ALL HAIL PRESIDENT TRUMP

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Aim_Deep wrote:

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Turtledove wrote:

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

<Response to Trump is an "evil genius"discussion snipped>

Trump is smarter and a bit more evil than average. I think what really defines him though is his single mindedness, his drive, and his self absorption. These are symptoms of his narcissism, his inability to empathize or to properly evaluate his own actions from a third party perspective.

This makes him inclined to abuse his power. His obstruction of justice described in the Mueller report is really more a symptom of his tendency to abuse his power. He ordered McGahn to fire Mueller. McGahn refused which probably saved his presidency. Then when it became public, he didn't like the story and so he ordered McGahn to lie that he was not told to fire Mueller.

This whole stonewalling shtick he's on now is just another example of his tendency to abuse power.

You guys must be so pissed after you named your dogs and cats and possibly children Mueller and that turned bunk... When Trump is reelected wonder what next conspiracy will be?

Mueller investigated the Russian connection. You are wrong that he turned up bunk though.

Mueller concluded that the Russian's interference in the 2016 election was in sweeping and systematic. The administration has said that the Russians are expected to be doing the same thing in 2020 that they did in 2016. Trump has prevented the administration from protecting us in the 2020 election though. Presumably because he wants Russian help again in 2020.

Mueller also laid out 10 really strong cases and 2 less strong cases of Trump breaking the law to obstruct the Mueller investigation.

Now Trump has declared that he will obstruct congress from investigating Russian interference in our elections as well as anything else that congress has a right to investigate.

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

The actual "evil geniuses"? Mitch McConnell, Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, possibly Steve Bannon. Trump is the recipient of all of their collective genius, all of the advantages they've built up over the years for republicans.

The Trump revolution in the GOP was a schism between the neoconservative/evangelocon establishment and a temporary alliance (again, of the Elric/Scar sort) of right-libertarians and pro-white racists under the new label of the "alternative right." (The right-libertarians would later purity-spiral the out-of-closet white identitarians out of the movement, along with the now-toxic alt-right label; arguably, the racists were played, not catered to, which is why ethnonationalists hate Trump now. But that came later.) I'm not one of those guys who's going to pretend Trump wasn't dogwhistling to racists when he hemmed and hawed about condemning David Duke; he was, and he knew what he was doing. The right-libertarian revolution within the party was successful, the Republican establishment conquered, and a new paradigm began, with old Republicans trying to find their new place in it (in McCain's case, as an undocumented Democrat neocon).

Also, 4 years ago Obama was President.

So it's completely bonkers to talk about incremental advantage built up over decades. There wasn't any; there was only weakness, which the MAGA movement (partially) dispensed with. The only one in that list who I thought might have been a genius was Steve Bannon. But even with him, Trump eventually kicked him out, and Trump administration strategy didn't take a nose-dive; therefore, he wasn't the (only) brains of the operation.

How about this: can we agree that somewhere within the Trump Administration, or perhaps just outside it but closely affiliated, there exists a Genius who is helping Trump? Me and Mikey the Manatee think it's Trump himself, but that's not as important. I think what's important is that you acknowledge the Trump organization has the strategic planning skills to at least challenge and often defeat the best plans the Democrats have to offer.

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

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You're correct that the currency in a free marketplace of ideas is attention. But you're implicitly arguing for an impossibility. Correctness can never be a currency. It can't be spent; opportunity cost doesn't apply to it; you can't trade something and get correctness in exchange.

The driving force behind any market is not its currency; currency is merely a medium of exchange. The driving force behind a healthy market is rational self interest. However, when the driving force behind purchasing decisions is something else, the market can accommodate.

If that's the case, then the marketplace of ideas is deeply diseased. If we insist on keeping the metaphor, then the existence of major popular figures like Alex Jones or Stefan Molyneux as serious cultural influences is akin to if the marketplace sold people coffee laced with arsenic and cocaine.

Oh, that's just bullshit. Jones and Molyneux don't have ideas that kill people. At worst, they have ideas that get people to believe some stupid shit. And as I've said before, regulating stupid ideas normally isn't required because the person most hurt by an idiot's idiocy is usually the idiot themselves.

