Trump’s character: The press was in bed with the Clinton campaign, so I discount their claims about Trump very heavily. I am not citing Scott Adam’s as a “source” on Trump’s character, I am citing him for providing skepticism against the media and the Clinton campaign’s portrayal of Trump.
As for Trump spreading unfounded rumors, like which ones? The press recently attacked him for claiming that illegal immigrants voted in the election.
However, illegal immigrants do vote in elections. Here’s the abstract:
In spite of substantial public controversy, very little reliable data exists concerning the frequency with which non-citizen immigrants participate in United States elections. Although such participation is a violation of election laws in most parts of the United States, enforcement depends principally on disclosure of citizenship status at the time of voter registration. This study examines participation rates by non-citizens using a nationally representative sample that includes non-citizen immigrants. We find that some non-citizens participate in U.S. elections, and that this participation has been large enough to change meaningful election outcomes including Electoral College votes, and Congressional elections. Non-citizen votes likely gave Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress.
So it’s not all at unreasonable for Trump to speculate that voter fraud gave Hillary the popular vote. The media discussion is highly distorted.
Bannon: I don’t agree with your section on Bannon because I don’t believe in social justice and I don’t believe in the concept of “racism.” Racism is merely a leftist term of abuse with an ever expanding definition. Tribalism and prejudice are real, but in many cases they are justified: human tribes really are different from each other, and every group has their own grievances. The concept of “racism” is that red tribe’s tribalism is evil, but blue tribe’s tribalism is good; attacking members of the red coalition based on ethnic attitudes is good, but attacking members of the the blue coalition on ethnic grounds is evil. Privileged white progressives use minorities as a shield. When the older concept of racism as prejudice wasn’t enough, progressives had to expand it to the ludicrous “privilege + power” definition, which bakes in a double standard that it’s impossible to be racist against certain groups. The word “racism” has been stretched so much that it should be abandoned; there is no “true” definition of racism to salvage.
It’s a mistake to engage in moral reasoning that takes such shifting and politicized moral weapons for granted, without inspecting them, and then reasons from these premises.
Authoritarianism: The original post I was responding to held democracy in such high-esteem that it advocated donating to a political party to “protect” it. However, why is democracy considered so great? Most smart people nowadays weren’t reasoned into this belief. They believe it because they were educated with a few propagandistic platitudes.They cannot justify democracy without the concept of “rights,” a meaningless concept that is inseparable from democracy. They are not familiar with any of the criticisms of democracy before 20th century propagandists defined it as the best thing since sliced bread (like Maine’s criticisms cited in my original post). They are not familiar with the history of democracy. They are not familiar with the history of monarchy, the most typical non-democratic form of human government, and they believe that any non-democratic government is like a dice roll for Hitler, Stalin, and Kim Jong-Il.
The downside risk is not greater for non-democratic government. It only looks that way if you take all your data-points from the 20th century.
Kim Jong-Il and Stalin were selected through communism. Of course you are going to get a bad leader that way. Hitler was selected through democracy, but the conditions of post-WWI Weimar Germany were unprecedented. Hitler was an expansionist populist, but Trump is an isolationist populist.
Angela Merkel and other EU leaders demonstrate the downside risk of democracy, by destroying their own countries by depressing their own people’s fertility in favor of foreign voters who commit elevated levels of crime and sexual violence. Virtually no historical autocrats did anything so crazy. The goal of historical rulers was to prevent their countries from getting overrun by hostile foreigners and their women raped en masse. It is only because of propaganda that we do not recognize what is obviously going on.
If the US recognized Kim Jong-Il as Emperor of North Korea, he would relax and become less oppressive over time. If the US stopped trying to undermine Putin, then he would be a lot nicer, because he would no longer have to fear the US trying to rig elections and using democracy to install their own puppet, like they’ve done in so many other “democratic” countries. It is not authority that inherently makes rulers evil, it is insecure authority. Being in a democracy, being under communism, or being at war tend to make rulers insecure. In the case of democracy or communism, they can be replaced as “the people’s” chosen; in the case of war, they can be unseated by a foreign power.
