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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   33226 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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Trump just tweeted "He who saves his Country does not violate any Law."

I know that Belisarius thinks I'm a far-leftist (lol), but I think that a fair reading my post history will show that I am what I present myself as, more or less a classical liberal who hates both the left and the right.

I've spent a lot of time and energy both online and offline defending Trump and Trumpism from the often hysterically-phrased accusation that it is fascist, a huge threat, etc. I feel a bit like an idiot now, to be frank. I still hate the woke and am somewhat glad that Trumpism rose up to halt the woke's authoritarian tendencies... but lord, more and more I wish that it had been almost anything other than Trumpism doing it. The argument that Trumpism is fundamentally a classical liberal force is becoming more and more absurd almost by the hour, in my opinion.

Accelerationists (the three or four actual ones for whom it's not just a funny pretense) must be rubbing their hands raw with glee right now. Things are moving very fast.

As much as I appreciate some of what Trumpism is doing to upend stale norms and wokism, at this point I, and probably many other centrists are starting to think "shit, maybe the hysterical libs had a point about these people". And if politics is making me start to side even slightly with literal Redditors, you know that things are bad and crazy.

My biggest mistake, I think, was to extremely overestimate libs and the left. I really thought they would manage to blunt Trumpism's worst impulses and there would be a sort of stalemate like there was during Trump's first term. But libs and the left seem to be missing. Turns out that there is no deep state waiting with sharp fangs and CIA assassins to stop the orange man as soon as he tries to actually do anything that hurts the Blob. Instead, there are only old tired bureaucrats and the occasional protester wearing a pussy hat.

Whoops. Well, so much for that. I was wrong. And this shit is starting to be a bit genuinely alarming. I think I am, actually, getting tired of "winning". I wanted the woke to be defeated by classical liberals, not by a rage-filled vengeful gaggle of right-wing revolutionaries.

Whoops. Well, so much for that. I was wrong. And this shit is starting to be a bit genuinely alarming.

😅 Like dr_analog, I would be curious to understand why this conclusion came so late.

The way I see it is the following:

  • One of my core values are rationality and natural science. If an argument is not logically sound, it's wrong. If a theory doesn't match up with observations of reality, it's a fantasy. The thing about Trump is that not only does he lie — he propagates statements that are clearly absurd and where he doesn't even bother trying to justify them. These statements are completely disconnected from reality, and knowingly so. Any person with paranoid schizophrenia has more connection to reality, because at least they believe that their statements are real. With this way of presenting "arguments", I fail to see how Trump would be able to make any of his policy promises real — they don't work, they are not even intended to work. This implies that Trump has no genuine policy goals, he is just fishing for votes. But then what are his goals? He must have some, or he wouldn't run for presidency…
  • Trump wants to undermine the Separation of powers. Separation means that lawmakers decides what should be, the executive makes it so, and the judiciary checks that what the executive is doing matches what the lawmakers said it should. It follows that the Supreme Court should have no place for partisan politics — neither Democractic nor Republican, it's not their job. The job of the executive is not to make law — it's to make real those that already exist. The attempt at dismantling the separation of powers in favor of political influence is a clear sign of authoritarianism.

I know that Belisarius thinks I'm a far-leftist (lol), but I think that a fair reading my post history will show that I am what I present myself as, more or less a classical liberal who hates both the left and the right.

yeah being here and recent events pushed more towards the middle-right. otherwise, a decade+ ago I was often the most right-wing person in any social event

Accelerationists (the three or four actual ones for whom it's not just a funny pretense) must be rubbing their hands raw with glee right now. Things are moving very fast.

they aren't. the first 100 days are always hectic like this as the new admin overtakes the departing one by hiring and firing staff, and so on. At some point, the low-hanging DOGE cuts will be done, and Trump will have to legislate to enact any lasting change, which as his first term showed, is is major weakness and he risks spinning his wheels for the next 4 years. Also, people overestimate Trump's willingness or overturn the status quo; look how he punted on any decision regarding the Bitcoin reserve, delaying it by 180 days, which likely means it will not happen at all. Trump also is pro-business and wants to make inroads with tech; these are very much in keeping with the establishment.

The same people who in 2016-2017 predicted the demise of democracy were wrong then and I see little evidence they are right now. None of these criticisms are new. Trump is more competitive , which I think is misconstrued for wanting to subvert democracy for not accepting the 2020 results unhesitantly. Trump has visions of grandiosity but I don't see this crossing to fascism or other fears.

In terms of foreign policy, a case can be made Trumpism can make America safer. Under Biden, saw Russia invade Ukraine, China flexing its might against Taiwan, Hamas attack Israel, Iran attack Israel, etc. Foreign leaders perceive Biden as weak, compared to Trump. I feel safer under Trump compared to other administrations.

Trump infamously tweeted a Mussolini quote in 2016, fwiw.

And praised China's "strength" for Tiananmen square, while lamenting that we're not strong like that and that we should be stronger

And praised China's "strength" for Tiananmen square, while lamenting that we're not strong like that and that we should be stronger

After learning Tiananmen Square was a Soros funded color-revolution, I sort of get it. They had it coming. Funny how our own media never talks who instigated and funded that protest. Oh the soldiers crushed the protesting students under their heels, shot them and bulldozed them with tanks? Good.

Is this true?

Sounds awesome, now you just have to claim that protestors have some foreign funding and it’s open season on your citizens

You mean like "removing and punishing the spread of Russian-like malinformation"? We're familiar with that strategy already thanks.

Him defending it to NBC at the time was hilarious.

Surely nobody can accuse him of lying when he said "I want to be associated with interesting quotes".

Mate. It's a tweet. From Trump.

While the major names around him keep talking about their idea that judges should not be able to impose limits on the executive

Oh man. Unnamed people talked about ideas?

Benjamin, get the musket.

There are (according to Claude) 673 district court judges. If seems that any one of these unelected tyrants gets to (at least temporarily) make law that affects the entire country. This is insane and probably unconstitutional.

Careful jurisprudence would avoid this, but on a practical level there are simply too many judges for some of them not to be hacks. One of the judges who ruled against Trump had a wife getting dollars from USAID for example and refused to recuse himself. Another one suggested that trans people deserve lighter sentences for the same crime than non-trans. How do we prevent biased, unelected, and unethical judges from stopping elected leaders?

Edit: then there's [https://x.com/America1stLegal/status/1891226933481877590](this judge) who is blocking spending cuts while serving on the board (and until recently chairman of the board) of an NGO that has received $128 million in federal funds. Short of impeachment (which requires 2/3rds of congress) these judges have pretty much no checks on their short-term power to block elected officially. Unless, of course, you simply ignore them like Biden claimed he wanted to do with student loan forgiveness. I think that would be a bad thing, but the current system is madness.

There is a 90%+ chance all this hysteria will seem ridiculous 2 years from now. Congress isn’t doing anything and radical action requires not only congress but in some cases actual constitutional amendment, which is even less likely. Hysteria about this forgets all of Trump’s countless other statements over the years that didn’t happen.

Maybe I'm overly black pilled, but what law?

Virtually the only aspect of the bill rights in tact is the provision against quartering troops in people's homes. We've discovered in the last decade mass government surveillance, illegal search and seizure (civil forfeiture), a cabal of misleadingly named NGOs funded by the government trying to end run around the 1st amendment, the federal government in naked dereliction of duty enforcing it's obligation to protect our borders, local and state governments in collaboration with school systems to systematically violate parental rights, etc. Literally not one of the rights I'm supposed to be lucky to have because I live in America that I learned about in middle school actually exist anymore.

None of those things were a "constitutional crisis", despite the Bill of Rights being part of the constitution. And yet Trump unilaterally firing many of the people responsible for those violations of the constitution somehow is. Because of some process minutia lawyers are arguing over.

I simply cannot possibly be made to care anymore. When it comes to my rights as outlined in the constitution and the Bill of Rights, nothing seems to be a "constitutional crisis". When it comes to arguing over who exactly has the authority to illegally surveil me (or other unconstitutional abuse of my personal rights), suddenly it matters exactly how congress delegated this illegal authority, and the separation of powers that has haphazardly allowed said illegal authority to continue, and Trump can't just shut down illegal programs or terminate state actors that have systematically abused my civil liberties! They have rights!

And my god, think of what would happen if Trump was able to abuse all the programs they had been abusing over the last several decades? What if he spied on his political opponents, and then used parallel construction or process crimes to disqualify them from office? Only we are supposed to be able to do that, because we're special!

It's pretty well known trans kid is the topic I'm most radicalized over. In my state we voted as hard as we could to stop it. It just doesn't matter. No matter how hard we vote, the schools refuse to stop. No matter what judges say, the schools refuse to stop. Now we have the president telling them to stop... and they refuse to stop. They tax the fuck out of us, and then use that money to fight us in court forever until they run the clock out and a different administration drops the cases or changes policy. This has been radicalizing for me beyond belief. Voting nor the law is solving this life or death issue.

And while that is going on in my state, in my county, I'm supposed to care that Trump might illegally be taking a fire axe to the DOE and lawfaring said schools? That those actions are the bridge too far and a constitutional crisis?

I just can't possibly be made to care anymore. Trump could wipe his ass with the shreds of the Constitution his predecessors have left behind. Most of it's down the toilet already. Just because Trump uses the last of the roll doesn't mean he's chiefly responsible for using it all. He's only responsible for replacing it.

Virtually the only aspect of the bill rights in tact is the provision against quartering troops in people's homes.

They violated that too with Covid rent moratorium.

Of the bill of rights, the 3rd, 5th, 7th, and 8th remain more or less intact. The first is a mixed bag and I don't actually think anyone knows what the ninth is about. That's almost exactly half.

The 1st amendment is interpreted more expansively now than it was when the Constitution was adopted. Likewise the 6th.

I don't recall the founding fathers threatening printing press and paper manufacturers to make sure they only allow people with the right opinions to publish ideas. But maybe that's just me.

In fact, wasn't this precisely the sort of thing that the anti-federalists were getting assurances against?

Isn't that exactly what the federalists did with the sedition act, like the second they got hold of power?

Yeah, and it caused a massive constitutional and political crisis that contributed to the total end of the Federalist Party as a going concern because Jefferson and Madison could present Adams as a tyrant while unilaterally claiming the power of nullification for the states, with public support. It never reached the Supreme Court, but the Sedition Act absolutely precipitated the first major constitutional crisis of the country; in relevant terms to today, people convicted under the Sedition Act were pardoned by Jefferson when he became president. A comparison to the COVID restrictions appears completely apt to me.

In a sense. 1a has always had war as a sticking point.

But since I'm here referring to social media censorship (in peace times, ostensibly), that would rather fall under prior restraint or licensure, which the federalist argued 1a forbade in that first major debate, as opposed to seditious libel.

Although I suppose a counterargument would be that those nice letters the feds sent to twitter on who shouldn't have an account were sometimes motivated by national security under the reasoning that we live in a world where mere journalism is warfare in the information theater.

So perhaps getting banned for saying the Russians aren't so bad has more common law backing than for misgendering people. I'm not sure where it would fall on Covid.

Of course bending the rules to make them say nothing that stops you is a long and storied tradition.

Takings has been partially rejuvenated but largely deadwood (eg regulatory takings can be so extreme that my property could lose a massive percentage of value but have no recourse).

It isn’t just that though I agree with it. The OP seems fundamentally to have bought into a notion that the bureaucrats function as part of the separated of powers. But if the bureaucrats exercised power with zero real oversight of the bureaucrats, then of course there is no separation of powers but really a concentration of power within the bureaucrats.

Rather than tearing down separation of powers Trump is invigorated it by removing the previously unaccountable bureaucracy. The district judges are in my mind lawless traitors.

Right. After "my side" of the gun rights issue winning in the Supreme Court not once but twice (Heller and Bruen) and finding I still cannot legally purchase a firearm in any state in the union, "oh noes he's not obeying the district courts" is not particularly convincing to me. Particularly not when all obeying the courts (in Obergefell; there was one post-decision dissenter and she was crushed quickly) did is lead to all the transing-the-kids stuff.

I wanted the woke to be defeated by classical liberals.

We could debate all the fundamental philosophical problems of liberalism (classical or otherwise), but what I think is the more pressing problem with this attitude of simply wanting to return to "90s liberalism" which seems to be espoused by many figures is that they make no effort to explain that even if somehow liberalism defeats woke and we all become good liberals again, how will liberalism not immediately give rise to woke again. Woke, if not liberal itself, arose in the conditions of liberalism. Why wouldn't it do it again? Even if you're a 'classical liberal' rather than a '90s liberal' (social liberal) it's just delaying the problem slightly longer.

Ironically, despite the contemporary right-wing movements often being accused of being reactionary, it's really the anti-woke liberals who are reactionary in the quite literal and plain meaning of the word. They think we can just turn back the clock on political and philosophical development of the last thirty, fourty, fifty years and (re)establish a liberal utopia and the last fifteen years of woke will disappear forever like a bad dream, like it never happened. Remember, this 'SJW' 'woke' thing is just a fad that college kids will grow out of once they enter the real world.

Contemporary right-wing thought doesn't do this. It's decidedly post-liberal, not liberal or pre-liberal. It has, with maybe a few exceptions, fully embraced that liberalism has had its political moment, it has failed and the question is how to address those failures. The dialectic has progessed, one might say. Even the ironically named 'neo-reactionaries' aren't really reactionary in any meaningful sense, other than just borrowing basic, well-worn concepts from eons past. Their politics are still clearly post-liberal. I would even argue 'MAGA' (insofar it is a coherent political movement) is post-liberal, again despite the ironic name.

So my question to all those who just want to 'retvrn' to the liberalism of decades past - how to you plan to address or reform liberalism so it will won't cause woke again? What do you acknowledge are its problems? How would your changes keep the essence of liberalism so despite the changes it could still meaningfully be called liberalism? How would it not just be simply nostalgia for a past that can never be returned to, if it existed at all?

Ironically enough, the woke succeeded partially by making this very argument. There was a long tradition in the Frankfurt School of actively trying to undermine liberalism, their explicit rationale being that "liberalism has failed before, therefore it can fail again; and we need to put in [authoritarian system] to maintain social order".

The example they loved to use in all of their writings was the liberal Weimar Republic being usurped by the illiberal Nazi Party, and they used this to argue that the liberal system was obviously insufficient to guard against such abuses. Their claimed solution to this problem was that the information environment needed to be selectively seeded with propaganda "emancipatory" ideas which liberated people from their false consciousness, not terrible oppressive reactionary ones which maintained preexisting power structures and produced things like Nazism. Herbert Marcuse in particular loved using this argument, and it was so successful that it resulted in the domination of all of our major institutions by wokeness. They have become the "hegemonic power structure" they once criticised despite the fact that they are still masquerading as a subversive grassroots movement, their deep will-to-power makes them fail to abide by their own standards and instead suppress any kind of counter-narrative thought which might act as a check and balance to their worst impulses, and I think we both agree this was not a good thing in the slightest.

