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A major crux for me is P(WWIII) combined with P(Trump goes senile at some point in this coming term).
Because, let's be real here: if WWIII happens, then dealing with SJ is not very hard. Half their voter base will literally die in a fire. The other half will be discredited by having weakened the West and invited the challenge to them that resulted in WWIII. In-office representatives might try to fight a desperate rearguard to preserve malapportionment, but that's super-doomed. And then the Serious Business tools - constitutional amendments, impeachments, and so on - start getting handed over to the conservatives while they're still hopping mad (even more mad if a malapportionment rearguard had to be crushed). At that point I'd be more worried about White Terror than about Thermidor failing.
Trump being old and too much of a Trump to resign or 25A himself, though, might worsen the Western death toll.
Could I get a confidence level on that prediction?
This is a common argument over at Jim's blog — that nuclear war will benefit the right because it's the big lefty cities that will go up in mushroom clouds, not the right-wing countryside. I've had a few objections to this; primarily, given what the competence crisis has done to our government's ability to maintain things — and particularly, the question of tritium production — I'm not sure our nukes will work, meaning I'd expect us to lose WWIII, and that will have serious negative consequences for us regardless of which side wins the internal political conflict.
More personally, I once found a website that let you see the blast radii for various nukes superimposed on a (Google-sourced) city map of your choice. And if your standard Russian or Chinese nuke got dropped on JBER — a reasonable target for either country in a WWIII scenario, especially the former — then I'm outside the "killed almost instantly in the blast" radius… and, unfortunately, inside the "die slowly after an agonizing hour or two from horrible burns down one side of your body" radius.
Russian Nukes are likely even worse- US nuclear maintenance might be skimped on or done by questionably competent people who overlook mechanical issues, but the commanders aren’t systematically stealing the budget for it. And China has a shortage of warheads to wipe out life in the U.S.
Moreover, nuclear targeting is not done on the basis of a list of largest cities in the enemy’s homeland, it’s done by targeting military and command installations and war critical infrastructure as well as strategic forces. A lot of that is pretty red, although admittedly DC and San Diego are not.
I'd expect both in actual practice; a lot of the point of a deterrent (short of the US/Russian lolhuge arsenals) is that you threaten to go countervalue in response to an attack out of spite, and it's likely that things going nuclear will be the result of a false alarm saying the other side's attempting alpha strike.
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A full exchange of nuclear warheads will end the US as a political entity for at least decades and probably forever. If it reforms it will be much later. The current political situation will cease to matter at all to the survivors. Pretending this is not true is deeply silly.
In a scenario where Taiwan goes hot in the near future and the Chinese arsenal is deployed, I'd expect probably a few dozen mushroom clouds over the USA, due to destruction on the ground + ABM + other targets (Taiwan itself, Japan, South Korea, Australia, possibly others). The USA would probably survive, although things'd be tough for a while.
The Russian arsenal, assuming for the sake of argument that it works, is a different kettle of fish.
China is rapidly building up there arsenal. Taiwan won't go hot until they know they can slag the US as a going concern.
...unless they're confident that the USA won't intervene, or that they can avoid escalation to nukes like they (barely) did in Korea.
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Well yes, right wing posadism remains stupid.
Although you aren't technically replying to me, I feel obliged to note yet again that Is =/= Ought. I have no clue why I keep having to spell this out, and in Rat spaces no less.
I am saying that SJ is, probabilistically, less of a problem because there's a fair chance nuclear war gets rid of it rendering most efforts to fight it moot. I am not saying that mass casualties from nuclear war are good because of this. The past couple of election cycles I've been begging all the parties to do anything about civil defence; I'd have been willing to vote for the Greens if they'd had word one about this.
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"I know my thumb is broken and if I cut my whole arm off that will defiantly fix the problem" type thinking
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I'm bad with numbers, but it feels pretty likely to me. Is that 70%-80%? I don't think I'd say 90%, the electoral college situation does give me some hesitation. By "inevitable" I mean "I don't see anything short of a black swan event shifting the outcome from where it's currently headed," not "I'm 100% sure of this specific outcome."
And yes: when Harris' chances hit 33% on Polymarket, I was sorely tempted to YOLO a lot of money into it. But I am extremely risk-averse; I can barely psychologically handle the uncertainties of reasonable business investment. "Shares" of anything that can go rapidly to $0 are just too much for me, at least on my current budget.
Trump is sliding on polymarket and fast. So it seems your opinion is shared by some people.
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I understand completely, sharing this aversion to some extent. I wasn't looking to bet you, just to quantify the various dire claims I'm seeing floating around here; as a non-American it's hard to know who to believe, and track records help.
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Is this assuming a mostly legitimate election?
I don't mean to interrogate you, I'm just curious how one reaches that assumption. I'm less comfortable with Trump than you, and I'm thinking Kamala basically did her job of losing gracefully for the Dems.
Well, I feel like it's already a little late for that; to whatever extent "violating norms" can be said to undermine legitimacy, Harris' circumventing the nomination process to simply assume candidacy has already called into question the legitimacy of this election.
