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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   8957 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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Scott-featured global health philanthropist and activist John Green made a video about TB treatment and USAID. tl;dw, TB is the brick-shithouse of bacteria, so treatment takes 4-6 months, but the good news is that people mostly aren't contagious during treatment. Stopping treatment increases the risk of treatment-resistance, including the spread of newly-treatment-resistant strains, so interruptions in the supply chain are a major global health problem. Yes, it's bad that global health was overly reliant on the USA, but it requires government-level funding and logistics. (Unsaid, his family pledged $1m/year 2024-2027 for a USAID TB program in the Philippines, in addition to $6.5m for Partners in Health, so he's literally put his money where his mouth is.) His contacts in confirm that drug supplies are being interrupted.

Even if one wants to cut USAID, a stop-work order, rather than a phase-out, was likely a net-negative by most measures of utility.

This is a hostage puppy, which has been discussed here before.

It's not a hostage puppy, it's collateral damage. There's no evidence that USAID was shut down and the bureaucrats decided to stop TB treatment first. Everything got axed, the good with the bad.

The reason this is being done so crudely is because every less-crude attempt made in the past was stopped. If you let them slow you down they'll keep finding reasons to do it until the whole thing grinds to a halt.

There was a limited supply of veto power and it has been squandered on less important issues. Don't blame the bartender for cutting you off, blame yourself for drinking too much.

The reason this is being done so crudely is because every less-crude attempt made in the past was stopped.

My thoughts throughout this Presidency (all three weeks of it) has been a mix of:

  1. Damn, Trump is reckless, unprofessional, and vain.

  2. How the fuck does he have so much ammo?

There's a plane crash? Air Traffic Controllers were hired under a racist system. Foreign aid? Transgender operas in Colombia. Funding basic science? >60% "administrative overhead" tacked on. Threaten Canada with tariffs? Suddenly our border security is a valid issue. Random whatever? $20M in subscriptions to the Associated Press, and another $1.6M to the NYT.

It feels like a weird mirror to the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy: He gives every indication of shooting blindly, but there has actually been a bullseye where he hits all along. That could be luck or good spin, but the most compelling story is that everywhere is that bad.

(Related joke: There has been a shooting at a peaceful protest! A child molester, a sexual assaulter, and a convicted felon illegally carrying a gun are the only people injured.)

I still don't think he's doing a good job, but damn does he have a strong narrative.

The name of the concept you're reaching for is "target-rich environment".

I've been digging into some of these laws and regulations. I'm coming away more convinced than ever that democratic governance is a myth. No regular person could possibly comprehend the byzantine labyrinth of rules, regulations, and case law required to competently evaluate government decision making.

Every spigot of federal funds grows into a hydrothermal vent of highly-specialized fauna perfectly adapted for siphoning-off those sweet sweet grants. Congress can't fix the problem, because all they are able or willing to do is appropriate more funding for things.

The reason this is being done so crudely is because every less-crude attempt made in the past was stopped.

Can you give examples of past attempts? As a cynic, it wouldn't surprise me, but this is The Motte, not The Bailey, so I don't want to assume that what wouldn't surprise cynical, old me is correct.

Afghanistan and Syria withdrawals last Trump term come to mind. Generals bragged about playing shell games in Syria with troop numbers.

https://nypost.com/2020/11/13/diplomat-says-officials-misled-trump-on-troop-count-in-syria/

“We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” James Jeffrey, US special representative for Syria engagement, said in an interview with Defense One.

Different branch of gov, but basically the same idea. Leave wiggle room and you leave them room for to wiggle out of the order.

Relatedly, pulling out of Afghanistan. We finally did it, but the military leadership insisted on dragging their feet and doing it in an incompetent fashion to undermine Biden and it worked.

Reagan is the classic example. But pat Buchanan in the 90s is an additional attempt. Government grew over the time period.

The problem, for me, is that my options are not between an orderly phase-out and a stop-work order, but between a stop-work order and the status quo. I firmly believe that doing this in a slow, orderly fashion would just result in caterwauling about how we're killing the children in the future and that this caterwauling would continue apace through the next administration, which would restore funding in full plus a little extra bump for their trouble. If, like me, you want many of these activities curtailed, you just have to bite the bullet and accept that it's going to be an ugly process where every single person denied a previously received bit of American largesse informs you that you're literally killing children.

So, the solution, for me, is to say that the mistake is not in stopping now, but that we ever began the process of giving away so much American money that can never be redacted in the slightest and that is never enough to even begin to slake the demand.

John Green is a good point of discussion in philanthropy apropos USAID. The mediocre king of YA and man who appears truly convicted in his beliefs has, in addition to his tuberculosis charity, also contributed in fighting maternal mortality in Sierra Leone. He uses some of his money to, he believes, improve the world.

Does he? Are we a net positive when we spend money on maternal mortality and tuberculosis in the third world?

You ask John and the NGOs involved in these efforts what the causes are and they'll rifle off a list of things money fixes. For Sierra Leone, if they had better infrastructure, more hospitals, more trained medical workers, antenatal care and all the supplements in the world, their rates would fall. For tuberculosis, the relevant parts of the above and also staff ensuring patients complete their regimens. Americans regularly fail to complete antibiotic regimens, what of those in far poorer, far less equipped nations? Their failures are prolific. They use the wrong medications, or the right ones at the wrong amounts, and either way the patients at unacceptable frequency fail to complete their regimens.

Add to this pharmaceuticals in countries like India pumping out genericized versions of American pharmaceutical products under government license and we reach the outcome of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis.

And all this happened under robust US aid spending. More money in a year than John Green, who does well for himself, will make in his lifetime and beyond with the royalties of his estate. We can no longer afford to tolerate these practices. The solution is not more money, we've tried that, it's not infrastructure, health workers, medication access. The solution is those countries cease public treatment of tuberculosis, it is travel bans, and it is drone strikes on factories making knockoffs.

This is where John Green, Scott and EA utterly fail. It's true that with first-class western medicine far fewer mothers in Sierra Leone would die, but the root cause is population health, it's the genetic basis for particular risk and susceptibility to postpartum hemorrhaging. Throwing money at Sierra Leone will not solve that population health issue, it will also not improve its socioeconomic conditions. Nigeria is far wealthier, similar rates. Liberia at least for a time, far lower rates. Haiti, same as Liberia. When those mothers live through one birth, what happens? More children, more daughters, more future mothers, more future aid necessitated. But at least with Sierra Leone and broadly with efforts to lower maternal mortality you can't say an obvious externality is superbugs. With tuberculosis we know outright the process is creating superbugs and the response somehow has been "give even more money."

No, it is no longer time for that. If India cannot manage its tuberculosis issue for itself, if India has to keep on stealing American weapons against illness only for their population to dull them flat through misuse, they don't get help anymore, they don't get to make our drugs anymore. They must live or die on their own mettle, because they aren't playing a domestic game with domestic consequences, they're toying with a pandemic. Every dollar spent "fighting" TB in the third world is a dollar spent adding fuel to the fire of a real global health crisis. I can't blame John, he's so charmingly naive that he's constitutionally incapable of considering the solution is doing nothing at all. I can blame Scott, he knows better.

Directionally I agree with EA and with the moral judgment of value in eradicating disease. I believe it in completely, but lifetime treatments, fighting and suppressing and temporary cures, these do not constitute eradication. When we can engineer treatments that do eradicate, when we can target population health through genetic engineering, such as in reducing the risk of postpartum hemorrhaging, when we have the panacea that can wipe out AIDS and TB and whatever else, it won't be merely worthwhile but our true moral obligation to see it through the world over.

But efforts that increase suffering -- like increasing populations by creating more mothers at risk in Sierra Leone, creating more people throughout sub-Saharan Africa who will ultimately become infected with HIV in excess of those spared of mother-to-child transmission, and separately causing the emergence of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, these are not actual charity and they are not love. Blindness to the consequences of your actions from whatever flavor of naivety is not love, knowing what is truly best for someone and acting in accordance with that is love. Love would be making treatments in Sierra Leone dependent on subsequent sterilization, same for PEPFAR. Love in India would be establishing secure facilities where under no circumstances are patients permitted to leave during their entire course of their regimen. Call it Directly Observed Treatment, Until Cured. It may sound cruel, but our current "kindness" is leading many of these countries straight to hell.

Uh, what does India stealing medical patents have to do with anything? Are their knockoffs less effective? Pardon my ignorance, but it would seem that a stolen antibiotic is, in terms of effects, identical to a purchased one.

While the factories likely have purity issues, the main issue is the antibiotics are culturally ineffective. That is, people routinely do not complete their regimens, which is a primary driver of antibiotic resistance. There are subpopulations in America where this is also true, but it is believed to be a widespread problem in India.

No, opposite problem. They are effective, they aren't utilized properly. Prescribed wrong, treatment regimens not followed, both kinds of failure cause TB to gain further drug resistance.

Not OP, but if we were giving them antibiotics we might at least hope to suggest they use them responsibly. If they just steal them instead, they can hand them out like candy.

(Again, not OP, and I have no stake in this issue, just suggesting a possible connection).

The point he's making is "if Indians misuse antibiotics then they shouldn't be allowed to have the ones we're trying to keep in reserve; since they'd respond to a refusal to licence by seizing the patents, blow up the physical factories".

If the United States tells the people of the Global South "We have the ability to save you from a painful death, but we are choosing not to For The Greater Good", the survivors will be fertile soil for Usama bin-Ladin 2.0 or some other radical cultists. They will be much more sympathetic to the Peking Clique, if and when they decide to demand something Washington is unwilling to concede. No fortress you can build will be strong enough to keep them out, when, like Belshazzar, you are numbered, weighed, and divided.

The cost of indefinitely providing medical care to people who cannot care for themselves may seem steep, but it is trivial compared to the cost of not doing so.

The US would never implement such a policy, not without an effective or actual revolution in governance. The brutal pragmatism wouldn't stop at "Good luck with that," it would be a fully isolationist US or West. We're talking a mined, milecastled and turreted border wall with Mexico with no entrances, boats flying unacceptable or no flags being sunk, no flights to those countries, no business in those countries, no telecommunications access permitted from those countries. We're talking skin color as a reason for detainment and summary deportation. It's a nightmare scenario.

The position was hyperbole in service of my conclusion: we do have an ultimate obligation to help these countries but what we're doing right now is hurting them. Hurting them so much threatening them with drone strikes would be superior than our "aid." It's not charity to think of every human as a blank slate, it's confusing what ought to be for what is, and profound differences in human behavior is what is. Just health differences, that our discourse has devolved so far that in another environment I might have to heavily couch myself to avoid the impression of wrongthink when all I'm wondering about is a genetic propensity to PPH, this isn't right, good, truthful. Now instead we're in decades of a geopolitical implementation of the trope of the pageant girl's vapid "I'm going to work for world peace." Charity must be tailored to the target, it must be undertaken with knowledge of the recipient's strengths and shortcomings, all of them. In other words, it must be undertaken out of actual love. John Green wants to show love, he grew up Christian in whatever surely protestant environment that didn't teach it right, though anymore, what churches do? But when he donates to fighting maternal mortality he isn't thinking as hard as he needs to be, he isn't asking, okay, well, what if this just means a lot more girls will be born who wouldn't be, what if they grow up and they need all this, and what if the money isn't there, and they die? The most important questions with these kinds of charitable projects must be above all others "What is our plan for obsolescence?" — "What is our plan if we have to stop?"

One of the arguments in the post you are replying to would require tens of thousands of 9/11s to get close to rebutting .There are already billions of wannabe Bin Laden's in the global south, most currently don't have the resources or skills. If anything, propping them up makes the terrorism and future war problem worse...

Radical Islam is already running wild in Africa and getting worse by the day, partly because of how ineffective US military aid is. African countries have already been turning away from the United States by the dozen because of the US’s inability to help them fight it. America’s help is weak an ineffective partially because the aid is conditioned on a bunch of stupid aesthetic requirements like “respecting bizarre western sexual practices” and “not being a military dictatorship”. The Russians and the Chinese don’t make these totalizing demands. They are more than happy to trade guns and effective military advisors for mineral rights on a transactional basis. The Africans like that better because relationships with Russia and China, while mercenary, actually allow the Africans to govern their own countries and don’t turn into a clingy codependency where they have to live and rule according to what makes American liberals feel good.

To be crude: Those folks will become fertile soil for MOAB 2.0. Like the people unlucky enough to have shared a slice of continent with Osama bin Laden.

The cost of indefinitely providing medical care to people who cannot care for themselves may seem steep, but it is trivial compared to the cost of not doing so.

My gut tells me this isn't true at all. Where is the direct negative for the western world to not giving free stuff to an infinitely growing third world?

It feels like you are hoisting the western world on its own petard. Leveraging the massive amount of sympathy and charity it has given, which has driven it to its knees, in order to justify it continuing the practice to not face the wrath of the people it has been saving for the past century.

"Better keep giving charity to us or we will kill you."

Whenever I hear an argument along the lines of "We have to engage in leftist policy X, or else terrible thing Y that right-wingers fear will happen!", I reach for my tired disappointment.

Be honest with me now: you don't want to provide aid to the people of the Global South to prevent radical cultists; you want to provide aid to the people of the Global South because you think it's the right thing to do, and Osama 2.0 is a convenient argument you came up with.

I do favour providing aid to the Global South because I believe that it is the right thing to do, and wish everyone else supported it for the same reason.

However, as many people here do not share that moral instinct, I am left only to appeal to their self-interest.

The fact that they point in the same direction is not a coincidence but the working of karma. If you harden your hearts towards the suffering of the least fortunate among you, it will come back to bite you in the rear end.

But from what I hear USAID has been making the Global South more sympathetic to the Peking Clique, as you call them, by showing up and demanding to know how the sexual minorities are being treated. Eliminating USAID is not a commitment to forever forsaking the Global South and banning all foreign aid forever, it's shutting down an organization that's served as an arm of US coercive diplomacy.

Do you have evidence of USAID unjustifiably deviating from best practice or Sierra Leonians having a genetic susceptibility for postpartum hemorrhaging?

Postpartum Hemorrhaging as leading cause of maternal deaths in Sierra Leone.

Particular disposition to hemorrhaging is my speculation, but when Sierra Leone at least was the world capital of obstetric mortality with >1000/100K while Haiti had <500/100K, a genetic basis is the rational guess.

People dying of TB is bad. But it's net negative only for the countries with the TB problem. Why should US subsidize this?

You know how every time there's a new potential pandemic you hear about how new diseases are deadlier because the pathogen is not adapted to human hosts? And how a well adapted pathogen doesn't want to kill the host, it wants to live in the host long enough to propagate to other hosts?

TB is arguably the most human adapted pathogen out there. It has our immune system beat six ways from Sunday, kills slowly over an extended period of time, and can lie dormant for years before becoming active again (which means healthy people you let through customs may have a passive infection, and will only turn active and contagious later when they're already in the country). It is also arguably the most difficult bacterial infection to cure. You need to be on multiple powerful medications with significant side effects (including potential blindness) for 6-9 months in order to cure it.

If a TB strain managed to become resistant to one of those medications then it may not be possible to cure it, not without new drug development. In the US we've managed to mostly extirpate the disease at great cost over many years of effort. If an antibiotic resistant strain showed up it could undo decades of progress in US health.

It'd be interesting to compare the cost-effectiveness of USAID's reduction in pathogens brought to the US and quarantining all international travelers and cargo ships, including economic impact, but the counterfactual in the comment you replied to was "phase-out," not indefinite continuation.

Ah, thank you for pointing this out. It's already paid for and thus unnecessarily cruel - this is the main point. IMO good faith interpretation, from the US government perspective the management of the drug supply chain isn't free, so they are just saving on that.

