As far as the election. I think Trump has taken over the working class, which use to belong to the Dems.
On a more important topic (to me), my daughter (who is gay and lives in the city with many gay and trans friends.) Is totally freaked out about Trump, we're hanging out next Monday. (Veterans day no less.) Starting with breakfast, (I'm thinking apple pancakes (w/ butter and maple syrup) and potato pancakes, with sour cream and apple sauce?) And I need to talk her off the ledge, she's talking about a lot of crazy ideas. ie, getting sterilized because she's afraid abortion will become illegal nation-wise. I'm here asking for any ideas I can throw at her. (I'm going to start with why I almost voted for Trump, till I talked with her before the election and she had a cow. ) (Sorry these ideas are really scrambled, I mostly suck at communication.)
I don't think the ideas you've gotten so far are good. Regarding her fear she will get pregnant and be unable to get an abortion, I recommend that you say that if that happens, you will make sure she is able to get one, even if you have to get her plane tickets to Mexico or Europe. I understand that what she is worried about is *extremely* unlikely, but if you try to convince her of that you'll be back to arguing about what Trump is like and what he will do and you have already learned that leads nowhere with her right now. So just be loving and say you will help her if it comes to that, they way you would help her if, say, she got badly injured and could not work for 6 mos. and needed a place to stay. As time passes the people like her who expect their world is going to get turned upside down instantly are going to see that day to day life is pretty much the same as ever, and that Trump cannot just snap his fingers and decree radical changes in laws. And everybody will calm down. So in a few months you might be able to have a conversation with her about Trump and what to worry about and what not to. But right now you can't, so just tell her if the worst happens you'll be there for her. And even if she tries to turn it into a conversation about whether Trump is going to force all pregnant women to keep their babies, be evasive. If she says, "but do you really think I'm just being silly and Trump would never do that?" say something like, "I'm definitely less worried than you are, but if it should happen I will make sure you are able to get an abortion."
I second this excellent advice, but I think you need to do a little bit of work to fully "sell" it to her.
So make a plan with specific, executable steps, as if you actually are taking this seriously:
1. Tell her to start the passport process *now,* so that if she needs to leave the country there won't be any delay.
2. Collaborate on a system to keep her hypothetical pregnancy top secret. She can't be prosecuted for an abortion no one but the two of you know she's had. So absolutely no explicit discussion about a pregnancy on the phone or via text, only in person (and if you can't be in person, invent a code for "I'm pregnant" right now). No menstrual cycle tracking apps and you'll buy any pregnancy tests with cash at the Dollar Tree while wearing a baseball cap so it can't be tracked back to her, etc.
3. Research together exactly what it takes for an American to get an abortion in Canada, Mexico, Thailand, etc. What are the laws, wait times, etc? Which specific facilities? How much will it cost? You can go as far down that rabbit hole as you like.
4. Make sure she has Plan B on standby at home, with a plan to monitor the expiration date and replace it as necessary.
5. Whatever else.
Is this all a little silly? Almost certainly. But the goal here is to give her actionable steps to gain a sense of control over her fear. She's in an emotional state where she may want want to reject your offer of support if it's too vague/difficult-sounding, or if she believes you're only offering because you're dismissive of her fear. If you approach with a tone of, "Meh, not gonna happen, but I'll pay for you to go to Mexico if it gets to that point" it is not going to be nearly as comforting as, "Here's the address of the clinic we'll visit during our 'vacation' in Mexico, here's the budget, and here's the money to pay for it in my savings."
I know someone else who is also afraid of getting stuck with an unwanted baby inside. She is asexual, not gay, and her fear is that she will be raped and get pregnant from the rape. I understand of course that 3 very unlikely things have to happen for her to end up forced to bear a rape baby to tern: rape, get pregnant from the rape, & the US at the time has strict laws against abortion in all circumstances. She is plenty smart enough to understand this -- she's getting a PhD in one of the hard sciences at a famous university. But she is too scared to think straight.
You actually think this is a helpful suggestion? You think this young woman does not know the copper IUD exists? Or that she knows it exists but that it has not occurred to her that she, too, can be protected by one against an unwanted pregnancy?
> You think this young woman does not know the copper IUD exists? Or that she knows it exists but that it has not occurred to her that she, too, can be protected by one against an unwanted pregnancy?
This woman is also so freaked out about current events that she's considering getting sterilized, just in case she might get pregnant in the future (as a gay woman) and there's no way for her to get an abortion anywhere. So no, maybe we shouldn't model her as a perfectly rational actor who computes all possible options from the data available to her.
Besides, humans are humans, and sometimes we need to hear it from someone we trust, to know that it's okay.
If she's amenable to rational arguments, you can point out that the fears are misplaced. "If it bleeds, it leads" so media are incentivized to catastrophize. But when we look at the predictions of bettors whose only incentive is to make money, by being correct, rather than to scare people, they assign only a 5% chance to Trump signing a national abortion restriction (https://polymarket.com/event/trump-signs-national-abortion-ban-in-first-100-days?tid=1731195439244) in his first 100 days.
And that describes *any* sort of restriction on when, where, or under what conditions abortions can be performed. That would include restrictions which are still far more lax than the laws currently in place in many states (including New York) such that in practice, even under in this very likely event, abortion access would likely be unaffected or at worst, would become less available in some states, while remaining equally available in other states.
The same goes for other concerns she may be freaked out about. In general, it's important for her to remember that sources of her information generally don't pay a price for promoting unwarranted fear, and generally profit from it, while only markets are actually incentivized to tell the truth. So as a rule, unless she gets her news from betting markets, she's probably being systematically misled.
As far as particular fears that she has, you can look to see if betting markets address them. For what it's worth, the US stock market rallied following Trumps election. That implies that they think that the US economy as a whole will do quite well under Trump. That suggests a generally low probability of many possible types of catastrophes that people might occurring under Trump.
E.g. I've seen many people worrying Trump would eliminate the Department of Education. Markets assign just an 11% of him doing that in his first 100 days: https://polymarket.com/event/trump-ends-department-of-education-in-first-100-days. If she's still scared, you can look into the particulars of why that wouldn't actually be such a big deal.
You'd know better than anyone how wise it would be to mention that you considered voting for Trump to her, but to me, that seems pretty risky. To many people (who are presumably disproportionately demographically similar to your daughter) voting for Trump is evil. She may, then, view your voting comment as essentially admitting that you considered being evil, but chose not to, which will likely not endear you to her, unless she assumed you voted for him, anyway.
> "You'd know better than anyone how wise it would be to mention that you considered voting for Trump to her, but to me, that seems pretty risky."
Agreed, absolutely do not tell her you were ever even slightly tempted to vote for Trump. In the state she's currently in, all of her fear and rage could instantly transfer to you, and she might lash out at you to achieve a sense of power over her "enemy."
I was just dumped by what I thought was politically moderate dear friend of 8 years via a single, vicious text message after I told him I pointlessly protest-voted for a third-party in my West Coast state. I never saw it coming; I was certain that we loved one another, that we were ride or die friends for life. Do not underestimate your daughter's fragility.
(1) A national ban on abortion seems extremely unlikely. A lot of politicians know they can't vote for such a law and expect to keep their jobs. This is different from appointing Supreme Court justices to uphold state-level abortion bans, since voters won't hold them directly responsible for the decisions of those justices.
(2) Even if she thinks there is a significant chance of such a law passing, it seems safe to postpone getting sterilized until after the abortion ban actually passes into law. It will take a while between the law being proposed as a bill and the legislation taking effect, so there's no need to rush. This is particularly true for a gay woman, which is presumably a fairly low risk demographic for needing to terminate a pregnancy on short notice.
(3) If she's still coming up with hypothetical situations in which she might want or need sterilization or abortion and be unable to obtain one, ask if she would be willing to set up a dedicated emergency bank account containing sufficient money to have these procedures performed, plus enough to cover the airfare to have them done in another country. (The total will probably come out as less than the cost of getting sterilized in the US.)
(4) If none of this works, maybe she wants to get sterilized anyway and is just using Trump as a convenient "excuse." In that case, you can still offer all the reasons why you think it's a bad idea, but in the end you just have to accept that it's ultimately her own decision what to do with her body.
Yes to all of this. I don't think sterilization is something that is happening right away. My guess is that sterilization is asserting her power in some sphere where she feels somewhat powerless. So maybe we can come up other ways to assert herself. IDK we'll talk, thanks for your response.
I would highly suggest just avoiding the topic. If you just want to stop her from getting sterilized, maybe you can talk her into some less permanent solutions... But there's just no need to further sour relations with her. Don't take what you have for granted.
Ah no a very high amount of love between me and my daughter. My idea is that we're all living in these different bubbles. (Like and X-dimensional venn diagram of influence/ ideas.) This is totally what we'll be talking about... among all sorts of other things.
I totally get a ban on outright verbal abuse and ad hominem. But honestly, I'm a bit put off by the recent turn towards punishing smugness and condescension in space like these. Is that really what everybody wants? Are we that sensitive? That level of moderation feels a bit infantilizing from my perspective.
The comments I saw that got banned were pretty vile. One was from someone who thinks trans people rule the internet, and have almost as much power as the damn Jews. Told a joke about how male to female trans women should get high quality pussies with lots of secretions, so much that when they leave the Christmas dinner table they'll leave a trail of slime. Another one was a response to someone saying they're sad about the election outcome, something like "good, I'm delighted that you are." And neither of these posts had any content beyond what I quoted.
What Scott has actually said about rudeness, is that you only get to fail to meet one of the 3 standards: kind, true and advances the discussion. You can drop kind, but then you better be right and advance the discussion. I was quite rude to both of those posters, but my rudeness was embedded in posts while I explained my objections to what they'd said. So I'd say my comments were rude and right and advanced the discussion. And when the angel of death passed over the comments, I was not one of the ones banned.
There is no "we" here: This is Scott's walled garden and he has aesthetic preferences about how people should conduct themselves, even if we'd prefer more "spirited" disagreement, it's reasonable to respect the host's wishes.
There are other SSC offshoots that are more lenient on disagreeableness.
I'm aware of this. I was actually hoping Scott would read my comment and perhaps it would have an impact. I know that is unlikely, but not impossible. Scott is highly unpredictable (which is a good thing).
If you accept the premise that a rationalist forum is dedicated primarily to Getting the Right Answer, then smug or condescending arguments get in the way more often than not, even when the reader isn't getting their feelings hurt. Such arguments sound to a rational reader like "I don't have enough evidence to support my view, so I'm going to resort to rhetoric to manipulate your emotions into believing me anyway" and now the rational reader has to exert effort to peel away all the rhetoric and get at the actual evidence.
So why waste everyone's time? Just lay out the evidence.
Hey, all of you guys have lost track of Scott's guideline. It's not that you can't be rude. It's that you have to hit 2 out of these 3: kind, true, and advances the discussion. If you make good points that advance the discussion, you can be rude. If you say stuff that's obviously not true, and you are polite and trying to advance the discussion, you're OK. If you are kind and making a valid point, but it's off the subject and does not advance the discussion, you're OK. What gets people banned for a while is being rude and wrong, wrong and off-topic, or rude and off-topic. Or, of course, rude, wrong and off-topic.
The catch there is telling the difference. For that, we need a process for figuring it out, which is what rationalism is nominally all about. Which brings us back to smug or condescending entries degrading that process more than honestly submitted wrong answers.
"If you accept the premise that a rationalist forum is dedicated primarily to Getting the Right Answer."
Is this really what rationalists believe? I'm not going to pretend I've never heard this sentiment. But I guess I just wanted to think the best of rationalism and so I assume this was a minority sentiment.
And by "think the best," I meant I wanted to think the best of their intellectual abilities. I can't imagine a more uncynical attitude, and in my view, uncynical is borderline delusional. And here we run into another situation where I am unduly restricted by the civility requirement. "Delusional" is a harsh word, but as much as I struggled to, I just couldn't think of a word that worked better for this. Some things really are that stark, that black and white. Thanks to the civility rule, I have to take this time to explain and justify my use of that word. And haven't I just wasted everyone's time doing so?
Anyway, in my mind, the primary purpose of a comment section is to have a good time. Online commenting is a kind of hobby or recreation. I don't have any illusions about us solving the world's problems. And I think that we are self-important and self-regarding if we do imagine we are going to have an approachable positive impact on the world by commenting online. The Internet is not real life.
Lots of people with lesser intellectual abilities have plenty of fun on an online forum. The ones I'm thinking of, have it by posting "sick burns" on their outgroup, and are rated by their low-effort peers around an Algonquin Folding Table.
The catch is that that table is often a very public forum like Reddit, meaning their outgroup has to put up with it. This is especially annoying when that forum is originally advertised as a place to get good information, and the people who have a good time by getting good information (aka Getting the Right Answer), can't.
So that crowd looks around for such a forum, specifically filtering out people from the former crowd. They turn out to be hard to make, and easy to infect with the former crowd unless actively moderated. I think Scott wants ACX to be that type of forum.
Above, you argued that you want to think the best of rationalism, declared that inclination to be uncynical, and delusional. That confuses me; people don't usually want to be delusional. So you arguably did waste people's time, but only in the sense that you didn't succeed in conveying your idea. But that's not necessarily bad; some ideas are difficult to comprehend, and may require some extra time.
Maybe rational readers are selling themselves short by cutting these voices out. Since the time of Jonathan Swift, serious thinkers have been using acerbic wit and cutting language to express important ideas. And are you sure it's all about keeping evidentiary arguments in primacy? And it's not about "I don't want someone to hurt my feelings?"
Acerbic wit seems quite different to smugness and condescension. Swift might have been acerbic but I don't think critics of the time were complaining about the condescending tone. Wit requires effort (perhaps mostly in developing it, not necessarily in its deployment) while smugness is something I can get from a small language model or a person not paying much attention or putting much effort into editing, and therefore comes across as disrespectful of the reader's time. ACX is not a neighborhood barbecue, but more like a stadium concert, so I hold those walking up to the microphone to a higher standard than when Jim from next door spouts a random opinion after a couple of beers.
This is an anonymous comment section for a blog. I can't think of a more perfect analog for a late night bull session at your local bar. The only difference is that vocabulary and average formal education level is higher. Street smarts and emotional intelligence and common sense are not higher.
And thanks to the strict civility norm, I have to worry about being reported and banned for this comment. Even though there really is no other way that I could express this idea, and even though this idea deserves to be expressed. My free speech has been thoroughly chilled.
