"I see (Trump's) supporters as failing to realize there are better alternatives in the Republican field."
Were DeSantis looking to wrap up the nomination by March, he would be facing the exact same lawfare attacks Trump is facing- the Rubicon had been crossed by the Democrats over 6 years ago. Even worse for the GOP, however, is this- without Trump on the ballot, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania are not competitive states- all three lean 4%+ to the Democrats and states like Iowa and Ohio still lean 1-2% to the Democrats. Had Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, or Marco Rubio been the GOP candidate in 2016, Hillary Clinton would today be finishing her second term as President. The Democrats have a lock on the Electoral College that only Trump was able to pick, and only the one time. If Haley or DeSantis is the nominee, Biden or his replacement will win the election by simply holding all the states Biden won in 2020 with the possible exceptions of Arizona and Georgia.
Yes- I also believe DeSantis would make a far superior President to Trump, but I don't see how he wins a general election given the massive edge the Democrats already hold in a fair election, and we now have massive mail-in-voting that only enhances that edge.
In order to enact policy, the politician must first win. Trump’s policies are good enough, his personality defects are less bad than Biden’s corruption (known before 2020), and he’s far far more popular among working voters.
His ability to get more votes makes him better, that’s the primary, flawed purpose of democracy.
DeSantis hasn't run a particularly good campaign. His decision on 6-week abortion is basically malpractice. He hasn't offered anything on school choice that would translate to the national level. I'm not sure he would be reliable on foreign policy.
I'd probably choose him over Trump but I'm not remotely surprised he isn't getting the nomination.
Antisemitism never died in America. People who have made antisemitic remarks in my presence did so not realizing that I am Jewish. I think my experience is fairly typical. Antisemitic remarks don't particularly bother me, as I figure they go with the territory, and in at least one instance I recall a fellow tribe member and I sharing amusement over an antisemitic comment made in our presence, but calling for the mass extermination of Jews crosses one of my red lines. I have to add that I am a bit annoyed about these wealthy Jewish donors withholding their donations to Harvard and other elite universities only after the events of October 7th and the testimony of those 3 women college presidents. I stopped donating to my alma mater at least a decade ago, and I made it clear at the time that antisemitism was my top concern, though I also mentioned the social justice crap the alumni magazine was peddling. Where have these people been?
They have been following the easy to follow fashion, rather than logic. They read The NY Times which, in lies about Trump or Palin or Kavanaugh, supplies the market for rationalizations.
Belief in untruth leads to, not disbelief but disregard for, T Truth.
Few things in social science are as true as the claim that “Black 18 year olds have, on average, lower IQ scores.” All who are unwilling to accept this truth look for something else to believe in, instead. Something less true, like Systemic Racism, or White Privilege, or Whites are all oppressors and thus guilty. That means Jews, who are White, are guilty oppressors. That’s the rationalization logic.
This belief in an untruth follows from unwillingness to proclaim the truth.
People like to hate The Other, and have long enjoyed secretly hating Jews, so many are very very happy to join in the current elite fashion of Jew Hate. Not so different from Trump hate, and lots of Jews enjoy the fashion of hating Trump. Maybe you even know some Trump hating Jews. Trump hate, like Jew hate, is more fashionable than logical.
Maybe I know some Trump hating Jews? My mother died long before the 2016 election, but she had an irrational hatred of Nixon, and when I brought up Obama's attendance of a church led by a jew-hating preacher in one of our many disputes over politics, her only response was 'well,' in other words, she was willing to overlook it. Most Jews will keep on pulling the donkey lever until the cattle cars come to round them up. But I believe Trump does have some diehard Jewish fans.
I think most Orthodox Jews already support Trump more than Democrats, but they are seldom as prominent in academia, media, or business.
I call it Dem Derangement Syndrome against Trump, & DDS against Bush, Palin, Kavanaugh, Reagan, and even Nixon & Goldwater.
The market for rationalizations provides pseudo logical arguments for whatever fashion the heart is set on. Your mother sounds like the kind of friends thenewneo.com has. She has a great series on how A Mind Is A Difficult Thing To Change.
She thinks Trump is less sharp than before, and notes his silly RINO attack against Chip Roy. Which I also don’t like.
I am sad about how many smart Trump hating friends I have, too. Some even bring up the West Bank settlements to mitigate condemnation against Hamas.
The Emperor has Ugly Clothes - not a fairy tale because fashion is deliberately subjective, so ugly is in the eye of the beholder. To me, both Jew Hate and Trump Hate are ugly, most Dem disagree on at least 1.
Actually, there is a pretty good reason not to hold Rev Wright against Obama. If politics weren't an issue, Obama could have admitted he rarely attended church and had no idea Wright had said these things. Instead, we live in a country where admitting you don't attend church loses you voted so he didn't want to admit that because it was worse than taking heat about Wright.
I got here because I saw your Dec 25 comment. I'm curious if you think everyone against Trump has TDS.
Of course Trump has some Jewish fans. He also has some black fans. No real surprise. The somewhat bigger surprise is his Hispanic immigrant fan base has recently grown dramatically.
No, I don't think everyone against Trump has TDS. And that reason for not holding Wright against Obama, whatever its merits, is irrelevant to my mother's thinking.
I don't think it is irrelevant. She doesn't form her opinion of Obama based on what Wright says. She might not know the details of why she shouldn't and she might ignore Wright for all the wrong reasons but ignoring Wright is still the right thing to do.
The point is that I have better information about my mother's thinking than a complete stranger like you would. Regarding the substance of your reasoning, the only thing I take away from it is that Obama was a con job (as is the case with all presidential candidates in recent memory, but to a more extreme degree), but I already knew that.
When it comes to antisemitism there are three things to be optimistic about.
1. Israel - it continues to be an amazing success story and its success doesn’t depend on educating against antisemitism. Iron Dome, IDF and SLBMs are pretty darn effective.
2. The United States - within the U.S., creative destruction is the ultimate work-around to fashionable beliefs. Yes you have to build new, but again, this doesn’t require educating against antisemitism.
3. Education - it’s very slow, but can be very effective. It might take a generation. Tiny textbooks, chants, songs, and direct education work surprisingly well if you own the elementary school.
I recommend listening to the Akhil Amar podcast episodes with Baude and Paulsen on the 14 amendment decision. I'm troubled by the implications of this but the reasoning is in fact rock solid -- this is the law of the land. It might be better for the country if SCOTUS decides the case wrongly and finds for Trump, but the originalist support for the CO decision is very strong.
The best legal defense the opponents of the decision have come up with is that the president doesn't count as an "officer of the US." Supposedly the Reconstruction era framers of the amendment wanted to bar Lee and Davis from serving in Congress but not from the presidency. Ridiculous.
I am ok with the President being an officer and even being specifically included in those positions for which an insurrectionist cannot run for office.
My argument - and prediction for the technical, procedural way in which SCOTUS will dispose of this case without having to get into the merits - is that the case of whether Trump should be kept off the ballot was "nonjusticiable for lack of ripeness."
That is, it's ok to keep Trump off the ballot after he's convicted of treason in Federal Court, and even if he's still appealing that conviction. But, until convicted, free to run. We shall see, but that's my bet.
