engaged in 'whataboutism', which btw is totally fair. We can weight the comparative outcomes of whether Trump or Kamala are more likely to increase racial tension based on which fringes support them. But I want to point out that both you and Paul also are agreeing with the throughline -- that is, Trump DOES have the support of racist Nazis, that his presidency will embolden said racist Nazis, and the only question at hand is whether that is better or worse than embolding [insert left fringe]
I don't think it's a meaningful criteria though. Nazis supporting Trump only requires that they perceive a Trump presidency to be marginally more favorable to their cause than a Harris presidency. It does not mean a Trump presidency would in fact do anything to increase the amount of Nazism in the country. As Nazis clearly have very stupid ideas, I am inclined to actively not care what they think.
By that argument, you should also vote against the person who brought communist ideas into the mainstream - assuming of course you're against communist ideas.
Which is really an argument against the argument of assessing a candidate by whichever 0.002% of the population you can find with the wackiest ideas, that will realistically have 0% chance of being catered to by that candidate, regardless of what that group thinks about the acceptance of their wacky ideas.
Two things:
- first, I have a lot of reasons for disliking Trump. That he empowers racist Nazis is one drop in a very large bucket. Broadly, though, I agree with you that you shouldn't evaluate a candidate based on JUST which fringe supports him/her. That said, the specific question in this post is about whether or not Trump's rhetoric or election will increase racial tension, and I think it will. Maybe there are other reasons to like Trump, but if the reason you like Trump is because you think he will turn DOWN the racial tension temperature, I got a bridge to sell you.
- second, I think your claim is that the fringe left wing is as bad as racist Nazis? I'm open to hearing that argument, but I think it's a tough fence to climb, sorry.
ETA: third point: if Marx was on the ballot I'd vote against him, but he isn't. I think Kamala is much farther from / more antagonistic to her fringe than Trump is to his.
I'm not claiming Trump will turn down racial tension. I'm claiming *no* candidate will turn down racial tension. Moreover, I'm claiming Harris will have no better effect on racial tension than Trump, because the candidate in office is having only a minor effect on racial tension on the US.
Ergo, racial tension is not a reason to choose one candidate over another, and anyone for whom that pops up as a first-level reason to determine their pick could probably stand to revisit that.
Even if you have serious disagreements with Harris's policy positions, why would you want to install a person in the White House who is obviously suffering from severe cognitive decline? I really can't understand your thinking. IANAMD, but doesn't his behavior fit the definition of Lewy Body Dementia? (https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/lewy-body-dementia/symptoms-causes/syc-20352025)
I await your refuttal of his cognitive decline (examples below)...
https://x.com/i/status/1804586561545097640
This is the first time I've heard that the Nobel committee just nominated Biden for not just one but TWO Nobel prizes...
https://x.com/i/status/1305343209153818625
Of course, he is capable of honoring memorable people like Arnold Palmer. After he did a rambling 10+ minute monologue about Palmer, he finished it by praising the size of Palmer's penis. Note: earlier this election cycle, Trump claimed he could drive a ball down the fairway further than Palmer (sorry, can't find the video for that one), so Trump did show some humbleness by praising Palmer's package.
https://x.com/i/status/1847765368657363009
Of course, there's Trump's avid appreciation of music — where instead of taking questions he stood around and swayed on stage for many minutes. He's a lot more low-energy now than in 2021 when he was still President and boogying to YMCA...
https://x.com/i/status/1845978409257607408
Remembering fun times at Studio 54...
https://x.com/i/status/1346300289704316930
Of course, he's been canceling campaign rallies because his staff says he's exhausted. Time for your nap DonOLD?
https://x.com/i/status/1847409782669422672
And let's not forget, during that classic speech on the important issue of a sinking ships (and the hazards of boat batteries), when he told us that he'll always take death by electrocution over death by sharks.
https://x.com/i/status/1814782222018183248
Trump has had long standing concerns about the threat of sharks, though.
https://x.com/i/status/1296543743764566017
And here...
https://x.com/i/status/1803177883369673026
And here...
https://x.com/i/status/1814782222018183248
And then there's his obsession with the late great Hannibal Lecter—mentioned in many of his speeches, but this is his best tribute to his old friend...
https://x.com/i/status/1814788324126502937
On top of that he's a crook and convicted felon awaiting sentencing. Yet somehow you think he's qualified to be President?
