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Indeed. I've seen you post half a dozen times here something along the lines of (and feel free to correct my paraphrasing): 'My model of the world is that the ingroup will consistently choose to harm the outgroup as much as possible. In 2020, protesters burned down billions of dollars worth of homes/businesses to harm the outgroup. When Red-tribe Kyle Rittenhouse tried to defend innocents he was attacked and then tried by the Blue-tribe Justice system that refused to prosecute the crimes of the rioters.
When the pandemic happened, Blue tribe health officials instituted draconian lockdowns that minimally impacted the white-collar laptop-class but wrecked Red tribe laborers and Red tribe parents.
My model of the world predicts these events perfectly! Do you have a better model, and if so, does it accurately predict the world?'
To which I would say, would your model predict:
To be clear, I doubt I could have predicted these events with any accuracy. But my observation is that you couldn't have done that either. If you want to prove me wrong, make some concrete predictions about the next four years. Will Trump incarcerate Biden or some other major democrat? Trump assassinated by an activist? Significant uptick in lone wolf attacks? World War III?
The only thing your model has going for it is that nobody pays attention to things that don't happen, even when that's the critical evidence against your argument. But whenever something controversial happens, you pop up and point towards the big flashing sign saying 'EVERYTHING SUCKS.' It's the same sensationalism that governs journalists, wrapped in a Bayesian/rationalist worldview.
I admit to being disappointed in Biden, the pardon is deplorable and shouldn't have happened. I remain unconvinced that Joe Biden is particularly corrupt (...pardon notwithstanding), and I'm skeptical that Hunter is particularly corrupt by the standards of DC.
One tribal narrative was that Biden was corrupt and abused his office to get rich. The other tribal narrative is...well, that the Bidens aren't particularly corrupt. Setting aside which direction the facts are consistently breaking, one tribal narrative has to be false in order for the other to be true. In your model, since you clearly believe Red Tribers are correct, are entrenched Red Tribalists denying reality?
edit: well, OP changed substantially after I hit post.
https://www.newsweek.com/shadowy-group-janes-revenge-claims-attacks-anti-abortion-organizations-1753992
Literally zero attempts to prosecute them of course, unlike people standing silently across the street from an abortion clinic.
(Edit: actually it looks like Florida got one in jail and fines for a few others! Clever trick, basically forcing the feds to evenly apply the FACE act against abortionist terrorists)
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"Trump" isn't a unitary figure - the people who would have had to prosecute Hilary were the DOJ, which Trump was embroiled in a...contentious relationship with, given his termination of his first AG (who, incidentally, had a long history with Hilary as colleagues in the Senate), and the role of senior officials at DOJ in promulgating and sustaining the Russian Collusion hoax. Any order Trump gave to try and prosecute her would not have been obeyed.
How quickly we forget. There was at least one significant attempt at actual terrorism in the lead up to the Dobbs decision, coupled with strategic DOJ non-enforcement of (and thus tacit condoning of) the laws against harassment of judicial officers. There then followed a propaganda smear campaign designed to gin up impeachment efforts against conservative justices, notwithstanding similar conduct from liberal justices.
There was quite a bit of ‘4 am property damage’ attacks directed against Catholic Churches in the aftermath of dobbs as well, the stuff that could have been prosecuted as a hate crime if the perpetrators weren’t politically sympathetic. A very small number of far left activists attempted to interrupt masses and were physically prevented from doing so, which I suspect had a deterrent effect on confrontational behavior.
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Sorry, it's a bad habit. This still seems like a really good reply, though, and I'll try to get a substantive response.
One note, real quick. The quote is:
It's like "A Tribe Called Quest", you have to say the whole thing. I try to keep the phrasing as consistent as possible, I've been using it for years now because I think it's a really important insight.
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By your reasoning, he should also predict that Biden will put on a vest full of explosives and suicide bomb Donald Trump.
Nobody will choose to harm the outgroup "as much as possible" if that means literally as much as possible regardless of the harm to themselves in the process. What they will do is harm the outgroup as much as they can without too much harm to themselves. That isn't the same thing. They did in fact tried to keep lockdowns going and they did support "abolish the police"; it's just that the political cost of continuing to do so was too great.
You've also thrown a few things in there that don't even harm the outgroup; a January 6 style protest against Trump winning the election wouldn't harm anyone in the outgroup (and the actual January 6 didn't harm anyone either, it was just an excuse for a left-wing crackdown).
Okay; explain to me why left-wing protesters can't simply have George Floyd level riots and burn DC, NYC and every other major US city to the ground in response to Trump's election? You believe that sympathetic AGs in all of those very blue districts will fail to prosecute them, correct? What harm will come to stochastic terrorists, when I've been assured that it's very easy to do this kind of damage to infrastructure and hard to track the perpetrators? As far as I'm aware, no public health official has suffered legal other major professional consequences, so what harms did they personally suffer to make them stop pushing lockdowns and vaccines?
Perhaps I'll add, why didn't democrats rig the 2024 election given that nobody suffered consequences for rigging the election in 2020?
When you say 'without too much harm to themselves,' you've essentially watered your argument down to democracy/populism, given that most of your proposed consequences come from the ballot box. Or at least given yourself enough of a loophole to drive a George Floyd-style riot through. At which point, if my model of the world is that elected officials largely try to do things that are popular with the electorate (at least when those actions are legible to the public), and that a majority of Americans aren't particularly motivated by harming the outgroup, please give me concrete examples where our predictions about the world would differ?
Imagine you put a puppet in as president, knowing that he was controllable due to ill health and that your control of mass media could hide and lie about any visible instances of his declining health, which doctors assured you was bad, but currently easy to hide. Imagine that due to circumstances outside your control his condition deteriorates faster than you expect and can manage, such that after a disastrous debate performance (perhaps sabotaged by an alternative faction in your party) power players in your organisation begin publicly demanding he step down. If he steps down however, you will have to return a bunch of money you've already spent and start a brand new presidential campaign 100 days out from the election. Due to your financial situation and because all of the highly ambitious possible alternatives refuse, you have to run a person nobody thinks can win.
Wouldn't you cede that election and put your effort in preparing for the next one? You still have to campaign as hard as possible for the people downticket, but you aren't going to pull out all the tricks to win the presidency. Especially not when your opponents are watching like hawks.
Note in this hypothetical you are the party leaders, I don't mean to imply anything about the average democrat supporter, who I believe aren't especially motivated by harming the outgroup.
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Because the people who were organizing them stopped when the post riot life started harming democratic candidates! In other words they were getting into too much trouble so they stopped that particular harm effort.
What is the evidence of this? People here and elsewhere argued that Floyd was a boon for democrats in 2020, and they won fairly convincingly four months later.
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Because Floyd-level riots hurt Democratic-run and Democratic-voting areas (you yourself mention NYC--not a Republican stronghold!) and discredit the Democrats. They have some propaganda value against the right, especially when the media is sympathetic, but they probably hurt the left more than the right. This doesn't depend on prosecutions.
Because their ability to rig elections is not unlimited and they couldn't rig it by enough to push the election to the Democrats.
"They'll allow as many Floyd-style protests as they can get away with, but they will eventually stop" is very different than preventing Floyd-style protests as much as they can. You would predict the latter. Certainly you wouldn't predict prosecutors going easy on protestors.
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