Njordsier
6mo ago
I had a strong prior on exactly this before the assassination of Shinzo Abe, but now I'm not so sure.
Njordsier
7mo ago
I'm gonna assume the two elections prior to 2016 that you're referring to are 2000 (where he ran in the Reform Party primary) and 2012, where he drummed up birtherism but declined to run.
The obvious explanation for why he didn't take off in 2000 was because he was running in the primary of a third party that included such disparate figures as Ralph Nader and David Duke, and which was falling apart with Jesse Ventura leaving. He could have won the primary but doing so wouldn't have gotten him anywhere in the general with the party hollowed out by infighting while the two mainstream parties fielded serious candidates.
And the obvious explanation for why he didn't take off in 2012 is that he chickened out after Osama Bin Laden was killed, crimping his plan of hammering Obama for being soft on terror and darkly insinuating that he's One Of Them. He maybe could have won the nomination in 2012 but he would have been competing with the rest of the parade of anyone-but-Romney caricatures who got a week each in the spotlight before the media and polls moved on to the next one.
The difference in the 2016 primary? There wasn't a consensus establishment pick for the nominee so the non-establishment candidates were on equal footing with the establishment ones, and Trump could outcompete the others on non-establishment bona fides, or more generally just staying in the spotlight and making the conversation about him all the time. And he could expect to face off against a general election opponent that he thought he could beat (though, notably, he didn't seem to think it was a sure thing).
Same thing on 2024, the establishment was split between DeSantis and Haley, but neither had the charisma to get grassroots support. But more importantly, Trump had successfully spent the last eight years reinforcing, through constant jousts with the media, that any criticism of him must be coming from the Bad Guys who are Out To Get You so any challenger in the primary couldn't possibly criticize him without inheriting the stink of the dreaded Enemy.
The trajectory of a political campaign depends on a lot of things that aren't necessarily in the control of the candidate. It matters who else is running and what else is happening in the world. Very talented figures who could do well in a general election can easily get passed over if they don't get their foot in the door with party insiders. And very counterproductive figures can be elevated to placate insider groups.
Njordsier
9mo ago
I have often fantasized (ever since 2004) about a Republican winning the popular vote and losing the electoral college and galvanizing support on the right for an EC reform amendment or more states signing into the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, but realistically I can't assume that Democrats would continue to be interested in such a reform after the EC turns out to benefit them, even if I can promise that I personally would.
Once Trump is gone, one way or another, there might be bipartisan interest in clarifying the scope of some executive privileges that he has laid claim to, but that all needs to be far enough in the rear view mirror, like FDR's four terms, for it to not get polarized.
The concept of contingent elections, where state delegations of House representatives choose the president in the case of no electoral college majority, will not last long after the next time one happens.
If a foreign adversary tries to take advantage of US weakness during a chaotic lame duck session, for example if Trump wins after a campaign promising to dismantle NATO and China thinks it's a good time to make a move on Taiwan while the US is distracted, we might get a new amendment like the 20th that shortens the lame duck period.
But I doubt you'd be able to pass anything more than boring no-brainer kind of amendments like the 27th. Maybe one that requires Officers of the US (maybe clarifying that to include the President) from trading stocks, but again, only after the immediate controversies with a partisan valence are well in the rear view mirror.
Njordsier
11mo ago
I would prefer the remedy to "the laws are bad" to be "change the laws to be good" rather than "don't enforce the laws".
Njordsier
1yr ago
Is it just pre-emptive striking from execs who respond to headlines?
Obviously yes? Same thing happened with James Gunn. If the Hollywood execs who fired him from Guardians of the Galaxy had done their due diligence they would have realized it was right-wing troll groups stirring up controversy about him, but that didn't matter. It wasn't "most people" that the execs were responding to, it was, in both cases, paranoid PR departments seeing (potential) controversy about their properties and trying to head it off, perhaps with some inside-baseball career jockeying that has nothing to do with ideology.
Njordsier
1yr ago
Do you think a deontological or virtue ethicist AI, or one programmed/designed by deontologists or virtue ethicists would be less likely to pose an existential risk? Or what moral framework do you have in mind that would make the AI alignment problem less of a problem?
Njordsier
1yr ago
I think the problem with this is that the person being suspended could move to another platform and they'd have no reason to stick around if they could get randomly suspended on a platform with this feature.
It would only work on a site with a de facto monopoly from network effects. Twitter is as close to this as any site for the kind of content it serves but a disproportionate amount of its appeal is access to celebrities and big names, who are precisely the people who'd be the biggest targets of crowdsourced suspension.
Njordsier
1yr ago
Streisand effect says otherwise. I hadn't heard of any of the banned journalists until my timeline was flooded with people talking about the banned journalists.
Njordsier
1yr ago
Everything in there that is useful was written by someone else in a more succinct and engaging way elsewhere.
Why should someone refuse to enjoy anything but the absolute most succinct and engaging presentation of every idea they encounter?
Njordsier
1yr ago
I don't see it as very competitive since it's trivial for someone to press subscribe
This presupposes you see things you subscribed to and things you could potentially subscribe to on even footing, which is no longer the case the moment you subscribe to anything. You see more of what you subscribe to, that's what subscription is.
How do you square this with the law of large numbers?
Path dependency.
Njordsier
2yr ago
but after the Race, when votes were being stolen by the corrupt Election process in Broward County, and Ron was going down ten thousand votes a day, along with now-Senator Rick Scott, I sent in the FBI and the U.S. Attorneys, and the ballot theft immediately ended, just prior to them running out of the votes necessary to win. I stopped his Election from being stolen…
Uh, what? I do remember when Trump cried wolf about fraud in the Florida 2018 race before all the votes were counted and Gillum had an early lead, it was part of the basis for my correct prediction that he wouldn't accept a loss in 2020. But he's saying he actually sent agents that somehow changed how the votes were counted and is giving himself credit for DeSantis' win because he did so? That sounds like 1) a huge lie that would have been exposed by the media/FBI leaks if it actually happened, and 2) easily read as a confession to electoral fraud to people motivated to accuse him of such.
Is this a 4D chess move to drag DeSantis into January 6 investigations? Does he know he's lying, but actually thinks this is an effective attack on DeSantis that makes himself look good? Or does he think he's telling the truth and sincerely believe DeSantis owes his 2018 victory to Trump sending FBI agents to something something stop ballot theft?
Njordsier
2yr ago
No man is free until he can unilaterally homestead his own O'Neil cylinder in the Oort cloud.
Njordsier
2yr ago
But decades of neoliberal policy treating energy companies as The Great Satan have made them too nervous.
Just when I thought I was getting a handle on what people mean when they say "neoliberal" I get pitched this screwball.
I've updated hard on a lot of things these past few weeks, but I don't think the expected payoff for a rational would-be assassin is one of them.
Last I heard, the Trump assassin was a crazy person without policy objectives (which came as a mild surprise to me) which makes an evaluation of the efficacy kind of meaningless.
Maybe a week ago, assuming the plausible claim that a Trump assassin would want Trump's policy objectives to fail, I would have assumed this episode was a stronger strike against Abe-level assassination effectiveness because of how much it clearly empowered Trump. But the way the media cycle has moved on to other things this week maybe it's a wash.
Overall, a weak update away from Abe and towards the sane baseline that assassination attempts are not rational.
I'm still confused about why the assassination of Abe was so effective towards the assassin's goals.
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