>Even if you have serious disagreements with Harris's policy positions, why would you want to install a person in the White House who is obviously suffering from severe cognitive decline?
There seems to be one right now and things are alright.
You've just implicitly admitted that your guy has dementia. Teleprompter or not, my guy can still speak in whole sentences.
https://x.com/i/status/1838590917545955790
And Kamala is sharp as a tack...
https://twitter.com/i/status/1847026957407449361
Well, I'm not american, so I don't have a guy here (though I admit my sympathies lie with the right). But the notion that Biden is currently less cognitively impaired that Trump seems ridiculous, given what we've seen of both of them so far.
And that's basically the point, you've had a guy who barely seems there siting as president for quite some time, and things have gone on as usual, so if Trump is also declining fast, well that even seems like a good thing, makes him easier to work around.
This is obviously not an argument most people like, because Democrats don't want to admit that they've been running Weekend at Bernie's for some time now (why is Biden unfit to run, but fit to be sitting president?), and Republicans have been claiming you should vote for Trump because he's not an empty suit like Biden and Kamala largely have been and will probably continue to be, so you can't just admit Trump just might become that soon enough.
You say it's obvious that Biden is cognitively impaired? Look at the videos I posted. The difference between Trump and Biden is obvious. Biden always has talked in the slow methodical manner that you see in the video, and it's because of a speech impediment.
And if you're not American, why do you think you have the knowledge to comment intelligently on American politics? BTW, what is your nationality?
>And if you're not American, why do you think you have the knowledge to comment intelligently on American politics?
I mean, why not? We have the internet, grandpa, pretty much the same information is available globally. It's not like we're discussing the intricacies of on the ground operations in key battleground states.
>BTW, what is your nationality?
Russ...err... Argentinian. Argentinian is what I meant to say!
In a nutshell: "I am voting for Trump because I am now quite conservative." I mean, the concerns he identifies, and the language he uses, pretty much define what it means to be on the right of the political spectrum. There is nothing wrong with being on the right, but there is nothing new or interesting about it.
Of course, it is also possible that this is all a rationalization. But that isn't very interesting, either.
Re (33), the usual argument is that electoral frauds that can’t be scaled up to large numbers of votes don’t matter, so the optimum level f security is pretty low.
> electoral frauds that can’t be scaled up to large numbers of votes don’t matter
What does scaling up mean in this context?
It's hard for one person to cast tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots, but it's trivially easy for tens of thousands of people to cast tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots (or steal other people's ballots out of the mail, or whatever).
It is virtually impossible for tens of thousands of people to engage in any coordinated action without blabbing that fact far and wide enough that everyone knows they are doing it.
And if it's not coordinated, then sure, maybe ten thousand people will each independently decide to e.g. send mail-in ballots for their parents or spouses who died just before election day, but half of them will be Democrats and half will be Republicans and it won't much matter.
I guess the question would be, what's the fewest number of conspirators needed to change a vote outcome by the necessary number, in this case low five digits?
If they have access to the voter roles to get names and access to the ballot creation process, the number might be very low. Single digit, possibly even a lone person, if they had all of the access. If the office in charge of elections were interested in doing this, it might even be trivial. Don't purge the roles of people who are dead or left the state, print their ballots as normal but don't mail them out, fill them out as you like, and then collect them as if they had been sent in from the actual voter. That would take a good bit of work for a small team to accomplish, but it's certainly not impossible and doesn't require a massive conspiracy that would get outed.
Other methods would be to go to nursing homes, mental hospitals, and other locations where it's normal for service workers to help people carry out their business. This would not be a single digit number, but dozens or low hundreds at most could pull this off. They ask someone sympathetic at the facility if they can talk to the residents about voting, nominally get some kind of approval on the voting choices, and "help" the resident fill out their ballot.
I'm not saying that any of these things necessarily happened or would be easy, but a motivated group could definitely pull it off.
