The worst damage hasn't been done by SuperPACs and the like, it's been done by elected officials and wingnut rodeo clown "content creators" [1], none of which would have been affected in the slightest if Citizens United had gone the other way.
The strongest (but not, IMO, sufficient) argument against CU was always that, while money is speech, it is also money and thus unrestricted campaign spending can drive a lot of soft (and for that matter not-so-soft) corruption.
But saying vile false sh!t and believing vile false sh!t are both very much protected speech.[2] CU would never have done a thing to stop QAnon or the spread of N@zi lies about Springfield's Haitian immigrant community.
[1] Not disjoint categories by any means: MTG is both, and Trump was for four years and might well be again.
[2] There's a bit of a carveout when the vile sh!t is defamatory but it will virtually never apply to electioneering.
"Look, we were really worried about the overall trust people have in news organizations, so we decided to torch our credibility with the people who do trust us in the hopes of building trust with people who think millions of illegal immigrants voted in 2020, January 6 was an antifa false flag, climate change is a Chinese hoax, COVID vaccination is a plot to corrupt our purity of essence, and Jews cause natural disasters with space lasers!"
When people say “are you honestly suggesting that you’ll let innocents suffer as part of a protest action against political decisions we don’t like”, here are some doctors saying “yes, we will”.
They are saying that when it comes down to cases, their job is more important than someone’s life.
You moved those goal posts so fast they visibly reddened.
Overall this has been one of the most ridiculously bad faith stories of the election, and allegedly non-partisan media outlets were extremely eager to run with it.
This all despite the fact that:
Biden wasn't calling Trump supporters garbage;
and that Trump calls Biden supporters "vermin" and the "enemy within" routinely.
I can understand the partisan double standard coming from the GOP on this, and to an extent it's all in the game.
But I really don't see why allegedly mainstream media outlets have decided that it's completely fine for Trump to be an absolute f*ckhead 24/7 but any sign of rudeness on the part of the Democrats has gotta be the whole f*cking news cycle.
(Also for the love of all that is holy can someone please change the way the moderation filter works? It's unreasonable to expect us to discuss contemporary American politics without using the F-word.)
Yeah most of the ideas were in the mix but Trump was the major accelerant.
Suburban "Resistance" groups also exposed a lot of people who ranged from "sorta liberal maybe" to "was a Republican 15 minutes ago" to concepts from the "woke" lexicon (especially privilege) who picked them up with surprising enthusiasm.
I think it's something like a regression to the mean; the Democratic Party as a clearly liberal/progressive/Near Left party is a recent development if it's a development at all.
That said, I also think the hold that conservatism is going to exert over suburban PMC Near Rightists who join the Dems is not going to be all that strong.
This was never the kind of piece that was going to inspire hundreds of comments of back-and-forth, but I really did appreciate it for being both well-structured and comprehensive.
If Harris wins, we will see much less intensity from the Broad Left on cultural issues--indeed, the reduced intensity from the Broad Left we've seen during the Biden Administration will continue, and the intensity we do see will be much less aligned with partisan politics.
One of the things that has always seemed glaringly obvious to me, but rarely commented upon, was how much of what Matt Y. calls the Great Awokening was anti-Trumpist counter-reaction. It ramped up around the time he elected and started petering off after he was out of office.
Regardless of what you think of "woke" positions at the object level [1], much of the embrace of them was being driven by the shock of Trump's election, and the reasonable if not iron-clad belief it instilled in a lot of relatively sheltered white liberals and moderates that the country was a much more dangerously bigoted place than they had previously believed.
I recall a fair amount of frustration from the Further Left at liberals who were largely spurred to activism and political awareness by Trump treating racism, misogyny, and anti-LGBT hate as flowing from Trump, and saying things like, "I'd be eating brunch right now if I weren't fighting Trump's fascism!"
They started to chill out once Biden was elected, DEI initiatives started fizzling out, and culture war-driven boycotts started coming from conservatives who were enraged that trans people exist.
But re-elect a proud rapist to the Presidency, bringing a red-pilled Thiel ghoul along as his sidekick? After he's spent the past year raving about vermin and poisoned blood and enemies within? After he's promised mass deportations of millions of immigrants, including millions of legal immigrants, based on literal N@zi lies about black people eating pets?
Yeah, you're gonna see some fishing counter-reaction.
On the other hand, electing Trump will do nothing and less than nothing to calm the right-wing culture war freakout. Hell, it will probably get worse--remember that QAnon was invented on Trump's watch.
