No. My argument (so glad to know I have an argument now) is that given two choices, Biden is clearly better. Climate change is one example, and a good one. — Mikie

You've have provided an argument on climate change.

A bad argument, but at least an argument with some supporting evidence.

Simply stating Biden is better than Trump on all issues, is not an argument, it is a claim without justification.

It's also clearly false, on the issue of being a geriatric person susceptible to dementia and having hallucinations (such as Mitterrand is still the leader of France), Biden is clearly worse than Trump as he is older. So on the simple issue of age, Biden is quantitatively a worse candidate than Trump.

It’s not the same, it’s not equal, it’s not hard to see which is worse. The choice is not difficult. — Mikie

This is your position, that the "choice is not difficult".

You provide zero argument to support not only is Biden the right choice but that it's an easy choice to make.

You accept Biden is committing a genocide but somehow it's easy and trivial to know Biden is the best choice. Maybe step back and listen to yourself.

If you don't like genocide, it should be at minimum pretty fucking difficult to vote for someone who has committed a genocide.

And Biden and Trump are not the only two choices available, you can refuse to reward Biden for genocide while not voting for Trump. Yes, obviously Trump is then more likely to win, but making the point that genocide is not acceptable can be pretty easily argued is more important than ensuring Trump is not reelected. You say Trump would also commit the genocide even harder; not only is that far from established but the option is available to demonstrate distaste for genocide by voting for neither Trump or Biden.

It's only through voting for a third party that corruption will be held accountable. Republicans and Democrats are clearly equally contented with having the other as a foil while they make bank.

No, I mean significant. In comparison to Trump — who, again, believes it’s a hoax. — Mikie

You simply ignore the part where Biden and the democrats are not doing anything of significance on climate change, and their corrupt duplicitous apathy and service to the oil lobby behind the scenes significantly weakens the movement.

Nothing of importance on climate change will be decided in the next 4 years, so if this really is your only major issue of consideration, it's clearly not a given that continuing to back and reward a corrupt leader with power is better than having a clear opponent in power.

You simply ignore the fact that being in opposition can bring very essential discipline to a political movement. The "good ideas" but indefinite corruption is not a good long term strategy, at some point the corruption is as bad as just straight up bad ideas such as calling climate change a hoax.

“One dimension.” Laughable. It’s called an example. But please keep trying to intellectualize something a child can understand. — Mikie

You've argued Biden is better than Trump on climate change.

You have not provided any actual argument that Biden is overall better than Trump.

You've simply stated your claim and then you have an example.

Now, if that was all you were doing, dropping your opinion and providing one example, ok that's fine.

Where I take issue is your claim that it's not simply your opinion that Biden is better than Trump, but that it's obvious. "Not difficult choice" to use your words.

Something obvious should be incredibly easy to argue.

Now, if Biden wasn't a corrupt geriatric mental patient that has a disturbing history of touching children and committing genocide, and a good candidate with all their marbles and a lack of corruption scandals and genocide, then it would indeed be pretty obvious that Biden is better than Trump.

But that's not the case here, Biden is a terrible candidate (even you agree to that) so the choice is obviously not easy. Maybe Trump is better on some key issues like nuclear war. Someone with dementia could really start a nuclear war in a situation where Trump, as erratic and bombastic as he is, wouldn't even consider it as an option.

Then there are longer term strategic considerations. If Trump wins the Democratic Party may have opportunity to rebuild and find better leaders than Biden, that could have a really big impact longer term than sticking to a decrepit leader now.

I know this is difficult to process for you, but your simply repeating that the "choice is easy" doesn't make is so. Global situation is complicated, politics is complicated, it's not a binary choice, the difference between two terrible candidates is not obvious (just like the difference between too good candidates isn't obvious).

Which is why I’ve been condemning Biden and US policy both in Ukraine and Israel for years…also easy to look up.

God you’re delusional. (“My guy.” Lol.) — Mikie

Biden is clearly "your guy" here that you're arguing is the obvious choice.

Doesn't matter that you've been condemning Biden all these years, he's clearly "your guy" come election time. He so you're guy you don't even consider third options to express your "condemnation" of him.

You do see the basic problem here? That you're not only advocating voting for someone you condemn but that you additionally claim that's an easy choice.

No: I provide one example (and then many others), gave evidence, and have acknowledged your apparently one-track issue (war) many times, both here and for years on this forum. — Mikie

Well I seem to have missed where you navigate even that one issue of war, much less all the issues in some cohesive argument.

Feel free to just cite it if you've done the work already.

My criticism here is that you haven't done that work, you've just stated your opinion with one example. Which is not an argument. You can argue your example is true (obviously even a single example could be false), but that doesn't then transform your mere claim of an opinion into an argument.

If I claim one company is better than their competitor in literally every product, obviously just focusing on one product doesn't create a sound argument. If the companies have a lot of products then obviously it will be a lot of work to actually argue one company is superior in literally everything, it's of course easier to just focus on one example you feel there is genuine superiority and then continuously repeat the claim that there superiority in everything and that's obvious.

It's called propaganda.

Now if you're not consciously propagandizing but are just really, really dim enough to be enable to see the light of obviously valid criticism, then maybe sit down and actually think things through.

True, Trump will go after "your guy" but Trump going after corruption in the democrats would be actually really good for the democrats long term, rather than continuing to be wedded to the corruption.

Of course there are short term negative consequences of Trump, as he's a terrible candidate for president, but so too are there negative consequences of Biden, as he too is a terrible candidate. It's 4 years, (outside nuclear war, which seems to me Biden is far more likely to start) there's only so much damage Trump can do, and cleaning house and finding actual leaders of merit would be of immense longer term value to the left.

Furthermore, you seem to agree that Biden and the neocons have terrible policies in Ukraine, likely to just keep starting more wars (as that's their main thing), whereas, empirically, it is reasonable to assert that Trump doesn't start more wars. It's also Trump's nature to stabilize the US government's appetite for more war because no one is quite sure what Trump will do in a big war (generals who want a war can "count on Biden" and the neocons but they can't necessarily count on Trump in the same way). 4 more years of Biden and the neocons starting more wars could have pretty disastrous and long term consequences.

So, if you're a good faith actor, go think about these things and seriously evaluate your claim that the decision is easy.

The situation is difficult and complicated and good strategy is not easy and obvious, and it is simply false to claim there are only two choices (but even if there were only 2 choices, there are some good points for Trump; the argument that Biden should be rewarded for genocide because Trump would also commit the genocide, just harder, is pretty weak; I'd actually argue Israel is going hard now precisely because they fear they wouldn't own a Trump presidency, he might win and may discipline Israel simply because it would be popular to stop seeing so many dead children and parading war trophies, or then make it clear the US wouldn't join a bigger war and Israel would be on their own).

Strawman.

I never did that. I have ONE example that demonstrates ONE way in which there are significant differences and in which one administration is clearly better — which was in response to your difficulty determining such. — Mikie

That's exactly what your argument is, that Biden is better on climate change.

Your claim of "significantly better" is ludicrous as you yourself state that fossil production is at record highs under Biden, so really by "significant difference" you mean zero practical difference but some difference in rhetoric, which you claim is important.

When I pointed out that climate change is only one dimension of evaluation you then respond to that just repeating your point about climate change.

Not only have you presented no reason to believe Biden's duplicitous rhetoric, i.e. corrupts utterings in service of the oil lobby, is any better than Trump's overt utterings in service of the oil lobby in terms of consequence, you just ignore the other subjects such as Biden's complicity in a literal genocide.

Which, maybe take a step back to appreciate the irony and just how bad faith people of your ilk are, for I remember very clearly the parallels Democrats would make between Trump and Hitler and every possible pretext used to accuse Trump of essentially being Hitler and his followers brown shirts (and if not explicitly Hitler then as close as possible to that message).

Then, your guy, backs, finances, arms, helps coordinate, carries water for and covers with gaslights, encourages to "keep doing what they're doing", in participating in a literal genocide and it's "nothing to see here".

Truly amazing.

Strawman. I never once said that. Stop making things up. — Mikie

Pointing out you can argue the genocide issue in Biden's favour is not a straw man, it's pointing out what you would need to do to support your conclusion.

It's you who claims not only is Biden better than Trump but this is somehow trivially obvious.

You provide one dimension of analysis, don't even argue that, then dismiss all the other dimensions of analysis in just stating Biden is better on everything.

Last I checked, Trump doesn't have a literal genocide under his belt, so you're obviously wrong.

You'd need to show how it's trivially obvious Biden's helping carry out a genocide is somehow trivially irrelevant, to support your position that it's trivially easy (aka. obvious) to conclude Biden is better than Trump.

Otherwise, genocide is a pretty serious thing and it's not trivially obvious why you'd reward genocide at the ballot box.

Strawman. But who are you talking about, Trump or Biden? Both are geriatric. Claiming only Biden is off his rocker is swallowing right wing propaganda wholesale. Not a surprise. — Mikie

I've made what's called an actual argument on this point, that old age physical and mental decline is an exponential process and so the difference in age between Trump and Biden is quite significant.

Based on the risk of death representing general health, Biden is basically 2x less healthy and more advanced in mental and physical decline than Trump. A factor of two is significant.

It's also clear from just looking and listening to Biden and Trump ("paying attention" which you admonish us to do) that Biden is not only old but literally entering geriatric dementia and it's getting worse all the time, whereas Trump has not (he still "has it together" in his peculiar Trump way).

One has done the most of any president for climate change; one says it’s a hoax. That to you amounts to “Mahh climate change!”? — Mikie

"Done the most" in terms of reducing emissions or just in that "rhetoric" you've been talking about and meaningless policy that has zero effect on emissions?

Just like the issue of old age, climate change requires math to understand.

The actions required to actually avoid terrible climactic disruptions are significant; measured in multiples of WWII scale global effort.

The Democrats "business as usual but we'll throw you a few bones" is absolutely meaningless in outcome, exactly the same as just assuming climate change is a hoax. Which can be seen when plotting COP meetings against emissions; there is zero effect of COP meetings on emissions, doesn't matter who's in the Whitehouse, what gets discussed or agreed, the emissions keep rising.

The only difference between Democrats and Republicans on climate change is that with Democrats will appease a bit the anxiety with "rhetoric" while pursuing the exact same policies of bending the knee to the oil lobby.

There really is no difference between Democrats and Republicans on this particular issue; where there's big differences is in things like starting or enabling more wars, in which Trump is simply empirically better. Trump simply doesn't have a war boner like Biden and the neocons do, and that's simply a factually better thing about him.

I do so, and more than happy to get into the weeds about each one: — Mikie

Well then go ahead.

You haven't even dealt with Biden's corruption and service to the oil lobby being more harmful to the environmental movement than someone overtly hostile to it. Sabotage from within (such as a corrupt leader in power) can be far more damaging than facing someone overtly hostile in power. Sometimes time in opposition is essential for building movements (precisely because it allows for purging corrupt elements and building good faith positions that can attract new partisans, rather than covering for some corrupt senile idiot which deflates even existing partisans).

And that's only one issue, which plays out over the long term so there's really very little difference (almost exactly zero difference in terms of actual emissions) between Trump and Biden, whereas other issues are acute, such as committing genocide or starting a nuclear war (you either do or you don't during your time in power, and Biden is already 1 for 2).

So pointing out that Biden is far better on climate change isn’t an argument. Pointing out numerous other ways Trump is worse also isn’t an argument. — Mikie

It is not an argument that supports your position that Biden is obviously better than Trump, and even that argument is unsupported as you simply ignore criticism (that backing a corrupt leader is worse than time in opposition for a movement in the long term; that being undermined from within is sometimes worse than being overtly attacked).

Your other "pointing out" are not arguments at all, you just make claims without any reasoning or justifications.

You simply assert that Trump would be even more genocidal than Biden, but what's the argument? Why would we believe that? Biden "wavering" after 6 months of intensely supporting genocide and helping to carry it out being a positive for Biden, really needs some intense justification to believe.

Trump has made anti-war part of his brand, such as claiming he could get a deal worked out over Ukraine in a single day.

He'd also be under intense opposition and protest from Democrats. Democrats would be losing their shit if Trump was backing Israel committing a genocide, Israel soldiers literally parading around draped in woman's bras as war trophies (and you have the courage to claim Biden is "pro woman").

Trump was already elected president once and it wasn't a world ending event (as many advertised), whereas a senile demented corrupt idiot could actually start a nuclear war with much higher probability.

Then there's the fact when one's own side becomes too corrupt, it is far healthier for the movement to punish that corruption and then spend time in opposition rebuilding than to continue the corruption. If the other side is equally corrupt, that is actually a good thing in this situation as it makes it easier to consolidate, clean house, and then return to power with some less corrupt people and better ideas.

The democrat position is basically: reward us for our corruption because there's slightly more corruption on the other side.

Climate change is an existential risk. So that example is particularly relevant. But there are multiple others— that was one, yes. I’m not basing my entire judgement on that one example, though. (Some might argue that’s a kind of “fallacy” on your part.) — Mikie

The fallacy is taking one dimension of evaluation and claiming it's conclusive.

My pointing that out is not a fallacy, it's basic reasoning.

Yes, climate change is important, but so too is genocide and war, including nuclear war.

You are welcome to make the argument that Biden's complicity in genocide is a "no biggy" or even a positive. You are welcome to make the argument that advancing geriatric dementia in the president isn't a war risk, murder, genocide and nuclear risk (for example you could argue that the generals don't have dementia and they'll just do what they want and that's ok as there's no actual reason for civilian oversight of the military in making key decisions; i.e. that you're fine, and it should be fine for everyone, that a Biden presidency means a de facto military dictatorship in any military sphere and your votes mean nothing on these issues).

What I'm pointing out is you haven't make any such argument, you've just blurted "Mahhhh! Climate Change!!" which isn't an argument. You could make a nuanced argument that, while we both agree Biden is a terrible candidate who shouldn't be president, he's not as bad as Trump; that the risks of a Biden dementia driven incompetent administration are lower risks that a megalomania driven incompetency of a Trump administration.

Yes, supporting genocide is sickening. So is environmental destruction. So is a judiciary that wants to take rights away. So is giving tax breaks to the wealthy and exacerbating inequality. So is trillions in student loans and making it impossible for students to cancel them.

With Trump you get all of the above. With Biden, you get one: now-wavering support for Israel. Trump would not be the least pressured by or concerned with anti-genocide protests. — Mikie

Simply stating that Trump is worse on all issues of concern isn't an argument.

Trump is not a neocon, which is a bid positive on the pointless evil war issue.

Just brushing aside genocide is pretty bold.

Im not sure I agree that we have any duty at all. — AmadeusD

Hey mate, thank you for your thorough reply. Some of my utterances below will seem combative. THey are not - we just disagree in ways that look combative. But, your incredulousness at my position should at least allow you to understand that however we disagree, I simply do not care. You're giving me the time of day and I enjoy locking horns in this way. — AmadeusD

I don't know about you but I came here for an argument.

Be at ease, you're clearly debating in good faith, which warrants respect.

My disrespect is reserved for people arguing in bad faith, which I define in a philosophical or political context arguing positions they do not actually believe; i.e. not arguing on substance but simply deploying a wide range of propaganda tactics to manipulate perceptions of said substance.

I ask you to clarify your position to both be confident you're arguing in good faith but also to understand your position. Most emotivists or moral relativists, in my experience, generally have moral absolute limits and are just arguing plurality within a limited "nice and acceptable" moral terrain. Which is a perfectly coherent view to have, I am myself an emotivist and moral relativists in this sense, but it is clearly a moral absolutist position in which some plurality and diversity and various internally consistent positions, even if at odds, are perfectly acceptable; as you are clearly aware, it is the moral absolutist framework which is the far more important foundation in such a theory in which adding some compatible plurality can be pretty trivial; such as, in stoicism (my moral point of view), if moral goodness is the effort towards the good then pretty much any expressed moral system in attempting to do so, as either a linguistic / notional system or then simply doing things expressing the moral content, is morally laudable, whatever it is (however wrong it is from some epistemologically omniscient point of view) as long as it's the result of genuine moral effort towards the good (taken as either or revelatory a priori knowledge in stoicism: i.e. once one is ware of there are better and worse decisions, one is duty bound to try to make good decisions resulting in a moral journey throughout the cosmos in which advancing on one's journey, regardless of the starting point of present situation, is what is of moral worth)—to show my cards, as it were, in reciprocity to you showing yours.