If the vote leader had a commanding lead, like Biden in CA or NY, then that's probably fine. Given the very small sizes of the differences in some states that mattered in both 2016 and 2020, that's not particularly reassuring.
US history is full of voting situations where the final outcome was determined statewide by less than 1,000 votes (Florida in 2000 comes to mind). Organized fraud that remains undetected and moves low five-digit votes seems eminently possible. Especially if the means of detecting fraud is not implemented or followed. 2020 was a perfect storm in a lot of ways, because covid was either a good reason or a good cover for getting rid of a lot of oversight, depending on your perspective.
broadening the argument in 33
as far as I know, the Biden admin hasn't done anything to systematically strengthen institutions, including improve election transparency, efficiency, security, or legitimacy. That is a big disappointment.
Consistent with that, you might care about electronic voting machines, because “hacker changes a number inside a computer” includes big changes to the number.
Which is why we don't trust any one computer to tell us who won an election. Hacking a thousand airgapped voting machines scattered across a hundred precincts, without getting caught even once, is a much less practical plan. And hacking the one vote-counting machine that will give us the early returns on election night but be verified by a hand recount a few days later when the loser complains, doesn't accomplish much either.
Seeing otherwise intelligent people being dumb is making me depressed this election cycle.
Let's pick item 2, national finances, that is probably the closest to Ackman's field (though stock picking and activist investing actually has almost nothing to do with macro economics.) He seems unaware that Trump's economic policies led to a massive increase in the federal deficit, even though there was no underlying economic need for fiscal stimulus (pre-pandemic). A lot of other things can be argued with nuance, but this was pure fiscal irresponsibility.
Do you think there was a need for more pandemic stimulus in 2021?
Ya know, the round that caused the worst inflation since the 70s?
By the team who STILL HAD FUCKING PANDEMIC RESTRICTIONS IN PLACE IN 2021??!
I don't know with high confidence. To me, whether pandemic stimulus was optimal in 2021 is clearly in the realm of debatable. I'm a deficit hawk and have a bias against that stimulus.
Isn't it kind of strange that green subsidies and incentives have ended up unlocking (or may unlock) multiple potentially revolutionary technologies - (Solar, EVs, synthetic hydrocarbons)?
It's because they allow us to break out of a local optima - and I think this suggests there's lots more such techs out there. I call these techs 'Qattara Depression Technologies'
Here I attempt to explain this clunky new term: https://medium.com/@bobert93/qattara-depression-technologies-26723f5b362f
Have I missed the full write-up of the AI/Human Art Challenge? Or hasn't it appeared? That was a lot of fun to do.
Hasn't appeared give him time :)
I would be interested in reading Scott respond to this post Against Steelmanning by economist Noah Smith. He even mentions the Ivermectin discussion Scott had here as an example of why it's bad.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/against-steelmanning
I like a lot of Noah's posts, and it was dumb for the Washington Post to ask him to make the case for Trump's economic policy proposals (instead of someone that actually supports those proposals), but that article was very bad and quite a bummer to boot.
I responded here :https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/against-steelmanning/comment/73820118 - the gist of it is that nothing Noah complains about is a problem inherent to steelmanning. For example, he worries "Steelmanning can easily turn into strawmanning". The problem here is, of course, strawmanning. The same issue plagues each of his objections.
We need some guide on what is and what isn't steelmanning, because obviously different people understand it differently.
As I see it, the point of steelmanning is to *find the truth*, for my own benefit. If my opponent's opinions are 90% crap and 10% truth, I want to be able to extract that true part, without accepting the rest... as opposed to rejecting everything, or converting and accepting everything, which would be the default human reactions.
What steelmanning is not:
- being "fair" to my opponent (except insofar as being fair to my opponent helps me find the truth);
- pretending that my opponent's arguments are 100% true or sane;
- providing free advertising for my opponent.
What would it mean to "steelman a policy proposal"? If it means saying that 90% of its consequences are bad, but 10% are good... that still sounds like a good reason to reject the proposal. And maybe to design a completely different policy proposal that might achieve those good 10% in a different way. It does not mean talking nicely about the policy proposal as it is.