I'm very aware of the many failure-modes of liberalism - they've been discussed here at length, and I think they have credence. My counter-question is "if we get rid of the woke, what do you propose to replace it with, and if you've discarded liberalism as an idea how do you plan not to fall into the same trap the woke did?" Because there's a real risk of that, and using the fact that authoritarian systems have managed to succeed in some places as a reason for why an illiberal ideology should be introduced is the root of many of the harmful social trends that are occurring today. The woke obviously thought they were doing good - virtually everybody who does harm thinks so. What kind of self-correction mechanism would this new proposed hypothetical system have to prevent false dogmas from going unchallenged? Because while the left's unhinged dogmas are most salient in today's environment, dogmatism is not the exclusive preserve of the left.

Of course, some very doomer part of me does indeed think all this debate is pointless and that people have an inherent bent toward constructing sacred cows and adopting them in a quasi-religious manner, so we're doomed to swing from dogmatic idea to dogmatic idea and the idea of constructing an environment meant to guard against any given ideology's worst tendencies is a utopian abstraction that will never materialise in the long run. As always, the only thing that ultimately matters in this dynamic is making sure you're the one on top.

the more pressing problem with this attitude of simply wanting to return to "90s liberalism" which seems to be espoused by many figures is that they make no effort to explain that even if somehow liberalism defeats woke and we all become good liberals again, how will liberalism not immediately give rise to woke again. Woke, if not liberal itself, arose in the conditions of liberalism. Why wouldn't it do it again? Even if you're a 'classical liberal' rather than a '90s liberal' (social liberal) it's just delaying the problem slightly longer.

Well, one of the better-argued answers I see to this (even if I disagree with it) is that it is indeed about delaying the problem — turning the clock back thirty years buys you a few more decades — until tech comes to the rescue. There's the position that we just need to keep up 90s liberalism and fight the return of woke until AGI and the Singularity arrives and ends all human politics forever. Or then there's @mitigatedchaos's position that we need to return to "colorblind" 90s liberalism to contain racial conflict (and white identitarianism) another decade or so, at which point gene splicing technology will be safe and cheap enough to broadly use to fix all the HBD issues. (Personally, I find all these sorts overly-optimistic about the rates of technological progress.)

The next-best answer is the same one classical reactionaries often give: the second time around, we'll see the woke coming, and be better prepared to fight them off.

This is why I think of myself as both a neoreactionary and a right revolutionary, they aren’t opposites at all rather they’re synergistic and actually necessary for one another.

Neoreaction is at its heart the recognition, mourning of, and ultimately a plan for the restoration of a lost future. It’s about triangulating where we could have been without the malign influence of the cluster of intellectual cancers that have been slowly withering down our collective will to live and will to power, and then grabbing the steering wheel and jerking it as hard as possible in that direction.

There’s no going back. If you’re fifty years old and unsatisfied with your shitty life, there’s no use trying to be young again. It’s actually pathetic to even try, we collectively recognize people doing that as living in deep denial. But it’s not too late; through honest introspection you can identify your mistakes, begin to heal and learn to love life again.

I’m not even remotely interested in indulging classical liberal’s collective midlife crisis.

I’m absolutely here. Liberalism, even in mild forms like the enlightenment are a total disaster. It’s basically a slow rolling auto-immune disease of the body politic that eventually kills its ability to reject destructive ideas. The reason those cancers took hold is because they appealed to the kinds of people who should have zero say in the government of a state. People who cannot control their own lives, people who have no understanding of how a society ought to be run, and people with malignant empathy for things that if allowed let alone encouraged by the public purse will rot the country from the inside out.

Even if you could somehow avoid the woke virus, there are other equally bad cancers: relativism, communism, cultural Marxism, various forms of decadence and depravity, tolerance for criminality, disrespect for achievement, loss of meritocracy, loss of basic virtues and politeness. We’ve become a decadent and dying society completely unwilling to acknowledge the rot, and denigrating anyone who says something is wrong.

My suspicion as to why Liberalism was weak to wokeness was twofold.

  1. The average person believes that society was wrong about homosexuality. As such, when a new movement that professes to be like the gay movement arises, they're very eager to show they wouldn't have made the same mistakes as their predecessors. (There's a major difference between someone who is gay, lesbian, or bisexual, and someone who is queer/LGBTQ+ - I'm referring to the former group on terms of what the average person would accept).
  2. The right wing still carries a lot of baggage from some specific forms of christians. A very common life path is someone who is raised in a religious environment, then goes to university. People who are less intelligent who follow rules tend to enforce them without understanding the purpose behind them (for example, at work you could have a procedure to set the printer page delay to 15 seconds because the color ink doesn't dry quickly - someone intelligent would know a black and white print could have no delay, while someone less intelligent would do it every time). As a result, the kids who go to university feel that there are no redeeming factors to christianity, and feel it represents the right.

I think that if wokeness suffers a hearts and minds defeat, as opposed to what Trump is doing, it actually would be possible to go back to liberalism. We'd have in our cultural milieu a reference to leftism going insane, which would produce antibodies against the empathy spirals that the current left uses.

That being said, I don't think that we are currently on that trajectory - I think that Trump (like Biden and Obama) is projecting a culture change top down, and that we have too much of a bifurcation in beliefs to return to it yet. I honestly think that a very major country (like, G7) has to fall specifically from wokeness (similar to the fall of the Soviet Union) before we can see the potential for it to return.

Napoleon lost half a million troops invading Russia, got loads of French killed in other imperialist misadventures, was defeated and died in exile. He was like a politically correct, safe-edgy earlier version of Hitler. There may be some kind of death drive manifest in idolizing him.

Sachons vaincre, ou sachons périr.

We're talking about the legacy of one of the greatest statesmen and generals to ever live here. A man so feared he was the equal of nations. A man whose conception of justice is practiced in a third of the world. A man who invented total war. A man who made himself emperor from nothing. History on a horse. What is death to such a man?

If you've ever desired to mark history, there is no choice but to be envious of Napoleon Bonaparte.

I like to think of him as a very well-made Final Boss. Incredibly intimidating, incredibly powerful, has multiple health bars...but he still gets his arse kicked :P

But at least we can assure he was of a very average height, for his time.

Curious. What gave you the impression that Trump had principled beliefs in the integrity of the US's legal system and upholding political norms? Why did you think he couldn't cross these lines?

I am 0% surprised he could tweet something like that.

Whether he actually has the cajones to lead a revolution is dubious. He's fairly shy when it comes to bloodshed, going by his last presidency. In fact the only durable principle he seems to have is an unwillingness to get US troops killed, which I find commendable even though I'm more of a neocon myself.

I think he loves to troll though, especially for political edge, but also knows when it stops being fun and games.

I wanted the woke to be defeated by classical liberals

The problem is that "classical liberalism" has very little positive substance to it in most formulations; it's usually articulated as something of a meta-philosophy about open competition between ideological groups (free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, equality before the law, etc.). It has very little to say about what the actual positive vision society should be working towards is. Hence its fundamental discomfort with the actual exercise of power necessary to rip out the institutional kudzu the woke has implanted into the liberal's precious "impartial institutions."

My biggest mistake, I think, was to extremely overestimate libs and the left. I really thought they would manage to blunt Trumpism's worst impulses and there would be a sort of stalemate like there was during Trump's first term.

The problem is that there is no institutional check on the left when it gets into power (eg all the nonsense the Biden Administration got up to, as documented ably by Rufo and many others) so the only actual check there can be is the one originally contemplated by the Founders - the full exercise of political power by a successive administration elected to reverse the initiatives of the last.

In fact, the checking of one aggressive force (wokism) by an equally and oppositely-aggressive one (Trumpism) is precisely the balancing of powers and passions contemplated by Madison and the federalists. It's just been so long since we had anything even resembling an equal fight between progressive and conservative forces in the country's institutions that actual open conflict looks like a radical coup.

My first question about that tweet, actually, is who wrote it.

Perhaps this is just guessing too much based on a vibe, but it doesn't look like Trump. That isn't how Trump expresses himself. He's not that laconic, and it doesn't have any of the obvious signs of Trump, like the capitalised words, the hyperbole, or even the insults.

Is this Trump, or is this some executive staffer with access to his Twitter? Whose thought is this? This sounds like the conclusion of someone dwelling on political philosophy - it's roughly the same thought as "the constitution is not a suicide pact", which I've heard from every side of politics before. This kind of reflection on the meaning of politics and the legitimate exercise of political power is not something I've really seen from Trump himself before either.

Sounds like something Musk said to Trump and he liked enough to tweet.

I'd bet on Vance before betting on Elon here.

Also, Trump posts on Truth, and only reposts screenshots to Twitter, if this is his first "real" tweet. that means he or his team wanted to get eyes on it. Whether it's a distraction or a trial baloon, for better or worse, it seems to be a calculated move.

I agree, I actually had the same thought when I read it... this doesn't sound like Trump.

I feel like I must be living under a rock here.

Were there any concrete developments that precipitated this post besides the tweet?

Outside of what DOGE has been up to, how are "things moving very fast"?

Outside of what DOGE has been up to, how are "things moving very fast"?

There is at least the cluster of things that amount to a rapid shredding of the previous arrangement where the US has a network of allied nations that enthusiastically follow it as a Big Good/moral leader - see the tariff tussles, and the public snubbing of Ukraine and especially the EU over the Ukraine war. All the German papers have spent the past few days apoplectic about Vance's comments at the Munich security conference, ranging from NO Uing Europe with accusations of democratic backsliding and comparisons to the Soviet Union to declaring that they will not have a seat at the table in upcoming negotiations over Ukraine. As much as I get a "you tell them, bro" feeling about those remarks, this does amount to kicking the lapdog for no good reason.

In terms of internal politics, there are also the ICE deportation raids and the drama about Adams discussed downthread.

I feel sorry for OP. Classical liberals have already left the running decades ago, when they failed to formulate a response to the logic of fear-driven engagement bait from either side.

None of the points you listed strike me as particularly momentous. It all just seems like another flavor of business as usual (“ICE deportation raids” in particular could be rephrased as “enforcing existing laws”).

My position that “nothing ever happens” is falsifiable. If Trump were to, say:

  • cancel the midterms or the next presidential election and declare that he (or his appointed successor) would stay in power indefinitely,

  • or immediately halt all legal immigration to the US,

  • or even just implement any of the more hardline social policies from Project 2025, like making pornography illegal,

then I would say that yes, things are happening and maybe things really will be different this time. But nothing Trump has done so far meets that threshold for me. His gestures seem largely performative at this point.

I mean, if Trump does bring about a hybrid regime, you wouldn't expect him to do any of those things. I'm far from convinced he will, I'm also not very upset at the possibility.

I agree, literally nothing has happened yet.

There is at least the cluster of things that amount to a rapid shredding of the previous arrangement where the US has a network of allied nations that enthusiastically follow it as a Big Good/moral leader

Was that why? Or was it because the US was the strong horse?

Classical Liberalism was doomed from the start. It’s basically unilateral disarmament in the face of opposition and therefore fails in the face of resistance. The ideology is that everyone lays down together and has debates, but don’t try to take power to claim victory. This just means you aren’t seeking power, and says nothing about your enemies. To the contrary, they will seek power, and they will use that power once they have it.

The kinds of liberalism we’ve been used to in the past only worked on gentleman’s agreements, and that only works as long as both gentlemen are in broad agreement on the issues. Once it becomes clear they disagree on substance, the power game begins in earnest.

I'm wondering why it got off the ground then. Few remember but it was very explicitly a banned ideology in continental Europe before it won.

I'm wondering why it got off the ground then.

The argument I usually see, including from some defenders of liberalism, is that it's due to the Thirty Years' War. Specifically, that the Peace of Westphalia was a pragmatic decision, rather than a principled one, motivated by the massive bloodshed and destruction producing only stalemate. Further, cuius regio, eius religio only ended the religious wars as external, interstate conflicts. There was still plenty of religious conflict within many states — albeit less bloody, due to smaller scale; and much shorter, due to the (increasingly centralized) state being on one side. These conflicts, in turn, became a problem due to the economic changes Europe was undergoing, with mercantilism evolving toward capitalism (intolerance of Catholic or Protestant minorities is bad for business).

When it comes to choosing or building ideologies, people tend to find ways to justify and rationalize the things they're already doing. Thus, the need to find an ideology that justified not invading your heretic neighbors to impose the true faith, not oppressing minority denominations too hard; as well as all the changes in the structure of government (driven in turn by changes in military technology — the end of castles was the end of feudalism proper, and states with labor-intensive militaries are generally more democratic than those with more capital-intensive ones) and economics. Liberalism provided just that. (Limited) religious tolerance went from an unprincipled, pragmatic accommodation with the realities on the ground to a clear application of moral and political principles.

(Of course, it then turns out that the kind of religious pluralism envisioned has ultimately proved unworkable in more than one way.)

Classical liberalism emerged out of centuries of vicious religious conflict as a truce between warring parties that had just beaten each other to a bloody pulp and were too tired to continue, and functioned so long as a cultural memory of that struggle endured that was strong enough to put down any would-be challengers. Now that those lessons have been forgotten (because [the other side] violated the truce first, everyone says) they will have to be re-learned the hard way.

And to think that this all happened because Scott platformed Mencius Moldbug back in 2013. Search your feelings. You know it to be true.

I wouldn’t really mind Elon becoming techno-monarch tbh, but I don’t trust Trump with absolute power.

From Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Chapter 78:

Later, looking backward, Harry would think of how, in his SF and fantasy novels, people always made their big, important choices for big, important reasons. Hari Seldon had created his Foundation to rebuild the ashes of the Galactic Empire, not because he would look more important if he could be in charge of his own research group. Raistlin Majere had severed ties with his brother because he wanted to become a god, not because he was incompetent at personal relationships and unwilling to ask for advice on how to do better. Frodo Baggins had taken the Ring because he was a hero who wanted to save Middle-Earth, not because it would've been too awkward not to. If anyone ever wrote a true history of the world - not that anyone ever could or would - probably 97% of all the key moments of Fate would turn out to be constructed of lies and tissue paper and trivial little thoughts that somebody could've just as easily thought differently.

https://i.imgflip.com/9kgiot.jpg

That same meme but Nick Land hyperdosing on experimental chem analogs and the fall of western democracy.

Just because it would be funny unfortunately doesnt mean its true. I was first linked to Scott by reactionaries who then were floating around in libertarian spaces. This is where Moldbug came from and was mostly talking to.

That's my experience too, NRX was floating around in silicon valley long before Scott took notice.

In some sense Scott felt he had to talk about it precisely because it was.

I don't agree with your first sentence. As cliche as it might seem, I am coming around to thinking that it all kicked off with GamerGate, when lots of people started noticing that something was off.

Playing videogames is a coup-complete problem.

I think pro- and anti-GamerGaters both tend to overestimate its impact. I tend to think GamerGate was just one instance of Toxoplasma of Rage that served as a political awakening for some people. I don't think it was more impactful than other Toxoplasma skirmishes, like New Atheism or BLM.

Though I must admit, GamerGate was also a conflict that almost entirely passed me by. I had one friend in college who I had one conversation about it with, and I was vaguely aware of Anita Sarkeesian, but neither side was salient to me (I play video games from time to time, but I'm not a "gamer", and I've never been an SJW or woke scold) and so I was never very invested in it. It would be like me trying to get involved in the "pro-shipper vs anti-shipper" debate in fan fiction communities. I have my principles, and they might align with one or the other side of that debate more than the other, but I'm also not fighting in that war because it seems dumb and fake to me.

