SlowBoy
8d ago
This served as a convenient fig leaf for Republicans who want to appeal to anti-immigration voters without being accused of racism
Every anti-immigration Republican is already accused of racism
On the other hand, if they want to keep appealing to their white nationalist faction
They don't
they're going to have to come up with some new justification for being opposed to immigration other than racial animus or the still-unacceptable euphemism of "cultural homogeneity"
There are lots of them. The last ten years of Trump politics were run on them
a very large Republican faction who will accuse any Republican politician who isn't aggressively opposed to immigration of being a RINO regardless of their stances on other policy questions
Immigration is the most important issue
SlowBoy
15d ago
Lindsay essentially replaced most of the words of the excerpts he quoted. This would fool most readers. It does not fool Claude / ChatGPT / MOSS, which have different intuitions from casual readers. (These algorithms tokenize a sentence into parts of speech so that even total find-replace changes will show no real differences to them.)
After seeing the extent of Lindsay's changes, I went from thinking this was embarrassing for the conservatives, to embarrassing for Lindsay. The journal's only mistake was not checking his submission for plagiarism, which would have turned this up -- expect that to become standard meta now that AI is so cheap.
SlowBoy
18d ago
Joe built his political career on peddling political influence to foreign nationals. Hunter was both the ultimate proof, and a terrible distraction because Republicans couldn't close the sale. It looked like political cornball. If this had been 60's, this would have dwarfed Watergate. But nobody cares anymore because every politician does it, and every politician does it because nobody cares.
SlowBoy
18d ago
I don't really mind Biden lying about it, I don't take the word of politicians to be all that sacrosanct. Politicians lie all the time, and I don't just mean in small ways that amount to fodder for a rant on facebook. A reasonable person would have accepted the possibility of Biden lying; and people who earnestly posted pro-Biden No Pardon propaganda made themselves easy marks.
I agree with you overall, but I'm struck by the helplessness of the frame the discourse has taken. Biden lied, Biden pardoned Hunter, Biden prosecuted Trump, Biden demonstrated that the first family gets to break laws and get away with it... but, voters legitimized this. Final responsibility lies with the American people. Even if we take 2020 and fraud and Hunter's laptop and say, "Americans were cheated, it wasn't our fault," people up and down the line endorsed all of this. Biden chose to run again and the Democratic party allowed him to. RFK tried to primary Biden and was thoroughly shut out. Millions of Democrats turned out to vote for Biden in the primaries, record turnout, far exceeding what Obama got in 2012. Biden tanked the debate, and while they made him stand down from re-election, nobody made him stand down, or even offer a plausible explanation for why he should remain in office if he's not fit to run.
Whatever people are saying now, they endorsed this, the American people allowed this to happen. Yeah, Biden lied, but at a certain point that should have been priced in. It's naive that it wasn't. And the Democratic electorate had every opportunity to change course and didn't.
SlowBoy
18d ago
As The Motte's most rabid Trump partisan: I really don't care. I'm not sure what people expected.
Maybe this will finally end years of gaslighting about Hunter and Joe. The idea has always been that Hunter traded money for connection to Joe, and Joe was in on it, and took a cut. The rest of Hunter's crimes were just personal antics, of a kind any normal person would have received worse punishment for. But it wasn't really "political" except from bungling Republicans who couldn't sell the connection from Hunter to Joe, so made it look like all this uproar was over dick pics et al.
Personally I like the pardon power and am glad it exists. This is probably a much better outcome than the alternative. The example of other nations shows thay prosecuting presidents and their families is much likelier to lead to coups and crises than genuine justice and law.
SlowBoy
25d ago
They should have different standards. They owe the voter their judgement, not their obedience.
You are very obtusely missing the point. Voters elected Trump. Republicans elected Trump. Collins, Murkowski et al. can either work with Trump or not. They choose to defect, over and over again. They don't do this with Democrats -- they voted to confirm Merrick Garland who immediately went about trying to put Trump in jail. Which goes back to my original point: in victory, Trump has not retaliated against his enemies. He didn't try to lock anybody up in his first term. He rewarded regular mainstream Republicans with appointed positions. (He gave McConnell's wife a cabinet position in his first term.) And these same Republicans over and over again continue to defect, voting against Trump, criticizing him in public, undermining his administration. They always come back to this same defense: they're just doing their jobs, their judgment, they don't owe the voters anything. Ok! That is why voters are rejecting them.
It might be true that, for Collins specifically, her interests lie in being a centrist moderate vote. Ok, that's fine as far as that goes, politics is a realistic game. But she also wants to call herself a Republican! She wants seniority so she can chair committees and exercise political power and direct money back to her state. These politicians aren't actually independent, they need alliances and seniority and the Republican Party to have any power at all. And then they try to have the best of both worlds: they'll take the Senate committee chairs they won because Trump won, but they won't vote to give Trump anything he wants! This is exactly what I wrote to begin with: Trump continues to act as if in victory people will come together to enjoy the spoils. It's loser establishment Republicans who continue to defect!
