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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   23493 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 1, 2024

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Some of the latest Biden-camp excuses coming up seem plainly and on their face delusional. I'm paying close attention to who is saying what, using what words, to see their degree of participation in this farce. The obvious logical implications of these claims are, well, obvious.

Exhibit 0: Biden himself talked about his debate the next day. He said:

I know I'm not a young man. I don't walk as easy as I used to. I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to, but I know what I do know — I know how to tell the truth. I know right from wrong. I know how to do this job.

Are we supposed to be impressed about telling right from wrong? That he knows how to do the job he's been in for four years? These are not reasons to be elected President again, they are basic pre-requisites. For that matter, "speaking smoothly" and "walking" might actually be core requirements as well.

Exhibit 1: He traveled too much before the debate. He did go on some global travel, but then spent 11 days at Camp David afterward preparing and recovering. But who on earth takes a whole week and a half to recover and is still at the point where he, as he himself said at a recent fundraiser, almost fell asleep on stage? Even on its face, that's worrying. This is not an excuse, it is a condemnation.

Exhibit 2: Biden struggles after 4 p.m.. Staffers say that he really does everything between 10 and 4. Six useful hours is, on its very face, a very worryingly short amount of time to not "make verbal mistakes and become tired". The debate was at 9pm local time. But the job of President isn't really seen as a part-time gig! If I said to you, "yeah my grandpa has six good hours, but after that he gets tired and makes a lot of mistakes" I wouldn't go "great, let's put him in charge of the country for four years and hope that that window of time doesn't shrink too much". This is not an excuse, it is a condemnation.

Exhibit 3: It was "preparation overload". Okay, fine, some candidates self-destruct for no reason on the debate stage, or lean too hard on canned phrases (Marco Rubio I'm looking at you). But usually this is limited to a few occurrences. Biden was consistently off all night and responded to comments Trump was expected to make, but did not yet make, on at least four separate occasions. If a candidate takes 11 days to prepare for one 90 minute stretch and still blows it, surely that says something about the candidate? That's like saying "I did poorly on the test because I studied too much". Like, it happens, but not to this extent. This is not an excuse, it is a condemnation.

Exhibit 4: It's hard to debate when the other person lies a lot, says Nancy Pelosi and others (though, credit due, just today she said whether it was a condition or episode is a fair and legitimate question). But a candidate lying in the debate should make your job easier, not harder, because even if the moderators don't fact-check, what's to stop you from doing so? Biden did at least once or twice, or tried to, so clearly it can work. Sure, you don't have notes per the rules, but surely if there are 20 false statements (per NYT's count) you can pick out at least a few with your week+ of prep. On its face, this is not a good excuse.

Exhibit 5: A columnist claiming replacing him would be undemocratic. Yes, he got votes in the primaries. However everyone knows that the party endorsed and supported him before other challengers even got going, which makes this argument eerily similar to the obvious horseradish of saying Iran is democratic because people vote (ignoring how candidates are selected). Furthermore, there's evidence the Biden team has withheld information and exposure to Biden on purpose, and as at least one media outlet likes to remind us, "democracy dies in darkness".

Sidenote, related: Here for example, you get stories about the insularity of his team recently. Corporate wants you to find the different between this picture:

During meetings with aides who are putting together formal briefings they’ll deliver to Biden, some senior officials have at times gone to great lengths to curate the information being presented in an effort to avoid provoking a negative reaction.

“It’s like, ‘You can’t include that, that will set him off,’ or ‘Put that in, he likes that,’” said one senior administration official. “It’s a Rorschach test, not a briefing. Because he is not a pleasant person to be around when he’s being briefed. It’s very difficult, and people are scared shitless of him.”

...and this picture:

A former senior intelligence official familiar with the matter said intelligence about Russia that could upset Trump is sometimes just included in the written assessment. The order in which the information is presented could also be altered to try not to upset Trump, according to the Post.

“If you talk about Russia, meddling, interference — that takes the PDB off the rails,” a second former senior U.S. intelligence official said, referring to the president’s daily brief.

Pam: They're the same picture.

Okay, well to be fair, one is an intelligence briefing (Trump) about core national security issues and the other (Biden) seems to be more domestic political briefings (I think, from context), so the level of severity is actually quite different but... I'm still struck by the similarity.

tl;dr: We all know a debate is not the same thing as actual governing. But just like how excuses tell you hints about the character of the individual, I think the excuses given by the people around Biden give you hints about Biden, too. Good on the press for calling them like they are: excuses.

Exhibit 0: Biden himself talked about his debate the next day. Are we supposed to be impressed about telling right from wrong? That he knows how to do the job he's been in for four years? These are not reasons to be elected President again, they are basic pre-requisites. For that matter, "speaking smoothly" and "walking" might actually be core requirements as well.

While that may be true. It’s clear he was contrasting himself with his opponent. He’s saying Trump doesn’t satisfy these basic requirements but he does.

If you're in a job interview, and you say something like "well sure maybe I'm a bad writer, but at least I know how to work a computer!" it doesn't really help you very much, even if the other applicants in fact are bad at computers. If you are responding to allegations about your age by... uh, confirming allegations about your age, and bringing up a different point, that's just mutual destruction, it doesn't actually help you much. I mean clearly in his worldview everyone has a binary choice, so if it truly were zero-sum, he'd be making a smart point. However, that's not how elections work, and especially not this one. Turnout is a thing.

And in fact more broadly, people have been debating whether it would be better to have an incompetent but moral leader, or a competent but immoral leader for a long time, it's a core philosophical debate. Hanging your whole strategy on appealing exclusively to people both a) accepting this framework and then on top of that b) preferring the former of the two is not a winning recipe. Both of those assumptions are very shaky! I know a fair number of people who actually do prefer a competent narcissist over a useless do-gooder due to the stability, and hope that the economy will be better with the trade-off.

lean too hard on canned phrases (Marco Rubio I'm looking at you)

The idea... THE IDEA... that I would lean too hard on canned phrases.. is ridiculous.

I don't personally care about things like leaning too hard on canned phrases, but I definitely thought back to Rubio during this debate and wondered if anyone would pillory Biden for it. Maybe it's just taken a seat wayyyyy back in the back of the classroom, since it is such a phenomenally minor thing in comparison to the main debate about his general cognitive state.

I'm going to be contrarian and say I thought Biden's debate performance was horrifying but I think it's still fine to run him if voters were like me and not like normal people.

I realize he looks terrible but is the President not being in peak fitness actually that important? Biden doesn't strike me as insane, or malevolent, or like he's so completely out of it that he'll launch nukes because he mistook the big red button for the toilet handle.

I'm probably too cynical but I think the President's job is probably a lot like a doctor's job in a hospital: the nurses all know more or less what the patient needs but they need the MD to make decisions. Sure you'd like a brilliant doctor like House for the truly difficult problems but any doctor that just did what the nurses told him to would probably make for an okay hospital. Biden probably spends his days picking from a set of reasonable proposals offered by his handlers. If he makes too many batshit decisions in a row too often he'll eventually get replaced.