I must admit, GamerGate was also a conflict that almost entirely passed me by. I had one friend in college who I had one conversation about it with, and I was vaguely aware of Anita Sarkeesian, but neither side was salient to me

I never heard of GamerGate at the time but it was still salient to me, in that I was reading Polygon and Rock Paper Shotgun reviews and I started noticing when they became anti-male and anti-nerd. I was still in a 'it would be nice if games were a bit less hyper-macho' mode but I noticed the tone of the conversation change, to the point where it felt like the games industry was actively trying to reject me. It was just the small waves caused by explosions deep beneath the sea, but it made me Notice for the first time that lots of people online seemed to actively dislike me for being a bog-standard white male teenager.

EDIT: I mean mostly the "gamers are dead" articles referenced by @theincompetencetheorist

I think pro- and anti-GamerGaters both tend to overestimate its impact. I tend to think GamerGate was just one instance of Toxoplasma of Rage that served as a political awakening for some people. I don't think it was more impactful than other Toxoplasma skirmishes, like New Atheism or BLM.

There was a period where people were claiming memes got Trump elected (or at least selected in the primary). This obviously wasn't the case except in the most trivial sense. It wasn't God Emperor Trump memes or the_donald, those were all riding on existing enthusiasm for the guy who broke with the learned helplessness strategy on a few issues central to the base.

It's just overly online people over-estimating the impact of the things they care about.

I'm probably above the 90th percentile of grass deficiency here. I was actually still reading IGN and other games sites for reviews and even I couldn't be fucked to drill through the tangle of claims that was Gamergate. It was just another populist vs journalist flashpoint AFAICT.

I'm sure there were people saying memes got Trump elected, like people saw him shopped as God emperor and were overcome with the need to vote for him, because the internet is hilarious. But there is a defensible version of that claim I think, which is that Trump's meme game won him the election. But by that I mean his intuitive understanding of the zeitgeist and the various thoughts and emotions that were being ignored by the establishment.

I mean, sure. He has good political instincts for where the base is (not that it was unclear immigration was an issue voters cared about). So did Obama.

But, if we're going with that older definition of meme, then the mainstream media would arguably be more responsible for "memeing" him into existence. Both in terms of the free advertising/transmission and by condemning him so much.

Something they've never psychologically recovered from.

What makes a meme funny is in part the truth communicated by it. It is just a form of satire

Let me take the neutral ground and say that GamerGate wasn't the precipitating event, but it was pivotal insomuch as videogames were (and still are) a universal hobby of young men. And when confronted with the blunt and obvious truth of Noticing the blue-hairs ruin everything, one could either go down the trail of Noticing everything else or sticking your head in the sand and saying it's a good thing. The 4chan/Resetra divergence, the chud/woke speciation.

It was the universal radicalizing event of the generation, and even those who were normie enough to not care were inculcated with the memes (on both the left and right.) No one questions the cultural impact of music or movies. Video games as a medium are larger than both combined. At some point, video games transitioned from being influenced by political trends to making them. Comparing the financial success of chudgames vs wokegames has become a tribal sport.

Which is to say... if someone plays a piece of media for thousands of hours, having it consume every waking moment of their lives, of course it would effect their political values. New Atheism and BLM are dead and gone but people are still mad that they got rid of Tracer's ass wiggle. I think you're just disconnected with what young men back then and now consider important.

if someone plays a piece of media for thousands of hours, having it consume every waking moment of their lives, of course it would effect their political values

And so I am so sorely disappointed that the Chinese one I'm currently sinking hundreds of hours in is still steeped in the same oppressor-oppressed narrative in the story. Not even a Marxist modes of production one, which at least would be novel in the $current_year, but the same old identity one. Well, at least I can quit it anytime. Just after one more day.

Chinese Skinner box uses Western Monomyth to appeal to Western audiences? Say it ain't so...

I think you expect too much from a mass-market product.

I expected something different, not even necessarily better, from a mass-market product that, to the best of my knowledge, targets the domestic Chinese market as a priority. Well, at least they still remember what is a woman.

Let's grant that it was radicalizing. I'm not sold that a certain sort of anti-woke radicalism matters.

It takes a long time to get people to some Rufo stage. A lot of the critics of Anita Sarkeesian were still fundamentally in agreement with progressives. It was just "mostly the same values, can you just leave our shit alone?". Around this time atheism was having a moment online and the GOP were the loser squares who talked about the body shutting down legitimate rape. Working with them to break wokies was unthinkable and the sheer unconstrained nature of woke demands and their who/whom mentality wasn't fully accepted. Some people are still in denial (until it impacts them)

A lot of people didn't care, and a lot of people were embarrassed by attempted strike backs against the heart of the problem or to rally people against that a la "they came for gamers, gamers".

It was the universal radicalizing event of the generation

It simply cannot have been, because I was of that generation and I was mostly put off by how much people cared about the whole thing on either side.

New Atheism and BLM are dead and gone but people are still mad that they got rid of Tracer's ass wiggle.

If I had to pin a name on what it seemed like from the outside, it was like "Asking Disney Corporation for a handjob." The nature of top tier media (AAA video games, blockbuster movies, etc.) is that only a small number of companies are able to marshal the resources in order to make them, and they can only make a few such releases a year, so if your tastes aren't represented in what they produce, you are left out in the cold. So people complain about the big corporations, and their failure to deliver what they want. Woke feminists want ugly, disabled women in the top tier media, and anti-woke coomers want sexy eye candy. Those desires are mutually exclusive, and so one or the other of them will be disappointed.

Some people have really started to invest in the idea of symbolic victories that can be provided by this or that big corporation kowtowing to their desires, and I'm sure I won't be able to dissuade anyone in that camp. But I really think people need a Diogenes and Alexander moment. When Alexander the Great comes up to your wine tub in the middle of the agora and asks if you want anything, you should be prepared to answer, "Stand a little out of my sun."

Nobody needs Blizzard. Nobody needs EA. Nobody needs Disney, or a thousand other big media corporations.

Either create your own stuff, or engage with enduring cultural artifacts that are 30+ years old, or support the smaller creators who are making things closer to your tastes. Like, the ancient Greeks made commentary after commentary about the Homeric epics and engaged with those stories on a deep level for centuries. But our culture is so temporally parochial, so obsessed with novelty, that we enslave our imaginations to big corporations and lose our souls in the process. Human flourishing is not merely to consoom. And it's certainly not to win pointless little cultural victories in a product you paid $60 on Steam.

Woke feminists want ugly, disabled women in the top tier media, and anti-woke coomers want sexy eye candy. Those desires are mutually exclusive, and so one or the other of them will be disappointed.

Not totally related to the thrust of your point but this isn't even true. Skin packs already exist. Very little of the games cost is actually making a few extra models. There really could be a woke and non-woke addition of any AAA game. Hell, this is already done in practice for some international copies that remove LGBT flags or less radioactively the chinese version of WoW that gave a bone dragon flesh because of Chinese sensibilities around exposed skeletons.

I largely agree with you but I just want to point out that the situation is much less symmetrical than you make it out to be, at least in video games.

What I mean is that the woke feminists demanding only ugly women in all the games never intended to actually stoop as low as actually playing the games in question. They don't have an interest in engaging the media, they only have an interest in using it as a kudgel.

It's more like when you kill your enemy and display his corpse. You even get this sense from the developers themselves: to the extent that they care about the game, it's due to it being a propaganda vehicle that allows them to push an agenda.

It's the old lament about how video games used to be made by neckbearded (white) autists and everything has gone to shit since.

It simply cannot have been, because I was of that generation and I was mostly put off by how much people cared about the whole thing on either side.

I dont care how much people care about things in the appropriate internet forums, or how petty they get. The "radicalising" part is how ouside society reacted to it. Like when one of those people got a hearing at the UN - what does that say about "our institutions"? In googling for this article, I found one from Austrias major center-left newspaper on the topic - from 2021. I think gamergate was mostly not causal - plenty of other things happened that could have done its work, but in the actual history it did play a major role. It was the first example of "blob enforcement" outside the traditional political arenas.

I've seen Zoe Quinn analogized to Franz Ferdinand.

World War I was always going to happen, because the entangling web of alliances was predisposed to make all the great powers go to war with each other; the assassination of the archduke was simply the spark that lit the waiting powder keg.

Likewise, gaming journalist had already been taken over by SJWs who hated games and hated gamers; some slut fucking five gaming journalists in exchange for giving her shitty game good reviews was simply the point where it went public.

Wasn't the kickoff event of Gamergate to do with artsy SJW types capturing some sort of indie game award, though?

My sense is that the drama about wokeness in expensive "AAA games" actually came later - the community was instead taken over from below, with the points of incursion being along with the gaming-liberal arts border (journalism, awards, small-scale narrative games). I vaguely recall people asking an evil genie that video games finally be recognised as an artform in the years leading up to it.

Wasn't the kickoff event of Gamergate to do with artsy SJW types capturing some sort of indie game award, though?

The rage was ignited by the coordinated attack of about bunch of articles(about 20 IIRC) showing up in various media outlets trying to "kill" the gamer identity, because a small bunch gamers of notices the SJW types getting coverage for their shit. Gamergate wouldn't exist and nobody would have noticed if it weren't for the "gamers are dead" articles. It just showed that activist had infested the gaming journalism space and people started noticing on how the infestation was present in regular media.

For me, it was The Zoe Post. Before GamerGate, The Quinnspiracy, the Five Guys Saga, this is was the event that engaged my now dead and putrefying hobby horse.

People largely don't even remember it anymore, but this guy Erin Gjoni came out exposing Quinn as essentially a serial abuser with receipts. How did our good feminist SJW community react?

They sauntered over to the bookshelf and pulled out the How to Gaslight and Re-traumatize an Abuse Victim Field Manual and threw the whole fucking thing at him. Oh my god, it was absolutely everything and the kitchen sink. It was:

  • You're only doing this for attention.
  • You're only doing this because you're jealous of her success.
  • Don't pretend you didn't enjoy it you little whore.
  • You were never in a relationship with her.
  • You hate women.
  • And so much more!

Erin's biggest mistake was hearing all the rhetoric his community put out about holding abusers accountable and failing to read between the lines that none of it was for men. He's been living in exile from his people ever since.

My biggest mistake was believing anyone would give a shit about this part of the story, or that it would even be remembered. If I was paying closer attention I could have realized this then rather than a decade later. But I guess all of us have things we have to learn the hard way.

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Or/also- that the regular media was aligned enough to be partisan allies. Had GamerGate stuck to just the gaming media, it would have been a tempest in a teacup. When major media influence networks began weighing in, it both demonstrated it was a broader issue, and that the broader media was inclined to picking sides rather than neutrality (which was still the nominal stance of the media of the era- the Obama-era 'we are objective, it's just that reality has a liberal bias,' which started as a Steven Colbert comedic gag line but was unironically adopted).

What was also notable about GamerGate is that it was one of the first major sustained partisan media cancellation storms of its type that didn't actually crush the targets. While 'victory' was proclaimed in the ability to dominate the wikipedia and establishment media records, it lacked the career / identity destroying effect that previous such media storms had, which were known for forcing Republicans to drop Problematic People or deplatform people from, well, entire platforms. GamerGate, while driven off of some platforms as part of the partisan push, survived in others, which started to establish the lines of what spaces were / were not controlled by the party-media, which in turn is what allowed the alternate/right (not alt-right) media systems to grow beyond progressive-media control.

This led the a reduced-but-defiant rather than beaten-and-cowed demographic, which by existence demonstrated both (a) the ability to survive attempts at media cancellation and (b) the nascant support base for the unapologetically-resistant.

Previously, this was broadly thought impossible. Afterwards, Donald Trump took a similar approach- openly confrontational and defiant to attempts at Gamergate-style coordinated media warfare- that ultimately won the white house in 2016.

It wouldn't be right to say that Trump won because of gamergate, but gamergate was a paradigm shift that increased not just hostility to coordinated media efforts, but the belief in the ability of a force to survive such attacks, and thus view such a strategy as not intrensically doomed.

Put another way- the media-juggernaut that 'won' gamergate was shown to be more limited and vulnerable than it had been believed, and so more people were willing to believe it could fail.

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Wasn't the kickoff event of Gamergate to do with artsy SJW types capturing some sort of indie game award, though?

I think it was "The Zoe Post". Her Depression Quest had already been mocked for its lack of traditional gameplay and unusually positive critical reception (in essence, it was a typical contemporary art piece), but now this discrepancy could be resolved with a very glib explanation: Zoe Quinn had fucked game journalists in exchange for positive reviews.

Like, the ancient Greeks made commentary after commentary about the Homeric epics and engaged with those stories on a deep level for centuries

Copyright law is at fault for this. Letting individuals monopolize cultural icons neuters our ability to use them as shared myths... And that destroys our society's ability to self-reflect. "Superman" for example is a potent shorthand for a vision of what it means to be american, but only warner bros is formally allowed to use that shorthand to make money which in practice serves as a massive disincentive for artists to portray the same values in the same package and discuss them in a salient way.

And in the end, the only people that benefit are middlemen, not artists. Fanfiction artists getting patreon money is proof that in a world without copyright artists could still make a living, but we only stick doggedly to it because copyright is the means by which corporations rent-seek.

(All the same logic applies to patents, by the way, and in general all ip law except trademarks. Trademarks can stay because impersonating other people or groups is identity theft.)

Copyright law also means that entire videogame libraries vanish into the aether every five years when a new generation of consoles comes out.

And the move from physical media to streaming has been brutal for the classics; Netflix barely has any movies from before 1970.

Books themselves only sell for a decade or two before falling into obscurity because it is not worth paying the author to print them but nobody else is allowed to make copies until they enter the public domain a century later.

Makes it hard to "engage with enduring cultural artifacts that are 30+ years old".

And books get junked from public libraries a lot quicker nowadays too.

I doubt if anybody under 40 has ever read Arthur Herzog's Heat or IQ 83, or Robert Silverberg's The Calibrated Alligator.

The classics are perfectly safe. Any classic movie can be streamed for a small fee on numerous platforms. If it's old enough, you can even find it for free on IA or YouTube since they're out of copyright.

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Copyright law is at fault for this. Letting individuals monopolize cultural icons neuters our ability to use them as shared myths...

"Cultural appropriation" is, strangely, an attempt to do this even to things that can't be copyrighted, by people who otherwise can't stop complaining about capitalism.

but only warner bros is formally allowed to use that shorthand to make money which in practice serves as a massive disincentive for artists to portray the same values in the same package and discuss them in a salient way.

On the flip side we have no end to Superman expies: Homelander, Omni-Man, The Plutonian, Brightburn. They're just deeply, deeply cynical and aimed at subverting the character. Which may say something about the audience.

They're just deeply, deeply cynical and aimed at subverting the character.

In other words: not portraying the same values in the same package. I fail to see how this is anything other than agreeing with the grandparent post.

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Or may say something about the creators?