Because while the NGO's left hand is open demanding money, the NGO's right hand has boatload after boatload of diseased "asylum seekers" poised on your border. One way or another, they will make it your problem.

The selfish motivation is that pathogens don't respect borders. Travel between the US and the Philippines is relatively common, almost a million Americans visited the country in 2024. Any one of them can pick up a new antibiotic resistant strain of TB and bring it home, at which point it's our problem. Solve the problems where they are so we don't have to solve them here in the future.

Wouldn't it be cheaper to:

  • Ban immigration from and travelling to the countries with this problem
  • Treat your own citizens if this issue arises

After a while these poor countries find new sponsors who will solve their problems. Or solve it by themselves.

Banning all travel to and from places millions of Americans visit each year would be costly to the economy so while it might be cheaper for the government it would surely be more expensive for the country. Also, I want freedom to travel where I please. We shouldn't impose travel bans that aren't actually necessary.

@2rafa? Your response?

DOGE sets its sights on Medicare and Medicaid:

Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency is quickly expanding its reach through the federal government. It recently accessed systems at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Musk and his team are now looking at key payment and contracting systems for Medicare and Medicaid - that was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. On X, Musk posted, he believes that, quote, "big money fraud is happening."

Mostly just talk and speculation at this point, but there are clear indications that medicare/medicaid have not escaped the notice of the DOGE.

In spite of the perceived celerity with which DOGE is eviscerating government programs, I'm still mostly in the "nothing ever happens" camp. "Cutting government spending" at this point is akin to rearranging deck chairs on the sinking Titanic that is Western civilization. The slow Brazilification of America is irreversible either way. Nonetheless, I am enjoying the apoplectic response that Musk's antics have occasioned.

EDIT: Oh, and social security was named as a potential target alongside medicare/medicaid as well.

What I’d like to see (like significantly cutting medicare coverage for treatments that prolong the lives of the very elderly / sick for minimal benefit) happen still seems very unlikely to happen, so I’m not updating any beliefs now.

Here in the UK every government comes to power promising to cut “waste” in the welfare and/or healthcare bill. And sure, there is some waste here and there. But in the end, they all find that real savings require real cuts to coverage, quality and funding, and they lack the guts to do that.

Perhaps Trump will be different, but I think Trump’s instincts run against that. As with calling for a federal abortion ban, he knows that’s unpopular.

It is probably possible to make an at least noticeable difference in the medicare/medicaid bill by cracking down on fraud, without reducing coverage, just because outright billing fraud is so common. Remember, these are single payer healthcare, not single provider, and the payer is well known for always paying. For for profit healthcare providers, that's tempting.

A bunch of the somalis convicted of that $250,000,000 COVID child food aid fraud had also been conning Medicaid for "adult daycare services." Some of them were still being paid for running non-existent daycares even after their fraud convictions!
It hasn't made the news much, but there's billions of dollars of theft out there.

Medicare fraud is extremely common. There are entire companies that just ship wildly expensive, random "medical equipment" (which is usually some kind of actual equipment, like a back brace or something) to old people and charge it to Medicare on their behalf, and then just see if the octogenarians can figure out how to file a return through their Byzantine phone trees or website.

The slow Brazilification of America is irreversible either way.

What does this mean?

To expand on what @Primaprimaprima wrote, it means you will have walled communities with armed guards that will provide first world living standards, but will have little to no political power, because huge numbers of black and brown bodies voters will live in the slums outside and demand more and more handouts with each election. At most, left-wing populists will be replaced with right-wing populists for a term.

It means becoming like a Latin American country in terms of racial demographics, standard of living, general texture of the social fabric, etc.

The actions of Trump on immigration and Doge on the budget will set the Brazilification project back by at least a decade, or indefinitely as long as the Republicans can keep winning elections.

Consider that immigration under Biden 2 would have been something like +15 million and under Trump it will probably be negative.

Similarly, there is hope on the budget. A return to 2019 spending would mean a $500 billion budget surplus. While that's not possible due to inflation, the era of mega deficits only started in 2020. We can and will go back to a more reasonable 3% deficit/GDP. When we do, interest rates will fall, reducing our borrowing costs and further reducing the deficit.

Similarly, there is hope on the budget. A return to 2019 spending would mean a $500 billion budget surplus. While that's not possible due to inflation, the era of mega deficits only started in 2020. We can and will go back to a more reasonable 3% deficit/GDP. When we do, interest rates will fall, reducing our borrowing costs and further reducing the deficit.

Actual question- where's the extra spending? Totally understandable that the deficit exploded in 2020 and 2021 due to stimulus packages but those aren't going on anymore. Is it just social security increases due to population aging?

A decent chunk is also interest expense

Yes. And this is what makes the problem more tractable than it may seem at first. If we can get the budget under control, interest rates will come down, which creates a virtuous cycle.

Check out the IRA budget. I haven't even started to wrap my head around the scale of it. It's literally all the crazy "green new deal" stuff they ever asked for. I see articles from WA green groups about how they can't spend all the money.

Consider that immigration under Biden 2 would have been something like +15 million and under Trump it will probably be negative.

It's unclear that Trump can even deport all of the people Biden let in.

Oh, he can't. There's no question about that. The Biden Wave was unprecedented and terrible.

But I think net immigration will be negative for the next 4 years. If Biden had got a second term, that would have resulted in a second Biden Wave and put us firmly on the path towards a Third World future.

I was hoping you were referring to the dystopian movie Brazil, written by written by Terry Gilliam, Charles McKeown, and Tom Stoppard.

I assume this is exaggerating for effect? The US has way too much going for it in comparison to Brazil, from geography to demographics to the structure of their economy, for something like this to happen in the forseeable future.

geography

Sure, the continental US is a valuable piece of land. But as the saying goes, there’s no magic dirt.

demographics

For now. But you have to look at the trend line.

the structure of their economy

Ultimately dependent on and a product of demographics. A high quality population produces high quality conditions, and vice versa.

Hitler's Identity Politics, Part I

(c) Feb 10, 2025, By J. Nelson Rushton

Note:

This post is an installment of a book I am writing, under the working title They See not, which I am serializing as a series of posts on The Motte. The book is planned to be about the nature and common characteristics of populist tyrannical movements, with special focus on the woke ideology, and about how to combat such movements. The first three posts in the series were:

The current chapter is entitled Hitler's Identity Politics ,Part I.


Introduction: Cargo-Cult Political Science

No one else is considered the face of modern evil like Hitler. That is peculiar, because Mao Zedong murdered far more people than Hitler did, and caused the deaths of tens of millions more through ideology-driven malfeasance. The number of Chinese civilians that were murdered and needlessly starved under Mao was probably greater than the total number of deaths in World War II and the Holocaust from all causes, on all sides, civilian and military combined [source]. Moreover, Bolshevik revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin, the man who was Mao's practical model of success, murdered just as many as Hitler, and, unlike Hitler, founded a regime that transformed his country into Mordor for generations.

Yet a statue of Lenin, sans head, stood in the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas for years. One stands in Seattle at the corner of 35th St. and Fremont as of this writing, and that one has the head on. It is not unusual to hear people quote the allegedly wise sayings of Mao and Lenin on their merits, even while being aware of their crimes. People say things like, As Mao Zedong said, women hold up half the sky. Joe Biden repeated this quote in 2021 in a commencement address at the US Coast Guard Academy, though he did not mention Mao. It also once happened that Trump unknowingly quoted Adolf Hitler, and you can compare the news coverage of those two events by looking at the results of this google search in terms of news coverage compared to this one.

While I believe that Mao was a man consumed by evil, I also believe that when Mao said women hold up half the sky, he identified an important truth and put it in a memorable and persuasive way. Is it OK to quote Mao on that, on the merits of the saying, in spite of the fact that he killed tens of millions of people? Some think it is and some think it isn't, and I honestly I don't know. But I do know that nobody (outside of a skinhead rally) begins a paragraph with "As Adolf Hitler said, ...". That is even though Hitler was a more cogent writer and speaker than Mao -- and, like Mao, or Lenin, or any other tyrant, some of what Hitler said had merit. Even a blind, evil pig finds an acorn once in a while. I also know that there aren't any statues of Hitler in Las Vegas or Seattle, with or without the head -- and no one would put one up because it would make them a social and economic pariah. So why is Hitler completely demonized, in a way that Lenin and Mao are not?

I submit there is a great deal of cargo-cult science surrounding Hitler. The phrase cargo cult science comes from Richard Feynman's 1974 Caltech commencement address, where he related the following story:

In the South Seas there is a "cargo cult" of people. During the war, they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires [like landing lights] along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut [like a control tower] for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones, and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas. He's the controller, and they wait for the airplanes to land.

The moral of Feynman's story is that when you look at something to see what makes it tick, the features that matter are not always the ones that meet the eye most easily.

For example, in the broadest strokes, Hitler was a far-right national socialist. Many people hold that since Hitler was "far right", the more right-wing you are, the more like Hitler you must be. And many hold that, since Hitler was a nationalist, the more nationalist you are, the more like Hitler you must be. But, for some reason, vanishingly few people hold that the more socialist you are, the more like Hitler you must be -- even though, if one actually reads the Nazi platform, it has about as much for Bernie Sanders to love as it has for John Birch. But at the end of the day, saying that Hitler was essentially defined by his right-wingism, or his nationalism, or his socialism, just because he was a right wing national socialist, is no more logical per se than saying that what defined him was his distinctive style of moustache. Accepting any of these uncritically, from the nationalism to the socialism to the funny little moustache, is what Feynman would call cargo cult (political) science.

Beyond the question of what made Hitler and his ideology so evil, there is widespread uncritical acceptance of the proposition that Hitler was evil in the first place -- even radioactively evil, in a way that even Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Zedong are not, though the latter were more prolific mass murders. As a kid growing up in America in the 70's and 80's, I naturally accepted that Hitler was evil. It did not have to be explained to me in any detail what made Hitler count as being evil; duh, he started World War II and murdered six million Jews. Of course anyone who launches a war of conquest is pure evil. Like Hitler. Or James K. Polk. No, wait a minute; that can't be right. But of course anyone and orchestrates a genocide is evil. Like Hitler. Or Moses. No, wait a minute; that's not right either. Weights and weights, measures and measures.

Branding Hitler as evil without being able to cogently say why is dangerous for two reasons. First, it makes it more likely that we might be following in his footsteps without realizing it. Second, it increases the risk that our children will reject our assessment of Hitler when they see that we have made up our minds for no good reason -- and that could make them more vulnerable to jumping on the bandwagon if another Hitler comes along, especially a Hitler in sheep's clothing. For both of those reasons, it is important to understand what made Hitler Hitler in deeper than cargo-cult fashion, so that we can better recognize whatever that thing is in other contexts -- most importantly within our own hearts. Or do you believe that, whatever made Hitler Hitler, it can't happen here, or that you have none of it in you?

I will argue that what makes Hitler literally Hitler, first and foremost, was not his nationalism, or his socialism, or his right-wingism, or his wars of aggression, or even his penchant for genocide, but his identity politics. I define identity politics as the embrace of a caste system with different moral standards for different groups, based on demographic characteristics such as race, religion, and ethnicity. Hitler practiced identity politics of two substantively different forms: one form to rationalize his wars of aggression (primarily against Slavs), and another to rationalize his attempted genocide of the Jews. These will be discussed in the following sections.


Pagan Views of the International Order

Not everyone who launches wars of aggression, even copious wars of aggression, is trading in identity politics. Consider, for example, the opening lines of the Anglo Saxon epic Beowulf:

Lo! The Spear-Danes in days gone by
And the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.
There was Shield Sheafson, scourge of many tribes,
A wrecker of mead-benches, rampaging among foes.
This terror of the hall-troops had come far.
A foundling to start with, he would flourish later on
As his powers waxed and his worth was proved.
In the end each clan on the outlying coasts
Beyond the whale-road had to yield to him
And begin to pay tribute. That was one good king!

Note that in the Saxon mind, Shield Sheafson was "one good king". Why? Because he drove men in terror, not from their trenches, not from their fortresses, but from their bar stools, where they had presumably been minding their own business before he showed up -- and because he did this far and wide, making war on and subjugating, not one, not two, but every neighboring tribe, and exacting tribute from them like a schoolyard bully on an indefinite basis.

Note also what these lines do not say about Shield. They do not say that he settled some ancient score, or imposed cosmic justice on his tribe's historical exploiters, or even that the clans "beyond the whale road" deserved what they got because they were lesser men than the Danes. Sheafson's greatness lay in his sheer will-to-power and the macht to impose it on others. Moreover, the hero of the passage is not a member of the poet's tribe: Shield was a Dane, while the poet is a Saxon. If Shield Sheafson was a historical person, the author's ancestors may have been among his victims -- and yet the poet esteems Sheafson's mægen (greatness) impartially. Even if Shield was not a historical person, this glimpse into the Saxon mind tells us something important about them: if they glorify a Danish king for his rapacious imperialism, they certainly wouldn't need a moral pretext justify their own kings waging wars of aggression -- such as that targets had it coming because they did it to us first, or even because they were lesser men than us. The greater men they were before we whipped them, the better. Lo!

For a second example of the pagan view of warfare, consider Homer's Iliad. The Iliad tells the story of the beginning of the Trojan War. It is a tale of heroism and excellence on both sides -- but also, as much as anything, a lament for men caught in a bloody struggle whose making was beyond their control. If you had to pin the blame for the catastrophe on a single person it would be the Trojan prince Paris -- but he is more of a self-indulgent simpleton than a villain; his bumbling takes place before the story begins, and is barely deemed worth mentioning by Homer. In Homer, there are no black hats and no white hats, for individuals or for groups. Though the story was written by a Greek poet, and was a national epic of ancient Greece (comparable to a book of their Bible), it could have been written by a Trojan with much the same perspective, even if with far less craft.

Considering Beowulf and the Iliad side by side, we see that whether the story is written by the winners or the losers, there is no need in the pagan mind to cast international conflicts as matters of right and wrong, or of who is entitled to what (in stark contrast, for example, to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people in modern times). We should be careful not project part of our own worldview onto Homer or the Beowulf poet, and ascribe to them the belief that "might makes right". In fact, they would find that view alien. Their view of international relations is not that might makes right, but that might makes might, and right barely enters into the picture. Lo!


For a third example we will consider the Roman Republic. In 61 BC, in honor of his 45th birthday, a monument was erected to the Roman general Pompey bearing this inscription:

Pompey, the people’s general, has in three years captured fifteen hundred cities, and slain, taken, or reduced to submission twelve million human beings.

There is no indication, in the inscription or anywhere else, that Pompey was seeking vengeance or justice, or that the Goths and Gauls he subjugated, enslaved, and killed were scumbags, or even bad folks.

The Romans did think of barbarians as lesser men than themselves, but they did not feel entitled by a sense of cosmic justice to rule over them on that account. On the contrary, the Romans believed that Heaven as well as Earth existed in a Hobbesian state of nature: an amoral war of all against all, or what we might call the "law of the jungle". While the Romans believed that their own gods favored Roman victory and imperialism, they also believed that foreign gods, just as real as their own, favored their barbarian adversaries in much the same way. Thus before battle, the Romans prayed not only to their own gods, but sometimes to those of their enemies as well. The Roman prayer to the gods of their enemies was known as the evocatio, and a version of this prayer, said during the siege of Carthage, is recorded by the Roman historian Macrobius Theodosius:

I call upon the one in whose protection are the people and community of Carthage,
whether it be a god or a goddess, and upon you above all,
who have undertaken to protect this city and people,
and ask you all for your favour:
may you all desert the people and community of Carthage,
leave their sacred places, temples, and city, and depart from them ...
and come to Rome, to me and my people,
and may our sacred places, temples, city be more acceptable and approved.