I also don't think Trump has any edge on the mental side that would make up for the fact that he's him. Also his edge isn't great anyway, he's also incoherent, except he presents with speed freak energy. I wouldn't expect his judgment to be any better and he could just as likely start sundowning any day now as well.

It'd be sweet if they ran a Biden that was 20 years younger, but I still think he's better than Trump.

Well, I've been saying the whole time that if they really, really insist on running Biden, Biden is taking the wrong tactical approach and should have leaned on the "team effort" aspect from the very start. The fact he has not chosen to do so makes me worry that he actually does not in fact have a sufficient team mindset to lean on people enough. I think the Cabinet would pull through okay, but the attitude and humility makes a difference. Domestically at least, you are more or less correct that we'd be fine.

However, I should offer the massive caution that foreign policy-wise, which is actually a good third of the job (sometimes more, but rarely less), his specific capacities actually still matter a great deal. There's some noise from European diplomats who have noticed some stuff, apparently. Despite a lot of painting the mil-ind complex and foreign policy industry as hopelessly deep-state (though there's certainly some strong institutional instincts and inertia), the simple fact is the president actually has an astonishing degree of both latitude as well as actual power, not just ceremonial, to make things happen. For example, if Trump decided to take us out of NATO, he basically could, probably even over the objections and even laws of Congress if we're being honest. In other words, the institutions can't do anything about batshit crazy moments. They have to be pretty bad to be considered.

I think if Biden were in Kennedy's place when the Joint Chiefs wanted to get belligerent or even use nukes against the commies, there's a very good chance that the nukes would have flown.

What does the man so no to?

I recall a QC from a little back which asserted that nurses and NPs really don’t compete.

A good NP can operate on the level of an Intern (first year resident) a great one can operate at the level of a second year resident. I've never, ever seen an NP operate at the level of a more senior resident or attending.

Medical education is insane, and it both teaches skills and filters for intelligent, diligent, neurotic individuals. It’s tempting to suggest that the metis of nursing experience can outweigh a fancy education, and I’m sure it happens on the margin, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Which is kind of a moot point, because I really doubt political office works like a hospital. When a hospital needs to plan its COVID strategy, or negotiate jurisdiction with a neighboring ER, or secure funding, it doesn’t send the most senior doctor. It has dedicated administrators.

Biden surely has access to the most competent team his establishment can provide. I agree that they can probably handle the vast majority of normal government tasks. Better than Trump, judging by the giant holes in his cabinet! But that’s not necessarily enough.

For crises and for strategy, I think I’d rather have the average American than either Biden or Trump.

How many hospital procedures does the distinction between NP & Doctor make a meaningful difference, though? I'm sure there's shortfalls but is it a matter where 98% is functionally identical treatment? Plus frankly what % of the remainder cases where there'd be a meaningful differentiation represent productive uses of resources versus using pure ingenuity and the light of god to get the 85 year old to 87 years old.

Procedures? Nearly all of them, although if for no other reason than the fact that midlevels don't do most types of procedures. This being for a variety of reasons including the fact that they don't get training in this area (or much training at all - NPs can be online degrees).

The best case data presented by the NP lobby will argue that MDs and NPs have the same outcomes, when MDs are handling complicated cases and NPs are handling basic ones. More balanced analysis is pretty lopsided.

The differences are stark. For instance a Child Psychiatrist has 23,000 hours of clinical training. An equivalent NP has 600. And the formers hours are predominantly work, with the NPs being shadowing. And if that Child Psychiatrist wants to switch to Emergency Medicine they'd need an additional 15,000 hours of training. The NP would need zero.

Procedures? Nearly all of them, although if for no other reason than the fact that midlevels don't do most types of procedures. This being for a variety of reasons including the fact that they don't get training in this area (or much training at all - NPs can be online degrees).

I understand that there are a lot of different procedures, but surely there has to be some sort of pareto principle involved in which the top 30 or so procedures cover 90% of the hospitalizations. I do agree that NPs will get the most basic cases, but what % of cases actually is that?

Is there that huge a difference between 23,000 hours of Child Psychiatry and 600? I work in a well-paid niche role and generally if somebody's got the right disposition towards it I'd be comfortable of allowing most fresh grads on the tools after about 50 hours of shadowing.

The word procedure in a medical context refers to physical tasks that must be performed on the patient, such as surgeries. PAs/NPs are allowed to do a very small subset of these, which makes sense because they don't have things like formal Anatomy Lab or years of supervised practice doing hysterectomies etc.

I'm guessing you don't want to get wrapped up in semantics on that though, so NPs, or my friend John who works in IT can handle the most basic admissions, but what we train for in medicine (and what you pay for in the hospital) is for correctly identifying if the patient is basic (which midlevels suck at) and for when a basic admission suddenly turns not (uncommon but not rare).

Midlevels typically extend the nursing model of "the blood pressure is high, we should fix it, let's use this medication" pattern recognition. The physician model emphasizes understanding the underlying physiological reason for the rise in blood pressure, and identifying a pharmacologic agent that addresses that physiologic response in a way that does not interfere with any other medication or pathology the patient has. "How" not "what." I know what emphasis I'd prefer if I was in the hospital and for my family. This may seem like a harsh characterization (although if you look at training material you'll see legitimate emphasis on "the nursing model") but this is also where that time gap comes into play. Doctors barely get all their learning in and that is with 7-12 years of 60-80+ hour weeks.

Most people don't realize what goes on in medicine because the majority of their interaction is an outpatient visit with the doctor rolling in and asking a few unsatisfactory questions before making some vague pronouncement and then leaving, and if they have a family member in the field it's a nurse who is high on her own supply.

Like with pilots and flight attendants most of the training and activity is invisible to you, but it's absolutely critically important for when things go wrong.

For the hours stuff think of it as more like a combat sport than normal on the train training. Who you putting your money on in a fight? The person with 600 hours of training or 23,000 hours, especially given the fact that the people with significant native talent go into one field preferentially over the other? This isn't something like a role where you have to learn how to use one machine that does the same thing every time, its something where you need experience blocking all kinds of attacks from all kinds of body types which takes year to build up.

Also keep in mind stuff like the fact that it takes years of practice to respond appropriately when someone starts actively dying in front of you, something which happens rarely in most types of finished practice, all the time in MD training, and not really at all in NP training. You need that in your tool belt.

I'll stop here.

As I said downthread, I think this is actually worse if Biden is a figurehead than if he is not. If it's one man (him) in control, then the rot that produced this disaster could be localized in him and if so could be cured by replacing him. If instead he's the figurehead for the entire technocratic machine, then the rot that produced this disaster runs into that machine, and can only be cured at much greater cost.

I appreciate your take. A few thoughts:

Biden is running on the platform of respectability and saving democracy itself. Regardless if he wins or not, it’s pretty clear he will not be running the country after 8pm. Whoever will be will not have been elected to do so. That does not look like saving democracy to me. As to the side of respectability, imagine the president literally falling asleep at state functions. This is going to happen, and it will be taken as a personal insult because it is! Crisis at 3am. Oh well, it can wait. The most respectable thing to do would be to step aside.

