Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
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User ID: 373
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
This is what relentless negative partisanship does to people. The outgroup is always guilty until proven innocent. Even when they're proven innocent, a lot of partisans don't believe it. I've seen at least a few people on /pol/ claim the FBI is covering up evidence that would prove their theories correct, for both this shooter and the Trump shooter.
Is nobody going to be held accountable for making overconfident and wildly-inflated claims for partisan purposes?
Oh my sweet summer child.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
Who's "teaching marxism" here? The person I responded to deliberately chose fairly wishy-washy language of "informed by people" because more forceful positions like "teaching marxism" aren't backed up by evidence of being widespread.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
This idea only works if a person is seriously committed to exploring viewpoints on their own merits rather than using that as a shield to broadcast highly controversial views. Tucker and the people who watch him might not fully agree with Nazi viewpoints as they're espoused, but they probably agree with at least some of them, and more importantly wish they were in the Overton Window in order to make their own views more palatable.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
Given he ran 2 other political campaigns where this didn't happen, and he's nearly 80 years old now, yes I'd say it's a reasonable conclusion. If the shoe fits...
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
I'm not letting men off the hook
And yes, perhaps bans on porn and restrictions on video games should be on the table
Why are the problems with society my duty to fix? I'm already being asked to finance Boomer entitlements and their massive deficits, and now you want to take away the ability for me to enjoy the things that have given me a very happy, inadvertently MGTOW life. We all know that if a system was proposed that punished both men and women, that the punishments targeting men would get the political capital to pass first, long before anything targeting women would come into effect. Both the left and the right think men are the source of all the world's problems. My response would be a simple "buzz off". Let me do my own thing
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
Some of the object-level details in your post are wrong, but your overall message is correct: there certainly has been a change in Trump's campaign. It's a combination of Trump's visible aging, along with a decent dose of Trump fatigue. The man is old news by this point, so unless he does something very crazy, nobody really pays attention like they used to. He's also less energetic than he used to be and so he's likely abdicated some of his responsibilities to his campaign staff, most of whom probably want him on a tighter leash.
Claiming this is Trump "evolving" is... charitable. He's regressing to a more median politician in his old age.
For the object-level details:
The campaign is still very leaky, e.g. there was inside reporting on the disastrous weeks where he lost the polling lead, his anger at Vance, and his campaign getting hacked.
And Trump has been completely free to go even further, to discuss mass deportation, and this is somehow considered even less outrageous than the border wall was considered not that long ago.
This is a combination of two things: 1) the public becoming more anti-immigrant due to Biden's defacto open borders for the first 2 years, and 2) the public knowing that Trump is mostly BS'ing here. Trump promised deportations in his first go around and that didn't really happen. Trump was basically no better than Obama when it comes to stopping illegal immigration.
Democrats used to campaign on "defund the police" and other stances hostile to cops. Now Democrats are campaigning on having put more cops on the streets- the old Trump stance!
Trump even created controversy with his "America First" branding. But now Democrats are copying that in everything but name.
Democrats aren't anti-woke, per se. But they have abandoned almost all of their explicit pro-woke messaging, moving much more towards the Trump stance.
These are all true. Trump might have been a small part of changing the culture. Most of it is just woke burnout. If you want, I guess you could credit Trump with supercharging the woke movement from 2017 to 2020 which poured gasoline on the movement.
Trump was also the first President to constantly rattle on about the stock market and gas prices and so on. Now Biden/Harris do that, too.
He's certainly not the first to talk about gas prices -- that's just laughably wrong. I can't remember other politicians talking about the stock market so explicitly so this one seems true-ish.
I also frankly think that after hiring and firing enough people, Trump has finally ended up with a much more loyal staff than he's ever had before.
When he first became president, he tried hiring a combination of 1) establishment conservatives, 2) hard-right zealots, and 3) supplicating grifters. He'd eventually learn that he hated (1), distrusts but is forced to pay lip service to (2), and really likes (3). Now he knows to fill his staff with a sprinkling of (2) and a ton of (3). So yeah, I expect somewhat less churn in his admin if he becomes president, although that wouldn't exactly be a high bar compared to his first term.
Trump seems to have lost weight.
Yes, this is a common issue with the elderly.
His coloring is now so unremarkable
A combination of people acclimatizing to his face, and losing coloration from getting older.
Perhaps partly due to having less physical heft, he isn't as audibly "loud" as he used to be.
Yep, it's harder to yell as people get older.
I have been surprised at how little discussion there has been in the media
Agreed, there should be much more discussion of his age. Even Elon knew this a few years ago, but it seems like Biden being even older broke the media's brains a bit and so they put the yardstick for "old politician" at "unable to speak more than a few sentences".
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
A huge chunk of the elites of society are informed by people who are actual literal out and out marxists who use falsified marxist postulates as inputs in their theorems. Very little of this has to do with support for command economics, and you can have non-marxist totalitarian command economies.
And we just had Tucker, who informs almost the entire Republican right, interviewing a Nazi with Elon Musk promoting it. Would you take that as evidence that anti-Nazi efforts in the US have failed and that we must now quintuple down on them?
