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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   22577 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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Scott Alexander endorses basically anyone but Trump

The main points:

  1. Trump will move the needle towards right wing strong man authoritarianism.
  2. The democrats might seem worse, but they aren't.
  3. Some of us want to punish the democrats for being bad by voting for Trump, but this isn't a good thing to do if Trump will be actually worse on the things we care about punishing the democrats.

I went back and read Scott's 2016 anyone but Trump election endorsement.

The main points:

  1. Trump doesn't have solutions, he just wants to blow up the system.
  2. Trump is high variance.
  3. He will lead to anti-intellectual populism dominating the conservative movement.
  4. Trump won't do as much about global warming.
  5. Trump pisses off the libs, and this will further radicalize the libs rather than bringing us back to a better spot.

I would maybe suggest in the future that these posts are counter-productive. The most recent one moved my needle more in favor of Trump. I can't believe I'm considering voting for a major party candidate (I've voted libertarian the few times I've bothered to actually show up). Going back and reading the old anti-endorsement was even worse. With hindsight answering the criticisms:

  1. Trump did not blow up the system. People blew it up in an attempt to oppose him. Generals lied to him about troop deployments. Prosecutors invented novel legal theories for going after Trump. The FBI encouraged censorship of a story by heavily implying it was false when they knew it was true. Pharma companies held back the release of their vaccines to not give any perceived benefit to Trump. Congress and intelligence agencies spent three years persecuting Trump based on an accusation that was entirely made up by the Clinton campaign.
  2. Trump had a high variage twitter account. Crazy things were said sometimes. But the actual day to day governance was fine. There were fewer major wars and foreign entanglements started. War seems like a very high variance problem especially wars with a nuclear power involved.
  3. I feel that the conservative movement has come to a healthier space where they differentiate the university and educational establishment that they hate from intellectualism in general. This worry did not materialize.
  4. He didn't do much about global warming. I'm happy about that. Honestly worrying about something with consequences 20 years out feels a little silly at this point. It was nice when we had such long time horizons.
  5. He did indeed piss off the libs. Trump Derangement Syndrome did not go away. He also didn't "crack down" on them. He didn't send Hillary to jail, despite how much her Russia hoax thing probably meant she deserved it (I know she would have gone in for other reasons, but seriously talk about norms breaking). Trump has weathered a great deal of hate. He seems uniquely suited to it. I am happy with him in this role. It has helped a large number of people learn to basically ignore "cancel culture" attempts. Or to immediately look with suspicion at any story of someone doing something awful.

I really feel like there is some gell-mann amnesia going on with Scott. He reads these horrid stories about Trump. With the details sensationalized in the worst possible way. And he accepts them as fact. Meanwhile the New York Times threatens to dox him so they can run a hit piece article on him that they sourced from a weirdo on wikipedia with a knack for rules-lawyering.

He talks about how Trumps norms violations are loud and unsubtle. While the democrats only subtly and slowly violate norms. But this is a framing that has been shoved down our throats by the media. Every minor violation of Trump's is blown out of proportion, and every major violation of the democrats is minimized and not talked about. How is it not a massive norms violation to spend 3 years investigating and accusing a sitting president of Treason based on a campaign dosier that was almost entirely made up by his opposition? And the people doing this knew it all along. I don't think democrats or liberal leaning people seem to realize how much the Russia Hoax thing has utterly fucked their credibility on everything. Especially after the Hunter Biden laptop story came out, and it turned out that the intelligence agencies helped them cover up exactly what they had been accusing Trump of doing.

This is supposed to be a government system where one side wins, implements their things, becomes a little too unpopular for going too far, and then the other side wins and get to do their thing for a little while. They switch back and forth. We all learned in 2016 that no, this is not actually how it operates. There is actually a hidden veto by the bureaucracy and the deep state. If they don't like the president they can decide not to let him do his thing. People are righteously pissed off about that, and many of them would happily see that bureaucracy and deep state dismantled if it meant they never get to use their veto again. And one way to test if they still have the veto power, and one way to give someone an incentive to fix it, is to keep electing presidents that we know they will "veto".

Trump is a vote for restoring norms. For restoring the ability of democracy and the vote to actually pick a direction for the country, rather than have that direction dictated by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats. I dislike Trump on most of his policies, but it wouldn't be a vote for his policies. Its a vote for voting on policies.

I read Scott's piece as about as Straussian as he ever gets.

He lays out a long and detailed takedown of the Democrat Industrial Complex, then adds a relatively wishy-washy 'but Trump does these bad things too'. I don't think he's a secret MAGA by any stretch, but I do think that Scott has come a long way from his railing against feminism days & not because he ever had a 'come to Jesus' moment - he's just very politically canny now, and cares about what happens to his (grey) tribe. My guess is that he's predicting a Trump victory and wants to avoid himself, his family and his tribe from being targeted by anti-Trump backlash, living as they do in the heart of Blue culture. Again, I don't want to accuse Scott of dishonesty as I think he's a top 1% scrupulosity person - I think he won't be voting for Trump and doesn't particularly like the guy. I just think that the piece should be read with an eye for realpolitik.

Trump is a vote for restoring norms.

But will be countered by:

People blew it up in an attempt to oppose him.

They'll go as far as possible to oppose him next time. They're whipping themselves into a frenzy about how this is the last election, etc. Someone on reddit told me the military would kill them if Trump wins.

The actual leaders of the Democratic party are not that hysterical redditor. But they'll be plenty Trump deranged in their own way. Blowing up any and all norms or guardrails will be routine in their Quixotic struggle against him.

I originally had something in my post about negotiating with terrorists.

I didn't want to be confused about calling the dems terrorists. But there is somethign to the US policy of "no negotiating with terrorists". If someone threatens you with violence or defecting, it makes sense to no longer negotiate with that person. Basically once that is on the table there is no guaranteed off-ramp except more violence.

If the democrats are willing to hold the government hostage, then there really isn't much room to negotiate with them. The only winning move is not to play.

Ironic, they see Trump as someone who threatens them with violence, so they think they shouldn't negotiate too

Trump is not a vote for restoring norms. That’s just stupid, I’m sorry but Trump did and continues to violate norms regularly. He still won’t concede the 2020 election and J6 may have been small potatoes(it was), but it’s definitely not within the norms.

Now all that being said- democrats are a lot worse. As Scott correctly notes, democratic backsliding in the real world, as opposed to Netflix shows beloved by progressives, is one party that packs the courts and colludes with private media to censor the opposition and finds three felonies a day reasons to go after dissidents after spying on them and ending meritocracy in economic and educational opportunities to distribute spoils to supporting groups. Sort of like what we have with democrats. You know, the things they’re actually literally doing. Not the ones we can imagine Trump doing.

Do you think Erdogan is going around saying he’s ending judicial independence to consolidate his own power?

This is an election between two sets of norm violators. Trump will do far less damage.

There is actually a hidden veto by the bureaucracy and the deep state

I disagree that this is a "hidden" veto, I think it's an obvious feature of liberal democracy. A president can't govern without the lower level bureaucrats' cooperation. If they find his proposals so hideous that they're willing to blow up their careers by defying him, he'll have difficulty implementing anything. To become an actual totalitarian, the president would have to replace all the bureaucrats with yes-men, and that takes time. If he just fires them all immediately, he won't have the infrastructure to govern. I find this very comforting, and it makes me less scared of a Trump presidency than many of my family members and friends. But when a politician talks about "draining the swamp", that's a clear sign that he's not willing to work within the system. We need to protect the swamp.

I don't like bureaucrats and I obviously didn't vote for them. These self-appointed vetoers should be fired and criminally punished if I had my way. They derive all their authority from the executive. In a better world they would be suitably punished for betraying that. They also almost all happen to be partisan Democrats very selectively deciding which sorts of policies to obstruct.

I think they exercise the veto power prior to Trump doing anything, and they exercised it without any serious consequences. There were generals lying to Trump about troop levels in foreign countries, and not only were they not court marshaled for insubordination they were lauded for their efforts. And I'd be pretty happy to with generals that were willing to stand up and defy orders like "shoot american civilians" but they used their "backbone" to defy the president by continuing to wage wars abroad that the president and voters did not want.

I agree that there is a good use case for a veto among the bureaucracy and state agents. But they basically demonstrated the worst level of judgement in exercising it pre-emptively, used it for dumb things, and then suffered no consequences. Theoretically good, but in practice it was awful.

If they find his proposals so hideous that they're willing to blow up their careers by defying him, he'll have difficulty implementing anything.

That is not how it went when marriage ceased to be between a man and a woman: if bureaucrats had an objection of conscience at facilitating a man marrying man, they lost their jobs. Such firings weren't called totalitarian by those who now object to insubordination possibly having actual consequences.

I'm not exactly saying that bureaucrats shouldn't be fired if they disobey the president. Just that the process of firing them and finding replacements would serve as a buffer against a totalitarian president implementing his agenda. If only a few bureaucrats object, it's obviously not much of an obstacle. But their act of civil disobedience can still raise awareness of what's going on.

Right - the conscience veto didn't work in the case of marriage because it was only a small handful of people willing to stand up for it. It's different when you're looking at most of the bureaucracy. The president can fire them all, but if so he's destroying his own state apparatus and thus his own ability to act.

There's an obvious rebuttal here - "If I fire the bureaucracy I won't be able to act? But I'm not able to act now! My choice is a bureaucracy that refuses to do what I want, and no bureaucracy that does nothing. At least with no bureaucracy, there isn't an institution actively impeding me, and I can get started on the long, difficult process of building a new state apparatus."

But that's where I worry about the election cycle. Four years is not long enough to rebuild the entire federal bureaucracy.

But that's where I worry about the election cycle. Four years is not long enough to rebuild the entire federal bureaucracy.

First, I — like many — would question just how necessary so much of the federal bureaucracy is. There was that discussion here recently about what the Department of Education does. I'd also point to some of Curtis Yarvin's comments in this interview by Harrison Pitt about bringing in Elon Musk to head a "Department of Government Efficiency":

Well, if you wanted to run the government efficiently, you would do actually the California startup thing, which is you would simply replace it with a different organization; and which is about approximately 100,000 times easier and more effective than trying to take a process-oriented bureaucracy and turn it into some kind of mission-oriented thing.

It would be like, you know, if you told Elon Musk, basically, that he had to build a space program and start with NASA, he would simply fire all of NASA and build SpaceX.

…

Like you can't actually make these organizations more— I mean, you cut a little here; modify, tweak a little, but you can't make them into organizations that are even 1/1000 as efficient as SpaceX.

Moreover, if you're doing this kind of organization where you're just, like, "okay, I'm going to replace the State Department," uh, great, then you're face-to-face with an even more knotty question of what is the State Department, and what does it do, and why does it do it, and is this organization going to have the same goals and missions as the State Department; because the State Department is, of course, living in this sort of, like, exquisite historical fantasy, which it itself has constructed, of the Global American Empire.

…

You would not, if you actually worked from first principles in the way Elon Musk does when he launches a rocket, you would be, like, I don't even know even the concept of a rocket is up for grabs here, because if you look at what the State Department does, and the system it administrates, it is almost entirely a contingent product of history.

…

There's all of this just frame-breaking, where you try to make this thing— we're going to make the State Department more efficient, and you start thinking harder and harder what is the State Department? Why do we need a State Department? Right. And you're just basically, as you get more and more galaxy-brained, you're basically just, like, the reality is the United States does not have an Executive Branch, it has an administrative branch.

So, if you focus only on rebuilding the most core, essential functions of the federal government — can we get by for awhile without a Department of Energy? Transportation? HUD? CPSC? USAID? The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service? the Postal Regulatory Commission? — I can see quite a lot getting done in just four years.

Pharma companies held back the release of their vaccines to not give any perceived benefit to Trump.

Citation? I thought the bottleneck was FDA approval, with mass production starting alongside Phase 2 success.

He didn't do much about global warming. I'm happy about that. Honestly worrying about something with consequences 20 years out feels a little silly at this point. It was nice when we had such long time horizons.

Do you smoke? (Or purposely do something else that can ruin your body on a roughly 20 year time scale.) I don't find this argument persuasive - even accepting "consequences 20 years out" at face value, "consequences 20 years out" isn't dispositive of "prevention best done now."

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/10/19/1010646/campaign-stop-covid-19-vaccine-trump-election-day/

Citation?