If Biden were running on delegating responsibility, that would be an honest campaign I could vote for.

I realize he looks terrible but is the President not being in peak fitness actually that important? Biden doesn't strike me as insane, or malevolent, or like he's so completely out of it that he'll launch nukes because he mistook the big red button for the toilet handle.

Yes, it's actually very bad that the leader of the country can't be trusted to have a one-on-one conversation with leaders of other countries. I don't even mean enemies or true adversaries, just countries that have their own interests and goals. From what you saw, do you think Biden's capable of having a meaningful conversation about emergent economic and trade issues with, say, Brazilian leadership? In the event he did have that conversation and seemed like he basically understood it, do you think he seems like he's capable of keeping that straight in his head in order to keep his word on any promise? I just absolutely doubt it.

It's wild that we're actually having a conversation about whether it matters that the President can't hold up for a ten-minute conversation. Of course that's very bad! Of course you should select someone that's capable of making credible promises to other leaders! This isn't a high bar to clear.

you should select someone that's capable of making credible promises to other leaders!

That just leaves the candidate with the brain worm.

Diversity win: Americans elect the first non-binary mind flayer president

Maybe Yeerk subjugation wouldn't be worse than the alternatives.

I think the doctor-hospital analogy is incomplete and presents a bad mental model.

I agree that there's no way for the President (or most of Congress for that matter) to be knee-deep in substantive issues across the entire breadth of current affairs. There's just too much going on too fast. So, you have to be able to delegate and this act of delegating begins by selecting appropriate subordinates to help with your overall management strategy. You have to trust these people to handle the issues because you, the President, don't have enough time to double check all of their work.

In the MD-hospital-nurses example, I would think that the MD just signs off on run-of-the-mill stuff, but slows down to double or triple check higher risk courses of care. The MD can do this because there's a little bit more time (i.e. a patient with a broken leg isn't going to literally die if they have to wait another day or something) and because patients are independent from one another. The guy in room 1 has no bearing on the condition of the guy in room 6.

Not so with the Presidency. "All politics is local" and all that. Your broad economic policies are full of cross pollination influences with one another. There's no such thing as isolated bilateral foreign policy (that isn't secret). What you do with one country is seen by the entire world. Even domestic and foreign policy aren't fully separated domains. As we've seen with Israel-Gaza, a fairly uninvolved foreign policy can whip back to smack you in the face at home (Ivy League protests etc.) In reality, you're managing a complex system with a lot of non-linear feedback loops.

So whom you pick to do what matters or else you're going to have to try to manage a ton of fast moving non-linear parts on your own. Or, you just don't manage much and chaos and Congress pick up the slack. This is bad not only for self-evident reasons, but because your administration is now playing a reactive policy game instead of a pro-active policy game. That's a fantastic way to lose reelection.

Biden has demonstrated that he picks loyalists from way back who mostly serve to insulate him from the real world and create policy with overly deliberative, consensus driven, PowerPoint processes. I think this is pretty self evident, especially from the recently leaked comments from staffers. They're also myopic and tend to gravitate towards personal issues that effect themselves and their social circle. This is why the Biden admin has tried multiple times to grant sweeping student loan forgiveness despite the fact that those loans are hyper-concentrated among a tiny demographic that already reliably votes Blue. But a lot of senior advisors and staffers (who make pennies, especially in the HCOL area of Washington, D.C.) probably carp about "student loans" enough that it feels like a big issue.

This style of policy making might be okay if the rest of the executive were allowed to just function on its own with mostly rubber stamps from the Oval Office, but it doesn't seem that's the case. To me, it appears the Biden Admin doesn't want anything to happen without, at least, their awareness and approval. But how does that square with 10-4 hours and an insular inner circle that doesn't fully brief The Big Guy?

I watched the messaging on Israel-Gaza constantly get fucked up again and again. "We support Israel's right to defend itself ... but also the Palestinians deserve freedom....worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust....don't attack Rafah...let's talk about a ceasefire....also free hostages...on both sides." Tony Blinken had to wait for hours to meet MBS in Saudi because MBS knew Blinken had zero authority himself and it was all about getting The Big Guy (and his circle) on board in order for anything to happen.

This U.S executive branch isn't a hospital or corporation. It doesn't have smooth self-sustaining ongoing operations. It's more like a startup every 4-8 years, but with tens of thousands of new employees and also tenured, deeply embedded lazy people. The President has to delegate fast and effectively and try to build solid communication and feedback loops both to him and to chief subordinates. Failing to do that yields either chaos (Trump admin) or utter gridlock (Biden).

Biden and the Democrats got here by thinking in these oversimplified terms. "He's a little old, but the team around him can handle it." This has not been true since FDR invented the imperial presidency and specifically transformed the office from a figurehead position. The President matters.

Why did England lose the Hundred Years War?

Aside from Joan of Arc, their tough and vigorous king Henry V died and was replaced by his infant son, Henry VI. The whole system relied on having a strong king to keep the powerful nobles organized and on-mission (conquering France). A child can't do that. A regency council couldn't do that. Nor could a soft, weak, peaceloving king like Henry VI. And that was before he had a mental breakdown. Civil war broke out in the 1450s as various cliques and nobles struggled for power.

The US is not a medieval kingdom. But it does have powerful actors, the military-industrial complex, the intelligence agencies, the State department, the Democratic Party and so on. There are surely people who want to preserve the regency, so to speak. They want to act freely and advance their agendas while there's nobody in full control (or while the Presidency is ruled by the last person to brief or whoever's closest to Jill and Hunter). There are people who want their own candidate on the throne. You have factional strife and plotting, none of this is good for the country.

Just from following the news, I have felt a sense of, I dunno, listlessness in this administration in the last couple years. There have been a lot of mixed messages, which makes it feel like either they're steering the entire ship on the basis of which way the winds public opinion polls are blowing, or it's the unchecked infighting of a royal court's competing fiefdoms without a strong executive to force high-level alignment. And honestly, it feels pretty depressing that "running almost exclusively on opinion polls" is the charitable option.

We saw executive orders on immigration from the first week of the administration get mostly rescinded recently after claiming congressional action was necessary. The administration came out opposing transgender surgeries for minors within the last week, but its appointed members were advocating to remove age limits from the professional guidance just a couple years ago. Nobody is stepping forward to give speeches giving us a bigger picture and answering hard questions on the changing directions. It works for a while, but it seems like the wheels are starting to come off.

The whole situation with Lloyd Austin just seemed fundamentally unserious. Something that shouldn't even be possible if anyone had their eye on the ball.

For it to go unpunished...

What's the situation with Lloyd Austin?

He disappeared and went to the hospital for a couple days for surgery for prostate cancer, without anyone being told.

I.e., not even Austin's deputy was told. She was vacationing in Puerto Rico and had to be emergency bum-rushed back to DC when someone noticed that there wasn't anyone in charge at the Pentagon.