Chance, let me give you an analogy. Suppose your favorite indie band or TV show or whatever announced they were going corporate: filing off all the rough edges for mass market appeal. Instead of trying to be unique, they'll try to be like everyone else. Would you support the change?
Now replace "band" with "discussion space". There are lots of places that work like bull sessions at your local bar; all the bars out there, for a start, but also the comments at Reddit, Facebook, news websites, most blogs, et cetera. Not many get to be anything else at all, and those that are, generally don't stay that way for long -- it is much harder to *add* civility than remove it, so the transformation is irreversible once it starts. This place has avoided that fate through aggressive moderation; it has chosen to be something, and *wants* to be it.
Your stance seems to boil down to, "But this place is so unlike all the other places out there!" Yeah, and that's a *good* thing. We hang out here precisely because there’s nowhere else like it.
When you say, "Nowhere else is about convincing people by laying out a civil argument! Everywhere else is about having a good time!", I think, "And who are *you* to say we're not having a good time, in our own way? Who are *you* to say we should stop having fun our way?"
When you say, "You guys are so uncynical here, you think you can actually persuade anyone here!?", my response is "Yes. This is a place by autistic people, *for* autistic people. We do in fact persuade each other around here, because we don't work like normal people.
And if you intrude, claiming we're weird and should act more like everyone else... then kindly, piss off. You already have a thousand places to go be yourself, while we have only here. And if you want to destroy our one sole hang-out spot, so you can have a thousandth-and-oneth place for people like yourself... then, piss off. Go to a bar or something. Be happier with your own people. But don't pretend for a moment you speak for us, invader. If we wanted your 'bull sessions at the local bar', we would have already set that up."
TL;DR: Don't storm into an indie band and announce you're taking it corporate, without expecting pushback. We don't *want* your mass market appeal. And if we did, we wouldn't need your "help".
I'm autistic myself and I am aware of this as a biopsychosocial health problem. I am now facing an issue in one of my organs that should have been addressed long ago, but wasn't, partly due to my high pain tolerance. Which makes me partly incapable of recognizing the alerts my body sends out.
This health problem (autism) is not something to celebrate. It is not something to romanticize. While there are silver linings, this is still a health problem and it is a cross to bear. I will not apologize for trying to overcome my symptoms instead of wallowing in them. If I have any loyalty or solidarity with my fellow autistics, I will tell them the straight truth instead of indulging their fantasies of superiority.
We must learn humility, cynicism and world-weariness, or we will be victimized over and over and over. Or even worse, we will end up victimizing others without even realizing what we're doing.
PS. I never argued “this should be more like a bull session at the local bar.” I said THIS IS a bull session at the local bar. Very different arguments.
There is a difference between (a) writing an essay intended for a broad audience and (b) a comment intended to be part of an exchange of views. The greater the emotional component, the more suitable for (a) rather than (b).
When I see someone posting with a high degree of smugness, I assume they are operating in bad faith and are not seriously open to counterargument. It's fine to feel that sense of certainty, but I would like to participate in spaces where both sides bring an open mind. There are a million places on social media to be smug and get likes. There are precious few where actual dialogue can happen.
Another way I'd put it is that being both smug/condescending AND persuasive at the same time is hard. It often takes a Jonathan Swift to do it. Many people see the smug stuff, don't recognize the persuasive stuff, and cargo cult their way to a bad attempt that ends up being *anti*-persuasive. Get enough of those together and you get (waves hand in direction of most of the internet). Indeed, a lot of people appear to have dispensed with the persuasion altogether and gone full conflict theory, treating forums as nothing more than a place to feel good for a moment by ranting and pandering to the choir. It's a safe bet they're not persuasive.
Rationalism is IMO a push against that.
Also, how many comments were banned for being smug/condescending AND ALSO persuasive to someone outside the choir?
Nobody is persuading anybody in an online comments section, or at least not about anything important. People choose to be persuaded more than they are persuaded by others, if you know what I mean.
I don't know if you speak for rationalists here, but if you do, I'm slightly shocked. I did not realize commenters here took these discussions that seriously. I view online commenting as a pastime or recreation. I never imagined the stakes were any higher than that.
As I implied above, there are plenty of online forums out there for people who don't wish to take commenting seriously.
You implied you also wanted a forum full of commenters with high intellectual capability. Well, I don't speak for all of them, but I do find most such people only go to forums where their intellect is matched - which excludes forums where people just go to have a good time in the casual sense. High-intellect comments require high effort, even from high-intellect people.
Someone who expects to just hop on such a forum and comment in ways that imply stuff like "normies; amirite??" will quickly find the forum either aggressively moderated, or empty.
Who got banned for smugness and condescension? A lot of it seems to be getting by the smugness and condescension filter.
But, AFAICS, most of the discussion on these open threads does *not* involve evidence-based arguments. A lot of it is old-school rationalist, though — i.e. people coming to conclusions via logic — albeit ones based on faulty presumptions.
So, where's your evidence that people are getting banned for smugness and condescension? ;-)
But seriously, most of the bans seem to have been for people getting nasty. Anecdata: I was banned (temporarily) a while back for viscous sarcasm.
Sorry to be a complainer. But is anyone else frustrated by how consistently conventional and middle of the road commenters are when it comes to foreign policy? I see very little pushback on mainstream narratives. Maybe that's a simple consequence of STEM people having More Interesting Things to think about, and not having the time or patience for foreign affairs?
I'm a STEM nerd with plenty of time and patience to think about foreign affairs, and I don't think I'm alone in that. I even used to have a side gig where I dealt with one aspect of foreign policy semi-professionally.
I haven't noticed myself holding any particularly contrarian views on the major foreign policy issues of recent discourse, but that's because I *have* thought about them and have concluded that this time the "mainstream narrative" got it right. That happens from time to time.
But maybe you're thinking of different foreign policy issues than I am. So it would probably help for you to be specific about what sort of discussion you're looking for,
"The cops won't arrest shoplifters because they won't be prosecuted and they feel that it is a waste of their time." If this is true, and that is a big if, this seems like a severe miscalculation on the cops' part. Don't they realize that getting arrested and spending a few hours in booking is a punishment in and of itself? How could they not realize that this alone will have something of a deterrent effect?
I think the person making the decision is not the ordinary beat cop, but the leadership, maybe even the chief of police.
In my very Blue town, I’ve seen police responses to public disturbances vary widely over time, from aggressive police presence to turning a blind eye. It seems political to me, though I can’t really parse it.
It may have to do with election cycles. In my city, homeless camps pop up in the months prior to the mayoral election, and they are cleared out immediately after the election.
Getting arrested and spending a few hours in booking is a major disheartening and punitive event for a respectable middle-class citizen who is concerned that this might go on his Permanent Record, or that his friends and family might find out. But to the sort of people who are actually out doing the shoplifting, and once it becomes clear that the policy is catch-and-release, it's just a minor annoyance.
I'm a lifelong poor person (AMA) who used to hang with a very rough crowd, and in my anecdotal experience, you're just flat wrong. Being arrested is deeply unpleasant for each and every human being, regardless of their socioeconomic background or criminal background. It is far more than a “minor annoyance.”
Even if it WAS just a “minor annoyance,” this still doesn't explain the (alleged) behavior of the police. Surely a minor annoyance is a better deterrent than no deterrent. No, at this point I simply can't believe that police officers are operating on this logic. If they are refusing to arrest shoplifters, it is likely because said police do not take shoplifting seriously THEMSELVES.
...Why do you keep talking about deterrence, as if it's something anyone cares about? The point is to hurt these lowlives, and the current sentences aren't hurting them enough.
That is what justice is. The more the good are rewarded, and the more the wicked are punished, the more justice there is.
People do in fact care about deterrence and about reducing crime. That's the primary purpose of having police and courts in the first place. (Punishment for its own sake is a distant secondary goal). Yours is a minority view, and not one I feel a need to seriously engage with.
...I didn't say that because it was my own view, I said it because that's what justice is at its core, as far as humanity is concerned. Notice how we call the system surrounding law enforcement the "justice system." It's not enough to simply minimize incidences of crime. The perpetrators must pay what they owe in suffering. That is the only way the victims and the public will be satisfied. Why do you think capital punishment continues to be legal in so many states, despite the fact that it does nothing to reduce crime or reduce costs?
And who would be more zealous in that belief than those who willingly join law enforcement? They didn't sign up for this job just to be another cog in the machine. They signed up because our society is filled with scum that need to be punished. They want control over society, their own lives, and the lives of others. What do you think happens when you rob them of that control? You erase the sole benefit of being in this line of work. Why would they continue to actually do their job, especially when they keep getting paid anyways? The hounds will not work unless they are fed.
Recently, I ran into a custom machine translation task I wanted to use AI for: seventeenth century French to modern French. (French to English, etc.is well-served by existing machine translation products).
Here's an example:
Princesse héréditaire a bien jmpatience de sauoir si
Königsmarck est arivé hereusement il sest passé bien des
choses que Princesse héréditaire écrit sur le feuillet qui
est tout blanc ie ne peus me consoler d'avoir si tost perdu
Königsmarck labsence en paroist mille fois plus cruelle
ie suis abatue a ne pouuoir me soutenir l'exes des plaisirs
et la douleur de ne plus uoir ce que j'aime me mette en
cét estat quil est cruel de se séparer de uous uous estes le
plus aimable de tous les homme plus on uous uoit plus
on uous descouure de charme que ie suis heureuse d'estre
aimée de vous et que ie connois bien tout mon bonheur
tout ma félicité
This is from a letter to the Comte Königsmarck.
If you know French at all, you'll realise this predates the spelling reforms of the mid eighteenth century: i/j used differently; u/v used differently; y with diaresis where we'd use an i; estre for être, etc. And on top of being from the late seventeenth century, the author can't spell. It's usually obvious how you would modernise it, but this just cries out for "come on AI, show me what this would look like in modern French so I don't have to struggle readfing it.
I am told several native speakers of French found this particular writers style to be really funny; personally, I find it just annoying to read...
Back in the dark ages (2020), I tried to create a modern day English to 1600s English "translator." I thought i would just scrape Shakespeare and the King James Bible and it would be simple. Needless to say, I spent weeks trying to get a parallel corpus and had only the final 2 days of class to train the model. "Could you email me that file" -> "Thy thy thy thy thy ..." Glad these guys are doing it much better!
I was surprised to learn that Native Americans voted overwhelmingly for Trump. Did a little research, found an answer that gave me a surprising amount of hope.
What kind of hope does this give you, aside from the prospect that Gorsuch will continue to rule in favor of tribes in cases that come across his desk?
It was great news. It was terrible news. We had elected a savior who would lead us to paradise; we had elected a Hitler who would bring us hell on earth. It would be a new golden age; it would be the last election, and even now the knives were being sharpened to impale the innocent. The people had shown their wisdom and their will to see through the tricks of liars; the people had shown their gullibility and would Miss Him Yet. We had skated past a hole in the ice; we were even now sinking beyond resuscitation, the light of democracy a fading crack of sun unreachably above. We had grasped at a new vitality and verve to tackle the untackleable; we had fouled beyond foul, scored an own goal, and would be traded if the coach knew what was good for the game.
Given that I was WAY off base on how the election would go, do any Trump whisperers on here want to help me out with a prediction?
How likely is the 20% across the board tariff to happen?
I have a couple major projects I'm working on; I'd rather wait to buy materials but if this actually goes through I need a bunch of sheet goods, wire, firebrick, bar etc; some of which I need in order direct from alibaba quantities.
If tariffs actually hit these will all go way up, like how plywood went up 200% the first time and never came back down to earth.
Do I sacrifice my back room to construction/build a lean-to , or is it all the tariff talk hot air?
Tariffs MUST be selective, as all tariffs are protective tariffs, to protect local industries and production. So a blanket tax on imports doesn't make sense unless one wants to alienate one's country from the world. Since it doesn't make sense, I hope Trump is just advancing the idea to make people cheer, and won't implement it.
It may make sense to impose tariffs on things like steel, even if other countries can produce the same or better quality cheaper, because we must not rely exclusively on other countries for something as fundamental as steel. Optional things, like specific foods, make poor targets for tariffs, because people don't NEED them; if bananas were no longer available, people would eat local fruits.
> Tariffs MUST be selective, as all tariffs are protective tariffs
Why? Why can't tariffs just be for revenue? Or worst case, national security? If there's any use of tariffs that are bad, it's using them for protectionism!
I'm generally opposed to tariffs for protectionism. But if you said 20% tariff across the board, up to but not exceeding the tariff that the country imposes on our product, and as a replacement for the income tax, then 100% sign me up.
Also I'm warming up to the idea of using tariffs not to protect jobs, but for fairness in laws that internalize externalities. For example, adverting a situation where e.g. meat prices go up because we prohibit antibiotics in cattle, so we just import meat from countries without such a law. That is, not necessarily to protect jobs, but to protect our laws.
So is it really the case that tariffs must be selective?
In what case is a tariff NOT a protective tariff? The only case I can see is if your country doesn't produce any of the product for which the tariff applies, which makes it effectively a tax on your own citizens.
If you impose, say, a 10% tariff on widgets, then widgets get more expensive to buy for the consumer. That means higher expenses, which is less income for businesses that must pay the tariff. Or it is a tax on your own citizens, controlling the price making it higher (if your country imports all of its widgets) or it protects domestic widget pricing, making them relatively cheaper and thus making foreign widget providers sell fewer of them.
If your country has a 50% tariff, but imports all of its widgets, then domestic widget production ought to be significantly profitable to start with, and could become competitive even when the tariff goes away.
So if you try to replace the income tax with tariffs, domestic producers will take more of the market, and your income will be less than projected.
The US imported about $3.8 trillion in 2023. It took in about $2.2 trillion in revenue, of which almost all came from individual and corporate income taxes, and payroll taxes. A 20% tariff, even if nothing changed, wouldn't cover the lost income.
Finally, I don't understand your example on meat prices going up. If we prohibit antibiotics in cattle, that should be for a policy reason because we have discovered the antibiotics are bad, and getting around it by importing antibiotic meat products from countries that allow it would then be poisoning your people. Either imports need to comply with your laws, or your country should not import from them. Though we seem to make an exception for labor, in that we allow products to be imported which have components of slave labor...
> In what case is a tariff NOT a protective tariff?