The Romans did not share our modern idea of human rights. Human rights, in the modern sense, are rights granted equally to all men by natural law. The Romans had a sophisticated code of due process, but the rights of the accused -- e.g., to stand trial and cross examine witnesses before being deprived of liberty or property -- were in their view not human rights granted to all men by natural law, but Roman rights granted to Romans by the state of Rome! Acts 22 relates the following:

When they tied Paul down to lash him, Paul said to the officer standing there, “Is it legal for you to whip a Roman citizen who hasn’t even been tried?” When the officer heard this, he went to the commander and asked, “What are you doing? This man is a Roman citizen!” So the commander went over and asked Paul, “Tell me, are you a Roman citizen?” “Yes, I certainly am,” Paul replied. “I am, too,” the commander muttered, “and it cost me plenty!” Paul answered, “But I am a citizen by birth!” The soldiers who were about to interrogate Paul quickly withdrew when they heard he was a Roman citizen, and the commander was frightened because he had ordered him bound and whipped. [Acts 22:25-29, NLT]

The passage records that under Roman law, jailing and flogging a Roman citizen without a trial was strictly forbidden, and must have carried a rather grievous penalty -- but jailing and flogging a mere human being without a trial was allowed. Even if this account is not fully historical, it must have been intended to be believable to its contemporaneous audience -- which could only be the case if that was indeed the Roman policy.

In the Roman mind, when Caesar conquered Gaul, he was not violating anyone's "human rights" -- for there were no "human rights" to violate in the first place. Does this mean that the Romans were engaging in identity politics? On the contrary, it means they were not. Identity politics is not merely protecting your own people and exploiting others; it is protecting your own people, and exploiting others, and then wailing and moaning in righteous indignation when the shoe is on the other foot. Identity politics is when Ibram Kendi complains about the Atlantic Slave trade and the exploitation of Native Americans America while turning a blind eye to the vicious enslavement of a million whites by the Barbary Pirates. But hypocritical, self-righteous wailing of this sort was not the Roman way.

Consider, for example, the Roman reaction to the worst defeat in the history of the Republic, in the Battle of Cannae at the hands of Hannibal Barca. Around 60,000 Romans were killed at Cannae in a single day -- far more than the number of Americans killed in the whole of the Korean war. Additionally, between 10,000 and 20,000 Roman soldiers were taken prisoner, and Hannibal sent ten of these to Rome to plead for ransom for the rest. And what was the conversation in Rome over this event? What an affront it was to the Natural Order for Romans to be defeated by barbarians? How Rome had been stabbed in the back by traitors from within and without? How it would never have happened but for the weather? As the Roman historian Livy relates the events, no to all of that. There was resolve to continue fighting, and a somber debate over whether to ransom the hostages. The decision of the senate was to not ransom the hostages, because this would only fill Hannibal's coffers and enable and encourage further aggression. The ten Roman soldiers who had come as a delegation to Rome were sent back to Hannibal under Roman guard -- because they had given their word to return to whatever fate awaited them at the hands of the foreign general. Even the law of the jungle is a law, and fair's fair.


The Hebrew View of the International Order

The ancient Hebrews were not pagans, and their view of tribal conflict was fundamentally different from that of pagans. The Hebrews held (and still hold) that the universe has an immutable and impartial moral compass, that points in the same direction for every man and every group of men -- and that therefore, when two tribes go to war, one must be in the wrong and deserve defeat. But the Hebrews were not fundamentalists; in the scads of wars that show up in their own historical account, half of the time it was the Hebrews that were in the wrong. More than half the time, actually, by my recollection.

As an illustration of the Hebrew view, consider the book of Isaiah. The backdrop is that the Hebrews have been defeated and enslaved by the Assyrians. It is a tale of privation, defeat, and despair. Here are a few snippets from Chapter 9 [KJV translation]:

The Lord shall set up the adversaries of [Syrian king] Rezin against him, and join his [Israel's] enemies together; The Syrians before, and the Philistines behind; and they shall devour Israel with open mouth. For all this his [God's] anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still.

...The Lord shall have no joy in their [Israel's] young men, neither shall have mercy on their fatherless and widows: for every one is an hypocrite and an evildoer, and every mouth speaketh folly. For all this his [God's] anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still.

... Through the wrath of the Lord of hosts is the land darkened, and the people shall be as the fuel of the fire: no man shall spare his brother. And he shall snatch on the right hand, and be hungry; and he shall eat on the left hand, and they shall not be satisfied: they shall eat every man the flesh of his own arm: Manasseh, Ephraim; and Ephraim, Manasseh [tribes of Israel]: and they together shall be against Judah [in Hebrew civil war]. For all this his [God's] anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still.

And why is this happening? Chapter 1 explains why, and almost every chapter thereafter reminds us: because the Jews have done wrong.

Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth: for the Lord hath spoken,
I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me.
The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib:
but Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider.

Ah sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity,
a seed of evildoers, children that are corrupters:
they have forsaken the Lord, they have provoked the Holy One of Israel unto anger,
they are gone away backward.
[Isaiah 1:3-4, KJV]

The conquest and subjugation of the Hebrews by the Assyrians was a historical event, and these verses were written by a Hebrew priest within living memory of it. Moreover, the attitude expressed in the book of Isaiah is not a one-off; it is characteristic of Hebrew culture over long periods. The books of Ezekiel and Jeremiah were written over a hundred years later, under similar circumstances of defeat and enslavement for the Hebrews, this time by the Babylonians. In all three books -- Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah -- the Hebrews humbly accept their fate of defeat and cruel exploitation as a penalty for the error of their ways. The book of Daniel, while focusing more on a single individual captive in enemy hands, takes the same tone of humility and forbearance in defeat.

So the Hebrews teach that they are God's chosen people, but they are not chosen to rule the Earth. God does that. The Hebrews are chosen to receive God's law and proclaim it to the world, and in doing that to be held to a higher standard -- being especially blessed when they do right, but also especially cursed when they do wrong. It turns out people of every sort, Hebrew or otherwise, do wrong often enough this is no enviable bargain. As Tevye (Jewish main character in "Fiddler on the Roof") said, I know, I know, we're the chosen people. But once in a while, could You choose someone else?


Now here is a riddle for you: How is the book of Isaiah like Hitler's Mein Kampf? Answer: Both are stories of national desolation and defeat, told poignantly by one of the defeated -- and both blame the Jews. The next chapter will contrast Hitler's view of the international order with the pagan view on the one hand, and the Hebrew view on the other.

Not to do a driveby on your post, which goes into a lot of topics in fine detail, but it feels like you are falling into a quagmire of interacting with the 'post-war consensus' too earnestly.

Simply put: It's an either or. Either you believe in the 'post-war consensus' 1 2 and you have a pocket theory for why Hitler is justifiably considered the master of evil, or you don't believe in the 'post-war consensus' and you recognize the satanization of Hitler as a function of human psychology interacting with propaganda that is necessary to justify the overarching moral narratives of the winners of WWII and the cold war. Nothing proves 'We are the goodest guys' quite like 'because we triumphed over the evilest evil'.

The most obvious way to tell the belief in HitlerSatan is downstream from propaganda is that nigh everyone, apart from the fringes, has their own pocket theory of why Hitler is satan and not any of the other guys from histories greatest hits. There's no strictly objective metric at play that people can latch on to. It's literally every single reason it can be, all at once. This works since we are not dealing with rational thought but post hoc verbalizations for the emotions that have already been instilled in people.

These emotions are not there because anyone directly told people to have them. They are there as a necessary logical consequence of our informational environments and how our minds deal with not just information but the implicit question of why we are seeing the information. We know Hitler is the most evil because we learned about him the most out of anyone. That's where the association is made. Why did we learn the most about him and his reign in school? Why are there so many movies made about those guys and how bad they were? Obviously because he is the most evil. Why else would we have been learning about him the most? It's a feedback loop in your brain.

At risk of getting too deep into 'generative anthropology', we can only hold one primary victimary narrative at a time(with some caveats). The victimary narrative of our age is focused on the iewish people, their suffering and why it was a result of HitlerSatan and his evil beliefs.

To make a long story short, the answer to the question of what makes Hitler into "literally Hitler" is not found by digging deeper. It's found by throwing away the shovel and leaving the hole of the post war consensus.

Either you believe in the 'post-war consensus' 1 2 and you have a pocket theory for why Hitler is justifiably considered the master of evil, or you don't believe in the 'post-war consensus' and you recognize the satanization of Hitler as a function of human psychology interacting with propaganda that is necessary to justify the overarching moral narratives of the winners of WWII and the cold war.

I don't agree with this bifurcation. The form is ((A & B) or (~A & C)), so obviously it isn't a tautology, and I am not interested in B or C. More specifically, I am not interested in whether or not Hitler is worse than Mao, and I am not (here) interested in why Hitler is so strongly demonized in popular culture. My interest in this post and the one that will follow is discuss, propaganda aside, what actually is distinctive about Hitler's ideology.

And what was being argued by me was that the pursuit is flawed from the start, and that the reasoning given here:

I will argue that what makes Hitler literally Hitler, first and foremost, was not his nationalism, or his socialism, or his right-wingism, or his wars of aggression, or even his penchant for genocide, but his identity politics. I define identity politics as the embrace of a caste system with different moral standards for different groups, based on demographic characteristics such as race, religion, and ethnicity.

is just another misstep by fault of the post war consensus permeating everything. It's all 'identity politics', always has been. We've only been pretending it's not for the past century whilst the rest of the world watches in befuddlement and takes advantage. Hence why questions about Hitler and his allegedly distinctive ideology are flawed to begin with. We're passing judgement and pontifications from a historically abnormal ivory tower that's writhing and ready to fall.

But that might very well be presumptuous and unfair of me to say given there is more to follow, though I do feel compelled to defend my originalg post say that what I wrote does pertain to what's been written so far, even if it's just a driveby on a small part of a greater whole.

The most obvious way to tell the belief in HitlerSatan is downstream from propaganda is that nigh everyone, apart from the fringes, has their own pocket theory of why Hitler is satan and not any of the other guys from histories greatest hits

I think "Hitler killed millions of Jews" is a bit too common a reason to call Hitler Satan, for it to count as a pocket theory.

Why this person and these people in specific warrant recognition over all the others is where the pocket theories come into play.

The thing with Hitler as the new Satan is that the narrative has been a dominant narrative because it’s a very good origin story for the Rules Based International Order (RBIO).

That story goes something like this:

Once upon a time, there was an Evil German guy named Hitler. He was mean to everyone, invaded several countries in Europe, killed a bunch of political enemies, and genocided Jews and Gypsies. This is all of course very bad. He was winning for a long time, and hope was fading, until all of the Allies banded together to fight this very evil man and his very scary regime full of soldiers wearing Hugo Bass. And the allies won! The world was saved from German Nazis (and Japan, who was actually equally bad if not worse, and never apologized, but just ignore that) rebuilt by the RBIO into a peaceful prosperous place.

This does a few things.

First, it’s a post-Christian system of morals and ethics. It’s secular and makes no reference to any religious beliefs. This is critical because religion tends to get in the way of things people really want to do. You can’t quote scripture to justify doing one thing without bringing along everything else in that text. The Bible forbids being gay, excessive interest, exploiting the poor, among other things. And people don’t like some of those rules. But it’s a lot easier to make a case if you can just point to New Satan and say “you know who else didn’t like gay people? Hitler.”

Second, it provides an easy justification for war. Basically, if you can point to something the Nazis were doing being done by modern states, you get to bomb the crap out of that country, you get to invade, you can impose sanctions on them, anything you want. It’s insane to me how often such stories are told about countries we wanted to invade. Iraq, Russia, Serbia, Iran, Israel and Palestine (depending on whose side you’re on in that conflict) and so on. If you hear comparisons to Nazi germany, chances are that Theres going to at least be sanctions, if not an invasion.

Third, it’s a message to unaligned countries that you want to be on our side. After all, we defeated the Nazis, and therefore we can protect you from anyone who’d invade your country. We have the manpower and the will to protect shipping lanes, and we can solve disputes with the UN.

The number of Chinese civilians that were murdered and needlessly starved under Mao was probably greater than the total number of deaths in World War II and the Holocaust from all causes, on all sides, civilian and military combined [source].

I would note that this is both a very high number (almost certainly an overestimate) for Mao's body count and similarly a rather large undercount of WWII's, which is pretty conventionally estimated at ~70-75 million.

I think it would be worth softening the language here.

Sources?

I’m seeing 53M here and 60M here. Not much info on methodology. Wikipedia’s higher numbers are supposedly based on more accurate research from after the fall of the Iron Curtain, but I wasn’t able to find an actual paper dealing with more than one country at a time. So your numbers there are plausible.

Is it possible that @johnfabian was using a statistic that included wounded? Those would still count as casualties.

I do think the Mao numbers are on the high side. Here and here are articles with significantly lower numbers for the Great Famine despite no friendliness towards Mao. 40M is given as the upper bound.

Feels like this analysis is suffering from a lot of presentism. Or is including a lot in order to achieve it's political goal; singling out identity politics as a unique evil. I don't think this really holds up on closer examination though. The holocaust's identity aspects weren't unique to Nazi Germany. Jewish pogroms had already been common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Eastern Europe and weren't seen as especially noteworthy. It's true that ancient people didn't have the same justifications, but they lacked knowledge of genetics. Really Nazi Germany was just an evolution of the same feuds you cite, incorporating newer ideas about identity, namely genetics, along with industrial advances that led to a much larger scale war and much larger scale pogrom.

The concept of Nazi Germany as uniquely evil wasn't even really a thing during and shortly after ww2. After the war things were more pragmatic, we needed West Germany to oppose the USSR and we even recruited Nazis via Operation Paperclip. The Nazis as a unique evil was mostly spun due to it's utility not due to any morality. This happened later, around the 60s and 70s. That's when a lot of holocaust documentaries and the modern beliefs about the holocaust and Nazi Germany as the most evil of evils became more widespread.

The US was fully embracing its role as empire at this point and tabooing white identity politics served these interests. Also had the civil rights movement, Hart-Celler and all that garbage happen around the same time.

The holocaust's identity aspects weren't unique to Nazi Germany. Jewish pogroms had already been common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and weren't seen as especially noteworthy.

Few characteristics outside mathematics and the physical sciences are unique to anything, but the matters of frequency and severity are what set things apart. Can you give some examples of pogroms you think are comparable to the Holocaust in scope and severity?

  • It's true that ancient people didn't have the same justifications, but they lacked knowledge of genetics.

I don't think identity politics rests on a quantitative understanding of genetics. Everyone knows what tribes, races, and religions are.

The concept of Nazi Germany as uniquely evil wasn't even really a thing during and shortly after ww2

Can you support this, or any of the claims in the last two paragraphs?

Can you give some examples of pogroms you think are comparable to the Holocaust in scope and severity?

The one I've seen mentioned occasionally is the pogroms associated with the Khmelnytsky Uprising in the mid 17th century.