Which gets to the other point: Trump clearly has a vision in how he is making cabinet appointments. He is selecting for smart competent people who are loyal to him, have specific axes to grind in administrating their bureaucracies, and who represent the various parts of his coalition. This is extremely obvious, even liberal outfits like MSNBC and NPR are talking about it. But for some reason on this forum a few posters like OP want to deny this, out of some sort of TDS anti-explanation. They don't like Trump, or don't want to understand him, or don't want to admit that they have been wrong about anything. So very explicable political processes somehow become totally inexplicable: Trump is just making picks at random, haphazardly, the guy who staged the greatest political comeback in American history just isn't all that smart. (People who are smart: posters on The Motte who propose that events are fundamentally random and no explanations can be deduced for anything Trump does.)
SlowBoy
26d ago
Read Ymeskhout's if you haven't
He's my friend, I have a cameo in the article. His belief is that Republicans are going crazy, he respects my intelligence but thinks I have a reality distortion field that makes me irrational about Trump. Sure, he can think that -- and I think he's wrong! The theory is that we're wrong about everything, we're conspiracy theorists, we're cranks, we're crazy, we believe things without evidence, etc. etc. etc. Most of these guys don't actually know anything about the evidence: I sincerely doubt Hanania could give a steelman of RFK's position about vaccines, or Corona, or a steelman about anything, frankly. Yassine, at least, has been very patient in having these kinds of conversations, but I don't think he would really accept any of these arguments as legitimate: he isn't convinced, and he's not convinced anyone else should be convinced. So they're not just wrong arguments, they're crank arguments, conspiracy arguments, etc.
the fact that Republicans really have become the party of choice for conspiracy theorists that have very little grounding in reality
Democrats are the party of people who act as if there isn't a Replication Crisis. I see the worst nonsense taken credulously just because it was in a study somewhere. Corona came from wet markets? Puberty blockers are reversible? I can go on bluesky right now and find people arguing that Kamala won the election and has all the evidence and will coup Trump any day now. Please, please, I cannot stand to hear more about how I need to carefully consider the people who call me crazy because they didn't carefully consider me. The right does not have a monopoly on nonsense and that is so apparent that it's embarrassing to be told otherwise.
SlowBoy
26d ago
All three of these articles about "cranks" on the right parse as: People who disagree with right-wingers think right-wingers are wrong. I am not a crank -- I'm right about everything!
SlowBoy
26d ago
These same Republicans voted for Merrick Garland, who proceeded to try to throw Trump in jail. They have completely different standards from what constitutes "unfit" from the mainstream Republican voter. It's a two-party system, you vote for your guy and against the other. Talking about vetting candidates for being "fundamentally unfit" is missing the point: that's why Republicans continue to lose! Trump wins specifically because he's not the party of Murkowski, McConnell, Collins, et al. Republicans would have lost without Trump, and instead of going along with what Trump wants to do, they sabotage his cabinet. That's "defecting".
Literally any combination of picks could be rationalised in this way.
Describing cabinet appointments as managing factions is basically a truism. Calling cabinet appointments fundamentally random, as OP did, is an anti-explanation.
Her only political experience is as a backbencher and later twitter poster
Tulsi served in Hawaii and was the heir to a minor Hawaiian political throne. She served in the military and was at one point No. 2 at the DNC. She's not some grizzled veteran, but come on: She has more experience in politics than Obama or Trump did when they assumed office.
SlowBoy
27d ago
then pulling the plug when people inevitably started talking about said scandal. How did he not see that coming?
Gaetz withdrew himself.
Trump continues to act as if in victory people will come together to enjoy the spoils. It's loser establishment Republicans who continue to defect!
How does this square with Rubio, Burgum, Turner, Chavez-DeRemer and any number of other picks which seem basically ordinary Republican picks - Chavez-DeRemer even has decent/sympathetic relations with trade unions, especially by Republican standards!
Hegseth, Gaetz, RFK, Tulsi. There's an obvious pattern here, I can hear it discussed on NPR. Yeah, it's a big cabinet, there are lots of things going on, coalitions need to be managed. But OP's analysis is that Trump is essentially a random actor and nothing he does make sense and this is all totally stupid: that's nonsense, that's TDS, that is an anti-explanation.
SlowBoy
27d ago
This translates to something like: "I like my political operators to not get lied about. If they were smart their enemies wouldn't be lying about them." E Carrol Jean. Tulsi Gabbard. Kavanaugh.
