site banner
PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12832 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 1, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

7
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

(https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/03/biden-tells-governors-he-got-a-medical-check-up-00166579)

Over a dozen democratic governors have convinced Joe Biden to take a medical test (undoubtedly a cognitive test) to see if he can continue as a candidate. This would seem to me to be a pretty strong signal that they are pretty much pushing the Big Guy overboard. Especially since it’s now public that Joe is seen by his own party as in need of a cognitive test. They would not allow this to be public unless they were pretty sure they wanted him out because, again it’s almost impossible to walk back “your own governors don’t think you can do it,” and the really huge doubts it raises about not only candidate Biden but President Biden. He cannot get away from those questions.

My questions are 1) do you think they’ll wait for the convention, and 2) are we looking at a 25th amendment situation here?

I take the exact opposite message from it: after the debate a strong party would not be taking anything on Biden's word. A strong party wouldn't be waiting for some hail Mary interview or strategy change.

A strong party would simply defenestrate him because it's quite clear what the problem is. It has been clear in polling for months now - the public has made it clear this is a huge issue for them. It's been clear in the reporting since the debate. Biden essentially already got all of the leeway he could expect - for months! - at this point.

What is the point of elites if they can't just pull the cord?

All of this seems like a weak party moving from the denial to the bargaining stage. Now it's clear they've gone too far and it's just too gosh-darned hard to remove Biden (especially with Kamala on maneuvers, making it clear they're not jumping her) they're listening and hoping something happens, someone else does it, when they should be telling Biden.

Of course, they don't have the time to get to acceptance, so Biden likely runs out the clock.

I don't think it was a cognitive test, as per your link anyway:

Biden’s remark, according to a person familiar with the president’s schedule, was in reference to a short checkup by a White House physician in the days following the debate due to lingering symptoms from his cold. The exam, that person added, was brief and did not include any major tests.

I also don't think your framing that the governors pressured Biden into it is correct:

President Joe Biden on Wednesday evening told more than 20 Democratic governors in a private meeting that he underwent a medical checkup after last week’s debate and is fine, according to three people with knowledge of the discussion.

The general optics of the meeting, at least as per the Politico article, read much less like governors getting together to influence Biden and much more like Biden summoning a group of governors to influence them and assess/reinforce their loyalty.

Over a dozen democratic governors have convinced Joe Biden to take a medical test (undoubtedly a cognitive test) to see if he can continue as a candidate.

Maybe they did but the article doesn't seem to say that.

President Joe Biden on Wednesday evening told more than 20 Democratic governors in a private meeting that he underwent a medical checkup after last week’s debate and is fine, according to three people with knowledge of the discussion.

...

Biden’s remark, according to a person familiar with the president’s schedule, was in reference to a short checkup by a White House physician in the days following the debate due to lingering symptoms from his cold. The exam, that person added, was brief and did not include any major tests.

It sounds like he had a medical test anyway and then told the governors about it after the fact. I don't see anything indicating that the governors told him to do it.

My questions are 1) do you think they’ll wait for the convention, and 2) are we looking at a 25th amendment situation here?

3- How much danger are we in that if the 25A's not invoked by October, Xi Jinping sees an opportunity to invade Taiwan? He (or rather his intelligence apparatus) watches the US news too, after all. And yes, the 25A would almost certainly be invoked if that happened (section 4, if Biden refused to enact section 3), but every hour counts in the opening stages of that.

  1. Wait for the convention to do what? Take the cognitive test? Move to replace Biden as the nominee?

  2. If Biden wins, he will probably select the most loyal cabinet possible, as Trump attempted to do when he was in office.

What I think Biden should do, if he really wants to set the record straight, is address the nation directly from the White House about his health, being completely transparent about whatever is going on with him. I don't think we have the full picture of the situation, and everything we hear about it is either in a news article, an opinionated tweet or a one-line quote. We need to hear about what's going on, no holds barres, direct from the source.

Would anyone really believe him if he took a test and said “I’m fine” in a televised speech? He’s still officially running for the position. And an address from the White House which doesn’t allow for any questions is not going to be nearly as reassuring as people think it would. A speech can be recorded when Biden is at his most able to be replayed in the evening. It can be heavily edited to hide speech flubs, pauses, and word salads. Hell, the only reason we detected the problem in the debate is because it was an unscripted event that happened after 4pm where he couldn’t simply memorize and deliver a speech to a camera with the option of cutting anything that doesn’t sound right. Anything short of that wouldn’t convince most people.

If he’s really okay, I would expect a press conference with live Q&A held in prime time for at least half an hour. It would prove to people that he can actually think on his feet, answer questions, and understand the questions asked. Holding such an event after 4 would show that he’s not sundowning as has been reported. If he can’t do that (and keep in mind he hasn’t done a lot of press conferences thus far in his presidency) then there’s no reason to believe that he’s capable no matter what spin they put on it.

And as I said before, I think the fact that the Democratic Party is breaking ranks on Biden’s cognitive decline is very telling as they would not be doing this if they expect him to be able to continue. They’re basically own-goaling with every such rumor and statement. If he does continue, these attacks will be front and center in Trump’s campaign. In fact, these rumors are so damaging that basically if the republicans are smart, they’ll just campaign by playing these messages and doing nothing else.

Over a dozen democratic governors have convinced Joe Biden to take a medical test (undoubtedly a cognitive test) to see if he can continue as a candidate.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. Biden has made it a point to release his physical check results each year, but does not include a cognitive exam in those results. If he agreed to a test, it's probably just another one where the report will be "is in good physical health for a man of his age," and is silent on mental acuity.

I didn’t see that in the link. Am I just groggy this morning or is it the wrong link?

After the debate disaster, everyone's been talking about how it will affect the election and if he'll drop out. I want to ask something else: How fucked are we if any serious foreign policy crises kick off in the next 6 months? There's much to criticize in our current handling of the situations in Ukraine and Gaza, but at least they're not going totally sideways. Are those going ~neutral because they started before 'Ole Joe finally lost it? Was he already out of it then but the deep state had good plans in advance? Or is his current cabinet effectively making all the decisions as they go?

Do you think four more years of Joe as a figure head will play out roughly how the past 4 did in terms of foreign policy competence? Or do you think his decline is going to make things worse?

Before this debate I thought it'd be more of the same. At this point I wouldn't trust him to have a friendly chat with an allied leader. At this point the ship of state is effectively on auto pilot. Or drifting on momentum. How long it's been like this is an open question.

I think it would be entirely appropriate to remove him with the 25th Amendment at this point. The fact that no normies are talking about that scares me. Is everyone just quietly OK with not having anyone in charge? I think that while it would be best for the Republic, a removal would do even more electoral damage to the Dems than even the chaos of a hotswap. That's why we're not going to see it.

Do you think in the next 6 months it's possible the situation worsens enough that the 25th Amendment actually gets used? I think if there's another public meltdown like this around a crisis, it could get to that point. Call it 5% odds of removal without an international crisis, 20% with.

(First post, feedback appreciated)

I think a lot of people overestimate how much power the US president has to dictate what happens everywhere else in the world. Trump himself did it during the debate - no, he can't just end the war in Ukraine with a phone call. But yes, a non compos mentis president (which I am not sure Biden is, but clearly he's heading there) is cause for concern. I'm more worried about China and Taiwan than Gaza or Ukraine.

I think removing him under the 25th might happen if he really does become unable to perform his duties to the point that they can't even keep him on task long enough to sign papers. Obviously if (big if) he wins reelection, they just have Harris step in at that point. No more worries about how "electable" she is. I think the Democrats will use every means available to avoid invocation of the 25th before the election. Even if he escaped his handlers and wandered naked into a press conference, they could still probably pass it off as "an episode" and keep him from being formally removed from office.

Keep in mind there's precedent for the president effectively not really being the one running things. It's obviously not how things are supposed to work, Constitutionally, but assuming he doesn't have to, say, manage a war, they can drag it out for a while.

Neil Gaiman having sexual misconduct allegations alleged against him.

https://x.com/bordigay/status/1808522316017815898

Fascinating for the usual 'she was a defenseless underaged 21 year old' tract and 'we had somewhat bad sex at some point' allegations. Reading between the lines it feels clear that Gaiman is a serial polyamorist and atleast a moderate sexpest (by modern standards), but surprising timing to go for him now.

There's been some minor backlash-backlash on grounds of the accusers being TERFs and therefore unworthy of being in the online sphere, and there's nothing explicitly criminal about the accused actions but will be interesting to see how it impacts ongoing projects like Sandman and Good Omens.

Liveblog of the podcast with the details from someone skeptical about the allegations (she's only done the part with the first accuser so far):

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1808514093323587854.html

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1808604076650660238.html

The highlights would be the Whatsapp messages. Like this one after the day when Neil Gaiman allegedly sexually assaulted her on her first day as a nanny:

She sends Neil some what's-app messages about childcare and then adds, "Thank you for a lovely, lovely night. Wow. Kiss."

And this one a few days later after the weekend when he allegedly "anally penetrates her, she says, without asking and without using a condom and she says he uses butter as a lubricant.":

Hello darling. I've had a crazy weekend. To getting bitten by a spider, to ridiculously crazy and rough and kind of amazing sex.

Or these messages to Neil, also from shortly after the alleged anal rape:

Now they're telling us her What's App message the next day: "Do you feel like a rain bath? smiley emoji"

The next day: "I am consumed by thoughts of you, the things you will do to me, I'm so hungry. What a terrible creature you've turned me into. I think you need to give me a huge spanking very soon. I'm fucking desperate for my master." That's from Scarlett to Neil.

If I've got it right, they met on Friday, and she sent that to him on Monday. He says she was into "mild BDSM," I guess describing that kind of message. She says he groomed her (over a weekend?)

Or these after he messaged her about her supposedly telling people he raped her and she planned to MeToo him:

I feel like bawling my eyes out. I would never Me Too you. I don't where that came from, and I have told Amanda that even though it began questionably, eventually it was undoubtedly consensual and I enjoyed it. Heart is pounding too.

Or the general description of the year of messages following her meeting Neil, a relationship that supposedly started with him sexually assaulting her on the first day they met and anally raping her the second day:

The journalists say that the What's App message they have from Scarlett's phone cover her entire relationship with Neil Gaiman and go back and forth for an entire year afterwards. ?!?!!?!

"The messages are friendly, often affectionate or supportive."

Journalist: "It feels like a very different story, not so black and white, like we're viewing the offense from the other end of the telescope." They're presuming there is an offense to view.

Journalist: "It really throws me, because when I read the What's App, Scarlett comes over to me as besotted."

Other journalist: "Messages like these appear to be evidence of consent in black and white."

In summary:

The journalists ask experts "How can we reconcile her What's Apps to Neil Gaiman with her account to us of what happened?" That is not the right question to ask. The right question to ask is, "Is she telling the truth?"

They seem to be working from the assumption that her account is truthful and then trying to justify why the evidence doesn't fit it.

And this one a few days later after the weekend when he allegedly "anally penetrates her, she says, without asking and without using a condom and she says he uses butter as a lubricant.":

The only known case in the universe in which butter was used as an anal lube was in last tango in paris. And him going to the kitchen to take the butter stick out and applying it to one's asshole gives plenty of opportunity to ask "what the fuck are you doing".

Or on your first day in the job at some point you could raise an eyebrow at the invitation to bathe naked with your new boss, as well.

Gotta say, this isn't a good look from him. It sounds like he didn't do anything illegal but he sure did take advantage of a young, inexperienced woman who was both star-struck from meeting a rich celebrity and also working for him. She had very little sexual experience and he was instantly leading her into some sort of intense sub/dom thing.

This is the sort of thing where I think "me too" actually makes sense. He doesn't deserve any legal repurcussions but I'm OK with trashing his public reputation over this. Especially since it apparently wasn't just this one woman but at least 14 according to his wife (herself a famous feminist celebrity).

you know how the internet likes to take old-fashioned words and re-use them? Words like "lewd" and "grinch" and "ruse?" I wish we could do that with "cad." It's the perfect word for the modern age. A guy who didn't actually do anything illegal but still behaved immorally towards women.

I can't help but disagree here. Lots of 21-year-olds like kinky sex. Not to mention with a celebrity! WhT a bonus! Where's the immorality?

I would be more than happy to slot him in with Joss Whedon as examples for the rule: "The more a male celebrity is feted for his feminism, the more likely he is to have done skeevy things with young women."

This is the sort of thing where I think "me too" actually makes sense.

It would make sense if we had any semblance of coherence in the rules governing the relations between the sexes, but you can't do this "all bets are off, only consent counts" free-for-all, bash people for "taking advantage of" inexperienced women, as you're declaring anyone claiming there are differences between men and women to be sexist.

who is "you?" me? I didn't make the rules. No one does, it's a massive freewheeling anarchy. Let's just look on the bright side and be happy that it has some positive benefits, even if overall I hate feminism and anything related to it.

Besides the reporter who gets a pelt, who is this benefiting? Who gains in the long run?

Many high status men will continue to sleep with young women regardless , many aren't as public-facing and woke as Gaiman so have less to fear from this particular form of reactive punishment. (Andrew Huberman just had a recent case of "hell hath no fury" journalism and he just...ignored it) Many women like this will probably continue playing these games, come to regret it and they'll never get even that brief moment of vindication when stories like this going viral before having to go back to their anonymous lives.

It certainly makes no difference to the great mass of humanity if a rockstar discovers that 19 y/o groupie isn't as easy a target as they assumed.

This is akin to saying that there're "positive benefits" if you burn someone's mother-in-law as a witch and she turned out to be absolutely awful at PTA meetings. It's not a benefit, it's a coincidence. If it was a benefit, it wouldn't be anarchy.

who is "you?" me? I didn't make the rules. No one does, it's a massive freewheeling anarchy.

I don't think this is true. There are people who make the rules, though I accept you're not one of them. But you do seem to be supporting the rules, so I am addressing you.

Let's just look on the bright side and be happy that it has some positive benefits

It doesn't. The incoherence of the rules is causing massive damage to society, and I haven't seen any upside to it.

I've dated in these sort of fanfiction-enthused circles, and whilst I agree it's something a lot of the girls with somewhat grow out of there's a lot of.. uh... tangled desires towards the Fifty Shades of Grey stuff that comes with limited romantic experience, exposure to older men and especially with people in some sort of fandom roles.

I agree he was cringe and should have known better, but I also feel that this is clearly a matter of retroactively revoked consent a decade later. I wouldn't want my daughter hanging out with him, but this is standard horny nerd stuff to me.

Also he and his wife had an open relationship and there's texts of them communicating about their various affairs.

It sounds like you more-or-less agree with me? Except I'd go beyond "cringe" and say he was an asshole. Also I'm not concerned about his wife, but I do care about the string of women who consent and then end up badly emotionally hurt.

I agree, but like on the other hand I feel like 'weird dom-sub stuff with angsty older male artiste' is the female equivalent of falling in love with a stripper and nobody's cancelling strippers for taking advantage of impressionable young men.

"Stripper" is almost as low-status a title as it's possible to have, there's nothing left to cancel.

Honestly I've got a close female friend who's prettymuch an exemplar of this, and even prone to fandom-adjacent 'whirlwind romances'.

Everything is either 110 or 0, and 'hell hath no fury like a woman scorned'

I will never ever ever forgive the people who got The Expanse character Alex killed off because the actor who played him had the audacity to sleep with some woman at a convention who was attracted to him.

Good. The more rapidly these people get woken up the better. Maybe we’ll get some good art out of it.

I thought that was worse than Trevor Bauer, who is my current litmus test for sexual misconduct allegations (true, embarrassing, and she wanted it). Am I wrong?

His death was literally the worst moment on the show. He died from G, in a clearly post production scene. What?

I hope this takes off so they go back and tear through all his 90s work hunting for "problematic" content.
It's a rich vein even putting aside the avant garde kid sex stuff, and it would be a good reminder to artists that the rewards of collaboration are treachery and betrayal the second you're more useful as a punching bag than an "accomplice"

It's a rich vein even putting aside the avant garde kid sex stuff

Are you thinking of Lost Girls?