The accounts of contemporary Jewish chroniclers of the events tended to emphasize large casualty figures, but since the end of the 20th century they have been re-evaluated downwards. Early 20th-century estimates of Jewish deaths were based on the accounts of the Jewish chroniclers of the time, and tended to be high, ranging from 100,000 to 500,000 or more; in 1916 Simon Dubnow stated:

The losses inflicted on the Jews of Poland during the fatal decade 1648–1658 were appalling. In the reports of the chroniclers, the number of Jewish victims varies between one hundred thousand and five hundred thousand. But even if we accept the lower figure, the number of victims still remains colossal, even exceeding the catastrophes of the Crusades and the Black Death in Western Europe. Some seven hundred Jewish communities in Poland had suffered massacre and pillage. In the Ukrainian cities situated on the left banks of the Dnieper, the region populated by Cossacks ... the Jewish communities had disappeared almost completely. In the localities on the right shore of the Dnieper or in the Polish part of Ukraine as well as those of Volhynia and Podolia, wherever Cossacks had made their appearance, only about one tenth of the Jewish population survived.[35]

From the 1960s to the 1980s historians still considered 100,000 a reasonable estimate of the Jews killed and, according to Edward Flannery, many considered it "a minimum".[36] Max Dimont in Jews, God, and History, first published in 1962, writes "Perhaps as many as 100,000 Jews perished in the decade of this revolution."[37] Edward Flannery, writing in The Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-Three Centuries of Antisemitism, first published in 1965, also gives figures of 100,000 to 500,000, stating "Many historians consider the second figure exaggerated and the first a minimum."[36] Martin Gilbert in his Jewish History Atlas published in 1976 states, "Over 100,000 Jews were killed; many more were tortured or ill-treated, others fled ...."[38] Many other sources of the time give similar figures.[39]

Although many modern sources still give estimates of Jews killed in the uprising at 100,000[40] or more,[41] others put the numbers killed at between 40,000 and 100,000,[42] and recent academic studies have argued fatalities were even lower. Modern historiographic methods, particularly from the realm of historical demography, became more widely adopted and tended to result in lower fatality numbers.[25] Newer studies of the Jewish population of the affected areas of Ukraine in that period estimate it to be 50,000.

Coincidentally, I have also been thinking about communism a lot lately, namely, its impossibility, and how it is treated in public discourse. I guess I'll just add on to your thinking on it.

As far as I can tell, Karl Marx knew that a classless, stateless society would get rolled by a central state immediately if capitalism still existed. So, the plan was to seize the state and implement socialism, and wait for every other society in the world to dissolve their states at once. Anyone who is really thinking could tell you that that would never happen, especially looking at the pathetic state of any genuinely central government behemoths of socialist states at the time. And yet, all kinds of Marxists, probably except for the anarchist movement, want to stack the bodies to create this ideology that will never work and is unfalsifiable, and will end up stacking even more bodies, accidentally and intentionally.

There are any number of posts on /r/LateStageCapitalism where they express their utter disdain for liberals. Every post on /r/TheRightCantMeme has an automod message that says that the subreddit is a far left one, and that liberals can fuck off. But liberals, for the most part, don't even seem to know of the existence of these people. Most of them seem to think there are no enemies to the left of them, or if there are any, it's just a handful of crazy college kids. The largest criticism I've seen is "nice going you berniebros, you got Trump elected", but nothing besides. It's a far cry from how the right wing tends to exist in this country, where they are all very cripplingly aware that there are enemies to the right of them that must be disavowed when discovered.

More than anything, it's the biggest slap in the face that accusations of communism or marxism are laughed off, when the share of open Marxists has seemingly increased exponentially in the last couple of decades.

Coincidentally, I have also been thinking about communism a lot lately, namely, its impossibility, and how it is treated in public discourse. I guess I'll just add on to your thinking on it. [emphasis added]

Just two cents more on this. The most serpentine Marxists define socialism as the workers owning the means of production, without reference to state force. Alright then, what's stoppin' ya'? Surely someone could get a small business loan from Geroge Soros or somebody to start a small business -- say, a Taco Bell franchise -- that was collectively owned by the workers, and you're off to the races with your socialist experiment. Why no clamor for this from the Socialists? Not a peep?

The reason is that we know, and they know, that the truly employee-owned-and-managed Taco Bell would be almost certain to go out of business, beaten in the market by competitors owned by investors who hold the personnel accountable from the top down. It turns out that managing the means of production is a skill, that it is crucial to the success of any business, and that most cashiers and taco-makers don't have it. So... the only way that business can exist is with heavy handed, forcible intervention in the market -- say, to force all of its competitors into the same model. And then all of their suppliers (because the employee-run business can't afford market prices for stock and equipment), and all of their customers (because otherwise they buy from the lowest bidder to cut costs, which would be a top-down managed company), transitively, until you get guess what? A po-lice state.

Yeah, workers' coops are an actually possible thing in America, but this is ignored.

I think anarchists are about the only faction of communism that realizes that they could just start communism with each other, in the form of workers' cooperatives and in communal villages, voluntarily. I think they are a far less harmful version of the ideology, and if all of the Marxists were instead anarchists, all the better; now you just have a bunch of people who vote left to shift the Overton window left without actually planning on doing anything nefarious (or doing much of anything at all, considering the anarchists I have interacted with).

Since anarchism is voluntary, the idea is that the commune shows people how things could be, and everyone slowly realizes the way things could be and join up themselves, I think. If the commune reaches a certain size, reality will check it and check it hard, so this bastion of freedom doesn't live very long and doesn't convince anyone who wasn't already a deviant. I consider that more benign, because it only disadvantages accountable people who willingly joined in.

But liberals, for the most part, don't even seem to know of the existence of these people. Most of them seem to think there are no enemies to the left of them, or if there are any, it's just a handful of crazy college kids. The largest criticism I've seen is "nice going you berniebros, you got Trump elected", but nothing besides. It's a far cry from how the right wing tends to exist in this country, where they are all very cripplingly aware that there are enemies to the right of them that must be disavowed when discovered.

Is this perception not an artifact of awkwardly projecting onto a 1D left-right axis? To the Western normie, "more left" now means "more LGBTQI+ and environmentalism" - if pushed on it they might actually contend that tankies and Bernie bros can very well be enemy because they are actually to their right. This in fact tracks with some local instances of discourse I have seen - there's often a sense of betrayal when casual SJWs learn for the first time what old-school commies actually believe, and how even though they were sold as the legendary leftiest of them all the positions of theirs that the normie cares about actually reek of "fascism" and "right-wing disinformation".

Yes, I suppose it could be due to that kind of motivated reasoned mental mapping of where "left" and "right" are. You see this with the right wing in the exact same way: some righties say that actually the Nazi Party was socialist, see, it's in the name, Nationalist Socialist German Workers' Party! To me, it reads as a cope (our side is just, and those other guys that got it wrong weren't actually our guys), but even if it was true, it is just proving horseshoe theory correct.

Well, the mistake is in thinking that "left" and "right" as used in practice represent any object-level political positions at all. The true extensional definition, as I understand it, is that "left" means that you imagine yourself as a rebel fighting against an oppressive system, and "right" means that you fancy yourself holding the line against chaos and decay. These are constraints on form, not on content, and even the form is merely a constraint on mythology that can survive a lot of friction with reality (so Trump's unpredictable bulldozing of norms and institutions still can be perceived as "right", and the SJWs' reliance on the same and treatment of their opposition as a wild element that needs to be dealt with by managerial techniques is "left"). However, the Left can never rest easy without believing in the existence of a greater, more powerful and more organised enemy they are fighting as underdogs against, whether it is the Patriarchy, Trumpism or international capitalism; and the Right needs to believe that its enemies are less structured, more unstable, and ultimately incompetent.

In 61 AD, in honor of his 45th birthday, a monument was erected to the Roman general Pompey bearing this inscription:

Certainly this is 61 BC?

Thanks. fixed.

I would just like to make the point at this time that Lenin, Stalin, and Mao had power over larger populations than Hitler.

Stalin and Mao also ruled for longer.

https://www.themotte.org/post/1146/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/256318?context=8#context

Evil Peak vs Evil Career Counting Stats

I think the point that Hitler has an unjustifiably outsized reputation as the face of evil isn't unsubstantiated, but a far better example of a communist regime that far outstripped Hitler in terms of proportional body count would probably be Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge at large, who killed approx 25% of their population (among working-age men, the primary targets of the genocide, this figure rises to an astonishing 50-70%; very smart choice to absolutely decimate your main worker base in a primarily subsistence agrarian economy) while having power for less time than the Nazi Party.

They also grabbed infants by their legs and smashed their heads against chankiri trees to stop them from taking revenge after their parents had been killed, practiced Unit 731-like human experimentation including vivisecting people alive and injecting coconut juice into victims' veins, etc. It’s almost comical how exaggeratedly evil they were, and all these factors taken together probably makes them a very strong candidate as the worst regime in history. In this light, the fact that communism has a better reputation than fascism in the current day is beyond ridiculous - McCarthy, ironically enough, really did a great job inoculating them from criticism.

EDIT: Additional, unrelated thought: The Khmer Rouge were highly influenced by French communist schools of thought; many members of the party studied at the Sorbonne. I always wonder how the intelligentsia who promulgated such ideas managed to live with themselves upon seeing the fallout. Frankly, imagining myself in such a situation makes me viscerally understand the appeal of seppuku as a practice.

I will concede that the Khmer Rouge were at least as evil as the Nazis, if not worse. (Given certain proposals of the more extreme Greens [the term 'Khmer Vert' has been mentioned among certain climate dissidents], this puts Elongated Muskrat's disputed gesture in a different light.)

My theory for why Hitler is seen as a unique evil compared to Stalin and Mao was because the western powers were allied with Stalin and Mao and made war against Hitler. Then it would follow that the way we see Stalin, Mao and Hitler today is poisoned by the propaganda of the past. But I guess that would not explain why Pol Pot is not seen as uniquely evil because the west fought against Cambodia.

The west (well, mostly the US) fought against Pol Pot taking control of Cambodia, but even the US opposition was incidental enough that we don't even think of it as an American war; we were mostly bombing the hell out of North Vietnamese logistics routes plus any Cambodians unfortunate enough to be in the blast radii, and none of it stopped the Khmer Rouge from taking control in the end.

The fight which took Cambodia away from the Khmer Rouge was accomplished by, of all nations, Communist Vietnam. I'd like to imagine that this proves the existence of a "what the fuck are you doing with those babies" red line that even most Communists don't want to see crossed, but I think the reality was more like "territorial disputes got violent and that snowballed". Regardless of Vietnam's motives, at this point for obvious reasons the west was giving them no support, and a little political resistance, and so when it turned out that Chomsky was wrong we didn't exactly have any reasons to be proud of or want to talk about the whole affair.

I think the reality was more like "territorial disputes got violent and that snowballed".

This was essentially what occurred, yes. Democratic Kampuchea and Vietnam initially had an alliance, but the Khmer Rouge harboured a belief that the VCP's goal was to start an Indochinese federation with Vietnam at the helm, so they started purging their own Vietnamese-trained members and attacked Vietnam multiple times in fear of their expansionism. These acts of aggression by Cambodia was what got Vietnam to take action, it was not because Vietnam was so appalled by the behaviour of the Khmer Rouge that they did not believe it could be allowed to stand. Keep in mind also that the VCP did participate in persecutions (though not to the same degree as Kampuchea) and was so hell-bent on collectivising the means of production that they almost let it starve their nation.

In general, with regards to these things it's helpful to assume they're not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. It's all realpolitik and always has been. Communist nations are often prone to mutual distrust and territorial infighting in spite of the shared ideological well they draw from - another great example is Ethiopia and Somalia. Despite the fact that Somalia is held up as an example of the failure of anarcho-capitalism, if you look at the history its current state was actually created by the infighting of two cartoonishly dictatorial communist governments - the Derg (Ethiopia) and the Somali Democratic Republic, governed by Barre. In short Barre attempted to invade Ogaden on the basis that Somalia actually had rights to the land and that Ethiopian administration of the region was essentially tantamount to an African colonial occupation of a primarily Somali-occupied area, effectively starting up a war which he lost after the USSR backed Ethiopia. This defeat, coupled with a refugee crisis created by the war and extreme disregard on Barre's end toward the Isaaq people (who were largely the ones who bore the cost of the crisis) was the catalyst that resulted in the blossoming of a full-scale civil war and the complete disintegration of Somalia.

attacked Vietnam multiple times in fear of their expansionism

Man from what I can tell this is one of the most bruh moments in all of history. As I recall, Vietnam had, essentially, overwhelming firepower over the Khmer Rouge (particularly since the Khmer Rouge were systematically eliminating their own manpower base) but the Cambodian regime still insisted on randomly invading and wiping out villages along their borders until Vietnam got fed up with them and overthrew the government.

Then China threw a hissy fit about it and invaded Vietnam in retaliation.

The particular disreputation of Hitler is not just due to his evilness, but also due to the fact Germans are Western. Communism gets to largely write Khmer Rouge off its reputation because most people don't seem to care about third-world Asians (Chinese less so, but also, owing to how numerous they are) massacring each other. As the meme goes, "emperor Ching Chuang Hong declares minor border war, 100 millions dead".

No, no, the meme goes more like "In 924, Emperor Quan sat on the throne. 392 million would die."

I agree, good post. Hitler is not complicated.

Hitler's goal was to increase the strength of the German people by uniting them and conquering more land to settle. Land is the base of national strength. You need lots of good land if you want a large population and a strong country. He wanted this because Hitler conceptualized the world as a competition between nations, the state is a suit of armour for the nation. That's what identity politics is. It's the belief that politics is about using the state to strengthen and benefit one's people. It's about creating the biggest, toughest suit of armour that can brush aside any physical or psychic attack in a dangerous, bloody world. And you are allowed to strike first, if necessary.

This is totally against the concept that politics is about doing good in some universal sense, or leaving people alone.

The libertarian sees the state as a bikini that should only provide the bare minimum of protection, provide the maximum freedom of movement. They think that the world and other peoples are fundamentally good, the environment is pleasant and danger is rare. If you're on a tropical island why constrict yourself with clothing?

The moralist sees the state as a fashion statement, a social statement, a political message, it's about ensuring that the poor textile workers received a fair wage. Thus the state can be bound by international law, clothing is bound by fashion. The international community matters, those judging eyes are watching. Trendsetters should be followed. Getting one's hands dirty is to be avoided, you don't want to get blood on these jeans!

I think the Statist and Libertarian approaches are naive in opposite directions. Libertarians tend to be naive about people abusing the lack of control to exploit the weak. Statists tend to be naive about abuses of power.

So a libertarian wouldn’t worry too much about things like the power differential between an employer and employee, or between a strong person and a weak one. Or between a teacher and student. And they assume that no one would exploit a knowledge gap to make more money. So they don’t see a need for any government intervention in those things because employers would never exploit an employee’s desperation for a wage to get them to accept unsafe conditions or longer work hours. A pharmacist wouldn’t give you a substance they knew was addictive just to get a repeat buyer.

On the Statist side, they tend to assume that anyone in government is protected by magic good-guy dust and thus would never use their power to reward friends, punish enemies, or enrich themselves. They assume that no cop ever abuses power over a person he assumes is a criminal.

The libertarian sees the state as a bikini that should only provide the bare minimum of protection, provide the maximum freedom of movement. They think that the world and other peoples are fundamentally good, the environment is pleasant and danger is rare. If you're on a tropical island why constrict yourself with clothing?

I don't think this is true. I think libertarians tend to have a fairly negative view of humanity, as they think that people generally cannot be trusted with power, and that power itself almost inevitably leads to crimes and catastrophes. The Ron Swanson "everything before 1776 was a mistake" view of history is one of the most pessimistic views of man one can conceive of.

To a certain extent sure, but it's usually only very sheltered peoples that embrace libertarianism. The British avoided the need for a large standing army because of their geography. The US enjoyed the luxury of having no strong powers in their entire hemisphere. Neither power ever really suffered at the hands of any foreign forces like the less fortunately positioned countries.

