Why did you vote for Trump?

[kingofthepirates]

I'm curious to see if the picks he's made work well together or all end up infighting amongst each other and getting nothing done. You make a good point, though. However, neither of those seem particularly religious, which is what Jamie was talking about.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they started stumbling over each other…
Tbh it was a bit of a misquote on my part, as number 13 would be more appropriate. I just noticed number 8 first lol

[flash2015]

Its almost like the democrats wanna make america great again because its such a shithole, oh woops wrong party

Wait, what? Jamiet complains that Trump supporters are too positive about America. When I respond to this now you complain that Trump supporters are too negative. Can you make up your mind on what your actual complaint is here?

[Jamiet99uk]

Its almost like the democrats wanna make america great again because its such a shithole, oh woops wrong party

Wait, what? Jamiet complains that Trump supporters are too positive about America. When I respond to this now you complain that Trump supporters are too negative. Can you make up your mind on what your actual complaint is here?

It's one of the inherent contradictions of Trumpism.

They claim America is a great country.
They wear hats saying they need to "Make America Great Again".

Trump Doublethink.

[brainbomb]

Its almost like the democrats wanna make america great again because its such a shithole, oh woops wrong party

Wait, what? Jamiet complains that Trump supporters are too positive about America. When I respond to this now you complain that Trump supporters are too negative. Can you make up your mind on what your actual complaint is here?

I dont need to make up my mind; America is falling behind globally in quality of
Life, cost of living, healthcare cost, infant mortality rates, math and science scores, and lord knows were the most likely place in the world to get shot at while buying groceries.

[flash2015]

But seriously get off the planet with that statement bud. Republicans have been running on that this country sucks for 16 years - and propping up orange fuckboy as its savior from itself this whole time.

Again, make up your mind what your actual complaint is here. Are Trump supporters too positive or too negative???

Just to expand a little on how liberals/leftists make it appear that the US is a racist/sexist/homophobic etc hellhole, a study came out today on the effects of many DEI policies:

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/dei-training-increases-perception-of-non-existent-prejudice-agreement-with-hitler-rhetoric-study-finds

Paywall bypass here:

https://archive.is/8IGBl

A big part of DEI training is pushing the idea of "systemic oppression" and "systemic racism". An assumption being in this is that any difference in outcomes is due to racism. One of my favourite stories about this was the paper explaining how mathematics instruction is racist:

https://capitalresearch.org/article/math-lessons-are-racist-as-per-the-gates-foundation/

Which of course makes sense. If some races do worse that white students it means there is a difference in outcomes. Therefore of course mathematics instructions must be racist (let's ignore of course the Asian students which do better than white students - that is just a pesky detail).

What this ideology leads to in the DEI training (led by works from Ibraham Kendi and Robin DiAngelo) is to push the idea that racism/oppression is absolutely everywhere and that white people are inherently racist.

This study (surprise, surprise) found that spreading this nonsense may not actually be helpful. It actually increased hate and caused people to find racism in situations where there was no evidence of racism.

What makes this worse of course, is that the NYT and Bloomberg were both supposed to run with the story on this study but they both killed it. The decision by the two papers is at best a bit sus.

But perhaps I was being unfair. Is the NCRI is some evil far right organization spreading misinformation?

No, the NCRI has been famous for studies on QAnon and January 6th which the NYT had covered in the past. This leads to the obvious conclusion that the NYT/Bloomberg did not publish because the study outcomes did not fit their ideological narratives.

This brings us back to another of Jamie's points where he whines that the Trump administration won't listen to "experts" . At least in recent years, the left has increasingly only listened to experts if they reinforce their ideological narratives. If they don't like the conclusion from experts at best they will just ignore them. At worst they will completely throw the disobedient experts off the reservation and call them misinformation peddlers/far right/hateful/nazis/fascists etc. If Democrats/the left aren't willing to listen to experts that have the temerity to even slightly disagree with their narratives, then they aren't really "listening to experts".

[Esquire Bertissimmo]

It seems very obtuse to misunderstand "Make America Great Again", let alone to consider that sentiment some dog whistle for fascism.

Basically every politician needs to frame problems for which they and their party are the solution. Harkening back to some supposedly golden past is not even just a Republican phenomenon — John Kerry ran on "Let America be American Again" back in 2004.