We've definitely seen feudal infighting and unpredictable positioning based on who could control the administration best in the financial sector. The SEC's behavior in particular has been completely incoherent. And that's not just according to crypto people who rag against it all the time (who ironically parlayed the chaos into lobbying gains), but literally everybody that interacts with the financial aspects of the Biden administration is unhappy. Even bond traders are fed up at this point.

Biden even seems to have lost a powerful stronghold of Democrats in the Silicon Valley VC universe. Techies with money are following Thiel's lead, holding their nose and going with Trump, which is a small revolution in such a solidly blue demographic.

I mostly blame Elizabeth Warren for this. It's an open secret that she loomed large over the economic policy and I wouldn't be surprised if she personally was behind most of this electoral poison (such as unrealized income taxes).

This is all to say that it speaks to a regency situation: Biden is a weak king and all his dukes are too busy fighting for control to maintain a united front against external enemies.

Let’s be real though, it also speaks to the widespread belief among liberal centrists (and even Thiel is ultimately a gay libertarian) that Trump isn’t actually going to do anything socially conservative. On immigration he might tighten the border a little beyond what Biden just did, but he’s not going to deport 15 million illegal immigrants. On abortion the Roe reversal is as far as he will go given his personal ambivalence on the issue. On guns he’ll leave it to SCOTUS which seems much less aggressive than many pro gun copium addicts were predicting 5 years ago. On China the candidates are largely indistinguishable. On Ukraine even the Europeans are pushing for some kind of ceasefire now, if quietly. Trump isn’t going to pull back the military from overseas while the evangelicals are champing at the bit to unleash the USAF on Hezbollah and China rhetoric heats up. He’s smart enough to know that cutting back medicare doesn’t play well with the millions of geriatric whites who comprise many of his most dedicated supporters. What is left that is radical?

The weird period of explosive promise in 2016 and early 2017 is over. Trump is going to govern as a center-right president except when it comes to hunting down his personal political opponents, who will face the full weight of a new Paxton-led justice but who will probably just leave the US and chill for a few years while the vast, vast majority of the establishment remains in place.

Trivially, trans stuff is going to come to a critical head soon one way or the other: social conservatives has been focusing most heavily on minor transition, but Kincaid v. Williams is the other shoe dropping for Bostock, can't be put off another four years, and it's... hard to overstate how broad of an impact it would have. In addition to the direct regulatory impact, it would likely (given the recent EMTALA example) result in the feds overriding every remotely anti-trans state law under a Dem admin. And the next President has non-trivial chances of replacing the two names on the dissent from denial of cert in Kincaid. I don't think Trump particularly cares about trans stuff, but I don't think you can staff a Trump admin without anti-trans activists precipitating out of the woodwork even if he did care.

There's a lot of active encouragement of at-least-gray immigration under Biden. It's possible that most of that escapes scrutiny in a Trump administration, but at least some of it won't survive, for better or worse, and I'd expect it to be a serious target as this decade's version of 'self-deport'.

There's an increasing set of broad policies that the Democratic party is looking to get through over a wide variety of infrastructure goals for their political movement: regulation on charter or private schools, post-Janus encouragement for unions like banning right-to-work states, reparations-likes for (certain) minority groups. Trump obviously would be strike against any of those going anywhere, but progressive seem him as likely to do reversed version. Again, I'm not sure Trump cares, but a Trump administration will near-certainly bring people who do.

((Conversely, I think Paxton talks a much stronger talk than he actually walks.))

The one exception is probably the ME where I imagine a Trump administration will act very differently from Biden's.

What of the Ukraine? Trump's constant boasting that he'd put an end to it may not ultimately change much as the country seems spent, but I would expect a democrat to keep antagonizing Russia to a higher degree.

In fact this alone may be why Trump's no longer that repellent to the establishment. He can be the cleanup crew for their long telegraphed pivot to China.

I'm not sure I understand your question? I didn't mention Ukraine.

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I suppose, but how much different. He can’t accuse Biden of being weak on Iran and then pull out US forces, but at the same time I think Trump’s political instincts prevent any messy entanglement in Yemen or Lebanon which he would see as costly. That boxes him into much the same space as Biden.

Surely there's a lot of scope for policy differences besides actually deploying troops? A big factor of course is whether or not the Hamas/Hezbollah conflicts have died down, but even if they have then there are things his administration would probably do differently, such as not pressuring Israel into accepting the outlines of a two-state solution in return for a normalization agreement with SA as well as providing more diplomatic shielding for Israel and deterrence towards aggressors generally. And if the war is still on, or new wars break out, he'd likely be vastly more supportive of Israel than Biden.

In this sense, Bush Sr. is probably the last real president to date, in that he was respected by the permanent government and knew how it worked and how to twiddle its knobs.

Every POTUS since has been led around the nose by the blob one way or another, even Obama.

I actually think it is the opposite. President is there to lead and communicate policies of his team toward the public. If his staff members are the writers, president is the actor or comedian delivering the lines and bits. Presidents are supposed to debate, they represent their administration while giving State of the Union, they should represent the state behind closed doors meetings with other world leaders, they should inspire in times of need and be the face of the administration and above all else they should provide legitimacy for the government they represent as they are the person that people get to vote as opposed to their PR managers or analysts.

This take that person of POTUS is just unimportant position and that a corpse remotely controlled by unnamed staffers could do as good of a job, and that people really should just vote opaque party machinery and believe in the best is absolutely surreal to me. If the politicians can no longer be bothered to even pretend that they care, the legitimacy of the power is gone. It is incredibly dangerous direction imho.

I actually think it is the opposite. President is there to lead and communicate policies of his team toward the public. If his staff members are the writers, president is the actor or comedian delivering the lines and bits. Presidents are supposed to debate, they represent their administration while giving State of the Union, they should represent the state behind closed doors meetings with other world leaders, they should inspire in times of need and be the face of the administration and above all else they should provide legitimacy for the government they represent as they are the person that people get to vote as opposed to their PR managers or analysts.

That's a fair point. If Biden was a much better orator and could speak non-stop about Israel, Ukraine, and opposing China and denying them semiconductors, he might be able to better persuade the public about the importance of these causes. Strategists have expressed regular frustration that the economic indicators are really good under Biden's administration but the public hasn't heard any messaging about this.

Although his State of the Union performance looked good, didn't it? I mean, he didn't seem like a tired corpse.

This take that person of POTUS is just unimportant position and that a corpse remotely controlled by unnamed staffers could do as good of a job, and that people really should just vote opaque party machinery and believe in the best is absolutely surreal to me. If the politicians can no longer be bothered to even pretend that they care, the legitimacy of the power is gone. It is incredibly dangerous direction imho.

I don't think he's a corpse with no agency. I think he still has judgment and isn't insane and can act like a reasonable person that's aligned with Americans. It seems like he tires easily and is probably tedious to keep up with and you have you have to remind him to stop going off on tangents. Doesn't look good, and we deserve better, but I don't think it means Trump is therefore the answer.

I mean, he didn't seem like a tired corpse.

Only to someone without a clear memory of what he was like in 2012.

