monoamine
2mo ago
I'm a Democrat but I'm not sure how I feel about this. Despite what feels like obvious intuition, it's not entirely clear a new candidate will fare better. There's really no way to know and I think he had no choice but to step down, but, yeah, the counterfactuals here are difficult to calculate.
monoamine
2mo ago
I work in the industry and while I can confirm that regulatory compliance related to cybersecurity is theatrical bullshit, your assessment of CrowdStrike is completely wrong and nonsensical. It's certainly not the case for every vendor in the industry, but CrowdStrike's products and services do significantly reduce the risk of certain types of cybersecurity threats companies face.
monoamine
2mo ago
I think it's good to separate the principle from the instances. One can theorize or perhaps identify an absolute autocrat who is "good" by some standard. The principle of dictatorships, and therefore the act of ever advocating for any dictator to be installed in any nation, is 100% bad. This is one of the many issues I have with Yarvin and Yarvinism.
I agree with much of what you say here in a general sense (minus the use of the vitriol aimed at everyone here; I agree with it but I wouldn't say it, because incivility is pointless), but I think it's also fair to say that it's kind of a "meh" case. He paid off a porn star so that disclosure of his affair with her wouldn't hurt his electoral odds, and the payments were deceptively labeled as legal services payments to hide the fact that it was hush money.
This is bad, but: 1) Trump has done so much worse stuff that it's hard for me to care that much about this. Sure, if Biden or Obama did this then the right would talk about it every day for a decade, but that's in part because it would be their biggest known scandal. Relative to the rest of Trump, it's basically a blip. And 2) it feels tough for me to evoke the vibe of "felony" when picturing this case.
It feels a little like the example in Scott's noncentral fallacy post:
Suppose someone wants to build a statue honoring Martin Luther King Jr. for his nonviolent resistance to racism. An opponent of the statue objects: "But Martin Luther King was a criminal!"
Any historian can confirm this is correct. A criminal is technically someone who breaks the law, and King knowingly broke a law against peaceful anti-segregation protest - hence his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail.
But in this case calling Martin Luther King a criminal is the noncentral. The archetypal criminal is a mugger or bank robber. He is driven only by greed, preys on the innocent, and weakens the fabric of society. Since we don't like these things, calling someone a "criminal" naturally lowers our opinion of them.
The opponent is saying "Because you don't like criminals, and Martin Luther King is a criminal, you should stop liking Martin Luther King."
It's ironic because I think (in an informal sense) being a criminal is central to who Trump is and I think comparing him to MLK is absurd, but I also think there's a lot of "people don't like criminals, Trump is now technically a criminal and a felon, so we will now call him that every time we mention him forever" going on here. I wish the trials would move forward for anything related to the "alternative electors" plot or at least the classified documents case. Then I'd feel much more comfortable with this.
monoamine
2mo ago
Absolutely, and one can point to several fact checking site examples that oversimplify an analysis in a misleading way, but most things left-leaning media/fact checkers deboonk are indeed just complete bullshit. You can throw examples of the press repeating things like "Trump said white supremacists at Charlottesville are very good people", and I'll scoff at them with the rest of you, but I find the dismissal of fact checkers disingenuous when one considers the big picture. They're much more right than they are wrong, given how much wrongness circulates.
monoamine
2mo ago
At least at the time of his attack against Paul Pelosi, he had far-right views. He had a blog with a lot of pro-QAnon, antivax, and election denial stuff.
monoamine
2mo ago
I don't personally agree with it, but I'd say the majority of the right has no problems doing the exact same. Each side dehumanizes the other.
monoamine
2mo ago
That's true, but if hypothetically all of the notable Jewish scientists stayed in Germany, it's possible other powers would have gotten nuclear weapons much later. Einstein's letter to Roosevelt in 1939 may have been instrumental for the start of the Manhattan Project.
In which case they still would've lost, all else being equal, but overall it definitely benefitted their allies. The ideology spawning things like Aryan Physics (which sought to deny relativity and all other "Jewish physics") shows how untenable it was for scientific superiority.
monoamine
2mo ago
I don't think Trump is Hitler, but I'd echo JD Vance's initial sentiment: he has some signs of being an early-stage Hitler. Or at least an early-stage Caesar figure. January 6 and the fake electors plot highly updated that probability in my mind. Would the senators have wanted to assassinate Caesar before he crossed the Rubicon? Probably not many.
I agree the people calling him "literally Hitler" are hyperbolizing and most don't really believe it, but the hyperbole is backed by the genuine belief (which I agree with) that he may pose a major threat to American democracy. The ascension of Vance, backed by the anti-democratic Thiel and who respects the anti-democratic Yarvin, also does not bode well.
So, just because I see him as an authoritarian threat doesn't mean I think he should be assassinated. A threat is just a potential until it's realized. There is some threshold after which I think assassination could be morally justifiable, and I don't think he's met it. Many people I know do think he has, which leads to some awkward conversations.
monoamine
1yr ago
The fact that people get so mad about [X] leads me to believe there must be something to it
I don't think this is a good tendency. Possibly related: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence
He'll be viewed with respect in hindsight if Trump ends up losing this election, at least. He'll be admired for stepping down when he could've pushed forward.
More options
Context Copy link