If you tried libertarianism in central Europe or Asia, then you're in for some really bad experiences. Germany - 25% dead in the Thirty Years War. Unity is strength, be the hammer not the anvil. Poland -- annexed because they weren't strong and autocratic enough. Decisive, central leadership has its virtues. China - massive crises and disasters with tens of millions dead whenever the state shows weakness. Don't show any weakness.

What is the libertarian response to a bunch of bandits coming over the hill? There's more of them then there are of you. They're bandits, they're professional robbers and you're an amateur homestead defender. You need numbers, you need preparation, you need professionals, you need a state to fight them off. The only way to be without those things is if people are benign and don't decide to repress you in the first place. In fact the bandits could make their own state as stationary bandit. They become the nobles that own all the land that you pay taxes to, they provide protection. Either way you lose freedom if there are enough bad people.

be the hammer not the anvil

Ackchyually, the hammer tends to break first.

All the blacksmithing demos I've ever seen have some serious ritual about how you are not supposed to hit the hammer on the anvil. Only with the workpiece between.

usually only very sheltered peoples that embrace libertarianism

Well, this depends on how you define "libertarianism" and famously each libertarian has 3 - 5 competing definitions. I agree inasmuch as the ideology itself is a product of the modern age and makes modern assumptions, and by historical standards most all modern peoples are very sheltered. However if you look at people groups with libertarian characteristics (low state capacity, egalitarian attitudes, primacy of the individual or family, emphasis placed on individual rights) you tend to find the opposite – libertarian attitudes thrive in places like the Anglo-Scotch border region, the Comanche tribes of North America, I hear perhaps Somalia. These places are places of constant conflict, not sheltered places.

The British avoided the need for a large standing army because of their geography.

What time period do you have in mind here? The British were fairly consistently menaced by outside invasions (from Scotland, from France, from Spain, from various Viking invasions, etc.) and they raised huge armies (and ran up massive expenses) to deal with some of these threats.

If you tried libertarianism in central Europe or Asia...

Those regions produced libertarian thinkers like Frédéric Bastiat and of course most (in)famously Ayn Rand (idk are we counting Russia as European or Asian here?)

Germany

Germany is the heartland of the Anglo-Saxons (who, if memory serves, were noted in antiquity for their egalitarian attitudes) and (almost) the geographical home of the Austrian school of economics!

China - massive crises and disasters with tens of millions dead whenever the state shows weakness.

This also describes China whenever the state shows strength, does it not?

Decisive, central leadership has its virtues.

I agree with you that low state capacity (particularly after the Industrial revolution) is potentially a critical weakness in a society, but I would suggest you don't understand how this interfaces with the libertarian impulse. The libertarian impulse arises from a condition where self-reliant individualism is an adaptive capacity, not places where it is maladaptive, and I think historically it is often adaptive in frontier regions that are high in violence and low on population and trust.

What is the libertarian response to a bunch of bandits coming over the hill?

Probably to airstrike them? In my experience libertarians are very often former military personnel and are better equipped both psychologically and otherwise to deal with a bunch of bandits coming over the hill than most people.

(An aside – , I can't speak as much for other places, but in the United States, the "bandits coming over the hill" (Indians) were often better dealt with by locals (for instance, the Meusebach-Comanche Treaty) or state forces (e.g. the Texas Rangers) than the strong arm of the centralized government, in this case the United States.)

More fundamentally, though, "bandits coming over the hill" is a quintessential example of a situation where libertarians are quite happy to look to the state. I don't think you understand the way (if I can speak broadly about an ideology or movement as prone to infighting as "libertarianism") that libertarians think about state capacity. Libertarians take a very Hobbesian view of the state (going back to a low view of human nature). For them, the state is fundamentally a killing machine that enjoys the monopoly on violence. Thus, they want the state to have capacity to deal with

  1. Collective self-protection via the military
  2. Enforcement of contracts (as a neutral party with a monopoly on violence)
  3. Crime (albeit with strong due-process norms)

None of this inherently implies any sort of weakness when it comes to military affairs. Libertarianism arguably is inadequate to 19th and 20th century industrialized warfare because internal state capacity translates to military prowess. But this is due to the intersection of culture and technology, and of course in World War Two the more libertarian regimes (the United States of America, the U.K.) were actually superior to regimes with ostensibly stronger state capacity like the USSR and Nazi Germany. There's nothing inherent in libertarian philosophy that requires a low state capacity for dealing with external threats, and I don't think the correlation between internal state capacity and wartime state capacity is quite as strong now as it was in the earlier days of the Industrial Revolution.

That's what identity politics is. It's the belief that politics is about using the state to strengthen and benefit one's people.

I actually don't agree with this, and it is a central subject of my next planned post. The belief that politics is about "using the state to strengthen and benefit one's people" is what I would call the pagan view, but in my next post I will argue that Hitler was not a pagan. He doesn't want Germany to expand and flourish because they are his people, and he would not gracefully tolerate the same view from other tribes. Hitler wants Germany to expand, flourish, and conquer because they are the best people, in an absolute sense -- and that their flourishing and conquering at the expense of others is the only course in harmony with the one and only Natural Order.

That's fair. I suppose that's another way of looking at his Anglophilia. I see it as 'Germans and English are basically the same people, let's work together' but you could go 'the English are also a top-tier race (plus China/Japan), let's work together'.

So the Hebrews teach that they are God's chosen people, but they are not chosen to rule the Earth. God does that. The Hebrews are chosen to receive God's law and proclaim it to the world, and in doing that to be held to a higher standard -- being especially blessed when they do right, but also especially cursed when they do wrong. It turns out people of every sort, Hebrew or otherwise, do wrong often enough this is no enviable bargain. As Tevye (Jewish main character in "Fiddler on the Roof") put it, I know, I know, we're the chosen people. But once in a while, could You choose someone else?

This is entirely wrong, as the Hebrew conception of God is simply a metaphorical and symbolic representation of themselves as a tribe.

Hebrew teaching is that they have a divine mission to heal the world, and it so happens that "healing the world" means driving out all worship of all idols offensive to Yahweh. Yahweh is a metaphor and synonym for the Jewish people themselves. Their Chosenness is not a cosmic burden, it's a declaration of ethno-supremacism that coheres them in the face of ethnic conflict.

You get close to identifying a real differentiation between pagan and Hebrew worship. Pagan worship did entail baseline respect for the idols of foreigners whereas Hebrew lore does not. The Hebrew mission is to destroy the idols of everyone else in the entire world in favor of sole worship of the Jewish tribal god Yahweh above all else.

I see where you are going with this, that German National Socialism is more Hebrew in spirit than Aryan in spirit. That could not be more incorrect, but I'll wait until you actually present that argument to respond.

Nice thesis statement.

What I would be interested to see is evidence in the sacred texts of other religions, or in the histories of other tribes, of humble laments of the sort found in Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah -- in contrast with the "them's the breaks" tone of the pagan texts, or the "we got stabbed in the back by vermin within and without" tone of Mein Kampf. Of course I haven't read every mythological treatise of every world religion, so maybe you can teach me something.

With respect to "humble laments", sure there are plenty of Roman myths where the god, and by extension the people the god represents, are humbled in some sort of way. And in terms of literary tone and prophecy Virgil's Aeneid has some similarities.

But ultimately you are misinterpreting Isaiah as being foremost self-criticism and "humility and forbearance in defeat" while leaving out the most important part of Isaiah, which is the prophet Isaiah professing the coming of the Messiah and the destruction of Babylon. Isaiah is another chapter in the Hebrew motif of Yahweh coming into conflict with Civilizational Order, with the Babylonians being the Civilization of the era hated by Yahweh... Another among a very long list: The Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Europeans...

Mein Kampf is less like Isaiah and more like a Babylonian who read Isaiah and pieced together that the Jews want to see Babylon destroyed. Or sorry, I guess according to @4bpp it was just God's will that Babylon gets destroyed, nothing to do with the will of the Jews themselves. Prophecies are very real insofar as they symbolically represent plans and wishes.

Isaiah is relevant because it provides literary justification for the Yahweh versus Civilization dialectic that is endemic in Hebrew lore and also identified in Mein Kampf, only in the latter case interpreted from the side of the Babylonians- the side of Civilization, the side of the Romans, or the side of the exasperated Pharaoh who expelled the Jews after they wrought plagues onto civilization and murdered the first-born sons of the Gentiles...

Isaiah is not about forbearance, it's about plotting the destruction of civilization.

This also gets to the heart of the difference between Indo European Paganism and Hebrew religion. The former was meant to organize society into expansive Civilization with a clear hierarchy and social order, and the latter is meant to represent a resistance to the former.

I think we've reached a terminal point in this thread of the discussion, where we are at what Sowell calls a "conflict of visions". I have read Isaiah in its entirety, and I presume you have as well. There is no more data to collect, but we see the data through the lens of different concepts and different values. The truth is, you aren't going to convince me of your reading of Isaiah through dialectic, and I'm not going to convince you of mine, even if we are both being honest and logical. The denial of that truth is a chief delusion of the so-called "Enlightenment". A sower went out to sow his seed; and as he sowed, some fell by the way side...". That's life.

With respect to "humble laments", sure there are plenty of Roman myths where the god, and by extension the people the god represents, are humbled in some sort of way.

I wish you would have given an example of a source. I'm skeptical of this (that any Roman myth has the tone and general purpose of Isaiah) to begin with, but if it comes without a source on the first stab, I'm doubly skeptical.

Sorry, I don't accept "agree to disagree" when your analysis ignores Isaiah's prophecy of the Messiah and the ultra-violent genocide of Babylon:

Every Babylonian who didn't manage to "flee to their native land" (13:14) would be slaughtered, including prisoners (13:15), infants (13:16,18), and children (13:18). The specific fate of the women is not mentioned, except that they would be raped (13:16). The city would be "overthrown by God like Sodom and Gomorrah" (13:19), and it would "never be inhabited or lived in through all generations" (3:20). Babylon's name, survivors, offspring, and descendants would be "wiped out" (14:22)

Humble forbearance indeed!!!

chapters 13 and 14, not 3 and 4.

OK I see, you are quoting Chapter 13 not Chapter 3. Looks like the Babylonians are in for some Old Testament justice.

This is something I will address at greater length in my next post (note that it was me who first brought up Moses in connection with Genocide), but long story short is this: if we compare Mein Kampf and Isaiah, one is self-righteous, entitled, and enraged, and the other his humble, repentant, and resolved. Jamming on the enemy in itself has nothing to do with identity politics.

There is also an important question of fact here. The moral axiom that connects Judeo-Christian foreign policy , so to speak, from the bronze age to the 20th century is this: like a police officer making an arrest, you are obligated to handle your enemies with the lightest touch you safely can -- but no lighter, and them's the breaks. As a matter of fact, in the bronze age, the lightest touch you can safely use, when bordering a near-peer ruthless belligerent, may be enslavement or genocide (what is your other option? "I guess that war is over; whew; you can all go home now; better luck next time wiping us out and raping our wives and daughters "). But I do not believe Jews per se were threat to Germany at all -- even if Marxism was a threat to Germany (which it was), and Jews were disproportionally Marxist (which they were). The 30,000 Jews who won medals for bravery in WWI were certainly not a threat to Germany -- but many of those very men, and their families, perished in Nazi death camps all the same.

Now how did Hitler think when the shoe was on the other foot, and his own tribe was being a pest and got their asses kicked? If the allied cause was a Jewish conspiracy like Hitler charged, then he should have expected Old Testament justice at Versailles. Austria and Prussia, and their union in the German Empire, had fought bloody wars of aggression against the allies with whom they sought terms at Versailles, and in some cases against their fathers and grandfathers. So by Hitler's own logic, the allies would have been within their rights to push for a final solution to the German Problem while they had the upper hand. But the Versailles treaty, hard as it was on Germany, was not the Holocaust (not the same ballpark, not the same sport) -- and yet what did Hitler say about it? Vae Victus? No. What did we do to deserve this? Not exactly. He said it was an unfair, unjust, absolute abomination. Poor baby.

And that's identity politics: group justice with double standards. It is holding that your people are entitled to prey on others whenever the opportunity presents itself, and whining in self-righteous indignation when the shoe is on the other foot. The Hebrews didn't do that, and neither did the pagans.

Jamming on the enemy in itself has nothing to do with identity politics.

Of course it does, the friend/enemy distinction is the essence of identity politics. When the Hebrews do it it's just "Old Testament justice" but when Hitler identifies Jews as adversarial then it's identity politics? Give me a break.

It is holding that your people are entitled to prey on others whenever the opportunity presents itself, and whining in self-righteous indignation when the shoe is on the other foot. The Hebrews didn't do that, and neither did the pagans.

I'm sorry but this just shows a total ignorance of the Hebrew bible, which consists exactly of cycles of the Israelites genociding people according to the will of Yahweh and then acting like whiny victims when the shoe is on the other foot. Jews to this day still publicly celebrate the mass murder of the first-born sons of the Gentiles in Egypt. And don't get me started on Purim...

It is also just a plain fact that US intelligence shortly after WWII regarded Jews as a security threat to the United States. And of course nearly all Communist spies were Jewish. The idea that the entire notion was just "Hitlerian Identity Politics" is total bunk. There was more of a 'there' there.

Overall your analysis too heavily relies on these extremely high-level characterizations of Mein Kampf. If you are going to cite books from the Bible can you also cite passages from Mein Kampf that demonstrate your point rather than your over-reliance on super high-level characterizations of that work?

I've been accused of a lot of things -- but total ignorance of the Hebrew Bible, that's my new favorite.

It is also just a plain fact that US intelligence shortly after WWII regarded Jews as a security threat to the United States.

This is the same org that recently said right wing extremism is the greatest threat to US national security. I never took them seriously as you seem to, but maybe I should have another look.

When the Hebrews do it it's just "Old Testament justice" but when Hitler identifies Jews as adversarial then it's identity politics?

When the Hebrews do it it's "this is something written in a book, secular historians don't think it actually happened, and it's not something to do today".

At least cite Isaiah correctly, you are missing a 1 in front of your chapter numbers. You are thinking of Isaiah chapters 13 and 14, not 3 and 4.

What are the references to? They don't seem to be from the book of Isaiah. For example you have

Every Babylonian who didn't manage to "flee to their native land" (3:14) would be slaughtered, including prisoners (3:15), infants (3:16,18)

But Isaiah 3:14-16 reads

The Lord will enter into judgment with the ancients of his people, and the princes thereof: for ye have eaten up the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces, and grind the faces of the poor? saith the Lord God of hosts. Moreover the Lord saith, Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet: Therefore the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will discover their secret parts. In that day the Lord will take away the bravery of their tinkling ornaments about their feet, and their cauls, and their round tires like the moon,

This is all about God's judgment upon Israel, and in any case doesn't match the themes of fleeing, slaughtering, prisoners, or infants.

Putting part of your post in quotes and googling leads me to this reddit thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/11a4ttc/isaiahs_prophecy_of_the_destruction_of_babylon_is/

which misquotes Isaiah over and over. Did you check those with the original source (the Bible) before you posted?

Of course I've read the original source, that provides a good summary. The summary is less annoying than pasting the verses, but here you go: It is Chapter 13 and 14:

They come from faraway lands, from the ends of the heavens— the Lord and the weapons of his wrath— to destroy the whole country...

Wail, for the day of the Lord is near; it will come like destruction from the Almighty.

Because of this, all hands will go limp, every heart will melt with fear.

See, the day of the Lord is coming —a cruel day, with wrath and fierce anger— to make the land desolate and destroy the sinners within it.

Like a hunted gazelle, like sheep without a shepherd, they will all return to their own people, they will flee to their native land.

