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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   24825 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

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Could American social progressivism be (in part) an intelligence operation to create “defense-in-depth” against America’s weak points, akin to the cybersecurity or military strategy?

In cybersecurity, valuable assets are hyper-protected with multiple layers of security, so that if any layer fails the others may still hold. The idea being that the assets are so important to defend and attacks could come at any time (and with novel stratagem), so it is reasonable to over-defend it in many different ways. In the military usage, layers of physical defense are established so that one may retreat into another defense upon an assault, ensuring reduced losses and longer periods of defending. Another somewhat ancillary idea is “fencing the Torah” in Judaism. It is so important not to violate a Torah prohibition that “fences” are established to make even the chance violation impossible. Eg, the the rule to not even pick up a tool lest you accidentally use it which would violate the sabbath prohibition.

America’s weak point is clearly potential civic disunity which could result in balkanization along racial, religious, or cultural lines. In order to hyper-defend from that risk, you implement a social operation involving defense-in-depth where the majority constituents must necessarily deny their own identity and engage in ritual ”sacrifices” upon the altar of plurality (from Trayvon to George Floyd). This explains even the whitification of Asians: once they become significant enough to possibly lead to Balkan problems, you enforce the same depotentiation. Notably, it is not enough of a social defense to merely pledge allegiance to plurality, as that hardly changes someone’s psychology. You must actually make it a social ideal so that it is promoted and normalized especially among the young potential rebels, and that is in fact what we see — those most at risk for any potential rebellion are coerced into a Kaczynskian “system’s neatest trick” procedure where their very rebellion helps to solidify state security. Why allow “Antifa” their own zone in Portland? Because when they are doing that they are doing nothing serious. Along the same lines, see how valuable transgenders have been as a layer of defense: millions of conservatives hours are spent arguing against something that has a surprising level of state support, and millions of progressive hours are spent defending something that is historically and intuitively off-putting. Those are hours that are not spent on something actually valuable; transgender stuff is simply the most outer layer of defense against a possible Balkan threat, and if conservatives win there’s nothing valuable lost from a state security perspective.

As outlandish as it seems, I think this is possible. It would be par for the course for how intel agencies behaved historically — well before they had enormous databases of information and AI to help them decide state hyper-protection. We could imagine the team of hundreds of some thousands employed toward this objective at some intel agency: “how do we protect against the most cataclysmic threat for America?” They look at the cost and benefit with history in mind, with WWII’s staggering death toll and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in mind.

America’s weak point is clearly potential civic disunity which could result in balkanization along racial, religious, or cultural lines. In order to hyper-defend from that risk, you implement a social operation involving defense-in-depth where the majority constituents must necessarily deny their own identity and engage in ritual ”sacrifices” upon the altar of plurality (from Trayvon to George Floyd). This explains even the whitification of Asians: once they become significant enough to possibly lead to Balkan problems, you enforce the same depotentiation. Notably, it is not enough of a social defense to merely pledge allegiance to plurality, as that hardly changes someone’s psychology. You must actually make it a social ideal so that it is promoted and normalized especially among the young potential rebels, and that is in fact what we see — those most at risk for any potential rebellion are coerced into a Kaczynskian “system’s neatest trick” procedure where their very rebellion helps to solidify state security.

This seems more likely to create problems of civic disunity than to serve as a defence against them, at least as currently implemented.

“There’s no realistic white nationalist movement in the country” could very well be due to the propaganda against it for more than a decade. In other words, it is as much evidence against my point as for my point. The “unite the right” event was catastrophized in the media specifically to destroy the threat of similar rallies; Nick Fuentes was de-person’d, forbidden to fly and having his bank accounts cancelled, not to mention banned by all social media giants. Literally, anti white nationalism was a major news plot point for years during the beginnings of Trump admin.

If US intelligence was most focused on strengthening America's stability, wouldn't they try to shore up American identity? Wouldn't they want colorblind patriotism, the supporting the troops ethos? You want to smooth over divisions, you don't want to create even controlled conflicts. You'd try to subvert and suppress dangerous groups of course but you wouldn't try to suppress the majority's white identity, you try to annex it into American identity.

Look at what Russia does. Rally around the flag, enemies all around us, we're all Russians regardless of race/creed, sacred duty to the motherland... They suppress the liberal/trans/separatist minority rather than the majority.

Here's an interesting article that perhaps deserves a post of its own. There are many things to say about it ("Gorbachev and Yeltsin ruined ice cream, the cowards.") but you get the sense that the state machinery is trying to keep the country together, promoting unity rather than division: https://harpers.org/archive/2024/01/behind-the-new-iron-curtain/

That's not what the US is doing. They're playing the patronage/suppression game, not the national unity game. 'We need more blacks in the Air Force, quotas everywhere, need to fight white supremacy and racism'. Those Stand Down days in the US military to counter extremism, internal conflict over things like migration and national identity.

Wokeness really isn’t very far from what Russia and China do for their minorities; both practice affirmative action openly or less openly. These countries’ governments are both officially anti-racist. Chinese rightists complain online about privileges granted to non-Han minorities; Russian ones complain online about advantages of Central Asians or Muslims replacing whites in Moscow and so on. Russia has emphasized national unity since the start of the Ukraine War, but it doesn’t seem to me more radical than the unity the US had in support of ‘the troops’ after 9/11. The US military’s internal rationale for affirmative action is domestic social unity, that’s why the Supreme Court gave them an explicit carve-out in the affirmative action ban last year.

Non-Han minorities get certain privileges but if they step out of line they'll be in a world of pain. Imagine if a minority group in China pulled an LA riot or a Floyd in response to police brutality, let alone a CHAZ. They'd be whisked away, never to be seen again. The police would launch an orgy of repression and re-education. China is super into historical grievance narratives, patriotism and Chinese nationalism (as opposed to Han nationalism or multiculturalism). The only times they're allowed to riot is when there's some incident with the US, the Belgrade embassy bombing for instance. Then they have the police put the kid gloves on and subtly stoke the fires, while trying to keep things under control.

Imagine if the top earning film at the US box office was 'Saving Private Ryan' turned up to 11 with an ending caption saying 'the eternal glory of the US Army shall be remembered forever and ever, the brave martyrs live forever in our hearts'. That's the Battle at Lake Changjin, that's real, intense nationalism. The top grossing film in America is Star Wars VII, a woke remaster of the original Star Wars.

If Central Asians desecrate Russian symbols, they and their families are expelled. Russia takes national pride very seriously, to a quasi-religious level. There's a lot of intense patriotism and nationalism, people (Strelkov and co) who'll go volunteer to start a tough war in support of their national beliefs.

https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-uzbek-boys-expelled-eternal-flame/32726911.html

Russia and China - civic nationalism. USA and West - multiculturalism and wokeness.

The only times they're allowed to riot is when there's some incident with the US, the Belgrade embassy bombing for instance. Then they have the police put the kid gloves on and subtly stoke the fires, while trying to keep things under control.

To be fair, I think that Floyd was much more similar to this than you'd first think. It was completely supported by the mainstream media and institutions.

The power balance in the West is different from that of China; there isn't a single Politburo, the media and institutions are power centers in their own right. But there's still a group of people you can more or less draw a circle around and say, these people are the people who actually decide what happens. And those people supported Floyd, even not-so-subtly stoked it, and if they hadn't it would've never happened.

Non-Han minorities get certain privileges but if they step out of line they'll be in a world of pain.

Non-Han minorities have received privileges that American leftists could never dream of. Imagine if the left restricted white parents to one child while allowing black and brown people to have unlimited children. The CHAZ and Star Wars are nothing compared to that.

Imagine if the top earning film at the US box office was 'Saving Private Ryan' turned up to 11 with an ending caption saying 'the eternal glory of the US Army shall be remembered forever and ever, the brave martyrs live forever in our hearts'. That's the Battle at Lake Changjin, that's real, intense nationalism. The top grossing film in America is Star Wars VII, a woke remaster of the original Star Wars.

Have you watched ‘Masters of the Air’ (2024)? It’s the successor show to Band of Brothers, it’s very patriotic and features a majority white male cast. I don’t think the occasional line about ‘But Black People Were Still Oppressed’ changes that. A rare negative review in Ars Technica said:

The only thing allowed here is wall-to-wall jingoistic patriotism—the kind where there's no room for anything except God, the United States of America, and bombing the crap out of the enemy.

Now, you can argue that no Chinese outlet would publish that about Battle at Lake Changjin, but it’s not clear that that’s really something negative about the US in comparison.

China is indeed doing things to minorities that American leftists could never dream of. Even allowing for US propaganda, they are not very tolerant.

In addition to the arbitrary detention of Uyghurs in state-sponsored camps, government policies have included forced labor,[5][6] suppression of Uyghur religious practices,[7] political indoctrination,[8] forced sterilization,[9] forced contraception,[10][11] and forced abortion.[12][13] Experts estimate that, since 2017, some sixteen thousand mosques have been razed or damaged,[2] and hundreds of thousands of children have been forcibly separated from their parents and sent to boarding schools.[14][15] Chinese government statistics reported that from 2015 to 2018, birth rates in the mostly Uyghur regions of Hotan and Kashgar fell by more than 60%.[9] In the same period, the birth rate of the whole country decreased by 9.69%.

Or consider what they've done in Tibet. That is not woke behaviour! They offer the carrot and the stick - if your ethnic group doesn't do what they want, they'll ensure you regret it. You had better be Chinese first, second and third, Tibetan fourth. It's very different to wokeness which is all carrot and no stick, for minorities at least. Wokeness undermines and reinterprets what it means to be American, Christopher Columbus Day or Thanksgiving are 'controversial'. It's thoroughly different to Chinese nationalism.

I'm not saying it's great to be super-nationalist like China but a certain level of nationalism is preferable for stability in a time of uncertainty.

It's very far. Both Russian and Chinese interpretation of multiculturalism is "better restaurants plus folk song and dance ensembles". Unless you're in one of the few ethnic republics that can get away with that, you won't be discriminated against for being too Russian, and as far as I know, China doesn't allow that at all.

Do their military contractors have bizarre struggle sessions over Han / Russian privilege? Do their major corporations tell workers to be less Han / Russian?

If not then this is just cope.

Imagine if black people and Muslims in America were allowed to have 4 kids each but white people were only allowed to have 1 child each. That was literally state policy in China until recently. I don’t know how you can say that’s better than the US.

I could imagine it of there was a billion Americans, and it came with none of the self-flagellation. Sorry but there just is no comparison between the two approaches.

I don’t think you really mean that. Would you accept a permanent end to affirmative action, bans on any DEI, guaranteed meritocracy in public and private employment and harsh crackdowns on any racial identitarianism (white or black) in exchange for limits on the number of kids white people could have?

It is simply indisputable that China is more leftist about this kind of thing than the US. The specific flavor of anti-racism in America is largely unique to the Anglosphere, progressivism isn’t.

If the policy was time-limited like in China, sure.

It is simply indisputable that China is more leftist about this kind of thing than the US

We were talking about wokism, not leftism.

Also note how you completely dropped Russia from your argument.

I discuss it below, but it’s hard to quantify the extent to which Putin tolerates the extreme overrepresentation of various minority groups in organized crime in Russia proper. By contrast the modern FBI went after organized black gangs to the extent that the whole culture fractured and the drugs business is no longer even the main cause of internecine conflict in eg. the South Side.

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Exactly. The Chinese and Russian regimes rather markedly do not normalize ethnomasochism.

Ethnic self flagellation happens because progressives do not view normal whites as part of their tribe, hence denigrating white people and white supremacy does not diminish the interests of white progs. Gutting the promotions of white Royal Air Force and forcing new hires to be uninterested and unqualified blacks stationed in some isolated northern airbase has zero impact on a Ministry of Defense desk jockey in London whose tribe is oxbridge peers in the city. The institutional capture by progressives to advance value negative minorities is to crush the vile bad whites, and at no level do these progressives view themselves as vulnerable because the championed classes can only survive under their stewardship.

This is the big difference between western style progressive championing of minorities and Russian/Chinese style 'wokeness'. The Russians and Chinese have no internal enemy they need to weaponize a minority against, so they can make a pretense of largesse towards compliant minorities. Moreover these are neither market dominant minorities whose presence upends the socioeconomic dynamic nor violent separatists who need to be clamped down on. Let the minorities have their food and costumes so long as they do not cause violence or upend the dominant order; the Hui have always had minimal trouble compared to the Uighur or the Yunnans for the Chinese, as the Buryats have been ignored compared to the Tajiks for Russia.

pretense of largesse towards compliant minorities.

Pretense? Tuvans and Chechens both seem very favoured, moreso than ethnic russians.

The current 'favored minority' position seems a function of the deft political power employed by Shiogu and the necessity of Kadyrov as a strongman to keep Chechnya in line. Bribes siphoned by Shoigu and paid to Kadyrov are not necessarily indicative of any Muscovite high opinion of those peoples and cultures detached from their political leaders. There has been little wealth flowing downwards to the tuvans or chechens from Moscow, and doubtless the utility of Shoigu and Kadyrov in keeping those populations docile is part of their value proposition to the state.

How about the extreme amounts of organized crime by various non-ethnic-Russians that the Kremlin largely tolerates and which de facto amounts to huge wealth transfers to these minorities? Sure, there aren’t many state handouts (although there are some), but that isn’t the only thing that serves that effect.

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akin to the cybersecurity or military strategy

"Defense in Depth" means something very different in the cyber versus the traditional military context.

It's a real shame that the term was re-used but then also redefined. So, unfortunately, I think your analysis is confused and self-contradictory not because of a failure of your personal construction, but because the terms and the concepts underlying them can't be swapped out as easily as you may have assumed.

Directly answering your intro question - hard no. Conspiracy theories about the all-powerfulness of the amorphous "intel" cabal of the USA I always dismiss out of hand because the axiomatic assumption underpinning it is that they're all powerful. "Could an all powerful entity do ... stuff!?" Yes, yes it could.

The sad fact of the matter is that the really cooky progressive stuff is the result of a Long March through the institutions paired with the kind of narcissism that can only result from the most prosperous generation of all time (boomers) failing to introduce their children (millennials) to reality. If you grow up richer than all other humans and never leave the suburban never-never land (even into college), tinker belle starts talking about polyamory, and then everyone starts calling your green tights gay, then, yeah, maybe cheering for the Islamic Death Cult helps you work through those emotions.

Phrased differently; social progressivism is make believe that has survived as a political ideology only briefly. Remember, 10 years ago we were in lame duck Obama years and looking at an at the time probable Bush-Clinton 2: Electric Boogaloo contest in 2016. Then the Orange rolled down the escalator and changed the game. 10 years in politics / social ideologies isn't nothing, but it isn't that long. The hard left is dying quickly before our eyes (big caveat here: the overton window has been shifted so much that the non-hard left is still pretty nuts.)

MAGA types are going to take multiple victory laps as the hard left continues to decline, but they've problems of their own. If the hard left is political make believe, the hard right is nihilistic fatalism. We had Walt Bismarck around these parts not too long along. Reading his substack is both worth it and difficult. Worth it in that a lot of his highlighted problems are very real and very well analyzed. Difficult because a lot of the solutions are heavily caveated "...but, even still, I don't think society is recoverable."

Looking in the mirror, earlier this week or last week, I got called out for unintentionally recommending a Benedict Option. That one made me think. Nihilism and fatalism aren't self-sustaining ideologies for obvious reasons. Worse, they don't actually cultivate pro-social and pro-growth behavior in a constituency. I saw a funny thing during the heart of the pandemic; my progressive friends were barricaded in doors wearing their CBRN costumes during zoom meetings - they mostly got a little fat, posted on Twitter more, and got good at home brewing anxiety. My MAGA friends stayed outside, went to spring break --- and got constantly shitfaced without a second thought. They definitely "owned the libs" at their end of the world party. And now, even those who think Trump: Deuces Wild is inevitably going to premier in November walk around very much like a doomsday cult that had their D-Day come and go without the rapture and are now feeling empty, fearful, and unprepared.

And none of this is the real threat to America.

Because that's China.

I’m gonna sort of disagree on the causes, and I think it’s a misunderstanding of how powerful things like culture and education are. I don’t think it’s a cabal deliberately trying to create divisions, but I do think the cathedral is.

Just to take your Islam example. The cathedral wants them accepted because they need worker drones and Muslim immigrants are it. Having other people rag on them for being different is bad for business and national Stability. There’s a lot of ways to go about making Islam less dangerous-seeeming. Put Muslims on TV as good people, or victims. Don’t educate people on what the religion is really like, don’t teach people about the Hadiths especially the violent ones. And add in the culture memes of diversity and inclusion and religion not being a serious thing, and you’ve got kids who think they can simply try out Islam.

I don’t necessarily agree that the right is nihilistic. I think the left has some of those tendencies, but not really on the right. The Benedict Option isn’t nihilistic in the least, in fact the main conceit of the BO is exactly that the white Christian community is worth sacrificing to save. A nihilist would look at a culture like ours not aligned with the good life and not care about it. They wouldn’t care if John decides to become Jill because it doesn’t matter, it’s another life choice in a sea of other unimportant life choices. Nihilism means nothing matter so do what you want to do.

No, I think if someone was acting according to your intent it would be more akin to beating a kid to the point of hospitalisation to 'toughen him up'. American cultural resilience is not anti-fragile.

I think this is too much 5D chess even for the American intelligence community.

Far more plausible is that they popularized this to contain internal threats (people typically point to Occupy and the uptick of media led racial discourse at a time of economic turmoil) and that it escaped from their grasp, either through some healthy encouragement from external threats or on its own.

This doesn't pass any kind of parsimony, does it?

Do you need to posit a benevolent(?) conspiracy to explain hyper-polarisation in American life? Surely not.

And surely where we would expect to see evidence of any such covert action, we don't. A deliberate act of social engineering on the scale of the entire US would require large numbers of people and large, coordinated programmes that we don't see. Meanwhile, if we do look for causes of progressive attitudes to race, it seems to me like we see large efforts put forth by non-state actors, for reasons that are plausible on their own independent of any 'defense-in-depth' plan.

I think it's plausible that American polarisation over unimportant or superficial issues might function to obstruct deeper polarisation, and that through this process real or successful revolt becomes less likely. But if so, it seems more likely that this is a happy accident, rather than something planned for an implemented by an agency.

I don't see it.

America’s weak point is clearly potential civic disunity which could result in balkanization along racial, religious, or cultural lines.

You can claim that Social Justice Progressivism aims to kit racial and ethnic cultural fault lines in society, perhaps.

