I didn’t criticize what Biden said on the phone. I simply posted the leaked call and quoted how Zelensky described it. I also predicted how it might be used by the Trump campaign. I’m not here to convince you what to think of it

This is the sort of anti-Trump fabulism I’m talking about. It leads to the kind of rhetoric that Claas Relotius would win awards for.

I like Trump and think he is a great president. I’ve never hidden that. I am also one of those bad supporters. But anti-Trumpism is, in my mind, far worse.

“You’re not supposed to say that...”. And why not? The biggest single-day protests in American history, the Russia hoax, impeachment, and every day we are told the sky is falling, are because of Trump’s statements, not because of any injustice or tyranny. This is borderline superstition. This is the world the politically correct have built for themselves and now they have to watch as it is proven effete and powerless by a boorish, billionaire playboy. It was always effete and powerless, the white flag of a civilization too stupid to survive, but it took Trump to make them realize.

The “racist nationalism” part is false, though. His brand of populism may be protectionist and nationalist, but it is not racist.

I'm not big on metaphor. I see him say and do terrible things and I call him out on it. That's it.

I’m not sure “terrible” is a fair and accurate description.

And then there are the rational people in the middle who simply recognize that he's a terrible person and a terrible President who enacts terrible policies.

You have constructed an effigy upon which you can swing your pitchforks in sight of everyone else.

Trump has become a folk hero to some. But to others he has become a folk devil, a scape goat for the world’s ills and evils. This is what occurs when a pliant mind is caught in an amplification spiral of the media’s making. He steps into a moral panic the likes of which he refuses to retreat from. They render themselves dumb, Trump confined in the heads where rational thoughts once stood.

Why would you do that? Sounds tedious.

Some rumblings from Ukraine. Leaked calls between Quid Pro Joe and former Ukrainian president Poroshenko have been leaked, giving ammunition to the Biden/Ukraine corruption narrative. Also featured is John Kerry.



Ukrainian president Zelensky said a probe into the call is beginning, as it “might be perceived, qualified as high treason”. I guess Trump didn’t need to demand an investigation of his political opponent after all.

The latter quote seems unequivocally to be about counter-signals, but I'm not aiming for conversion or self-recognition. At this point, I'm just fascinated by rationalizations in the wild, formed in real-time - how do you go about making consistent those two quotes?

I think they’re consistent, and honest. Choosing to wear a mask or not doesn’t have to be a form of ostentation. I think the question should be: how are you are able to receive a signal, counter or otherwise, if I am not sending one? Reading the delightful fiction you wrote about a no limp-noodle liberal, one can see how this is achieved.

Since your standard of what constitutes a successful argument is only held to skeptics of lockdowns, there is little to no incentive to do the work. So I’ll pass.

Agreed. I think her arguments are important and cause for concern, and it would do us well to focus on those instead of the reliability of those who agreed with her and signed her letter. The implications of a continued shutdown are dire, “including patients missing routine checkups that could detect things like heart problems or cancer, increases in substance and alcohol abuse, and increases in financial instability that could lead to "[p]overty and financial uncertainty," which "is closely linked to poor health.” I would also add that if an economy suffers, so to does the health system.

I trying to make a joke about wikipedia. But wikipedia at least cites their information. Luckily I can click on the cited link and see where the information comes from. I did so and one can read the HIV article, which advocates against suppressing dissenting views. It was written and signed by one doctor.

If a group of doctors who think HIV doesn't cause AIDS say we should end the shutdown, I say that's an excellent reason to keep it going. Thanks @Hanover.

Only one article by one doctor was skeptical of the idea that HIV caused AIDS. Though I think publishing the commentary is questionable, there is no evidence his views are held by the entire group. In order to prove a doctor is not credible you would have to show where he’s engaged in quackery instead of deeming him guilty by association. So it would be ad hominem.

And consider this paradox:

Wikipedia is not a reliable source.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_not_a_reliable_source

I think the reasoning of the WHO is that there was, as of the time of their guidance, little scientific evidence of their efficacy in certain situations, and that the unintended consequences of such measures (leaving little masks for doctors and nurses for example) could be dire. Their stance is subject to revision given more study and resources, I’m sure.

That's a good counter-signal, right there. See if people are signalling something, so you can react by counter-signalling. Nothing like defining yourself by countersignalling signals. Some would think that this way-of-living suggests a resentment that has metastasized - why would anyone base their choices around reactions to others' choices otherwise? defining themselves in terms of the people they hate, even as a negative outline?

But who knows, really?

Maybe you just know that when you walk into a convenience store without a mask, people will know you're the real deal, no limp-noodle liberal. 'That's a cool guy,' people with sunglasses on motorcycles will say, 'That's not someone who has tragically come to define himself entirely in reaction to the people he professes to hate, so that nothing of himself is left. He's just a very cool, not-sad-at-all guy.'

That is likely true of people who like to signal to others, for whatever reason. But absent the motive to show off, there are many other valid reasons to refrain from adopting habits and norms others have adopted without question.

According to the WHO, if you do not have symptoms you do not need to wear a mask.



According to the WHO, masks can give you a false sense of protection and can even be a source of infection. Healthy people should only wear a mask when taking care of someone with covid-19.



The potential risks of masks are as follows.

- self-contamination that can occur by touching and reusing contaminated mask
• depending on type of mask used, potential breathing difficulties
• false sense of security, leading to potentially less adherence to other preventive measures such as physical distancing and hand hygiene
• diversion of mask supplies and consequent shortage of mask for health care workers
• diversion of resources from effective public health measures, such as hand hygiene

But it seems obvious to me that a mask would block droplets to some degree, and might be useful for those who tend to spit when they talk.