I mean I'd be willing to bet that he's a very horny man who has probably been improper (especially if measured through the TurboVictorian lens of 2024 cancel culture) to women at some point. I'd also be willing to bet that nothing he's done has crossed the line of light coercion and taking advantage of fangirls.

TurboVictorian

You know, we have a new monarch on the throne, so it seems like the time to coin a new adjective here, but "Charlesian" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

Although Elizabeth II doesn't really have a good unique one either that I've come across.

Third Caroline Period

🎶 Sweet Caroline 🎺 🎺 🎺 Good times never seemed so good 🎵

Today I learned. Thanks!

Nothing crossing the line in reality, sure, but I’m not sure that there probably isn’t anything else to whatever transgressive-shit he was into a few decades ago. The issue is that all ‘artists’ who were ever interested in those things in the past that have eventually cultivated some cultic fan club of ever-appreciative groupies buried whatever they could and ignored the rest, hence why Steve Albini was heralded as some wholesome sweet-hearted genius when he died recently despite all the evil trash he put out at the height of the punk scene.

Hmm… I mostly only recognize his name as one of those authors that for some reason is discussed a relatively fair amount in the nerdsphere but for whom’s writing I could never get into, like a minor case of Stephen King.

However, that’s not necessarily a knock upon him, as it’s tough for me to sit through a book.

That being said, obligatory “she was only 21, you sick fuck.”

its_all_so_tiresome.jpg

Ukraine/Russia and Israel/Palestine have nothing upon the forever war that is the #Fightfor35

The usual Schrodinger’s Feminism: Young women are Strong and Indendepent #GirlBoss Queens that should be listened to, yet vulnerable damsels in distress that can be groomed at a moment’s notice like children.

I read Coraline and enjoyed it quite a lot, although my understanding is it's something of an outlier in his oeuvre.

#Fightfor35

Can you expand on this hashtag?

Raising the age of consent to 35, one of the funnier troll ops of the last few years. There is or was a website for it.

The original was Fight for 25, a campaign to “End adult grooming. Raise the age of consent for women to 25.”

However, it got quickly rendered obsolete by stories such as this, where a reknown cancer researcher was Canceled for grooming a 29 year-old researcher and seasoned carousel rider:

Knouse, Sabatini remembers, had ongoing flings with men who she referred to with nicknames like “anesthesiologist fuck buddy,” “finance bro,” and “physics professor,” and she wanted to keep it that way.

Reality outjerking satire once again.

Chuds and Noticers, being the kind, Decent Persons they are—and wanting to join hands with progressives—eventually started a grassroots campaign for 35 as a more appriopriate age of consent for women to protect them from the manipulations of men and their pedophilic shittiness.

The fight for 25. Linked archive because it's registration lapsed.

Sandman was good. I liked Good Omens (probably I liked the Terry Pratchett parts more than the Neil Gaiman parts). Most of the other stuff of his I've read has been "meh," and struck me as a bit on the pretentious "Look at me, an Artist, making Art" side.

As far as people digging through his "problematic" material, he got some flack even back in the 90s for the character of Wanda, a transwoman, who was positively portrayed, but at one point couldn't participate in a magic ritual because the moon goddess or something didn't recognize her as a woman. (Transphobic goddesses!)

I did kind of notice that in American Gods, the main character's wife dies while blowing another guy in a moving vehicle. Like, that's the sort of narrative detail that is, um, a choice. And it was not the first or last time I noticed that Gaiman makes these sorts of choices in his stories, so him turning out to be a little skeevy doesn't surprise me. That said, I admit to being rather skeptical of these "abuse" allegations (which sound to me a lot like "Never meet your heroes and definitely you shouldn't fuck them"), and finding considerable irony in that it seems to be the TERF brigade who dragged them out and is currently boosting them most heavily on social media (because Gaiman has been quite vocal about being pro-trans rights).

Hmm… I mostly only recognize his name as one of those authors that for some reason is discussed a relatively fair amount in the nerdsphere but for whom’s writing I could never get into, like a minor case of Stephen King.

However, that’s not necessarily a knock upon him, as it’s tough for me to sit through a book.

Me too. My feeling about Gaiman is that he has a very uh... "feminine" approach to writing. Highly emotional, lots of beautiful imagery, very little focus on what the hell is actually going on. There seems to be a lot of scenes like "woah is me, I'm trapped by the cosmic horror of a malevolent demon and there's nothing, absolutely nothing I can do to save my soul from this beast!"

...So yes I can see how that kind of guy would attract a lot of teenage female fans and potentially end up in some sketchy situations with them.

For conventional writing, Coraline and Good Omens (collaboration with Terry Pratchett) are some of the easier ones to get into, maybe followed by MirrorMask and American Gods. Much of his influence is elsewhere, though: he's been massive part of the comic sphere. Pretty much every worthwhile Endless (aka Sandman) comic and a majority of the not-awful Constantine ones are his work or related to one of his works, and that's had downstream effects on a lot of writing and tabletop spaces (eg Exalted and especially Nobilis/Chuubo's).

On the flip side, his long presence in the tumblr sphere as one of the few authors that Just Shows Up in fandom mentions was always unusual, as was his pronounced defense of Alan Moore's Lost Girls; the man had been holding a lightning pole up in the rain for a while.

I've been playing Sunless Skies again after playing Sunless Sea for the first time and deducing it's just an inferior early version of Skies, really, and the Gaiman influence shows strongly there too.

I played Sunless Sea some time after it came out, and found it epochal.

Sunless Skies was fine, I guess. Better than 'a house of many doors', which was also ok.

But going from "you and your crew are living on some steam boat on a subterranean ocean" to "you and your crew are living on a steam locomotive driving through the void without tracks" somehow broke my suspension of disbelief.

Good Omens is Pratchett book, at least 51% if not more like 80%. I'm not sure what Gaiman ever brought to the book. The four horseman are already in Discworld, although I notice they left out Mr Soak the milkman.

This is praise. Pratchett is one of the best to ever write and the high quality of his prodigious output is astounding.

If you don't like fantasy, the Long World with Baxter is fantastic.

But now we're in the Friday Fun thread, What Are You Reading.

I felt that you could usually tell whether you were reading a Pratchett section or a Gaiman section by the tone of the writing.

Pratchett is essentially a satirist and a humourist, and nothing really terrible ever happens to the people in the Discworld books. Even when people do suffer (like the murdered dwarves in Thud!) it happens offscreen or is skimmed over.

Whereas Gaiman is a dark fantasy / horror writer. When something really grim happens, like the telemarketers being eaten alive by worms or people ripping each other to shreds because War is in the room I'm pretty sure that's Gaiman.

So there's a musical on Broadway, called Suffs, about the Women's Suffrage Movement in the US in the 1910s. It won a couple Tony's last month (https://playbill.com/article/shaina-taub-wins-best-original-score-at-2024-tony-awards-for-suffs). Alas, even the stage is not immune from impromptu protests, as a far-left group of demonstrators interrupted the show and unfurled a banner for approximately 20 seconds before being escorted out. (https://apnews.com/article/suffs-disrupted-broadway-whitewash-05c6df87a220c253b66807f312948a80).

The group's website (https://www.cancelsuffs.com) alleges that the show is whitewashing the history of the suffrage movement. They point out two historical main characters Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt excluded Black women from the NWP and believe white supremacy would be strengthened by the movement. They also bring up Woodrow Wilson's efforts to segregate the federal government and his screening of The Birth of a Nation while the suffrage movement was still ongoing. They also suggest that the 19th Amendment opened the door to women-centered factions of the KKK.

Has anyone here seen the musical? What are everyone's thoughts about the depiction of controversial historical events as entertainment? Is there any merit to this far-left group's position?

No clue about this particular musical, and I hate the idea of a group of random protestors interrupting an artistic show. But, I kind of get it- the early suffragettes would be a complicated group for modern leftists:

  • feminism! Women fighting for their rights! Yay!
  • But it's entirely white women. Mostly upper class. Probably they said some things that would be considered racist by today's standards. boo.
  • Also they were highly religious. As I understand it, voting rights was almost a secondary issue for them- what they really wanted was prohibition. Bring their husbands home from the pub and send them to church!
  • very harsh on any sort of open display of sexuality. No doubt they'd be super against homesexuality, if they even mentioned it at all.

All in all a weird, interesting group that doesn't fit neatly into the modern political spectrum.

But, I kind of get it- the early suffragettes would be a complicated group for modern leftists:

feminism! Women fighting for their rights! Yay! But it's entirely white women. Mostly upper class. Probably they said some things that would be considered racist by today's standards. boo. Also they were highly religious. As I understand it, voting rights was almost a secondary issue for them- what they really wanted was prohibition. Bring their husbands home from the pub and send them to church! very harsh on any sort of open display of sexuality. No doubt they'd be super against homesexuality, if they even mentioned it at all.

All of this is why I question the appropriateness of telling the story in the format of a musical.

Our daughters' daughters will adore us / and they'll sing in grateful chorus / "well done, sister suffragettes!"

But not for too many generations after that, alas.

I'm reminded of the statue of Ulysses S. Grant being pulled down and can only conclude that, if social progress continues to operate as it has, eventually the progressives of today will be swept into the same historical bin as their adversaries. Give it a century and "CancelSuffs" themselves will have their moral improvement over the suffragettes judged insignificant.

One might ask whether one could or should be okay with that state of affairs, but I think even if one is, it's going too fast. Being so quick to tear down societal heroes (I do think a century for this is quick) is to live in a perpetual revolutionary terror, where instead of building a new and stable and hopefully improved status quo, the heroes of yesterday get guillotined tomorrow. Try to shorten the moral arc of history too much by bending it too sharply and it may spiral out of control.

Give it a century and "CancelSuffs" themselves will have their moral improvement over the suffragettes judged insignificant.

You don't need to wait a century, we're doing it live. Canceling the Cancellers is half of Cancel Culture's schtick - there's a top level post on Neil Gaiman getting MeTooed in this very thread, for example.

Try to shorten the moral arc of history too much by bending it too sharply and it may spiral out of control.

A few years ago I would have pushed back, as the capricious nature of the mob somehow felt like it was an advantage for the movement, but these days it does feel like they're running out of manager, so here's hoping for the spiraling out of control.

I expect them to yield to this pressure eventually. No progressive, left-wing, or liberal movement seem to really have any leverage they ever seem willing or able to use against attacks from the left. I don't see how they could fight back without painting a big target on their back.

I'll take that bet. I think they mostly ignore it and the musical continues its planned run without modification.

I think it depends. The fatal weakness is any mention of "inclusivity" as a core value; once you do that you might as well roll over and present your belly because there is no way to defend yourself against someone with greater oppression points.

I imagine the motive here is to further deny the white public from admiring their supremacy in any way. It is a reminder that you can’t have white heroes or stories, not in the foundation of the Republic (what we saw a few years ago) and not even in the misguided women’s rights movement, and certainly not in pseudohistorical entertainment (Bridgerton, Hamilton). You have to let them know that every white achievement is stained in blood and evilness. So to have a musical — the culture of the wealthy liberal base — extol heroic white women is a faux pas that must be balanced by blackening their reputation. Expect an update story and cast in future productions. At least to me this genuinely has the most predictive power for which things are criticized and altered. It’s not actually about purity spiraling, as we know (for instance) that MLK was a pro-rape plagiarist [2]. There won’t seriously be change to the connotation of MLK because of this.

It's egodeath for a lot of minority interests to have to essentially acknowledge that the majority of equal rights concessions came from Western Whites essentially opting to concede them

Now explain why progressive whites - who actually possess the bulk of the power in situations like this - indulge it.

This is "indulgence" indeed. Land acknowledgements without giving the land back. Bitterly complaining about historical whites without giving up their good job for a non-white person.

These people pay no personal cost for indulging in this. They gain social cachet if anything.

Bitterly complaining about historical whites without giving up their good job for a non-white person.

Yes, this is the standard explanation but I don't think it can fully explain the situation.

White people do lose out on positions. Most progressive whites aren't at the top of the stack, able to ride out issues like AA and so on until retirement. Even those that are can suffer from cancellation when they violate a new rule.

Because we don't care about shit like this. There are yacht parties to go to.

I think a little bit of the MLK discussion stems from a desire to use something like the legal "fruit of the poisoned tree" idea, since many of the bad things we know about him were, though in many (not all) cases true, were also the result of a racist and politically-motivated smear campaign by Hoover's FBI. I'm a little sympathetic. The other angle, of course, is that hero worship never went away, it just changed targets for a little bit.

The balance of how much as a society we "allow" hero worship is still a major point of debate. Personally, I feel we've swung too far on the hate and criticize side of things, to the point where some of my friends are saying things like we shouldn't teach patriotism too much in schools because it could be dangerous or is dishonest or something. I think that since it's generally harder to build up than it is to tear down, maybe we should lean a little bit towards letting hero worship alone. Or even, in the case of public schooling, both deliberately start with positive indoctrination, and then deliberately add some critical nuance a little later. Neither of those two sequential steps are optional, it doesn't work without both. For adults where it might be "too late", the question is more like what's worse, cynicism or idolatry? I actually don't know. I think we could use some passionately wrong people in today's society more than we need cynical nothings.

In this case, given how little the general public knows about the suffrage movement, I think it's probably completely and totally fine to go all-in on a production even if it lacks context or is exclusionary or whatever it is. The lower the knowledge, the more tolerance for simplistic narratives, that's kind of just how we learn, for better or worse.

IMO heroes are not quite the issue. The Left has heroes, they are just continually written into and out of the political story. Their heroes come and go like musical productions. Obama was a hero, now he is not, and AOC is a hero for those who “subscribe” to her but one day she won’t be. What the Left doesn’t have is any permanent hero, definitely not any old white ones from the white tradition. I mean… Marx? I don’t know. The parasocial relationship that young left Americans have with Hasanabi is pretty indicative of “hero worship” — watching for hours, imitating, buying merch, as an example.

My apolitical opinion on hero worship is that it’s an essential biological feature of humans that will never go away, because it’s shared social imitation. Ideally we should appreciate the specific virtues of specific heroes and not care about about the rest, and possess a large repertoire of heroes to pull from. For a culture, it’s optimal to have a number of heroes as points of reference in conversation and as stories for the young and as “self-checkups” for our own conduct — that’s kind of what the medieval virtues were all about.

Hmm, that's really interesting. So you think having a common set of hero cultural touchstones is nice, and that we should attempt to deliberately cultivate a set of heroes with some very well-exemplified virtues? Does that mean, for example, that you'd like to see MLK there, but only if he were accompanied by a good and (diverse?) set of other people in a larger pantheon, rather than getting special and rare privilege?

Absolutely + absolutely; the third question is bit complicated for me — if he did demonstrate a virtue closest to perfection (there’s no one better at universally important skill x) and if I subscribed to the idea of a “general American” pantheon then yes. IMO this is the best use of our instinct to like heroes. Flaws in heroes can then help us to remember the inevitable flaws of all humans (our own Achilles’ Heel). If I could extend the ideal further for no reason, the “special and rare” virtue of the pantheon is social humility, the great untold heroic quality behind every civilization. People love this quality, eg the internet loved when the owner of Arizona Iced Tea talked about purposefully keeping the price a dollar. Now maybe the owner lacks the virtue of prudence but that’s another digression.

So to have a musical — the culture of the wealthy liberal base — extol heroic white women is a faux pas that must be balanced by blackening their reputation.

I think there is some merit to the opinion that a Broadway musical is not an appropriate venue to tell such controversial stories. It's am entertainment product, first and foremost. It exists to make money before anything else. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to put such a show on as a truly non-fictional retelling at a museum or non-profit cultural center, where they have staff that can evaluate the script, characters and cast, sets, music etc. to be period correct and sensitive to context.

