AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
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User ID: 2498
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
3mo ago
Legal immigration and naturalization are also things that happen.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
3mo ago
Ehhhh, Jew-hate was pretty central. It wasn't everything but it was a lot. It's underplaying it to say "they were just an obstacle to the real goal" when the real goal was racial supremacy.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
3mo ago
Population keeps increasing. It would not be at all surprising if the election winner got the most votes in history.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
3mo ago
The virulent anti-semitism was a major and defining aspect of Nazism, true. But there were other significant and distinctive aspects of their ideology such that I think it can be meaningful to describe someone as Nazi-without-the-Jew-killing. I don't think that label describes Trump well though. For instance:
- Nazism considered military struggle and conflict a natural and desirable part of human existence. While I'm cynical about the "no wars" rhetoric we get from Trump and his ilk, he's certainly far less dedicated to war for its own sake.
- Nazi ideology famously supported killing the disabled and infirm. Trump obviously has suggested nothing like this.
- Trump is much more individualist than the Nazis. Their collectivism was not compassionate, but it was a collectivist ideology nonetheless.
Trump has many flaws, but he ain't a Nazi.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
3mo ago
I reckon she'd have a decent shot if she went all in on a law-and-order message. That's pretty much her background but in 2020 Democrats were not keen to say things like "crime is bad" and that made her pretty rudderless.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
3mo ago
I have no interest in talk of "sides". You have no evidence that this lady specifically was in any way involved in any of those events. She is not an avatar of leftism, she's not an organizer of online mobs, she's just some cashier at home depot. Punishing her for what some people she doesn't know did to someone else she doesn't know is grotesque.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
3mo ago
While this is obviously a very different system and situation to the kinds of leadership challenges that happen fairly often in parliamentary systems, I'll make a few observations about what tends to happen in my experience.
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The under-siege leader gets increasingly defiant and intransigent. Even when their position is obviously mortally wounded, they will desperately hang on and try to fight off the people coming for them. For example when Tony Abbott faced an empty-chair spill (no alternative candidate, just a motion to kick him out) that got 39% support, most observers recognised that there was no coming back from that. Abbott himself though clung on for another 7 months until finally being blasted out by Turnbull. Similarly, when the knives came out for Turnbull he made plans to call an early election before his internal party foes could get the numbers to take him down, and was stopped only by the Attorney General threatening to resign. Gillard endured two unsuccessful attempts over an extended period before Rudd finally took her down. Leaders can and will stay through wall to wall media coverage saying "X is GONE" for months on end.
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The media narrative runs way ahead of the actual deciders. The news is frothy and excitable. Agitators use the media to build momentum and exaggerate their numbers. The people who actually need to gank the leader are much more slow to take that step. It absolutely can happen but it's a big deal and people have personal loyalties that are not so easily discarded. By the time it actually happens it usually has felt completely obvious and inevitable to everyone on the outside for some time. (Gillard's sudden and swift assassination of Rudd being an obvious exception).
Now we have party bigwigs openly calling on Biden to go, this is getting serious. But I'm still looking for a few more steps in escalation before I think Biden is likely to consider folding, such as a party leader (like Schumer or Pelosi or Obama) publicly calling on delegates pledged to Biden to abandon him, or an alternative candidate announcing they will try to win the nomination at the convention. If it gets to the point where Biden recognises he's going to lose regardless, he might back out then rather than forcing the issue.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
3mo ago
Yeah, you could maybe make a case for Kohli somewhere on the list, but he's not the kind of standout that a Warne or a Tendulkar were and of course no one holds a candle to Bradman.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
3mo ago
I'm talking from the perspective of a serious adversary. An Iranian hit squad is not going to care at all about Trump's relationship to the bureaucracy or whatever, their problem is with America and it's not going away. So the only people you actually have to defend against are random kooks who want to impress Jodie Foster or something.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
3mo ago
I think a lot of the upside play is they don't have to go around making themselves look stupid insisting Biden is as sharp and vigorous as ever.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
3mo ago
No. Rules are different for politicians. You're asking for an incredible amount of power over people's lives, the flip side of that is those people get to say mean things about you.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
3mo ago
I think it would be just for every person cheering this on to get a visit at their own workplace from someone with a camera harassing them over their own internet posts.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
3mo ago
I don't think so. I think politicians say stuff with no intention or ability to actually change things all the freaking time.
It probably shows that more and more Democrats are making the calculation that it's better for their personal position to call for him to drop out than to keep pretending that he's fine.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
3mo ago
Trump is not highly replaceable
Of course he is. He's not even president. If he dies the GOP nominates Vance or DeSantis or Rubio or someone and the world keeps spinning.
AshLael
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3mo ago
Crooks doesn't seem to have been a guy with a plan.
AshLael
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3mo ago
He's an actor, he knows how to pretend, not to actually do things.
Very much like a lot of actual human "experts".
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
3mo ago
The main "protection" that politicians have is that they're highly replaceable. You kill a Senator, they make someone else a Senator. You kill a President, they have a whole other spare President ready to go. So there's not really much point doing it for any serious strategic adversary, and mostly only total dingbats try.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
3mo ago
I still don't see the mechanism for turning "people saying Biden should drop out" into "Biden drops out". He's clearly intending to hang on and run the clock out till the convention. More people telling him not to do that is going to change what?
It's a convention challenge or a 25th amendment scenario, those are the options. No one is even hinting at them. So he stays.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
3mo ago
Yeah this is where I land as well. Which is why it irks me to see people going "haha they says he's literally Hitler but also saying the assassination attempt was bad, they're clearly full of shit." No, it's that crossing the line of embracing political violence and murder is a serious thing and most people won't do that lightly.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
3mo ago
Yeah that's true. I was thinking about the period between eg the Beer Hall Putsch and him actually taking power but once he's already started WW2 it's far from clear that taking him out improves things. Decisions like choosing to stop focusing on RAF bases to instead bomb London were pivotal and the war could have gone very differently.
AshLael
Just here to farm downvotes
3mo ago
This is exactly what sanewashing is though. "Well literally abolishing the police would obviously be retarded, so they obviously don't mean that." But yes, they really did literally want to abolish the police and they actually were retarded.
I don't know if Trump is going to go ahead with this full scale cleanout of the bureaucracy, but I know Vance isn't the only person on his side who wants this and is planning for it. Like the whole Project 2025 thing has gotten a lot of press couching it in vaguely conspiratorial terms as a secret policy agenda but the more substantial and meaningful part of the project IMO is the effort to build a database of loyalists pre-vetted to come and fill those positions.
I'm pretty firmly of the opinion that there is a sharply diminishing marginal effect in terms of electoral outcomes, and the practical impact gets maxed out quickly. It's easy to point out examples where massive spending achieved approximately nothing (Michael Bloomberg, Carrick Flynn, etc).
But even so, there can still be a corruptive effect if politicians believe that money buys elections, and most of them do.
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