Communism and Nazi sympathies are contrarianism born from negative partisanship, not genuine broad support for those ideologies.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
You're right, I get the two confused.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
Can you point to a case where the FBI leader wrote a dubious memo to measurably change the dynamics of a tight race by 3%+ on the eve of an election?
It's not that I'm unpersuadable that the FBI has an anti-right bent to it, but Trump is moderately-to-significantly more corrupt and disorganized than the median presidential nominee, so it's obvious why he'd encounter more troubles with the FBI. You describing the Comey letter upthread as "an FBI effort to protect Clinton breaking down" and "The FBI did their best, but there were literally too many crimes to cover up" is just goofy. It gives me the vibes that the arguments I'm hearing are being filtered through an aggressively partisan lens, where the ingroup candidate never commits any crimes yet is infinitely persecuted, while the outgroup candidate commits infinity crimes that get "covered up".
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
I was more describing why people felt that way rather than claiming it was correct. It was on the "is" side of the "is-ought" divide. Staying on that side for a moment, I can't think of any atrocities committed by Communists that had the same death toll x deliberateness that the Holocaust had. It had some with plausibly higher death totals, and some that were just as deliberate, but none that were both.
Moving to the "ought" part, I think Communism should be lumped in with Nazism broadly as "Authoritarianism" and stand in contrast to Democracy or Liberalism. We can quibble over exactly how much proportional guilt should be assigned to something like the Cultural Revolution compared to the Holocaust (0.5x? 0.8x?) but any measurements would pale in comparison to how relatively well-behaved democracies have been. They've obviously done some bad things themselves (e.g. Japanese internment), but the difference in scale and severity is readily apparent.
I believe that the West still harbors Communist sympathies because I observe its treatment of previous generations of Communists, and I observe a current generation of violent Communist thugs organizing widespread political violence
ANTIFA is not guilty of widespread political violence since it's not popular enough to generate such action, and BLM can't reasonably be called communist.
I note that I am routinely lectured on the present threat of nazi ideology by people with the hammer and sickle in their social media bio.
Deranged leftists on Twitter are not evidence of widespread communist sympathies. At least, they're no more evidence than deranged right-wingers on 4chan or this very site(!) are of widespread Nazi sympathies.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
I don't disagree that normies think Nazism is worse (often far worse) than Communism. That's mostly because of the Holocaust. Communism has some atrocities with higher death counts (e.g. perhaps Mao's Cultural Revolution), but the Holocaust's relatively high death toll + the deliberateness of the whole ordeal is what makes it really pop. If you squint, you can sort of see how many of the deaths in China were accidental. It's hard to do the same for death camps.
If so, what is the problem with describing this rectification as "teaching normies that communism is bad"?
It's not that it's a bad to teach them this, it's that there's not really a point since the vast majority already believe it. Yet for some reason much of the motte thinks a huge chunk of the West still harbors Communist sympathies, so most of his answers were specifically addressing that point.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
Republicans will think any charges against Trump for any reason are politically motivated. Most don't think he's a saint or something, it's just pure culture warring -- circle the wagons and defend the leader from the outgroup no matter what.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
First off, thanks for replying. I always find your comments to be well thought out and high-quality.
My follow up would be to question if the situation with Iran is really analogous. The Great Firewall of China is fairly easily bypassed for anyone who wants to break containment, but most normies in China simply don't care enough to do so. Most people just want to browse whatever sites they're used to, and as long as they can do that then the other details are immaterial. So say a neutral (e.g. Indian or Russian) competitor to Starlink is born which promises to fulfill the wishes of whatever censorship regime a country may have. The government could then mandate that satellite dishes have to be of whatever visually-distinct partner brand is cooperating with them. Of course they'll never get 100% compliance, as people could disguise their dishes or whatever, but most people simply won't care about that enough to bother.
A complete banning of satellite dishes like Iran did would be costly as there are presumably a bunch of reasons why people would have them. But if the state tells people to switch from one brand to another, that's an entirely different story.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
Well yes, it can be a factor. But then, lots of things can be factors. The original question asked:
Are we entering an era where elections are mostly decided based on corporate censorship?
Which is still a resounding "not really", same as it's always been. It's like asking if the media alone can start wars. If you squint, you can sort of see it, but you'd have to ignore a lot of other factors first if you wanted to declare it was "mostly decided" by the media (or censorship thereof).
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
What do they mean by death to America? I don't think they mean death to ordinary Americans. They mean death to neoliberal imperialists.
This made me chuckle IRL
"The leopards eating faces party surely don't want to eat my face, just the faces of my outgroup!"
Suppose communism is bad. How do you teach normies this?