I'm taking a history of modern (well, post-1600) theater class right now, so come back in a week or two and I'll have something more specific to say about this! My initial impression of what we've talked about so far in class is that telling controversial stories was in fact a central component of at least one modern theater movement, but overall, the history of Broadway seems to be more rooted in American melodrama more than anything else, of which your opinion is a fairly typical representation. So that's a fair take. But more broadly, "making money" and "entertainment first" are not general theatrical principles, and they tend to be more American-specific than universal. What form and content these kind of performing arts have taken and included is usually more closely linked with what society is going through.

For example, there's this fascinating history in England of a few successive movements and genres that reflect the anxieties, restrictions, and feelings of the era. You had Puritans take over for a while who absolutely and passionately loathed theater, and then when the monarchy was kinda-sorta restored and theater was legal again, you had a few interesting things happen. One, you had people who were tired of the super-strict puritan stuff as well as civil war, they wanted happy endings. So several Shakespeare plays were rewritten to have happy endings (Lear survives, Romeo and Juliet are together, etc). They also let women start to act, and "restoration comedy" ended up getting quite raunchy. Then, Enlightenment ideas start to become all the rage. You had this result in some "comedy of manners" and related genres, where plays started reflecting things like "marriage is a social construct/contract". Also, you get "sentimental comedy" as a sort of backlash against the excesses of restoration comedy, where they really weren't very funny but were often set up as a means of preaching moral lessons to people to make better choices. But wait! Enlightenment ideas started to lead to some crazy revolutions and unrest, paired with the beginnings of industrialization and urbanization. Cue Romanticism! Now we're back to emotion over intellect, instinct over reason, basically angst about Enlightenment ideas that seemingly made a mess of things. Shakespeare makes another comeback, plots grow more fantastical again, and this dovetails with advancements in the spectacle and technical side of the stage and increasing popularity.

It is only within that context of changing ideas of "why should I watch theater" and "who should watch theater" (which are extensive and beyond the brief overview here) that soon melodrama was born. In fact what would later become musicals first became popular because, bizarrely, in England for a long time only two (and a third in the summer) theater companies were licensed to do theater, and other play performances were illegal. Yet this only applied to spoken text, so if they threw in some songs here and there, it no longer counted as a banned play, but instead something, uh totally different. Yes your honor, totally different. As another side-note, technically an entire field called "dramaturgy" exists and is exactly what you describe where scripts, cast, sets, etc. are evaluated in context! These people are often attached to theater companies directly, though there are also some in academia, etc. How much they are employed or utilized, well this depends. However, they exist already within the theater community, so this idea that "oh that's the nonprofit realm, get away from my entertainment" is not very accurate.

I think there is some merit to the opinion that a Broadway musical is not an appropriate venue to tell such controversial stories.

This is that ship, sailing away at high speed.

To me, that's an exception to the rule. Hamilton has a diverse cast and a unique style of music (and written by a non-caucasian man) that made it extremely marketable.

I don’t quite understand your position here. To summarize, a Broadway musical might not be an appropriate venue for a controversial story, unless the cast and author are non-white, in which case it’s okay because it will make a lot of sales. If the cast and authors are all white, the play should be relegated to a museum, where the story can be told with sensitivity (i.e., told in a way that makes its worst critics happy), regardless of profitability.

You seem to be subtly merging two different criteria (ethical and financial) to judge whether a play is appropriate to perform on Broadway. No one would disagree that an unpopular play shouldn’t be performed on Broadway; the question is whether a financially successful play that upsets leftists should be allowed to be performed. In other words, the question is one of censorship, not popularity.

There's been immense/intense backlash in the decade since, though.

I have no doubt that, like most people in the 19 teens, the suffragettes were racist and often couched their goals in those terms. This doesn’t have much to do with their final goals; in fact I think it rather unfair to judge people who died the better part of a century ago by modern progressive standards, even to the extent(very limited) that modern progressive standards are a good thing to judge anyone by.

With all that being said, my comment is ‘I love when they fight each other’.

Well it sounds like to me, these protestors simply want the appropriate context applied to the show. Was it right to interrupt the show? I'd say no. But to write off their concerns as meritless, I'm not so sure of that.

"The group of hecklers coordinating to veto your speech are merely providing context."

Any demand that a venue provide “appropriate context” is a hostile one. Who is to decide which context is important to include, if not the show’s creators? Would anyone find it reasonable if far-right protestors demanded that any show that denigrated Hitler must include the context that he was a vegetarian, animal-loving artist who worked tirelessly and apparently quite unselfishly in service for his country? Of course not. So why should anyone take these far-left protestors’ similar demands seriously?

"Is there any merit in this far-left group's position" seems like an intentionally loaded question.

Cynically, I note that it used to be conservatives who were eager to play up the racism and eugenicism of early feminists. Now leftists will try to "cancel" anything that doesn't center queer BIPOC or imply that white people might once upon a time have done an admirable thing or two. Even Lin Manuel-Miranda's Hamilton, which recast all the Founding Fathers as black, has not escaped such criticisms.

So sure, what they say about Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt is (I assume) true. Does that mean a musical shouldn't be made about them, or a musical shouldn't be made that makes protagonists out of them instead of dragging them for their white supremacy?

Nowadays, I don't think you could make a movie or musical about George Washington or Thomas Jefferson at all that didn't offer at least some criticism of their status as slaveowners. Even Abraham Lincoln isn't immune - he did, after all, say:

I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races—that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermingling with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which will ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together, there must be the position of superior. I am as much as any other man in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.

Of course there is some historical context to that quote, and evidence that he was moving towards a more egalitarian position when he was assassinated, but as much as I struggle to sympathize with the "cancel suffs" group's argument that history should be presented in full (even given the limits of a musical which can't be expected to cover literally every relevant detail), the problem is that that really isn't their argument. I do not think they are, in good faith, complaining about historical whitewashing and agitating for a more complete and accurate historical presentation. For the same reason I don't credit Holocaust deniers with actually caring about truth and historical accuracy even if they might sometimes have a point about specific historical details. The agenda is something else entirely (in the case of "cancel suffs," I strongly suspect that it's some combination of "How dare a musical about white women win a bunch of awards?" and some theater in-group fighting) and the claims of caring about factual history are a mask.

The agenda is something else entirely (in the case of "cancel suffs," I strongly suspect that it's some combination of "How dare a musical about white women win a bunch of awards?" and some theater in-group fighting) and the claims of caring about factual history are a mask.

My personal read for a lot of these cancellation attacks is that the ultimate motive is freeing up a seat at the table for them or their friends. The protestor is here informing the culprits about their moral failings, which puts them in the position of having superior knowledge and adherence to left wing priorities. Obviously the people being protested have to go, and conveniently enough there are some people right here who know what they did wrong, and can recommend a replacement who won't be so problematic.

Is there any merit to this far-left group's position?

This is challengingly broad. Let's hypothetically grant that they're correct on the historical proposition that women's suffrage was enmeshed somehow with white supremacy, and also grant that white supremacy was necessarily a bad thing.

Then we're left with an interesting question whose shape crops up everywhere - "this good thing is all tangled up with a bad thing. Can we still endorse or celebrate the good thing?"

To which the answer is, in real life, normally "it depends on the balance of good things to bad things". But objects of thought and discussion in daily practical life are kind of naturally bounded in extent - if we're assessing whether a day at the park was a good thing, we're likely only to assess the day in question, and won't trace back the park-day's genesis to several years beforehand.

But in academia or serious thinking, we're unbounded. A thoroughly partisan advocate of American indigenous peoples can rue the Mongols' failure to do to Europe what they did to Baghdad as A Bad Thing - since a powerful Europe was able to come and wipe out indigenous peoples in the Americas a short time later. For such a partisan, the Roman empire is probably on net a dreadful thing.

"Is there any merit to this far-left group's position" then hinges on whether you think the project of de-Europeanising and specifically de-Anglicising the US is a good or bad thing.

Some not-bare links, words, and a Scott watch.

1 a. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prediction-markets-suggest-replacing

First, a Scott post on Biden, debate, and a personal accounting of The Big Reveal. The curtain drawn across the stage to lay bare Biden's cognitive decline for the world to see. This is the common framing and narrative, anyway. He writes:

Many people on Twitter are asking “how could anyone possibly have been stupid enough to not realize that Biden was senile?”

I was that stupid. I didn’t say it openly, because I’m at least smart enough to have a high threshold for giving my opinion on political things I don’t know much about. But I thought it in my heart. So in case the people asking “how could anyone have been that stupid?” actually want an explanation, here’s my former reasoning.

Republicans have been accusing Biden of being senile (and the Democrats of hiding it) for at least five years now. Before the 2020 debates, they were excited that this was when they could finally prove once and for all that Biden was senile. Then Biden did fine, and they retreated to “well he’s senile but”....

Reversed stupidity is not intelligence. Even if liars are saying something for their usual liar reasons, it can still be true. For twenty years, people spread false rumors that Castro was on his deathbed, but this didn’t make Castro immortal. In the same way, I should have figured out that even if I couldn’t trust any particular claim that Biden was senile, the prior for an 81 year old becoming senile was still high.

He then suggests Biden drops out, dropping Kamala as well, and throwing in some "purple-state Governor". Like Scott, this seems rather late in the game to me. There is still plenty of time to the election, as I'm sure the Biden loyalists are also telling themselves, so anything can happen. Who knows, maybe Biden gets a war? Wars are good for incumbents.

1 b. https://eigenrobot.substack.com/p/come-on-man

Eigenrobot, Twitter poaster extraordinaire, has some good thoughts looking at the same theme, but with regards to the media. He lays some groundwork with articles speaking of Biden's potential decline as an elderly gentleman some dating back to 2017.

My tentative conclusion from all of this is just that everyone here was socially or otherwise imprisoned and so prevented from putting two and two together even privately. All of the evidence was plain to see; or at least enough to not be shocked by what happened last Thursday. What was wanting was the capacity to perceive it.

There are some beliefs held for utility, and some load-bearing for survival; if they were to be abandoned, one would have to surrender their convenience, their security, or an identity. These are real costs.

Finishing with something that's been mentioned here many times:

The secret is my God I mean Biden was coming up on eighty years old! Have you ever met or known eighty year olds? Even if they don’t get a diagnosis, even if their minds aren’t totally lost to us, the fact is octogenarians are just in a phase of their lives where they are meaningfully slowing down both mentally and physically.

Biden is old! This reaction with CNN anchors exclaiming, "how could the Whitehouse aides forsake us" is funny. Journalists have gotten worse at their jobs, that's how. There was space and time to talk about Biden's age and its potential impact it may have on the election. All well within the Overton window, even. Some journalists did write about it-- even those in Respectable Publications. That this idea was pushed into right-wing meme territory is an apparent, notable, visible failure for journalists. Not only do they feel lied to, they feel inadequate that they allowed themselves to be lied to. An outrage!

  1. https://youtube.com/watch?v=_sZU0tQkwnQ&t=3382 - Mistake theory strikes again

I listened to this Q&A with Scott and Nate Silver at the allegedly controversial Manifest conference that happened in June. There's some interesting tidbits in there if you're interested in prediction markets, Nate Silver+election models, AI risk, and so on. Perhaps not anything new for your ears that these two haven't written about.

The time stamp shows Scott answering a question about AI and how that may play into the risk of future wars. He first says that wars between great powers have a good chance of going nuclear and that is bad. However you want to define "good chance", fine. Then he goes on to say how it is his impression that "often [wars between great powers happen because] everybody was trying to do brinksmanship and made a mistake".

Scott is answering questions off the cuff in an informal, impromptu format. He's not some foreign policy wonk and neither am I. Brinkmanship is a thing. Some conflicts may escalate to unwanted, outright hostilities due to brinkmanship, political grandstanding, or get accidentally'd into full blown war. My impression is that escalation is usually not a mistake, though. Ukraine is not some exception as Scott suggests.

Escalation can be a proactive, reactive, or provocative measure to induce war. Escalation can be seen as a deterrent by one side, then used as a provocation to the other, sure, but I don't think it's fair to call these things mistakes. They are realities. Over stepping, going a little to far, these things can happen between states as they do people. Maybe he means a war that led to nuclear exchange would be considered a mistake. Which is probably true if it happens.

It's easy to see why the left didn't catch onto Biden's age problem sooner: negative partisanship. Intense polarization clouds everybody's eyes and means neither side is really looking at the evidence in an unbiased way. The Right has been banging the "Biden is senile" drum for a long time now, long before it was persuasive to people outside the conservative information bubble. They'd post something like Biden flubbing numbers or stuttering as "irrefutable proof" that he had dementia, despite Biden having issues with those for his entire political career. When the evidence actually started getting more persuasive, it was still easy enough to ignore since the people most interested in it had been crying wolf for years. Some on the left saw it sooner, but most only really started believing it once it was impossible to deny during the debate.

Of course the Right is going to take a victory lap, but it's pretty silly to see them do this while also ignoring Trump's own cognitive decline. It's nowhere near as advanced as Biden's is, but compare his most recent debate performance to his debates in 2016 and its clear that his brain is slowing down as well. I'd peg the Trump of today roughly where Biden was 4 years ago, i.e. not terrible, but there are definitely worrying signs. He's always had a meandering speaking style, but it's gotten noticeably worse over time. There's funny stuff too, like Trump challenging Biden to a cognitive test while in the next breath forgetting the name of his own doctor. Trump is only 3 years younger than Biden and would be older than Biden is today when he would leave the White House.

When people on the right encounter this opinion, they mirror what the Left's reaction has been for years and say that not only is it utterly ludicrous to think this, but that it's so ridiculous that the person saying it must be a liar engaging in bad faith.

"Republicans might have been right all along, but instead of lingering in that uncomfortable truth, let's consider the ways in which Republicans are still wrong and I am still right."

This is about as dishonest as the “Biden is as sharp as a tack” argument.

No, Republicans were attacking Biden for stuttering or flubbing numbers. It was qualitatively different and much worse. This is just repeating a bad talking point.

Yes Trump is old. So is Bernie, Buffet, and Grassley. They are all very much with it. On the other hand, McConnell or Biden are younger than some of those guys but clearly worse. Is there a risk that Trump falls off a cliff? Sure. But he is much better than Biden was four years ago.

That Eigenrobot post really nails it. I had a relatively tame disagreement with someone who has since deleted their response back on the reddit version a few years ago about this exact scenario, and was noting the markers of early-stage alzheimers back in 2020 due to a member of the extended family who has been going through roughly the same thing at roughly the same pace. I won't claim some sort of magical prognosticating powers, only just being willing to observe publicly available information and not be spun (a childhood stutter that reemerged in his late 70s my stuttering ass.)

But the debate was just too hard to explain away. Beyond the clear aphasia, the vacant expression, the weak and tremulous voice, the physical signs are impossible to ignore. That's not just the first lady helping the president take a single step down off a short stage, but a staffer immediately stepping up to provide a second bit of support. This is the way you treat an 81 year-old man who definitely has a history of falling when unaided, and those falls have not been reported out of the White House at all. I'm not talking stumbles on the stairs to AF1 or tripping over a sandbag at a speech, but the kind of falls that accompany the middle and late stages of alzheimers.

I'm not even mad at Biden, his grasping nursemaid wife, his corrupt family, or the staffers and flunkies who honored the omerta on saying what was really happening. I'm pissed that we went four years without anyone in the media thinking, "Boy, I could really make a name for myself by reporting on how Biden's gait has notably changed within the last 18 months." Or, "It sure is weird that Biden keeps calling himself a Senator or Vice President and doesn't do public appearances at night. I should start digging." The first, second, and third question always seems to be "Will this help Trump/Republicans in any way? If so, better just ignore it."

Republicans, and Trump especially, are not more honest than Democrats. Such is the nature of the species homo politico. Except that Republicans/Trump mostly can't get away with it due to being forced to operate in enemy territory. Democrats, and the liberal portions of the federal machine, on the other hand . . . We just had four years of Trump Russia! Russia! Russia! followed by two years of Covid lies at the same time that the man at the helm of the ship of state was slowly (and then rapidly) turning into a root vegetable. Having a political press, intelligence apparatus, and bureaucratic state that is completely pliant to the will of one political party isn't just bad for the out party, it encourages deep rot in the benefitting party too. Occasionally that rot gets exposed to air.