I agree wholeheartedly. Copyright in its current shape is a travesty.

It's a bit sad when you think about it - the greatest generation got world war 2, the boomers got the free love revolution, and millenials got... gamergate. (Gen x get nothing, as is tradition.)

(Gen x get nothing, as is tradition.)

"Baby Boomers got sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. We got AIDS, crack and techno."

GenX got 9/11 and the war on terror.

GEN X GET NOTHING. Just for that we're taking the eighties off them and giving it to the millenials.

You know where the name "millenial" comes from, right?

Most Millennials were children when the towers were hit.

I guess the actual fighting in the WoT was done mostly by millennials though.

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this all happened because Scott platformed Mencius Moldbug back in 2013

Did he? I'm not aware of this part of the rationalist-sphere lore. Do tell.

Scott wrote Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell which built on the ideas of Mencius Moldbug, and then wrote the The Anti-Reactionary FAQ in order to refute it. Many in the dissident right and neo-reaction thought Scott's initial presentation was the better of the two.

I regret to inform you that there have only ever been seven sincere classic liberals. The rest were embarrassed reactionaries.

I'm quite serious, if hyperbolic. Genuine "social liberal, fiscal conservative"-types are incredibly rare. It's just not a very popular belief set (if you find traditional social hierarchies objectionable you probably feel the same way about economic hierarchies; likewise if you support traditional social relations). What it does have going for it is that it offers an intellectual framework for pushing back against anti-discrimination laws and other elements of social liberalism without openly defending bigotry.

That's not to say there are no genuine classical liberals, but they're not a faction with power or influence.

I don't know if "social liberal, fiscal conservative" is a fair gloss of the people that self-identify as classical liberals. What would you label people that are fiscally left-wing (for taxes, regulation and redistribution) and socially liberal as in for the freedom to abort and take drugs and also the freedom to use slurs and misgender and sideline minorities that are statistically rarely good enough for high-status jobs?

I think there's an unfortunate impulse to take the default political compass too seriously - "we are auth-right, so our archenemies must be lib-left". I think reality is explained much better by putting the entire SJ movement in the auth-left quadrant - just because they are noticeably and loudly for allowing some things that you don't like, this doesn't mean they are permissive in the anti-authoritarian sense. Even the Mao-era CCP, a type specimen for auth-left if there ever was one, allowed and tolerated some things that the auth-right wouldn't, such as parading people through town naked, vigilantism and (locally) cannibalism. Conversely, it's easy to come up with lots of things that are allowed in the perfect MAGA world and forbidden in the perfect BLM world.

I think reality is explained much better by putting the entire SJ movement in the auth-left quadrant

I disagree. Many people in the movement come to it with a normie-auth mindset, but the principles really are against social hierarchy, and continue to have their influence. This is also why SJ social groups are notoriously dysfunctional, in ways that auth groups usually arent until you get to "everyone here is a basketcase anyway" levels of extremism.

I don't really see them being against social hierarchy - to me this perception seems like another instance of conflating "they don't accept my version of $thing" and "they are against $thing". What is "trust the science"/"trust experts" if not an appeal to social hierarchy? What is the "progressive stack" if not an outline of a social hierarchy? Do you imagine established SJWs sassing an Ibram Kendi?

There are always a few Youth Guards early on in the pipeline who take the stated principles a bit too literally, and in turbulent times they might even be fielded as useful tools, but as they age and learn to integrate cognitively dissonant positions more effectively, they fall in line. On the other hand, it's not like there isn't plenty of dysfunction and backstabbing in auth-right movements as well.

to me this perception seems like another instance of conflating "they don't accept my version of $thing" and "they are against $thing".

I think its not surprising that a movement against society has failed to eliminate society, even amongst themselves.

On the other hand, it's not like there isn't plenty of dysfunction and backstabbing in auth-right movements as well.

As I said, all directions of extremists are dysfunctional to some extent, but in terms of whats the most respectable that youll encounter a given level of dysfunction... Im not sure there even is a level of white nationalism where drama motivated by something other than sex or money becomes common.

In fairness, aren’t neo-Nazi drug addicts definitely a thing?

But is it related to the Naziism? As in, how many people at that level of Nazi are addicts, and how does this compare to genpop/demographic controls? Depending on how you count the Aryan Brotherhood, maybe yes - Im not aware of anything otherwise.

What would you label people that are fiscally left-wing (for taxes, regulation and redistribution) and socially liberal as in for the freedom to abort and take drugs and also the freedom to use slurs and misgender and sideline minorities that are statistically rarely good enough for high-status jobs?

rare That just sounds like a normal liberal with some idiosyncratic beliefs*, i.e. a normal liberal. Nobody is on-side 100% of the time, any model of politics is going to collapse some distinctions, and at the end of the day the most important question re: political alignment is who you're voting for.

*A lot of this really depends on how they prioritize issues.

That sounds like outgroup homogeneity bias to me. I am also tempted to describe SJWs as normal right-wingers with some idiosyncratic beliefs (The basic similarities are all there! They all want to defend a specific hierarchy, restrict speech, impose strict rules on sex life and push doomsday beliefs.), and any similarity is not diminished just by them happening to have the luxury of choosing between two parties that cater to them.

Left-behind leftists. They're not classical liberals, because they're for redistribution and regulation.

Hah, that's catchy, but I don't know. Per the second paragraph that I edited in, I really do think that something fundamentally divides us from SJWs and even their ideological ancestors - even during my middle-school-era political awakening when I didn't have an older version of any political firmware to cling on to, I felt firmly alienated from the class of leftists that wanted to ban and prescribe individual behaviour (in Germany, at the time, the Greens), even as I would want to march with them against the corporations and governments. Without American Citizens United gaslighting, the two views are really not incompatible - I have never had trouble distinguishing corporations from people.

Let’s wait for Trump to do something fascist before you know getting upset.

Right now, he is tearing down the fascist aspects of our system (the corrupt bureaucrats who answer to no one and who extract wealth from corporations). In fact, a classical liberal should love the destruction of these shitty statist orgs.

I understand the fear is “but then what comes next.” But that doesn’t justify the status quo ante. Choice is continue down a road to perdition or make a change. Change wins every time.

Someone on the Internet speculated that this tweet/Truth posting (?) was testing the waters. I find that a very plausible explanation.

In which case, it reminds me of Historia Civilis's amazing storytelling about later Caesar. At Lupercalia there's an incident where Mark Antony suddenly out of nowhere, from a crowd, appears and insists Caesar wear a diadem/crown which would make him a king. As people do sometimes, you know? Caesar turns down the repeated bizarre attempts. Speculation abounds that Caesar and Antony were testing the waters to see how the public reacted to him finally taking the shot and outright calling himself king, rather than dictator for life with a literal golden throne. But they plainly didn't like it so he pretended it was presumptions and silly. In other words, depending how Trump's fanbase reacts to this, and how much everyone else pushes back, we will get more.

Anyway, yeah. I've never had Trump derangement syndrome. And it's strange because going by topology, I should have it. I've been mystified by what people see in him, negative or positive. I get downvoted and banned for both defending and denouncing him (the latter more so only around here or places like this). I thought I was clear headed and everyone else was going insane, but maybe I've been missing something. It seems the squawking MSM libs saw something I could not. He really does seem to be a fascist, and him and his cohort really are a danger to democracy. All I can say now is I notice I am confused.

Worth noting that today (Feb 15) is Lupercalia. If the tweet isn't testing the waters for Trump as king, it is god-tier trolling.

Bring back real Lupercalia- the beatings, the public nudity, the pro-natalism.

Revolutions are cool. They have happened in every country. Many countries are better after the fact. I would rather America have one now, when White people are in charge, than in 100 years when White people are ~20% of the population. And who made a better product: Steve Job’s at Apple with his monarchical approach, or the bureaucratic IBM / BlackBerry / Xerox? Jobs was, well, rage-filled and vengeful.

Revolutions are cool. They have happened in every country. Many countries are better after the fact.

As far as I can tell, very few countries have been made better by revolutions. Look at France and Britain: the former abolished their monarchy via revolution and ended up with millions dead and a century of chaotic and unstable governments (three monarchies, two empires, and five republics) while the latter defanged their monarchy piecemeal over hundreds of years and took its place as the richest and most powerful country in the world. Certainly the various communist and Islamic revolutions have been disasters for the nations in which they took place. Whether the American Revolution was an improvement depends on how you feel about Enlightenment values. Perhaps only the Glorious Revolution counts as an unmitigated success.

the latter defanged their monarchy piecemeal over hundreds of years and took its place as the richest and most powerful country in the world

The english civil war wasn't exactly bloodless. More than twice as many as a percentage of the population died in it compared to world wars.

That is true, although I would count it as another point in favor of the "revolutions are bad" camp.

I don't disagree, I just thought England was kind of a bad example of the reform path. Revolutions are bad and do a shit-ton of internal damage. In the long run this rarely matters (unless you end up with communism) but have your society destroyed and a large part of your population killed isnt particularly fun for the people involved. Things have to be extremely bad for it to be preferable to slow reform.

Revolutions are cool. They have happened in every country. Many countries are better after the fact.

Most countries are made worse by their revolutions. Even the U.S. revolution led to mass emigration of many of the best and brightest, as well as substantial inter-communal violence. And we got lucky that our Revolutionaries set ups something comparatively benign; we could have gotten Bolsheviks, Levellers, Chavistas, Maoists, Taiping-tier religious totalitarians, Bonapartists (who, for all his genius, wound up killing millions from his incessant warmongering, and shoved France from being the pinnacle of Europe into an early demographic transition which broke its power to this day), etc. etc.

The thing that's really cool about being a radical wishing for a revolution, is that you don't know whether it's going to be your team or the other one that dumps you in a shallow grave.

Exactly, and right now is the best time for my team. In 100 years it will not be.

In 100 years the US whites will be steadily growing as a population share.

I believe @johnfabian means that you, the reader, will end up in a shallow grave no matter if it's your team that enacts the revolution, or an opposing one. Which is preposterous for two reasons: it assumes that the probabilities are the same and are higher than that probability in case of the status quo standing; and it assumes there are no principles where the omelette is worth breaking the eggs even if you end up one of those eggs.

At some point, Mr Fabian, the existing rulers become too corrupt for this to matter to anybody that takes politics seriously. "Anything but that" is the credo of all revolutions, whoever wins the ensuing brawl then attempts to pretend they were the sole opposition destined to power and legitimacy.

To mock revolutionaries as "they all think they'll be on top by the end" is missing the point. They all make the calculation that the shallow grave is preferable to the status quo.

Often their calculation is fatally flawed, driven by a drive for adventure more than anything else.

Of course. One always LARPs themselves into revolution after all. But rarely for no reason on the aggregate.

And who made a better product: Steve Job’s at Apple with his monarchical approach, or the bureaucratic IBM / BlackBerry / Xerox?

Regardless of the governance of a firm, firms are subject to market discipline both on the demand side (who buys their product?) and on the supply side (who is willing to work for them?) in a way that states are not. Pretending that Apple is successful because it was a monarchy is to completely miss the fact that there's a million bankrupt firms with the same governance structure. The fact is that Apple's success is made possible by the competitive, decidedly non-monarchial conditions of the market.

Apple’s competitors also existed in competitive market conditions. The difference is that Apple is monarchical, run by someone with a track record and a powerful spirit, and the competitors were not. And so we still see that more monarchical is better (even in news, with the NYT, as Yarvin pointed out in his interview). So our monarchical elites should be selected from competitive industries, like real estate or private equity, and selected for a competitive personality so that they want America better than peers (for instance, in trade).

there's a million bankrupt firms with the same governance structure

Not run by people like Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Thiel-acolytes. No one is saying that the country should be run by the median small business owner, so your argument falls flat. We can select our new “elites” from institutions that filter for actual skill, as opposed to academia-related skills and politicking-related skills. (Eg, the social skills that Kamala had in becoming VP has nothing to do with the skill required for running an organization, whether that org is a business or country.)

Not run by people like Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Thiel-acolytes.

Yes, run by people like them too. Megalomania is not a trait in short supply among businessmen.

And let's not forget that Tesla is below NVidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta in market cap (and also has a tiny revenue compared to these companies).

Do you think those companies are also run like monarchies? Trust me, I can tell you from personal experience that they aren't.

On top of that, Jobs died 14 years ago and Apple has continued to prosper despite a decidedly non-monarchial government structure. Tim Cook is not running the company like Jobs did, not even close.

I won't even touch Trump because his firm makes just $600M in revenue which is way, way down the leaderboard of American companies (the 100th highest revenue company is fucking best buy at $43 billion with a B). I don't think any of the biggest companies are run by Thiel acolytes at all.

You're repeating a just-so story that explains one success without considering the other successes that work differently or the failures that work the same way. On top of that, you're under the impression that all companies run like this are the most successful in the country, which really isn't even close to true. Even Best Buy can out-earn one of your central examples of monarchical companies. Or should the country be run by Corie Barry?

I've spent the last 15 years telling leftists who want to "tear down the system" how much that's a terrible idea, because when the system is torn down, tens of thousands of people die. I think there was some SSC post about this but I can't find it. I think it's beneficial to remember that tearing down the system is bad when the right wants to do it, just as when the left wants to do it. Now, defining what constitutes tearing down the system vs cleaning house and getting rid of waste and cruft may be the next place this argument would go, and I don't know any really good answers for that.

Revolutions are very much not cool. They might be necessary, they may be beneficial in the long run (though they definitely aren't always), but they are still brutal affairs where a lot of blood gets spilled. They should be avoided unless absolutely necessary, much like drastic surgery.

Drastic surgery is always better than the alternative.

Even the kind of butchery they used to do before anesthesia and sterilization was recognized as better than doing nothing and waiting to die.

Drastic surgery is not always better than the alternative.

Plenty of people out there have been made worse off from unnecessary surgeries.

Awhile back I was having some back issues. Saw a surgeon who leveled with me that he could justify surgery, but he could do it for just about anyone my age, almost everyone's got some disc abnormalities that will show on an MRI. He told me that the outcomes from surgery would almost certainly be worse than non-surgical options. And so I went the non-surgical route and don't have back issues any longer.

And so I went the non-surgical route and don't have back issues any longer.

Can you pop into the next Wellness Wednesday thread and talk about your route?

I know that Belisarius thinks I'm a far-leftist (lol), but I think that a fair reading my post history will show that I am what I present myself as, more or less a classical liberal who hates both the left and the right.

No, not particularly?

You come off as a pretty standard Blue-Tribe American democrat with left-leaning sensibilities. You reliable tend towards the left framing paradigms, complete with regularly adopting left-fronted framings of what goes on, and this has been true of Trump in particular for who knows how long. Your dislike of the progressive-left comes more from irritation at friendly fire in your direction than a distrust of statist / establishment-dominated politics in general- it's just a who, whom, rather than anti-left.

Ive had a look through his history and before this current topic he doesnt seem particularly leftist. Could you do some example analysis?

'Particularly' leftist is a loadbearing word there. My claim was a 'pretty standard Blue-Tribe American democrat'- and standard blue tribe American democrats are not what I'd consider 'particularly leftist.'

Also- not an easy ask, given it requires characterizing things like 'what is left?'

But, since you asked-

-and with a general point that I try to not re-enter exchanges like this a day later and didn't want to go into such depth yesterday since it can easily come off as condemnatory/combative when someone feels defensive about being associated with their political opponents-

-but I think it is fair to justify the claim in a way that can try to avoid implying a tone aggression which is not intended and I have been trying to work on that-

-and thus with a giant disclaimer that what follows is personal observations and explaining thought processes and is not intended to insinuate judgement is not implying any sort of character failing on the part of Goodguy, who I have a generally positive opinion of-

/

TL;DR: Goodguy will regularly adopt the paradigms of the left-of-center spectrum even as he criticizes particular sub-strands of the left, but the former is more important than the later for placing general orientation in the American context.

Starting with paradigms in the information sphere, this is basically 'Goodguy will often incorporate the framings of the political left, even as he competes with specific elements and thus their arguments.'

In the current top level post chains this includes both the fascist accusation (notably over a tweet, not an action or style of government) that has been the go-to leftwing accusation for well over a decade, and even echoing the motions / form of 'the regretful trump supporter' confessionary meme which is currently a high focus / boosted memetic narrative being pushed on various left-dominated social media. For Trump in particular, this tendency to incorporate and use leftist framings also goes back into the last election, where Goodguy was a routine poster of basically accepting the framings of the democratic election-propaganda on the results of various media narratives, such as the race-level impacts of debates or the Trump scandal of the hour. While he bemoaned rather than celebrated the framings he was still buying into frameworks and undestandings of how Trump was being viewed with the broader American political ecosystems (because the left-wing media sphere was attempting to shape the perception to try and bolster Harris).

That Goodguy didn't vote for Harris is irrelevant- a significant part of the American left did not vote for Harris. What matters is the political-narrative framings one buys in to both understand and communicate to the world.

-Transition to point 2-

This paradigm basing has extended to other topics as well. To pick one- and only one- example, Goodguy is on the record for arguing that the 2nd Amendment should be reconsidered. The position itself is less important than the reasoning why, which- to paraphrase- was a lack of trust in other people in the country to have guns. Since they could not be trusted, they should not be allowed to, hence reconsidering the Amendment which exists to protect the right of people to have guns from encroachment from the government.

'Left' and 'right' are hard-to-define positions in the first place, but in the American/Anglo-context, this is an exceptionally left-coded attitude to rights, in which rights are derived from the government, and are something bestowed/tolerated on the basis of trust. This is something that goes into the conceptualization of 'rights' as either positive rights versus negative rights. Negative rights- the concept of which is right-coded- are 'this is a right you have unless taken away. Positive rights- the left-coded premise- is something subjected to the action of another group, i.e. 'you have a right to taxpayer-subsidized healthcare.'

Historically, this distinction between positive and negative rights goes back to the divides in the post-enlightenment, and the general conflict / tension between whether rights are inherent (and thus social contracts are about people agreeing to come together to protect their rights from infringement from others / each other), or a granted by the state (which can provide, or force, or withdraw). This, in turn, drives how to deal with fundamental assumptions of the nature of man (if man would be naturally good if society let them, a greater role for the state to provide more; if man is naturally selfish, resist the role of the state that will be ruled by selfish men who infringe), and how these things dealt with major historical events and approaches to governance (such as the French Revolution and French reign of terror and the Napoleonic civil code; the American Revolution the weak state and English common law). All of that is gross oversimplification and there is a lot of cross-pollination and no one is purely one and all that. This is relevant historical context not because of how it applies to Goodguy specifically, but the American context that Goodguy exists in.

One of the reasons that gun rights are right coded is that the American right broadly conceptualizes rights in terms of negative rights- something you have inherently, and which is deprived if it is taken away. Furthermore, as a common law derived legal system, the traditional American political system at the time of founding, what the right vaguely appeals to / towards even with inconsistencies, was established on a 'if it is not forbidden by mutual consent, it is allowed,' with that Amendment being the double footstomp underscore that, yes, the social contract was explicitly recognizing this even though the first 10 amendments generally weren't in the American constitution in the first place because they were considered so uncontroversial that it shouldn't have to be mentioned.

In such a right-framing construct, such rights aren't bestowed because you trust someone- rather, such rights are recognized because you don't trust the other not infringe if there isn't a clear line in the sand recognizing the right as not subject to reconsideration barring overwhelming consensus.

By contrast, in a positive rights paradigm, you are denied your rights if something is not provided that should be... but if you determine it should never have been in the first place, then not-offering is not the same as infringing. This is how deplatforming is not a violation of free speech, as it is 'just' removing someone's basis to be heard, not to talk at all (in theory). This is also consistent with the paradigm for the Napoleonic civil code, which shaped / was shaped by the European left that was the birth of the modern American left. If Napoleonic civil law was over-simplified vis-a-vis common law, it might be as 'if it is not permitted, it is forbidden'- an oversimplification, but a useful one for an underlying paradigm. (And for governance- one of the reasons for the success of civil code at a civilizational level is that a lot of things are dangerous, so 'prove to me it's safe first' has a lot of avoided costs compared to 'you can't stop him until he hurts you.' Modern american law is arguably as civil-law influenced as common-law.)

Getting back the premise of rights, in this left-rather-than-right context, a political right is extended on good faith / trust in the ability of the human recipient to use it well, and if this proves to be a bad idea then the right can be retracted (reconsidered) so as to limit it's use to abuse, because fundamentally the right is something provided (and thus subject to reversal if misused), and not inherent (and thus far higher barriers). This is why, for example, the continental Europeans have far more speech control laws than the Americans or Brits- speech is a human right, but rights are positive.

The reason I bring this up isn't that I think Goodguy wants to impose a new Second Amendment by force, or even what Goodguy thinks the balance should be, but rather how Goodguy approaches the subject of changing it. Approaching something like the Second Amendment in terms of 'we can't trust people with guns; therefore, they shouldn't have guns and we should change the laws that let people I don't trust to have guns' is a very left-coded approach, both in terms of the paradigm of positive vs negative rights and the basis of changing. Especially given the American right paradigms for resisting such proposals to resist such proposals, which includes, well, a lack of trust of the would-be regulators.

Again- it's the reason for calling this left is not the position itself. It's the underpinnings behind and process leading to the position, and the proposal of what to do (retroactively change the permissions) and why (lack of trust of the recipients).

-Transition to Point 3-

Which leads to the third general point, of the emphasis Goodguy places on formal positions rather than paradigm.

This includes Goodguy's chosen paradigm of disproof of being left-of-center. Goodguy's basis of denying that he was a leftist was basically to point that he disagreed with / did not support various leftists (woke, communists, Harris).

This is not a disproof even in a formal sense. The left-spectrum is notorious for leftist groups conflicting and not supporting eachother. This is where we get our circular firing squads, purity spirals, and so on. Even in the election this wouldn't be proof of any meaningful sort- Trump had a blow out notably because Harris cratered in Democratic turnout. Undisputed left-aligned partisans did not turn out. Non-support for Harris is completely compatible with being a Democrat, because most Democrats (or rather- Blue Tribe / left spectrum) did not actually support Harris.

It is, however, another example of a left-paradigm of how to define the left.

Every political coalition has its own way of arguing who is / is not part of the club, but one of the paradigms for examining those categorizations is 'what you claim to support' versus 'how you support it.'

The modern-historical left is generally used the former for itself, for reasons that are partly about the ideological consensus efforts of the Cold War socialist-influenced leftist movements that fed / birthed much of the modern left. One of the dynamics of this was a tendency for no-true-Leftist identification. It was useful for the Communists/Socialists in the Cold War to try and claim a monopoly over the mantle of the left, and as such to claim 'no true leftist cannot support/prioritize labor.' Claiming the paradigm gave influence... but it wasn't true. Part of the modern split in the left, between the labor-centric left and the woke-left, is that they claim different central belief systems that Must Be Believed to be Left. Which is why they often deny the other is 'not really' part of the left.

But- again- the paradigm of self-identifying left on the basis of adhered to central beliefs of the era, despite the generational turnover in what 'left' has meant across history, is just a paradigm. A 'how you support it' paradigm would easily go 'they are both left'- they may disagree what they consider central things, just as the Trotskyists and Stalinists hated eachother passionately, but they are both fundamentally class-based approaches of the leftist spectrum who argue that social hierarchies and contexts should be the basis of analysis and redefining class privileges, whether it's through an economic marxist or cultural marxist paradigm.

But- also again- the left spectrum is not that either woke or communist are True Left but they are true left because of marxist class-based premise. The paradigm that one had to be part of the 'marxist True Left' to be truly left was a self-framed paradigm that non-leftists are not obliged to adopt. The spectrum of leftist premise- such as the approach to positive or negative rights, or what media-sphere world view one adopts- are also parts of being 'on the left.'

So, to bring this back to Goodguy, when Goodguy denies that he is not part of the Left because he disagrees with the Marxists, cultural or economic, on important things... that is still a leftist paradigm for defining what it means to be left. The framing that being at odds with [True Left] means you are not left is simply taking the proffered paradigm and continuing to use it even if the pejorative has lost its value.

To bring another example of how such internal versus external farming paradigms exist in the wilds, it'd be like saying you are not a Christian because you are at odds with Catholic doctrine. This is a framing that only makes sense if you adopt the premise that being Catholic and Christian are synonymous, rather than overlapping, categories. The Catholics may believe that- and once upon a time millions were killed to try and in insist on that- but outside of the paradigm, others can go 'nah, you're Christian.' And they can still do that if you expand the objection to 'I'm neither Catholic OR Protestant.' (Orthodox says hi.) We can even label people as Christians even if they are part of what Catholics and Protestants would generally consider not-really-Christian cults, like Mormons, or Calvinists, and so on.

This is the power / role of where the more generally right-coded 'how you support it' paradigm starts to be asserted. They all go to buildings with crosses, read common books, praise Jesus, and otherwise have enough similarities that even though they might vehemently, desperately, and sincerely deny their commonality... they're Christian, yo.

Now, obviously, in broader society there are enough people outside the Catholic, and Christian, identity-bubbles that the narrative framing power of 'True Christian' is weak. For anyone outside of it, it comes off as kooky, and Christians are as social animals as any other humans and tend to tone that down since there are enough alternative 'I am the true faith' that they come off as equivalent rather than Obviously Correct. You'd generally have to grow up in the narrative environment to adopt and internalize such a paradigm.

-Transition to Conclusion-

But- returning to Goodguy- this is where we get his tendency to use and provide leftist paradigms without recognizing them as such.

Such as his understanding of how the Trump campaign was playing out, where he put significant weight on the framing of the left-of-center mediasphere when right-of-center info lanes were presenting very different (and in some ways substantially more accurate) characterizations. And his occasional approach to positive and negative rights. And his paradigm for defining inclusion / exclusion from the Left on positional terms.

These are all very standard Blue Tribe / left-of-center dynamics, and are entirely consistent of a left-of-center inter-left conflicts, and broadly consistent with typical left-of-center American Blue Triber.

Which is not an extremist! I do not believe this implies someone who is 'particularly leftist' as defined by positional extremity. The typical blue-tribe left-of-center democrat has a lot of things they dislike about other tribes within the American left. They, like most people, have positions that fall on different sides of a positional-alignment paradigm. They are not radical extremists.

But they do often swim in the leftist paradigm sea without recognizing the nature of the water.

And now that I've wasted far too much time on this, I shall end with 'that's, like, my opinion,' which was all the original observation was intended to reflect, and which I didn't want to go into the necessary depth yesterday because doing so directly would be far more confrontational than I wanted to be for someone who I generally like and think well of even if I disagree with them on their self-conception.

Excellently said. I would also like to note that the reason I immediately went full ball treating him like a crypto leftist is in response to his framing. I don't have the wherewithal to explain such things though so I moderated towards the centre.

In the current top level post chains

I agree hes acting leftist here.

Goodguy is on the record for arguing that the 2nd Amendment should be reconsidered. The position itself is less important than the reasoning why, which- to paraphrase- was a lack of trust in other people in the country to have guns.

I agree this conflicts the red tribe, but thats not the same as putting him in the blue tribe - which would be exactly what he claims. By your argument, wouldnt something like this tell us hes right-wing?

A 'how you support it' paradigm would easily go 'they are both left'- they may disagree what they consider central things, just as the Trotskyists and Stalinists hated eachother passionately, but they are both fundamentally class-based approaches of the leftist spectrum who argue that social hierarchies and contexts should be the basis of analysis and redefining class privileges, whether it's through an economic marxist or cultural marxist paradigm.

This would be a good point if you gave examples of him supporting things with class-based approaches.

Overall Im not convinced by this, because I think for this discussion you should evaluate his politics from things other than behaviour in this thread, and you havent shown me much of that.

If I'm a standard Blue-Tribe American democrat or leftist I must be a weird one, given that I have literally never voted for a Democrat in my life and I regularly criticize communists. I swear, sometimes I feel like this site is becoming too much of an echo chamber where anyone who is not actually right-wing is assumed to have leftist sympathies or whatever. I hate the woke, but that doesn't mean that I want to support what seem to me like weird, ideologically fervent right-wingers who are displaying the same sort of authoritarian tendencies, tribal emotionality, and lust for conquest that the woke displayed.

I have literally never voted for a Democrat in my life and I regularly criticize communists.

Do you think the median American democrat supports Mao?

For the record, I wouldn't consider you a leftist and I do enjoy seeing your comments, even if I sometimes disagree with them. I would consider myself generally aligned with classical liberalism as well and am not explicitly pro-Trump. It was never my opinion that the Trump administration would align with me on many or even most issues, and even if he and I do incidentally align on multiple points of contention, my support is primarily down to the fact that I hate his opposition more and want to see their hegemony in the opinion-setting parts of the media and academia wiped out, along with their lobby groups who exert influence over government and society through wholly undemocratic means.

I think there should be room for considered criticism of the Trump administration here, without accruing -2000 downvotes and accusations of being a bad faith troll. I do differ with you in that I don't believe the current changes being wrought are representative of an overcorrection to the right, however, nor do I think the woke have come anywhere close to drawing their last breath, nor do I think the Trump administration is even close to being as bad as the progressives. Their hegemony among the PMC is well-entrenched, and I consider them such a threat to my value system that I am willing to sustain a few short-term blows in order to root them out entirely. Trump might be a correction I don't 100% agree with on every front, but it's a correction that absolutely needs to happen.

given that I have literally never voted for a Democrat in my life and I regularly criticize communists.

That's literally the same argument I always used for saying I'm not on the right (until very recently). How compelling do you find it in my case?

I haven't paid attention to your spectrum alignment, but regardless, your additions to conversation are always enjoyable and interesting to read.

If I'm a standard Blue-Tribe American democrat or leftist I must be a weird one, given that I have literally never voted for a Democrat in my life and I regularly criticize communists.

When I say you lean towards left-fronted framings, this would be among them. Neither communists or progressives have a monopoly on the broader category of leftism. You adopting their paradigm to try and distance yourself from them by disproof is not, in fact, a disproof of leaning into leftist paradigms. Fish and words for water, and all that.

