Goodguy
2mo ago
I kind of understand where you are coming from, but first of all, my apologies for this at least - I had no idea that there was a separate debate thread! I probably should have bothered to check, but I didn't. If I had realized that there was one, I would probably have just posted all of this over there. Also, I personally would prefer if Trump won the general election. I am whining because I feel that he is shitting the bed. And because I feel that his shitposting has become weak and his debating, outside of the primaries, has always been weak, and this is showing itself yet again. Talking about how backseat driving is tedious because Trump has sometimes succeeded at shitposting and debating would be one thing if this Trump had won in 2020, but he did not. So I think it is fair to say, even though granted COVID did a lot to hurt Trump in 2020, that it is fair to question Trump's skills at shitposting and debating.
Goodguy
2mo ago
Trump getting suckered into getting emotional and raising his voice and rambling and focusing on things that do not help him has dogged him in every general election debate I can remember him having, other than the super-easy one against Biden the other month. For some reason he was great in the 2016 primary debates, but he seems to struggle in debating Democrats.
Much worse. He is constantly allowing Harris to set him up for typical leftist or moderate establishment framings of things like foreign policy and racism and he has little ability to get out of those traps other than by raising his voice, thus looking defensive, and repeating the same talking points about how the Democrats are destroying the country and so on - which I happen to agree with to some extent, but I don't think repeating it and rambling about it plays well to the electorate. He failed to figure out some kind of judo or direct assault to get out of some very typical leftist traps, such as accusations of racism, in a way that would make him look good. He has allowed Kamala to look like the calmer one of the two. He brought up abortion for absolutely no reason before Kamala even did. He is shitting the bed so hard that even a bunch of people on /r/conservative are criticizing his performance. Which is unfortunate for me because, while I hate both sides, on the whole I would prefer Trump to win because I live in a Democrat-run city and I can see close-up the consequences of Democrat policies.
To be fair, the deck is stacked against him if for no other reason than that leftist attitudes are more prevalent in the public mind than right-wing ones, and the moderator might be a bit unfair. But he did not do a good job of preparing for this debate.
Well, this is the Trump experience. I mean this debate. He started out really strong, was totally defeating Harris for the first ten minutes or so. Then he just couldn't help but start rambling and making unforced errors. Why decide to bring up abortion and ramble about ninth month abortion? That's not one of the Republicans' strengths. Why bring up Marxism? Outside of the highly online left and right, people generally think of Marxism as some boring thing from decades ago, not as an important issue. Why bring up the Springfield pets thing? That's another highly online issue that plays weird to normies.
Why not just focus on your strengths of crime, the economy, and immigration? He's starting to try to pivot more back to those now, but now he's rambling and raising his voice and acting defensive, which looks bad.
This guy has always sucked at debates other than in the 2016 primaries and when he got to go up against Biden a few months ago, but almost anyone could have won that debate against Biden.
Kamala is a competent but relatively weak debater, a strong debater could easily run rings around her. But Trump has learned nothing, it seems, from past debate performances. He keeps making the same kinds of unforced errors and making himself look bad. He can't stop himself from getting defensive and rambling and bringing up stuff that most people don't care about, or even stuff that favors his opponent.
If he could have just stayed calm and focused, he would have this debate in the bag by now. Instead he is fumbling it. How the fuck can a man have nine years of experience at politics and political debating and not learn the simple lesson of staying calm and looking calm and tough when the context makes it the right decision, instead of getting flustered and emotional all the time?
A quick bit of Googling and comparing modern UK homicide numbers compared to modern UK attempted homicide numbers shows that about 69% of the reported attempted homicides end up with actual homicides, which I think indicates that in this context the difference made by better medical technology is not that large. It is possible that Victorian England was a bit less homicidal than modern England, but that would not demonstrate that Victorian England was necessarily more high-trust than modern England. As for the improvement in policing between then and now, sure, but this has implications both ways. To what extent can we really call a society high-trust if the people in charge of it do not care to provide the lower classes with adequate policing? Sure, the Victorians did not have modern forensic and surveillance technology, but they were perfectly capable of flooding the slums with cops if they had wished to do it. They easily could have afforded to put enough cops in the streets to massively crack down on crime. But they did not do it. Well, we have a similar situation now in the West, don't we. Maybe things have not changed that much after all. I am still not convinced that their society was significantly higher-trust than ours, if you look at their society as a whole and not just selected elements of it.
Goodguy
2mo ago
Even in Medieval times, when the average person believed devoutly in Christianity, which one might think would suffice to provide a why, nonetheless there arose a notion of supplementing it by devotion to an individual human being,.