Did I hallucinate that time when he threatened a journo with his Beretta, or did it actually happen? Not what I'd call "a tired corpse", if so.

Doesn’t that sort of lay bare that the public doesnt get to vote for their government?

No one expects the president to be in charge of everything but you expect him to be a CEO. It is clear Biden isn’t capable of being a CEO. So…who is that person?

Well, I think you vote for the person and his orbit of family, friends and trusted advisors. That's kind of sort of like a vote in your government.

I'm probably too cynical but I think the President's job is probably a lot like a doctor's job in a hospital: the nurses all know more or less what the patient needs but they need the MD to make decisions. Sure you'd like a brilliant doctor like House for the truly difficult problems but any doctor that just did what the nurses told him to would probably make for an okay hospital.

I wish. Take it from me that's not how it works, there's certainly a lot of rubberstamping involved where you need a Magic Signature™ for medicolegal and regulatory purposes, but a hospital de-facto run by the nurses would be a disaster in short order. It's not like rushing them through a year or two of training to proclaim them Nurse Practitioners with more autonomy particularly helps, the moment things go beyond the obvious and algorithmic, there's trouble.

I'm sure /u/Throwaway05 could say much the same.

Nurses are blue collar construction workers and physicians are architects. Yes one implements the vision of the other and can see patterns in what the other requests, but that doesn't mean they can safely do the planning. They do think they can however.

Not commenting if this has situational parallels lol.

Nurses, unlike construction workers, are usually not actual crackheads. Experienced and not drug addicted construction workers can and often do plan projects on their lonesome.

Yeah nurses can figure out basic things. That's the point. Basic.

Sounds like Harvard and Yale needs to put together a "presidential science" master's program. People in the future will be horrified that politicians without presidential science degrees were allowed to be president.

We’re getting there with the Oxford PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) degree in the UK. Explicitly intended as a ‘preparing to govern’ degree.

https://amp.theguardian.com/education/2017/feb/23/ppe-oxford-university-degree-that-rules-britain

Often criticised for being too wide-ranging and shallow, producing an elite who think they understand everything about everything.

Dominic Cummings wrote on his influential blog: “If you are young, smart, and interested in politics, think very hard before studying PPE … It actually causes huge problems as it encourages people like Cameron and Ed Balls to … spread bad ideas with lots of confidence and bluffing.”

Teaching there could become the automatic next job of any new ex-president (as long as he was not removed by impeachment or 25th Amendment), and they would all give a different class.

I'm going to be contrarian and say I thought Biden's debate performance was horrifying but I think it's still fine to run him if voters were like me and not like normal people.

Yeah I'm actually with you on this. This could be a good learning opportunity for the general public- they need to realize that the president is just one man and a human being, not some superhero working 24/7 who personally runs the entire government by himself.

I thought Biden looked old and tired, and it was hard for me to hear half the things he said, but he didn't actually seem senile. It's actually OK with me if he wants to take a low-key approach where he only handles president business from 10-4 and lets other people handle things the rest of the time. Trump was a better speaker but just sort of rambled from soundbite to soundbite with no logic.

but he didn't actually seem senile

"We finally beat medicare?"

Obviously not his best line, but it seemed more like he was just stumbling over his words under time pressure. I assume he meant something like "we finally beat the cost-spiral of inflation in the price of medicare." The people I've known with senility were way, way less cogent than him.

I thought Biden looked old and tired, and it was hard for me to hear half the things he said, but he didn't actually seem senile. It's actually OK with me if he wants to take a low-key approach where he only handles president business from 10-4 and lets other people handle things the rest of the time. Trump was a better speaker but just sort of rambled from soundbite to soundbite with no logic.

I disagree. Trump was able to respond to most of the retorts when allowed in the debate format, while Biden was rigid and unable to follow the path of discourse nearly as well as Trump. Trump started getting bogged down in the 2nd half of the debate because he wanted to get the last word in on previous topics, but is a natural extrovert and engaged with the audience and connected to viewers while Biden was unable to be creative in spur of the moment debate. This is especially concerning as he should have ample experience with engaging people and being in the center of attention every day. How often does Biden interact with staff, intelligence agencies, CEOs, diplomats, and international leaders? The president isn't a programming job, it's a customer service job, and Biden has just publicly shown he is completely unable to interact with people in a meaningful day to day experience. Trump blusters, speaks in hyperbole, brags relentlessly, but he does it in a way that is immediately engaging and creates dialogue and interaction between himself and whoever he is engaged with.

How often does Biden interact with staff, intelligence agencies, CEOs, diplomats, and international leaders? The president isn't a programming job, it's a customer service job, and Biden has just publicly shown he is completely unable to interact with people in a meaningful day to day experience

I feel like the day-to-day reality of that is very different than a debate though. In real life he can pause, take his time, collect his thoughts. He can schedule the difficult meetings for a time when he's ready, not late at night while he has a cold. The meetings would be mostly focused on one topic, jumping around from "the economy" to "foreign policy" with 1 minute on each. And he could just focus on the issues instead of trying to deliver punchy zingers for applause.

Trump is very good at the reality TV aspect of saying dramatic things on camera, but he was terrible at actually getting anything done as president.

Everything about the format of the debate broke down. I was talking with my wife about this.

Both candidates effectively refused to give any substantive answer on Gaza. Trump largely bloviated on the IMHO unfair yes or no question about a specific future policy, I think it was asking whether he would sign a federal abortion ban of some sort. I don't blame him for not answering it.

Both candidates also mostly regurgitated talking points. Trump more successfully IMHO, in that he actually finished the sentence. If you knew the answers ahead of time, you could guess at what Biden was trying to get to, but he rarely got there. Some of their talking points were direct answers to the questions, some weren't. Pretty par for the course IMHO. Trump was the only one to think on his feet in any capacity.

The format was supposed to be 2 minutes to answer, 1 minute rebuttal, 30 seconds to respond. This held up pretty OK at first. But at a certain point they dropped the 30 second response, so Trump would begin his next 2 minute answer doing the 30 second response he was itching to do. By the time the candidates were talking over each other, arguing about their golf handicap, any pretense of the mic being muted when it wasn't their turn to speak was out the window. I first noticed this break down when they unmuted the mic for Biden when he wanted to talk over Trump, and I then I noticed it a few minutes later when they unmuted the mic for Trump so he could talk over Biden.

All I heard post debate was how much Trump lied. But IMHO they were the sorts of "lies" they are broadly subject to debate (is Biden or Trump responsible for inflation) or directionally correct (I'm not sure illegal immigrants have raped and killed as many people as Trump claims, but they have and we don't like it). Biden's lies were bizarre and brazen, like claiming no service members have died during his administration, or that the border patrol endorsed him, both of which are bold faced, no way to shade it lies.

It didn't break down as much as it did in 2020, but I do agree with you that they were hamstringing Trump by not letting him have time to respond and it slowed down the debate topics because he was forced to reiterate old topics and it derailed the debate. This didn't bother me too much as I've attended too many events to know how quickly things become disorganized or run late, the best laid plans often run awry.

