Guys, Biden is a spent force. He’s a talisman that probably doesn’t have enough juice left for the next round of mystical tribal dances we call elections. Plan accordingly.
Yeah, this. I tend not to agree with most of what Eric writes, but I am more agreement with the OP here. The caveat being that Biden's low approval ratings is not fundamentally a media issue.
Biden has low approval ratings because he's a low-energy, ignorant, mentally deficient doofus, and the whole world sees it.
This is where a lot of the optimistic Demo plans have or will fail. At some crucial step, they're going to depend on Biden being somebody other than who he is.
My one observation on Afghanistan and why it is/was a good policy decision that yields negative political gains is not that the pullout was bad strategically (it wasn’t), not even that the pullout was bad tactically (it was)… it’s that Biden didn’t follow-up his good Strategic decision by punishing the bad tactical execution.
This is at least a little bit uninformed. You can fire some generals for window dressing if you want, but this strategy good/tactics bad idea is a bad take. The mistakes that lead to the debacle were Biden's, and the generals did pretty well in cleaning up after him.
For what it’s worth, I agree that residents in a lot of high-crime areas would like the pendulum to swing back a bit.
Well yeah, this is an example of why at least sometimes is better to spell things out explicitly. Probably, you and Chip are on the same page, at least to the extent that the failures of American criminal justice, especially municipal police are severe enough to justify radical reforms.
For normie Americans, it's not just that they favor the crime profile of 2010 over what we have today. It's also that they understand that to mean empowering our criminal justice institutions, eg, police et al, to lower crime.
So even if normie Americans trusted you and Chip in some way, it doesn't necessarily follow that they would support Jaybird-Chip Criminal Justice Reform because they formulate the problem in a completely different way.
By elaborating the way I did, I wanted to steer away from phrasings like “lost trust” to more precise ones.
Yeah, I don't think that changes anything. From here it doesn't seem that Chip is any more interested in marginally improving trust through climbing the trust gradient any more than he was interested in regaining lost trust.
Tbh, Chip is at least as much to blame here, probably more. What Chip means by trust is "Give me and my buddies all the political power in America", which of course is not at all what trust means. And irrelevant beyond that even, as we're in a circumstance now where American politics is running full throttle in the opposite direction.
Ok, now you are making more explicit some things you should have spelled out ten comments ago. So, you and I are getting closer to a substantive discussion. That's not exactly what I intended, but whatevs.
I would argue that lack of trust is why we don’t have a lot of things and that includes, but is not limited to, “radical” police reform.
(Wait. What does “radical” mean? Like, getting rid of QI and that sort of thing? Firing police who screw up? Is that the definition of “radical”?)
Like disbanding the Camden Police Department is radical. It could be good or bad, but it is definitely radical.
It's also useful to point out that there are more possibilities circulating around than simply lack of trust. There is also a lack of desire, or political need. People are aware that crime was not as big a problem from say, 2005-2015 and municipal police departments were doing their thing back then.
There's probably a lot of willingness among urban residents and others to return to that state of affairs.
On top of that, I clarified that it’s not a 1 or 0, but a gradient. I’m making the point that we don’t have high trust, not that we have no trust.
The whole argument of us moving from a relatively better place to a relatively worse one is one that strikes me as being fairly self-evident.
My guess is, here you're elaborating on something that was never the point of contention in the first place.
I actually argued that it’s a salve to make oneself feel better but doesn’t move the ball forward.
When I want to know “What’s your plan to move the ball forward?”, I get answers like, and let me copy and paste this, “South Africa after apartheid, East Bloc countries after Communism, American Reconstruction, postwar anywhere.”
My guess is, Chip doesn't see any need to move the ball forward. He's content to sit where he is, and wait to cash his lottery ticket when his number comes in. And when that happens, ie some faction of Warren-ite GOP-hating lib Demos take over, he won't have to worry about who trusts who to reform police. That's just one of the things that will come out in the wash, along with white nationalism, Reconstruction and whatever.
Now, at a substantive level, that is obscenely stupid. But again, it's just a guess because Chip isn't any more coherent than you are.
Is this one of those things where we’re not allowed to remember the discussion from last time, every time?
Yeah, then in that case you should cite that and move on. And if that's what Chip complains about, then you know where the problem is.
And this case, you also assumed without substantiating that:
1. Lack of trust is why we don't have radical police reform.
2. Lack of trust is functionally equivalent to Chip and libs in general having lost trust.
3. Complaining about the other party is a copout.
Chip (rightly) is complaining about #2 here but if anything he's even worse that you are. White nationalism and Reconstruction have nothing to do with the price of tea in China and Chip never even really tries to argue his case.
My guess is Chip is thinking about Reconstruction as an example of lack of power, and then he applies that to a situation that's about the lack of trust, which isn't really the same thing at all.
I'm pretty sure that's right, but I can't say for certain because neither one of you is making a good faith effort to be coherent.
My goodness. I admit that I thought that “not having a high level of trust/collaboration” was one of the things not in dispute!