And yet, there is more to being left than voting Democrat, or not criticizing communists or progressives. You are a contrarian, but being a contrarian is not a political identity, nor is a disproof of political inclination.

Which, in turn, is why you come across as a standard Blue-Tribe American democrat who, as much as any other American, love to appeal to the mantle of moderate centrist as a talisman of distinction rather than anything as base as non-balance regardless of consistency. Six months ago, it was the regular proclamations that Trump was fumbling the election to Harris because he wasn't doing your favored stance and [insert partisan framings], and now it is proclamations that Trump is fumbling into fascism and [insert partisan framings]. In another six months, it will be how Trump is fumbling into [totally not exagerated bad thing] and [insert partisan framings.]

To be honest, I don't understand where you're coming from. How am I left?

Are you a monarchist or a republican?

Or anprim?

All anarchisms are republicanisms, except for paleolibertarianisms, which are monarchisms.

Of course collapsing all of politics to one bit is absurd. But so is asking how you're left wing when you don't support Louis XVI and the Roman Catholic Church.

You may as well ask how Nikolai Bukharin was right wing. Dimensional political analysis is nonsense. Only coalitions matter.

Why would you think you aren't? Just because you are in conflict with a spectrum notorious for internecine conflicts?

Because I disagree with the left on many crucial, definitional issues. If you think that I am a leftist, I think you should probably explain specifically why you think that I am a leftist.

When your own proof of not being a leftist is practically a cliche of leftist self-contrasting with other leftists, I'm inclined to just generally gesture in your direction.

You may really, really want to not be characterized as a leftists, but this is itself a common leftist trope- it's why many of the American leftists characterized them as liberals during the Democrats neoliberal era, while communists bitterly maintained they weren't real leftists.

Wait though... you're still not giving any actual specific reasons based on my writings to show that I am a leftist.

I mean, if I was a leftist it's not like I would be embarrassed by being a leftist. I would proudly wave a leftist flag high, since I am pretty straightforward as a person (sometimes too straightforward) and I would have no good reason to lie on this site. It just so happens that I am not a leftist, lol.

More comments

I dont think you should react a lot to that tweet. Trump has always taked big and not done as much. I mean, clearly things are happening now, but itll still be a lot less happening than he says. Its reasonable to update on the executive orders and DOGE activity- but if that tweet is what finally convinced you, then I think youre still somewhat hysteric in that moment.

I'm having some vocabulary issues expressing this but:

I think people with actionable plans based on a theory of how the world works will generally place anyone who does not have any of that in the 'enemy' category. Coming in as Captain Hindsight after the fact to point out that this, this and that had negative outcomes so 'we were wrong for doing that so lets scrap our entire political project' is just, matter of factly, a very juvenile position to hold.

Being in charge is hard. In order to make policy you have to believe in something about the world around you. You then put this worldview to the test when implementing policy and change based on it. Hopefully the changes have the intended effect, but if they don't, quitting isn't an option. You can't scrap your worldview just because it's not infallible or without problems. To that extent both 'left wingers' and 'right wingers' will identify the same strain of short sighted 'centrist' conflict aversion as cowardice and sedition against their cause.

I would ask: Are they wrong? Do you have a solution for the problems that drove western societies towards the 'woke' and all of the precursors? If not, what is your point here? Should we do race communism slower? Should we do fascism more moderately? The vanguards of the left and right would both ask these question. If your answer affirms their worldview they might not brand you as an enemy, but if your answer is just a thinly veiled excuse for the enemy position then they will lump you in with that crowd. What else should they do?

'Classical liberalism' failed completely in solving the problem of the population group gaps within American society. You can approach the reason for as to why in multiple ways, but you have to engage with that fundamental problem. If you don't there is no point to anything you say as far as the political vanguards are concerned. They have to deal with reality.

I'm in favor of a brand of classical liberalism that is pragmatic and acknowledges things like HBD, that is anti-woke because it values judging people as individuals rather than based on the average characteristics of the groups they belong to, to the extent that this is feasible. Classical liberalism has a pragmatic approach to issues like population group gaps. The fact that this approach has not been followed for the most part is no reason for me to switch my actual politics, although it may be a good reason for me to switch my strategies of messaging and optics.

I question your assumption that centrists do not have to deal with reality. Why would that be the case? If anything, it seems to me that us centrists are dealing more actually with reality than either left or right vanguards are. The left and right vanguards, to me, seem like they are existing in airy clouds of their own imagined worlds, driven ahead by self-reinforcing echo chambers and the thrill of owning their enemies.

If anything Trump is doing now is giving you pause, what kind of America do you envision where you do not feel similarly towards whatever person it is that could push forth some kind of HBD driven policy? How would anything going on now not pale in comparison to that?

One of the reasons I assume centrists are not dealing with reality is because they never formulate their viewpoint into a political movement. Even if it's just an online larp on X. It never goes further than personal opinions and browbeating their left and right sides within the Overton Window.

I don't think it's a coincidence that when they actually do go into real politics, like Carl Benjamin did a few years ago, that they end up moving towards firmer ground, be that on the left, or in this case the right. Same thing happens all the time in countries with multi-party systems. The big 'left and right' parties scoop new 'not on a side' political parties up into government coalitions, they serve that sides interest and then implode next election. Or, like happened recently with my local Pirate Party, they refuse coalitions and instead slowly drift towards the left until there's no point in having them, and then they implode.

I can go on 'lefty twitter' and see what the various factions on the left are up to, same for the right. Both groups have animating theories for how the world works and what is best to do based on that. They can have fundamental differences with each other about what the world around them actually is. They stake their claims, dig their heels in and stand for something. I can't go on 'centrist twitter' and see what the propositions are from their side. What is their view on the fundamental problems and what answers do they hold? Moderate re-education camps? Racism 0.5?

At the heart of the left-right divide is a fundamental difference in how people see reality. There is also a shared understanding of the inherent necessitated logic that drives both theories. Both parties recognize this. 'Centrists', for the most part, do not. Which is why they seem endlessly bewildered why the two sides are so hostile to them.

I mean it's pretty simple, my ideal world is one in which you can talk about the fact that different ethnic groups have different intelligence levels and that trans women are more like men than they are like women, without losing your job. But at the same time, individuals of whatever ethnic group would be judged based on their individual characteristics rather than based on their group averages, and politics would not be dominated by resentment-driven fanatics of either a left or a right persuasion. This is not some weird abstract ambivalence between left and right, it is a genuine solid third view that is opposed to both the left and the right, and it is my view.

You're describing what you want, not how to get there. That's the fundamental difference between engaging with reality and not.

If colleges judge black people on their individual merit you will lose the vast majority of black enrollment overnight. Black people and many others will resent this. Black people and many others will organize based on their race and advocate as a group block for their group interest. This political movement will dominate politics. Call it 'Civil Rights Reloded'.

To fight this you would have to purge academia and nigh every single popular base of mass media in actions that make the Trump of today pale in comparison. That's the reality we're getting at.

trans women

Can I call them trans men, because they're actually men and nothing can or will ever change that?

Can I refuse to hire them because they're weird and gross and frankly, mostly, perverts, and I don't want to sort through for one of the good ones? Can I fire them when they want to transition for the same reasons?

Did you even notice the assumption you smuggled in?

This is not some weird abstract ambivalence between left and right, it is a genuine solid third view

Your 'third view' is nothing of the sort, it's just stopping the insane train one stop earlier. It's a ratchet, and you want to stop turning the ratchet, but can't possibly stand the idea of turning it back the other way. Classical liberals would not have passed the CRA, and classical liberals would not be forcing me to both have health insurance and forcing that same health insurance to cover boob jobs for pervert men on the basis of some phony-baloney 'mental health.'

MTF and FTM would leave no ambiguity.

Can I call them trans men, because they're actually men and nothing can or will ever change that?

Nobody will understand what you're talking about. 'Trans men' is a word that already exists and people will understand you to be referring to mentally ill women pretending to be not-women. Words have meanings even if their etymology is stupid.

Trans men are women who identify as male: the opposite of trans women.

The term you are looking for is "trans-identified male." Trans people consider "TIM" and "TIF" to be transphobic, so it probably serves the purpose you want, though it was coined by TERFs, so maybe it doesn't.

(From a moderator point of view, I would not mod TIM or TIF, but if you start calling people trannies or ranting at length about how you think they are all disgusting perverts, you're going to run afoul of the rules, because we do allow trans people to participate here and you're expected to be civil to them too, even if you really don't want to be.)

Doesn't "trans" also connote some kind of medical procedure or is it entirely based on identifying?

I am not ignorant of your definition. I reject it.

The term you are looking for is "trans-identified male."

No, I was not looking for that term. I do not use that term, because I do not want to use that term, because I do not agree with the assumptions necessary for it to make sense.

I thought that was clear when I accused goodguy of smuggling in assumptions. This was the very assumption I objected to in the first place, and simply repeating it does nothing to change my objection.

Your terms don't make sense, though. You're just using words in an idiosyncratic way because you think you're putting some extra fire into them, but you will actually fail to communicate what you're talking about.

More comments

Bro you're being way too sensitive, to be frank. Yes, I'm completely fine with you calling them trans men, I just used the term "trans women" because that is the most common and thus least confusing term these days. And yes, you can refuse to hire them if you want to. I lean in favor of freedom of association overall. Although, you might want to be careful with that principle, since the same principle will cause some people to refuse to hire anyone with views that are seen as too right-wing, which indeed we have already seen happening.

As for the CRA, I think we can agree that it was in many ways a bad idea for the country. But that does not mean that it is a good thing for fervent, resentment-driven right-wingers to take over the country. Those are two somewhat separate conversations. CRA and Trumpists can both be bad.

Here’s an idea why don’t we call trans women men who play make believe?

Anyone who thought Trump 2024 would be the same as Trump 2016 was being lazy. You should feel stupid. You were willfully ignorant. Your entire plan was, "libs will save me from myself."

You knew that the only thing stopping Trump 2016 was career bureaucrats. You knew he had a plan not to let that happen again. Project 2025 was no secret. Did you think unitary executive theory was a joke? Or did you just pretend Trump would not even try, that he'd roll over and lose to the same move twice? Or did you stop thinking here and murmur idly, "libs will save me from myself."

You got what you voted for.

  • -16

I dunno, Trump 2016 wasn't very competent - why would I expect an even older Trump to be more competent after the Biden experience. To take the opposite position on competency, the stance on tariffs is far worse policy than I would have thought possible.

I also would not have thought that Doge would seemingly be so powerful - it seems to me like Doge is usurping Congress' ability/responsibility to dictate spending to an arguable enough degree that it is surprising that it is not all being blocked for judicial review.

Project 2025 was no secret.

It was also officially, and seemingly genuinely, disavowed.

I didn't vote for Trump. I left the presidential vote blank. Yes, I feel a bit stupid, although I certainly don't regret not voting for Harris, but I think given how much libs have flexed their muscles in various politically effective ways over the course of the last 10 years, I can be forgiven for thinking that they would put up more of a fight against Trump 2: The Trumpening than they actually are. Well, in any case, it seems that I was wrong.

I did think that Trump would roll over and lose to the same move twice. His first term left me assuming that given a second term, he would spend all his time tweeting and eating McDonalds on some bed in the White House. I think I really underestimated the team that he gathered around himself since 2020. They have proven to be effective and committed, and have caught me by surprise.

I feel a bit stupid

You should feel more stupid. Even now with hindsight you can barely muster a proper mea culpa. Your failures of judgement are innumerable, yet you fall back to "I didn't even vote." And you have the audacity to say the accelerationists are full of pretense? You will learn nothing from this.

  • -31

Be less antagonistic. You can make your point without namecalling.

It might be copium, but maybe Trump and Musk will pull a Cincinnatus, and step down after they've "fixed" the Republic. Regardless, I'm with you in being disappointed with the current timeline. Under different circumstances, I could have been okay with a lot of the cuts, but this really does seem to be all the worst aspects of the Imperial Presidency finally come to roost.

I've been so disappointed in partisans the last few years. I lost a lot of hope when the left-leaning home depot employee lost her job, and many in the anti-woke right proved in their gleeful reactions afterwards that they had never had a principled opposition to cancel culture - they were always just angry that it wasn't their power to wield. As someone who is opposed to woke tactics like deplatforming and cancel culture because I do actually support free speech and a broader free speech culture, it was a real blow to me.

and step down after they've "fixed" the Republic

This is what Sulla did. It Did Not Work Out.

Trump will step down in 2028; he is not in a position to pull a Cincinnatus, since he isn't dictator in the first place. Nor, obviously, is Musk. Trump quoting Napoleon (apparently not in reply to anything?) is basically him stirring up his opponents for some reason.

Whether the quote is trolling or not, many in the X/Twitter replies were taking it at face value and affirming their support of the underlying sentiment. Someone in another thread said we need a "Kremlinology" of Trump that is attuned to knowing when to take what he says seriously or literally, and I agree in this case.

I would argue that if Trump is being literal with this tweet, then he is basically positioning himself as a "dictator" in the original Roman sense of the word. Someone imbued with emergency powers in order to save the republic in a crisis. The problem is that nobody actually appointed him to do that. Like, you could argue the American people did, but a 51/49 victory should not a Roman-style dictator make. 51/49 is "reform immigration, lower taxes, use the bully pulpit to get as much of your agenda through congress as possible" territory. It is not, "take all the power you need to save our republic, but please give it back when you're done" territory.

I simply do not share the belief that Trump couldn't have done most of what he wanted to do with the Republican majority congress and Supreme Court. He just chose to do it in a legally dubious method instead, and that's the main thing that concerns me.

EDIT: There's also the component where he's posting it on Lupercalia (Feb 15), the same day Mark Antony tried to crown Ceasar king. Even if it is god-tier trolling, then I've got to say I'm not amused. I actually care about my republic. (Thanks /u/SoonToBeBanned for reminding me of the Lupercalia connection.)

Whether the quote is trolling or not, many in the X/Twitter replies were taking it at face value and affirming their support of the underlying sentiment.

Ah, Twitter drama. Still don't care.

I would argue that if Trump is being literal with this tweet, then he is basically positioning himself as a "dictator" in the original Roman sense of the word.

The US doesn't work all that much like Rome; we have no dictator, and no consuls to appoint them.

The US doesn't work all that much like Rome; we have no dictator, and no consuls to appoint them.

I beg to differ. While we don't have the formal office, I would argue that both Abraham Lincoln and FDR both arguably fill the "dictator" role in American politics. Though of course, the American tradition is for the "dictator" to die or be killed in office, rather than to have them voluntarily cede power back to the republic.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying I think Trump is definitively a dictator in the Roman style. I'm saying that one reading of his Napoleon tweet is that he's positioning himself as a Roman-style dictator, thus justifying the extra-legal way in which he had been advancing his agenda these past few weeks.

While I have expressed my concerns on the Motte about the health of our republic as a result of Trump's actions, I don't think the republic is quite dead yet. Our republic was already sick from an Imperial Presidency, and a cycle of Crisis and Leviathan, but the way Trump has chosen to carry out his agenda is increasingly worrying, and I'm someone who mostly lurked on the Motte during the Trump I years and agreed with the consensus about Trump Derangement Syndrome.