This just seems like “my outgroup lies” by Scott. There were just sooo many videos and incidents.

His outgroup does lie. Frequently and, sometimes, brazenly. That's politics, baby. It's not so reasonable to assume they are baseless smears to the extent that you're surprised by something closer to the truth given the facts in this case. Like the Hunter laptop story. That was a true story. It was even a believable story. But, it was also a timely political smear, which reasonable people are skeptical of. Folks should not take every claim in political attack ads at face value.

Outright shoving them into the Republican propaganda box isn't doing people like Scott any favors. I would not be surprised if Scott hadn't paid attention to or watched any Biden old clips-- certainly not selectively edited ones posted to pwn libs on X.com.

I believe it was Michael Moynihan of the Fifth Column that said, a couple years ago now, what sold him that Biden's age was a real problem was the distinct omission of it as a topic in media. That late night talk shows didn't make jokes about his boomer moments was evidence itself this was not a concern people were interested in even laughing about. Then again, I'm not sure we'll ever really see a late night talk show scene that sees hosts take D-politicians to task for jokes.

selectively edited ones posted to pwn libs on X.com

I keep hearing about these selectively edited Biden gaffes, but I keep seeing normal videos of Biden having senior moments.

Those are the same thing seen through different eyes, right? If I took a video every time my mother forgot the name of something or why she came into a room, I could absolutely make her look demented. If all you have is a set of videos curated by interest group A, and another set of videos curated by B, your final conclusion is going to have to rely on your pre-existing opinions or some other set of evidence (frequency of videos, or lack of unscripted public appearances). A lot of Ds should have known better, but I can see why people like Scott weren't convinced.

The videos went beyond forgetting a name.

Of course his outgroup lies. But his in group lies a lot too. Including to him. Maybe he wants to revisit his position on the media.

His point with "the media rarely lies" wasn't that the media isn't deceptive. He was using an extremely narrow definition of lie - to deliberately tell a known falsehood as true. I do agree with him that the media rarely does that.

Yet here…they basically did. Not all lies are created equally. When the media directly lie, they seem to lie on the really weighty matters.

I doubt this would violate Scott's position that the media rarely lies. For that to happen, you would need to show that:

  1. The media was saying things like "Biden is incontrovertibly in amazing condition and has no cognitive decline whatsoever"
  2. Many many reputable news outlets would need to say this

1 is necessary for it to be a lie, but as we know, most news outlets wouldn't take a stand quite like that. They'd instead say something like "White House PR team indicates reports of cognitive decline are overstated". There's a few levels of indirection there, that make it hard for us to say that the media themselves were lying. They'd be reporting on what someone else says, and they also wouldn't be saying that he has no cognitive decline, but something far more defensible.

2 is necessary for us to say that the media lies more than rarely. But even if we find some examples where an outlet did something like 1, that wouldn't be enough to say that it's more than "rarely" lying.

It depends on who you classify as the media. See Joe Scarborough’s comments.

NYT also wasn’t very honest on it either.

What did NYT say? I really doubt they'd make factual claims that go beyond reporting what other people say.

What did Joe Scarborough say? Once again, individuals actors or outlets would not be enough to fully falsify Scott's claim. There would be to be many, and then it'd end up being a judgement call about how you define "rarely"

Mods, can we get a mega thread for Biden’s age?

There's not enough posts to justify a megathread. This is the megathread. I can collapse chains easily. Browsing thread and yeah, this could have gone in a pinned comment or something.

there's been considerable concern lately about declining participation in the forum. This is the most political ferment we've seen in a while; why dilute it?

Yes, Republicans have been calling Biden senile for years. But even as early as his inauguration ceremony he was repeating instructions from an earpiece ("salute the marines") instead of following them. I don't object to the earpiece itself here: it's fair enough that for a big event like inauguration you might have someone giving you cues, but he's been wobbly since the start and only gone downhill. There were also a few instances where he appeared very confused about what documents he was signing and when he should sign them, but I can't find the good clips of that online any more.

The Libertarian Party of Colorado has declined to run Chase Oliver, the national Libertarian candidate, and will instead put Robert Kennedy on the ballot. Colorado is solidly blue (screenshot) according to the prediction markets (screenshot), but the polls (screenshot) are showing that Kennedy is hugely popular in the state.

Whether it's Biden, Harris, or door number 3 on the Democratic ticket, I think this has potential to split blue votes and turn my accursed state red for one brief, shining moment.

I think that may actually be The Libertarian Party of Colorado's plan. Kinda refreshing to see a political party actually playing 2D chess for once, instead of Candyland or whatever the hell the Democrats and Republicans are playing.

Edit: updating with screenshots of prediction sites since they might change

They don't really have anything to lose, with two major party candidates that are unpopular, despite people saying they will still vote for one of them.

I mean, didn’t the latest round of polling show that Biden was in a dead heat with Trump in Colorado?

I have not seen that poll; could you link to it? I know New Jersey showed a dead heat recently (amazingly), but from what I've been able to find, Colorado is still firmly in Camp Biden if he and Trump were the only options. I'd love to see something to the contrary.

Libertarians have surprised me as of late with how pragmatic and Leninist they have become. Not the whole of them, but enough of them that they are able to parlay their small stature into a significant political force, which is pretty new.

Getting Trump to show up at the convention, nay, to actually make some symbolic libertarian promises and generally appear sympathetic to their goals is a big deal.

The lolbert faction is still there, which is how Oliver is even the nominee, but from what I understand of the internal politics it's had to rally around a bunch of interest to get this, which may ultimately have just been the secret agenda of the Mises Leninists all along (what with splitting the Democrat vote to get a sympathetic Republican in).

I wonder if this will last, but it may have an outsized effect. A small but well organized LP could do a lot to sway Trump's hypothetical bureaucratic purges in a libertarian direction.

What does "leninist" mean in this context?

The term is a reference to Rothbard and his study of the tactics of the most successful revolutionary of all time.

In this context it means someone who maintains a pragmatic centrism in tactics as opposed to sectarians on one side and opportunists on the other. Someone who like Lenin is willing to embrace flexibility in service of their ultimate cause, which for Rothbard is of course the abolition of the State, without compromising the goal for short term gains or ideological purity.

It means someone who, like Lenin is committed to victory, not process. To ends rather than means. Something very much opposed to what the LP has been for a while.

This to me at least is an uncommon usage of "Leninism". Other spheres use "Leninism" to describe the process of lifting up a cohort of lesser qualified/politically irrelevant people to power as a mechanism of ensuring loyalty. See also "Bioleninism".

Is non-public information leaking into election betting markets?

Prior to the debate, on Predict It, Biden had something like an 85% chance to secure the Democratic nomination. After the debate, his odds fell to around 60%. By last night, it had eroded further to 50%.

Last night the flippening happened. The bottom fell out of Biden shares and went to Kamala. As of this moment, Kamala Harris trades at 51% and Biden is at just 29%.

As far as I can tell nothing has changed since 24 hours ago, so what gives? A few possibilities I can think of:

  1. Someone is manipulating the markets to create a false consensus. I think this is the most likely. Mega-donors will spend billions on this election. A Biden campaign is doomed. Spending a couple million to move markets could have an outsized effect.

  2. Non-public information is leaking. A source high in the Democratic party is talking and his friends are betting.

  3. A whale is making a giant bet. I view this as the least likely because moving the market this much tends to be extremely unprofitable. Without inside info, this would be a very stupid bet.

Edit 1: I wouldn't rule out manipulation, but it does seem there was some public information to move the market.

Edit 2: Michelle Obama is up to 12%, which is the same as Newsom. Normally, the lower percentage bets are not liquid, but 12% rises to the level of "something, not nothing". Michelle Obama solves the Kamala Harris problem. And if we're electing useless figureheads she's better than Biden. But does she even want to run?

Rather than non-public information leaking in, I think this is actually just public information taking a while to leak in. I've been on the record as claiming that Biden was suffering from age-related cognitive decline since this site was on reddit - if you take off the partisan blinkers the decline is obvious, undeniable and easily predicted even without any video evidence of his gaffes.

Yes but it wasn't just 'the debate happened and Biden started plummeting'. There was a bunch of movement against Biden during the event, it largely wound back, and then about 24 hours ago a second far-stronger push of money started happening without any particular headlines to motivate it.

Michelle Obama's random 10-15% position in every market has been a thing since 2020. Some people believe she's waiting to jump out of the proverbial bushes.

I personally think it's a mix of a large whale making a large anti-Biden bet, the market being rather spooked at the moment (Polymarket only took $200k~ approx to move Biden from 60% to 48% due to potential non-public information and a lot of enthusiasm to bet non-Biden candidates for the Dem nominee at the least provocation.

Scott Alexander needed years to realize that yes, Biden is on his path to dementia. Maybe it is just that now more bettors have finally realized what is going on.

With the public information we had strong priors that Biden shows signs of likely dementia and if true, it will be progressing. Recently we saw how much it had progressed. Now we can estimate how much worse Biden will be in 1 month, 2 months, 4 months etc. with quite narrow confidence intervals.

As Anatoly Karlin says – it is all programmed. Previously people just refused to believe these bad news.

Similarly it was with effectiveness of masks in preventing covid. I didn't see any prediction markets but many people wanted to believe them to be effective despite all the evidence. When it was all reviewed and Cochrane review was published many still refused to believe that the evidence for any benefit is non-existent. Politicians are especially resistant to negative scientific findings but eventually they will be forced to accept reality in one way or another.

I’m not convinced that there’s “nothing going on”. The democrats are leaking bits of information about Biden’s mental state, and none of it has been reassuring. And I think that by itself is telling. If they thought he still had a chance, they would not be leaking what they are because there’s no way to back off from “he’s only good between 10 and 4.” Or that he’s not always with it at important meetings like G7. If they weren’t pushing for a change, it doesn’t make sense to leak that your president has dementia this bad.

I think this is what prediction markets are picking up on. If this is what’s being made public, then I don’t think they can actually continue with Biden. Kamala seems a reasonable choice, as she can step in as President and save the day.

The issue with Biden's dementia was revealed by Biden himself 4 years ago. In one response to Trump he revealed that he knows the details of the test used to assess dementia. Apparently he had been evaluated by doctors already then. We just have never been told the results and how they have changed with time.

Leaking this information would reduce uncertainty but essentially it would be the same that we can infer from videos but more precise.

I'd imagine anybody at that level of politics at his age would be subject to a lot of medical screening.

Not that Biden doesn't clearly show signs of pre-dementia, but I'd be surprised if Trump etc hadn't also been screened at some point.

1 and 3 wouldn't work. The bet sizes you're allowed to place are not large enough.

Yeah Polymarket in particular didn't really move on that much money. 200k approx from 60% to 48% Biden.

Admittedly it was on no headlines during US overnight slot

There's been a lot of reporting over the past few days on what Biden and his team and donors and congress are thinking, people in the house calling for him to drop out, and polls continue to coming out clarifying what voters think of Biden's performance. Just today

Dozens of Democratic lawmakers are considering signing a letter demanding President Joe Biden withdraw from the race, a senior party official said, as panic mounts that he’ll cost them control of Congress. Biden is rapidly losing the support of Democratic lawmakers and candidates concerned the 81-year-old’s continued candidacy would lead to a Republican sweep of Washington and an unchecked Donald Trump presidency.

So information is leaking, but it's public information leaking via the media

2, but it's less heirarchal than you're thinking. A chunk of prominent insiders have decided to see if they can push out Biden. They are getting the press to run damaging stories and contacting other Dems to rally support.

So there are a lot of people who know what's going on, it's not just their close friends.

Michelle Obama's name always comes up on these things because she's one of the few prominent people that the Dems could unite behind easily. I don't think she wants it. Her current life involves hanging out with celebrities and the super wealthy who all tell her how awesome she is. Then she gets paid to give talks to people who tell her how awesome she is.

There's nothing in her history that suggests she'd rather go to Michigan and listen to the problems of the hoi polloi. Or that she's particularly interested in having to make decisions about geopolitics.

Michelle Obama's name always comes up on these things because she's one of the few prominent people that the Dems could unite behind easily.

Looking at the "Career" section of her Wikipedia page, while Michelle Obama has been involved in politics plenty, she's never even run for an elected position herself. I really can't see the Democrats going for her, in addition to her being pretty clear about not wanting the job.

Correct, she would be running on ‘Obama’s third term’, not ‘Michelle’s first’.

I mean, obviously, the bigger problem either way is that her life in which she doesn’t run for office is one in which she’s paid to hear about how great she is, and her life in which she does run for office is based on getting insulted by Trump while people call her a tranny and the media pries into minor facets of her personal life for an outside shot at having the most difficult job in the world.

I don't think the Democrats would let a wee thing like qualifications or experience stand in their way. And there is an argument to be made that Barack Obama and his former staff would just run the show anyway.

Obviously, it's not great for our nation when spouses and reality TV stars win office, but the culture war is hot enough that people want victory more than doing the right thing and losing.

The only impediment is her not wanting the job. She now enjoys a sterling reputation that would certainly be tarnished rather quickly if she ran.

Something weird is definitely going on. Looking at the charts on Election Betting odds, Biden's chances went from 36% to 22% on June 28th, the night of the debate. It then stayed relatively constant for several days, before collapsing to <9% on July 3rd, which is very strange. The first drop was obviously the debate performance, but then Biden stayed steady despite a barrage of articles demanding he exit the race, and little public comment from Biden other than that he would "talk with his family" about what to do. Then we have this second drop when, if anything, Biden is receiving some positive news. He's saying he's going to stick around, the barrage of negative articles has mostly stopped, and other Dem leaders are more publicly supporting him.

I've checked with a few of the people I know, and none of them are really saying much has changed, so either this is very private stuff, or it's just an issue with the markets being thinly traded and subject to the whims of the whales.

the markets being thinly traded and subject to the whims of the whales.

The big plunge happened during the middle of the night US-time on not much volume. I think thin liquidity + assumptions of whoever's moving the market having private info has created the current state of affairs.

In my mind it's The Dog That Didn't Bark situation. The backlash hasn't come. Biden hasn't done anything to flex back. People aren't defending Biden very aggressively. A week has come and gone with no organized resistance. That's probably more important than the debate itself.

Compare that time Hillary collapsed at an event and got thrown into her limo like a side of beef. Really bad, but immediately her surrogates (essentially the entire establishment media) were out there fighting it hard and within a few days she was doing appearances where she was shaking it off.

The lack of response might be more indicative than the initial crash.

Compare that time Hillary collapsed at an event and got thrown into her limo like a side of beef. Really bad, but immediately her surrogates (essentially the entire establishment media) were out there fighting it hard and within a few days she was doing appearances where she was shaking it off.

If Biden's debate was a Category 5 Hurricane of a PR storm, Hillary fainting was at best a weak tropical storm. Yeah the optics weren't good but an aging politician fainting in hot, humid weather (presumably over-dressed and maybe a decent coating of makeup) isn't some great disaster as long as it's not a sign of some other problem. Much more of an embarrassment to shove under the rug than a critical failing.

I just checked it to show my friends, it now shows Biden at 45 and Kamala at 37.

So it may have come around again.

Algorithm-triggered Biden flash crash!

My friend who bets on these things bought as many shares as he could (I guess it's not that much) on Biden stepping down by end of day.

Edit: Karine Jean-Pierre is doing a press conference right now. Say's there's been no discussion of suspension of campaign or resignation which I don't believe but seems odd to say if Biden is going to stop down today. Just don't have a press conference.

Him stepping down now creates a bad situation for Harris, it either sets up an open convention or a farcical situation where everyone is voting for him at the convention only for him to accept the nod and have the committee give it to her afterward

His staff will be saying he's not stepping down up to and through the point where he's walking up the podium to resign.

"and went to Kamala." This indicates insider information about insider coordination.

Not necessarily. I've seen multiple commentators assert that Kamala is the only possible alternative. They might be wrong, but it's not unreasonable the betting markets might buy that.

I can’t believe Obama would sign off on Kamala but maybe he just doesn’t care anymore.

I mean, the case for replacing Biden isn’t that a different democrat could win, it’s that a different democrat would do less damage to turnout among people who won’t vote R.

I’m not sure that’s true in the case of Kamala, but it’s not ipso facto impossible.

Depends on whether Kamala does more damage to down ballot races?

If you're gonna lose anyway, why not let her take the hit? It might be better than trying to dislodge her.

I can’t imagine him capstoning his career by stepping over a black woman.

It is her turn after all.

Was Obama ever particularly identity-focused in his politics? Honest question, I didn't pay attention to politics during most of his presidency (and haven't paid much attention to him since then).

Somehow Tea Party Republicans got it in their head that Obama was the anti-Christ, but he both ran for election and governed as a fairly center-left technocrat and leaned on very main-street rhetoric that wasn't too charged. As an example, he didn't support gay marriage until a good chunk into the presidency. He mostly tried to ignore us-vs-them, at least in 2008. He got bogged down a bit into more partisan warfare later in his second term, but frankly I think the Tea Party really did "start it". Hillary at the end was pretty night-and-day culture warry in comparison, though some of the shift in rhetoric was visible for a few years beforehand in some left-wing higher-ed type circles. At least that was my impression.

The "dear colleague" letter and the subsequent title ix witch hunts alone should dispell that belief. How much of that was Obama vs people he empowered in his administration is debatable, but irrelevant.

Identity politics didn't meaningfully exist in 2008. He also governed in extremely capricious ways that were more than "fairly center-left technocrat". If you watched any Fox News at all circa 2009, you would have heard over and over again Obama promising to "fundamentally transform the United States of America" in his campaign stump speeches.

Obama personally might not have given a damn about equity as such, but he filled his administration with people who did: Eric Holder, Valerie Jarrett, Susan Rice. Eric Holder practically enshrined disparate impact at DOJ, which is just equity by another name. Many of the key inciting incidents that made woke morals blow up -- George Zimmerman, Michael Brown -- were made worse by his administration and his personal actions.

We could go down the list all day.

but frankly I think the Tea Party really did "start it".

The Tea Party started as blowback over Obamacare. It really started as spontaneous protests and town hall meetings where constituents were livid over what Obama and Congress wanted to do with healthcare. Eventually, it got co-opted by Republican officials who made it another part of their vendetta against Obama. But it started with Obamacare, a piece of legislation which made American healthcare more expensive and more complicated, which people understood at the time, and pissed them off. No Obamacare, no Tea Party.

This is a popular take, but I don't think it's the right one. 2009 had Obama's first meeting with GOP leadership summarized as "I won", the Affordable Care Act was 2009 and passed on party lines during infamously flametastic discussion where anything but the Democratic proposal was demanding people die in the streets by the thousands or tens of thousands, and the only reason someone could oppose this was Racism. By May he was joking about IRS audits of organizations that didn't agree with him enough. He instructed the Department of Justice to not defend DOMA in federal court in 2011.

Not all the worst of the 2008 culture wars were downstream of Obama directly -- there was a conspiracy theory that Palin's youngest child was 'really' her grandchild, and she had an involuntary biographer take up residence as a neighbor, and afaik that were genuinely just nuts (Andrew Sullivan, everyone!) that media groups latched onto rather than promoted by the Dem party directly -- but a lot of them were.

Perhaps more critically, many seeds were planted for future culture wars, even fairly early. The ACA threw in expansive mandates for gender-related stuff, and took over a large portion of higher education loans, for example.

I mean, I see all of these as somewhat partisan but not necessarily or explicitly identity politics. For example, although he nominally supported affirmative action, and a few of the bills ended up having those kind of effects, IIRC most of his efforts were fairly ambivalent and he would usually say things to the tune of 'well we need to make sure we're accounting for poor white students and their disadvantage too'. He talked about being the first Black president not in a Black pride/power way but more couched in generic "American Dream" language about equality. In other words, he was on the equality train, but not the equity train, not anything like what it would eventually become. Personally, I don't think that many center-left folks had any idea what some of these seeds would sprout, and I correspondingly imagine that it wasn't by and large deliberate, up until perhaps the last two years, maybe?

Of course there was also a period from about 2011-2013 roughly where I was a bit tuned out from politics, so maybe I missed a bit there.

His campaign portrayed him as black to blacks, non-white to other minorities, and post-racial to whites.

His actual views are a bit harder to pin down...

His mother raised him with stories about what a great African leader his father was. Obama was probably initially planning to go into the state department. He seems to have been recruited before he went to Columbia U and his assigned roommate just happened to be the son of a prominent politician from Pakistan (or some other Muslim country, I'm not 100% sure).

While at Columbia he seems to have had a change of heart.

He decided he wanted to be a black leader in the US, and moved to Chicago after graduating. So from 85-97 you can find some more identity focussed quotes from him because he was trying to get accepted by Chicago voters for an eventual run.

Michelle used to baby sit for Jesse Jackson, so getting an in with the Chicago political machine was part of her appeal.

He seems to have realized that he sold much better to white liberals than Chicago blacks. They wanted someone with stronger links to the community. Becoming president was more realistic than becoming mayor of Chicago.

His main schtick in 2008 was post-racial, post-partisan unity of the United States. "Not red states or blue states" etc.

See his Philadelphia speech on race in 2008. Progressive activists thought he was kind of a sell-out or too much a naive believer in white goodwill.

But [Reverend Wright's] remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren't simply controversial. They weren't simply a religious leader's efforts to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country — a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

As such, Reverend Wright's comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems — two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change — problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.

Of course, he then lit a lot of that goodwill on fire by bungling the Trayvon Martin case, needlessly blowing the Skip Gates silliness way out of proportion (remember the "beer summit" at the White House?), etc.

I don't think he bungled anything there. To secure his re-election he needed to repeat the crazy high black turnout of 2008. That might not have happened if race relations were cool and calm.

2008 was a different time. Post-racial unity was the way to do anti-racism back then. Esoteric critical theories were only starting to show up on obscure nerdy spaces, and even die-hard Democrats thought they were way off.

I can’t believe Obama would sign off on Kamala but maybe he just doesn’t care anymore.

She has really high negatives, but fewer negatives IMO than Biden at the moment, and her negatives are pretty much limited to people who closely follow politics. If she is kept away from improvisational moments, the narrative will become a series of hyped up "Girl Boss" and "Yass Queen" memes with a lot of media cheerleading. Democrats and their sympathetic social media drones will easily fall in line for "the first female president." How much the middle is persuaded by "making history" is a gamble, but it revives enthusiasm temporarily.

Her negatives include public speaking and generally negative charisma. She is less likable than Trump and Biden alike.

I don’t think the HRC campaign strategy will work better the second time around.

The flip side is Trump is now sitting on a boatload of cash. You can get out all of the embarrassing Harris videos. You can point out how her role in the admin was…the border.

I think Harris at this point is a better bet than Biden but only slightly.

Also, if there's a concern that Biden's ticket replacement will have their political career tanked by an inevitable loss, no one will shed a tear for Harris. She's an acceptable casualty rather than some actually promising future candidate.

She'll be the American Kim Campbell; we'll have to hear a similar story about how the first woman president was set up to fail.

There was a report that 25 house Dems are going to go public asking Biden to step down. Similarly there is a report that Clyburn is going to have a talk with Joe.

There is a sense blood is in the water.

There's this concept in football politics (and business politics in general) of the "full support of the board", this is usually what you are told you have two weeks before you're sacked. Beware the CEO who has been given such a backing, he's a dead man waking. I remember reading SBF getting it and knowing as I read the phrase that it was over for him. And surely enough, a week or so later...

I think Obama's "bad debate nights happen" was just this. He gave Joe the full support of the board. Now everyone's rushing to position themselves before his fate becomes concrete.

I don't know about football, but in normal business, "full support of the board" is typically followed after a short cooling off period by "resignation to spend more time with one's family".

Yep. Kiss of death. You never need “full support of the board” unless things have gone terribly wrong. Same here.

Blood is in the water, but it isn't clear who the sharks are just yet.

To my knowledge, you're only allowed to have $850 per contract on PredictIt (i.e. you could bet $850 on Biden-No and $850 on Kamala-Yes, but couldn't go above $850 on either). Thus, I'm not sure how a whale would be moving the market - there's tens of thousands of shares moving each day on those contracts...

How good is their security- is it possible to dodge the system by making a ton of burner accounts? Alternatively, is this just one influencer tweeting at all their followers?

NYT dropped either a leak from someone with high-level access or somebody floating a tester this morning. Whatever happens, this is wild to watch.

I'm still confused why, if the intent is to regain momentum and fight the narrative, he's doing an interview on Friday, which is normally the day to bury news that will disappear over the weekend. Today would have been a much better day. As it is, Biden's fitness is going to be one of the biggest casual conversation pieces at family get-togethers tomorrow.

That link doesnt seem to load

Loads for me. Here's the original link if you want to give the scoundrels at the paper of record some views.

Some of the latest Biden-camp excuses coming up seem plainly and on their face delusional. I'm paying close attention to who is saying what, using what words, to see their degree of participation in this farce. The obvious logical implications of these claims are, well, obvious.

Exhibit 0: Biden himself talked about his debate the next day. He said:

I know I'm not a young man. I don't walk as easy as I used to. I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to, but I know what I do know — I know how to tell the truth. I know right from wrong. I know how to do this job.

Are we supposed to be impressed about telling right from wrong? That he knows how to do the job he's been in for four years? These are not reasons to be elected President again, they are basic pre-requisites. For that matter, "speaking smoothly" and "walking" might actually be core requirements as well.

Exhibit 1: He traveled too much before the debate. He did go on some global travel, but then spent 11 days at Camp David afterward preparing and recovering. But who on earth takes a whole week and a half to recover and is still at the point where he, as he himself said at a recent fundraiser, almost fell asleep on stage? Even on its face, that's worrying. This is not an excuse, it is a condemnation.

Exhibit 2: Biden struggles after 4 p.m.. Staffers say that he really does everything between 10 and 4. Six useful hours is, on its very face, a very worryingly short amount of time to not "make verbal mistakes and become tired". The debate was at 9pm local time. But the job of President isn't really seen as a part-time gig! If I said to you, "yeah my grandpa has six good hours, but after that he gets tired and makes a lot of mistakes" I wouldn't go "great, let's put him in charge of the country for four years and hope that that window of time doesn't shrink too much". This is not an excuse, it is a condemnation.

Exhibit 3: It was "preparation overload". Okay, fine, some candidates self-destruct for no reason on the debate stage, or lean too hard on canned phrases (Marco Rubio I'm looking at you). But usually this is limited to a few occurrences. Biden was consistently off all night and responded to comments Trump was expected to make, but did not yet make, on at least four separate occasions. If a candidate takes 11 days to prepare for one 90 minute stretch and still blows it, surely that says something about the candidate? That's like saying "I did poorly on the test because I studied too much". Like, it happens, but not to this extent. This is not an excuse, it is a condemnation.

Exhibit 4: It's hard to debate when the other person lies a lot, says Nancy Pelosi and others (though, credit due, just today she said whether it was a condition or episode is a fair and legitimate question). But a candidate lying in the debate should make your job easier, not harder, because even if the moderators don't fact-check, what's to stop you from doing so? Biden did at least once or twice, or tried to, so clearly it can work. Sure, you don't have notes per the rules, but surely if there are 20 false statements (per NYT's count) you can pick out at least a few with your week+ of prep. On its face, this is not a good excuse.

Exhibit 5: A columnist claiming replacing him would be undemocratic. Yes, he got votes in the primaries. However everyone knows that the party endorsed and supported him before other challengers even got going, which makes this argument eerily similar to the obvious horseradish of saying Iran is democratic because people vote (ignoring how candidates are selected). Furthermore, there's evidence the Biden team has withheld information and exposure to Biden on purpose, and as at least one media outlet likes to remind us, "democracy dies in darkness".

Sidenote, related: Here for example, you get stories about the insularity of his team recently. Corporate wants you to find the different between this picture:

During meetings with aides who are putting together formal briefings they’ll deliver to Biden, some senior officials have at times gone to great lengths to curate the information being presented in an effort to avoid provoking a negative reaction.

“It’s like, ‘You can’t include that, that will set him off,’ or ‘Put that in, he likes that,’” said one senior administration official. “It’s a Rorschach test, not a briefing. Because he is not a pleasant person to be around when he’s being briefed. It’s very difficult, and people are scared shitless of him.”

...and this picture:

A former senior intelligence official familiar with the matter said intelligence about Russia that could upset Trump is sometimes just included in the written assessment. The order in which the information is presented could also be altered to try not to upset Trump, according to the Post.

“If you talk about Russia, meddling, interference — that takes the PDB off the rails,” a second former senior U.S. intelligence official said, referring to the president’s daily brief.

Pam: They're the same picture.

Okay, well to be fair, one is an intelligence briefing (Trump) about core national security issues and the other (Biden) seems to be more domestic political briefings (I think, from context), so the level of severity is actually quite different but... I'm still struck by the similarity.

tl;dr: We all know a debate is not the same thing as actual governing. But just like how excuses tell you hints about the character of the individual, I think the excuses given by the people around Biden give you hints about Biden, too. Good on the press for calling them like they are: excuses.

Exhibit 0: Biden himself talked about his debate the next day. Are we supposed to be impressed about telling right from wrong? That he knows how to do the job he's been in for four years? These are not reasons to be elected President again, they are basic pre-requisites. For that matter, "speaking smoothly" and "walking" might actually be core requirements as well.

While that may be true. It’s clear he was contrasting himself with his opponent. He’s saying Trump doesn’t satisfy these basic requirements but he does.

If you're in a job interview, and you say something like "well sure maybe I'm a bad writer, but at least I know how to work a computer!" it doesn't really help you very much, even if the other applicants in fact are bad at computers. If you are responding to allegations about your age by... uh, confirming allegations about your age, and bringing up a different point, that's just mutual destruction, it doesn't actually help you much. I mean clearly in his worldview everyone has a binary choice, so if it truly were zero-sum, he'd be making a smart point. However, that's not how elections work, and especially not this one. Turnout is a thing.

And in fact more broadly, people have been debating whether it would be better to have an incompetent but moral leader, or a competent but immoral leader for a long time, it's a core philosophical debate. Hanging your whole strategy on appealing exclusively to people both a) accepting this framework and then on top of that b) preferring the former of the two is not a winning recipe. Both of those assumptions are very shaky! I know a fair number of people who actually do prefer a competent narcissist over a useless do-gooder due to the stability, and hope that the economy will be better with the trade-off.

lean too hard on canned phrases (Marco Rubio I'm looking at you)

The idea... THE IDEA... that I would lean too hard on canned phrases.. is ridiculous.

I don't personally care about things like leaning too hard on canned phrases, but I definitely thought back to Rubio during this debate and wondered if anyone would pillory Biden for it. Maybe it's just taken a seat wayyyyy back in the back of the classroom, since it is such a phenomenally minor thing in comparison to the main debate about his general cognitive state.

I'm going to be contrarian and say I thought Biden's debate performance was horrifying but I think it's still fine to run him if voters were like me and not like normal people.

I realize he looks terrible but is the President not being in peak fitness actually that important? Biden doesn't strike me as insane, or malevolent, or like he's so completely out of it that he'll launch nukes because he mistook the big red button for the toilet handle.

I'm probably too cynical but I think the President's job is probably a lot like a doctor's job in a hospital: the nurses all know more or less what the patient needs but they need the MD to make decisions. Sure you'd like a brilliant doctor like House for the truly difficult problems but any doctor that just did what the nurses told him to would probably make for an okay hospital. Biden probably spends his days picking from a set of reasonable proposals offered by his handlers. If he makes too many batshit decisions in a row too often he'll eventually get replaced.