However, the main fault lines I see today in the US are not Black vs White or New Immigrant Culture vs Traditional US Culture, but rural vs urban and SJP vs MAGA. If any religions are involved in fault lines, it is Christianity! (Notably, rich vs poor is not a big rift.)

While I can not disprove that Hari Seldon looked at the civil rights movement in the 1970s and saw that despite the racial barriers slowly falling, the end result would paradoxically be an increase in racial tensions, and set up SJP as a way to avoid a race war, I find this highly unlikely.

I think the roots of SJP in the civil rights movement started with relatable, noble goals and had the bad luck to mostly achieve their goals. So they did what any movement would do and picked further goals. Some, like gay rights, were again noble enough. Some, like insisting on equality of outcomes instead of color-blindness were IMHO harmful, some were mostly silly empty symbolism (like Confederate statues -- if you have the majority to blow them up, whatever, but this is not a decisive battle for the future of the US in any case.).

I think the roots of SJP in the civil rights movement started with relatable, noble goals and had the bad luck to mostly achieve their goals. So they did what any movement would do and picked further goals. Some, like gay rights, were again noble enough. Some, like insisting on equality of outcomes instead of color-blindness were IMHO harmful, some were mostly silly empty symbolism (like Confederate statues -- if you have the majority to blow them up, whatever, but this is not a decisive battle for the future of the US in any case.).

The civil rights movement was after equality of outcome from the start. Most of the things one finds bad about modern black identity politics existed there. If anything, the original movement was more violent against white people.

You could argue that parts of the broader society that helped the movement on some areas might have had more limited goals, or that they had then more so legitimate grievances too, but the reality is the core movement and a figure like MLK would be all in favor of the modern woke types, and he would be insinuating that opposition as he did as the time with contemporary republicans are nazis, racists, etc. It simply wasn't a movement with just limited goals.

No.

The most important parts of our army have dropped out of the army. Masculine males often southern no longer feel they fit in with the military.

Racial resentment is higher now.

A significant portion of the right (and disproportionately our best fighting men) now have a great deal of fondness for Putin or Xi. A masculine Chinese or Russian ruler doesn’t sound that bad to them versus being an adrogenous they/them with no real purpose in society.

On Balkanization - moreso in Europe but you did not have to worry about balkanization when a Swede was a Swede and you didn’t invite in sub Saharan blacks or Syrian immigrants. In the U.S. I think we have fewer big cultural issues with our immigrants coming from the South but they aren’t going to be our sophisticated fighting class.

Blacks in America have never posed a political problem. They are lower class. They have never been a key part of our fighting class. If they rose up against white well violent repression would not be hard.

On the left wokeism and oppressor-oppressed has literally caused a not that small group of Americans to identify with Hamas and take the side of our enemies.

In short if wokeism came from the intelligence community it’s the worst idea they have ever had.

The lefts concern that Putin in 2016 infiltrated our social media to radicalize America against itself plus China weapononizing wokeism on Tic-Tock is far more logical. America is far more Balkanized today than it was in 2008.

identify with Hamas and take the side of our enemies

There are lots of groups that have a dim view of Hamas' enemy. In the US I've only seen those on the left taking the side of Hamas. Are there groups on the right also aligning with Hamas? On the right I see more "let your enemies fight".

I'll offer a kind-of alternative hypothesis: wokeness exists to weaponize racial resentment against any group which defects in the approaching American economic crisis. The obvious drawback is the development of a high-ingroup-preference group identity in the targeted group, which explains why it was deployed against whites for field testing- you can rely on liberal and conservative whites to attack each other even if they're sharing a foxhole, rather than circle the wagons. Only time will tell if red tribe whites will develop a sufficient group identity to escape that trap and advocate for the ingroup.

I agree that trans qua trans is not the reason that the government promotes it so hard; I think in widespread civil conflict the pro-federal side will not care very much about some subset of its allies shooting transgenders out of hand, or otherwise learning from other cultures- such as Islamic ones- on the issue. But I don't think the conservative reaction is the point, unless it's some kind of 5d chess move to prevent ingroup orienting among conservative whites by getting them to argue about something else instead. I think trans is a distraction from deeper systemic issues.

It's true that a prolonged economic crisis leading to balkanization or pervasive civil strife is the main threat to the current world order; the USA is still #1, and Russia and China have demographic and economic issues preventing them from being true world hegemons, to say nothing of the problems faced by, like, India. But I think wokeness is intended as a weapon to be used against groups that are perceived as rebelling, not as a means of keeping them in line.

There is no approaching economic crisis. The USA is doing better than every single country in the world economically. Why do you say this like is is a default belief we should all accept. What proof do you have?

But I don't think the conservative reaction is the point

The government decided to redefine the social contract in a way that allows it to attack more and more people and institutions as "transphobic" in a way that is basically unavoidable. Because of the moralizing, it was able to do this shockingly fast and with relatively little pushback, even according to activists themselves.

I mean, that sounds enough like a conspiracy theory to me! Not sure why we need to posit some additional indirect play or benefit.

Why allow “Antifa” their own zone in Portland? Because when they are doing that they are doing nothing serious.

These sort of reverse arguments are easy to generate (e.g. "welfare is actually bad for the recipients because they become dependent on it", "affirmative action is bad for Black people because people assume they're diversity hires", etc), so barring any actual evidence, it's hard to take any specific example seriously.

America’s weak point is clearly potential civic disunity which could result in balkanization along racial, religious, or cultural lines.

Similarly, it seems extremely weird to argue that elevating racial groups in discourse is supposed to prevent civic disunity along racial lines. When there is a clear direct relationship in one direction and an alleged indirect relationship in the other, I take the direct relationship far more seriously.

Every example you posed can actually be considered thoughtfully (“does affirmative action harm black people? In what capacity? Can it both harm and help different cohorts of black people?”). I think it’s a poor cognitive choice to opt out of thinking about questions which lack easy empirical data. This would mean that you can’t think about the most powerful agencies in America (or Russia), as they are necessarily clandestine. “Reverse arguments” is a fictitious category which cannot be uniformly swept aside. For this question, the evidence consists in thinking: do you want your leftist political agitators engaging in something that is actually problematic to state security (see anything from Italian anarchists, the IRA, the weather underground, to that one highly effective anti-meat org in the UK), or do you want them to instead embarrass themselves in a couple city blocks where agencies can collect identifiable data and where you always have the option to arrest them? “CHAZ” never had any chance of getting out of hand because what they were doing was clearly illegal. Rather than immediately arresting them, you can lure potential rebels into doing nothing serious while collecting data on everyone who showed up. (Remember how the FBI for some reason had drone footage of Rittenhouse?)

it seems extremely weird to argue that elevating racial groups in discourse is supposed to prevent civic disunity along racial lines

The propaganda which has been fully imbibed by the PMC class is not that they were elevated, right? What the PMC exemplar believes is that some racial wrong was rectified and that white solidarity is wrong. This created a fear about group solidarity among whites (right now the only group that can actually threaten a risk of balkanization). Various black advocacy groups are appeased, though it’s not like black people can be an organized threat to the state (especially with gang culture and consumerism completely depotentiating them). What the BLM et al stuff effected is a class of high achieving young people who fear having an identity apart from harmless anti-cultural things (LGBeTc) and consumerism.

For this question, the evidence consists in thinking: do you want your leftist political agitators engaging in something that is actually problematic to state security (see anything from Italian anarchists, the IRA, the weather underground, to that one highly effective anti-meat org in the UK), or do you want them to instead embarrass themselves in a couple city blocks where agencies can collect identifiable data and where you always have the option to arrest them? “CHAZ” never had any chance of getting out of hand because what they were doing was clearly illegal. Rather than immediately arresting them, you can lure potential rebels into doing nothing serious while collecting data on everyone who showed up.

Isn't this premised on the idea that the people who were involved in CHAZ would have, had they not been involved in CHAZ, become real security threats?

Is that plausible?

At least two alternative possibilities spring to mind. Firstly, the kind of people who engage in street circus nonsense like CHAZ are not in fact the same sort of people who are likely to become real threats, like the early Bolsheviks. They're both radicals, in a sense, but they have very different strategies and interests. If these groups are different, then CHAZ might actually decrease overall security by making governments and security agencies devote time to CHAZ, rather than serious threats. Secondly, it's also perfectly possible that the kind of people who engage in CHAZ would go on to become serious threats - CHAZ itself is a clown show, but the experience of engaging in radical action, even the ineffective sort, might prepare people for more effective action later.

In fact both those possibilities might be the case. If I were a genuine radical - if I were part of a modern Weather Underground or something - I might look closely at CHAZ, identify the most competent or most radical people involved in it, and then aim to recruit them. Even if only the top 5% of CHAZ participants have real revolutionary potential, that's not nothing. A real radical might benefit from the existence of a large number of shallow, ineffective protests in order to skim off the top level of participants. For any organisation whose primary business is illegal, recruiting is a real challenge. Test beds like these protests seem useful.

Is that theory true? Is that what's actually happening?

No idea!

My point is that being able to imagine a situation in which X event benefits Y people does not constitute evidence that Y did X. It's not that easy to transmute theory into fact.

Interestingly the anti-semitism push last year was aimed at the black supremacists who were organizing the strongest 'everyone get organized and stop fucking up' push in the black community.

Like who?

Black Hebrew Israelites and 5% nation, most notably.

That's what I thought.

My thinking is they got caught up so easily because they're antisemitic (and can't/won't hide it) and b) no one is really worried about them: "we need to finally get organized" is just a cliche in these circles. It's actually even used by grifters now: Dr Umar Johnson has - allegedly - been building a woke black school forever and keeps complaining about how black people want to talk and not step up and donate.

There are prominent black people organizing or lobbying. Presumably you'd go after them first. But most aren't going to start on a rant about being the real Jews when pushing the NFL.

So the idea is that the powers behind the throne use woke discourse to provide circuses to prevent an actual threat to their dominance of American life?

All reports are that the intel agencies aren't insulated from woke discourse and the culture war, so it doesn't particularly work that they float it to protect themselves from attack.

Not to prevent a threat to the agency but to prevent a threat to American security and territorial integrity.

If so, it's their biggest failure ever; there's a serious possibility of civil war, and even if unrealised that threat is contributing to other threats such as a potential WWIII over Taiwan.

a serious possibility of civil war

America has shockingly little threat of civil unrest for a 333 million strong country that is globally hegemonic. It’s our endless catastrophizing against potential unrest (an example of hyper-defense) which leads to our civic equanimity. When some people made vague gestures toward the possibility of legitimate civil unrest on January 6th, which was never actually a threat, their punishments and social shame were maximal simply as a way to deter even future gesturing.

It would take a fairly-major spark, yes. Here are some possible sparks big enough:

  • hard hit on debt ceiling, police and military defunded for long enough that they desert from lack of pay
  • a true repeat of Bush v. Gore without a concession and with a hated candidate winning (Jan 6 was as mild as it was because Trump was clearly bananas to the point that the Republican machine didn't back him, and because Joe Biden was a milquetoast candidate who didn't (yet) have the hatedom that Trump himself and almost every other Democrat did)
  • open defiance of SCOTUS by the executive, or possibly court-packing.

None of these is remotely a sure thing, but it's hard to rule any of them out either. Hence, serious possibility.

(And there's at least one other I know of.)

Frankly the USA lacks a clean racial/cultural split across demarcated geographies to let a proper civil war play out. Gretchen Whitmer isn't rallying Dutch-German Americans in the Midwest to take up arms against the New Englanders of Hochul. There are too few concentrated natural resources or geographies worth fighting over in the USA because it is so large. The most likely failure point will be race based riots collapsing a major metropolitan area totally combined with a refusal by a governor to send in the national guard or said national guard rebelling. Think full riots of BLM and Rodney King with 0 law enforcement for a few weeks. A spontaneous violent mob horizontally coordinated along racial lines for ease of identification just to wreck shit. Less armed factions battling street by street Stalingrad style, more Harlem Riots with more destruction.

Civil wars really require geographically consolidated factions free of any local element capable of resistance. This is especially easy when the state institutions are token rebrandings of existing tribal or ethnic power structures. When the state falls, the militias simply swap out their patches and return to their old ways.

A spontaneous violent mob horizontally coordinated along racial lines for ease of identification just to wreck shit. Less armed factions battling street by street Stalingrad style, more Harlem Riots with more destruction.

I think that describes the Rwandan genocide pretty well, too- if perhaps a very extreme example.

Civil wars really require geographically consolidated factions free of any local element capable of resistance.

Of course, the problem here (for the belligerents) is that defense against even a consolidated faction is really one-sided. 3 foot soldiers dead on national TV was enough to end BLM; how much worse for turbo-BLM in a free-fire zone? Unless the National Guard is defending them, but "government organization decked out in military gear shooting civilians" is the definition of civil war anyway.

3 foot soldiers dead on national TV was enough to end BLM; how much worse for turbo-BLM in a free-fire zone?

BLM ended because the godzilla threshold for sending in the troops to quash rioters was breached. The riots could definitely have descended into haiti-level extortion rackets if the police never came in.

I don't doubt that cowardly looters would scatter at the first few dead, and reprisal raids conducted by amateurs are easily defended as you state. However defense of territory is never easy with multiple entry vectors, and territory can never be held in anarchic situations. A regression to defensible strongpoints with the rest being grey zones is the likely path for any conflict state with insufficient bodies and weapons to wage permanent war.

Today is Eurovision! For you Americans this is like the Super Bowl, only with power ballads, ABBA nostalgia, residuals of nationalism and flamboyant glittery gayness. The European song contest is often watched ironically in a party setting with family or friends, we print out sheets of the participants and give them points and have a competition who can make the most snarky comment, but deep down under the snark, irony and sarcasm we love it!

This year it is sadly very very political, because of the participation of Israel. The songs name was named „October rain“ but had to be changed, together with lyrics, to remove references of the Hamas attack. So there isn’t plausible deniability that it is an unpolitical love song.

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/eurovision-israel-eden-golan-protests-gaza-palestine-072826896.html

He said the majority of the crowd were booing and shouting 'free Palestine' with very few people cheering for her. Mina said: "I could see people arguing in the standing section, and people were shouting at others that were booing to shut up."

For television the sound engineers did amplify applause and mute the boos which also gives a nice discussion about truth and Orwell etc. It will be very interesting what sound from the audience will be broadcast at the final show today.

Surprisingly (or not) Israel doesn’t have only haters, their betting odds improved massively, they actually have a chance to win the contest!

https://twitter.com/DrEliDavid/status/1788690154133012637

Italian TV accidentally revealed their televoting percentages during tonight's #Eurovision semi-final, according to which the Israeli 🇮🇱 song is leading by 40%, with a huge margin ahead of all others.

It's the super bowl if only the people of soy and normies watched it. The kind of underclass trash that watched Big Brother and Jersey Shore. Eurovision is extremely gay and unrepresentative.

Please avoid this kind of snarling at the groups you don’t like.

For television the sound engineers did amplify applause and mute the boos which also gives a nice discussion about truth and Orwell etc. It will be very interesting what sound from the audience will be broadcast at the final show today.

From what I recall there was no notable booing during Israel's performance, but lots while the head of the EBU was on screen. I'm guessing they assumed there would be booing for the Israeli entry and planned accordingly, but didn't think that the audience would boo the inoffensive bureaucrat who's technically in charge.

We heard booing for both.

Representing Ireland is a (sigh) non-binary singer-songwriter calling herself* (sigh) Bambie Thug. Her decision to participate was controversial, with many figures in Ireland's music scene likening her to a scab worker for not honouring the Eurovision boycott in protest of Israel's participation. She has given multiple interviews defending herself and insisting that she is acting in accordance with her values. I believe I read somewhere that she claimed she was originally planning to wear a dress with the word "ceasefire" or something to that effect emblazoned on it in ogham (am ancient Irish script) but the Eurovision people made her wear something else.

*Don't care.

Bambie Thug

acting in accordance with her values

Would that be spermjacking you at gunpoint?

I get the "gunpoint" part, but why "spermjacking"? Is there a "Bambie" among the various women who've impregnated themselves with stolen semen, or something?

Lol

Don't do this.

I mean, okay, but I was just laughing at that guy's joke. Is it against the rules to say "ha ha, your joke was funny"?

Yes. It's not because we hate humor. It's because threads full of people saying "Lol" and "This" are annoying, so we discourage it.

Understood.

She's said that she thought Isreal should be excluded if they're excluding Russia.

This made me suspicious about the sources of historical anti-witch propaganda.

Do we know how unified the witch communities position on Isreal / Zionism is?

Is it common for Eurovision to consistently have so many LGBT performers? I clicked on a few participating countries' performers and all but one seemed to be in that category. I get that the whole thing is pretty gay but even taking that into account it seemed a bit unusual.

Her decision to participate was controversial, with many figures in Ireland's music scene likening her to a scab worker for not honouring the Eurovision boycott in protest of Israel's participation. She has given multiple interviews defending herself and insisting that she is acting in accordance with her values.

What exactly is it with Ireland and Israel? I know Israel's not exactly popular these days but I feel over half of the public statements I see denouncing them come out of ROI. I definitely haven't heard of any other national contestant having to defend their choice to attend the competition based on Israel being there.

Is there a meaningful undercurrent of anti-semitism in Irish society (yes I know anti-semitism isn't definitionally the same as Israelophobia, but they tend to be pretty correlated)? It's not as if there are a lot of Muslims there. Or is it mostly performative political progressivism, like their cousins in Scotland?

What exactly is it with Ireland and Israel?

Brendan O'Neill has an interesting write-up today about Bambie Thug and the historical links between Ireland and Israel.

Maybe they're still salty over Isreal's use of fraudulent Irish passports / identities for their intelligence agencies wet work.

This is the first I've heard of it, do you have a source?

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/israeli-official-expelled-over-use-of-fake-passports-1.678818

https://m.independent.ie/irish-news/israel-insists-it-has-no-case-to-answer-over-fake-passports/26634905.html

https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-20424935.html

I was living in Ireland for this. It was well reported but didn't really persist.

Dead link.

Fixed

Thanks a lot.

Is it common for Eurovision to consistently have so many LGBT performers?

When I was a kid, my memory is that the western European entrants tended to be knowingly, overwhelmingly camp (over-the-top dance-pop songs, garish stage production etc.), while the eastern European entrants tended to be more serious and subdued (mid-tempo ballads accentuated with traditional instrumentation). The audience for Eurovision has always been as gay as they come, but I think it's only within the last decade that many European countries have started consciously leaning into this by submitting performers with the intent of appealing to gay audiences i.e. performers who are themselves LGBT.