Well yes, that tends to be one of the things you find out when to try to resolve mindless repetitions like this, is that certain things which you thought weren't in dispute, or maybe even shouldn't be in dispute, are in fact in dispute (not trying to speak for Chip here obv).
Or at least as likely, the way you meant a certain proposition, like this one, is much much different than somebody else interprets it.
For example, I could point to the lack of collaboration between the two main political parties as a smaller measure and, for larger measures, I could compare to countries that we agree have high trust/collaboration.
Yeah you could have but you didn't (heretofore).
Or in another case, what happens when Ellen and Keith go the marriage counselor? Why do we think this is a useful metaphor for the failure of meaningful police reform in America? Among other things, Chip has a point. If we don't know anything about Ellen or Keith, why should the lack of trust be the libs' fault, assuming lack of trust is the heart of the problem. It could just as easily be the Red Team's fault.
My belief is that we do not currently have a “high” level of trust and not having a “high” level of collaboration follows from that.
That's your belief, but at least as far as this post is concerned, you've done nothing to substantiate the proposition that your belief has any meaningful close relationship with reality.
And Chip has his beliefs, and the story is the same there. Between the two of you, you're stuck like a broken record.
So we started by asking how to build trust, and you immediately leapt into accusations that your hated outgroup the liberals have done something wrong, and now you’re playing the Grand Inquisitor demanding we confess our sins?
This is not the clever persuasion tactic you think it is.
This siht is stupid. The both of you.
Both of you are arguing from premises that are unstated and unshared with the opposite party. And worse, retreating and reiterating the same unsubstantiated premises when called out.
In an alternate universe, Jaybird could be "right", since in our political culture at this moment, the Right has the trust of the grassroots in ways that the Left doesn't, therefore Chip's carping about why doesn't the Right have to gain somebody's trust if the Left does, that's just disingenuous and irrelevant. As that goes double for issues like policing.
Be that as it may, Jaybird has never tried to substantiate this, I'm not even sure he believes it. So he's just as bad.
Not that I’m endorsing dumping Biden—for all his faults, he’s probably the best we can expect from Democratic primary voters, and I’d back his embalmed corpse over Katie Porter—but you can’t really draw any firm conclusions from that few data points, and what little data we have are biased by the facts that dumping the incumbent is usually a hail Mary play when the party is already in a bad place.
I'd endorse dumping Biden. That's to say I would if I were a Democrat trying to figure out the best chance for Demos to hold the White House in 2024 (obviously I'm not).
Two reason already mentioned by the other commenters:
1. There's not enough data to make any real conclusions.
2. For the examples that typically are cited, the causality is backwards. The incumbent is doing poorly for whatever reasons, and attracts primary challenges.
But there's also a third reason why it's a good idea to get rid of Biden before he runs for reelection, and for this one I have to give some credit to the Left twitterati Will Stancil.
One of Will's ideas is the "main vibe". That is, you can't strategize around events and policies in strictly objective terms, you also have to consider the grassroots Americans and the frame of reference they will interpret the events with, ie the "main vibe".
At this point, Will gets it exactly wrong. His idea is you can't really know the main vibe, so Demos should flood the zone with as much inflammatory bullsiht they can with lib cable nets and legacy media (and social media). Meanwhile, they should implement whatever policy the lib staff/activist class likes.
But even if Will's inferences are wrong, the basic idea of the main vibe has a lot of value. There's a lot of frustrations among Demos (including Demos working high up in the Biden Administration) that they got killed on Afghanistan but aren't getting any credit for Ukraine. Or alternatively, they're getting killed on inflation, but they're not getting any benefit for a good employment environment. And Will is right here: you could come up with objective reasons why one is registering and another isn't, but when push comes to shove you have to say the real juice in the matter is a vibe-y thing.
Will's mistake is to think that the main vibe is fundamentally too obscure to understand directly. I disagree. Especially now, the main vibe is actually pretty simple. In fact, there's two main vibes in circulation right now, both of them cutting hard against the Democrats.
1. Lib/Demo activists suck. In the full picture, this needs a little more nuance because Demo voters actually like Demo activists, but still they are never accepted as final decisionmakers.
2. Biden is a lazy, mentally compromised doofus. This is self-explanatory, and needs no further nuance at all.
This is why it's in the best interest for Demos to get rid of Biden ASAP. Fundamentally, nothing is going to improve the political standing for the Demos while Biden is still President. If something good happens, it's either dumb luck or more likely, an apolitical thing that happened to go our way. But if something bad happens, it's that fcuking ignorant Biden's fault. And so Demos are stuck playing a game of heads we lose, tails we tie.
If Biden is forced out by intraparty conflict, yeah Demos are going to have to pay the piper for that and take some hits and bad feelings, but then at least they get the chance to heal. They don't have to deal with Biden reading the stage directions on his Teleprompter as a substantive part of his speech, or gaffes of a similar nature in the coming months and years.