I do. Sincerely apologies if, at any point, I seem a bit short. I have heard just about all of the infantalising responses to my position (despite recognizing they aren't intended that way!!). I have thought about this. I have read a lot on it. I have discussed it with laypeople and philosophers. I have fully embraced the consequences. They don't strike me the way they strike you. That's all. I still have good reasons to act or prevent acts, that I am sure you would, overall, agree with teh results of. — AmadeusD

I ask for clarification just to be sure my understanding of your position is correct.

The best way to clarify a moral position is to consider the social consequences (as morality is mostly, though not entirely, socially contingent).

However, social consequence is only a clarifying and cannot possibly be an evaluative factor of moral positions and theories. For, obviously we cannot evaluate what social consequences are good or bad without first committing to a moral theory to make such an evaluation. To say this moral or political scheme is wrong because it has these or those social consequences is not a complete argument without first establishing the moral scheme required to make such an evaluation, which if we happen to already know is true then it is trivial that anything incompatible with it claimed to be good will be evaluated to be bad.

Of course, it just so happens that the vast majority of people operate this way as they are unconscious of their foundational moral or evaluative framework in which they evaluate any new moral claims. Therefore, if you take a moral scheme for granted the fastest way to resolve the acceptability of any new moral claim is to work out it's social consequences and decide if they are good or bad based on what one already believes.

The reason I ask so much clarification of emotivist and moral relativistic positions is that most people in modern society explicitly believe they have such a theory while implicitly believing in moral absolute limits (in which case those moral absolute limits are far more interesting and the actual heart of the debate in such a case).

Correct. This is not a problem to my mind, other than because It makes me uncomfortable. Not sure how it could be 'wrong' in any other sense. — AmadeusD

I think it's pretty clear we'll need a new thread to go deeper here. I should have time this week to transcribe MacIntyre's core objections to emotivism / moral relativism, as I'm sure you'd agree his position is worth considering and it would anyways benefit the forum to gain insight into such a powerful thinker. I do not actually agree with MacIntyre's overall framework, but my own position is only a slight upgrade in strength of several of MacIntyre's statements; basically in some foundational places MacIntyre hesitates to simply make an absolute claim all while denying he's simply made moral relativism more complicated. His sort of "riding the line" and very Buddhist "neither is true but it is true" I think is worth considering (and his whole argument is a brilliant insight into how society works and I am 100% convinced by his epistemological claim that moral content can only develop and make sense within a moral tradition), but at the end of the day I'm simply not convinced it's possible to avoid "we have a duty to the good of society" for the virtues MacIntyre promotes to be actual virtues and even if it is possible as MacIntyre sets out to do that there is any need to do so.

Not at all. I just think you're making an obvious mistake. — AmadeusD

If you mean by mistake using social consequences to evaluate moral positions (i.e. that moral consequences I find unsavoury for exterior reasons is a valid argument against a moral claim, without first establishing my moral theory can be taken to be true to begin with), then I hope that has been clarified above.

If the social consequences of a position are accepted (what MacIntyre refers to as "paying the price") then of course that "I don't like those consequences" or "people don't like those consequences" is not an argument. It's only an argument if you also agree that those consequences are unacceptable and you are not assigning equal moral merit to those consequences as compared to others.

They do, but you've named instances that include the other reasons I've alluded to. Suffice to say at this stage that I formulate in these scenarios (though, I'm not yet at a fine-grained version of this view, so bear with) that hte actor has, in fact, chosen to accept hte subject's emotional position, rather than a moral obligation. — AmadeusD

Well if your invoking some sort of social contract that is to me a moral absolutist position (that people should do what they give their word to do, as a moral duty): i.e. the cop should fulfil his duty of honest impartiality and not plant evidence because he's accepted that duty, the surgeon should finish the surgery because of the hypocritical oath, and serial murderer has (probably) entered into all sorts of explicit or implicit agreements with society to respect the law and not go around murdering people.

If there are no duties, then there are no duties to keep one's word either. You can give your word because you feel like it and are of equal moral weight in breaking your word because you feel like that too.

Not at all. It seems clear to me that these lines of yours are somewhat unhinged. *shrug*. — AmadeusD

This seems to me nearly a tautology. Even if we could imagine a society that "just so happens to function" even if no one is doing anything that can be described as "political" eventually an existential crisis will arise and the only solution is "doing politics" which if no one is willing to do then society will end, being the definition of existential crisis.

Which you seem to accept in your very next sentence:

I think the bolded in sufficient, but apparently you do not. That said, If no one in the country wants to defend it - Okay. That's the situation. — AmadeusD

In my experience, this is the main problem emotivist have to contend with as there's all sorts of institutions requiring duties to be performed to maintain any sort of comfortable life that "feels good". Generally, at least in my experience, emotivists want others to perform social duties so that they can feel good while denying those duties actually exist.

Libertarian oriented emotivists will usually try to solve this problem with hazard pay—fighting a war is dangerous and so soldiers are compensated for it—while ignoring that obviously this wouldn't work in practice for two reasons: first, if every soldier demanded market based hazard pay it would simply be unaffordable to have an army, but second, and more problematic, hazard pay in the market deals with risks in which the plan is not to die (there are no jobs in which the advertisement is "you'll definitely, probably be killed" but we'll compensate you for that), but for a war to be prosecuted successfully almost always involves plans where the risk of death is acute and so a market solution would require increasing the hazard pay as the risk increases. Not only is any actual military far from being hazard pay based, but nearly all states reserve the right of conscription which is as far from compensating soldiers for risk as is possible. If people have no duties then of course they should abandon their posts as soon as the risk to their person warrants it.

This may not be your case, but at least for libertarians "free riding" they view as a bad thing and it usually causes them problems to become aware they are free riding on other people willing to self-sacrifice for their security and comfort all while they claim any self-sacrifice (even in the form of taxation) is not only not a duty but many go so far as to say is evil. In other words, for the market to exist in the first place requires a long list of institutions and whole host of individuals dedicated to refuse economically rational choices (abandon the battlefield as soon as the hazard pay doesn't cover the risk; take a bribe to rule in one party's favour as soon as soon the reward outweighs the risk of being caught by people equally rational and willing to take bribes, and so on).

I'm not sure this sort of criticism applies in your case (libertarians generally have plenty of morally absolute positions such as theft is wrong and contracts are sacred and they are doing "good" by being self interested, and so on, and the cause of the problem above is in relying on soldiers doing in their view "bad" and entering into non-market based labour exchanges and willing to self-sacrificing, paying a life tax, for the benefit of the state and moochers, including people enjoying the fruits of market relations due to the maintenance of the state that makes those market relations possible).

I would point you toward Heydel-Mankoo for a perspective on this aspect that seems to me inarguable, and exposes the preening nonsense of anti-colonial sentiment in te 21st century. But we are likely to almost violently disagree here. — AmadeusD

We literally have actual settler colonialist genocide happening right now fully supported by Western governments, and you seriously believe that considering that as a moral failure of the West (along with the destruction of the natural world and the habitat we depend on to continue the whole civilization project) is "preening nonsense".

However, by "sentiment" are you also referring to all the colonialism in the past? Aka. that the current distribution of wealth and power globally has nothing to do with colonialism at all, neither now nor in the past?

This is seems laughably wrong, and nothing you've provided seems to move the compass. He's an impassioned writer that seems to ignore two or three fundamentally important aspects of what he's talking about (one, being the above - the vast majority of people (who consittute the culture!!!) simply are not involved in this side-show - it goes on, in spite of hte ridiculous Political stupidity. This seems true in most cultures, and the West is not unique in that way. — AmadeusD

This is MacIntyre's starting thesis, so I will transcribe the key parts hopefully this week.

However, insofar as I've represented MacIntyre's position accurately, it seems bold to dismiss an argument of a pretty well respected philosopher as laughable. He's received criticism from many different schools and many other well respected philosophers and I have yet to hear the criticism that his arguments are laughably wrong. So we'll see if your claim here holds up.

As for the substance of your rebuttal, it's equally bold to simply assume society will simply muddle on despite ridiculous political stupidity. For example, if there was a general nuclear exchange started by the United States due to ridiculous political stupidity, would you evaluate this as a success?

Now, if your definition of success is just whatever happens (for example a nation is invaded, no one bothers to defend it as no one feels like it, they're all killed and this is successful because it happened), then seems there's no content in success or failure; anything that exists or ceases to exist represents success.

More fundamentally, if you have no moral standard, which seems implied in a position in which there's no duties to do anything, then how are you even judging success? So my first charge here is that you seem to be invoking some moral absolutes in critiquing my statements, whereas if we're basing morality on feelings then my position is equally valid to yours as I clearly feel Western society, the enlightenment project, has failed whereas you feel it's successful, and my feeling is just as good as yours. Even if you proved me to be factually wrong based on invoking a shared reality neither of us have a duty to accept is real, I would still have no duty to accept any particular facts about it.

What's hte issue? That's the choice that Nation made. Forcing the populus into a War seems to be a much, much worse thing to do. — AmadeusD

I didn't say anything about forcing.

The alternative to no one defending the interests of society and forcing people to, is a society in which duties are really believed to exist; soldiers feel bound to their duties because they think those duties are morally binding on them, not contingent on insofar as they feel like it or then their hazard pay (insofar as things aren't too hazardous and it makes economic sense). As described above, the moral tensions is if there's expectation soldiers (or anyone taking any risk to protect the interest of society) carry out duties all while denying there are any such duties.

I can only roll my eyes at the baked-in biases here.

I have to be entirely honest in that the type of vibe your views encompass a little bit funny. I'm sorry for that coming through as I know you're good faith and being honest with me. It just seems childish and I have a hard time. This is likely a flaw in me, but wanted to be clear about why some responses might seem flimsy. I think that's what they call for. I mean no offense. — AmadeusD

What's childish?

This is "the debate" when it comes to moral relativism v moral absolutism. If every point of view is valid and there are no absolute moral claims, then the Nazis were and are equally valid and the holocaust is as laudable social project as creating a health care system. Obviously Hitler felt he was doing good and so if no moral feeling is better than another, then Hitler was doing as much good as anyone else.

It's easy to argue moral relativism if the only moral positions under consideration are those pre-selected by the society you live in as acceptable. However, that's no the implication of moral relativism. If every position is equally morally valid (or invalid, but result in equality) then implication is that a serial killer has just as valid a moral position as a honest and compassionate doctor.

You've claimed no one has duties ... Ok, well that clearly means no one has duties to not engage in serial killing nor then stop anyone from doing so. People who "feel like" stopping the serial killer are just as morally justified as the serial killer and anyone who would do likewise, obviously they feel like serial killing.

Where you get pluralism, which to me clearly seems your comfort zone, is when you allow for a wide range of faiths and goals, but place absolute moral limits on what is morally acceptable in pursuit of those goals. Pursuing pleasure by skipping a stone on a lake: acceptable, approved. Pursuing pleasure by torturing little children to death: unacceptable, not approved.

The position that there are no duties (as you say, you'd report child sexual abuse only if you felt like it and wouldn't consider it wrong to not-report it if you didn't feel like it; there's no duty to report crimes against children as there are no duties at all).

Now, if you're willing to "pay the cost", as MacIntyre put it, and just flatly say that though you are happy people perform various duties to maintain your situation of comfort that you feel good in but they are simply wrong if they performed those duties because they thought those duties were real and not because they "happened to feel like it", which seems to be what you're saying, then I fail to see how its childish to point out the consequences.

Obviously a society in which no one performs any duties (no one keeps there word, no one tells the truth, no one protects any social institution required for society to function) wouldn't be comfortable society to live in.

Insofar as people "feel compelled" to actually perform duties due to the social consequences it is because of a history of society repeating to itself those duties are real: you should actually do them, you should actually reject a bribe as a judge and tell the truth as a witness. If those duties aren't real and people shouldn't feel compelled by them and people hear your message which clearly you are happy to share and then they see the light, then what's childish is to then simply assume that things would go on as before.

The adult position is to just accept that indeed society would basically fall apart if no one performed any duties and that's perfectly acceptable to you as an outcome. Which in one comment you seem to accept, that no one has a duty to defend the country and so if no one happens to feel like doing that then there's no way to defend the country and so be it, but then here with similar considerations the retort is it's childish.

If no one has any duties, then it's clearly perfectly morally acceptable to just lazily go about your day and contribute nothing to the general welfare just as it's perfectly morally acceptable for soldiers to abandon their posts as soon as they don't feel like risking their lives any more. The only difference in the soldier case is your invoking the false dichotomy that the only alternative is to force people to serve (the alternative you leave out is people serving their country because they feel a duty to do so, that they believe is very real and if they didn't believe that they wouldn't continue on based on merely happening to feel like it).

If you fall back to social norms (that we expect a judge to refuse bribes and soldiers to follow orders) and so there's negative consequences for failing to do what people expect, well the big incentive to conform to social norms that maintain society (not well by any stretch of the imagination, but not yet totally destroyed either) is the belief of others that those norms are real moral precepts. So, to say those norms aren't actually moral precepts, no one should believe them truly binding in any moral sense, but people act like they are real because other people think they are real and so impose a cost for violating those norms, obviously doesn't work anymore once enough people sees the truth that those norms aren't real. Which in a long list of cases is a good thing (according to the new norms of society) because it turns out the basis of those norms (slavery, racism, killing homosexuals, wife and child beating, and so on) weren't well supported: feelings changed and so what people felt compelled to do by social pressures also changed (in a process that is far from complete). However, the feelings changed (historically) not because people started to believe there are no moral truths at all but rather due to the consequences of debates about what those moral truths are.

I think the idea that a critical mass of a population would act against not only their own self-interest, but their own relations in the world is far-fetched enough to simply not care about this potential. — AmadeusD

As I just explained, this is the philosophically naive position.

If you aren't concerned about the consequences of no people believing they have any duties (as, according to you, they should believe because that's the truth) then you're basically in the free riding problem as above. A critical mass of people won't agree with you and so you don't have to worry about that happening.

However, there's a lot more fundamentally wrong with your statement here.

First, you're clearly bait-and-switching individual self-interest with collective self-interest. It is in the collective self-interest for a soldier to self-sacrifice (by explicitly jumping on a grenade or then just taking on extreme risk) but it is obviously not in their own self-interest (as their dead now).

This is the core problem of politics, essentially before any other as maintaining any political system whatsoever requires a significant amount of self sacrifice, starting with both facing extreme risk (risking life and safety for the "self-interest" of society) as well as refusing advantages (bribes and favouritism and so on) but is a tension that goes far deeper (for example we not only expect the judge to refuse bribes, we also expect the judge to put in the work required for a fair trial even if that goes against his self-interest to have a pleasant life or is in conflict to important, but not as important, duties to his own family, such as disappointing his spouse or children due to late nights considering the merits of the case at hand).

"Self-interest" in your statement above is actually referring to collective-interest which may or may not be compatible with self-interest. It maybe in your self-interest and also the collective-interest to get a job, but it's in your self-interest and not the collective-interest to steal from your job, as a general rule (even if you are guaranteed to get away with it).

Economists just randomly invent abstracted entities (families, companies, organizations, government and the like) and then just randomly say those abstracted entities will act in their self interest to describe how society "should work", but any entity that represents a collection of individuals has collective-interest and not self-interest. Collective is a bad word in Neo-liberal economics so they just ignored what they're doing: confusing collective-interest with self-interest to solve the problem of self-interest being in conflict with collective-interest in the first place; this problem is not solved by simply stating:

"a critical mass of a population would act against not only their own self-interest".

This is just wrong. A critical mass of a population, in pursuing their individual self-interest, can definitely act against their collective interest of both themselves and dependents. That is exactly what are environmental problems are: we have no collective interest to have a system in which pollution can be externalized, but we each have an individual interest to externalize the costs of our pollution in pursuing our own pleasures. We could solve the problem but that would require a critical mass of people acting against one's self interest to ignore the political process altogether (something you see as perfectly fine, even morally superior to the many "rediculously stupid people" engaged in politics) because one's effect on outcomes is lower than the cost-benefit of the resources it requires (mostly time and brain calories).

