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Not really, because we didn't actually get the generation being "radicalized by Trump being a bad president", we just got them radicalized by Trump being president, despite him not doing anything all that radical or harmful.
What I want doesn't really matter in any material sense, but I'm not going to base electoral politics on how whiny the loser will be about. I want Trump to win because I think he'll do some of the things I want a President to do and few of the things I don't want a President to do. My top priority by quite a bit is reducing the role of the federal administrative state in everyday life, which Trump's leanings and setup with groups like Project 2025 seem likely to do. His judicial appointments will also assist with deregulation and disempowering the discretion of petty bureaucrats. My other top priority is stanching the flow of immigrants, which Trump seems likely to do.
If you disagree with those positions, that's fine, but being willing to sign up for federal policies that you disagree with so that political obsessives whine less just seems kind of cowardly to me. You're getting crybullied!
Roe vs. Wade just got overturned because of his SC nominations.
That might not be a big deal to you, but I assure you it's a big deal to a lot of women around the country, and the men who care about them. That's a big harmful thing, just on its own.
I'll also point out that most on the left will blame Trump for not having a strong response in the early days of Covid where we could have maybe actually headed off the worst outcomes, and for letting his party fall into turning COVID into a partisan issue where it was impossible for any policy to fight it because half the country would disobey. I don't in a million years expect I could convince you that;s factually true, so I don't want to argue about it, but you have to be aware that it's the type of thing the people who disagree with you think about when they say 'Trump was a bad president'.
This to me sounds pretty strongly like the perception-of-reality-warping whining that leftists did under Trump (see where I talk about it here). Trump needed to do exactly what the leftists told him to do. When he didn't do that, the leftists got everyone to believe that Trump was the one making a partisan issue out of it.
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You and I are not remembering the same sequence of events. It was Democrats who made it political first, and they did it by whining about anti-asian racism.
This is not coming from the right.
Liberal publications were attacking Trump, and his supporters, as racist for trying to shut down the Kung Flu, right up until the point they completely switched into authoritarian lockdown mode.
Yeah...
I am old enough to remember, even though it's now been about 4 years, Nancy Pelosi telling people to go out and Celebrate Lunar New Year (as in telling people to go out in public around large groups) when fear of Coronavirus was right-coded. Its right there in an official communication.
This position was, later, switched towards banning any sort of large gatherings altogether.
Which THEN switched to allow people to gather as long as it was a BLM protest.
I saw this with my own eyes in real time, while all the while I'm becoming increasingly afraid of the implications of the virus itself and the politicization crippling our ability to respond to it.
I could pull my old posts from the motte subreddit at the time to back this up.
The left initiated almost every major action that drove the politicization of Covid.
Some days it seems like having memory better than a goldfish is a superpower.
While I agree that there was a very interesting dynamic with left-coded cries of "racism" being used by public health and "pro-science" professionals to pooh-pooh the need to close ports or intitute quarantines on points of entry in January 2020 (1), these particular statements by Pelosi were boilerplate well before the pandemic from 2006 to 2021, and only stopped when China went full Wolf-Warrior diplomacy in late 2021 and early 2022.
As evidence, I give you some other official announcments. The omission of years prior to 2017 just means I didn't bother looking for them, and the URL wasn't obvious.
Please check your arguments to verify that they are solid before presenting a weakman argument for your point.
(1) IMO, the Trump admin could have used the national emergency to close all border flows, left the US epidemiologically secure like Taiwan, and used the inevitable leak as further justification for border security. But Trump is incompetent, Trump's staff was incompetent, and the CDC isn't competent enough to quarantine tourists anyway.
Okay, I feel a little bad about this, but I was actually presenting a weakman to see if anybody would actually try to argue the counterpoint.
If you want to hear Pelosi's thoughts on the Coronavirus at the time, listen to her exact words, spoken from her own mouth:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=2SKy8XAn5MQ?si=ycMLrkzra7wkEEJD
"PELOSI EASING OUTBREAK FEARS" is the Chyron. This was the official Democrat/lefty position, that racism was the bigger danger, and the virus was of moderate concern because they 'took precautions.' This was aired on January 24, BEFORE she issued her boilerplate press release.
Once again, I saw this with my own eyes. Heard it with my ears. People trying to convince me I was misinterpreting can politely sod off.
Not the most sporting of me, but I also don't appreciate people gaslighting me, and I suspect you're not interpreting my objections in good faith.