What exactly is it with Ireland and Israel?

As a country which got its independence in the last century, the Irish carry around a residual postcolonial sentiment and (rightly or wrongly) see the struggle for Palestinian statehood as analogous to the battle for Irish independence. It may be "performative" in some sense, but the Irish support for the Palestinian cause predates the modern progressive/woke movement by decades e.g. when I was in primary school, every Easter we'd raise funds for the charity Trócaire, who even at the time were outspoken in their support for Palestine. Even many social conservatives are sympathetic to the cause: my mum often tells the story of her father (a devout Catholic who was opposed to the legalisation of divorce, never mind abortion) visiting Israel in the early 2000s and describing how appalled he was by the security checks Palestinians were made to go through on entrance to the state. The Provisional IRA (active in both north and south from the 60s to the late 90s) were in direct contact with the PLO, and even received training from them. I was in Belfast in January, and when driving through heavily Catholic districts of the city (e.g. the Falls road), I saw Palestinian flags hanging from every pub, which were conspicuous by their absence in the Protestant districts. A friend of mine joked that this makes Israel-Palestine one of the most effective shibboleths for gauging someone's religious background in Northern Ireland. Even prior to October 7th, it wasn't remotely uncommon to see Palestinian flags adorning the balconies of working-class council flats in Dublin (October 7th has "gentrified" the cause such that the middle-class houses who were displaying Ukrainian flags for the last two years have now added Palestinian flags, or even replaced them). I doubt it will surprise you to learn that I don't think the alleged parallels between Palestine-Israel and Ireland-Britain really hold water (e.g. to my mind, Hamas leaders have made it perfectly clear that their ultimate goal is the extermination of every Jew from the face of the earth; while I have nothing nice to say about the IRA, they did not have the stated goal of massacring every Briton), but that's neither here nor there.

I've never gotten the feeling that Ireland is an antisemitic country (the most famous novel to come out of the country has a sympathetic Jewish protagonist; there's been at least one prominent Jewish elected official in my lifetime; there was a Jewish guy in my class in secondary school who was far more popular than I was). If there had been scenes similar to London or Sydney over the last six months (e.g. rabbis getting harassed on the street, mass crowds chanting "gas the Jews"), I imagine I would have heard about it. There aren't many Muslims in Ireland, but thirty times as many Muslims as Jews according to the 2016 census, and the ratio is probably even more skewed now. Even the numerous pro-Palestine protests that I've seen seem to be principally attended by native white Irish people rather than first-generation Muslim immigrants.

I was in Belfast in January, and when driving through heavily Catholic districts of the city (e.g. the Falls road), I saw Palestinian flags hanging from every pub, which were conspicuous by their absence in the Protestant districts

In the more loyalist areas (I think more moderate Protestants are kind of embarrassed by all the flag-waving) you’ll also see Israeli flags being flown in response to this.

Thanks for the explanation. It doesn't sound a whole lot more rational than straight-up Jew-hatred, but I appreciate your thoroughness in writing out the history of this mode of thought.

Thanks for the explanation. It doesn't sound a whole lot more rational than straight-up Jew-hatred,

Really? Maybe rational isn't the right term, but I find it perfectly understandable that a nation formerly oppressed by a much larger one who had to fight for their independence through terrorist bombings would have a bit of empathy for a small nation in much the same situation. Hell, it was even the same people who both conquered Ireland and imposed Israel on the middle east.

Terrorist bombing campaigns were more a feature of the Troubles than of the War of Independence. The IRA of the era largely favoured guerrilla warfare tactics, in which their combatants (in plain clothes) would assassinate a police officer or British spy and then melt into the crowds. In the Wikipedia article about the War of Independence, the word "bomb" only appears five times, one of which in reference to a Loyalist bombing attack and another to a planned bombing campaign on the British mainland which was never actually carried out. I'm not aware of a single instance of the IRA using any of Hamas's more unsavoury tactics (e.g. child suicide bombers, planting bombs with the deliberate intention of causing mass civilian casualties) during the War of Independence.

would have a bit of empathy for a small nation in much the same situation

It doesn't seem understandable that anyone intelligent would empathise because it's not a remotely similar situation. Israel hasn't been in Gaza since 2005, so I'm not sure what sort of independence the Irish think Gaza/Hamas is fighting for. Unless the Irish feel that what they were struggling for during the 20th century is in some way analogous to the peculiar Palestinian notion of "independence" i.e. slaughtering all 9m inhabitants of Israel to "reclaim" a land no Gazan has any living memory of, in which case yeah I do think there's something quite wrong with the Irish national psyche.

Israel hasn't been in Gaza since 2005

Are you going to claim that Israel hasn't been exerting any kind of pressure or influence in Gaza since 2005? Even if you grant that absurd falsehood, the idea that their actions prior to 2005 couldn't have any kind of lingering impact is equally farcical.

slaughtering all 9m inhabitants of Israel to "reclaim" a land no Gazan has any living memory of,

If a people lacking a living memory of their land is enough to deny their claim to it, why should Israel exist at all given that none of the zionists and British people involved in creating it had any living memory of it either? Plenty of Irish people were born with no living memory of independence, but that doesn't actually justify anything the British did to them.

Are you going to claim that Israel hasn't been exerting any kind of pressure or influence in Gaza since 2005?

The influence they've exerted since 2005 has been driven primarily by Hamas who keep starting conflicts with them. Unless the Irish think that Israel should just sit there and not respond to rocket fire and massacres like 10/7?

Even if you grant that absurd falsehood, the idea that their actions prior to 2005 couldn't have any kind of lingering impact is equally farcical.

I'm also not sure what this is supposed to suggest. Would it be acceptable for the IRA to conduct acts of terrorism against the British due to the lingering impact of British colonialism in Ireland? Or for the Taliban to keep hijacking airplanes because of the lingering impact of the USA in Afghanistan? Why even grant any diplomatic concession to an adversary if your prior acts are apparantly justification for continued violence on their part?

If a people lacking a living memory of their land is enough to deny their claim to it, why should Israel exist at all given that none of the zionists and British people involved in creating it had any living memory of it either?

Israel should exist for the same reason any country should exist - the vast majority of people living there are born there and have no where else to live, and as such it's their home. The founding myth or original claim or whatever you want to call it is irrelevant. It wasn't justifiable for the original European settlers in the US to displace the native population, but no one sane is suggesting that descendents of the natives should be allowed to carry out mass rape and murder of Americans with European ancestry. Same argument applies to Australia, Canada, the Saxons displacing the Brits, the Vikings displacing lots of Saxons etc. etc.

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Eurovision is basically always two steps gayer than the rest of the society, so it's gayer than in the 90s, but it was already gay in the 90s by the 90s society standards. The gayness has never really been a huge hindrance to it being a huge popular spectacle, even many European conservatives are willing to tolerate gay and gender nonconforming stuff as long as the context is artistic expression.

The Irish are incredibly pro-palestine because they metaphorize it to their treatment by the British.

I’m not Irish, so take this with a grain of salt. But as I understand it, the Irish have always analogized their situation with respect to the British to the Palestinians’ with respect to the Israelis.

I did consider that but wanted to give the Irish the benefit of the doubt. I can only assume their education system is significantly more challenged than I thought.

It was a big part of IRA propaganda wrt Catholics in northern Ireland, not a surprise that it's a pervasive brainworm.

she is acting in accordance with her values

Considering I have a strong prior that the values of someone choosing to go by 'Bambie Thug' are to garner as much attention as possible at all times...

I've no problem with the gays and Eurovision is camp as Christmas and all the better for it. "Non-binary" is lame and cringe, and "Bambie Thug" seems to take herself awfully seriously for someone with such a silly stage name.

It's worth noting that the people's favourites were, in order:

  • Croatia (an energetic, rock-adjacent anthem written in broken English)
  • Israel (a standard Euro-ballad that was originally called 'October Rain', forced to change by the producers)
  • Ukraine (a vaguely ethnic, vaguely religious ballad with light effects very reminiscent of bombs)
  • France (a minimalist love song by an established French singer with an impressive voice)
  • Switzerland (the jury winner)

The juries came with a similar list, but put Switzerland much higher, and gave very few points to Israel. So either Israel's song was great, and the juries were biased against them, or it was meh and the public were biased in favour of them. Also the juries love a man in a skirt.

Other highlights include:

  • Finland - A comedy song by 'Windows95Guy' which involved him running around on stage wearing nothing from the waist down, his skin-tone pouch strategically blocked by scenery a la Austin powers.
  • Ireland - Another non-binary (a woman this time) seemingly trying to summon a literal demon.
  • UK - A gay guy sings while buff male backing dancers gyrate on eachother. Somehow not the gayest entry this year.
  • Audible booing every time the head of the European Broadcasting Union appeared on screen (for letting Israel compete).
  • Several coded anti-Israel statements from national representatives (ostensibly talking about peace and love).
  • Plus lots of 90s throwbacks, obscure ethnic instruments and young women in Beyonce-esque bodysuits.

Altogether a fairly standard year for Eurovision.

UK - A gay guy sings while buff male backing dancers gyrate on eachother

Nul Points from tele voting

As is tradition

Yes, but they deserved it this year.

I was shocked at how well Israel did in the popular vote. Not only was their song kinda boring and mid but politics is a huge part of the televote (and jury vote?) and I thought what with public support for Palestine, Israel would get a super low score in the televote.

Possible explanations:

  1. I have terrible taste in music, the song was actually a banger, but the juries hated it for reasons.
  2. Joe public's support for Palestine / antipathy for Israel is hugely overstated and in fact most people are still very sympathetic toward Israel after October 7. I am extremely online.
  3. People are not necessarily sympathetic to Israel, but are massively sick of constant pro-Palestine protests, and this was pushback.
  4. people felt sorry for 20-year-old Eden Golan constantly getting booed by the crowd.
  5. The BDS movement to boycott Eurovision was weirdly effective which trimmed off the pro-Palestinians, and consequently their votes.
  6. Mossad did it.

Thoughts, anyone?

70% of Europeans believe that there are too many migrants.

It could very well be that people dislike Muslims and Arabs so much that they'd favor Israel just because of the recent very loud and obnoxious activism on behalf of Palestine.

Cold be 3.

7 A lot of people care a lot about Israel-Palestine, but the pro-Israelis could dump all 20 of their votes onto Israel, while the pro-Palestinians in the audience couldn't coordinate.

8 A conspiracy by rich Jews to buy votes (1 euro per vote).

Personally, I think 1 and 7. I wouldn't describe the song as a "banger", but I put it at 4th, after Croatia, Armenia (I sometimes have quirky taste), and France.

Fair - there was an 'Israel' button but no single 'not Israel' button - the closest to that was Irish singer Bambie Thug who has been at the centre of some very juicy Israel/Palestine drama, tried to get the Israeli team banned and the producers prevented xirself from wearing a pro-Palestinian slogan during her performance, but I guess that was opaque to most viewers.

Armenia

Now, that was a banger!

6

Ireland - Another non-binary (a woman this time)

This made me laugh (sorry I haven't got anything more substantive to add).

Watching all that has convinced me 'Windows95Guy' is the ruritanian version of Bowling for Soup making fun of the superfluous gayness in everything else.

Windows95man has a decade of career as a DJ and a visual artist, he's not really a musician (well, unless you count his DJ career as being a "musician"). His selection was originally quite controversial in Finland as well, I think that it was an attempt to redo Käärijä's flamboyant personality from last year but forgetting that Cha Cha Cha was a legitimate banger by itself. Croatia's entry was Käärijä's true heir this year.

OK, even I have to admit that a luchador and what appears to be a washroom attendant rapping what seems to be Kpop but put through a filter to make it sound like the black tongue of mordor would have improved that video.

Israel's song was pretty good, all things considered, but the juries probably smelled an opportunity for shitshow of epic proportions to happen (riots in Malmö, riots in the hall itself, all the issues related to organizing the contest next year in Israel etc.) if it won and thus purposefully blocked it.

What's more American than inventing a bizarre new identity for yourself, especially a sexual identity, and proclaiming that to the world? I would have thought America's at the forefront of that.

I have long said that the eurovision song contest needs to be imported to the USA. We need an outlet for regionalist jingoism and dumb arguing and snark. We need something to get politics notionally out of the news. I need another opportunity to insistently call Taylor Swift 'Travis Kelce's girlfriend' because football is more notable.

The one American who I think would legitimately love Eurovision if he was, for some reason, visiting the event by himself, would be Donald Trump. I won't elaborate further.

Trump hosting or commenting on the Eurovision would be hysterically funny.

We've had terrible poofters folks, really terrible, Bidden's gay musicians can't even suck a cock properly, but my gay vocalists can. Really we have HUGE gays, the gayest.

Couldn't resist.

I wonder if it's partly because something like Eurovision requires a level of whimsy or self-deprecation that Americans can't manage?

I have a lot of fondness for Americans, but they do undoubtedly take themselves very seriously - perhaps too seriously for something like Eurovision. If I imagine an American Eurovision, America can do the excess and the glamour and the high-budget-yet-low-taste glitter of it all, but there has to be this subtle element of self-mockery in it, of realising that the whole thing is silly and yet embracing it anyway.

We do have the Miss America Pageant, but very few people really care about that anymore. I think with modern communications and moving around, there just isn't as much jingoism between US states anymore.

We might be more interested in an intra-North America competition. Doing it between countries really amps up the jingoism, like the Olympics and World Cup. It would be fun to see the US go up against Cuba in a song contest. Not sure how you'd make it fair, though...

We have a perfectly cromulent outlet for regionalist jingoism, college football. At least until the TV money got large enough to drive the bus with conference consolidation and transfers becoming a whole lot closer to free agency.

Even before it wasn't quite the same. Eurovision contestants are typically born and raised in that country. Sure they've often done some travelling but they have lifelong links.

College football players often didn't have any link to the college or state before they got the scholarship.

The transfer system is garbage. Really undermines college sports.

The strength of Eurovision is that you can know absolutely nothing about it, watch it, and still be thoroughly entertained. Eurovision has such wide appeal that people far outside Europe tune into it and watch it, sometimes fanatically.

American football is impenetrable to anyone who isn't already deep within it. American football even by football standards is an unusually unintuitive game. It doesn't spread beyond America, at all, and even in America there are wide swathes of the population who don't understand it.

American football is impenetrable to anyone who isn't already deep within it.

I very much disagree. American football isn't as intuitive to start watching as soccer, but you can learn enough about the rules of American football to start enjoying the game in like five minutes. The details of American football rules are extremely complex, but you don't need to know them to be a fan and indeed, out of all NFL fans I think probably only 10% or so actually understand those rules on a deep level. And I am not one of them, lol. All you really need to know to start understanding the game enough to enjoy it are: 1) 7 points touchdown / 3 points field goal, 2) you get 4 attempts to pick up 10 yards, if you succeed you get another 4 and if you don't the other team gets the ball, and 3) you can throw the ball forward no more than 1 time per play.

I myself went from knowing basically nothing about American football to being a fan in just a few minutes of watching. Actually, I don't think I even understood #3 above when I became a fan.

I guess just using myself as an ancdote, that explanation has not helped me. Pick up? Huh? Getting yards?

You throw the ball forward and if you can do that without the other team interfering, you get to move the starting line forward ten yards, and then repeat?

I remember finding it helpful to hear that American football is basically a turn-based strategy, unlike soccer or my native AFL, which are real-time strategy, so to speak. American football is a stop-start game, divided into clear, turn-like 'plays'. Maybe I should look up an explainer video with some diagrams of the game in play?

Sorry, "pick up" is slang for "to gain", "to acquire".

Yes, American football is essentially a hybrid turn-based/real-time game where each turn is a burst of real-time activity,.

In each turn, one team is on offense and starts with the ball. It is trying to either get the ball into the other team's endzone for 7 points or kick the ball through the other team's uprights for 3 points. The other team is on defense and is trying to stop that. If either the team on offense scores points or the team on defense manages to grab the ball away from the offense, the team on offense "loses possession" and then has to be the team on defense, and the other team that was on defense before becomes the team on offense.

A given team's offense and defense are usually made up of completely different players, but this is not enforced by the rules. It's just that in practice, no player is good enough at both offensive and defensive skills and has enough endurance to be worth playing both on offense and on defense.

The team on offense can throw the ball or run the ball as much as it wants, but with the extremely important caveat that it can only throw the ball forward once at most in any given turn ("down"). It can throw the ball backward as much as it wants, though teams almost never do this because statistically it is usually a bad idea.

When a team goes on offense, it generally starts at the part of the field where the other team lost possession when it was on offense. The team on offense then has four turns ("down"s) to move the ball, by throwing or running, at least ten yards closer to the other team's endzone than where it started. Each time it tries to move the ball, no matter what happens, then the next time it tries to move the ball, it starts at wherever the ball was stopped the last time it tried to move the ball. So let's say on the first down, the team on offense manages to move the ball 3 yards forward. Then on its second down, it starts 3 yards closer to that imaginary 10-yard line that it has to cross, the line that is 10 yards forward from where it first started the current set of 4 downs.

If the team on offense manages to move the ball past 10 yards from where it started on offense in those 4 turns ("down"s) it has, it then gets another 4 turns to move the ball 10 yards further from wherever the ball was last stopped. And if in those next chances it moves the ball more than 10 yards, then it gets yet another 4 turns... and so on... as long as the team on offense keeps managing to get at least 10 yards in 4 turns, it always gets 4 more turns, and in this way it can "march down the field" as they say and eventually get in the defending team's endzone. But if at any point the team on offense uses up 4 turns and fails to move the ball 10 yards forward in total between all the 4 turns, it gives us possession to the other team and then the other team goes on offense starting from where the offensive team had the ball.

At any point in a 4-turn cycle, the team on offense has the option of kicking the ball far towards the other team's endzone, hoping to run in the direction of the other team's endzone and stop whoever on the defending team catches the ball. Once the other team catches the ball, they become the team on offense. So the only reason for the team on offense to do this is if they feel that there is very little chance that they would be able to get 4 more downs by moving the ball past 10 yards and so it would be better to make sure that the team on defense gets the ball (and thus becomes the team on offense) close to their own endzone rather than at the place where the two teams are currently facing each other.

This is a lot of words but it can all start to make sense pretty quickly once one watches a game.

It is gaining in popularity in Germany. Also, the CFL does exist. It is also hard to overstate the popularity of football in the States.

Also in Finland.

Interesting—didn’t realize that. Thanks!

I had a flatmate in Scotland who was really into it. No idea if it's gaining wider popularity there, but that's my anecdote, fwiw.