What you have here is a failure to distinguish evil from stupid. Broadly speaking, stupid is wrong ideas or speech, while evil is wrong action. Specifically, evil is the use of force upon others to prevent them from taking, or compelling them to perform, certain actions. There is one exception to this: when your use of force would prevent evil done by another, due to properly identifying a threat — that is, making a prediction of that person's preventable/prevented actions based on evidence sufficient that to convince reasonable folk that evil was prevented. (Unlike Molyneux, I believe this prediction is inherently subjective; he would likely agree with this paragraph otherwise, while insisting threat is objective because NAP etc.)

I view the First Amendment, which protects speech and religion, to be a Constitutional guarantee of the right to be a moron without worry of evil being inflicted upon you. And I consider that a good thing.

Oppressing stupid just creates a victimhood narrative around them, because you're trying to fix stupid by inflicting evil upon it. Despite all their supposed supremacy and redpilling, white identitarians' have yet to find consistent success, so they use an excuse: they falsely claim they are victims of institutional racism at the hands of Jews. (I believe there are racists in every sufficiently large group of people, including a tiny number of Jews who are racist against non-Hebrew whites, but that's not what they're saying, hence "institutional racism.") If people believe that evil is causing your failures, it covers for your stupid.

My argument is that you're confirming, not disproving, their narrative when you create an institution whose primary purpose is to oppress, harass, and/or deplatform people who have white-identitarian ideologies — or, more frequently, are falsely accused of such. In other words, the SPLC and the ADL, in their current forms, advance white identitarian narratives better than they combat them. It's basically the Streisand Effect, a possibly well-intentioned strategic blunder.

I advocate the liberal method of defeating stupid ideas. A liberal attitude towards a particular behavior (even if it is perceived as misbehavior) is that government interference is not required to fix it. The essence of liberalism is to say "I disagree with what you're saying, but I'll defend your right to say it." An example of an extremist liberal, who believes government isn't required for anything, is an anarchist, but most liberals aren't nearly that extreme; in my case, I draw the line between evil and stupid.

For many decades liberalism was associated with the left: a law against gay marriage is not required (even if you're Christian and believe homosexuality is sinful); a law separating black people from white people is not required; sending our soldiers overseas to fix stupid governments in other lands, that present no threat to America, is not required. However, in the past decade the Overton Window has shifted far enough left that liberal attitudes are increasingly associated with the right: the government shouldn't force a baker to make a cake for the gay couple's wedding; internet oligopolies shouldn't deplatform nonterrorist organizations for mere words; laws that favor black applicants over white applicants aren't required. The Left that once embraced liberalism has abandoned it.

But I digress. The reason why liberalism works is because it removes the excuse of a persecution narrative. By employing freedom of association, like-minded people tend to cluster together — those who are correct with those who are correct, and idiots with idiots. Then you apply separation (good fences make good neighbors) and see who prospers better. It's still a contest, and I'm certainly not advocating that you love idiots, or that you'd want to see them win; I'm simply turning what would be a violent conflict into a race to some impossible objective, where people can judge for themselves who is better according to the empirical evidence of relative prosperity. That's why so many people in the 1800s fled countries with stupid policies and came to the United States — they wanted to join the winning team.

If some company wants to hire only white non-Jewish people, I don't want to send a SWAT team to their house. I'm not scared of stupid; I have more faith than that in the inevitable victory of reason. I'd only ask that they openly announce their policy — that is, put some sunlight on it — and see how well they compete when their competitors have access to the most talented people of color while they, through their own self-imposed rules, do not. A social experiment to prove racism is the foolishness we believe it is. I'm not afraid of a contest; I welcome one.

It seems to me that you lack that confidence. Are you so convinced that The Good is not adaptive, that intelligence exposed to idiocy will die from infection, that the world is a cruel place where stupidity is predetermined to win over reason unless the reasonable themselves become the cruel?

You know, the thing I find most ironic about the classical, anti-Semitic white supremacist is that, in promoting his persecution narrative, he tells of the dominance of Jews over his own people. If Jews have been able to not only accomplish such a task, but also cover it up so well that you'd have to believe some extremely improbable things to even believe it is real, then aren't the Jews, according to them, the superior race? Are they truly white supremacists, or are they Jewish supremacists who are just super pissed off about it?

In the same way, are you really a reason supremacist, or do you think stupid is inevitable victor in this conflict? If so, better get with the winning team.

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

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Lest you begin thinking this is a digression, the point is that cultures are different rubrics for assigning value hierarchies, and value hierarchies are used to determine expenditure of scarce resources such as attention. Attention paid such that it makes us less likely to die and more likely to breed (without disturbing homeostatic equilibrium with our habitat) is what determines which cultures rise and fall. The cultures that promote paying attention to dumb shit will not last in the grand scheme of things, and those that do will inherit the future and — if we can use the Sunlight Method of tying their downfall to their culture — be laughed at by children of future generations, not to be repeated again.

Have you seen Ian "InnuendoStudios" Danskin's "The Alt-Right Playbook" series? Because reading this it seriously reminds me of the most recent video, "Always a bigger fish", in a rather chilling way.

I'll check it out later.

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

Breitbart: "The Slaughterhouse Three, Obama, Pelosi and Reid, have authored the legislation that will make every American a POW, strip them of their Freedoms and Liberty and shove them in a meat cellar for cold storage".

My first thought reading that was: wow, divorced from any other context that sounds completely batshit.

My second thought was: there probably was some kind of context that makes that sound less crazy, although probably still overzealous.

My third thought was: I bet BPC never even thought to fact-check this with a simple Google.

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

"If they pass health care, government health care, that is the end of the republic. That is the final nail in the coffin of the individual free human being. Once they own your body, they own everything. Once they can withhold health care from you, because you're too old, because you're too sick, or maybe 'cause they just don't like you -- did you ever think about that?"
- Jim Quinn

Or this:

"Sir, you're overweight. What? Yes, sir, you are overweight, we're going to have to require you to lose weight. And if you don't lose weight on your own, we're going to send you to a fat camp and make you lose the weight. And if you still don't lose the weight, then you know, we're just going to have to do surg—we're just going to have to put you in jail. And if you don't lose the weight in jail, sir, I don't know what else to do. Maybe some end-of-life counseling might be good. I mean, I remember a woman that got—that was greased by Dr. Kevorkian because she was fat."
- Chris Baker, on Glenn Beck's show

Can you even find a liberal take on the Trump tax cuts that comes close to being as insane as either of those statements?

Assuming you actually mean liberal: Absolutely not.

Assuming you mean leftist: Possibly. But that wouldn't be a fast Google.

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rojimboo wrote:

Can we stop calling people with differing political affiliations mentally ill, please?

The vast majority of the "impeach Trump" crowd are not mentally ill, but some are. I can't in good faith comply with your request.

I might not call them that here. But as I was telling BPC, threatening to deplatform someone rarely changes their mind.

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Turtledove wrote:

Mueller also laid out 10 really strong cases and 2 less strong cases of Trump breaking the law to obstruct the Mueller investigation.

That is misleading. The Mueller report explicitly does not conclude that the President committed a crime (but it explicitly doesn't exonerate him of obstruction either). Thus, in revealing the evidence he had collected, Mueller laid out 10 dubious cases and 2 even more dubious cases of Trump possibly breaking the law to obstruct the Mueller investigation.

You overestimate the value of what little you have. If Mueller was confident it was a slam dunk, he wouldn't have equivocated.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

The actual "evil geniuses"? Mitch McConnell, Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, possibly Steve Bannon. Trump is the recipient of all of their collective genius, all of the advantages they've built up over the years for republicans.

The Trump revolution in the GOP was a schism between the neoconservative/evangelocon establishment and a temporary alliance (again, of the Elric/Scar sort) of right-libertarians and pro-white racists under the new label of the "alternative right." (The right-libertarians would later purity-spiral the out-of-closet white identitarians out of the movement, along with the now-toxic alt-right label; arguably, the racists were played, not catered to, which is why ethnonationalists hate Trump now. But that came later.) I'm not one of those guys who's going to pretend Trump wasn't dogwhistling to racists when he hemmed and hawed about condemning David Duke; he was, and he knew what he was doing. The right-libertarian revolution within the party was successful, the Republican establishment conquered, and a new paradigm began, with old Republicans trying to find their new place in it (in McCain's case, as an undocumented Democrat neocon).

Also, 4 years ago Obama was President.

So if that's the case... How is the MAGA crowd's agenda different from McConnell's? And who's getting what they want? As previously noted, we're not exactly getting that wall. We got a Muslim ban, after much hemming and hawing, but that's something the president can do alone without any help.

No, when I consider "who's getting what they want", my immediate thought goes to Mitch McConnell, whose long-term goal of stacking the courts with right-wing appointees is finally taking off. I think of the neocons, who are pushing hard for war with Venezuela (and it doesn't exactly look like Trump is trying to stop them).

But the whole thing is kind of silly, because there isn't some broad disconnect between the MAGA crowd and the republican old guard. They're largely the same voters, they're largely the same politicians (for fuck's sake, John Bolton is back in the government). They have overwhelmingly the same policy positions. They're not even that much crazier - Qanon is dumb as shit, but it's hardly that much dumber than the birthers, more a logical extension of the same "let's see if we can get them to believe THAT" mentality nurtured in the early 2010s by the right-wing media.

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So it's completely bonkers to talk about incremental advantage built up over decades. There wasn't any; there was only weakness, which the MAGA movement (partially) dispensed with. The only one in that list who I thought might have been a genius was Steve Bannon. But even with him, Trump eventually kicked him out, and Trump administration strategy didn't take a nose-dive; therefore, he wasn't the (only) brains of the operation.

Two words: Vince Foster.

In the 2016 election, Trump had the advantage of 25 years of bullshit allegations targeting Hillary Clinton. He had the advantage of Fox News, which has been a transparent right-wing propaganda organization for as long as I've been alive. He had the advantage of the growth of the right-wing media sphere under Obama - there's no fucking reason Breitbart should be taken seriously by anyone, let alone be the largest online right-wing media source. Trump came into an environment where he could expect that the average republican would never have to take any negative coverage of him seriously. That's a really big advantage for a candidate any reasonable electoral system would spit out faster than an ipecac suppository.

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Oh, that's just bullshit. Jones and Molyneux don't have ideas that kill people.

Molyneux's ideas heavily feature apologia for white fascism and redpill ideologies - both of which have spawned a disturbing number of terrorists and radicals very recently. If Alex Jones has failed to get someone killed with his conspiracy theories it's probably not for lack of trying.

But does it matter? I think you're reading the "arsenic" bit too literally here. The point is that their ideas are bad. They are transparently, obviously stupid if you take even a little time to look into them. It's not hard to figure out - what they're saying is not just a little wrong, it's pants-on-head retarded wrong. They are not good actors. Jones in particular is such an obvious grifter who constantly makes bad predictions that it's stunning that he exists as a public figure, rather than a youtube channel with a few hundred subscribers.

And yet... the marketplace has rewarded them with attention. So much attention that they've been able to build incredibly lucrative careers off that attention. Both of these men are believed to have a net worth in the millions. If there is a "marketplace of ideas", said marketplace is as functional as the marketplace for brain-power-esque supplements.

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At worst, they have ideas that get people to believe some stupid shit. And as I've said before, regulating stupid ideas normally isn't required because the person most hurt by an idiot's idiocy is usually the idiot themselves.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=who+is+the+current+president

That's the cheap shot. Here's the scary version of that:

"Another portion of the document shows that Bissonnette routinely checked the Twitter accounts of right-wing pundits, conspiracy theorists, and alt-right trolls. These include (but are not limited to) Ben Shapiro (whom he checked the most), Paul Joseph Watson and Alex Jones of Infowars, white nationalist Richard Spencer, alt-right troll Baked Alaska, conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich, former KKK leader David Duke, the far-right YouTube pundit and alleged cult leader Stefan Molyneux, Kellyanne Conway, Fox News personality Tucker Carlson and then-Rebel Media personality Gavin McInnes. (McInnes was a co-founder of VICE. He and the company severed ties in 2008.)"

(Bolding mine)

Stupidity doesn't exist in a vacuum. The kind of stupid that these people are pushing isn't even the relatively harmless, generic "the universe will vibrate with you to create harmony" kind of stupid new age religions push. Alex Jones regularly calls on his viewers to get mad and do something. Stefan Molyneux argues that we should have a white ethnostate, that white people should be terrified about becoming minorities, and that, in particular, Muslims are dangerous and harmful. It shouldn't shock anyone if people who take those ideas seriously come away thinking, "We need to do something about those Muslims!" or something similarly harmful. Stupid becomes evil very quickly in such situations.

I'm not the first person to compare white fascism to a death cult. But the idea that it's somehow harmless stupidity is just... so, so wrong.

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Oppressing stupid just creates a victimhood narrative around them,

They've already got that, nothing I do is going to make that substantially worse. We had the president bitching to the CEO of twitter about "losing followers". These people will beat the "victim" drum regardless of what anyone does. They will take anyone who either won't affirm or won't take their bullshit as proof of that victimhood narrative. Any action whatsoever that doesn't further their goals will confirm this narrative. And if they can't find something, they will make something up.

Deplatforming plays into that narrative, just like everything else... But it also has the advantage of deplatforming them. It makes it clear, "this is not acceptable, this will not be tolerated". And while it may entrench true believers in the victimhood mentality, you end up losing the people who aren't true believers (the "angry jacks" of the world), and limiting the ideology's spread. This isn't controversial - deplatforming works. The part being debated is whether it's justified (because it works), not whether or not it works.

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It seems to me that you lack that confidence. Are you so convinced that The Good is not adaptive, that intelligence exposed to idiocy will die from infection, that the world is a cruel place where stupidity is predetermined to win over reason unless the reasonable themselves become the cruel?

To quote one of my favorite authors:

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The point is – imagine a country full of bioweapon labs, where people toil day and night to invent new infectious agents. The existence of these labs, and their right to throw whatever they develop in the water supply is protected by law. And the country is also linked by the world’s most perfect mass transit system that every single person uses every day, so that any new pathogen can spread to the entire country instantaneously. You’d expect things to start going bad for that city pretty quickly.

Well, we have about a zillion think tanks researching new and better forms of propaganda. And we have constitutionally protected freedom of speech. And we have the Internet. So we’re kind of screwed.

If the last decade hasn't shaken your faith that intelligence will consistently overcome stupidity, I think you haven't been paying attention. It can and will get worse if we don't fight it head-on. The adaption is antifascism. It's recognizing that no amount of debate or new information is going to convince someone who has made millions of dollars pushing conspiracy theories to stop pushing conspiracy theories, and that the only reasonable response is to get that guy's bullshit off the marketplace of ideas. It's recognizing the threat fascists pose and taking it seriously. It's punching a nazi so hard and so often that he no longer wants to be a nazi (in public anyways). It's actually enforcing community norms, doxxing the shitheads carrying nazi flags at Charlottesville, and making it clear that you can't be a part-time nazi - if you're a nazi online, if you're a nazi at rallies, you'd better damn well be ready to be a nazi in your day job, and deal with the consequences of that.

I don't want to change Richard Spencer's mind. I don't think I can. I don't think anyone can. The dude stood up on a podium in front of cameras and shouted, "Hail Trump, Hail Victory, Hail our people". He's kinda locked in. I want to make sure he can't change anyone else's mind. That this particularly noxious and toxic strain of "stupid" is contained.

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My third thought was: I bet BPC never even thought to fact-check this with a simple Google.

It's neither the dumbest shit Breitbart has said nor the dumbest thing listed in the article said about Obamacare, you'll have to excuse me for not giving one of the worst right-wing propaganda mills the benefit of the doubt. I'm not going to apologize for assuming that a site that published "The Vetting – Exclusive – Obama’s Literary Agent in 1991 Booklet: ‘Born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii’" would continue its proud trend of saying incredibly, bizarrely stupid shit. And to come back around to the topic: Breitbart is the largest right-wing internet media entity. It's fucking gigantic. And it's completely batshit insane.

How's that marketplace of ideas doing?

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

It's punching a nazi so hard and so often that he no longer wants to be a nazi (in public anyways).

When you go to jail for assault or harassment, I'll be sure to write you a note. Acting like a thug doesn't do a single good thing.

Speech is not violence.

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The ramblings of the insane and the propagandists will never go away. Believe it or not, you can't punch speech out of existence. It can't be regulated out of existence, either. If any speech is allowed whatsoever, some of it will be insane or propagandistic.

The effectiveness of propaganda increases as discourse is closed, though. The fewer people that are allowed to talk about differing opinions, the more people are isolated (increasingly alone on the internet, nowadays) and easily swayed by propaganda.

Turned into little fascists that want to punch people into silence, for example.

The first amendment is very clear about the importance of speech. It makes no distinction for hate speech, nor should it. If this bothers you, if you can't accept living by the rules in front of you, you should try to civilly change the rules by getting 2/3 of the House and Senate on your side or 3/4 of 2/3 of the states. You will probably find this a difficult task, though, since your stance is about as insane as anything Alex Jones has ever put out.

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pneuma wrote:

Speech is not violence.

The law disagrees with you even in the US. EVer heard of call-to-action?

And internationally you signed up to the UN bill of human rights, which guarantees freedom of expression UNLESS it violates the other basic human rights, like the right to be free from persecution.

Many countries have adopted hate crime/hate speech laws, in a fairly lax sensible manner, where the court judges usually have the final say.

Protecting freedom of speech to say bigoted racist things is not noble at all, quite the contrary. Inciting racial hatred against a minority by a public figure is usually the norm for such cases.

I doubt any of this makes one iota of difference to the constitutionalists who still think their piece of paper is infallible and up to date in 2019. See gun control and gun crime in the US for another such example, that causes great harm this day.

On a related note, why don't you guys just leave the UN?

You're doing more harm than good at this point with your veto and watering down of important agreements.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/trump-administration-un-resolution-rape-war-abortion-france-ambassador-a8884021.html?utm_source=reddit.com

“It is intolerable and incomprehensible that the Security Council is incapable of acknowledging that women and girls who suffered from sexual violence in conflict – and who obviously didn’t choose to become pregnant – should have the right to terminate their pregnancy,” he said.

“We are appalled by the fact that a state has demanded the withdrawal of the reference to sexual and reproductive health – a challenge to 25 years of achievements in favour of women’s rights in situations of armed conflict.”

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Turtledove wrote:

Mueller investigated the Russian connection. You are wrong that he turned up bunk though.

Mueller concluded that the Russian's interference in the 2016 election was in sweeping and systematic. The administration has said that the Russians are expected to be doing the same thing in 2020 that they did in 2016. Trump has prevented the administration from protecting us in the 2020 election though. Presumably because he wants Russian help again in 2020.

Mueller also laid out 10 really strong cases and 2 less strong cases of Trump breaking the law to obstruct the Mueller investigation.

Now Trump has declared that he will obstruct congress from investigating Russian interference in our elections as well as anything else that congress has a right to investigate.

You mean Mueller found no conspiracy or coordination with Russians and found that Trump has tried to protect his presidency (not even himself because he did nothing wrong as Mueller has proven) from a politial coup. Shocking!

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pneuma wrote:

The first amendment is very clear about the importance of speech. It makes no distinction for hate speech, nor should it. If this bothers you, if you can't accept living by the rules in front of you, you should try to civilly change the rules by getting 2/3 of the House and Senate on your side or 3/4 of 2/3 of the states. You will probably find this a difficult task, though, since your stance is about as insane as anything Alex Jones has ever put out.

That argument won't work because commies hate the constitution. They'd rip it in half if they could.

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Xavderion wrote:

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pneuma wrote:

The first amendment is very clear about the importance of speech. It makes no distinction for hate speech, nor should it. If this bothers you, if you can't accept living by the rules in front of you, you should try to civilly change the rules by getting 2/3 of the House and Senate on your side or 3/4 of 2/3 of the states. You will probably find this a difficult task, though, since your stance is about as insane as anything Alex Jones has ever put out.

That argument won't work because commies hate the constitution. They'd rip it in half if they could.

Who exactly is a commie? Do you have many communists in the US or wherever you are?