It's not contradictory to think that America is on the decline in several important ways, but also has the capacity to reverse that trend.

I'm deeply skeptical that Trump is the person to fix all these problems, but the MAGA worldview that the US is broken yet repairable was clearly more compelling than the Dem's messaging, which has been a weird mix of "don't believe your lying eyes on crime and the economy" and "we are irredeemably bigoted unless everyone agrees to vote blue in every election".

[CaptainFritz28]

I'm still curious what people's personal definitions of fascism are here, especially those who keep blaming Republicans for being fascist.

[Esquire Bertissimmo]

I'm still curious what people's personal definitions of fascism are here, especially those who keep blaming Republicans for being fascist.

My pushback on Jamie-style hysteria about Trumpism is not because there's no real issues, but because the scattershot approach of calling everything "fascist" makes it harder to focus-in and condemn the worst behaviours.

Electional denialism of the 2020 variety (which was repeated again this election cycle but conveniently dropped after he won), followed by the well documented attempts by Trump and Co. to pressure officials to "find the votes", the unprecedented request of the VP not to certify the results, and the "fight like hell" comments on Jan. 6 were all profoundly anti-democratic.

Trump's former Chief of Staff Steve Bannon openly acknowledged their approach was to produce a "firehose of falsehood" intended to disorient the public and make it hard to determine truth from fact. The "all politicians lie" cliche is not sufficient cover for the way in which Trump boldly lies without any regard to truth. His embrace of conspiracy theories like Q-annon is obviously problematic. Trump has called the free press the "enemy of the people" and has hurled abuse at individual journalist — that's abnormal in US politics and is reminiscent of historical anti-democratic movements.

Cracking down on illegal immigration, and even being anti-immigrant in general, is not fascist. Saying "they're eating the dogs" without evidence feels akin to the scapegoating minorities and understandably makes some folks uncomfortable. The "Muslim ban" was outrageous.

Trump's fan implausible debate this, but it is clear that he conflates his own interests with the US national interest. He's uniquely bad at appointing friends and family to top roles. He has said criticism of his presidency is unpatriotic. He did a Goya bean commercial in the White House. He nakedly wants to use political power as a means to extricate himself from the legal proceedings against him, several of which seem to have merit.

None of these critiques would have applied to the other Republican presidents in my lifetime.

[Octavious]

It depends on whether you interpret "find the votes" as "everything told us to expect x number of votes and they've counted far fewer. Find the ones that have gone missing" or "we need x number of votes to win, so create some new votes". I've always believed the former as it was in keeping with the narrative of the night, but admittedly there is an element of "Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?" about it.

As for fight like hell, maybe I'm used to European style political language because it doesn't sound particularly undemocratic to my ears. Hell, the Labour Party regularly sing about martyrdom, traitors, blood, and death... and that's fine. It's a good song. Puts some fire in your belly. Fighting like hell is the absolute minimum of what's expected. Our very own Jamie is constantly prepared to punch the people (approximately two thirds of the population as far as I can tell) he considers to be Nazis... and as long as he doesn't actually do it that's largely fine too.

Trump's general standard of behaviour is poor and his instinct to promote friends and family is fine for a family business but appalling for serious government. I don't mind his lies because I don't find them particularly deceptive. Regardless of what he says what he actually does is more or less in keeping with what both his supporters and opponents expect of him. He is a wolf in wolf's clothing holding up a sign saying I love sheep, which can be interpreted however you wish. When he eats the sheep his opponents will shout liar, and his supporters will shrug and say it was blatantly obvious what he meant, but none of them will be surprised.

Contrast that to the British Labour Party whose policies have come as something of a shock to many of their voters, even though they can argue that they technically didn't lie about them. But the gap between perception and the eventual reality was really quite large. To my mind this is far more dishonest.

[Esquire Bertissimmo]

I am coming to terms with the idea that Jan. 6 will forever be a funhouse mirror where different people see different things.

It's crazy to me to look at the totality of that election cycle, the months of out-loud efforts to say the vote would be rigged before the election, the context of "fight like hell" being said as a partisan mob breached the capital, etc. and to still say "well how can we know for *sure* Trump doesn't respect the outcome of elections?"...let alone all the bellyaching about how it was stolen for years afterwards despite no evidence to support that claim.

If by "fascist" people mean anti-democratic then I think Trump's style of election denialism is the strongest case. Obviously most Americans either don't agree with this framing, don't particularly care, or believe the shenanigans of the blue side are worse.

[kingofthepirates]

Therefore of course mathematics instructions must be racist

Not disagreeing with the idea you're pushing (that math instruction is not racist), but I will say that there have (at least historically) been inequalities in access to education (including math education). To be clear: math itself isn't racist; its a 'law' of the universe (random philosophy thing here about interpretations/observations vs truth or smth). Math instruction is generally not racist (if you have a racist teacher or smth then its different, but the core teaching should be generally unbiased). But access to math education, particularly high quality math education (ex. tutoring, math camps, competitions), has had faced restriction on various grounds (at the moment probably mostly economic, but at least in the past racial with segregated and unequal schools and what not), which eventually bleeds into results.

[kingofthepirates]

felt compelled to post the above cus my math teacher made it a key point while discussing the syllabus and the opportunities in the class (its advanced for hs) and the school math team and stuff

[flash2015]

Not disagreeing with the idea you're pushing (that math instruction is not racist), but I will say that there have (at least historically) been inequalities in access to education (including math education). To be clear: math itself isn't racist; its a 'law' of the universe (random philosophy thing here about interpretations/observations vs truth or smth). Math instruction is generally not racist (if you have a racist teacher or smth then its different, but the core teaching should be generally unbiased). But access to math education, particularly high quality math education (ex. tutoring, math camps, competitions), has had faced restriction on various grounds (at the moment probably mostly economic, but at least in the past racial with segregated and unequal schools and what not), which eventually bleeds into results.

I don't disagree with you here. I am just pointing out some of the crazy which I believe actually hurts efforts to improve access to quality education.

These problems aren't simple. They are multi-faceted. A big problem in the US for example is that school funding is tied to local property taxes so rich town/counties have far better schools than poorer counties. I believe this is bonkers.

One thing that really sticks out for me though. My wife has been a teacher at schools filled with minority students and at a school for largely white students in Riverdale. After hearing of her experiences and hearing of her brother's kids experiences, I have become a believer in the Bushism "the soft bigotry of low expectations". When you set expectations for performance and behaviour lower for black/brown kids than you would for white kids and tell them they are not in control of their own destiny, don't be surprised if they don't do as well.

When we call everything racism, it isn't about finding solutions, it is about assigning blame. "This minority group is falling behind and it is all because of this other group!" How is this actionable to actually improve the situation?

[flash2015]

Jay Bhattacharya has been selected to run the NIH. Bhattacharya was famous for the Great Barrington declaration with hindsight (I thought it was nuts at the time - I was heavily pro lockdown) was probably the right call:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg4yxmmg1zo

We really do need a proper retrospective on COVID to figure out what we did right/what we did wrong and hopefully do better if there is a next time.

This has been blocked by activism on the left (unfortunately a lot of scientific institutions have been compromised by activist politics) because they claim lockdowns/masks/mandates etc. were 100% correct and any criticism is smeared as "anti science". Jay Battacharya was one of those experts that did not stick with the right narrative so he has been constantly smeared.

If you read the articles now about the appointment, the mainstream press continue to smear him. The current smear is that they claim that Jay Bhattacarya said there would only be 20K to 40K deaths to show he must be an idiot. This is from USA today for example:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/11/26/trump-picks-jay-bhattacharya-covid-lockdown-critic-as-nih-director/76608013007/

"In a March 2020 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Bhattacharya argued COVID-19 could be a "20,000 or 40,000 death epidemic" in the U.S. Four years later, more than 1.2 million Americans have died from COVID-19, according to the latest figures by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."

If you actually go back to the WSJ article you will find this is a wild misrepresentation of what he said:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-coronavirus-as-deadly-as-they-say-11585088464

Archive link: https://archive.is/C98ZF

Here is the relevant paragraph:

"This does not make Covid-19 a nonissue. The daily reports from Italy and across the U.S. show real struggles and overwhelmed health systems. But a 20,000- or 40,000-death epidemic is a far less severe problem than one that kills two million. Given the enormous consequences of decisions around Covid-19 response, getting clear data to guide decisions now is critical. We don’t know the true infection rate in the U.S. Antibody testing of representative samples to measure disease prevalence (including the recovered) is crucial. Nearly every day a new lab gets approval for antibody testing, so population testing using this technology is now feasible."

He was theorizing that the estimates on IFR may be way off and if he was right we should be treating the pandemic very differently. But he is not categorically saying that he is right and everyone else was wrong. He was saying we needed to do more antibody testing to figure out the right value. He was 100% right to push this. While his initial hypothesis set the IFR too low (perhaps as low as 0.01%) the consensus IFR estimates at the time were orders of magnitude too high (2-3% range) and the extreme skew of deaths towards the elderly wasn't fully understood. If I remember correctly the final IFR for COVID wasn't that much different from the flu (0.1% - 0.2%). It was just that COVID was wildly, wildly more infectious than the flu.

While I really don't like Trump, I am hoping we can get back a little bit closer to sanity here. He needs to clean house of the activists in the executive which have been corrupting science. The worry of course is that he may go to far.

[Esquire Bertissimmo]

It's an interesting question whether the potential advantages of Jay Bhattacharya counteract the likely silliness of RFK Jr?

Does being a smart person with a contrarian (and mostly right) view on the COVID pandemic qualify someone to run a major government bureaucracy?

These are not rhetorical questions. It will be genuinely interesting to see how much these figures matter in the new administration and whether this growing team of "outsiders" can actually affect change.

[learnedSloth]

I'm still curious what people's personal definitions of fascism are here, especially those who keep blaming Republicans for being fascist.

I don't want to blame Republicans of fascism, but I think that it is just a particular form of a much broader phenomenon where deluded people force their will on others, so defining fascism doesn't seem important to me. Its meaning seems to have broadened a lot from its historical origin, because leftists use it to label their political opponents.

[Jamiet99uk]

What do you define as being wrong with "leftism" ?

Being pretty far over to the left, interested to know what you think I believe, and why you hate that.

[CaptainFritz28]

What do you define as being wrong with "leftism" ?

Being pretty far over to the left, interested to know what you think I believe, and why you hate that.

I don't hate it, or yourself, and I don't think I've said as much, so I'm sorry that you've gotten that misconception about me. Turns out you can disagree with someone/something and not hate it.

Leftism, to me, means an expanded role of the government in all areas of society, particularly including healthcare, the economy, "social justice," etc. (I put that in air quotes because it is so vaguely defined and unstructured). It is the mindset that the individual is too dumb to govern themselves whatsoever and must therefore be mandated by a central government.

I think it fails to be a good system of government 1) because historically it has proven highly corruptible, ending in failure, in every instance of its implementation, 2) I find that putting more power into the hands of fewer people does not produce a conducive environment for honesty, teamwork, or the consideration of what would be best for anyone except for the individual, 3) because you can't expect people to exercise any self-responsibility if you give them no reason whatsoever to do so, and 4) because you force people into a situation of paying such high amounts in taxes that they do not own their own labor, their own property, their own anything. They become slaves to the government, entirely dependent upon it and holding little to no self-authority.

But I think it's best when people explain their own beliefs instead of having other people give caricatures of what they think people believe, and in that spirit I'd like to ask you again what you mean when you say that anyone who voted for Trump is fascist, since that seems to be such a strongly held conviction of yours.

Also, I'm curious why you decided not to give a straight answer... or any answer at all, for that matter.

(Just now realizing that you weren't replying to me lol, guess I should read more before replying. Well, if you were asking me or not, there's my answer; there's no point deleting it.)

[CaptainFritz28]

Does being a smart person with a contrarian (and mostly right) view on the COVID pandemic qualify someone to run a major government bureaucracy?

I mean... surely it's better than being a smart person with a conformative (and mostly wrong) view on the COVID pandemic...

[flash2015]

What do you define as being wrong with "leftism" ?

They have completely lost their way.

More and more purity tests across more and more topics. Even the slightest disagreement leads to ostracizing.

Leftists supposedly are trying to fight against "hate" but their idealism has been corrupted so much (a lot of it now wrapped up in sanctimoniousness) that they have become the hate themselves.

I know the obvious response to this is "but Trump!". Just because the other tribe has bad behaviour too doesn't make your bad behaviour OK. A pox on both your houses.