I gave you several examples of tariffs besides protective tariffs. You can have a tariff for raising revenue. You can have a tariff for fairness. Just because some job sector sees increased employment doesn't mean that's the purpose of the tariff. That doesn't even mean it's the best way to describe it. You could plausibly have a tariff that is purely punitive due to the amount of money it's removing from the economy.
But also I object to your framing. If all tariffs are protective, then the term "protective tariff" is redundant. If that's really what you think then we're obviously talking past each other.
> If you impose, say, a 10% tariff on widgets, then widgets get more expensive to buy for the consumer. That means higher expenses,
By itself yes, tariffs reduce consumption (shifts the supply curve to the left), but I was proposing a tariff that entirely replaces the income tax. Individual taxes may shape the economy,and change the makeup of who pays the taxes, but at the end of the day they don't actually increase or decrease the total amount taxed. Government spending determines total taxation, by which I mean all the ways that government can reduce the share of goods and services otherwise available for purchase: by direct taxation, debt (which comes out of the private sector and increases interest rates), or by inflation (an increase in prices from the time you get paid to the time you purchase a product).
> importing antibiotic meat products from countries that allow it would then be poisoning your people
No, by the time the meat is sold the antibiotic meat is identical to domestic meat. The purpose of banning antibiotics is to avoid forming drug-resistant bacteria, which makes this a classic collective action problem, it only works if everyone observes it. Another example is greenhouse gases. We can ban CO2 all we want, but that's not going to make any measurable difference compared to China.
> Though we seem to make an exception for labor, in that we allow products to be imported which have components of slave labor...
I'm much less concerned about this. Most of what we call "sweatshops" are actually highly sought after jobs in many countries. In many places the only alternative is grueling, outdoor manual labor, or sex work. Sweatshops are actually a great example of comparative advantage in labor markets that we can benefit from.
A tariff isn't protective by definition. It's protective in function. You may implement a tariff for any of the reasons you say, but it will end up having a protective component unless your country doesn't produce that good at all.
"I was proposing a tariff that entirely replaces the income tax."
Unless you want to impose a tariff of upwards of 50% across the board, the income tax won't be replaced by it. And the tariff would only start at the replacement amount, as it would have to increase to account for decreasing imports due to higher prices.
Ok fine, it's fair to say "almost all tariffs are protective of some industry" but I don't think that's the same thing as saying "a protective tariff".
I still disagree with your framing "protective in function" because this depends on the industry and nature of the tariff. The issue with tariffs is not "do we want protection or not" but "what is it protecting and who is it harming". It's not always clear who it's helping, but an arbitrary tariff is almost always harmful to an arbitrary person, even if only a tiny amount.
> Unless you want to impose a tariff of upwards of 50% across the board, the income tax won't be replaced by it.
Sure, there's a whole lot more that goes into this, obviously.
Looks like the last tariff increase was proposed in May and went into effect in September, so you should have four months' warning if they move forward on it in January.
Wood is heavy and takes up a lot of space, so a lot of the price is in transport and thus most production is semi-local. Prices are also very correlated with fuel prices, which are generally lower during R administrations and most is produced in the US now anyway. Tariffs with Canada would hurt, but I think that less likely than most other countries.
Trump likes to propose stuff like this as a negotiating tactic, so he can threaten foreign countries to get better trade deals. But Trump is a high variance kind of guy, who knows if he'll go through with the tariffs or not.
There will be a lot of analyses and post-mortems in the coming weeks (now there's an overused sentence...) but forget policies and issues and candidates and demographic coalitions for a moment. I'd like to suggest that everyone should update on the following structural facts:
1. Voters are actually quite empirically-minded. They will primarily consider what has actually happened, under each administration, not what is being promised or theorised to happen. While this obviously isn't always rational, it's something that is both often rational and also a fact about the way people think. No amount of talk was ever going to change the fact that nothing catastrophic happened during Trump's first term*, and that both economic and safety conditions clearly worsened under Biden-Harris (not to mention the state of the world). You can't gaslight people away from their own perceptions. When are elites going to learn this?
2. Whining about "bothsidesism" doesn't, fucking, work, unless the thing you're accusing the other side of is actually entirely absent on your side. If your candidate has never lied, then "both sides lie" can be dismissed; if your candidate has also lied, but just not *quite* as much, it can't. It's amazing how much the Democrats have relied on "oh sure the thing we're condemning the Rs for we've also done, but ackshually it was not *exactly* the same, therefore we're fine." Trying to overturn the 2016 election with a faithless EC wasn't exactly the same as trying to overturn the 2020 by refusing to certify (how? they're both exploiting technical loopholes to completely invalidate democracy). Official policies tolerating crime, and ignoring illegal immigration, aren't the same as ignoring Trump's fraud conviction (I don't even know the justification for this one). The capitol riots weren't the same as the BLM riots (even though the latter caused far more damage, because...). As we saw yesterday, no one's buying it.
3. People don't forget what you've done in the past, especially if you never paid for it. The things the left did in 2020, most obviously the riots but also the tech censorship of anti-Biden information, and lab leak evidence, and many other such things. I think the Ds thought that since they got away with it at the time, and still won in 2020 because it was overshadowed by other things (or, you know, because free discussion of it was being suppressed) that they could pretend it never happened and no one would remember. And that they could even go on and on about the Republican January riots and somehow think voters wouldn't remember the June ones and would somehow take them seriously. The past will catch up with you. The cowards who stood by while cities burned because it was politically difficult to criticise the rioters signed away their credibility, the trust of the people that they would do the right thing, and their right to ever use the words "safety", "non-violence" or "democracy" ever again.
That's just what I can think of right now.
*Well except the pandemic, which he mishandled and was rightly voted out for, just as the Ds are being voted out for mishandling the border and public safety. Importantly, almost none of the fear-mongering about Trump is based on the thing he actually did: mishandle an external catastrophe. Maybe they should have tried that...
>Trying to overturn the 2016 election with a faithless EC wasn't exactly the same as trying to overturn the 2020 by refusing to certify (how? they're both exploiting technical loopholes to completely invalidate democracy).
1. Trump's fradulent electors are being charged by their respective states and some have even been convicted already. That's because there was no technical legal loophole, it's illegal to falsify electoral votes on behalf of a private candidate. Not a single state governor, AG, legislature, or whatever other official political party approved Trump's fradulent electors.
2. No Democratic official directed the 2016 faithless electors. Trump personally directed his campaign officials and personally phone called numerous state representatives and private actors to pressure them into falsifying electoral votes and accepting the fradulent ones over the state certified ones.
3. Multiple states already have laws that invalidate faithless electoral votes. The ones that haven't outlawed them see defection from the popular vote as a legitimate way to run their elections, in line with the original reasoning for establishing the electoral college system.
4. The faithless electors that broke their state's laws were fined and accepted the legal punishment. Trump argued in court that he should have complete criminal immunity for any actions he took as President.
Nearly everything else in your comment is also hilariously wrong, it's a shame you keep trying to epistemically pollute these comments by doing 0 research and blindly regurgitating propaganda that can be disspelled just by copying and pasting any of your claims into google.
I was rather amused to see the Matt Yglesias post-mortem (stop doing dumb radical stuff and appeal to moderates) juxtaposed with the Freddie DeBoer post-mortem (the Ds gotta give the far left a reason to vote for them).
Yeah, the Democrats are going to have to do some kind of soul searching on that question. For electoral purposes, I think they can thread the needle on this (emphasis on "can" not "will") by dropping the most off putting culture war stuff while still retaining some fairly distinct leftist positions. That likely means trans gets thrown under the bus and a significant drop of racial resentment politics. They'll also have to be smarter about their economic platforms or at least how they're sold. Rent control is apparently popular in polls but makes the actual problem of high rents far worse. That's hard to work out, but they can avoid the whole problem if they can find a way to get more housing built in cities.
Interestingly, this whole situation has a strong parallel in the 2012 Republican autopsy. In order for the Romney-type Republicans to do better, they needed to expand their base and cause fewer people to hate them. This seems roughly equivalent to what Matt Y is saying now - turn down the temperature and be more centrist. What actually happened was a political realignment with anti-immigration (very popular but neither party previously did anything about it) being at the forefront - the direct opposite of one of the 2012 autopsy recommendations.
FDB is suggesting something more akin to pushing a realignment. Drop the centrist stuff and go for popular items that are outside of the Democrat platform now. If they would do that, the Democrats would likely be fighting for the working class again, rather than accidentally ceding that whole population to populist Republicans. They would have to repudiate a lot of their own elites to do this, the same way the Republican elites frequently became Never-Trumpers, even so far as actively campaigning for Harris. If both parties are pursuing the working classes again, then it'll be interesting to see where the elite go.
I don't think trans people have to be thrown under the bus at all. No one's going to balk at "treat them like (slightly strange) human beings". Most people will balk at "treat them like second class citizens". Various things will follow from this, such as giving them the same job discrimination protections as anyone else, marriage protections, and estate settlement. (I honestly can't imagine any of this ever having come up, though perhaps I missed it for all the other hoopla.)
The parts that I know people got upset over were transwomen in women's sports, and parental notification for minors thinking about gender change medical treatments. There's also outrage over being cancelled by this or that company for saying something that was declared offensive by trans standards, but I don't believe the law has a role to play there in either direction.
I guess I should be more specific about which trans issues would be dropped. Pronouns (i.e. requiring others to use preferred pronouns) I would also add to your list.
I wouldn't expect the left to drop "treat them like (slightly strange) human beings" as a general and acceptable stance.
For the vast majority of voters it seems clear that Point 1 is the only one that mattered.
The lesson for Democrats is "try not to be President during a time of massive global inflation, because it doesn't matter what you do in response to it, people will just be mad anyway." I know immigration was a clear #2 in this election, and I'd be curious to do a time-travel A/B test to see if it would have changed things, but my guess is 'no'.
I do agree with you on Point 2 that the D's attack lines just didn't have the juice they hoped for. I think this is less because "Ds have their own weaknesses here" and more because "nobody gives a shit because they have low standards for their politicians as long as they personally like them."
I think "nobody gives a shit because they have low standards for their politicians as long as they personally like them." is broadly correct, but I think it's a learned behavior. Other than maybe Carter, I don't know that I can name a US president since at least Ike (maybe I just don't know him very well) that didn't lie about important matters. Call it what you will, but we've consistently had politicians that intentionally or negligently misled us about various things in order to push the public in their desired direction.
Hillary Clinton was a pretty famous liar, so for her to complain about Trump's lies felt disingenuous at best. It left open the need for a discussion about the types of lies each told - Trump's braggadocio verses Hillary's lawyerly deception.
I took Monkyyy's comment as a request for a single thread for that discussion, so that people who preferred the cool-off period could collapse that thread and be done.
To satisfy your condition, the thing to do would be to politely ask everyone to honor a cooling off period (whether or not there's a single thread later).
To all the people who were saying "both sides are undermining democracy" before the election: Please note that the Democrats lost an election and they did *not* immediately start a media blitz to convince people there was widespread voter fraud, nor did they file a series of doomed-to-fail lawsuits that pretended that tiny procedural irregularities were actually a vast conspiracy to steal the election.
This is a normal thing that happens all the time, but after 2020 it's not something you should take for granted.
The democratic party nominee was appointed by the incumbent, who had the right to do because of a joke of a primary that no one seriously believes was a fair election. She was not chosen by any sort of democratic process.
So, are you arguing that no President before 1910 was chosen democratically? Because that's when the first presidential primaries were held - before that nominees were simply chosen by the parties internally.
Whether you choose to have a primary, a caucus, or no vote at all is an internal party decision. The fact that I as a Democrat didn't get consulted on the choice of Harris, is no more a violation of my rights than the fact that I as a Democrat didn't get consulted about nominating Trump as the Republican candidate.
(Although a world where only jungle primaries are allowed, to maximize people's ability to choose the candidates for the election, does sound like an interesting concept.)
Seems like a tradeoff to me, either way; no unmitigated positives.
As you say, parties used a different method before primaries. And there were endless variations anyone can see by reading through all the presidential election articles on WP. Even the Libertarian Party uses a not-obviously-democratic method to settle on a nominee.
One method I'd like to see some day would be a jungle primary with instant runoff voting. Arrow notwithstanding, such a system might tell us more than it conceals.
"Please note that the Democrats lost an election and they did *not* immediately start a media blitz to convince people there was widespread voter fraud"
No, they started a media blitz to convince everyone that the result was illegitimate "because Russia", Just Asking Questions about the security of voting machines, using the phrase "voter suppression" at every opportunity, calling for the Electoral College to appoint the loser as president, having said loser officially concede but then spend years calling her loss "illegimitate", and insisting more times than you could ever count that even though they lost according to the rules, they didn't *really* lose because the rules should have been different!
Yes, that was all in 2016, not now, but people haven't fucking forgotten it and the memory-holing and gaslighting and "when *we* undermine democracy it's COMPLETELY different" has to fucking stop.
Other than that, I agree with you. People should accept the result of an election, the right's reaction to 2020 was disgraceful, and it was significantly worse than the left's reaction to 2016. On the other hand, the left defected *first* from these democratic norms, even if to a much lesser extent, and I think people underestimate the significance of the first defection: it all but guarantees that the other side will respond even worse. And also, although there was a difference in degree, there was no difference in kind: both sides had large sections that refused to accept the legitimacy of their loss, and were willing to use any means including violence to resist the democratic outcome.
Upshot: shame on both side's partisans, and on all who defended or enabled them, and on all who try to rewrite history for them. Thankfully, this is the first election in three cycles where the candidate who pulled ahead early in the counting, the candidate who won the popular vote, and the election winner were all the same, so hopefully there should be more acceptance of democracy this time. Both those things *shouldn't* matter for legitimacy, but recent history has shown they do.
This is way too hard into both-sides-ism. "The electoral college sucks" has been a recurring complaint for decades, so have complaints about how "election security" laws often seem aimed at suppressing Democratic votes in particular. I think most of the 2016 complaints were within the bounds of normal political discourse. The only part of this I agree on is the faithless electors thing - I think it was both a dumb idea and an undemocratic one.
(Also, in the case of voter suppression, how are the people passing the suppressive laws not the ones firing the first shot?)
> Thankfully, this is the first election in three cycles where the candidate who pulled ahead early in the counting, the candidate who won the popular vote, and the election winner were all the same
If you want to make sure that the candidate who won the popular vote is also the election winner, then don't yell at the people who complain about the electoral college!