Steve Sailer is the one who keeps harping on the vaccine delay most, including a retrospective recently. Not the most persuasive source to cite, but he does cite his own sources and doesn't seem to be making up any facts, just adding speculative but more-plausible-than-the-official motives. The official story is that pharma companies did hold back the analysis of their vaccines until right after the election, but only because it's okay to violate experiment protocols when you're kinda feeling super nervous.

I thought the bottleneck was FDA approval, with mass production starting alongside Phase 2 success.

Pfizer announced 90% effectivity in a preliminary analysis of their Phase 3 trials on November 9, announced the analysis was finished on November 18, applied for FDA approval on November 20, and got the Emergency Use Authorization on December 11.

Certainly the FDA taking 3 weeks to approve was as unhelpful than Pfizer delaying for 2 weeks, but both decisions probably killed thousands in the end.

Of course, the real bottleneck was the FDA, because we could have saved tens or hundreds of thousands more lives if not for decisions like "Forbidding the human challenge trials we could have done in April", "Not jailing the people who did the forbidding and then doing human challenge trials in May", etc. But letting people die in large numbers because of mindless authoritarianism is part and parcel of modern society, whereas letting people die in less-large numbers because you want to hide information from voters feels like a new low.

COVID-19 vaccines: history of the pandemic’s great scientific success and flawed policy implementation The FDA and companies delay vaccine trial until after the US election

Further discussion 25:35 from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of the Covid Vaccine (with Vinay Prasad)

Multiple companies announced the completion of their vaccines immediately after the election.

This feels like the health equivalent of street racing, motorcycle driving, skydiving, and shooting up heroin. And then worrying about smoking as a health risk. I'd tell someone with those problems to go ahead and smoke if it gets rid of any of their other terrible habits.

I'm also aware that we can basically do massive climate change on the cheap whenever we want. Sulfur dioxide seeding in the upper atmosphere or a massive sun shade in space are orders of magnitude cheaper than carbon emissions reduction.

Multiple companies announced the completion of their vaccines immediately after the election.

Which ones? Weren't Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson all in Phase 3 by the time the election happened?

I'm also aware that we can basically do massive climate change on the cheap whenever we want. Sulfur dioxide seeding in the upper atmosphere or a massive sun shade in space are orders of magnitude cheaper than carbon emissions reduction.

And it'd be better to begin geoengineering now than to wait 20 years, wouldn't it?

Yeah all of them announced completion of their vaccine literally the day after the election.

And it'd be better to begin geoengineering now than to wait 20 years, wouldn't it?

Not really. Depends on the discount rate and the cheapness of various solutions. Basically do the geo-engineering when it makes sense from a cost benefit perspective.

Yeah all of them announced completion of their vaccine literally the day after the election.

I've been given links about the controversy of the data collection period.

Not really. Depends on the discount rate and the cheapness of various solutions. Basically do the geo-engineering when it makes sense from a cost benefit perspective.

A stitch in time saves nine - does anyone here know of models of what geo-engineering would be needed at different points in time?

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/10/19/1010646/campaign-stop-covid-19-vaccine-trump-election-day/

Assume that it works, why would it? It's not as though the climate has become intolerable, or will be 20 years from now?

Assume that it works, why would it?

If there were no consequences of climate change until a known point in time and geo-engineering would be an immediate success, there would be no advantage to implementing geo-engineering prior to the known point in time at which consequences would occur. Do you expect geo-engineering to be an immediate success?

No offense to Scott, but I've long abandoned rational thought as a principle and embraced Kierkengaardian absurdism: I encourage everyone here to vote for Donald Trump, knowing that it will probably make things worse but having faith in God that everything will end well. Providence is clearly on his side. For Harris, it's clear that the only higher power on her side is the DNC.

Or, rather, the Democrats may not be “authoritarian” in the strictest sense of the dictionary definition, but that’s because the Democrats wrote the dictionary and defined the term to mean “bad in the exact way that bad conservatives are bad” (this is almost literally true; a lot of the current authoritarianism discussion comes from a construct invented by Theodor Adorno called “right-wing authoritarianism”).

I will grant that we're all going to prioritize different types of authority differently and process various exercises of power differently, but I am baffled that anyone would feel the need to hedge this way while attempting to steelman their opponent. No, my position is not that there's a dictionary problem, it's just that Democrats are flatly more authoritarian than Republicans. Not because of some idiosyncrasy in verbiage or because I think arms rights are more important than abortion rights, but as a generalized temperament with regard to almost all of the things that I care about.

The current Democrat preference is a whole lot of expert-trusting for a massive bureaucracy that meddles in everything. If you're a large business, get ready to record lots of racial and gender data so you don't run afoul of federal equal opportunity statutes. If you're a landlord, get ready to have people funded by the DoJ try to ascertain whether you're being racist. If you'd like to buy a showerhead, make sure you check whether it's one that you can adjust the flow regulator on or you're going to wind up with one that is saving the planet instead of giving you a nice shower. If you'd like to consume some raw milk, well, that's not safe enough for you and you may not engage in voluntary transactions with farmers, even if they label it clearly. For each of these and a million more, the Democrat position is just, "well, yes, that's a good thing". I will grant that it's a sort of benevolent authoritarianism, but with a hat tip to CS Lewis.

This isn't to say that Republicans don't use power, or don't use power in ways that I don't like, but it is to say that I will absolutely stand on the belief that Democrats want to exercise control over many, many more aspects of my life than Republicans. We haven't even talked about Covid, firearms, and taxation! Those are bigger issues, but I really am just referring to the general temperament and style of governance. Republican administrations simply do less than Democrat administrations, and they would do less still if they would get around to firing half the bureaucracy in the fashion that Vance and Vivek suggest.

I like this post. Would you be willing to post it on the ACX comments section? I would like to hear what Scott himself would have to say to this. I'd also be curious what he'd say in response to most of the comments here, as well.

Don't you have to pay the man just for the privilege of leaving comments?

I think there are subscribers only open threads, but otherwise no you don't have to pay to comment. Though he usually expects a real name with the comments. Which is another reason I can't post it. I'd reveal my real name in the process. (I could theoretically go through the trouble of creating a fake account, but it's all just extra friction for an inferior interaction.)

Though he usually expects a real name with the comments.

Not sure where you getting this, plenty of people use nicknames and he quotes them in highlights

I've had posts appear in the "Highlights from the comments..." threads under a username in the past. Not seen any bias towards real names, the bigger issue is that it's likely too late for a comment to get noticed amongst thousands of others

I don't think so. I don't pay him but I can comment on his posts.

Thanks, I post here because I like the engagement I get better. Scott knows where this forum is, and I'm probably way to late to get this post noticed if I made it as a comment over there. You can feel free to post a link on his blog back to this comment, or even fully quote it over there if you want.

I feel that the conservative movement has come to a healthier space where they differentiate the university and educational establishment that they hate from intellectualism in general. This worry did not materialize.

Trump essentially killed the conservative movement. It's not healthy, the old base now hates it and it's institutions have had to choose between sacrificing their souls or irrelevance. Just go to a MAGA space and say the word 'neocon' and see what happens.

MAGA doesn't even trust Conservative intellectual institutions. What progress is still being made (say, what's happening in Florida), is localized, not part of the national movement, which has shattered and died in most places.

Neocons are bad conservatives. Good riddance to that lot of big government military adventurers. Disaffected leftists turning bad and ruining the Republican party.

Neoconservatives are not and were not ever conservative. Their origin was in the Democratic party, in many cases as Socialists, who saw an opportunity to take over the foreign politics of the Republican party when they lost a struggle session to New Left Great Society culture leftists. This would be like if the Chapo guys defected with Anna Khachiyan to the right because they had some weird fascination with Eastern Europe and the Balkans and in 60 years you called them conservatives when they defected back to the left to ensure the (D) candidate doesnt stab Bulgaria in the back

The "conservative" movement was about to fold on immigration after Romney, so one wonders what movement would have remained after another round of amnesty or civil war as they tried to force their base to accept this. Trump was drawing on something real after all.

This [Northern conservatism] is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt hath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always when about to enter a protest very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its “bark is worse than its bite,” and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent role of resistance: The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it “in wind,” and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy, from having nothing to whip.

— Robert Lewis Dabney, in 1897

What good is this sort of "conservatism", anyway?

The neocons adapted so well to the Democrats that one wonders if they ever belonged with the Republicans in the first place.

If it 'died' it is in large part because it wasn't fit for the new environment and DEFINITELY wasn't fit to battle its major competitor.

I'd view this as more of an adaptation than anything else.

History is more contingent than that. And it's not clear that MAGA is particularly well equipped to perform better. The old Movement Conservatism elected Presidents and won elections, too. Outside of Trump himself, MAGA has mostly lost Republicans elections over the last eight years and I'd bet it'd lose this one, too, if the Democrats hadn't chosen an invalid and then an incompetent to be their standard bearers.

Trump is probably a net drain now that he's broken the consensus. But Dobbs is a huge confounder here. The GOP was projected to gain in midterms even with Trump and the result of standard conservative maneuvering for the last few decades seems to have interfered.

Trump is notably less gung-ho on the pro-life issue than many in the party.

Well my personal take is that "MAGA" as such dies with Trump. Doesn't mean he takes the entire right-wing edifice with him.

I'm far more interested in what comes after Trump, given how disruptive he was to prior alliances.

I suspect JD Vance is a hint of what we'll be seeing later on.

if the Democrats hadn't chosen an invalid and then an incompetent to be their standard bearers.

Realize how much of that was almost inevitable given the ideological demands the Dem base now makes. Think about why Kamala didn't pick Shapiro despite desperately NEEDING to win PA. Think about why the Dems can't do effective outreach to male voters or even acknowledge that male voters have their own independent set of concerns.

Can the Dems even run a standard, electable candidate without ticking off a large part of that base and triggering infighting anymore? Do they have candidates that can clear the primaries (a significant portion of the Dem electorate backed Bernie Sanders twice) and then be dominant in the general these days?

The old Movement Conservatism elected Presidents and won elections, too.

Yes. And what were the outcomes of those victories? Why are election victories valuable?

Because otherwise you get the New Deal and the Warren Court.

I hate this argument. That the right should accept losing slowly as a "win," because it's not as bad as losing quickly.

I don't remember if it was here, or at the old subreddit, but I remember reading yet another gun control argument, yet another "cake slicing" characterized as a "compromise." When someone asked what exactly the pro-gun side got out of such a compromise, one gun control proponent got quite honest: you get to keep some of your guns for now. You get them taken away slowly, a bit at a time, rather than all at once right now. You get to lose slowly, instead of quickly, and you should be happy with that. It's a very vae victus attitude, an "I am altering the deal; pray I don't alter it any further," attitude.

I'm also reminded of a Nick Freitas video where he complained about a constituent who called him "useless," then spent an hour explaining how state legislatures work, how little power elected politicians have, how the system is rigged against right-wingers so that it's often "lose-lose" — in short, how he's useless. Or, more specifically, that he personally is not useless, but that any right-wing politician in his position playing by "the rules of the game" will be just as impotent.

As I see it, "well, at least you get to lose slowly" isn't an argument for playing the rigged game, it's an argument for flipping the table. Because, as @FCfromSSC notes, even when we "win" electorally, we still end up in the same place.

Sun-tzu says not to fight where you are weak and the enemy is strong, fight where you are strong and the enemy is weak. Your argument is one that says electoral politics is a battleground where the right is weak. So why should we fight on that one, instead of one that's more favorable to us. Because there's one battlefield where we have, if not an advantage, then the least disadvantage — the literal battlefield. We have a lot more guns, more veterans, a lot of favorable geography, control of the food supply, and less dependence on some highly-vulnerable infrastructure.

As I see it, your statement here isn't an argument for why we should seek electoral victories for the Republican party, it's an argument for why we should grab our guns and start shooting.

it's an argument for why we should grab our guns and start shooting.

Please stop saying this.

Why? He's right, given the premises. The people offering the lose-lose alternatives should take notice, unless (as I suspect) they already have and are perfectly willing to fight the real war.

More comments

Nice, fedposting, consensus building and stupid rolled in one.

Not entirely sure is it trolling or genuinely advocating for civil war. And unsure which one would be sadder.

And my point is that we got the equivalent of the New Deal and the Warren Court even when we won.

