SlowBoy
2mo ago
What on earth? Trump is not breaking down and is continuing to give rallies and interviews, sometimes at personal risk. Not a single person I know is talking about what you describe (?).
SlowBoy
2mo ago
The line referring to Trump as an “unserious man” is a good line. Trump’s lack of seriousness is obvious to all but his most ardent supporters.
The man got shot in the head and, after standing up, started chanting, "Fight! Fight! Fight!" He gave up a very cushy real-estate and media career to do that. The man is incredibly serious. I reject the implication that people like Joe Biden or Mitt Romney or whoever are serious because they speak calmly. If this is the common verdict across the political spectrum, it's the opinion of a weak electorate that values deeply silly traditions about how politicians are supposed to act.
SlowBoy
3mo ago
Detroit's decline is pretty exceptional and represents some deep forces. The amount of industry and wealth lost in Detroit was incredible.
SlowBoy
3mo ago
Basically, the technology exists and eventually people will have access to it. Maybe it can be kept locked down for a while, as long as it takes huge feats of engineering to make a good AI. But eventually people will have access to it. Arguments like this make me think, "I am not sure society is ready for everyone to have access to a printing press." Maybe society actually wasn't ready for that. But, well, it's coming.
SlowBoy
3mo ago
It's not thinking, it's braining. Marcotte wants to talk about evil MAGA Republican husbands, and about the virtues of voting. But she's a party-line progressive, and the party line is that mail-in ballots are good and election day is outdated. So the whole middle of the argument is an empty void in which anything can be put, much like ChatGPT. Take the things you believe and permute them through sentences and paragraphs until you have something in the shape of an argument.
This is basically the description of most professional op-ed writers today. The smarter ones apply more complicated levels of augury. I haven't read Peggy Noonan in years now, but maybe she's still talking about the color of Trump's ties.
SlowBoy
3mo ago
As a different post for a different point: Maryland has become one of the most fascinating states, to me. It's probably the most important state that nobody really thinks about: DC is basically a carve-out of Maryland, and even if they're very different places, they're often the same thing. A lot of the old money of Maryland runs through DC, and Maryland is an odd hodge-podge of beautiful small town Americana, blue collar throwbacks, and absolute total shitholes. The history of Maryland is this deeply-repressed and forgotten thing (Catholicism was suppressed until the adoption of the Bill of Rights with the Constitution). And Marylanders often have a pride in their state that rivals Texas or California.
I wonder how much of Baltimore's condition has specifically to do with the nature of DC. In any other state, the largest city would attract some measure of wealth and some corresponding level of niceness, but all the wealth in Maryland is oriented toward the District. Baltimore is a second- or third-tier city relative to Philadelphia or New York, and it doesn't even have the tax haven corporate deference of Trenton New Jersey. In some respect the city has no real economic motive for being, except that it's close enough to DC to beg at the table for scraps, and it has a port. If Baltimore had become the government's capital city (as it could have been), I doubt it would be quite a dilapidated as it is today. If DC had been put somewhere else entirely, I wonder if it would be as bad as it is.
SlowBoy
3mo ago
This, along with another user's posts about Pittsburgh (whose name I've accidentally rudely forgotten) is one of the best posts on the site. This kind of stuff is much more interesting and compelling than yet another post about abstract housing policies or culture war coconuts. I think there's a rich tradition waiting to be written about the characters and places of the country.
Has anything really changed in response to the Key bridge collapsing? I live in the next major city Southwest of you, and was actually driving home the night it collapsed and was supposed to take that route and took a different one to avoid city traffic.
SlowBoy
3mo ago
He's not attacking her identity wantonly, he's attacking the way she uses it.
SlowBoy
3mo ago
Please allow me to roll my eyes: the weather changes every day. Hanania is wrong routinely, and taking one twist in the story as vindication is spending too much time on the scroll. The Greeks will never break the Trojan Walls, and the Optimates win again.
SlowBoy
3mo ago
2012 Joe Biden said that Mitt Romney would put black people back in chains. Name-calling and lousy smears aren't a Trump invention.
SlowBoy
3mo ago
Comments like this are really the lamest kind of partisanship, and a waste of intelligence.
SlowBoy
3mo ago
All the right-wingers I know are escastic. Walz is a dumb governor who says dumb things on camera. Shapiro was the smart choice who had pundits scared.
