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Texas is freedom land

9 followers   follows 3 users  
joined 2022 September 05 17:27:40 UTC

				

User ID: 647

netstack

Texas is freedom land

9 followers   follows 3 users   joined 2022 September 05 17:27:40 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 647

Yeah, and I tried to respond. I don’t think it sends notifications correctly.

I don’t know how many layers of irony you’re on. It doesn’t really matter. We have banned you numerous times already for picking fights and spitting the laziest possible hot takes. Your last warning was a month ago, but you clearly didn’t take it to heart, because this is nearly indistinguishable.

Banned for a month this time.

I see from the footnote that it’s a transcription of a YouTube video. I don’t know what “sott.net” does, but I can make an educated guess if they’re prognosticating “Zio Anglo American plans for world domination.”

Most historical fantasy isn’t particularly original. That doesn’t make it a credible forecast!

That might be a better way to say what I was thinking: “It’s particularly frustrating to watch people try and claim the moral low ground.”

Americans love an underdog. You can justify extreme tactics as leveling the playing field, and when something doesn’t pan out, you can blame the loss on wreckers. I see the strategy, but I simply find the exercise…frustrating. Unappealing. Tiresome.

Like mall ninjas, but for the deep state.

Well, the Beer Hall Putsch didn’t get traction, but it had a pretty direct line to the actual dismantling.

Napoleon deposed the Directory to become Emperor in the first place. The Hundred Days don’t count because it was a constitutional monarchy and hadn’t even managed to dismantle his imperial institutions. I’d also give Napoleon III half credit for couping himself.

There’s also the various post-Bolivar democracies of South America. Paraguay, Colombia, Ecuador. More if you go back to the initial revolutions.

That’s a pretty questionable translation. Might be worth putting it into a more modern tool.

Also, the author predicted a shooting war with Japan and Russian and Chinese collapse by the 2020s. I think he might be one of those alt-history guys.

I’m only seeing one mass-deleter; I’ve already issued a warning.

To be clear, the content was acceptable, if repetitive. It’s deletion that suggests bad faith.

They choose not to because that’s a terrible idea.

Maybe it works when your conscripts aren’t handling anything more expensive than a rifle, but for anything bigger, you don’t want to cheap out on the human operators. They either need to be motivated or compensated.

what does this mean?

I don’t see it. Who thinks they need us? Maybe if the substackers came back. But they’re all happily tilling the CW fields.

No, the temperature has just turned up now that the government is actually doing something.

I’ve had decent results tapping the “nothing ever happens” sign, so I guess my predictions look like this.

  • 80% chance of invoking the Act and deploying troops. Conditional on that,
  • 70% it looks like the Greg Abbott strategy, just extended to states other than Texas.
  • 20% of something closer to martial law.
  • <10% of troop presence anywhere near the 2026 elections.

Putting numbers to these makes me realize how unsure I am. It’s hard to frame the predictions without getting way too detailed.

The long and the short of it is: I expect Trump to take any options that look like a Strong Leader Doing Something. In the absence of a flashpoint, Doing Something means scaling up existing red-state policies, not suspending elections.

It’s easy to see a route which leads to Trumpocracy. That doesn’t mean the route is likely.

This is a forum for discussing the Culture War. That’s a lot harder when you delete your contributions.

I think you can find plenty of that here.

Please keep culture war content to the CW thread. This’d make a decent top-level comment.

Making something more unpleasant is still a deterrent, though.

If one thinks the war is moral whether or not Ukraine wins, then the question of whether they can win is secondary. The real metric would be marginal cost/benefit.

I think most of the rules-based-international-order types fall into this category. They’ve valued deterring or debilitating Russia higher than you.

Oh, I only get that from browsing the Motte.

Oh, and it does look like @CSsmrfk deleted a response. You’ll have to ask him if he wants to share.

I don’t exactly disagree with you. We saw the same evangelists coming out to spread the Good Vibes, and they were clearly motivated by various outlets opening the floodgates. I would be surprised if there wasn’t any coordination at the editorial level.

How much, and how heavy-handed? Eh, this is where I’m more reserved. I think a scenario where all the major editors get a phone call from Barack Obama is less likely than one where they all go to the same dinner parties and talk each other into the same conclusions.

The latter is my model for most American political activism. Lobbyists work by building a consensus in their chosen bubble: “Everyone knows that policy X is good.” Once it becomes an ingroup signal, bubble members feel the need to propagate it. This feedback loop does the heavy lifting.

I think the Vibe Shift fits that pattern. “Everyone knows Biden is going to lose.” One way or another, that became common knowledge in the editors’ bubble. After that point, they were almost certainly coordinating to spread the word. It’s the most pedestrian form of conspiracy.

The debate was bad enough that I suspect lots of Democrats, influential or not, came to the “Everyone knows…” conclusion. If so, it would be unsurprising for public opinion to follow suit. It’s not conspiratorial to suggest that realignment probably involved a lot of private conversations and some coordination!

Easy: Republicans were expected to drop Trump after (your choice of revelations here).

At first that was supposed to be primary voters. Then general voters. Then GOP congressmen. Then his base. Then the general again. Here we are, 10 years later, and Democrats are still holding out hope that (your choice of current events) will break the spell. If they feel so horrified, surely Trump’s supporters must too.

Remember how the Kamala vibe shift just sort of…happened. Suddenly, everyone from Congress to the NYT remembered that aging is bad. Biden was dragged offstage by the Vaudeville hook, and Harris picked up where he left off.

Trump has had countless events which look, to a Democrat, like that kind of scenario. But this doesn’t account for his fundamentals. There has never been an alternative to Trump.

wait how did I get involved here

What part of that was a denial?

I made predictions: no Democrat equivalent to 1/6. Harris concedes. Riots possible, but without any objectives.

What was I supposed to say? Was I supposed to include a CHAZ land acknowledgment?

Stefferi’s explanation fits my mental model of Trump. He rewards his friends, and he doesn’t think those countries have been very friendly lately. Thus, they deserve the short end of the stick.

As for goodwill? Mine lasted from the election until about 90% of the way through his inauguration speech. You can identify the exact moment my expectations started sliding.

I personally resent the guy, and I despise the way he encourages political tribalism. I’m sick and tired of listening to smart people jump through hoops to explain how he’s actually totally aligned with their principles. FCfromSSC has suggested that the last decade is something like a distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup; while I don’t want to believe it, no one exemplifies the idea better than our President. He will continue to trample the commons and loot the treasury, sometimes literally. He will collect immunity to the various consequences which apply to us little people. And he will be praised for any damage he does so long as he hurts the right people.

The Republicans are going to do fine in 2026.

That’s how they got me, too…