It’s not happening, and if it is, it’s a good thing?

more an argument over definitions, in my view. Red Tribe's prospects look better to me under MAGA than they have at any point since W's first term. The MAGA movement is pretty clearly a national contender; and this despite what one might euphemistically refer to as "procedural headwinds". It's true that we're aligning into a direct fight with the entire formal establishment, but that sort of fight is exactly how this nation was founded, and I like our odds. Certainly the present situation seems preferable to one where we endlessly sacrifice value to support that establishment and receive nothing in return.

but that sort of fight is exactly how this nation was founded

In very different times, under very different conditions (geographic, economic, technological, military…).

and I like our odds

On the basis of what? I, of course, question such optimism…

Certainly the present situation seems preferable to one where we endlessly sacrifice value to support that establishment and receive nothing in return.

…but still agree with this part totally.

The Neocons killed the conservative movement by expending its credibility in support of ruinous Forever Wars. If the Republican candidate had been anyone but Trump in 2016, I was planning to vote Hillary.

W wasn't even a neocon. Although the Bushes like 'compassionate conservatism', they were really just the wild Northeastern Establishment reaching it's dead hand forward into the 21st century.

The neocons were a core part of Movement Conservatism, from the beginning. They had no special connection to foreign policy and the weight of anti-war sentiment coming down on them was more a creation of left wing anti-war media than something central to the neocons themselves. While Reagan's three legged stool makes clear the neocons weren't the only part of the conservative movement, Trumpism has also abandoned the other two legs: the social conservatives have been thrown under the bus on abortion and the business conservatives/fiscal hawks have been shown the door both in rhetoric and actual practice.

The Old Right/Paleos have essentially entirely won the battle and so the Conservative Movement is dead. The Conservative Movement in America was something that grew out of the collapse of the Old Right in the face of the Eisenhower Presidency as essentially another path for opposing the New Deal Consensus. While the. Social base of the MAGA movement allowed for this revival of Paleoconservatism, the base of the New Right in the suburbs is moving Left too rapidly for the New Right to ever revive, so Movement Conservatism is essentially dead. Evangelicals will continue their deal with the devil and Business Conservatives will dither over what to do: go to the Democrats and just pray their socialist wing can be kept under control or try to influence MAGA to be more friendly to them.

But the old Movement is 100% gone.

the social conservatives have been thrown under the bus on abortion

Trump gave them the best win they could get from a President: removing the Supreme Court's federal restriction on pursuing their politics. If they can't win on a state level and abortion likely ends up codified like in every other industrialized nation (albeit with more restrictions) then maybe that's on them?

On gay marriage: okay, the party seems to have totally folded there.

abortion likely ends up codified like in every other industrialized nation

This will happen very quickly after most of the boomers are in the ground as any look into pro-life vs pro-choice by age demographics will tell you.

How have the social conservatives been thrown under the bus on abortion?

But the old Movement is 100% gone.

Good? The old movement already lost twice to Obama, and then to Trump in the primary. It is non-viable in the current political environment, and any forseeable future environment, as the Republican party, at least. The National Review and David French can wail and gnash their teeth on the daily until the cows come home, but the world has changed, and they need to deal with that fact.

It also elected Reagan, twice, took Congress back for the first time in 40 years and gave us probably the most conservative policy decade since the 1920s, elected both Bushes four times in total, and won the House nine times (I'll let you guys have 2016, although I think that really was still momentum from the Conservative Movement), the Senate ten times, and brought Republican control of state legislatures and governor's mansions to a numeric height unequaled in a century.

It's not so clear that failing to beat Obama meant it was 'non-viable', although I know that's the self serving story MAGA likes to tell itself.

Reagan did some great things, and genuinely had a vision for the future. He also left office more than a third of a century ago. Bush Sr. is notable pretty much only for beating up on a couple of tinpot dictators and largely failing on the domestic front. Bush Jr is notable for being completely eclipsed by his VP, embracing the idiot wing of the GOP, finishing up his daddies work in the most expensive fashion possible, and entangling the nation in a festering quagmire of a war that wouldnt succeed in its objective of killing one guy until the next president and genrally being an enormous suck of lives and treasure; domestically he passed a terrible education bill and a few minor tax cuts while overseeing the regulatory idiocy that led to the 2008 financial crisis.

None of this is worth celebrating- good riddance to it.

elected both Bushes four times in total, and won the House nine times (I'll let you guys have 2016, although I think that really was still momentum from the Conservative Movement), the Senate ten times, and brought Republican control of state legislatures and governor's mansions to a numeric height unequaled in a century

And what did the Right get from all that, in terms of concrete outcomes? And I mean wins, not just "well, the left didn't get as much as they could have otherwise."

Why should the right be satisfied with "well, you didn't lose as quickly as you could have"?

Failing to beat Obama after the 2008 financial crisis.

Did any 1st-world governing party except Merkel's CDU survive that? Post-2008 German politics is hilarious - the 60% or so of the electorate who want Merkel out keep trying to vote her out (including by punishing her coalition partners) but she keeps finding a new coalition partner willing to trash its relationship with its own voters for four years running the German foreign ministry.

It also elected Reagan, twice, took Congress back for the first time in 40 years and gave us probably the most conservative policy decade since the 1920s

This is true, and the 80s were a real success. They also ended 34 years ago. It's notable that in your summary, your detailing of concrete outcomes stops there, in favor of detailing process "wins".

It's not so clear that failing to beat Obama meant it was 'non-viable', although I know that's the self serving story MAGA likes to tell itself.

Because it allowed Blue Tribe political and cultural victories to snowball victories to the point that the term "Blue Tribe" became a necessary part of the lexicon. since the 80s, its wins were pyrrhic at best, to the point that the best option currently available to its constituents is to organize behind an analogue of 1990s-era Bill Clinton.

The movement you are eulogizing played a significant role in the destruction of America as a viable political entity. We will be paying for its mismanagement for decades to come.

W wasn't even a neocon. Although the Bushes like 'compassionate conservatism', they were really just the wild Northeastern Establishment reaching it's dead hand forward into the 21st century.

I voted for W, and one of the biggest reasons I voted for him was his firm stance against nation-building. 9/11 was shocking enough to change my mind for a year or two, but before his first term was out I had achieved escape velocity from the Conservative movement of my birth almost entirely because of the war and the whiplash-inducing abandonment of principles that went with it. Torture was fine. Fiscal responsibility was out the window, with the meme at the time being us dumping pallets of hundred dollar bills out the back of airplanes in Afghanistan. Two ruinous foreign wars leading to what were obviously going to be indefinite and doomed exercises in nation-building, based on deliberate lies to the public. Massive violations of civil liberties, "free speech zones", ubiquitous government surveillance. I had opposed Clinton and the Democrats explicitly because I didn't want any of that!

The neocons were a core part of Movement Conservatism, from the beginning. They had no special connection to foreign policy and the weight of anti-war sentiment coming down on them was more a creation of left wing anti-war media than something central to the neocons themselves.

I suppose I was fooled then, because what I remember is The Project for a New American Century and W's administration being notably staffed by neocon true believers in numerous prominent positions, and that they set policy in numerous ways from those positions. I remember those policies defining the era, and I remember the results.

the social conservatives have been thrown under the bus on abortion

The social conservatives have gotten Roe overturned, and are now one of the core nuclei for serious Red Tribe organization in the culture war. W's attempts to support the social conservatives as an integrated part of American society failed categorically. The current strategy seems like a better deal to me, given the present realities. We no longer have any illusions that public morality can be maintained, but that is probably for the best. Better for us to accept our role as the outsiders, to recognize that this nation and its social order are incompatible with our understanding of universal truth.

and the business conservatives/fiscal hawks have been shown the door both in rhetoric and actual practice.

As they should have been, because they have zero credibility with any part of the public any more. Offshoring manufacturing in favor of the "service economy" was supposed to provide broad prosperity. It did not. "Learn to code" is a cruel joke now, but I remember when that was the actual, inironic policy prescription. Fiscal responsibility is a joke after W and the Obama presidency; there will never be a balanced budget, and pretending otherwise is foolish; even if we could maintain it under Republican leadership, which we couldn't, there is no benefit to tightening Red Tribe belts to pay down Blue Tribe's credit card. We let the business conservatives lead, and they consistently led us to failure and to outright disaster. Then when we'd beggared ourselves supporting their defunct ideological prescriptions, they promptly dumped us and defected wholesale to the Blues.

You are describing outcomes, but you are not accounting for the process by which those outcomes arrived.

While the Social base of the MAGA movement allowed for this revival of Paleoconservatism, the base of the New Right in the suburbs is moving Left too rapidly for the New Right to ever revive, so Movement Conservatism is essentially dead. Evangelicals will continue their deal with the devil and Business Conservatives will dither over what to do: go to the Democrats and just pray their socialist wing can be kept under control or try to influence MAGA to be more friendly to them.

The social base of America is dead. The social cohesion you see right now, where cities are haunted by the specter of nation-wide race riots and federal politicians are dodging assassins' bullets, this is as good as it's ever going to be, and it's never going to be this good again. In less than a week we're going to vote in a national election, and no matter what the result may be, social cohesion is going to decrease significantly, yet again. Nor is it going to recover in the next ten years any more than it did in the last ten. The Culture war consumes all other concerns, and it continues to escalate. Red Tribe has a pressing need to mobilize to a war footing versus the Blues, and MAGA is the best option available for achieving that. There is no reason to compromise that mobilization to prop up a social order not only dead but visibly rotting off the bone.

So you agree with me that the Conservative Movement is dead.

I agree with you that a conservative movement is dead, certainly.

Yes, for 60 some years now what people meant when they said 'Conservative Movement' is dead.

Yes, for 60 some years now what people meant when they said 'Conservative Movement' is dead.

And given what that "conservative movement" looked like, how is that a bad thing for people on the right?

More comments

And yet, it seems to me that my conservative principles find better representation under the current environment than they did under the old arrangement. Why should I mourn this outcome?

W wasn't even a neocon.

Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Doug Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, and Condi Rice were, though. Even W's speechwriters like David Frum were.

Man, I'm going to be a good rationalist and "notice I am confused" about rationalists who choose to actively endorse voting at all as a means of affecting positive changes, given the candidates we have on offer.

I do not get how somebody could watch the events that unfolded from early 2020 to now and ultimately decide that picking the status quo candidate is a 'rational' path forward, without it being a purely ideological choice of which 'team' you think you're a member of.

I can see how risk aversion would drive one away from Trump, as he presents many unknowns, mostly in terms of who he'd bring into positions of power. Yet, during his term we DIDN'T have tensions with other countries escalating into armed conflict. We DIDN'T have mass persecution of minorities or prosecution of political opponents. We had riots over racial issues, that much MUST be admitted... but they were centered almost entirely in Democrat-controlled cities and Democrat-run states! The Dem's VP Candidate was governor of the state where that all kicked off, the literal epicenter! What are they signalling with that choice??

I won't belabor the point around pandemic response, but there is simply no reason to believe that the Dems would have done categorically better than Trump, and some reason to believe they'd be worse.

And with the 'status quo' candidates, we've had blowups all over the place, and it sure feels like they're not interested in putting a lid on it, and it also looks like we're less able to for like 100 reasons. And it sure DOES feel like they're trying to put a lid on U.S. technological progress, instead.

I'm not trying to even be convincing with the above, just explaining why my 'rational' analysis is that Trump is simply not 'the problem' with the system. He's probably not 'the solution' either. The case that he is worse than the status quo simply falls flat to me, anything horrible you might expect him to do he either didn't do during his first term, or the current admin is already doing said horrible thing. We are tangibly closer to something resembling 'World War III" now than at any point back when some kept expecting Trump to cause it.

And perhaps worst, if you actively endorse Kamala, you're signalling loud and clear that its completely fine for the powers that be to lie about the mental state of a sitting president or other candidate, to abruptly pull him out of the race and swap him for a different, unpopular candidate without any input from the voters, and prop them up against any objections as to their fitness. Oligarchy just picking who they want to lead, and if they win, it was rewarded.

So guess what, you can fully expect them to do it again. How in the hell do you justify that as an outcome?

And it Trump is really, truly so horrible as you keep insisting, that he is so beyond the pale that rational folks must oppose him, and he wins again, consider why the status quo is so horribly unpopular and Trump's arguments are sufficiently convincing that he can beat them in an election despite them holding virtually all the cards and bringing every single underhanded tool and pulling out every single stop to try and suppress his popularity.