I also don't think Trump has any edge on the mental side that would make up for the fact that he's him. Also his edge isn't great anyway, he's also incoherent, except he presents with speed freak energy. I wouldn't expect his judgment to be any better and he could just as likely start sundowning any day now as well.

It'd be sweet if they ran a Biden that was 20 years younger, but I still think he's better than Trump.

Well, I've been saying the whole time that if they really, really insist on running Biden, Biden is taking the wrong tactical approach and should have leaned on the "team effort" aspect from the very start. The fact he has not chosen to do so makes me worry that he actually does not in fact have a sufficient team mindset to lean on people enough. I think the Cabinet would pull through okay, but the attitude and humility makes a difference. Domestically at least, you are more or less correct that we'd be fine.

However, I should offer the massive caution that foreign policy-wise, which is actually a good third of the job (sometimes more, but rarely less), his specific capacities actually still matter a great deal. There's some noise from European diplomats who have noticed some stuff, apparently. Despite a lot of painting the mil-ind complex and foreign policy industry as hopelessly deep-state (though there's certainly some strong institutional instincts and inertia), the simple fact is the president actually has an astonishing degree of both latitude as well as actual power, not just ceremonial, to make things happen. For example, if Trump decided to take us out of NATO, he basically could, probably even over the objections and even laws of Congress if we're being honest. In other words, the institutions can't do anything about batshit crazy moments. They have to be pretty bad to be considered.

I think if Biden were in Kennedy's place when the Joint Chiefs wanted to get belligerent or even use nukes against the commies, there's a very good chance that the nukes would have flown.

What does the man so no to?

I recall a QC from a little back which asserted that nurses and NPs really don’t compete.

A good NP can operate on the level of an Intern (first year resident) a great one can operate at the level of a second year resident. I've never, ever seen an NP operate at the level of a more senior resident or attending.

Medical education is insane, and it both teaches skills and filters for intelligent, diligent, neurotic individuals. It’s tempting to suggest that the metis of nursing experience can outweigh a fancy education, and I’m sure it happens on the margin, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Which is kind of a moot point, because I really doubt political office works like a hospital. When a hospital needs to plan its COVID strategy, or negotiate jurisdiction with a neighboring ER, or secure funding, it doesn’t send the most senior doctor. It has dedicated administrators.

Biden surely has access to the most competent team his establishment can provide. I agree that they can probably handle the vast majority of normal government tasks. Better than Trump, judging by the giant holes in his cabinet! But that’s not necessarily enough.

For crises and for strategy, I think I’d rather have the average American than either Biden or Trump.

How many hospital procedures does the distinction between NP & Doctor make a meaningful difference, though? I'm sure there's shortfalls but is it a matter where 98% is functionally identical treatment? Plus frankly what % of the remainder cases where there'd be a meaningful differentiation represent productive uses of resources versus using pure ingenuity and the light of god to get the 85 year old to 87 years old.

Procedures? Nearly all of them, although if for no other reason than the fact that midlevels don't do most types of procedures. This being for a variety of reasons including the fact that they don't get training in this area (or much training at all - NPs can be online degrees).

The best case data presented by the NP lobby will argue that MDs and NPs have the same outcomes, when MDs are handling complicated cases and NPs are handling basic ones. More balanced analysis is pretty lopsided.

The differences are stark. For instance a Child Psychiatrist has 23,000 hours of clinical training. An equivalent NP has 600. And the formers hours are predominantly work, with the NPs being shadowing. And if that Child Psychiatrist wants to switch to Emergency Medicine they'd need an additional 15,000 hours of training. The NP would need zero.

Procedures? Nearly all of them, although if for no other reason than the fact that midlevels don't do most types of procedures. This being for a variety of reasons including the fact that they don't get training in this area (or much training at all - NPs can be online degrees).

I understand that there are a lot of different procedures, but surely there has to be some sort of pareto principle involved in which the top 30 or so procedures cover 90% of the hospitalizations. I do agree that NPs will get the most basic cases, but what % of cases actually is that?

Is there that huge a difference between 23,000 hours of Child Psychiatry and 600? I work in a well-paid niche role and generally if somebody's got the right disposition towards it I'd be comfortable of allowing most fresh grads on the tools after about 50 hours of shadowing.

The word procedure in a medical context refers to physical tasks that must be performed on the patient, such as surgeries. PAs/NPs are allowed to do a very small subset of these, which makes sense because they don't have things like formal Anatomy Lab or years of supervised practice doing hysterectomies etc.

I'm guessing you don't want to get wrapped up in semantics on that though, so NPs, or my friend John who works in IT can handle the most basic admissions, but what we train for in medicine (and what you pay for in the hospital) is for correctly identifying if the patient is basic (which midlevels suck at) and for when a basic admission suddenly turns not (uncommon but not rare).

Midlevels typically extend the nursing model of "the blood pressure is high, we should fix it, let's use this medication" pattern recognition. The physician model emphasizes understanding the underlying physiological reason for the rise in blood pressure, and identifying a pharmacologic agent that addresses that physiologic response in a way that does not interfere with any other medication or pathology the patient has. "How" not "what." I know what emphasis I'd prefer if I was in the hospital and for my family. This may seem like a harsh characterization (although if you look at training material you'll see legitimate emphasis on "the nursing model") but this is also where that time gap comes into play. Doctors barely get all their learning in and that is with 7-12 years of 60-80+ hour weeks.

Most people don't realize what goes on in medicine because the majority of their interaction is an outpatient visit with the doctor rolling in and asking a few unsatisfactory questions before making some vague pronouncement and then leaving, and if they have a family member in the field it's a nurse who is high on her own supply.

Like with pilots and flight attendants most of the training and activity is invisible to you, but it's absolutely critically important for when things go wrong.

For the hours stuff think of it as more like a combat sport than normal on the train training. Who you putting your money on in a fight? The person with 600 hours of training or 23,000 hours, especially given the fact that the people with significant native talent go into one field preferentially over the other? This isn't something like a role where you have to learn how to use one machine that does the same thing every time, its something where you need experience blocking all kinds of attacks from all kinds of body types which takes year to build up.

Also keep in mind stuff like the fact that it takes years of practice to respond appropriately when someone starts actively dying in front of you, something which happens rarely in most types of finished practice, all the time in MD training, and not really at all in NP training. You need that in your tool belt.

I'll stop here.

As I said downthread, I think this is actually worse if Biden is a figurehead than if he is not. If it's one man (him) in control, then the rot that produced this disaster could be localized in him and if so could be cured by replacing him. If instead he's the figurehead for the entire technocratic machine, then the rot that produced this disaster runs into that machine, and can only be cured at much greater cost.

I appreciate your take. A few thoughts:

Biden is running on the platform of respectability and saving democracy itself. Regardless if he wins or not, it’s pretty clear he will not be running the country after 8pm. Whoever will be will not have been elected to do so. That does not look like saving democracy to me. As to the side of respectability, imagine the president literally falling asleep at state functions. This is going to happen, and it will be taken as a personal insult because it is! Crisis at 3am. Oh well, it can wait. The most respectable thing to do would be to step aside.

If Biden were running on delegating responsibility, that would be an honest campaign I could vote for.

I realize he looks terrible but is the President not being in peak fitness actually that important? Biden doesn't strike me as insane, or malevolent, or like he's so completely out of it that he'll launch nukes because he mistook the big red button for the toilet handle.

Yes, it's actually very bad that the leader of the country can't be trusted to have a one-on-one conversation with leaders of other countries. I don't even mean enemies or true adversaries, just countries that have their own interests and goals. From what you saw, do you think Biden's capable of having a meaningful conversation about emergent economic and trade issues with, say, Brazilian leadership? In the event he did have that conversation and seemed like he basically understood it, do you think he seems like he's capable of keeping that straight in his head in order to keep his word on any promise? I just absolutely doubt it.

It's wild that we're actually having a conversation about whether it matters that the President can't hold up for a ten-minute conversation. Of course that's very bad! Of course you should select someone that's capable of making credible promises to other leaders! This isn't a high bar to clear.

you should select someone that's capable of making credible promises to other leaders!

That just leaves the candidate with the brain worm.

Diversity win: Americans elect the first non-binary mind flayer president

Maybe Yeerk subjugation wouldn't be worse than the alternatives.

I think the doctor-hospital analogy is incomplete and presents a bad mental model.

I agree that there's no way for the President (or most of Congress for that matter) to be knee-deep in substantive issues across the entire breadth of current affairs. There's just too much going on too fast. So, you have to be able to delegate and this act of delegating begins by selecting appropriate subordinates to help with your overall management strategy. You have to trust these people to handle the issues because you, the President, don't have enough time to double check all of their work.

In the MD-hospital-nurses example, I would think that the MD just signs off on run-of-the-mill stuff, but slows down to double or triple check higher risk courses of care. The MD can do this because there's a little bit more time (i.e. a patient with a broken leg isn't going to literally die if they have to wait another day or something) and because patients are independent from one another. The guy in room 1 has no bearing on the condition of the guy in room 6.

Not so with the Presidency. "All politics is local" and all that. Your broad economic policies are full of cross pollination influences with one another. There's no such thing as isolated bilateral foreign policy (that isn't secret). What you do with one country is seen by the entire world. Even domestic and foreign policy aren't fully separated domains. As we've seen with Israel-Gaza, a fairly uninvolved foreign policy can whip back to smack you in the face at home (Ivy League protests etc.) In reality, you're managing a complex system with a lot of non-linear feedback loops.

So whom you pick to do what matters or else you're going to have to try to manage a ton of fast moving non-linear parts on your own. Or, you just don't manage much and chaos and Congress pick up the slack. This is bad not only for self-evident reasons, but because your administration is now playing a reactive policy game instead of a pro-active policy game. That's a fantastic way to lose reelection.

Biden has demonstrated that he picks loyalists from way back who mostly serve to insulate him from the real world and create policy with overly deliberative, consensus driven, PowerPoint processes. I think this is pretty self evident, especially from the recently leaked comments from staffers. They're also myopic and tend to gravitate towards personal issues that effect themselves and their social circle. This is why the Biden admin has tried multiple times to grant sweeping student loan forgiveness despite the fact that those loans are hyper-concentrated among a tiny demographic that already reliably votes Blue. But a lot of senior advisors and staffers (who make pennies, especially in the HCOL area of Washington, D.C.) probably carp about "student loans" enough that it feels like a big issue.

This style of policy making might be okay if the rest of the executive were allowed to just function on its own with mostly rubber stamps from the Oval Office, but it doesn't seem that's the case. To me, it appears the Biden Admin doesn't want anything to happen without, at least, their awareness and approval. But how does that square with 10-4 hours and an insular inner circle that doesn't fully brief The Big Guy?

I watched the messaging on Israel-Gaza constantly get fucked up again and again. "We support Israel's right to defend itself ... but also the Palestinians deserve freedom....worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust....don't attack Rafah...let's talk about a ceasefire....also free hostages...on both sides." Tony Blinken had to wait for hours to meet MBS in Saudi because MBS knew Blinken had zero authority himself and it was all about getting The Big Guy (and his circle) on board in order for anything to happen.

This U.S executive branch isn't a hospital or corporation. It doesn't have smooth self-sustaining ongoing operations. It's more like a startup every 4-8 years, but with tens of thousands of new employees and also tenured, deeply embedded lazy people. The President has to delegate fast and effectively and try to build solid communication and feedback loops both to him and to chief subordinates. Failing to do that yields either chaos (Trump admin) or utter gridlock (Biden).

Biden and the Democrats got here by thinking in these oversimplified terms. "He's a little old, but the team around him can handle it." This has not been true since FDR invented the imperial presidency and specifically transformed the office from a figurehead position. The President matters.

Why did England lose the Hundred Years War?

Aside from Joan of Arc, their tough and vigorous king Henry V died and was replaced by his infant son, Henry VI. The whole system relied on having a strong king to keep the powerful nobles organized and on-mission (conquering France). A child can't do that. A regency council couldn't do that. Nor could a soft, weak, peaceloving king like Henry VI. And that was before he had a mental breakdown. Civil war broke out in the 1450s as various cliques and nobles struggled for power.

The US is not a medieval kingdom. But it does have powerful actors, the military-industrial complex, the intelligence agencies, the State department, the Democratic Party and so on. There are surely people who want to preserve the regency, so to speak. They want to act freely and advance their agendas while there's nobody in full control (or while the Presidency is ruled by the last person to brief or whoever's closest to Jill and Hunter). There are people who want their own candidate on the throne. You have factional strife and plotting, none of this is good for the country.

Just from following the news, I have felt a sense of, I dunno, listlessness in this administration in the last couple years. There have been a lot of mixed messages, which makes it feel like either they're steering the entire ship on the basis of which way the winds public opinion polls are blowing, or it's the unchecked infighting of a royal court's competing fiefdoms without a strong executive to force high-level alignment. And honestly, it feels pretty depressing that "running almost exclusively on opinion polls" is the charitable option.

We saw executive orders on immigration from the first week of the administration get mostly rescinded recently after claiming congressional action was necessary. The administration came out opposing transgender surgeries for minors within the last week, but its appointed members were advocating to remove age limits from the professional guidance just a couple years ago. Nobody is stepping forward to give speeches giving us a bigger picture and answering hard questions on the changing directions. It works for a while, but it seems like the wheels are starting to come off.

The whole situation with Lloyd Austin just seemed fundamentally unserious. Something that shouldn't even be possible if anyone had their eye on the ball.

For it to go unpunished...

What's the situation with Lloyd Austin?

He disappeared and went to the hospital for a couple days for surgery for prostate cancer, without anyone being told.

I.e., not even Austin's deputy was told. She was vacationing in Puerto Rico and had to be emergency bum-rushed back to DC when someone noticed that there wasn't anyone in charge at the Pentagon.

We've definitely seen feudal infighting and unpredictable positioning based on who could control the administration best in the financial sector. The SEC's behavior in particular has been completely incoherent. And that's not just according to crypto people who rag against it all the time (who ironically parlayed the chaos into lobbying gains), but literally everybody that interacts with the financial aspects of the Biden administration is unhappy. Even bond traders are fed up at this point.

Biden even seems to have lost a powerful stronghold of Democrats in the Silicon Valley VC universe. Techies with money are following Thiel's lead, holding their nose and going with Trump, which is a small revolution in such a solidly blue demographic.

I mostly blame Elizabeth Warren for this. It's an open secret that she loomed large over the economic policy and I wouldn't be surprised if she personally was behind most of this electoral poison (such as unrealized income taxes).

This is all to say that it speaks to a regency situation: Biden is a weak king and all his dukes are too busy fighting for control to maintain a united front against external enemies.

Let’s be real though, it also speaks to the widespread belief among liberal centrists (and even Thiel is ultimately a gay libertarian) that Trump isn’t actually going to do anything socially conservative. On immigration he might tighten the border a little beyond what Biden just did, but he’s not going to deport 15 million illegal immigrants. On abortion the Roe reversal is as far as he will go given his personal ambivalence on the issue. On guns he’ll leave it to SCOTUS which seems much less aggressive than many pro gun copium addicts were predicting 5 years ago. On China the candidates are largely indistinguishable. On Ukraine even the Europeans are pushing for some kind of ceasefire now, if quietly. Trump isn’t going to pull back the military from overseas while the evangelicals are champing at the bit to unleash the USAF on Hezbollah and China rhetoric heats up. He’s smart enough to know that cutting back medicare doesn’t play well with the millions of geriatric whites who comprise many of his most dedicated supporters. What is left that is radical?

The weird period of explosive promise in 2016 and early 2017 is over. Trump is going to govern as a center-right president except when it comes to hunting down his personal political opponents, who will face the full weight of a new Paxton-led justice but who will probably just leave the US and chill for a few years while the vast, vast majority of the establishment remains in place.