[1] I continue to believe it's a mixed bag of good ideas, arrant but mostly harmless nonsense, and things that would be good ideas that have been watered down to nothing by consultants and entrepreneurs who want to make a buck selling them to Fortune 500 D suites.
[2] I wrote a bit of an OT piece about this called "Those Who Walk Away from Omelets", but like most of my OT pieces it went nowhere.
The anti-abortion movement's plan for addressing any backlash caused by the lethal cruelty of their preferred policies is to make it illegal to tell anybody about them.
Not Jaybird but my take is that I, a somewhat engaged gamer, had barely heard of Concord, didn't even know what sort of game it was, and next thing I'm hearing that is that it had lost $400 million. Overall it seems like the game took forever to pull together (the long dev cycle is consistent with the very high cost) and ended up being a mediocre entry in a saturated sub-genre, and one where people would have to stop playing competitors to start spending time with it.
I mostly play single player games with finite campaigns, so while it may take me a while to finish a game, eventually I will finish it and move onto the next one. That isn't really the way it works with online games that work on a subscription basis, which makes it even harder to break in with a new property.
If this is actually true, this is an extreme understatement:
I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it. That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.
If they were going to do it, the time to do it was months ago, being open about the decision and rationale with both their readers and newsrooms. Springing it now is such obviously garbage change management it's hard to believe the claims that it's a principled decision.
As for this:
Dave Limp, the chief executive of one of my companies, Blue Origin, met with former president Donald Trump on the day of our announcement. I sighed when I found out, because I knew it would provide ammunition to those who would like to frame this as anything other than a principled decision.
Those people include the Trump campaign itself, of course:
His point about coalition management stuck out to me.
I think the GOP has always had the edge here (being less diverse along most axes, very much including ideology), but since 2016 they've been able to outsource it entirely to Trump's personality cult.
Trump is, of course, not bothering to keep up the GOP narrative in his response to Hitchcliffe's alleged jokes:
Trump also insisted he didn't hear any of the comments, even as they've been played on television and written about extensively. When asked what he made of them, he did not take the opportunity to denounce them, repeating that he didn't hear the comments.
Can't just say the jokes sucked because he might offend one of the millions of racist tools who worship him.
And, like, "he didn't hear the jokes" is a weak dodge for anybody, but especially this guy who routinely expresses very strong opinions on things that were never said in the first place.
I'm really just straight plagiarizing InMD now, but the anti-incumbent sentiment extends well beyond the US.
Strongest counter-argument is the COVID disruptions (especially inflation) hit the US pretty hard but less hard than other countries, but I still think it's essentially correct that Harris had a high hill to climb and has at least mostly climbed it.
Also Trump is actually an awful candidate and everybody looks at him and says, "Why can't you beat this awful candidate? You must suck!"
To an extent that's a plausible argument for 2016 where Clinton had real liabilities and made serious tactical errors in the home stretch.
Still, 2024 is Trump's to lose and he's been working overtime at it.
Yeah amazing that a guy who thought the counter-protesters at Charlottesville were violating the free speech of the N@zis there would endorse the guy who insisted that there were very fine people on both sides.
I'm sure I'm really missing out on not reading that argument and am just enforcing my epistemic bubble by doing so.
Stuff like this really pushes me towards InMD's broader point of view.
Harris was drawing dead due to broad and deep anti-incumbent backlash and fundamentals[1], but she's a decent candidate and Trump is a wall-to-wall sh!tshow.
The MSG rally is just the latest iteration of this.
[1] I don't know if the negative sentiment over the economy is really fundamentals due to how much of it is vibes that don't come through in actual numbers[2], but it is at least fundamentals-adjacent.
I'm not sure I get the argument there--the way polling works I'd expect correlated errors across polls and pollsters. Even without herding, and herding does seem like kind of a real thing.
(Like I definitely agree it's pretty much a coin flip now. Just commenting about how fat the tails are.)
Yet no one will for a second question whether Trump is the best that the Republicans could have done.
Nobody even did that after he lost in 2020 and tried to steal the election by fraud and force.
Because the key thing, among Republicans, among media both right-wing and non-partisan, and among most commenters here, is to ensure that no one ever thinks that Republicans have a whit of agency.
It's always the fault of the Democrats for not stopping them.
On “From The Washington Post: On Political Endorsement”
This does not seem obviously right to me.
The worst damage hasn't been done by SuperPACs and the like, it's been done by elected officials and wingnut rodeo clown "content creators" [1], none of which would have been affected in the slightest if Citizens United had gone the other way.
The strongest (but not, IMO, sufficient) argument against CU was always that, while money is speech, it is also money and thus unrestricted campaign spending can drive a lot of soft (and for that matter not-so-soft) corruption.