It'd be an indictment of the status quo all by itself. A ruling party not competent enough to beat Donald Trump (while staying mostly within the rules and norms of the game, assassination should be off the table!) is probably not one we should be endorsing to continue leading us. REMEMBER, the status quo we had before Trump is what led to Trump getting elected in the fucking first place!

Yep. Still confused.

"...I am confused" about rationalists who choose to actively endorse voting at all as a means of affecting positive changes, given the candidates we have on offer.

This has always been difficult for me to wrap my head around too. I've been cynical about American elections so long that I almost forget why and when someone intelligent that I respect says to me that voting is actually important I will stop and listen. But I have yet to be convinced that my participation has any impact on anything. It seems irrational to view my vote as meaningful, hence I always throw it away. I only vote for outsiders and always as a protest--but I do vote. Why? Habit I suppose, certainly not because I can justify it.

I suppose the problem is that I wouldn't recognize when my vote might matter. I kind of look at it all like a sweepstakes where I like 1:1000 odds but don't bother with 1:3,000,000 odds. So, I focus on school board races, state representatives, city council and the like. Presidential elections stir no feelings or emotions in me because they only exist as mid-wit theater.

Right, it would make more sense for rationalists to offer advice on how to pick a good school board candidate or a good city councilman or a good dog-catcher, for races where the reader has a tangible impact on the outcome.

Literally, offering any endorsement at all on a presidential race seems reads like you believe you're influential enough to make a difference, which could be just a tad... delusional? Narcissistic? I get why Newspaper editorial boards would do it, but not every single personality need voice their opinion on this.

Will you have more impact on the vote than Taylor Swift? If not, then why exactly are you spending this effort?

I won't belabor the point around pandemic response, but there is simply no reason to believe that the Dems would have done categorically better than Trump, and some reason to believe they'd be worse.

Without Trump, there might not have even been a pandemic...because the media and institutional apparati wouldn't have been so motivated to belabor the crisis and keep it going. The COVID Death Counter only got removed once he was out of office. Under Trump, every event got magnified into a crisis to keep people wound up and deranged.

Trump was the one who stupidly lifted the ban on GOF research, so you may be right that there wouldn't have been a pandemic without him.

  • -15

GOF research was being funded by Fauci the entire time it was supposedly "banned"

Cunts like Fauci, Daszak & co have a whole lot of blood on their hands, but does it bother them?

I'd love to see a source for this claim. According to Wikipedia, the Wuhan Institute of Virology was conducting research into coronaviruses in bats as early as 2005.

In 2015, an international team including two scientists from the institute published successful research on whether a bat coronavirus could be made to infect a human cell line (HeLa). The team engineered a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells.

That sounds pretty similar to GoF to me.

Also:

[In 2014], the US government granted exceptions to the GoFR moratorium to 7 out of 18 research projects that had been affected.

The covid death counter is alive and well.

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#maps_deaths-total

There was one on CNN or some other major news network, that they literally removed the day of Biden's inauguration.

I have never watched CNN but this appears to be false.

https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-did-cnn-remove-covid-19-tracker-after-joe-biden-took-office-1564233

There's a pic of biden's inauguration speech with the counter on it, and on later days as well.

Maybe they showed it less frequently, I'm not in a position to judge.

Fair enough, in the end neither am I. Just remember someone posting about it on /r/stupidpol.

I would occasionally remind people that Nancy Pelosi was actively encouraging people to go out in public in large groups in those very early stages.

It might be arguable that the Pandemic wouldn't have gotten so aggressively politicized (that was the biggest disappointment, to me) sans Trump but I don't think there's much argument over who was doing the politicizing.

When I first read this I thought it was a reasonably well thought-out post. It wasn’t until later that I realized that Scott didn’t mention immigration once in the entire essay. There’s a Straussian reading here where Scott personally cares more about his own social standing than HDB civilizational risks, but understands why others would not, leaving the objection open and unrefuted.

I think all the arguments that Scott is being unfair in his specific recounting of Trumps flaws are cope. I’m voting for him anyway because stopping uncontrolled immigration and keeping Rawlsians off the court really are that important.

...keeping Rawlsians off the court really are that important.

I hadn't even conceived of framing it this way, but this is exactly right from my perspective as well. The one that pops to my mind most recently is the Grants Pass case, but really, it's the echoes of Robinson and the later dissents in Powell where I just keep thinking, "what in the world are we talking about?". The idea is that a status can't be criminalized, but an action can. The dissenters in Powell (and Grants Pass) insist that things like alcoholism and homelessness are statuses, so you can't criminalize things that are downstream of that status. What in the world are we talking about? Applying that logic consistently, absolving people of any meaningful agency, is completely unthinkable to me. Yes, even if you really, really, really want to be drunk in public, I think the police should show up and tell you that's enough for the evening. Yes, even if you don't currently have a home, I think the police should show up and escort you out of the park. More importantly when considering the case law, I cannot fathom that there is a federal right to be drunk in public or sleep in parks.

I want to point people back to my old comment on Grants Pass, because this logic has really infected tons of things. They were so successful in playing this game with sexuality (going all the way to effectively banning Christian groups from campuses) that it's almost hard to blame them for thinking that they could get away with it everywhere else, too. I don't really like to let my mind drift to partisan politics (rather than just focusing on understanding what is actually true), but it's hard to not have the thought floating around that we could easily have been two Clinton appointees in place of two Trump appointees away from this stuff metastasizing even more. Frankly, it just makes it annoyingly harder to simultaneously follow the news in the legal realm while also trying to stay personally philosophically coherent when to even explain what has happened requires constantly reminding yourself, "Of course this is complete philosophical bollocks."

Yes, somehow Grants Pass was the most striking for me as well from this last term, in that it seemed the most tenuous and absurd. I was thinking the whole time, how did that position manage to attract three votes, when it was so transparently not what the 8th amendment is saying?

Every minor violation of Trump's is blown out of proportion, and every major violation of the democrats is minimized and not talked about.

I don't want to get into an object-level argument about this (though my personal stance is probably blatant), but it's interesting and funny how for the opposite side it's viewed as the exact opposite of this, with the perception that all media across the spectrum is always "grading Trump on a curve" / minimizing his actions because they're so acclimated to it while the left can get away with much less than he can.

Freddie deBoer recently wrote about this, in Big Mommy is Not Coming to Save Us:

This is the “why has the media gone easy on Trump??” narrative, which has somehow flourished for almost a decade now despite the fact that Donald Trump has been covered more critically by our media than any other figure in my lifetime, seemingly to his advantage.

He proceeds to gives a ton of examples from the New York Times.

It’s incredible that so many people sincerely believe that the Times is a secretly pro-Trump publication, as they don’t even bother to pretend that their op/ed section is a space where actual pro-Trump sentiment is going to be shared, outside of a once-or-twice a year novelty piece.

[..]

If they go so easy on Trump, why can they not scare up a single authentically pro-Trump voice for the Opinion page? This recent NYT piece asks nine members of their editorial team to reflect on who they’re voting for and why. All nine are voting for Democrats. It’s a bunch of plugs for Harris or the Democrats generally and one weird endorsement of an environmentalist who stole his wardrobe from the Lumineers tour bus. They couldn’t even find a single staffer to endorse a Republican for appearance’s sake, to ward off the obvious criticism. Not one!

I'm sure there are people on both sides that claim their guy isn't treated fairly, and the other guy deserves more scrutiny. But I think this is a case where the Democrat voters are simply wrong.

Grading Trump on a curve as, say, Ben Shapiro says he does, does not exclude dubious media hysterics over Trump. I think the shrinking institutional media leans hysterical while claiming objectivity, while new media tends to grade him on a curve, and simply says thats what they do.

The other point is that various biases cause both old and new media to focus on trivialities (process scandals, horserace polls, gaffes, bimbo eruptions etc.) over substantive coverage of what is actually at stake. And, at least in this cycle, both candidates are leaning in to the media obsession by not sharing meaningful policy proposals at all (Kamala) or sharing stupid proposals which his intelligent supporters insist he won't actually implement (Trump).

Because partisans of both sides think that their side is right on the merits, they see a bias in favour of trivialities over the merits to be a systemic bias against their side.

I never understood this either. There's an argument that I've heard that the media is biased precicely because they don't go after Trump hard enough. I can't compute it. As a reasonably disinterested American, all I've seen for 15 years is the media constantly going after him, but in the last few months, basically since he was shot at, the media kinda, sorta treats him like he's a presidential candidate--while also reminding us how terrible he is at the same time. The idea that "Trump has been normalized " is so far beyond my perception of reality I don't even know how to engage with it.

What? Who says that?

Trump has been normalized only in the sense that what would have been shocking for another candidate is blasé for him. He’ll do something scandalous, the media will insist it’s a scandal, and then everything will continue exactly as it was.

I remember not too long ago, a bunch of conservatives got excited because the audience for whatever show Colbert hosts now, booed when the CNN affiliated host said something about them being impartial. It was amusing to me, because the conservatives took it to mean, even this progressive audience knows how biased (against Trump) CNN is. Of course, the reality was that they were booing CNN for being biased in favor of Trump, because this was within about a month of the debate and that was the normie progressive take, that CNN was basically in league with Trump.

I've seen the claim a few times on notes on Substack and shared posts from Twitter. Along with things like, "If Trump is elected we will literally be killed!"

I'm not sure if you're objecting to the claim that the media is saying Trump is being normalized or that people are complaining that media has been normalizing Trump. Both have happened a lot.

How Not To Normalize Trump

Fallon: I Didn't Mean to 'Normalize' Trump

The Case for Normalizing Trump

Don't Normalize Trump's Vision for America

Normalizing Trump: An Incredibly Brief Explainer

How We Normalized Trump

We are Normalizing Trump. Again.

Protesters Outside of New York Times demand newspaper "Stop Normalizing" Trump

This has been going on since 2016. I mean the media obviously aren't normalizing him, in my opinion and experience, but people are certainly claiming that it's happening.

What? Who says that?

At least one progressive has said something like that to me directly. In particular, there were quite a few examples of this attitude in the recent aftermath of Trump/Biden debate, where I saw quite a few tweets to the effect of "Why is the media being so harsh on Biden when Trump said/did XYZ" etc.

I've seen it said, or maybe heard it said. But I can't point to anything specific.

Usually when I see or hear it I just realized I'm living in a totally different information environment than whoever said it, and I give up most hope of discourse with them.

Third, and more idealistically, I would feel like a total hypocrite with no ground to stand on if I claimed to be pro-freedom, pro-liberalism, and pro-democracy, but didn’t really take a stand against somebody trying to attack enemy politicians and rig an election.

If you didn't read anything else but this sentence, would you know Scott was arguing against Trump or against the Democratic Party?

Scott being against Trump is one thing. Scott willing to support Harris is another. Scott was canceled by the establishment she is the titular head of. He is a traitor to himself, in the sense of adhering to his own enemies and giving them aid and comfort. That's a horrible thing, and the next time he gets canceled, I will not be in the least bit upset.

I don't think Scott has been cancelled by the establishment or was ever in serious danger of being. (It is hard to cancel a doctor in private practice.) The primary row was about the NYT publishing his real name - he said that he would feel obliged to self-cancel if this happened. He later changed his mind on this question, and now has both a Substack and a psych practice tied to his legal name.

There was an attempt by Topher Brennan to get Scott cancelled, but it didn't work, and in any case Topher Brennan is not the Biden-Harris administration (despite having "former candidate for US Senate" on his Medium page). I assume the personal beef driving this was a boundary dispute between users of the semi-socialised pussy in their shared social circle.

(It is hard to cancel a doctor in private practice.)

Not necessarily. Private pay patients have choice and can google, in Cali they may avoid Scott.

You also have to not piss off your partners, staff, malpractice provider, landlord, etc. Again in Cali can be a problem.

This is the exact kind of thinking he is criticising. It would be more than a little narcissistic to choose whom to elect as President based on where each of the candidates fits into your own personal psychodrama (his word not mine) - that might be the narrative most personally compelling to him, but it isn't objectively of any importance compared to everything else at stake in the election. Voting isn't a question of 'aid and comfort', it's a dispassionate selection between the range of options offered to you. And Scott is saying that one shouldn't let personal animus or revulsion lead one into an erroneous selection. If one objects to Harris on the grounds she is closely associated with the broader cultural milieu that 'cancelled' Scott, one must also consider that Trump is personally extremely quick to 'cancel' or attempt to do so, and you aren't released from that obligation of considering what the alternative is just because you really hate the left-liberal establishment.

