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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29536 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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A comment on how Trump lies like a used car salesman and other politicians lie like a lawyer caught my eye.

It seems to me that some people, basically, see obvious "used car salesman" lies as insults, personal ones. "You think I'm gonna believe that??? You think that's earning my vote??? The nerve..." So they get incensed. But lawyer lies, on the other hand, they get a nod when they get noticed. "Ok, good one, you even managed to technically say the truth."

There's also some crossover with the way the lies of Soviet regimes are often described. "Everyone knows that they're lying, they know that we know they're lying, yet we can't do anything about it." Now, you don't have to pay lip service to Trump's lies. Yet!!! I imagine that plays into the frustration some people exhibit at Trump's embellishments and what drives them to "fact-check" his every single misdetail smugly.

I think a better comparison would be Trump lying like a fisherman or a hunter. Everyone knows the fish wasn't thaaaat big and that grizzly didn't literally jump on your tent, but these embellishments make for a better story.

And different people have different levels of tolerance for this sort of bullshit.

how Trump lies like a used car salesman and other politicians lie like a lawyer caught my eye.

Interesting because it's not true at all. Car salesmen rarely exaggerate. They'll play the numbers to scam you, such as hiding the sctual price and financing for 84 months. But the numbers you do get are real.

And when it comes to the car itself, he'll either read some nonsense off of the car's official marketing materials, or make up some blatant pants on fire lies. All 100% insenscere with the intention of duping you the sucker into paying out the nose for a lemon.

When Trump lies, he at least is making boasts in the same general direction he believes in. Meanwhile the democrats also make pants on fire lies, such as repeatedly claiming Trump supports a national abortion ban, a position Trump has never even remotely approached.

I think this is pretty insightful. I am personally someone who cannot deal with a used car salesman of that type and I will do a lot to avoid the need to interact with them. Whereas I feel a lot more comfortable with political types. Their speech seems more informative because if they lie and you spot it, you have learned something about how they estimate you and what they think they can get away with. If you don't spot it, you may have been tricked, but being wary of politicians' statements is good epistemically anyway so that's all right. With a used car salesman type liar you may as well ignore them entirely since there's really nothing to learned.

It seems to me that some people, basically, see obvious "used car salesman" lies as insults, personal ones. "You think I'm gonna believe that??? You think that's earning my vote??? The nerve..." So they get incensed. But lawyer lies, on the other hand, they get a nod when they get noticed. "Ok, good one, you even managed to technically say the truth."

Well, part of my argument (or, well, my suspicion, anyway) was that there was something like a class or place-in-the-hierarchy aspect to how different groups of people respond to the used-car-salesman-style lie vs the lawyer-style lie... and further, that that place-in-the-hierarchy aspect was potentially dangerous or destabilizing for the broader system, long term, and even further, elite groups have a lot of short-term incentives not to see the fact that it was potentially dangerous and destabilizing, because the social validity of their forms of lying (and only their forms) props up their place in the hierarchy.

Lawyers don't get offended if they see other lawyers absolutely shading and abusing the truth well, because they have internalized a value system that sees that as at least plausibly virtuous behavior. Like, we live in an adversarial system where everyone deserves representation, and therefore every lawyer, MORALLY, should be doing everything possible inside the bounds of the law to advocate for their clients - and this is fine, because other parties ought to have their own lawyers advocating similarly for them. And further, they see those moves as just the inevitable, legitimate moves given our set of incentives and institutions. It's like expert game fans watching a good speed runner - yes, reprogramming Mario 64 in real time on the controller via a buffer overflow glitch arguably violates the spirit of the game design of Mario 64 and makes for a lousy show, but wow is that being good at the actual, existing Mario 64! That's what being a good speed runner looks like! And so it is with being a good lawyer - this is certainly my experience with knowing a few lawyers, anyway. Don't hate the player, adjust the game (eventually).

Meanwhile, what do you call a hundred lawyers on the bottom of the ocean? A good start! Har har! The reality is, lawyer jokes don't come from nowhere.

Similarly, good politicians who actually know things about political rhetoric (and diplomacy for that matter) have a moral story about how, to knit together a giant, disparate coalition of low information voters and special interest activists who all have tons of unspoken assumptions and values that clash, you have to rely on certain kinds of misleading and ambiguous abstractions and narratives to pull people together for the greater good, even if it leaves individuals with highly incorrect impressions of what you say and mean and will do. It's not lying in some profane sense; rather, it's all strictly utilitarian, with those technically-just-inside-the-bounds-of-law statements being primarily viewed entirely by what effect they have in the broader social world. Plato named the Noble Lie more than 2000 years ago, and despite technological changes since, that core idea remains true and unavoidable.

Meanwhile, how do you know that a politician is lying? Their lips are moving! Har Har! Once again, the reality is, politician stereotypes don't come from nowhere.

Part of why I, personally, have found the replication crisis so jarring of my own worldview (after following it pretty closely) is that I had, previously, assumed that anybody doing something with "science" in its name had, as an ultimate value, pursuit of "disinterested, objective, universal truth" in exactly the way that politicians and lawyers didn't. That faith and trust in "science" was a huge motivator in pulling me out of the more conservative religious background I grew up in. So it's been extremely disruptive to me (on a personal, emotional level) to realize that many of the people in those fields are much closer to the politicians and lawyers than I had been led to believe and, frankly, had wanted to believe. And, similarly, I think such people themselves overwhelmingly have their own moral stories about why what they're doing is, ultimately, virtuous - power poses could help women gain equality, and microaggression research is on the right side of history, so finnicky details about study design and p-hacking and the garden of forking paths (or whatever the details were) are secondary to the greater moral purpose, and it's more important that we not undermine social solidarity in addressing those vital moral issues than that we get every single detail right about how things actually work....

And by the way, have you seen the absolutely cratering of trust in the academy that happened over the last decade? It didn't come from nowhere, either.

I think this is the nub of it. A used car salesman lying, in its ugliest form, is very low status, because its so nakedly venal. "I want money, and I don't mind hurting strangers to get it, because if I lie to you and you believe it, you are a sucker and that's proof you deserve to be taken advantage of." But because it's so venal, and often so crass, I think it's easy for normal people to understand. They can mostly trust their instincts and have their guards up. NOBODY will justify the lying of a used car salesman. And by the way, have you heard about Trump university and Trump steaks?

But the moral cases I just made for what lawyers and politicians and academics do (and I say this as someone who has a few lawyers and many academics in my social circles) are not just much easier to make, they're actually kind of foundational to our entire system. It's what justifies people's behavior and recognition of social power. And status differences play a huge role in it all of this. And a lot of normal people, I think, understand this power difference on a gut level, even if they are unclear on the details and know that they can't actually understand or refute (or even always recognize) the styles of truth abusing being used on them.

In a way, it reminds me a lot of Scott Alexander's essay on getting Eulered, or Paul Graham's old essay that includes the idea of the Blub Paradox. Both essays emphasize the problems of a person encountering arguments or techniques that they can't evaluate because the arguments rely on knowledge or concepts that they can't understand, and yet they are forced to make weighty choices in the face of those arguments... and they recognize the larger, contested social context those arguments or techniques are in, too, and that there are certain zero sum aspects underlying everything.

The lawyer metaphor reminds me a bit of the discussion ymeskhout brought up comparing TWA Flight 800 as compared to certain sanctionable lawsuits, and what I contrasted with the Subway Tuna lawsuit allegations.

From a lot of points of view, all of these lawsuits had what a serious literal reader would consider were made 'recklessly or in bad faith'. And I don't just say that given what's happened since in Krick: even at the time, it was clear that several core claims, including one that ymeskhout highlighted, were presented with either ignorance of their context or willful misrepresentation, and that a good many others were paraphrased commentary from randos taken as gospel truth.

Some of that difference in treatment is politics, and the electioneers are treated as a dire threat while Krick is a tragic sob story. But I think there's something deeper.

There Are Rules, some explicit and some the sort of thing that are like describing water to a fish. It matters if your phooney balooney claims are things that would be in the possession of a specific named other party you've sued in this case, or if they're something that would require 'discovery' of an unrelated third party. It matters if you've got an affidavit from one rando with credentials or a dozen without. These change the extent courts can interact with matters, and also the extent that they'll treat you seriously.

But these norms aren't about what's 'real' or not, or even if they're not-intentional-lies.

That's not even limited to things like lying or not. I've got an effortpost brewing on how some politicians are Nice and some aren't, and how little it has to do with them actually being kind, even to the people around them, and it has a lot of overlap.

It's because you know, and the Used Car Salesman knows that you know, that you're rounding everything he says down by 50% and probably just straight up ignoring some of it. It's a game you're both playing. If you called him out on his BS, he'd probably concede immediately "Well okay not quite zero to sixty in 2 seconds, maybe more like 5 seconds, but she's zippy! You're gonna love her!"

Whereas when the Lawyer lies to you, he thinks he's the only player in the game -- you're too dumb to play. He either sincerely believes you're too stupid notice the subtlety of his lie, or he knows that his lie-by-omission is well-crafted enough that refuting it would take an order of magnitude more time and energy and make you look like a fool for trying. If you call him out he will not concede, he will just persist in his bold-faced lie. Glib, simplistic political slogans are a closely related type of lie, which is why they are so effective at enraging political opponents.

I think it's the opposite, the lawyer is the one who'll have to adjust when called out because they depend on longer term trust relationships. The used car salesman will just grin through it and move onto the next customer.

This has been the exact opposite of my experience, and as @ArjinFerman observes such adjustment can be read as professional weakness in thier position.

I think it's the opposite, the lawyer is the one who'll have to adjust when called out because they depend on longer term trust relationships

That doesn't help when they're working for your opponent.

Funny, my reaction is the complete opposite. Getting upset at Trump's lies is like getting upset at Gillette after discovering that there, in fact, might be something better a man can get. It's the lying while telling the truth that I find insulting.

Now, you don't have to pay lip service to Trump's lies. Yet!!!

In stark contrast to lies of the establishment, which I am forced to pay lip service to.

Getting upset at Trump's lies is like getting upset at Gillette after discovering that there, in fact, might be something better a man can get

Love this analogy. I definitely feel the same way. I find Biden‘s lies, which have an air of supposed respectability about them, much more offensive than Trump’s lies, even when Trump’s are more blatant.

A missing mood in development news: Environmentalists pin hopes on tiny fish to stop Highway 413.

From a plain reading of the article, the logic goes:

  • Activists don't like the proposed Highway 413
  • They searched for a way to stop it.
  • They found these fish, and the strategy may be effective.

In a sane world filled with people arguing in good faith, you might see a similar situation:

  • There are endangered animals in an area
  • Environmentalists discovered development posed a risk to them
  • Therefore they oppose that development

If you trust the CBC's reporting, then the activists would be better described as anti-development rather than environmentalist. The discussion is centered on the highway, the political situation around it, the promises that Doug Ford (bad!) made, and the actions the Federal Liberals (good!) took which slowed it down.

There's a reason the wisdom for landowners who discover endangered species on their property is 'shoot. shovel. shut up.'.

Unfortunately, in this world, the way it works is

  1. Law is proposed

  2. People opposed to the law note it can be easily abused by people acting in bad faith.

  3. Their objections are overruled; no one would do that and surely there are safeguards against it

  4. People acting in bad faith abuse the law

  5. The people in 2) note this and complain

  6. Those in charge insist on taking the bad faith objections as if they are in good faith. ("Maybe that tiny fish really is vital to the ecosystem. Can you PROVE otherwise?")

  7. Repeat step 4-6 forever.

This is a tale as old as environmental law. In the 1970's, the discovery of the endangered snail darter blocked completion of the almost-finished Tellico Dam by the Tennessee Valey Authority. Congress had to pass a specific exemption to complete the project.

We later found out that the snail darter also lived in other rivers in the area, and the completion of the dam did not drive it to extinction.

For another variant of the problem, see the wildlife 'separate populations' discussion Kagan brought in Loper-Bright was about this case asking if the Washington State population of the squirrel subspecies sciurus griseus griseus was distinct enough from the Oregon and Californian populations of the same subspecies to 'count' as a species-as-legal-term for the Endangered Species Act. Or where local regulations effectively traded off unproved harms committed by politically disconnected actors against much-more-established risks by powerful ones.

I grew up in the San Diego area, and recall environmentalists opposing transmission lines from new desert solar plants into the city because it threatened some desert tortoise's habitat. Environmentalists have been this way for decades, at least right wing environmentalists like Uncle Ted and the anarchoprimitivists are honest about their intentions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunrise_Powerlink

https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/public_lands/energy/sunrise_powerlink/index.html

Also for anyone wondering after reading the environmentalist article, given that I grew up less than a mile away from the edge of the Cleveland National "Forest," it ain't no forest.

See this is exactly why I don’t like environmentalists as a group. I can understand the need to protect a species, and I’m generally in favor of protecting the environment where possible. But there’s a point where you have to be pragmatic about these things. We need roads, power plants and wires. Planning around a major habitat I get. But if you oppose everything people want to do even when it’s 95% of what you want, then I see no reason to take them seriously when they suggest we need to retool our infrastructure to protect the environment.

In their defense they are like the various right wing commenters here who refuse any compromise on guns, abortion, environmental law, etc. on the grounds that the left will just run rampant over them if they compromise and the only winning move is complete defiance and opposition to anything the enemy does. Even if each action is indefensible individually. I don't have a high opinion of either group.

In their defense they are like the various right wing commenters here who refuse any compromise...

Then just come out and say it.

"No gun control" and "Full ban on abortion" are both within the Overton Window, albeit as fringe positions. "No new development in Ontario" would be derided as batshit insane. If they're going to refuse any compromise, then they should at least have the balls to stand by their convictions.

State your arguments, gather support, and fight for your goals. Anything less than that has too many shades of conspiracy for my tastes.

That "the left will just run rampant over them if they compromise" is also obviously true with guns in a way it is not with the right for the environment. Containing the tiniest little compromise, the Bruen decision has resulted in it remaining illegal for me, a citizen of the State of New Jersey with no criminal record, to buy a gun anywhere in the United States or to carry one outside my home in New Jersey or anywhere in New York. Whereas the environmentalists not winning every battle on the environment has not resulted in lead back in gasoline or the Cuyahoga river catching fire again.

Obstinate Gun Owners is a thing, but I don't think they're analogous to environmentalists. Gun owners and its advocacy are working with much different incentives. Gun owners online can be annoying like environmentalists, but gun owners are mostly fine to stay out of the news. Most change is bad, most coverage is bad. Status quo is the best thing. They rarely receive friendly reporting when they organize, so they haven't learned to leverage media the same way as environmentalists. Generally, 2A advocacy groups fight in in the courts, or in some places on online forums (lol), but not in big displays of protest.

When gun owners do mass it's usually not so much a shock-and-awe lever, but a more traditional "we exist, there's lots of us, we will walk to the state capitol, clean up, and leave."

Generally, 2A advocacy groups fight in in the courts, or in some places on online forums (lol), but not in big displays of protest.

Sure, but fighting in court is what we've been talking about this whole thread, not protests. Environmentalists also do silly protests, but those aren't what we are talking about and I'm not making a 1 to 1 analogy or making this especially about the 2A.

It's good politics if you care about your goals. Centrist opinion doesn't matter in the long run. Only control of institutions does.

Centrists vote for the status quo. So all you have to do is be the status quo.

If you want something different out of politics, you have to be Lenin, not Talleyrand.

In the long run, I think Talleyrand spent more of his life getting what he wanted than Lenin did. And he saw a lot of change in his life, too. He just didn't think he could control it.

It feels like one of those intentionally bad metaphors. It's so bad I can't make heads or tails of it, but, also, to quote Bertrand Russell on Marx,

"His theoretical errors, however, would not have mattered so much but for the fact that, like Tertullian and Carlyle, his chief desire was to see his enemies punished, and he cared little what happened to his friends in the process."

I feel the same about all these people who look down on centrists and Talleyrand.

I don't look down on him. He was an incredibly competent and useful man, and without his involvement France may not even still exist.

But he is also not who you want to be if you have political goals. He went with the flow, only altering fate in small ways.

If you want to make a mark on history and change things you need to hire guys like him, but you can't be like him.

Here is an interesting development: Kamala Harris is now demanding unmuted microphones for her debate with Donald Trump.

It's been memory holed, but I seem to remember the general opinion being that allowing Trump to interrupt his opponent during debates gave him an unfair advantage since he would interrupt more often. This appears to be a complete 180. It's tempting to model this as a reflexive reaction to Trump's dominance in the June debate with Biden (which muted the candidates' microphones when it wasn't their turn to speak), but I get the sense that there are deeper strategic considerations at play. A few possibilities:

  • The Harris Campaign wants Trump to come off as unhinged by giving him the oppurtunity to make a complete ass of himself. This didn't work for Jeb, Rubio, Cruz, or Hillary, but maybe it will work for Harris? (I am pressing X to doubt)

  • Kamala wants to unleash her inner prosecutor and roll around in the mud with Trump. This could work, but it strikes me as the kind of thing that sounds better in the shower than it does in real life.

  • This is just mind games. The Harris Campaign is using meaningless nitpicks to bait Trump into doing something stupid. I think this is an underrated strategy in general. It would be very bullish for Harris if the people in charge are this smart.

Kamala wants to unleash her inner prosecutor and roll around in the mud with Trump.... sounds better in the shower than it does in real life.

Phrasing.

Kamala wants to unleash her inner prosecutor

Kamala can't unleash her inner prosecutor when she's being interviewed 1 on 1 by a friendly journo, I very much doubt she'll be able to out-shitpost Trump on stage. Maybe they think they have some real good pre-learned zingers for her, or maybe they realise just how bad the whole mic-muting-control looks optics wise, the people understand they are desparate, maybe this is a way to show that they are somehow back in control. It'll be hillarious either way.

They also want Kamala to get a 'Shut up, I'm talking' viral clip.

The public likes Trump more when he shuts up. Throughout all his political campaigns (with an exception of early 2016) and his entire presidency, his approval rating and polling would go down when he was in the news for saying boneheaded crap, and then it'd go back up when he wasn't saying anything at all. Trump doesn't ever really do stuff that's good PR, so simple "not bad" is the high point for him.