They have the chance to get a head start on putting the problems of their current situation in the past, and hope to create a more compelling main vibe that may actually cut in their favor.
A big part of the idea here is to encourage libs from moving away from a narrow focus of what they personally want, and moving to a greater prominence for what promotes solidarity for all us.
So in this case, there is a desire among libs to implement gun control so that at some point soon or later the Republicans will be caught in a gotcha situation between gun owners who strongly favor Repblicans and other Americans who are presumably friendlier toward gun control.
In this circumstance, this is somewhat defused by the fact that Sen John Cornyn negotiated a bipartisan gun control bill will the Democrats and signed into law. But it should be noted that this new law is widely thought will be ineffectual.
The larger point is that these kind of gotcha games are silly. Among other reasons, the "traps" they are trying to spring are worthless. GOP can just walk through them without effect, as we're seeing in the January 6 hearings among others.
Instead, libs should move off agitation and amplification of group grievances and move toward engagement and solidarity toward mainstream America instead.
Regarding paragraph 3: the only people who are aggrieved by any of the present day actions are conservatives.
This is just not true, and in fact I'm at a bit of a loss as to why you would even assert that.
For example, it's just been a couple of weeks since the incident(s) surrounding Felicia Sonmez and her tweets and workplace drama. And she's an especially good example because of how weak her grievance was and the tenuous connection between that "grievance" and her response. And I think it's pretty obvious that Sonmez is not a Republican and neither is anybody who was instinctually inclined to support her.
Not wanting to sweep the dirt under the rug is, in the end, a way to make this country better for every citizen. To suggest that taking up arms is a reasoned response to this is a deeply unserious take.
This is wrong on a couple of counts. What you're calling "not wanting to sweep dirt under the rug" isn't about making the country better. It's about saying that our solidarity is worth much much more than the mindless score-settling and ledger-keeping that contemporary Woke libs are inclined to do.
As far as mass shootings being a "reasoned response" to personal aggravations, to be honest I'm not following your (presumed) imputations to me.
I am not saying that mass shootings are a reasoned response to personal disturbances or aggravations. What I am saying is that where somebody feels some kind of group based grievance, we resist the mentality that that grievance necessarily has to be amplified and vindicated, as libs are likely to do.
Fine. What about the rest of it? Let’s not get into what’s an AR-15 territory here.
I'm assuming this is about me.
I could have brought up many other reasons to vote Republican besides the Highland Park incident, the reason that particular one comes to mind is that, at least to some extent you'd think that libs would want to address that, typically in their minds as a matter of gun control.
But, if I think if you take any kind of meaningful perspective at all, it's pretty apparent that the prospects for improvement there are very dim. And I'm not just talking about the legal and legislative impediments to gun control either (though obviously those are important).
Beyond that, there's also the idea there's some opportunistic value to get a leg up on the Republicans. And then it turns out the whole world votes Republican anyway, which seems to defeat the utility of that idea.
At this point, there really does seem to be some possibility that libs might actually try to understand why it is they are so invested in cultural antagonism towards mainstream America and maybe consider doing something else.
That's why Highland Park is useful in this context. It's something that the libs have at least some motivation to address, but given the lack of progress on their terms, maybe they'd be willing to consider something else.
Well yes, the point is that the Highland Park incident is one of many that's occurred over a period of months and years. And even though the nature of the grievances varies widely, as a very strong generalization the perpetrators of such crimes are very much unhappy and aggrieved people. So in particular, I am not trying to argue that it's the same grievances animating Chip to bytch about Republicans here which are the same reasons that motivated Robert Crimo to shoot the parade-goers there.
The Highland Park guy had different motives than the Uvalde guy who had different motives than the Buffalo guy, who had different motives than the Ft Hood shooter who had different motives than Dylan Klebold. What I am saying is that for each of those men, beyond being unwell and aggrieved, somehow process and followed through on the idea that in some way the best response was to shoot a group of random or vaguely predefined people.
And that is what I'm blaming the libs for. Because it has been the animating energy of libs for at least 30 years, but especially the last ten or so, that mass grievances, especially related to class, race, sex, but also sometimes other things as well, are magnified and vindicated. So, because blacks in Tulsa were attacked by a white mob in 1919, blacks in Memphis get reparations in 2022. Because the Federal Army subdued the various Indian tribes all over the American plains in the 19th century, Elizabeth Warren gets a faculty appointment to Harvard. Because the Puritans of Massachusetts drowned sexually promiscuous women as "witches", some college professor accused Sen Josh Hawley as being transphobic for suggesting that it is women who get pregnant and give birth. (That last one happened today I think btw.)
Any possibility of moderation, of forbearance, of solidarity, of a mentality of abundance and future time-orientation, these are all things that libs understand to their core will hurt the political viability of the Democratic Party. Especially now in a world where Pres Joe Biden has sub 40% approval rating. Therefore they will work desperately hard to prevent this from happening. That's why we have the culture that we have.