Dante Alighieri wrote in La Vita Nuova, around 1290:
Nine times, the heaven of the light had returned to where it was at my birth, almost to the very same point of its orbit, when the glorious lady of my mind first appeared before my eyes—she whom many called Beatrice without even knowing that was her name. She had already been in this life long enough for the heaven of the fixed stars to have moved toward the east a twelfth of a degree since she was born, so that she was at the beginning of her ninth year when she appeared to me, and I saw her when I was almost at the end of my ninth. She appeared, dressed in a very stately color, a subdued and dignified crimson, girdled and adorned in a manner that was fitting for her young age.
At that time, truly, I say, the vital spirit, which dwells in the innermost chamber of the heart, started to tremble so powerfully that its disturbance reached all the way to the slightest of my pulses. And trembling it spoke these words: "Here is a god stronger than I, who comes to rule me."
Granted, Dante Alighieri was unusual for his time. But there is a reason why the notion of fervent romantic love became such a prominent feature of those times' literature. I really do wonder if back then, they really fundamentally had any more of a strong sense of why in their hearts than we do. They probably did, but I am not sure that they had it a great deal more than we do.
Goodguy
2mo ago
Well, I would hope that here on The Motte we are trying to be beyond caring about personal reputation as much as possible. Personal reputation is a very useful heuristic, but it has limits when it comes to seeking truth.
I think that some people have a rose-colored glasses view of Victorian England because it would feel nice to imagine that it was a beautiful society full of people who played violins while eloquently debating the finer points of the latest geopolitical news from the continent, while maybe overworked yet fundamentally good and noble commoners dutifully worked the machinery in the factories. I would probably be likely to fall for such a view myself, it's just that I read a lot of Sherlock Holmes when I was younger, and I've read a lot about the Jack the Ripper case, so I was already predisposed to be somewhat familiar with Victorian England's criminal issues.
There's also the fact that late 19th century European industrial civilization is what gave us militant anarchism and communism, which is not proof, but is suggestive evidence, in favor of the theory that conditions for the lower classes really were pretty bad back then, and the society was not any more high-trust than ours is.
Goodguy
2mo ago
No worries man, I've had brain-farts of a similar level before. It happens.
Goodguy
2mo ago
One big thing they didn't have was antibiotics, which is pretty important.
As for higher trust and social capital, I am not sure about that. There are two separate issues there, I think:
- Were the middle/upper classes in pre-WWI England more trustworthy than today's middle/upper classes? Maybe, but I see no clear evidence of that. Surely there was plenty of backstabbing going on back then too.
- Were the lower classes in pre-WWI England more trustworthy than today's lower classes? I'm not so sure. My understanding is that the homicide rate in 1900 England was either higher than in modern England, or at best about the same as today. Part of that might be because modern policing is more effective than the policing back then - on the other hand, for the very same reason, it is possible that the England homicide rate from 1900 is under-reported. I see no evidence that the society was actually significantly higher-trust than today.
Goodguy
2mo ago
Well, 2.5 times worse is still not exactly "about as bad as COVID".
In any case, no matter what you think about COVID, in my opinion the right-wing reaction to it was bad politics. I can't blame right-wing politicians much for it because in this case it was really more of a grassroots thing from the right-wing base.
Old people vote more than any other age cohort. Old people are also the ones most in danger from COVID. And as someone else pointed out, old people tend to associate vaccines with good things.
I do not live in a swing state, and I plan to not vote for either Harris or Trump. If I lived in a swing state, I would have to think carefully. I deeply despise both sides, but I might vote Trump in that case simply because he is slightly more likely to do something about things like violent crime, wokeness, and the Democratic Party's attacks on free speech.
I have seen unpleasant signs lately:
- The arrest of Paul Durov.
- The approval for the extradition of Kim Dotcom.
- The Biden campaign's recent attack on supposed Russian disinformation operations - which I'm sure exist, I just don't see anything in Biden's attempting to crack down on them other than a partisan attempt to attack the right.
- The recent attacks on Tenet media for being a Russian disinformation operation (and they might well be, but I don't care if they are), and the fact that it has become clear to me that Harris is in favor of more regulation of speech on social media (which she has been for a while, but I only realized it lately). It seems that the left-leaning establishment is pretty solidly unified behind the idea of cracking down on their opponents' speech, and is taking real, serious steps to try to crack down on it.
- The FBI's
anti-heresyanti-disinformation operations: https://newrepublic.com/post/185668/fbi-document-influencers-russian-disinformation.