This may also be why Trump's 'lying' doesn't bother me much because it's the lying of humans interacting of each other. It's not a calculated lie to manipulate people but the lie of being in the moment, of verbal sparring, bullshitting, and the barstool one-up-mansship that men do to each other. It's why I find the pundits constantly talking about the strange things that come out of his mouth as juvenile and childish and ultimately doesn't sway my opinions of him. Trump doesn't try to hide who he is, so his personality and choices doesn't bother me nearly as much as the way that Biden, Hillary Clinton, or Pelosi tend to lie to manipulate, deceive , and gaslight.

The lies Biden espoused were defensive 'nu uh'. He was on the back foot the entire time, intellectually and socially. It was kids fighting on the playground, not a nuanced discussion or breakdown on policy. I do think Trump should have continually associated Biden's failure to curb illegal immigration with drug trafficking of deadly narcotics/opioids and the loss of (black) Americans to addiction instead of direct murders, but it's very hard to have a nuanced take in a heat of the moment debate and decided to stay on his course.

Yeah I'm actually with you on this. This could be a good learning opportunity for the general public- they need to realize that the president is just one man and a human being, not some superhero working 24/7 who personally runs the entire government by himself.

That is one of the reasons I wanted Donald Trump to be president in the 2016 election. I wanted to see if the government would keep running if a person with no political experience occupied the White House.

An analogy to which I often compared it was the TV show "LOST". There is a character named Desmond who lives alone in a bunker with a computer terminal. He believes it is his job to type a specific sequence of numbers into the computer every 108 minutes or else the world will be destroyed. Quoting from the LOST wiki:

Occupants of the Swan station followed a protocol in which they typed a sequence into a computer every 108 minutes. Typing these numbers and pressing "execute" (a.k.a. pushing the button) on the keyboard discharged an electromagnetic buildup, continually averting worldwide catastrophe.

My fear about Donald Trump becoming president was that there would be some kind of highly technical task which the president was obligated to perform—analogous to typing a specific sequence of numbers into a computer terminal every 108 minutes—but which could only be figured out by somebody who had held another political office or who had graduated from Harvard Law School or Yale Law School.

When Donald Trump became president, his lack of political experience and legal knowledge did inhibit him from certain things. He signed executive orders that were dead-on-arrival because he failed to write them in a lawyerly fashion with t's crossed and i's dotted. Some of his appointments and nominations were hamstrung by procedural errors. But the world did not literally end because he typed the wrong number into a computer terminal like in LOST, which I consider to be a positive endorsement of the idea that random civilians with no political experience can become president.

But the world did not literally end because he typed the wrong number into a computer terminal like in LOST

As president, Trump literally fired the guy whose job that was and we did have a worldwide catastrophe.

  • -10

As someone who has gone into the weeds on this, I do not think you want to start getting into the origination of COVID, Peter Daszak and the ecohealth alliance et al. There aren't any wins for progressive politics in that direction.

I know far more than I'd like about the lab leak conspiracy nonsense. But it's also not actually relevant: whether the virus came from the market or the lab, the US position in the Chinese CDC is about the cover-up afterward.

Remember we only got the sequence used to make the vaccines because an Australian scientist, Eddie Holmes, had a personal connection with a Chinese scientist and convinced them to defy the Chinese government to release the sequence (interview with Eddie Holmes about that). Having people in the Chinese CDC is to have enough visibility in what's going on there so they won't cover things up / have those personal connections so they won't. With those connections, we wouldn't have needed that Chinese scientist being willing to light their career on fire to get that information. And would have known about the outbreak sooner.

So we had one less guy to call us racist for pointing out something odd was going on in Wuhan?

I rated this "Bad" on the volunteer page; I actually agree with your point, but zingers are not how you have productive debate. You could have raised this point less obnoxiously.

Damn, had a pretty good warning-free run, but some things are too hard to resist.

@token_progressive, apologies, I was out of line.

All good points, though it certainly seemed like Trump couldn't get his agenda done. He was good at talking politics but not really at the details of enacting policy. Of course, not wanting your President to do anything is a valid desire I think.

OTOH, though, Biden has gotten a lot of important agenda items done.

I broadly agree with this. Ronald Reagan, for my understanding, spent most of his presidency in an equivalent state to present Biden and a lot of people would argue that that was the pinnacle of the American empire.

Quite easily debunked. Here's Reagan vs. Mondale in 1984.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ObDjMJdNGBw

This just isn’t true. At most it was the final couple of years.

Reagan's senility has been greatly exaggerated with time. It all comes down to a few moments where aides caught him sundowning in private. McConnell, Pelosi and Biden have all had much more serious moments caught on camera, multiple times.

I thought being shot was seen as contributing to his infirmity, as well

I remember the big Feinstein moments, but somehow I totally missed any with Pelosi. Must be this one? That is wacky: https://youtube.com/watch?v=fwqWzbk_LeY

Byrd Bath or Privilege Scrub is memorable: https://youtube.com/watch?v=or0nSfFir6s

Biden probably spends his days picking from a set of reasonable proposals

Biden probably spends his days talking to people who aren't there if the medical team gets his meds wrong that day. You can actually see him either being too strung out from focus stims or narcoleptic depending on if they got their dosages right of the various cocktails they have him on.

He is a corrupt sex pest who was showering with his daughter according to her diary...

How is that acceptable seeing he lacks any redeeming qualities and is purely a blob creature?

This is a bad comment. You can think what you like about Biden and you can post links to the various allegations if you want to talk about them or bring them up as evidence that he's bad, but just replying to someone talking about Biden by saying he's a sex pest and a blob creature isn't an argument, it's just hawking and spitting.

Normally you'd just get warned not to do this. But you've been doing this and been warned that if you don't rein it in, you're going to start to get longer bans. Your record is shitty. Eight warnings and two bans, you keep ignoring our requests to chill out, and you come back from your bans just to whine about how they were unfair.

Now you're banned for a week. Returning to whine about how it was unfair is unlikely to result in greater leniency if you continue down this path.

sex pest who was showering with his daughter according to her diary...

Link?

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ashley-biden-diary-claims/

Snopes rates the following claim as "true":

A diary authored by U.S. President Joe Biden's daughter, Ashley Biden, describes showers taken with her father when she was a child as "probably not appropriate."

https://www.msn.com/en-US/news/us/joe-bidens-daughter-ashley-admits-her-diary-entries-are-real-in-court-letter-showers-with-dad/ar-BB1mWabj links to Twitter posts that have screenshots of the relevant page (including claims that she was hypersexualized at a young age), along with Ashley's submission to the court.

It is kind of damning that the Democrats couldn't find anyone who could talk to the proles other than an elderly compulsive liar with a penchant for sniffing hair.

In fairness fetterman seems pretty good at talking to proles.

I almost brought him up! It's telling that the good prole talkers like Fetterman and Manchin tend to drift away from the party.

Being fair, it is a general indictment of the US political regime that the choice is between that and another senior compulsive liar. I like Trump what he is, and in some sense he is America incarnate, but in no sane era would he, Biden or indeed any of their potential replacements be allowed near the levers of power.