The Harris campaign likely judges that the more he speaks, the more likely he is to put his foot in his mouth. The most spectacular example of this was the first debate in 2020 when he acted like a petulant child the entire time, which cost him 4% in post-debate polling. 4% is a crazy big move in an era of hyper polarization.

There's also the chance that Trump is now just too old to really quip back effectively. Trump has never been a particularly effective debater. He could hold his own in 2016 and benefited from his opponent imploding in 2024, but he's always had a meandering semi-coherent speaking style that's only become worse with age. There could be an opportunity for Harris to jab at him in a way that he couldn't effectively counter.

Trump's campaign knows he's a liability, but Trump himself almost certainly doesn't like being "muzzled" to any extent, so it's Trump + Dems on one side and Trump's campaign on the other, trying to keep their candidate from another self-inflicted wound. I can only imagine the lies his campaign staff is trying to cook up to convince him not to turn on the mics, because they obviously can't tell the truth to someone like him.

I think it's a defensive move; Trump is good at debates (well, not at debating, but at turning the debate to his advantage) so they want to force a 'draw' by making it as chaotic and unproductive as possible.

Not a great strategy, Kamala trying to match Trump will probably come off as 'bitchy', not the 'sassy' they're hoping for.

What in the world?

Trump has never been good at debating. At best he's been OK, as in he's been good enough to not crumple to someone like Jeb Bush's attacks back in 2016, but he's never really gained much from debates, he's just treaded water.

Then in 2020 he gave one of the worst debate performances in presidential history.

And he flubbed strategically in 2024 by letting Biden debate way early, when there was still time for the Dems to change horses. Trump is in a much weaker position because of that debate than where he was before it.

Let’s see:

  1. He ended Jeb Bush’s political career in a debate.

  2. He had one of the best lines in debate history “because you’d be in jail” which just might have pushed him over the top in 2016.

  3. He ended Biden’s political career in a debate.

He did poorly in 2020.

Not sure id say he is a top debater but he surely isn’t bad.

  1. I don't recall any great debate flub by Jeb, but 2016 was a long time ago so maybe I'm forgetting something?
  2. The "because you'd be in jail" didn't help him, and if anything it temporarily cost him support with moderates. Trump went from -4.6 against Clinton to -7.1 in the weeks following that.
  3. Biden self-destructed. Trump didn't do anything to help it along other than a weak "I don't think he knows what he's talking about" and be minimally competent enough to not also get dinged. A good debater could have accelerated it (like what Christie did to Rubio in 2016).

he's never really gained much from debates, he's just treaded water.

This is a pretty bizarre standard, because generally debates don't matter much at all. Who remembers the 2008 or 2012 debates? As I recall Romney was generally considered to win a few debates against Obama, but it didn't really matter and nobody cared. Trump, by contrast, used the 2015 debates to win the primary, the 2nd debate with Hillary to revive his campaign after the Billy Bush tapes, and now his debate with Biden to force an unprecedented mid-election switch. Declaring that Trump is a bad debater is one of those stylistic preferences, where people who already don't like Trump conclude he isn't actually good at anything.

Who remembers the 2008 or 2012 debates?

I remember Obama's "slam dunk" on Romney, in which he said the following.

Gov. Romney, I'm glad that you recognize that al-Qaida is a threat, because a few months ago when you were asked what's the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia, not al-Qaida. You said Russia ... the 1980s, they're now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War's been over for 20 years

It's somewhat ironic, in retrospect.

He did great in the 2016 republican debates. Consistenty entertaining and stole the spotlight, as you'd expect from someone who spent so long working in reality TV. He struggles more with the 1v1 debate format, i think. Maybe because that gives both people too much airtime and the whole thing is just boring.

His advantage in the 2016 debates stemmed from his approach being so unconventional that the audience found it exhilarating, and the other participants were so flummoxed by anyone not being appalled by it that they didn't know how to effectively respond. By 2020 his schtick had worn thin, and Biden knew what he was up against.

Honestly that says more about the extraordinary weakness of the 2016 Republican field than it does about Trump's strength.

The silver lining here is that it's going to be great entertainment.

Millions of streamers are now salivating at the prospect of commenting on a sassy black woman putting misogynist old huwhite Drumpf back in his place or glorious tangerine god emperor throwing Kamabla in a volcano of facts and logic.

There is a grandiose spiritual conflict for the ages in this. The shameless robber baron huckster versus the soulless HR lady corporate face.

Which one will better skewer social norms to their aid? Which one will inherit the soul of America?

Millions of streamers are now salivating at the prospect of commenting on a sassy black woman putting misogynist old huwhite Drumpf back in his place or glorious tangerine god emperor throwing Kamabla in a volcano of facts and logic.

Neither of these seems likely to me. Kamala doesn't seem that witty, and "facts and logic" isn't the kind of witty Trump is, even when he's on.

huwhite

Unrelated but what is this spelling about? I've seen it a lot but never got the memo.

I thought it was like cool whip. https://youtube.com/watch?v=nfVEvgWd4ek?si=Yuf-nRiy-BURug_2

I think it started with imitating famous Japanese social scientist Jared Taylor's upper class accent.

I think it's supposed to be mocking people with upper-class accents who pronounce the "w" in white.

Or it's referring to this chick.

(Despite her going viral a while ago, the only video I could easily find of her was from the Daily Wire. "Asian girl spitting while saying white people" uh... gives a lot of results in an entirely different genre...)

There are people... Who don't pronounce the "w" in "white"?

Sorry - meant "h". Apparently it's actually supposed to be lower-class dialect, though I distinctly remember a debate on a talk show many years ago where a Bostonian was arguing that "whether" is properly pronounced with an "h." Which is probably why a pretentious, aspirated "wh" sound registers more as an upper-class thing to me.

I was scratching my head trying to figure out how someone pronounced white sans w. Hey look that guys hite!

Pronouncing the h is one thing, inserting an initial h is another.

I’m not convinced that @hydroacetylene and @sarker are right about the intended connotations. The various upper class New England accents (most notably the Transatlantic accent, but other accents as well) have also traditionally distinguished between “w” and “wh.” I’d always assumed that “huwhite” was meant to mock the (outdated) stereotype of an old-fashioned, conservative, racist, elitist, country club snob, not a poor, dumb hick.

To be fair, the white racist in question could be southern too, but either way, he’s elite.

"huwhite" clearly emphasizes an initial "h" sound, not that there's an "h" following the "w".

More comments

Pronouncing the h in white is a deep rural accent from the red dirt belt where the south and lower midwest meet- not particularly upper class or high status. Think Hank Hill but ruraler.

Yes, this must surely be it. Imagine "hwhaait" in a southern drawl.

The times I’ve seen it it’s used to at least imply that the person involved is hoping a white man would be put in his place.

I expect probably both bitchy and sassy are undesirable adjectives here. Confident and aggressive, maybe.

It helps them avoid talking policy which seems to be one of their main strategies other than keeping Kamala away from any unscripted events. I mean obviously during the debate itself they will finally have to justify their policy assuming Trump can call them out on how stupid things like price caps on food, taxing unrealized gains, and giving virtually everyone 25k free towards their house is, but if there is a lot of back and forth bickering and banter between those bits than the media coverage over the next week can ignore the policy weaknesses and just report on the Jerry Springer esque drama. Drown out any policy weaknesses.

I think one interesting thing Trump could do is say you were against XYZ and now allegedly coming to my position. The position you labeled deplorable. The position you labeled anti American. Maybe if voters want that position, vote for the guy who didn’t try everything else until they were forced to at the last moment.

I think it’s 3). Kamala is trying to bait trump into looking like an ass canceling.

He says many stupid-sounding things. In the recent event where the guy was grabbed by cops going over the rail I heard Trump in the background (well technically he was the main event but the video footage was of the climbing guy), expounding on how at some point in the recent past (maybe his shooting day) a couple of US flags were flying in just the right way as to resemble, in a photograph, angel's wings. Which is Sunday School for toddlers enough of an image, but then he kept on about it, like he wouldn't drop it. Now I'm not irreligious and I can even be moved by certain religious iconography but this seemed like the kind of hamfisted shitty politicking you'd hear in a Hollywood film penned by someone trying to satire a populist politician.

Anyway. I am trying very hard to see Trump in the best possible light. I find not listening to him speak useful. God help me.

The longer Kamala speaks uninterrupted, the more incoherent she appears. Thus, her teams wants the debate to be a continuous conversation: She interrupts Trump, he interrupts her, and she doesn't get bound up in 2 minute rambling answers. This is the opposite of Joe, who can no longer adapt quickly to a live conversation, so they wanted closed mics so he could recite rehearsed answers.

The twitter PR spin (that comes from Kamala's handlers, almost certainly not Kamala herself) is just spin. I think you have to be very credulous to believe that Trump is scared of debating Kamala Harris. Likewise, I don't imagine that Kamala's brain trust is a brilliant team of superplanners. They probably just figured this was an attack line that sounded good. I don't think it is.

The longer Kamala speaks uninterrupted, the more incoherent she appears.

There's an interesting point in there.

Most politicians are quite good at establishing a rapport with their constituents during in-person interaction. I won't link them here for the sake of brevity, but "I met ${congressman} and he wasn't the scum-sucking pile of human shit that I expected him to be" stories are incredibly common. This rapport building usually translates to public speaking as well. It's almost a universal trait in politicians.

Off the top of my head, I can only think of four cases where that's not true, and where direct person to person communication seems to result in lower favorability for the politician in question. They are in no particular order:

  • Kamala Harris
  • Hillary Clinton
  • Michael Bloomberg
  • Rick Santorum

Looking at that list, I can't really see any obvious commonality. We have two and a half Democrats and one and a half Republicans (I'm splitting Bloomberg). We have prosecutors and businessmen. We have men and women. We have representatives from the North, South, East, and West.

Are there other politicians like this, where their mere presence seems to be anathema to their political goals? What's behind it?

Hillary is the GOAT of "How in the hell is she worse in person?!" stories around the beltway.

The further we get from 2016, the more it looks like a Trump victory was inevitable.

None of them had really faced a truly competitive election before, except for Santorum (who racked up some genuinely impressive wins). Usually politicians have to have some baseline likeability to get to the national election stage.

Rick Santorum

Are we sure about that? The public seemed to like him less as they got to know him, but he was supposedly genuine, friendly, and caring-seeming in person, just way outside the overton window on the public stage.

Santorum's political career is an interesting case study. Everyone forgets this, but when he was in the House he represented a district that was heavily Democratic and waged his first Senate campaign as the prototypical "compassionate conservative" who would look critically at the budget but still try to accommodate social services spending. At the very least, he always shied away from the "up by your bootstraps" mentality that characterized a lot of the Reagan right in those days. As such, he was a rising young star who had bipartisan support. His first term was relatively uneventful, and he cruised to victory in a totally unmemorable campaign that was nonetheless closer than it probably should have been. He was popular enough in PA but had no national profile. He decided to rectify this during the Bush administration by going hard in the direction of the religious right. This decision absolutely boggles the mind. Maybe things looked different in 2001 or 2002, but those guys generally don't win presidential primaries, let alone general elections. He couldn't even keep his Senate seat, losing to Bob Casey, who even back then always looked like he was about to fall asleep.

As far as him being unlikable in person is concerned — I'm from the same neck of the woods as him and I never heard that. That being said, most of his interactions around here are from the '90s, when he was "your local elected official" as opposed to after 2000, when he was "national political celebrity". Part of the reason people may view him as unlikable may be that he turned into a caricature of himself at some point and couldn't turn it off. Maybe the lone attendee of his 2016 rally during the Iowa Caucuses can shed some light on this.

He decided to rectify this during the Bush administration by going hard in the direction of the religious right. This decision absolutely boggles the mind.

It's entirely possible that this is 100% driven by genuine religious convictions.

That being said, most of his interactions around here are from the '90s, when he was "your local elected official

All the reports I have are from PSU and CMU faculty and staff. That probably has enough impact that, in hindsight, maybe I shouldn't have included him in the list.

Are we sure about that?

I can't say for sure. The people I know who have met him first-hand are all of a specific (upper middle class blue tribe) type, so there may be some cognitive bias in play.

"I met ${congressman} and he wasn't the scum-sucking pile of human shit that I expected him to be" stories are incredibly common.

I'm always surprised that they're surprised. Con artists don't scam people by being so off-putting that no one would ever want to speak with them. People can know going into an interaction that they're being targeted for a confidence trick and then still get tricked by it.

It would be interesting if Trump chose not to speak at all and gave Kamala a chance to hold a two hour uninterrupted unprepared speech.

The impartial, unbiased moderator would immediately declare the debate over. The network would then proceed to the post-debate discussion in which a panel of impartial, unbiased journalists would discuss how Kamala's stunning and brave girlbossity dazzled the Bad Orange Man into a catatonic state.

This is pretty low effort. At least make doomposting interesting and have something to say.

meanwhile... https://www.themotte.org/post/1140/transnational-thursday-for-august-29-2024/245145?context=8#context

The job of the mods is hard enough and they’re doing a great job. Let’s cut them some slack.

Campy is at least trying to be humorous which I appreciate. The mods post was just sneering. They literally can't think of a single reason beyond contrarianism that people aren't supportive of Ukraine?

You don't have to call me a "they," I'm not non-binary.

The question wasn't "Why aren't you supportive of Ukraine?" It's "Why are you pro-Russia?" Those aren't the same thing.

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Unmodded post, he can say whatever as a citizen.

And in every discussion you will see the same comments about how they're against Ukraine because globalism or trans people or something. It just feels wildly incongruous every time, like trolling.

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Here is an interesting development: Kamala Harris is now demanding unmuted microphones for her debate with Donald Trump.

You think that was a demand?

The full text of the tweet is:

Donald Trump is surrendering to his advisors who won't allow him to debate with a live microphone. If his own team doesn't have confidence in him, the American people definitely can’t. We are running for President of the United States. Let’s debate in a transparent way—with the microphones on the whole time.

I don't think "Let's [do thing]" would be a demand if Trump was saying it, and I don't think this is a demand.

And I think that without those blinders, it is pretty plain to see that she is trying to taunt him.

My guesses are more like some mix of

  1. They're changing the conditions repeatedly to try to get Trump to pick a fight in a fit of pique and call off the debate altogether. Which Trump might do at any given time. This is at worst a neutral outcome for Kamala.

  2. They want a messy debate where Trump yells a lot and she scolds a lot and the moderators try to get everyone back into order and nobody even remembers what anyone said about anything substantive. They don't think Kamala can deliver a great performance, so the best choice is to make sure that Trump doesn't either. The noise about it is at worst a neutral outcome for Kamala.

I maintain my theory that Kamala's mission is primarily aiming to shithouse a draw, and if she manages a win then great. But the goal is to make sure the Dems win the house, hang onto as close a margin in the Senate as possible, and hopefully win the popular vote to undermine the Trump "mandate" in the popular consciousness. What could undermine that goal is a disaster debate, where Kamala looks lost on substantive issues.

So they're minimizing risks. The better, more substantial debate has upside, but it has downside. A shithouse yelling match will just force everyone to double down on their priors and won't change anything.

I like this take.

Trump's debate performance is a known quantity. He can land solid substantive points earlier in the debate. He had some real wins on immigration in the first half with Biden. He then gets either bored, distracted, or hung up on a single issue. This turns into rambling, but Trumpian rambling has a fixed return on investment - pretty much zero, but not negative.

Kamala's debate abilities are forecast to be between 2008 financial crisis and negative eleven billion. The DNC showed she can give a speech, perhaps. But the time pressures and direct adversarial nature of a debate are not at all her home field.

Exactly. The dems are losing two senate seats for sure, and there’s good chances of losing two or three more. They don’t really have pickup opportunities. Their standard bearer is a ditz whose softball interview with CNN had to be edited and still looked bad. The democrats strategy is to minimize risk as much as possible while trying to drive TDS. If Kamala can scrape out a win that way it’s great, but if she can’t, then at least keep the republicans from winning 54 senate seats and enough house seats to do what they want.

If having unmuted mics worked for Trump last time, why is his team not agreeing to it now?

I'm thinking trumps cognitive decline is far worse than expected and his team is worried about how he'll look.

What are you talking about? Trump speaks in public regularly and gives frequent interviews. These interviews are more critical than anything Kamala Harris or Joe Biden are subjected to. Trump was literally just shot in the head at a rally and had the presence of mind to stand up and pump his fist yelling, "Fight! Fight! Fight!" Before that, he debated Joe Biden in conditions that lead to Biden having to resign from the race. He was just at Arlington and gave several appearances in public there. What decline? Trump isn't hiding.

I think "Trump's cognitive decline" is just a talking point from the DNC, though I thought it had petered out a couple of weeks ago.

I think Trump actually has gotten worse at getting a point out. When he wanted to cite Snopes fact checking Charlottesville at the Biden debate he couldn't quite land the point in a way where you knew what the hell he was talking about if you weren't already familiar with what he was trying to say.

He’s been living politics for so long now he assumes everyone else has a similar knowledge base.

I mean, Trump has a pretty unique cadence to his speech. It's always been a bit rambly, a bit non sequitur. The usual hallmarks of senility, the inability to hold a conversation thread, are kind of difficult to apply to Trump.

That said, when I have bothered to watch long form Trump speeches or interviews, while he's not at Biden levels of word salad and starring slack jawed into space, he's definitely lost a step from 2020. And he's lost a lot of energy and force from his performances since 2016. I was watching that clip of him talking about his brother on Theo Vonn's podcast, and while he was human and sincere in a way you rarely see politicians, he also told the same part of the story what felt like a dozen times, got distracted, repeated it again, etc, for like 15 minutes.

And like I said, that's kind of always been part of Trump. But like Biden's stubbornness, it seems cranked up to 11 as he nears the cusp of "If this were Grandpa, we wouldn't be letting him drive anymore".

I'm still voting for him. I don't think applying "cognitive decline" to him the way it was applied to Biden is remotely fair or honest. But it's also impossible to ignore that he's lost a step or three since 2016.

It doesn’t really work as a political ploy the way it does with Joe. Trump still seems to have some vitality. See his golf outing with the PGA star.

I do think it is fair to ask “what about in three years”

I hate to be pedantic but Bryson DeChambeau is not a PGA star. He's a former PGA Tour star, and possibly a LIV Golf star, if you're of the opinion that LIV Golf actually has stars.

Something tells me you don’t hate to be pedantic.

The bullet wasn't really a back and forth debate. Neither was Biden, speaking facetiously.

And if there's no decline, why does his team not want open mics for him?

Trump has been subjected to intense public scrutiny. He speaks in public over and over and over again. We know what it would look like if he were senile: his handlers would hide him from the public and run a front-porch campaign, as they did with Biden, as they're essentially doing with Kamala.

The mics were muted last time and the pundit consensus is that this was in Trump’s favor.

Agreed. I think Trump came off as less unhinged to the normies by waiting his turn. He didn't need to do anything because Biden sunk himself. Kamala can't talk off the cuff in a credible way as far as I've seen so the same strategy might pay out.

She is well known for having scolded previous participants including Mike Pence, so I strongly suspect the goal is to portray her dominance by both interrupting Trump and throw him off balance and theteby goading him into a nasty retort, and also to contemptuously scold him if he interrupts her. I'm sure the idea is to exploit female sympathy to the maximum extent possible. It didn't work that great for Clinton though, so I doubt it's worth the bad PR of reneging a fair agreement.

ETA: I previously stated that I much preferred the debate with no talking over and everyone I discussed it with expressed the same. They should keep to these rules purely for the benefit of the viewing public if nothing else.

I strongly suspect the goal is to portray her dominance by both interrupting Trump and throw him off balance and theteby goading him into a nasty retort, and also to contemptuously scold him if he interrupts her. I'm sure the idea is to exploit female sympathy to the maximum extent possible. It didn't work that great for Clinton though, so I doubt it's worth the bad PR of reneging a fair agreement.

I'm not so sure - when some researchers put on a genderflipped 2016 presidential debate, female!Trump, with all Trump's mannerisms and lines ("WRONG!") turned out to be incredibly popular, and male!Hillary was reported as “'really punchable' because of all the smiling." If Hilarie had acted more like Kamala proposes to ("I'm Speaking!") it may well have gone much better for her.

You know, when she scolded Mike pence she still lost- to both him and the fly landing on his head.

I’m pretty sure that dem staffers are up their own assholes in a media bubble, but I don’t think they’re that far up their assholes.

In what way did she lose?

Yeah, I'm not sure sounding like a scold is the win some think it is

It just leans into the further political polarization between men and women. Women overwhelmingly cheer a woman living out their "and everybody clapped" public humiliation fantasy against a boorish man. Men get PTSD flashbacks to all the normalized relational violence they've suffered. It's just going to be two screens the whole way down.

Eh, a brutal slugfest of talking over each other is probably better for Kamala than her uninterrupted rambling. But coming off as a bitch doesn’t endear her to the median woman- women are really harsh on each other.

Men get PTSD flashbacks to all the normalized relational violence they've suffered.

Can you please expand on this a bit? I’m not sure what you mean.

My read is that he's using 'violence' in the same way that campus protestors do, to mean things that make the accuser feel attacked. In this case, women humiliating their menfolk in public (which is obviously bad and can shade into abuse, but isn't violence).

Thanks!

My bad, I meant Relational Aggression. But no, I didn't make it up out of whole cloth.

Thanks!

What does "two screens" mean?

Two movies, one screen.

Yeah, WC got the expression pretty much backwards, but it's an established enough part of the lingo around here that I knew what he meant right away.

My impression is that her team think they can train her up with a few canned clapbacks (eg. “I’m speaking now” that @WhiningCoil mentioned below) that will please the base, and that maybe there’s the added bonus of interrupting a Trump ramble where he goes way off topic as he is wont to do with some kind of “Donald, what are you even saying?” question that might provoke him into getting mad or doing something stupid.

Kamala's singular successful quip is "I'm speaking now". If Trump never interrupts her, she never gets to girlboss him back and have everybody clap. In fact, having the microphones muted except when it's your turn to speak is even worse. I recall, possibly falsely, that during her debate with Pence in 2020 she got so in the rhythm of going "I'm speaking now" when Pence would interject, she started accidentally doing it when she was point of fact talking over Pence during his time to speak. And then everybody clapped.

Unironically, what would be Trump’s best response to “I’m speaking now”? If you were wargaming strategies with him, what advice would you give?

Is it just unbeatable because of the broader cultural optics? Part of the problem is that I have no idea what the psychological profile of an “undecided” voter could possibly look like at this point, so it’s hard to craft a strategy that could appeal to them (because winning over Kamala supporters in any non-negligible amount is a non-starter).

Part of the problem is that I have no idea what the psychological profile of an “undecided” voter could possibly look like at this point

A few I’ve spoken to(understand my filter bubble is not representative)

  • thinks Trump’s personal behavior is too much to look past, but also that democrats refusing to condemn after birth abortions is too. Generally trust Trump on the economy but thinks he’s likely a criminal.

  • thinks republicans are too socially conservative but doesn’t trust democrats not to make inflation way worse through shear incompetence. Antiwoke and anti war but moderate to liberal on most of the issues, including things like race and the border.

  • opposed to wars and likes trump on that basis, but scared of rate cuts and thinks democrats are less likely to push/enable the central bank. Thinks Trump won the 2020 election.

  • conspiracy theorist and major antisemite who opposes wars, wokeness, and an open border, but supports woke prosecution for no reason I can understand. Doesn’t expect trump to be better on the economy but is mostly center-right on social issues, except for far right on guns.

major antisemite but supports woke prosecution

Damn they should come in for an AMA.

Wild guess: Nation of Islam or similar background.

Nope, just conspiracy theorist. White claims-to-be-Cherokee, more or less consistent with his views that low level crime should be basically tolerated- he thinks the owner of a store should have carte Blanche to beat a thief but that the police shouldn’t be called. Oh, he's also a legalize-all-drugs, yes including the ones that kill you, type but he still doesn't like gays or abortion and supports strong religious liberty protections and lax homeschooling laws.

That’s consistent. I’d probably like the guy, even if the feeling’s not mutual.

Honestly I'm torn between wanting to see him post on the motte and not wanting to see competition with SS for most antisemitic motteizean.

“If you wanna speak then actually say something, Kamala”

Or perhaps a bit longer form:

“Kamala wants to speak? After refusing to give interviews alone? Well she’s been talking a lot tonight but she’s not saying anything in terms of policies. Not a thing. Very sad, you know, the American people want to know what your policies are, Kamala. They wanna know and you’re not telling them a thing. You can’t though because you do have a record. The Biden-Harris record, and it’s been a total disaster. You wanna run for President but you’re running away from your record. Which has been a complete horror show, so if you wanna speak then talk about the Afghanistan withdrawal or inflation or immigration. All disasters.”

If it were me I'd just break the fourth wall and point out that its literally her one move. Tell her to get it out of her system since she changed the debate rules to do it. Mime saying it with her since shes so predictible. If there were and audience I'd lead them in a mocking chant of it. Turn it into that Simpsons meme about Bart saying the line.

I say this like it'd be easy to do, and it probably wouldn't. You'd need the instincts and timing of a veteran performer. Lucky for Trump, while he's no Bill Burr or Tony Hinchcliffe, I'd still say he has better odds than most at pulling that off.

Yeah. The Chris Christie approach re Rubio. Basically “you had that one canned just like you did for Pence—do you have anything to say that isn’t preprogrammed and focus grouped? Do you have something genuine to tell the American people?”

a solution that occurs to me would be for him to just start saying "i'm speaking now" early and often as an interruption and also talking over any interruption she makes. after he's said it 10-20 times go back to business as usual. (and if she starts saying it, talk over her and say it at the same time)

I can see that being very effective. Even if you're not fond of girlbosses, not being able to hold your own in a debate is a very telling weakness.

This is just mind games. The Harris Campaign is using meaningless nitpicks to bait Trump into doing something stupid. I think this is an underrated strategy in general. It would be very bullish for Harris if the people in charge are this smart.

The catastrophically bad setup and staging of her recent interview suggest that this is not the case.

Pennsylvania's Commonwealth court just ruled that ballots that are in Allegheny or Philadelphia must be counted, even if they are undated or misdated. This only applies to ballots submitted on time, purportedly. The takes that I've generally seen online are that this is evidence that they have plans for fraud. The court argued this, though, on the grounds that dates are unnecessary, as the counties have other means of telling when votes were submitted (I think they scan a barcode when received). But what's certainly a problem is that this decision was written to apply only to Allegheny (where Pittsburgh is) and Philadelphia counties, the two counties that contribute the largest margin to the democrats. Given that they estimate that around 75% of mail-in ballots are for democrats in Pennsylvania, the most mail-in ballots are from suburban and urban voters, and that around 10000 ballots were not counted for that in 2022, this could have the effect of aiding the democrats by 5000 votes or so. Thankfully, this is only 0.07% of the vote, so not all that likely to be decisive.

The other interesting feature of this case is that the court ignored non-severability provisions, which said that if any provision of the act, or its application to any person or circumstance, was held invalid, the whole act is void. They did so merely by arguing for a presumption of severability in Pennsylvania laws, despite the explicit language to the contrary in this case. Voiding the act would have thrown out the entire mail-ballot system. Them striking down part of it, but not the whole thing, against the explicit text, seems the most sophistic part of the whole thing, to me.

This can still be appealed to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. It's blue, though, so I'm not expecting changes. Thankfully, it doesn't seem like, barring fraud, the effect will be too large.

Edit: Make sure you read the comments of @Rov_Scam, where he argues that I'm not representing this accurately or completely—I don't want to be misleading.

I find most relevant the announcement from Pennsylvania's Department of State:

Pennsylvanians won’t always know the final results of all races on election night. Any changes in results that occur as counties continue to count ballots are not evidence that an election is “rigged.” See the full explanation at http://vote.pa.gov/FactCheck.

What an odd thing to say. So hire more workers, run campaigns, do everything necessary to ensure you have the results. If significantly poorer, significantly less bureaucratically competent and on-the-whole significantly less organized and civilized countries can manage elections in single days, the continuing tolerance of statements like this -- statements that are expressly narrative primers for fraud -- in the Union is so goddamn insulting. They have the ability, we know this objectively from other countries, and we know from this statement they could but decline to do so. This is ostensible incompetence at counting ballots covering for a highly competent fraud machine.

The general upside is they'll lose the national regardless of fraud in Pennsylvania. The dream upside is they lose the state while posting so many precincts with actual and effectual >100% turnout even the laziest audit torches them.

Any changes in results that occur as counties continue to count ballots are not evidence that an election is “rigged.”

I'm going to be very blunt - they are lying. Everyone knows this is a lie. While changes to results aren't dispositive with regard to rigging, they absolutely constitute evidence of rigging. All else equal, it is much better that results be immediately obvious and transparent to all. Preemptively lying in this fashion is additional evidence of rigging.

The way the systems are designed really affects how they are counted. I know Arizona allows for day-of dropping off of mail ballots and requires signature verification, which slows things down, and so it can take a few days to be entirely finished. But Florida's way faster.

One of the things I find most irritating about gish gallop election fraud claims is the way they breathlessley move between theories that assume the theft of the 2020 election was something that Democrats had been planning for months and that it was something that was done at the last minute after they realized Trump was going to win. Somehow, your post seems to capture both of these sentiments simultaneously — the PA Department of State is planning on rigging the election, but it's apparently impossible for them to do so without a couple extra days on the back end. How this is supposed to work is beyond me.

What has to be understood about this discussion is the American left is better if they commit electoral fraud. It means they believe what they say, that they really do view their opposition as so grave a threat -- to whatever they hold sacred -- they are willing to take extreme measures to protect themselves. That left, who speaks and acts with capricious concern for constitution and law, have spent most of the last decade giving every indication they would steal an election if necessary, and you are calling them a unique kind of liar. You treat them with a cynicism even the most lefty-hating righty commentators don't hold. You won't find MacIntyre musing on the left not believing in what they march for; 0HP might observe on the meta their level of investment in a given position but he wouldn't categorically reduce the movement to having no conviction in what they say they believe. Hyde's most famous lines all implicitly consider their being genuine believers and Carlson knows them as zealots and speaks of them as such.

"They don't need to" begs the question in assuming they haven't. They needed to for most of the 20th century, we know they had fraud machines dominating major cities during that time, through JFK. What, they just stopped? As the economy exploded and the US reached ever greater hegemony, the corrupt interests packed up? Of course not, the system put selective pressure to produce the sorts of bureaucrats and politicians who don't get caught, and who exert control within their hierarchies such that the system further protects their ways of corruption. Pivotally on the election, which when we look at your field of arguments they fall apart one by one until you're left with "Well despite all that, they didn't." A process that produces a quantity result that cannot be audited is necessarily unfalsifiable. In literally any other circumstance an unfalsifiable number would be presumed false. Why not elections? Why not the thing that decides who has power?

"It hasn't been a problem until now," yes, and until the last 10 years the American government hasn't been in a dead sprint toward anarcho-tyranny. We haven't had such material reason to believe they would defraud a nation until now, and raising the novelty of our concern is not an argument.

"Gish gallop" is also not an argument, nor is your false dichotomy. Even you, which I say apropos your ideological inclination, must understand in the pure hypothetical, fraudulent actors would face extreme risk if they went all-in on flooding the machine with fraudulent ballots before the results are known. If they undershoot they lose, if they overshoot they hazard blowing past the polling margins while producing rows of precincts with ≥100% actual or effectual turnout and thus reveal themselves. It's no stretch to understand this as a priming of the narrative, something that requires no knowledge on the part of the individuals in the PA DOS responsible for actually making that statement, as the fraudulent actors anticipate as, like 2020, they will need some number of fraudulent ballots delivered after midnight November 6th, which is when they will have the totals so they will know the approximate number to inject to stay within the polling margin.

As for arguments from complexity, I wrote on this about a month ago. American history has immediate examples of conspiracies involving very large numbers of actors who never came forward. With "democracy and the future of the country" at stake, the ideological component of conspiring for the greater good is more than fulfilled. But this is just a reiteration of the above, that the only argument is "They wouldn't." They would, and their failure and now continued refusal to build a system that proves they don't is the only evidence anyone needs on the matter.

If I had to guess about you, and of course I am probably wrong, but I know this is the case for my brother and a couple of my dearest friends and so I know for many others -- I know they think my view, this view of the world is very bleak. They don't want to live in a world where the American left needs to cheat to win. There's a frightening finality to it, an upheaval of fundamental beliefs about the way of things. I definitely understand if nothing else the discomfort they have at the Trump Right being the good guys, which they feel is the necessary consequent to admitting a stolen election, but it isn't. Everybody can be and often are wrong about many things, like viewing me as a pessimist. I know I'm more optimistic than anyone I know, I don't think anyone on this site is as optimistic as I am about the future, and my optimism does include anticipation of a very dark period, but I see us getting past the issues of today, without war or calamity, I see us reaching the singularity and becoming post-scarcity and settling the stars. The shadows in the hearts of men don't discourage me, they embolden me, I know we'll make it through, but I know we'll make it through by understanding the world as it truly is. The world is what it is, reality is, all unaffected by our perceptions and by what we want to be true rather than what is true. The things we know in this life that are worth loving and worth working for all still exist, and we love them as they truly are even if we're not quite right about what they truly are. They exist in a world that does have shadows, they exist in great spite of those shadows. We just can't ignore the shadows. Know them, name them, chase them. Win.

That left, who speaks and acts with capricious concern for constitution and law, have spent most of the last decade giving every indication they would steal an election if necessary, and you are calling them a unique kind of liar.

Really? I've been among mainstream lefties my entire life and I've never once heard anyone say that elections should be stolen if necessary, whether from personal acquaintances or any mainstream media or political figures. Of course, you never claimed that they said as much, only that they gave indications that they believe it, which is whatever you subjectively interpret that to mean. Anyway the sum total of your case is as follows: 1. Leftists gave "indications" that they were willing to steal an election. 2. Democratic politicians had fraud machines in major cities 60+ years ago. 3. They couldn't overshoot their fraud or they'd get caught, 4. Big coordinated secret campaigns have happened before.

What you haven't presented is any real allegation, let alone real evidence. Give me a name or names and describe something specific that they did and how it affected the vote totals. Then provide some kind of evidence, whether documentary or testimonial. If Trump were to have won the 2020 election I'm sure I could have come up with just as many broad, vague, unprovable allegations as to why the Republicans rigged the election, were I so inclined. Give me something like "The Bubb County Judge of Elections commandeered 1500 mail-in ballots that the postal service returned to his office as undeliverable and marked them for Biden. As evidence of this we have copies of the ballots themselves, which all have signatures which an expert concludes are from the same pen, and email from the judge to his secretary telling her to hold onto any returned ballots, the testimony of the secretary stating that the judge instructed her to put the ballots into the office safe, and testimony from the assistant judge saying that he wanted to consult with the county solicitor on the matter of what to do with the ballots but the judge told him not to worry about it. This would create a strong, though not dispositive, case of fraud.

As for arguments from complexity, I wrote on this about a month ago. American history has immediate examples of conspiracies involving very large numbers of actors who never came forward.

One thing all those have in common is thousands upon thousands of pages of documentary evidence. There's no way you're running a complex fraud operation across five states involving hundreds of local boards of election and doing it all with in-person meetings that wouldn't arouse anyone's suspicion. What makes you think the people counting the ballots are all ideologically motivated to the point where they'd be willing to commit felonies? Seriously, if your employer asked you to commit a felony for ideological reasons and promised that you'd totally get away with it, would you do it? I know people who actually counted ballots in Allegheny County. They're county employees who don't make a lot of money. They also hate doing it and look for any excuse to do their regular jobs on election day (one supervisor described the tedium of testing thousands of voting machines as they moved them out of storage). Even if you assume they were all paid off, that amount pales in comparison with how much money they'd make if they were able to present a credible case of electoral fraud. It wouldn't even be that hard to prove either since you'd have to hold huge training sessions with handouts and Power Point slides. I know you're going to come back at me with some supposition on how they destroyed the evidence and how every employee in Allegheny County is a Democrat and whatever but unless you can actually prove any of this, I don't want to hear it. Just show some real evidence or quit making the allegation.

How do we have a discussion when you ignore the evidence staring you in the face? The evidence of fraud is the inability to audit results. If a corporation's books have unauditable numbers year after year, people will go to jail. Why is this not the standard for American elections? You repeatedly present the tautological "They wouldn't cheat; they aren't criminals." You don't get to claim this, one you could know every single elections department worker and poll worker and poll volunteer in Alleghany County and it still wouldn't be an argument, and two, it is insultingly untrue to present the institutional American left as having a moral compulsion against breaking the law, most definitely including "felonies." (Also, Pennsylvania was won in 2020 by Philadelphia, no matter how great your familiarity with the mechanics of Pittsburgh politics, it says nothing about the notoriously corrupt Illadelph.)

Maybe 100 years ago a guy could make it through court by taking the stand and saying "I'm just not the type of guy to have done this." Today, that guy would go to prison. I see the retort, "If there's no evidence" -- there may be no murder weapon, but there's means, motive, and opportunity. Circumstantial evidence yes, people do to go prison over circumstantial evidence, but I only make this comparison for the lack of investigation when any one of these meets criteria. A system closed to audit is means; the transferal of executive power is motive; a dominant ideology among poll workers is opportunity. There should be investigations in every state at a minimum every 4 years. I'd support it in my blood red state, as would almost if not universally the voters in this country who could characterize themselves as if nothing else "not left." Yes, when Trump wins in November, voice your doubts, clamor for investigation, I agree. We should audit every election, in every state. Prove it, everywhere, every time. Behind you 100%.

As for paper trails, we still don't know the depths of MKUltra because Helms had so many records destroyed. We know very little about the CIA's drug smuggling because they learned to keep looser books. They don't need records, they would need conversations, those surely happened, but if nobody's recording, nobody goes to jail. Also keep in mind MKUltra included mid-20th century-cultured-American university personnel giving highly psychoactive substances to individuals who did not consent. Stopping the next Hitler from getting to power? C'mon man. It's also feasible for disparate and especially mostly unwitting actors to converge on one goal. Atlanta is individually corrupt, Detroit is individually corrupt, Philadelphia is individually corrupt. Not hard to see their local corruption being incidentally congruous with a separate national objective. But to be clear, I do take somewhat more to the former, I would argue for some level of national conspiracy, insofar as on election night in 2020, the knowledge Trump was to win was received by a central source and propagated to those separate necessary parties who oversaw the injection of fraudulent ballots. There are also assumptions of numbers, we don't know the process, it is closed to audit, we have no idea if, were we able to examine the system, we would find a glaring "at this step it'd be trivial for a handful of actors to introduce significant numbers of fake votes."

And here we return to the inability of audit as proof of fraud. If an electoral system cannot prove itself to be free of fraudulent activity, like the mass injection of fraudulent ballots, that is itself an act of fraud. I describe a criminal act when saying of the system "It can't be audited," that is itself a crime. Though, even without this, you remain wholly mistaken on where the burden of proof lies, and on this I put most vital emphasis: I owe you nothing, the people owe you nothing, because myself and more than a hundred million of my fellow Americans are under no obligation to prove ourselves when we fear the government as having become criminal. The government however is obligated not only by the intrinsic bindings of our nation, but by the very essence of the social contract to prove, whenever demanded, that they aren't criminal. If they can't, they are.

Before when go any further, what do you mean by "inability to audit"? The last I checked all but 6 states had audit provisions. If you want to make that argument, fine, but you have to apply it to all states equally, so unless you can tell me what it is in particular about Texas's audit procedures that make it better than Pennsylvania, I'll have to assume that Trump only won Texas due to fraud, no? I'd like to respond to your other points as well but I need this cleared up first.

Respectfully, I think you're conflating two entirely separate mechanisms here. Actions taken at the state level do not require coordination at the local level, even if the actions taken at the state level can enable actions taken at the local level.

We know that Pennsylvania, and in particular Philadelphia, is unusually corrupt. So corrupt, in fact, that a former congressman was recently convicted on election fraud charges.

It is entirely possible that the department of state is not rigging the election. It's also entirely possible that the department of state is pointedly not taking steps to assure that other parties do not engage in illegal activities.

At the local level, we already know that actors have wildly rigged elections in multiple Pennsylvania precincts already. Are we supposed to ignore that evidence and not factor it into our priors? Given that the constant media drumbeat of "Trump as Existential Threat" has been banging for close to a decade now, are we supposed to believe that nobody might bend the rules (again, still)? Especially when it's for the Greater Good? Especially when we know that the supposed watchers are looking the other way?

If people are engaging in fraud what makes us think that they will be willing to steal an election but balk at back dating their fraudulent ballots?

I think we shouldn't be relying on the date the voter puts on their ballot at all. In Bayesian terms, it's not very good evidence one way or the other.

But the law apparently required the State to give it credence. Which is silly.

Excellent point, you're right, I shouldn't have mentioned it.

This seems like a pretty good scenario to go back to the basics: ballots should be counted if the relevant authority can be assured they arrived on time should not be counted otherwise. The remaining effort is on how to ascertain that for a given set of facts.

If an early MIB arrived on October 15th and the relevant authority has strong assurance of that (it went into a chain-of-custody and blah blah blah) then not counting it because it was dated wrong seems unjustified. Other fact matters might lead to different conclusions.

The remaining effort is on how to ascertain that for a given set of facts.

The obvious answer would be to knock it off with the gigantic piles of no-reason absentee ballots and just hold a normal election.

There are real concerns with absentee ballots, the inability to date them is hardly the most salient.

This seems reasonable.

I addressed the mirage of this decision only applying to Allegheny and Philadelphia counties below. As to the severability question, any severability or non-severability clause in a statute is going to be ignored by courts. This has been true for a long time, in every jurisdiction. Courts in Pennsylvania and elsewhere have all but completely invalidated these clauses. If this seems sophistic to you, there are legitimate public policy reasons for the courts' stance. Consider the following: Congress passes a law with several provisions that are clearly, unequivocally, unconstitutional. The law also includes a provision saying that if any part of the law is ruled unconstitutional than every law passed by congress since 1890 is unconstitutional as well; the ultimate non-severability provision. I don't think we disagree that it would be ridiculous for a court to uphold such a provision. Now lets consider a less dramatic and perhaps more on-point example. Suppose the PA election law that was at issue here was part of a comprehensive electoral reform bill that completely replaced all prior election law, which was repealed in a separate bill. The new law includes a non-severability provision. Should any successful challenge result in the complete scrapping of an entire state's election laws? If there are clearly unconstitutional provisions in that law, should the courts be forced to either let them stand or concede total electoral chaos? There's obviously a line here somewhere, and the courts have repeatedly ruled that the only way to determine where it is is on a case-by-case basis. They strike down entire laws only when it's clear that the problematic provisions are essential to the law itself. They aren't going to let legislatures poison pill their way into keeping unconstitutional laws on their books.

The entire state’s elections wouldn’t vanish overnight because the non-severability provision would also apply to the part of the comprehensive election reform law that repealed the prior election law.

The statement that courts ignore severability is also absolutely wild, considering severability questions have been a major part of many Supreme Court cases (which is relevant, considering your example related to Congress). I’m not going to go trawling for more, but off the top of my head, this was the case for the NFIB case upholding Obamacare and the Reno case that effectively created the modern Internet by invalidating almost all of the Communications Decency Act.

I’d also agree with @anti_dan that it is reprehensible behavior even if it were true, so it shouldn’t matter if it is truly some norm amongst judges, as you claim.

The entire state’s elections wouldn’t vanish overnight because the non-severability provision would also apply to the part of the comprehensive election reform law that repealed the prior election law.

I specifically said that they repealed it in a separate bill.

The statement that courts ignore severability is also absolutely wild, considering severability questions have been a major part of many Supreme Court cases (which is relevant, considering your example related to Congress). I’m not going to go trawling for more, but off the top of my head, this was the case for the NFIB case upholding Obamacare and the Reno case that effectively created the modern Internet by invalidating almost all of the Communications Decency Act.

I'm not going to regurgitate it here, but Stilip v. Commonwealth (905 A.2d 918, 970) goes into an extensive analysis of why courts aren't required to strictly interpret clauses relating to severability. It basically boils down to a separation of powers issue: The legislature can't dictate to courts how they will analyze a case. They can provide such statements to demonstrate intent, but that's as far as it goes. The US Supreme Court ruled similarly, IIRC, in a case where the statute said that the court would use strict scrutiny as the standard of review, and the court basically said that you can't legislate the standard of review. The cases you reference are just examples where the court applied severability provisions. There's no conclusive ruling stating that courts are strictly bound by that language when deciding severability questions.

While your interpretation is what the courts actually do in practice, I find it fairly reprehensible. The court doesn't know that the severability clause (terminating all American law prior to 1890) isn't what the legislators actually wanted in the beginning. They are engaged in mind reading by not sticking to pure textual readings and saying "this is what the legislators told us they wanted".

Applying vote counting rules only to specific counties has shades of Bush v Gore and equal protection. Not that that case was supposed to set precedent. 🙄

Could this one go all the way to SCOTUS? Even if Pennsylvania's court doesn't change anything, they could.

Not that that case was supposed to set precedent. 🙄

Well, at least it set President (ba dum tss)

On what grounds did the court decide that this ruling only applies to those two counties?

Short answer: They didn't. The declaratory judgment invalidating the strict dating provisions as unconstitutional applies to all 67 counties.

Long answer: The plaintiffs only sued Allegheny and Philadelphia Counties. Since those counties declined to defend the suit, the Republicans (the RNC and the PA equivalent) intervened as defendants. They then filed a motion to dismiss on the basis that the plaintiffs failed to join all necessary parties. Civil procedure requires that certain "indispensable" parties be joined in a lawsuit. Typically this is for stuff like contracts involving multiple parties or property with multiple owners, where the court needs to sort out what everyone's rights and obligations are. The defendant intervenors argues that since any declaratory relief would apply to all 67 counties, the plaintiffs should have joined the other 65. The court didn't buy this argument; the plaintiffs said that the reason they only sued 2 counties is because those were the only counties where they had knowledge that voters were being harmed by the dating provisions. If the court had dismissed the suit on the grounds that the plaintiffs hadn't joined all necessary parties, the plaintiffs would have refiled the next day naming all 67 counties as defendants. At that point, the 65 counties who weren't sued the first time would have moved to dismiss for failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted, and the court would have been forced to grant those motions. The court didn't say this in so many words, but suffice it to say that if a court knows that an action against a party won't survive a motion to dismiss, they're loathe to find that party "indispensable" to the proceeding, especially if there are 65 such parties. The court can't issue injunctions against non-parties, so injunctive relief was only granted against Philadelphia and Allegheny counties by virtue of them being the only named defendants. The technical distinction is that they've been specifically ordered to stop something they were already doing. We officially don't know if the other counties were doing anything offensive to the state constitution or not, but the declaratory judgment clearly delineates what they aren't allowed to do in the future. Pinging @urquan since his comment touches on these issues.

Please use more paragraphs, they make text much easier to read.

Makes sense, thanks for the clarification.

I think just that only those two parties were part of the suit.

I think this election will provide evidence for or against the 2020 election fraud narratives.

How? Because some states, but not others, are now taking action to prevent election fraud. And if Republicans outperform expectations in those states it would indicate that Democrats were benefiting from fraud. It's a natural experiment.

Virginia seems to be ground zero here. The Republican governor, Youngkin, has directed that the voter rolls be purged of people who are dead, non-citizens, or have moved out of state. Tens of thousands have been purged. To further prevent fraud, they will only allow paper ballots, and the machines that count the ballots will be tested and not connected to the internet. People will need to request an absentee ballot instead of mass mailing of ballots. And all dropboxes will be monitored 24/7.

All of this stuff is basic common sense and should be standard practice.

The fact that many states don't take these basic actions is sort of a wink-wink-nudge-nudge, "there's no fraud, but also we're going to make it incredibly easy to do fraud". There's a good chance that this election will come down to how much cheating happens in corrupt cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee.

So I wouldn't be surprised if Trump outperforms polls in Virginia. I also won't be surprised if he doesn't. Whatever happens, it will be a good opportunity for me to update my priors.

One of the things I find most irritating about these "Voter integrity" narratives is that they operate on the assumption that states have crappy systems while the people making the arguments have no idea what the systems actually are. I can't speak for what Virginia's laws were like before Youngkin, but the fact that only "tens of thousands" of voter's were purged after his directive suggests that things were actually running like they were supposed to. I live in Pennsylvania, a state that's often accused of shenanigans and was in fact so accused earlier in this very thread, and they purged nearly 300,000 voters from the rolls in 2020. There was nothing unusual about this because they "purge" a similar number every year because that's how many people die or move away every year. While I wouldn't expect some rando on the internet to know that, I would expect a gubernatorial candidate to know that before he says the state of the PA voter rolls is so messed up we need to do a total purge and require everyone to re-register. OF course, it's easy to keep track of people who move out of state if you're part of a multi-state system that keeps track of these things. Youngkin, however, decided to remove Virginia from the ERIC system, following the lead of other Republican-led states who were convinced by conspiracy theories about it being some evil Democrat vote rigging scheme. How these states plan on eliminating those who move elsewhere from the voter roles is currently anyone's guess, but election deniers would prefer to ignore that.

To further prevent fraud, they will only allow paper ballots, and the machines that count the ballots will be tested and not connected to the internet.

Again, Pennsylvania was doing this before 2020. Voting machines were never connected to the internet. I'm unaware of any jurisdiction that hasn't tested voting machines before an election, at least in Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

And all dropboxes will be monitored 24/7.

I highly doubt this is the case. The most obvious concern about dropboxes is that someone could break into them and destroy the votes. This is not something I've heard the election deniers express any concern over. Instead, they express vague fears that the dropboxes will enable ballot harvesting that is somehow a vector for MASSIVE FRAUD. They might have an argument if the only place to cast these ballots were the dropboxes, but these are mail ballots. Every mailbox in the state is a potential ballot dropbox. If someone is going to ballot harvest they can just put them in a mailbox on the street, or mail them from their house for that matter. I doubt Youngkin is posting monitors at all public mailboxes, let alone monitoring households and businesses.

Instead, they express vague fears that the dropboxes will enable ballot harvesting that is somehow a vector for MASSIVE FRAUD. They might have an argument if the only place to cast these ballots were the dropboxes, but these are mail ballots. Every mailbox in the state is a potential ballot dropbox. If someone is going to ballot harvest they can just put them in a mailbox on the street, or mail them from their house for that matter. I doubt Youngkin is posting monitors at all public mailboxes, let alone monitoring households and businesses.

This sounds like an argument for increasing security around mail-in voting in addition to monitoring dropboxes more closely, not an argument that the dropboxes don't matter?

I mean, if states are doing this, then great! But let's be honest. Not all of them are. There are constant exposes about dead people on voter rolls.

Here's an article in which BBC "debunks" claims about dead people voting, then acknowledges that dead people did indeed receive ballots and maybe even vote, even if the maximalist fraud claims were untrue: https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-54874120

Given everything we know about state and local governments it's very unlikely that they do a good job maintaining clean voter rolls. Presumably the 80,000 people removed by Youngkin was opposed to the counterfactual of a Democratic governor. That's like 1% of the population of the state. It's big. But I'll admit that reporting on these issues is very low quality.

Personally, I think it's important to get this right, and to not dismiss concerns that people are voting illegally. You want people to buy into the system? Don't make them feel cheated. We need to have clean voter rolls. And we need to be able to easily prove that they are clean. To my knowledge, no states are doing that. The example of Michigan's effort to be transparent (in the linked BBC article) shows how badly managed these systems can be.

Caesar's wife must be beyond reproach.

won't this just be proof that Republican efforts are effective voter suppression which is what Democrats claim they are

Yes, suppressing the rights of the dead, the out of state, the non citizen and the ballot harvesters. How much did these factors matter? We’ll see.

To be maximally charitable, the requirement to request an absentee ballot does make voting harder, and thus constitutes suppression of legitimate (i.e., 18+, living, compos mentis, state-resident, US citizen, voting-once-per-election) voters—at least according to some people’s definition of “suppression”

Going further down this line of reasoning, anything less than electoral officials bringing a mobile voting booth and ballot box to your front porch would be "supression". At some point voters should make the smallest of efforts to enable themselves to vote for the sake of practicability and in support of election security.

The fact that many states don't take these basic actions is sort of a wink-wink-nudge-nudge, "there's no fraud, but also we're going to make it incredibly easy to do fraud"

I found this incredibly frustrating in all the discussions on the topic. I get "look, we can't overturn the elections on the basis of your sayso", but the lack of acknowledgement of the sad state of American election integrity was driving me bonkers.

I think the flip-side is, the lack of acknowledge of the frictions of voting are also frustrating.

Both are valid, IMHO. We have a system that manages to be both awful at integrity and awfully painful to use.

Can you elaborate on what friction there is to voting where you are? I am in Texas and I find it ridiculously easy and painless to vote here.

Well, these days I live in a deep blue state that's completely eliminated friction at the enormous cost of serious doubts about the integrity of the election. But before, I'd say the largest friction points were:

  • Narrow timing of in-person voting, sometimes just a single day that I couldn't make work
  • Long lines on occasion, or at least uncertainty about wait times
  • An inability to pre-fill choices on my own time and then go in person to quickly transfer them to an official ballot

You can 100% pre-fill choices on your own time and use the sheet in the voting booth in Texas(supposedly strictest voting laws in the nation), don’t know about other states. You just can’t use your phone(it must be physical paper) and need to research the races ahead of time.

Ideally I would want to get a machine readable version so voting in person was as smooth as possible.

VA is a bad test case to use, because it's got a giant tumorlike amalgram of the worst kinds of Never Trump Republicans around defense installations near DC.

Is this the beginning of a popular rebellion against woke Hollywood garbage?

Like (I imagine) a lot of you, I got fed up with mainstream Hollywood movies and TV a long time ago. For various reasons, but a big part of it was how they insisted on inserting heavy-handed woke propaganda into everything, even where it made no sense. I'm hardly the first to complain about that, but it seemed to be mostly anonymous online reactionaries complaining, while mainstream critics and everyone "respectable" still lapped it up. The Star Wars sequels, Nu-Trek, and all Marvel movies made $$$$$$$ while also gathering rave critical reviews, even though it became something of a joke when the "audience score" on rotten tomatoes was always so much lower than the "critic reviews" score.

And to be clear, I'm not (just) mad at those things because I disagree with their politics. I genuinely think those are terrible movies. They have bad plots, bad characters, bad dialogue, and often even bad at basic filmmaking stuff like editing, camera angles, and sound mixing. One theory I like is that, for quite a while, Hollywood was so focused on exporting big famous brands to foreign countries that they didn't care how it sounded in English. They'd all be watching it dubbed or with subtitles anyway, and then (hopefully) buying merch. But for a long time I felt like I couldn't say these things without getting labelled as a deranged culture warrior.

But now? I dunno. I'm seeing more and more open criticism of big hollywood brands, and some of it is coming from people who are not easily dismissed. Examples:

The last one was what inspired me to write this post. Lots have people have already criticized Star Trek over the years, most notably the RedLetterMedia guys who kinda got famous from it. But I associate most of them with the online right. This is a 4 hour review from someone who doesn't normally do movie reviews, and she felt compelled to keep saying how she normally loves seeing pro-diversity left wing messages in Star Trek. But it's such an amazingly bad series that even its target audience can't defend it. I'm not woke, but I used to love Star Trek as a kid. Picard season 1 was so terrible I refused to watching anything after that, and it made me completely hate the franchise as a whole. I know that "some people say" that it got better, or that some other new Star Trek shows are good, or whatever. I don't care, I hate that pile of garbage so much that I'm never giving them another dollar or view unless they publically apologize for it. It felt like someone (maybe Patrick Stewart? Maybe Alex Kurtzman? Maybe all the Star Trek actors who have been stuck doing silly conventions with crazy fans for decades?) genuily hated their fanbase and wanted to give them the finger.

I don't know. Maybe I'm being too optimistic here. But I feel like we've finally crossed the threshold where everyone is fed up with Hollywood's crap. They've taken pretty much every bit of pop culture we loved as children, and burned it all down to make a quick buck. They kept recycling the same crap in their little clique of Jewish Hollywood elites and refused to listen to any criticism. You can only keep doing that for so long before the audience gets sick of it.

And at long last, we can finally agree that the new Star Trek movies are bad, right?

It seems to me that hollywood is currently ongoing somewhat of a hangover moment: a lot of people there got really high on ideology in 2019-2021 and now that the high has subsided they're scrambling to fix the mess. Hence the acolyte getting canceled, borderlands and the marvels getting dumped without advertising, snow white, blade and captain america getting long delays and reworks, etc...

But it doesn't mean they won't get high again in the future. In fact I would say that for movies at least, it is guaranteed: they codified their DEI in the academy awards rules. What are they going to do? Make movies that can't get an oscar? I don't think so. I wouldn't be surprised if the movie-making side of hollywood is just going to slowly die and become more and more woke in the process.

Picard season 1 was so terrible I refused to watching anything after that, and it made me completely hate the franchise as a whole. I know that "some people say" that it got better, or that some other new Star Trek shows are good, or whatever

Season 2 is actually way worse. I was actually of the opinion that season 1, for all its faults, showed promise. Season 2 is terrible. It gets better with season 3, actually, season 3 is even good if you don't think too hard about some things. If you ever reconsider, skip season 2.

One important angle to the problem of Hollywood being woke and out of touch is that it’s been exacerbated by intensified political self-sorting in different industries including Hollywood. I imagine it’s actually gotten harder to find competent conscientious screenwriters young screenwriters in LA who aren’t politically progressive. So even if you want to appeal to middle America, it may be hard to find people able to do so with requisite skills and experience.

I don't think the problem is being able to find talent. I think they genuinely don't care anymore. Its like how government ambassadorships are usually given to party insiders and weathy donors as a reward, and if they happen to actually be good at the job that's just a happy little accident. These big media franchises have become so big, "too big to fail," that the people in charge can do whatever they want and the fans would still just buy it anyway.

It’s not just self-sorting — Hollywood has been intentionally purging itself of right-wing talent for far longer than the term ‘woke’ has even existed. The rural purge happened in the early 70s.

Any inability of Hollywood to appeal to middle America is its own fault. If they’re suffering for it now, it’s just the chickens of decades of purposeful ideological and cultural homogenization coming home to roost.

As long as they can keep anyone else from making money by appealing to the people they don't want to appeal to, they're fine with it.

Strictly speaking, who is losing here? The progressive media elite say they care about fulfilling the market demand of the hidden woke masses screaming for representation, and will whine that normies don't give a shit about lousy shows, but in the end the only opinion that really affects the media elite is their own peers. The hundreds of millions of dollars burnt on progressive shows shows up as a line item on some production companies balance sheet that disappears into a thousand hollywood bank ledgers as accounting aether.

This money was never theirs to curate, manage or be responsible for. Make the highest grossing R rated movie ever? Pandering to incel chuds (Joker) or manchildren (Deadpool). Lose a billion dollars with your female and minority heavy slopfest? The Marvels/WW84 was never for the men anyways and also its their fault for not supporting it so just keep slaying kween, its all good.

Its not like anti-wokeness is an automatic money printer. James Gunns Suicide Squad lost money while incredibly woke Avatar 2 made money, but neither director is playing the media victimization game. For video games Cliff Blezinski and Randy Pitchford are whiners complaining that modern gamers are woke pussies who like the marvel aesthetic, while Kill The Justice League is a flailing shitpile with defenders playing defense for uglified women.

The hollywood elite are all playing social games with each other and burning some index funds capital while clogging up our media with trash. They don't actually care about us, and are not obligated to actually deliver shit the audience cares about. Crash winning an Oscar was the start of the end, and our shows have been continually enshittified as a result.

It's worse than that. They actively don't want the wrong sorts of people liking their shows, because that would look bad to their peers. Trump supporters shouldn't have things they enjoy, and you shouldn't make things for them. Leaving that money on the table is the moral thing to do. You don't want to be that guy who the far-right online trolls like RLM are saying good things about.

You can go back well before Trump or modern era. The Rural Purge was a deliberate removal of still-popular and still-profitable television shows that cut not just rural media in general in favor of urban, but also greatly reduced regional representation. The nominal justification was in pursuit of younger audiences, but the executives also reportedly hated the format/genre of rural-representation, and given that this was during the era tv-centralization in the United States, that was the ultimate sort of cancellation.

Strictly speaking, who is losing here?

I don't know. I have a sense that Hollywood inside baseball is a strange, insular thing and not really legible to outsiders. Like you said, the execs making the business decisions aren't really risking their own money, and Disney has so many bllions that even a hundred million isn't such a big deal to them. And the artists making the shows clearly aren't that concerned with the aesthetic concerns of us plebs. I'm reminded of that Michael Chrichton quote, where he says there are things in Hollywood that are obvious to him as in insider, but which get reported completely backwards in the news. So I'm inclined to agree with you that it's all some internal status game. But tastes can change.

And to be clear, I'm not (just) mad at those things because I disagree with their politics. I genuinely think those are terrible movies. They have bad plots, bad characters, bad dialogue, and often even bad at basic filmmaking stuff like editing, camera angles, and sound mixing.

I tend to think it's the bad film-making ruining things, not the woke. The original Star Trek was pushing all sorts of boundaries (i.e. "woke" for it's era), but it holds up because the writing is good, and the characters are amazing.

But they went into it saying "I want to write a great sci-fi story that is also diverse", not "I want to write a diverse sci-fi show". The goal was to make a good TV show, not to ensure that black lesbians got more air-time.

A lot of shows these days start with the premise "what if we did X, but 'diverse.'" There's no thought to the characters beyond some token diversity labels - god, when was the last time we saw a Strong Female Character that wasn't basically interchangeable with every other Strong Female Character? But Uhura? She was an actual character, and she existed because it made sense for her to be in the story. She reacted how Uhura would react, not following a generic Strong Female Character script.

(I feel like the recent "all female" Ghostbusters was the best example of this: they swapped the genders, but somehow that had absolutely no effect on the rest of the script. They didn't bother to write interesting new female characters, or even to explore how gender-swapping might affect the existing plot.)

But they went into it saying "I want to write a great sci-fi story that is also diverse", not "I want to write a diverse sci-fi show". The goal was to make a good TV show, not to ensure that black lesbians got more air-time.

It's probably further up the pipeline, too. They're recruiting writers who aren't particularly good at their trade, but they have the right politics and personal identity, so they get hired.

The backlash won't just be criticism, it will be creation. It won't just be negation, it will be renaissance. It won't just be tearing down, it will be building up.

I'm not going to be really optimistic about backlash until I see actually good anti-woke art being made. Stuff like BAM or the collected works of Yarvin are a start, but I want to see a creative imaginary.

And Christian entertainment is getting more common.

what is BAM? google search is failing me on that one.

Bronze Age Mindset, Bronze Age Pervert's book. A fun little read on PDF. I'm sorta using it as a stand-in for all the 4chan philosophy majors out there, who have scribbled fun little weirdo screeds and incredible credos. But they're the background, not the immortal art itself. Yarvin and Scott Alexander aren't the thing itself, they're the kind of guys who are background to background, your favorite author's favorite author.

IF the anti-woke backlash hits for real, people will read stuff like that when they get deep into studying the masterpieces that come out of it and they want to see the thinker that inspired the intellectual atmosphere. The White Panther Party to understanding Kick Out the Jams. Some of them might make it.

Ah OK. I've heard of it but I would never think of it from just the acronym.

Bear in mind, it can take time for aesthetic taste to change. So many artists who are now famous died poverished and unknown during their own life. And others who were popular in their time are now mostly forgotten.

Bronze Age Mindset (BAM), the principle written work of Bronze Age Pervert (BAP)

I loved the new Star Trek films and hated the new series’.

And I love TNG & DS9.

Sooooo, no.

Agreed otherwise mostly - but Tarantino didn’t watch Toy Story 4 because he loved 3 so much.

Personally I... enjoyed the new Star Trek films, in the sense that I thought they were a fun way to spend two hours but will probably never watch them again. But I absolutely hate the new series. So... I think you and I are in agreement?

Have you watched SNW? Disco I stopped watching after a few episodes. Picard was garbage for 2/3 seasons. But SNW was decent.

SNW wasn't bad. In the he broader context of this thread, though, I think it's interesting that what I saw as the most culture-warry episode (refugee courtroom drama) was also probably the weakest, least engaging one as well.

Star Trek works best when it has a positive vision of the world that it wants to portray. That vision may be fully automated gay luxury space communism, but at least that vision exists, and a solid narrative flows from it when the writers respect it.

Agreed 100%. That was by far the weakest and was the most “message” episode of that series.

It is ironic because two of the strongest TNG episodes were court room episodes (The Drumhead and The Measure of the Man). These episodes dealt more with abstract principles instead of shoe horning in the latest thing.

I haven't, and probablly won't. i'm just totally burned out on that entire franchise now.

Jewish Hollywood elites

Hollywood is, as @SteveKirk suggests, less Jewish today than at any time since the 1930s. A combination of the streaming wars (the leading streamers controlled by Reed Hastings, of OG Boston Brahmin WASP stock, and Jeff Bezos, who’s a mix of things but certainly not Jewish), DEI and long-term secular decline in Ashkenazi intellectual performance due to intermarriage has seen to that handily.

I do think we've reached some sort of inflection point. There can never be another The Marvels, there can never be another The Acolyte. They can only take so many nine-figure bombs directly on the chin, and the ones they've already taken have exposed certain truths.

It turns out that no, men will not automatically turn up for literally anything with the right brand name on it. Yes, you actually need to appeal to them on a continuing basis. No, women don't actually want to see male-coded space warrior bullshit but now with empowered lesbians of color. Women don't give a single shit about that kind of thing.

Popular media discourse likes to focus on the white male chuds who are constantly mad about all these shitty movies and shows, after all they are the ones making all the noise, but it's that silent overwhelming apathy from women that really left "modern audience" advocates up shit creek. They gambled billions on the idea that a bunch of LGBT activists knew what the female audience wanted, and they lost.

The other thing that's changed is that the "product not bad, audience just bigoted" defense has finally reached expiration even with dumbshit Reddit normies. The cancellation of The Acolyte really brought this to a head, with the press and the actress herself going out of their way to blame "a torrent of alt-right bigotry" blah blah blah, and people just weren't having it. You could see them in the /r/television thread going "Wait a minute... I think they just say this every time something is bad!" as their brains finally caught up to eight years ago.

Captain America 4 is going to come out next year and bomb, at which point the entire MCU theatrical slate for the last couple years will have consisted of Deadpool & Wolverine's white male asses sitting on a pile of a billion dollars, bracketed by humiliating diversity flops. Watching the usual suspects in the media struggle not to notice is going to be interesting.

They gambled billions on the idea that a bunch of LGBT activists knew what the female audience wanted, and they lost.

I should look up how many major feminist figures are lesbians cause I have seen this claim before: that feminism is skewed by lesbian attitudes. But it isn't even just LGBT activists. Someone like Rachel Zegler is, AFAIK, straight. And yet she disdains the classic Snow White story's romantic elements because what's important is that Snow White becomes a real leader.

Well, for most people, the actual point of most stories is not to become a king or queen since they won't, the romance is the most real thing in the story. Zegler, on the other hand, can hope to reach those heights.

They're making movies for themselves, not the audience.

The cancellation of The Acolyte really brought this to a head, with the press and the actress herself going out of their way to blame "a torrent of alt-right bigotry" blah blah blah, and people just weren't having it.

Half-white, affluent actress using the plight of dead underclass blacks to whine about racists not liking her show was too much even for normies.

Collier’s review came up in my YouTube feed a few days ago, and I’d never heard of her before. I ended up watching the whole four hours that same evening. If you’re like me, a Star Trek fan disillusioned by all the recent series, it’s a good watch.

This one has some things you won’t have seen before from channels like RLM. For example, she drops quotes from Patrick Stewart’s autobiography that give an insight into what went on in the creative process. Also some details on his personal life that make me deplore him even more than I already did.

While I’m done with Star Trek I still find Star Trek criticism fun and compelling. It’s cathartic and a verification that I’m not crazy.

The YouTube algo must have identified and hit all of us with the same recommendation. I did precisely the same thing. She actually reminded me a lot of Jenny Nicholson, whom I've watched a bunch of stuff from. I assumed that's why I she was inmy feed. I was surprised when I looked up Collier to find that she was a PhD and Science commentator and not a media reviewer.

To this point in my life, I've probably watched 10x the amount of ST:Discovery dissection than I have the show itself.

Yeah I think I'm pretty much on the same page as you. She's not a media critic at all, she normally does science education stuff, but it's obvious that she was a huge fan as a kid and put a lot of time and effort into that critique.

They kept recycling the same crap in their little clique of Jewish Hollywood elites and refused to listen to any criticism.

You can't blame the Jews for this. It's a global thing.

Only more evidence of the power of global sionism!!

Just like how systemic racism can be perpetrated by a black cop, it turns out systemic Judaism can be perpetrated by goyim. It has to be true, because you can't falsify it!

Ultimately, Hollywood is there to make money. Since activists will keep pushing and pushing until someone stops them, I guess it was inevitable that eventually there would be pushback from the viewers and therefore those who hold the purse-strings. When Disney spends $180 million on four hours of television, even they are going to care if nobody watches it. When Amazon spends $700 million on a series that gets outwatched by a car man running a farm badly, the business people notice these things.

One benefit of the streaming age is that series don't need to appeal to everyone, they just need to appeal to their market. If modern political correctness was as strong during the linear TV age, it could have been worse. We only had four channels to choose between when I was growing up, I can't imagine how it would have been if every single one of them was forced to include 1/4 black people in every Regency drama or sassy girlbosses or an inexplicably large number of gays.

I think the future of streaming is like Youtube. Hyper-specific niches and sub-brands determined by the algorithm. Sure, there won't be a common media culture, but that ship has already sailed anyway.

They kept recycling the same crap in their little clique of Jewish Hollywood elites and refused to listen to any criticism.

I was onboard with this post, but this came a bit out of left field and seems largely unrelated to the main thrust of your argument.

Yes, Hollywood is disproportionately controlled by Jews, so it's strictly true that Jews are responsible for recent trends in Hollywood slop.

But Hollywood has been disproportionately controlled by Jews for as long as Hollywood has been a thing. From Goldwyn to Wilder to Spielberg, Jews were responsible for some of the most beloved films in the American canon.

Whatever the underlying cause of the downturn in quality in mainstream American cinema, you can't just point to the religion or ethnicity of the people in charge. They have the same religion and ethnicity as the people who were in charge when Hollywood was good.

Yeah I hesitated a bit about whether to mention it. But I felt it necessary to, um, "notice" that this isn't a broad representative slice of America doing this stuff. It's a very niche, inbred culture of people who grew up in Hollywood and all know each other because of their family/religious connections. Maybe it worked out OK in the past because they were talented, but at this point it's just nepotism.

I would actually be interested in whether the Hollywood decline coincided with a loss of Jewish control, like it did with the universities.
In both cases it always seemed like they kept a tight leash on the pet elements that could harm profits/donations: Hakeem Jeffries got the "woah there sambo" treatment in the 90s once he clarified that "soulless white ice people" included the jews.

Once the grievance-studies departments took over the admin staff, the Rudenstines and Bacows couldn't stop Harvard going Gay.

Perhaps Harvey Weinstein's casting couch was the one remaining meritocratic hiring process in Hollywood?

Hollywood is turning to garbage because it’s now run primarily on nepotism, connections, blackmail and propaganda. The Acolyte is a good example of this. The showrunner/writer was Harvey Weinstein’s personal assistant. She likely got this opportunity as a bribe to keep her quiet because she knows where some of the proverbial bodies are buried (blackmail). The lead actress Amandala Sternberg is then selected because her parents have industry connections and she’s from a racial demographic that Hollywood favors (connections, propaganda). The supporting actress is hired because she’s married to the show runner (nepotism). The male supporting lead Lee Jung-jae seems to have been selected mostly due to talent. Notice that we are now four rungs down into the selection process and this is the first time that vocational talent seems to have been considered at all. And from everything I’ve seen in reviews left and right, he’s the only bright spot in this whole shabby enterprise. Many many projects are like this now. In the early days of silent filmmaking up until the 2000s, who got to make movies was primarily dependent on talent and sales. Now it’s like a late feudal monarchy or the Soviet Union. The number of Jews has mostly remained constant and I don’t think it’s a factor in the early success or the later decline at all.

Lee Jung-jae

I find it amusing that the only two watchable people in this atrocity were east asian males.