15 Whoever is captured will be thrust through; all who are caught will fall by the sword.

16 Their infants will be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses will be looted and their wives violated.

Their bows will strike down the young men; they will have no mercy on infants, nor will they look with compassion on children.

19 Babylon, the jewel of kingdoms, the pride and glory of the Babylonians,[b] will be overthrown by God like Sodom and Gomorrah.

20 She will never be inhabited or lived in through all generations; there no nomads will pitch their tents, there no shepherds will rest their flocks.

21 But desert creatures will lie there, jackals will fill her houses; there the owls will dwell, and there the wild goats will leap about.

22 Hyenas will inhabit her strongholds, jackals her luxurious palaces.

Her time is at hand, and her days will not be prolonged.

Any reader can compare what is actually Isaiah with your tripe about Humble forbearance. I cited a summary of the claims as I already knew about the prophecy. The chapter given is wrong, but the point is not misrepresented anybody can read it himself.

Any reader can compare what is actually Isaiah with your tripe about Humble forbearance.

Funny, that was going to be my argument, too (except for the word "tripe").

I think Thomas Sowell is hands down the most notable right-leaning political thinker of our lifetime, and Conflict of Visions is Sowell's favorite Sowell book. I hope you'll read it if you haven't.

More comments

Sorry, I don't accept "agree to disagree"

lol. What does you not accepting it look like? Whatever it is, knock yourself out.

I can't agree to disagree because I don't even know how you incorporate Isaiah's prophecies into your analysis. You just ignore them and then end the conversation when they are brought up.

Hebrew conception of God is simply a metaphorical and symbolic representation of themselves

This is not an interpretation I have heard before. What do you base it on?

Differentiation between pagan and Hebrew worship

The counterexample that immediately comes to mind is Atenism which during its brief life went full iconoclasm on the normal Egyptian religion and afterwards got eradicated in turn. Occasional Chinese persecution of Buddhists also comes to mind. The Romans also had little respect for Celtic religion.

This is not an interpretation I have heard before. What do you base it on?

Yahweh creates a blood covenant with the Jews. It's a tribal god, Yahweh is a metaphor for the people he represents. Very straightforward reading of the mythos. If some Roman gold selected the Romans as his Chosen people and formed a heritable blood covenant with the Romans wouldn't it be very obvious to you that the god is a symbol for the people represented in the covenant?

It is universally acknowledged that the Roman pantheon was fluid and integrated the idols of foreigners that came under the hegemony of the Roman people. The Hebrew mythos demands sole worship of Yahweh above anything else and declares a holy mission to destroy all the idols of all foreigners. It's a major difference in the religious orders that is not acknowledged by OP and is going to undermine the direction he is trying to take this.

It is universally acknowledged that the Roman pantheon was fluid and integrated the idols of foreigners that came under the hegemony of the Roman people.

If only they integrated the people who worshiped those idols.

They did, modern Ashkenazi Jews are descended from intermarried Jews and Romans.

Since the descendents of these unions became the modern ashkenazim, that means it's a case of Romans (Roman women, specifically) leaving the Roman demos, rather than Jews joining it. If the Jews had integrated in, then their descendents wouldn't be Jews today.

modern Ashkenazi Jews are descended from intermarried Jews and Romans.

Many modern people are descended from the interbreeding of masters and slaves. What I mean is, if only they had incorporated conquered people into their society having the rights of citizens.

Yahweh creates a blood covenant with the Jews. It's a tribal god, Yahweh is a metaphor for the people he represents. Very straightforward reading of the mythos. If some Roman gold selected the Romans as his Chosen people and formed a heritable blood covenant with the Romans wouldn't it be very obvious to you that the god is a symbol for the people represented in the covenant?

No. I think you are stretching interpretations to force your hobby horse. There are plenty of examples of tutelary deities among pagan religions, including ones that were reused. Do any of the number of deities that the Aztecs believed they had a personal responsibility to keep fed with blood lest the universe get destroyed count as a representation of the Aztecs themselves, even though other Mesoamerican peoples were found to have the same gods with etymologically related names and the same attributes? Were Greeks worshipping Athena worshipping the city of Athens, even as they waged war against it? What about Apollo, who the Spartans considered their tutelary god with the lexical connection being less obvious?

It is universally acknowledged that the Roman pantheon was fluid and integrated the idols of foreigners that came under the hegemony of the Roman people. The Hebrew mythos demands sole worship of Yahweh above anything else and declares a holy mission to destroy all the idols of all foreigners. It's a major difference in the religious orders that is not acknowledged by OP and is going to undermine the direction he is trying to take this.

This is true of Romans (with respect to some foreigners), but not of all pagans; e.g. Atenism. Therefore intolerance of foreign gods is not a uniquely Hebrew feature, and can't be used to distinguish Hebrew(-lineage) religions from pagan ones.

Both Athens and Sparta were indeed worshipping a people represented by Athena and Apollo and the ideals they represented. It was an Indo European religion, those figures represent the Indo-Europeans themselves and cult worship of them functionally entailed worship of Indo-European forbearers and founders.

Athena and Apollo represent Indo-Europeans, Yahweh represents Jews. And in any case the Athena cult existed before Athens. Athens was named after Athena. That is nothing like the Mosaic covenant that features in Exodus. If the origin of Athena as a goddess was that she chose Athens as her city then it's unlikely it would have ever been a pan-Hellenic cult. But the pan-Hellenic cult came first and then the name of the city came later. Whereas the Mosaic covenant is the very origin of the Jewish religion and worship of Yahweh.

Can you please provide your interpretation of the blood covenant? Do you think it's literally true? If you don't think it's true, then how could you have any other literary interpretation than the god portrayed in Exodus is a symbolic representation of the people he has Chosen? The covenant is even inherited genetically, it's a tribal representation.

This is true of Romans (with respect to some foreigners), but not of all pagans; e.g. Atenism.

Yes, one of the weaknesses of the word "pagan" is a lack of clarity- I was referring to Indo European religion which does have this quality.

I’m curious about your spirituality (not a gotcha question). I mean you flirt, in these posts, with some kind of genuine spiritual belief in Indo-European paganism that goes beyond just ‘it was good social technology’.

I mean you flirt, in these posts, with some kind of genuine spiritual belief in Indo-European paganism that goes beyond just ‘it was good social technology’.

It basically boils down to "it was good social technology" but why it was good social technology is important. Like the Hebrew bible, it was not just about moral lessons it was about cohering the identity and racial consciousness of people who followed the religion. And using that racial consciousness to change the world. Worshipping Apollo was worshipping a racial ideal just like it is with Yahweh.

I also think humans are innately religious, and religiosity is essentially a personality trait. I do think having some pro-European and pro-Civilizational religious revival is essential, and that means moving beyond Yahweh and Hebrew lore. I don't think that revival will be a reform of Indo-European paganism although I think it would have some similarities in spirit and aesthetic.

I don't understand why gods have to be symbolic of anything beyond what their believers claim them to be symbolic of, whether that is "wisdom" or "a choleric narcissist father figure that created the universe and everything in it". The blood covenant also does not need any special interpretation: it's just the claim that the all-powerful figure has specially favoured a particular lineage. Can you not believe yourself to be the favourite son of a father with many children without claiming that the father is uniquely similar to yourself? If I think my boss or advisor likes me, does that imply I think he is the same as me? Every medieval European royal house claimed that their lineage was chosen to rule by the Christian god. Does that mean that each house saw the Christian god as a symbolic representation of themselves, in your understanding? Why did different royal houses then ever get along at all, if they apparently had a fundamental disagreement that amounted to "Jesus is symbolic of us! - No, Jesus is symbolic of us!"?

The attempt of medieval European royal houses to appropriate Yahweh as a symbol of their lineage falls flat precisely because of the Hebrew bible. If Exodus entailed God choosing the lineage of Alfred the Great, then it would absolutely be cogent to identify the God portrayed in that mythos as representing the people chosen by him. You sure as hell wouldn't be saying "oh the worship of that god started because the Saxons claimed that god selected them as his favorite among all the nations, who knows what the god is supposed to represent! Nothing, probably."

You aren't recognizing the difference between the mythological impetus for the cult itself being the Moasic covenant, whereas it has not been in any single other case you have tried to cite as a point of comparison. You have just continued to point out that gods representing people is a thing that happens all throughout history, except for Exodus I guess! Yeah right.

The Yahweh cult is rooted in the Mosaic covenant. Yahweh is a symbol of that people. If some other cult emerged on the basis of a blood covenant between a god and a people you would certainly recognize that as plainly obvious.

Except it is true that countless Christian countries, particularly in Europe, and countless other Christian movements believed that they were chosen by (the Christian/Jewish) God for greatness, for fortune, for special favor. What’s more most also believed that the Jews had lost his favor and/or were now heretics, and that they were their inheritors.

The only way you seem to suggest this is untrue is in the argument that there is some kind of inherent, intrinsic spiritual bond between Abrahamic religion and the Jewish race, despite the fact that for the overwhelming majority of the last 2000 years the great majority of believers have had a negative view of practicing Jews. Some Christians do believe this (like Evangelicals), but that’s because they believe deeply that the whole thing is real. Since you don’t believe it’s real, I don’t really understand why you think that connection is so inherent and so immutable. Clearly it hasn’t prevented antisemitism or guaranteed philosemitism, in either the Christian or Islamic worlds.

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I still can't discern a single argument that any of the gods discussed is supposed to symbolise the people that worshipped him or her. You just keep asserting that it is so and must obviously be so, against a wealth of literature that is replete with claims of those gods symbolising all sorts of things but people, and not a single example of anyone ever understanding worshipping the god to entail worshipping the associated people. There is of course a trivial sense in which they do, in that people who both believe in the god and in the story that a particular group of people are the god's chosen necessarily will treat that group in a special way, but there is no evidence whatsoever that the latter belief follows from the former, or that this amounts to worshipping the group as synonymous with the god.

Ask any adherent of religions in the Judaism-derived family and they will probably tell you that yes, they worship the exact same god as the Jews do, no, that god is not a symbol for the Jews, and no, they definitively are not expected in a symbolic way to worship the Jews. They will probably also tell you that the thing about the Israelites being god's chosen for some reason or another does not apply to modern-day Jews, and they are just confused. Even the Jews themselves make a point of not requiring non-Jews to believe the part about the covenant.

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I’m increasingly starting to believe that counting famine deaths as murders is epistemological hogwash. If we’re going to blame Mao and Stalin for their famine deaths, then we need to blame Churchill for the Bengali terror famine, Prime Minister John Russell for the Irish Holodomor, and Franklin Roosevelt for maiming 2 million Americans with pellagra during the Great Depression. And in all three of those examples you can point to sketch things that make them look intentional. During the Irish famine, the British government was actively taking food out of Ireland for export even while people were dying, they refused to allow American foreign aid to Ireland (just like Stalin did), and various British thinkers and high-ups were muttering darkly about how fewer Irish was probably a good thing. Churchill specifically routed supplies away from India claiming it was necessary for war reasons. Roosevelt was paying American farmers to burn entire crops while people went hungry.

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It seems to me that the proper thing to do is distinguish between intentional deaths and deaths via mismanagement. Probably Roosevelt did not intend to give people pellagra, but I think it's fine to blame him for the result, even if we don't consider it the moral equivalent of mass murder.

On one hand, I think the Holocaust does read differently if the exact same victims died of plausibly-deniable famine: it's seemingly unique on the basis of the deliberate industrial murder, even though accounts generally count malnutrition and exposure deaths. On the other, this just incentivises malicious incompetence going forward, and doesn't necessarily reduce actual body counts. I'm not sure exactly where I'd put it, but IMO there is a line past which incompetence should be assumed to be malice when it comes to mass murder.

"Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."

It's a fair point that famines are far more complex than straight up shooting your political opponents - but I think you're making a historical error to include things like the Bengal famine and even the Irish potato famine in with the holodomor uncritically - especially using the same term for both Ukraine and Ireland.

The Irish potato famine has lots of history - but basically it was the confluence of the potato blight interacting with a growing industrialization (meaning people no longer had craft activities to fall back on) and pressure from population with limited land rights (their small plots could only grow potatoes on the marginal zones at yields to support their families). The economic and support system at the time was "laissez faire" - although there were some direct transfers from British during the first blights, this dried up later in 1847/48 ish as a liberal government came in during a time of recession (I think, it has been a while since I read about it all here: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781315708522/famines-european-economic-history-declan-curran-lubomyr-luciuk-andrew-newby). Interestingly the areas that kept exporting typically did better: support was paid out of the wealth of local landowners and those who were exporting higher value cash foodstuffs (cattle for example) could afford to cover the cost of importation of famine relief foodstuffs - the exports weren't typically the key issue. The real key issue was the laissez faire attitude of the British in general to social support at the time leading to little support from Westminster, the changing economic model giving people no diversified income and the fact that both the central government and local landowners had little connection to those they ruled. They didn't need their votes (they didn't have any), there was a local surplus of labor and they didn't feel a brotherhood. It was horrible, but not a holodomor - it was pretty medieval attitudes to smallholders and those you rule over hitting industrial realities.

Churchill and the Bengal famine we don't have enough time to cover in detail, but it does seem like he's unfairly smeared - unlike the governor at the time (Victor Hope) who deserves serious sanction for taking the word of others that everything was fine and not being at all proactive. Contrary to routing supplies away, Churchill did the reverse, constantly raising it with Roosevelt, unfortunately the pressure from the Japanese and the ongoing demands of Operation Torch (the US landings in North Africa, which needed huge logistics) meant that he didn't get much help and British shipping was tied up or depleted. However, again it was a case of failing to divert enough aid to the region and act fast enough, rather than requisitioning food out of hungry mouths. The central source (I think only?) for Churchill being a shit in the crisis comes from the private notes of Wavell - who took over and was really annoyed at the lack of action. We only have his account, which might be accurate but it doesn't seem to match up with what we have documented about Churchill's actions and that Wavell didn't know about, for example how much effort was going on behind the scenes to bring grain in - although too little too late.

The Ukrainian Holodomor however is much worse than those two examples above, and represented something between a complete indifference to millions of deaths in order to secure export earnings and a deliberate attempt to use famine to break the resistance of Ukraine and other zones to the Soviet Union. Soviet agriculture was a mess, they wanted to industrialize and needed money for that but the prices they were paying to farmers didn't encourage them to sell, which led to things like the "Scissors" crisis of the early 1920s where they just stopped selling to cities given the prices the Soviets offered and they couldn't be compelled via force, they could hide the food or plant less. On top of that, Ukraine and outlying regions were more anti Soviet, especially in rural areas where industrialization was non existent. Once the Soviet state was powerful enough to force the issue, Stalin collectivized the farmers (pushed them all onto standard plots where output was more legible). This reduced sharply reduced yields for several reasons, but meant that everything was controlled and could be seized, from now on the famines fell on the countryside rather than the cities, and famines became much more common. Then, the real killer was the forced export targets to earn foreign currency, which were impossible to meet in bad years of which there are many.

We can argue if the holodomor was genocide (many of Stalins actions were - like to the Crimean Tartars), but it's using famine as a tool to break political opposition and knowingly creating one to achieve a target of industrialization, unlike those above where it was a failure or indifference of a colonial authority to provide enough aid to a region rather than using famine as a club. Both the Bengal and Irish potato famines were a serious black mark on the British empire, the Irish one was a large rallying cry for independence (Bengal less so, Indian elites at the time looked at their share of the blame and didn't think it tactical to focus on at the time) - but they weren't premeditated like the Holodomor and efforts were taken to offset them, just badly.