The caliber of statesman that the US has been able to produce has either greatly diminished, or those people are smart enough to realize their talents are better utilized elsewhere.

I mean swap sniffing hair with cheating with porn stars and talking about how hot his daughter is and the like and it's not far off the the Republicans either right? Trump and Biden are both elderly liars.

Is it damning for the Republican and Democratic parties or is it more damning of voters?

You might have noticed that I never complain about politicians. I leave that to others. And there's no shortage of volunteers; everyone complains about politicians. Everyone says they suck. But where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky; they don't pass through a membrane from a separate reality. They come from American homes, American families, American schools, American churches, and American businesses. And they're elected by American voters. This is what our system produces, folks. This is the best we can do. Let's face it, we have very little to work with. Garbage in, garbage out.

-George Carlin

This is not a good take as it’s clearly not the best we could do. The problem is the filter, not input.

Exhibit 6: The Russians have used the Brain Neutralizer on Biden, giving him Havana Syndrome

We've been cooperating with the Russians on this one since the Bush era. Unfortunately it took us that long to figure out what the "фронт к врагу" label meant.

Exhibit 5: A columnist claiming replacing him would be undemocratic.

It would be undemocratic to replace Biden with another candidate. I think it's fine to admit that, I think almost everybody would prefer the "undemocratic" candidate to the "democratic" candidate in middle-stage senility. And, probably, if you were to run the primary today all over again, the voters would pick someone else. The problem is that the apparatchiks might not pick that same someone else.

If anything, this would look like a return to the older way of selecting candidates for the major parties. The primary process used to rely much heavier on backroom deals gated by rounds of voting to select a candidate, with the regular voting public mostly shut out. After the perceived meddling in the 2016 Dem primary (Sanders and Clinton), I wonder how this would play out among the democratic party electorate.

Weren’t Biden’s competitors in the primary literally RFK and Oprah’s spiritual advisor? I continue to maintain that the chances of Biden being replaced going even worse for democrats are higher than it salvaging the election.

It wasn't really a real primary since Biden was the incumbent. After Carter was primaried in 1980 (and Ford primaried in 1976) the lesson strategists internalized was that primarying the incumbent leads to a loss in the general. Since then Democrats have shut out primary challengers (more successfully than Republicans have). RFK and Marianne Williamsone were the only two outsiders of any note willing to break this consensus.

However, I think Democratic voters also bear some blame here. 15 million of them turned out for Biden in the primary. They were excited to vote for him! I don't know if they felt like they were closing ranks around Biden, endorsing his performance, or trying to mobilize suplort against Trump. But they endorsed this! Look at Obama's re-nomination versus Biden's: in 2012, Obama got about half as many votes as he did in the contested 2008 primary. Whereas Biden's 2024 primary numbers are very close to his 2020 results. It's not just the party machinery that closed ranks around Biden: voters did too.

I think to some extent it mostly makes sense to confine talk about how "democratic" things are to the actual election and related mechanics. I think the actual word we should be talking about is "fair". Because that's what we're really talking about, right? As long as states are democratically setting candidate criteria, and ballots get printed, the results get tallied, judges step in when appropriate, the whole nine yards, the actual lower-D democratic process is still okay and can continue functioning in its way, which is built on a foundation of long-term checks and balances. It can remain perpetually democratic if the machine gets enough oil. I realize this mechanics approach is a narrower definition than many people use it, but I think it is more precise and accurate.

The idea behind whether to replace Biden or not is one of fairness, not democracy writ large. The system and norms upholding actual democracy in the US are not at stake, in the sense that the rules nationally and by state are consistent and created by representatives, even if not perfectly fair. What we're really getting at is it feels bad to have someone "the people" don't want. We're tempted to say that the people's will is the same thing as democracy, but it really isn't. Democracy is the core idea that people determine the shape of their own government and have some sort of regular input on how it's going, and that the system resists hostile takeover strong enough to change those core facts.

Maybe I'm being too pedantic and even I am not able to keep this standard straight, but it still feels more correct. At least in terms of an attempt to set a reasonable standard as opposed to simply calling out hypocrisy. The one weakness of this argument is some might say that political parties have become a de facto part of the system itself now, and thus should be included in worries about democracy, but I don't know if I'm willing to go that far.

So I think it's fine to say that replacing Biden might feel unfair, but maybe it's best to say that the most fair thing moving forward is to make the best of a bad situation.

How we select candidates in America is through a democratic process. Lying about the state of the presidents heath only to switch him out when it is obvious he will lose is a subversion of democracy.

Re-reading my comment I think it came across as if I'm trying to split hairs a little too much. If Biden were to get swapped out I think people would have a right to be mad, but if the actual winner of the whole election got switched out, people would have a right to be maximum furious. The latter case is the sort of existential democratic crisis that is worth getting existential mad about. The current what to do about Biden crisis is not existential and thus the anger should be some degree lower than maximum.

Perhaps the better question would be, let me set up this scenario, which would be "more fair" or "more democratic"?

  • Biden dropping out at some point during his presidency, and Kamala taking over. No one voted for Kamala in the primaries, well, to be more specific many voted against her. Biden chose her as an individual with zero direct democratic input after winning the primary. Biden is the source of democratic legitimacy here.

  • Biden dropping out now, and a new candidate taking over at the convention. No one would be voting directly for the candidate like a primary, which is a weaker link of democratic authority, but on the other hand the delegates were chosen more or less democratically from the party constituents and are the source of democratic legitimacy here.

Both scenarios clearly have a break in the direct line of "democracy", defined more lazily here as just "people should have voted for the person who ends up in charge", which is why I say the word is unclear and "fair" is better -- and that it's hard to directly compare which is better without using more accurate words. It's also why a some political scientist types get exacerbated when we call our system of government a democracy, because it isn't. The whole "representative" idea comes into play at some point, and we just need to reasonable decide where to make the tradeoff of general direct democracy vs. vesting that authority indirectly in another.

Put another way, who has the better claim to representing Democrats? Biden as an individual, or the delegates in aggregate? So it might seem like I'm splitting hairs, but actually it's a pretty significant question. Honestly, I think given the circumstances, the delegates actually have a stronger case. The first bullet point is undermined by the self-evident behind the scenes work of the party apparatus itself to stifle other would-be competitors, several states decided they wouldn't even bother with primaries before any serious challenge even emerged. In other words, we can't escape the shadow the DNC and related party machinery casts over the whole thing. I think the second bullet point is "more fair".

but I know what I do know — I know how to tell the truth.

The worst part about this is that Biden is, like Trump, one of the most dishonest candidates of all-time. The number of lies he told during the debate alone was shocking. As is his history of creating self-aggrandizing stories out of whole cloth.

Claiming the mantle of truth is pretty bold for this serial liar.

That just makes me think of Hippias Minor, in which Plato's Socrates proposes that the man who does evil deliberately is better than the man who does it accidentally, in that he is more capable.

Well, it's not the sort of character attestation I would want to make about myself, at least.