And what is the anti-left coalition doing? Not enough, it seems to me. Do most people in the anti-left coalition even understand the extent of the left's hate for them? In my experience, most leftists are nice people in person, but if you start talking about politics, an interesting thing emerges... the average anti-leftist thinks that leftists are stupid, but only a relatively small subset of anti-leftists think that leftists are evil. On the other hand, in my experience the majority of leftists think that the right is evil and should be destroyed. Not necessarily destroyed through force, most leftists aren't in favor of concentration camps or killings. But they think that the right should be eradicated from the Earth. They are true believers in the idea that leftism is morally superior, and they believe it on such a deep level that trying to convince them otherwise is like trying to persuade some random European in the year 1200 AD that maybe Christianity is just bullshit.
Believing that your opponents are evil is stronger motivation than thinking that your opponents are stupid.
The left has suffered some defeats recently, like Musk buying X for example, and I think that in some ways peak woke is now behind us. But the swap of Biden for Harris has given the left a resurgent energy, and to me the Trump campaign increasingly seems to not be up to the challenge of winning the election. Which is bad news not because the Presidency really matters that much in and of itself, because for the most part it does not, but because the rest of the right does not seem to be doing any better than Trump is when it comes to winning elections and because a Harris win would energize the left.
Goodguy
2mo ago
It is amazing to me that the Empire lasted for several hundred years, yet that society never managed to figure out a regular form of succession that people could more or less agree on.
Goodguy
2mo ago
Which two? The Hong Kong flu of the late 1960s killed only about a tenth as many people as COVID did in the US. Granted, the population of the US was only about 60% as large back then as it is now, and it is possible that reporting of deaths in one or both pandemics is faulty. But still, I figure that at most, the Hong Kong flu was "only" about a fifth as deadly as COVID.
Goodguy
2mo ago
Given that the generation of your parents' parents and grandparents created the world in which the two largest wars in human history happened, I have some doubts about whether they were any more moral than we are. Don't get me wrong, I think the fact that there hasn't been another huge war has much more to do with nuclear weapons than with morality. I don't think that we are necessarily any more moral than those people. But I also think that probably we are not any less moral.
Goodguy
2mo ago
Not only that, but she managed to do it without the aid of being really good-looking. She wasn't some kind of gorgeous beauty when younger, she was a completely unremarkable-looking woman.
Goodguy
2mo ago
I think this is a case of a very niche interest becoming slightly less niche, but still staying very niche. The vast majority of people do not care in the least bit about the fertility rates of societies.
Goodguy
2mo ago
She might be an exception to the averages. It makes no sense to be convinced that the marriage is dysgenic from an intelligence point of view unless you know something about what her individual intelligence is actually like.
Goodguy
2mo ago
Well personally, I think it's the same thing no matter which side does it.
Goodguy
2mo ago
I agree, but supporting women's having better material and social conditions is not incompatible with granting them more freedom to control their own reproduction. One can do both.
Goodguy
2mo ago
I think that in modern society the opinion that men should have more control over women's sexual decisions, other than potentially in the one case of abortion (because that one has potential moral implications beyond the woman) is just fundamentally loser-coded because the Internet has made it pretty clear that the majority of men who want to police women's sexual decisions are doing so out of sexual frustration. Of course there is a small minority of rationalist-types who genuinely care about the impact of women's sexual decisions on fertility rates or social cohesion out of a detached interest in supporting pro-social policies, but the modal guy online arguing for controlling women's sexual decisions is, assuming that he is not a genuine pro-lifer, pretty clearly doing it because he isn't getting laid as much as he wants.
Goodguy
2mo ago
Generally speaking, people who think that education reduces fertility rates do not think that it mainly does this by making women have arrested development into their thirties, they think it mainly does it by giving women more options in the economy and thus making them more independent from a need to settle down with a man just to have a decent standard of living. Granted, the reactionary flavor of the argument does often talk about arrested development. But I think the reactionary flavor is currently a minority view.
Goodguy
2mo ago
While it might be true that for a majority of women, having children is actually the global maximum of satisfaction, there are also clearly many women for whom that is not true. It makes sense to support women's right to control their own reproduction so that women can make the choice on their own.
Well to be honest, I can't think of any great ones off the top of my head. But surely there must be some out there, and Trump has people funded by millions of dollars working to help him with these things. At the very least, maybe he could point out that Kamala was picked for Vice President for racist reasons. On the other hand, to explain to normies why that is a bad thing would probably take some calmness and sustained intellectual ability at explanation that Trump might simply not be capable of.
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