So what we should ask, in fact it's what he should insist as much as we are capable, that the libs simply stop doing these things. And therefore, without the constant regeneration of lib cultural pollution into our society, we have the possibility of rebuilding ourselves in a spirit of solidarity and abundance for all.
So yes, that is one reason among many why you should be voting Republican. If you find this at all fanciful or unpersuasive, please appreciate if nothing else it's why I vote Republican.
Oh jeez, I fear this is a time suck aimed straight at me. There's lots of things a person could try depending on how motivated they were. The thing that comes to me offhand is the 4th of July parade shooting incident in Highland Park, Illinois. The lib cultural energy that animates the Democratic Party is profoundly oriented toward encouraging and empowering the alienations against mainstream America. This has been going on for a long time, of course, but matters have gotten dramatically worse during the Obama/post-Obama era. And it's exactly these sorts of alienations that create incidents like the Highland Park thing. So, to mitigate against the likelihood of similar incidents occurring in the future, we should all vote Republican. (And of course, it's also tremendously valuable in dialing down the political/cultural hostility in America in general. It's fairly intuitive, at least for me, that the overall cultural animosity among Americans is a bigger and broader problem than the current issues with gun violence, though obviously any one particular circumstance is much less likely to be lethal.)
In the bigger picture, I'm kind of an odd duck for a right-winger in that the Wokes actually convinced me of a few things. So I'm kind of a Right-Woke, and I don't think there's too many of us. And one of the things the Wokes used to say (maybe still do for that matter), is that it's not our obligation to do your spiritual and intellectual work for you for free.
In this case we've seen, over a matter of months or years, that Chip and Saul are strongly animated by grievances and alienation, against conservatives and Republicans in particular, but not just us. And at least as important as that, a larger number of libs here at the League share the same grievances, but just do a much better job of maintaining thoughtfulness, circumspection, and emotional balance.
And sometimes we try to resolve these grievances, at least among ourselves. Sometimes it seems to be worth the effort, other times it just seems to add to the frustration, for both the Left and Right commenters. But the important thing to emphasize is that we don't have to do that. We have no obligation to do their spiritual work for them. We don't have to refute their grievances. We don't have to address their grievances, we don't even have to acknowledge that they exist.
People like DeSantis, Youngkin, Kim Reynolds, Greg Abbott and Adam Laxalt are going to be elected, this cycle and the next. They are going to pass laws and make rules, and people like Chip and Saul can simply follow them. And if they don't, that can be addressed then.
You’re establishing a double standard for the two parties, effectively asking the Deocrats to unilaterally disarm.
Then the Democrats should be unilaterally disarming then. On a practical level, what weapons do the Demos think they have that they haven't mobilized yet? With President Biden's appoval rating at 38%?
Chip's plan seems to be to rally all the Democrats to one or another procedurally radical scheme, and for whatever issues there are as to why such schemes might not work, ignore them. But at least all the Democrats are behind Chip's latest brainstorm, right? Oh. That too.
And then when these initiatives fall flat, I'm there will be more rounds of bullsiht and rationalization as to why Republicans are uniquely horrible so that justifies me doing whatever and why hasn't the DOJ indicted Joe Manchin yet?
Yes, actually you should unilaterally disarm.
Instead of inflaming the alienations of aggrieved parties feeling butthurt because of whatever, libs should work towards dialing down those alienations instead. That way we could start to rebuild our stores of solidarity among Americans, and we wouldn't have as many incidents where that guy shot up a parade in Highland Park, Illinois.
In any event, here's what it says about the justification for lethal force in general:
Determining that Byrd “seized” Babbitt is only the first step, though. In a highly influential Fourth Amendment case, Graham v. Connor, the Supreme Court held that, as a seizure, an officer’s use of force must be “objectively reasonable.” In another, Tennessee v. Garner, the Court held that the use of deadly force is reasonable when officers have probable cause to believe that someone poses an imminent threat of “death or serious physical injury.” (The court used the term “immediate”; we use “immediate” and “imminent” synonymously.)
Drawing from common law, the policing community has defined a threat as “imminent” when someone has the ability, opportunity and intention to cause the specific harm at issue (here, death or serious physical injury). “Ability” refers to the person’s capacity to cause the identified harm and requires asking whether the person is physically capable, at the time, of inflicting the harm. For example, a person holding a knife can use it as a weapon, so the individual has the ability to cause serious injuries or death. “Opportunity” refers to the subject’s proximity to a potential target and requires asking whether anyone is vulnerable, at the time, to the specific harm. For example, a person with a knife who is standing immediately next to an officer has both the ability and the opportunity to attack the officer with it, while an individual with a knife who is 50 feet away has the ability, but not the opportunity, to do so. “Intent” refers to the person’s apparent desire to cause the identified harm and requires asking whether the person wants, at the time, to cause the harm. For example, a person who is physically close to an officer while cutting cucumbers with a knife in the kitchen might have the ability and opportunity, but not the intention, to cause death or serious physical injury.
The question is whether the officer reasonably believed she was in the moment.