You poisoned derailed the discussion by leading with this. Almost no normies actually think communism is good, nor are they yearning for it to any great degree. At worst they have some uninformed ideas that, if you squint, can sort of seem communist-adjacent. Stuff like supporting price ceilings or floors in competitive industries. But even these aren't really doing much damage. Things like "building more housing leads to higher housing + rent prices" has been much more disruptive to a flourishing society, and it doesn't spring from anything related to communism, but rather from ignorance of basic economics.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
In pure polling terms, the Comey letter made Clinton go from +5ish over Trump, to ~+1ish. It'd revert a bit when he posted the "lol jk" retraction 3 days from the election, but most of the damage had already been done. By contrast, Trump being convicted of felonies did almost nothing since he's judged on an extremely generous curve. So in terms of polling, the Comey letter was far worse.
If the left was anywhere close to being as conspiratorially minded as the right is, it could have easily claimed that Comey made a conscious effort to throw the election to Trump with his October Surprise, and that the 2016 election was therefore functionally "stolen". But of course, they didn't do that.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
How exactly does this apply to what I said? This is a genuine question of clarification, not an accusation.
It seems like that should make Star Link trivial to block if the Brazilians really wanted to then.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
Could the marginal effects of this story spreading have impacted the outcome of the 2020 election?
There's a possibility it could have, but mostly because recent elections have been decided by razor-thin margins in a handful of swing states. Almost anything can impact the outcome of elections in such a scenario, like how the Comey letter plausibly cost Clinton the election in 2016.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
Normies don't care about being anti-censorship on principle, they only care when it impacts a political opinion they personally agree with. And even then, they only raise a stink about it when their trusted political influencers tell them it's a problem. The "I just want to grill" conservatives might grumble a bit about covid censorship, but they really don't go to bat against it. Instead, half the Republican party is obsessed with trying to commit electoral suicide by loudly forcing women to have their rapist's child.
Are we entering an era where elections are mostly decided based on corporate censorship?
We've never been in the situation where elections are "mostly" decided by corporate censorship, nor will we ever be. However, it could push things lightly at the margins. But this is really no different than what the media was always capable of doing.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
How long before authoritarian or neutral countries have their own version of Starlink? The advantages they give, if they're truly as big as you say, seem like they would attract the interest of other state actors to co-opt them. At that point, limiting Starlink is just a matter of banning its terrestrial assets in the country, which is easy enough. Normies can then switch to Chinalink or Indialink or whatever and not be that bothered.
Granted, this might not apply to the current situation, but Musk is playing a dangerous game here by directly incentivizing the creation of competitors.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
- I don't recall any great debate flub by Jeb, but 2016 was a long time ago so maybe I'm forgetting something?
- The "because you'd be in jail" didn't help him, and if anything it temporarily cost him support with moderates. Trump went from -4.6 against Clinton to -7.1 in the weeks following that.
- Biden self-destructed. Trump didn't do anything to help it along other than a weak "I don't think he knows what he's talking about" and be minimally competent enough to not also get dinged. A good debater could have accelerated it (like what Christie did to Rubio in 2016).
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
What in the world?
Trump has never been good at debating. At best he's been OK, as in he's been good enough to not crumple to someone like Jeb Bush's attacks back in 2016, but he's never really gained much from debates, he's just treaded water.
Then in 2020 he gave one of the worst debate performances in presidential history.
And he flubbed strategically in 2024 by letting Biden debate way early, when there was still time for the Dems to change horses. Trump is in a much weaker position because of that debate than where he was before it.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
The public likes Trump more when he shuts up. Throughout all his political campaigns (with an exception of early 2016) and his entire presidency, his approval rating and polling would go down when he was in the news for saying boneheaded crap, and then it'd go back up when he wasn't saying anything at all. Trump doesn't ever really do stuff that's good PR, so simple "not bad" is the high point for him.
The Harris campaign likely judges that the more he speaks, the more likely he is to put his foot in his mouth. The most spectacular example of this was the first debate in 2020 when he acted like a petulant child the entire time, which cost him 4% in post-debate polling. 4% is a crazy big move in an era of hyper polarization.
There's also the chance that Trump is now just too old to really quip back effectively. Trump has never been a particularly effective debater. He could hold his own in 2016 and benefited from his opponent imploding in 2024, but he's always had a meandering semi-coherent speaking style that's only become worse with age. There could be an opportunity for Harris to jab at him in a way that he couldn't effectively counter.
Trump's campaign knows he's a liability, but Trump himself almost certainly doesn't like being "muzzled" to any extent, so it's Trump + Dems on one side and Trump's campaign on the other, trying to keep their candidate from another self-inflicted wound. I can only imagine the lies his campaign staff is trying to cook up to convince him not to turn on the mics, because they obviously can't tell the truth to someone like him.
We don't have to use mind-reading here to determine motives. Rather, we can see if he's done similar things to the other side to determine if he has a genuine interest in all sides of the discussion. Has Tucker had a good faith interview with a far left woke person before? As in, one where the goal wasn't to laugh at them or use them as a foil, but to explore their views as he's comfortable doing with Nazis? I highly doubt it, but feel free to prove me wrong.
If we refuse to do this, then we capitulate to grifters who eternally claim they're "just asking questions". It's bad to give JAQing off a pass.
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