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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   38610 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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I don't know if it's Schrodinger's dementia; there's a consistent position that looks something like "there's a baseline for mental competence; Biden is above it now, and two months ago we believed he would be above throughout his second term; the debate added new evidence to indicate he will not be above the baseline two years from now, but that he's still above it and would be throughout the remainder of his first term; so the change in candidate while Biden remains in office is perfectly reasonable."

This is pretty tenuous, to say the least, but it doesn't require holding mutually inconsistent positions. The issues in that argument are a willful misreading of evidence (both the debate and everything that preceded it) and a decision to choose a baseline in a very narrow, convenient interval.

Political considerations are, of course, what is driving this, not logical ones, but I don't think that's a surprise to anyone.

But how could one watch that debate, especially in light of other evidence, and conclude “he is fine now.”

Is there a theoretic argument that he is just above competency now but might not be in two years. But does anyone really believe that? Does anyone think they can calibrate that well? If Biden believes Harris should be the president, then why not give her the office given his advanced age?

It’s possible to believe that his decision making isn’t a particular concern but that his ability to speak under pressure is.

Personally I’m not afraid he’s going to cause some catastrophic error in the next 6 months, but I also don’t think he has it in him to effectively campaign especially while governing at the same time.

I guess in theory. But it wasn’t bad speaking; it was incoherence. And it wasn’t just a single speech. And it wasn’t just in speeches (eg wandering off).

I have a hard time imagining how someone could honestly conclude that, but then again I've thought Biden was obviously mentally incapable since long before the debate.

(And the same for Trump! To a much lesser extent: he roughly seems at the point Biden was in the mid to late 2010s.)

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