Just 27 Republicans in Congress will acknowledge that he won. Only 30 will say in writing that he will be President-elect after the Electoral College votes, so cowed are they Trump.

It's great the courts aren't giving Trump what he wants, or that enough of the state legislatures have decided not to vote to overturn the election. It is, however, quite worrying that there are plenty of Republicans is state legislatures who are arguing that the state should overturn the election results.

Caesar Augusts didn't create the Principate (role of emperor) himself. His way was paved by Julius Caesar, Marius, and Sulla, and with the murder of the Gracchi Brothers. The norm breaking had to start a generation earlier. And indeed, people may prefer a competent Caesar to what we have now, an inept gerontocracy. Rule by fabulously rich octogenarians.

In his "Origins of Political Order," Fukayama attributes the rise of strong, centralized states to the demands of the emerging bourgeois and the peasantry to have the kings empowered to protect them from the rapacious nobility. I think a similar dynamic is at work here. Rule of law doesn't seem to apply to the elites. The people increasingly prefer a tyrant to rule by oligarchs.

The other driving factor behind strong centralized states for Fukayama is the need to wage wars. Thomas Piketty demonstrates how war, and the need to mobilize the populace, had also acted powerfully to redistribute wealth and political power. Absent war, the returns on capital slowly allow a small elite to pull away and dominate the economy and politics.

The US and by extension Europe's sickness is perhaps an ironic lack of wars. To be sure, there are large military expenditures, and foreign adventurism, but these are not existential wars that require major mobilization. The US military is now a small professional corps. Increasingly it is a multigenerational, hereditary profession, particularly in the officer corps and particularly at colonel and above.

As Gibbon said of the Roman Army after the final Punic War, the professionalization of the legions "elevated war into an art, and degraded it into a trade." Our combat effectiveness has never been higher, neither has our separation from a citizen army in the model of old Greek city states or the Roman Republic.

The US is like Rome after defeating Carthage. The USSR/Carthage is gone, and now the wealth to loot inside the empire is worth more than what is outside of it. There is no external threat, and so the race to loot begins. China is akin to Parthia. A threat to the periphery, but far enough away (for now) to have its own sphere of influence.

Although, not to contradict myself, but in a larger analogy, I would say:

USA = Carthage. A trading state using a mercenary army ruled by degenerate elites without civic virtue.

Western Europe = Greece. A once great power still know for intellectual exports, but held in loose thrall by the ascendant cultural power of Rome/America. It helps that Rome/America copied Greece/Europe so that they can still feel culturally in charge, even as.the flood of Hollywood sweeps inland.

Russia = Persia. A once great power that is currently much reduced, hoping to move back to ascendancy but crippled by infighting and corruption.

China = Rome. A stoic and ascendant power that is remarkably self confident even as it rises to challenge established powers.

The analogy doesn't totally work because Greece is aligned with Carthage not Rome, but whatever.



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Https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/survey-who-won-election-republicans-congress/2020/12/04/1a1011f6-3650-11eb-8d38-6aea1adb3839_story.html

Well, those folk over there are now yelling "Trump won! 4 more years!" again.

(I occasionally chat with one or two of them; they are ... obsessed)

Imagine the level of retard that believes this shit, multiply by 50 million, and you've got Trump's base.

Damn, dude, such astute commentary; locals like me (& Hanover) could suspect you're hoboing around Georgia lately.

, they express "absolute certainty" that they have a rock-solid case with the Supreme Court.
Faulty proprietary algorithms in those machines, and "statistical anomalies", they boldly claim.
Actually, their "certainty" that Trump won has been around since he lost.
I wouldn't say these particular people are stupid, but they sure as heck are personally invested.

I wouldn't say these particular people are stupid — jorndoe

Or liars. There's a fucking paper ballot given for every electronic one recorded, for a start, and they match. You might as well claim Biden is hiding in the machine changing the votes by hand.

My sister has just moved to North Carolina, so when I get a chance to see her next, I may just pay y'all a visit too.

Cook up those grits, Hanny!

My sister has just moved to North Carolina, so when I get a chance to see her next, I may just pay y'all a visit too.

Cook up those grits, Hanny! — Baden

I would come visit you, but I think I'd have to quarantine a couple of weeks before you'll let me in public. Anyone can come here. We still openly accept all wretched refuse.

Or liars. There's a fucking paper ballot given for every electronic one recorded, for a start, and they match. You might as well claim Biden is hiding in the machine changing the votes by hand. — Baden

They object to the mail in ballots that have now been separated from the envelope bearing the voter's signature, claiming fraudulent ballots have been stuffed in the ballot box.. Like all conspiracy theories, it could be true. If only there were evidence it actually happened, they'd have a better case. Alas, if only.

My sister has just moved to North Carolina, so when I get a chance — Baden

Oh, and you're welcome. So it doesn't go unnoticed, you brought up your sister, and not a single inappropriate comment from me.

Thomas Piketty demonstrates how war, and the need to mobilize the populace, had also acted powerfully to redistribute wealth and political power. Absent war, the returns on capital slowly allow a small elite to pull away and dominate the economy and politics. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I assume this is a reference to an all out war, where basically the country itself is the battlefield. In the case of the US kept secure by those two mighty oceans and an own continent without any rivals, this seems a bit odd. As it is now those "colonial wars" fought by the professional army (still made of US citizens though) are a splendid way to cash in for the elites.

Yes, he's referring to mass mobilizations. It doesn't necessarily have to be a war on a country's own land. WWII greatly reduced inequality and allowed workers to gain concessions in the US.

Wars also force elites to accept a more centralized states. This is pretty obvious in the massive growth of the US security apparatus after WWII. Theoriticians like Fukayama and historians like William Durrant both tie the growth of competent states to the need to field larger and more complex armies. This is a trend that starts with the European Wars of Religion and then truly gets under way with the Napoleonic era and the levee en mass.

I wouldn't say these particular people are stupid, but they sure as heck are personally invested. — jorndoe

I don't think they're stupid. I think leaders actually lead, which means there are people who follow. If Trump would have said the election were fair and that the solution lies in winning in 2024, then his followers would have followed. I think we'd all like to think we're not sheep and that we all exercise independent judgment, but it's part of being human that people look for the alpha dog to follow. Some of us are better at fighting this instinct than others. It is a very dangerous instinct no doubt, and those who exploit it fit the definition of evil fairly well.

tl;dr. But, yeah, grits. With that stupid hot sauce or whatever you call it. And don't try to gyp me with no fucking ketchup.

Yes, he's referring to mass mobilizations. It doesn't necessarily have to be a war on a country's own land. WWII greatly reduced inequality and allowed workers to gain concessions in the US. — Count Timothy von Icarus

If you have fought a long war where a large part if not all of the males of the younger generations have learned only warfighting and not have been sitting at school or learning their professions, it is simply a political suicide to forget these people afterward. Things like the G.I. Bill are an obvious policy, if you have the resources to do it. The dumb mistake of leaving a huge number of soldiers just to their own was last done by the American occupiers in Iraq. The inept American leadership just left the defeated Iraqi army alone to disband chaotically without any program for the now unemployed officers and soldiers. And what do you know, in an instant you had a Sunni insurgency in the country.

Wars also force elites to accept a more centralized states. This is pretty obvious in the massive growth of the US security apparatus after WWII. Theoriticians like Fukayama and historians like William Durrant both tie the growth of competent states to the need to field larger and more complex armies. This is a trend that starts with the European Wars of Religion and then truly gets under way with the Napoleonic era and the levee en mass. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Do notice the obvious changes in warfare that have taken place: the Napoleonic or World Wars types of mass armies have gone. A conventional infantry battalion is quite vulnerable today, hence manpower isn't so important.

The oddity might be my country and the Swiss, which have an exotic strategy in their defence and deterrence yet aren't thinking of using that outside their borders, actually. And then there's Israel, which also has lowered it's wartime strength. Also the Finnish wartime Army is down to 300 000 from 700 000 and the Swiss Army would field perhaps half a million, if it needed.

(Switzerland actually called roughly 4 000 of it's wartime medical staff to "arms" to fight COVID-19)


If we take out Israel from this as the country is basically at war with it's neighbors all the time, at least in an low intensity conflict, then this thinking is basically logical for the 20th Century Cold War era, but not for this Century anymore. The only occasion is if a poor country fights another poor country, like in Africa. Or if you are planning to fight a civil war. Hence I think a new approach ought to be looked on the issue.

(Levée en masse. In one of the poorest countries in the world it works still.)