But yeah, I don't think the Democratic machine in the relevant swing states is going to go down without a fight (and a dirty one, if necessary).
Insofar as Harris has not (yet?) done anything blatantly unconstitutional, I also think it is a little more likely than not (55%? 60%?) that a true electoral win from Trump could still see his inauguration prevented by his opponents, hook or crook. This could potentially be done by preventing an apparent electoral victory simply by thumbing the scales in a few key states. We saw Lisa Page's and Peter Strzok's texts; how many three-letter-agency texts have we not seen? How many texts like that were never sent, because the people who might have sent them were smarter than Page and Strzok? (Page and Strzok were ultimately fired, but they sued the government over that, and then settled for a payout of about a million bucks apiece--not exactly the kind of government response that seems likely to discourage similar behavior from others.) We saw Hollywood's faithless elector scheme, how far would they go to prevent a second Trump term? There have already been so many attempts on Trump's life that there is a whole Wikipedia entry dedicated to them, which does not appear to be the case for any other U.S. President or presidential candidate. As we discussed a few weeks ago, there are a lot of people expressing worry over how to convince Republicans to accept a Trump defeat gracefully, and yet when I asked whether there would be any way to convince Democrats to accept a Harris defeat gracefully, no one even attempted to answer that question. Instead, several people flatly denied the demonstrated reality that Democrats in 2016 were working just as hard to change the outcome of the election, as Republicans were in 2020.
Unfortunately, I suspect that no matter who wins this time, the response from the other side will be lawsuits, denials, and probably some riots. Just like in 2016. Just like in 2020.
I'm pretty uncomfortable with Trump; I'm just much, much less comfortable with the idea of packing the Supreme Court with justices who don't know what "woman" means.
So No, it's not assuming a mostly legitimate election, it's assuming a high probability of a stolen election?
What's "high?" What's "stolen?"
I think it is a little more likely than not that Harris pulls off an electoral victory without anyone stuffing ballot boxes, and I think she does this by virtue of corporate news media having become the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. This is why Bezos is getting such pushback on seeking to gain media credibility outside the blue tribe: news no longer exists to be credible, it exists to build consensus for your tribe and punish the outgroup. Does that count as "stealing" an election? My inclination is to say no! But when you add to that the political influence of teachers unions over indoctrinating children, the moneyed influence of woke capital, the cultural influence of Hollywood, the behind-the-scenes influence of government employees... at some point it seems like the idea that any election is the result of rational discourse or democratic consensus just becomes laughable in a way that discourages the appellation "legitimate."
Those same forces (news media, schoolteachers, woke capital, Hollywood, "deep state") are additionally committed to preventing a Trump inauguration even if he wins electoral victory, and so I think it is at least somewhat likely that, conditional on a Trump electoral victory, there will again be significant efforts to prevent his inauguration.
I'm just trying to resolve a prediction from sometime I respect between
"Butch Coolidge will lose his upcoming match because his opponent is an up and coming star and too fast for an over the hill has been"
And
"Butch Coolidge is going to lose his upcoming fight because I saw him come out of Marcellus Wallace's joint and tuck a packet of cash into his jacket."
Both are predictions based on knowledge, but reflect very different observations.
But two things can be true at the same time.
I do not think that either political party is engaged in organized attempts to "steal" elections. And yet election-influencing prospiracies arise with alarming regularity, whether that be in the form of lawsuits, robocalls, social media posts, or whatever. We even have hard evidence of such prospiracies arising in the context of elected officials and government employees (Trump campaign wiretapping, Strzok) and even rising to the level of full-blown conspiracies (Watergate).
None of that precludes the possibility that Harris is also sufficiently appealing, or Trump sufficiently revolting, for her to manage a "genuine" electoral victory. I find myself basically persuaded by the big city numbers and the suburbia polls that Kamala can pull off an electoral victory. But I am not a pollster! Math is not my thing! I would not encourage anyone to make bets on anything I predict, ever; I'm far too reflexively skeptical to ever feel very sure about anything, even ridiculous things. So I also have to think about the possibility that I've been misled by the polls. It certainly wouldn't be the first time!
What all that other stuff does preclude is any ability in me to feel highly confident about the results-as-eventually-reported. This is the argument Clinton (IIRC) initially brought out when Trump in 2016 started making noise about stolen elections. My memory is that she (or maybe it was one of her supporters) correctly observed that the outcome of the vote is just part of what's important; the other part is that people have to believe it wasn't rigged. Well, this painted her into a bit of a corner when she lost, and it took her a little while to reverse course and get in on the "Trump is not a legitimate president" narrative.
But eight years later we're all living in "broken window" territory. Democrats* tried to actually steal the 2016 election, via Russian dossiers and faithless elector schemes and votes against certification and throwing riots and spurious impeachment attempts. Republicans* largely followed suit in 2020. If you think your opponent is likely to play dirty, then you're a little more likely to play dirty, and if your opponent knows you're likely to escalate, then they prepare to escalate. Whether we're talking about nuclear war, rioting and looting, or election shenanigans, the logic is the same.
* "Not all..."
De-escalation is hard.
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