But saying vile false sh!t and believing vile false sh!t are both very much protected speech.[2] CU would never have done a thing to stop QAnon or the spread of N@zi lies about Springfield's Haitian immigrant community.
[1] Not disjoint categories by any means: MTG is both, and Trump was for four years and might well be again.
[2] There's a bit of a carveout when the vile sh!t is defamatory but it will virtually never apply to electioneering.
"
"Look, we were really worried about the overall trust people have in news organizations, so we decided to torch our credibility with the people who do trust us in the hopes of building trust with people who think millions of illegal immigrants voted in 2020, January 6 was an antifa false flag, climate change is a Chinese hoax, COVID vaccination is a plot to corrupt our purity of essence, and Jews cause natural disasters with space lasers!"
On “Open Mic for the week of 10/28/2024”
You moved those goal posts so fast they visibly reddened.
"
i could not possibly care less
could have fooled me with the way CNN et al. were flogging the story
"
Overall this has been one of the most ridiculously bad faith stories of the election, and allegedly non-partisan media outlets were extremely eager to run with it.
This all despite the fact that:
Biden wasn't calling Trump supporters garbage;
and that Trump calls Biden supporters "vermin" and the "enemy within" routinely.
I can understand the partisan double standard coming from the GOP on this, and to an extent it's all in the game.
But I really don't see why allegedly mainstream media outlets have decided that it's completely fine for Trump to be an absolute f*ckhead 24/7 but any sign of rudeness on the part of the Democrats has gotta be the whole f*cking news cycle.
(Also for the love of all that is holy can someone please change the way the moderation filter works? It's unreasonable to expect us to discuss contemporary American politics without using the F-word.)
"
What do you even mean by "abortion deaths"?
Total number of women dying during abortions?
Number of women dying per 100 000 abortions?
On “What If Kamala Wins?”
Yeah most of the ideas were in the mix but Trump was the major accelerant.
Suburban "Resistance" groups also exposed a lot of people who ranged from "sorta liberal maybe" to "was a Republican 15 minutes ago" to concepts from the "woke" lexicon (especially privilege) who picked them up with surprising enthusiasm.
"
I was not. Why do you ask?
"
I think it's something like a regression to the mean; the Democratic Party as a clearly liberal/progressive/Near Left party is a recent development if it's a development at all.
That said, I also think the hold that conservatism is going to exert over suburban PMC Near Rightists who join the Dems is not going to be all that strong.
On “Declare Your Independence From Donald Trump”
This was never the kind of piece that was going to inspire hundreds of comments of back-and-forth, but I really did appreciate it for being both well-structured and comprehensive.
On “What If Kamala Wins?”
If Harris wins, we will see much less intensity from the Broad Left on cultural issues--indeed, the reduced intensity from the Broad Left we've seen during the Biden Administration will continue, and the intensity we do see will be much less aligned with partisan politics.
One of the things that has always seemed glaringly obvious to me, but rarely commented upon, was how much of what Matt Y. calls the Great Awokening was anti-Trumpist counter-reaction. It ramped up around the time he elected and started petering off after he was out of office.
Regardless of what you think of "woke" positions at the object level [1], much of the embrace of them was being driven by the shock of Trump's election, and the reasonable if not iron-clad belief it instilled in a lot of relatively sheltered white liberals and moderates that the country was a much more dangerously bigoted place than they had previously believed.
I recall a fair amount of frustration from the Further Left at liberals who were largely spurred to activism and political awareness by Trump treating racism, misogyny, and anti-LGBT hate as flowing from Trump, and saying things like, "I'd be eating brunch right now if I weren't fighting Trump's fascism!"
They started to chill out once Biden was elected, DEI initiatives started fizzling out, and culture war-driven boycotts started coming from conservatives who were enraged that trans people exist.
But re-elect a proud rapist to the Presidency, bringing a red-pilled Thiel ghoul along as his sidekick? After he's spent the past year raving about vermin and poisoned blood and enemies within? After he's promised mass deportations of millions of immigrants, including millions of legal immigrants, based on literal N@zi lies about black people eating pets?
Yeah, you're gonna see some fishing counter-reaction.
On the other hand, electing Trump will do nothing and less than nothing to calm the right-wing culture war freakout. Hell, it will probably get worse--remember that QAnon was invented on Trump's watch.
[1] I continue to believe it's a mixed bag of good ideas, arrant but mostly harmless nonsense, and things that would be good ideas that have been watered down to nothing by consultants and entrepreneurs who want to make a buck selling them to Fortune 500 D suites.