No. It's not about Mr Byrd's actual beliefs, it's whether a reasonable person standing in Mr Byrd's shoes and acting on what Mr Byrd saw or had access to at the time would believe that Mrs Babbitt was an imminent threat.
But, of course a 30-something woman crawling through that window is not an imminent threat to anybody and any reasonable person would see that.
Ie, it's the imminence that counts not the third party.
The imputations that she was a threat (all of them that I have heard) are contingent upon other subsequent things that could or would have happened and/or the situation of other people, neither of which justifies the use of lethal force against Mrs Babbitt.
You and Oscar are both way over complicating this.
Yeah, but no. Obviously Oscar has priors about law enforcement, particularly the propensity of American law enforcement to use lethal force. I'm agnostic to those priors, at least for the purpose of the comments to this post.
The legal standard in play is Defense of Third Person.
That's not really relevant to my comments. As I mentioned several times, Ashli Babbitt was not an imminent threat to anybody's life or limb.
My understanding is, that the considerations of self-defense (or the use of lethal force by law enforcement) are basically the same whether you're defending yourself or someone else.
If I had the time, I would go through the comments on all of the posts about other people being killed by the police to see how often you expressed this sentiment.
Go ahead. As right-wingers go, I'm not especially cop-friendly.
Not even, the police have killed for less and gotten commendations and medals for it.
No, no. The Capitol Police are like, nothing to see here, move along for at least six months or so. The officer involved wasn't disclosed. The process to exonerate him wasn't disclosed, etc.
Even for municipal police, the mayor and chief of police are political figures and don't get away with that.
On “The Inherent Weakness of the Joe Biden Presidency”
Yeah, this. I tend not to agree with most of what Eric writes, but I am more agreement with the OP here. The caveat being that Biden's low approval ratings is not fundamentally a media issue.
Biden has low approval ratings because he's a low-energy, ignorant, mentally deficient doofus, and the whole world sees it.
This is where a lot of the optimistic Demo plans have or will fail. At some crucial step, they're going to depend on Biden being somebody other than who he is.
"
This is at least a little bit uninformed. You can fire some generals for window dressing if you want, but this strategy good/tactics bad idea is a bad take. The mistakes that lead to the debacle were Biden's, and the generals did pretty well in cleaning up after him.
On “Robb Elementary Report: Read It For Yourself”
Well yeah, this is an example of why at least sometimes is better to spell things out explicitly. Probably, you and Chip are on the same page, at least to the extent that the failures of American criminal justice, especially municipal police are severe enough to justify radical reforms.
For normie Americans, it's not just that they favor the crime profile of 2010 over what we have today. It's also that they understand that to mean empowering our criminal justice institutions, eg, police et al, to lower crime.
So even if normie Americans trusted you and Chip in some way, it doesn't necessarily follow that they would support Jaybird-Chip Criminal Justice Reform because they formulate the problem in a completely different way.
Yeah, I don't think that changes anything. From here it doesn't seem that Chip is any more interested in marginally improving trust through climbing the trust gradient any more than he was interested in regaining lost trust.
Tbh, Chip is at least as much to blame here, probably more. What Chip means by trust is "Give me and my buddies all the political power in America", which of course is not at all what trust means. And irrelevant beyond that even, as we're in a circumstance now where American politics is running full throttle in the opposite direction.
"
Ok, now you are making more explicit some things you should have spelled out ten comments ago. So, you and I are getting closer to a substantive discussion. That's not exactly what I intended, but whatevs.
Like disbanding the Camden Police Department is radical. It could be good or bad, but it is definitely radical.
It's also useful to point out that there are more possibilities circulating around than simply lack of trust. There is also a lack of desire, or political need. People are aware that crime was not as big a problem from say, 2005-2015 and municipal police departments were doing their thing back then.
There's probably a lot of willingness among urban residents and others to return to that state of affairs.
My guess is, here you're elaborating on something that was never the point of contention in the first place.
My guess is, Chip doesn't see any need to move the ball forward. He's content to sit where he is, and wait to cash his lottery ticket when his number comes in. And when that happens, ie some faction of Warren-ite GOP-hating lib Demos take over, he won't have to worry about who trusts who to reform police. That's just one of the things that will come out in the wash, along with white nationalism, Reconstruction and whatever.
Now, at a substantive level, that is obscenely stupid. But again, it's just a guess because Chip isn't any more coherent than you are.
"
Yeah, then in that case you should cite that and move on. And if that's what Chip complains about, then you know where the problem is.
And this case, you also assumed without substantiating that:
1. Lack of trust is why we don't have radical police reform.
2. Lack of trust is functionally equivalent to Chip and libs in general having lost trust.
3. Complaining about the other party is a copout.
Chip (rightly) is complaining about #2 here but if anything he's even worse that you are. White nationalism and Reconstruction have nothing to do with the price of tea in China and Chip never even really tries to argue his case.
My guess is Chip is thinking about Reconstruction as an example of lack of power, and then he applies that to a situation that's about the lack of trust, which isn't really the same thing at all.