SlowBoy
3mo ago
I received 2 red notifications from the bell icon in the upper right, but when I click on them I get no new messages in my inbox or response history. I can't figure out what these notifications are for. Can anyone tell me?
SlowBoy
3mo ago
These kinds of racial tensions are like spontaneous emotions, you can't reason through them. It's not really about racism. Being black in a white society always causes tensions and upsets because that's consequent of being a minority. You can change all the surface dressings, but that doesn't fix the tension itself. So some previous generation made positive (positive?) depictions of black people, but they were made by white people, and that leads to all sorts of invisible frictions. These may be positive (?), but they're depictions of black people as animals, or in a separate category from white people, etc. etc. etc. (There's always a reason ready-at-hand.)
To my way of thinking, I predict that many positive black representations current today will eventually be seen as racist.
SlowBoy
3mo ago
Richard Baris talks about this on Twitter: the vast majority of voters are not undecided, and driving turnout among partisans ends up being much more impactful than swaying the mythical moderates. (Besides, the more you activate your own partisans, the more reasonable and mainstream your ideas become, and thus inherently more "moderate".)
"Moderating" is basically an act of persuasion more than actually moving to a political center: if you frame the issue right trans kids becomes the responsible take, while tax cuts for the middle class become an extreme take.
SlowBoy
3mo ago
There is no VP pick Trump could have made that would not have been spun by hostile media forces as a bad choice.
The idea that the VP pick helps win the home state is largely a myth. Vance isn't going to help Trump win Ohio.
Virtually any other VP pick would have been a sign to Trump's base that he was moderating, and would have depressed turnout.
SlowBoy
3mo ago
Trump flops on all the hard questions in a way that asks whether or not there is anything deeper in there than making the liberals cry.
Trump gets at the issues in a much deeper way than all the policy wonks cynically consumed by statistics and specifics. What do you do about the Ukraine War? It's not hard, you get on the phone with Putin, you stop the war with a phone call, this is literally how that works. You don't need answers to "hard questions," you need the vision to lead and inspire.
SlowBoy
4mo ago
But you, as in you the people here, you the people reading this message, are not better than the SJWs in this specific way: you demonize rather than argue.
Why am I expected to argue with this? This is, literally, not an argument.
Your entire post is based on some kind of appeal to emotion, or rhetoric, or whatever, it's a definitional problem, it's probably just bait, because it's actually a very simple idea to anyone who isn't rationalizing-whatever. Just because something is named a felony, or a woman, or low inflation, or whatever doesn't make it so. 12 people voted guilty, OK, mistakes and unjust verdicts don't exist, nothing about this persecution is illegitimate, I'm supposed to, what now? Not vote for Trump because that's moral? Sure, whatever, I'll do whatever you want because the magic words have been invoked. I guess that's what arguing is. I think I'd rather jerk off.
"You, the people here," "we hold Trump accountable," I don't know what you're talking about. "I'm a classic conservative," what does this mean? These are all just empty categories.
SlowBoy
4mo ago
What?! If Trump were replaceable, there would be no point in assassinating him.
SlowBoy
4mo ago
That's missing the point. No one is denying that you have the free speech right to say you want to kill the president. It's also morally reprehensible. Cowering behind the defense that, it's just a joke man, that's my free speech, man, is retreating. It's pretending that they didn't say what they said.
SlowBoy
4mo ago
Sure, it's possible to make a joke about killing the president, and it's even possible for it to be funny, but this is obviously a bad faith justification people are applying after they get criticized for bad taste. There's a big difference between a dark joke comedy sketch and actually admitting out loud that you want the president to be killed.
SlowBoy
4mo ago
I'm not saying it's not free speech, I'm saying it's bad stupid and morally reprehensible speech. Falling back on, "it's just a joke," "it's free speech" is the lowest possible justification. Being sarcastic about it doesn't make your defense any stronger.
SlowBoy
4mo ago
When they go after Home Depot lady they are going after essentially their own people.
Someone isn't on my side because they work at a Wal-mart.
He talks about these at literally every rally he gives. It's the center of his campaign. I question where you're getting your ideas about the Trump campaign from.
He literally just dodged a bullet on stage and stood up and told his supporters to keep fighting. The largest independent candidate since Ross Perot just endorsed him. Kamala Harris has yet to give a press interview. Trump is doing fine.
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