That being said, if wearing a mask becomes an issue of conformity and virtue signalling, I will not be wearing one.

Since we’re spouting conspiracy theories, maybe big pharma doesn’t like hydroxycloroquine because it’s super cheap and has been in use for decades. Many doctors from Gilead were a part of the NIH panel that advised against hydroxycloroquine in favor of Gilead’s expensive drug Remdesivir. Coincidence?

Fact is, many countries and some drug companies are researching hydroxicloroquine because it showed promise, not because Trump mentioned it. The NIH only recommended against taking it in high doses.

The Panel recommends against using high-dose chloroquine (600 mg twice daily for 10 days) for the treatment of COVID-19 (AI), because the high dose carries a higher risk of toxicities than the lower dose.

https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/whats-new/

But that’s something you or the press fail to mention.

I hope socialists don't believe anything like that, but I worry that is the outcome.

I’m a little more cynical. Why else would they pooh-pooh freedom unless they were justifying denying it to others, or admitting that they were by nature obedient?

Collective bargaining, I think, has superseded socialism. It can meet the needs of workers without having to violently overthrow this or that “class” (fellow citizens) and seize mob rule.

Freedom is freedom for those who think differently, to quote a socialist. Unless 100% of the community is in agreement, some sort of injustice or coercion has to occur in order to meet the wants and desires of socialist power. This internal contradiction seems to me why socialist plans always collapse.

The problem here is what to do with the people who don't agree.

That’s an important question. The most common practices as far as I can tell are gulag, re-education, murder and genocide. The threat of these punishments looming over the people’s heads leads to a life like what Ceszlaw Milosz described in The Captive Mind, where a premium is placed on every type of conformist, coward, and hireling. But these are questions champagne socialists refuse to face.

I see Mondragon and collectives brought up in conversation about socialism all the time, so I assumed that you were holding them up as exemplars. My apologies.

So like... you see a supermarket like the Co-op or that company Mondragon and immediately put it in the same box as Stalin?

One of the great things about starting a business is that you can apply any business model you like and run it how you see fit, even starting a collective. But socialism is an economic system, not a business model.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: "Notice that every sci-fi horror flick begins with people ignoring scientists"

It’s fiction for a reason.

Translated by a moron. Just perfect.

The move towards lifting the lockdown, even partially, proves, beyond doubt, that money is more important than life. Perhaps people would rather die with a full belly than perish from starvation.

I think that people would rather face life on their own terms than on the whim of some politician and state health official.

Here’s a little red meat for anti-trumpists. The Lancet, a medical journal, is getting into American politics, telling that because of the weakening of the CDC and the defunding of the WHO, Americans need to vote in someone else.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31140-5/fulltext

Who is they? If you mean business owners, they are private citizens like us. Workers have, will and do run businesses.

Sure, some jobs will go the way of the dodo bird as technology advances, but that has been the case throughout history and production has only increased. So I’m not quite worried about that.

It does not have to be that way. One can only live off others for so long.

No

Why not?

Believe it or not many people want to work, not just out of necessity, but because it provides purpose, dignity, and fulfillment. So I don't see why we'd try to solve work as if it was a problem. Capitalism would, I think, allow the freedom to choose which profession or trade they'd like to pursue, whereas I don't think that is true in socialism, though I could be wrong.

It’s nice to see this distinction. Modern liberalism is still liberal. Democratic socialism is still socialist.

The relationship between socialism and the state is an interesting one. Engels spoke of a “withering of the state”, that after people have either absorbed or have been indoctrinated in socialist ideals the state would become obsolete. I would argue that the opposite occurs, that the state only gets bigger and more entrenched after generations have been raised in it. Rosa Luxemburg, I think, predicted this. The gradual introduction of socialism through incremental social control (a la Eduard Bernstein) has proven to be failure for socialists, as it seems to have only made capitalism more palpable for the proles, and the state more powerful, socialism be damned. But I wonder the differences between Engel’s stateless socialist society and an anarchist society, if there are any.

Guys! The president called me a warrior!

Piddle around with the words all you want.

Of course the media class is fixated on the term Obamagate, and not on the reasons for applying that term. Nothing could be more predictable. But it’s simply untrue that they don’t know what it means because they’ve been talking about it for years now. It’s public information and available to anyone with the curiosity.

The Obama administration not only used Russian-sourced, DNC gossip to justify spying on the Trump campaign—American citizens—they used the state apparatus to do so. One of the differences between Obamagate and Watergate is the Nixon campaign didn’t have the technology and access to intrusive data collection, so they had to physically break in to access their opponent’s documents and put bugs on their phones.

When we refer to natural rights that are not recognized by the law, I think the only thing we're saying, for any practical purposes, is that they should be legal rights.

But why should they be legal rights? I’m reminded of Bastiat’s argument:

“ Life, faculties, production — in other words, individuality, liberty, property — this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it. Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.”

The Law

Governments have created a good little racket. Shut down the economy, eliminate any means for citizens to provide for themselves, then act as the solution to their economic woes.

Perhaps a better question: what do those voting for a third party candidate hope to accomplish by doing so? I ask this seriously. Is there some other goal besides disgust with the two candidates?

Not every vote is strategic or instrumental. Many votes are “expressive”, perhaps a matter of ethics or moral obligation.

I guess it’s a good thing that I don’t care what you think.