SlowBoy
2hr 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
20hr 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
20hr 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
4d 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
4d 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
4d 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
8d 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
8d ago
Maybe Harris got more votes in 2024 because Georgians were less excited about her.
SlowBoy
8d 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
8d 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
8d 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
9d 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.
SlowBoy
9d ago
The report went out that a water pipe burst. This caused people to change their behavior. The fact that it wasn't real is even more suspicious. How did this story get out there? Poll watcher went home!
SlowBoy
9d ago
I offered one: vote counting stopped simultaneously across several swing states, poll watchers were sent home, then huge pro-Biden ballot drops were delivered. If you can't respond to that, this is not an argument, this is just two people posting text.
Again: comparing two numbers from two different events without any context is apples-to-oranges. Harris got more votes in Fulton County than Biden did: ok, what does that mean? How do we sort out confounding variables? I weighed 100 pounds four years and 150 pounds today, I must be getting fat! (I was 8 then and 12 now, I've put on one and a half feet and I'm junior varsity swim.)
SlowBoy
9d ago
Your question is a non-sequitur: why do I have to prove anything more? There is clear irregularity in 2020, either give an innocuous explanation for the counting stopped over a water pipe, or concede.
There could be all sorts of trivial reasons why Harris would grow from Biden:
- They learned how to cheat better
- Population Growth
- Demographic Change
- Georgia flipping blue in 2020 excited more blue voters to vote in 2024
Comparing two different numbers from two different moments in time without any context is, pardon, complete apples to oranges.
SlowBoy
10d ago
Ballot counting stopped in Fulton County on election night 2020 because of claims of a burst pipe that later turned out to be false. But after poll watchers went home ballot counting continued and the next morning the largest pro-Biden ballot drop of the entire election was delivered.
SlowBoy
10d ago
Ballot counting stopped in Fulton County on election night 2020 because of claims of a burst pipe that later turned out to be false. But after poll watchers went home ballot counting continued and the next morning the largest pro-Biden ballot drop of the entire election was delivered.
SlowBoy
10d ago
They do a good piece every now and then, but all the best content that people still talk about seems to come from a 10-year period that ended somewhere in Obama's first term.
SlowBoy
15d ago
The polls did better this time than 2016 and 2020. At least, in general.
The controversy about polls starts in 2016. I think this is worth emphasizing, because there are still arguments floating around that the polls in 2016 were fine. And thus every subsequent argument about polls is really a proxy war over 2016. Because 8 years later we're still talking about Trump, we're still discussing how the polls over- or under-estimate Trump. We're still discussing how the polls do or don't measure white rural voters.
In 2016 the polls were entirely wrong. For months they predicted Hillary winning by a large margin blowout, sometimes by 10+ points. (I remember sitting in class listening to a friend excitedly gossip about Texas flipping blue.) Toward election day itself, the polls converged, but still comfortably for Hillary. And when Trump won, and the argument came around that the results were technically within the margin of error -- it missed entirely that whole states were modeled vastly incorrectly. The blue wall states of Pennsylvania Wisconsin and Michigan were not supposed to have gone red. Florida was supposed to have been close. States that had once been swing states were not even close. (To. me, this was the smoking gun that Trump had a real chance in 2016: Iowa and Ohio were solidly predicted for Trump from the very beginning, and no one offered any introspection on what that implied as a general swing.)
2020 was not much better. Without getting into claims about fraud and states: Biden was also supposed to win by larger margins than many states in fact showed. There were still lots of specific misses (like Florida redding hard). And again a series of justifications that polling did just fine because, technically, everything was inside some margin of error.
2024 is actually much better. AtlasIntel and Polymarket both broadly predicted exactly what happened. Rasmussen was fairly accurate (after taking a break in 2020 if I remember correctly). There's also a lot of slop. Selzer's reputation is destroyed (actually people may forget all about it by 2028). The RCP national average was off by a few points. Ipsos and NPR and Morning Consult and the Times were all wrong. Well, maybe that's not much better than 2020 -- but mixed in with all the bad data were predictors who got everything exactly right.
So Nate Silver's problem is that his method is junk. He takes some averages and models them out. The problem is that a lot of the data he relies on is bad. A lot of the polling industry is still wrong. And unless Silver is willing to stake a lot of expertise on highly specific questions about counties and polls, he can't offer all that much insight.
SlowBoy
15d ago
In a way, Biden's legacy is Trump. He was the only one of three candidates to beat Trump, then he's forced out and endorses Kamala to spite the party bosses. (Saw some reporting out today supposedly confirming that this is why he endorsed Kamala.) Biden's whole presidency is defined as the Interregnum Trump. To a large extent his legacy is going to be remembered in the things he's already done, but all those things will be remembered as occurring between Trumps.
It would be hard for Biden to do anything that couldn't get undone by Trump, which also means that most of what Biden could do would be implicitly accepted by Trump. Actually, probably the biggest thing he could do for his legacy would be maintain a smooth and peaceful transition, and maybe even help Trump in a matter or two.
SlowBoy
17d ago
People drank raw milk for thousands of years. Louis Pasteur only invented pastuerization in the 1860s. It wasn't until the early industrial era of contaminated factory dirt that raw milk began causing problems. Which is to say, pasteurization doesn't make milk safe to drink, it makes dirty contaminated milk safe to drink. Which isn't even a problem anymore because our cleanliness is better. Not to mention that the average cow used for raw milk lives in very healthy natural conditions compared to the feedlot pens used for factory farming mass milk cows.
I've been drinking raw milk on and off again for years. It's never made me sick. Raw milk is banned in certain states, but a dozen or so allow it, and more allow some workarounds. It would probably make the Founding Fathers sick to know that milk as they knew it is now illegal to drink in many places. What kind of liberty is that?
Anyways, the last pandemic probably didn't come from viruses in the food supply jumping to humans; it probably came from novel coronavirus funding. Prosecute the people responsible or bankrupt the institutes responsible. I don't know that either of those things will happen, but with Bobby Kennedy in government it's the likeliest chance we'll ever have.
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!
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