I'm pretty sure that's right, but I can't say for certain because neither one of you is making a good faith effort to be coherent.
"
Well yes, that tends to be one of the things you find out when to try to resolve mindless repetitions like this, is that certain things which you thought weren't in dispute, or maybe even shouldn't be in dispute, are in fact in dispute (not trying to speak for Chip here obv).
Or at least as likely, the way you meant a certain proposition, like this one, is much much different than somebody else interprets it.
Yeah you could have but you didn't (heretofore).
Or in another case, what happens when Ellen and Keith go the marriage counselor? Why do we think this is a useful metaphor for the failure of meaningful police reform in America? Among other things, Chip has a point. If we don't know anything about Ellen or Keith, why should the lack of trust be the libs' fault, assuming lack of trust is the heart of the problem. It could just as easily be the Red Team's fault.
"
That's your belief, but at least as far as this post is concerned, you've done nothing to substantiate the proposition that your belief has any meaningful close relationship with reality.
And Chip has his beliefs, and the story is the same there. Between the two of you, you're stuck like a broken record.
"
This siht is stupid. The both of you.
Both of you are arguing from premises that are unstated and unshared with the opposite party. And worse, retreating and reiterating the same unsubstantiated premises when called out.
In an alternate universe, Jaybird could be "right", since in our political culture at this moment, the Right has the trust of the grassroots in ways that the Left doesn't, therefore Chip's carping about why doesn't the Right have to gain somebody's trust if the Left does, that's just disingenuous and irrelevant. As that goes double for issues like policing.
Be that as it may, Jaybird has never tried to substantiate this, I'm not even sure he believes it. So he's just as bad.
On “Joe Biden and the Incumbent Advantage”
I'd endorse dumping Biden. That's to say I would if I were a Democrat trying to figure out the best chance for Demos to hold the White House in 2024 (obviously I'm not).
Two reason already mentioned by the other commenters:
1. There's not enough data to make any real conclusions.
2. For the examples that typically are cited, the causality is backwards. The incumbent is doing poorly for whatever reasons, and attracts primary challenges.
But there's also a third reason why it's a good idea to get rid of Biden before he runs for reelection, and for this one I have to give some credit to the Left twitterati Will Stancil.
One of Will's ideas is the "main vibe". That is, you can't strategize around events and policies in strictly objective terms, you also have to consider the grassroots Americans and the frame of reference they will interpret the events with, ie the "main vibe".
At this point, Will gets it exactly wrong. His idea is you can't really know the main vibe, so Demos should flood the zone with as much inflammatory bullsiht they can with lib cable nets and legacy media (and social media). Meanwhile, they should implement whatever policy the lib staff/activist class likes.
But even if Will's inferences are wrong, the basic idea of the main vibe has a lot of value. There's a lot of frustrations among Demos (including Demos working high up in the Biden Administration) that they got killed on Afghanistan but aren't getting any credit for Ukraine. Or alternatively, they're getting killed on inflation, but they're not getting any benefit for a good employment environment. And Will is right here: you could come up with objective reasons why one is registering and another isn't, but when push comes to shove you have to say the real juice in the matter is a vibe-y thing.
Will's mistake is to think that the main vibe is fundamentally too obscure to understand directly. I disagree. Especially now, the main vibe is actually pretty simple. In fact, there's two main vibes in circulation right now, both of them cutting hard against the Democrats.
1. Lib/Demo activists suck. In the full picture, this needs a little more nuance because Demo voters actually like Demo activists, but still they are never accepted as final decisionmakers.
2. Biden is a lazy, mentally compromised doofus. This is self-explanatory, and needs no further nuance at all.
This is why it's in the best interest for Demos to get rid of Biden ASAP. Fundamentally, nothing is going to improve the political standing for the Demos while Biden is still President. If something good happens, it's either dumb luck or more likely, an apolitical thing that happened to go our way. But if something bad happens, it's that fcuking ignorant Biden's fault. And so Demos are stuck playing a game of heads we lose, tails we tie.
If Biden is forced out by intraparty conflict, yeah Demos are going to have to pay the piper for that and take some hits and bad feelings, but then at least they get the chance to heal. They don't have to deal with Biden reading the stage directions on his Teleprompter as a substantive part of his speech, or gaffes of a similar nature in the coming months and years.
They have the chance to get a head start on putting the problems of their current situation in the past, and hope to create a more compelling main vibe that may actually cut in their favor.
On “Comment Rescue: A request for a sales pitch from Chip Daniels”
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A big part of the idea here is to encourage libs from moving away from a narrow focus of what they personally want, and moving to a greater prominence for what promotes solidarity for all us.
So in this case, there is a desire among libs to implement gun control so that at some point soon or later the Republicans will be caught in a gotcha situation between gun owners who strongly favor Repblicans and other Americans who are presumably friendlier toward gun control.
In this circumstance, this is somewhat defused by the fact that Sen John Cornyn negotiated a bipartisan gun control bill will the Democrats and signed into law. But it should be noted that this new law is widely thought will be ineffectual.