So what does this mean for Trump? Well, he is a populist and he was selected through democracy, which are both bad. Luckily, Trump is not a communist or socialist, and the US is not threatened by a bigger foreign power. Trump may not be the president America wants, but he is the president America deserves: red tribe deserves him because they voted for him, and blue tribe deserves him because they tried to push globalist socialism too fast from inside their self-congratulatory media bubble.
I don’t know about you, but I would not want to live in a regime like China where not only my speech but my very access to ideas and facts is strongly limited (and please don’t come back with the absurd false equivalency that political correctness is akin to mass-scale state censorship).
There’s a small difference: in China, they are using a more technological approach, while in the West, they use a more ideological and social approach. In China, the state suppresses free speech explicitly. In the US, the state suppresses free speech by punishing employers of thought criminals to make them unhireable if they step too far outside the Overton Window.
Free speech causes a problem in democracies, because it means that any new coalition can develop to challenge the current coalition. This makes the reigning coalition insecure, so it lashes out with social pressure and tries to crush individuals who join a challenger coalition. This is our current situation of culture wars: culture wars are inherent in democracy.
I don’t expect this response to convince you, and in fact you probably shouldn’t be convinced by something this short that clashes with your current worldview, but my goal is to show that alternative perspectives are possible. Those who want a more sophisticated understanding of democracy and its alternatives can start with this essay, or ask me for recommendations.
I think I have one more response left in me and then I’m going to call it quits.
Regarding Trump’s character: you are still not fully engaging here. You didn’t respond at all to my point that we can see him bullying private citizens on Twitter knowing full well that his supporters will rain down harassment on anyone he calls out there. As far as unfounded rumors go, the voting thing is just one of many, many examples, but let’s talk about that. I appreciate that you provided evidence for your case, but you failed to mention that that evidence is disputed in what I find to be a convincing rebuttal by Harvard researchers. Sure, the claim that zero undocumented immigrants vote in elections is probably untrue, and I would not be surprised to learn that it happens once in a while. But millions of votes? The backup for that claim is pure speculation and hearsay. I stand by the characterization of that rumor as unfounded.
More to the point, I have counted two instances now in this thread where you have provided sources to back up factual claims you’ve made that have later turned out to be misleading or downright false. (The other example being the story about settling 1000 refugees on a small island when it turned out that there were just a couple dozen). Say what you want about outlets like the New York Times, but they issue corrections when they get facts wrong, and even employ a public editor to call them out when they screw up. When has Breitbart ever issued a correction for anything? I think that should be a red flag for you to reconsider the relative reliability of the mainstream media vs. your preferred sources. Perhaps you don’t know anyone who works in mainstream media. I do, and they are honest people who believe strongly in journalistic ethics and integrity. I understand you have a worldview that is not well represented in those spaces and I support a reasonable degree of skepticism about any source, but when you find your views challenged there you should apply some of that skepticism to yourself as well. That’s what we all do.
Regarding authoritarianism, if the best example you can come up with for a worst-case scenario in a democracy is seriously Angela Merkel, I think that speaks for itself. (Agreed that Hitler came to power in a democracy, but it was an extremely compromised democracy and the fact that he immediately moved Germany toward dictatorship supports rather than undermines my point.) The idea of Merkel “destroying her own country” seems, uh, inconsistent with a nation that is the 16th-happiest in the world.
Regarding social ostracization of “thought criminals,” that is going to happen in any society, democratic or not. If it’s going to happen, I’d prefer that the people who are ostracized are those who cause the most harm to others by their words and actions. It seems from your response that you don’t believe in white privilege. I hope you can see that if one accepts white privilege as a reality, than the progressive double standard on racism makes sense and is justified. So it then becomes an empirical question of whether white privilege exists, for which I think there is ample evidence that it does.
So you are correct, I’m not convinced. I do appreciate you being realistic about that, and the time you’ve put in to explain your views. It seems we will continue to disagree.
Happy holidays (or, if you prefer, Merry Christmas) to you.
I’m afraid this debate has gotten overly partisan.
On Trump: I didn’t engage your accusation about Trump bullying private citizens, because “bullying” is a subjective and partisan term, and you didn’t provide any specific examples. My perception is that Trump plays tit-for-tat and attacks those who attack him.
As for the reliability of the sources I provided, you are not operating in good faith.
Illegal immigrants voting: You point out the Harvard study rebutting the study about illegal immigrants voting, despite the fact that my link mentioned that rebuttal. Well, the authors have their own response to that rebuttal (short version in Washington Post, long version). They defend against the charge that their results were just due to measurement error and they provide reasons to believe that their measures were valid. Since neither of our comments captured this larger debate, I object to your characterization of my comment as “misleading,” because I could just as easily say the same thing about yours.
The larger point was about about whether Trump spreads unfounded rumors. I showed that one of the supposed unfounded rumors spread by Trump (illegal immigrants voting) was in fact supported by research. Yes, that research is under ongoing debate, but Trump was painted as a madman for holding a similar to position to some scholars in that debate.
On Breitbart: I provided a Breitbart article about British police arresting a man for criticizing Syrian migrants. AGP and you are picking on a totally tangential part of the article, where it mistakenly said that migrants were getting put on the island instead of in a larger area of Scotland. This seems like a deflection from the key point of the article. I agree that Breitbart isn’t perfect, but it reports on politically inconvenient events which the mainstream media is trying to sweep under the rug for political reasons; it’s a good source because its biases are anticorrelated with mainstream biases. We could have a larger discussion about the credibility of Breitbart vs. the New York Times and their errors and retractions, but I think we are going to have to disagree because you believe that people in the mainstream media have journalistic ethics and integrity.
White privilege: Yes, I reject the concept of “white privilege” and all such social justice concepts. The concept of white privilege is that whites and non-whites are fundamentally similar and would have the same outcomes if it wasn’t for the evil oppressiveness of white people. I believe that human tribes are sufficiently different that underperformance of one cannot be blamed on another. There are also plenty of bad historical things that non-white people did that are erased by the concept of white privilege (e.g. the Barbary Slave Trade). Social justice and anti-racism are purely a recent political invention for elite white people to dispossess poor and middle-class white people, using non-white people as the excuse.
I recognize that you are putting in effort to engage me in detail, but I’m happy with leaving this here because we are clearly operating in two completely different realities.
Trump’s character: The press was in bed with the Clinton campaign, so I discount their claims about Trump very heavily. I am not citing Scott Adam’s as a “source” on Trump’s character, I am citing him for providing skepticism against the media and the Clinton campaign’s portrayal of Trump.
As for Trump spreading unfounded rumors, like which ones? The press recently attacked him for claiming that illegal immigrants voted in the election.
However, illegal immigrants do vote in elections. Here’s the abstract:
So it’s not all at unreasonable for Trump to speculate that voter fraud gave Hillary the popular vote. The media discussion is highly distorted.
Bannon: I don’t agree with your section on Bannon because I don’t believe in social justice and I don’t believe in the concept of “racism.” Racism is merely a leftist term of abuse with an ever expanding definition. Tribalism and prejudice are real, but in many cases they are justified: human tribes really are different from each other, and every group has their own grievances. The concept of “racism” is that red tribe’s tribalism is evil, but blue tribe’s tribalism is good; attacking members of the red coalition based on ethnic attitudes is good, but attacking members of the the blue coalition on ethnic grounds is evil. Privileged white progressives use minorities as a shield. When the older concept of racism as prejudice wasn’t enough, progressives had to expand it to the ludicrous “privilege + power” definition, which bakes in a double standard that it’s impossible to be racist against certain groups. The word “racism” has been stretched so much that it should be abandoned; there is no “true” definition of racism to salvage.
It’s a mistake to engage in moral reasoning that takes such shifting and politicized moral weapons for granted, without inspecting them, and then reasons from these premises.
Authoritarianism: The original post I was responding to held democracy in such high-esteem that it advocated donating to a political party to “protect” it. However, why is democracy considered so great? Most smart people nowadays weren’t reasoned into this belief. They believe it because they were educated with a few propagandistic platitudes.They cannot justify democracy without the concept of “rights,” a meaningless concept that is inseparable from democracy. They are not familiar with any of the criticisms of democracy before 20th century propagandists defined it as the best thing since sliced bread (like Maine’s criticisms cited in my original post). They are not familiar with the history of democracy. They are not familiar with the history of monarchy, the most typical non-democratic form of human government, and they believe that any non-democratic government is like a dice roll for Hitler, Stalin, and Kim Jong-Il.
The downside risk is not greater for non-democratic government. It only looks that way if you take all your data-points from the 20th century.
Kim Jong-Il and Stalin were selected through communism. Of course you are going to get a bad leader that way. Hitler was selected through democracy, but the conditions of post-WWI Weimar Germany were unprecedented. Hitler was an expansionist populist, but Trump is an isolationist populist.
Angela Merkel and other EU leaders demonstrate the downside risk of democracy, by destroying their own countries by depressing their own people’s fertility in favor of foreign voters who commit elevated levels of crime and sexual violence. Virtually no historical autocrats did anything so crazy. The goal of historical rulers was to prevent their countries from getting overrun by hostile foreigners and their women raped en masse. It is only because of propaganda that we do not recognize what is obviously going on.
If the US recognized Kim Jong-Il as Emperor of North Korea, he would relax and become less oppressive over time. If the US stopped trying to undermine Putin, then he would be a lot nicer, because he would no longer have to fear the US trying to rig elections and using democracy to install their own puppet, like they’ve done in so many other “democratic” countries. It is not authority that inherently makes rulers evil, it is insecure authority. Being in a democracy, being under communism, or being at war tend to make rulers insecure. In the case of democracy or communism, they can be replaced as “the people’s” chosen; in the case of war, they can be unseated by a foreign power.
So what does this mean for Trump? Well, he is a populist and he was selected through democracy, which are both bad. Luckily, Trump is not a communist or socialist, and the US is not threatened by a bigger foreign power. Trump may not be the president America wants, but he is the president America deserves: red tribe deserves him because they voted for him, and blue tribe deserves him because they tried to push globalist socialism too fast from inside their self-congratulatory media bubble.
There’s a small difference: in China, they are using a more technological approach, while in the West, they use a more ideological and social approach. In China, the state suppresses free speech explicitly. In the US, the state suppresses free speech by punishing employers of thought criminals to make them unhireable if they step too far outside the Overton Window.
Free speech causes a problem in democracies, because it means that any new coalition can develop to challenge the current coalition. This makes the reigning coalition insecure, so it lashes out with social pressure and tries to crush individuals who join a challenger coalition. This is our current situation of culture wars: culture wars are inherent in democracy.
I don’t expect this response to convince you, and in fact you probably shouldn’t be convinced by something this short that clashes with your current worldview, but my goal is to show that alternative perspectives are possible. Those who want a more sophisticated understanding of democracy and its alternatives can start with this essay, or ask me for recommendations.
I think I have one more response left in me and then I’m going to call it quits.
Regarding Trump’s character: you are still not fully engaging here. You didn’t respond at all to my point that we can see him bullying private citizens on Twitter knowing full well that his supporters will rain down harassment on anyone he calls out there. As far as unfounded rumors go, the voting thing is just one of many, many examples, but let’s talk about that. I appreciate that you provided evidence for your case, but you failed to mention that that evidence is disputed in what I find to be a convincing rebuttal by Harvard researchers. Sure, the claim that zero undocumented immigrants vote in elections is probably untrue, and I would not be surprised to learn that it happens once in a while. But millions of votes? The backup for that claim is pure speculation and hearsay. I stand by the characterization of that rumor as unfounded.
More to the point, I have counted two instances now in this thread where you have provided sources to back up factual claims you’ve made that have later turned out to be misleading or downright false. (The other example being the story about settling 1000 refugees on a small island when it turned out that there were just a couple dozen). Say what you want about outlets like the New York Times, but they issue corrections when they get facts wrong, and even employ a public editor to call them out when they screw up. When has Breitbart ever issued a correction for anything? I think that should be a red flag for you to reconsider the relative reliability of the mainstream media vs. your preferred sources. Perhaps you don’t know anyone who works in mainstream media. I do, and they are honest people who believe strongly in journalistic ethics and integrity. I understand you have a worldview that is not well represented in those spaces and I support a reasonable degree of skepticism about any source, but when you find your views challenged there you should apply some of that skepticism to yourself as well. That’s what we all do.
Regarding authoritarianism, if the best example you can come up with for a worst-case scenario in a democracy is seriously Angela Merkel, I think that speaks for itself. (Agreed that Hitler came to power in a democracy, but it was an extremely compromised democracy and the fact that he immediately moved Germany toward dictatorship supports rather than undermines my point.) The idea of Merkel “destroying her own country” seems, uh, inconsistent with a nation that is the 16th-happiest in the world.
Regarding social ostracization of “thought criminals,” that is going to happen in any society, democratic or not. If it’s going to happen, I’d prefer that the people who are ostracized are those who cause the most harm to others by their words and actions. It seems from your response that you don’t believe in white privilege. I hope you can see that if one accepts white privilege as a reality, than the progressive double standard on racism makes sense and is justified. So it then becomes an empirical question of whether white privilege exists, for which I think there is ample evidence that it does.
So you are correct, I’m not convinced. I do appreciate you being realistic about that, and the time you’ve put in to explain your views. It seems we will continue to disagree.
Happy holidays (or, if you prefer, Merry Christmas) to you.
I’m afraid this debate has gotten overly partisan.
On Trump: I didn’t engage your accusation about Trump bullying private citizens, because “bullying” is a subjective and partisan term, and you didn’t provide any specific examples. My perception is that Trump plays tit-for-tat and attacks those who attack him.
As for the reliability of the sources I provided, you are not operating in good faith.
Illegal immigrants voting: You point out the Harvard study rebutting the study about illegal immigrants voting, despite the fact that my link mentioned that rebuttal. Well, the authors have their own response to that rebuttal (short version in Washington Post, long version). They defend against the charge that their results were just due to measurement error and they provide reasons to believe that their measures were valid. Since neither of our comments captured this larger debate, I object to your characterization of my comment as “misleading,” because I could just as easily say the same thing about yours.
The larger point was about about whether Trump spreads unfounded rumors. I showed that one of the supposed unfounded rumors spread by Trump (illegal immigrants voting) was in fact supported by research. Yes, that research is under ongoing debate, but Trump was painted as a madman for holding a similar to position to some scholars in that debate.
On Breitbart: I provided a Breitbart article about British police arresting a man for criticizing Syrian migrants. AGP and you are picking on a totally tangential part of the article, where it mistakenly said that migrants were getting put on the island instead of in a larger area of Scotland. This seems like a deflection from the key point of the article. I agree that Breitbart isn’t perfect, but it reports on politically inconvenient events which the mainstream media is trying to sweep under the rug for political reasons; it’s a good source because its biases are anticorrelated with mainstream biases. We could have a larger discussion about the credibility of Breitbart vs. the New York Times and their errors and retractions, but I think we are going to have to disagree because you believe that people in the mainstream media have journalistic ethics and integrity.
Merkel and Germany:This 16-year-old German girl. A 31.6% increase in crime doesn’t sound happy (article in German but readable with Google Translate).
White privilege: Yes, I reject the concept of “white privilege” and all such social justice concepts. The concept of white privilege is that whites and non-whites are fundamentally similar and would have the same outcomes if it wasn’t for the evil oppressiveness of white people. I believe that human tribes are sufficiently different that underperformance of one cannot be blamed on another. There are also plenty of bad historical things that non-white people did that are erased by the concept of white privilege (e.g. the Barbary Slave Trade). Social justice and anti-racism are purely a recent political invention for elite white people to dispossess poor and middle-class white people, using non-white people as the excuse.
I recognize that you are putting in effort to engage me in detail, but I’m happy with leaving this here because we are clearly operating in two completely different realities.