Scott: Trump did not end up destroying useful institutions
Comments: Uh, he did
Scott: Sources?
Comments: Here, here, here, here, like dude, how are you speaking so confidently about things you haven't looked into at all?
Scott:
> In general I would prefer you not make fun of me for admitting ignorance and asking for information, because that disincentivizes me to to try to learn more about things I might be behind the curve on.
Has he ever considered that if he doesn't want to get made fun of for not knowing things, he should consider doing some minimal research about a topic before writing a few thousand words about it and posting that publicly?
> In general I would prefer you not make fun of me for admitting ignorance and asking for information, because that disincentivizes me to to try to learn more about things I might be behind the curve on.
whinysnowflakesayswhat
> In general I would prefer you not make fun of me for admitting ignorance and asking for information, because that disincentivizes me to to try to learn more about things I might be behind the curve on.
That's straight up emotional blackmail, fuck this guy.
I mean, you're not wrong to point out public health infrastructure. But I feel like the low hanging fruit here is Trump introducing the legal theory that the vice president can simply unilaterally decline to count a state's electoral votes if he feels like it. That definitely won't come back to haunt us anytime over the 10-20 years of a dwindling Republican electorate, no sir.
“We actually won the election, your government is illegitimate, and we’re going to kill you all” is how civil wars start. Trump was too much of a prim little fancy lad to do it but should the 2024 include someone like Lindell we are probably going to have a little civil war.
I mean, I'd argue that 1/6 is a pretty good case where I, for my part, have seen enough of the results of that particular little institution-busting.
But I understand that Scott might well prefer to keep his eyes firmly shut, because he cares more about being contrarian than about being right.
TRUMP: Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. But I’ll tell you what,
somebody’s got to do something about Antifa and the left.
When asked to condemn white supremacists and militia groups, Trump
immediately said “Sure”. Wallace asked if he was willing to tell these
groups to stand down. Trump said yes. Wallace kept pushing him in a way
suggesting he wanted a message targeted at a specific group. Trump asked
who specifically who specifically Wallace was asking him to say should
stand down. Wallace started to say “white supremacists”, but Biden
interrupted with “Proud Boys”. Trump said the Proud Boys should “stand
back and stand by”, which as far as I can tell is equivalent to “stand
down”, the specific thing Wallace kept trying to make him say even
though he had already condemned everybody.
I’m trying as hard as I can to be charitable - maybe people thought
Trump should have followed Wallace’s exact wording and said “Stand down”
instead of the more temporary-sounding “Stand back and stand by”? Or
maybe they got confused by the crosstalk between Wallace and Biden, and
thought Trump should have said this to white supremacists in particular
(a third time) instead of to the Proud Boys? But it’s really
hard for me to come up with a narrative where someone trying to
comprehend this honestly could see it as Trump endorsing the white
supremacists who he had already condemned just seconds before.
Scott is not a dumbass. His selective, off-the-charts levels of naivete always appear when he needs them the most.
Sometimes I catch myself, wondering "how could someone so apparently intelligent make such an inhumanly stupid argument", and then I remember that Scott is lying to me about what he believes, and why he believes it, and this is all just obfuscation to further serve his far-right agenda.
The interesting thing is that he’s obviously not out-and-out in favour of Proud Boys, the KKK, Trump, whoever. It’s that it’s clear that he’s so laser-focused on defending people who *are* against perceivedly unjust criticisms for being a bunch of dumbasses from the “liberal media” that his blind spot becomes an entire personality. So it’s less that he has a far-right agenda of his own, but that he’s so pathetic he can’t handle having his friends who *do* have that agenda being criticised, and acts out like a toddle whenever they’re called out.
It almost feels like it’s not a coincidence that the other Scott takes the same approach so brazenly.
This also applies to Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and other anti-anti-Trump folks, and over time it becomes a distinction without a difference.
It's also a good way to befriend a lot of fascists who will make your life miserable if you ever piss them off, which is a possibility I'm sure someone as neurotic and thin-skinned as Scott is well aware of.
I’ll put one in for Taibbi against Greenwald to be fair. He’s done some shitty things but never stooped quite that low except in his early years with eXiLe. He’s generally on the side of right as far as I remember as he’s matured, even if he gets a bit crazed just like so many of them do working in media.
Scott is literally pro-nrx and pro-"race science", did you even read the leaked emails
Do you think his post about the Republican Party that was "hey guys, what if you adopted an anti-Cathedral (anti-media, universities, and "so called experts") platform, just for fun :)" and not a plain description of his ideal political party?
And how about last week, where Scott argued that he didn't see any difference in legitimacy between an non-democratic oligarchy with no protections for minorities whatsoever (implemented against the will of the population via a coup government), vs. any typical democracy?
He's never just going to "come out" and say it, you know. This is how he gets the clicks.
> And how about last week, where Scott argued that he didn't see any difference in legitimacy between an non-democratic oligarchy with no protections for minorities whatsoever (implemented against the will of the population via a coup government), vs. any typical democracy?
I mean, this is an easy one to explain. He has anarchist/libertarian leanings, and it doesn't take much thought to realize that basically all theories of government authority and legitimacy fail on a basic level.
Huemer's "The Problem of Political Authority" does a pretty good job laying out all the arguments for political authority, and why they fail. I'm a consequentialist, so I mostly take issue with his critiques of those consequentialist justifications of political authority, but with all of his other take downs I basically think he properly shows why none of the can really get off the ground.
The idea of a "social contract" is fundamentally untenable. If you reach that point, then there really is little difference in legitimacy between a constitutional republic with representative democracy, and a non-democratic oligarchy with no minority protections. Both are completely illegitimate from the word go.
> Scott is literally pro-nrx and pro-"race science", did you even read the leaked emails
I have, and he didn't say anything radically different in the leaked emails that he didn't say out loud or heavily imply in his other blog posts. It's only "scandalous" because it leaked.
Scott seems to have, at the very least, a benevolent racism in favor his own ethnicity of ashkenazi jews, but I don't think most of his HBD takes are anything that would be controversial in a social science or intelligence research setting today.
I'm aware of Huemer, I actually had a brief back-and-forth debate him in person at my university a few years ago. From what I've gathered he spends a good amount of time using the framework of classical-liberalism to knock down it's own justifications for the state, which is only sort of interesting/persuasive if you are already operating in the liberal-capitalist framework, but pretty much meaningless if you're not. (Quite like Lysander Spooner's most famous piece, who before Huemer's rise to prominence I would often see cited as the "definitive" take-down of state legitimacy).
Elsewhere though, his case is super flimsy. For example, this is the crux of his argument against the idea of using force to redistribute wealth, in what think is one of the most unintentionally hilarious "persuasive" arguments I've ever read:
> One need not give a theory of why this is wrong nor argue that it is wrong, because it just seems wrong to nearly everyone, regardless of whether one is leftwing, rightwing, libertarian, or other, and this appearance suffices for justified belief, in the absence of specific grounds for doubt.
Don't debate your opponent, just say he agrees with you! And that everyone else who is reasonable already agrees with you. So obliviously, you're right! (This by the way, is how almost all "ethical intuitionism" args works in ancap circles)
So much of Huemer's strategy boils down to: First, cherry-picking the axis that he wants to debate morality on (The use of force. Notably absent are outcomes, tradition, orderliness). Then second, cherry-pick examples of that *involve* the use of force that people generally think would be bad (like being robbed at gunpoint). From there he concludes: "because of these generally-accepted bad situations involving the use of force, people must be opposed to the use of force in the general sense, and it must the primary axis in which they derive their morality". Which is just transparently ridiculous once you see it spelled out.
As for Scott:
I really couldn't ask for a better example than a "private city, ruled by an oligarchy" to demonstrate just how meaningless the distinction is between libertarian-capitalism and neoreaction/neofeudalism.
"Ah, but you see Scott said he wants to replace democracy with unchecked autocratic rule for *libertarian* reasons, not because of his reactionary ones" -who cares
Have you purposely killed of the part of your brain that does pattern-recognition, or were you born like this?
You guys always going on about Bayesian Probability, so are you really going to say "but you don't know *for sure*" like it's some sort of own?
Dude literally said he's trying to boost neoreactionary ideas in a leaked email, and you're trying to tell me that we don't know if that's what he really believes, because we "can't read minds". High school debate-club tier response. Are you next going to remind me that the world I see with my eyes is merely an illusion created by my brain, and thus cannot be independently verified?
> Have you purposely killed of the part of your brain that does pattern-recognition, or were you born like this?
Excessive pattern recognition is *the problem*. It is a fundamental component of the illusion.
> You guys always going on about Bayesian Probability, so are you really going to say "but you don't know for sure" like it's some sort of own?
I say you do not know for sure, because it is objectively true. It is Bayesian thinkers who have the problem, not me. It is a useful tool, for sure, but it is a double edged sword.
> Dude literally said he's trying to boost neoreactionary ideas in a leaked email, and you're trying to tell me that we don't know if that's what he really believes, because we "can't read minds".
Are you able to detect the change in the story that just took place?
> High school debate-club tier response.
Rhetoric, the common go to.
> Are you next going to remind me that the world I see with my eyes is merely an illusion created by my brain, and cannot be independently verified?
It is an illusion, *literally*, but "cannot be independently verified" is a separate matter.
Something to realize: just as your visual cortex substantially condition physical input before presenting it to your conscious mind, so too does your subconscious mind condition reality before it presents it to your conscious mind. If you do not believe this to be true, then test the quality of your beliefs by reading some neuroscience and psychology.
He responded to the George Floyd killing by condemning it, signing an
executive order pushing police reform, and expressing support for ending
chokeholds by police.
HAHAAHA OH MY GOD
I mean, I shouldn’t be laughing. Scott’s whole gameplan is to
whitewash neoreacionaries and fascists to make them more palatable for
liberals. I just…thought he would have tried a little harder than
this.
This “summary” of Trump’s response to the Floyd murder reads like an
Onion parody of a OANN host.
No mention of withholding disaster aid to Washington State because of protests in Seattle, tear gassing protestors so he could do a photo op, his tacit support of targeting journalists to silence the media, support of shooting people with "non-lethal" weapons indiscriminately that fracture skulls and permanently blind, him wanting to designate antifa as a terrorist organization, support of passing laws that further criminalize street protests, support for passing laws that provide exemption for truck drivers who murder street protestors, his absolute unwavering support for the cops in wrapping himself in the thin blue line flag and criticizing the protests as the core platform of his 2020 campaign.
Nope, none of this. All of this is conveniently left out. Scott really thinks his readers are so dumb, they wouldn't notice lol
lmao, even his own commenters are calling him a dumbass for some of
this shit. Also
Trump said the Proud Boys should “stand back and stand by”, which as
far as I can tell is equivalent to “stand down”, the specific thing
Wallace kept trying to make him say even though he had already condemned
everybody.
Fucking disingenuous dumbass. You fucking know those two things
aren’t the same
Obviously the white supremacist terrorists who stormed the capitol were not high-decouplers enough to catch that bit of nuance as well as Scott so clearly can.
The best thing about Trump is that he *always* sawed off the branches that his dumbass followers climbed out onto, and they never learned from watching the previous guy fall into the abyss. Now disingenuous hacks like Scott are stuck trying to claim that Trump didn't mean all the horrible shit that he said clearly and repeatedly because they were just too fucking full of themselves to not distance themselves from the wannabe dictator.
The Greeks have been trying to teach us about hubris for millenia now and nobody ever fucking listens.
Honestly, I don't really agree with this interpretation, and I did listen to him make that statement live. I read the situation as being much like when Trump made his infamous "good people on both sides" statement. He wasn't acting out of stupidity, but out of a desire to not contradict or decry his base. Yes, he was floundering, but he was floundering out of a desire to answer Wallace while not dousing his supporters, not (simply) out of stupidity.
EDIT: To expand on this just a little bit, it's been a very consistent pattern for Trump to absolutely refuse to condemn his supporters. I'm not sure I've ever heard him condemn anyone that was loyal to him. From the Charlottesville "good people on both sides" to "QAnon are just people who love me and hate seeing what's going on in this country". His "stand back and stand by" is just a very natural continuation of that pattern.
Trump has consistently acted and spoken in a blatantly racist way throughout his public life, and I'm pretty sure Bannon and Steven Miller coached him against alienating the alt-right, knowing how brutal they can be. He's certainly an idiot, but if he wasn't encouraging the alt-right, he may as well have been.
I just don't think he's that quick or clever. It was pretty obvious to me what he was doing (flubbing a line out of inarticulateness, Swiss cheese short term memory, and childish boredom with the subject) and was mildly surprised to hear people screeching about it over the next few weeks as though he had delivered a clever dogwhistle off the cuff.
Of course it doesn't matter now. Easily terrified liberals and the actual Proud Boys chose to interpret it as a coded signal, each for their own reasons, and the rest is history.
If your ~~white supermacist~~ fascist followers think you're a ~~white supremacist~~ fascist, does it really matter if you're just too stupid to discourage them?
*Edited on behalf of The Cathedral.*
I'm not sure what you're asking here, since nobody worth talking seriously disputes that Trump is a white supremacist, and the Proud Boys are not an explicitly white supremacist organization (their membership is open to fascist PoC).
[The next generation is] going to lean regressive, totalitarian left.
I think this basically happened. A.
Aww look at this totally not right leaning sensible centrist.
Another thing that caught my eye was his list of examples of “the
media going crazy” and “reading racism into anything”. I checked his
links backing up his claims and they point to, National Review, New York
Post, The Bulwark, some reddit post with a whopping 115 upvotes, some
ACLU dude’s personal Twitter account, a local news station from Boston,
BuzzFeed News, and Snopes discrediting some random photoshop. Truly a
representative sample of mainstream US media landscape.
BuzzFeed News looked like one I should maybe pay attention to, so I
looked into the story a bit and it’s about Homeland Security issuing a
statement that “We Must Secure The Border And Build The Wall To Make
America Safe Again”. Scott finds it ridiculous to read any malicious
subtext into this perfectly innocuous statement about border
security.
It is incredibly revealing that his scores are far lower on
predictions where he can be fact-checked. When he says:
“Total hate crimes incidents as measured here will be not more than
125% of their 2015 value at any year during a Trump presidency”
Or:
“Trump cabinet will be at least 10% minority”
He can’t just BS his way to an “A” like he does for:
“The next generation is going to lean regressive, totalitarian
left.”
Because he actually made a falsifiable prediction for those first
two.
Overall, his predictions were bad but not embarrassingly bad. What is
embarrassing is him desperately BSing as many results as it takes to get
his “C” grade, then taking the literary equivalent of a victory lap.
He wasn't marking himself on his predictions, he was marking himself on his ability to convince himself that he was right all along. So who are we to say he doesn't deserve an A-? But the main purpose of his article was to explore ways to perform "Trump wasn't really that bad, when you think back on it" revisionism. You know, just as a thought experiment to entertain his friends.
My favorite part is when he says “the media” was going crazy to call
Trump racist and his examples of “the media” are, aside from shitty
conservative rags like the NY Post and the National Review which to be
fair, are part of “the media”
Two Medium posts by someone I’ve never heard of
A tweet by someone I’ve never heard of
A local Boston radio station
A Snopes post debunking a facebook meme
And last but not least, a reddit post on /r/socialism with 115
upvotes and 24 comments(as many comments as this post at the time I’m
writing this! Are we the media?)
I like that for earlier posts his go-to leftist was Freddie deBoer, a guy, of whom in many years of reading socialist stuff on the Web I never heard until Scott.
But I’ve since come to count this as a mostly false prediction. The
main thing was talking to a few patients and SSC commenters who said
their family members strongly supported QAnon in ways that put serious
strain on their families; since these are a semi-random sample of the
population, that suggests it’s pretty big
Need an objective measure of whether something is a problem in
society? Just take the “semi-random sample” of people you interact with
and see if it is a problem for them.
“I think my argument that you shouldn’t vote for Trump because he would violently destroy useful institutions ended up kind of falling flat. D.”
Scott, I’d like to introduce you to our Global Health Security and Biodefense unit. You could grade yourself higher on this one.
what the fuck
HAHAAHA OH MY GOD
I mean, I shouldn’t be laughing. Scott’s whole gameplan is to whitewash neoreacionaries and fascists to make them more palatable for liberals. I just…thought he would have tried a little harder than this.
This “summary” of Trump’s response to the Floyd murder reads like an Onion parody of a OANN host.
lmao, even his own commenters are calling him a dumbass for some of this shit. Also
Fucking disingenuous dumbass. You fucking know those two things aren’t the same
Aww look at this totally not right leaning sensible centrist.
Another thing that caught my eye was his list of examples of “the media going crazy” and “reading racism into anything”. I checked his links backing up his claims and they point to, National Review, New York Post, The Bulwark, some reddit post with a whopping 115 upvotes, some ACLU dude’s personal Twitter account, a local news station from Boston, BuzzFeed News, and Snopes discrediting some random photoshop. Truly a representative sample of mainstream US media landscape.
BuzzFeed News looked like one I should maybe pay attention to, so I looked into the story a bit and it’s about Homeland Security issuing a statement that “We Must Secure The Border And Build The Wall To Make America Safe Again”. Scott finds it ridiculous to read any malicious subtext into this perfectly innocuous statement about border security.
Us: There is no way even Scott Alexander could keep arguing Donald Trump isn’t a racist at this point
Scott: I Have Never Been More Correct Than When I Said Donald J Trump Wasn’t A Racist
It is incredibly revealing that his scores are far lower on predictions where he can be fact-checked. When he says:
Or:
He can’t just BS his way to an “A” like he does for:
Because he actually made a falsifiable prediction for those first two.
Overall, his predictions were bad but not embarrassingly bad. What is embarrassing is him desperately BSing as many results as it takes to get his “C” grade, then taking the literary equivalent of a victory lap.
My favorite part is when he says “the media” was going crazy to call Trump racist and his examples of “the media” are, aside from shitty conservative rags like the NY Post and the National Review which to be fair, are part of “the media”
Two Medium posts by someone I’ve never heard of
A tweet by someone I’ve never heard of
A local Boston radio station
A Snopes post debunking a facebook meme
And last but not least, a reddit post on /r/socialism with 115 upvotes and 24 comments(as many comments as this post at the time I’m writing this! Are we the media?)
Okay, I’m impressed. I didn’t think he could still surprise me with his level of racism denial, but goddamn if he didn’t achieve it.
Not sure that is the winning argument he thinks it is
Need an objective measure of whether something is a problem in society? Just take the “semi-random sample” of people you interact with and see if it is a problem for them.
“congratulates himself” again! and again! and again, ad infinitum