The only 'duty' the West actually imposes is to not interfere with others against their will. I'm quite absolute in this regard. People should be allowed to hurt themselves, and contract into self-disinterested behaviour. — AmadeusD

Ok, well all this discussion to come to the fact you are a moral absolutist, exactly as a suspected.

Why say things like:

Im not sure I agree that we have any duty at all. — AmadeusD

When you are perfectly sure, quite absolute, in that people have a duty to not interfere with others against their will.

So ok, "feelings" mean nothing, we have a quite strict absolute moral rule to abide by.

Fortunately, all the criticism above is still completely relevant, as your absolute moral rule doesn't really mean anything unless we (aka. a critical mass) have a duty to violate our own self interest in applying this standard to others on behalf of others violated by it (aka. maintain a government, police, prosecutors, judges or then analogous law-enforcement system), which in order to function require a long list of duties that go far beyond simply avoiding interfering with someone. Indeed, if that was the only rule then police and judges wouldn't interfere with the lives of people interfering with people (and there would be no police and judges).

Anyways, you could just say "I'm a libertarian" and so believe the rules that maintain market conditions are absolutely inviolable, the original acquisition of resources that created market conditions being unjustifiable is a "myth", and I want to free ride on soldiers sacrificing their self-interest without market based hazard pay, praise them to keep going all while knowing I (and others) are cheating them of just market relations by manipulating their naive natures.

We've had plenty of debated on libertarianism already, but it's always refreshing to have another: see how you solve the issue of taxes and democratic participation and corruption and externalities and so on without people having a duty to the collective interest under any circumstances (except of course to stop anyone interfering with you, then of course the entire mechanism of the state must be taken for granted to stop that).

Now, I still think we should discuss MacIntyre, but his argument is with actual emotivists and / or moral-relativists where there is no claim to absolutes whatsoever, they "pay the cost" as I've mentioned and simply accept the Nazis had as good claim to moral goodness as anyone else.

Libertarianism is basically agreeing with MacIntyre's framework, just joining the libertarian tradition instead of MacIntyre's Aristotelian "heroic society" tradition, which has prima-facie equal claim to moral justification in MacIntyre's framework. Where we could evaluate one tradition as "better than another", for example in this case libertarianism with Aristotelian heroic virtuism, would be in demonstrating inconsistency in one or the other position or then being able to solve moral dilemmas in one tradition that are insoluble in the other tradition.

Therefore, it is 100% MacIntyrish to pit MacIntyre's preferred moral tradition to yours (something similar to if not exactly libertarianism), or to mine (stoicism), and see if one seems superior to another and we may switch from or then amend our own tradition, all while avoiding moral relativism (we really did believe our tradition at the start was the best available and if that changes at the end then we really do believe that's an even better moral tradition).

No— I used one example to demonstrate both a very big difference and how one administration is clearly better than the other. It happens to be an excellent example, given the stakes of climate change. — Mikie

You're response to my objection that you are taking one example and drawing a wholistic conclusion, is "I used one example to demonstrate both a very big difference and one administration is clearly better than the other!!"

The current administration is literally completely engaged in financing, supporting, helping to execute and then just gaslighting everyone about a literal genocide and you're bold enough to say one administration is "clearly better than the other" based on a single naive example.

Not only do you fail to even attempt to argue that the corrupt, bad-faith, covertly in service of the oil industry and mendacious duplicity of the Biden administration on climate change is superior to an overtly climate denialist position of the Trump administration, but climate change is not the only high stakes issue.

In terms of how things "legally are supposed to work" Biden could launch nuclear weapons in a complete delusional fantasy reliving the Cuban missile crisis. That's also a high stakes issue that requires some consideration. Either you'd need to argue that statistically 86 year olds (the age Biden will be at the end of his administration) should not be questioned in their mental competence as such nor with the overwhelming evidence of Biden really actually entering geriatric dementia, or then you'd have to argue that "his team" are super competent and are only pretending (i.e. gaslighting everyone) Biden is competent to be president and make nuclear use decisions insofar as it seems necessary to defeat the orange man, but if that situation actually arose then they'd stop pretending and take power away from Biden and send him to the ol' folks home (and that there would always be time to do that, even if one general is pushing for nuclear use and would execute on an order from the president, arresting anyone who disagrees as is his legal duty to do, as generals are not in charge of evaluating the president mental competence but a bunch of other political people which it's not the place of generals to second guess).

Exactly. Which is absurd and, I’ll repeat (accurately); if this is your conclusion, then you’re not paying attention. Plain and simple. — Mikie

Again, there's literally a genocide and your position is: Don't pay attention to that and even question if genocide should be rewarded at the ballot box!! Climate change!! Climate change!! Pay attention to that ... but not so close attention that you wonder if the covert climate change and service to the oil lobby of the democrats is actually worse than an overt climate change denial and service to the oil lobby of the Republicans (that being undermined can be worse than being attacked, and so therefore it is not "perfectly clear").

Then you’re simply not paying attention. Take one example:

Biden: “Climate change is a problem we have to address.” Passes biggest climate bill in history — the IRA.

Trump: “Climate change is a Chinese hoax.”

You: “I see no difference.” — Mikie

The fallacy you're engaging in is one dimensional comparisons based on the two whole strawmanning my position as having said they are exactly the same.

I didn't say they are exactly the same with exactly the same policies and same actions and so on.

The first straw man is presenting a difference in a single dimension to then draw conclusions about the whole.

The difference between the Republicans and Democrats on climate change really is slight in nominal terms, but in substance there is a big difference. Republicans are explicit climate change deniers and explicitly in the pockets of the oil lobby, whereas Democrats are covert climate change deniers and covertly in the pockets of the oil lobby.

The democrats on the issue of climate change are the duplicitous corrupt party rather than overtly corrupt.

It is not actually a foregone conclusion that being undermined is better than being overtly attacked. It could be, but it depends on the circumstances which is the theme of the second and general objection to your thesis.

Secondly, there is obviously many dimensions of comparison, not just one, and better and worse is a wholistic assessment.

Trump does have positives, for example he is at least corrupt for himself and his personal aggrandizing and family members, rather than corrupt in service of delusional and corrupt ideology such as Neo-conservatism. It is entirely possible that had Trump won in 2020 that neither the war in Ukraine would have occurred or this genocide in Gaza, for the simple fact since Trump serves himself no one is sure how he will react to things. Israel knows they have Biden by the balls (precisely because Democrats are supposed to be, if not anti-war then war sceptical, and precisely because the Democrats are covertly corrupted by Aipac rather than overtly corrupted by Aipaic and explitly in service of fanatical evangelical support of Israel, there's no opposition party in this current genocidal campaign). There weren't new major wars during the Trump administration, which is a potential positive of Trump on that single dimension.

Now, we clearly agree that both Trump and Biden are terrible candidates and neither is fit to be the leader of nation, far less a powerful one.

Your second level of straw man in your retort is presenting my position as implying either Trump is better than Biden or then there's no difference and thus no difference in outcomes.

My statement was that there's no reason to believe Biden is any better.

When you have two extremely bad candidates it mostly down to external circumstances what the differences in outcomes will be. Just as two equally good leaders (good morally and in political competence) you would be content leading in any situation but one maybe better than the other in the given circumstances, precisely because even if comparable in goodness they are not exactly the same, comparably bad leaders one equally dissatisfied in them leading but one maybe worse than the other due to particular circumstances. In both cases, it is not a trivial task to make out the best of two good leaders or the worst of two bad leaders.

So my main issue with your position is in trivializing the task of comparing Trump to Biden.

There is equally trivial arguments in favour of Trump, for example we can easily imagine political situations (especially when there are tensions between the largest nuclear powers) where simple common sense is required from the leader, and presumed puppeteering of Biden by his "competent team" breaks down or then never really existed, and, the simple inability of Biden to understand what is going on due to cognitive decline results in disaster (for example there's one general with simply an insane plan, or then Biden order something insane all by himself, and the military simply carries it out); whereas Trump in the same situation, as mendacious as he his, is at least able to exercise common sense and understand the basics of what people are saying to him. True, Trump is almost as old, but as I've already explained, physical and mental decline in old age is exponential, so being even slightly ahead in an exponential process can be a large quantitative difference.

Point being, a comparison would need to get pretty deep not only in the intrinsic differences of Trump and Biden but the actual circumstances. We can imagine many situations and processes in which a corrupt and bombastic Trump would bumble and fumble through to a better outcome than a corrupt and demented Biden, and vice-versa, and so we would need to weigh the differences against the likelihood of those situations arising.

Then there's second order differences. For example, one may concede that having a senile geriatric serial plastic surgery patient deciding on important military matters is pretty terrible and it would indeed be better to have a somewhat more lucid Trump in that situation, but then go onto argue that Biden's national security team would be better than Trump and they'd manage things essentially ignoring what Biden says. I would actually argue against this, that Biden's Neo-conservative national security team is completely dedicated to evil and delusions in service to that evil, but it's the kind of second order argument one could make.

For example, a second order argument in terms of climate change is that a overt climate denialist in the White House results in more action on climate change in the rest of the world who are then motivated to "get on with it", and, more importantly, can't hide behind the duplicitous United States pretending to do something about climate change to avoid domestic pressures. "No, no, no, we need the US on board" is a more plausible argument to make (from corrupt European sycophants for example) with a Biden administration than a Trump administration. "Look at Trump! The US isn't going to do anything, we need to just do what we can do and move things forward in the rest of the world" is only a powerful argument when you have Trump in the White House.

As disgusting as it is, Europeans vassals line up to suck Biden's dick, whereas European elites as a whole at least considered the possibility of not being vassals any more. Of course being a vassal is so comforting and they ran back to kiss the ring as soon as it was offered again, but Trump's US focus and bombastic nature does at least encourage more critical thinking in, for lack of a bette word, the "Euro-bitch" class of bureaucratic wankers.

Of course, we can then go onto third order analysis, for example: let's assume all the above, but it turns out that if the US is too weak then all hell will break loose as we're constantly warned, and the only people who can manage the US empire to avoid too much weakness are the Neo-cons and things would just fall apart without them and we'll be plunged into a 1000 years of Chinese communist rule without them. Obviously by my wording I wouldn't buy such an argument, but it is the kind of third order argument that can be made: that something is worse in a way peculiar to circumstances prevents something even worse from happening (a sort of evil equilibrium).

A third order consideration that is more likely is the effect of Trump or Biden on corruption. Where I would focus my efforts (if I have the time) in arguing major points in favour of Trump is in the empirical difference of new wars starting (I am of course aware of the point of view that Trump was a disaster precisely because he didn't start new wars and that the wars of Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden are all justified reactions to "bad things" they had nothing to do with starting and everything is now better in all those countries that benefited from liberation, but obviously would argue against that position) along with Trump's impact on corruption: If Trump were to be elected, his primary motivation would be revenge and this could result in purging large sections of corrupt officials while four years would not be enough time to consolidate a new network of corrupt scum. This sort of explosive event could (certainly not guaranteed, but could) lead to a power vacuum in which non-corrupt actors could more easily emerge than in a Biden administration continuing and expanding the grift at all costs.

Sorry, but it’s sheer idiocy. You may not like either choice— neither do I — but let’s try to face reality. The whole “no difference between parties, they’re all corrupt” line is about 20 years out of date. Now it’s primarily used by those who know exactly nothing about either party, or their policies.

The differences are, in fact, stark. It takes effort not to notice. — Mikie

No difference in corruption of both parties turns out to be 100% accurate and the time to get out of the paradigm of "the other side is worse" and back a third party was indeed 20 years ago. For, even substantial voting for a third party is a disciplinary measure on corruption, and had that been done 20 yeas ago (or much, much sooner) then there would in fact be stark differences now between the parties (or even better proportional representation would have become a thing, which easily solves the problem of corruption by simply enabling parties in the same policy space to be no-cost disciplined for their corruption by simply voting for the other party with essentially the same policies).

You get to this point, where you don't like either choice as you just stated, precisely because of buying into the fear mongering of the other side when the rot is only starting and then getting "locked in" as the quality of candidates (and thus legitimate fear) simply gets worse and worse over the decades (in a legal environment that increasingly legalizes and rewards corruption).

Precisely because people focused on this "there is a difference if you squint hard enough!!" 20 years ago ... and 30 years ago ... and 40 years ago ... and 50 years ago ... people weren't focused on the systemic corrupting of the system in which both parties were completely willing and active partners. The consequences of corruption however are far, far worse than most policy differences (exceptions being pretty rare) and, as important, far harder to reverse. In a non-corrupt system most bad policies that gets enacted this election cycle can just be changed in the next (again, exceptions are pretty rare, most policies are reversible); but corruption is not a simple switch, you don't just pass a law and the system switches from being corrupt to being not-corrupt. Corruption seeps into every nook and cranny of the system, becomes self-reinforcing as corrupt networks dominate anti-corrupt networks and therefore expand both in scope and entrenchment and will fight (with very corrupt means) to defend and expand their power (therefor the "friction", to use soulless economic language, faced going backwards is enormous and increases, essentially exponentially); whereas in a non-corrupt system the only friction to changing bad policies is making the case and voting (I am only considering democracies here).

Point being, extremely unusual circumstances are required to reward corruption in your own party. True, disciplining corruption will result in different policy, but if it is indeed bad policy as you believe or then an equally or more corrupt candidate, then that eases the work of returning to power (you'll then have empirical evidence for your beliefs). Rewarding corruption on the other hand is likely to just make a mess of your preferred policies and given this advantage to your opposition.

I can confidently say I would report it, but not on moral grounds (assuming, as I think is warranted, that your/our use of obligation here is a moral term). I want it to stop. That's all. If I didn't want it to stop. my moral outlook wouldn't matter anyway. I can't get further than that. I don't have to do it. I don't think claiming I 'have to' or 'ought' to do it makes any sense. Based on? *insert any possible non-supernatural answer* Okay, thank you. Well, I reject that premise. I can't think of response to this which isn't a reiteration of the *insert..* portion. — AmadeusD

I'm not quite sure you fully appreciate the implications of your position: that a police officer could plant evidence on you to make his job easier, a surgeon could just walk out mid surgery leaving to slowly wake up in excruciating pain and a slow death, anyone could just randomly torture you death for their amusement, and they have done you no moral wrong, they had no duty to do otherwise; of course you may not like any of these things and want them to desist but that would just be your own feelings about the matter which are no better than theirs.

I will make a thread outlining and defending MacIntyre's critique of this sort of emotivist position and we could discuss if further , but if there's some obvious nuance to your position feel free to briefly clarify it.

I just cannot understand how one could think this about the West. *shrug* — AmadeusD

The Western enlightenment project has failed. Again, MacIntyre I think succinctly explains why. And it is no coincidence that he appears in my response here again, as it is basically because of emotivism (do what you feel) that virtues become lost and society falls apart.

I disagree with MacIntyre on a few pedantic points, but that the West has entered a new dark ages he clearly foresaw before I was even born.

I don't now have time to transcribe all I would like, but I'll do so for one passage I think particularly apt for this conversation:

The Supreme Court in Bakke, as on occasion in other cases, played the role of a peacemaker or truce-keeping body by negotiating its way through an impasse of conflict, not by invoking our shared moral first principles. For our society as a whole has none.

What this brings out is that modern politics cannot be a matter of genuine moral consensus. And it is not. Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means, and Bakke was an engagement whose antecedents were at Gettysburg and Shiloh. The truth on this matter was set out by Adam Ferguson: 'We are not to expect that the laws of any country are to be framed as so many lessons of morality .... Laws, whether civil or political, are expedients of policy to adjust the pretensions of parties, and to secure the peace of society. The expedient is accommodated to special circumstances ...' (Principles of Moral and Political Science ii, 144). The nature of any society therefore is not to be deciphered from its laws alone, but from those understood as an index of its conflicts. What our laws show is the extent and degree to which conflict has to be suppressed.