Well yes, college ball is too much like the pros these days. Need something lighthearted and trashy, for to let the chainsmoking wives of America fly their regional prejudices proudly over the most trivial excuses.

Eurovision is like soccer: Americans don't care, Americans don't need to care, and that's all to the good.

Eurovision is one of the things I'm definitely going to edit out of my perception once doing so is possible. I'd like to wholly forget it exists.

As a "favorite sport", soccer is almost as popular as basketball or baseball among Americans now.

Yet another reason to eliminate immigration. Liking soccer is moral degeneracy. I say this only slightly in jest!

I'm curious, do you dislike it because you see it as a particularly un-American cultural import or is there some other reason you're not keen on it (and assuming I'm not taking your comment entirely too seriously)?

It is said mostly in jest. But I think soccer is an inferior sport to say football or Hockey. It is less physical, less specialization, and less tools. And I think the reason people in the states love it isn’t intrinsic to the sport but because it is popular. I hate that.

Also there is something sad to the homogenization of all culture. Sports are part of culture

That's interesting because again I would say those are points in soccer's favour. Particularly when it comes to it being less physical, surely it's more entertaining to watch people compete based on skill rather than brute size/strength? I can't imagine there'd be much of a market for watching someone who weighs 150kg beat up an opponent half his size in boxing or MMA. Whereas in soccer someone like Messi can run rings around players much larger than him thanks to his co-ordination and ball control.

In American sports, you do have the ultra skill guys who can compete against the physical brutes. But skill is not enough and athleticism is not enough. Either one will only make you good. Greatness requires both.

And again I can’t stress the point of physicality enough. Physicality isn’t primarily about athleticism but it is hitting. Aggression.

Lots of Americans don't like being asked to care about soccer because they consider a sport which doesn't score that frequently boring.

Living in one of the rare other countries where soccer isn't the main sport, there really seems to be a something ostentatious about the way anti-soccer Americans go out of their way to talk unprompted about just how much they don't care about soccer and how un-American it is etc. that you don't really find here.

I suppose it's a culture war thing but even then, a self-aware person would at least consider that it really is then the culture war that's at fault, moreso than the game itself.

That's fair. IMO the low-scoring nature of soccer/football is what makes the game tense and exciting - that feeling of not even wanting to go to the bathroom because you risk missing a dramatic game-changing moment isn't something I can imagine experiencing watching something as high-scoring as basketball. Differing tastes.

This seems like the inverse of reality. With football or basketball, so much is happening so often that the odds of me missing something very cool (an athletic dunk, a field-flipping interception, a clutch three-point shot from a mile away, a nifty trick play) is astronomically higher per minute I’m away than with soccer.

Even if something exciting does happen in a soccer game, it often takes several minutes to develop (i.e. even after intercepting a pass, a player has to actually make it all the way upfield and usually wait for some team support before attempting to score, giving me plenty of time to get out of the bathroom before missing the best part) and frankly isn’t usually all that visually appealing even when it does finally happen. I would say the average soccer match includes maybe five or six interesting moments. An average basketball game includes like twenty.

Looks like no

Maybe yes

I’d guess the kind of people who liked baseball (coastal white ethnics) are now the dominant soccer audience in the US. Baseball seems to have completely died in terms of younger audience.

I suspect the dominant soccer audience are immigrants and progressives dying to be European

and progressives dying to be European

I remember this as one of Scott Alexander's initial descriptors for blue tribe members.

That’s not surprising. Games are on streaming services and rarely on network TV. Going to a ballgame is expensive for families— somewhere between 150-200 dollars to attend a game and get a snack and a drink. Even youth baseball is harder to access, it’s mostly select teams after first or second grade. All of this means kids aren’t watching as much baseball as they used to.

No, the country music audience likes baseball. Flyover whites and assimilated hispanics go to baseball games all the time.

Baseball is declining, and that's partly because there's too many games for anyone to watch all of them, except for the most hardcore fans ever or those who have some professional reasons(eg local entertainment newscasters). This leads to few people even trying, which makes baseball less lucrative. But ticket sales remain strong so that teams are able to stay above water.

No, the country music audience likes baseball

More than football? Hispanics I agree of course. But I do think there has been a big decline amongst Ellis Island Americans. Every suburban white male New Yorker (be he Jewish, Irish or Italian) over fifty seems to like baseball, almost no young ones do.

No, not more than football, but definitely more than basketball or soccer.

I legitimately know very little about the habits of Ellis island Americans; I live in the south and see northerners with hyphenated ethnicities as essentially foreigners.

There was American Song Contest on NBC in 2022 and hosted by Snoop Dogg and Kelly Clarkson, but mixed reception meant it had no 2023 and beyond editions.

Coordinated minority>Disorganized majority

You can vote more than once from the same number. Up to 20 times or something. Any geopolitically motivated adult can outdo a kid who votes once with the permission of mom and dad.

You could say the same for opponents of Israel, they all get 20 votes. But the difference is that they have no singular target to back. And they are still only changing the points on a ladder of 1-12. So even if they all vote for the same country, giving it 12 points, Israel can just run up behind them and claim 11.

Aside from all of that, I don't think winning will do Israel any propaganda favors, although it would be funny. So whilst a 'respectable' middle of the pack outcome might be on the cards for Israel, you never know with how unhinged and rabid philosemites/zionists are and how honest or not the Eurovision voting is counted and which way the minds of the jurors sway. The jurors might hope for a politically neutral result, but too many 6-7 pointers for Israel could make things interesting.

That being said, Eurovision is a purely news cycle driven thing. It doesn't matter in any sense outside of that.

Or the televotes result is a disorganized majority that is tired of the agenda that shove politics in their face by what is en vogue for the terminally online, they just come for the entertainment and music. Because if you look at the UK televote votes. They received 0 points for almost a gay live show. And Israel received more televote points than the LGBTQIA+ winner. So in my mind, people simply didn't give a fuck and voted for the act they liked the best.

That could all be true at the same time as every philosemite and zionist vote for Israel 20 times. Since there are very obviously a lot of philosemites and zionists clawing for every straw they can to bundle up in support of Israel in any manner they can. They are not tired of politics.

On top of that, Croatia won the popular vote with a not so gay song. If people were really tired of all the politics then they wouldn't vote for Israel, a country embroiled in a whole lot of politics. In fact, they wouldn't watch a whole lot of Eurovision to begin with. But if they did, they would probably vote for Croatia.

not so gay song

Not gay at all. He's engaged to a woman, Padre Pio and the Apostle Paul are his spiritual role models.

The video is fun too https://youtube.com/watch?v=kmg8EAD-Kjw?si=igvoPTcj2GAdBn9i

Eurovision has always been a mix of political and song enjoyment. It is highly unlikely that politics had nothing to do with this considering how the Israeli-Palestinian war is the current big issue. Ukraine won in 2022, and it makes sense that the war is going to affect a decent share of votes.

The whole point I'm trying to make is that the given that it is very public protest against the Israeli-Palestinian situation and Israel getting the second place in the popular vote. So if that vote is political then calls on cracking pro-Palestine protests would have been bigger than it is now. People are sitting at home and basically "fuck your virtue signaling" to the protestors and voting Israel. I see that as an apolitical act. One of the reasons we have a culture war is that we allow people to make everything political.

A lot of acts with queer themes did well. The UK act did badly because that guy just couldn't sing.

That is the point. It wasn't the queer theme or the politics that matter it is if people enjoy the show or act, my comment is in response that the "usual suspects" are "organizing a ballot stuffing". Well the usual suspects should have also been stuffing with UK votes. Ukraine winning because they are being invaded is an exception.

The gossip is that the usual suspects are coordinating in the usual channels to vote for Croatia.

Who are the usual suspects in this case?

The people who all share the same name by a coincidence, and that name is 😷✊🏿🇺🇦🇵🇸

Speak plainly.

Terminally online on the left side, if you insist.

I think progressives? I browsed the eurovision subreddit and saw some Croatia memes and didn't really get it, although it makes sense in the context that they're being chosen as a semi-random country to make sure Israel doesn't win

Probably an international conspiracy of people who share my musical taste; Croatia was my clear favorite.

Baby Lasagna was robbed.

What's the actual viewership?

Last year:

162 million people The 2023 Eurovision Song Contest, organized by the European Broadcasting Union, reached 162 million people over the 3 live shows across 38 public service media markets.

Is it real viewership, as on youtube where people seeing 3% aren't counted, iirc you have to view most of it, or fake viewership as on Twitter where a view means someone scrolled past a post or video ?

Surprisingly (or not) Israel doesn’t have only haters, their betting odds improved massively, they actually have a chance to win the contest!

How does the voting work? Are their brackets and eliminations, or is it just one giant vote and winner-takes-all? Being "polarizing" can work when you're just one choice out of many, and the haters weren't going to vote for you anyway, and they're split between many other options, but it attracts a small number of hardcore fans.

Confusingly.

Basically, Eurovision has two separate votes: televote (ie. conducted among viewers) and jury vote. Both are organized country by country, with both the televotes and the juries awarding a maximum of twelve points to the top-voted country, 10 points to the second most voted, and then 8, 7, 6, 5 etc. to the next ones.

The implicit purpose of the jury vote can often specifically negate the televote when there's a feeling a "non-preferred" song (typically one that seems too much like a comedy entry and not like a traditional Eurovision winner ballad) might win (like last year...), so it's possible that Israel might, for instance, win the televote and not the jury vote. Then again it might also do quite well in the jury vote, Israel has not been a particularly bad performer there either in the previous contests, from what I've understood.

I can't help but feel like there's a certain similarity to that, and how most European elections work. With all your different political parties, and weird cutoffs/bonuses, and backroom deal-making to make a coalition...

The cutoffs and bonuses are necessary in proportionally elected parliaments, otherwise the incentive would be for every niche interest to get a party unless there was no way it could achieve even 1 seat (which in a say 300 seat parliament would be 0.33% of the vote). You’d have dozens of parties and wrangling them together into coalition would be impossible. Israel is an arguable failure state; it has a low threshold of 3% and no majority bonus system which is really what it needs.

The more you look into non-FPTP traditional constituency systems the more problems come up. The UK/US two-party systems have major problems but force the public to make compromises instead of (just) politicians, which I think is theoretically preferable.

The actual instability in many continental (ie. usually PR-using) countries is less due to the small parties (they're often easy to ignore - they're small!) and more because there are major parties that are politically toxic (due to being extreme right or extreme left, or separatists) and thus basically almost automatically out of the government, which thus forces the rest of the parties into ideologically amorphous, unstable coalitions, or alternatively leads o the creation of large ideologically amorphous, unstable "system parties" (like the Italian Christian Democrats, the hegemonic party due to the main opposition being the Communists who were kept out of the government) where political barons bring down governments and cut each other down due to byzantine political machinations or simply due to spite.

The reason why those parties exist is because there are or were deeper systemic factors in those countries leading to large portions of population choosing such extreme or separatist parties. The Weimar Republic was not unstable because of its electoral system but simply because huge portions of the German population distrusted democracy and supported antidemocratic parties like the Communist, Nazis and the DNVP. If unstable countries were using FPTP, the same factors would just express themselves otherwise; the extreme left and right would eventually affect and radicalize the mainstream parties, and separatist/ethnic parties are usually concentrated enough to elect MPs even in FPTP systems.

The main FPTP-using countries, ie. Anglo countries, have been stable because they have been wealthy and have had longlasting liberal democratic cultures with powerful mechanisms encouraging stability. Nevertheless, even they've seen increasing destabilization lately, and that destabilization has then channeled itself in different ways, so you have the Trump presidency, Corbyn leadership in Labour and the Brexit.

A large number of parties making coalitions more difficult in Weimar was at least the excuse the Grundgesetz used to impose a 5% limit on votes. And I think that argument has a bit of a point. I mean, in the 1928 elections in Germany.

Percentage of Reichstag seats:

  • Far-Left:
    • KPD (Communists): 11%
  • Democratic:
    • SPD (Social democrats): 31.2%
    • Zentrum (Catholics): 12.4%
    • DVP (Right liberal): 9.1%
    • DDP (Left liberal): 5.1% (but below 5% of the popular vote!)
    • BVP (Bavarians): 3.4%
  • Far Right:
    • DNVP (Monarchists): 14.8%
    • NSDAP (Nazis): 2.4%
  • Others (some probably also democratic):
    • WP (middle class Saxons?): 4.6%
    • Smaller parties: 5.7%

Here, the five parties under the heading democratic formed a coalition with had a whopping 61.2% majority. I am not sure why they did it that way. They obviously needed SPD and Zentrum. Perhaps a coalition with the DVP only would have resulted in the them being more vulnerable to threats of the DVP to walk out. Instead with the five party coalition, none of the three junior partners could threaten to break the government by walking out. Or they wanted to share power among the democratic parties to ensure that none of them would profit more by defecting to the anti-democrats. From a modern German perspective, this seems weird. Top politicians generally want to become ministers. Anyone suggesting that a coalition should give up 19% of the minister posts to parties which they don't require to form a majority to be more inclusive towards fellow democratic-minded parties would be laughed out of the room.

Did I have a point to make? Hm... if the Reichstag had a 5% barrier to entry, then 21.2% of the seats would not have gone to smaller parties. But 8.5% of them would just have been shuffled around among the coalition (BVP going to Zentrum, DDP perhaps forming a general liberal party with DVP). At the the ~10% of seats of the Others might have bolstered the ranks of the bigger democratic parties.

For democracy to thrive, you need both a viable coalition of democratic parties and a credible opposition of democratic parties offering another option. If 11% of the seats are taken by people who want to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat and some 17% are by people who want to restore the monarchy or establish a Fuehrerstaat, then you are in trouble perhaps not immediately but in the next elections, as people disillusioned with the previous government end decide to vote them out, and will likely turn to the extremist parties.

It is a bit of a catch-22: if the democrats don't form coalitions with the toxic extremist parties, the extremist parties won't get blamed for bad outcomes while the democrats will, and if they form coalitions with them they might just enable a Machtergreifung.

Having ten or percent of the seats occupied by sub-5% small parties which can not form stable coalitions due to scaling issues is making the problem a bit worse, but the main problem is the extremist parties.

If voters are required to compromise, if the amount of information they can give with their ballot is reduced, discovering their true preferences becomes harder. It adds another layer of obfuscation on top of the already indirect (representative) democracy.

True, and that's what proponents of PR argue, that, say, the German system allows for the 'right' to consist of a center-right party (CDU/CSU), a libertarian party (FDP) and a nativist party (AfD) that reflect nuanced positions in the electorate. Another example is Israel where there are various minor flavors of secular vs. religious vs. very religious nationalist parties, centrist religious nationalist parties, ethnic parties and so on. But the downside is that many of the same voters feel betrayed when 'their' politicians compromise, which means that they quickly support and abandon certain parties, which makes dealmaking very difficult because everyone is afraid of being destroyed at the next election, which means nobody is willing to compromise to the extent necessary, which results in gridlock.

Conservative Mike Cernovich (1.2M followers) Tweeted "Trump needs a VP that will make him assassination proof. Anyone saying otherwise has no understanding of the time we are in. Tim Scott as VP? Trump's survivability will drop to zero. It's incredible to me that more don't understand this."

How seriously should Trump take such a threat, and how seriously does Trump take such a threat? Yes, the powers-that-be truly hate Trump and if he became president and had Scott as VP many would rejoice at Trump's death. But by what mechanism might they kill him? Obviously, it creates horrible incentives if Trump believes the threat and it causes him to consider someone such as Kari Lake, Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Sarah Palin for his VP nominee. In sort-of support of Cernovich, part of the reason that Biden might be sticking with Harris as VP is to reduce the chances he gets removed from office for senility.

Sarah Palin

I don't trust Sarah Palin not to immediately cuck to Isreal/Ukraine. Trump needs a VP that will absolutely ruin the deepstate/military industrial complex's little proxy wars if left unattended.

I'm skeptical... But then again I've never really understood why more politicians don't get assassinated. Lethal chemicals are not that hard to procure and blow darts are not that hard to mount to drones.

What gives?

I can only assume that something I don't understand is locking down most would be assassins.

Why'd you need to assassinate politicians if you can

  • ensure only the right ones get elected

  • get rid of them by non lethal means that make them out to be crooks, not martyrs

Spilling blood is way too risky. It's the laziest, dumbest solution.

Lethal chemicals are not that hard to procure and blow darts are not that hard to mount to drones.

Poisoning people isn't easy, blow darts are not very useful, and politicians have security. Modern tech makes a successful getaway hard to pull off.

At the moment, yes, drones and explosives probably afford a fair chance of getting away with it, especially as they can be guided through cell phones unless your target is Putlet, of course or possibly the US president.

However, anyone smart enough to cobble together such a drone understands you don't affect an ecosystem by pinching off a single flower.

What @Felagund said, and historically the killing of a given politician DOESN'T immediately result in the particular outcome you desire occurring.

So unless the outcome you want is literally "X politician is dead" then no rational person would carry out such an assassination in hopes of achieving their end goals.

I had a strong prior on exactly this before the assassination of Shinzo Abe, but now I'm not so sure.

How's your prior on this now?

I've updated hard on a lot of things these past few weeks, but I don't think the expected payoff for a rational would-be assassin is one of them.

Last I heard, the Trump assassin was a crazy person without policy objectives (which came as a mild surprise to me) which makes an evaluation of the efficacy kind of meaningless.

Maybe a week ago, assuming the plausible claim that a Trump assassin would want Trump's policy objectives to fail, I would have assumed this episode was a stronger strike against Abe-level assassination effectiveness because of how much it clearly empowered Trump. But the way the media cycle has moved on to other things this week maybe it's a wash.

Overall, a weak update away from Abe and towards the sane baseline that assassination attempts are not rational.

I'm still confused about why the assassination of Abe was so effective towards the assassin's goals.

I think there just aren't that many people who would try.

Whelp, there was at least one.

If these mysterious powers that be really don't want Trump to be president to the point that they're willing to assassinate him, and we presume they have the ability to pull it off, why wait until he gets elected? Anyone even more odious than Trump is probably someone who has even less chance of getting elected — and none of the personality cult — than he does, so why not do it now? Especially since the security of a sitting president is almost certainly much tighter than whatever he's getting now. We've never had a major party candidate drop dead during an election season before, so it's uncharted territory how much of a shit show it could turn into trying to find another nominee on short notice. The veep is the obvious choice, but I'd be willing to bet that the actual primary candidates will feel like they deserve a shot since they actually got votes at the convention and Trump's pick was only for vice. Or hell, do it now while there are still primaries to go and Haley is still on the ballot. She may have a better shot of beating Biden in the general but four years of her are certainly better than four years of Trump. Why even give the guy a chance if you don't have to?