Damit. Why didn't you link to the YT video the first time? Would have saved me a lot of time drudging through Pelosi's official statements. This is the kind of link I can save for use in future online arguments.
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cynically, the superpower is having either a goldfish memory or absolutely no conscience about telling the most convenient lie in any given post. In a lot of modern discussion environments, having the nagging memory that we weren't always at war with Eastasian-flu is an active hinderance to keeping friends and staying unbanned.
Yeah, I think the latter (having zero conscience) is the actual 'superpower' insofar as it grants one strong advantages when navigating a given social environment.
But I think it at least in part depends on others not having a decent memory.
If you have a good memory and can recognize the scam that has been pulled, because you remember the sequence of events that led to it, at least you can protect yourself from a repeat performance.
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Oh, I completely understand the position with regard to abortion, but this is simply baked into the cake of any Republican. I don't particularly like abortion restrictions either, but it's not some weird, radical position that Trump cooked up.
Yeah, this is a fair description of what I understand the left-leaning position to be. Still, I find it disorienting to hear people refer to Trump as "authoritarian" when one of their strongest criticisms of him was that he wasn't anywhere near authoritarian enough.
I mean 'authoritarian' is definitely a hugely overdetermined word with lots of definitions and conflicting connotations, yeah.
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I think that this is basically correct. I'll be damned before I let other people's whining determine who I support for public office. If Trump is the best, then I'll vote for him, if not I won't, and nobody else comes into it.
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Well, consider "whiny" is perhaps an understatement, or a proxy for other things. What happens when the whining is so intense that it actually distorts people's perception of reality? As an example, I really can't trust any news source for anything that is said about Trump. They can basically say whatever they want, because half the country is ready to believe it, and they have tons of precedent to draw on from other new sources doing the same thing.
And the same thing happens in my everyday life, too, when dealing with all my friends and loved ones. It's a complete uphill battle for me to try to communicate to anyone that they're being a conspiracy theorist crazy person, and ultimately I end up sounding like the conspiracy theorist because I'm going against the grain. It's hard enough to argue against a Gish gallop, but even worse when there's precedent for the Gish gallop, and everyone dogpiles on board, and there's a whole industry devoted to that one Gish gallop.
edit: I can't find it now, but I remember Scott wrote an SSC article where he talks about how when refuting crazy theories (like aliens built the pyramids or something), you end up sounding like you're making a bunch of one-off refutations that are not seeing the bigger picture.
What people?
Most normies are on Twitter for sports news, maybe a favorite celebrity, and possibly something location specific, and don’t check it every day. The whining- and the people who pay attention to it- is a very small percentage of the total.
Normies get their news and opinions from sources that are downstream of it, a lot of time. George Floyd and the response to it has to be a central example, I would think. Tik-tok lefties may be a minority of the population, but if they start evangelizing to normies in real life, and get mass media backup for their evangelizing, that's more than enough to create false beliefs in an outright majority.
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Well, I think that sort of thing trickles down to the normies, too. If there's this ambient level of crazies constantly spouting "Trump's insane, Trump's going to kill us all, Trump's going to usher in a second holocaust, Trump cheated his way into the presidency", at some point the normies start to believe it. It has become truth to anyone who doesn't pay really really close attention or at least have some source of information that doesn't fall in line, because of this onslaught of one-sided information coming from sources that were considered reliable prior to Trump's presidency. Like, my cousins are those sports news people, and they are pretty checked out of world events, but even they believe Trump is the complete worst, tacitly.
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@gattsuru had it right with Pyramid and the Garden. I thought Scott elaborated on the part where a sufficiently advanced defense also looks like a conspiracy theory, but it wasn’t in Epistemic Learned Helplessness. Maybe Prospiracy Theories counts?
Edit: JulianRota found the real part you were looking for while I was typing this. I really appreciate that we have so many users willing to pore over the sacred texts for that one thing we remembered seeing.
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That would be You Are Still Crying Wolf, section 17 near the end. Which, curiously for this thread, is exactly about refuting the crazy theory that Trump is racist.
Thanks! I kept thinking of The Pyramid and the Garden and kept combing through it to try to find it, but it is funny that it's actually from Scott's post about this exact topic!
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Have you considered that you’re affected by the same thing? Honestly everything you wrote sounds like a really unhinged rightoid conspiracy theory to me. Maybe this is just evidence that everyone’s brain is broken.
Don't do this. Its antagonistic phrasing. There are better ways to get your point across.
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Maybe the ACT post Contra Kavanaugh on Fidism? Or SCC The Pyramid and the Garden?
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