That is horseshit, Dave. The question the supporters of the CO decision have never answered, not even one time, is who gets to decide that an insurrection took place and that Trump participated in it? Note that Trump hasn't even been charged by Jack Smith and his grand juries with insurrection, and definitely not convicted of it by any trial jury. Any clear-headed reading of the amendment and subsequent actions of later Congresses demonstrates that there is one and only one political body specifically empowered by the Constitution to determine the fitness and eligibility of a candidate for President, and that is Congress.
Congress could act today, if it is so clear that Trump is ineligible that even a non-federal court judge/s can rightfully bar him from a federal election, and re-impeach and convict him of the actions taken after the 2020 election and declare him ineligible under its Article I powers. So, why haven't the Democrats done that, Dave? Additionally, the Congress that sits on January 6th 2025 will also have the power to refuse to accept a Trump electoral slate should he win the election in November. So, why don't the Democrats do that, Dave? If the case is so clear that Trump is inelegible, shouldn't it be a cakewalk to simply defeat him at the ballot box in November, so why don't the Democrats do that, Dave?
Let me ask you this- some Republican states are making noises about barring the Democrat candidate from the ballot by simply declaring that they participated in an insurrection. How, exactly, would such a candidate prove that they hadn't participated in such an activity? What would you say were that to happen and SCOTUS sat on its hands and allowed both parties to bar the opponents from the ballot? Wouldn't you be angry to see it happen to the Democrat candidate? Wouldn't you feel it to be unjust and undemocratic? Wouldn't you be making exactly the arguments I made above? Or would really just say, "Thems the rules, and the courts get decide who we the voters get to vote for"?
I agree that the "insurrection" part is more debatable than the "officer" part, but it's clear from the history that state courts were allowed to exclude from ballots ex-Confederates who once took an oath to the US. They didn't need to be charged or "convicted" of being rebels.
Re the impeachment issue, remember that where there is a contradiction between an amendment and an earlier article or amendment, the later amendment overrides the earlier part of the constitution. That's why the call it an amendment. Cf the 14th amendment sec 2 overriding the three-fifths compromise.
And yes, I agree with you that the law has troubling implications. I think it is a bad law, but it is the law. Like I said, perhaps it's better if the Supreme Court decides the case wrongly. I'm not sure what to think about this.
The Presidency isn't a state office, Dave. A state court has no power to bar a candidate from that office, or from the federal ballot. The 14th Amendment clearly states in section 5 that power of enforcement is in the hands of Congress- no one else. It would be a closer case, still not close, were this a decision of a federal court, but it still doesn't change the fact that the power to determine eligibility for the office of President rests with Congress alone- the 14th Amendment didn't amend that fact at all.
If Trump were convicted, would you then deem him unfit? The courts in multiple jurisdictions have charged him, and the evidence seems solid. I think there is a strong process argument here, in that no one should be barred before conviction....but do you think Trump is genuinely innocent? Please state your case if you do. Respectfully, the Democrats tried to impeach and convict, but Republicans stonewalled them.
I can’t speak for others, but I feel as if most Trump supporters will move the goalposts even further if he was convicted. “It was rigged”, “The judges were corrupt”, etc. I think of Donald Trump was convicted, your opinion wouldn’t change and you’d still find a way to support him Yancey. Outside of the due process argument you outlined...why should he not be barred from the ballot?
I think the charges are horseshit, Sean- stretching the law in ways they weren't intended and have never been used before to convict one guy. However, even if he is convicted, the courts still don't have the power to remove him from the ballot- only Congress has that power, and you complain all you want about how Republicans refused to convict him in the 2021 impeachment, but I want to see your argument for why the GOP votes in that impeachment weren't based on a belief that the impeachment, like these court cases, were just more horseshit put up by the Democrats.
I think you are are just another Democrat or Never-Trump Republican blinded by your hatred of the man, so you call the "evidence" solid and are looking for any reason to keep him off the ballot. Like I asked Dave- if you are so convinced the case against Trump is solid, then why not just defeat him at the ballot box? It should be a walk in the park, right, if Trump is so obviously guilty of the crimes with which he is being accused. It shouldn't be hard to convince 50% + 1 of the voters that he should not be president. So, what are you afraid of- that a majority of voters don't agree with you?
Actually, I think he was defeated at the ballot box the first time, that’s why I’m genuinely scared. Trump was defeated in 2020. He lost multiple states, and none of the suits about election interference went anywhere. Trump would have had to overturn multiple states elections, which is nearly impossible and highly improbable. He would have had to pick up multiple states.
If you want to know why I’m scared he can’t be defeated at the ballot box, is that he was defeated, and then a mob went into the capitol and was about to force Trump as presidents without the votes. I think even if Trump loses the election, his supporters will say it was rigged, and we will repeat a lot of the bad things that happened around January 6th, only worse. I do believe that Democrats could get 50 + 1 %, but Trump will never concede and things will get worse.
I think the GOP didn’t impeach because they’re scared of Trump’s base and everyone believes he will go away. The GOP faction of congress knew he was guilty, and waited hours for Trump to call off the mob. This is a fact. We have audio of Trump and multiple witnesses who said Trump waited for multiple hours to call off the mob at the capitol. I think politicians are scared of the mob, scared that there are elements of trumps base who may threaten them, but mainly, they have a belief that the base can be managed and that it was politically convenient to not stand up to Trump.
The GOP consists of Trump's base, Sean- you don't get to pretend they are two different entities when it suits your argument- he wasn't convicted in 2021 because there simply weren't enough votes to do so. You have to accept that as a fact- the charges weren't obviously convincing. Congress tomorrow has the power to impeach, convict, and bar Trump from ever holding the Presidency again- so write your congresscritter to get it going- an obviosly guilty Trump should be easy to impeach again and convict this time, or are you just looking for an easy way out?
Arnold wrote "...I see (Trump's) supporters as failing to realize there are better alternatives in the Republican field." That depends upon one's assessment of the challenges we face. If one sees the government as deeply corrupt, incompetent,,and dangerous to the civil order then someone like Trump who is bent on change rather than a more conventional go-along to get-along candidate is preferable. Things have gotten so bad with the abuse of the law to try to derail Trump's candidacy that it has become imperative to support it, regardless of other concerns, in order to thwart what amounts to an attempted coup d'etat by the Left.
Desantis has a proven track record for being better than Trump on all of that, and on literally everything else, with one sole exception, a little thing called 'popularity'. Which .... yeah ....
DeSantis decided to enact a six week ban when running for president. That's basically political malpractice. Most of the things I like about DeSantis in Florida he hasn't articulated any plan for enacting at the federal level. And it's not clear to me his foreign policy would be better.
I like the guy, but man what a terrible campaign he has run.
DeSantis appears to be constrained by his donors; he is dependent on mostly large donors. Hence his waffling on foreign interventionism (Ukraine). But he has done a great job in Florida.