That just makes me think of Hippias Minor, in which Plato's Socrates proposes that the man who does evil deliberately is better than the man who does it accidentally, in that he is more capable.

I think the opposite is true. The man who does evil deliberately intends evil -- wanton suffering, pain, misery -- and will continue to do it because evil is the goal. The man who does evil accidentally has a non-evil goal and may be persuaded to pursue that goal through a different, non-evil path. Believing that a person is better because they are more capable of pursuing evil successfully is itself an evil notion and Socrates should drink some hemlock for even thinking it.

The man who does evil accidentally has a non-evil goal and may be persuaded to pursue that goal through a different, non-evil path.

I'm highly skeptical of this notion. In practice, my experience is that the man who does evil accidentally in service of a non-evil goal, will inevitably double down on that evil as not actually evil and then call out even considering following some alternative non-evil path as the ultimate evil. On the other hand, the man who does evil in service of an evil goal can often be coerced into stopping his evil actions, by forcibly preventing his evil actions from accomplishing his evil goals. This is a different point than the one about the virtue of competence, but I think it's true nonetheless, that in terms of effect to the rest of society, someone doing evil deliberately is better than someone doing so accidentally.

On the other hand, the man who does evil in service of an evil goal can often be coerced into stopping his evil actions, by forcibly preventing his evil actions from accomplishing his evil goals.

On top of that, I'd say they're more likely to decide they've had their fill, or that some things are too fucked up even for them.

That's an interesting idea, could you give some examples of what you mean?

I think the reaction to Trump since his initial campaign in 2015 all the way to now is a good example. Let's just take for granted that preventing Trump from becoming POTUS is a non-evil goal - hardly a consensus opinion, but certainly one believed in the hearts of hearts of the people being discussed right now, who would likely say it's not just not-evil, it's anti-evil. In an effort to accomplish this non-evil goal, many people did many evil things, including lying about Trump, ostracizing Trump supporters, obfuscating Biden's mental incompetence, and physically assaulting people who appear as Trump supporters, among others. Some people tried to point out that these evil things were evil, and that a non-evil path to accomplish this non-evil goal was preferable (I personally also believed that a non-evil path was more viable and more likely to be successful, but that's beside the point), but those people were cast aside as evil Trump supporters who were either trying to obfuscate their Trump support or were ignorantly supporting Trump without even recognizing it. As a result, people - who in general don't want to be seen as pushing back against an anti-evil movement - were cowed into not speaking out against these evil things, and thus these evil things kept happening (and, again, beside the point, the electorate's trust of journalists has fallen heavily, and Trump looks like the current most likely person to become POTUS in 2025).

There's actually no shortage of examples in CW issues. The whole trans/gender issue in the past 5 or so years is another good one: to the supporters of "trans women are women," the goal is a very much not-evil - again, actually anti-evil - one of helping otherwise ostracized and denigrated people feel more belonging in society, and they believe in accomplishing this by opening up women's sports, prisons, and shelters to any male who genuinely believes that they are a woman, enacting legal punishments for people who choose to use pronouns that reflect their own perception of someone's gender instead of the person's claimed internally experienced one, and encouraging adolescents to hormonally/surgically/socially transitioning in secret from their family and friends if they judge them to be "eggs" (i.e. people, usually young, who are considered to be not yet aware that they are trans). Many people pointed out and continue to point out that these are all evil acts in service of an ostensibly non-evil goal, and those people have tended to be dismissed as evil transphobes who are motivated by their evil hatred of trans people to evilly oppress them. As a result, people - who in general don't want to be seen as pushing back against an anti-evil movement - were cowed into not speaking out against these evil things, and thus these evil things kept happening.

He didn't say that evil is the goal, merely that he did it deliberately. As in, the kind of person who knowingly dumps poison in the river if it's not punished, as opposed to the person who is just running their plant so incompetently that they can't stop polluting everything even if they don't want to. As you may guess, I'd prefer the former, since he can be persuaded to change his way, while the latter is incapable of doing so.

Imo history has vindicated him; The advent of meritocracy, which often only cared about morality insofar as the person can be relied upon not to work against the interests of the employer, caused a major speed-up of progress. Greed used to be seen as a vice that needs to be reigned in, but through capitalism we managed to channel it into productivity instead.

I don't necessarily think we should entirely ignore morality, but combining competence with good incentives leads more reliably to good results.

You're discounting the virtue of competence. Which is one of the only objective components most ethical systems recognize. It's difficult to say which path is the righteous one. But it's easy to say that whatever path we may pick, we ought to reach the end of it swiftly so we can move on.

As Land said by way of Lindsay, by way of Ostwald by way of Kant: "The only moral action is the minimization of entropy".

Better not waste all our time and ressources and get to the heart of things instead of wallowing in the miserable timidity of senility. The categorical imperative requires it.

That's fine about personal virtue. But if we're talking about candidates, I prefer the candidate who incompetently pursues the evil goal over the candidate who competently pursues it.

Understandable, but of course, Socrates, Confucius and other classical philosophers of virtue and natural law consider public virtue an extension of personal virtue.

Not to wallow in contrarianism but I think there is also a legit argument for wishing your enemies to be somewhat competent in general in that competence is predictable. Idiots can throw a wrench into the best of plans and ruin not just what they seek to ruin.

In the particular circumstance of democracy where you know power will be shared with your enemies at some point in the near future, you should want for this minimum out of mere pragmatism. It is a risk to all of us that the nominal head of the most powerful army in the world is mentally incapable.

And I understand none of this applies if you wish to see the end of the United States as we know it. In some sense the actual accelerationist argument is that it is good Biden is so obviously incapable, because it shows everyone how power actually works in the American regime and lets all decide what to do about it instead of continuing to play act at republicanism.

Not to wallow in contrarianism but I think there is also a legit argument for wishing your enemies to be somewhat competent in general in that competence is predictable. Idiots can throw a wrench into the best of plans and ruin not just what they seek to ruin.

But they can also fail to ruin what they seek to ruin. I believe this dominates.

Yeah, in some ways Biden benefits from his reputation as a being a bit old and senile. People kind of shrug off some of his brazen lies as confusion or misremembering stuff. But he's a shameless liar and he has been for decades! The bloke stole Neil Kinnock's life story because it sounded better than his!

Granted, lies are very common in politics and neither Trump nor Biden is very far outside the norm in that regard. But as you say it makes it galling when he drapes himself in the mantle of honesty.

The worst part about this is that Biden is, like Trump, one of the most dishonest candidates of all-time. The number of lies he told during the debate alone was shocking. As is his history of creating self-aggrandizing stories out of whole cloth.

There's a line in Catholic doctrine that goes something like "the accuser reveals thier nature in the accusation". One can debate its correspondence to reality but i think there is some element of truth to the idea that "a thief will assume others to be thieves" and "a liar will assume others to be liars".

Edit: I'm not saying I endorse it, but there is a line of thinking that goes...

"Biden and his supporters know that Biden is a self agrandizing liar who takes bribes, the only reason they're accusing Trump of the same crime is to level the playing field."

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