The larger point is that these kind of gotcha games are silly. Among other reasons, the "traps" they are trying to spring are worthless. GOP can just walk through them without effect, as we're seeing in the January 6 hearings among others.
Instead, libs should move off agitation and amplification of group grievances and move toward engagement and solidarity toward mainstream America instead.
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This is just not true, and in fact I'm at a bit of a loss as to why you would even assert that.
For example, it's just been a couple of weeks since the incident(s) surrounding Felicia Sonmez and her tweets and workplace drama. And she's an especially good example because of how weak her grievance was and the tenuous connection between that "grievance" and her response. And I think it's pretty obvious that Sonmez is not a Republican and neither is anybody who was instinctually inclined to support her.
This is wrong on a couple of counts. What you're calling "not wanting to sweep dirt under the rug" isn't about making the country better. It's about saying that our solidarity is worth much much more than the mindless score-settling and ledger-keeping that contemporary Woke libs are inclined to do.
As far as mass shootings being a "reasoned response" to personal aggravations, to be honest I'm not following your (presumed) imputations to me.
I am not saying that mass shootings are a reasoned response to personal disturbances or aggravations. What I am saying is that where somebody feels some kind of group based grievance, we resist the mentality that that grievance necessarily has to be amplified and vindicated, as libs are likely to do.
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I'm assuming this is about me.
I could have brought up many other reasons to vote Republican besides the Highland Park incident, the reason that particular one comes to mind is that, at least to some extent you'd think that libs would want to address that, typically in their minds as a matter of gun control.
But, if I think if you take any kind of meaningful perspective at all, it's pretty apparent that the prospects for improvement there are very dim. And I'm not just talking about the legal and legislative impediments to gun control either (though obviously those are important).
Beyond that, there's also the idea there's some opportunistic value to get a leg up on the Republicans. And then it turns out the whole world votes Republican anyway, which seems to defeat the utility of that idea.
At this point, there really does seem to be some possibility that libs might actually try to understand why it is they are so invested in cultural antagonism towards mainstream America and maybe consider doing something else.
That's why Highland Park is useful in this context. It's something that the libs have at least some motivation to address, but given the lack of progress on their terms, maybe they'd be willing to consider something else.
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Well yes, the point is that the Highland Park incident is one of many that's occurred over a period of months and years. And even though the nature of the grievances varies widely, as a very strong generalization the perpetrators of such crimes are very much unhappy and aggrieved people. So in particular, I am not trying to argue that it's the same grievances animating Chip to bytch about Republicans here which are the same reasons that motivated Robert Crimo to shoot the parade-goers there.
The Highland Park guy had different motives than the Uvalde guy who had different motives than the Buffalo guy, who had different motives than the Ft Hood shooter who had different motives than Dylan Klebold. What I am saying is that for each of those men, beyond being unwell and aggrieved, somehow process and followed through on the idea that in some way the best response was to shoot a group of random or vaguely predefined people.
And that is what I'm blaming the libs for. Because it has been the animating energy of libs for at least 30 years, but especially the last ten or so, that mass grievances, especially related to class, race, sex, but also sometimes other things as well, are magnified and vindicated. So, because blacks in Tulsa were attacked by a white mob in 1919, blacks in Memphis get reparations in 2022. Because the Federal Army subdued the various Indian tribes all over the American plains in the 19th century, Elizabeth Warren gets a faculty appointment to Harvard. Because the Puritans of Massachusetts drowned sexually promiscuous women as "witches", some college professor accused Sen Josh Hawley as being transphobic for suggesting that it is women who get pregnant and give birth. (That last one happened today I think btw.)
Any possibility of moderation, of forbearance, of solidarity, of a mentality of abundance and future time-orientation, these are all things that libs understand to their core will hurt the political viability of the Democratic Party. Especially now in a world where Pres Joe Biden has sub 40% approval rating. Therefore they will work desperately hard to prevent this from happening. That's why we have the culture that we have.
So what we should ask, in fact it's what he should insist as much as we are capable, that the libs simply stop doing these things. And therefore, without the constant regeneration of lib cultural pollution into our society, we have the possibility of rebuilding ourselves in a spirit of solidarity and abundance for all.
So yes, that is one reason among many why you should be voting Republican. If you find this at all fanciful or unpersuasive, please appreciate if nothing else it's why I vote Republican.
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Oh jeez, I fear this is a time suck aimed straight at me. There's lots of things a person could try depending on how motivated they were. The thing that comes to me offhand is the 4th of July parade shooting incident in Highland Park, Illinois. The lib cultural energy that animates the Democratic Party is profoundly oriented toward encouraging and empowering the alienations against mainstream America. This has been going on for a long time, of course, but matters have gotten dramatically worse during the Obama/post-Obama era. And it's exactly these sorts of alienations that create incidents like the Highland Park thing. So, to mitigate against the likelihood of similar incidents occurring in the future, we should all vote Republican. (And of course, it's also tremendously valuable in dialing down the political/cultural hostility in America in general. It's fairly intuitive, at least for me, that the overall cultural animosity among Americans is a bigger and broader problem than the current issues with gun violence, though obviously any one particular circumstance is much less likely to be lethal.)
In the bigger picture, I'm kind of an odd duck for a right-winger in that the Wokes actually convinced me of a few things. So I'm kind of a Right-Woke, and I don't think there's too many of us. And one of the things the Wokes used to say (maybe still do for that matter), is that it's not our obligation to do your spiritual and intellectual work for you for free.
In this case we've seen, over a matter of months or years, that Chip and Saul are strongly animated by grievances and alienation, against conservatives and Republicans in particular, but not just us. And at least as important as that, a larger number of libs here at the League share the same grievances, but just do a much better job of maintaining thoughtfulness, circumspection, and emotional balance.
And sometimes we try to resolve these grievances, at least among ourselves. Sometimes it seems to be worth the effort, other times it just seems to add to the frustration, for both the Left and Right commenters. But the important thing to emphasize is that we don't have to do that. We have no obligation to do their spiritual work for them. We don't have to refute their grievances. We don't have to address their grievances, we don't even have to acknowledge that they exist.
People like DeSantis, Youngkin, Kim Reynolds, Greg Abbott and Adam Laxalt are going to be elected, this cycle and the next. They are going to pass laws and make rules, and people like Chip and Saul can simply follow them. And if they don't, that can be addressed then.
On “The Fickle Nature of Supreme Court Rule”
Then the Democrats should be unilaterally disarming then. On a practical level, what weapons do the Demos think they have that they haven't mobilized yet? With President Biden's appoval rating at 38%?
Chip's plan seems to be to rally all the Democrats to one or another procedurally radical scheme, and for whatever issues there are as to why such schemes might not work, ignore them. But at least all the Democrats are behind Chip's latest brainstorm, right? Oh. That too.
And then when these initiatives fall flat, I'm there will be more rounds of bullsiht and rationalization as to why Republicans are uniquely horrible so that justifies me doing whatever and why hasn't the DOJ indicted Joe Manchin yet?
Yes, actually you should unilaterally disarm.
Instead of inflaming the alienations of aggrieved parties feeling butthurt because of whatever, libs should work towards dialing down those alienations instead. That way we could start to rebuild our stores of solidarity among Americans, and we wouldn't have as many incidents where that guy shot up a parade in Highland Park, Illinois.
On “Justice for Ashli Babbitt”
No. "Imminent" is a reasonably common English word and its meaning is fairly clear, and it's not the way you're representing it.
And furthermore, as a generality it is what the law requires (allowing for a bunch of complicating and contextual factors).
Here's a piece from Lawfare I thought was interesting (not all of antagonistic to Mr Byrd btw):
https://www.lawfareblog.com/evaluating-police-shooting-ashli-babbitt
In any event, here's what it says about the justification for lethal force in general:
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No. It's not about Mr Byrd's actual beliefs, it's whether a reasonable person standing in Mr Byrd's shoes and acting on what Mr Byrd saw or had access to at the time would believe that Mrs Babbitt was an imminent threat.
But, of course a 30-something woman crawling through that window is not an imminent threat to anybody and any reasonable person would see that.
Ie, it's the imminence that counts not the third party.
The imputations that she was a threat (all of them that I have heard) are contingent upon other subsequent things that could or would have happened and/or the situation of other people, neither of which justifies the use of lethal force against Mrs Babbitt.
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Yeah, but no. Obviously Oscar has priors about law enforcement, particularly the propensity of American law enforcement to use lethal force. I'm agnostic to those priors, at least for the purpose of the comments to this post.
That's not really relevant to my comments. As I mentioned several times, Ashli Babbitt was not an imminent threat to anybody's life or limb.
My understanding is, that the considerations of self-defense (or the use of lethal force by law enforcement) are basically the same whether you're defending yourself or someone else.
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Go ahead. As right-wingers go, I'm not especially cop-friendly.
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No, no. The Capitol Police are like, nothing to see here, move along for at least six months or so. The officer involved wasn't disclosed. The process to exonerate him wasn't disclosed, etc.
Even for municipal police, the mayor and chief of police are political figures and don't get away with that.
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Mrs Babbitt was not an immediate threat to anybody's life or limb.
Seems to me he didn't.
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That's true to a significant extent, and this was such an odd case that it's hard to know exactly what a comparable situation would be.
But even by the standards of contemporary law enforcement, this was a whitewash.
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Sometimes that happens, and when it does that's bad too.
Definitely agree.
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No. What I'm saying is that there are very narrow reasons to justify the use of lethal force, by Mr Byrd or anyone else.
Those reasons didn't apply in the situation between Mr Byrd and Mrs Babbitt. End of.
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Coulda shoulda woulda
Coulda shoulda woulda
Coulda shoulda woulda.
From what I understand, there's black-letter rules about the justification of lethal force. What Mr Byrd did was freelancing.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.