My politics went from “what policy is best for society” to “friend or enemy” as a result of the 2020 riots, censorship, and covid policies.

Harris went after the fraternal charitable organization in my church and every Catholic Church in America, the Knights of Columbus. She’s my enemy. I can’t in good conscience vote for such a person.

What happened there? I must have totally missed that news cycle.

During more than one judicial nomination she's called the KoC extreme for opposing abortion and gay marriage and her line of questioning for the nominees implied that membership is somehow disqualifying. URL is yahoo.com but this is from the National Review: https://www.yahoo.com/news/brief-history-kamala-harris-knights-140302014.html

There are many valid criticisms of Harris, but if you dislike Trump more than Harris you must support Harris and vice versa. To act otherwise in the US electoral system is to act irrationally.

But, anyway, all these comments trying to relate this to his cancellation are truly baffling to me. How can you all be so tribe-brained? The NYT and some weird anti-rats with vendettas trying to cancel him is completely orthogonal to Trump being a horrible person, a horrible leader, and an initiator of democratic backsliding in the US (with a possibility he will become even more of one, whether he wins or loses). Harris and the DNC did not pen articles about Scott being problematic, and even if they did I suspect he would still (rightly) support Harris and the Democrats in the 2024 election, because their opponent is Trump.

because their opponent is Trump.

It's probably a little early, but maybe someone should start collecting bets on whether the next Republican candidate gets tarred as uniquely evil in the same way. Seems quite likely to me, but I guess a lot depends on next week there.

A comment from @JTarrou from many years ago still lives in the back of my mind:

The current Republican president is always the worst person in history. The last one is always surprisingly human. The one before that is always a pretty decent dude.

The current Democratic president is Star Trek Jesus with sprinkles, the last one was a corrupt liar who wasted his vast potential, and the one before that was a Republican.

I don't know that Obama has quite followed that trajectory yet, but since the connection to Biden is so strong and he is still 'around' and influential enough in the party that some folks think he's still pulling many strings, maybe he'll just be a bit delayed on the path. I'm watching that one as well as looking forward to Trump's trajectory once he's actually out of the picture politically.

Clinton has the 'corrupt, unprincipled liar' treatment and Carter gets a 'too good for this sinful earth' aura among democrats. Both Bushes seem to be treated as pretty decent folks by the media. Obama's still Star Trek Jesus, Biden is treated as senile and incompetent. Kamala seems to be getting a lackluster Strong Black Woman treatment.

So no, I don't think this is a universal rule.

if you read any coverage of DeSantis back when he seemed like the rising star you would realize it is beyond likely, it is certain.

But, anyway, all these comments trying to relate this to his cancellation are truly baffling to me. How can you all be so tribe-brained? The NYT and some weird anti-rats with vendettas trying to cancel him is completely orthogonal to Trump being a horrible person, a horrible leader, and an initiator of democratic backsliding in the US (with a possibility he will become even more of one, whether he wins or loses). Harris and the DNC did not pen articles about Scott being problematic, and even if they did I suspect he would still (rightly) support Harris and the Democrats in the 2024 election, because their opponent is Trump.

I could express a sort of faux-bafflement at the blatant lack of self-awareness and/or hypocrisy in this paragraph, highlighted by the parts I bolded, but that would be dishonest at this point. I just find it depressing.

Because what's clear to me is happening here is that many posters have, in good faith, honestly concluded that the Democratic party and the larger culture that it's a part of are bad things, and that they were hoping that Scott's experience of being burned by this would lead him to correcting his own earlier delusions that they're not all that bad. When people laugh at supporters of the leopards-eating-people's-faces party for getting their faces eaten by leopards, the point being made isn't that these supporters should tribally go against the party that hurt them, it's that they should have recognized that leopards eating people's faces is just a bad thing that they shouldn't have supported in the first place. Sometimes, the person comes to this recognition once the consequences of such support become personally unavoidable; other times, the person looks at his daughter's torn-off face and offers up his other daughter face-first to the same leopard while other people praise him for proving that he's principled by taking a costly action.

Of course, it is tribal thinking to, in honest good faith, believe that leopards eating people's faces is wrong in a world in which a significant team exists that supports the leopards-eating-people's-faces party. A less tribal conclusion to this person's continued support would be that, "Perhaps I ought to rethink my judgment that this whole cancel culture thing is all that bad, if someone who ostensibly got burned by it is still supportive of the exact same forces that led to him getting burned."

This is isomorphic to the honest good faith belief that Trump is just that bad of a person, bad of a leader, bad of a ward of democracy, etc. that he's a bad choice for POTUS. In the presence of such a major team with skin in the game that disagrees with this, a less tribal conclusion would be that, "Perhaps I ought to rethink my judgment that Trump is such an obviously or extremely bad choice for POTUS, or that my preferred choice for POTUS is any better."

Now, we can actually analyze these things non-tribally and try to conclude if the kinds of principles that led to the smearing of Scott is actually bad in comparison to how bad of a leader Trump is, as well as how much influences these things will have in the US depending on who's elected. I, for instance, think it's reasonable to conclude based on the fundamentals that Trump has demonstrated a lack of seriousness in how he governs through his first term, which works out mostly okay but which creates significant risk in emergencies, and this is worse than the emboldening effect that a Harris presidency would have on the people who brought forth the culture that led, among other things, to Scott getting smeared. But complaining about others being tribe-brained while also declaring that Trump is just so horrible is just trying to eat your cake and have it too. Either accept that other people can be just as tribal as you and come to the honest, good faith conclusion that [thing the other side likes] is actually horrible just like you have, or actually rise above the tribalism.

Because we weren't born yesterday. The NYT is not some fringe; they're a major institution in the progressive machine that Kamala is a part of. And they are notorious for message discipline. If the NYT takes a shot at you, it's that machine taking a shot at you.

As for Trump's "democratic backsliding", I will note there is one party which attempted to remove their major opponent from the ballot in several states, had said opponent criminally convicted with the assistance of people from the Justice Department, and continues to make a mockery of the law by prosecuting him with an unauthorized prosecutor on the Federal level, and it's not the Republicans.

Members and allies of said party also attempted to violently disrupt the 2017 inauguration and physically interfered with the confirmation hearings on at least one of his appointed Supreme Court justices. Further, Democratic-allied members of the government bureaucracy both supported false information (e.g. the Steele dossier) and falsely denigrated true information (the Hunter Biden laptop) under the color of their authority. They also "partnered" with social media to suppress the Biden laptop story among others. The party which presents the by far the greatest threat to democracy is the Democrats.

violently disrupt the 2017 inauguration

There is simply no comparison here. Here is what Hillary said on it becoming clear she would lose;

We have seen that our nation is more deeply divided than we thought. But I still believe in America and I always will. And if you do, then we must accept this result and then look to the future. Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.

There is nothing Trump ever said with one hundredth the degree of grace and humility in her concession, and it wasn't even a particularly exceptional concession speech.

Further, Democratic-allied members of the government bureaucracy both supported false information (e.g. the Steele dossier) and falsely denigrated true information (the Hunter Biden laptop)

Again none of this is on the scale of Trump's contempt for the democratic process. This is not really much different from the general rough and tumble of political life - the Republicans had been dishing out similar nonsense for years. Members of Congress openly indulged birtherism! While I would no doubt question your interpretation of the Trump/Russia or laptop episodes, even if I accept Democrats were knowingly lying, politicians lying is not something new. Major politicians refusing to concede elections is.

When a Democrat says 'I just want to find [the number of votes it would take to change the outcome]', then I'll worry about them as much as Trump.

It's not the politicians lying that was the problem. It was the intelligence agencies covering for them and joining in on the lies. As well as other parts of the machinery of government that we expect to be non-partisan and stay out of elections.

It goes both ways. Comey re-opening the emails investigation could well have cost Hillary given the slim margins involved.

That is a valid point. I do feel like there is a major difference in scale. And that the Hillary email investigation was not based on a fabrication by her political enemies.

Not investigating a real thing is bias. But investigating a fake thing is bias. And obviously you might not know which is which until afterwards. But the investigators should have figured out which was which sooner. Their failure to do so in the trump Russia thing was either massive incompetence or willful bias and political favoritism. Normally I'm willing to assign incompetence to the government, and maybe I would have if it had only dragged on for a year, but three years beggars belief.

To your understanding, how did the emails investigation get closed, and why did he have to re-open it?

There are many valid criticisms of Harris, but if you dislike Trump more than Harris you must support Harris and vice versa. To act otherwise in the US electoral system is to act irrationally.

No, this attitude is 100% Molochian. The odds of your one vote altering the outcome of the election are infinitesimal. Treating your vote as a strategic move in a game assumes a completely unrealistic degree of personal agency and impact. The psychological impact that voting (or not voting!) has on you is almost certainly (>99%) the only impact your vote will have on anyone, anywhere. In distant second place, your protest vote for a third party might contribute to making an impression on someone in power, such that they shift their policy priorities slightly toward your expressed preferences.

Of course, from the perspective of an American political party the most important voters to persuade are precisely those voters who are least likely to cast a vote for either major party candidate: the ones not already ideologically captured by either party. Consequently it is in both the Democrat and Republican parties' best interests to perpetuate the idea that because third party candidates are not "viable," it is a waste to vote for the candidate you prefer; you must vote only for the major party candidate you hate least!

Everyone should vote (or not vote!) as seems best to them, without regard for "picking a winner." To behave in any other way is to make of oneself another simple tool of party political machines.

If you're not voting with reference to the outcome, why bother going at all? If it's just a question of making yourself feel better, stay at home and throw darts at a picture of Kamala Harris, and let the people who actually care about who becomes President do the voting.

If you're not voting with reference to the outcome, why bother going at all?

What are you talking about? I didn't say people should vote without reference to the outcome. I said people should vote as seems best to them.

If you think your vote will affect the outcome, you're probably just bad at math. What do you think it means to vote "with reference to" the outcome? Here's my take: a vote is your opportunity to express a preference to the public concerning how the public should be run. There is presumably some outcome that you desire, and voting is a system we have in place to allow you to express that (or not). So of course you vote "with reference to" the outcome, if you decide to vote at all--you just don't vote in a way that implies you actually have some control over the outcome. If instead of expressing your desire, you try to influence the outcome in a strategic way, then again: you're probably just being bad at math. It's not a big deal, you being bad at math is fine, and even your imagining that your vote matters to the outcome is a relatively harmless delusion.

But if you cast your vote because you think it will influence the outcome, then you'll influence the outcome equally well by staying at home and throwing darts at a picture of Donald Trump, and letting the people who actually care about public discourse do the voting.

If instead of expressing your desire, you try to influence the outcome in a strategic way, then again: you're probably just being bad at math.

In one sense obviously yes, one vote will not determine the outcome of the election, but think about it like this. If one side in the election all suddenly came to this realisation and freely discussed and acknowledged this fact, while the other still maintained the fantasy that 'every vote matters', then side B would win a landslide, and in a sense they've almost willed their fantasy into being. What I mean is that both for democracy at large and for your preferred candidate, it's pretty important that the general proposition that every vote matters is considered to be true, even if it isn't. And insofar as each individual contributes to keeping up the delusion, 'every vote matters' almost becomes true even while it is obviously strictly false.

If one side in the election all suddenly came to this realisation and freely discussed and acknowledged this fact, while the other still maintained the fantasy that 'every vote matters', then side B would win a landslide, and in a sense they've almost willed their fantasy into being.

Indeed. And if everyone were to suddenly come to this realization all together, and realize that everyone else had reached this realization, then we'd almost certainly elect many more "third party" candidates. This is why I always push back against the "you must pick one of these two" argument: because it is false, and we'd all be better off if everyone treated it as false. Far better for people to simply vote to express what they think is genuinely best, than to imagine themselves strategically selecting a particular outcome.

What I mean is that both for democracy at large and for your preferred candidate, it's pretty important that the general proposition that every vote matters is considered to be true, even if it isn't.