If these mysterious powers that be really don't want Trump to be president to the point that they're willing to assassinate him

I think the odds of an established power trying to take out Trump is quite low. The odds of a deranged person along the lines of Wilkes Booth or Oswald or any of the other people who've killed American president, much higher, although today security for Presidents is vastly higher and could probably foil most threats. But I'd still put more than 0% chance odds that Trump will be assasinated. Although I doubt having an insane VP would significantly lower his assassination odds, I don't think any would-be assassin is rationally weighing the merits to the nation.

Booth was hugely popular and successful, perhaps the most popular and successful of his day.

The odds of a deranged person along the lines of Wilkes a booth or Oswald or any of the other people who’ve killed American president, much higher, although today security for Presidents is vastly higher and could probably foil most threats.

The probability of a successive assassination scheme gets even lower if you get rid of one that actually superficially ‘succeeded’ in being actualized by one individual who was ‘a deranged person’, given that there’s probably a moderately high chance that Oswald didn’t even shoot at Kennedy, nonetheless kill him.

Presumably because the backlash to an assassination would lead to Trump's successor getting elected in a blowout.

What backlash, what assassination? Donald Trump was old and overweight, there's nothing unusual when an old overweight person dies from cardiac arrest. Nothing to see here, move along.

In this day and age, shooting someone with the heart attack gun and getting away with it is vastly harder to get away with.

You can do it on journalists, Breitbart looks like a bit sus case perhaps.

That would almost certainly ensure a DeSantis or Younkin presidency depending on the time the assassination happened (Younkin being more likely the closer the assassination is to election day). Which is probably even less palatable to these powers. The problem, after all, isn't Trump, its Trump's voters.

I'd preface this by saying that since these "powers" were so poorly defined by the OP, speculating about who they'd find acceptable seems kind of pointless, since any discussion can elicit a response of "no, the powers aren't like that". Anyway, I'm going to proceed on the assumption that these mysterious overlords are left-leaning but not too far left, avatars for the man they're actually trying to keep in the White House. Which I guess makes me one of them, though I'm opposed to assassination and, in any event wouldn't know where to start, but I'll nonetheless use this as license to consider myself somewhat of an expert, especially since most of the people in my social circle are of roughly the same opinion.

Desantis was a credible Bogeyman two years ago but his absolute inability to outmaneuver Trump has rendered him impotent in the eyes of the Powers. And in the eyes of Trump supporters he's totally disloyal and probably a cuck, too for taking abuse from Trump and not bothering to fight back. Desantis's main advantages over Trump were that he was supposedly more competent and that he was actually willing to fight rather than get involved in messy political disputes. His campaign showed that he was totally uncharismatic and couldn't run a national campaign to save his own life, allowing also-rans like Nikki Haley to run circles around him. And he his profound unwillingness to attack Trump, even in the face of his abuse, didn't exactly project the image of a fighter. He's a guy most lefty Democrats would reflexively dislike and bitch about for his policy positions, but he isn't the kind of guy whom anyone would be concerned about the country over. If Trump, as charismatic as he is, was unable to cow the governmental apparatus into bending to his will, then Desantis sure as hell isn't a threat. He's also too much of a traditional Republican at heart to make any serious changes. He'll talk about ending woke but when he realizes that there isn't much he can do about it he'll just shift to enacting more tax cuts. PLus, the guy does have actual executive experience running a large state.

As for Youngkin, I've never met a Democrat who has strong feelings about the guy. I don't live in Virginia, but outside of there the man comes across to most Democrats as as somewhat moderate, the kind of Republican who can actually win a statewide election in Virginia. While he wouldn't be as acceptable as a guy like Phil Scott, he's not exactly the MAGA menace Republicans would need to nominate to really scare the lefties. For Trump to be assassination-proof his putative successor would have to be someone like MTG or Boebert, and there's no way in hell that's happening. And if it somehow did happen, there's no way someone like that is defeating an incumbent. And even if someone like that did beat Biden in the general, it would pose no real threat to any powers that be because these people are totally incompetent and more interested in soundbites than government.

This is totally anecdotal but it proves my point. A friend of mine has a winter house in Boebert's district in Colorado. Being in the West, there's some local water authority, basically a citizens group, that relies on the local rep to get Federal funding for their operating budget. This isn't exactly controversial politically, but they have to meet with the rep every year to go over the budget and whatnot so the rep knows how much to ask for and can justify the number if pressed. First, instead of attending the board meeting, Boebert wanted to do it over the phone for no plausible reason other than that she was too lazy to attend. Okay, whatever, but when she's on the phone it's clear to everyone involved that she wasn't actually listening. When she asks for clarification of something that she should have understood had she been paying attention, it's clear to them that she's either a complete moron or has such a short attention span that she can't even listen to the answers to questions she asked (Which weren't pointed clarifications of someone involved but simply asking them to repeat what they just said). Then she terminated the meeting early by actually telling them it was boring. These aren't the kind of people who are going to make any significant change if in the White House.

The part about Boebert is what your described is an underlying reason why we're seeing such shifts in college educated suburbs outside of the other more obvious factors.

Like, I'm sure there have been a lot of right-wing representatives in the past who actually worried about constituent needs - one example off hand is Thad Cochoran of Mississippi didn't need a single black vote to win easily in the state, but nonetheless, he was well known for having good constuent services, even in overwhelmingly black areas of the state, and not surprisingly, while he didn't do fantastic in the black belt regions, he did much better than Trent Lott did who was the other Senator at the time, even pre-Strom Thurmond praise.

Hell, Brian Kemp has passed a fairly strict abortion ban, passed trans laws close to Florida, passed a strict voter ID law, passed the usual tax cuts, and done a lot of stuff I don't like as a left-wing social democrat, but he has a 65% approval rating in Georgia because he said, "nah, Biden won, you weirdos," then he and his Secretary of State easily curbstomped a primary challenge.

The problem for the modern hard-right/far-right/dissident right, whatever people want to call themselves is that there's zero appeal unless you're either a partisan Republican or you're obsessed with the the Culture War issues of the day, but if you're even a somewhat serious person, they all seem like weirdos. Again, I know some won't like this, but look up how AOC questions people in Congressional panels versus Freedom Caucus types. You don't have to like her questions, or agree with her premises even, but she's well prepared and has follow up questions.

Obviously, not every member of the Squad is like that, but the median member of the Progressive Caucus is more serious about actually doing the work of legislating as opposed to trying to get a hit on Fox News or Newsmax than the median member of the Freedom Caucus, and in the long run, swing voters given the choice of having to use certain genders they don't get and some more immigrants speaking Spanish but actually getting stuff done versus chaos, abortion bans, and weird obsessions with issues they've never heard about, they'll back the woke side, even if they heavily disagree.

AOC might be charismatic and indeed she literally got on the casting couch for this job, but she's a filthy traitor. If I was a leftie I'd be absolutely pissed about her shenanigans (not using the squad leverage to extract Medicare for all from Pelosi).

As a leftie, there was no way to get Medicare for All from Pelosi, because not only does M4A not have the 218 votes you need in the House, it'd die on the Senate. All that would result of such a vote is a bunch of terrible primary challenges that would fail, because the median Democrat, while preferring Medicare for All, it's not a support it or else issue. Stuff like abortion, gay rights, thinking Trump is bad, those are actually support or else issues to the Democratic base of African-American women, suburban Mom's and so on.

Plus, in the long run, Biden did far more of what lefties expected economically. Unfortunately, some of the dumber ones are now upset about that full employment and higher wages means higher prices for Chipotle or Doordash.

If you think AOC is prepared and say Chip Roy isn’t then I think you are just operating from a biased perspective.

No, people like a strong horse, not a dead horse. If Trump is assassinated, the Democrats think "good!" (and we probably have a few stories celebrating it, including on major media though those will be quickly toned down) and the Trump base is demoralized, leading to a Biden landslide.

If Trump is assassinated in a blatant way expect a real insurrection, not the Qshaman walk about kind.

... When has that ever worked like that?

We've never had a major party candidate drop dead during an election season before

Well, depending on what you mean by 'major party' and 'election season'...

the powers-that-be

There should be a requirement that if you're going to use vague and allusive terms that you define those terms so people can know who you're talking about. Don't just say 'elites' or 'the powers-that-be'. What specific people/organizations/institutions do you mean?

There is a rule about being specific:

Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible. General groups include things like gun rights activists, pro-choice groups, and environmentalists. Specific groups include things like The NRA, Planned Parenthood, and the Sierra Club. Posting about general groups is often not falsifiable, and can lead to straw man arguments and non-representative samples.

It's not followed or enforced. But it is a rule.

There should be a requirement that people who act as if the ruling class is only a useful category when it is legible explain what they think people ought to do in political regimes where the ruling class is incentivized to be as illegible as possible.

Because I don't really see "not talk about the ruling class" as an acceptable answer to that question. And we happen to live in one such illegible regime.

These demands for specificity displace the object level debate into another debate about the true nature of the ruling class, in which dissidents usually disagree with each other, and thus serves the interests of the ruling class by keeping opponents divided. Since that rhetoric serves an interest, I find it suspect.

In a sense it is in effect completely irrelevant what the nature of the ruling class is, what matters is who is their friend, and who is their enemy. And that can be easily divined without needing to elucidate the specifics of who they are down to a list of names.

Because I don't really see "not talk about the ruling class" as an acceptable answer to that question

You could just be specific. I'm not suggesting you need a comprehensive list of every single person involved, but you should be able to provide some key identifiable institutions or people. It is extremely relevant who they are because you cannot possibly draw useful conclusions about them otherwise. A nebulous "they" has no interests.

These demands for specificity displace the object level debate into another debate about the true nature of the ruling class, in which dissidents usually disagree with each other, and thus serves the interests of the ruling class by keeping opponents divided. Since that rhetoric serves an interest, I find it suspect.

All rhetoric serves an interest. Vagueness makes it impossible to interrogate claims or simply obfuscate their absurdity. The motives of the "powers that be" to assassinate Trump are not something anyone can examine because there is no clear reference.

Of course, the real answer to all this is that the "ruling class" is a fiction - the people and organizations that wield power are fragmented and frequently at odds.

the people and organizations that wield power are fragmented and frequently at odds

This is entirely compatible with the concept of the ruling class and I should say necessary to understand the reasons of formation and collapse of the category. Everyone is indeed always at odds, a ruling class is a group of people that are sufficiently organized that their internal squabbles don't jeopardize domination of their external enemies.

Let us consider a salient and inarguable example of a ruling class, the Soviet nomenklatura.

No sane student of history would deny that these people had vicious internal fights, often to the death. But then nobody would deny either that they were a ruling class. They formed an organized minority of people who ruled over the majority of Soviet population.

Insofar as they were ready to favor their social circle over the population at large, they held power, and it slipped from their fingers at the precise exact time that their inner divisions became more powerful than the pact they held against the population. In the 1991 Yanayev coup, when fellow party members stopped being friends, and became enemies.

All rhetoric serves an interest.

In some abstract sense, perhaps. And everything is also political in that sense. But it dissolves the category into uselessness. Rather, as I think you're saying, refusing to front a list of names serves the interest of dissidents. Which is also suspect.

Fair enough, but I then don't think we ought to take sides if we want do do a descriptive inquiry. Talking about the ruling class, whatever it is, and the ruling class, a specific one; are both valid and useful in my view.

The motives of the "powers that be" to assassinate Trump are not something anyone can examine because there is no clear reference.

I guess we agree in the sense that we then ought to bring up different models of the establishment and its behavior, and compare them against the situation. I think that's productive and we should cultivate a number of such models if we want to understand the world as it is.

I simply want to prevent us from the demand of fronting a perfect prediction model for something that is desperately trying not to be observed.

I'd like some more details too. President Biden is obviously part of the American ruling class. I couldn't name anyone else who inarguably is though. Is Marjorie Taylor Greene part of the ruling class? Are New York Times journalists? Are American generals? Is Peter Thiel? Is Donald Trump himself? Supreme Court justices? State governors? If you're saying Trump is at risk of being assassinated by the powers-that-be, I want some more details on which powers exactly those are, because there are a lot of powers in America. Many of them hate Trump, many of them hate each other, many of them hate Trump and also hate other people who hate Trump.

That's a hard question, especially without specifying the number of people in the set called "powers-that-be". I like the term because it is clear that I am not pretending to know exactly who is in the set.

Define powerful. Not going to instantly get fired for supporting Trump? Sure. Having influence, though? That's much harder.

I don't think Trump will get assassinated. If I were ranking potential assassination risks my top would be that if Biden is elected and has a Senate majority (even 50/50 with VP as tie breaker) the value of killing a right leaning SCJ would be very high in certain eyes.

If I were ranking potential assassination risks my top would be that if Biden is elected and has a Senate majority (even 50/50 with VP as tie breaker) the value of killing a right leaning SCJ would be very high in certain eyes.

Well now I'm genuinely curious, have you reassessed this at all?

Some, but not at the top line. I still think SCJ are more likely to be assassinated than Trump, though I would put it a LOT closer than I did before. This is because part of the reason I had them much more likely to be killed is that they get vastly less security protection. However, if Trump's security protection is going to be incompetent then that lowers its value (though its still worth a lot more than what SCJ get).

The real games the powers-that-be care about are foreign policy and the distribution of money. The Supreme Court mainly handles the cultural wars kayfabe stuff that keeps the masses entertained.

But I don't think PTB blackbag ops are the real threat, I think it is culture warriors who have been convinced that the other side winning is Armageddon and they have to Do Something! Killing Trump would be a big win for those people, but he has massive SS protection at all times, and if the outcome is just Trumps VP takes office its not as big a difference maker as it could be. But the Supremes are much softer targets and would have a big effect if you could kill a coupe and Biden replaces them with lefties. Normally you'd think that Dems would actually balk at taking advantage of such a situation as that would be seen as endorsing assassins, but Dems also think several seats were stolen in one way or another, and Thomas while not a stolen seat is uniquely vile.

But manchin will probably not cooperate with replacing an assassinated justice, that’s a pretty big jump, and the core blue tribe has a widespread perception of the right being better at violence, so a big escalation like that is something they’re scared of.

My guess is that the Dems would go for a moderate, because throwing in an opposing partisan would get them in internal trouble but they'd want to be seen as not validating political murder. Except, well, in point of fact replacing an opposing partisan with a moderate still is validating political murder, so the Rubicon gets crossed anyway.

But manchin will probably not cooperate with replacing an assassinated justice

Sure he would. Why wouldn't he? And what choice would he have anyway?

Would he even be able to find someone for the job in that situation? I know a seat at the court is the ultimate prize in a US law career, but if it comes attached with an permanent target on your forehead, I think the candidate pool is going to narrow quite a bit.

I would bet it would narrow only a very small bit. And of course the first time it happened the justices would get more security.

I’m gonna agree here. We haven’t had a situation like this since the civil war — both sides absolutely believe that the nation will be in grave danger if their guy doesn’t win. They’re not going to simply cower in the corner and do nothing when they believe that the country’s future is in the balance. There’s a not insignificant number of people on the left who believe that Trump is Hitler with a bad combover, and likewise a substantial number or people on the right who believe that Biden is a Mao or Stalin. Furthermore, the belief on both sides that the election is being manipulated in various ways creates even more tension as the losers can absolutely believe that the president in question cheated.

We haven’t had a situation like this since the civil war — both sides absolutely believe that the nation will be in grave danger if their guy doesn’t win.

In what way is this current situation different from 2020? Or 2016 for that matter?

I remember online chatter about the possibility of a new R President being the Worst Thing Ever being near-constant, all the way back to Bush Jr.'s second round.

I don't think Trump is Hitler. If he begins the deportation of American Jewry, I'd be surprised.

Biden strikes me more as Mr. Magoo than Mao or Stalin. Unless it's an act.

Biden, the dementia case isn't nearly as consequential as people running his administration.

Why are we even talking or pretending a person who needs a chest sheet for a press conference matters??

The people running things aren't sane (the title IX reform) or competent.

as people running his administration

I agree, but who are these people? Makes me wish Trump was a bit Hitler or Franco.

Is the Title IX reform team the same as the war in the Ukraine team?

On the other hand, the blue tribe is bad at doing, and the red tribe army camped on the border with Mexico hasn’t kicked off a constitutional crisis yet- and factually the feds have backed down every time it looked like they were about to.

a substantial number or people on the right who believe that Biden is a Mao or Stalin

Does anyone on the right actually believe that? I only ever hear complaints that Biden is old, senile, and obviously being puppeted around by various other figures in his administration. In other words, he is personally weak and pathetic, something even their worst detractors can’t say about Stalin and Mao.

In other words, he is personally weak and pathetic, something even their worst detractors can’t say about Stalin and Mao.

Mmm, you kinda can regarding the last few years of Mao's reign, with the Gang of Four effectively running the show in his name, although certainly not about the decades prior to that.

Stalin and Mao are definitely the wrong examples. However he's not acting like a normal democratic leader. Openly launching multiple criminal trials against a political opponent leading up to an election is something even Putin hasn't done.

Normal parties don't renominate corrupt, criminal losers who tried a coup.

Like, the Right had this same argument about Brett Kavanaugh - "see, you'll try to take out any Republican nominee with lies and false allegations.'

Except it didn't happen with Neil Gorsuch, who had much the same background and views. Sure, people attacked his judicial views, but in the way both sides do. There were no allegations of him being a rapist or even some lesser crime, because he hadn't possibly done criminal things.

Don't nominate the corrupt former New York real estate guy who tried to overturn an election and you'll be all clear. Yes, we'll say mean things about him if you nominate say, Greg Abbott, but for what I know, he's done no crimes. He's allied with somebody even conservative Republicans think has done cirmes (Ken Paxton), but Abbott himself is just a right-winger.

  • -11

Gorsuch was replacing Scalia, and while they were salty about the Republican Senate with Garland, it was merely a missed opportunity. And frankly, they could read that they had lost that battle enough already that throwing a further fit was likely to be counterproductive with a new president and Republican Senate. Kavanaugh, on the other hand, was replacing Kennedy, which represented a real threat to liberal wins on abortion, affirmative action, and gay rights (two of the three have come to pass), among other issues where the right found Kennedy to be "too squishy". They threw out all the stops for the real threat.

I’ve got to ask you to be more specific. Make your case politely and firmly. If you skip to the conclusion, you’re just booing your outgroup.

Don't have the time, so I'll delete the comment.

God, I wish Trump was as vile as you imagine him to be.

Why? What more vileness do you want from him?

I don't know about that guy, but I'm still salty that I was promised Right Wing Death Squads, and they never materialized.

I mean, if Trump was going to be the harbinger of death, he's been the shittiest one possible. He just whines about being disrespected, blusters about how he totally is on top of things, and acts as a bugzapper for progs to sperg out and suicide straight into with increasingly unhinged takes. Trump cant even get a proper militia running to shake down a library of degenerate trannies, much less round up every BLM activist and lynch them like they've been screaming about. The only faction in the last thirty that walked the talk of being a bunch of brutal bastards who wrecked shit has been ISIS and the Cartels. Putin hasn't nuked London, Kim hasn't invaded Seoul, Meloni hasn't sunk the migrant boats, Bibi hasn't initiated Nakba 2 and Trump hasn't killed a single fucking prog.

Well, it is now looking like Trump may have been right. We know Wisconsin election was illegally ran in a way that probably tilt the balance from Trump to a Biden. The recent Georgia inquiry likewise shows different shenanigans in favor of Biden.

Add to it the hunter Biden false prebunking annd the interesting J6 revelations …are we sure Trump wasn’t the legit winner and Bisen is the one who ended democracy?

How close was he?

Openly launching multiple criminal trials against a political opponent leading up to an election is something even Putin hasn't done.

I mean, technically I'm not sure he's done multiple against a single opponent, but since convicted criminals can't run for President in Russia, and Putin has tight control of the courts, he only needs the one. And this is, in fact, his primary method of preventing election losses; IIRC he's done it to several candidates that looked like they were gaining steam.

Of course, the fact that Putin does, in fact, abuse disqualification is no defence of the tactic.

Openly launching multiple criminal trials against a political opponent leading up to an election

What should a 'normal democratic leader' do if a political opponent appears to to have committed multiple crimes leading up to an election?

Well, the answer is he hasn’t.

  1. The NY case (that appears to again be coordinated with the WH) is a joke. First, it is very unclear whether Trump committed the book keeping record violation. Second, it is pretty clear that Trump did not as a matter of law commit the predicate crime (Campaign Finance law violation) that enables the SOL to run. The prosecution would need to argue that Trump was mistaken about campaign finance law and thought notwithstanding the actual law the law was different. That is a tough hill to climb. Next the prosecution needs to prove that Trump made the book keeping error (which might not be an error) to cover up the non crime Trump thought was a crime despite Trump likely not even being involved with classifying the small claim on the books (ie he wouldn’t be looking at the books item by item). Then, there is a question of whether the NY law can even use federal law as the predicate crime. Andy McCarthy wrote about this. Finally, the prosecution is based entirely on the word of serial perjurer Michael Cohen. In a fair trial with a fair jury pool, this case is never brought because it’s absurd. The prosecution is relying on a politically motivated judge and jury pool. Keep in mind Manhattan went about 90% for Biden. With a good jury selection there were probably no Trump voters on this jury.

  2. The documents case is legit (albeit some of the info coming out suggests the government may have been trying to set Trump up and he fell for it). But Biden then has to answer “why Trump and not Biden” since Biden has his own documents violation. There is also the Clinton precedent (remember she unilaterally deleted evidence under subpoena).

  3. The Jan 6 case was a case of protected speech. Trump didn’t do anything that was illegal. Moreover, there is an arguable double jeopardy question. Finally, it seems likely that some of the indictments will be mooted by the SCoTUS (not on immunity claim but in a collateral challenge by J6 defendants). Again here the prosecution is primarily relying on judge and jury pool (DC went 95% for Biden; Haley won the Republican primary).

  4. The Georgia case is an absolute mess. If you read the entire context of the call, it is clear that Trump believes there was massive fraud (which given what is happening in Fulton inquiry looks more likely by the day) and wasn’t asking to manufacture fake voters; instead, he was making the point the margin of victory was so small and the fraudulent votes (in his mind) was so many that it wouldn’t take much to flip the state. That again is protected speech and isn’t illegal. Turning that into a RICO is just insane. Add in Fani’s unprofessional behavior where she has committed forensic misconduct and appears to have engaged in a kick back scheme also calls into question the soundness of the prosecution.

I say none of this as a Trump guy. I wish RDS had won.

Again, because Biden, Pence, and other politicians when informed immediately returned some documents. The problem isn't having the documents. It's an expectation that in a world where there are 9 trillion documents, some classifield ones will get moved, not out of malice or illegal acts.

If Trump had done what Biden, Pence, and others did, there would be no case.

But, when you refuse to work with the agency tasked to get these records, show said records to other people and talk about how they're classifield, and more, yeah, that's worse.

It's the difference between accidentally forgetting you put a candy bar in your pocket and running out with a shopping cart full of electronics.

If Trump had done what Biden, Pence, and others did, there would be no case.

You're lying through your teeth here. Nothing Trump did comes remotely close to the seriousness of HRC's breach of confidential document rules and if he had done what she did there would be nowhere on Earth free from triumphant news broadcasts talking about his perfidy.

Again, the sheer magnitude and location of Biden’s document location suggest a lot of “forgetting you put a candy bar in your pocket.” Some of those documents were documents you were supposed to only review in a clean room. Kind of hard to analogize that as “forgetting you put a candy bar in your pocket.”

Also this ignores Hillary who pretty clearly had the server to avoid FOIA and then destroyed the evidence under subpoena.

Finally, there seems to be some evidence that NARA and DOJ was trying to entrap Trump.

On 1. Can a lawyer answer for me how that case has gone forward. It feels as though there are serious questions on the law in the case versus proving whether he did the acts in question.

Interpreting the law seems like a question for judges not juries. I guess my question is did Bragg provided the SOL run to the current judge and he agreed it’s a correct interpretation. Now the jury is deciding if he did the actual acts? If he’s convicted then does Trump challenge Bragg’s interpretation of the law to try and get the conviction thrown out. To me it would make more sense to challenge the legal interpretation of the law first (does SOL apply). Then do the jury trial.

Even if Trump is convicted now I feel like there are years of appeals. Potentially all the way to the SC to litigate whether SOL applies. Obviously not a lawyer but I would have thought he could have done a lot of challenges before the trial on the SOL issues. There is no reason to have a jury trial on whether he’s guilty if the underlying act he’s accused of either isn’t a crime or is protected by SOL.

The New York courts get to decide the law. They're not impartial. Any appeals would have to go all the way through the New York system (with Trump potentially imprisoned the whole time) before reaching the Supreme Court. Which would most probably simply reject any appeal on the grounds that there is no substantial Federal question.

I think Arizona V. US logic and preemption could be in play.

I'm 100% with you except for the massive fraud stuff. This political witch hunt is setting up banana republic style precedents where if you want to stay out of jail after your time in power you must remain in power forever... It is terrible for the country. The US election process is pretty safe and accurate though and the stolen election stuff is just wrong.

Judging by precedent, studiously ignoring them seems to be a popular option.

Yes. Multiple times in our history, our politics has chosen the openness of the electoral system over strict adherence to the law.

This kind of prosecutorial discretion used to be considered 'wisdom', the kind of compromise that keeps the system going at the expense of absolute legalism.

I always deeply resented the sort of "wisdom" you're describing, and that hasn't really changed. I resent the fact that our political establishment has insulated itself from any form of legal accountability, and one of the reasons I continue to support Trump is because I want the contrast as stark as possible. Prior to Trump, one could claim that the insulation from legal consequences was at least impartial, because both sides enjoyed it. Now we see that both sides enjoyed it because they were part of the establishment, not because the system was actually impartial. The common knowledge is useful for coordinating defiance to that establishment.

This wisdom is why the South is currently the most patriotic part of the country instead of a hotbed of political terrorism and separatist ideology.

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Repression of dissidents is a feature of every political regime. No exceptions.

What is true here is that the US establishment has become a lot less subtle in its repression, and is now forced to employ overt tactics. Since they are foxes who thrive on good optics, this is a show of weakness.

Repression of dissidents is a feature of every political regime. No exceptions.

The motte: To the degree that this is true, it is so vague that it is useless. It is like saying "every animal can survive outside water", implying (a) for some non-zero time span (b) in microgravity (c) with the correct air pressure.

The bailey: To the degree that it is non-vague, falsifiable it hints at 'repression is a key element in any regime', or 'the amount of repression is similar between regimes' this is false.

If someone asked you 'I want to have a system with minimal political repression, should I pick Stalin's Russia or Obama's US?' and you reply 'Repression is universal, so it does not matter', that is akin to answering 'what would make a good pet for my terrarium, a hamster or a gold fish?' with 'every animal can survive outside the water, so it does not matter'.

How much repression a political regime commits is a function of its weakness rather than its ideological character or theoretical 'system'. Stalin's communist party committed mass political repression because it was the only way for the regime to survive. The US regime under Obama's presidency committed very little political repression because its headwinds were weak; the moment it ran into a slight uptick in resistance in the mid-2010s, this was revealed to be from lack of need rather than a principled tolerance built into its constitution.

Repression in the USA now seems comparable to the more muted level of the USSR between Khrushchev and Glasnost. Its methods are different. But, as an individual, it is impossible to question the ruling ideology of the US without reprisals that eject one from any decision-making or managerial role in any important organization. Groups, meanwhile, will be harassed with impunity by mobs and lawfared into submission or irrelevance, as you can see with VDARE.

'I want to have a system with minimal political repression, should I pick Stalin's Russia or Obama's US?'

Both have torture and executions. If you are a true opponent of either establishment your fate is almost exactly the same. Misery and death for you and your loved ones.

The answer to this question depends on your own beliefs and how tolerable they are to a a given regime, not how tolerant a regime is, because there is no such thing as a tolerant regime except in the sense that it is secure and unchallenged. Power suffers no competitors. If you are dangerous to the establishment you will be robbed, killed, tortured. No exceptions.

What you're doing here is simply denying moral community to terrorists and other enemies of yourself, a (to a degree) supporter of the establishment. You're fine with some people getting tortured and executed. Because they're not human in the sense you care about.

This is fine. It's nothing special. But if we want to have any sort of reasonable debate about the nature of politics, you have to remove yourself from this ideological frame and consider things from the outside.

I'll gladly embrace the bailey: repression is a key element of every single political regime that has ever existed, including the one you live under right now, and no regime could even exist without it. As for the quantity of the repression, it's a function of how secure the regime is and essentially nothing else.

I am a utilitarian, numbers matter to me. The main difference between gitmo and the gulags are the scale. Now, I thought gitmo was an abomination when it was first established by GWB and I think the same to that day.

We have two options to compare these systems. One is to count every act of state violence against members of the population. Of course, this puts us in morally ultra-relativist territory: "Some states have the death penalty for murder, rape, gay sex, criticizing the party, theft, not bowing deep enough, apostasy, listening to enemy radio stations, arson. All of these serve to keep the regime in power, therefore all of the acts forbidden are morally equal as forms of political dissent." Or we could claim that some of these acts are intrinsically more political than others. States not (at least in principle) punishing murders leads to a bad equilibrium (feuds), so almost all states at least notionally have laws against murder on the book.

But even if you count the whole US prison industrial system as pure repression, by the numbers I would gladly pick the US over the 1940s USSR even through a veil of ignorance where I materialize as a random citizen. And that is before we even go to the indirect advantages of having less repression, like

As for the quantity of the repression, it's a function of how secure the regime is and essentially nothing else.

The version I could agree on is 'every system of government has a minimum of repression it requires to stay in power'.

Some governments deal out too little repression and are overthrown, like the Weimar Republic.

But a common feature of the more repressive governments is that they overdo repression. Almost no organization ever declares that its mission is accomplished and disbands itself. The secret police is no exception. There will always be someone who is the first to stop applauding after Comrade Stalin gives a speech, some intellectual who is the least aligned with the party line.

And some ideologies are more accepting of repression than others. A communist who declared that the class struggle is over, all the bourgeois counter-revolutionaries are defeated would have to answer uncomfortable questions about when exactly the communist utopia will become reality, while in a liberal democracy a lack of life-or-death conflict should be the default state.

I am a utilitarian

One's moral position is entirely irrelevant to descriptive analysis.

You're playing the Botero to my Machiavelli here. The idea that the USSR is better or worse than the USA is less than useless to predict the behavior of either power. I won't have the Prince submit to God's higher power as a prerequisite of our discussion, because I'm interested in how politics actually works, not how it ought to.

Some governments deal out too little repression and are overthrown, like the Weimar Republic.

This is a widely believed myth that does not understand that Hindenburg's maneuver to the right was precisely meant to repress the communists in a way he thought he could better control. He couldn't of course. But Weimar had much stronger repression than people think.

You are directionally right however in that it is his own scruples that led to him being circulated away. A common feature of the fall of elites is that they grasp for hard power at the last minute but do not possess the resolve to use it when it is actually necessary.

some ideologies are more accepting of repression than others

This I think is our real disagreement. You (and you are in numerous company there) believe that ideology is the precursor to political action, that people think of things to do and then do them, and therefore that various ideologies can justify themselves into doing various levels of things.

I disagree. I think ideology comes after political action, and is merely a justification mechanism. I think any group who has large enough an interest to do something will find a way to justify it within any ideological framework, to degrees that look absurd from the outside.

And I can engage to my side the countless points in history in which politicians have acted seemingly against their declared principles. They are almost too numerous to count. Was Reagan collaborating with Iran really coherent? Was Mao declaring himself "right wing" at the end of the cultural revolution coherent?

It was not, but coherence is a luxury you build on top of power. Not the other way around.

There can be different scales of repression though. A regime that can securely survive a larger range of human behaviors will restrict its populous to a wider range of behaviors than a less secure regime.

Its true that all regimes have boundary conditions of what they will accept, and that outside of those conditions they will suppress to whatever degree is required to be effective.

But different regimes have different ranges they permit and different means for being flexible and changing those domains.

You're just flattening everything to one question- "does a boundary exist" without considering the relevance of the properties of that boundary.

A regime that can securely survive a larger range of human behaviors will restrict its populous to a wider range of behaviors than a less secure regime

This is true, but it is also not a function of ideology. Merely of how secure a regime is.

It's the insecurity that allows the state to grow total, not ideology that prevents it from doing so.

This comment is unhinged. I'm reminded of the quote (paraphrasing) "You condemn a black-and-white morality as having only two colors; but you replace it with grey, which is only one."

To my knowledge, the Obama administration only sought the torture and execution of one US citizen on political grounds (Snowden). I'm quite happy to deny "moral community" to the nation's enemies, which is why I drew the line at US citizens.

Putin's Russia is wildly different. Take for instance Trump's election while Obama was in power. How does that fit into "Power suffers no competitors"?

To my knowledge, the Obama administration only sought the torture and execution of one US citizen on political grounds

What about Abdulrahman al-Awlaki? I suppose being the family of a political enemy is "political grounds" but then that decays into agreeing with me.

Take for instance Trump's election while Obama was in power.

Unlike you, I'm not convinced that the ceremonial power structure of the US maps onto its real power structure. In a presidential election, who the ruling class is is almost never on the ballot. And when it is is precisely when the historic assassinations start to happen.

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The twisting to come to this conclusion is almost head spinning. I hear what you're saying from a 10,000 foot level, but the boots on the ground reality does not match with your assessment of this hypothetical. Some regimes and societies are better to live in than others. That is just a fact. If you would rather live under Stalin than Obama then I don't think anyone can have a real conversation with you unless you're a hard core USSR stan.

For who? For whom? If I were a bolshevik and all else were equal, it would be the rational choice.

Besides, I'm not seeing a counter argument.

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Help help I'm being 'repressed! https://youtube.com/watch?v=l8ukak8P2vY

  • -15

What I've always found interesting about this sketch is that in a way, Dennis and Arthur believe the same thing: that if you tell a nice story about who should have power and why, that somehow magically makes you legitimate. The difference only being that Arthur thinks powerful mythical imagery is the way to go, whilst Dennis favors verbose tirades about procedural specificity and mandates from the people.

A familiar opposition to anyone familiar with the XXth century. But both are ultimately wrong (and ridiculous), which is my whole point.

It is Mao, Rand, Marx and Hoppe who are right: power comes from violence.

The reason Arthur is king and Dennis is a peasant has nothing to do with how cool either's absurd story is. It's all down to the fact that the former holds the sword and would normally lob the latter's head instead of ineffectually kicking him into being quiet. Which is why, if you remove that essential part of the process it becomes absurd.

Incidentally, if you reverse who holds the sword, you get another funny sketch about someone who thinks in mythical imagery trying to ineffectually invoke that to deal with an entirely procedural democratic system. Which is to say:

Bimmler: Mr Hitler, Hilter, he says that historically Taunton is a part of Minehead already!

Vibbentrop: He's right, do you know that?

So to circle back to @quiet_NaN's point. It is much better to be a an actor playing a peasant in a Monty Python sketch than to be an actual peasant in 6th century Britain. Things are actually quite a bit better now.

As NaN so eloquently states. Repression is not a blanket catch all, nor an equally applied device. There are gradients and subtilties. To compare the USA currently to Nazi Germany or Russia or the Stasi in East Germany is farcical.

On the other hand, it’s iirc a tactic kagame has used to remain in power, and Orbán, erdogan, etc could very plausibly do something similar.

Openly launching multiple criminal trials against a political opponent leading up to an election is something even Putin hasn't done.

To be fair, Putin doesn't need multiple trials. Just one is enough. And sometimes a trial isn't even needed.

What? He literally had his political opponent thrown in the gulag where he died. What are you on about?

Somehow 5 downvotes...For something 100% factually correct. Along with Ditto blocking me, amazing stuff really.

What makes it a gulag instead of a prison? How are American jails different?

If they locked up Trump, would you refer to American prisons as "gulag"?

Because "maximum security labor camp in the Russian Arctic" is literally the actual definition of a gulag.

Missing the forest for the trees here don't you think? I'm using the term gulag because that is what the Russian prison system and work camps were called in western media for decades, no need for quotes. If you mix in some forced labor and politically motivated charges then you've got yourself a gulag. So if they had Trump breaking rocks and cutting lumber and he got sick from being outside in the winter then yeah it would be an American gulag. The term is still used as a mildly derogatory nod towards Russian notions of justice. The gulag is bad, but not as bad as suffering from the one of the rash of defenestrations that seem to come for you if you badmouth the boss man.

Perhaps not.

But they do believe Biden will end the country.

"a continuation of the Biden administration is national suicide" - Bill Barr

They’re not going to simply cower in the corner and do nothing when they believe that the country’s future is in the balance.

Red Tribe will, Blue Tribe won't. For two reasons. One, Red Tribe believes more in the institutions and will yield them rather than engage in a fight that would most likely destroy them. Two, Red Tribe learned what happened when it does more than cower in the corner on January 6, whereas Blue Tribe has been learning the opposite lesson since the '60s.

This is just politics as pro wrestling, meaningless simulacra level 3 stuff. He's posting galaxy-brained dumb justifications for things his audience believed anyway because it gets him likes. Threats of assassination are not a meaningful incentive in US politics right now, if anything it's lower than ever when you compare the rate of political violence a mere 40-80 years ago to now. If they were, the stakes would be a lot higher than 'have a VP that's slightly worse than trump'. Assassinating a sitting President Trump would both be a huge escalation against 'process' and 'democracy', which the deep state loves, and extremely stupid because it'd backfire horribly in terms of support for Trump, people love martyrs.

Sticking with the theme, let's look at the quote tweets. From one of the DR people, Peachy Keenan: A very experienced criminal psychiatrist who once testified in the Bobby Kennedy assassination case told me TODAY that he is convinced with absolute certainty that assassination is the only path left for the Democrats. Chilling.. Chilling, yes. Candace Owens: Was literally saying this 48 hours ago. Trump should obviously choose Vivek or someone like @RepThomasMassie for this reason. He chooses Tim Scott or Nikki Haley, and we are in trouble. Needs to be someone the establishment cannot control. Very reasonable.

Trump is an obese 77/78 year old. It makes sense to have a backup you'd be happy with regardless.

Is he obese? Gaining some weight is common with age.

He's really fat. Easily obese.

This is a problem I have with Biden. I'm not looking forward to Madame President Kamala.

"Madame President Kamala" is too many syllables. She's "Momala" now

I heard an audio clip with that word on the radio. So horrible when said outloud by a sycophant speaking to Kamala.

I think the odds of Trump being assassinated are low, but there's some value in speculating about it. In fairness to Cernovich, he tweets hundreds of times a day, on dozens of subjects. A thought like this occupies less than a fraction of a percent of his attention, which feels like about the right amount of time for us to contemplate it too.

"Unacceptable VP" is sort of a bad cliche at this point, it's been said about all the recent presidents. Cheney was imagined as the puppetmaster of the Bush admin, and Biden was widely mocked by conservatives as too stupid to ever credibly replace Obama. Pence was weirdly cast by some liberals as a demented anti-gay Dominionist tyrant, and there was some speculating on how Pence as president could be even worse. Kamala is probably genuinely the lowest-calibre of any of these guys, but that didn't stop the Dems from anointing her as VP to the oldest president in American history.

I think the odds of Trump being assassinated are low, but there's some value in speculating about it.

Any updates on your thinking here? Am absolutely curious.

What happened was even more improbable than assassination, because the bullet missed Trump's head by fractions, famously caught on camera, and then created the conditions for an even more iconic picture, one of the greatest pictures in American history. This is basically extremely impossible, it defies prediction, it's one of the greatest meaning-making moments of American history.

In another sense everything I've written above is extremely exaggerated, because the assassination "doesn't mean anything" and "nothing ever happens". But in some primal monkey caveman grug brain unconscious level (, the only level that really matters) -- Donald Trump was literally just saved by God in front of the entire world. That is incredibly incredibly powerful. It doesn't "mean" anything, there is no mechanism by which having a chunk of his ear blown off translates into better personnel or policy. The direct consequence is that Trump is renominated and probably wins the election. But in a fundamental way the whole global consciousness is different.

Trump is a great historic figure like Caesar or Napoleon. I am not trying to crudely exaggerate. His whole self is now deeply bound up with the age in which we live, his personality strengths and flaws have deep consequences for the future. Trump isn't important because of any specific things he's done (which is really quite a lot of things). But he represents, for better and worse, the deep American spirit. Something was ratified this week. This was basically impossible to anticipate, despite any rational calculations about rhetoric and civil war and violence and likelihoods and odds. And I don't think people will stop talking about this any more than they stopped talking about Napoleon escaping from Elba or Caesar at Alesia.

To put it in perspective I try to imagine sending that picture back in time to 2016 /r/thedonald, where it would be considered a little too over the top.

I agree, the odds of Trump being assassinated are low but worth some attention.

However, the odds of Trump dying, or losing his mental function, of natural causes are significantly higher. For that reason even if nothing else, he should choose a good VP candidate.

Marjorie Taylor Greene

The biography From Prostitute To President: An American Tale will be worth it.

I’m sure Vice President Harris is having her ghostwriters cook up a memoir with precisely the same title as we speak.

Or "A Woman First: First Woman: A Memoir".

Or "AI has two letters, my plan for alignment."

Are you confusing her with Lauren Boebert or did I miss something?

I thought both of them had murky alleged ties to sex work but might be mistaken.

One could argue. She dated her boss (Willie Brown) who subsequently appointed her to some cushy gigs.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kamala-harris-affair-willie-brown/

Snopes says the truth is "mixed", which means it's pants-on-fire level embarrassing.

Snope's explanation of why the rumor is mixed is hilarious:

What's True

Harris did date former San Francisco Mayor and State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown for a period of time between 1994 to 1995. In his capacity as speaker, Brown appointed her to two political posts — first to the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board, and then to the Medical Assistance Commission.

What's False

Although Brown was technically still married during the time period that he dated Harris, he had been estranged from his wife Blanche Brown for more than a decade. Harris' first, successful run for office in 2003 happened well after the relationship ended, and Harris sought to distance herself from Brown.

So it's half true because Brown was estranged from his wife. LOL. The offensive part was trading sex for favors. The adultery is nobody's business but Mr. and Mrs. Brown.

Lol now TheMotte is getting into trump assassination territory....Should I stop coming here and start watching fox news?

  • -37

If you don't like the commentary, yes, go do something else. And I did not read the OP as suggesting or advocating for assassination, which makes your pot-shot seem disingenuous and contrived.

Your constant low-effort sneers and pointless posts (and self-admitted drunkposting) are becoming very annoying, and if you don't stop, you're going to get banned.

'Wow, a viewpoint or topic I don't agree with? This place is getting a bit too low brow for the likes of me'

You are equal to a Fox News viewer, believe it or not. You just come at it from a different direction.

It has been quite the journey over the last decade seeing this general space, in its various homes, drift from being a place for a variety of dissenters, idle imaginers, original thinkers, and malcontents to being just another space for Trumpers to get together and gripe about everyone but themselves.

  • -25

Be the change you want to see: post relevant non-Trump content. Those griping Trumpers can't stop you.

Unfortunate, because while this place rarely bans people and to my knowledge has never does it on the basis of their ideology, most online leftist spaces will ban you for having dissenting opinion (or even centrist opinion, hence that meme about how the centrists of the past are now considered far rightists). That leaves very little space on the internet for debate and discourse between the left and the right.

Imagine what the forum would look like if every progressive who flamed out and tearfully quit after losing an argument didn't do that.

Well that is a pretty uncharitable way to put things. I'm to the right of most of my social circle but I'm to the left of whatever this place is turning into. People just get sick of getting downvoted and unable to post in real time, eventually they say something rude and get banned or they say "fuck it" and leave.

When the conversation turns to being worried about trump picking his VP based on possible assassination, putting guns in holes as a generational family gun stash in your back yard, "powers that be" conspiring to eliminate people like you, heavily downvoting someone pointing out having sex with blackout drunk people is probably wrong, being afraid to leave your red state for fear of being locked up for defending yourself, practicing religion harder being the only answer to societal ills, women only being truly happy barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen....I mean the parody starts to write itself at some point.

The votes don't matter at all. They should let you toggle being able to see votes in order to prevent the emotional distress some apparently get.

But they do matter. Negative "karma" slaps a cooldown on your ability to post.

On reddit yes. And auto-collapses your comment. And puts it at the bottom of the thread.

But I thought we didn't have all that around here.

@Amadan am I correct to think the worst features of reddit karma are missing here? It is just a number at the Motte.

afaik, the only effect of getting consistently downvoted here is that the poster will keep winding up in the new user filter, which means we mods have to manually approve their posts. This happened to @guesswho, despite his having been a regular poster for months, and now it's happening to @AhhhTheFrench.

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Can you defend how praciticing religion harder isn’t a solution to most societal ills?

Well it is make believe to start. How would you react to being asked why the 3 little pigs were a not solution to societal ills?

Also the countries that have tried that are all total shitholes. Been to a theocracy lately? Not great.

And the Deep South sucks ass. Alcoholism, teen pregnancy…

Correlation isn’t causation.

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Well that is a pretty uncharitable way to put things.

Anyone who's been around long enough could name names. "I lost an argument about HBD and the mods won't ban anyone for it, time to make a dramatic post about how everyone is Nazis and I quit" was a meme for quite a while in the Reddit days.

I've never mentioned anything about HBD. I tend push back against religious zealotry and related magical thinking, it is funny that so many religious posters can look at scientific evidence regarding race and draw logical conclusions, but can't do the same in their personal lives regarding "spirituality".

You are nowhere near a good enough poster to adopt this tone and be taken seriously.

Case in point, last week you made statements referring to stay-at-home mothers as breeding machines and house servants. It was the kind of thing that would get updoots on most of Reddit, but you were clearly and utterly unprepared for any sort of pushback.

When asked what it was about an average menial job outside the home that elevates a woman from the status of machine or servant you completely imploded. I personally love the upvotes and downvotes here. They tell me interesting things, like how your claim that I was putting words in your mouth persuaded absolutely no one.

You aren't some hero fighting the good fight, you're an /r/atheism midwit who's out of his league.

Much as I hate to affirm French's passive-aggressive non-report report, he's right that throwing ad hominems is not allowed, and you've been warned enough that you know this. The only reason you're not getting a ban for this namecalling, given your track record, is that I don't want to reward either of you for flinging shit.

Spicy stuff somedude! That Huxley line was gold, I just had a hearty chuckle re-reading it, -20 just proved my point. If I'm not wrong you've also just overstepped somewhat and there is a modpost incoming.

  • -14

I remember some of those specific comments you're referencing. But I don't see what the problem is?

Some of the views that get expressed here are views that I find deeply objectionable. Like, not just silly, but actually upsetting. But in spite of that (in some senses, because of that) I think this is a very valuable discussion space. Other people think differently than I do, that's life. I'm just glad we have a place that doesn't moderate on content where we can discuss controversial topics in a relatively civil manner.

That is what initially attracted to me to this space and why I was very excited about it. I'm just sad to slowly watch it turn from a rat adjacent discussion forum into more of a bog standard Tucker Carlson talking point partisan space. Maybe not in all the comments (yet), but the votes are there to turn it into an echo chamber once all the non-conformists are driven off. A right wing "Shit post" even one that catches a mod ban, will get 30 upvotes while a well thought out slightly to the left posing will usually be in the negative. The writing is on the wall and I'm unsure as to why I'm fighting against it.

You're not saying anything that hasn't been said for years - since before we left reddit.

The median poster here is not a MAGA Trump supporter, but a disaffected former liberal. Actual MAGAs, or even old-school Republicans/conservatives, are almost certainly a minority, albeit a vocal one. We have some (former) alt-righties and DRs and a few actual fascists, and a few lefties. But most are still somewhere in the center and only appear "right wing" simply because, as others have pointed out, we don't ban people for supporting Trump or preaching white supremacy or complaining about Jews or saying trans women are men, and thus we tend to attract people who really want to talk about those things.

Honestly, what would you like? More left-leaning opinions? Bring in some more (higher quality, non-trollish) left-leaning posters. Maybe you are right and we're doomed to eventually become a Nazi bar. But you aren't helping when most of your contributions read like shitposts too.

By the way, there is quite a dedicated core of left-wing posters who consistently downvote and report every right-wing post, and vice versa. Despite people claiming they don't want an echo chamber, empirically quite a few people do want an echo chamber. So we're always fighting against that too.

We really need a new poll. Maybe I'll ask Trace what his old questions were and see if I can put a form together.

I haven’t noticed any uptick in Nazi posts. I suppose we’re more racist on average than we were on Reddit, we definitely have a higher fraction of socially conservative tradcaths. But most people here seem to be, on average, fairly centrist, blue tribe but fed up with antics, the sort of people who would be persuadable Biden voters in a better economy.

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I don't want left leaning posts. I want rational posts!!!! I want hot takes on current events from a reasonable and objective body of smart people. Not this partisan shit. It just makes me upset and mad at what it could have been, and what it has been when in full form. I occasionally have been able to come on here and the former sub for some of the smartest and most informative information available anywhere on the planet.

Maybe the news is too slow now and it is impacting the quality of the posts, maybe it is ideological drift or capture, all I know is I'm not getting the discourse I would expect from a forum that perhaps I saw as a more august body than it was.

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People just get sick of getting downvoted and unable to post in real time

You've been shitposting here from day one, dude.

One man's trash.

  • -13

Sorry, I kind of have to agree with ArjinFerman—at least, it would be disastrous for the forum if everyone started adopting your tone and habits of response. You're consistently above-average in antagonism and dismissiveness. And this definitely is one of the factors in you drawing more downvotes—it's often the reason if ever I downvote you. That of course doesn't address the overall problem of voting based on whether people like it driving dissenting views away, but it could make a meaningful difference in your particular case.

So I guess, two.

I know you don't like deficit spending, but I don't think I was particularly rude or dismissive in that recent exchange. I didn't accuse you of magical thinking as you accused me for disagreeing on monetary policy (I save that for the religious debates where I am summarily chastised). I feel that budget hawks continually underestimate the power of extend and pretend, and we may, in fact, be able to do it forever.

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Ironic shitposting is still shitposting.

I've never posted ironically. I stand behind every post I've made. Unlike those of you who hide their posting history.

I think you're implying that we've become too ideologically homogeneous and people's viewpoints aren't being challenged often enough here. Maybe that's true if you restrict yourself to only looking at "basic" culture war issues - Trump, trans issues, DEI, etc. But if you look at the total range of issues that get discussed here, we have lots of arguments over lots of things. We have plenty of substantial disagreements with each other.

It would be better if we had more "garden variety" leftists who were anti-Trump, pro-trans, etc. so we had more ideological diversity, but, the reasons for our lack of leftists have already been discussed ad nauseam.

I also see that you haven't made a top level post in the last 3 months. You are the forum. If you think the posts here are low quality, then write the kinds of posts that you would prefer to read.

Did anyone who complains about "trumpers" ever complain about the opposite, or it is just usual tactic of "identify the community population as problematic, suggest doing something about them"?

I'm more than happy to complain about Leftists and their 'liberal' fellow travelers and useful idiots, does that count?

I doubt many people here are Trumpers. They are probably better described as anti anti trumpers.

Or even "anti-a-fraction-of-anti-Trumpers"? I think Trump was a depressingly sub-par president, but I'm still able to appreciate that the right way to beat him is "nominate someone much better", not "insist that prostitute hush money is clearly a campaign expense and prosecute misreporting it".

I’m not even sure reporting an NDA as a legal expense is misreporting it…

I take and agree with your larger point

Also Hillary funded the Steele dossier and falsely reported it as legal expenses. I notice she wasn't prosecuted in criminal court for doing that.

I’m not even sure reporting an NDA as a legal expense is misreporting it…

It's ambiguous enough that I feel certain that had Trump declared it as a campaign expense, we'd see the exact same case with the prosecution making the claim that no, paying someone to keep quiet should not be recorded as a campaign expense.

Ambiguity should also be the death of the charge. Rule of lenity.

The problem is the prosecutor will argue that it was blindingly obvious that (insert bunch of opaque regulations) said Trump had to record it as a campaign expense and not a business expense. The defense will argue that no, (insert different bunch of opaque regulations) said he should have recorded it as a business expense and not a campaign expense. The jury, not being experts on the ins and outs of New York business accounting, will not be able to come to a conclusion on the merits, so it'll just be a matter of who they believe. The prosecution certainly won't admit to any ambiguity.

Anyone can make a toplevel post, there've always been a few of these.

Putting a 77-year-old in prison unjustly (if that is indeed what is being attempted) is on par with assassinating him.

No, it’s not. And no, it isn’t.

Is it your belief the lawfare is just?

“Have you stopped beating your wife?”

I’d say the Stormy Daniels prosecution is probably unjust in that it wouldn’t be happening but for Trump’s political status. Low confidence.

The classified documents, on the other hand? Nothing I’ve seen suggests that Trump was innocent, or that a random citizen could get away with doing the same thing. While I was surprised that it escalated to a trial, I don’t think it’s unjust.

My understanding is that a low level government worker who did what Trump did with classified documents would go to jail, but an important politician (e.g. Hillary, Joe Biden, Sandy Berger) likely wouldn't.

a random citizen

Those people don't handle classified documents on the regular.

How about a random politician?

True. I was thinking of Thug Shaker Central guy: low level military.

A better natural comparison is Biden, who had 25-30 documents around his house and office. The report on him concluded with a Hillary-worthy lack of “why, how or whom.” Why didn’t Trump get that benefit of the doubt?

  1. They’re confident in the why, how, and whom.
  2. He’s being punished for non-cooperation with NARA.
  3. He’s being punished as a proxy for other unprovable crimes, like using RICO against mobsters.
  4. He’s being harassed for personal distaste.
  5. He’s being harassed to keep him out of office.

I’d say 2-5 could count as lawfare, but most people using that term mean something more like 4 or 5.

1 is almost certainly true. Look how much the warrant focuses on specific people. They were definitely more confident in who was actually handling the boxes and giving the orders.

Same for 2. I have to stress—NARA did have reason to believe Trump was holding out on them. Biden’s team bent over backwards to avoid that.

3 is implausible; it’s not like there’s a lack of other cases to use. Including actual RICO charges.

4 and 5 are more credible. I’d be very surprised if people on these teams didn’t dislike the man or even think he’s a danger to the country. Enough to fabricate their entire job (e.g. planting classified docs)? Probably not. Enough to push when they wouldn’t for anyone else? Much more likely.

In short, I think there are a lot of reasons. The ones which I find most likely are the least “lawfare” of the bunch.

I think that's a fairly good summary of why this is a scissor statement.

Ultimately, one's view of the situation is dependent on how much respect they have for the institutions in question. And the object level facts of whether this was or wasn't technically illegal don't matter except to us nerds.

They may not even really be what decides this case, ultimately.

Nothing I’ve seen suggests that Trump was innocent, or that a random citizen could get away with doing the same thing.

Probably not a random person, but every other President in history -- which does seem a bit unfair?

Every other President post Nixon, you mean. Since the Presidential Records Act was passed specifically to keep him from holding on to stuff.

The best comparison is probably Biden or Pence. In both cases, they got ahead of the search warrants and basically bent over for NARA. No valet testimonies or partial handovers. I think that has a lot to do with it.

Reagan is another possibility. Apparently he was allowed to keep diaries, but I can’t find the relevant part in the Hur report.

Biden’s violations include papers from when he was a senator. Those papers were ones he was only supposed to have viewed in a clean room. Biden absolutely broke the law. But because his DOJ was in charge he “cooperated” with himself.

Biden and Pence were not President -- every other President has been allowed to go through his papers at his leisure and select what to return and when. Obama probably still has stuff. It seems like a fairly civilized policy.

No random person could be in Trump's position vis-a-vis the classified documents, so "every other President in history" is really one of the few reasonable comparisons.

That is, no one who wasn't in high political office could actually receive classified documents in the way that Trump is alleged to.

What about the fraud case? Or the Rico case?

And have you read some of the unredacted statements coming up in the Florida case? It suggests some degree of set up (and typical Trump stupidity)

Which one is the fraud case? Hard to search.

Yes, I’ve been keeping up with the unredactions. Mostly to argue with people in the other subthread. I swear, when I started reading I didn’t look like such a partisan hack!

A few of the claims are very defensible. Then they’re used to argue something much more elaborate (and, of course, more favorable to Trump). Nothing about the document reordering changes the facts of the warrant or the charges. Translating “we acknowledge inconsistency with what we previously understood and represented to the Court” as “we are lying liars who got caught” is disingenuous.

That conclusion is propped up by thinner evidence. There’s a paragraph suggesting NARA gave Trump boxes at one point? That must mean they were the classified documents; it’s all a setup! News outlets ran with a misleading FBI photo? Psyop! Any time Politico or CNN says something uncharitable? Proof of the deep-seated conspiracy. Except when the judge postpones; clearly she’s the only rational, unbiased individual in this whole mess.

The biggest outlier is the claim about early DoJ/NARA collaboration, which is most likely to prove a political but-for. It’s also getting far less attention from Trump partisans. Is that because they aren’t sure about the timeline? Because they understand the difference between correlation and causation? Because they already assume the political motive is the only way? I don’t know. That’s the issue I’ll be following most closely.

Fraud is where he was hit with a 350m penalty for making allegedly fraudulent statements to the bank for a loan on which he paid every cent on the loan (which doesn’t mean there wasn’t fraud but disgorgement at best would be much smaller)

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For a standard prison, no it isn't. Prisoners can communicate with the outside world and file lawsuits, to give two pertinent differences.

I'm imaging life in prison for a rich 77-year-old is likely a worse-than-death outcome.

In the staggeringly unlikely event of trump being in gen pop, he’ll do fine by smearing some money around.

Prison is a place there's literally nothing to do but play social dominance games. Trump would probably do fine if he didn't get killed learning the ropes.

...why? This feels like a complete non-sequitur.

What they are openly trying to do to Trump is as bad as an assassination attempt, is my point.

From who's point of view? The voters? The average global citizen? Surely in Trump's own subjective experience getting assassinated is worse than going to prison.

Average global citizen - depends if you like him

Voters - I think more than not think it’s an abuse of process

Trump - he has a big ego. There would be a certain historic parallel if he was assassinated with Julius Caesar. Who probably is a good comp for his career so far. If little Ron or Vivek or someone not known emerged as Augustus finishing his goals and Trump was remembered as Caeser then he might not mind being assassinated

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Trump is given a choice: Go to prison for the rest of your life or with probably P get assassinated. For what value of P is Trump indifferent? If it's for a P>.9 the two are very similar.

Really though, this is why we need a thread for more low-effort, dumb and fun stuff. I guess Friday Fun is kind of that, but Cernovich rambling about assassinations just isn't that fun.

But there are already lots of places on the internet for low effort dumb fun stuff. /pol/. rDrama. Whatever floats your boat. I don’t need TheMotte to become those sites. It’s fine for them to remain separate.

Trump is Tiberius Gracchus

On which of these other places would you see a comment like this implying that readers know who Tiberius Gracchus was?

Trump isn’t a Gracchus anyways, he’s Marius.

Is Tiberius Gracchus someone we are expected to know here as common knowledge? I’ve actually read Gibbons huge book and can’t place him a long time ago. I assume I am just expected to be smart enough to google and hit Wikipedia.

He’s a solid 300 years before anything discussed in detail by Gibbon.

Yes if you are a man and therefore think about Rome every day.

  • Lincoln: plot also targeted Andrew Johnson
  • Garfield: “Arthur, a Conkling ally, had been selected as Garfield's running mate to placate the Stalwart faction. As a self-professed Stalwart, Guiteau convinced himself that by removing Garfield, he was striking a blow to unite the two factions of the Republican Party.”
  • McKinley: anarchist with no statements on VP
  • Roosevelt: nutjob with no opinions on VP
  • JFK: sigh
  • Reagan: nutjob with no opinions on VP, or even President

So 1 out of 6. And Garfield’s assassin was dealing with an actively fragmented Republican Party with multiple credible candidates. I don’t know what Tim Scott’s deal is, but he looks to be a completely generic Southern Republican. What’s he supposed to bring to the table?

Garfield's assassin was also a nut.

Right, and it’s possible he would have stalked Garfield even if the VP wasn’t from his preferred party. But he specifically said "I am a Stalwart, and want Arthur for President." So he definitely counts for this question.

Garfield and McKinley being assassinated a century ago doesn't really say very much about the likelihood of it happening today.

My take is it's extremely unlikely, but not extraordinarily unlikely. If you wanted to make a "Doomsday Clock" for assessing assassination odds, it's probably closer to midnight than it was ten years ago.

I'd count JFK, and maybe Nixon too. I think he was likely setup.

I don't think assassinations are likely to happen anymore. I think CIA or something similar carried out JFK assassination and then realized how much of a massive headache it was to cover up and never did it again.

Seems like they usually go the lawfare or controversy route to get people out of the way. Trump has just been a bad target for these methods since he basically excels in those situations.

JFK was more of a unique situation, since Kennedy’s death was sort of just a means-to-an-end rather than anything else according to most serious researchers; Kennedy’s head being blown off was actually just meant (according to their theories) to act as a false flag against Cuba in order to invade the country and depose Castro, with LBJ hopefully biting the bait to support a full-on land invasion, with Kennedy dying just being an added bonus (given his sympathies towards Communist countries and his ‘betrayal’ against the anti-Castroites in not providing Air Support in the Bay of Pigs). Unless Trump’s death could be used as a means to some bigger benefit, I doubt the intelligence community or any other big organization might attempt to get the hit off, especially with the potential backlash of Trump’s successors.

…what? “Most serious researchers?”

That theory raises more questions than answers, anyway. Like how Cuba remains un-invaded.

…what? “Most serious researchers?”

Yes, like John Newman (former executive assistant to the director of the NSA & Professor at James Madison), Gaeton Fonzi (HSCA investigator & NYT contributor), Anthony Summers (Pulitzer finalist & BBC producer) among others. They all have done great work.

That theory raises more questions than answers, anyway. Like how Cuba remains un-invaded.

Not really. LBJ & Hoover upon realizing that Lee Harvey Oswald was impersonated during his visits to the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City, along with Oswald or an impersonator meeting with the Soviet head of covert assassinations there, came to the conclusion that the Lone Gunman scenario (Oswald acting alone) was the only really tenable way forward. Earl Warren, the Chief Justice of the SCOTUS, wasn’t willing to head the Warren Commission (which was working on the presupposition that Oswald acted alone) until LBJ pulled out ‘a little incident in Mexico City’ which would have implicated the Soviets and lead to ‘millions of Americans dead in an hour’, which caused Warren to actually cry on the phone with LBJ and reluctantly admit to head the commission. All of this is in the public domain and readily available.

your link doesn't work, which seems a shame.

I fixed it. Thanks.

What are the circumstances such that the "powers that be" would be able to assassinate Trump but not his VP? Especially if Dems take back the House, as predicted. Assassinating both of them would likely mean President Hakeem Jeffries.

If Trump wins its hard to envisage a dem house.

The only people it really makes sense to assassinate are the other side's Supreme Court Justices while your side is in power. Then your side gets to replace them, and if you then don't pick octogenarians they'll sit for decades. However, that doesn't seem to be a tactic that has seen any use at all, while the President has been assassinated multiple times.

This is because assassination, in America, is not an action usually attempted by rational actors, it’s attempted by schizos who just want to be deranged in public. In countries where assassinations are used by ‘normal’ political actors the targets are chosen a good deal more rationally.

It should be remembered that for much of the US's existence, SCOTUS wasn't really as powerful as it now is. Jackson, for instance, directly defied SCOTUS successfully.

It’s almost like the people who assassinate public officials aren’t particularly rational.

That suggests an interesting speculative question: how often have assassins shifted the course of world history toward something they would have preferred, making the assassination "rational" in some sense?

Most of the time, the effect seems to be neutral at best. Princip did nothing for Serbian nationalism. Goatse provided a founding myth for a secular, not Hindu, state. James Earl Ray didn't kill the Civil Rights Movement but birthed a martyr. Charitably, Brutus may have delayed empire for a decade or so. Who knows what Oswald's political opinions were, but it's almost certain that they didn't come to fruition.

The only effective assassination I can really think of is Booth's. He managed to eliminate a politician who was a genuine driving force toward something the "deep state" wasn't particularly interested in, and it made the Reconstruction stillborn, with a new President not particularly interested in tackling a hard problem anyways. It was going to be a hard slog anyways, but he killed it with a bullet.

Maybe there were some Russian anarchists who maybe helped the serfs a bit?

Explicit note for any insane Motteizans (and lurking Feds): even ignoring morality, most of the time assassination seems useless at best and counterproductive at worst.

Well, the Japanese May 15th incident in 1932 and the October 12, 1960 assassination of Asanuma Inejirō are what immediately comes to mind for me. Also from Japan, there's the Isshi incident of July 10, 645; the Sakuradamon incident of March 24, 1860; and the League of Blood incident (a precursor to the May 15 incident).

And, of course, depending on how you define "shift[ing] the course of world history toward something they would have preferred," there's the 47 Rōnin, the revenge of the Soga Brothers, and the Igagoe vendetta.

I guess the lesson might be that it works better in Japan?

Bashir Gemayel’s assassination, maybe? Alexander III’s assassination definitely contributed to a communist revolution, albeit in an accelerationist way and not directly.

That’s of course ignoring Game of Thrones-style assassinations of family members to seize the throne; those are historically confined to certain circumstances(Macedonian monarchies, the Ottoman Empire, etc) but well represented in the historical record.

I'll have to read up on Gemayel.

As for Alexander II (I think you mean, though I just found out III was the object of an assassination attempt by Aleksandr Ulyanov, elder brother of the most famous Ulyanov), I'm on the fence. The assassin's ideological program seems consistent with Communist revolution: the long temporal gap, conservative reaction, and WW1 being the more immediate cause all point in the opposite direction. Maybe I'd land on a half point?

Court intrigues seem less like history and more like bookkeeping to me, though perhaps that's just distance and time obscuring the historical changes they caused.

Where's the line between an assassination and a purge? Because if you kill enough people, that frequently makes a difference.

I'm taking a more limited definition of assassination: an individual who attempts to change how he is governed by killing an individual or small group who govern him. I'd say this excludes a government killing domestic opponents (governments can kill on a much grander scale, since they are not the governed but the governors) and soldiers killing other soldiers (two governments sending their governed to kill each other to resolve a dispute).

Assasination of former Japanese PM Shinzo Abe, by a man motivated by his mother getting scammed by a Korean New Religious movement, led to it and particularly its influence on Japanese politics put under scrutiny.

how often have assassins shifted the course of world history toward something they would have preferred, making the assassination "rational" in some sense?

Darius the Great killed (a man allegedly falsely claiming to be) Bardiya, who was ruling Persia, which allowed him to take over the Persian Empire. Darius got what he wanted and was good at managing the Empire too, so that worked out for him.

Court intrigue and usurpers seem categorically different from the modern assassin.

Goatse provided a founding myth for a secular, not Hindu, state.

Putting the “ass” (both of them) in “assassination”.

On a serious note, I would say that Leon Czolgosz got at least a piece of what he wanted in killing Bill McKinley. McKinley’s successor genuinely did make significant efforts to rein in some of the worst practices of large predatory corporations which were exacerbating the obscene levels of wealth inequality typical of the period. Sure, America never got full anarcho-socialism like Czolgosz and his comrades hoped - although it wasn’t for a significant lack of trying by the Wobblies and other major communist labor movements of the time - but I would say that at the very least taking out McKinley probably moved thing at least directionally toward his assassin’s goals.

Bill McKinley

I definitely had to look this up, you’re talking about William McKinley. I didn’t recognize the name from the list of presidents stuck in my head, I thought you were talking about some other politician.

Yes, there’s a bit in Stephen Sondheim’s musical Assassins where people sing a patriotic campaign song calling him “Bill McKinley”.

I’ve tried to find out if during McKinley’s life, people actually did refer to him familiarly as “Bill”. The only concrete example I’ve found is that during the Battle of Antietam, McKinley drove a supply wagon carrying, among other things, coffee, and that this led to political opponents later in his career derisively referring to him as “Coffee Bill”.

to reign in

"rein in" is an equestrian term and has no G.

Yeah, that’s what I get for posting right before I go to sleep.

Putting the “ass” (both of them) in “assassination”.

I like.

I'm not convinced that Teddy changed the trajectory of the regulatory state. This is all speculative, of course, but both Democrats (stagnant in support, admittedly) and a meaningful and growing number of Republicans were anti-corporate in sympathies. Teddy may have been the particular executor of many anti-corporate policies, but had McKinley not been assassinated, would his vision have dominated for the next 20 years? I suspect eventually someone outside of it would have won a Presidential election (perhaps TR himself).

Princip did nothing for Serbian nationalism.

Princip started a chain of events that led to the Serbian-dominated Kingdom of Yugoslavia. On the other hand, there was a bloody war in-between which he deeply regretted (and didn't live to see the end of).

TIL that Goatse killed Gandhi, and we know all too well that Marat was slain by Tubgirl.

I don’t know who assassinated Pupienus, but there’s probably a fitting meme somewhere…

Goatse provided a founding myth for a secular, not Hindu, state.

Thank you for this typo, I needed a good belly laugh

Would be too obvious, and might seriously threaten the stability of the US.

While the establishment Democrats probably don't want a civil war, there are those on the SJ side who think a civil war beats another Republican presidency, particularly if they can leverage being technically in power into enough control of the military to win that civil war.

And, of course, assassinating the President is very much a "unilateralist's curse" issue.

Eh, it seems like most SJ types recognize a civil war puts them against the wall while a fascist regime takes power. There’s some resistance libs who crow about the military beating up gun owners but I don’t think they’re talking about a civil war. They have an insurrection in mind.

Browsing through a certain interaction I had... some think Trump winning is already a fascist regime taking power, and some think that civil war is inevitable anyway.

You're more right than I thought, but the amount of people I've encountered saying outright that couping Trump would be the right thing to do is still not zero, and as I said this is very much a case of the unilateralist's curse.

If Trump was at any real risk of being assassinated by the kind of people who are rational enough to care about the VP who would become President as a result, then why has he not already been assassinated, at some point between 2015 and now?

I'm beginning to suspect that Powers That Be may not Be all they're cracked up to be. Current track record on presidential assassinations is leaning really heavily in favor of deranged highly motivated individuals and against the Illuminati.

edit: deranged is not really an appropriate descriptor for many presidential assassins, but even the ones with clear political motives were acting alone or in a small group, not as agents of a significant institution.

It’s not? Out of the four big assassins, the only one who made a coherent plan was Booth. Half credit for Oswald. The Reagan, Teddy, and Jackson attempts were pretty unhinged, too.

I mean, it is clearly is appropriate for many as well, but off the top of my head Booth, McKinley's assassin, the Puerto Ricans, and that one Georgian dude who threw a grenade at Dubya had fairly clear ideological motives. It may not necessarily have involved a good plan, but it wasn't like the ghost of Elvis told them to do it.

The Powers-That-Be will likely be sending Trump to prison if Trump doesn't win in the next election. Don't just look at US history, but all of human history when considering the possibility of the elites killing the guy at the top. The US has been extraordinarily lucky in nearly everything since the Civil War, so expect reversion to the mean and don't consider past US history as a good bases for your Bayesian priors.

JFK assassination seems like a case of elites killing off the top guy. Or at least I'd say I'm 80% certain the elites at the time were involved in some portion of that assassination.

I'm also about 70% certain that the elites setup Nixon for his fall.

Intelligence agencies don't seem generally trustful. I just don't think they can use overt methods anymore.

I'm not an end-of-history guy, but I do actually think the professionalism of the Secret Service is pretty remarkable. I have never heard a credible claim that they don't do their level best to protect the President regardless of who it is. American patriots are actually better than third-worlders.

They're also quite good at their original mission: investigating and stamping out counterfeit money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfeit_United_States_currency

an estimated $70 million in counterfeit bills are in circulation, or approximately 1 note in counterfeits for every 10,000 in genuine currency, with an upper bound of $200 million counterfeit, or 1 counterfeit per 4,000 genuine notes

It’s still fascinating to me we got the people who investigated money to be the presidential guard. I guess all around they’re there to make sure the presidents’ face stays intact.

Yeah it's a weird double-mission in the modern era. I guess it made more sense in the wild west days, when they were more like frontier super-policemen.

I always assumed that putting the Presidential security detail in the Treasury Department (where the Secret Service sat until it was moved into DHS in 2003) was a coup-proofing measure - you wanted the detail to have a totally different reporting line to the military or federal law enforcement. But checking dates suggests that the story might be simpler - the Secret Service took over Presidential security in 1901 (after the McKinley assassination) and the FBI wasn't established until 1908. So at the time they put the detail in the Secret Service, the only civilian alternatives were a new agency, the Marshalls Service, or the Postal Inspectorate. I suspect the Postal Inspectorate would have done a better job.

The Powers-That-Be

Can you be more specific?

The Justice Department. Jack Smith. Alvin Bragg. You know, the people currently prosecuting him for felonies.

Why not say that instead of using a needlessly vague and conspiratorial sounding term?

Because Biden is more likely to beat Trump than the alternatives.


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