However, the colonial cases point to the fact that people who lack representation and who the elites just don't need are in a really shit position famine wise (one of Sen's positions), and conditions like theirs combined with a technological shift can create terrible results. Hopefully never relevant for AI. Hopefully.

I explicitly did not count famine deaths as murders, but counted them separately on top of murders. Note (with emphasis added):

caused the deaths of tens of millions more through ideology-driven malfeasance.

The number of Chinese civilians that were murdered and needlessly starved

Huh, I hadn't read about the Laogai death rate, and was under the impression that the Cultural Revolution was in the hundreds of thousands rather than the millions. Thanks for spurring my education!

I don't think the point about Hitler's identity politics is as surprising as you make it out to be, given that the deaths caused by Lenin and Mao are not exactly a secret. In fact, this is what the difference in their assessment often openly stems from - Hitler's stated goals (which really are those same identity politics you are talking about) are taken to be evil, but the goals of Lenin and Mao are generally actually perceived as a deontological or virtuous good even by many of those (common in the US) who consider them a utilitarian evil. If you wreak murder at an inconceivable scale in the service of evil goals, you are a particularly insidious (because effective) kind of evil; if you however wreak murder in your pursuit of good, you are seen as closer to something like a tragic or merely misguided, even antiheroic figure.

It's easy for resentful right-wingers to see this as a simple case of who/whom thinking being conveniently weaponised against them, but unless you specifically subscribe to (or want to no-enemies-on-the-right) Hitler's brand of identity politics, you are not actually the [antonym of beneficiary]. In the grand scheme of things, most murderous movements in history are actually tolerated, including ones that would unambiguously code conservative in the modern eye - nobody bats an eye at Genghis Khan branding, and even crusader chic is still on the menu (could you imagine a grand strategy game like Crusader Kings II, but modelling the political tug-of-war between Hitler's Gauleiters?) despite their portfolio including religiously motivated rape, murder and land grabs against people further down the progressive stack, use of child soldiers and much more.

given that the deaths caused by Lenin and Mao are not exactly a secret.

Not exactly a secret, but not nearly as embedded in our cultural consciousness as those caused by Hitler. You should try asking 30 young adults who the most prolific mass murderers of the 20th century were. I did that experiment several times in the 90's. Stalin was rarely mentioned, and Mao was never mentioned once. Hitler was always the first name on the collective lips of the class. The situation is probably a little different now, but I would be very surprised if perception has caught up to reality.

At least with hitler, as long as you weren’t… a jew, a slav, a jehovah’s witness, a political opponent, a homosexual, a cripple… you were sort of safe cravenly heil hitlering your way though the war-torn hellscape. Whereas for the khmer rouge, the entire present population was fair game. It was all about the future. And if the present clay wasn’t molding fast enough into the ‘new man’, throw it away and try again, as many times as it takes. They went beyond identity politics, there was no ingroup left.

My eye does twitch involuntarily when people say genghis khan's empire 'opened up trade lanes' and 'travelers had never been so safe'.

I don’t believe in the hierarchy of motives. If you had offered to take the ‘undesirables’ off hitler’s hands, he would have happily agreed, just like the communist only wants successful reeducation for capitalists. The deciding moment comes after the original optimistic plan fails. You can then either give up on the idea, or find that you “have to” apply more force for reeducation than you thought, and so tragically break a few eggs in the process/ murder everyone out of convenience. The relevant moral lines are broken here, not on the higher level of goals.

At least with hitler, as long as you weren’t… a jew, a slav, a jehovah’s witness, a political opponent, a homosexual, a cripple… you were sort of safe cravenly heil hitlering your way though the war-torn hellscape

I agree with you that Nazi persecution was more predictable and narrowly targeted than that of the communists, but you left one important group off your list of those who were marked for death by the Nazis: people who would not keep their mouth shut and their tail between their legs. The fact that there were so few of these is a testament to how ironically wrong Hitler was about the alleged greatness of the German Volk. Hitler pointedly lambasts sycophants in Mein Kampf, but he hypocritically demanded it of his vassals and subjects, on pain of death. Hitler reigned over a nation of Spucklecker (spit lickers; his term for sycophants) -- and if they hadn't been, he couldn't have.

I don't think spit-licker is too unkind a term for someone who professes Christianity, and yet silently, passively watches the Nazi persecution of the Jews. I have never done anything so brave as stand up to a murderous tyrannical regime, and so I cannot claim that I would have done anything different than what most Germans did, even most of the ones who recognized Hitler as a ruinous, berserk tyrant. Maybe I would and maybe I wouldn't. What I am saying is that those of us who are (or might be) spit-lickers should recognize those among us those who demonstrably aren't, such as Deitrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller, as better men than us in the most important way. In the words of Solzhenitsyn,

And as for him who lacks the courage to defend even his own soul, let him not brag of his progressive views, boast of his status as an academician or a recognized artist, a distinguished citizen or general. Let him say to himself plainly: I am cattle, I am a coward, I seek only warmth and to eat my fill.

Not to be all atheist, but one of the things I find most discrediting to the Church’s claim of providing moral guidance was its shameful compromising with hitler. Even though it was clear to church leaders that nazism was both generally evil, and opposed to the power of the church as such. Unlike the german people, who were more bribed than threatened into compliance with the regime (so can be said to be morally corrupted, and complicit), the church’s behaviour reflects pure moral cowardice.

but the goals of Lenin and Mao are generally actually perceived as a deontological or virtuous good even by many of those (common in the US) who consider them a utilitarian evil.

They are deontologically evil, I've brought this up before though on a different subject. Star Control has an origin story for a comically evil race be the pursuit of the perfect good. They achieved it, but then overdid it, resulting in the ultimate evil. Same principle.

I assumed we are talking about the beliefs of typical people rather than us assorted degenerates haunting the Motte, since we are trying to explain why the general populace is more comfortable with Mao/Lenin quotes than with Hitler quotes. If you do not actually believe Hitler quotes to be less appropriate to quote approvingly than Mao/Lenin quotes, then your moral beliefs on the topic are not particularly relevant.

Then isn't the simpler explanation the years of propaganda they go through in public schools, or all the media portraying him as the ultimate evil, while the ins and outs of communism are mostly glossed over? It's not lime most people are doing an in-depth ethical analysis of each system and the ideas behind them.

Then isn't the simpler explanation the years of propaganda they go through in public schools, or all the media portraying him as the ultimate evil, while the ins and outs of communism are mostly glossed over?

I'm surprised this has not been the go-to explanation in the discussion. The clue is not that Hitler is stigmatized, but the pattern of the what Moldbug calls the "cathedral" minimizing and excusing communist atrocities even after they became known. I think this pattern is obvious.

At least at the German school I attended they covered in sufficient detail the beliefs associated with communism and the various skull mountains associated with it, but apart from the one token card-carrying neonazi kid (who wanted to become a tank driver but I think grew up to be a ski instructor instead) everybody still walked out with the standard differential assessment of the two. Of course morality rarely spontaneously materialises out of nowhere and people ultimately believe that aiming to advance one race at the expense of others is intrinsically evil because they are instilled with this message from early on, but all I am saying is that this is the deontological moral package that most people wind up with, and given that package the conclusions that they arrive at are correct in the sense that no amount of additional information about communism or Hitler is likely to change them. If you want to rehabilitate Hitler or throw communist leaders in the pit with him, there is no shortcut around convincing a majority of people to actually change their morality, rather than merely exposing them to some "glossed over" forbidden information.

people ultimately believe that aiming to advance one race at the expense of others is intrinsically evil because they are instilled with this message from early on

I don't think this accurately describes our shared common moral sense. If people in a black church take up a collection to send money to hungry children in Zimbabwe, that they could have sent to even hungrier children in Ukraine, then they are advancing their race at the expense of others and few people have a problem with it, and I wouldn't have a problem with it. On a similar note using religion instead of race, if two people were taking up collections, one to aid persecuted Christians in Pakistan and one to aid persecuted Muslims in China, I would preferentially donate to save-the-Christians, and I think that is OK too, and I think it also accords with common sense (and that the push for "effective altruism" defies common sense).

What is wrong in our moral common sense is not advancing your people at the expense of others; it is advancing your people by violating the negative rights of others. Which is what Hitler (and Lenin and Mao) did, of course.

People rightly intuit that we live in an anti-fascist civilization with WW2 as a founding myth. In that myth, the Soviets are flawed allies but ultimately on the side of good.

For people to reliably recognize all forms of totalitarian socialism as equally evil, we'd have to live in a society that considers virtue as distance from totalitarian socialism, not distance to fascism.

At least at the German school I attended they covered in sufficient detail the beliefs associated with communism and the various skull mountains associated with it.

(...) rather than merely exposing them to some "glossed over" forbidden information.

You're right, I shouldn't have phrased it as "ins and outs" of communism, because it's not a question of not knowing about some event. Many people have knowledge of the shenanigans of Genghis Khan, but they won't have a similar reaction to him as they do to Hitler, even though the scale of his atrocities is comparable, and he doesn't have much of a deontological footing either.

Rather than information, it's about the constant reinforcement of the message that Nazis == Satan, and the Germans are absolutely unrivaled in that. Even some of the nations that were victimized by the Nazis are not so uptight about it. If you stop hammering that message, I doubt Hitler will be seen as any worse than Stalin, which you can even see in the attitudes of people in countries like India.

Hitler's stated goals (which really are those same identity politics you are talking about) are taken to be evil, but the goals of Lenin and Mao are generally actually perceived as a deontological or virtuous good even by many of those (common in the US) who consider them a utilitarian evil.

What was Hitler's stated goal, in your view?

The Communists' stated goal was to make a better world by killing everyone who didn't fit into it, a number they generally estimated at ~10% of extant humans.

a number they generally estimated at ~10% of extant humans.

Citation?

The early Soviet communists were explicitly pro-terror and against "Quaker-Papist babble about the sanctity of human life", but I was under the impression that they were imagining a world where a relatively small amount of terror and murder would be sufficient to make everybody else fall in line. Maybe my recollections are muddled with later leftist movements, but I could swear I recall even early Communism being very pro-equality, to the point of having theories of psychology where people are all basically the same underneath and the fact that some of them eventually want to be evil capitalist oppressors is just because they got an evil capitalist upbringing. Maybe I'm wrong, though - "reeducation camps" were a feature of lots of later strains of Communism but the Gulags didn't really bother to put on such an optimistic "we're trying to fix you for your own good" facade.

To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia's population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated. — Grigory Zinoviev, 1918

Early Communism was indeed very pro-equality, but it also viewed humans as the output of social forces, presumed that bad social forces could make bad humans, and was not shy about advocating that bad humans should be "liquidated". Once Communists gained power, this sort of liquidation was routine wherever they gained power.

I was wondering if maybe your citation would be nutpicking, and worried when I didn't recognize the name, but shame on my ignorance. The "chairman of the Communist International from 1919 to 1926" is a pretty solid reference. Thanks.

I think you specifically would've been around last time I had a similar discussion, but Hitler's stated goal was to make the world better for ethnic Germans at no expenses spared for other ethnicities (and with particular vengeance towards some specific ones that he considered their sworn enemies). For better or worse, most people consider such a goal already more evil than the same thing with people selected by socioeconomic status, but that's neglecting that the communists' stated goal as commonly understood does not mandate killing or even displacing any fixed set of people (that's why they ran reeducation camps).

Having to kill capitalists rather than being able to brainwash them all into becoming good workers was presumably seen by most communists (with the exception perhaps of outliers like Cambodia) as a failure and unfortunate compromise with reality. If you conflate "do terrible thing to everyone who doesn't fit in your world" and "do terrible thing to everyone who you can't reform to fit in your world no matter how much you try", then everyone supporting law and order in the US could also be said to want to make a better world by brutally robbing the liberty of everyone who doesn't fit into it, a number that is bounded below at ~0.5% of the US population.

Hitler's stated goal was to make the world better for ethnic Germans at no expenses spared for other ethnicities (and with particular vengeance towards some specific ones that he considered their sworn enemies).

Can you point me (or us) to Hitler's statements on this?

Now that Trump has ignored the order of a judge to unfreeze the funds he is withholding comes the first constitutional crisis. This is where checks and balances should kick in. If he brazenly defies the courts then Congress can take action against him by impeachment and removal. Hopefully.

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It appears that the judge’s daughter is at a presidential appointed position at Dept of Ed, a department squarely within the crosshairs of DOGE. So not only is the ruling dubious on constitutional grounds, but there is also a concern that his order directly helps his daughter suggesting a conflict of interest.

I shouldn't be surprised, but I am.

I thought the Democratic Party was primarily ideologically motivated, but I'm realizing more and more that it's a patronage network. Their sinecures are more important than ideology, the country, the debt, everything.

Let me know when you have such a shocking realization about anyone you actually liked.

If you find a conservative-leaning individual that actually believes the Republican Party and broader right wing is low on people who were likable but turned out to act as though "sinecures are more important than ideology, the country, the debt, everything", please point them to me. I can come up with a pretty wide list of once-loved (among soccons) conservative politicians and speakers that turned out quite willing to sell their movement up a creek, sometimes for embarrassingly few pieces of silver light grift.

To be fair, the Republicans only got into their new position of Shiva the Destroyer because they were so inept at the power game they lost nearly 100% of the elite.

We're lucky in a way. Normally it takes a war or a depression or other major crisis to clean up government. But we're getting a cleanup on the cheap. It's a miracle really. Normally the corruption would be split equally between the two parties, and would be impossible to get rid of. But since everyone in the elite was so united against Trump, he can go after corruption without any political cost.

Don't worry, I'm sure if Trump gets what he wants, there will be lots of corruption flowing to Republicans as well. In a way, the current situation is a result of the Dems just winning so hard for so long.

I donno about that. There are reports I'm inclined to believe that Trump's SV donors are having their way slashing away at regulators (even justifiable ones) that have been hounding them. I'm taking the reports with a grain of salt, but if they are to be believed and aren't just fear mongering we may see rollbacks of numerous pro-consumer banking regulations. Like how banks and credit cards can't order transactions to maximize fees. But we shall see.

I still think 4 years of SV theoretically looting the commons won't be as bad as the last 4 years of open borders, schools secretly transitioning children, DEI mandates and your quality of life constantly being attacked (no plastic straws, gas ovens, etc) because "muh environment". But maybe they'll surprise me. Maybe they'll invent fresh horrors the likes of which makes me beg we could return to debating only sterilizing and mutilating children.

You guys are whipped up in a frenzy over mere speculation. Is there any actual evidence to suggest corruption here? Trump constantly engages in brazenly corrupt behavior, but all I hear from the acolytes here are apologetics that strain the limits of credulity.

This is not really sufficient effort for a top level post. It's good that you at least added a link to a story in a response downthread, but that should have been proactively provided (particularly given the overt partisanship of your post) in the first place. You also haven't really explained what each of the parties under discussion actually did, or made any attempt to steelman either side.

Remember,

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light...

So low effort wishcasting is frowned upon generally, but doubly when it is a top level post.

Heard (5000% not trying to be sassy I just think getting modded doesn’t deserve much more than an acknowledgment and a yes sir. I said a while the modding here is not for me so if I’m gonna keep posting here I’m 1937467% not arguing with the mods)

As a notable Yale law grad recently explained:

If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal.

If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that's also illegal.

Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power.

Maybe the real Constitutional crisis is some random judge deciding that the President's powers as described in Article 2 are actually reserved for that particular judge and they personally shall decide how and if the President may exercise them.

That is literally what judges do though. They say "this particular military operation, or this particular use of prosecutorial discretion, is illegal". That's their only job in the US legal system. I don't really see how this law grad you speak of can say that a judge isn't allowed to do such things. Judges don't have unlimited power to control the executive, but they do have some power to do so.