Any idea will have tradeoffs - good sides and bad sides. The catch is that those sides won't always be evident for free. There's no database where you can "select sides where idea=X sort by badness" and just go down the list; one typically has to exert effort hunting.
Because of that effort requirement, it's tempting for people to look at an idea in terms of its appeal to their intuition. If it's appealing, they exert effort to look for the good sides, and when it's time to exert effort looking for the bad, well, why would anyone go out of their way to talk themselves out of something they believe is good?
The idea of steelmanning a policy proposal is the same as that of steelmanning any idea - arguing for it as if you were its proponent, with the implication that you would have gone out of your way to find the good sides of that proposal (or the bad sides of the alternatives), as opposed to only exerting that effort in the direction you wanted a priori.
You're right that it doesn't include "talking nicely" about the proposal. Talking nicely has nothing to do with it, and anyone who thinks that that's what steelmanning is is missing the entire point, which is to find whatever evidence there is in its favor.
I read Noah's article as far as the paywall would let me, which included "it could lead to strawmanning" because you naturally won't be good at assessing an idea you're against, and "it could lead to sanewashing" - which only works if one starts from the assumption that one was right to begin with, aka begging the question.
I suppose Noah makes a good argument that he might be *personally* bad at steelmanning his opposition, given that he (IMO) wasn't even that effective at steelmanning his own side.
I'm not a paid subscriber, so I only have read the beginning sections. I thought the claim about steelmanning turning into strawmanning was a useful point of caution, but not convincing as a reason to not steelman.
I wonder if he includes this point:
In a political campaign, there are two questions before the voters: (a) what policies to pursue and (b) who is trusted to lead. In the US system for national elections, only (b) is directly asked. In this system, effectively and convincingly describing and arguing for a policy set is a signal of fitness to lead. By steelmanning a weak policy presentation, you are distorting this signal.
This might be deeper in his section on sanewashing. Linking my idea and sanewashing, I would say a difference between steelmanning and sanewashing is that steelmanning is good tool for refining ideas, while sanewashing is giving credit to a person that they don't deserve.
4 subtypes of autism linked to genetic variants -
https://www.thetransmitter.org/spectrum/untangling-biological-threads-from-autisms-phenotypic-patchwork-reveals-four-core-subtypes/
I finally get the deeply uncanny feeling of the Berenstain/Mandela Effect. Does anyone else have distinct memories of the word “anemone” actually being “anenome”? I would swear that it has been pronounced “an-enemy” my entire life until reading “anemone” very recently. I’m not willing to give much credence to a split-universe or matrix glitch thing, so why does this happen, neurologically? How hard is it for a phonemic neural bit to just get flipped?
Oddly enough, I remember having this exact same thought about the word "anemone" a few years back. It may be due to the movie Finding Nemo (note: highest-selling DVD of all time - that's how popular it was) and its sole responsibility for the word entering the lexicon for many young people in the early 2000s. Saying "anemone" was a meme back then due to this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZ1KDf3O-qU. Kids often pronounce weird words wrongly, and perhaps that is what happened here, the mispronunciation sticking through adulthood for many (how often do we talk about ocean flora?).
And this is how I'm spending my Wednesday night 😁
It is super easy for a phonemic neural bit to get flipped, especially if it's easier to say after flipping. "Children" used to be "childern".
Childern is easier to say when I'm in German speaking mode
I heard it pronounced as "an-emony", and "an-enemy".
If you shrunk the afro a bit, doesn't this guy look like his bust would fit in with those of the Roman Emperors?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/college-football/article-13985481/College-fan-eye-catching-appearance-goes-viral-Georgia-Texas.html
I’m a fan of the Accidental Renaissance subreddit, this guy has probably already been posted there, he’s got those Borgia Pope features
I don't know, but how horrible that we live in a world where some random young man, minding his own business at a football game, can suddenly have thousands of people picking apart his (ultimately unremarkable either way) looks.
Oh come on, you can't seriously say it's unremarkable. It looks like those photoshops of Charlie Kirk's face shrunken down, but actually real.
Please post a photo of yourself so the world can criticise your looks.