Hollywood is turning to garbage because it’s now run primarily on nepotism, connections, blackmail and propaganda.

I don't know about blackmail, but wasn't Hollywood always run on nepotism, connections, and propaganda?

Dafne Keen as the young jedi girl also brought her A game, and Carrie Ann Moss also brought gravitas. Both could work with facial expression, body language and limited dialogue to still bring character and intent.

You know, acting.

A good actor can be a shining gem in a bad script, but it just highlights how shit the script is and how much of a slog it is to get through. Bad actors in bad scripts just become exhausting, and right now there are no good young black actresses. Zoe Saldana and Zendaya are above average but not Halle Berry or Angela Bassett level, and Dominique Tipper is decent but can't do dialogue. Every other young black woman is some flavor of 'repressed racial rage' and can't fucking smile or joke because that's white supremacy or something. (Note: I heard good things about Abbott Elementary so maybe black talent is concentrated in comedy AS USUAL).

The Noticing variable for an enshittified show is a young black woman who don't take no shit from no man. Scifi is especially guilty of this, and thats why Discovery, Acolyte and Obi Wan sucked balls.

Interesting, I just realized the Expanse (which I really enjoyed) subverted this by having that character in the first few episodes, and then having her fall in love with and becoming a supporting partner with the (white male) lead. But then again, the show writers were constrained by the source material so probably they shouldn't get any credit.

Eh, they can get credit. Her name is Naomi Nagata, and could easily have been asian. They got an indian guy to play a texan hick as well, and no one really gave a shit because the series cleaved its racial differences as space palestine vs 2 faraway superpowers. In fantasy all colors of humanity unite to be racist against orcs, and speciecism is more appealing in scifi than racism still.

Not to the extent that it is now. If you look at biographies for actors and actresses before the 2000s, most of them were nobodies who broke out. Now they’re all some other famous actor’s son or daughter. Directors and producers usually got experience on smaller films or TV and then had one project that got really popular, catapulting them into the big leagues.

This was my question. If anything I'd assume it was worse in the past, given lack of regulation and transparency.

There has been an exponential increase in nepo-babies though, which is in a way only natural as time goes on and the industry grew but it also shows the lack of meritocratic guardrails in the industry.

Maybe there's a synthesis here: Hollywood did use to be pretty corrupt and nepotistic in a way that everyone knew about, but now it's corrupt and nepotistic in a different way we're not aware of.

This is an intriguing take, and one which—ironically—brings to mind a certain argument advanced by antisemites of the European paleoconservative ilk, viz. that the Enlightenment techniques of using reason and logic to question longstanding social norms were at least tolerable in the hands of Christian/Christian-heritage thinkers, who held an almost innate (if unconscious) sense of where to draw the line and stop applying the culture of critique, lest they rend Western society apart entirely. Jews, on the other hand, possessing no such intuitive metis, blew past all Christian guardrails in their blind zeal to make everything rational, scientific, legible—whence the horrors of checks notes communism and the Frankfurt School.

Jews have never been in a proper standpoint to understand Christian morality because they're the outgroup. All moral systems have profound flaws when viewed from the outside. I don't care what gentiles have to say about Jewish culture either because there's minimal chance they really get it.

I do think there's something to the argument that Jews are more prone to fall for the more excessive varieties of left-wing bullshit because they're much more culturally predisposed towards notions of collective (familial, racial, class) based consciousness, guilt, virtue, etc. than the wider West.

Except wokeness in practice isn’t really big into collective responsibility/guilt. It’s all about what you’re owed. A lot of it is actually quite individualist.

And what is the basis of this alleged debt?

It is rarely anything the claimant themselves have done, its all "you owe me because somone who looked vaguely like you wronged someone who looked vaguely like me 100 years ago" or "i deserve to have my choices validated because of [insert group membership here]".

The view isn’t too far from that expressed by various reaction-adjacent Jewish people. In any case, as one myself, I’m skeptical that Jews have any particularly great insight into Jewish culture that gentiles don’t (and vice versa).

I agree, Jews don't know where to stop in their criticisms. But that's a universal human trait. The problem is not "Jews like to destroy other moral systems" but rather "two or more distinct moral factions are incompatible with a healthy society and one will always try to trounce the other". To disdain them for refusing to integrate is natural, but on the inside there's an obvious tension of "Should we ever fully integrate, we may get targeted again but with our now weak communal bonds we'll be far more vulnerable." The best criticism you can give is that modern America doesn't seem like the Jew-persecuting type, but this cycle is so ingrained in them that mindless adherence to "They want to kill us!" is slightly justified. But I'm not in the position to fully dissect all that

This is largely Solzhenitsyn’s argument and is implicit in Churchill’s writing on European Jewishness. I don’t think it’s necessarily antisemitic, again Moldbug comes pretty close to advancing it now and again and if anything the most hardcore antisemitic dissident rightists of the MacDonald school usually dispute it. Essentially Jews embraced liberal ideas both more zealously and more literally because of a combination of their own desire (hardly surprising) to move beyond the previous status quo in European Christian-Jewish relations and because of the specific way in which criticism and commentary upon the Talmud was central to Jewish intellectual culture.

I don’t think it’s necessarily antisemitic, again Moldbug comes pretty close to advancing it now and again

I agree that it's not necessarily antisemitic, though I think Moldbug is not the best example to use here. I've always found his disavowal of extra-Overton-window takes (on HBD, liberal democracy, and antisemitism) to be lukewarm at best and performative at worst. My pet theory is that it's a kind of Kolmogorov complicity by proxy: though he's far from the levers of power himself and (genuinely, as far as I can tell) professes no desire to get closer, he doesn't want guilt by association to tarnish the prospects of any politico who openly touts him as an influence.

the most hardcore antisemitic dissident rightists of the MacDonald school usually dispute it

This is news to me; I wasn't aware that the MacDonald school* even knew about this argument, let alone disagreed with it. What's their take?

*Not to be confused with Hamburger University

Lots have people have already criticized Star Trek over the years, most notably the RedLetterMedia guys who kinda got famous from it. But I associate most of them with the online right.

This will be a bit of a nitpicky response since I'm a huge RedLetterMedia fan. But I just wanted to call out that they got famous for their Star Wars reviews. They did a lot of Star Trek reviews, but that was mostly of the next gen movies, and I don't think those reviews are too famous.

Also, they are definitely not right-wing. They're pretty centrist/apolitical, while sometimes mentioning that other people care about politics, but sometimes they definitely lean more towards liberal points. For example, they frequently talk about diverse casting as not necessarily a bad thing. But half of their members lean more liberal (Rich Evans and Jack) and half of them are slightly closer to the center.

Rich is pretty clearly an extant member of the old school, classic internet atheist-libertarian-contrarians (the two things that seem to get his goat the most are organized religion and new-wave mumbo jumbo). If he didn't vote for Ron Paul back in the day I'll eat my hat.

Like someone else mentioned, I definitely get the sense Mike is more woke-averse than he lets on, but smartly hides it or masks it under more innocuous complaints. He is by far the funniest, and a lot of that comes from being clearly unconcerned with being PC. This is even more clear if you have the Patreon and can see the outtakes. Like you said, I definitely wouldn't go so far as to say he's "right wing" though. Probably close to Rich's libertarian, but softer on religion; lapsed catholic vibes.

Jay is the hardest to read. To me he comes across as a truly centrist/apolitical guy who probably hangs around a lot of lefty artistic types, which rubs off on him, but at the same time is too contrarian to really buy into any of it, on either side. He just wants to watch his violent sex-weirdo movies in peace, and dislikes the scolds on either side that might get in the way of this.

Jack and Josh are pretty standard and openly left/liberal. Usually doesn't get in the way of the comedy though. Usually.

I think the big thing about them, and one of the things that makes them great, is Mike and Jay are the rare online content creators that don't appear to be very-online themselves. They seem genuinely and refreshingly ignorant of a lot of the underlying internet culture war BS, outside of where it intersects with a particular movie they may be interested in. It's rare to find such a genuinely apolitcal space online these days, especially with as long as they've been around. Most have either bought into the "woke" framework, or specifically positioned themselves as being "unwoke" and gotten into the right wing grift. Probably helps that they are older, more Gen-X than millennial.

I'm pretty sure "But I associate most of them with the online right" was referring to "Lots [of] people have already criticized Star Trek over the years" and not RLM specifically.

They are old fat midwesterners who dress as blue collar repairmen in their movie warehouse dungeon and don't breathlessly celebrate 'representation'. As far as wokes who worshipped Lindsay Ellis till Rayagate are concerned, these old white men might as well be MAGA redhats.

Also, RLM skewered girlGhostbusters ,Star Trek Discovery and Last Jedi/Rise of Skywalker, the originators of 'fans hate their white male.heroes being replaced with strong women and blacks!' anti-criticism card. Since RLM was the only platform with significant reach to beyond weird film autists, they caught the ire of progressives.

Also, RLM skewered girlGhostbusters ,Star Trek Discovery and Last Jedi/Rise of Skywalker, the originators of 'fans hate their white male.heroes being replaced with strong women and blacks!' anti-criticism card

That's true, but they frequently call out people as garbage, who are anti these movies on the basis of hating feminism/woke ideology. And I remember when they were excusing a lot of what Brie Larson said in her rant as "she didn't really mean that, she just put her foot in her mouth". That's not to say I think they're progressives, I think they really try to take a middle ground most of the time, or are just kinda checked out.

Edit: see time 13:00 here https://youtube.com/watch?v=9pQNYeOEFJc&t=780

RLM has consistently dunked on whiny fanboys crying about Canon or muh blacks and girls, and especially mindless Consume Product fanboys. But RLM also doesn't hold back from criticizing mid products and calling them shitty even if they have a protected class in the forefront, especially Star Trek Discovery.

Perhaps the nuance here is that RLM has not actually come out as anti-woke, but that RLM has not onboarded the Message consistently pushed out by 2016-era progressives smirking about how all these legacy franchises were being replaced with new hip exciting Modern Audiences. The media/academic elite narrative came first: these legacy franchises with shitloads of money were ripe for being replaced by minorities and women for social messaging to be readily absorbed by fanboys hungry for content.

Of course, the problem for that logic is that fanboys are no longer restricted to whatever slop is out on the theaters or newly released or even in print. Torrents of legacy shows exist, reducing even the friction of going to Blockbuster and hoping the DVD for some oldass show still exists. I don't think ANYONE here on this board would have watched any Star Wars show without their dad or friend digging up an old copy of the Original Trilogy to let John Williams hit us right in the jimmies. Fans don't need to be wheezing 80 year olds trying to capture the magic of the 60s, they can watch legacy shit. The existence of RLM and other media critics (left and right) who can say 'hey this new thing is not like the old thing' is poison to new talent that want to force their relevance into the modern cultural landscape.

For the sin of knowing the past and not really giving a shit about the future, RLM is an enemy. Good thing they can just keep repairing that VCR to time travel to the good old days when men were alcoholic sex perverts and women didn't exist.

Yeah I didn't mean to hold up RLM as an exemplar of the online right. More like, they made an impact criticizing pop-culture franchises, and lots of other people followed in their wake, and most of those others were on the rightwing. But like the other person said, RLM is not explicitly left-wing, and in today's world, that pretty much makes them right-wing by default.

And ill nitpick you right back and say they started with their star trek movie reviews, and got a pretty decent following from them (including me) before they did the star wars ones (which admittedly got a much bigger reaction)

Ah ok, you got me there. I don't remember their star trek next gen movie reviews being that popular, but I wasn't really paying attention to them back then so you're probably right.

I think Mike is keeping his power level hidden.

He’s Polish and openly believes in ghosts. He’ll be back in the pews and reciting the creed soon, if he’s not already.

RLM’s media criticism is pretty traditional as it is. For a movie to work, it needs a certain narrative structure, should have setups and payoffs, etc. One of their compliments they give is “it’s a movie” where so much of what they review lacks the necessary elements to even be called a movie.

Underneath it all they’re really talking about truth, beauty, and goodness.

Might be but I don't think he's keeping too much hidden. Seems like a slightly lapsed traditional liberal that's keeping his head down to me.

I'd agree with that. But I don't think he seems right wing. He is always talking about how much he loves the Star Trek next gen liberal "positive future" values. There's a lot of progressivism that is kinda baked into that worldview.

I know that’s the general consensus. But it seems to me it misses the huge point that technological change likely changes economic systems. If you move to what seems like a post scarcity, then you likely abandon capitalism. But that doesn’t mean you abandon capitalism before you move to a post scarcity economy. That is, ST’s (incoherent) communism doesn’t address today.

I'd say there's very little progressivism baked into Star Trek (at least up to ds9, which is the only stuff I've seen). There's no notion of affirmative action. People are subordinate to their superiors. Race and gender is simply not salient at all.

Here's the classic scene: https://youtube.com/watch?v=HKII3sFUCgs?feature=shared

Acting commander Data (a (simulacrum of) a white man) takes Whorf (an Underrepresented Minority in Starfleet) into his office to give him a dressing down about being insubordinate. Whorf takes it like a man and apologizes. Could such a scene be made today?

Race and gender is simply not salient at all.

Relative to the time period this was extremely progressive.

There's a reason Martin luther king jr. famously publicly fanboyed over star trek.

I think the main difference is you're used to post 2010 ish idea's of DEI, and those are definitely much different from the 1960s progressivism in star trek

It seems to me that "treat people as individuals rather than members of groups" is the sine qua non of classical liberalism. Progressivism must necessarily be about the Marxist struggle of the oppressed (groups) versus the oppressor (group).

And that sort of classical liberalism was controversial in the 60's when Star Trek was doing it with the OS and, if not controversial, at least something people had in mind as a sore point when TNG was doing it in the 80's.

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It seems to me that "treat people as individuals rather than members of groups" is the sine qua non of classical liberalism.

Some would argue that it goes even further than that. If anything this is the sine qua non of enlightenment values and post modernism (of which Marxism is a sub school) is by its nature post/anti-enlightenment.

I don't think there is necessarily a contradiction there, especially for nostalgic media we loved in our youth. You can simultaneously enjoy the utopian idealism of a sci-fi show and don't have that reflect what you believe what current policy would be effective, especially not in all areas.

The depth of the spiritual rot is great enough to be noticed even by its proponents, but that doesn't mean it doesn't just get worse.

The underlying reasons for it are still there, the same talentless politicos are now entrenched in the production hierarchy and they're not giving up their seat.

There is some reason to be optimistic since the financial situation is now such that companies are habitually giving up on DEI and other nonsense aimed at courting activist investment.

I still think the most likely scenario is for some young upstart to poke at the whole rotten carcass of entertainment and collapse it with seemingly no effort. If young George Lucas was around today and managed to get some serious funding, he'd make bank. There's so much money on the table that institutions can't bring themselves to pick up.

What I'm seeing is that it started with (a) die-hard fans who would go see the latest "thing in franchise" no matter what and (b) progressives who would go see it to "own the chuds," and then give it critical acclaim and say that anyone who criticized it was just racist/sexist. But over time the right-wing chuds just stopped even bothering to complain, and the die-hard fans stopped watching. So there wasn't much for the progressive fans to do. It's not fun to watch a crappy movie and pretend you like it if you've got no righteous cause to fuel it.

Also kind of weird that Disney single-handedly controls so much IP. That should be a point of vulnerability. These days all the good stuff is coming from other countries.

These days all the good stuff is coming from other countries.

There are like 5 major countries that make interesting new IPs, The USA, Great Britain (which is so heavily tied with the US they may as well be one "block"), Japan South Korea and China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_media_franchises Though really it's mostly Japan and The USA with South korea and china playing second fiddle.

Japan is being hard carried by video games anyway, if we limit ourselves to just television https://www.imdb.com/chart/toptv/?ref_=nv_tvv_250&sort=num_votes%2Cdesc it's almost 90% american/british made stuff. There are a few japanese cartoons in there and a small handful of korean dramas but it's predominantly american made stuff.

Japan is being hard carried by video games anyway, if we limit ourselves to just television https://www.imdb.com/chart/toptv/?ref_=nv_tvv_250&sort=num_votes%2Cdesc it's almost 90% american/british made stuff.

Doubtful a list with GOT in 1st place is of much use for anything. yeah, yeah the first few seasons are decent but if I'm reading the entries right, it comprises all the seasons, including the last one.

Another point against using that list as a comparison point between western series and anime in general is that the premier ranking list of the anime medium is MyAnimeList.net, doubtful you will find representative scores in imdb for anime outside of the overly mainstream series as Attack on Titan.

This isn't sorted by rating, it's sorted by popularity. there are 11 anime in the top 100 on IMDB. Attack on Titan, Death Note, One Piece, Full metal alchemist Brotherhood, One Punch man, Naruto, Demon Slayer, Dragon Ball Z, Cowboy Bebop, Hunter x Hunter, and Jujiutsu Kaisen. Those 11 are also extrmely high in popularity on MAL, main misses would be Sword art online, My hero academia Tokyo ghoul and Stein's gate.

japanese cartoons in there

How was this list generated? Anime is HUGE for young people but its very, very heavily pirated which may limit its appearances in some lists. It's also very often not of the best quality, even if beloved.

It's number of users who gave the show a rating.

Yeah anime's quality is pretty low overall, there's a reason there's a saying "this anime is trash and so am I". Look there aren't many what I'd consider "high class" anime. It's mostly wish fulfillment nonsense with little depth. At the same time you can find your wish fulfillment nonsense. Like me with the saga of tanya the evil and GATE thus the JSDF fought there.

Yeah some of (like barely any) is VERY VERY good, but Anime really hits for a lot of people and has huge cultural penetration.

The percentage of people under age 25 who know who Deku is is probably incredibly high, even in not very nerdy sub cultures, but if you aren't of that age or an anime fan.....not a blob of cultural relevance.

Yeah but for people over the age of 25, many would know about Pokemon, Dragon Ball Z, and Yu-gi-oh. I suspect that many adults (maybe above 5% of americans) would know the name Light Yagami or Eren Yaeger. (I'd definitely bet above 2% and around 10% is probably pushing it).

Pokemon especially is the single largest media franchise on the planet,

Noticed Time had Pikachu and Eevee covers last week.

I don't think I have seen anything noteworthy come out of China since Hero.

But Japanese anime/manga/videogames and Korean dramas/movies/music are definitely viable alternatives to the otherwise dominant American/British/Canadian cultural block.

Thank God.

yeah, I guess liking stuff like Attack on Titan or Death Note instead of House of Cards and Game of thrones does let you get through. (ok the anime I watched recently like Gate thus the JSDF fought there and The saga of tanya the evil are extremely niche shows for a narrow Audience aka me)

I remember that in the TCG sphere we have the "big 3" which is Magic the gathering, pokemon and Yu-gi-oh. MTG is american but at least the other 2 are Japanese. Pokemon is huge in the videogames sphere and even though the mainline games have been a letdown from a main storyline perspective, the side-parts have gotten a lot better.

I just await the time when high school dxd hits the mainstream and everyone freaks out about japan poisoning our youth.

"highest grossing media franchises" isn't a good way to judge art, IMO. It might be cliche, but I still like French movies, even though they don't gross so much. Also Italy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Strangers_(2016_film)), Mexico (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bardo,_False_Chronicle_of_a_Handful_of_Truths), and... Uganda...!? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_Captain_Alex%3F)

It’s interesting, in that it seems we aren’t at 2018 levels of fervour, but most of those names look like crotchety outsiders or no-name bloggers to me: GRR Martin is a British author with no real Hollywood connections and although QT has always loved Hollywood I got the impression he was an auteur who never really fitted in. And also, reading the article, QT didn’t criticise anything, he just said that 3 was perfect and he doesn’t want to see 4 even if it’s good because he liked how 3 ended.

If I were taking a bellwether of Hollywood opinion I would look at people like George Clooney, Oprah, Matt Damon, Di Caprio. Or perhaps they would be the last stones to roll?

EDIT: I am completely wrong about GRR Martin. I thought I’d heard somewhere that he was a Brit basing his books on the War of the Roses. Authors who are unhappy with how Hollywood handled their works are ten-a-penny and always have been.

Uh, GRR Martin is American and has been working in Hollywood for decades, long before he hit it big with Game of Thrones. It's very odd for him to publicly criticize his own baby. QT is a little old now but he's still a huge name, so the same thing applies.

I don't know why you'd look to aging actors who haven't been a big box office draw for a long time now, for opinions. They seem to just smile blandly for everything. So yeah, they'd be the last stones to roll- if they criticize something it'll only be long after everyone else has already done so.

It's very odd for him to publicly criticize his own baby.

He's complained before about the inability of Hollywood writers to avoid changing what they're adapting just to "make it their own" and no doubt GoT soured him a bit. So I'm not shocked that he has opinions about HOTD. It is odd, but mainly because he's a producer.

Wondering if someone from HBO is calling desperately.

Sorry about that, I made a mea culpa above.

My understanding is that people like Clooney and Oprah are the movers and shakers of Hollywood - the ones who decide who gets access and who introduce people to each other at parties. Grandees, in short. I would care about their opinions in the same way that I would care about the opinions of George Osborne / Tony Blair / Obama over some up-and-comer. They’re the ones who decide who ups-and-comes and who ups-and-downs.

To be honest, im just not plugged in enough to hollywood gossip to know. You might be right, i just dont know. The producers, especially, confuse me.

As I have accidentally made clear, neither am I! It came up a lot in the context of Prince Harry and Meghan Merkle trying to make a new life and career for themselves in LA, and being tentatively accepted at first before being shunned, so what I know is from the reporting on that.

Re: producers, I understand their role varies a lot depending on the producer and the film: sometimes the producer is the driving force behind the funding, the choice of director, the script, etc. and sometimes they're a glorified bookkeeper. But again, I'm not really a film guy.

GRR Martin is a British author with no real Hollywood connections

Are the two people with the same name? The author of the game of thrones is American.

No, I’m wrong, but thank you for the charity haha.

The last new star Trek movie came out, what, 10 years ago, and they weren't particularly woke anyways (by Star Trek metrics). The beef with them was they were shallow James Abrams action-fests, not that they were too woke. Star Trek has always been progressive. It just wasn't always so #CurrentYear.

My beef is with Star Wars, anyways. I very specifically got accused of "being against strong role models for girls" when I said The Last Jedi wasn't very good, and I've kinda never forgiven the world for that.

There's still a set of critics and influencers who will clap like circus seals at anything that vaguely alludes to capitalism bad or hwiteness bad,

If anything, I find The Last Jedi a very strange film to use as a vehicle for that criticism? The female characters in The Last Jedi aren't very good role models, even if all you value is strength!

The major female characters in The Last Jedi are Rey, who achieves very little in the story and whose primary moral struggle is to do with resisting the appeal of sexy Adam Driver; Rose, who is a sidekick whose big heroic moment is saving the life of the man she's in love with; Holdo, who makes a series of bad calls, is overwhelmed by the First Order, and has to sacrifice her ship just to give the other characters a chance to escape; and Leia, who we last see nodding to a young male hero and telling everybody to follow him. If you look at the heroes whose actions actually drive the plot or save the day, it's mainly Finn, Poe, and Luke.

As Adam Roberts put it:

It’s great to show the good guys being led by strong, confident women, but it would surely be more progressive if these leaders were not—whisper it—so incompetent. I mean, the First Order senior staff seem pretty incompetent, and exist in a state of constant sniping, upheaval and infighting, but there is, surely, a big difference between a (male) officer corps that is dysfunctional because they’re all so ruthless and personally ambitious, and a (female) officer corps that is dysfunctional because they just don’t have the ability to plan six hours into the future. Add to this that the female officer corps all have really great hairdos, and we are surely encroaching on Egregious Sexism.

I don't know, I just feel like if I were going to pick a mediocre-to-bad film to defend to the hilt on the basis of it having good role models for girls in the form of its strong female characters, maybe I wouldn't pick a film in which the two female leads are motivated in large part by their attraction to more proactive male leads, and where the female supporting characters are demonstrably bad at their jobs.

I might choose a film that actually has compelling, three-dimensional female characters with well-rounded motivations, who overcome various obstacles through their talent, courage, and virtue; or failing that, at least a film with female leads who actually succeed at things.

Well-spotted, but I'm sure the person who said that to me was basing it off a YouTube video about how only misogynistic chuds don't like Star Wars.

I don't really hate the new Star Trek movies, they were stupid but at least kinda fun. it's the new TV shows I can't stand. Like you said, they went all in on the "strong female role models" angle and it became impossible to criticize them. But they were also this joyless slog through a grimdark universe of unrelenting misery. I do think some critics are finally waking up to that, or at least new critics are appearing who have noticed that the core audience is fed up.

I really do think it's becoming a more "normie" opinion that the Star Wars sequels were bad. If anything I hear more praise for the prequels now, people appreciate them for at least trying to be fun and being their own weird quirky thing.

There was a great article in Social Matter(?) (possibly by David Grant?) charting the decline of American liberalism through Star Trek.

From Kirk lecturing aliens about democracy in front of the literal American flag, to TNG's mushy ethical navel gazing, to DS9's cynicism, to Voyager's "me and my tumblr mutuals against the galaxy" interpersonal drama.

TOS liberalism wasn't coherent, but it was muscular and sure of itself. After that everything was built on a foundation that was already being "deconstructed"

I wonder what the author would make of the new shift to Gaslight, Genocide, Girlboss.

It's ironic that you resent the latest Star Trek shows being unrelentlessly grimdark, which is true, because Star Trek was originally a very optimistic view of the future, but as @haroldbkny says above, that was largely a progressive worldview. Star Trek has always been very explicitly leftist, albeit center-leftist (the original premise being that progressive multicultural politics would transcend all and the Federation was basically a future United Nations, as the UN was supposed to operate and not as it really does). You are no doubt aware that it's famous for featuring the first interracial kiss on broadcast television, and many, many episodes from the various series have been essentially liberal talking points turned into sci-fi thought exercises (sometimes poignantly and sometimes in a very ham-handed fashion).

Gene Roddenberry was extremely liberal and very much "woke" by 60s standards. Deep Space Nine was not the first time that writers took a somewhat more critical view of the Federation and suggested maybe it wasn't the post-scarcity utopia that early series sunnily portrayed it as, but Star Trek was still supposed to represent a future that is positive and optimistic. Humanity will eventually get its shit together and work together as a species, and we will face external threats and have moral conflicts, but we'll resolve them rationally and humanely, and we'll be able to include other races as well, grant civil rights to androids, recognize the self-determination rights of less technologically advanced people, etc... All very liberal and woke, no?

The more recent series have felt like they were written by writers who resent this optimistic view of the future - specifically, the idea that a largely Western, liberal democratic society could actually produce something good. And so they have painfully deconstructed it, so now the Federation is shit, all the characters we knew and loved are dead or assholes, and there is certainly no "fun" to be had in a universe where Western Enlightenment still holds sway.

The path with Star Wars is similar though not as obvious because Star Wars was always less nuanced. It was a children's story of good vs. evil space wizards. The Jedi were never supposed to be perfect, but they were fundamentally good guys. But unproblemetized good guys (especially white men) are not in vogue any more, and must be deconstructed.

Thus we arrive at Rings of Power and the laughable "Orcs just want to raise their families in peace." The problem with this is not that the idea in itself is laughable. It's that the writers actually think they are doing something new and subversive here.

Look, way back in the 70s, D&D players were raising questions about the "Always Chaotic Evil" trope. Just why should every single Orc be born evil? Yes, in Tolkien they're "fallen" elves and basically a sort of artificial race, but in D&D and its many spin-offs, they were just another humanoid species and thus presumably had agency and free will, so.... Half-orcs were a playable race since the very early days, and they weren't required to be evil, so clearly Orcs don't necessarily have an "evil gene." Most explanations were something like "They're naturally brutish and stupid and live in a violent society" (raising all kinds of Implications that have become Discourse today), but even very non-woke D&D players in the 70s didn't find the idea of an Orc raised in a more civilized environment turning out to be a Paladin or something outrageous. And later games (Shadowrun, 1st edition published in 1988) and Orkworld (published by the insufferable John Wick in 2000) took an explicitly critical lens to the "always evil" trope and made all the races, if still archetypical, less stereotypical.

These "woke" writers everyone complains about aren't inventing anything new, is the problem, but they think they are the first people ever to have mind-blowing thoughts like "What if the Jedi got too arrogant?" or "What if Orcs aren't just mindless killing machines?"

All very liberal and woke, no?

Not really. Where's the eternal oppressor class, which must be forever blamed for every wrong? Where's selecting a specific group and declaring it forever tainted with past sins? Where's the identarian strife and the oppression hierarchy? Where's the guilt for past injustices, overwhelmingly driving any future decisions? Where's the affirmative action, land acknowledgements, deconstruction and destruction of every past achievement due to them all being oppressive, removal of monuments, rewriting of films and books? Where's the only cure for past discrimination being future discrimination? Where are the species quotas and quarterly reports about racial and species-al makeup of the command structure, the redshirt casualties and the promotion schedule from every captain? I mean, no starship even has a DEI officer! That's not even close to woke.

Troi was totally the ship's political officer though. You can't unsee it after you notice. Outside the command hierarchy but involved in decision-making, authority to interrogate anyone on board for problematic thoughts the computer caught them writing in their journal?

Could be. So they are much closer to early commie sci-fi - especially Soviet - which also often was very bravura and optimistic. Woke though naturally would tend to be much darker and depressing.

Oh god, now I'm gonna have nightmares about corporate HR ladies seeing right through my poker face because they can sense my feelings as they drop prog talking points at lunch.

I once read, somewhere, that sci-fi tone shifted hard in the very early 2000s and that that was the death blow for star trek. I think the blame was put on Battlestar Galactica being so successful in the reboot.

Galactica probably does deserve some of the blame, but I frankly suspect a lot of that was mostly just the post-9/11 zeitgeist (which itself influenced new!BSG). It felt like everything got darker, edgier, and more cynical around that time.

We Stargate fans blame it for killing that franchise too, except it was more the network wanting a series that focused more on the melodrama BSG had in its later (arguably worst) seasons than the classic SG technobabble optimism.

Honestly Stargate was a 'humanity, fuck yeah!' series that could easily have been darker and edgier and was probably trending that way anyways. The turn towards interpersonal melodrama was, however, baffling- I liked seeing American soldiers kicking ass in space, not some alien hangers on worrying about their personal problems.

It could easily have had a Space! Iraq storyline.

Some of Stargate SG-1's problems were also wanting to become Voyager of all things, rather than Battlestar Galactica. Some extent of that was probably inevitable as power inflation started giving the US military access to spaceships, superweapons, (those stupid zats), Jackson ascending so often it turned into a punch line, and so on, but a lot of the entire Ori plotline was trying so hard to be MagicBullshitBorg following in the tracks of Seven of Nine, without understanding why that worked (and so many other interpersonal melodrama bits of Voyager didn't work!).

There were definitely dark veins and they could have tried to balance things (or just kept "classic" SG and then added things like Universe).

But I think they were just embarrassed, it's a status thing. Stargate was essentially the sort of show people mean when they say "I don't like fantasy besides Game of Thrones". BSG and the praise it got gave them an alternative/pretext.

A shame it wasn't actually as popular or well-regarded as Game of Thrones.

Look, way back in the 70s, D&D players were raising questions about the "Always Chaotic Evil" trope. Just why should every single Orc be born evil?

I don't understand why Orcs have always been the go-to example for this. First of all the "Always Chaotic Evil" terminology only goes back to 2000 and was gone again by 2009 - it originates with the 3rd Edition Monster Manual introducing a bit more nuance into alignments, with the usual alignment now preceded by "Always" (for things like demons where that alignment was part of their nature), "Usually" (where it was more a case of strong cultural associations with that alignment), or the rarely-used "Often" (like usually but the association is much weaker). I think humans got "Often True Neutral" but I can't remember another case where "Often" was used.

And Orcs were firmly in the "Usually" bucket. You even gave some of the reasons for this. All over the Internet people talk like they got tagged "Always Chaotic Evil" and it's just not true! In both editions where that terminology exists they are "Usually Chaotic Evil". The problem they are referring to (EDIT: insofar as it ever existed, which wasn't very) was already fixed in the same book that originated much of the terminology used to discuss it.

I'll need to check the books when I get home, but off the top of my head, orcs themselves have never been Always Chaotic Evil. The language used for monster alignment has changed across the editions, but I believe you're correct that 3e introduced the 'Always [Alignment]' phrasing, and in 3e, orcs were not Always Chaotic Evil. Always Chaotic Evil was reserved for demons and a few other similar characters - monsters that are by definition evil.

Even prior to 3e, though, there was some nuance with orcs - they were presented as usually evil, but not always, and sometimes they were presented with a valid perspective of their own. I remember the origin story for orcs in 2e Forgotten Realms was reasonably sympathetic to them, suggesting that maybe the 'goodly' races really did screw them over, and orc aggression and hostility is a response to an initial divine division of the world that relegated them only to the wastelands, and miserable lives of violence and poverty therein.

More when I have the old sourcebooks to hand, I think, but as far as I'm aware now, ACE orcs is a strawman.

But as I grouched a little while back, I think today, even among D&D players, there's widespread illiteracy as to D&D's past, and a tendency for people to substitute an imagined caricature of mindless hack-and-slash for the game as it actually existed. ACE orcs fit the narrative if you believe that everything prior to 5e was troglodytic monster-murdering with no hint of story.

EDIT:

Okay, here we are.

AD&D1e and AD&D2e both just list orcs' alignment as "Lawful Evil". AD&D doesn't give frequency, but it does say in the introduction to the Monster Manual 1e "ALIGNMENT shows the characteristic bent of a monster to law or chaos, good or evil or towards neutral behavior possibly modified by good or evil intent", and for the Monstrous Manual 2e "ALIGNMENT shows the general behaviour of the average monster of that type". As such I don't regard either manual as indicating that all orcs are necessarily Lawful Evil.

I don't have the 3.0 Monster Manual to hand, but I do have 3.5. 3.5 lists orcs' alignment as "Often chaotic evil", so not only have they swapped from law to chaos, they've also qualified it. The glossary at the back of the book clarifies that "Often" means "The creature tends towards the given alignment, either by nature or nurture, but not strongly. A plurality (40-50%) of individuals have the given alignment, but exceptions are common."

The 4e Monster Manual just gives orc alignment as "Chaotic Evil" without further qualification, but the introduction does note explicitly "A monster's alignment is not rigid, and exceptions can exist to the general rule".

The 5e Monster Manual also just gives orc alignment as "chaotic evil", though its introduction also states, "The alignment specified in a monster's stat block is the default. Feel free to depart from it and change a monster's alignment to suit the needs of your campaign. if you want a good-aligned green dragon or an evil storm giant, there's nothing stopping you."

As far as I can tell orcs have never been rigidly boxed into a single alignment. They have always been presented with an evil alignment as the most common default for them, but anybody who says that orcs were ever presented as ontologically evil in all cases no matter what is telling a falsehood.

As far as I can tell orcs have never been rigidly boxed into a single alignment. They have always been presented with an evil alignment as the most common default for them, but anybody who says that orcs were ever presented as ontologically evil in all cases no matter what is telling a falsehood.

Even in 1st edition AD&D, no one thought "Alignment: Lawful Evil" meant there could be literally zero exceptions in all the multiverse, and the earlier editions of D&D were much more freewheeling in suggesting DMs just make up whatever they wanted ("rulings over rules"). People came up with reasons to have non-evil Beholders and Mindflayers, after all. The point of the trope is not that modern players think back in Ye Olden Days, it was Gygax Law that all Orcs must be Evil, but that a lot of players (remember, D&D was mostly played by young men, often tweens and teens) did take the rules pretty literally. Remember that Alignment Languages were a thing? (Don't know if they still are in more recent versions.) And Alignment itself was based on Moorcockian and Vancian ideas that implied they were mystical properties of the universe and thus a fundamental part of a character, not just a rough label to describe behaviors. There were complicated rules for changing alignments.

So in that context, labeling races in the Monster Manual as "Evil" was taken as a sort of metaphysical categorization. 5E, which as I understand it has moved towards a more "blank slate" model where races do not have attribute modifiers or alignments or class limitations, is largely a reaction against that.

"Hack and slash" gaming also existed, and described quite a few campaigns and convention games. It was so common as to be another trope. Of course this wasn't how the creators of D&D meant it to be, nor how it was presented in the books, and players and GMs frequently bemoaned "hack and slash" gaming. But they bemoaned it because it was common enough to generate semi-parodies like this.