When Trump doesn't concede the election, it's because it wouldn't be fair to concede when election officials broke the law in ways that almost uniformly disadvantage you. When he forms a legal argument to this effect, his lawyer gets charged with conspiracy.
When Clinton says the election was "stolen" and "Trump is illegitimate" and manufactures evidence to get her opponent investigated, how is that "politics as usual"? It's another case of a dozen of Democrats accusing Trump of doing the bad things that they're actually doing.
> "The electoral college sucks" has been a recurring complaint for decades
And it's a bad complaint. The electoral college is a game and if Trump were playing the popular vote game in 2016 he would have campaigned up and down California and New York and won the popular vote. But that's not the rules of the game and so that's not the game he played. Somehow Democrats haven't figured out that California disenfranchises Republican voters, though they have it in their power to make it not be that way. They could at the very least allocate votes based on congressional district like Nebraska and Maine. But they don't.
Elements of the Obama executive branch worked in tandem with the Clinton campaign to spread knowingly false information (particularly the Steele Dossier) in order to undermine the incoming Trump campaign and were able to secure FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign through this process (which then led to three years of intense investigations intended to undermine Trump and prevent him from exercising his constitutional powers).
I don't know if there's a way to objectively compare how bad that is compared to January 6. You probably wouldn't get partisans on either side to agree to a metric.
But I do know that both are them are *very* bad. Does it matter if one is worse than the other when both are this bad?
I would note that the consequences for the FBI intentionally lying to the FISA court were... uh, they had to promise not to do it again. Compare that to what happened to the people involved in J6. Or the Trump staffers charged with lying to the FBI, if you think that's a more fair example.
Sure, but that point is downstream of agreeing that both are bad and neither should happen. If we can agree that both are bad, then we can talk about fixing the situation for the future. Neither side is going to agree to "your side did a bad thing and you should be punished" without seeing fairness applied. That's true even if the blue team's soldiers got off easy for previous infractions.
> Thankfully, this is the first election in three cycles where the candidate who pulled ahead early in the counting, the candidate who won the popular vote, and the election winner were all the same, so hopefully there should be more acceptance of democracy this time. Both those things shouldn't matter for legitimacy, but recent history has shown they do.
Since everyone else is posting their top-level election responses I just want to remind everyone that it doesn't matter who wins or loses, the important thing is that both candidates had a good time.
Seriously though, I feel like my friend has just broken up with his girlfriend and gone back to his old girlfriend, and now for some reason the dumped girlfriend is going to spend the next four years bitching at *me* about it all.
The election has elected, and the room temperature IQ mass has spoken.
I, of course, will (probably!) be fine.
I'm white, I'm male, I own my own house, and I'm fairly wealthy; enough so I might actually edge into whatever tax cuts are coming.
I'll be even more fine if the Trump and Vance both die somehow and someone who isn't a fucking mercantilist gets the big chair, but if prices go up by 20% I'll be OK.
I do admit that I want to see the full Trump this time. War with Iran, collapse of the social safety net, social security revoked, 60% tariff on our main partner, the whole shebang.
I wanna see the proles and the olds who voted for the dude get everything they wanted. I wanna see some dudes dieing on the street, wondering why they don't get their government check and their government dialysis anymore. Perhaps a trans hamas communist mexican haitian took it?
This is bad, of course, and actually it would be great of the morons were right, the entire profession of economics was wrong, and everything is fine.
I will try to restrain my worst impulses and not wicca style manifest a curse or some shit.
My worry is that actions Trump takes won't manifest as negative until 10 years later. Ie, he cuts some of the funding sources for SS (taxes on tips, on SS payouts), that reduces SS solvency timeline from, say, 2036 to 2032, and seniors start to struggle in the presidency of... AOC, or Taylor Swift, or Ivanka, or something.
I understand the general feeling of "Trump will mess something important up" but your specific list seems mostly wrong.
Like, he's not going to get rid of Social Security. He likes being popular, and knows that would be unpopular. It's something he's explicitly said he wouldn't do, despite his opponents saying otherwise.
He's also not going to war with Iran. He fired Bolton over that topic, because Bolton wanted to get into war.
I don't want to criticize people for disliking Trump, and have plenty to say against him as well, but it's unhelpful in a wide variety of ways (including your sanity) to believe things that you think Trump will do that are just wrong.
I dunno. Trump might not want to cut SS, but he certainly wants to defund it wherever he can; and his hangers on definitely want to eliminate social security and cut federal healthcare. I'll give you this one though.
The Iran thing is just false though. He isn't gonna declare war on anybody, but he played stupid brinksman games throughout his term with Iran, he is vastly more likely to force them to force us to go to war by doing something stupid.
Maybe I've just missed it, but do you have quotes or examples of his leadership team or campaign saying anything about cutting SS or Medicare? Some Republicans want to, some for very good reasons (i.e. we're on track for SS to become insolvent if we don't do something), but that's neither Trump nor his team.
When Biden sent carriers to the Red Sea to bomb Houthi rebels, was that brinkmanship? Or the various times he (or Obama, Bush, and Clinton) launched missiles and drones at various opponents? From all accounts, Trump seems to have done less of that than any president in the last 30-40+ years. If your opinion is that all of them were also engaged in brinkmanship, we can probably agree. But then, why the specific worry about Trump? Harris would have been doing the same.
I think Social Security should go away, but not in a stupid way. When I realized how it worked, perhaps 30 years ago, I thought a good plan would have been to phase it out, such that people who are 25 would pay (smaller and smaller amounts) to keep it going, until it gets phased out in 30-40 years. When I came up with this plan, I thought 2030 would be a good time to end it, which is about when I expected to reach retirement age, which means I would have paid into it and received no payment out.
This may not be a viable plan, since the government can change significantly over 30-40 years. But I think Social Security is fundamentally flawed, in that one group is receiving benefit from a different group that pays for the benefit, and so should go away. A mistake, once made, cannot be undone in the past, but can be mitigated or erased by future actions.
I know I'm catastrophizing, but then again last time this dude was in power a lot of bad shit happened.
On the other hand, there was a slight case of global pandemic.
On the third hand, all the neocon/neolib guys he had around to run things are gone this time.
On the fourth hand, I hate those guys.
On the fifth hand, war with Iran would be really really funny.
And on the sixth hand, if it goes really badly again, there are midterms in two years and even the least policy brained culture warrior will have to recognize reality he said, realizing it wasn't true even as he typed it out.
So who's to say? Maybe it's fine, and maybe I can get some laughs out of it if it isn't.
I've got no idea why you'd think war with Iran is more likely under Trump, who has run as a peacenik, than under Harris, who campaigned with the Cheneys.
There's plenty to criticise Trump for, but this one doesn't feel high on the list.
"Trump ran as a peacenik" is news to me. I saw lots of his supporters here talking about how Biden made us weak and Trump is going to Get Tough With Iran and China.
When he started out, he was Mr. Loose Cannon. "What's the point of nukes if you don't use 'em?" was a quote I recall. I also recall the counter: there's value to someone who looks wild enough to press the button if the opponents have all learned to call any bluff short of that.
And then, after 2020, Trump supporters would point out that he tried to withdraw from Syria and began drawdown in Afghanistan, and didn't get into any new wars. (Some argued moving the US Israeli embassy to Jerusalem was provocative, as was the drone strike of an Iranian terrorist, but no war was in fact triggered by either.)
I wouldn't call this "peacenik", though, before I called it "intimidating the riff raff into silence", which is indeed closer to "Get Tough".
> One of my most foundational political beliefs is that while the winner in an election doesn’t usually deserve to win, the loser always deserves to lose. I can’t think of anyone who deserved to lose more than Kamala Harris.
It reads like a far-from-center leftist who wants to blame someone for losing the election. If he truly thought Harris was going to lose, then he ought to have posted something similar to this BEFORE the election, bemoaning that the Democrats are giving away the store, "and this is how and why".
Hmm, I think I don't have enough context to engage with that essay, talking of quite a few people I don't know. Aesthetically, I also prefer Kriss, but that is highly subjective of course.
I thought this is a "Harris lost because she didn't adopt my policy preferences" but I wasn't sure what the policy preferences were going to be until I read it.
It's actually about the extreme nothingness of Kamala and about how we've learned nothing in a decade of dealing with Trump.
Any Democratic swing- or purple-state governor would probably have been better. They, like Kamala, would have needed more than just a couple months of campaigning, but they'd have an actual track record of winning elections and running a government, they'd have proven themselves able to attract moderate Republican-leaning voters, and they wouldn't be as tied to nationally unpopular far-left policies than Harris.
And that last is maybe not really fair to Harris, but it is nonetheless a fact that, with the vice-presidency such an underwhelmingly low-visibility post, people had to form much of their image of Kamala from A: her time as a California AG and B: California's general track record of far-left nuttiness that voters outside of California don't follow in enough detail to know which parts are the fault of which politicians. A purple-state governor wouldn't have that sort of image problem, because if they did they wouldn't be a purple-state governor.
Harris would have also had to come to grips with her 2019 presidential campaign promises, which were extremely far to the left, and her (fairly brief) senate voting record of the same. Given the baggage of coming from California while she's also trying to find a lane in the 2020 primaries, I don't know that she had a choice while maintaining relevancy. That said, it made a pivot to the center or right seem extremely disingenuous and unlikely to succeed.
I guess that means I agree with you about a purple state governor. Coming from California seems like a pretty hard sell to the nation at large. Newsom I think understands this, as he started vetoing some progressive legislation around the time he was thinking about running for president.
I don't know. It seems that you never find out which candidates will actually work well under a national spotlight until primary season starts. Candidates who seem strong on paper often turn out to be terrible, while obscure names often turn out to perform a lot better than expected.
That's the value of the primary system, and why the Dems were very dumb to skip it this time around.
I agree it was a huge mistake for the Dems to treat Biden like a normal incumbent and not primary him. That mistake may have made all the difference.
OTOH, Trump won bigly last night. Hard to imagine any Democrat beating him, particularly if the vote was mostly about "Trump is better for the economy than Dems", which it seems to have been.
To be fair, not primarying the current incumbent has been a bi-partisan tradition since Taft in 1912, and before that, Pierce. (To date, the only US President to *not* get the nomination despite seeking it.) If you want the incumbent out, you either talk to him quietly behind the scenes (e.g. Grant), or you just go third party and end up as a spoiler (Teddy, Thurmond, Wallace, Perot). Both parties learned a lesson that's hard to ignore.
To be even fairer, the Dems caught a bad break. No one plans when to go into mental decline. Biden was a risk in 2020; I think the DNC hoped he'd hold together until 2028, and if not, you want him to drop out early in 2024 or late 2023, not maybe kinda sorta hold together until it's too late to call up the bench for primary candidates.
OTOH, we can probably hold them responsible for making Biden their man in 2020 despite the risk, and then for going out of their way to push "sharp as a tack!" until the debate.
I think they backed themselves into a corner with Biden. 2020 couldn't really have happened any other way, with their goal of keeping Bernie out of the general (which could be argued either way but was clearly their goal). No one else could have taken the mantle like Biden did. Once he's in, there's no good moment to remove him if he wants to stay in. Forcing a contested primary is really bad for morale and is a huge vote of no confidence in Biden, which could backfire badly if he still wins it.
I think it's fair for all of us to blame Biden and the people closest to him (including Harris) for not admitting his decline earlier. The 25th Amendment exists for a reason, but even well short of that someone should have done the right thing and made it obvious to the voting public long before the summer of the election on national TV.
you shouldn't be shocked by the election results, and yet I am.
I guess I thought people were less stupid than this.
Welp.
I know people make this joke every election, but I think it's for real this time. I have one other nation I can get a passport for, I'll see if I can get a permanent visa for the EU also, I'm pretty sure I can in at least one country.
Seriously, I moved from Cali to Texas. There's some regrets but overall it is very, very worth it. There's a real, measurable improvement to my quality of life.
> I guess I thought people were less stupid than this.
Usually, when reality doesn't conform to our beliefs, it's wise to update ones beliefs and then take appropriate action. Blaming is the opposite of this--its a way to go deeper into some delusion.
I have an EU passport but I'm also a US citizen and I'll be staying and figuring how I can help. It seems like the most effective option
As far as the election. I think Trump has taken over the working class, which use to belong to the Dems.
On a more important topic (to me), my daughter (who is gay and lives in the city with many gay and trans friends.) Is totally freaked out about Trump, we're hanging out next Monday. (Veterans day no less.) Starting with breakfast, (I'm thinking apple pancakes (w/ butter and maple syrup) and potato pancakes, with sour cream and apple sauce?) And I need to talk her off the ledge, she's talking about a lot of crazy ideas. ie, getting sterilized because she's afraid abortion will become illegal nation-wise. I'm here asking for any ideas I can throw at her. (I'm going to start with why I almost voted for Trump, till I talked with her before the election and she had a cow. ) (Sorry these ideas are really scrambled, I mostly suck at communication.)
I don't think the ideas you've gotten so far are good. Regarding her fear she will get pregnant and be unable to get an abortion, I recommend that you say that if that happens, you will make sure she is able to get one, even if you have to get her plane tickets to Mexico or Europe. I understand that what she is worried about is *extremely* unlikely, but if you try to convince her of that you'll be back to arguing about what Trump is like and what he will do and you have already learned that leads nowhere with her right now. So just be loving and say you will help her if it comes to that, they way you would help her if, say, she got badly injured and could not work for 6 mos. and needed a place to stay. As time passes the people like her who expect their world is going to get turned upside down instantly are going to see that day to day life is pretty much the same as ever, and that Trump cannot just snap his fingers and decree radical changes in laws. And everybody will calm down. So in a few months you might be able to have a conversation with her about Trump and what to worry about and what not to. But right now you can't, so just tell her if the worst happens you'll be there for her. And even if she tries to turn it into a conversation about whether Trump is going to force all pregnant women to keep their babies, be evasive. If she says, "but do you really think I'm just being silly and Trump would never do that?" say something like, "I'm definitely less worried than you are, but if it should happen I will make sure you are able to get an abortion."
I second this excellent advice, but I think you need to do a little bit of work to fully "sell" it to her.