Supporting Trump is hardly a fashionable belief. It is as unfashionable as it is possible to be. The media and the establishment aren't pushing Trump the way they are pushing LBGTQ+. The opposite is true. Support for Trump is a protest vote, as Thucydides comment implies. Judging from the media and other signs, there has been an ongoing effort to make Nikki Haley represent the 'fashionable' belief on the Republican side (and she checks off 2 diversity boxes), and that tells you all you need to know about her.
I can believe it. A friend of mine is on the Nikki Haley bandwagon. The 'thinking' seems to be that there is an untapped reserve of women out there who won't vote for Trump because he is too icky, but would come out in droves for Nikki's 'girl power' schtick, and maybe that the other side will be less motivated to stuff the ballot boxes if Trump's name is not on the ballot. Trump calls her 'birdbrain,' but the label is equally apt for conservatives who buy such nonsense. At the risk of reigniting our previous debate, Haley would continue bankrupting the US with support for the Ukraine war, as well as other unwinnable wars, but that is one reason I would never vote for her.
I read something about one of the debates. She failed an elementary IQ test with respect to the most meaningful thing Desantis has done in Florida. She is no conservative, so she’s a good fit for the GOP; but it’s becoming clear neither party should be anywhere near the presidency.
"If one sees the government as deeply corrupt, incompetent,,and dangerous to the civil order then someone like Trump who is bent on change rather than a more conventional go-along"
But if Trump's first term is anything to go by, he will say a lot and get very little done, e.g., almost nothing of the border wall got built in his four years.
100% Agreed! But the power of fashion has long been evident. Remember the Dutch tulip mania? Well, me neither, since it happened about 400 years ago, but fortunately someone remembered to write about it. And that bunch, almost entirely literate Protestants, might’ve known better but were held captive by their own maniacal impulses and greed anyway. We just seem to be having the damndest time overcoming human nature, despite all the cool stuff we come up with. A couple days ago, amidst a mid-Manhattan crush of holiday revelers, I witnessed a group of young women posing for photos together, doffing their bulky coats in 35 degree weather to better capture their youthful cuteness in front of a massive, sparkly Christmas tree in the background. It was kinda funny, really. It occurred to me that it wouldn’t have happened quite the same way, if at all, in the days of film cameras.
I've seen much, much worse "doin' it for the gram" than that! This relates to a point I wanted to argue against the post's sentence, "But as the written word gives way to electronic media, we are going to retreat from logic, objectivity, and the pursuit of truth." But since you mention this kind of behavior, I'll make it here.
My point is that it's *not* literacy, reading, writing, etc., even as badly as those skills have recently degraded on average, especially for young people.
Instead, the issue is that now the virtual is more important than the real.
Arnold's mirage of "Distant seems Familiar" is just one manifestation of this larger phenomenon. Have you noticed how now even news of big, real, terrible events somehow feels emotionally flat, unimportant, and unreal, just a margin over from the similar, skeptical, dismissive feeling of something you think has been faked? This confusion results from the fact that they way you feel about things is a product of your perception of whether everyone else has seen it and whether they all share a strong feeling about it too.
Your judgments about these things used to derive from there only being a few major broadcast outlets and reinforced by actual in-person bouncing against lots of other people who were certain to have seen and heard the same things and whose repetition in chatter only served to reinforce the sociality of the information. But "everything online" world means you can't know if you're stuck in an epistemic niche or whether your social feedbacks are attenuated or exaggerated.
While always somewhat tenuous for reasons of status signaling, the digital communications platform as primary socially interactive intermediary has allowed an almost total untethering of "personae image perception management" from real lived-experiences.
Anyone who saw how the first young female users of social media reacted to the new state of affairs is familiar with the radical change in their perspective, focus, and allocation of effort. In short, it turned everyone into their own mini-celebrity brand manager. This is hard to notice for younger people who have been marinating in this stuff since birth, but there are those of us who were of a certain age (ahem, motivated to pay close attention to young women) just as this transition was happening, and who thus felt the jarring nature of it most intensely.
Prior to everyone being very online - that is, everyone else *seeing* "them" mostly via network interface, that knowledge of that being the way your peers observe and judge you - experiences pursued for signaling purposes were still in many important ways pursuable for their own sake, as enjoyable in their own right, even if only as a collateral and incidental benefit to a primary signaling motive. And these were experiences you had to have in front of people, and with people, to signal to their eyes by experiencing something in the real world with them that was by nature hard to fake.
But EVERYTHING digital online is EASY to fake, and to be manipulated to make seem much more photogenic, aesthetic, impressive, and so forth. This goes *way* beyond the traditional "everything is going perfect for our beautiful loving family" Christmas cards, as if every moment of your life now had to be choreographed to the whole world with as much effort and fakery as those cards.
You don't have to say, "That would drive me nuts" - it did in fact drive everyone nuts, that already happened a while back. The psychological collapse of reasoning capability that came in the wake of that was only coincidentally post-literate, being downstream of the same 24/7 immersion in multimedia virtual interaction, inundated by recreation so as to blur what is real life and what is 'entertainment'.
And Covid lockdowns put the "the viral meme-of-the-minute firehose is now what passes for our culture" effect on super-steroids. Listen carefully to Bo Burnham's, "That Funny Feeling." - "A live action Lion King, the Pepsi half-time show. Twenty thousand years of this, seven left to go. ... Full agoraphobic, losing focus, cover blown. A book on getting better, hand-delivered, by a drone. Total disassociation, fully out your mind. Googling de-realization, hating what you find."
What happened was everyone was watching everyone else's selective, performed, and manipulated "presentations" of their "lives". The "exchanging perception-manipulating performances" social equilibrium produces games for influence that *are not won by rigor* but the popularity contests of viral appeal and factional utility, and that includes ideological, conceptual, and interpretive deutungshoheit.
The point is that what all this being online is doing to everyone is making it so that they don't actual live their lives in the real world. Reality is now only useful as props, staging, and setting for the shared multimedia of performances and presentations. People becoming trapped in "social reality" and social reality has completely different corrective feedbacks from "actual reality".
Reasoning ability is good for "actual reality" while "social game-playing" and all kinds of fakery is good for "social reality". *That* is what has been happening, only simultaneous with loss of literate capacity. To maximize utility, it doesn't make sense now for more people to invest cognitive resources in rational capacity, and instead, they need to optimize for succeeding at the social influence game. And the mental structures and decision processes which characterize the ways to come out ahead in these games could not be more different.
The story of history is that just as foragers gave way to farmers gave way to industrial civilization, the optimize-by-socializing era gave way to the optimize-by-reasoning era, and we hit "peak reasoner" a while back and now the pendulum is swinging the other way and taking everyone's brains with it. It just so happens the thing that is causing the pendulum to swing back happens to also make it unnecessary and straining for most people to read and write anymore.
FWIW, obsession with appearances and doltish superficiality were plenty strong before the unholy union of digital cameras and social media produced our current state of affairs, but they certainly exacerbated the problem. Part of my point was simply that the ease and cheapness of digital photography has motivated people to act in ways they wouldn’t have before, but that was more a matter of expense, convenience and opportunity than character. Your bit is interesting and you may be onto something but I’m not as audacious. Consider the possibility that this kind of exchange - fun and invigorating but, for many, also a pathway to fury or despair they might’ve otherwise avoided - is also a product of our digitized days and that distance from it all is valuable and often necessary for maintaining sanity. Peace be with you brother.