I was done with D&D by 3rd edition, so I didn't even know how they mucked with the alignment system in later editions. But Orcs are the go-to example because even in earlier editions, they were a canonically "evil" race, like many others, but the ones even normies were likely to have heard of.

The only other race with as much resonance over this issue were the Drow.

The main bit of pre-2E orc lore I remember was an article in Dragon on their gods, most of which later showed up in books like Monster Mythology and thus became fairly canonical, if it wasn't already. Though skewing toward the violent and warlike compared to, say, elves, theirs were varied enough that even back then it didn't really support an "Always Chaotic Evil" interpretation.

Look, way back in the 70s, D&D players were raising questions about the "Always Chaotic Evil" trope.

No, they weren't. "Always __ evil" was a 3rd edition exclusive, and didn't apply to orcs anyway. Anyone who says this, particularly using the exact phrasing "Always Chaotic Evil", is probably quoting TV Tropes or imitating a meme copied from TV Tropes.

I was there, son.

Orcs were actually Lawful Evil in 1st and 2nd edition, if I recall. But that wasn't the point (as you are perfectly well aware). Whether or not the TV Tropes phrase existed, the issue did.

2nd edition: "Alignment shows the general behavior of the average monster of that type. Exceptions, though uncommon, may be encountered."

And this contradicts what I am telling you how? I know you love to think you have a gotcha that proves people are lying every time you find a single word that can be parsed in the most pedantic, literal fashion to contradict them, but reread what I wrote and then stop trying to die on a hill you already died on. "Always evil" monsters were a trope that was talked about in the 70s, it isn't something wokes discovered to make fun of on TVTropes in the 2000s. Dragon magazine published cartoons about it. People joked about it and made satirical adventures about at conventions. You are not being clever or getting applause from the crowd as you Au Contraire Mon Frere!

It's ironic that you resent the latest Star Trek shows being unrelentlessly grimdark, which is true, because Star Trek was originally a very optimistic view of the future

Sorry but how is that "ironic?" It's like you're saying that I'm "ironic" for hating new Star Trek for being something 100% against the core themes that it started with. That's not ironic that's just... natural? If anything I just want to acknowledge what a weird state we've arrived at, where these huge popular media franchises have been perverted into something that seems designed to antagonize all of its original fans, and we're not allowed to criticize them for it. I guess you could say it's our fault, as nerds, for not paying attention during high school English class- we were all so focused on the plot and worldbuilding that we missed what the teacher was saying how it's the theme and tones that really matter, so we let our ideological enemies take control of "our own" beloved media.

Like you said, it seems as though the writers hate optimism, hate fun, and genuinely hate anything good in life. I wouldn't mind so much if they just had a bunch of stupid plot holes. But these new sci-fi writers seem to genuinely want to inflict pain on their audience. I don't even know where they can go from here. Will the next season just be a long, extended, graphic scene of Patrick Stewart being raped? Because that seems to be the tone that they're going for.

Also like you said, "but what if the bad guys aren't really all bad?" is not really the innovative question that some writers think it is. It basically just marks the boundary between entertainment and literary fiction. But if you're going the literary route, you need to know that it's a tough road that will not be fun to follow, and you'll lose most of your audience along the way. Putting that into a normal genre fiction piece will destroy it.

The irony is in thinking it's progressivism that is making Star Trek grimdark. Of course I know some people think all liberality (even going all the way back to the Enlightenment) is an inevitable path to the grimdark authoritarianism we see today, but Star Trek was originally a very liberal vision. I guess technically it still is, unless you are one of us liberals who have become by modern progressive standards fascists. Though to be honest I haven't seen the last few shows or movies, so I only know what it's like from cultural osmosis and memes.

Also like you said, "but what if the bad guys aren't really all bad?" is not really the innovative question that some writers think it is. It basically just marks the boundary between entertainment and literary fiction. But if you're going the literary route, you need to know that it's a tough road that will not be fun to follow, and you'll lose most of your audience along the way. Putting that into a normal genre fiction piece will destroy it.

Strongly disagree with this. You can have complex, three-dimensional characters, like villains who have sympathetic motives or heroes who are flawed, in genre fiction. It doesn't all have to be black hats vs. white hats. "What if the bad guys aren't really all bad?" "What if Orcs aren't all evil?" "What if the Jedi fucked up?" Those are perfectly fine questions to introduce even into a genre set piece with bright lines between good and evil. The problem is not with introducing moral complication and nuance, the problem is with fundamentally rejecting the idea that "good" or "evil" exist, even within the context of a universe that was built on the premise of a conflict between Good vs. Evil. Deconstructing that and saying "Well, actually they're all just the same; Sauron vs. the Fellowship is like the Republicans vs. the Democrats, the Rebel Alliance vs. the Empire is like rooting for the Packers or the Cowboys... at the end of the day it doesn't matter who wins," that destroys the narrative unless you are just that level of cynical.

but Star Trek was originally a very liberal vision

Was it though...? It was set onboard a military ship, with a strict hierarchy, and the characters all strongly demonstrating classical virtues. It had some worldbuilding that could be seen as liberal, like the replicators that made everything free, but that's just sci-fi plot stuff. It certainly had some moments that would have been considered liberal for the 60s, like the famous "first interracial kiss on TV," but that was also, you know, a captain kissing his secretary. The themes of the show were classic western/hero's journey stuff, "wagon train to the stars." Most of the plots were along the lines of "a big bad Other shows up, and the heroic Captian Kirk must punch it to death."

What if the bad guys aren't really all bad?" "What if Orcs aren't all evil?" "What if the Jedi fucked up?"

The problem is, we get all that in real life. We look to entertainment to simplify and escape that sort of thing. If you want to write a story where the orcs aren't evil, it just ends up being a grimdark slog where Aragorn was ruthlessly genociding a sentient people and "we all need to feel sad, man, because that's just like what happened with the Native Americans, you know?" You can just read actual history for that. Or, perhaps, an avant-garde literary novel that assumes you've already read thousands of pages of both popular entertainment and criticism. It's not going to work for a normal human who just wants to experience the feeling of being heroic for once in their life, without having to feel guilt and shame for it.

Same thing with "what if the Jedi fucked up..." you mean like all politicians do? Just go watch the news for that. The Jedi were awesome as this mystical fictional ideal. We don't need to see that perverted into something corrupt. Surely you can find some other example of a corrupt politician, if that's what you're interested in.

edit: to me, that sort of criticism is like saying "what if the unobtanium is not really unobtainable?" It's not some profound insight, just poking at something that the writers used to tell an entertaining story in a simple way. Maybe that could be the basis for a great story, but you'd have to really think about why you want to tell that story, and make sure it's not just "because I want to depress the hell out of the audience."

Was it though...? It was set onboard a military ship, with a strict hierarchy, and the characters all strongly demonstrating classical virtues.

Those were not seen as incompatible with liberalism at the time.

It certainly had some moments that would have been considered liberal for the 60s, like the famous "first interracial kiss on TV," but that was also, you know, a captain kissing his secretary.

Harlan Ellison famously denigrated Uhura as a telephone operator, but she was not Kirk's secretary. The "secretary" position was filled by Yeoman Rand, who had a thing for Kirk (at least until "wolf" Kirk tried to rape her). Further, I don't think the idea that a power imbalance was inherently rape entered the mainstream until the 1970s. The past remains a foreign country.

The past remains a foreign country.

I think thats really the crux of it. I wouldnt argue that TOS star trek is some sort of alt-right bedrock, but it's hardly modern woke either. Even the existence of a heroic straight white male main character would invalidate that. It's... its own weird thing. A weird mix of ww2 nostalgia, 60s california hippies, and Gene Roddenberry just being weird.

The problem is, we get all that in real life. We look to entertainment to simplify and escape that sort of thing.

Mm, speak for yourself. Unambiguous Good Guys vs. Bad Guys can be fun sometimes, but not all of us want "simple" entertainment.

Introducing moral complexity and shades of gray doesn't mean you have to go all grimdark and nihilistic.

Agreed, but writers should think about why they're adding these "shades of grey."

Like, if I go to a bakery and buy sugar cookies, I expect them to taste sweet. Sweet tastes good. Perhaps it might be interesting, sometimes, to dump in chili pepper or coffee grounds or whatever and "subvert expectations" with complex flavors. But unless you really know what you're doing, it mostly just tastes bad.

JRR Tolkien was not a stupid man. He fought in WW1, and was well familiar with the horrors of war against a morally complex foe. But he still used orcs as a simple, pure evil, because that gave him the space to focus on other elements of the human condition. Saying "well what if the orcs arent pure evil" would overwhelm the rest of the story.

I actually had that happen in a DnD game once, sorta. We were being attacked by bandits, and knocked them unconscious. We were lawful good, so we couldnt just execute them. It basically turned the rest of the campaign into a boring slog as we ran a prison camp to try to keep these stupid NPCs alive, instead of doing any fun adventuring stuff. If I wanted to hear a story about the human nature in prison, there are other, better places for that.

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It's ironic that you resent the latest Star Trek shows being unrelentlessly grimdark, which is true, because Star Trek was originally a very optimistic view of the future, but as @haroldbkny says above, that was largely a progressive worldview.

Meh. It was also pretty reactionary. I'll even say most of it's optimism comes from rejecting progress.

Gene Roddenberry was extremely liberal and very much "woke" by 60s standards

So what? Things are what they are, not the direction and velocity with which they are moving. Woke progressives have no claim on Star Trek, whichis proven by them having to adjust it to fit their ideology, and breaking it in the process.

Meh. It was also pretty reactionary. I'll even say most of it's optimism comes from rejecting progress.

It's reactionary in the sense that, as harold says, Roddenberry himself (and probably most of the show writers) still had a positive view generally of democracy, law and order, American military power, and the military in general. But they assumed we'd continue down the progressive path on race relations, gender relations, abolishing inequality, etc.

So what? Things are what they are, not the direction and velocity with which they are moving. Woke progressives have no claim on Star Trek, whichis proven by them having to adjust it to fit their ideology, and breaking it in the process.

Well yes, my point is that the current woke movement is a rejection of the optimistic liberalism of the 60s. That wokeness is in fact very illiberal is not a new observation.

It's reactionary in the sense that, as harold says, Roddenberry himself (and probably most of the show writers) still had a positive view generally of democracy, law and order, American military power, and the military in general. But they assumed we'd continue down the progressive path on race relations, gender relations, abolishing inequality, etc.

It's a lot deeper then that. It's reactionary in the sense that it has respect for the limits nature places on humanity, that borders on religious, even if they're all superficially secular. They have the ability to rewrite DNA on the fly, hack into the nervous system, support lifestyles of endless hedonism and debauchery... and they never take the bait. If they used the technology they had to it's full potential (and/or in the service of self-actualization rather than higher ideals, as following progressivism would imply) the average episode would end up being a mashup between Black Mirror and The Garden Of Earthly Delights.

Well yes, my point is that the current woke movement is a rejection of the optimistic liberalism of the 60s. That wokeness is in fact very illiberal is not a new observation.

Then what was the point of mentioning it's relative "wokeness" in the 60's? You made it sound like there's something ironic about people bemoaning Current Year's Star Trek making a far-left turn.

To be fair, honestly most of us are in grimdark phase right now anyway because so much of our real world society is falling apart. You’ve undoubtedly been reading the descriptions of Philadelphia here. Or if not you’ve seen the ruins of most major cities with bars on the windows, trash in the streets, drug use and homeless people everywhere one looks. Where taking public transportation is an exercise in risk management during the day and unsafe at night. Where kids no longer expect to live as well as their parents even as they must work ever harder to not fall into poverty from the cost of living and debts and lack of real opportunities even though those kids worked extremely hard to get where they are. It is not exactly surprising that the grandkids of people who watched the original show resent that their grandparents believed in a hopeful optimistic future where there’s no poverty and people can live a life they want when the promise is not only no closer to being delivered, we’re actually farther away from many of them than we were in the 1960s.

Philadelphia was that way in the early 2000s too (it got better in the interim), worse before that or so I'm told, and media wasn't so grimdark.

Media was dark back when it was worse, but it wasn't grimdark and it was good.

And it could play its darkness off really lightly. Crocodile Dundee is very family friendly for how it portrays the dregs of Manhattan in the 1980's.

Yes, media was less dark, but the reality was at least as dark if not darker (certainly Manhattan and Philadelphia were worse)

Kind of interesting how, as things get better, the outlook gets bleaker.

I don't know who "most of us" is. There are problems I find intractable at present, yes, but that said, if you asked me if I'd rather live today or in the 60s (without any tricks like "You get to know the next 60 years of history and can make decisions accordingly," etc.) I would definitely choose today.

Reminds me of all the black people who insist America today is not even a little bit better for black people than in the days of slavery. I just flat-out don't believe they actually believe this.

Roddenberry was a political odd duck much like Robert A. Heinlein. He was a progressive hippy, but also a former military officer and LAPD policeman. So he had a lot of progressive ideals, but also held fairly small-c conservative attitudes towards organizational hierarchy and he believably writes what a pseudo-military organization (Starfleet) would look and act like. And he’s pretty optimistic about that pseudo-military organization’s morals and goals. No Machiavellian glowies like Section-31 in his mind.

The more recent series have felt like they were written by writers who resent this optimistic view of the future - specifically, the idea that a largely Western, liberal democratic society could actually produce something good. And so they have painfully deconstructed it, so now the Federation is shit, all the characters we knew and loved are dead or assholes, and there is certainly no "fun" to be had in a universe where Western Enlightenment still holds sway.

I imagine this is a large part of why lower decks was so well received. Unlike the other shows it sticks with the original positive premise, even if it's modern, progressive and deconstructing star trek.

Unlike the other shows it sticks with the original positive premise, even if it's modern, progressive and deconstructing star trek.

did it though? From the (two) episodes I watched, it seemed to be constantly taking the piss out of the optimistic naive male character that wanted to do good, while propping up the #girlboss# female character as a queen who could do know wrong, no matter how insufferable she was. Most of the jokes were just taking little bits of what the older shows did for convenience (eg, making a teleporter because filming a shuttlecraft was too expensive) and trying to seem "smart" by pointing out minor inconsistencies.

In star trek tradition the first episodes (and by extension the first season) were the worst of the series and things get better from there on. The female character doesn't get to just be an uncriticised girl boss that does no wrong and the male character isn't just a pathetic punching bag. I watched the first episode and though it was a bit shit but pushed on because there seemed to be such widespread praise of the series even from places that were kind of primed to shit on new Trek.

Even after the first season, there were standout stinker episodes to the point where one in three was good, another one in three was serviceable or had something redeeming, and a 3rd was offensively bland and pointless garbage.

I do love Landlord Cops, though. And Big Strong City, Capital of Pakled Planet.

That may be but it's hard to overstate how much of an improvement these metrics are to the rest of new Trek.

Even Tolkien himself didn't like orcs being irredeemable. You might already know about this, but if you don't, you might find it interesting. Look up Tolkien letter 153.

The more recent series have felt like they were written by writers who resent this optimistic view of the future - specifically, the idea that a largely Western, liberal democratic society could actually produce something good

I think it's worth mentioning that this shift is probably largely because progressivism or leftism itself has shifted. Back in the 60s, I think people were more optimistic on the left, and less of the view that the west sucked. There were those people and those themes, but they weren't the majority. More liberal themes dominated, and people were more into the idea that we can all live together in utopia, less that the West is responsible for dystopia. It wasn't until the 2010s that the "West sucks" crowd became the majority.

Picard S3 abandoned most of this and wasn’t bad. SNW is also not bad (there are some work themes but focus is generally on the characters and not the message).

To me, that's like saying "Bill Cosby has a new comedy series, and it's not that bad! A lot less terrible than his last season of the Cosby show!"

Like... why. Why do these people get to make so many mistakes, and still get the big chances to try again. We need to stop watching them.

I held off from watching season three for about a year, watched the first episode, then didn’t bother with the next. They had Beverly Crusher do a murder and then setup a mystery box, and I lost all interest.

Though after watching Collier’s review I learned the mystery boxes all get resolved immediately in the next episode.

They didnt let mysteries simmer which was nice. Bev made dumb decisions

Literally everyone I've talked to about episode 8-9 irl have thought they were atrocious. The apolagia for the new movies seems like an (almost) entirely online contrarian/"AstroTurf" thing to me. Perhaps it's different in parts of America though.

When Force Awakens came out I liked it. Looking back, if I could watch it alone without the ones after, I'd still like it okay--because it was basically of the same film family as the original trilogy, down to the exact same tropes. Rey was feisty and headstrong, but that was a combination in a way of Luke and Han. She showed weakness, at least one time, until she suddenly didn't, but there were unanswered questions that might have been answered in a way later that could have explained this. The film ended with a cliff hanger--you knew Luke was going to be awesome in the next film.

He wasn't. The Last Jedi on first watch was like a spice you've never had at a restaurant you're trying for the first time that serves food you thought you knew how to eat. The spice wreaks havoc on your digestive system and you think "God damn what did I eat? What was in that burrito?" I wanted to like it. I even refrained from piling on when people complained about it. And I still feel like Rise of Skywalker at least tried to undo some of TLJ's damage. But the trauma was too great. It was like taking an overdose of painkillers for a really bad headache. The cure made things worse.

The only thing positive I can say is that the acting as a whole was pretty good in the sequels. Every lead role actor and actress gave convincing performances. The soundtracks were quite good, as to be expected. And now I'm out of praise.

Tellingly, my sons, who I showed the original series to, and then the prequels, and who rewatched these films many times, never wanted to re-watch any of the sequels after seeing them once. Once!

The one guy who I've met in real life who claimed to love the Last Jedi was a literal Antifa guy on a flight to seattle to "help out" with the Chaz/Chop thing after it had already ended. All the people who will try to make excuses for it have been some manner of Leftist. Probably because it vaguely alludes to "capitalism bad" at one point.

I remember 8 being hugely contentious. Lots of people were saying it was great, and we "just didn't get it." The main star wars subreddit banned all criticism, to the point where people started a new one "saltier than crait" just so they could complain about it. I worked with nerds in a progressive area, so I was kind of afraid to discuss it with them. I feel like it started with a ton of apologia, and even ardent fans, and now that shit is finally dying away.


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