So make a plan with specific, executable steps, as if you actually are taking this seriously:
1. Tell her to start the passport process *now,* so that if she needs to leave the country there won't be any delay.
2. Collaborate on a system to keep her hypothetical pregnancy top secret. She can't be prosecuted for an abortion no one but the two of you know she's had. So absolutely no explicit discussion about a pregnancy on the phone or via text, only in person (and if you can't be in person, invent a code for "I'm pregnant" right now). No menstrual cycle tracking apps and you'll buy any pregnancy tests with cash at the Dollar Tree while wearing a baseball cap so it can't be tracked back to her, etc.
3. Research together exactly what it takes for an American to get an abortion in Canada, Mexico, Thailand, etc. What are the laws, wait times, etc? Which specific facilities? How much will it cost? You can go as far down that rabbit hole as you like.
4. Make sure she has Plan B on standby at home, with a plan to monitor the expiration date and replace it as necessary.
5. Whatever else.
Is this all a little silly? Almost certainly. But the goal here is to give her actionable steps to gain a sense of control over her fear. She's in an emotional state where she may want want to reject your offer of support if it's too vague/difficult-sounding, or if she believes you're only offering because you're dismissive of her fear. If you approach with a tone of, "Meh, not gonna happen, but I'll pay for you to go to Mexico if it gets to that point" it is not going to be nearly as comforting as, "Here's the address of the clinic we'll visit during our 'vacation' in Mexico, here's the budget, and here's the money to pay for it in my savings."
Is she a gay woman who has sex with men?
I know someone else who is also afraid of getting stuck with an unwanted baby inside. She is asexual, not gay, and her fear is that she will be raped and get pregnant from the rape. I understand of course that 3 very unlikely things have to happen for her to end up forced to bear a rape baby to tern: rape, get pregnant from the rape, & the US at the time has strict laws against abortion in all circumstances. She is plenty smart enough to understand this -- she's getting a PhD in one of the hard sciences at a famous university. But she is too scared to think straight.
I'd just recommend a copper IUD. They are reversible, quite safe, and extremely effective.
You actually think this is a helpful suggestion? You think this young woman does not know the copper IUD exists? Or that she knows it exists but that it has not occurred to her that she, too, can be protected by one against an unwanted pregnancy?
> You think this young woman does not know the copper IUD exists? Or that she knows it exists but that it has not occurred to her that she, too, can be protected by one against an unwanted pregnancy?
This woman is also so freaked out about current events that she's considering getting sterilized, just in case she might get pregnant in the future (as a gay woman) and there's no way for her to get an abortion anywhere. So no, maybe we shouldn't model her as a perfectly rational actor who computes all possible options from the data available to her.
Besides, humans are humans, and sometimes we need to hear it from someone we trust, to know that it's okay.
If she's amenable to rational arguments, you can point out that the fears are misplaced. "If it bleeds, it leads" so media are incentivized to catastrophize. But when we look at the predictions of bettors whose only incentive is to make money, by being correct, rather than to scare people, they assign only a 5% chance to Trump signing a national abortion restriction (https://polymarket.com/event/trump-signs-national-abortion-ban-in-first-100-days?tid=1731195439244) in his first 100 days.
And that describes *any* sort of restriction on when, where, or under what conditions abortions can be performed. That would include restrictions which are still far more lax than the laws currently in place in many states (including New York) such that in practice, even under in this very likely event, abortion access would likely be unaffected or at worst, would become less available in some states, while remaining equally available in other states.
The same goes for other concerns she may be freaked out about. In general, it's important for her to remember that sources of her information generally don't pay a price for promoting unwarranted fear, and generally profit from it, while only markets are actually incentivized to tell the truth. So as a rule, unless she gets her news from betting markets, she's probably being systematically misled.
As far as particular fears that she has, you can look to see if betting markets address them. For what it's worth, the US stock market rallied following Trumps election. That implies that they think that the US economy as a whole will do quite well under Trump. That suggests a generally low probability of many possible types of catastrophes that people might occurring under Trump.
E.g. I've seen many people worrying Trump would eliminate the Department of Education. Markets assign just an 11% of him doing that in his first 100 days: https://polymarket.com/event/trump-ends-department-of-education-in-first-100-days. If she's still scared, you can look into the particulars of why that wouldn't actually be such a big deal.
You'd know better than anyone how wise it would be to mention that you considered voting for Trump to her, but to me, that seems pretty risky. To many people (who are presumably disproportionately demographically similar to your daughter) voting for Trump is evil. She may, then, view your voting comment as essentially admitting that you considered being evil, but chose not to, which will likely not endear you to her, unless she assumed you voted for him, anyway.
> "You'd know better than anyone how wise it would be to mention that you considered voting for Trump to her, but to me, that seems pretty risky."
Agreed, absolutely do not tell her you were ever even slightly tempted to vote for Trump. In the state she's currently in, all of her fear and rage could instantly transfer to you, and she might lash out at you to achieve a sense of power over her "enemy."
I was just dumped by what I thought was politically moderate dear friend of 8 years via a single, vicious text message after I told him I pointlessly protest-voted for a third-party in my West Coast state. I never saw it coming; I was certain that we loved one another, that we were ride or die friends for life. Do not underestimate your daughter's fragility.
On the sterilization thing:
(1) A national ban on abortion seems extremely unlikely. A lot of politicians know they can't vote for such a law and expect to keep their jobs. This is different from appointing Supreme Court justices to uphold state-level abortion bans, since voters won't hold them directly responsible for the decisions of those justices.
(2) Even if she thinks there is a significant chance of such a law passing, it seems safe to postpone getting sterilized until after the abortion ban actually passes into law. It will take a while between the law being proposed as a bill and the legislation taking effect, so there's no need to rush. This is particularly true for a gay woman, which is presumably a fairly low risk demographic for needing to terminate a pregnancy on short notice.
(3) If she's still coming up with hypothetical situations in which she might want or need sterilization or abortion and be unable to obtain one, ask if she would be willing to set up a dedicated emergency bank account containing sufficient money to have these procedures performed, plus enough to cover the airfare to have them done in another country. (The total will probably come out as less than the cost of getting sterilized in the US.)
(4) If none of this works, maybe she wants to get sterilized anyway and is just using Trump as a convenient "excuse." In that case, you can still offer all the reasons why you think it's a bad idea, but in the end you just have to accept that it's ultimately her own decision what to do with her body.
Yes to all of this. I don't think sterilization is something that is happening right away. My guess is that sterilization is asserting her power in some sphere where she feels somewhat powerless. So maybe we can come up other ways to assert herself. IDK we'll talk, thanks for your response.
I would highly suggest just avoiding the topic. If you just want to stop her from getting sterilized, maybe you can talk her into some less permanent solutions... But there's just no need to further sour relations with her. Don't take what you have for granted.
Ah no a very high amount of love between me and my daughter. My idea is that we're all living in these different bubbles. (Like and X-dimensional venn diagram of influence/ ideas.) This is totally what we'll be talking about... among all sorts of other things.
...I highly doubt she'll respond positively to that, but whatever, it's your funeral.
Well time will tell, thanks for the response anyway.
I totally get a ban on outright verbal abuse and ad hominem. But honestly, I'm a bit put off by the recent turn towards punishing smugness and condescension in space like these. Is that really what everybody wants? Are we that sensitive? That level of moderation feels a bit infantilizing from my perspective.
The comments I saw that got banned were pretty vile. One was from someone who thinks trans people rule the internet, and have almost as much power as the damn Jews. Told a joke about how male to female trans women should get high quality pussies with lots of secretions, so much that when they leave the Christmas dinner table they'll leave a trail of slime. Another one was a response to someone saying they're sad about the election outcome, something like "good, I'm delighted that you are." And neither of these posts had any content beyond what I quoted.
What Scott has actually said about rudeness, is that you only get to fail to meet one of the 3 standards: kind, true and advances the discussion. You can drop kind, but then you better be right and advance the discussion. I was quite rude to both of those posters, but my rudeness was embedded in posts while I explained my objections to what they'd said. So I'd say my comments were rude and right and advanced the discussion. And when the angel of death passed over the comments, I was not one of the ones banned.
There is no "we" here: This is Scott's walled garden and he has aesthetic preferences about how people should conduct themselves, even if we'd prefer more "spirited" disagreement, it's reasonable to respect the host's wishes.
There are other SSC offshoots that are more lenient on disagreeableness.
I'm aware of this. I was actually hoping Scott would read my comment and perhaps it would have an impact. I know that is unlikely, but not impossible. Scott is highly unpredictable (which is a good thing).
> punishing smugness and condescension in space like these. Is that really what everybody wants?
With specific examples, I could give a more specific answer, but speaking for myself in general, I am okay with that.
> Are we that sensitive?
I find some ways of communication annoying, and if we can make them go away by pushing a button, I am in favor of pushing that button.
> That level of moderation feels a bit infantilizing from my perspective.
I don't mind spending my time at a nice place. I guess I am too old to worry about signaling how grown up I am.
If you accept the premise that a rationalist forum is dedicated primarily to Getting the Right Answer, then smug or condescending arguments get in the way more often than not, even when the reader isn't getting their feelings hurt. Such arguments sound to a rational reader like "I don't have enough evidence to support my view, so I'm going to resort to rhetoric to manipulate your emotions into believing me anyway" and now the rational reader has to exert effort to peel away all the rhetoric and get at the actual evidence.
So why waste everyone's time? Just lay out the evidence.
Being wrong also gets in the way, arguably even more often than smugness. Do we delete all arguments that are wrong?
Hey, all of you guys have lost track of Scott's guideline. It's not that you can't be rude. It's that you have to hit 2 out of these 3: kind, true, and advances the discussion. If you make good points that advance the discussion, you can be rude. If you say stuff that's obviously not true, and you are polite and trying to advance the discussion, you're OK. If you are kind and making a valid point, but it's off the subject and does not advance the discussion, you're OK. What gets people banned for a while is being rude and wrong, wrong and off-topic, or rude and off-topic. Or, of course, rude, wrong and off-topic.
The catch there is telling the difference. For that, we need a process for figuring it out, which is what rationalism is nominally all about. Which brings us back to smug or condescending entries degrading that process more than honestly submitted wrong answers.
"If you accept the premise that a rationalist forum is dedicated primarily to Getting the Right Answer."
Is this really what rationalists believe? I'm not going to pretend I've never heard this sentiment. But I guess I just wanted to think the best of rationalism and so I assume this was a minority sentiment.
And by "think the best," I meant I wanted to think the best of their intellectual abilities. I can't imagine a more uncynical attitude, and in my view, uncynical is borderline delusional. And here we run into another situation where I am unduly restricted by the civility requirement. "Delusional" is a harsh word, but as much as I struggled to, I just couldn't think of a word that worked better for this. Some things really are that stark, that black and white. Thanks to the civility rule, I have to take this time to explain and justify my use of that word. And haven't I just wasted everyone's time doing so?
Anyway, in my mind, the primary purpose of a comment section is to have a good time. Online commenting is a kind of hobby or recreation. I don't have any illusions about us solving the world's problems. And I think that we are self-important and self-regarding if we do imagine we are going to have an approachable positive impact on the world by commenting online. The Internet is not real life.
Lots of people with lesser intellectual abilities have plenty of fun on an online forum. The ones I'm thinking of, have it by posting "sick burns" on their outgroup, and are rated by their low-effort peers around an Algonquin Folding Table.
The catch is that that table is often a very public forum like Reddit, meaning their outgroup has to put up with it. This is especially annoying when that forum is originally advertised as a place to get good information, and the people who have a good time by getting good information (aka Getting the Right Answer), can't.
So that crowd looks around for such a forum, specifically filtering out people from the former crowd. They turn out to be hard to make, and easy to infect with the former crowd unless actively moderated. I think Scott wants ACX to be that type of forum.
Above, you argued that you want to think the best of rationalism, declared that inclination to be uncynical, and delusional. That confuses me; people don't usually want to be delusional. So you arguably did waste people's time, but only in the sense that you didn't succeed in conveying your idea. But that's not necessarily bad; some ideas are difficult to comprehend, and may require some extra time.
Maybe rational readers are selling themselves short by cutting these voices out. Since the time of Jonathan Swift, serious thinkers have been using acerbic wit and cutting language to express important ideas. And are you sure it's all about keeping evidentiary arguments in primacy? And it's not about "I don't want someone to hurt my feelings?"
Acerbic wit seems quite different to smugness and condescension. Swift might have been acerbic but I don't think critics of the time were complaining about the condescending tone. Wit requires effort (perhaps mostly in developing it, not necessarily in its deployment) while smugness is something I can get from a small language model or a person not paying much attention or putting much effort into editing, and therefore comes across as disrespectful of the reader's time. ACX is not a neighborhood barbecue, but more like a stadium concert, so I hold those walking up to the microphone to a higher standard than when Jim from next door spouts a random opinion after a couple of beers.
This is an anonymous comment section for a blog. I can't think of a more perfect analog for a late night bull session at your local bar. The only difference is that vocabulary and average formal education level is higher. Street smarts and emotional intelligence and common sense are not higher.
And thanks to the strict civility norm, I have to worry about being reported and banned for this comment. Even though there really is no other way that I could express this idea, and even though this idea deserves to be expressed. My free speech has been thoroughly chilled.
Chance, let me give you an analogy. Suppose your favorite indie band or TV show or whatever announced they were going corporate: filing off all the rough edges for mass market appeal. Instead of trying to be unique, they'll try to be like everyone else. Would you support the change?
Now replace "band" with "discussion space". There are lots of places that work like bull sessions at your local bar; all the bars out there, for a start, but also the comments at Reddit, Facebook, news websites, most blogs, et cetera. Not many get to be anything else at all, and those that are, generally don't stay that way for long -- it is much harder to *add* civility than remove it, so the transformation is irreversible once it starts. This place has avoided that fate through aggressive moderation; it has chosen to be something, and *wants* to be it.
Your stance seems to boil down to, "But this place is so unlike all the other places out there!" Yeah, and that's a *good* thing. We hang out here precisely because there’s nowhere else like it.
When you say, "Nowhere else is about convincing people by laying out a civil argument! Everywhere else is about having a good time!", I think, "And who are *you* to say we're not having a good time, in our own way? Who are *you* to say we should stop having fun our way?"
When you say, "You guys are so uncynical here, you think you can actually persuade anyone here!?", my response is "Yes. This is a place by autistic people, *for* autistic people. We do in fact persuade each other around here, because we don't work like normal people.