[2] I wrote a bit of an OT piece about this called "Those Who Walk Away from Omelets", but like most of my OT pieces it went nowhere.
On “Open Mic for the week of 10/28/2024”
The anti-abortion movement's plan for addressing any backlash caused by the lethal cruelty of their preferred policies is to make it illegal to tell anybody about them.
"
I still haven't forgiven them for the second game.
"
Not Jaybird but my take is that I, a somewhat engaged gamer, had barely heard of Concord, didn't even know what sort of game it was, and next thing I'm hearing that is that it had lost $400 million. Overall it seems like the game took forever to pull together (the long dev cycle is consistent with the very high cost) and ended up being a mediocre entry in a saturated sub-genre, and one where people would have to stop playing competitors to start spending time with it.
I mostly play single player games with finite campaigns, so while it may take me a while to finish a game, eventually I will finish it and move onto the next one. That isn't really the way it works with online games that work on a subscription basis, which makes it even harder to break in with a new property.
"
If this is actually true, this is an extreme understatement:
If they were going to do it, the time to do it was months ago, being open about the decision and rationale with both their readers and newsrooms. Springing it now is such obviously garbage change management it's hard to believe the claims that it's a principled decision.
As for this:
Those people include the Trump campaign itself, of course:
https://x.com/thestevencheung/status/1850016625174388797?s=46
On “What If Trump Wins?”
His point about coalition management stuck out to me.
I think the GOP has always had the edge here (being less diverse along most axes, very much including ideology), but since 2016 they've been able to outsource it entirely to Trump's personality cult.
On “Group Activity: The Donald Trump Madison Square Garden Rally”
Trump is, of course, not bothering to keep up the GOP narrative in his response to Hitchcliffe's alleged jokes:
Can't just say the jokes sucked because he might offend one of the millions of racist tools who worship him.
And, like, "he didn't hear the jokes" is a weak dodge for anybody, but especially this guy who routinely expresses very strong opinions on things that were never said in the first place.
On “What If Trump Wins?”
I'm really just straight plagiarizing InMD now, but the anti-incumbent sentiment extends well beyond the US.
Strongest counter-argument is the COVID disruptions (especially inflation) hit the US pretty hard but less hard than other countries, but I still think it's essentially correct that Harris had a high hill to climb and has at least mostly climbed it.
Also Trump is actually an awful candidate and everybody looks at him and says, "Why can't you beat this awful candidate? You must suck!"
To an extent that's a plausible argument for 2016 where Clinton had real liabilities and made serious tactical errors in the home stretch.
Still, 2024 is Trump's to lose and he's been working overtime at it.
On “Open Mic for the week of 10/28/2024”
Yeah amazing that a guy who thought the counter-protesters at Charlottesville were violating the free speech of the N@zis there would endorse the guy who insisted that there were very fine people on both sides.
I'm sure I'm really missing out on not reading that argument and am just enforcing my epistemic bubble by doing so.
On “What If Trump Wins?”
Stuff like this really pushes me towards InMD's broader point of view.
Harris was drawing dead due to broad and deep anti-incumbent backlash and fundamentals[1], but she's a decent candidate and Trump is a wall-to-wall sh!tshow.
The MSG rally is just the latest iteration of this.
[1] I don't know if the negative sentiment over the economy is really fundamentals due to how much of it is vibes that don't come through in actual numbers[2], but it is at least fundamentals-adjacent.
[2] The exception here appears to be for white men without college degrees, who appear to have taken a beating in terms of real wages over the last 4 years,
"
I'm not sure I get the argument there--the way polling works I'd expect correlated errors across polls and pollsters. Even without herding, and herding does seem like kind of a real thing.
(Like I definitely agree it's pretty much a coin flip now. Just commenting about how fat the tails are.)
"
Yet no one will for a second question whether Trump is the best that the Republicans could have done.
Nobody even did that after he lost in 2020 and tried to steal the election by fraud and force.
Because the key thing, among Republicans, among media both right-wing and non-partisan, and among most commenters here, is to ensure that no one ever thinks that Republicans have a whit of agency.
It's always the fault of the Democrats for not stopping them.
"
We don't even know who Mussolini is!
"
In terms of qualifications, I think she's well-qualified by the standards we apply to other (non-incumbent) major party nominees.
In terms of overall candidate quality, she seems to be in the middle of the pack. Not a Reagan or an Obama, but not a Dukakis or a McCain either.
(Like overall I have a positive opinion of McCain but he was a dreadful candidate.)
"
Those people are being silly for one reason or another.
Less silly than the ones who have decided to support Trump because they’re mad about gas prices, but it’s not really a high bar.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.