It is pretty unprecedented for a district judge to order such a sweeping injunction that affects a core executive duty / power. All the more so when this is certainly a political question (ie Trump isn’t saying he won’t ever spend money Congress appropriated; he is saying first he needs to understand what it is being spent on because what it is being spent on may not be in line with the congressional grant and/or the grant may be impossible.

Also I don’t think judges have ever said “this particular military operation, or this particular use of prosecutorial discretion, is illegal.” Like can you find one case?

I don't have specific examples to hand, but I was speaking from the judiciary's role in the American legal system. Since they are responsible for determining what is and is not in violation of the law, that would then mean that if a particular case comes to court they are therefore deciding if the actions of the executive were ok or not.

Yes but that is comparing like with unlike. These particular rulings are rather unprecedented and responding by saying that rulings in other areas on other matters restrict the executive are common is not responsive.

It is what some judges do, very few. The nine on the Supreme Court.

District judges have no authority to issue injunctions against the President, and we know this because the first time it happened in the history of this country was by Judge James Robart in 2017. Do consider the history of this country: FDR hasn't quite passed from living memory, Trump may violate many contemporary norms, the travel ban violated no historic norms and represented no sweeping and dubious exercise of executive authority. Certainly not compared to the sweeping, unprecedented and wholly unconstitutional exercise of judicial authority by who ended up being multiple district judges attempting to actively restrain the authority of the executive. This is why SCOTUS ruled in favor of the XO per curiam.

I don't know if this is the hill where Trump should invoke Jackson -- probably because I expect SCOTUS will issue another per curiam -- but unless district judges are permanently shaken of the delusion that they have the constitution's endorsement to issue sweeping federal injunctions, let alone those against the executive, that moment is inevitable.

I don't know if this is the hill where Trump should invoke Jackson -- probably because I expect SCOTUS will issue another per curiam -- but unless district judges are permanently shaken of the delusion that they have the constitution's endorsement to issue sweeping federal injunctions, let alone those against the executive, that moment is inevitable.

The judges doing this don't really expect that their orders will stand. They're just playing the delaying game; if they can pretend to be just reasonably issuing restraining orders to preserve the case, and avoid the Supreme Court taking it up on the emergency docket, they can keep Trump from doing anything for years, perhaps even his entire term. If Trump invokes Jackson, the higher courts (even those he appointed) will side with their lower-court brethren and we'll have a full-on Constitutional crisis. So he'll try to play the same "I'm not touching you" game the Democrats do, and hope his courts will allow him the same leeway nearly all courts do the Democrats. I'm not sure that'll work, though.

I wonder if there is a way to go to a Republican friendly jdx and get an opposite ruling to effectively force a split.

It has to roll before the fifth circuit.

In the American legal system, judges have traditionally held that certain domains are non-justiciable—outside judical power to review. Military operations and prosecutorial discretion were mentioned here because those are two such traditional domains. So no—the traditional judicial response to suits about a military operation is to say "sorry, my hands are tied, it's categorically outside my judicial authority to be involved" and dismiss the suit.

You can argue that it shouldn't be this way, that judges shouldn't categorically exclude themselves from certain domains. There's a reasonable argument for that! But that shift, if it happens, would be a departure from traditional legal norms. And one judge doing so on his own can certainly be criticized as being at odds with the existing limits on judicial power as has been hitherto understood by the judiciary.

I'm not weighing in on the object level question of if the specific question in this particular suit should have been ruled as non-justiciable. It very plausibly is analogous to traditionally non-justiciable domains (like military operations.) But it's hardly cut and dried the way a suit about a military operation would be. There's precedent to be made here by higher courts in the future.

My point here is on the meta-level, that the US legal system recognizes some domains as categorically non-justiciable, and that this is why military operatorations and prosecutorial discretion were invoked as examples.

Fair enough. I was actually unaware of that, so thank you for the correction.

Yes I agree impeachment should be on the table…for the judge who wrote this absurd TRO. The sole random district court judge is requiring the president to violate his Art II core duty with zero precedent for such a sweeping declaratory TRO. It wouldn’t be unfair to label what the judge is doing as a judicial coup.

I assume you are referring to this order following up on the judge's temporary restraining order freezing (heh) the funding freeze. This is a bit of a strange situation. It's not entirely clear what specific action is being enjoined. They are prevented from... not funding things? Which things? Which specific transactions are required to go through? Which funding decisions are a result of following the president's executive order (forbidden by the court's order), and which funding decisions are simply government officials implementing what they consider to be the proper policy of the government? What even are the proper funding procedures in the absense of executive-directed policy? Are agency heads supposed to pretend that Biden is still president and fund whatever he would want instead?

Huh. Just from reading the TRO - maybe what the Trump administration did was bad (I suspect that SCOTUS will rule that there's at least some areas regarding funding that judges cannot issue this sort of order about due to the separation of powers but arguably you should wait for them to overrule the lower court before assuming that!) but in and of itself my guess is that "the executive branch imperfectly follows a TRO" is not exactly a rare occurrence. I did a quick Google, for instance, and found that the Obama administration, to my untrained eye, appears to have pulled a similar stunt in the national-security context.

This should be expanded upon for a top-level post.

If he brazenly defies the courts

laughs in Heller and Bruen

Yeah, it sure does suck when nobody respects court decisions and just does whatever they want in active contempt of those decisions.

Yeah, I've got a small genre of posts just for this sort of stuff, followed by places where the administration swore it wasn't going to do something, waited for the court case to end, and then did it anyway. This was this week, and I didn't even have to go searching for it. There's a million ways to talk about how all of these cases are tots different and there's some line that absolutely wasn't drawn by a Texas Sharpshooter, but the idea that this is terra nova is laughable.

Do you have a link to what you're talking about?

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-violating-court-order-freezing-funding-judge-2025-2

Thank you!

Checks and balances does not mean that your political enemies don't get to do any of their agenda. Sometimes in a democracy things happen you don't like. The judiciary is the least democratic institution in the American republic, the least accountable. If the President defies the judiciary and Congress supports him then the President gets his way. That's the part of checks and balances you probably don't like, and that's probably how it's going to end.

I literally don’t think that’s how the government works. If I did, then I’d take the L.

The judiciary doesn't have any formal mechanism to enforce a ruling upon the executive branch other than by tradition and precedent. If he makes unlawful, unconstitutional orders, Congress has reason to impeach him. But if Congress doesn't want to impeach him, then he gets away with it. It really is that simple. What do you want the judiciary to do? Send in the US Marshals, start a civil war?

Now perhaps there's a constitutional argument to go against whatever the president is doing. Certainly you could make a case for anything. But the vesting clause is very clear that the President is endowed with the full powers of the office. The Supreme Court will not suddenly make a ruling that will formalize any sort of control on the executive branch.

Do you have an argument to bring to bear against the unitary executive? How is the presidency supposed to work? Is there a strong legal theory behind the ability of fifty state judges to have a veto over the President?

Can't the judiciary hold members of the Treasury in contempt for not unfreezing the funds?

They could. But then Trump could instruct the DoJ not to enforce that ruling.

You see, without the rule of law and trust in institutions, all judges are is old people in unfashionable black robes. They're not wizards. If the judiciary is percieved (and acts) in a partisan way, then the other branches of government can hit back. The people shouting about checks and balances are unhappy it's being used on them.

All of this line-pushing is designed to go to the Supreme Court. It's clear from the Trump Administration's intent that they will no longer tolerate the judiciary getting in the way of their agenda with legalese. They don't regard them as a neutral institution enforcing the rule of law, but one colonized by its enemies.

I predict that the Supreme Court will give way to Trump to preserve its own legitimacy, as the court did to FDR to prevent him from stuffing it with his appointees.

I’m confused. You said if the President goes against the Constitution, then he should be removed. He has clearly violated the Constitution. Therefore he should be removed.

The presidency works by following the proper channels of checks and balances, not spamming Executive Orders until the courts block it. I have a very hard time believing that if a Democratic president did the same behavior you would have the same reaction.

I’m confused. You said if the President goes against the Constitution, then he should be removed. He has clearly violated the Constitution. Therefore he should be removed.

There is general agreement on this, but the question is who decides when this happens. According to the Constitution, the answer has been "Congress." As such, attempts to force this result by the judiciary are in this tradition inappropriate.

Spamming executive orders until the courts block it has been how presidential admins work since Obama lost his supermajority. Biden blatantly ignored the court orders blocking him from student loan forgiveness and eviction freezes and nobody thought it was a constitutional crisis.

Biden in fact attempted to get student loan forgiveness placed wholly outside the ability of the courts to review by arranging so nobody would have standing. The response of the Democrats was to be angry at the Republican's almost-as-tenuous methods of obtaining standing anyway.

Probably the closest we came to a crisis was Biden's extension of the rent moratorium after the Supreme Court's deciding vote (Kavanaugh) said basically "It's unconstitutional but we'll let you wind it down".

Popular presidents ignore the constitution all the time. Unless you're arguing that FDR's internment of Japanese-Americans was constitutional. The Biden administration made clear its intent to ignore the constitution when it was searching for a way to make good on its promise to make a handout to the college educated. It's unclear as to the executive branch auditing itself and controlling its staffing is unconstitutional: the Trump administration should ignore the lower courts until a clarifying ruling comes down from the Supreme Court.

The institution which interprets the US constitution, and has the final say on its meaning is the Supreme Court. It famously okayed the camps in Korematsu so from its issuing the matter was no longer in dispute. But in 2018 Hawaii case, USSC repudiated it.

So the camps were constitutional, as affirned in Korematsu, from their inception until 2018.

The Democrats in Congress don't have the votes to impeach him though, so that indeed creates the crisis.

The Republicans in Congress may have the votes to ratify the freeze though. That resolves the issue.

Alternatively there could just be escalating contempt of court proceedings against underlings and disregard for the judiciary.

As a thought experiment, what do you guys think it would take for Republicans in congress to impeach and convict Trump?

Like, suppose all those Reddit comments are right, and Elon really is looting billions of dollars from the treasury for his personal benefit. If Trump turns a blind eye, or even worse, pardons Elon, surely that would be enough right?

At this point I don’t think anything can. If Trump turns a blind eye and pardons Elon, I believe the base will think it’s correct/legal/not a big deal. I don’t even think murder would do it; I think there would be a spin that Trump had to do it.

Actually, now that I think about it, I think if Trump supported the LGBT population, was pro-sex education, or something else very much so not socially conservative, I believe it’d do it. But then he wouldn’t be Trump, so it’s kinda a moot point.

  • -16

President Clinton established that profound moral corruption was no bar to Presidential office. President Bush II established that reasonably sound moral character was insufficient to prevent disastrous misrule. President Biden killed any possible appeal to formal rule of law, and did some dancing on the grave of the moral character question in the bargain.

There aren't really a lot of valid norms remaining upright at the moment. In 2016, Democratic candidates stumped on the policy of taxing religions they didn't like and publicly laughed at the idea of Constitutional restraint for their desires. With this last election, I note that numerous Blue Tribe commentators explicitly dismissed the actual person murdered in the attempted Trump assassination, because he was a Trump supporter and therefore fair game. Likewise, one notes the Luigi fandom. If you're worried about people endorsing murder, there's no need to speculate about hypotheticals when we've got live examples around us at this very moment; likewise for other forms of extremism.

Do... do you... you really believe Trump is a doctrinaire social conservative? Like he doesn't support abortion up til birth without apology, I guess that makes him a radical Christian nationalist or whatever the snarl word is now?

Trump's support among social conservatives is that he'll protect us from efforts to make it illegal to be socially conservative, not that he'll enact socially conservative policies. Nobody expected him to be even as socially conservative as he is, we just expected him to make sure the little sisters of the poor get left alone.

I think if Trump supported the LGBT population

He waved a rainbow flag once. Roy Cohn was his mentor. He weirdly petted Peter Thiel's hand in a meeting in 2016. Theil called Trump more recently and asked him to select Vance as VP. No one cares that Trump is fine being friends with gay guys. A journalist asked Trump which restroom a transwoman would need to use in Trump tower and he said he doesn't care.

I'm not sure if Trump "supports" them, but he doesn’t seem to be anti-gay.

Trump made a gay married guy with gay adopted kids a treasury secretary.

Trump is not anti-LGBT per se, he's just pro owning the libs, so because libs funded the cause he froze that funding.

Actually, now that I think about it, I think if Trump supported the LGBT population, was pro-sex education, or something else very much so not socially conservative, I believe it’d do it.

Those are some interestingly selected examples. Let me go grab a big drink of water and -

cough hack

... are you intentionally trying to channel Darwin levels of being wrong for the engagement, or does this mean anything?

No, I’m not, and I don’t know why you want to insult me by saying I’m not commenting in good faith.

Because I’ve looked at your profile page:

yes I’m addicted to downvotes every time I get one it’s like a bump of that sweet smoking gun and yes I’m into BDSM let me get into my St. Andrew’s real quick and then you can call me a troll until your throat hurts.

( I don’t downvote lightly, and this haven’t done so here yet.)

…..I feel like the joke went over your head.

I'm pretty sure I get the joke. What I'm interested in seeing is whether it's a joke in the 'ha ha, I'm going to act the exact opposite of this' sense, or in the 'ha ha, I'm going to be extra wounded if someone notices a pattern' sense.

If you'd rather we spend three posts getting to the point where you can even recognize the "or does this mean anything?" part of my post above, I think that illustrates a lot of why I'd comment the way I did.

Darwin never had a sense of humor, at least she's got that.

I'll respect our difference of opinion if you don't find it funny, but I chuckled.

I am 100% certain Trump would be impeached and removed if he was caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.

Besides that, I'm less sure.

Define "caught". We're getting into territory where "how high on TDS do you have to be to believe that actually happened, rather than being an insane slander thought up by his enemies" would trump most sorts of evidence that could realistically be produced.

I donno, he's rubbing shoulders with a Kennedy now. Maybe some of that Chappaquiddick magic will rub off on him.

"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters be impeached and removed from office, OK? It's, like, incredible."

Is it really that far from precedent, though? Clinton's ATF and FBI burned a bunch of women and children to death in Waco. Obama ordered drone strikes on American citizens abroad. Cheney actually shot a man while in office. Two of those successfully ran for re-election afterwards.

And when the man Cheney shot got out of the hospital, he told the press conference, "My family and I are deeply sorry for everything Vice President Cheney and his family have had to deal with."

On the one hand, it was an accident, and it's possible that the victim contributed to it by moving too far ahead of the line of hunters too soon, and legitimately felt guilty about that.

On the other hand, it was Cheney, who you can absolutely imagine walking up to the guy he just shot and stating "If you survive this, the first thing you're going to do is apologize for getting in the way of my shot."

As long as Republicans think that Trump will get them stuff they want, he's invincible on a personal level. Like all politicians, first you have to gut the support, THEN you have to run the smear campaign. That's why Cakegate in the UK only started hitting home when conservatives realised that Boris Johnson was going all-in on lockdowns and immigration. Mind you, I think that UK voters are more invested in outward good behaviour from politicians than US ones, though I don't know how long that will last.

Enforcement is an exercise for Congress, not the courts. We have been exactly in the presumptive, possibly apocryphal, here before: “Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it”.

What crisis?

Andrew Jackson is supposed to be his favorite president.

What crisis?

Isn't "constitutional crisis" a general term where the branches contradict each other and it's not clear what to do to resolve it?

The thing is that it's pretty clear what happens here: Executive tells the judge to go pound sand, and if the case eventually ends up in front of the supreme court they will certainly write it off as nonsense.

I don't see how this has any teeth.


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