And if you intrude, claiming we're weird and should act more like everyone else... then kindly, piss off. You already have a thousand places to go be yourself, while we have only here. And if you want to destroy our one sole hang-out spot, so you can have a thousandth-and-oneth place for people like yourself... then, piss off. Go to a bar or something. Be happier with your own people. But don't pretend for a moment you speak for us, invader. If we wanted your 'bull sessions at the local bar', we would have already set that up."
TL;DR: Don't storm into an indie band and announce you're taking it corporate, without expecting pushback. We don't *want* your mass market appeal. And if we did, we wouldn't need your "help".
I'm autistic myself and I am aware of this as a biopsychosocial health problem. I am now facing an issue in one of my organs that should have been addressed long ago, but wasn't, partly due to my high pain tolerance. Which makes me partly incapable of recognizing the alerts my body sends out.
This health problem (autism) is not something to celebrate. It is not something to romanticize. While there are silver linings, this is still a health problem and it is a cross to bear. I will not apologize for trying to overcome my symptoms instead of wallowing in them. If I have any loyalty or solidarity with my fellow autistics, I will tell them the straight truth instead of indulging their fantasies of superiority.
We must learn humility, cynicism and world-weariness, or we will be victimized over and over and over. Or even worse, we will end up victimizing others without even realizing what we're doing.
PS. I never argued “this should be more like a bull session at the local bar.” I said THIS IS a bull session at the local bar. Very different arguments.
There is a difference between (a) writing an essay intended for a broad audience and (b) a comment intended to be part of an exchange of views. The greater the emotional component, the more suitable for (a) rather than (b).
When I see someone posting with a high degree of smugness, I assume they are operating in bad faith and are not seriously open to counterargument. It's fine to feel that sense of certainty, but I would like to participate in spaces where both sides bring an open mind. There are a million places on social media to be smug and get likes. There are precious few where actual dialogue can happen.
Another way I'd put it is that being both smug/condescending AND persuasive at the same time is hard. It often takes a Jonathan Swift to do it. Many people see the smug stuff, don't recognize the persuasive stuff, and cargo cult their way to a bad attempt that ends up being *anti*-persuasive. Get enough of those together and you get (waves hand in direction of most of the internet). Indeed, a lot of people appear to have dispensed with the persuasion altogether and gone full conflict theory, treating forums as nothing more than a place to feel good for a moment by ranting and pandering to the choir. It's a safe bet they're not persuasive.
Rationalism is IMO a push against that.
Also, how many comments were banned for being smug/condescending AND ALSO persuasive to someone outside the choir?
Nobody is persuading anybody in an online comments section, or at least not about anything important. People choose to be persuaded more than they are persuaded by others, if you know what I mean.
I don't know if you speak for rationalists here, but if you do, I'm slightly shocked. I did not realize commenters here took these discussions that seriously. I view online commenting as a pastime or recreation. I never imagined the stakes were any higher than that.
As I implied above, there are plenty of online forums out there for people who don't wish to take commenting seriously.
You implied you also wanted a forum full of commenters with high intellectual capability. Well, I don't speak for all of them, but I do find most such people only go to forums where their intellect is matched - which excludes forums where people just go to have a good time in the casual sense. High-intellect comments require high effort, even from high-intellect people.
Someone who expects to just hop on such a forum and comment in ways that imply stuff like "normies; amirite??" will quickly find the forum either aggressively moderated, or empty.
Who got banned for smugness and condescension? A lot of it seems to be getting by the smugness and condescension filter.
But, AFAICS, most of the discussion on these open threads does *not* involve evidence-based arguments. A lot of it is old-school rationalist, though — i.e. people coming to conclusions via logic — albeit ones based on faulty presumptions.
So, where's your evidence that people are getting banned for smugness and condescension? ;-)
But seriously, most of the bans seem to have been for people getting nasty. Anecdata: I was banned (temporarily) a while back for viscous sarcasm.
>"I was banned (temporarily) a while back for viscous sarcasm."
This might have seemed harsh at the time, but I think it was the right decision. Only low-viscosity sarcasm should be permitted in this forum.
I'm going to blame my spell checker for that one. Damn! I can't be smug if I misspell words.
I cannot go into further details for reasons that I cannot elucidate. Sorry!
(Not a joke)
Sorry to be a complainer. But is anyone else frustrated by how consistently conventional and middle of the road commenters are when it comes to foreign policy? I see very little pushback on mainstream narratives. Maybe that's a simple consequence of STEM people having More Interesting Things to think about, and not having the time or patience for foreign affairs?
I'm a STEM nerd with plenty of time and patience to think about foreign affairs, and I don't think I'm alone in that. I even used to have a side gig where I dealt with one aspect of foreign policy semi-professionally.
I haven't noticed myself holding any particularly contrarian views on the major foreign policy issues of recent discourse, but that's because I *have* thought about them and have concluded that this time the "mainstream narrative" got it right. That happens from time to time.
But maybe you're thinking of different foreign policy issues than I am. So it would probably help for you to be specific about what sort of discussion you're looking for,
"The cops won't arrest shoplifters because they won't be prosecuted and they feel that it is a waste of their time." If this is true, and that is a big if, this seems like a severe miscalculation on the cops' part. Don't they realize that getting arrested and spending a few hours in booking is a punishment in and of itself? How could they not realize that this alone will have something of a deterrent effect?
I think the person making the decision is not the ordinary beat cop, but the leadership, maybe even the chief of police.
In my very Blue town, I’ve seen police responses to public disturbances vary widely over time, from aggressive police presence to turning a blind eye. It seems political to me, though I can’t really parse it.
It may have to do with election cycles. In my city, homeless camps pop up in the months prior to the mayoral election, and they are cleared out immediately after the election.
Getting arrested and spending a few hours in booking is a major disheartening and punitive event for a respectable middle-class citizen who is concerned that this might go on his Permanent Record, or that his friends and family might find out. But to the sort of people who are actually out doing the shoplifting, and once it becomes clear that the policy is catch-and-release, it's just a minor annoyance.
I'm a lifelong poor person (AMA) who used to hang with a very rough crowd, and in my anecdotal experience, you're just flat wrong. Being arrested is deeply unpleasant for each and every human being, regardless of their socioeconomic background or criminal background. It is far more than a “minor annoyance.”
Even if it WAS just a “minor annoyance,” this still doesn't explain the (alleged) behavior of the police. Surely a minor annoyance is a better deterrent than no deterrent. No, at this point I simply can't believe that police officers are operating on this logic. If they are refusing to arrest shoplifters, it is likely because said police do not take shoplifting seriously THEMSELVES.
...Why do you keep talking about deterrence, as if it's something anyone cares about? The point is to hurt these lowlives, and the current sentences aren't hurting them enough.
That is what justice is. The more the good are rewarded, and the more the wicked are punished, the more justice there is.
People do in fact care about deterrence and about reducing crime. That's the primary purpose of having police and courts in the first place. (Punishment for its own sake is a distant secondary goal). Yours is a minority view, and not one I feel a need to seriously engage with.
...I didn't say that because it was my own view, I said it because that's what justice is at its core, as far as humanity is concerned. Notice how we call the system surrounding law enforcement the "justice system." It's not enough to simply minimize incidences of crime. The perpetrators must pay what they owe in suffering. That is the only way the victims and the public will be satisfied. Why do you think capital punishment continues to be legal in so many states, despite the fact that it does nothing to reduce crime or reduce costs?
And who would be more zealous in that belief than those who willingly join law enforcement? They didn't sign up for this job just to be another cog in the machine. They signed up because our society is filled with scum that need to be punished. They want control over society, their own lives, and the lives of others. What do you think happens when you rob them of that control? You erase the sole benefit of being in this line of work. Why would they continue to actually do their job, especially when they keep getting paid anyways? The hounds will not work unless they are fed.
So you're some type of anarchist? Not interested in continuing this discussion, but thanks for engaging.
Recently, I ran into a custom machine translation task I wanted to use AI for: seventeenth century French to modern French. (French to English, etc.is well-served by existing machine translation products).
Here's an example:
Princesse héréditaire a bien jmpatience de sauoir si
Königsmarck est arivé hereusement il sest passé bien des
choses que Princesse héréditaire écrit sur le feuillet qui
est tout blanc ie ne peus me consoler d'avoir si tost perdu
Königsmarck labsence en paroist mille fois plus cruelle
ie suis abatue a ne pouuoir me soutenir l'exes des plaisirs
et la douleur de ne plus uoir ce que j'aime me mette en
cét estat quil est cruel de se séparer de uous uous estes le
plus aimable de tous les homme plus on uous uoit plus
on uous descouure de charme que ie suis heureuse d'estre
aimée de vous et que ie connois bien tout mon bonheur
tout ma félicité
This is from a letter to the Comte Königsmarck.
If you know French at all, you'll realise this predates the spelling reforms of the mid eighteenth century: i/j used differently; u/v used differently; y with diaresis where we'd use an i; estre for être, etc. And on top of being from the late seventeenth century, the author can't spell. It's usually obvious how you would modernise it, but this just cries out for "come on AI, show me what this would look like in modern French so I don't have to struggle readfing it.
I am told several native speakers of French found this particular writers style to be really funny; personally, I find it just annoying to read...
Back in the dark ages (2020), I tried to create a modern day English to 1600s English "translator." I thought i would just scrape Shakespeare and the King James Bible and it would be simple. Needless to say, I spent weeks trying to get a parallel corpus and had only the final 2 days of class to train the model. "Could you email me that file" -> "Thy thy thy thy thy ..." Glad these guys are doing it much better!
I was surprised to learn that Native Americans voted overwhelmingly for Trump. Did a little research, found an answer that gave me a surprising amount of hope.
https://jakeorielly.substack.com/p/humility-as-an-antidote-to-despair
What kind of hope does this give you, aside from the prospect that Gorsuch will continue to rule in favor of tribes in cases that come across his desk?
It was great news. It was terrible news. We had elected a savior who would lead us to paradise; we had elected a Hitler who would bring us hell on earth. It would be a new golden age; it would be the last election, and even now the knives were being sharpened to impale the innocent. The people had shown their wisdom and their will to see through the tricks of liars; the people had shown their gullibility and would Miss Him Yet. We had skated past a hole in the ice; we were even now sinking beyond resuscitation, the light of democracy a fading crack of sun unreachably above. We had grasped at a new vitality and verve to tackle the untackleable; we had fouled beyond foul, scored an own goal, and would be traded if the coach knew what was good for the game.
It was an important day.
Not bad.
"For some reason, Dickens' sequel, 'A Tale of Two Shitties', didn't attain as much critical acclaim, though it did sell really well."
Given that I was WAY off base on how the election would go, do any Trump whisperers on here want to help me out with a prediction?
How likely is the 20% across the board tariff to happen?
I have a couple major projects I'm working on; I'd rather wait to buy materials but if this actually goes through I need a bunch of sheet goods, wire, firebrick, bar etc; some of which I need in order direct from alibaba quantities.
If tariffs actually hit these will all go way up, like how plywood went up 200% the first time and never came back down to earth.
Do I sacrifice my back room to construction/build a lean-to , or is it all the tariff talk hot air?
Market on average tariffs breaking 6% in any quarter in 2025 is at 57% for play money but only 38% for actual money: https://manifold.markets/RichardHanania/trump-impose-large-tariffs-in-first.
20% tariffs would of course be much less likely.
I hope not, but have no predictive power on this.
Tariffs MUST be selective, as all tariffs are protective tariffs, to protect local industries and production. So a blanket tax on imports doesn't make sense unless one wants to alienate one's country from the world. Since it doesn't make sense, I hope Trump is just advancing the idea to make people cheer, and won't implement it.
It may make sense to impose tariffs on things like steel, even if other countries can produce the same or better quality cheaper, because we must not rely exclusively on other countries for something as fundamental as steel. Optional things, like specific foods, make poor targets for tariffs, because people don't NEED them; if bananas were no longer available, people would eat local fruits.
> Tariffs MUST be selective, as all tariffs are protective tariffs
Why? Why can't tariffs just be for revenue? Or worst case, national security? If there's any use of tariffs that are bad, it's using them for protectionism!
I'm generally opposed to tariffs for protectionism. But if you said 20% tariff across the board, up to but not exceeding the tariff that the country imposes on our product, and as a replacement for the income tax, then 100% sign me up.
Also I'm warming up to the idea of using tariffs not to protect jobs, but for fairness in laws that internalize externalities. For example, adverting a situation where e.g. meat prices go up because we prohibit antibiotics in cattle, so we just import meat from countries without such a law. That is, not necessarily to protect jobs, but to protect our laws.
So is it really the case that tariffs must be selective?
In what case is a tariff NOT a protective tariff? The only case I can see is if your country doesn't produce any of the product for which the tariff applies, which makes it effectively a tax on your own citizens.
If you impose, say, a 10% tariff on widgets, then widgets get more expensive to buy for the consumer. That means higher expenses, which is less income for businesses that must pay the tariff. Or it is a tax on your own citizens, controlling the price making it higher (if your country imports all of its widgets) or it protects domestic widget pricing, making them relatively cheaper and thus making foreign widget providers sell fewer of them.
If your country has a 50% tariff, but imports all of its widgets, then domestic widget production ought to be significantly profitable to start with, and could become competitive even when the tariff goes away.
So if you try to replace the income tax with tariffs, domestic producers will take more of the market, and your income will be less than projected.
The US imported about $3.8 trillion in 2023. It took in about $2.2 trillion in revenue, of which almost all came from individual and corporate income taxes, and payroll taxes. A 20% tariff, even if nothing changed, wouldn't cover the lost income.
Finally, I don't understand your example on meat prices going up. If we prohibit antibiotics in cattle, that should be for a policy reason because we have discovered the antibiotics are bad, and getting around it by importing antibiotic meat products from countries that allow it would then be poisoning your people. Either imports need to comply with your laws, or your country should not import from them. Though we seem to make an exception for labor, in that we allow products to be imported which have components of slave labor...
> In what case is a tariff NOT a protective tariff?
I gave you several examples of tariffs besides protective tariffs. You can have a tariff for raising revenue. You can have a tariff for fairness. Just because some job sector sees increased employment doesn't mean that's the purpose of the tariff. That doesn't even mean it's the best way to describe it. You could plausibly have a tariff that is purely punitive due to the amount of money it's removing from the economy.
But also I object to your framing. If all tariffs are protective, then the term "protective tariff" is redundant. If that's really what you think then we're obviously talking past each other.
> If you impose, say, a 10% tariff on widgets, then widgets get more expensive to buy for the consumer. That means higher expenses,
By itself yes, tariffs reduce consumption (shifts the supply curve to the left), but I was proposing a tariff that entirely replaces the income tax. Individual taxes may shape the economy,and change the makeup of who pays the taxes, but at the end of the day they don't actually increase or decrease the total amount taxed. Government spending determines total taxation, by which I mean all the ways that government can reduce the share of goods and services otherwise available for purchase: by direct taxation, debt (which comes out of the private sector and increases interest rates), or by inflation (an increase in prices from the time you get paid to the time you purchase a product).
> importing antibiotic meat products from countries that allow it would then be poisoning your people
No, by the time the meat is sold the antibiotic meat is identical to domestic meat. The purpose of banning antibiotics is to avoid forming drug-resistant bacteria, which makes this a classic collective action problem, it only works if everyone observes it. Another example is greenhouse gases. We can ban CO2 all we want, but that's not going to make any measurable difference compared to China.
> Though we seem to make an exception for labor, in that we allow products to be imported which have components of slave labor...
I'm much less concerned about this. Most of what we call "sweatshops" are actually highly sought after jobs in many countries. In many places the only alternative is grueling, outdoor manual labor, or sex work. Sweatshops are actually a great example of comparative advantage in labor markets that we can benefit from.
A tariff isn't protective by definition. It's protective in function. You may implement a tariff for any of the reasons you say, but it will end up having a protective component unless your country doesn't produce that good at all.
"I was proposing a tariff that entirely replaces the income tax."
Unless you want to impose a tariff of upwards of 50% across the board, the income tax won't be replaced by it. And the tariff would only start at the replacement amount, as it would have to increase to account for decreasing imports due to higher prices.
> It's protective in function.
Ok fine, it's fair to say "almost all tariffs are protective of some industry" but I don't think that's the same thing as saying "a protective tariff".
I still disagree with your framing "protective in function" because this depends on the industry and nature of the tariff. The issue with tariffs is not "do we want protection or not" but "what is it protecting and who is it harming". It's not always clear who it's helping, but an arbitrary tariff is almost always harmful to an arbitrary person, even if only a tiny amount.
> Unless you want to impose a tariff of upwards of 50% across the board, the income tax won't be replaced by it.
Sure, there's a whole lot more that goes into this, obviously.
Looks like the last tariff increase was proposed in May and went into effect in September, so you should have four months' warning if they move forward on it in January.
Wood is heavy and takes up a lot of space, so a lot of the price is in transport and thus most production is semi-local. Prices are also very correlated with fuel prices, which are generally lower during R administrations and most is produced in the US now anyway. Tariffs with Canada would hurt, but I think that less likely than most other countries.
Trump likes to propose stuff like this as a negotiating tactic, so he can threaten foreign countries to get better trade deals. But Trump is a high variance kind of guy, who knows if he'll go through with the tariffs or not.
There will be a lot of analyses and post-mortems in the coming weeks (now there's an overused sentence...) but forget policies and issues and candidates and demographic coalitions for a moment. I'd like to suggest that everyone should update on the following structural facts:
1. Voters are actually quite empirically-minded. They will primarily consider what has actually happened, under each administration, not what is being promised or theorised to happen. While this obviously isn't always rational, it's something that is both often rational and also a fact about the way people think. No amount of talk was ever going to change the fact that nothing catastrophic happened during Trump's first term*, and that both economic and safety conditions clearly worsened under Biden-Harris (not to mention the state of the world). You can't gaslight people away from their own perceptions. When are elites going to learn this?
2. Whining about "bothsidesism" doesn't, fucking, work, unless the thing you're accusing the other side of is actually entirely absent on your side. If your candidate has never lied, then "both sides lie" can be dismissed; if your candidate has also lied, but just not *quite* as much, it can't. It's amazing how much the Democrats have relied on "oh sure the thing we're condemning the Rs for we've also done, but ackshually it was not *exactly* the same, therefore we're fine." Trying to overturn the 2016 election with a faithless EC wasn't exactly the same as trying to overturn the 2020 by refusing to certify (how? they're both exploiting technical loopholes to completely invalidate democracy). Official policies tolerating crime, and ignoring illegal immigration, aren't the same as ignoring Trump's fraud conviction (I don't even know the justification for this one). The capitol riots weren't the same as the BLM riots (even though the latter caused far more damage, because...). As we saw yesterday, no one's buying it.
3. People don't forget what you've done in the past, especially if you never paid for it. The things the left did in 2020, most obviously the riots but also the tech censorship of anti-Biden information, and lab leak evidence, and many other such things. I think the Ds thought that since they got away with it at the time, and still won in 2020 because it was overshadowed by other things (or, you know, because free discussion of it was being suppressed) that they could pretend it never happened and no one would remember. And that they could even go on and on about the Republican January riots and somehow think voters wouldn't remember the June ones and would somehow take them seriously. The past will catch up with you. The cowards who stood by while cities burned because it was politically difficult to criticise the rioters signed away their credibility, the trust of the people that they would do the right thing, and their right to ever use the words "safety", "non-violence" or "democracy" ever again.
That's just what I can think of right now.
*Well except the pandemic, which he mishandled and was rightly voted out for, just as the Ds are being voted out for mishandling the border and public safety. Importantly, almost none of the fear-mongering about Trump is based on the thing he actually did: mishandle an external catastrophe. Maybe they should have tried that...
>Trying to overturn the 2016 election with a faithless EC wasn't exactly the same as trying to overturn the 2020 by refusing to certify (how? they're both exploiting technical loopholes to completely invalidate democracy).
1. Trump's fradulent electors are being charged by their respective states and some have even been convicted already. That's because there was no technical legal loophole, it's illegal to falsify electoral votes on behalf of a private candidate. Not a single state governor, AG, legislature, or whatever other official political party approved Trump's fradulent electors.
2. No Democratic official directed the 2016 faithless electors. Trump personally directed his campaign officials and personally phone called numerous state representatives and private actors to pressure them into falsifying electoral votes and accepting the fradulent ones over the state certified ones.
3. Multiple states already have laws that invalidate faithless electoral votes. The ones that haven't outlawed them see defection from the popular vote as a legitimate way to run their elections, in line with the original reasoning for establishing the electoral college system.
4. The faithless electors that broke their state's laws were fined and accepted the legal punishment. Trump argued in court that he should have complete criminal immunity for any actions he took as President.
Nearly everything else in your comment is also hilariously wrong, it's a shame you keep trying to epistemically pollute these comments by doing 0 research and blindly regurgitating propaganda that can be disspelled just by copying and pasting any of your claims into google.
I was rather amused to see the Matt Yglesias post-mortem (stop doing dumb radical stuff and appeal to moderates) juxtaposed with the Freddie DeBoer post-mortem (the Ds gotta give the far left a reason to vote for them).
Yeah, the Democrats are going to have to do some kind of soul searching on that question. For electoral purposes, I think they can thread the needle on this (emphasis on "can" not "will") by dropping the most off putting culture war stuff while still retaining some fairly distinct leftist positions. That likely means trans gets thrown under the bus and a significant drop of racial resentment politics. They'll also have to be smarter about their economic platforms or at least how they're sold. Rent control is apparently popular in polls but makes the actual problem of high rents far worse. That's hard to work out, but they can avoid the whole problem if they can find a way to get more housing built in cities.
Interestingly, this whole situation has a strong parallel in the 2012 Republican autopsy. In order for the Romney-type Republicans to do better, they needed to expand their base and cause fewer people to hate them. This seems roughly equivalent to what Matt Y is saying now - turn down the temperature and be more centrist. What actually happened was a political realignment with anti-immigration (very popular but neither party previously did anything about it) being at the forefront - the direct opposite of one of the 2012 autopsy recommendations.
FDB is suggesting something more akin to pushing a realignment. Drop the centrist stuff and go for popular items that are outside of the Democrat platform now. If they would do that, the Democrats would likely be fighting for the working class again, rather than accidentally ceding that whole population to populist Republicans. They would have to repudiate a lot of their own elites to do this, the same way the Republican elites frequently became Never-Trumpers, even so far as actively campaigning for Harris. If both parties are pursuing the working classes again, then it'll be interesting to see where the elite go.
I don't think trans people have to be thrown under the bus at all. No one's going to balk at "treat them like (slightly strange) human beings". Most people will balk at "treat them like second class citizens". Various things will follow from this, such as giving them the same job discrimination protections as anyone else, marriage protections, and estate settlement. (I honestly can't imagine any of this ever having come up, though perhaps I missed it for all the other hoopla.)
The parts that I know people got upset over were transwomen in women's sports, and parental notification for minors thinking about gender change medical treatments. There's also outrage over being cancelled by this or that company for saying something that was declared offensive by trans standards, but I don't believe the law has a role to play there in either direction.
I guess I should be more specific about which trans issues would be dropped. Pronouns (i.e. requiring others to use preferred pronouns) I would also add to your list.
I wouldn't expect the left to drop "treat them like (slightly strange) human beings" as a general and acceptable stance.
For the vast majority of voters it seems clear that Point 1 is the only one that mattered.
The lesson for Democrats is "try not to be President during a time of massive global inflation, because it doesn't matter what you do in response to it, people will just be mad anyway." I know immigration was a clear #2 in this election, and I'd be curious to do a time-travel A/B test to see if it would have changed things, but my guess is 'no'.
I do agree with you on Point 2 that the D's attack lines just didn't have the juice they hoped for. I think this is less because "Ds have their own weaknesses here" and more because "nobody gives a shit because they have low standards for their politicians as long as they personally like them."
I think "nobody gives a shit because they have low standards for their politicians as long as they personally like them." is broadly correct, but I think it's a learned behavior. Other than maybe Carter, I don't know that I can name a US president since at least Ike (maybe I just don't know him very well) that didn't lie about important matters. Call it what you will, but we've consistently had politicians that intentionally or negligently misled us about various things in order to push the public in their desired direction.
Hillary Clinton was a pretty famous liar, so for her to complain about Trump's lies felt disingenuous at best. It left open the need for a discussion about the types of lies each told - Trump's braggadocio verses Hillary's lawyerly deception.
I wish there was a "trump won, discuss" open thread
I appreciate the cooling off period actually. Should make for more level-headed discussion whenever Scott gets to his post-mortem
I took Monkyyy's comment as a request for a single thread for that discussion, so that people who preferred the cool-off period could collapse that thread and be done.
To satisfy your condition, the thing to do would be to politely ask everyone to honor a cooling off period (whether or not there's a single thread later).
To all the people who were saying "both sides are undermining democracy" before the election: Please note that the Democrats lost an election and they did *not* immediately start a media blitz to convince people there was widespread voter fraud, nor did they file a series of doomed-to-fail lawsuits that pretended that tiny procedural irregularities were actually a vast conspiracy to steal the election.
This is a normal thing that happens all the time, but after 2020 it's not something you should take for granted.
Meanwhile, on Twitter sommmmmebody was already preparing sommmmething, just in case:
https://www-rnd-de.translate.goog/digital/us-wahl-2024-musks-plattform-x-schlaegt-an-wahltag-fast-nur-pro-trump-inhalte-vor-Q4H3TUWBSZH5NBCMOFTKOTTNQI.html?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp
The democratic party nominee was appointed by the incumbent, who had the right to do because of a joke of a primary that no one seriously believes was a fair election. She was not chosen by any sort of democratic process.
So, are you arguing that no President before 1910 was chosen democratically? Because that's when the first presidential primaries were held - before that nominees were simply chosen by the parties internally.
Whether you choose to have a primary, a caucus, or no vote at all is an internal party decision. The fact that I as a Democrat didn't get consulted on the choice of Harris, is no more a violation of my rights than the fact that I as a Democrat didn't get consulted about nominating Trump as the Republican candidate.
(Although a world where only jungle primaries are allowed, to maximize people's ability to choose the candidates for the election, does sound like an interesting concept.)
Seems like a tradeoff to me, either way; no unmitigated positives.
As you say, parties used a different method before primaries. And there were endless variations anyone can see by reading through all the presidential election articles on WP. Even the Libertarian Party uses a not-obviously-democratic method to settle on a nominee.
One method I'd like to see some day would be a jungle primary with instant runoff voting. Arrow notwithstanding, such a system might tell us more than it conceals.
"Please note that the Democrats lost an election and they did *not* immediately start a media blitz to convince people there was widespread voter fraud"
No, they started a media blitz to convince everyone that the result was illegitimate "because Russia", Just Asking Questions about the security of voting machines, using the phrase "voter suppression" at every opportunity, calling for the Electoral College to appoint the loser as president, having said loser officially concede but then spend years calling her loss "illegimitate", and insisting more times than you could ever count that even though they lost according to the rules, they didn't *really* lose because the rules should have been different!
Yes, that was all in 2016, not now, but people haven't fucking forgotten it and the memory-holing and gaslighting and "when *we* undermine democracy it's COMPLETELY different" has to fucking stop.
Other than that, I agree with you. People should accept the result of an election, the right's reaction to 2020 was disgraceful, and it was significantly worse than the left's reaction to 2016. On the other hand, the left defected *first* from these democratic norms, even if to a much lesser extent, and I think people underestimate the significance of the first defection: it all but guarantees that the other side will respond even worse. And also, although there was a difference in degree, there was no difference in kind: both sides had large sections that refused to accept the legitimacy of their loss, and were willing to use any means including violence to resist the democratic outcome.
Upshot: shame on both side's partisans, and on all who defended or enabled them, and on all who try to rewrite history for them. Thankfully, this is the first election in three cycles where the candidate who pulled ahead early in the counting, the candidate who won the popular vote, and the election winner were all the same, so hopefully there should be more acceptance of democracy this time. Both those things *shouldn't* matter for legitimacy, but recent history has shown they do.
This is way too hard into both-sides-ism. "The electoral college sucks" has been a recurring complaint for decades, so have complaints about how "election security" laws often seem aimed at suppressing Democratic votes in particular. I think most of the 2016 complaints were within the bounds of normal political discourse. The only part of this I agree on is the faithless electors thing - I think it was both a dumb idea and an undemocratic one.
(Also, in the case of voter suppression, how are the people passing the suppressive laws not the ones firing the first shot?)
> Thankfully, this is the first election in three cycles where the candidate who pulled ahead early in the counting, the candidate who won the popular vote, and the election winner were all the same
If you want to make sure that the candidate who won the popular vote is also the election winner, then don't yell at the people who complain about the electoral college!
> I think most of the 2016 complaints were within the bounds of normal political discourse.
The 2016 discourse was way worse than 2020 discourse.
We know for a fact the Obama campaign spied on other politicians.
e.g. Angela Merkel: https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/03/politics/germany-media-spying-obama-administration/index.html
The Clinton campaign MANUFACTURED false claims to get the FBI to investigate the Trump campaign, an argument which is very lengthy but I will direct you here: https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/509002-more-willful-blindness-by-the-media-on-spying-by-obama-administration/
In 2020, numerous officials (mostly Democrat) broke election laws in numerous states. So far this has not been ruled on because very few people have standing to challenge this in court: https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/texas-v-pennsylvania/
When Trump doesn't concede the election, it's because it wouldn't be fair to concede when election officials broke the law in ways that almost uniformly disadvantage you. When he forms a legal argument to this effect, his lawyer gets charged with conspiracy.
When Clinton says the election was "stolen" and "Trump is illegitimate" and manufactures evidence to get her opponent investigated, how is that "politics as usual"? It's another case of a dozen of Democrats accusing Trump of doing the bad things that they're actually doing.
> "The electoral college sucks" has been a recurring complaint for decades
And it's a bad complaint. The electoral college is a game and if Trump were playing the popular vote game in 2016 he would have campaigned up and down California and New York and won the popular vote. But that's not the rules of the game and so that's not the game he played. Somehow Democrats haven't figured out that California disenfranchises Republican voters, though they have it in their power to make it not be that way. They could at the very least allocate votes based on congressional district like Nebraska and Maine. But they don't.
Elements of the Obama executive branch worked in tandem with the Clinton campaign to spread knowingly false information (particularly the Steele Dossier) in order to undermine the incoming Trump campaign and were able to secure FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign through this process (which then led to three years of intense investigations intended to undermine Trump and prevent him from exercising his constitutional powers).
I don't know if there's a way to objectively compare how bad that is compared to January 6. You probably wouldn't get partisans on either side to agree to a metric.
But I do know that both are them are *very* bad. Does it matter if one is worse than the other when both are this bad?
I would note that the consequences for the FBI intentionally lying to the FISA court were... uh, they had to promise not to do it again. Compare that to what happened to the people involved in J6. Or the Trump staffers charged with lying to the FBI, if you think that's a more fair example.
Sure, but that point is downstream of agreeing that both are bad and neither should happen. If we can agree that both are bad, then we can talk about fixing the situation for the future. Neither side is going to agree to "your side did a bad thing and you should be punished" without seeing fairness applied. That's true even if the blue team's soldiers got off easy for previous infractions.
> Thankfully, this is the first election in three cycles where the candidate who pulled ahead early in the counting, the candidate who won the popular vote, and the election winner were all the same, so hopefully there should be more acceptance of democracy this time. Both those things shouldn't matter for legitimacy, but recent history has shown they do.
This.
Since everyone else is posting their top-level election responses I just want to remind everyone that it doesn't matter who wins or loses, the important thing is that both candidates had a good time.
Seriously though, I feel like my friend has just broken up with his girlfriend and gone back to his old girlfriend, and now for some reason the dumped girlfriend is going to spend the next four years bitching at *me* about it all.
The election has elected, and the room temperature IQ mass has spoken.
I, of course, will (probably!) be fine.
I'm white, I'm male, I own my own house, and I'm fairly wealthy; enough so I might actually edge into whatever tax cuts are coming.
I'll be even more fine if the Trump and Vance both die somehow and someone who isn't a fucking mercantilist gets the big chair, but if prices go up by 20% I'll be OK.
I do admit that I want to see the full Trump this time. War with Iran, collapse of the social safety net, social security revoked, 60% tariff on our main partner, the whole shebang.
I wanna see the proles and the olds who voted for the dude get everything they wanted. I wanna see some dudes dieing on the street, wondering why they don't get their government check and their government dialysis anymore. Perhaps a trans hamas communist mexican haitian took it?
This is bad, of course, and actually it would be great of the morons were right, the entire profession of economics was wrong, and everything is fine.
I will try to restrain my worst impulses and not wicca style manifest a curse or some shit.
My worry is that actions Trump takes won't manifest as negative until 10 years later. Ie, he cuts some of the funding sources for SS (taxes on tips, on SS payouts), that reduces SS solvency timeline from, say, 2036 to 2032, and seniors start to struggle in the presidency of... AOC, or Taylor Swift, or Ivanka, or something.
And then who will get the blame? Not trump!
I understand the general feeling of "Trump will mess something important up" but your specific list seems mostly wrong.
Like, he's not going to get rid of Social Security. He likes being popular, and knows that would be unpopular. It's something he's explicitly said he wouldn't do, despite his opponents saying otherwise.
He's also not going to war with Iran. He fired Bolton over that topic, because Bolton wanted to get into war.
I don't want to criticize people for disliking Trump, and have plenty to say against him as well, but it's unhelpful in a wide variety of ways (including your sanity) to believe things that you think Trump will do that are just wrong.
I dunno. Trump might not want to cut SS, but he certainly wants to defund it wherever he can; and his hangers on definitely want to eliminate social security and cut federal healthcare. I'll give you this one though.
The Iran thing is just false though. He isn't gonna declare war on anybody, but he played stupid brinksman games throughout his term with Iran, he is vastly more likely to force them to force us to go to war by doing something stupid.
Maybe I've just missed it, but do you have quotes or examples of his leadership team or campaign saying anything about cutting SS or Medicare? Some Republicans want to, some for very good reasons (i.e. we're on track for SS to become insolvent if we don't do something), but that's neither Trump nor his team.
When Biden sent carriers to the Red Sea to bomb Houthi rebels, was that brinkmanship? Or the various times he (or Obama, Bush, and Clinton) launched missiles and drones at various opponents? From all accounts, Trump seems to have done less of that than any president in the last 30-40+ years. If your opinion is that all of them were also engaged in brinkmanship, we can probably agree. But then, why the specific worry about Trump? Harris would have been doing the same.
I think Social Security should go away, but not in a stupid way. When I realized how it worked, perhaps 30 years ago, I thought a good plan would have been to phase it out, such that people who are 25 would pay (smaller and smaller amounts) to keep it going, until it gets phased out in 30-40 years. When I came up with this plan, I thought 2030 would be a good time to end it, which is about when I expected to reach retirement age, which means I would have paid into it and received no payment out.
This may not be a viable plan, since the government can change significantly over 30-40 years. But I think Social Security is fundamentally flawed, in that one group is receiving benefit from a different group that pays for the benefit, and so should go away. A mistake, once made, cannot be undone in the past, but can be mitigated or erased by future actions.
Maybe Scott should just repost "I can stand everyone except the outgroup" every election.
It could be a tradition. Rationalist Feast of the Ascension.
It would help, probably.
I know I'm catastrophizing, but then again last time this dude was in power a lot of bad shit happened.
On the other hand, there was a slight case of global pandemic.
On the third hand, all the neocon/neolib guys he had around to run things are gone this time.
On the fourth hand, I hate those guys.
On the fifth hand, war with Iran would be really really funny.
And on the sixth hand, if it goes really badly again, there are midterms in two years and even the least policy brained culture warrior will have to recognize reality he said, realizing it wasn't true even as he typed it out.
So who's to say? Maybe it's fine, and maybe I can get some laughs out of it if it isn't.
I've got no idea why you'd think war with Iran is more likely under Trump, who has run as a peacenik, than under Harris, who campaigned with the Cheneys.
There's plenty to criticise Trump for, but this one doesn't feel high on the list.
He sashimi'd a major figure of their government, and wanted to bomb Tehran.
Dude is not a peacnik, he just likes Putin.
"Trump ran as a peacenik" is news to me. I saw lots of his supporters here talking about how Biden made us weak and Trump is going to Get Tough With Iran and China.
Peace through strength.
When he started out, he was Mr. Loose Cannon. "What's the point of nukes if you don't use 'em?" was a quote I recall. I also recall the counter: there's value to someone who looks wild enough to press the button if the opponents have all learned to call any bluff short of that.
And then, after 2020, Trump supporters would point out that he tried to withdraw from Syria and began drawdown in Afghanistan, and didn't get into any new wars. (Some argued moving the US Israeli embassy to Jerusalem was provocative, as was the drone strike of an Iranian terrorist, but no war was in fact triggered by either.)
I wouldn't call this "peacenik", though, before I called it "intimidating the riff raff into silence", which is indeed closer to "Get Tough".
Sam Kriss wrote such an awesome essay about the Democrat loss:
I Told You So
https://samkriss.substack.com/p/i-told-you-so
> One of my most foundational political beliefs is that while the winner in an election doesn’t usually deserve to win, the loser always deserves to lose. I can’t think of anyone who deserved to lose more than Kamala Harris.
That truly deserves the label "jeremiad".
It reads like a far-from-center leftist who wants to blame someone for losing the election. If he truly thought Harris was going to lose, then he ought to have posted something similar to this BEFORE the election, bemoaning that the Democrats are giving away the store, "and this is how and why".
Kriss is a wannabe Mencken: all the smug contempt, but only about half the talent. (To be fair, that's still a reasonable amount of talent.)
Any particular essay of Mencken you recommend? I know I've heard the name, not sure if I've read anything from him.
While it's perhaps not as Kriss-like as many others, I guess my favorite would be his takedown of Veblen: https://jasonzweig.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Mencken-on-Veblen.pdf
Hmm, I think I don't have enough context to engage with that essay, talking of quite a few people I don't know. Aesthetically, I also prefer Kriss, but that is highly subjective of course.
I thought this is a "Harris lost because she didn't adopt my policy preferences" but I wasn't sure what the policy preferences were going to be until I read it.
It's actually about the extreme nothingness of Kamala and about how we've learned nothing in a decade of dealing with Trump.
Kamala was weak but what Democratic candidate would have been better?
Any Democratic swing- or purple-state governor would probably have been better. They, like Kamala, would have needed more than just a couple months of campaigning, but they'd have an actual track record of winning elections and running a government, they'd have proven themselves able to attract moderate Republican-leaning voters, and they wouldn't be as tied to nationally unpopular far-left policies than Harris.
And that last is maybe not really fair to Harris, but it is nonetheless a fact that, with the vice-presidency such an underwhelmingly low-visibility post, people had to form much of their image of Kamala from A: her time as a California AG and B: California's general track record of far-left nuttiness that voters outside of California don't follow in enough detail to know which parts are the fault of which politicians. A purple-state governor wouldn't have that sort of image problem, because if they did they wouldn't be a purple-state governor.
Harris would have also had to come to grips with her 2019 presidential campaign promises, which were extremely far to the left, and her (fairly brief) senate voting record of the same. Given the baggage of coming from California while she's also trying to find a lane in the 2020 primaries, I don't know that she had a choice while maintaining relevancy. That said, it made a pivot to the center or right seem extremely disingenuous and unlikely to succeed.
I guess that means I agree with you about a purple state governor. Coming from California seems like a pretty hard sell to the nation at large. Newsom I think understands this, as he started vetoing some progressive legislation around the time he was thinking about running for president.
I don't know. It seems that you never find out which candidates will actually work well under a national spotlight until primary season starts. Candidates who seem strong on paper often turn out to be terrible, while obscure names often turn out to perform a lot better than expected.
That's the value of the primary system, and why the Dems were very dumb to skip it this time around.
I agree it was a huge mistake for the Dems to treat Biden like a normal incumbent and not primary him. That mistake may have made all the difference.
OTOH, Trump won bigly last night. Hard to imagine any Democrat beating him, particularly if the vote was mostly about "Trump is better for the economy than Dems", which it seems to have been.
To be fair, not primarying the current incumbent has been a bi-partisan tradition since Taft in 1912, and before that, Pierce. (To date, the only US President to *not* get the nomination despite seeking it.) If you want the incumbent out, you either talk to him quietly behind the scenes (e.g. Grant), or you just go third party and end up as a spoiler (Teddy, Thurmond, Wallace, Perot). Both parties learned a lesson that's hard to ignore.
To be even fairer, the Dems caught a bad break. No one plans when to go into mental decline. Biden was a risk in 2020; I think the DNC hoped he'd hold together until 2028, and if not, you want him to drop out early in 2024 or late 2023, not maybe kinda sorta hold together until it's too late to call up the bench for primary candidates.
OTOH, we can probably hold them responsible for making Biden their man in 2020 despite the risk, and then for going out of their way to push "sharp as a tack!" until the debate.
I think they backed themselves into a corner with Biden. 2020 couldn't really have happened any other way, with their goal of keeping Bernie out of the general (which could be argued either way but was clearly their goal). No one else could have taken the mantle like Biden did. Once he's in, there's no good moment to remove him if he wants to stay in. Forcing a contested primary is really bad for morale and is a huge vote of no confidence in Biden, which could backfire badly if he still wins it.
I think it's fair for all of us to blame Biden and the people closest to him (including Harris) for not admitting his decline earlier. The 25th Amendment exists for a reason, but even well short of that someone should have done the right thing and made it obvious to the voting public long before the summer of the election on national TV.
1968, LBJ
you shouldn't be shocked by the election results, and yet I am.
I guess I thought people were less stupid than this.
Welp.
I know people make this joke every election, but I think it's for real this time. I have one other nation I can get a passport for, I'll see if I can get a permanent visa for the EU also, I'm pretty sure I can in at least one country.
Ciao, loosers.
I suggest moving illegally to Mexico. Turnabout is fair play.
Awesome. Go somewhere you'll be happy.
Seriously, I moved from Cali to Texas. There's some regrets but overall it is very, very worth it. There's a real, measurable improvement to my quality of life.
...You can't run forever. Why do you think what's happening here will be isolated to this country?
> I guess I thought people were less stupid than this.
Usually, when reality doesn't conform to our beliefs, it's wise to update ones beliefs and then take appropriate action. Blaming is the opposite of this--its a way to go deeper into some delusion.
I have an EU passport but I'm also a US citizen and I'll be staying and figuring how I can help. It seems like the most effective option
You don't get to come to Mars with us