Trivially, trans stuff is going to come to a critical head soon one way or the other: social conservatives has been focusing most heavily on minor transition, but Kincaid v. Williams is the other shoe dropping for Bostock, can't be put off another four years, and it's... hard to overstate how broad of an impact it would have. In addition to the direct regulatory impact, it would likely (given the recent EMTALA example) result in the feds overriding every remotely anti-trans state law under a Dem admin. And the next President has non-trivial chances of replacing the two names on the dissent from denial of cert in Kincaid. I don't think Trump particularly cares about trans stuff, but I don't think you can staff a Trump admin without anti-trans activists precipitating out of the woodwork even if he did care.

There's a lot of active encouragement of at-least-gray immigration under Biden. It's possible that most of that escapes scrutiny in a Trump administration, but at least some of it won't survive, for better or worse, and I'd expect it to be a serious target as this decade's version of 'self-deport'.

There's an increasing set of broad policies that the Democratic party is looking to get through over a wide variety of infrastructure goals for their political movement: regulation on charter or private schools, post-Janus encouragement for unions like banning right-to-work states, reparations-likes for (certain) minority groups. Trump obviously would be strike against any of those going anywhere, but progressive seem him as likely to do reversed version. Again, I'm not sure Trump cares, but a Trump administration will near-certainly bring people who do.

((Conversely, I think Paxton talks a much stronger talk than he actually walks.))

The one exception is probably the ME where I imagine a Trump administration will act very differently from Biden's.

What of the Ukraine? Trump's constant boasting that he'd put an end to it may not ultimately change much as the country seems spent, but I would expect a democrat to keep antagonizing Russia to a higher degree.

In fact this alone may be why Trump's no longer that repellent to the establishment. He can be the cleanup crew for their long telegraphed pivot to China.

I'm not sure I understand your question? I didn't mention Ukraine.

More comments

I suppose, but how much different. He can’t accuse Biden of being weak on Iran and then pull out US forces, but at the same time I think Trump’s political instincts prevent any messy entanglement in Yemen or Lebanon which he would see as costly. That boxes him into much the same space as Biden.

Surely there's a lot of scope for policy differences besides actually deploying troops? A big factor of course is whether or not the Hamas/Hezbollah conflicts have died down, but even if they have then there are things his administration would probably do differently, such as not pressuring Israel into accepting the outlines of a two-state solution in return for a normalization agreement with SA as well as providing more diplomatic shielding for Israel and deterrence towards aggressors generally. And if the war is still on, or new wars break out, he'd likely be vastly more supportive of Israel than Biden.

In this sense, Bush Sr. is probably the last real president to date, in that he was respected by the permanent government and knew how it worked and how to twiddle its knobs.

Every POTUS since has been led around the nose by the blob one way or another, even Obama.

I actually think it is the opposite. President is there to lead and communicate policies of his team toward the public. If his staff members are the writers, president is the actor or comedian delivering the lines and bits. Presidents are supposed to debate, they represent their administration while giving State of the Union, they should represent the state behind closed doors meetings with other world leaders, they should inspire in times of need and be the face of the administration and above all else they should provide legitimacy for the government they represent as they are the person that people get to vote as opposed to their PR managers or analysts.

This take that person of POTUS is just unimportant position and that a corpse remotely controlled by unnamed staffers could do as good of a job, and that people really should just vote opaque party machinery and believe in the best is absolutely surreal to me. If the politicians can no longer be bothered to even pretend that they care, the legitimacy of the power is gone. It is incredibly dangerous direction imho.

I actually think it is the opposite. President is there to lead and communicate policies of his team toward the public. If his staff members are the writers, president is the actor or comedian delivering the lines and bits. Presidents are supposed to debate, they represent their administration while giving State of the Union, they should represent the state behind closed doors meetings with other world leaders, they should inspire in times of need and be the face of the administration and above all else they should provide legitimacy for the government they represent as they are the person that people get to vote as opposed to their PR managers or analysts.

That's a fair point. If Biden was a much better orator and could speak non-stop about Israel, Ukraine, and opposing China and denying them semiconductors, he might be able to better persuade the public about the importance of these causes. Strategists have expressed regular frustration that the economic indicators are really good under Biden's administration but the public hasn't heard any messaging about this.

Although his State of the Union performance looked good, didn't it? I mean, he didn't seem like a tired corpse.

This take that person of POTUS is just unimportant position and that a corpse remotely controlled by unnamed staffers could do as good of a job, and that people really should just vote opaque party machinery and believe in the best is absolutely surreal to me. If the politicians can no longer be bothered to even pretend that they care, the legitimacy of the power is gone. It is incredibly dangerous direction imho.

I don't think he's a corpse with no agency. I think he still has judgment and isn't insane and can act like a reasonable person that's aligned with Americans. It seems like he tires easily and is probably tedious to keep up with and you have you have to remind him to stop going off on tangents. Doesn't look good, and we deserve better, but I don't think it means Trump is therefore the answer.

I mean, he didn't seem like a tired corpse.

Only to someone without a clear memory of what he was like in 2012.

Did I hallucinate that time when he threatened a journo with his Beretta, or did it actually happen? Not what I'd call "a tired corpse", if so.

Doesn’t that sort of lay bare that the public doesnt get to vote for their government?

No one expects the president to be in charge of everything but you expect him to be a CEO. It is clear Biden isn’t capable of being a CEO. So…who is that person?

Well, I think you vote for the person and his orbit of family, friends and trusted advisors. That's kind of sort of like a vote in your government.

I'm probably too cynical but I think the President's job is probably a lot like a doctor's job in a hospital: the nurses all know more or less what the patient needs but they need the MD to make decisions. Sure you'd like a brilliant doctor like House for the truly difficult problems but any doctor that just did what the nurses told him to would probably make for an okay hospital.

I wish. Take it from me that's not how it works, there's certainly a lot of rubberstamping involved where you need a Magic Signature™ for medicolegal and regulatory purposes, but a hospital de-facto run by the nurses would be a disaster in short order. It's not like rushing them through a year or two of training to proclaim them Nurse Practitioners with more autonomy particularly helps, the moment things go beyond the obvious and algorithmic, there's trouble.

I'm sure /u/Throwaway05 could say much the same.

Nurses are blue collar construction workers and physicians are architects. Yes one implements the vision of the other and can see patterns in what the other requests, but that doesn't mean they can safely do the planning. They do think they can however.

Not commenting if this has situational parallels lol.

Nurses, unlike construction workers, are usually not actual crackheads. Experienced and not drug addicted construction workers can and often do plan projects on their lonesome.

Yeah nurses can figure out basic things. That's the point. Basic.

Sounds like Harvard and Yale needs to put together a "presidential science" master's program. People in the future will be horrified that politicians without presidential science degrees were allowed to be president.

We’re getting there with the Oxford PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) degree in the UK. Explicitly intended as a ‘preparing to govern’ degree.

https://amp.theguardian.com/education/2017/feb/23/ppe-oxford-university-degree-that-rules-britain

Often criticised for being too wide-ranging and shallow, producing an elite who think they understand everything about everything.

Dominic Cummings wrote on his influential blog: “If you are young, smart, and interested in politics, think very hard before studying PPE … It actually causes huge problems as it encourages people like Cameron and Ed Balls to … spread bad ideas with lots of confidence and bluffing.”

Teaching there could become the automatic next job of any new ex-president (as long as he was not removed by impeachment or 25th Amendment), and they would all give a different class.

I'm going to be contrarian and say I thought Biden's debate performance was horrifying but I think it's still fine to run him if voters were like me and not like normal people.

Yeah I'm actually with you on this. This could be a good learning opportunity for the general public- they need to realize that the president is just one man and a human being, not some superhero working 24/7 who personally runs the entire government by himself.

I thought Biden looked old and tired, and it was hard for me to hear half the things he said, but he didn't actually seem senile. It's actually OK with me if he wants to take a low-key approach where he only handles president business from 10-4 and lets other people handle things the rest of the time. Trump was a better speaker but just sort of rambled from soundbite to soundbite with no logic.

but he didn't actually seem senile

"We finally beat medicare?"

Obviously not his best line, but it seemed more like he was just stumbling over his words under time pressure. I assume he meant something like "we finally beat the cost-spiral of inflation in the price of medicare." The people I've known with senility were way, way less cogent than him.

I thought Biden looked old and tired, and it was hard for me to hear half the things he said, but he didn't actually seem senile. It's actually OK with me if he wants to take a low-key approach where he only handles president business from 10-4 and lets other people handle things the rest of the time. Trump was a better speaker but just sort of rambled from soundbite to soundbite with no logic.

I disagree. Trump was able to respond to most of the retorts when allowed in the debate format, while Biden was rigid and unable to follow the path of discourse nearly as well as Trump. Trump started getting bogged down in the 2nd half of the debate because he wanted to get the last word in on previous topics, but is a natural extrovert and engaged with the audience and connected to viewers while Biden was unable to be creative in spur of the moment debate. This is especially concerning as he should have ample experience with engaging people and being in the center of attention every day. How often does Biden interact with staff, intelligence agencies, CEOs, diplomats, and international leaders? The president isn't a programming job, it's a customer service job, and Biden has just publicly shown he is completely unable to interact with people in a meaningful day to day experience. Trump blusters, speaks in hyperbole, brags relentlessly, but he does it in a way that is immediately engaging and creates dialogue and interaction between himself and whoever he is engaged with.

How often does Biden interact with staff, intelligence agencies, CEOs, diplomats, and international leaders? The president isn't a programming job, it's a customer service job, and Biden has just publicly shown he is completely unable to interact with people in a meaningful day to day experience

I feel like the day-to-day reality of that is very different than a debate though. In real life he can pause, take his time, collect his thoughts. He can schedule the difficult meetings for a time when he's ready, not late at night while he has a cold. The meetings would be mostly focused on one topic, jumping around from "the economy" to "foreign policy" with 1 minute on each. And he could just focus on the issues instead of trying to deliver punchy zingers for applause.

Trump is very good at the reality TV aspect of saying dramatic things on camera, but he was terrible at actually getting anything done as president.

Everything about the format of the debate broke down. I was talking with my wife about this.

Both candidates effectively refused to give any substantive answer on Gaza. Trump largely bloviated on the IMHO unfair yes or no question about a specific future policy, I think it was asking whether he would sign a federal abortion ban of some sort. I don't blame him for not answering it.

Both candidates also mostly regurgitated talking points. Trump more successfully IMHO, in that he actually finished the sentence. If you knew the answers ahead of time, you could guess at what Biden was trying to get to, but he rarely got there. Some of their talking points were direct answers to the questions, some weren't. Pretty par for the course IMHO. Trump was the only one to think on his feet in any capacity.

The format was supposed to be 2 minutes to answer, 1 minute rebuttal, 30 seconds to respond. This held up pretty OK at first. But at a certain point they dropped the 30 second response, so Trump would begin his next 2 minute answer doing the 30 second response he was itching to do. By the time the candidates were talking over each other, arguing about their golf handicap, any pretense of the mic being muted when it wasn't their turn to speak was out the window. I first noticed this break down when they unmuted the mic for Biden when he wanted to talk over Trump, and I then I noticed it a few minutes later when they unmuted the mic for Trump so he could talk over Biden.

All I heard post debate was how much Trump lied. But IMHO they were the sorts of "lies" they are broadly subject to debate (is Biden or Trump responsible for inflation) or directionally correct (I'm not sure illegal immigrants have raped and killed as many people as Trump claims, but they have and we don't like it). Biden's lies were bizarre and brazen, like claiming no service members have died during his administration, or that the border patrol endorsed him, both of which are bold faced, no way to shade it lies.

It didn't break down as much as it did in 2020, but I do agree with you that they were hamstringing Trump by not letting him have time to respond and it slowed down the debate topics because he was forced to reiterate old topics and it derailed the debate. This didn't bother me too much as I've attended too many events to know how quickly things become disorganized or run late, the best laid plans often run awry.

This may also be why Trump's 'lying' doesn't bother me much because it's the lying of humans interacting of each other. It's not a calculated lie to manipulate people but the lie of being in the moment, of verbal sparring, bullshitting, and the barstool one-up-mansship that men do to each other. It's why I find the pundits constantly talking about the strange things that come out of his mouth as juvenile and childish and ultimately doesn't sway my opinions of him. Trump doesn't try to hide who he is, so his personality and choices doesn't bother me nearly as much as the way that Biden, Hillary Clinton, or Pelosi tend to lie to manipulate, deceive , and gaslight.

The lies Biden espoused were defensive 'nu uh'. He was on the back foot the entire time, intellectually and socially. It was kids fighting on the playground, not a nuanced discussion or breakdown on policy. I do think Trump should have continually associated Biden's failure to curb illegal immigration with drug trafficking of deadly narcotics/opioids and the loss of (black) Americans to addiction instead of direct murders, but it's very hard to have a nuanced take in a heat of the moment debate and decided to stay on his course.

Yeah I'm actually with you on this. This could be a good learning opportunity for the general public- they need to realize that the president is just one man and a human being, not some superhero working 24/7 who personally runs the entire government by himself.

That is one of the reasons I wanted Donald Trump to be president in the 2016 election. I wanted to see if the government would keep running if a person with no political experience occupied the White House.

An analogy to which I often compared it was the TV show "LOST". There is a character named Desmond who lives alone in a bunker with a computer terminal. He believes it is his job to type a specific sequence of numbers into the computer every 108 minutes or else the world will be destroyed. Quoting from the LOST wiki:

Occupants of the Swan station followed a protocol in which they typed a sequence into a computer every 108 minutes. Typing these numbers and pressing "execute" (a.k.a. pushing the button) on the keyboard discharged an electromagnetic buildup, continually averting worldwide catastrophe.

My fear about Donald Trump becoming president was that there would be some kind of highly technical task which the president was obligated to perform—analogous to typing a specific sequence of numbers into a computer terminal every 108 minutes—but which could only be figured out by somebody who had held another political office or who had graduated from Harvard Law School or Yale Law School.

When Donald Trump became president, his lack of political experience and legal knowledge did inhibit him from certain things. He signed executive orders that were dead-on-arrival because he failed to write them in a lawyerly fashion with t's crossed and i's dotted. Some of his appointments and nominations were hamstrung by procedural errors. But the world did not literally end because he typed the wrong number into a computer terminal like in LOST, which I consider to be a positive endorsement of the idea that random civilians with no political experience can become president.

But the world did not literally end because he typed the wrong number into a computer terminal like in LOST

As president, Trump literally fired the guy whose job that was and we did have a worldwide catastrophe.

As someone who has gone into the weeds on this, I do not think you want to start getting into the origination of COVID, Peter Daszak and the ecohealth alliance et al. There aren't any wins for progressive politics in that direction.

So we had one less guy to call us racist for pointing out something odd was going on in Wuhan?

I rated this "Bad" on the volunteer page; I actually agree with your point, but zingers are not how you have productive debate. You could have raised this point less obnoxiously.

Damn, had a pretty good warning-free run, but some things are too hard to resist.

@token_progressive, apologies, I was out of line.

All good points, though it certainly seemed like Trump couldn't get his agenda done. He was good at talking politics but not really at the details of enacting policy. Of course, not wanting your President to do anything is a valid desire I think.

OTOH, though, Biden has gotten a lot of important agenda items done.

I broadly agree with this. Ronald Reagan, for my understanding, spent most of his presidency in an equivalent state to present Biden and a lot of people would argue that that was the pinnacle of the American empire.

Quite easily debunked. Here's Reagan vs. Mondale in 1984.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ObDjMJdNGBw

This just isn’t true. At most it was the final couple of years.

Reagan's senility has been greatly exaggerated with time. It all comes down to a few moments where aides caught him sundowning in private. McConnell, Pelosi and Biden have all had much more serious moments caught on camera, multiple times.