If Trump had just used his Republican majority in Congress and the Supreme Court to push through a legislative agenda through the usual means, I would have mostly just rolled with the punches and shrugged my shoulders. Republics, what can you do? But he's bypassed congress, and seems to be hell bent on doing as much as he can on his own. Even if the administrative state needed a serious culling, I would have been much happier if it had been done via Congress and the Courts, instead of by another executive embodying the worst aspects of the Imperial Presidency.

I beg to differ. While we don't have the formal office, I would argue that both Abraham Lincoln and FDR both arguably fill the "dictator" role in American politics.

This is not the original Roman sense of the word.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying I think Trump is definitively a dictator in the Roman style. I'm saying that one reading of his Napoleon tweet is that he's positioning himself as a Roman-style dictator, thus justifying the extra-legal way in which he had been advancing his agenda these past few weeks.

And another reading is that he is denying that he is engaging in extra-legal activity at all.

If Trump had just used his Republican majority in Congress and the Supreme Court to push through a legislative agenda through the usual means

He would get nowhere. Nothing would happen. He does not even have a majority; Congress is split three ways, between Democrats, MAGA Republicans, and non-MAGA Republicans.

Even if the administrative state needed a serious culling, I would have been much happier if it had been done via Congress and the Courts, instead of by another executive embodying the worst aspects of the Imperial Presidency.

Congress did not create much of what Trump has been going after -- it's either discretionary or entirely the creation of the executive. You will not find a line item in any bill appropriating funding for a transgender opera in Colombia. If Congress did not create it, it should not take Congress to tear it down. The demand that it should is just a ratchet which allows things to grow but not shrink, or allows Democrats to do things but that Republicans not undo them.

when the left-leaning home depot employee lost her job

You mean the one that spoke in favour of the Trump assassination?

Yes. I think such sentiments are ugly in anyone's mouth, but I also don't think they merit firing. In general, I would prefer a social norm that people only get fired for their public political opinions (even ugly ones), if being a mass media face of the company is part of their job, and it would violate the company's fiduciary duty to their shareholders to keep the person onboard.

Saying, "I wish the assassin hadn't missed" is not the kind of thing that should prevent you from working a low stakes retail job. The right would have forgotten about her in a week, and Home Depot acted as cowardly as any firm during an internet firestorm.

Well Im glad that youre so principled, but... calling for literal, legal-definition murder is not the same as saying that e.g. men and women are different. At the point when that was what you had to do to get fired as a rightwinger, they didnt complain about cancel culture, they didnt even form that concept. If this is where you lost hope, you might as well never have hope - and I have my suspicions if you actually apply/ied that standard to the left in practice.

Well Im glad that youre so principled, but... calling for literal, legal-definition murder is not the same as saying that e.g. men and women are different.

I think there's a big difference between wishing someone's death, and calling for someone's murder. Don't get me wrong, both are ugly, but saying "I wish the assassin hadn't missed" isn't that different from saying, "I wish the private jet his plane came in on crashed" or "I wish someone had strangled him as a baby in his crib."

There's plenty of colorful ways to say, "Boo X", and wishing their death is one of them. I do think after an assassination attempt we should ideally show more decorum, and hold off on such rhetoric, but again, I don't think it is worthy of firing if someone fails to show such decorum. And I definitely think it is a stretch to say that it is literally calling for murder.

If this is where you lost hope, you might as well never have hope - and I have my suspicions if you actually apply/ied that standard to the left in practice.

The woke left was the culturally ascendant group at the time. It was natural for me to look towards the anti-woke people on all sides of the aisle for the hope of a different set of cultural norms that encouraged engagement with ideas. In some ways the Motte really does model a lot of the discursive norms I wish existed in normie spaces, though I get that it is far too rarified and self-selected to truly serve as a model for society at large. Even so, I did have hopes of a more open society that embodied the virtues of frankness of speech on the one hand, and curiosity and charity on the other.

And I definitely think it is a stretch to say that it is literally calling for murder.

If you mean that it doesnt meet the legally actionable threshold, then sure. But if it had somehow happend before, e.g. reporting on the presence of an assassin before hes neutralised, she tweets then - that is getting into danger territory, and I dont think your arguments about booing psychology are much stronger if its after. You definitely can call for murder in the illegal way thoughtlessly if you just run condemnationbabble.exe, and I dont think thats an excuse. The point of this is not if its "worth" firing for, but to establish that were talking about very different levels here without having to assume my ideology-in-general.

It was natural for me to look towards the anti-woke people on all sides of the aisle for the hope of a different set of cultural norms that encouraged engagement with ideas.

And at what level of cancel culture did you start to look away from the left? Was it already at the level where only incidents like this one were punished, or a lot later?

There are some naturally-blue people who felt that it was worth supporting the right to some extent because cancel culture had gotten that bad, and then at various levels of right-ascendancy no long felt that way. Thats fine, but its not fine to present your personal all-things-considered switchback point as if it were parity on this one issue. We are still far from parity, and I doubt itll ever get there.

Yes. I think such sentiments are ugly in anyone's mouth, but I also don't think they merit firing.

Of course, back in the days when the U.S. was a real democracy, they merited tarring and feathering, or having the offending printer's press thrown into the local river. But I agree, burning is a bit much.

The United States was never a "real democracy," and that was by design. The United States is a republic with democratic elements.

There were founders like Thomas Jefferson who advocated for the democratic element to be more expansive, and amendments like the 13th, 17th and 19th have pushed the United States in a more democratic direction, but in theory we still retain most of our republican institutions, at least formally.

Personally, I would tend to be against destroying printing presses. Seems like it would have a chilling effect on free speech.

And yet that was at the height of print culture, when every town and village worthy of the name had at least one circular paper and most cities had four. I notice that your explanation isn't accurately predicting the historical results.

I don't think what you said connects. The following two statements can both be true:

  • A time period was the height of print culture, when every town and village worthy of the name had at least one circular paper and most cities have four.
  • In the same time period, mobs destroying printing presses that circulated ideas people didn't like had a chilling effect on the way people chose to exercise free speech.

Put another way, do you think that when Elijah Lovejoy's printing press was destroyed multiple times and he was eventually murdered over his abolitionist position, that this was good for free speech culture or bad for free speech culture? Do you think, on the margins, that people were more likely to want to speak out in support of abolition or less likely? Of course, there's no accounting for the martyr effect, but I assume the goals of Elijah's killers should be obvious and repudiated.

I think "free speech culture" in the context of the 1850's - a far more legitimately democratic (in the sense that actual political and physical power was exercised directly by the demos upon and against itself rather than via an elected/appointed expert/governing class) is something of a category error. The people who mailed Preston Brooks canes in encouragement of his beating of Charles Sumner on the Senate floor were exercising speech just as much as Lovejoy was. So was Cassius Clay in his antislavery advocacy. So was Thomas Wentworth Higginson and the other Secret Six fundraising for John Brown. People clearly were not deterred from expressing their political views.

But a person saying “they are sorry the guy missed” is not giving a political opinion. It’s a threat. You can’t cheer on death and hide behind it being a political statement.

  • -14

It’s a threat.

Not it's not. You are being disingenuous. It's a statements of words. Words do not hurt or harm. And a statement of belief.

You can’t cheer on death and hide behind it being a political statement.

Why can't you? You literally can, and it can very much be a political statement. People cheer death all the time. I remember people cheering Saddam Hussein dying. Was that not political statement, belief, and speech? And I literally can't count and catalog the amount of political invective I've heard against the Clintons on the Internet, over the years.

But a person saying “they are sorry the guy missed” is not giving a political opinion. It’s a threat.

That is by definition not a threat. A threat must communicate the intent to do something to somebody. Saying "I'm sorry the guy missed" is wishing death on someone and that's bad, but it isn't a threat either.

Sure you can. One can wish certain events would occur, or have an emotional reaction to certain events, without threatening to take illegal action to cause those events to occur.

Surely there is at least one person somewhere whom you wish would die, such that you would feel happy if you heard the news that they had passed.

my read of the psychological evidence is that, from my value system, about half the country is evil and it is in my self-interest to shame the expression of their values, indoctrinate their children, and work for a future where their values are no longer represented on this Earth.

https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/25/conservatives-as-moral-mutants/

I’ve been hearing things like this for a decade, now. In America you seem to have avoided this by a hair, for now. In Britain the process is still ongoing.

I don’t like cancel culture. I think the right should be careful lest we cut off all feedback the way the left did, and I appreciate @curious_straight_ca and others for being stubborn and saying, “no, really, how is this meant to help?”.

But.

It is also true that I don’t feel confident enough in victory to give quarter. For silly reasons I ended up leading anti-woke resistance in one organisation, and one of the reasons that we failed was because I prevented people from attacking certain obvious weaknesses in the woke activist team, not wanting to sink to their level. I’m not going to make the same mistake twice.

Turns out that there is no deep state waiting with sharp fangs and CIA assassins to stop the orange man as soon as he tries to actually do anything that hurts the Blob.

Jesus Christ. So unless the spooks succeed they don't exist, even if the last year has just been incident after incident proving they exist. Even if we now have plenty of evidence of the deep state and espionage shenanigans, the media said this is different so let's get scared for America again! Progressive politics just let a large swathe of California burn to the ground and the media told us blaming politicians was the height of rudeness, but Trump said something typically hyperbolic, that is both appealing to red tribe sensibilities and and agitating to blue tribe sensibilities so let's all lose our minds like msnbc suggests! Bel is right, you can call yourself a centrist, but the only answer you will accept is the progressive status quo.

Edit: fixed a link

Progressive politics just let a large swathe of California burn to the ground and the media told us blaming politicians was the height of rudeness

What the hell are you talking about? The level of deranged obsessive yet performative hatred and outright lying about California that exists in the right-wing sphere never ceases to amaze me. Are you saying "progressives" started literal fires? Or do you think your hobby horse and tribal "enemies" somehow made firefighting less effective? Or is this some weird dig at homelessness and media influences perceptions of petty crime, and the assumption that level surface tibal party politics has anything to do with them?

  • -14

Or do you think your hobby horse and tribal "enemies" somehow made firefighting less effective?

Yes.

What the hell are you talking about?

Our idiot mayor (promoted far above her competence because of her race and gender) decided to be in Ghana even after she was warned that conditions were going to be particularly dangerous for fires.

The deputy mayor - also a part of the same ethnic political machine - was out of the picture because he is being raided by the FBI for allegedly calling bomb threats in to City Hall.

The third in line - the City Council President who only got the gig after the previous President went down for allegedly racist comments about the same ethnic mafia - was too busy cutting off public comment and oversight over City Council meetings and didn't do anything either.

In previous fire seasons, fire-engines were forward-positioned in the hilly areas to respond quickly to reports of small brushfires before they could spread and get out of control. Efforts were made to clear fire access roads up into the hills and cut away excess brush. DBS inspections were made of properties with notably overgrown brush and fines assessed if the landlords did not engage in required clearance. Etc. Etc. None of this was done, and the fire department itself dedicated to issues of gender and sexual diversity rather than actual fire-fighting effectiveness.

To say nothing of how decades of one-party liberal rule have led to a situation where our municipal water infrastructure is ancient and creaky - unable to deliver the volume of water needed in a true crisis - the DWP has become a byword for corruption instead of competence, and we still have the same number of fire stations as we did when the city had half the residents.

I think my hobby horse and tribal "enemies" somehow made firefighting less effective. How did you write level before surface in the last sentence? It's breaking my brain. Did you construct this post with the cut-up method?

I just assume that if the deep state actually set up a shooting to assassinate Trump, they would probably succeed at killing him. It's hard for me to believe that they would manage to get a shooter within fairly easy range of him, yet the shooter would miss. The lone wolf theory seems way more plausible to me. In any case, if the deep state has had 10 years in which to kill Trump and they haven't done it, then they are fairly irrelevant as a political force, which is part of my original point.

As for the progressive status quo, I don't know where you are getting that from. I disagree with progressives on a range of issues, including HBD, policing, and the economic consequences of socialism. The average progressive would certainly not classify me as a fellow progressive if exposed to my unfiltered political ideas.

If Trump didn't turn his head at the exact second he did, he'd be dead now. Call it luck, call it coincidence, call it providence, it wasn't incompetence that saved Trump that day. You can, if you are naive or lying, claim incompetence put him in that position, which is exactly why pretending to be retarded has been such an integral strategy for the deep state. And it is also why the lead 'counter sniper' in Trump's SS detail was two years into his career, wasn't on counter sniper detail, and forgot his radio. And why that chubby cutie was playing hot potato with her gun. And why they blamed the local police. And every other insane detail from that fiasco.

As for the progressive status quo, it's because you keep buying into this ridiculous hysteria despite a decade of fake news declaring every saucy tweet Trump fires off the end of America and democracy. And never mind that the people we supposedly put in charge of promoting America and democracy abroad were primarily lining their own pockets but also helping fund groups that literally fucking hate America and democracy. And you don't mind it, because the media, which you inexplicably still trust, tells you it's just defunding trans operas and aids cures and you probably can't fix it anyway. You have to recognise by now that you are being manipulated. I mean how can you read the motte, read posts by people like @WhiningCoil and @jeroboam and me and not realise that "He who saves his Country does not violate any Law." is a blatant appeal to red tribe values, in the same category as 'The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time' and '1776 WILL COMMENCE AGAIN'?

Edit: edited out a cheap shot

This is astoundingly stupid. No theory of a hyper powerful deep state can explain why a deep state that wanted to assassinate someone couldn’t do so.

It's just YET ANOTHER amazing coincidence that negatively affects Trump huh? It's a good thing people don't have agency or we'd have to wonder about the motives of the people involved in these coincidences. We might ask why, the very first time anyone attempted to kill Trump, the first guy to give it a shot is the world's most opsec responsible teen with no social media presence they can find except some small things suggesting NO MOTIVE! Well that's unfortunate Mr Trump, so sorry you attract lunatics! How did such a green assassin even get to take off the shot though? Because he was up against agents just as green! As a tangent, did you know the ss had been maliciously complying with Trump throughout the campaign? They repeatedly refused to provide him with proper security, and the Butler rally was no different - they forgot to bring enough comms, so they had zero contact with local police. Of course, that doesn't really matter since members of the public were telling them about Crooks and THEY JUST FUCKING IGNORED THEM.

Like I said, you can call it all coincidental incompetence, but I would dispute which of us is being astoundingly stupid if you did. I don't mean they are hyper powerful, I mean that some key players, particularly in leadership, are compromised. After all, I'm told Trump was so hateable a third of the country would be happy with him dead, surely that includes some senior staff at the secret service. So they meet the minimum requirements for service, and mysterious coincidences just keep interrupting the work flow, no one is to blame for the lack of radios, no one is to blame for the counter snipers not being put on counter sniper detail, and so on and so on.

Nope. Three times is enemy action.

You know what, since I've been summoned...

You know how virtually the only thing the FBI ever did (prior to persecuting their political opponents) was textbook entrapment? Talk some neuro divergent weirdo in their mom's basement into joining ISIS or committing a McVeigh style attack, sell them some fake (or real) materials to do it, and then immediately arrest them? Take a few victory laps proudly in public about how they caught another "terrorist" and they're doing such a good job keeping America safe. Then depending on whether they caught a white guy or a brown guy, one party or the other would grumble. And libertarians. Always the libertarians.

Isn't it weird how as often as the FBI does this, we've never heard about them accidentally letting someone they radicalized slip between the cracks and actually commit an atrocity? I mean, you'd have to assume it's happened at least once. Everyone fucks up eventually. Maybe it was Bob's last day and the hand off of his casework was just sloppy. And if I were the FBI, and that happened on my watch, I'd bury that shit as hard as I possibly could.

I think about that sort of thing a lot with the Trump shooter in Butler PA. Except minus the part about him accidentally slipping between the cracks after being radicalized. It would be remarkable with all the declassification and all the regime enemies in charge of intelligence if we ever find out. But given that google searches for "Bleach bit", "lawyers", "wipe hard drive" and "offshore bank" are exploding in DC, I suspect they have their tracks well covered. You know... were that the case.

Isn't it weird how as often as the FBI does this, we've never heard about them accidentally letting someone they radicalized slip between the cracks and actually commit an atrocity?

I've personally thought the Las Vegas shooting was caused exactly by this, but I confess I have no evidence beyond twisted Occam's Razor and the overbearing presence of federal law enforcement in the aftermath.

Isn't it weird how as often as the FBI does this, we've never heard about them accidentally letting someone they radicalized slip between the cracks and actually commit an atrocity? I mean, you'd have to assume it's happened at least once.

McVeigh described himself as the person whose fingers were slipped through originally to his attorneys. Of course, just one version of the narrative.

Isn't it weird how as often as the FBI does this, we've never heard about them accidentally letting someone they radicalized slip between the cracks and actually commit an atrocity?

1991 World Trade Center bombing. Draw Mohammed Day attack, stopped only by an off duty municipal cop who knew nothing about the FBI involvement. But yeah, probably there's been quite a few others they buried.

About the assassination attempt: look, it's just clear to me that there is nothing necessarily surprising or conspiratorial about the Secret Service fucking up after successfully protecting one of the most hated figures in US history, who also constantly does outdoor rallies, for 10 years. It would be surprising if they didn't eventually fuck up.

As for your second paragraph, I think that you profoundly misunderstand where I am coming from. I have spent years regularly arguing against people who engage in anti-Trump hysteria. As recently as a few months ago, I was telling lib friends that their horror of Trump was overblown and misguided. I'm not some kind of crypto leftist who is here to convince people to hate Trump, for fuck's sake. I am telling you the truth, which is that until recently I thought Trump was part good and part bad but I felt he would be effectively contained by checks and balances, but I am now worried because I am beginning to see the checks and balances waver. You may agree with me, you may disagree with me, but the reality is that I am not making a bad faith argument. I am literally just telling you about the evolution of my political thought. A few months ago I really thought that Trump's second term would be a nothingburger, both because Trump's first term was a nothingburger and because I assumed that libs and leftists would put up more resistance than they actually are.

The idea that I "inexplicably trust" the media is absurd to me. I have spent years criticizing the media to anyone who will listen. If you assume that I am some slavish devotee of the media, you are just plain wrong. I hate and distrust the mainstream media, but that doesn't mean that I have to like Trumpism.

I am now worried because I am beginning to see the checks and balances waver.

What are two examples of actually illegal behavior that you think the checks and balances are wavering on?

About the assassination attempt: look, it's just clear to me that there is nothing necessarily surprising or conspiratorial about the Secret Service fucking up after successfully protecting one of the most hated figures in US history, who also constantly does outdoor rallies, for 10 years. It would be surprising if they didn't eventually fuck up.

"Eventually"?

Where are all the other assassination attempts that they caught? If some guy showing up with a rifle at all those rallies were some sort of regular occurrence, and this one retarded dude lucked out and slipped through, what you say would make sense -- but this is not the case.

They have one job, and the first chance they had to do it, they fucked it up. OR -- they've been doing their job OK, then one day they didn't.

I am telling you the truth, which is that until recently I thought Trump was part good and part bad but I felt he would be effectively contained by checks and balances, but I am now worried because I am beginning to see the checks and balances waver. You may agree with me, you may disagree with me

I do not believe you.

Where are all the other assassination attempts that they caught?

There was the second attempt two months later where the Secret Service caught that guy on the golf course.

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

And this list of other stories I don't remember even hearing half of:

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

11 incidents in 9 years.

11 incidents in 9 years.

Mostly unarmed crazy people with no ability to do actual harm -- you can't brush this off as 'oh bad luck, bound to happen eventually what with so much public speaking and so many attempts on his life' when the very first guy who came to a speech with a gun was able to get multiple shots in the near vicinity of Trump's brainstem.

They didn't eventually fuck up -- they fucked up on the first try.

I agree with you on the assassination attempt side: along with the various procedural faults and failures to analyze or punish the source of those procedural faults, the post-incident review has not gone well.

On the other...

June 8, 2023:

Anyway, I still don't know why I'm supposed to care so much which one of these two candidates wins. Biden would do some things to hurt democracy, would support Ukraine a bit more, would support Israel a bit less, and would yell at Russia more. Trump would do some things to hurt democracy, would support Ukraine a bit less, would support Israel a bit more, and would yell at China more. The economy would muddle along without either one being able to do much more than just cheerlead when it's good and shift blame when it's bad. Biden would make certain kinds of mouth noises about immigration through the southern border, Trump would make a different kind of noises. At the end of the day probably not much would change because the president has limited power over the issue and Americans like cheap burritos and construction work, and companies like to hire the people who make it possible.

Neither candidate is someone I could imagine ever voting for. Both parties deeply, fundamentally disgust me in different ways. Biden would make one group of annoying people online scream that the world is ending, Trump would make a different group of annoying people online scream that the world is ending. As before, the Internet outrage would overrepresent the kind of person who spends a lot of time online writing about politics and would fail to capture the fact that in the "real world", most Americans don't really care that much about politics.

The only way I can think of that either candidate could truly screw things up as president is by getting into a major war with Russia and/or China. And, while Trump's legacy in office is more peaceful than Biden's, the combination of Biden's restraint from actually directly intervening in Iran, Israel, or Ukraine and Trump's volatile chest-pounding, boomercon love of Israel / hate of Iran, and anti-China rhetoric leaves me not entirely convinced that Trump would actually be less likely to go to war. I do think Trump is probably a bit less likely to go to war, but it's not enough to make me want to go vote for him.

If Trump is somehow actually significantly leading in polls with the election a month away, despite the usual rioting and screaming about fascism from Dem-aligned news outlets that we'll probably see next year, we will be in for an interesting outcome though if Biden wins anyway. I doubt that it would be enough to make the True Trump Patriots (tm) actually get up off their couches and do anything with their gun collections other than post pictures of them online, but who knows.

October 11th, 2024:

I think that in reality if elected Trump would probably just spend all day tweeting and failing to implement his promises. However, to many Democrats it is almost as if Trump is a Lovecraftian god the mere mention of whom leads to insanity. Such Democrats view him as some sort of annihilating force the very presence of which in the universe warps and endangers the sane, wholesome building blocks of existence itself. Meanwhile I just see a fat old huckster sociopath who talks a lot of shit but is effectively restrained by checks and balances. Not a savory person, maybe even a rapist, pretty certainly a bad guy, but not some sort of fundamental essential threat to the entire being of American democracy or to sanity.

It is not that I do not believe in evil. But I do find it odd when liberals perceive demonic evil in Trump, yet make excuses for vicious violent criminals (at least, as a class if not always individually) who are enabled by Democrats' soft-on-crime policies.

Would Trump do many harmful things in office? I am sure. Harris would as well. Which one would do more, who knows? I do not see a clear-cut answer to that question. He certainly would be no angel, I am sure of that. But it also seems to me that often, vehement anti-Trump sentiment has little to do with a clear-eyed assessment of the possible harms that he would cause.

What explains the particular mind-shattering power that Trump somehow inflicts on so many of his political opponents? Interestingly, it largely do not seem to be his actual political counterparts among the Democrat elite who view him as an eldritch destroyer of worlds... the Democrat elite may hate him, may despise him, may say that he is a threat to democracy, but I don't think I can remember any time that any of them acted as if he was a threat to one's very psychological foundation. Maybe their power and their close understanding of American politics generally inoculates them against such a reaction.

Huh this is a puzzle to untangle. If you have looked into the Butler shooting and not trusted the media and you aren't a crypto leftist or unable to speak English, then claiming the secret service successfully protected Trump is truly comical. And hey, the FBI successfully saved Gretchen Whitmer yeah? What a success!

Moving on, I was indeed beginning to suspect you were a crypto leftist. Turning that tweet into the incipient rise of fascism is that fucking crazy in my view. But my original image of you is as someone on the outskirts of the pmc class who sees centrism as a useful heuristic for navigating reality. Which is to say that you at the very least tolerate the progressive status quo, you just want it to be less intrusive. I view the progressive status quo as the civilisational equivalent of dating a girl with borderline personality disorder.

I can see how this is unfair to you, but you have to understand I've already lived through half a decade of monthly 'boy I was all on board the maga train at first but this latest tweet is terrifying' posts and tweets. Beyond that I really think you should wait until Trump has at least one disaster under his belt before you start worrying. On reflection though I was imprecise with my language, instead of saying that you trust the media, what I should have said is that you don't distrust the media. And if you think you do, you don't do it enough. Until your first instinct when you read or hear anything on the news or reddit or Facebook or X etc is to call bullshit, you don't distrust the media enough.

We live in one of two worlds:

  1. The Secret Service was genuinely trying to protect Trump and were so clownishly incompetent that people in the crowd were warning them about a guy with a gun going up onto the roof but still let him take his shots. Men With Guns are supposed to be their forte, this is the one thing they're not supposed to let happen. Why wasn't there a drone or something providing overwatch? How hard can it be?

  2. The Secret Service/Deep State was trying to kill Trump and chose some MKUltra victim who wasn't a good shot, as opposed to something like a drone or a precision mortar strike which would at least be reasonable for them to heroically fail to intercept. Intercepting drones is hard.

Either way they don't come off as very capable.

The way I look at it, Trump is:

  1. Someone who does a lot more outdoor rallies than most prominent politicians.
  2. One of the most reviled politicians in US history, among a large subset of the population.

The Secret Service might be good, but they are not perfect. It's not surprising if they just genuinely slipped up after almost 10 years of protecting Trump.

I don’t see incompetence when the crowd is literally walking up to the SS and telling them they see a guy with a gun on a roof and they don’t do anything. It’s just not possible that a group of people trying to protect someone have multiple people report a man on a roof with a gun and just don’t do anything.

If you've ever tried to manage people in a large and complicated setting like a concert, a mass causality event and so on you know it's extremely hard to triage these sorts of things and get them to the right people. Even something as self-contained as running a single patient trauma or a two pilot aircraft can result in poor communication and distribution of information.

Consider how easy it would be to mentally write this off as "oh yeah that's one of the police sniper teams."

Now if you have one organization that should have a plan for how to handle "tips" like this and not fuck up like this it should be the secret service - but that's incompetence not malice.

The standard way to launder malice is by appointing incompetent underlings for the task.

Are doctors appointed to patients randomly?

It's possible. The Secret Service are humans, not superpowered ninjas from a movie. They are good at what they do, but the reality is that there are probably like 30 million people in this country who would happily kill Trump if they could do it and get away with it. The Secret Service has managed to successfully protect Trump for 10 years, through hundreds of outdoor rallies and so on. They're not perfect, so it's rational that they eventually fucked up. One might argue that it's weird that the two assassination attempts that we know of that even came close both happened shortly before the election, but that can be explained by the fact that just before the election is precisely when random lone wolves would be most motivated to try to kill Trump.

It might seem weird that the Secret Service would not do anything in reaction to someone telling them they see a guy on the roof with a gun... but at the end of the day, it's a job for them. We all have bad days on the job when we're tired or whatever. Besides, if I my job was protecting Trump for years and having to stand around in all kinds of weather conditions listening to him ramble for hours, and someone told me that there was a reason to think Trump might be about to get shot, I can easily imagine even as an elite Secret Service operator being like "fuck who cares, I'm tired of all this shit".

It might seem weird that the Secret Service would not do anything in reaction to someone telling them they see a guy on the roof with a gun... but at the end of the day, it's a job for them. We all have bad days on the job when we're tired or whatever. Besides, if I my job was protecting Trump for years and having to stand around in all kinds of weather conditions listening to him ramble for hours, and someone told me that there was a reason to think Trump might be about to get shot, I can easily imagine even as an elite Secret Service operator being like "fuck who cares, I'm tired of all this shit".

I think you don't know much about the Secret Service. They are extremely dedicated to their jobs. While their reputation as elites has taken a (justifiable) hit lately, they go to great effort to recruit and train people whose job is literally to take a bullet for their charge if need be. And part of that job is, obviously, a full understanding that these people will be chosen by the political process, and it may be someone you personally don't like. This is why I find conspiracy theories about how the SS has been infiltrated by the Deep State and set up Trump to to be assassinated extremely unlikely. Incompetence and sloppiness is easier to believe than the SS not only turning into a treasonous conspiracy but deciding that letting an untrained mentally ill teen take a shot at someone. This is comic book villain plotting.

A Secret Service operator being like "fuck who cares, I'm tired of all this shit" would be someone who is having a breakdown of some kind and needs to be relieved of duty. It might have happened (they are human beings) but it would not be normal.

Besides, if I my job was protecting Trump for years and having to stand around in all kinds of weather conditions listening to him ramble for hours, and someone told me that there was a reason to think Trump might be about to get shot, I can easily imagine even as an elite Secret Service operator being like "fuck who cares, I'm tired of all this shit".

Really? If you were a Secret Service agent and your job involved such trivial and predictable hardships as standing around outside a lot and listening to the President talk, then you'd get so bored that you'd just completely ignore reports of an assassin? If this were actually an accurate description of your own level of diligence and not motivated reasoning, then you would be literally and objectively unqualified to hold pretty much any job whatsoever.

Sorry if my first post comes off as a flame, but this is a frankly ludicrous comment and I don't know how else to express it. There are absolutely no circumstances under which a Secret Service agent ignoring reports of a rooftop sniper is even the least bit understandable or excusable. That isn't being "not a super ninja" but rather being completely and utterly derelict to a degree indistinguishable from treason.

Turns out that there is no deep state waiting with sharp fangs and CIA assassins to stop the orange man as soon as he tries to actually do anything that hurts the Blob.

You know, putting aside the between two and five times they actually did try to kill him. And the eight or nine times they tried to throw him in jail. And the massive series of riots that for a hot minute looked like an actual state-sponsored color revolution (open source intel people were making only-half-joking control maps of Portland).

There is no real evidence that "they", as in some deep state group, even tried to kill him once much less 2-5 times. As for the color revolution idea, while I hated the 2020 riots, the notion that they were organized to hurt Trump has never made much sense to me. Realistically, such riots would tend to make as many people more likely to vote for Trump as less likely to vote for him.

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