So close! It's pretty important for the Republican and Democrat parties that the general proposition that every vote matters is considered true, even though it isn't. Democracy at large is better off without building a consensus around falsehoods.

The problem being that voting for your third parties splits your vote, and that only has a good outcome when everybody on all sides are doing so. If one side defects then they win because their vote isn’t split between several different parties, it’s concentrated in one party. So if conservatives choose between Reform, Constitution, Libertarian, and Republican, each gets 1/4 of the total conservative votes available. If democrats all vote for the Democratic Party, they get all available democratic votes. If you assume that the parties are roughly equal in support, the democrats will win even though the6 don’t have more votes.

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And if everyone were to suddenly come to this realization all together

Has this ever happened anywhere? FPTP always collapses into a two-party system (at least in individual races/regions, if not always country-wide as in the US). It's better that way though, and that's why I said it's better for the fiction to continue for democracy at large - if we all selected our favourite candidate among, say, twenty options all spread around various mixtures of ideology and policy the winner would have a) no legitimacy, as they'd have won a pathetic plurality of votes, and b) would on average be no closer than the median winner of two-party elections to the median American. After all, in such a scenario the winner would be pretty much randomly decided based on which candidate had the fewest spoilers in and around their ideological position. Multi-party countries only work with multi-party electoral systems, otherwise you get Belfast South. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belfast_South_(UK_Parliament_constituency)#Elections_in_the_2010s

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Done!

Everyone should vote (or not vote!) as seems best to them, without regard for "picking a winner." To behave in any other way is to make of oneself another simple tool of party political machines.

This might be true under causal decision theory, but it’s not necessarily true under evidential, functional, or timeless decision theory. Specifically, whether or not I choose to vote (and who I vote for) can provide very strong evidence about the voting behaviour of others like me, even in different states. If you’re a “bellwether voter”, it could be the case that by deciding to vote, you resolve reality so that others like you have also voted and your preferred candidate gets in.

Obviously if you’re a two-boxer this is superstitious nonsense!

On the other hand,being a non-voter should also provide strong evidence about the behavior of you and those like you in ways that influence those in power to adjust behavior.

If, say, only 10% of the eligible population voted in a major election, sure the voters 'decided' the actual outcome, but you think that those in power might take note of the fact that a lot of people purposefully abstained? That might be the strongest message of all!

In the absence of a 'none of the above' option... it could be the case that by deciding NOT to vote, you resolve reality in a way that aligns with your incentives.

In the absence of a 'none of the above' option...

I don't think anywhere in the US puts an actual bubble labeled "none of the above" on the ballot, but you can leave it blank or write in Mickey Mouse.

If you’re a “bellwether voter”, it could be the case that by deciding to vote, you resolve reality so that others like you have also voted and your preferred candidate gets in.

Sure, but if anything this would appear to strengthen my case. If you don't vote for Jill Stein because you don't think she can win, then you're collapsing the waveforms where everyone who wanted to cast a protest vote actually did so; in so doing, you could very well be collapsing the waveforms where Jill Stein actually wins.

Obviously if you’re a two-boxer this is superstitious nonsense!

It's definitely superstitious nonsense, but isn't that noumena in a nutshell?

I go back and forth on who to vote for simply because I don’t like either one. And tbh, I’m fairly confident that at the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter that much because we’re basically an oligarchy anyway. I’m a serf on a very large American plantation and so I’ll vote, but I don’t expect that the country is going to change based on who wins. The big things on the horizon are the wars (which I’m expecting to go hot by the end of 2025 and us to be actively fighting by the same time period. We’re careening toward WW3, possibly nuclear. I’m expecting inflation to continue in everything except wages much like now and I’m reevaluating my expenses in light of that. I’m expecting more deep state incompetence and more disasters made worse by that.

Civilization in America is collapsing. If you read into the problems of the late Roman Empire, we hit them pretty close. I’m not sure that with as many deep problems as we actually have, anyone can fix it.

I really feel like there is some gell-mann amnesia going on with Scott. He reads these horrid stories about Trump. With the details sensationalized in the worst possible way. And he accepts them as fact. Meanwhile the New York Times threatens to dox him so they can run a hit piece article on him that they sourced from a weirdo on wikipedia with a knack for rules-lawyering.

It's a combination of him going full-on native, and probably not wanting to paint a target on his back again by actually saying anything remotely controversial anymore. He's got his cosy little life and doesn't want to upset it or anyone in his gender-ambiguous urban polycule by making waves. He's only doing and saying what is necessary for that goal. The intellectual honesty and curiosity is gone, and everyone should give up on him. He's so preoccupied about keeping the peace these days, when his role used to be saying the unsaid and interrogating the unquestioned.

What once there was to respect in him has clearly left, and therefore so had my interest.

He's got his cosy little life and doesn't want to upset it or anyone in his gender-ambiguous urban polycule by making waves

In the comments to his mediocre guest post, someone speculated he'd only publish something so bad if it was from a girl he liked. Still wondering if that's true.

May be because of my staunch pro trumpness, but it feels so weak. It is as if I read NYTimes piece. To me the whole creative process was - start from the ending work your way backwards. I don't think he even for a second put to serious thought who he will vote for. And if you don't do that - then your endorsement is worth as much as the Washington Post one.

How is it not a massive norms violation to spend 3 years investigating and accusing a sitting president of Treason based on a campaign dosier that was almost entirely made up by his opposition?

To say nothing of using the Supreme Court to impose abortion and same-sex marriage on every single state. Or "not my president"--there was even a 2016 campaign to recruit faithless electors. The idea that Trump is the blatant norm-violator requires an awfully selective memory. I don't like Trump, but thanks to him I have been mostly satisfied with what's coming out of the Supreme Court for the first time in my adult life. The idea of returning to an activist Court, but with fresh Wokist judges instead of merely Liberal ones, is in my mind the most realistic bad-and-lasting effect of a Harris victory.

(Which, by the way, I do think is inevitable at this point, if not necessarily without some of what Time once called "fortification" from a "shadow campaign.")

That said, I think Scott's endorsement is 100% in-character for him, and it's probably worth noting that the reasoning he provides is in response to a case he has first worked to steelman. I suspect it is not a steelman he actually buys--just the best he was able to come up with. Rather, think of what the New York Times put Scott through the last time Trump won a presidential election. I don't know that it was this way for everyone, but in 2016 and 2017 I personally lost about 25% of my social media connections after Clinton's loss, and I didn't even support Trump--I just expressed clear criticism of Clinton. So I suspect that a lot of what we're seeing from Scott here is a kind of rhetorical, anticipatory flinch. Particularly given his somewhat defiant direct link back to "You Are Still Crying Wolf." (Insert Straussian reading here?)

So my biggest concern for this election is not really to do with either candidate, but with my suspicion that either way, the country comes further apart. The one thing I have appreciated from Harris is her bumbling attempts to appeal to the garbage deplorables. Even she (or at least her campaign) realizes that the culture wars are moving the nation in a potentially disastrous direction (not that this seems to have inspired the Left to pump the brakes--yet). But I have to wonder, climate-change-style, if we're not already past the point of no return.

Or "not my president"--there was even a 2016 campaign to recruit faithless electors.

Fair point to mention. But I'd argue that fake electors are much worse

But I'd argue that fake electors are much worse

You and a lot of other people! But that's one of the main reasons why norm violations are bad: they provide excuses for others to escalate. By declining to clearly and unequivocally condemn the faithless elector scheme, Democrats created a reason for Republicans to begin thinking seriously about ways to preserve victory in the face of electoral defeat.

Treating every conflict as the most important conflict ever and buying into the narrative that "whatever bad thing my side does is justified, because the other side is even worse" locks us all into a race to the bottom. Regardless of Tuesday's outcome, I have no confidence at all that the result will be a cooling of the culture war divide.

Do you in your heart of hearts believe that the way 2016 was done convinced Trump and his allies that it's fine to escalate to fake electors?

I'm not persuaded that Trump or his allies believed that what they were doing was assembling fake electors. Just as I suspect the people trying to recruit faithless electors (or the Representatives declining to certify) did not, for even an instant, regard themselves as attempting to "steal" the election.

This is not the sort of thing that people generally think of in a point-by-point tit-for-tat. Rather, the dirtier the other side plays, the more justified one feels about playing dirty. The particulars are less important than the trend, because it is the trend and not the particulars that point toward what is likely to come next.

I'm not persuaded that Trump or his allies believed that what they were doing was assembling fake electors.

I'm interested, if you have you written about Eastman and Chesebro I would like to read it

To say nothing of using the Supreme Court to impose abortion and same-sex marriage on every single state

Obergefell was/is a very plausible extension of previous fourteenth amendment jurisprudence. Roe has obviously been done to death, but suffice it to say conservative courts have been just as willing to impose on the states - 2nd amendment cases most obviously, but also trade union law, campaign finance &c. There doesn't seem to be a notable political valence to legislating from the bench.

Obergefell was/is a very plausible extension of previous fourteenth amendment jurisprudence

Yeah, no, not even remotely. Obergefell was an unusually vapid decision even for Kennedy. He should have retired to write poetry, because he was apparently so tired of doing jurisprudence he forgot to include any in Obergefell. At best, it raises the idea that because marriage is rooted in history and tradition (which is what makes it a cognizable right), same sex marriage must also be rooted in history and tradition. This is absurd on its face.

suffice it to say conservative courts have been just as willing to impose on the states

It's okay for the federal government to impose on the states, when the Constitution clearly authorizes it. But it's probably only fair to note that I also hate stuff like Commerce Clause jurisprudence; my concerns about Constitutional Law are admittedly far out of step with the legal profession and the practical reality that substantial portions of the Constitution are functionally dead letter.

There doesn't seem to be a notable political valence to legislating from the bench.

But there is a noticeable political valence to respecting precedent and history. Less today than in the past, I'll grant, but when the precedent is really bad (and Roe was really bad, even Ginsberg regarded it a poor decision despite supporting its result), what else can you do?

At best, it raises the idea that because marriage is rooted in history and tradition (which is what makes it a cognizable right), same sex marriage must also be rooted in history and tradition. This is absurd on its face.

This is a rather unfair reading. He freely admits that same-sex marriage is not itself rooted in tradition, but it doesn't need to be, as given that in many (even if not all) of the respects we do consider marriage to be an important liberty those rationales apply just as readily to same-sex marriages as traditional ones, such that preventing the former would be an abrogation of an important right, irrespective of whether the history and tradition that justifies that right was in fact exclusive of such marriages. Was marriage between prison inmates specifically rooted in history and tradition? If not, does that undermine Turner v. Safley?

when the Constitution clearly authorizes it.

Well that's sort of the nub. I defend clearly Constitutionally authorised rights/practices, you legislate from the bench, he tramples over states' rights.

But there is a noticeable political valence to respecting precedent and history.

Is there? I haven't been able to find any quantification of this question, but eyeballing some supposedly comprehensive lists it seems like except for a spate in the late 60s (most of which aren't particularly famous/significant) the overturning of precedents has happened at a relatively constant rate in the post-war period. Plus this is kind of another Russell conjugation - I rectify disastrous precedents, you have contempt for tradition. In any case, some of the most strongly conservative justices have the least regard for precedent. Thomas, most famously.

A major crux for me is P(WWIII) combined with P(Trump goes senile at some point in this coming term).

Because, let's be real here: if WWIII happens, then dealing with SJ is not very hard. Half their voter base will literally die in a fire. The other half will be discredited by having weakened the West and invited the challenge to them that resulted in WWIII. In-office representatives might try to fight a desperate rearguard to preserve malapportionment, but that's super-doomed. And then the Serious Business tools - constitutional amendments, impeachments, and so on - start getting handed over to the conservatives while they're still hopping mad (even more mad if a malapportionment rearguard had to be crushed). At that point I'd be more worried about White Terror than about Thermidor failing.

Trump being old and too much of a Trump to resign or 25A himself, though, might worsen the Western death toll.

(Which, by the way, I do think is inevitable at this point, if not necessarily without some of what Time once called "fortification" from a "shadow campaign.")

Could I get a confidence level on that prediction?

Because, let's be real here: if WWIII happens, then dealing with SJ is not very hard. Half their voter base will literally die in a fire.

This is a common argument over at Jim's blog — that nuclear war will benefit the right because it's the big lefty cities that will go up in mushroom clouds, not the right-wing countryside. I've had a few objections to this; primarily, given what the competence crisis has done to our government's ability to maintain things — and particularly, the question of tritium production — I'm not sure our nukes will work, meaning I'd expect us to lose WWIII, and that will have serious negative consequences for us regardless of which side wins the internal political conflict.

More personally, I once found a website that let you see the blast radii for various nukes superimposed on a (Google-sourced) city map of your choice. And if your standard Russian or Chinese nuke got dropped on JBER — a reasonable target for either country in a WWIII scenario, especially the former — then I'm outside the "killed almost instantly in the blast" radius… and, unfortunately, inside the "die slowly after an agonizing hour or two from horrible burns down one side of your body" radius.

Russian Nukes are likely even worse- US nuclear maintenance might be skimped on or done by questionably competent people who overlook mechanical issues, but the commanders aren’t systematically stealing the budget for it. And China has a shortage of warheads to wipe out life in the U.S.

Moreover, nuclear targeting is not done on the basis of a list of largest cities in the enemy’s homeland, it’s done by targeting military and command installations and war critical infrastructure as well as strategic forces. A lot of that is pretty red, although admittedly DC and San Diego are not.

Moreover, nuclear targeting is not done on the basis of a list of largest cities in the enemy’s homeland, it’s done by targeting military and command installations and war critical infrastructure as well as strategic forces. A lot of that is pretty red, although admittedly DC and San Diego are not.

I'd expect both in actual practice; a lot of the point of a deterrent (short of the US/Russian lolhuge arsenals) is that you threaten to go countervalue in response to an attack out of spite, and it's likely that things going nuclear will be the result of a false alarm saying the other side's attempting alpha strike.

A full exchange of nuclear warheads will end the US as a political entity for at least decades and probably forever. If it reforms it will be much later. The current political situation will cease to matter at all to the survivors. Pretending this is not true is deeply silly.

In a scenario where Taiwan goes hot in the near future and the Chinese arsenal is deployed, I'd expect probably a few dozen mushroom clouds over the USA, due to destruction on the ground + ABM + other targets (Taiwan itself, Japan, South Korea, Australia, possibly others). The USA would probably survive, although things'd be tough for a while.

The Russian arsenal, assuming for the sake of argument that it works, is a different kettle of fish.

In a scenario where Taiwan goes hot in the near future

China is rapidly building up there arsenal. Taiwan won't go hot until they know they can slag the US as a going concern.

...unless they're confident that the USA won't intervene, or that they can avoid escalation to nukes like they (barely) did in Korea.

Well yes, right wing posadism remains stupid.

Although you aren't technically replying to me, I feel obliged to note yet again that Is =/= Ought. I have no clue why I keep having to spell this out, and in Rat spaces no less.

I am saying that SJ is, probabilistically, less of a problem because there's a fair chance nuclear war gets rid of it rendering most efforts to fight it moot. I am not saying that mass casualties from nuclear war are good because of this. The past couple of election cycles I've been begging all the parties to do anything about civil defence; I'd have been willing to vote for the Greens if they'd had word one about this.

"I know my thumb is broken and if I cut my whole arm off that will defiantly fix the problem" type thinking

Could I get a confidence level on that prediction?

I'm bad with numbers, but it feels pretty likely to me. Is that 70%-80%? I don't think I'd say 90%, the electoral college situation does give me some hesitation. By "inevitable" I mean "I don't see anything short of a black swan event shifting the outcome from where it's currently headed," not "I'm 100% sure of this specific outcome."

And yes: when Harris' chances hit 33% on Polymarket, I was sorely tempted to YOLO a lot of money into it. But I am extremely risk-averse; I can barely psychologically handle the uncertainties of reasonable business investment. "Shares" of anything that can go rapidly to $0 are just too much for me, at least on my current budget.

And yes: when Harris' chances hit 33% on Polymarket, I was sorely tempted to YOLO a lot of money into it.

Trump is sliding on polymarket and fast. So it seems your opinion is shared by some people.

But I am extremely risk-averse; I can barely psychologically handle the uncertainties of reasonable business investment. "Shares" of anything that can go rapidly to $0 are just too much for me, at least on my current budget.

I understand completely, sharing this aversion to some extent. I wasn't looking to bet you, just to quantify the various dire claims I'm seeing floating around here; as a non-American it's hard to know who to believe, and track records help.

Is this assuming a mostly legitimate election?

I don't mean to interrogate you, I'm just curious how one reaches that assumption. I'm less comfortable with Trump than you, and I'm thinking Kamala basically did her job of losing gracefully for the Dems.

Is this assuming a mostly legitimate election?

Well, I feel like it's already a little late for that; to whatever extent "violating norms" can be said to undermine legitimacy, Harris' circumventing the nomination process to simply assume candidacy has already called into question the legitimacy of this election.

But yeah, I don't think the Democratic machine in the relevant swing states is going to go down without a fight (and a dirty one, if necessary).

Insofar as Harris has not (yet?) done anything blatantly unconstitutional, I also think it is a little more likely than not (55%? 60%?) that a true electoral win from Trump could still see his inauguration prevented by his opponents, hook or crook. This could potentially be done by preventing an apparent electoral victory simply by thumbing the scales in a few key states. We saw Lisa Page's and Peter Strzok's texts; how many three-letter-agency texts have we not seen? How many texts like that were never sent, because the people who might have sent them were smarter than Page and Strzok? (Page and Strzok were ultimately fired, but they sued the government over that, and then settled for a payout of about a million bucks apiece--not exactly the kind of government response that seems likely to discourage similar behavior from others.) We saw Hollywood's faithless elector scheme, how far would they go to prevent a second Trump term? There have already been so many attempts on Trump's life that there is a whole Wikipedia entry dedicated to them, which does not appear to be the case for any other U.S. President or presidential candidate. As we discussed a few weeks ago, there are a lot of people expressing worry over how to convince Republicans to accept a Trump defeat gracefully, and yet when I asked whether there would be any way to convince Democrats to accept a Harris defeat gracefully, no one even attempted to answer that question. Instead, several people flatly denied the demonstrated reality that Democrats in 2016 were working just as hard to change the outcome of the election, as Republicans were in 2020.

Unfortunately, I suspect that no matter who wins this time, the response from the other side will be lawsuits, denials, and probably some riots. Just like in 2016. Just like in 2020.

I'm less comfortable with Trump than you, and I'm thinking Kamala basically did her job of losing gracefully for the Dems.

I'm pretty uncomfortable with Trump; I'm just much, much less comfortable with the idea of packing the Supreme Court with justices who don't know what "woman" means.

So No, it's not assuming a mostly legitimate election, it's assuming a high probability of a stolen election?

What's "high?" What's "stolen?"

I think it is a little more likely than not that Harris pulls off an electoral victory without anyone stuffing ballot boxes, and I think she does this by virtue of corporate news media having become the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. This is why Bezos is getting such pushback on seeking to gain media credibility outside the blue tribe: news no longer exists to be credible, it exists to build consensus for your tribe and punish the outgroup. Does that count as "stealing" an election? My inclination is to say no! But when you add to that the political influence of teachers unions over indoctrinating children, the moneyed influence of woke capital, the cultural influence of Hollywood, the behind-the-scenes influence of government employees... at some point it seems like the idea that any election is the result of rational discourse or democratic consensus just becomes laughable in a way that discourages the appellation "legitimate."

Those same forces (news media, schoolteachers, woke capital, Hollywood, "deep state") are additionally committed to preventing a Trump inauguration even if he wins electoral victory, and so I think it is at least somewhat likely that, conditional on a Trump electoral victory, there will again be significant efforts to prevent his inauguration.

I'm just trying to resolve a prediction from sometime I respect between

"Butch Coolidge will lose his upcoming match because his opponent is an up and coming star and too fast for an over the hill has been"

And

"Butch Coolidge is going to lose his upcoming fight because I saw him come out of Marcellus Wallace's joint and tuck a packet of cash into his jacket."

Both are predictions based on knowledge, but reflect very different observations.

More comments

He's going to piss off half of his readers and maybe get a handful of votes at best. Not worth it imo but I suppose it's none of my business.

He's being honest rather than cowardly, even knowing it will be controversial. That's a good thing.

A polyamorous Bay Arean rationalist endorsing "anyone but Trump" for the second time is even less surprising than The Atlantic's endorsement.

I wouldn't call it cowardly, I don't think it's exactly fair to call it honest, but not bothering to make a pointless endorsement would've been a surprise.

Unfortunately, knowledge of Gell-Mann amnesia as a meme/antimeme is not nearly strong enough to overcome the temptation of a powerful institution's offer of ammo to defend your ingroup's membership-defining beliefs. Remember how, at the outbreak of the Ukraine war, the overwhelming majority in this forum suddenly developed unconditional trust in consensus MSM reporting, if only on that topic?

What I remember on that was the absolute insanity of people with no idea about anything to do with Ukraine suddenly deciding that it was not only important, but it was a one sided affair with huge stakes for us. Looking into it, none of the things said in defense of us being involved make sense. No Putin is not going to invade NATO, he doesn’t have the military strength to do that. No, Ukraine isn’t an important ally of geopolitical importance— it’s basically Kansas or Nebraska, farmland. No we cannot indefinitely send trillions of dollars to Ukraine alongside depleting our weapons stock. Yes, we can make more, but it takes time.

But throw in a sob story, and people were putty in the hands of the Ukrainians. It was mind blowing. Zelensky talking like a Marvel movie character, and some guy on a military base telling the Russians to “go fuck themselves” is enough for millions of people to spend blood and treasure, impoverish Europe with high energy prices, and risk nuclear war. It wasn’t even good propaganda, looking back. We’re just that stupid and gullible. Of course we’re also rather stupid on Gaza. It’s not our fight, but the ease with which millions of people suddenly decided that Israel was absolutely wrong is astounding. No idea of the decades long fruitless attempts to get any sort of real peace in the region, no idea of just who Hamas is, just bad images on TV is enough to get idiots to support anything.

Which I’ll admit has blackpilled me on democracy. Most people are too stupid to be allowed to vote. Even me, I’ll admit to that. People have no ability to rule themselves and while I think an autocracy is bad as well, at least our war decisions will be made on the basis of facts instead of who can sound most like the Avengers. And maybe economic decisions should be made by people who understand economics rather than by people who think government money is free.

The most frustrating part for me personally with Ukraine is all of the Europeans who spent the last 20 years complaining about America being the world police immediately expected us to bear the brunt of financing and supplying Ukraine. I'd say "you can't have it both ways" but apparently they can just neglect their military funding for decades and we'll happily pick up the slack. Literally this meme in reality: https://i.redd.it/9fo82deg74p81.png

I'm thankful that I'm not the only one who noticed this, or was annoyed by it.

By most metrics, Russia should have steam rolled their way into Kiev and won a victory in a few weeks. When weakness appeared it was an invitation to invest in the years old conflict-- one that the US and Europe had mostly ignored. This investment was also an opportunity to take rearmament somewhat more seriously. Neighbors making land grabs tends to cause justifiable concern among the security minded.

I can understand the frustration with the popular narratives. The overnight consensus that Ukraine, a corrupt and poor state on the outskirts of Europe the West had decided wasn't important enough to bother with a few years prior, became the last stand for Liberty, Freedom, and Democracy (tm). Sure, that's all bullshit and annoying propaganda. Conflicts generate plenty of bullshit and annoying propaganda. Alas.

It is equally frustrating reading the scattered visions among contrarians and dissidents. A gish gallop of reasoning and geopolitical theories. Might makes right justifications were in vogue, but then so were don't stick your nose where it don't belong. Strength is good, but we shouldn't work out our own muscles, or bother with our own ambitions. Alliances are bad and messy, but the US should embrace multipolarity and not bother with the aims of its competitors and adversaries. Often attached is the idea that the US should staunchly defend its (rarely defined) direct interests and nothing more. Even if those interests were defined and consensus formed, this makes an assumption that staunchly defending direct interests doesn't ever land a sea faring nation in a major conflict half a world away.

I read an underlying current of desire for an aggressive empire that does what it wants and eats when/where it wants. Then I read a longing for a different world with an assumption that a commitment to isolationism doesn't change much of anything except the US spends less money and arms. This assumption is often provided by the same people who say they would very much like to destroy the current globalized order of the world.

I'm not sure where you get the trillion dollar figure below. Isn't it more like 100 billion in aid including equipment when valued at replacement cost? When it comes to weapons systems and the US trading capability for Ukraine I am not sure there's a good analysis of whether this is true. My basic opinion is that when it comes to Taiwan, it is likely this conflict is fought by sea and air, and not with 10 million artillery shells. If China invades Taiwan tomorrow because US has loss its deterrent by donating to Ukraine I guess we'll learn about that. But it's probably more likely the US fails to intervene because of a lack of political consensus/support.

I’m less enamored in the idea of “world police” ideas. In fact, I think they tend to drag out conflicts rather than provide peace and stability. Had the west stayed out of this, or not gotten involved in Israel, both conflicts would likely be over. Israel would have taken over Gaza, and while it would suck for the Gazans it would be a stable peace, perhaps with all of Palestine on the West Bank or something. Instead, we “negotiate” a few years of peace and then start again because the Palestinians are counting on the West to soften the blow. Without that, the Palestinians would have long ago been forced to accept that they’d either join Israel in some form or fashion, leave, or get flattened. The results would probably be much more peace and stability. Instead, we get a fresh one sided war about once every 7-10 years, terrorist attacks on Israel, and a radicalized Middle East. In Ukraine, our intervention has made what, in natural circumstances would have been a war over in weeks to months and turned it into a war lasting nearly four years. Is this actually better? Is it better to feed thousands of men into a conflict that is probably going to last until we run out of Ukrainian men to fight it and probably eventually get conquered anyway. Ending conflicts the old fashioned way of letting them go to their natural end instead of creating perpetual stalemates that aren’t resolved.

Had the west stayed out of this, or not gotten involved in Israel, both conflicts would likely be over.

If Israelis had no considerations other than victory at all costs, sure. Maybe they would have wiped the slate clean in 1948. Israel makes a decision to not "end" the conflict, because Israelis will not or cannot end it in whatever manner you have in mind. Yes, there is pressure and considerations from its allies, because it finds value in these things.

If Israel decides to, it can go door-to-door next week and win forever. Arab states might fling cruise missiles at them for some decades, but the US isn't going to invade. Winning forever is too violent, destructive, and unpopular in Israel. Very unpleasant.

They have considerations other than American college students when it comes how to wage war. Like their own voting populace.

Is it better to feed thousands of men into a conflict that is probably going to last until we run out of Ukrainian men to fight it and probably eventually get conquered anyway.

Better for who? It still seems like they will avoid regime change. If you value that sort of thing. Making land grabs a costly endeavor is good, actually. You and I can decide what an appropriate cost is. You say 160 billion and a few hundred thousand slavic souls is too much. It's a lot. But you seem to think that, absent some donated anti-tank weapons and training, this would all be over and pleasant and nice. I don't think this is a given. Russia is paying an insane cost for what it has gained thus far in its endeavor for strategically questionable gains. Ukraine has paid a terrible cost, too.

Ending conflicts the old fashioned way of letting them go to their natural end instead of creating perpetual stalemates that aren’t resolved.

Depending how you define "the old fashioned way" it's easy to land on conflicts that lasts decades or centuries. We don't even have to go medieval. I'm sure if you asked a Prussian in 1872 whether the question of Alsace and Lorraine was settled, they would have said definitively. Lo and behold.

Winning forever with permanent conflict resolution is not the norm. Permanent resolution is more pleasant for those of us mostly uninvolved abroad, but not very pleasant for those getting permanently defeated.

So you assume that "staying out" of Israel-Palestine would lead to Israeli victory, rather than the collapse of Israel absent constant American support?

To be honest I’m not sure. But either solution— a fight until someone capitulates— is much more likely to be a stable solution than the current globohomo enforced stalemate that stokes resentment and causes constant attacks and the deaths and destruction that come along with it.

There are geopolitical and moral reasons to support Ukraine beyond what you list. It is not Marvel-ization but a support for American unipolarity, liberal democracy, and upholding of the taboo against territorial conquest. With all due respect, I think it is you who is acting stupid for thinking that bad arguments for supporting Ukraine -> good arguments to not support Ukraine. (That said, Zelenskyy's strong leadership is genuinely inspiring, even if it isn't itself a factor in the equation of whether or not to support or send aid to Ukraine.)

And there are plenty of reasons to think Israel is mostly in the wrong right now. In my opinion, there's a kind of midwit curve here where the topwits and the dimwits are the ones saying "TV images bad = Israel bad". You have the dumb leftists reflexively opposing whatever Israel will do but then the pro-Israel side reflexively defending them and telling you not to believe your lying eyes because of "Pallywood" or other such nonsense.

The point with the "I don't need a ride" and "go fuck yourself" info ops etc. wasn't really to make people in the West sympathize with Ukraine over Russia, that was bound to happen anyway, but to counteract the wave of "Ukraine is doomed to collapse in a matter of days, it's useless to support it" counter-ops and dooming. And those counter-ops and dooming indeed were wrong, Ukraine didn't go through an immediate collapse and - contrary to what a number of Very Serious Realists (and openly pro-Russian commentors) said - even took back some of the initially conquered territories.

To be fair, Ukraine is only holding its own because we’re sending trillions a year into the country, and that’s quite simply only until they run out of people to draft into the war. They’re already needing to kidnap people off the streets to force them to fight. I don’t think that’s sustainable as a long term solution. Add in that the war has increased food prices because the “breadbasket of Europe” can’t plant crops, and the increase in fuel prices because we’re at war with a major oil producer, and it’s a giant mess.

I’m also concerned that spending so much on Ukraine is going to mean losing Taiwan to China. Taiwan makes many of the world’s top end microchips, and losing that to a hostile rival is insane. But that’s where I think we’re heading. The public’s will to continue propping up allied states is nearly gone. The money is going fast, and the weapons systems we’re sending to Ukraine probably won’t be replenished in time for a Taiwan war. It’s insane.

Add in that the war has increased food prices because the “breadbasket of Europe” can’t plant crops

This has little to do with food prices because the EU doesn't import much of the kind of foods that Ukraine produces. The EU is a massive food exporter, both cereals and more processed goods.

The reason food prices are up is due to increased fuel and fertilizer costs (and to a lesser extend a lack seasonal workers), which has to do with the war but not the economic disruption of Ukraine. Disruption of Ukraine farming primarily drives up food costs in the middle east and Africa, not Europe.

This doesn’t match the figures I’ve seen at all — total US contributions to Ukraine are measured around $175 billion over the last two and a half years, with another $60 billion or so from the EU, so an OoM less than trillions”.

so an OoM less than trillions

In case anyone really cares about the technical definitions of order of magnitude. The numbers 175x10^9 and 10^12, might correctly be said to be of different orders, but the former is not an order of magnitude less than the latter.

To differ by an order of magnitude two numbers X and Y must satisfy abs(log10(X) - log10(Y)) >= 1. In this case log10(1000) - log10(175) ~ 0.76. It did seem a bit hyperbolic to say trillions, but it's not technically an OoM less.

On the other hand, to express the order of magnitude of each number individually, the conventional range for the significand is [1/sqrt(10), sqrt(10)). In this case 1.75x10^11 and 1x10^12. So the first has an order of magnitude of 11 and the second 12.

The 60 billion from the EU is just financial aid, there is also 47b in military aid.

Your point still stands but European aid isn't as low as just 60 billion.

Remember how, at the outbreak of the Ukraine war, the overwhelming majority in this forum suddenly developed unconditional trust in consensus MSM reporting, if only on that topic?

I'm afraid not.

I'm pretty sure the debates around the Ukraine war on here have revolved around the morality of other western countries helping Ukraine vs avoiding foreign entanglements. People weren't arguing over whether Russia actually invaded or the minutiae of what was happening on the frontlines.

As I remember, the disputes were principally about factual questions that were relevant for the moral dimension - whether and how significantly the 2014 revolution was orchestrated by Western countries, to what extent neo-Nazi movements were a driving political force on the Ukrainian side, whether and to what extent the Ukrainians committed actions that ought to lower their moral standing by Western standards before and after the Russian invasion (extrajudicial killings, ethnic and political persecution, various forms of corruption...), and to what extent either of the two armies was "clean" or engaged in atrocities (targeting civilians vs. using civilians as shields, allegations of massacres (Bucha) vs. allegations of false-flag massacres (Kupiansk), abuse/killing of POWs and whether it is systemic, both sides accusing the other of using "barrier troops" with orders to shoot those who retreat or surrender).

The thing is, manipulative advancement of a moral case for some cause through selective reporting/FUD/editorializing is exactly what most of the resident witches would accuse the Western media of in contexts where they are at odds with it. The NYT and WaPo were not disputing that BLM protests were happening, or that property damage occurred as part of the protests, but (were charged by those opposed to BLM to be) distorting the reporting on the scale of the property damage, amplifying information that made anti-BLM look bad and pro-BLM look good and thereby misrepresenting the moral qualities of the protesters and those they were protesting against to the point that someone who read their coverage would come to the opposite conclusion regarding which side deserved support from what those opposed to it thought was right. This is the shape of basically every progressive media establishment vs. basket of heterodox deplorables dispute, whether it is about added punctuation in Biden transcripts vs. removed punctuation in Trump transcripts or grifters sleeping around for reviews=?women artists trying to spread high culture to video games and getting a torrent of death threats trying to put them in their place. Yet, the same people who have no problem coming down on the media conspiracy theory side, and bemoaning the impenetrable wall of argument-by-authority and social pressure defending the official narrative, in each of those would then happily insinuate that you are a brainrotten conspiracy theorist if for example you expressed doubt about the Bucha story.

As I remember, the disputes were principally about factual questions that were relevant for the moral dimension

It may be a question of asymmetrical enthusiasm then. I don't think the overwhelming majority of the forum bought the mainstream narrative, but a disproportionate amount of skeptics may have decided to sit this one out. From what I recall of your posts, I'm pretty sympathetic to your perspective, but I didn't really bother debating the details of Ukraine's politics.

Remember how, at the outbreak of the Ukraine war, the overwhelming majority in this forum suddenly developed unconditional trust in consensus MSM reporting, if only on that topic?

No?

Given Scott's endorsement in 2016, I'm not at all surprised he's not changed his mind this time around.

In 2016, you could argue for "high variance". There were plenty of supporters who believed that Trump would bring his business acumen to bear to sweep away inefficiency and to make deals, or that he would successfully take on the establishment and "drain the swamp". There was a positive case to make for him.

But this didn't happen. In his 4 years, Trump was a pretty generic Republican, average to below-average in most respects. He failed to achieve most of his policy goals and was not a dealmaker or businessman in office. Perhaps the only area you might praise his achievements was in foreign policy, but even those successes look very short lived. Then right at the end, he veered towards the down part of the high variance argument.

It seems like now the overwhelming arguments for Trump are all "He's not Harris" or "He's not the democrats". For Scott whose policy positions are probably closer to the democrats, this is not going to be particularly convincing, as he lays out.

He failed to achieve most of his policy goals

This is the best reason to vote for him. I'm being completely serious.

Perfectly fair point, the Belgian option

Trump won't do as much about global warming.

He didn't do much about global warming. I'm happy about that. Honestly worrying about something with consequences 20 years out feels a little silly at this point. It was nice when we had such long time horizons.

I'll take the other side of the issue here, and still argue that this argument is horrible. I'd love if we did something about global warming, but who the hell is doing anything? All the ideas thrown around are gimmicks with little effect on emissions, and Asia's growth in the last 20 years has already compensated for anything the US could possibly do, including magically cutting carbon emissions to 0. I don't see how anyone calling themselves a "rationalist" can spin this issue into a (non-) endorsement.

Counterpoint: Trump's proposed tarrifs on China (which he seems likely to attempt again) are the best piece of environmental action that could happen. As you say, Asia compensates for any reductions in the West. The Rationalist take is to use all means possible to force Asia to follow Western regulations, tarrifs on cheap Chinese good flooding Western markets are a very good way to force that change.

Credit where it is due: the Biden admins de minimis reforms are also a good step in this direction. Now if we could just renegotiate the UPU treaties that make it 400% more expensive to ship a brick across Smalltown USA than from mainland China, we'd really be making progress.

Ironically, if he makes up on his promises to bring back nuclear, he might end up being the only American leader doing something significant on the net.

Not holding my breath though.

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