Yet if this is so, another virtue too has been displaced. Patriotism cannot be what is was because we lack in the fullest a sense of patria. The point that I am making must not be confused with the commonplace liberal rejection of patriotism. Liberals have often—not always—taken a negative or even hostile attitude to patriotism, partly because their allegiance is to values which they take to be universal and not local and particular, and partly because of a well-justified suspicion that in the modern world patriotism is often a facade behind which chauvinism and imperialism are fostered. But my present point is not that patriotism is good or bad as a sentiment, but that the practice of patriotism as a virtue is in advanced societies no longer possible in the way that it once was. In any society where government does not express or represent the moral community of the citizens, but is instead a set of institutional arrangements for imposing a bureaucratized unity on a society which lacks genuine moral consensus, the nature of political obligation becomes systematically unclear. Patriotism is or was a virtue founded on attachment primarily to a political and moral community and only secondarily to the government of that community; but it is characteristically exercised in discharging responsibility to and in such a government. Where however the relationship of government to the moral community is put in question both by the changed nature of government and the lack of moral consensus in the society, it becomes difficult any longer to have any clear, simple and teachable conception of patriotism. Loyalty to my country, to my community—which remains unalterably a central virtue—becomes detached from obedience to the government which happens to rule me. — After Virtue, MacIntyre

Which doesn't contain or summarize all of MacIntyre's criticism of Western society, just particularly topical.

More fundamentally, I do get that Western society allows you to do what you feel like most of the time, even enjoying the pleasure of a sort of general Western enthusiasm or even patriotic warm glow of a sort all while feeling bound by no duties towards it.

When I have more time I shall make a thread dedicated to the topic, but I hope it seems at least evoked from the above passage that a society in which there are no virtues or duties genuinely felt by the majority of the citizenry, is a society that a society that is not going to be able to perpetuate itself (without severe crisis in which duties and virtues sufficient for the maintenance of the institutions of society and the natural habitat reemerge).

For now, it is to me truly remarkable that people manage to pedestalize the West for making relatively few people "feel good" for a relatively short period of time while destroying entire ecosystems and species, not to mention both the foundation within and continuing practice of extractive colonialism.

Given I think there isn't a duty, take this with a grain of salt - I think you're making a huge mistake.
The political sideshow, is a really bright shiny sideshow. It simply does not represent most people. — AmadeusD

That's why I mentioned the larger majority of people of whom "no one cares, seeing no duty to even try to understand any topic of importance", so we definitely agree that most people don't pay much attention to politics and have checked out from any political cause.

Where we differ is that you seem to feel this is laudable, perhaps even wise, whereas I characterized it as "most damning" of all (as in worse than the people at least engaged on one side or another).

Again, I can completely empathize that as long as the institutions of society are taken for granted, then as soon as politics "sours" it is far more pleasant to simply ignore politics altogether. However, if enough people paying attention and acting in good faith is required for the maintenance of those institutions (not to mention the natural world) and the consequences of their destruction (and the natural world) is quite enormous and unpleasant, I hope it's clear that from this point of view ignoring politics altogether is a form of collective suicide as deranged as any cult (of course excusing who ignore politics for legitimate reasons, such as being wage slaves pushed to the extreme they genuinely have not a moment or calorie to spare on considering the institutions that put them there).

Regarding the balance of your post, firstly, thank you for illustrating a number of those ideas from MacIntyre. Interesting. Partially, i dismiss some of the heat in those passages due to the above (politics=/real life in some sense) but moreover, I don't think this is a bad thing. — AmadeusD

Glad my contribution is appreciated.

However, what you are responding to is but the briefest summary of the problem MacIntyre is addressing, basically his starting point.

MacIntyre also doesn't require virtues to be based on religious sentiment, just that obviously it was for thousands of years. Of course it's a debatable point as such, but MacIntyre's account of the virtues is not religious but a tradition starting historically in heroic society (i.e. those kinds of society's that existed at the start of written history). MacIntyre is explicitly Aristotelian.

Now, what is a virtue and vice, and whether an individual should be virtuous or not, is one debate, but what should be clear is that a society devoid of all duties and virtues cannot possibly last.

For example, let's say there's an invasion and you're feeling is that best someone deal with that, well that's going to require soldiers who happen to feel bound to their duties as soldiers as well as sufficient discipline, fortitude, craftiness, bravery and self sacrifice necessary to win any battles. If no one in society felt any such duty nor possessed the prerequisite virtues then no matter how many people feel it would be preferable that someone deal with the problem of the invasion, it won't be dealt with.

Point being, even if you don't personally feel bound by any duties, and even view the great achievement of Western society as creating the condition for people so disposed to lazily go about their day contributing nothing to the general welfare, certainly you can recognize that maintaining such conditions requires honest good faith people performing various duties with sufficient virtues to be successful at them, and once there are too few of these people to hold in check the bad-faith and dishonest people with virtues only sufficient enough to execute on their vices, society will collapse in relatively short order.

They view Russia through a lens of unending cynicism (and I would argue that is reasonably appropriate), but fail to realise America functions in exactly the same way. — Tzeentch

Well, there is one important difference in that the US is actually participating in a real genuine genocide right now, whereas it's only imagined that Putin is Hitler and Russia is carrying out a genocide.

So, the equivalence only goes so far.

There isn't one. — AmadeusD

We definitely agree on this point.

Once the system is well and truly rotten, the ground is ripe for populism. It is corruption that is the catalyst for populism. So while populism in ways is a problematic phenomenon, it is a reaction to a problematic status quo. This insight is what almost always lacks in discussions about how bad populism is. — Tzeentch

To add to this excellent point, the classes of people who benefit from a system very rarely see any problems. When you benefit, systemic corruption is just "the way things are done".

When the intellectual classes benefit (professors, scientists, established media avatars, and so on) a populist anti-corruption movement is not inherently anti-intellectual but is far more likely to be so.

To contrast, the reformation was sparked by similar outrage against corruption of the ruling class, in particular the church but also feudalism in general, but was pro-intellectual and lead by intellectuals and sharp criticism against both the church and feudalism. Which can be taken as simply a example that populism isn't always anti-intellectual, or then as an exception that proves the rule in that there emerged new intellectual classes (created by the printing press) who were simply average citizens that learned how to read and did not particularly benefit from the feudal system. That it was illegal to teach slaves in the US how to read is another indication people understood this latent danger of general literacy and the American Revolution is another example pro-intellectual populism for that matter.

The history of the ruling class since this pro-intellectual populist time I would argue is figuring out how to teach people how to read ... but also teach them to be uncritical docile consumers at the same time.

Putin will be forced to use tactic nuclear bombs, now. European populists and men-of-honor save Europe with your indisputable all-knowing wisdom! — neomac

You still don't get it.

As Ukraine loses the capacity to legitimately threaten Russia, NATO can therefore augment whatever doesn't change the outcome.

Once artillery, IFV's and tanks would no longer risk an actual Ukrainian breakthrough and routing the Russian in a significant way, cutting the land bridge for example, then, ok, sure, have some artillery, have some IFV's, go nuts in these tanks.

Why is Steadfast Defender, the largest NATO military exercise since WWII, happening now rather than last year ... or the year before that ... when it would have actually been a legitimate threat of intervention as well as legitimate threat of moving even more more equipment and weapons into Ukraine? A threat that would have genuinely applied a lot of pressure on the Russians.

Because Russia is no longer under pressure in Ukraine and so this additional NATO pressure is no longer all that meaningful.

Again with your piece of pro-Russian propaganda? — neomac

You're responding to a simple statement of fact.

So obviously the Kremlin believed it was their business, and whether you agree with that or not, if you do not take warnings like these seriously, you're a fool, or you're the United States preparing to sacrifice a pawn. — Tzeentch

Is just a fact.

Ukraine couldn't join NATO because Russia had ENOUGH Western/NATO complacent parties and issues (corruption, border issues, far-right movements) to prevent that from happening. So much so that Ukraine didn't join NATO since the collapse of Soviet Union until now.
Besides the reasons to keep NATO alive and NATO military capacity were declining.
And Ukraine was neutral until Russia annexed Crimea (https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-parliament-abandons-neutrality/26758725.html) as much as Finland did, pushed by Russian aggression of Ukraine. — neomac

Is just repeating exactly as @Tzeentch just stated but just in the form of complaining about how NATO didn't let Ukraine in.

Russia gave clear warnings, Ukraine ignored those warning and got invaded.

The point @Tzeentch is making is that it's foolish to ignore those warnings whether you believe Russia is justified or not.

For example, if you pull a gun on me and warn me you'll shoot me if I take another step, I'd be a fool to ignore that warning whether I feel you'd be justified in shooting me or not. At the end of the day I don't want to be shot and I need to navigate the real world and not the world as I wish it was. I may wish you wouldn't shoot me despite your warning or then wish that someone would jump in front of me to take the bullet and so I don't suffer the consequences of my own actions, but if that's not what reality is like then I'm a fool to make decisions based on delusional wishes.

That the US would drop Ukraine like a hot potato the moment the war no longer serves US interests was as obvious at the start of the war as it is now.

You can complain about "complacency" all you want, but unless it's a surprise betrayal, which is not in this case, then that's not a basis for decision making.

People should do A, B, and C and therefore I will do D based on the assumption they will do what they should, is only valid if there's reason to believe people will actually do that.

The Ukrainians see the US abandon their "close allies" and "deal friends" in Afghanistan, watch Afghanis literally fall off the last airplanes, and then tell themselves: hmmm, I want me some of that.

Making decisions based on reality and not wishes or assuming what other people "should do" when they have no track record of dong it, is a principle of decision making so basic it even appears in Disney movies:

The only rules that really matter are these: what a man can do and what a man can't do. For instance, you can accept that your father was a pirate and a good man or you can't. But pirate is in your blood, boy, so you'll have to square with that some day. And me, for example, I can let you drown, but I can't bring this ship into Tortuga all by me onesies, savvy? So, can you sail under the command of a pirate, or can you not? — Captain Jack Sparrow

Which I've quoted before but clearly the lesson remains lost, but your philosophical compass should definitely point directly at this paragraph to see you through these conceptually rough seas.

Im not sure I agree that we have any duty at all. But that is a much larger topic. — AmadeusD

Certainly could be good to discuss that in another topic. Nevertheless, you'd really hold the position that there is no duty, or then you are uncertain about it, to report evidence of child sexual abuse that you encounter?

There's of course a difference between refuting duties one does not see do any good or then outweighed by other considerations or then one would perform the duty if there was reasonable incentive and disincentive binding everyone to do likewise; there's a difference between these positions and refuting all duties altogether. Usually when duties are discussed we're talking about things that are debatable on these various grounds, but the position of no duties at all is quite extreme: there'd be no duty of any kind to children under any circumstances such as the example above, no duty to stop the Nazis carrying out a genocide, no duty to refrain from serial murder and rape for that matter, and so on for all the most heinous acts that we may list and agree upon.

So, agreed we could continue on this topic on another thread, but I am curious if your position really is doubting all duties of any kind.

In this specific discussion, I think it's fairly easy to loo at the West and say it's succeeding. On what grounds could it be 'collapsing'? — AmadeusD

I do not think the West is succeeding, so again perhaps a discussion for another conversation, but to summarize my view I do not view an unsustainable system as successful. Trading short term performance for long term survival is not a successful strategy, but entirely illusory.

For example, if you take methamphetamines to outperform your peers at work, it may appear you are very successful in the short term by working nearly 24/7, but as soon as the drug takes its toll and let's say you don't quit but just keep increasing the meth dose to keep performing until an overdose resulting in death or permanent disability, no one would consider this a "success"; no one would make a speech at your wake explaining that you were extremely successful and exemplary due to performing at a high level for a short period of time and everyone should do likewise.

The West, in creating and leading industrial civilizaton, is likewise unsuccessful, trading short term performance for long term viability.

Again, a discussion for another thread, but where it relates to Trump (and equally Biden for that matter) is in representing exactly why the West is unable to solve our long term problems; coherence doesn't matter and partisans are irreconcilable and political discourse is simply a short term power struggle and mostly, and most damning, no one cares, seeing no duty to even try to understand any topic of importance, much less do anything about it.

I'll try to transcribe some key points from "After Virtue" to illuminate this point of view and what the problem is, but the title itself may give some impression of the core thesis.

Too many ideas? — AmadeusD

The problem is not too many ideas but rather an inability to convert good ideas to good policy.

To give one of the most significant examples, in the 1960s to the 1980s it was not in dispute the "polluter pays" principle. Even Milton Friedman taking the pretty extreme "greed is good" position, agreed that the polluter should pay, that if a power station over here is dirtying your shirt over there then the power station should pay to clean your shirt.

There was a general agreement in principle of how society should respond to facts. If a given pollution is factual then certainly the polluter should pay for the clean up. And it's even easy to see why this principle was not even controversial as obviously you can't just dump trash on your neighbours property and have them pay to clean it up (regardless if it was an accident or on purpose or a side-effect of doing some legitimate thing like pruning your tree): you'll need to pay to clean up your trash. Simple and obvious and a widely agreed principle in which social policy can be implemented and updated.

The dispute at that time was on the facts. All while agreeing the polluter should of course pay, Friedman simply didn't agree that things like power stations produced pollution that did any harm: smog was. a natural phenomenon that even the native Americans talked about.

Likewise, even more generally, 50 years ago there was general agreement that we of course due have a duty to care for the earth, and therefore the disagreements on what to do were factual: how best to care for the earth?

The breakdown of these agreements in principle result in society unable to resolve problems and implement long term coherent policy.

The proximate cause of this erosion of "bare minimum social cohesion" is lobbies that go to work leveraging money to prop up a position that is simply intellectually lost. No one today repeats Friedman's theory that smog is a natural phenomenon that simply has nothing to do with coal power generation, but the fossil lobby can just replace one terrible unfounded theory with 3 new ones.

However, the ultimate cause of the situation, what lobbies are able to exploit, is the loss of generally agreed virtues that were previously supported by religion.

And Trump is a pretty good example of this theory playing out, as in the before times where generally agreed virtues were important to society there would be simply no way a person like Trump could compete in the political sphere, but "After Virtue" it is entirely feasible as there is no longer any expectation for anyone to be virtuous; for example if you pay a porn star for sex and then pay for her silence with campaign money ... well, why wouldn't you pay a porn star for sex and then pay for her silence with campaign money? We all want sex don't we? We all want to coverup our indiscretions don't we? The empathy of Western society today, at the end of the day, is with Trump being "a boss" and using money to satisfy his desires. Trump is the penultimate consumer: willing and able to consume even the immaterial political prestige that is the foundation of civil society.

I'm not sure how this relates. My point is that this Forum is not a good indicator of the real world. — AmadeusD

That seemed to me your point: that the forum is populated by weirdos and therefore that undermine my project, either due to a lack of reach or then engaging with weirdos is not representative, and so missing the mark of relevancy due to either or both.

My retort to that is that who knows what relevance the forum in itself has to global society, who visits and where those visitors then go and what they do and butterfly effect and all that. Perhaps it's irrelevant in any direct impact on society and policy makers, perhaps not. And my second point being that the project is anyways intended to have a second phase of writing a book or blog more accessible to the general public in anywise.

More power to you. That's a good project! — AmadeusD

Then we anyways agree on this second point, and I appreciate the moral support.

Im unsure why this is nested in the rest of hte comment. I agree, but didn't cover anything around this in my reply earlier. — AmadeusD

This wasn't in retort to you, just emphasizing what I presume is common ground.

I also am not claiming my project will have some profound effect on society. It's entirely possible our civilization is completely doomed and talking at this point in history will have little effect on outcomes. Again, I think we'd agree that to what extent that's likely, and regardless of whether we agree at all on how likely it is, that it is anyways our duty to try to solve our collective problems best we can.

"After Virtue" by Alasdair MacIntyre is probably the best analysis that I've encountered of the discursive collapse of Western society, and his conclusion is basically the problem is unsolvable. He makes a compelling case but I suppose we should try to solve it anyways; give it a go, at least verify he is in fact correct.

Yeah, but this is a weirdo forum for weirdos. — AmadeusD

Well, whenever someone denigrates the forum, I am always skeptical of these claims of irrelevancy. Maybe it is, maybe it's not. You're here, I'm here, a bunch of other clever people are here, we can't know who's lurking in the shadows. Honest clever people do seek out analysis that can withstand scrutiny from opposing view points, and I always ask where there is a better forum of such debate and I never get an answer. Of course you have to be peculiar to actually participate in the debate, but maybe less peculiar and more important people, the non-weirdos as you say, come and watch and learn something. Maybe not, who knows.

However, my project isn't simply to engage with bad faith debaters here but to build up examples of the method of dealing with bad faith debaters in the context of political discourse.

I suppose the next step is to write a book or something and try to make the knowledge more accessible. For now, the forum permits creating material for the project in a reasonable amount of time, due to the stewardship of the moderators. And why does the moderators work make these sorts of discussion feasible to begin with? Because they get rid of bad faith actors (without purging their good faith political opponents and so create an echo chamber) that would simply destroy the space of discussion as their next bad faith tactic as a retort to being demonstrated to be and faith. So, the mere example of there being entirely opposed views "allowed to exist" here on the forum and the world doesn't end and actual debate between people who disagree can then take place, is as valuable a lesson as what approach to bad faith tactics are effective within the discursive battle field.

↪boethius I wouldn't try to tease this one out. Not necessarily a comment about 180, but these types of political discussions are basically snowballs. No one keeps track of their claims, everyone just ends up yelling at each other and nothing is achieved. — AmadeusD

I'm keeping track.

Not out of personal or philosophical interest, but moral and civic duty.

And not because anything said on this forum is of any monumental political consequence, but rather to develop strategies for dealing with bad faith debate.

We are, in my view, repeating the circumstances of the original development of Western philosophy arising out of, and in opposition to, sophistry.

Precisely due to democratization of the public sphere in Greek democratic traditions (though none of them are actually democratic in a modern definition, more just large aristocracies, still far more democratic than top down rule).

This democratization of the public sphere in the Greek context was due to the Agora where all citizens could talk. For us cause of this is the internet. In between similar accrued with the printing press and pamphleteering.

Whenever the public sphere is democratized there is first dominance of bad faith tactics because people haven't learned yet to deal with them. In the greek context philosophy emerges; anyone can say anything but there are methods to separate truth from falsehood, better than no method. In the renaissance journalism emerges; anyone can write anything about what's happening anywhere, so we need people and institutions that build up a reputation to have an a priori set of probable facts (not all true, but at least a starting point to apply the reasoning methods bequeathed to us).

Today, anyone can copy and paste what the reputable journalistic institutions write, destroying their business model and undermining the entire system of public discourse built up since the invention of the printing press. Likewise, anyone can make an audio / visual emotional appeal promoting anything directly to the entire public.

This is a short summary of the history (there's also radio and television), but the point is that we're in a discursive environment where bad faith arguments dominate, exactly as you say everything political is just a snow ball fight.

In the previous philosophy forum, in the "before times" of the internet where television talking heads were still referring to everything on the internet as "blogs" and noting what was on "blogs" simply to post of it's irrelevant whatever it is, I focused on philosophical topics. This was literally 20 years ago and I was in my formative years, so genuinely didn't know if my beliefs held up to scrutiny (and of course they didn't and required a lot of reformulation). I then went off to accomplish my purpose and unfortunately the forum was disappeared from the internet.

This new forum emerged, public discourse degraded due to the above processes, and I just so happened to have gained considerable amount of experience debating with bad faith actors as corporate board director and oft times CEO. People will come up with the craziest shit when they want to under-deliver, underserved money or intellectual property, and managing corporations involves dealing with a considerable amount of bad faith.

Discerning good from bad faith, and how to deal with each, I would go so far as to say nearly entirely summarizes what management is about. Ipsofacto, seemed an additional dutiful purpose to join this forum to further develop and demonstrate methods of debating bad faith actors.

For the strategies appropriate to good faith and bad are not the same. The first thing a bad faith actor will do is take advantage of your ill adapted good faith habits. For example, if you're only accustomed to good faith debate (with friends and family and class mates and colleagues and so on) which is most of the time in real life, you'll likely have all sorts of bad habits when it comes to dealing with bad faith actors. For example, in good faith debate you assume your opponent seeks the truth as much as yourself, has at face value as credible premises as your own, and is speaking what they genuinely believe to be true. In short, in a good faith debate you pay a significant amount of respect to your interlocutor. Once you get into a management position of any significance, you immediately realize that a bad faith actor will take advantage of all of these good faith debate habits to harm you and people you're responsible as well as the entire world. It is not an intellectual debate, it is a conflict in which winning is important.

How do you win against a bad faith actor (often highly paid lawyers in a corporate context)?

First rule: respect is earned. Respect is earned by being good faith. If someone's good faith with me, I'll be good faith with them. If someone's bad faith with me, I will not be bad faith with them but I won't give them the benefits I extend to those of good faith either. Rather, I will, entirely legally and metaphorically, get my thumbs into their eyes and squeeze until they desist from attacking me, and the interests I represent, any further. I won't give them any ground whatsoever (i.e. I'll make them do the work of proving even those things that I know to happen to be actually true), I won't give them any respect (i.e. I won't assume their positions are on face value as credible as my own and continuously call out their bad intentions and deceptive practices), and above all I will make them understand I will never stop (i.e. they can't tire me out and I'll go to what would be, for many, irrational lengths in any quarrel: time, effort, pain, suffering, is of no consequence compared to satisfaction).

In short, if you want to deal with the bad faith actors of the world you must be, to them, a monster from the deep.

Transposing these methods to political public debate is my project here. We are in a time where everyone must become CEO's, unless we are to be ruled by our inferiors.

? ? ?

So if Russia you accept that Russia has this propensity to expand, how then view NATO enlargement is this US plot against Russia. More of a ploy of the neighboring countries to get under NATO security umbrella before they have a conflict with Russia. — ssu

Expanding your empire to get closer to a rival empire is exactly a plot against that other empire.

Now I get it, you view US empire as good and Russian empire as bad. Therefore, the US is justified in moving its military hardware and system closer to Russia. My view is more complicated than this dichotomy.

However, even if I grant this premise that the US is good and Russia bad, the problem is we don't let Ukraine into NATO. We (the US, NATO, EU, the West generally speaking) do not actually go and fight for these values you are talking about.

The policy of simply supplying Ukraine with arms fuels a disastrous war for Ukraine and loss of more territory.

There are other policy option that cohere with caring about Ukraine ... but just not enough to go and fight to defend Ukraine. Those policy options are diplomatic and not a battlefield solution.

Cheering Ukraine on to fight and supplying weapons and just "#believingUkraine" will miraculously win, causes enormous amount of death of Ukrainians, loss of population as refugees (in particular young mothers and children) and is a really bad and predictable outcome of the policy of just propping up Ukraine just enough to tread water for a while against the Russians.

F16's haven't even arrived yet, in a situation where if we were actually serious of giving Ukraine "whatever it takes", F16's and all sorts of missiles would have been supplied day 1. To say nothing of tanks and artillery and longer range missiles and so on.

Why?

Because the policy is not to help Ukraine but to damage Russia, which there is little evidence that even that is being achieved.

But if it was, it would (in my view) be completely immoral and evil to sacrifice so many Ukrainians to damage the Russians in a war that has a terrible outcome for Ukraine.

If we're not even damaging Russia but actually making it stronger, then the police is immoral, evil and retarded.

Well I've studied history in my own country and I think I know the history, so please say just to whom you refer this idea. — ssu

I am referring to "A Frozen Hell" by William Trotter and also "Upheaval" by Jared Diamond.

There's really a lot of material in these two books I think both useful for the discussion as well as making the case Ukraine is in no way following the Finnish model.

To take just a few choice quotes from Upheaval, which is a book dedicated to the theme of how nations manage crisis:

Finland illustrates flexibility born from necessity (factor #10). In response to Soviet fears and sensitivities, Finland did things unthinkable in any other democracy: it put on trial and imprisoned its own war time leaders according to a retroactive law; its parliament adopted an emergency decree to postpone a scheduled presidential election; a leading candidate was induced to withdraw his candidacy; and its press self censored statements likely to offend the Soviet Union. Other democracies would consider those actions disgraceful. In Finland those actions instead reflected flexibility: sacrificing sacred democratic principles to the extent required to retain political independence, the principle held most sacred. Quoting again from Zaloga's biography of Mannerheim, Finns excelled at negotiating "the least awful of several bad options". — Upheaval, Jared Diamond

Now, Ukraine has also postponed Presidential elections, but in the our Finnish case it was to appease the Soviet Union, not to create a wartime de facto dictatorship to ensure continued fighting without any potential political debate or change of leadership.

Both books emphasize realism, achievable goals and compromise. Before and during the war and after the war, it's the Finns trying to negotiate and find a compromise.

The Ukraine strategy of just making public ultimatums that Russia would obviously never accept and insisting on unrealistic military goals as a sort of purity test, is pretty much the opposite strategy.

The only thing that is a strict parallel between the Winter War and this war in Ukraine, is the West cynically making false promises to try to keep the war going for their own purposes.

I don't quite have time to transcribe all that I want, but I'll take time now for the citation concerning Finland's diplomatic efforts, in a chapter literally called "The Dance of the Diplomats: Round One"

Since the day he had assumed power, Finnish Foreign Minister Väinö Tanner had attempted to reopen talks with Moscow by every means he could think of. He had made personal appeals, he had sent secret emissaries to the Baltic states, he had tried to make contact through the offices of a number of sympathetic neutral nations. Moscow's only response had been a chilly silence. — Frozen Hell, William Trotter

I.e. Finland had a constant diplomatic effort as I claimed, talking to the Soviet Union, and it was Moscow, not Finland, refusing to negotiate only until compelled by facts on the ground (Moscow had created and recognized a puppet state in exile, so didn't even recognize the actual Finnish government as legitimate insofar as the belief was the war would be easy to win).

The military effort served this diplomatic strategy of achieving a peace through negotiations, offering severe concessions, including putting political wartime leaders on trial for an "illegal war" with the Soviet Union, to achieve peace.

Stop right here.

There was an attempt to make peace talks. I don't recall a written peace offer on the table from Putin. Perhaps unconditional surrender is for you a "peace offer".

Besides, this is irrelevant as Russia has formally annexed more territories (partly one that it doesn't even fully control) and hence this is quite meaningless.

I can also continue saying "If Putin had only had large exercises on the border and never attacked Ukraine!". Yeah, but that didn't happen, he did invade. — ssu

We were discussing a few weeks ago this offer and Zelensky's rejection of it (which the Western media don't even view as controversial) when the head of the Ukrainian negotiation team comes out and tells us the main point was Ukraine giving up seeking NATO membership, accepting neutralisy, everything else just cosmetic, and that they rejected the offer because "the Russians can't be trusted".

However, let's put aside what the Russians offered, what's the Ukrainians offer?

What peace deal are the Ukrainians fighting in a realistic strategy to compel the Russians to accept?

Russians putting a clearly reasonable offer on the table is literally doing the Ukrainians diplomatic work for them. The Ukrainians should have reasonable offers at every stage of the conflict.

Again, in sharp contrast to we Finns do in WWII:

Thus in 1944 as in 1941, Finnish resistance achieved the realistic goal expressed by my Finnish friend: not of defeating the Soviet Union, but of making further Soviet victories prohibitively costly, slow and painful. As a result, Finland became the sole continental European country fighting in World War Two to avoid enemy occupation. — Upheaval, Jared Diamond

The Ukrainians could have done what we Finns did: defend in a way that optimizes for Russian costs and losses, pressuring Russia into accepting a peace deal (that is not anywhere close to what we Finns would have desired: retaining access to the Arctic sea, retaining Korelia, not prosecuting literal heroes of the war, not paying reparations, not accepting defeat).

The Ukrainians don't do this, but rather ignore all the lessons of WWII.

It's not just our Finnish gumption (aka. sisu) that allows us to remain independent whereas Poland, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, France, Austria, Czechoslovak, Albania, Free City of Danzig, Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Greece, Yugoslavia, Yugoslavia, Slovak Republic, Ukraine and Germany didn't remain independent but were conquered by either the Nazis or the Soviets, or one and then the other.

There were geographic and geopolitical elements that allowed Finland, along with a "can do attitude" to resist occupation of the Soviet Union.

First, Finland is not in a strategically critical location between any of the major powers fighting in WWII. You do not need to go through Finland for any of the major powers to attack each other. You can, it could be useful, that's why Stalin demanded defensive concessions and then attacked Finland, but it's not critical. Finland is far from being Belgium, a flat plain in between Germany and France.

Second, Finland was at no point the Soviet Union's main concern. The main concern of the Soviet Union in World War 2 was Nazi Germany. Therefore, if attacking Finland actually reduces Soviet security vis-a-vis Nazi Germany rather than increases it, the rational option is to cease attacking Finland and accept a peace deal.

Third, Finland has some natural defensive advantages in being mostly dense forest with the only flat plain being a choke point south of lake Ladoga. Dense forest being famously easier to defend than flat plains, and choke points being famously easier for a smaller force to hold off a larger force a la Thermopylae. Finally, just as the Germans encountered Russian winter in Russia, the Russians encountered Finnish winter in Finland. Every level of winter requires an additional set of skills and equipment.

It is not just a case of heroism and "making a stand" and all the above listed countries that didn't fight to the death just "didn't want it enough". The countries that surrendered in WWII did so because they were compelled to and further fighting was not realistically in the interest of their people.

Finland had a realistic strategy leveraging Finns willingness to fight (a death toll that would be proportionally comparable to 9 000 000 Americans dying in a war today, more American deaths than all American wars combined), geography as well as the Soviets having bigger fish to be worried about: first the Germans and then the Americans. Finland could leverage all these elements (along with things like territory and money and trade relations) to make peace the rational choice for the Soviet Union.

Ukraine has done nothing remotely similar except the willingness to fight and take extreme losses.

Here's the "real world", kid –

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/890076

– a historically-informed US voter's perspective on the pending US presidential election of 2024. — 180 Proof

The conversation is:

1. You claim Trump is losing support
2. I go check your claim against the polls
3. Your claim doesn't check out, so you move the goal posts to polling doesn't matter but Trump is still losing support because a large, but still minor, amount of Republicans didn't back Trump in the primaries.
4. I point out you're obviously living in a liberal media bubble where claims.
5. You then deny being in anyway a liberal, but refuse to provide a definition of liberal of which you are not, all while trying to accuse me of being an American conservative (which I'm happy to not only deny the charge but actually explain what I am instead of being an American conservative).
6. Instead of learning something from being totally wrong, you then just move your ad hominem to me being a spectator and that somehow disqualifies my participating on this forum (mostly run and maintained by Europeans, from what I gather); not clear why being not-American is disqualifying, just does for some reasons (aka. random walls you erect to maintain your echo chamber, instead of going out and building a real wall that matters to protect America!! Shame on you.).
7. I point out that your new claims have nothing to do with your first claim; if polls don't matter much until 1-2 months before the election, ok, but what's your evidence that primary votes do matter? Considering Trump won in 2016 with an important faction of Republican #Nevertrumpers. To which your evidence to explain this hodgepodge of inconsistent claims is random YouTubers that represent said liberal media bubble.

So ok, I get it, you want to live in your self-identified not-liberal echo chamber where Trump has no chance of winning and you feel the need to bring your echo chamber into this forum for further validation.

But feel free to correct me where I'm wrong.

Reiterating (again), Russian officials claim that Kyiv is a Nazi regime, and Ukraine is to be deNazified and demilitarized. That's one pillar of their justification, and it's nonsense lapped up by the gullible and susceptible to Kremlin story-telling. — jorndoe

Simply because something is used in propaganda does not mean there's no truth to it. The best propaganda is generally based on true facts and exaggerated for effect.

For example, turns out Israel exaggerated what happened on October 7th, so based on your logic we could conclude that October 7th itself is nonsense, no attack took place at all, because Israel can't actually back up it's most extreme claims.

Obviously your rebuttal to that would be that we know October 7th happened as there's a bunch of video evidence of it.

Well, the Nazis in Ukraine have just as much video evidence.

Which I post every time the Ukraine partisan echo-chamber seeps in here and the issue is just denied with pats on the back to everyone who denies in.

Then, same thing every time, when I post a selection of Western journalist reports of the Nazis in Ukraine, there's zero contending with the evidence, but the goal posts move to there's not "enough" Nazis (without ever defining what "enough" Nazis would be), or then Russia has Nazis too, or then pointing to Russian statements that exaggerate how many Nazis there are, and so on.

And the Nazis are important to understand the war. Without the Nazis there may not be any war at all. Zelensky was elected promising to go to Moscow on his knees and beg Putin for peace, and it may very well be that the Nazis and other "extreme nationalists" frustrated that plan.

Hum...
Paradoxically—at least for purveyors of Kremlin propaganda, which holds that Ukrainians have been oppressing ethnic Russians—most Azov members are in fact Russian speakers and disproportionally hail from the Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine — neomac

It's not really paradoxical that there's Russian speakers in Azov considering the Azov sea borders the Donbas and Russian speaking region, although you'd still need actual evidence to backup this claim. Do you have a list of Azov members and where they come from?

Probably a better indication of where support for these groups draws from is the Svoboda's election results.

Here's a map for 2019:



There is much more support for the "Ultra right" in the West of Ukraine than the East, but there's a bit of support there too.

The West can’t reasonably troubleshoot everything the Russian can use as a pretext. They do not lack creativity and can literally spin anything in their media (as we have seen, the Isis-K terrorist attack is readily associated to Ukraine, and do you remember the "bioweapons labs" in Ukraine?), while the West can’t do much about it no matter what it does (https://thehill.com/policy/defense/380483-congress-bans-arms-to-controversial-ukrainian-militia-linked-to-neo-nazis/). — neomac

Right, right, just no way to "troubleshoot" a whole bunch of Nazis in Ukraine.

What you mean to say is that the West can't do anything about the Nazis and things like bioweapons labs, insofar as the West wants to provoke a war with Russia then you need to back the most radical elements of society.

If you don't want the war, then it's quite easy to make support contingent on concrete reductions of Nazis, and if Ukraine doesn't achieve that, well then no support, no weapons, no hundreds of billions of dollars if you get attacked.

You're presuming the West owes Ukraine something come-what-may and so if Weapons find there way to Nazis despite trying to make that "illegal" then there's nothing that can be done, we all just have to throw our hands in the air and just accept the situation. That's not the case, we could send no weapons at all. The West doesn't owe Ukraine any weapons at all.

Checked the polls again just now.

YouGov has Trump leading by 1.

HarisX has Trump +2 in one poll and even in another.

Leger conducted two polls both with Trump +4.

Beacon Research/Shaw & Company Research has Trump +6, +5 and +5 in three polls.

Quinnipiac University has Trump +1 in one poll and Biden +3 in another concurrent poll.

The numbers could be different, could be exactly as you say that Trump is losing support and I'd go check and see the polls confirm what you say and come back and be all like "yep, Trump is tanking".

However, what the polls actually say, what multiple expert groups in trying to gauge public opinion conclude based on data, is that Trump is gaining support.

I understand you don't like it, but welcome to the real world.

On the contrary, they show what Russian foreign policy in it's near abroad is like. And shows the reason why the Eastern European countries especially the Baltic countries wanted to join NATO and were quite correct in joining NATO. — ssu

The problem with Ukraine in NATO is that Ukraine has not been let into NATO.

If you're point is Russia, being an empire, will seek dominate where it can (where it does being its "sphere of influence") its expand when it can: sure, obviously, but that's exactly my point that given Russia's propensity to expand, playing footsie with Ukraine and supporting the Nazis there is just inviting and providing the pretext Russia would need to sell to its own population and its partners and non-Western countries that's invasion is reasonable (which it has successfully done, and Western hypocrisy is excellent diplomatic leverage outside the West, because no one likes hypocrites).

Now, if you want to say "well maybe Ukraine did have a lot of Nazis, concerning amount anyways, and tolerated and armed those Nazis, and the West did too, and maybe they were waging war against Russian speakers in the Donbas, but still!! Innocent virgin that doesn't deserve to be invaded!!" again, even if that's true, just a damsel in distress (which definitely implies, to me anyways, not so much agency, but maybe you mean that argument in a more woke modern way than how I read it), we've provided excellent propaganda material to Russia that materially helps it execute on its expansionist ambitions, and, more importantly, have no means to deterring Russia from doing so.

Ok, "Russia bad" ... what exactly can we do about that?

A reasonable answer to that question is not "Russia bad!!"

(Before 1991 you did have the Empire intact with the Soviet Union.)

Boethius, nobody is contradicting you here. I think everybody agrees with this. I've stated myself years ago before 2014 that NATO enlargement was the threat number 1. in Russian military doctrine. — ssu

Well I'm contradicting it. It could be true that Putin "lured NATO in" not so close that it's a "real problem" (the Baltics being small and unimportant countries with basically resources) but close enough to provide pretext to take what is practical to take. It's possible. There's just no evidence for it.

US also does all sorts of interference and invasions as a general rule of being an empire, but that doesn't establish they are therefore behind everything, as you've pointed out many times. You need more than just the "character of imperialism" as evidence Putin and other Russian elites had some sort of elaborate plan to always appear reacting to what NATO does, but actually NATO was dancing to their tune all along. It's a far fetched theory with zero evidence (requiring believing things like Nord Stream was built with the secret intention of being bait for the US to blow up, not as a basis for peaceful and mutually beneficial relations), but sure, could be true, in which case what does that establish? Just that Russians are far better strategists and NATO dances to the Russian tune and maybe NATO should stop doing that, as the corollary is that we're still playing into the Russian hand, still dancing that Russian jig on command.

Putin doesn't care about international business and economics. That has been obvious for quite a while. He has made his career from starting wars, actually. I think he is quite happy place with Russia transforming to a war-state. — ssu

He obviously does as business and economics is what funds wars.

Without the diplomatic leverage, such as NATO clearly trying to encroach to one of Russia's most massive and most vulnerable borders, it may not have been diplomatically possible to just randomly invade Ukraine, as other countries wouldn't "get it".

The Finns didn't start negotiations with Russians in the start of the Winter War, only when the military situation was desperate. — ssu

I don't have the time right now to transcribe all the relevant citations, but I'll try to do so in the next few days.

Actual historians very much disagree with your view.

Had Ukraine accepted the peace deal on offer at the start of the war, then there would be a parallel following Finland on the key points: accepting no way to win, accepting loss of territory, based on sober realism that it's the best outcome against a far superior opponent.

What Ukraine does is the complete opposite of the Finnish military and diplomatic strategy, and completely unrealistic.

And you are entitled to your conspicuously uninformed, spectator's opinion, sir/mam. — 180 Proof

Again, you state that Trump is losing support, I go check the polls to inform myself whether this is really true or not, and turns out he's not losing support.

Information that you then dismiss in favour of random pundit hot takes because polls aren't predictive.

... Well are random pundit hot takes based on Republican primary voting more predictive?

Feel free to inform us, to use your language.

As for spectator opinion; we all participate in the American empire, so it's hardly spectating. But even if it was a spectators position, you'd still need to justify why it's less worthy to consider. In more than a few cases spectators can far more easily discern what's going on than participants.

↪boethius :lol: I'm not a even "liberal" (or member of the Democrat>c Party). Pro tip: stop disinforming yourself with FOX Noise (or other MAGA media). — 180 Proof

Please do provide a definition of liberal and explain how you aren't a liberal and aren't in a liberal echo chamber at the moment.

You post that Trump is losing support, I go check the polls (maybe it's true) and get back to you that he's in fact gaining support, and then you respond that polls aren't predictive until within 2 months of the election but continue to insist that Trump is losing support due to random pundit hot takes.

That's called being in a echo chamber of only considering what you want to hear.

As for FOX News and MAGA, I'm not American, I don't live in the US. I live in a country that has free health care, free upper education, sends pregnant women a box of essential baby supplies (while paying maternity leave even if you've never worked). I happen to be a citizen by one of my parents, but I choose to live here because it's about as far democratically left as you can get on the planet, and I want to go even further to the left supporting salary caps, nationalization of any monopoly, UBI to replace the patch work of social security, direct democracy and so on.

Although studious of Marx, I wouldn't call myself a Marxist for the simple fact Marx believed industrial capitalism brought some good things, whereas I view industrial capitalism as a grave error from the start that has brought nothing but industrial wars, loss of humanity, loss of community and loss of nature.

So I'm no ally of Trump or the Maga movement.

However, because of the total corruption of the American elites I do see why Trump is appealing to a lot of Americans (appealing enough to win the presidency once and win the latest primary).

It's just objective fact needed to understand US politics, which as a Canadian, it's a national sport to follow and shake our heads at.

I also honestly don't see how the neocons are better than Trump, and I honestly think Trump is better for the world than Biden and the usual suspects (of a long list of war crimes, including participation in this latest literal genocide).

Although I do not believe the dictum that 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend' holds true in all cases, I do think it's worth entertaining when it comes to Trump. Trump is in a fight with some of the most powerful and evil networks of people the world has seen in arguably over half a century.

I say: let them fight.

I hope most of these trials are postponed till after the election. If Americans want to vote for a climate denying, election denying, neoliberal fraud — then let them. — Mikie

Agreed.

My main problem will be the 4 years lost in climate policy — which we truly don’t have — and the fact that the judiciary will be all but Trumpified for a generation, making it harder to get anything done even when the inevitable backlash hits. — Mikie

Would Biden do anything meaningful on climate?

Bidens' administration seems to just co-create terrible wars.

Not that Trump would do anything, but a second Trump administration I think could (potentially) cause Europe to stop being vassals to the US.

European leaders entertained the idea (at least talked about it) of ceasing to be cowardly vassals during the first Trump administration, but then Biden came along and EU elites ran to prostrate themselves and basically begged for abuse in their gimp suites. That's definitely their comfort zone.

Not that I know how history would go, but I honestly don't see any basis that a Biden administration would likely be better than a Trump administration, at least for the world and global ecosystems. Trump's quest for vengeance (randomly purging various officials and so on) could also cause a collapse of the corrupt networks that dominate the US, without 4 years being enough to consolidate a new network. A network that is already weakened by Wikileaks and various other whistleblowing and key players just aging out and dying.

Trump would also likely deescalate with the Russians and Chinese which could be immensely stabilizing, simply because there's no winning moves in Ukraine or against the Chinese and more conflict overseas is simply unpopular.

Which, despite all Trump's immense flaws and wrongdoing and being totally unfit to be president, he's at least sensitive to public opinion rather than on an ideological quest for world domination. Trump doesn't hesitate to insult the neocons as bizarre fools. The current administration is 100% neocon oriented, and they seem to me as evil as they are delusional. I wouldn't say Trump is evil; more petty, narcissistic, bombastic and plenty of other negative, but not quite evil, qualities.

My feeling is a second Trump presidency would basically kill the neocon bureaucratic hold and dream of world domination and realists would be the only effective players left to pick up the pieces of further imperial decline and chaos domestically. I don't think Trump could actually stage some sort of coup so in four years he'll be gone as you say, and the process would essentially result in a geriatric purge of the current ruling elite. Although the geriatric political elite fully legalized corruption, mobile phones have resulted in such a deep rooted fear of being recorded a lot of younger politicians are less corrupt as a habit while the ability to broadcast creates the habit of simply being open in one's analysis.

That's not a prediction however, just an idea of potential positive consequences of a Trump presidency, to make the point that I don't think it's foregone conclusion that a Biden presidency would be any better. Biden's overall trajectory is more and bigger wars, as that's how the neocons stay relevant.

Too many posters on this thread are looking through glasses - lenses - encrusted with junk. The templates they see that they think are derived from the world are instead artifacts of defective optics. A little lens cleaner might help. The purposes of the Arabs/Palestinians/Hamas are simply based in their beliefs and ideologies. The Israelis/Jews, on the other hand, are and have been literally fighting for their lives. And while this has been the reality of generations/centuries/millennia, 7 Oct. 2023 simply made clear and explicit the bestiality of Arab intentions and practices. As such, until and unless adjudicated, there is no reason to consider anything ante-7 Oct. That is, the animal who brutalized and outraged your daughter before, during, and after murdering her may be just misunderstood, but his actions make that for the while irrelevant: his own statement being that he is no better than an animal, a vicious one. — tim wood

Ah yes, cast off your junk encrusted lenses obscuring your vision! and put on my lenses that are totally opaque to anything that happened after October 7th and also anything before that is inconvenient to my belief Arabs are animal beasts!

How is this language, and the poster who posts it, even tolerated on the forum?

Is that notwithstanding any cognitive decline, he has got a lot done in spite of the best - or worst - efforts of Republicans. And if Republicans had condescended to contribute to government instead of trying to destroy it, likely much more could have been accomplished. It is my guess he has a good and dedicated team and they all work together. Republicans, on the other hand, have no good man or woman - "good Republican" being nearly an oxymoron - nor can they work together, but instead like sharks in a feeding frenzy feed on each other and even themselves. — tim wood

I'm not defending Republicans. Over the last half century they've spearheaded the legalized corruption in the United States based on completely fantastical legal arguments absolutely fatal for the, while starting illegal wars, illegal rendition and torture, blocking health care and free education (the basis of a healthy society), and worst of all creating massive amounts of propaganda to destroy the environment.

That being said, the Democrats are as completely corrupted by the legal corruption and beholden to largely the same special interests as Republicans, with some slight variations. Democrats have since Obama become the war party and corporate profiteering party of all kinds, as it lowers public opposition when "the left party is doing it". There's a long list of laws and policies that democrats would be outraged and in the streets over if the Republicans were doing it, and that's by design.

And for all this brew-ha-ha over Trumps pretty insignificant law breaking (from a national point of view) what did the democrats do about literal war crimes and torture? "We won't be going on a witch hunt" ... but we did "torture some folks". Where was the concern for the law of the democratic party then? Zero concern because they're paid to rape the law, which is far worse for the public good than Trump's sexual assault and "grab em' by the pussy" approach to life.

Now if you don't like Trump and republicans, both old establishment and the MAGA types, the reality is they have a chance to regain power due to democrat corruption. Biden is only in power because he's a linch pin in the wall holding back all the skeletons from just spilling out onto the house floor.

Whether you think Biden's cognitive decline matters or not to his job as president, because he has "competent team" that is making all the decisions, maybe true, but certainly you can recognize it's not a great campaigning slogan: "Vote for Biden! his controlled by his team, trust us!"

It's also highly suspect that a senile and demented leader is irrelevant because of the people under him. He still has the presidential authority and anyone with access to him could get him to sign anything and any sort of strife in his administration will be ultimately decided by presidential authority.

However, much worse, anyone familiar with people dying of old age would be familiar with the denial that goes with it. Old people can be essentially unable to see, unable to remember basic facts, reflexes of a tree, but insist they are completely capable of driving and incensed and angry at any suggestion to the contrary.

Well, Trump got a 10 day extension as well as only needs to post a smaller bond, 175 million dollars from 464 million dollars.

Last few weeks so many legal YouTubers were explaining how Trump's ask to the court of appeal had basis in law whatsoever, never been done etc.

Likely Trump will be able to secure this smaller bond; it is at least claiming he will. Definitely easier than half a billion.

Seems all these legal cases are going to be dragged out until the election, since as long as Trump can post bond then the appeal processes can go on for quite some time.

I think the main thing is that Trump will likely now avoid the embarrassing seizing of his properties. That would have been a near fatal blow, as it would just look "weak" which is not a good look for him as a rich "strong man" type (as far as his base is concerned).

What conclusions were drawn from the evidence in the 2016 election? How much more reliable is the evidence today? — Fooloso4

Conclusions drawn by who?

At the time, I expected Trump to win, but that was just gut feeling based on the idea people would want to see "what happens next" in the Trump debacle show. Fife Thirty Eight gave Trump basically a chance in 3 of winning.

However, I think the main thing to learn from 2016 is simply that the dissatisfaction with the political system in the US is so great that a complete outsider can beat both the Republican and Democrat establishment and media machine.

We also learned that while the establishment had all sorts of "fail safes" to prevent a too left candidate from ever winning, why the democrats have the super delegates, they simply assumed that they couldn't be threatened from the right: that the Republican Party would be the party of big business and other factions on the right could never be viable (libertarians, evangelicals, racists and fascists); therefore leaving open the weakness that a "business person" such as Trump waltz in and take the party away from the "gentleman warmongers".

What do the statistics show about the health of someone Biden's age, who is fit and active, versus someone Trump's age who drives his ft ass around in a golf cart and shuns vegetables in favor of Big Macs? — Fooloso4

I was in a pretty long relationship with a doctor and the main thing I learned about health is that age is the primary killer. Simply getting old is an exponential decay process, and exponentially worse odds of dying every year, and in the 80 year old bracket the odds are really high of dying.

Her experience was also that it was always a surprise who died and who continued to live. For example, whenever she went on vacation in internal medicine she would know some of her older patients would die but it was always a surprise.

The main factor, according to this doctor at least, is simply the bodies ability to recover becomes exhausted; any specific problem doctors can deal with pretty well but there's knock on effects on the other organs that increase with age, and so medical problems accumulate until you have a situation where you can keep one organ functioning but the medicine required will likely destroy what's left of the kidneys, of which the treatment would destroy what's left of the liver.

Bottom line, it's simply a fact that people get old and die. There's a good chance to live to 70, not uncommon to live to 80, over 90 is pretty rare and there's very few above 100 and above 110 is super rare.

So, what is for sure is that Biden's odds of dying due to being older is twice as great as Trump.

Who's healthier or leading a less stressful life I think is speculative. Golfing is pretty good exercise as well as relaxing.

Obviously Trump's legal problems are a big stress, but Biden also has legal problems.

Presumably being President is itself stressful under normal circumstances and there's less time to relax than Trump, though I wouldn't be surprised if Biden doesn't really do much and other people handle everything.

What is clear is Biden's cognitive decline compared to Trump, who (all while bing largely incoherent) mental acuity seems to be the same. Biden loses his train of thought, relives the past such as who's the president of France, and clearly can't handle any question requiring a complex or nuanced answer (such as the whole "XI is a dictator" saga).

And this is not a defence of Trump, just the reality is that Biden with his two pair odds of dying and clearly becoming senile and "time to go to a home time" on national television is the best the Democrats have to offer.

It's a sad state of affairs, but not unusual for a declining empire.

↪boethius :eyes: :roll: :smirk: Okay, whatever. — 180 Proof

Ah yes, the cunning response to evidence being "whatever".

If you just want to stay in your liberal echo-chamber, then why come here to post what you want to believe?

As you say yourself, there's very little way to predict (based on actual evidence) the outcome of the election from where we are at the moment.

Both candidates are incredibly weak, simply pointing to how absurdly bad one candidate is doesn't really advance the analysis for people who want to understand the situation.

Trump has his legal problems ... whereas Biden also has legal problems as well as 2 times more chance of just straight up dying before Trump, and even bigger chance of suffering some serious medical event or terminal decline (even worse than his current mental state). Trump has been found culpable of sexual assault, whereas Biden has literal a genocide on his hands.

It's truly mind boggling, but typical of a declining empire that the political elites become incredibly incompetent and senile, so it's mind bogglingly stupid but not "ahistorical", to use your verbiage.

As for the election, the evidence bases facts are that Trump is not losing support, but gaining support.

The fines he has to pay are a massive inconvenience but won't stop him from being on the ballot and potentially winning. Trump is not without allies and support, and there's plenty of interests who have a net-present value proposition for backing Trump even assuming he's more likely to lose than win.

And, as I demonstrated above with actual evidence and statistics, Biden has a non-negligible chance of dying (2-4%) before the election even happens.

These odds are comparable to drawing two unpaired cards in Texas Holdem and then hitting two pair on the flop (2%), if you want a feel for the what the (low end) of the odds are. Two pair isn't a remarkable hand.

Could the democrats recover from Biden just straight up dying? Seems a hard sell.

So, if we assume a Biden death would mean a Trump victory (though I'm happy to hear arguments to the contrary) and let's say a Trump victory would be an absolute total disaster for America and the world, the democrats are essentially betting nearly the absolute worst thing they can imagine happening (a second Trump presidency) on odds comparable to, or greater than, than flopping 2 pair.

↪boethius "National polls" are not predictive since US presidential elections are not "national elections". Also, polling only becomes somewhat meaningful, or predictive, in the Fall 6-8 weeks before election day indicating electoral trends only in swing states only of likely voters. — 180 Proof

Your statement was that Trump was losing popularity, generally speaking, since the criminal charges dropped. To cite you exactly:

In other words, he's not "attracting support" and probably hasn't been since the criminal indictments dropped last year. — 180 Proof

I then cite polls that show Trump pretty steady from 2021 through 2023 and then gaining in favourability since the primary, which demonstrates he's attracting support.

I then also point out that he's essentially dead even, if not slightly ahead, in the polls in a Trump v Biden.

I then point out that the electoral college favours heavily republicans as Red states have more electoral college votes overall, so (unless historical trends reverse and red states are now blue states) such polling would indicate a large Trump advantage.

But I ask you to provide the evidence upon which you're making your claim (as perhaps this coarse look at the polls misses something essential).

I already dealt with your point that a lot of registered republicans, that you'd need to establish that he's not trading that group for some other group. The polling shows he's gaining overall in favourability, so perhaps he's lost 20% of registered Republican support but has gained elsewhere.

Now, if there's a break down somewhere of the swing states, of the likely voters there and so on that provide some additional insight, then great; if not, if it's as you say:

Also, polling only becomes somewhat meaningful, or predictive, in the Fall 6-8 weeks before election day indicating electoral trends only in swing states only of likely voters. — 180 Proof

Then for your argument to make sense, you'd need to at least try to establish the primary voting isn't some analogue of a poll but far more predictive, far earlier, which you do not.

You're basically just handwaving and assuming Trump is losing support and in the face of data that he isn't you're just handwaving away the polls and any basis at all upon which you could rest your own claim.

About 20-25% of actual voters in state Republican primaries did not vote for Loser-1 even after he's become the only candidate left in the race. This indicates he's losing support of (most of) those actual GOP voters. — 180 Proof

How does 20-25% turn into "most of" in the very next sentence?

Now, definitely Trump is a "non-traditional" candidate so it's not unusual he'd lose support from "traditional republicans"; the question is whether his untraditionalness can pickup support elsewhere, which the polls at the moment indicate rather than your claim that he's losing support overall.

Compared to 2020, Loser-1 is underperforming both with voters and donations to his campaign, which is consistent with the trend with women voters in particular against the MAGA-GOP since SCOTUS trashed women's reproductive rights in 2022. — 180 Proof

Trump was massively out-fundraised by Hillary, yet still won. As I've already mentioned, there's not much prospects the SCOTUS will change in the next 4 years, so abortion may not end up being a big issue. As you say, we'll have better predictive power in the 1-2 months before the election.

Given these indisputable circumstances, do you really believe Loser-1's electoral prospects are going to improve in the coming months? If so, I think that's ahistorical wishful thinking ... but who knows, right? — 180 Proof

As we see above, they are definitely disputed circumstances by the polls, which you then dismiss but then claim in the very next sentence that Trump continuing to increase in favourability enough to win the election (i.e. in the right places that translates to votes) would be ahistorical?

What is the historical precedent are you referring to? If polls don't matter at the moment? What does?

I honestly don't get what you're basing your argument on other than your own feeling ... which seems to be exactly the case:

I'm not a betting man but I haven't lost since 2017 betting against the Cult Leader & his MAGA-GOP flying monkeys — 180 Proof

... So you haven't done any bets, being not a betting man, but you also haven't lost any bets since 2017 ... but what about 2016? You're basically just saying that except for the times you're wrong you've been right and we should just trust you on that.

Trump is the anti-establishment candidate, so his strength is fighting the establishment and so 2024 could be a repeat of 2016.

Biden is clearly mentally attenuated, if not in the first stages of dementia or Alzheimer's, and it's going to be difficult for him to campaign with any vigour. Then there's the whole Hunter thing and Biden's own mishandling of classified documents, the war going badly in Ukraine, war in Gaza and so on.

And just because Biden seems to "get away" with incredible gaffs (aka. clear signs of dementia in his case) of memory problems and losing his train of thought, doesn't mean it's not going to be a big issue. Trump super packs will inundate people with attack adds using all this material in the 2 months before the election.

Both candidates are incredibly weak candidates.

If you didn't know anything about the other candidate you'd assume they have absolutely zero chance.

My own guess is I think we're in for a rerun of 2016 where Trump was "the underdog" and widely hated and had incredible mind blowing scandal after scandal but that Hillary was also widely hated and had her own scandals and gaffs, and the establishment assumes Hillary is going to win but that turns out to be counter-productive and fuels Trump instead.

I'm not predicting Trump is going to win, just that he has a solid chance of winning.

A lot will depend on what money and allies consolidates around Trump, and Biden's ability to even keep it together.

Liberals like to dismiss Biden's age concern as some sort of "agist" thing, but one indisputable dementia moment far worse than we've seen so far could sink him. Or he could die; which based on his age is about a 5% chance between now and the election—true he has top of the line health care, but being president and running a campaign is also stressful, so who knows which factor dominates.

Which I don't think is appreciated enough. Death rates rise exponentially with age (after adulthood) and the probability of death at 82 years (within a year time frame) is 8%.

Age: 82
Death probability: 0.079691 — Actuary life table, US Social Security

Furthermore the process of dying from disease in old age is due to the decay of the organism, so there's generally a period of mental and physical decline and even incapacitation, which can be a long or relatively short process with few or many stays in hospital and medical interventions.

Of course, health is also a concern for Trump, but the 5 year difference in age with Biden is really a big difference on an exponential curve.

And this is strange, since the economy is usually the top issue, and it's been humming along: stock market highs (most people have 401(k)'s, so they benefit from Wall Street doing well), record low unemployment, inflation back under control, 3+% GDP growth. But the majority of people hate this economy. Maybe because buying a house and renting have become so expensive. But it's hard to see what Trump would do to change that. — RogueAI

Certainly agree it's hard to see what Trump would do.

However, the economic numbers are nearly entirely make-belief propaganda.

The official inflation is adjusted by simply substituting cheaper things for whatever increases in price.

I'm honestly not sure most people have 401(k)'s of any substantial worth, but feel free to provide evidence to the contrary.

Most importantly, employment only matters if jobs are good and actually provide for a comfortable and secure life, ideally meaningful also. These kinds of jobs are now pretty rare. If you're reduced to wage slavery then you resent and hate having a job and absolutely hate the system that keeps you trapped.

Then there's issue like crime, which you're going to prioritize over a lot of other things, such as your 401(k) for example doesn't mean as much if you think you maybe robbed and / or shot any day, and if not you then your children, and what matters here is perception and not actual chances of being robbed and / or shot.

What is not perception based is health. Again, no point in having wealth if you don't have the health to enjoy it and Americans are incredibly unhealthy. People do realize it's "the system" of corporate grifting and corruption that is making them sick and then dealing with the American health insurance is a nightmare. Worse than being sick yourself is your kids being sick.

There's also the decay of public spaces and infrastructure which people internalize as a low hum of constant anxiety.

Then there's the social media and the already mentioned porn, and so on.

Now, Trump's supporters may not understand what ails them in any coherent or systemic sense, much less how it could be actually fixed, but they do understand that the establishment has been lying to them.

Which is the foundational appeal of Trump; he's willing to say anything that will play well to his supporters, and so he'll say obvious truths that the establishment has just been gaslighting Americans about for literally decades.

For example:

President Trump blasted former President George W. Bush on Saturday over the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, calling it “the single worst decision ever made.”

Speaking at a closed-door event with Republican donors in Florida, Trump mocked Bush’s intellect and compared his decision to invade Iraq to “throwing a big fat brick into a hornet’s nest.”

“Here we are, like the dummies of the world, because we had bad politicians running our country for a long time,” Trump said, according to CNN, which obtained a recording of the president’s remarks.

“That was Bush. Another real genius. That was Bush,” Trump joked. “That turned out to be wonderful intelligence. Great intelligence agency there.” — Trump hits Bush: Invading Iraq ‘the single worst decision ever made’ - The Hill

Which you may expect republicans don't want to hear, but that's not the case.

Of course, it's not what the Republican establishment that made those decisions wants to hear, but Republicans are over represented in the army and the Iraq war was a total disaster on US military communities, not just Iraqis, and obviously it was a not just a disaster in terms of death and destruction and trauma, but the US doesn't even have the oil! So wasn't some sort of strategic "worth it" move to get the oil or oppose communism or something.

It was a terrible mistake and Trump is willing to call a spade a spade, something people who suffer from a mistake want to hear: maybe people are held accountable a bit at least in being called out in pubilc, maybe something is learned so it doesn't happen again.

Again, totally agree that Trump has no coherent plan to make things better, but it's not a mystery why he has so much support (enough to win the presidency once and also this recent primary).

And there are powerful interest groups that can put down hundreds of millions in loans (or investments), if and when it decides US foreign policy. Heck, the 2017 Shayrat cruise missile strike that Trump ordered, cost more than hundred million dollars. — ssu

Yes, there's just too much money at stake and Biden can't satisfy all the money simultaneously.

Even if Biden satisfies the biggest money there's still plenty of second tier billionaires and corporations that will be left out and would need to go to Trump for whatever it is if they want a chance at making considerably more money.

And it's not just hundreds of millions, but hundreds of billions (Fortune 500) and trillions (banks) determined by different policy over a 4 year period (spread over various billionaires and multi-millionaires), in addition to the long-term momentum. So compared to this the 1 to 2 billion needed to "have a go" at the presidency is simply not that much money, and some of the tab is covered by normal people.

There is another faction, those more aligned with the Claremont Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and Hillsdale College. They certainly are not uneducated. They are the "elites" that they and others love to blame. — Fooloso4

There's also the funders of those organizations (the elites' elite), and there's hundreds of billions of dollars on the line in terms of policy. If you can't bribe Biden (because he's already bribed by a competing company or industry), then Trump is the only alternative.

Plenty of billionaires and multimillionaires in the US and bribery is essentially legal, so Trump has plenty of "haggle space". Even if you don't think Trump will win, (if you're a billionaire) the chance that he might win easily justifies "investing" in Trump's campaign when there is so much money on the line.

This is in addition to the long term goals you mention which require backing Trump, keeping the base as vibrant as possible and then co-opting Trump's base later when Trump's less relevant or dead.

↪Wayfarer Based on his own party's primary elections since January, the former president is being rejected by 1 in 5 hardcore voting Republicans several months out from the general election. Debtor-1's base of support has been ebbing away since he's chosen to polarize the electorate rather than reach out to more moderate and centrist voters. In other words, he's not "attracting support" and probably hasn't been since the criminal indictments dropped last year. — 180 Proof

Do the polls actually show this? Seems Trump is gaining in popularity since the nomination (favourable rating) while also gaining in dislike (unfavourable rating); i.e. the undecided middle is starting to compress.

Favourable: 42.8%
Unfavourable: 52.6% — Donald Trump - Five Thirty Eight

Which obviously is more unfavourable than favourable, by a lot.

But Biden is even more ahead in disapproval compared to approval (40.0% approve and 54.6% disaprove).

In terms of projected votes, Trump vs. Biden are dead even in two of the listed polls, and Biden up 3% in one poll and Trump ahead by 7% in another poll.

Red states have far more electoral college power per vote than the Blue states, so dead even in the polls is a significant Trump advantage.

So I'm not sure Trump is losing in popularity at all since the time you mentioned, but maybe a longer data set would show that.

2-3 out of 10 of my fellow citizens are nihilists who are PTSD'd by opiods, booze, OnlyFans porn, very poor education, disinforming social media silos, chronic loneliness, political disengagement, personal and political corruption, and everyday grinding banality. — 180 Proof

Yes, but you have to ask yourself the question of who made things this way?

Joe Biden would be pretty high on the list of suspects.

At some point almost any change is seen as better than continuing the status quo, at least "you try" something else.

The machine is precisely calibrated so that the circumstances of the person's simulated life are such that it will maximize their happiness. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Simply assuming a machine has already solved a philosophical problem, such as what is happiness in this case, doesn't really solve all that much.

In "The Consolation of Philosophy," Boethius argues that happiness is equivalent to being good, since virtue is what leads to happiness. He believes that true happiness is not found in external circumstances, such as wealth or power, but rather in the internal state of the soul. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Taking this as the definition of happiness, the machine does absolutely nothing.

The whole foundation of stoicism, the philosophy which Boethius represents in the Consolation, is that true goodness cannot be dependent on anything external, such as the machine.

The answer to your question is that the machine does nothing with respect to happiness, goodness, or virtue; those are internal qualities of the soul and do not depend on anything external whatsoever, including the machine.

As others have pointed out, perhaps the machine is a useful training tool that a good person would use to increase their skill at some set of tasks, to then do those tasks more effectively later. I.e. just an analogue for education and training generally speaking.

However, education and training are external circumstances in the stoic framework. The slave, defined here as someone who lacks everything, and the emperor, who possesses everything, are both morally equivalent in their capacity towards the good; the greater means available to the emperor, including for example a virtue machine, changes nothing.

A good emperor would use a virtue machine to do good, and a bad emperor would use it to do ill.

Generally speaking, anything that is contingent on external events (such as access to books, discussion, training regiments, virtue machines) has no intrinsic moral worth in the stoic system. Of course, a good person would make good use of such contingencies but that does not make them any morally better than had they been deprived. A good person will use plenty to do good but would do an equal amount of good in complete lack: equal amount of effort towards the good, just the results would be less visible having no or little effect on the world provided zero means.

These basics of stoicism and the Consolation being understood, if the question is then what would a machine "programmed for stoicism" do, the answer would be to provide the user of the machine a choice of what the machine is capable of; i.e. some sort of training that would in some calculus be more effective over projected lifetime than going without it.

Whether the user could leave or not does not really matter.

If the occupant can leave, then when the occupant has decided the benefits of the machine are outweighed by the benefits of returning to the world and applying what was learned, the occupant would leave; if the prisoner could not leave then the prisoner could continue their effort towards the good and truth assuming it is useful in the next life.

The great demagogue has little if any leadership skills. And he won't compromise because it might look bad for his base. His four years prove that as his administration was far more chaotic than anything we had seen and his future administration will be so. Now he will have the Republican A-team right from the start, but Trump being Trump and as he has already been POTUS, I assume he will start to gather sycophants and yes-men around him. He will not, for example, go with the idea as previously to ask the military who are the best generals. — ssu

Though I generally agree, I think the main difference between a second Trump administration and the first one will be a quest for vengeance.

As chaotic as it was, Trump's first presidency was mainly focused on "trying to be president" as defined by the establishment. From what I could tell, in Trump's mind he had "won" and earned the respect of his elite peers and could just "enjoy being president" while putting his own spin on a few things.

Did we lock her up? Did we drain the swamp?

We didn't even build the wall, as you note above.

Trump's problem in his first presidency was a lack of sycophants available as the Trump movement didn't really exist at the time, so there wasn't really a class of "Trump politicians and operators". Hence hiring a bunch of generals, as there wasn't really anyone else available. There's more such "Trump people" now that have held office or otherwise have experience.

What an administration of such people would do could be significantly more chaotic, especially when mixed with a quest to counter-attack.

Which, on that note, as much as democrats are celebrating Trump's recent legal losses, he can just take the L, have properties seized in New York and then still go onto to be president.

Like 2016, there's still plenty of powerful people that will have more to gain from a Trump presidency, whether from difference in policy or direct favouritism.

Since the Superpack is a legal thing, the "smart money" can go to those to mostly attack Biden, and what Trump raises from his base can keep him afloat. I.e. that Trump has taken a half billion dollar hit does not mean that a half billion dollars needs to be raised before any money is spent on campaigning.

Money is not the end-all-be-all, but it is an important factor, and candidates would rather have it than not. — RogueAI

Sure, but if Trump already won once raising half the funds of Hillary, then we're not in a "all things being equal" situation. Things are not equal, Trump already demonstrated he can 2x his money in terms of results. Of course, he lost to Biden, but Biden wasn't so visibly senile back then.

And sure, the democrat base doesn't like the anti-abortion rulings of the Supreme Court, but I'm not sure that will be a big election issue considering the justices are now a lot younger than they were (oldest being 75), so it's not a "guaranteed likely" there will be new openings on the bench in the next 4 years.

Democrat base also doesn't like genocide, so the democrats turning themselves into the brutal genocidal war party is an un-motivating factor.

Not to say that will be a big election issue either, just pointing out that simple formulas such as abortion and money may not be big predictive factors at this stage.

As these ones: — neomac

Yeah sure you can equate Ukrainian Nazi indoctrination with Russian nationalist Neo-Tzarism or whatever you want to call it.

The point of my argument and the evidence that supports it is not "Ukraine bad! Russia good!"

The point of the argument is that the West supporting the Nazi groups in Ukraine is at best handing an amazing propaganda victory and reason for war to Putin and the Kremlin and at worst are far more powerful than the West realizes and these groups will successfully execute a coup.

And who are the Russians that would be predisposed to a war to regain territory anyways? The Russian nationalists! So is making an equivalence with Russian nationalists going to convince Russian nationalists that the Nazis in Ukraine are fine? Obviously not.

It matters only for Western propaganda that first the Nazis in Ukraine are denied they even exist, and then once that's untenable to just wish-wash it away with "oh there's Nazis everywhere" and when that doesn't actually work because there simply aren't similar groups everywhere then ending finally with "well Russia also has extreme Nationalism too".

If we're concerned about the real world, then what effect these Nazis have is providing a convincing reasons for Russia to fight in Ukraine. Now, if you want Russia to invade Ukraine then supporting the Nazi factions is definitely something you would do. If you don't want Russia to invade Ukraine or if they do you want Russian soldiers to more likely have actual morale problems then you'd want to suppress these Nazi groups and make it clear they aren't the "West's boyz".

The other problem with equating Ukraine to Russia as an argument to defend Ukraine is that just begs the question of why we're on Ukraine's side. Ok, Ukrainian nationalism is as problematic, bad and out of control as Russian nationalism ... so why are we supporting Ukraine again? Seems at best a coin flip, but Russia has more resources so probably more practical to just side with them in this scenario, if we had to pick sides.

Anyways, you asked for my sources to backup my claims, I understand by your moving the topic to Russian nationalists that you accept said sources do indeed lend sufficient reason to my claims.

Again it is insufficient and illogical to start viewing these conflicts from 2008.

Both Abkhazia and Southern Ossetia conflicts had started well before 2008. So again, it's far more proper to start with 1991-1992 South Ossetian war (and btw. there was in 1918-1920 a Georgian-Ossetian conflict with Ossetians siding with the Russian Bolsheviks). In Abkhazia the war was fought 1992-1993, where again the Russians supported the rebels.

The similar strategy seen in Moldova (Transnistria) and Ukraine (the Donbass) could be already seen here. When the pro-Russians insurgents were losing it, suddenly Russia intervened and put "peacekeepers" to make it a frozen conflict. Just like prior to 2022 invasion the Russian army came to help if the rebels were in trouble. — ssu

Well these other pre-2008 things are not really vis-a-vis Ukraine, it's seems closer to reading tea leaves.

Of course there's a historical context and lot's of things relevant before 2008, but that definitely seems the pivot point that changed the status quo with respect to both Georgia and also Ukraine. Merkel literally warned her American colleagues that Putin would interpret the intention to expand into Ukraine as a declaration of war.

And again, I'm not arguing some sort of contra-positive that for sure Russia would not have invaded Ukraine if there was no push or "pretend push because we're doing something we somehow also know and everyone knows we're not going to do" of NATO into Ukraine.

I'm arguing that if Putin had designs on Ukraine since 1999 or even 1991 or even before for that matter, that NATO expansion played into his designs and provided him the pretext to consolidate domestic support. Russia had become pretty integrated with the West by 2008, so it's a "easy thing" to just up and invade Ukraine and upset the applecart. If there was no reason to do so there was a lot of business and money in dealing with the West so it would be a difficult sell to other Russian elites as well as the public.

Again this delusional rhetoric from you. We've already have had this discussion.

It's very questionable from you to sideline the Partnership for Peace, the "new NATO" that focused in fighting terrorism, the Cold War being over, the various times of "resetting" the US-Russian relations done by George W Bush, Obama. — ssu

True, we have had this conversation before and it's always the same total at-odds. It's honestly bizarre the idea that Russia should view NATO as just a force for peace and stability and is good for Russia.

... And you're arguing here that Russia actually does view Russia that way.

Obviously they don't.

The US has literally codified Russia as an official state "adversary" and they have all sorts of books and papers by policy makers completely dedicated to the topic of avoiding peer competitors, even regional, arising anywhere as their singular obsession.

The US, via NATO, has done all sorts of offensive military actions. Even if you really did believe it was all out of the "goodness of their heart" it's honestly baffling the idea that the Russians not only should but do also see it that way.

There was a very popular revolution in Ukraine, not a coup how ever you try to point out Nuland and others talking to the Ukrainians. And in your narrative you totally forget the important elections afterwards where the far right lost their seats in Parliament. That kind of example how Ukraine has improved it's democracy isn't good for your narrative. But great that you at least admit that Russia annexed Crimea. Not that Crimean people opted to join by referendum Russia after Crimean volunteers (who looked and still look like Russian VDV paratroopers and special forces) occupied the Crimean parliament and other installations. — ssu

First, how do we know what a populate revolution is without elections?

Oh yeah, it's whatever we say is popular.

Second, a coup is still a coup even if popular.

Exactly the opposite? I disagree. Zelensky has tried actually to negotiate far more than Finns did. Ukraine is far larger than Finland and in a totally different situation. Besides, Finland didn't start peace negotiations in 1941, 1942 or 1943. And this is quite logical: when there's imminent collapse (in 1940) and a hopeless situation in 1944. — ssu

The idea Zelensky has tried to negotiate more than the Finns in the Winter War (what I was talking about) is completely absurd. In the Continuation War of course the "main thing" is the battle between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and Finland is largely a bystander.

I don't have much time now, but I do have time I'll write down some citations of historians on the Finns negotiation strategy in the Winter War and then likewise the Continuation War.

A little spoiler, the Finns never make declarations like they'll only negotiate after the Soviets Withdraw their forces or then "Stalin could end the war any day he wants" and so on.

↪boethius You're forgetting abortion. Since Dobbs, Democrats have overperformed in every special election. SCOTUS is taking up abortion again this Summer, and no matter what they decide, the mere fact of them sticking their noses in women's wombs will enrage and terrify them. — RogueAI

There's all the usual issues of why partisans usually vote for their party regardless of the candidate.

As I say in my post, I'm not saying Trump will win, just explaining why he can say outrageous things and that doesn't matter.

There's not a strategy of policy articulation, character and sense making but of marketing and branding and not-being the other candidate.

My focus was on Trump because the subject was Trump strategy.

Obviously Biden's strategy will be that he's not Trump, and says crazy things and has no character and so on.

Democrats also have a massive cash advantage. This is going to be a turnout election, and I would much rather be a Democrat candidate than Republican. — RogueAI

I think it's too early to say where the momentum is going to be, and I don't say that just because the election is some ways off but because we haven't seen yet what sort of consolidation, if any, will happen around Trump and now that he's the candidate we'll now see to what extent conservative figures, media and funders rally for Trump.

I think we're right now in a similar situation to 2016 where the the Republican establishment and media machine and usual funders were pretty radically against Trump and couldn't believe what was happening, so when Trump started secure the nomination it would seem he'd have no allies and the incoherent "hot mess" would sort of just fumble towards a blow out loss. However, then republicans started to rally and things became coherent enough and well run enough to build momentum and win the election. Of course a lot of people never "got on board" but enough did that Trump could win.

So I think we're in a similar place where there's still a large part of the republican establishment and media machine that were (while being way more pro-Trump than in 2016) perhaps not hoping for Trump to be taken down with all the lawsuits but maybe were waiting-and-seeing.

Trump won in 2016 while raising half the funds of Hillary, so I'm also just not sure that's a good proxy for odds of success.

Trump only won 60% of the vote in many of the primaries he carried, meaning there's a large percentage of Republican voters who won't vote for him — Wayfarer

That's a pretty tenuous premise.

Not simply because extrapolating from protest votes in primaries is pretty shaky ... but I'm pretty sure Republicans will vote for Trump.

'IF I DON'T GET WHAT I WANT EVERYONE IS GOING TO SUFFER!!!' How can that amount to a winning strategy? — Wayfarer

The election is a "lesser of two evils" for the majority of Americans. That Trump has a die-hard base of fanatics, and Biden doesn't, is a big advantage.

If you look at any one of the candidates in isolation they are absolutely terrible; literally competing for the worst candidates in the history of the planet, certainly for head of state and likely all positions of any actual responsibility.

You can list reasons Trump is unqualified all day, and crazy shit he's said all week, but then you look over at Biden and he's talking about his meeting with Miterand, gotten the US into a devastating proxy war (for Ukraine) with Russia that Biden is clearly losing (and no one likes losers, especially in America) in addition to becoming senile and barely able to talk coherently.

Now, there's die-hard liberals that (while not being particular enthusiastic about Biden) will just wish-wash away Biden problems, but the people somewhere in the middle trying to have some sort of objective view is going see Biden as extremely weak and unfit; that he is a senile senior citizen who should be in a home (that is not propaganda, that is just a literally true statement).

Which will be the basic theme in the election. Biden looks weak, the US looks weak, thee's a lot of chaos and uncertainty, and the argument will Trump says a lot of crazy shit but that he's "strong" and the crazy shit he says keeps adversaries on their toes and so on.

Not saying he's going to win, but Trump's basic "strategy" is just appear in the media as much as possible and if you need to say crazy shit then so be it. Most of the crazy shit he says is something that has some little nuance or he can walk back a bit, which then is the subject of controversy and more media coverage. His base and media allies then just fill in the narrative, sometimes spinning on a dime when they spent the morning assuming the narrative was A and then Trumps just comes out and asserts no-A, they'll just fall in line with not-A in the afternoon, and just completely ignore they were trying to justify A all morning.

Why this strategy worked the first time against Hillary is simply because if people are predisposed to not like Hillary either as a person or ideologically or what she's done (like most republicans and a fair amount of independents), then simply "getting your face out there" is a motivating factor: I don't like Hillary ... and well there's this guy. Not simply in terms of a sort of media momentum but also at a more basic level psychologically the more you "know someone" the more you rationalize and relativize their faults.

Trump's power is he has no shame, so "grab em' by the pussy" drops and he just stays in the game, and then people get used to it.

To go one level deeper, the reason this strategy works is that the US establishment is no more reasonable than Trump. The US policy establishment, represented by the likes of Hillary and Biden, have abandoned any authentic rational justification for things a long time ago. Things are not irrational in that they are crazy, they are perfectly rational as a system of graft and corruption and organized crime, but the presentation to the public is an irrational mess in order to prop-up a corrupt system. They don't view themselves that way, they think their propaganda is "clever" that it's just a matter of having a "private" and "public" position (but if you have a private and a public position on things, which one is your actual well thought out position? Obviously the private one, and the public one is just whatever you can get away with).

They also don't view themselves that way because they go around as "serious people" and there's pomp and prestige everywhere. However, the more you associate pomp and prestige with bullshit the less people are impressed by it.

The final pillar of establishment power is the aura of "you can't challenge us, nothing will ever, ever change".

So, in this political environment where things don't anyways make any sense, then Trump's nonsense isn't really a problem because people are already accustomed to nonsense. Not that Trump has any intention to make the system less corrupt and "drain the swamp" (that's just his "public" position because it sounds good to the disaffected population the elites have screwed); however a lot of people support Trump basically as a meme that the elites hate, just to mess with the elites, without much illusion he's going to fix anything.

In some ways Trump, as a category, is the only alternative you can ever get in US politics today. Precisely because he makes no sense most of the time, the US establishment didn't view him as a threat; indeed, they promoted him, told their media allies to give him more coverage, precisely because he doesn't play a "pomp and prestige" game, nor even fundraised all that much money, political elites assumed he had no chance, and then he gets too big and the cats out of the bag. Someone who's actually a threat to the system is a Bernie Sanders kind of category, who makes sense, isn't corrupt but only got so far as he did because he's a relic of a bygone (less corrupt) era where it was still possible (i.e. he's an exception today) to get in the system as a threat to otherwise unaccountable power (nowadays you either can't get in at all if you don't "play ball" or then if you do you're sidelined and no one ever pays attention to you so you can't go very far).

Point is, it doesn't really matter what Trump says or does; he's the alternative to the elites Americans know and hate. The reason he's the alternative is because of his celebrity status and money and branding skills and also precisely because he doesn't make sense he didn't seem a threat to the system until it was too late. A real threat is "taken care of" one way or another very early on.

One consequence of a second Tump presidency is he basically blows up the entire system and then the only people left need to compete on "sense making". A dangerous process but maybe better than continuation of the current system. Another possibility is that he just creates a new class of corrupt political elite. He'll definitely be trying to be doing the second goal, but precisely because he's not a good strategist he may fail at that and accomplish the first.