You wrote: "Andrey Mir has sold me on the idea that what I think of as rational, scientific thinking comes from the way that our minds are shaped by reading. But as the written word gives way to electronic media, we are going to retreat from logic, objectivity, and the pursuit of truth."
Some comments:
- This sounds plausible, but perhaps it's not reading but [depth of understanding and exploration of topics beyond the superficial] that is in decline?
- Higher ed academics read a lot, no, and that hasn't stopped many from being ideologically captured and discarding/manipulating logic, objectivity, the pursuit of truth.
- MB the decline is due to: increased political power over our lives, + virtue-signaling having more value to individual political players that actually doing good, solving societal/group problems?
We can’t overcome antisemitism any more than we can generally overcome any other evil within the human heart. We need to strive to overcome the evil within our own hearts. And we must continue, always, to speak against evil at every opportunity.
My understanding of Rob Henderson's luxury beliefs is that - beyond merely being fashionable - such beliefs will very often incur significant penalties/ costs on the people that are putatively being helped by those same luxury beliefs.
GameStop was seen as a way to stick it to the industry investors - they were short selling it, so the idea was to buy up the stock so they couldn't fulfill their commitments. It didn't work all that well; they just stopped trading in it and waited out those guys.
The price looks like it recovered. No idea if it actually was taken over.
Luxury beliefs continue until they cause pain. This is a retail process not wholesale; if you personally aren't experiencing pain, it's a rare individual who will change beliefs just because there is pain elsewhere.
Almost 3 decades ago as I sat with a then powerful member of Microsoft on a safari I was guiding in Kenya, I listened to the spiel about the future dominated by electronic media and I told her, "But this will lead to the re-barbarization of the Western mind, cut off from the lexalogical filter of reading and writing."
Shout out to Virginia Postrel on similar related ideas, and her earlier book
The Substance of Style.
When someone chooses style, the fashion they follow become part of their chosen, fashion tribe, their identity.
Jew hatred is more accurate than antisemitism, just as pro abortion is more accurate than pro choice. The Fashion is to be less clear, like “duplicative language” which will probably not replace plagiarism.
Trump haters are trying to make it a fashion to claim Jan 6 was an insurrection, and among elites it mostly is. But normal folk know it’s a lie, tho it remains a Dem fashion to hate Trump.
Luxury beliefs are not always fashionable, but are always held by rich or privileged folk who won’t suffer if their minority belief becomes the majority belief. Like the idea small shoplifters should not be punished.
Even poor folk can have fashionable beliefs, like it’s OK to shoplift. It’s even cool to do so, and you’re even a dumb sucker if you don’t steal. A dumb fu**. (Fu** seems more pronounceable than f*ck) calling somebody a sucker, or shaming them, is an important mechanism for enforcing the fashionable ideas, which become the temporary norm.
I really liked and still like Lou Reed’s live Take No Prisoners album, full of vulgar fuck speech, especially his 10 min story of how he wrote Walk on the Wild Side, where the colored girls sing. Vulgar speech, especially “fuck speech” became fashionable, even tho it wasn’t quite a luxury belief. Tho the Michael Lewis book Liar’s Poker included a character, maybe Jewish, the Piranha, whose every fucking other word was fucking emphasized so you had to be some kind of dumb fuck to not fucking understand that only fucking wimps and losers were too fucking polite to turn their fucking noses up at those who were cool enough to occasionally use the word fuck.
I enjoyed that kind of fashionable late 70s verbal rebellion.
WTF? Didn’t I realize if you get rid of one set of taboo words, there would be another set? No I didn’t.
And Blazing Saddles remains hilarious, especially the sheriff.
How can you be so relaxed about a Trump presidency? The man lies incessantly, assaults women, and cheats. He has said he wants to be a dictator. He will leave NATO. He will do untold damage to the constitutional order at home, and the peace of the world. Almost no one who worked with him in his first term will support him or vote for him. Most of them are issuing stern warnings.
I agree with a lot of what you write Arnold, but...I am exasperated
I should know better, but I can't resist. "The man lies incessantly, assaults women, and cheats." Are you talking about Trump or Biden? At least Trump doesn't sniff the hair of young girls, take showers with his daughters, or use his sons as bag men with respect to corrupt countries like Ukraine and China, as far as we know. Some critics predict that the administration's Ukraine fiasco will result in the demise of NATO, but we can only hope. The constitutional order at home has been slowly being undermined for decades, and the process has accelerated under the present administration. The only President in recent memory who didn't start any new wars will damage the peace of the world? I don't get it. As for those who worked with him in his 1st term not supporting him this time around, I agree with Arnold that Trump's personnel policy in his first term was abysmal, so that could be a plus. In any event, since unlike Arnold, I am skeptical that the next election will be free and fair, I think it is premature of you to be exasperated.
How can anybody be hysterically afraid of a Trump Presidency-we know he HAS been President, and was NOT crazy. He’s a big boastful arrogant billionaire, who cheated on his wives, tho less than B Clinton, LBJ, or JFK. It was Biden who grabbed Tara Reade by the p*ssy, then got her fired when she complained (complaint was lost). Almost all who worked with him were GOPe DC govt folk. Obama’s illegal spying & lying were far more damaging.
Democracy depends on free & fair elections. You think unlimited mail in ballots, forbidden in most European countries, is fraud free? Wray & Barr both knew the H Biden laptop was real, with real evidence of corruption against Biden, but they implicitly supported govt censorship of the truth, to steal the election so Trump would lose.
What Trump policiy was so bad?
But, the NYT will promote half truths, like NATO speculation, allowing Trump haters to rationalize their illogical, but fashionable, Trump hate.
Joining mass protests in real life, no matter for what, is another by product of too much online life.
Thanks for this link. The whole case rests on “insurrection” or not.
The unarmed protesters against a stolen election were not using, nor threatening to use, force against the armed police. No protester has been indicted, much less convicted, of insurrection. The deadly violence was police killing a small, unarmed woman who was illegally trespassing, with a peaceful protest mob in back.
(Who broke the door window she was climbing thru? A govt agent? If we don’t know, and I don’t but want to know, I believe it was a govt asset. Entrapment, like the “kidnap the governor” plot.)
No insurrection cases, no insurrection, no incitement.
More Dem deep state dirty tricks.
Will keep getting worse until Democrats lose at the ballot box.
I agree with your reply, but with reference to your previous reply to my comment about antisemitism as well as this reply, I would note that Ilya Somin emigrated to this country as a Soviet Jewish refugee. You can't make this stuff up.
Kling wrote:
"I see (Trump's) supporters as failing to realize there are better alternatives in the Republican field."
Were DeSantis looking to wrap up the nomination by March, he would be facing the exact same lawfare attacks Trump is facing- the Rubicon had been crossed by the Democrats over 6 years ago. Even worse for the GOP, however, is this- without Trump on the ballot, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania are not competitive states- all three lean 4%+ to the Democrats and states like Iowa and Ohio still lean 1-2% to the Democrats. Had Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, or Marco Rubio been the GOP candidate in 2016, Hillary Clinton would today be finishing her second term as President. The Democrats have a lock on the Electoral College that only Trump was able to pick, and only the one time. If Haley or DeSantis is the nominee, Biden or his replacement will win the election by simply holding all the states Biden won in 2020 with the possible exceptions of Arizona and Georgia.
Yes- I also believe DeSantis would make a far superior President to Trump, but I don't see how he wins a general election given the massive edge the Democrats already hold in a fair election, and we now have massive mail-in-voting that only enhances that edge.
+1
In order to enact policy, the politician must first win. Trump’s policies are good enough, his personality defects are less bad than Biden’s corruption (known before 2020), and he’s far far more popular among working voters.
His ability to get more votes makes him better, that’s the primary, flawed purpose of democracy.
DeSantis hasn't run a particularly good campaign. His decision on 6-week abortion is basically malpractice. He hasn't offered anything on school choice that would translate to the national level. I'm not sure he would be reliable on foreign policy.
I'd probably choose him over Trump but I'm not remotely surprised he isn't getting the nomination.
Antisemitism never died in America. People who have made antisemitic remarks in my presence did so not realizing that I am Jewish. I think my experience is fairly typical. Antisemitic remarks don't particularly bother me, as I figure they go with the territory, and in at least one instance I recall a fellow tribe member and I sharing amusement over an antisemitic comment made in our presence, but calling for the mass extermination of Jews crosses one of my red lines. I have to add that I am a bit annoyed about these wealthy Jewish donors withholding their donations to Harvard and other elite universities only after the events of October 7th and the testimony of those 3 women college presidents. I stopped donating to my alma mater at least a decade ago, and I made it clear at the time that antisemitism was my top concern, though I also mentioned the social justice crap the alumni magazine was peddling. Where have these people been?
They have been following the easy to follow fashion, rather than logic. They read The NY Times which, in lies about Trump or Palin or Kavanaugh, supplies the market for rationalizations.
Belief in untruth leads to, not disbelief but disregard for, T Truth.
Few things in social science are as true as the claim that “Black 18 year olds have, on average, lower IQ scores.” All who are unwilling to accept this truth look for something else to believe in, instead. Something less true, like Systemic Racism, or White Privilege, or Whites are all oppressors and thus guilty. That means Jews, who are White, are guilty oppressors. That’s the rationalization logic.
This belief in an untruth follows from unwillingness to proclaim the truth.
People like to hate The Other, and have long enjoyed secretly hating Jews, so many are very very happy to join in the current elite fashion of Jew Hate. Not so different from Trump hate, and lots of Jews enjoy the fashion of hating Trump. Maybe you even know some Trump hating Jews. Trump hate, like Jew hate, is more fashionable than logical.
Maybe I know some Trump hating Jews? My mother died long before the 2016 election, but she had an irrational hatred of Nixon, and when I brought up Obama's attendance of a church led by a jew-hating preacher in one of our many disputes over politics, her only response was 'well,' in other words, she was willing to overlook it. Most Jews will keep on pulling the donkey lever until the cattle cars come to round them up. But I believe Trump does have some diehard Jewish fans.
I think most Orthodox Jews already support Trump more than Democrats, but they are seldom as prominent in academia, media, or business.
I call it Dem Derangement Syndrome against Trump, & DDS against Bush, Palin, Kavanaugh, Reagan, and even Nixon & Goldwater.
The market for rationalizations provides pseudo logical arguments for whatever fashion the heart is set on. Your mother sounds like the kind of friends thenewneo.com has. She has a great series on how A Mind Is A Difficult Thing To Change.
She thinks Trump is less sharp than before, and notes his silly RINO attack against Chip Roy. Which I also don’t like.
I am sad about how many smart Trump hating friends I have, too. Some even bring up the West Bank settlements to mitigate condemnation against Hamas.
The Emperor has Ugly Clothes - not a fairy tale because fashion is deliberately subjective, so ugly is in the eye of the beholder. To me, both Jew Hate and Trump Hate are ugly, most Dem disagree on at least 1.
Thanks. I'm familiar with the new neo from Legal Insurrection, for which she used to write.
Actually, there is a pretty good reason not to hold Rev Wright against Obama. If politics weren't an issue, Obama could have admitted he rarely attended church and had no idea Wright had said these things. Instead, we live in a country where admitting you don't attend church loses you voted so he didn't want to admit that because it was worse than taking heat about Wright.
I got here because I saw your Dec 25 comment. I'm curious if you think everyone against Trump has TDS.
Of course Trump has some Jewish fans. He also has some black fans. No real surprise. The somewhat bigger surprise is his Hispanic immigrant fan base has recently grown dramatically.
No, I don't think everyone against Trump has TDS. And that reason for not holding Wright against Obama, whatever its merits, is irrelevant to my mother's thinking.
I don't think it is irrelevant. She doesn't form her opinion of Obama based on what Wright says. She might not know the details of why she shouldn't and she might ignore Wright for all the wrong reasons but ignoring Wright is still the right thing to do.
The point is that I have better information about my mother's thinking than a complete stranger like you would. Regarding the substance of your reasoning, the only thing I take away from it is that Obama was a con job (as is the case with all presidential candidates in recent memory, but to a more extreme degree), but I already knew that.
"A man in all the world's new fashion planted,
That hath a mint of phrases in his brain."
Who said that?
The Bard. (Not the AI).
When it comes to antisemitism there are three things to be optimistic about.
1. Israel - it continues to be an amazing success story and its success doesn’t depend on educating against antisemitism. Iron Dome, IDF and SLBMs are pretty darn effective.
2. The United States - within the U.S., creative destruction is the ultimate work-around to fashionable beliefs. Yes you have to build new, but again, this doesn’t require educating against antisemitism.
3. Education - it’s very slow, but can be very effective. It might take a generation. Tiny textbooks, chants, songs, and direct education work surprisingly well if you own the elementary school.
#3.......interesting and thought provoking
Two good examples here.
https://www.challengerschool.com/
https://www.thalesacademy.org/
"Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired." -- Jonathan Swift
I recommend listening to the Akhil Amar podcast episodes with Baude and Paulsen on the 14 amendment decision. I'm troubled by the implications of this but the reasoning is in fact rock solid -- this is the law of the land. It might be better for the country if SCOTUS decides the case wrongly and finds for Trump, but the originalist support for the CO decision is very strong.
The best legal defense the opponents of the decision have come up with is that the president doesn't count as an "officer of the US." Supposedly the Reconstruction era framers of the amendment wanted to bar Lee and Davis from serving in Congress but not from the presidency. Ridiculous.
I am ok with the President being an officer and even being specifically included in those positions for which an insurrectionist cannot run for office.
My argument - and prediction for the technical, procedural way in which SCOTUS will dispose of this case without having to get into the merits - is that the case of whether Trump should be kept off the ballot was "nonjusticiable for lack of ripeness."
That is, it's ok to keep Trump off the ballot after he's convicted of treason in Federal Court, and even if he's still appealing that conviction. But, until convicted, free to run. We shall see, but that's my bet.
That is horseshit, Dave. The question the supporters of the CO decision have never answered, not even one time, is who gets to decide that an insurrection took place and that Trump participated in it? Note that Trump hasn't even been charged by Jack Smith and his grand juries with insurrection, and definitely not convicted of it by any trial jury. Any clear-headed reading of the amendment and subsequent actions of later Congresses demonstrates that there is one and only one political body specifically empowered by the Constitution to determine the fitness and eligibility of a candidate for President, and that is Congress.
Congress could act today, if it is so clear that Trump is ineligible that even a non-federal court judge/s can rightfully bar him from a federal election, and re-impeach and convict him of the actions taken after the 2020 election and declare him ineligible under its Article I powers. So, why haven't the Democrats done that, Dave? Additionally, the Congress that sits on January 6th 2025 will also have the power to refuse to accept a Trump electoral slate should he win the election in November. So, why don't the Democrats do that, Dave? If the case is so clear that Trump is inelegible, shouldn't it be a cakewalk to simply defeat him at the ballot box in November, so why don't the Democrats do that, Dave?
Let me ask you this- some Republican states are making noises about barring the Democrat candidate from the ballot by simply declaring that they participated in an insurrection. How, exactly, would such a candidate prove that they hadn't participated in such an activity? What would you say were that to happen and SCOTUS sat on its hands and allowed both parties to bar the opponents from the ballot? Wouldn't you be angry to see it happen to the Democrat candidate? Wouldn't you feel it to be unjust and undemocratic? Wouldn't you be making exactly the arguments I made above? Or would really just say, "Thems the rules, and the courts get decide who we the voters get to vote for"?
I agree that the "insurrection" part is more debatable than the "officer" part, but it's clear from the history that state courts were allowed to exclude from ballots ex-Confederates who once took an oath to the US. They didn't need to be charged or "convicted" of being rebels.
Re the impeachment issue, remember that where there is a contradiction between an amendment and an earlier article or amendment, the later amendment overrides the earlier part of the constitution. That's why the call it an amendment. Cf the 14th amendment sec 2 overriding the three-fifths compromise.
And yes, I agree with you that the law has troubling implications. I think it is a bad law, but it is the law. Like I said, perhaps it's better if the Supreme Court decides the case wrongly. I'm not sure what to think about this.
The Presidency isn't a state office, Dave. A state court has no power to bar a candidate from that office, or from the federal ballot. The 14th Amendment clearly states in section 5 that power of enforcement is in the hands of Congress- no one else. It would be a closer case, still not close, were this a decision of a federal court, but it still doesn't change the fact that the power to determine eligibility for the office of President rests with Congress alone- the 14th Amendment didn't amend that fact at all.
It says Congress has the power to enforce it, the word sole does not appear
It doesn't grant the power to any other body, though, Dave, and that is enough to make the CO court decision null and void.
If Trump were convicted, would you then deem him unfit? The courts in multiple jurisdictions have charged him, and the evidence seems solid. I think there is a strong process argument here, in that no one should be barred before conviction....but do you think Trump is genuinely innocent? Please state your case if you do. Respectfully, the Democrats tried to impeach and convict, but Republicans stonewalled them.
I can’t speak for others, but I feel as if most Trump supporters will move the goalposts even further if he was convicted. “It was rigged”, “The judges were corrupt”, etc. I think of Donald Trump was convicted, your opinion wouldn’t change and you’d still find a way to support him Yancey. Outside of the due process argument you outlined...why should he not be barred from the ballot?
I think the charges are horseshit, Sean- stretching the law in ways they weren't intended and have never been used before to convict one guy. However, even if he is convicted, the courts still don't have the power to remove him from the ballot- only Congress has that power, and you complain all you want about how Republicans refused to convict him in the 2021 impeachment, but I want to see your argument for why the GOP votes in that impeachment weren't based on a belief that the impeachment, like these court cases, were just more horseshit put up by the Democrats.
I think you are are just another Democrat or Never-Trump Republican blinded by your hatred of the man, so you call the "evidence" solid and are looking for any reason to keep him off the ballot. Like I asked Dave- if you are so convinced the case against Trump is solid, then why not just defeat him at the ballot box? It should be a walk in the park, right, if Trump is so obviously guilty of the crimes with which he is being accused. It shouldn't be hard to convince 50% + 1 of the voters that he should not be president. So, what are you afraid of- that a majority of voters don't agree with you?
Actually, I think he was defeated at the ballot box the first time, that’s why I’m genuinely scared. Trump was defeated in 2020. He lost multiple states, and none of the suits about election interference went anywhere. Trump would have had to overturn multiple states elections, which is nearly impossible and highly improbable. He would have had to pick up multiple states.
If you want to know why I’m scared he can’t be defeated at the ballot box, is that he was defeated, and then a mob went into the capitol and was about to force Trump as presidents without the votes. I think even if Trump loses the election, his supporters will say it was rigged, and we will repeat a lot of the bad things that happened around January 6th, only worse. I do believe that Democrats could get 50 + 1 %, but Trump will never concede and things will get worse.
I think the GOP didn’t impeach because they’re scared of Trump’s base and everyone believes he will go away. The GOP faction of congress knew he was guilty, and waited hours for Trump to call off the mob. This is a fact. We have audio of Trump and multiple witnesses who said Trump waited for multiple hours to call off the mob at the capitol. I think politicians are scared of the mob, scared that there are elements of trumps base who may threaten them, but mainly, they have a belief that the base can be managed and that it was politically convenient to not stand up to Trump.
Just quit looking for a compliant court to do this for you- that is banana republic kind of thinking and acting.
The GOP consists of Trump's base, Sean- you don't get to pretend they are two different entities when it suits your argument- he wasn't convicted in 2021 because there simply weren't enough votes to do so. You have to accept that as a fact- the charges weren't obviously convincing. Congress tomorrow has the power to impeach, convict, and bar Trump from ever holding the Presidency again- so write your congresscritter to get it going- an obviosly guilty Trump should be easy to impeach again and convict this time, or are you just looking for an easy way out?
Arnold wrote "...I see (Trump's) supporters as failing to realize there are better alternatives in the Republican field." That depends upon one's assessment of the challenges we face. If one sees the government as deeply corrupt, incompetent,,and dangerous to the civil order then someone like Trump who is bent on change rather than a more conventional go-along to get-along candidate is preferable. Things have gotten so bad with the abuse of the law to try to derail Trump's candidacy that it has become imperative to support it, regardless of other concerns, in order to thwart what amounts to an attempted coup d'etat by the Left.
Desantis has a proven track record for being better than Trump on all of that, and on literally everything else, with one sole exception, a little thing called 'popularity'. Which .... yeah ....
DeSantis decided to enact a six week ban when running for president. That's basically political malpractice. Most of the things I like about DeSantis in Florida he hasn't articulated any plan for enacting at the federal level. And it's not clear to me his foreign policy would be better.
I like the guy, but man what a terrible campaign he has run.
DeSantis appears to be constrained by his donors; he is dependent on mostly large donors. Hence his waffling on foreign interventionism (Ukraine). But he has done a great job in Florida.
Supporting Trump is hardly a fashionable belief. It is as unfashionable as it is possible to be. The media and the establishment aren't pushing Trump the way they are pushing LBGTQ+. The opposite is true. Support for Trump is a protest vote, as Thucydides comment implies. Judging from the media and other signs, there has been an ongoing effort to make Nikki Haley represent the 'fashionable' belief on the Republican side (and she checks off 2 diversity boxes), and that tells you all you need to know about her.
I can tell you that it is working with the soft-headed old country-clubbers in Houston.
If she is the nominee, I will vote for Biden.
I can believe it. A friend of mine is on the Nikki Haley bandwagon. The 'thinking' seems to be that there is an untapped reserve of women out there who won't vote for Trump because he is too icky, but would come out in droves for Nikki's 'girl power' schtick, and maybe that the other side will be less motivated to stuff the ballot boxes if Trump's name is not on the ballot. Trump calls her 'birdbrain,' but the label is equally apt for conservatives who buy such nonsense. At the risk of reigniting our previous debate, Haley would continue bankrupting the US with support for the Ukraine war, as well as other unwinnable wars, but that is one reason I would never vote for her.
I read something about one of the debates. She failed an elementary IQ test with respect to the most meaningful thing Desantis has done in Florida. She is no conservative, so she’s a good fit for the GOP; but it’s becoming clear neither party should be anywhere near the presidency.
"If one sees the government as deeply corrupt, incompetent,,and dangerous to the civil order then someone like Trump who is bent on change rather than a more conventional go-along"
But if Trump's first term is anything to go by, he will say a lot and get very little done, e.g., almost nothing of the border wall got built in his four years.
100% Agreed! But the power of fashion has long been evident. Remember the Dutch tulip mania? Well, me neither, since it happened about 400 years ago, but fortunately someone remembered to write about it. And that bunch, almost entirely literate Protestants, might’ve known better but were held captive by their own maniacal impulses and greed anyway. We just seem to be having the damndest time overcoming human nature, despite all the cool stuff we come up with. A couple days ago, amidst a mid-Manhattan crush of holiday revelers, I witnessed a group of young women posing for photos together, doffing their bulky coats in 35 degree weather to better capture their youthful cuteness in front of a massive, sparkly Christmas tree in the background. It was kinda funny, really. It occurred to me that it wouldn’t have happened quite the same way, if at all, in the days of film cameras.
I've seen much, much worse "doin' it for the gram" than that! This relates to a point I wanted to argue against the post's sentence, "But as the written word gives way to electronic media, we are going to retreat from logic, objectivity, and the pursuit of truth." But since you mention this kind of behavior, I'll make it here.
My point is that it's *not* literacy, reading, writing, etc., even as badly as those skills have recently degraded on average, especially for young people.
Instead, the issue is that now the virtual is more important than the real.
Arnold's mirage of "Distant seems Familiar" is just one manifestation of this larger phenomenon. Have you noticed how now even news of big, real, terrible events somehow feels emotionally flat, unimportant, and unreal, just a margin over from the similar, skeptical, dismissive feeling of something you think has been faked? This confusion results from the fact that they way you feel about things is a product of your perception of whether everyone else has seen it and whether they all share a strong feeling about it too.
Your judgments about these things used to derive from there only being a few major broadcast outlets and reinforced by actual in-person bouncing against lots of other people who were certain to have seen and heard the same things and whose repetition in chatter only served to reinforce the sociality of the information. But "everything online" world means you can't know if you're stuck in an epistemic niche or whether your social feedbacks are attenuated or exaggerated.
While always somewhat tenuous for reasons of status signaling, the digital communications platform as primary socially interactive intermediary has allowed an almost total untethering of "personae image perception management" from real lived-experiences.
Anyone who saw how the first young female users of social media reacted to the new state of affairs is familiar with the radical change in their perspective, focus, and allocation of effort. In short, it turned everyone into their own mini-celebrity brand manager. This is hard to notice for younger people who have been marinating in this stuff since birth, but there are those of us who were of a certain age (ahem, motivated to pay close attention to young women) just as this transition was happening, and who thus felt the jarring nature of it most intensely.
Prior to everyone being very online - that is, everyone else *seeing* "them" mostly via network interface, that knowledge of that being the way your peers observe and judge you - experiences pursued for signaling purposes were still in many important ways pursuable for their own sake, as enjoyable in their own right, even if only as a collateral and incidental benefit to a primary signaling motive. And these were experiences you had to have in front of people, and with people, to signal to their eyes by experiencing something in the real world with them that was by nature hard to fake.
But EVERYTHING digital online is EASY to fake, and to be manipulated to make seem much more photogenic, aesthetic, impressive, and so forth. This goes *way* beyond the traditional "everything is going perfect for our beautiful loving family" Christmas cards, as if every moment of your life now had to be choreographed to the whole world with as much effort and fakery as those cards.
You don't have to say, "That would drive me nuts" - it did in fact drive everyone nuts, that already happened a while back. The psychological collapse of reasoning capability that came in the wake of that was only coincidentally post-literate, being downstream of the same 24/7 immersion in multimedia virtual interaction, inundated by recreation so as to blur what is real life and what is 'entertainment'.
And Covid lockdowns put the "the viral meme-of-the-minute firehose is now what passes for our culture" effect on super-steroids. Listen carefully to Bo Burnham's, "That Funny Feeling." - "A live action Lion King, the Pepsi half-time show. Twenty thousand years of this, seven left to go. ... Full agoraphobic, losing focus, cover blown. A book on getting better, hand-delivered, by a drone. Total disassociation, fully out your mind. Googling de-realization, hating what you find."
What happened was everyone was watching everyone else's selective, performed, and manipulated "presentations" of their "lives". The "exchanging perception-manipulating performances" social equilibrium produces games for influence that *are not won by rigor* but the popularity contests of viral appeal and factional utility, and that includes ideological, conceptual, and interpretive deutungshoheit.
The point is that what all this being online is doing to everyone is making it so that they don't actual live their lives in the real world. Reality is now only useful as props, staging, and setting for the shared multimedia of performances and presentations. People becoming trapped in "social reality" and social reality has completely different corrective feedbacks from "actual reality".
Reasoning ability is good for "actual reality" while "social game-playing" and all kinds of fakery is good for "social reality". *That* is what has been happening, only simultaneous with loss of literate capacity. To maximize utility, it doesn't make sense now for more people to invest cognitive resources in rational capacity, and instead, they need to optimize for succeeding at the social influence game. And the mental structures and decision processes which characterize the ways to come out ahead in these games could not be more different.
The story of history is that just as foragers gave way to farmers gave way to industrial civilization, the optimize-by-socializing era gave way to the optimize-by-reasoning era, and we hit "peak reasoner" a while back and now the pendulum is swinging the other way and taking everyone's brains with it. It just so happens the thing that is causing the pendulum to swing back happens to also make it unnecessary and straining for most people to read and write anymore.
FWIW, obsession with appearances and doltish superficiality were plenty strong before the unholy union of digital cameras and social media produced our current state of affairs, but they certainly exacerbated the problem. Part of my point was simply that the ease and cheapness of digital photography has motivated people to act in ways they wouldn’t have before, but that was more a matter of expense, convenience and opportunity than character. Your bit is interesting and you may be onto something but I’m not as audacious. Consider the possibility that this kind of exchange - fun and invigorating but, for many, also a pathway to fury or despair they might’ve otherwise avoided - is also a product of our digitized days and that distance from it all is valuable and often necessary for maintaining sanity. Peace be with you brother.
You wrote: "Andrey Mir has sold me on the idea that what I think of as rational, scientific thinking comes from the way that our minds are shaped by reading. But as the written word gives way to electronic media, we are going to retreat from logic, objectivity, and the pursuit of truth."
Some comments:
- This sounds plausible, but perhaps it's not reading but [depth of understanding and exploration of topics beyond the superficial] that is in decline?
- Higher ed academics read a lot, no, and that hasn't stopped many from being ideologically captured and discarding/manipulating logic, objectivity, the pursuit of truth.
- MB the decline is due to: increased political power over our lives, + virtue-signaling having more value to individual political players that actually doing good, solving societal/group problems?
We can’t overcome antisemitism any more than we can generally overcome any other evil within the human heart. We need to strive to overcome the evil within our own hearts. And we must continue, always, to speak against evil at every opportunity.
My understanding of Rob Henderson's luxury beliefs is that - beyond merely being fashionable - such beliefs will very often incur significant penalties/ costs on the people that are putatively being helped by those same luxury beliefs.
GameStop was seen as a way to stick it to the industry investors - they were short selling it, so the idea was to buy up the stock so they couldn't fulfill their commitments. It didn't work all that well; they just stopped trading in it and waited out those guys.
The price looks like it recovered. No idea if it actually was taken over.
Luxury beliefs continue until they cause pain. This is a retail process not wholesale; if you personally aren't experiencing pain, it's a rare individual who will change beliefs just because there is pain elsewhere.
Almost 3 decades ago as I sat with a then powerful member of Microsoft on a safari I was guiding in Kenya, I listened to the spiel about the future dominated by electronic media and I told her, "But this will lead to the re-barbarization of the Western mind, cut off from the lexalogical filter of reading and writing."
Shout out to Virginia Postrel on similar related ideas, and her earlier book
The Substance of Style.
When someone chooses style, the fashion they follow become part of their chosen, fashion tribe, their identity.
Jew hatred is more accurate than antisemitism, just as pro abortion is more accurate than pro choice. The Fashion is to be less clear, like “duplicative language” which will probably not replace plagiarism.
Trump haters are trying to make it a fashion to claim Jan 6 was an insurrection, and among elites it mostly is. But normal folk know it’s a lie, tho it remains a Dem fashion to hate Trump.
Luxury beliefs are not always fashionable, but are always held by rich or privileged folk who won’t suffer if their minority belief becomes the majority belief. Like the idea small shoplifters should not be punished.
Even poor folk can have fashionable beliefs, like it’s OK to shoplift. It’s even cool to do so, and you’re even a dumb sucker if you don’t steal. A dumb fu**. (Fu** seems more pronounceable than f*ck) calling somebody a sucker, or shaming them, is an important mechanism for enforcing the fashionable ideas, which become the temporary norm.
I really liked and still like Lou Reed’s live Take No Prisoners album, full of vulgar fuck speech, especially his 10 min story of how he wrote Walk on the Wild Side, where the colored girls sing. Vulgar speech, especially “fuck speech” became fashionable, even tho it wasn’t quite a luxury belief. Tho the Michael Lewis book Liar’s Poker included a character, maybe Jewish, the Piranha, whose every fucking other word was fucking emphasized so you had to be some kind of dumb fuck to not fucking understand that only fucking wimps and losers were too fucking polite to turn their fucking noses up at those who were cool enough to occasionally use the word fuck.
I enjoyed that kind of fashionable late 70s verbal rebellion.
WTF? Didn’t I realize if you get rid of one set of taboo words, there would be another set? No I didn’t.
And Blazing Saddles remains hilarious, especially the sheriff.
How can you be so relaxed about a Trump presidency? The man lies incessantly, assaults women, and cheats. He has said he wants to be a dictator. He will leave NATO. He will do untold damage to the constitutional order at home, and the peace of the world. Almost no one who worked with him in his first term will support him or vote for him. Most of them are issuing stern warnings.
I agree with a lot of what you write Arnold, but...I am exasperated
I should know better, but I can't resist. "The man lies incessantly, assaults women, and cheats." Are you talking about Trump or Biden? At least Trump doesn't sniff the hair of young girls, take showers with his daughters, or use his sons as bag men with respect to corrupt countries like Ukraine and China, as far as we know. Some critics predict that the administration's Ukraine fiasco will result in the demise of NATO, but we can only hope. The constitutional order at home has been slowly being undermined for decades, and the process has accelerated under the present administration. The only President in recent memory who didn't start any new wars will damage the peace of the world? I don't get it. As for those who worked with him in his 1st term not supporting him this time around, I agree with Arnold that Trump's personnel policy in his first term was abysmal, so that could be a plus. In any event, since unlike Arnold, I am skeptical that the next election will be free and fair, I think it is premature of you to be exasperated.
Okay - I'm outta here.
How can anybody be hysterically afraid of a Trump Presidency-we know he HAS been President, and was NOT crazy. He’s a big boastful arrogant billionaire, who cheated on his wives, tho less than B Clinton, LBJ, or JFK. It was Biden who grabbed Tara Reade by the p*ssy, then got her fired when she complained (complaint was lost). Almost all who worked with him were GOPe DC govt folk. Obama’s illegal spying & lying were far more damaging.
Democracy depends on free & fair elections. You think unlimited mail in ballots, forbidden in most European countries, is fraud free? Wray & Barr both knew the H Biden laptop was real, with real evidence of corruption against Biden, but they implicitly supported govt censorship of the truth, to steal the election so Trump would lose.
What Trump policiy was so bad?
But, the NYT will promote half truths, like NATO speculation, allowing Trump haters to rationalize their illogical, but fashionable, Trump hate.
Joining mass protests in real life, no matter for what, is another by product of too much online life.
I thought Ilya Somin's piece in Reason did a good job showing why the CO decision is legally sound: https://reason.com/volokh/2023/12/19/colorado-supreme-court-rules-trump-is-ineligible-for-the-presidency-under-section-3-of-the-14th-amendment/
Thanks for this link. The whole case rests on “insurrection” or not.
The unarmed protesters against a stolen election were not using, nor threatening to use, force against the armed police. No protester has been indicted, much less convicted, of insurrection. The deadly violence was police killing a small, unarmed woman who was illegally trespassing, with a peaceful protest mob in back.
(Who broke the door window she was climbing thru? A govt agent? If we don’t know, and I don’t but want to know, I believe it was a govt asset. Entrapment, like the “kidnap the governor” plot.)
No insurrection cases, no insurrection, no incitement.
More Dem deep state dirty tricks.
Will keep getting worse until Democrats lose at the ballot box.
I agree with your reply, but with reference to your previous reply to my comment about antisemitism as well as this reply, I would note that Ilya Somin emigrated to this country as a Soviet Jewish refugee. You can't make this stuff up.