SlowBoy
27d ago
Who cares? This is up there with stealing a balloon on free balloon day. Sloppy? It doesn't matter how careful you are, they will make scandals up. See Kavanaugh
SlowBoy
27d ago
If you want to argue that Trump is in the flow zone, sure, I could see it. OP is arguing that Trump is just incompetent and acting totally at random. This isn't understanding, this is anti-understanding, because it requires ignoring actual patterns and insights that are very plainly apparent. It comes off as TDS.
SlowBoy
28d ago
This goes against what many of Trump’s isolationist supporters want. It’s almost certain that Trump is making these picks extremely haphazardly, deciding on names after a bare modicum of thought and prioritizing vibes, “loyalty”, and Fox news appearances over any other concerns.
This is like a self-confession: You have no theory of mind for Trump or Trump-supporters. If you really think Trump is totally arbitrary foppsical and whim: I don't know what to tell you. I think you have a unique theory of how Trump operates. Even the most liberal publications I consume have picked the theme: Trump is nominating people with grudges against the bureaucracies they will lead, or who plan to destroy those institutions. If you genuinely think Trump has no purpose or motive I guess I'd like an explanation for how Trump succeeded at anything. It would be extremely interesting.
SlowBoy
30d ago
Can we give it a month before we prognosticate about red lines and weakness? Russia's response isn't guaranteed to appear within the quote tweets of one social media cycle. This would be like saying Americans showed weakness after 9/11 because Bush was still in the situation room on 9/12.
SlowBoy
30d ago
Doctrinal answers to this question vary of course. In France we launch a full scale nuclear response. And we make (pretty good) movies about it to make sure people know.
Maybe that's what the French tell themselves: in practice, France will not unilaterally launch a nuclear strike. Maybe they're more independent than other NATO countries but France is not doing this alone. A catastrophic decision like this will be consulted with the US government.
SlowBoy
30d ago
American appetite for ending the war is shrinking, which is reflected in Trump's election on pledging to negotiate peace. America might have more money to spend than Russia, but is less willing to spend it.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
It's imminently reasonable to suspect that some vaccines are not manufactured well. That would be a very explanation for why 1) vaccines are a good technology that save lives 2) some people seem to be getting sick from them.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
Maybe Harris got more votes in 2024 because Georgians were less excited about her.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
My mistake, I should have said dozens. I think I saw "hundreds" somewhere recently and internalized that for some reason.
Okay. Which vaccines in particular do you believe in?
The technology for smallpox vaccines could be totally sound, and the company that makes the shots puts too much mercury in them or something. A batch could be bad. Maybe the adjuvants are too strong. We have good heuristics for noticing when something causes noticeable immediate side effects, but not when something contributes to chronic stress. Maybe every shot contains one of the 32 arms of Exodia, and you need to catch them all to visit the shadow realm.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
The vaccine schedule now includes hundreds of vaccines and the incentives are all screwed up. I think it's pretty reasonable to believe in vaccines as a technology in general and that a lot of them have been captured by special interests.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
I do not know what RFK Jr.'s specific stance on vaccines is
Republicans won by increasing their share of the stupid vote.
You don't know what your opposition believes, but you're sure they're the stupid ones. Thanks for putting these two sentences in the same post because it saves me the trouble of having to argue them out of you.
SlowBoy
1mo ago
The post I replied to originally said there was no proof of fraud in 2020. I provided some. I can't make you argue that, but I don't see why you would want to join this thread if not to respond to that specific point.
You know people will laugh at the idea that Georgians were earnestly more excited about Harris than Biden.
This isn't even an argument, this is just shaming a plausible idea as a priori ridiculous so you can assume me of some sort of bad faith or sophism. If you think 2020 and 2024 were both legitimate, isn't Georgians being more excited about Harris imminently plausible? Ok, yeah, I guess you can keep claiming to have never seen a good argument when you reject mine out of hand.
> Something happens that doesn't usually happen > Why does this mean things will be different?
The key isn't just smugly concluding that small bills are bad too, so who can really say? Lots of people can tell, in fact, what is in bills. From all the discussion going around there were a lot of bad things in that first bill that aren't in the second one. Elon Musk is happier, Vivek Ramaswamy is happier, that must count for something? It's tedious to read the all-knowing attitude that everything is a publicity stunt, after all, and nothing really matters (but I don't actually know the specifics I'm just guessing because nothing really matters).
Edit:
As one example, here is Congressman Jim Banks alleging that the old bill funds an agency that censored conservatives:
https://x.com/RepJimBanks/status/1869350064742875341?t=EoITrkbHKRZJ0JeO_cPqDw&s=19
Short of an argument about how Jim Banks is wrong, actually, or censorship is good, actually, killing the old bill sounds good to me!
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