Yes, his facial proportions are somewhat out of the ordinary, but most people are out of the ordinary in some way. He is unremarkable in the sense that he is neither remarkably attractive nor remarkably ugly, he won't win a beauty contest but he also isn't doomed to a life of inceldom. He reminds me of any number of perfectly ordinary young men that I have known, except most of them never randomly had thousands of internet strangers bullying them for their flaws.
...Why the hell would I? I'm not stupid.
People aren't roasting him because he's ugly, they're roasting him because his face is extremely out of the ordinary. Just being ugly isn't even worthy of scorn or recognition. When people see something out of the ordinary, they are going to comment on it. That's just how the brain works, it responds heavily to novel stimuli.
Most of the time when you see someone with unusual facial features, though, you're too polite to mention it. I don't walk down the street saying "OH GODDAMN THAT WOMAN HAS AN UNUSUALLY POINTY CHIN LOOK AT HER".
For some reason, though, social media has broken that.
I want to highlight this recent proposal for Density Zones as a smart refinement to YIMBY tactics: https://agglomerations.substack.com/p/how-the-next-president-can-solve
The basic idea is that it may not be worth it try to get rid of building restraints across an entire city. For one thing, some powerful residents may put up a very strong fight against it in certain neighborhoods. For another, you might succeed in knocking down some regulations only to be stymied by others.
It's more efficient and effective to choose your battles and work with local officials to determine which areas of the city are most conducive to ending all building restrictions and labeling them Density Zones. This approach has been referred to as "going vertical instead of horizontal".
It occurs to me that the result here is still "zoning", but it's a much smarter approach to zoning. In many cities and neighborhoods, a vocal minority is enough to veto a building project. But if you provide that neighborhood financial support (federal subsidies) to allow more building, it can be easy to find more local supporters than detractors.
The financial support of the federal government gives localities capital that can be used to build infrastructure to support the resulting increase in population density.
The question is: why? Why ruin perfectly nice places that people have paid their entire life's savings to buy into, for the benefit of people who could just go live somewhere else?
They've just announced plans to do this kind of thing in my city, and I'm pretty angry/depressed about the whole thing https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/fifty-new-areas-getting-fast-tracked-high-rise-apartments-here-s-where-20241019-p5kjmb.html ... charming historic walkable suburban shopping strips are going to be bulldozed and replaced by canyons of brand new steel-and-glass apartment buildings. And for what? So that property developers can get rich, so that the city can add another four million people that it doesn't need, so that the economy can continue to be propped up by an immigration ponzi scheme. They want to take a city of four million and turn it into a city of nine million by 2050. And nobody ever says what's going to happen after 2050, it's not like the politicians of 2050 are going to be any more restrained than those of 2024.
Tbf if Melvin doesn't have kids and he's decided to never move again, he's voting in his personal economic interest. I just assume most people factor in longer term interests (eg kids/grand kids, or just relative health of the housing market)
> so that the city can add another four million people that it doesn't need
By that metric, your city already does not need the first 4M it has got. It would be perfectly happy as a sleepy farming village with 200 people. Yet you did not offer that village the courtesy if leaving it in peace, so why should the next 4M leave you in peace in turn?
"So that property developers can get rich, so that the city can add another four million people that it doesn't need"
The same people who talk like that complain about how the entitled and lazy millennial generation won't move out of Daddy's house.
The reason for why in the USA is the following (from the linked post):
"U.S. housing costs are out of control. The median home for sale was rarely more than four times the median household income throughout the 1980s and 1990s. But by 2022, it had risen to nearly six times. Renters have not fared better. In 1980, around one third of renters were cost burdened, meaning they spent 30 percent or more of their income on housing. Fully half of renters are cost burdened today.
The main reason housing is too expensive is that we don’t build nearly enough of it. The most recent estimates from Freddie Mac place the national shortfall at a staggering 3.8 million housing units. This gaping hole in the country’s housing supply negatively impacts nearly every aspect of American life, reducing economic growth and hindering workers and families from achieving the lives they desire."
But the demand for that housing is coming in part from the large influx of new people demanding it.