Biden picks Raytheon board member to be SecDef. Mainstream media can only talk about how he's the first black SecDef. Fuck Biden's intersectional imperialism. Fuck Biden's everything, of course.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/12/08/biden-picks-raytheon-board-member-to-lead-the-us-war-machine/

"The mass media are reporting that the Biden camp has selected former general Lloyd J. Austin III to be the next secretary of defense, assuaging fears among antiwar activists that the position would go to bloodthirsty psychopath Michele Flournoy as commonly predicted.

As has become the standard ritual for Biden’s cabinet picks, the mass media are holding a parade to celebrate the fact that Austin would be the first Black chief of the US war machine while virtually ignoring the murderous agendas he has facilitated throughout his career. As head of Central Command Austin actively campaigned to resurrect the Pentagon’s spectacularly failed program of trying to arm “rebels” in Syria to fight ISIS, and in 2014 he backed immunity for US troops from war crimes prosecutions by the government of Afghanistan. He helped spearhead the Iraq invasion, and he is a member of the same private equity fund which invests in defense contractors as Flournoy and Biden’s warmongering pick for Secretary of State Tony Blinken."

Another viewpoint in the picking of general Austin is that Biden continues with the similar line with Trump of appointing a former general to lead the department of defense. This has been quite rare.

Sure, might be no problem, and someone like Mattis did understand that his role was different as being a secretary as before in the military. The problem is that if this becomes a habit, perhaps unintentionally, it weakens the civilian control of the military. Already with the huge military-industrial complex behind it, a secretary of defense systemically being a retired career military doesn't make it better.

(Russia for example has a tradition of the Defense Minister being an active general, something inherited from the Soviet Union. In the west military officers being defense ministers has been rare.)

So this wildly fascinating clip is doing the rounds - retweeted by no less than Trump himself and taken up and ran by Tucker Carlson and general anti-Chinese fearmongers - but the takeaway that people are wringing from it seems to be all wrong.



People are focusing on the close ties between Wall Street, China, and Biden-as-establishment. That's not news to anyone with half a brain, despite this being highlighted by xenophobic fucksticks on the right. What's interesting is what the speaker himself flags as of paramount importance: that the decoupling between the US and China is exactly what China wants. And the opening of the Chinese financial sector will mean foreign - European and US - companies having to play by Chinese rules, and fostering a far more independent Chinese economy less beholden to (waning) US hegemony.

The real issue this raises is the willingness of capital to undertake that shift, with the carrot of a billion-person market just waiting to be plunged into. In other words: a capitalism unfettered even by the minimal pseudo-democracies of the "West". That's the real meat of the talk, not the conspirational rubbish about Hunter and Biden being a wall-street lapdog. Everyone knows that piece of shit is deep in their pockets. And Biden may well facilitate this shift to the benefit of China with wall street in tow. It'll be interesting to see how much his 'stand up to China' bluster is just that. Insofar as he's a servile wall street cuntfuck, there's every chance he'll hand China right over to them.

Not to defend Brennan, who was largely considered incompetent, but the US didn't disband the Iraqi Army, it disbanded itself. He stopped cutting them checks after they refused to muster or provide any basic defense function. What he probably needed was some sort of carrot and stick for the enlisted men and a reform strategy that would get me back in the organization.

Initial plans for Iraq had a big role for the military in keeping order. The problem is that soldiers went home and didn't want to come back out when it was unclear how things would progress vis-a-vis ethnic divisions of power.

In a larger way, histories of the Iraq war tend to be plagued by lack of nuance and detail. Trainor and Gordon's Cobra II and Endgame are one of the only "complete" narratives I've seen.

How much of that was Iran vs the US backing the wrong Iraqi leader?

Also fuck anyone who calls themselves a 'centrist' or 'moderate' which is just another name for 'conservative in disguise', including Joe Biden:

David Adler found that across Europe and North America, centrists are the least supportive of democracy, the least committed to its institutions, and the most supportive of authoritarianism. Furthermore, Adler found that centrists are the least supportive of free and fair elections as well as civil rights — in the United States, only 25 percent of centrists agree that civil rights are an essential feature of democracy.... Our findings show that concerns about political moderates — and specifically politically moderate men — are not unfounded. As America battles a global pandemic and an economic collapse and reckons with systemic racism, IDEALS suggests that moderate men may be the least likely to make a positive difference.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/biden-moderate-democrats-republicans-conservative-study-john-kasich-aoc-a9699431.html

It's been a while since I've posted but to echo your last point, I read an illuminating series of Essays from Jacques Ranciere early this year..."Hatred of Democracy" in which he is attacking the centrist and neoliberal bougiose intellectuals in France and I found it uncanny how easily the same criticisms could be applied to the Democratic party and "Well Meaning" Liberals in the U.S.

Isn't it odd, though, that some folk, smart and resourceful enough, would just run with Trump's word?
It's not like he has a record of relaying facts.
More like the opposite, we're talking alternative facts, post-truth'ery, bullshitting, exaggerating/downplaying/misdirecting opportunistically, incompetence, propagating/condoning conspiracy theories, sort of alarmist, exploiting the backfire effect, ...
Anyway, those folk apparently see "critical statistical anomalies" in data from New York Times (Edison and Scytl), here in processed json format (not the original source data): Pennsylvania, Wisconsin
(It's not difficult to parse out and plot, by the way; I can give pointers if anyone is interested.)
Other analyses: Security Debrief, Charleen Adams
Sample conversations:
Fan: "So is it over? Shit will start to go crazy?"
Conspiracy theorist: "it looks like we're approaching some kind of critical mass."
Sorry folks, the case here is just far too weak. :shrug:

Edit: Sorry, that was for and others in that line of chit-chat.

Ha, I'd consider myself both a centrist and a moderate. I guess that's because I'm not very ideologically motivated.

I totally get people drifting away from "democracy," as kind of golden ideal. Democracy hasn't helped the developing world or former Soviet Bloc in and of itself. Hell, polling shows a majority of people in most former Soviet states say they were better off under communism, and that's with the negative connotations of foreign domination for the non-Russians.

Accountable government is shown to be an important mechanism for successful states, but accountable government can take many forms. The people need a formal way to pick and remove leaders. However, this can be done in far better ways than a the current US system, which got us a moronic reality TV start as leader, followed by a cognitively declining octogenarian. Ideally you'd vote for a small council of people to pick and remove a chief executive so that they can be carefully vetted and chosen based on qualifications for the job. That's how city/county managers are picked, and they routinely outperform mayors. You could have people on the selection council elected at large for a majority of the seats, and then give carve outs for cultural regions. Keep it to 9-11 people so actual discussion happens.

Our legislature is way too big too. The percentage of people who know their reps is terrible. I'd reduce that and make it based solely on population, not arbitrary state lines.

Technocrats make better governing decisions than demagogues.

Hell, at this point, Xi Jinping Thought seems like a fat superior model for tackling the incoming climate crisis.

Americans are too dumb to pick their leaders directly. Just look at the shit that is popular on TV.

what he probably needed was some sort of carrot and stick for the enlisted men and a reform strategy that would get me back in the organization. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, some times you need a carrot and stick approach to handle potential insurgents. Or to get an insurgent force back to normal life. And it's a difficult balancing act that such inept people like Brennan simply could not fathom (when you hear him talk about it, you can see that he doesn't get it).

Besides, that "carrot-and-stick" approach was finally done by the US military with it's Sunni Awakening in Anbar province and elsewhere, which actually broke the back of the Al Qaeda in Iraq. Then military middle leadership was left to decide which Sunni insurgents weren't so bad after all. And with the Surge it worked... only to be later broken apart by the Shiite leadership after the US withdrew and Al Qaeda came back as ISIS.

The problem is that soldiers went home and didn't want to come back out when it was unclear how things would progress vis-a-vis ethnic divisions of power. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That ethnic strife was something that was quite apparent for the Saudis and others, that pleaded for Bush the older not to continue to Baghdad during the Gulf War. But afterwards, it didn't matter anymore.

A Republican from Iowa won a House seat by 6 votes and her opponent seeks to invalidate it by appealing it to the Democratic controlled House. https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-iowa-mariannette-miller-meeks-elections-iowa-city-3e6af839aca5c2c802e746d7348d7206

If the Democrats reverse this election result, I take back all condemnations I have for Trump and wish him well in his umpteenth appeal.

After a recount? Anyhow, the consistent thing seems to be condemning them both?

Extremely narrow wins are reasonably subject to recounts. Asking for a recount on a win by a single-digit number like that is not out of the ordinary or unreasonable.

Trump is asking for more than just recounts in elections that were won by much much larger margins.

It's apples and potatoes.