I thought being shot was seen as contributing to his infirmity, as well

I remember the big Feinstein moments, but somehow I totally missed any with Pelosi. Must be this one? That is wacky: https://youtube.com/watch?v=fwqWzbk_LeY

Byrd Bath or Privilege Scrub is memorable: https://youtube.com/watch?v=or0nSfFir6s

Biden probably spends his days picking from a set of reasonable proposals

Biden probably spends his days talking to people who aren't there if the medical team gets his meds wrong that day. You can actually see him either being too strung out from focus stims or narcoleptic depending on if they got their dosages right of the various cocktails they have him on.

He is a corrupt sex pest who was showering with his daughter according to her diary...

How is that acceptable seeing he lacks any redeeming qualities and is purely a blob creature?

This is a bad comment. You can think what you like about Biden and you can post links to the various allegations if you want to talk about them or bring them up as evidence that he's bad, but just replying to someone talking about Biden by saying he's a sex pest and a blob creature isn't an argument, it's just hawking and spitting.

Normally you'd just get warned not to do this. But you've been doing this and been warned that if you don't rein it in, you're going to start to get longer bans. Your record is shitty. Eight warnings and two bans, you keep ignoring our requests to chill out, and you come back from your bans just to whine about how they were unfair.

Now you're banned for a week. Returning to whine about how it was unfair is unlikely to result in greater leniency if you continue down this path.

sex pest who was showering with his daughter according to her diary...

Link?

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ashley-biden-diary-claims/

Snopes rates the following claim as "true":

A diary authored by U.S. President Joe Biden's daughter, Ashley Biden, describes showers taken with her father when she was a child as "probably not appropriate."

https://www.msn.com/en-US/news/us/joe-bidens-daughter-ashley-admits-her-diary-entries-are-real-in-court-letter-showers-with-dad/ar-BB1mWabj links to Twitter posts that have screenshots of the relevant page (including claims that she was hypersexualized at a young age), along with Ashley's submission to the court.

It is kind of damning that the Democrats couldn't find anyone who could talk to the proles other than an elderly compulsive liar with a penchant for sniffing hair.

In fairness fetterman seems pretty good at talking to proles.

I almost brought him up! It's telling that the good prole talkers like Fetterman and Manchin tend to drift away from the party.

Being fair, it is a general indictment of the US political regime that the choice is between that and another senior compulsive liar. I like Trump what he is, and in some sense he is America incarnate, but in no sane era would he, Biden or indeed any of their potential replacements be allowed near the levers of power.

The caliber of statesman that the US has been able to produce has either greatly diminished, or those people are smart enough to realize their talents are better utilized elsewhere.

I mean swap sniffing hair with cheating with porn stars and talking about how hot his daughter is and the like and it's not far off the the Republicans either right? Trump and Biden are both elderly liars.

Is it damning for the Republican and Democratic parties or is it more damning of voters?

You might have noticed that I never complain about politicians. I leave that to others. And there's no shortage of volunteers; everyone complains about politicians. Everyone says they suck. But where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky; they don't pass through a membrane from a separate reality. They come from American homes, American families, American schools, American churches, and American businesses. And they're elected by American voters. This is what our system produces, folks. This is the best we can do. Let's face it, we have very little to work with. Garbage in, garbage out.

-George Carlin

This is not a good take as it’s clearly not the best we could do. The problem is the filter, not input.

Exhibit 6: The Russians have used the Brain Neutralizer on Biden, giving him Havana Syndrome

We've been cooperating with the Russians on this one since the Bush era. Unfortunately it took us that long to figure out what the "фронт к врагу" label meant.

Exhibit 5: A columnist claiming replacing him would be undemocratic.

It would be undemocratic to replace Biden with another candidate. I think it's fine to admit that, I think almost everybody would prefer the "undemocratic" candidate to the "democratic" candidate in middle-stage senility. And, probably, if you were to run the primary today all over again, the voters would pick someone else. The problem is that the apparatchiks might not pick that same someone else.

If anything, this would look like a return to the older way of selecting candidates for the major parties. The primary process used to rely much heavier on backroom deals gated by rounds of voting to select a candidate, with the regular voting public mostly shut out. After the perceived meddling in the 2016 Dem primary (Sanders and Clinton), I wonder how this would play out among the democratic party electorate.

Weren’t Biden’s competitors in the primary literally RFK and Oprah’s spiritual advisor? I continue to maintain that the chances of Biden being replaced going even worse for democrats are higher than it salvaging the election.

It wasn't really a real primary since Biden was the incumbent. After Carter was primaried in 1980 (and Ford primaried in 1976) the lesson strategists internalized was that primarying the incumbent leads to a loss in the general. Since then Democrats have shut out primary challengers (more successfully than Republicans have). RFK and Marianne Williamsone were the only two outsiders of any note willing to break this consensus.

However, I think Democratic voters also bear some blame here. 15 million of them turned out for Biden in the primary. They were excited to vote for him! I don't know if they felt like they were closing ranks around Biden, endorsing his performance, or trying to mobilize suplort against Trump. But they endorsed this! Look at Obama's re-nomination versus Biden's: in 2012, Obama got about half as many votes as he did in the contested 2008 primary. Whereas Biden's 2024 primary numbers are very close to his 2020 results. It's not just the party machinery that closed ranks around Biden: voters did too.

I think to some extent it mostly makes sense to confine talk about how "democratic" things are to the actual election and related mechanics. I think the actual word we should be talking about is "fair". Because that's what we're really talking about, right? As long as states are democratically setting candidate criteria, and ballots get printed, the results get tallied, judges step in when appropriate, the whole nine yards, the actual lower-D democratic process is still okay and can continue functioning in its way, which is built on a foundation of long-term checks and balances. It can remain perpetually democratic if the machine gets enough oil. I realize this mechanics approach is a narrower definition than many people use it, but I think it is more precise and accurate.

The idea behind whether to replace Biden or not is one of fairness, not democracy writ large. The system and norms upholding actual democracy in the US are not at stake, in the sense that the rules nationally and by state are consistent and created by representatives, even if not perfectly fair. What we're really getting at is it feels bad to have someone "the people" don't want. We're tempted to say that the people's will is the same thing as democracy, but it really isn't. Democracy is the core idea that people determine the shape of their own government and have some sort of regular input on how it's going, and that the system resists hostile takeover strong enough to change those core facts.

Maybe I'm being too pedantic and even I am not able to keep this standard straight, but it still feels more correct. At least in terms of an attempt to set a reasonable standard as opposed to simply calling out hypocrisy. The one weakness of this argument is some might say that political parties have become a de facto part of the system itself now, and thus should be included in worries about democracy, but I don't know if I'm willing to go that far.

So I think it's fine to say that replacing Biden might feel unfair, but maybe it's best to say that the most fair thing moving forward is to make the best of a bad situation.

How we select candidates in America is through a democratic process. Lying about the state of the presidents heath only to switch him out when it is obvious he will lose is a subversion of democracy.

Re-reading my comment I think it came across as if I'm trying to split hairs a little too much. If Biden were to get swapped out I think people would have a right to be mad, but if the actual winner of the whole election got switched out, people would have a right to be maximum furious. The latter case is the sort of existential democratic crisis that is worth getting existential mad about. The current what to do about Biden crisis is not existential and thus the anger should be some degree lower than maximum.

Perhaps the better question would be, let me set up this scenario, which would be "more fair" or "more democratic"?

  • Biden dropping out at some point during his presidency, and Kamala taking over. No one voted for Kamala in the primaries, well, to be more specific many voted against her. Biden chose her as an individual with zero direct democratic input after winning the primary. Biden is the source of democratic legitimacy here.

  • Biden dropping out now, and a new candidate taking over at the convention. No one would be voting directly for the candidate like a primary, which is a weaker link of democratic authority, but on the other hand the delegates were chosen more or less democratically from the party constituents and are the source of democratic legitimacy here.

Both scenarios clearly have a break in the direct line of "democracy", defined more lazily here as just "people should have voted for the person who ends up in charge", which is why I say the word is unclear and "fair" is better -- and that it's hard to directly compare which is better without using more accurate words. It's also why a some political scientist types get exacerbated when we call our system of government a democracy, because it isn't. The whole "representative" idea comes into play at some point, and we just need to reasonable decide where to make the tradeoff of general direct democracy vs. vesting that authority indirectly in another.

Put another way, who has the better claim to representing Democrats? Biden as an individual, or the delegates in aggregate? So it might seem like I'm splitting hairs, but actually it's a pretty significant question. Honestly, I think given the circumstances, the delegates actually have a stronger case. The first bullet point is undermined by the self-evident behind the scenes work of the party apparatus itself to stifle other would-be competitors, several states decided they wouldn't even bother with primaries before any serious challenge even emerged. In other words, we can't escape the shadow the DNC and related party machinery casts over the whole thing. I think the second bullet point is "more fair".

but I know what I do know — I know how to tell the truth.

The worst part about this is that Biden is, like Trump, one of the most dishonest candidates of all-time. The number of lies he told during the debate alone was shocking. As is his history of creating self-aggrandizing stories out of whole cloth.

Claiming the mantle of truth is pretty bold for this serial liar.

That just makes me think of Hippias Minor, in which Plato's Socrates proposes that the man who does evil deliberately is better than the man who does it accidentally, in that he is more capable.

Well, it's not the sort of character attestation I would want to make about myself, at least.

That just makes me think of Hippias Minor, in which Plato's Socrates proposes that the man who does evil deliberately is better than the man who does it accidentally, in that he is more capable.

I think the opposite is true. The man who does evil deliberately intends evil -- wanton suffering, pain, misery -- and will continue to do it because evil is the goal. The man who does evil accidentally has a non-evil goal and may be persuaded to pursue that goal through a different, non-evil path. Believing that a person is better because they are more capable of pursuing evil successfully is itself an evil notion and Socrates should drink some hemlock for even thinking it.

The man who does evil accidentally has a non-evil goal and may be persuaded to pursue that goal through a different, non-evil path.

I'm highly skeptical of this notion. In practice, my experience is that the man who does evil accidentally in service of a non-evil goal, will inevitably double down on that evil as not actually evil and then call out even considering following some alternative non-evil path as the ultimate evil. On the other hand, the man who does evil in service of an evil goal can often be coerced into stopping his evil actions, by forcibly preventing his evil actions from accomplishing his evil goals. This is a different point than the one about the virtue of competence, but I think it's true nonetheless, that in terms of effect to the rest of society, someone doing evil deliberately is better than someone doing so accidentally.

On the other hand, the man who does evil in service of an evil goal can often be coerced into stopping his evil actions, by forcibly preventing his evil actions from accomplishing his evil goals.

On top of that, I'd say they're more likely to decide they've had their fill, or that some things are too fucked up even for them.

That's an interesting idea, could you give some examples of what you mean?

I think the reaction to Trump since his initial campaign in 2015 all the way to now is a good example. Let's just take for granted that preventing Trump from becoming POTUS is a non-evil goal - hardly a consensus opinion, but certainly one believed in the hearts of hearts of the people being discussed right now, who would likely say it's not just not-evil, it's anti-evil. In an effort to accomplish this non-evil goal, many people did many evil things, including lying about Trump, ostracizing Trump supporters, obfuscating Biden's mental incompetence, and physically assaulting people who appear as Trump supporters, among others. Some people tried to point out that these evil things were evil, and that a non-evil path to accomplish this non-evil goal was preferable (I personally also believed that a non-evil path was more viable and more likely to be successful, but that's beside the point), but those people were cast aside as evil Trump supporters who were either trying to obfuscate their Trump support or were ignorantly supporting Trump without even recognizing it. As a result, people - who in general don't want to be seen as pushing back against an anti-evil movement - were cowed into not speaking out against these evil things, and thus these evil things kept happening (and, again, beside the point, the electorate's trust of journalists has fallen heavily, and Trump looks like the current most likely person to become POTUS in 2025).

There's actually no shortage of examples in CW issues. The whole trans/gender issue in the past 5 or so years is another good one: to the supporters of "trans women are women," the goal is a very much not-evil - again, actually anti-evil - one of helping otherwise ostracized and denigrated people feel more belonging in society, and they believe in accomplishing this by opening up women's sports, prisons, and shelters to any male who genuinely believes that they are a woman, enacting legal punishments for people who choose to use pronouns that reflect their own perception of someone's gender instead of the person's claimed internally experienced one, and encouraging adolescents to hormonally/surgically/socially transitioning in secret from their family and friends if they judge them to be "eggs" (i.e. people, usually young, who are considered to be not yet aware that they are trans). Many people pointed out and continue to point out that these are all evil acts in service of an ostensibly non-evil goal, and those people have tended to be dismissed as evil transphobes who are motivated by their evil hatred of trans people to evilly oppress them. As a result, people - who in general don't want to be seen as pushing back against an anti-evil movement - were cowed into not speaking out against these evil things, and thus these evil things kept happening.

He didn't say that evil is the goal, merely that he did it deliberately. As in, the kind of person who knowingly dumps poison in the river if it's not punished, as opposed to the person who is just running their plant so incompetently that they can't stop polluting everything even if they don't want to. As you may guess, I'd prefer the former, since he can be persuaded to change his way, while the latter is incapable of doing so.

Imo history has vindicated him; The advent of meritocracy, which often only cared about morality insofar as the person can be relied upon not to work against the interests of the employer, caused a major speed-up of progress. Greed used to be seen as a vice that needs to be reigned in, but through capitalism we managed to channel it into productivity instead.

I don't necessarily think we should entirely ignore morality, but combining competence with good incentives leads more reliably to good results.

You're discounting the virtue of competence. Which is one of the only objective components most ethical systems recognize. It's difficult to say which path is the righteous one. But it's easy to say that whatever path we may pick, we ought to reach the end of it swiftly so we can move on.

As Land said by way of Lindsay, by way of Ostwald by way of Kant: "The only moral action is the minimization of entropy".

Better not waste all our time and ressources and get to the heart of things instead of wallowing in the miserable timidity of senility. The categorical imperative requires it.

That's fine about personal virtue. But if we're talking about candidates, I prefer the candidate who incompetently pursues the evil goal over the candidate who competently pursues it.

Understandable, but of course, Socrates, Confucius and other classical philosophers of virtue and natural law consider public virtue an extension of personal virtue.

Not to wallow in contrarianism but I think there is also a legit argument for wishing your enemies to be somewhat competent in general in that competence is predictable. Idiots can throw a wrench into the best of plans and ruin not just what they seek to ruin.

In the particular circumstance of democracy where you know power will be shared with your enemies at some point in the near future, you should want for this minimum out of mere pragmatism. It is a risk to all of us that the nominal head of the most powerful army in the world is mentally incapable.

And I understand none of this applies if you wish to see the end of the United States as we know it. In some sense the actual accelerationist argument is that it is good Biden is so obviously incapable, because it shows everyone how power actually works in the American regime and lets all decide what to do about it instead of continuing to play act at republicanism.

Not to wallow in contrarianism but I think there is also a legit argument for wishing your enemies to be somewhat competent in general in that competence is predictable. Idiots can throw a wrench into the best of plans and ruin not just what they seek to ruin.

But they can also fail to ruin what they seek to ruin. I believe this dominates.

Yeah, in some ways Biden benefits from his reputation as a being a bit old and senile. People kind of shrug off some of his brazen lies as confusion or misremembering stuff. But he's a shameless liar and he has been for decades! The bloke stole Neil Kinnock's life story because it sounded better than his!

Granted, lies are very common in politics and neither Trump nor Biden is very far outside the norm in that regard. But as you say it makes it galling when he drapes himself in the mantle of honesty.

The worst part about this is that Biden is, like Trump, one of the most dishonest candidates of all-time. The number of lies he told during the debate alone was shocking. As is his history of creating self-aggrandizing stories out of whole cloth.

There's a line in Catholic doctrine that goes something like "the accuser reveals thier nature in the accusation". One can debate its correspondence to reality but i think there is some element of truth to the idea that "a thief will assume others to be thieves" and "a liar will assume others to be liars".

Edit: I'm not saying I endorse it, but there is a line of thinking that goes...

"Biden and his supporters know that Biden is a self agrandizing liar who takes bribes, the only reason they're accusing Trump of the same crime is to level the playing field."


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats