The Glade 4.0

What if Donald Trump isn't a right-wing authoritarian white nationalist? What if Donald Trump is just a regular *** president that I don't like, don't agree with, and don't want? Just like every other president that's been elected since I've been eligible to vote.

For that matter, what if, as a candidate, Donald Trump was no different than all of the Democrat and Republican nominees who failed to win, that I also didn't like, didn't agree with, and didn't want? Maybe there's nothing special about our past presidents that set them apart from, of all people, Donald Trump. Maybe that's why having Donald Trump as president makes us all so upset - after four years of Donald Trump, we're still the same country as before and after eight years of hope & change.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I'd ask what difference it makes, but that's pretty much your point.

3 years ago the nation was handed a choice between being led by yet another liberal Democrat, yet another candidate named Clinton, or a "none of the above, and FU and the horse you rode in on!" candidate. I'm not upset with him 'cause I purposefully don't read anything his enemies publish about him. I don't trust what liberals say about conservatives and vice versa. Since Trump staked as his claim that he was going to drain the swamp, of course he'll have tons of enemies, and I doubt they speak in glowing terms when describing him.

I've come to the conclusion that there's an imaginary world that people are paying a lot of money to convince me exists. That world seems to be the one you're describing, where everyone is an angry, negative stereotype of one flavor or another.

In my world, I drive down the street and wave at folks, they wave back. I smile at white, brown, and yellow people and they smile back.

Nobody is marching down my street, and I don't personally know of anyone who has contracted covid or licked a tub of ice cream in the store. While I believe that in the real world some do march down streets, I'm convinced it's because they got hooked on the badly produced reality tv **** show folks are paying huge amounts to create. I'm convinced that if the money used to fabricate that imaginary world would stop flowing, it would too.

You can believe in the world you see or the one with the production budget.

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In time, this too shall pass.

If Trump's policies had been proposed by, say, Marco Rubio, you'd be about 99% correct about this. Trump's policies are met with such incredible dismay for largely the same reason Bush II's were: The sense that the election was in the bag for them, and that it was somehow stolen. As you mentioned in another thread, Democrats and the Left tend, in recent years to think every election is final and complete victory, and when that does not happen (when they do win, it turns out to largely be to curb Republican excess, not because everyone has seen the light of leftism) it must be the fault of the system.



What if, indeed?

I do not think any of us are ever really likely to actually get a candidate we like and want in our current environment. Republicans tend to be "Democrat-lite" or else tilting at windmills.

Democrats are... no competent serviceable Democrat can get anywhere in this environment. Joe Biden is neither. He is, however, wearing the hat of one. All of the competent, serviceable Democrats in this last election were also-rans that no one remembers. (By competent and serviceable I mean that they could be counted on to be center-left Democrats no worse than Obama or Bill Clinton; not that I in any way approved of them).

The Democrats that got all the attention were: Biden (by virtue of default) Sanders (a loon, but sincere) and a collection of incompetents all trying to be sort-of Bernie Sanders mixed with vagina, minority status, or in two cases, pretend minority status.

Fundamentally, they all ran on "I am not Trump" and when every one of the 21 of you is "not Trump" there is no meaningful way to differentiate between you and any of your peers.(The Republicans had something of this problem in 2016; had Trump not run Cruz probably would have been nominated simply by virtue of being much faster on the draw politically than his opponents; a talent not shared by any of his peers then, nor any Democrats this time around.)

As a result, the default candidate got nominated. Biden, it should be remembered, came in fourth and fifth in Iowa and New Hampshire. The problem is that the only reason anyone wanted anyone else was either they actually believe Bernie-lunacy, or else they were infatuated with the gay guy, the black woman, the fake-Indian-woman, etc. Every sing candidate's campaign amounted to "**** the Republicans and Trump" - except maybe Tulsi Gabbard who added "and **** all of the rest of you too" and we saw how well THAT polled. (I have met Tulsi before; she's worthless).

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

My refrain from the last 6 months in particular has been: stop making me defend Donald Trump.

I don't like him, and many of his policies are not good. But some are. Everything his administration does is not shitting on Americans and then lighting them on fire. But by god you wouldn't know it.

I talk to so many people who don't even know his policies, just his tweets. FFS people, TWEETS AREN'T POLICY. It's him **** with the media. He's just a troll. Pay attention to real-world policy, not tweets.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

There is one bright spot - the anti-gun lobby is backed up against a wall now, not only with people buying guns faster than ever, but a lot of them being previous anti-gun liberals, which started with the virus.

But on top of that, a lot of the police-heavy policies advocated by anti-gun types are not compatible with #BLM or defund the police. Not only is there no one to carry out the gun-grabbing, the people that would are the ones that #BLM wants abolished. There's no real reconciliation between these two, and the Left may just be forced to pick one or the other.

My money is that they will alienate BLM just because the oldsters in control of their party are anti-gun fanatics from long ago (Pelosi, Schumer and Biden) and they will get hurt worse than they think in Blue Dog areas. Going with BLM might be the wiser idea politically, but being anti-gun is an article of faith. It's a source of moral superiority over poor white people and dumb rednecks and those who hold it can't bear to give that up (until there's a pandemic and "honey, you need to go buy a gun. Tomorrow.")

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Trump is a great FU to The Cathedral and his attacks on the corporate press their response to him has handed out a lot of redpills. BUT, he's gotten very little done. It's not entirely his fault, but he can't even retract an Obama exec order and his SC pick still votes for prog causes. He didn't get us into any new wars, but didn't do much to limit our presence and the swamp is too powerful for one man to drain. People have an unrealistic concept of "power." Just being the Prez doesn't get it done. It's like conservatives are destined to lose. Also the debt is skyrocketing... My guess is that the US has a couple decades before total collapse. The Ds are technically more despicable(mostly due to the depravity and malfeasance), but conservatives are just progressives going the speed limit.

Our best hope for freedom lovers is to balkanize. Nothing can unite us. How can you unite a group that thinks women can get abortions unlimited with one that thinks it's straight up murder? How do you reconcile that? You can't and maybe shouldn't want to. If Bernie Bros wanna try a commie commune in Vermont, let em, just leave me alone. But they wont. EVER. Their ideology won't allow it. Moral busy-bodies are worse than corrupt statist tyrants. Their belief system will allow them to justify anything and their conscious will never allow them to leave you alone. -Paraphrasing someone

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Someone likes Malice or Moldbug.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Why not both? Other people have discovered the same things independently. I think both the Weinstein's are basically aware of the Cathedral, but call it something else.

I never called myself a libertarian, but have come to understand the complete futility of the Libertarian Party. Malice/Moldbug glued together some pieces of the puzzle together for me. You can be as right about fiscal policy as you like, but if no one cares you're just better off doing something else.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

His SC picks mostly don't vote for progressive causes. One vote doesn't really mean a lot. We don't expect SC justices to be lapdogs. On the other side, Kagan and sometimes one of the others occasionally vote with the conservatives.

As for not getting much done, part of the problem is a dearth of conservative professionals who aren't in the vein of the Bush wing of the party that's dominated since 1988. Conservatives have a deep problem with an intelligentsia that cannot get out of 1980, and cannot give up on some of our overseas commitments that are going nowhere.

One thing almost unmentioned is that Trump did, in fact, get rid of ISIS, even if only by giving Jim Mattis free reign. However he did it, that's mission accomplished. After that, there's not much for us to be doing in Syria, but we remain as new obligations like "supporting the Kurds" (against another of our allies) take over. Much of our national strategy is that of an amateur chess player, terrified of losing a piece, who just moves one bishop back and forth, endlessly stalling.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

How much of Afghanistan and Syria do you think is the Containment strategy in regard to global terrorism playing out though?

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

I don't like the US foreign policy for much, but if we're gonna do empire, at least do it well. Power means nothing if you have no will to use it. Ours is a total **** show and we're gonna lose it to China's Belt and Road in a couple decades. Assuming it's not already a done deal.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Less than the people advocating remaining are telling themselves that it is. The desire to remain endlessly is not entirely cynical; some of it is informed by the rise of ISIS. However, ISIS has been destroyed, and while there's a lesson that pulling out can create a vacuum where an ISIS-like entity can rise, there's another, more recent lesson, which is that "the entire world will show up and pound it flat." ISIS couldn't even get along with the Taliban, with one side or the other (I don't remember which) calling the other's leader a "fool and an ignorant warlord." That's really setting the standard for alienating people, right there. ISIS was horrifying, but it only got as far as it did because of ideal circumstances. Iran is the worst threat regionally, and it's a paper tiger when it comes to major combat. The death of Solemani showed all sides that ultimately we can simply crush any Middle Eastern opposition if we really want to pay the price, political, military, and otherwise. No one there can escalate sufficiently to stop us. There's more of a fear of a terrorist attack occuring "on someone's watch" than there really is of the actual harm it can cause; in some ways its akin to a fear of COVID triage deaths and how they would appear to the public being greater than the fear of all the other more diffuse harm of extensive lockdowns.

In some respects, also, it is a product of habituation. Long-term, low-intensity conflict has simply become the norm. When people were fussing about "forever war" 15 years ago, they were both right and wrong - they were right that it was a danger; they were wrong that it was happening in 2004, or even in 2009. Our experts are accustomed to dealing with this world now, just as they became accustomed to the Cold War. For the military, specifically, deployments have become the norm - people rely on the money, retirement and other benefots of overseas service, and for officers and senior NCOs, the evaluations, especially in command or key staff positions overseas. It is likely similar in civilian services. Even in the press, any hint of changing our "engagement" has at least as many voices bewailing the loss of American "leadership" as who want out of at least some of these commitments.

So, yes, it's partly that, but not because of any intentional strategy on our part making it that way. It's because the Republicans are holding onto neing the "National Security Party" for dear life, while the Democrats decided they liked fighting for their share of the national security credit more than they liked being the anti-war party, especially after getting to take credit for taking down Bin Laden.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

China has problems of its own, and the COVID situation really hit them - it's pretty much entirely on them, and it isn't like we were the only victims. Europe in particular is looking at them pretty askance. There's also not much they can do to slap a fresh coat of paint on the Hong Kong situation; the NBA may be cowed, but no one's really fooled.

We don't really do "Empire" outside of simply being a large country in the first place, and never have. We've been a lot more about a sort of "we need to have hegemony so someone worse than us doesn't have it", mainly Russia or China. Unfortunately, that does end up having sort of a similar effect to doing Empire badly.

As for foreign policy, I am not sure we've had one since about 2005 or so. The Iraq war ate it, and since then it's been crisis-to-crisis; no policy has been conducted because ANY policy will have drawbacks, and whoever's policy it isn't is loudly screaming that the drawback is the end of the world.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I would argue that the US does, in fact, do Empire, but not the traditional sort that the rest of the world recognizes. The traditional sort of Empire is where a nation looks around, finds the people and places that can't defend themselves from the force they can bring, and then takes over those people and places. For much of history, this was controlled by land proximity, and then in the past 400-500 years naval access and superiority weighed heavily. The US does not engage in that type of Empire, certainly. This drives the rest of the world absolutely bonkers, because they can't understand why we don't act like they expect. They can't understand, because the entirety of history tells them that we should be wanting to take their stuff, and we have no interest in their stuff. The Empire that the US has built is one of dreams and ideas and other intangibles that is incredibly seductive and almost impossible to defend against. We overwrite people's most basic identities with "American", and that is terrifying and dangerous to those holding onto power derived from older structures.

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That's an interesting idea. I am not sure that applying the term "Empire" to it does not broaden the term beyond usefulness, but I don't think your description of the phenomenon, whatever word is used to describe it, is necessarily wrong.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The USA doesn't seek to expand it's boarders or it's reach so much as to project it's influence to solidify it's national interests. So much nowadays it's about energy.

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In time, this too shall pass.

I think that is the textbook definition of Cultural Imperialism.

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Some cultures are better than others.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

That is why it is primarily a voluntary empire. It is hard to force a s*tty culture on others, ask ISIS or the Taliban.

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Not that hard, I still have to live here at the mercy of "US citizens" and their "will." What a joke.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn