#Philosophy of politics

[thecurioustale]

We Are Seeing How a Pressure Campaign Works, and It Is Very Dirty

(I originally wrote this on Thursday but held off on posting it so as not to oversaturate my posting with political stuff. But it still nags at me each day, so I am finally posting it.)

[UPDATE: Immediately after posting this, I read on The Washington Post that Biden has just dropped out.]

Following up on yesterday's post, I want to point out and call attention to the pressure campaign to push President Biden out from his reelection bid, because I don't know how many people on here (or in the public generally) have the political acumen to recognize and understand what is happening, and this sort of phenomenon, though subtle, is critical to recognize and understand if one wishes to be good at analyzing and understanding the news—not just on this one subject but in general, especially news about politics and business.

Here's the short version: The drop-Biden faction is making a full-court press to get rid of him; they are dead-set on it; and their strategy is "Lie over and over again until it actually becomes true." The news has been full all month of conveniently-anonymous sources making claims that the drop-Biden faction is winning: that the Biden campaign is privately imploding, that more and more people in the Democratic Party establishment and other relevant circles are abandoning Biden and leaving him more isolated than ever, and that even Joe Biden himself is beginning to recognize that his candidacy is "untenable" and he might not be able to stay in the race.

Almost all of these anonymous claims were almost certainly lies at the time they were made, but (sometimes) became true later.

This is an important part of how a pressure campaign works: You try to redefine reality. You frame the opposing side's position as completely untenable with no way forward. You frame your targets as trapped and fatalistic, as if they are caught in a slow-motion train wreck and can see what is coming but are helpless to stop it. You assert that more and more people who are relevant to the matter are realizing and accepting this "reality" and getting on board with the "practical" alternative—which may be risky, yes, but is better than doing nothing. And you give cover to all of this, which is essentially a campaign of gaslighting and lies, by blanketing the discourse with public statements by prominent, relevant individuals who make the case for your side and put their faces and reputations behind it. Following the assassination attempt against Trump, the drop-Biden faction lost a lot of steam...until Representative Adam Schiff (who is extremely respected in Democratic politics and was basically a trump card for the drop-Biden faction) came out and said Biden should exit the race. It worked, and the issue flared back to life and has become more intense than ever in the past two days [Sunday update: and in the several days since].

In politics there is much that never goes public, but I have absolute confidence that, except with the possibility of the past several days, Joe Biden has been nothing less than categorically committed to running for reelection, and that he was telling the unconditional truth in saying so publicly. I think his reflective conversations with family and aides immediately following his performance in the debate ended with him reaffirming that position, and I think he has held that resolve until this most recent and acute phase of the crisis. Biden is not the kind of person who would have played it any other way. I think there was no fatalism and sense of resignation in the Biden campaign, no "slow-motion train wreck," none of it. I think Biden had made his decision to stay in, and the campaign was getting on with campaigning.

I want you to note that President Biden and his representatives keep saying that Biden is staying in the race. The drop-Biden faction keeps saying "The President has an important decision to make"; Biden says he's made it; and the drop-Biden people keep saying "The President has an important decision to make." In other words, for them there is only one correct decision, only one decision they are willing to accept.

Notably, very few of these anonymous claims of the Biden campaign's disintegration have been explicitly confirmed by named sources on-the-record. When you look only at the verifiable facts, it still looks like the drop-Biden faction is on the outside, trying to make hay out of a nonissue and not getting very far with it.

In other words, the Biden campaign wasn't going to unravel on its own. The drop-Biden faction is solely responsible for what is happening.

Pressure campaigns usually don't work, because it's usually very hard to unravel power centers from the outside. What makes this one different is that almost the Democratic Party leadership, the Democratic megadonor class, and (of all things) the mainstream news media all seem to be in on it. Their tactics are working because they have the firepower of the biggest fleet in the sea. When it came out today that Representative Jamie Raskin had written a private letter to Biden to urge him to drop out, for the first time I got the feeling that the drop-Biden faction is actually going to succeed. Apparently Joe Biden had the same reaction, because the latest news as I write this [on Thursday] is that he is reconsidering his commitment to staying in the race. [Sunday update: So far, this reporting has not panned out. The drop-Biden people are now saying that Monday is going to be the big day.] Raskin, Schiff, Pelosi...these are just about the most respectable names there are in Democratic politics. President Obama is reportedly in on it, too, though I've heard other reports that he's not. Numerous governors and senators are publicly in on it. Both Democratic leaders in Congress. Not even the president can repel firepower of that magnitude; it's exactly the sort of "expel-the-foreign-object" autoimmune response that we all so dearly hoped the GOP would have done to Donald Trump in 2015, or if nothing else in the aftermath of his defeat in 2020.

This isn't just the usual "Democrats hate to win" that I mentioned in my first essay. It is almost unthinkable that the entire leadership of a major political party in the US—the healthy major political party, no less—would be so quick in joining a cabal to expel its own sitting president in the July before the election—and seemingly on such a capricious basis! Joe Biden has not behaved meaningfully differently since the debate than he had been doing before. He's the same Biden! It wasn't anything that happened in the debate that caused this degree of galvanization within the Democratic establishment to occur. And it's not just that Biden is down in the polls; Democrats are routinely down in the polls the summer before a presidential election.

To give due consideration to the drop-Biden faction, there must be something else motivating them. Perhaps they have decisive evidence that Biden's cognitive abilities are much worse than is publicly apparent, though I would have a hard time accepting that based on my own witnessing of the President's public behavior in recent weeks. I don't care if he's slow up the stairs of Air Force One. I don't care if he doesn't immediately reocognize a longstanding acquaintance in a busy crowd. I don't care if he flubs his words or speaks quietly. Those things are not dementia; they are a part of aging and there is a difference. So are all these brilliant Democratic VIPs just that dumb? I have a hard time accepting that. So what else might it be?

Perhaps the fascist menace and the specter of a second Trump presidency spooked them like horses and they've lost rational control. Despite their smarts, their savvy, and their long years of experience, I can believe such a thing happening of them. This is something I've studied a lot over the years both as a student of human nature and to deepen the quality of my fiction-writing. Humans, even the best of us, can get caught up in a kind of mass hysteria sometimes. The Republicans are running a convicted felon who wants to end democracy (or rather pervert it to his own use, which is the same thing in practice) and yet is somehow clearly ahead in the polls. America feels like it is turning a corner into something dark and terrible, and both right-wing propaganda and now increasingly the mainstream traditional media are behaving in a way that insinuates that this might be acceptable and even desirable, and in any case is likely if not inevitable. I think they really might be spooked, in the sense of having gone collectively insane.

(Just a quick tangent here to say that Jake Tapper in particular, on CNN, has carried a LOT of water for the drop-Biden faction. I never liked his dour attitude to begin with, but I am disgusted by him after what I've seen in recent days.)

Another possibility is that perhaps this really is the rare conspiracy-coup to actually succeed, and now we are simply in the "snowball effect" stage where the political gravity has changed and everyone who wasn't part of the original conspiracy is just getting sucked into it by its sheer size and force as it rolls on down the news cycle.

And of course there are always a few Democratic stragglers down the ballot in tough reelection campaigns who care more about their own self-interest than anything else.

Whatever their motive(s), and to hearken back to my central thesis in the first essay, the drop-Biden faction lacks the confidence of its convictions. They do not have consensus, and they are not-so-secretly trying to push Kamala Harris off the ticket too. That's why they won't say her name as the obvious replacement when they call for Biden to exit; that's why they frame her natural replacement of Biden as a "coronation" i.e. undesirable; that's why they're calling for an "open primary" despite the fact that we already had a primary election and the formal nomination is in less than a month. And they don't have consensus on who the replacement should be; they are jockeying on this question as we speak. They are a conspiracy at war with itself—weak and self-serving and despicable. This is some surreal bullshit.

And it is incredibly dirty. This is dirty politics. This is party leaders and zillionaires overturning our vote as Democrats to choose Joe Biden to be our party's presidential nominee (and, implicitly, Kamala Harris to be his running mate), with no clear replacement in mind except "not Kamala." This is wrong, and it is fucked up.

And I'm going to tell you right now: It has probably cost us the election. We are probably going to lose because of this. If Joe Biden stays at the top of the ticket, he has been devastatingly damaged by this relentless summer pressure campaign against him. The nature of the supposed problem at the root of all this—Biden's age—is a genie that can't be put back in the bottle. Now that the entire nation has seen just about the entire Democratic party establishment panicking that Biden is not fit to be president, it is extremely difficult to imagine Biden winning this election.

But the thing is, Biden was by far our best shot at winning. He is a stronger candidate than people give him credit for. If he does step aside, Vice President Harris will also almost certainly lose, because she was always a weak candidate, because it's so damn late in the election cycle, and because America is a racist, sexist cesspool sometimes. If Harris takes Biden's place, our best hope is that Democratic messaging can successfully frame this debacle as "We listened to you, the people, and are giving you change: a young, vibrant candidate!" But it's a very, very long shot.

And if both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris get ousted by this cabal, then we are in the worst position of all, because millions of Democratic voters are going to feel betrayed and cut out—and from what I am hearing, this revulsion will be centered in some of the most critical Democratic constituencies, most notably the black community, which has largely been sticking with Biden through this and is well aware of the campaign to not only oust Joe Biden but also push out his black vice-president. [Sunday update: AOC came out and basically said the same thing: The drop-Biden faction wants to drop Harris too; behind the scenes they are fighting among themselves for power.)

Whatever happens, we are probably going to lose in November. Not just the presidency, but both houses of Congress. And I want you to know that the drop-Biden faction is to blame. Some of the best names in Democratic politics—people I still respect, though my respect for them has been firmly damaged by this

But more importantly, to get back to my main point tonight, I want you to recognize that this is what a large-scale pressure campaign looks like. "Lie until the lie becomes true." Is Joe Biden going to drop out? Everyone but Joe Biden keeps saying that he is, including the media (who really shouldn't be saying anything either way).

It's going to take me a long time to understand why this happened, if I ever do. And I also have new questions about the news media that I didn't have before. Jake Tapper on CNN has been the most glaring example of this, but it is media-wide: They've been pushing for this. They want this story to be the top story, and I get the sense that it's as much because of a desire to get rid of Biden as it is a matter of ratings and clicks. The Republican money and connections in the mainstream media want it for obvious reasons: It's the first story in years that distracts from Donald Trump, and it also happens to be just about the most damaging story imaginable for the Democrats. And the Democratic money and connections in the mainstream media seem to be an integral part of the drop-Biden faction, and why they want this to happen is still an open question for me, because from the outside this is like a self-inflicted mortal wound. These idiots have all but destroyed our chances in an existentially critical election.

This is so, so dirty. The Democratic Party, and the mainstream media, have both done America dirty. And I don't understand why they would take leave of their senses like this...but I sure don't like it. And this scenario actually runs afoul of my private list of Democratic Party yellow and red lines that would threaten my support for the party. We are well past the yellow line. You do not overturn elections, even if they are primary elections, so that some invisible back-room cabal can pick our new president and vice president. You just don't do it. We fought to put an end to these back-room dealings; the people should pick the nominees of their party. If neither Joe Biden nor Kamala Harris is on the ballot this November, I will have to have a serious think on what I will do.

Whatever does happen in November, the results-oriented thinking from the drop-Biden faction and their stooges in the media is going to be insufferable. If we lose with Biden at the top of the ticket, the drop-Biden faction will blame everyone but themselves, even though they themselves will have been by far the single biggest factor in weakening him as a candidate. If we lose with Harris at the top of the ticket, that same faction will say we should've had an open convention rather than defaulting to her, and again there will be no admission that the drop-Biden faction caused a series of events where she became the presidential nominee. If we win with Harris at the top of the ticket, the drop-Biden faction will say they were right all along to get Joe Biden off the ticket. And if we win with Biden at the top of the ticket, only in this one scenario will the drop-Biden faction be discredited in the way it so richly deserves to be. In every other scenario, history will be rewritten by the faction to glorify itself and erase the truth of what really happened.

I am quite upset about all this, really really upset, and as someone who mostly retired from news and politics a couple of years ago, I foresee a firmer and broader-reaching recommitment to that principle in my future after this election. For the first time I am finding myself seriously thinking about what will happen with a full Republican government next year. They are not happy thoughts.

It makes me wonder, "What was it all for?" Why does it even matter that I teach you how to recognize pressure campaigns in the news, if this is what America does with all its riches of knowledge?

Anyway, that's the last I'll say about any of this for the time being. For those with the energy to do so, please recognize that a cabal is trying to steal the election, and it is on our side.

[sailing-ever-west]

the trolley problem vs. systemic oppression: a comic.

[lazyarrogance]

Aristotles take on oratory and rhetoric which is different from Socrates and Plato

[typhlonectes]

[the-cybersmith]

I think we're all being rather too blasé about the fact that most of the anglophonic population doesn't seem to believe in democracy.

I'm not using "believe in" as a synonym for "endorse", to be clear.

I mean the general sentiment is that the nominally democratic institutions of our societies do not represent the will of anyone but a small, ideologically captured elite who do not share our interests, and who do not respect the values important to us.

Democracy has been elevated to a near-sacred status. It is preached in th schools, and the voting booths, and the civic offices, and in the courts, and in the town halls, and in the hallowed halls of legislatures.

It is the value upon which our system of rule justifies and legitimises itself.

In some sense, it replaced the divine right of kings. That failed when people ceased to believe in God.

What happens to our modern civilisation when we no longer believe in democracy?

Neitzche saw the downfall of the old order in Apostasy.

A new Apostasy is upon us. An Apostasy fuelled by increasing evidence that the god of the public will is illusion, and that the heavenly throne of electoralism is empty.

We are carried forward by momentum, not fuel.

The world as it has been suffered a bevy of wounds, and soon it will bleed to death. I know not what will be born from the carrion of Democracy, but I think we are all being unreasonably calm about it.

[quote-bomber]

[kafkasapartment]

[danandfuckingjonlmao]

do you ever think about how we have phannies in every field? like we have doctors and baristas and mental health therapists and geologists and audiologists and engineers and neuroscientists and authors and social media consultants and activists and child care workers and museum managers and teachers and biologists and emts and linguists and accessibility coaches and sign language interpreters and artists and musicians and editors and actors and chefs and fucking EVERYTHING. not to mention the specific knowledge bases and hobbies we have outside of our professions—coding, linguistic and cultural diversity, artistic creativity, political/social awareness, passion for justice, research, make up and hair and fashion design, media literacy, philosophy, all of our special interests/hyperfixations, etc. we could run a successful commune no problem at all. we’re so smart and talented and resourceful and powerful.

the phandom is rooted in a past of being infamously shitty, and i do see yall slipping back into old habits sometimes (mostly on twitter but sometimes here and you know it <3) but it’s pretty fucking cool how capable this community is and our ability to unify. anyway phanmune when.

(if you want, leave your knowledge base/skills in the tags or replies. can be profession, hobby, major/program of study, what you study in your free time, what you want to learn about, what you’re interested, all of the above, anything)

[3sbeee]

Can we talk about how the idea that STEM and the humanities are mortal enemies with no overlap is actually incredibly harmful and is not only preventing people from pursuing their passions but also part of the reason why the humanities aren’t given their proper respect? No, artists are not all snobby pretentious assholes who think they’re more cultured than everyone else and no scientists are not all emotionless robots who think they’re smarter than everyone else and it’s possible to be an artist and a scientist at the same time. By acting like you have to choose between STEM and humanities we are eliminating thousands of potential careers and causing unnecessary divisions in a time where nothing is more crucial than unity. I’m so tired of people acting like STEM majors are incapable of understanding art and humanities majors are incapable of understanding math when the two fields are crucial to one another. Who would design our architecture if it weren’t for artful engineers? Who would discover the rules of composition? At the end of the day we are all just people trying to learn and make a living, and all of these careers are important to humanity. People can’t say that STEM is more important than humanities if there’s no such thing as STEM vs humanities.

[independentanon]

Be Safe Out There

People are going to be protesting in every state today. I hope you all are safe and successful. I wanted to go to my state capitol myself but I wasn't able to arrange a carpool with it being so short notice. However, I'll still be going to Midland, MI to protest later today. I'll be handing out three signs and an un-cut stencil there.

Don't forget to fly your flags upside-down, boys and girls and non-binary types. Stay safe, and fuck Trump & Co!

[thecurioustale]

Not Going to Click

Across all social media platforms, including on YouTube, the algorithms are trying so hard in recent days to re-ensnare me in the political news death spiral I have since retired from. Just a little click, one simple little click, and all these scandalous stories of Trump and his cadre are mine for the apoplexy!

I've been trying to retire from politics basically ever since Trump got elected the first time. It only really started to take, however, after Desert Bus one year, I think 2021, because I came partially out of retirement when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine a few months later. And then of course the massacre in Israel on October 7 definitely recaptured my attention, and the subsequent mask-dropping of leftist Jew-haters. And, inevitably, I got pulled a little bit back into presidential politics last year with all the crazy things that went on. And the Los Angeles fires, of course, pulled me back onto the websites of (local) news organizations.

But, although my trendline has been extremely jagged, the arc is clear: After being very closely attached to the news on a daily basis for my entire adult life, in the past nine years or so, and especially in the past three, I've definitely moved away from it. And this time I mean for the break to hold. I'm telling YouTube's algorithm not to recommend those kinds of videos to me, sometimes even entire channels. I don't visit news websites at all anymore, except local news websites for local stories. I've significantly reduced my political (nonfiction) writing everywhere.

I'm done with national news. I'm more or less done with national politics. I fully, painfully realize that America as we have known it is on the way out. In its place is a country of people who pride themselves in being sick, poor, filthy, ignorant, docile, irresponsible, and cruel. In time, these people will reap the harvests of their culturally suicidal decisions. Sadly, many of the rest of us will be their collateral damage.

I don't know if "fascism has won" per se; I think an electoral coalition built on lies and indecency and disgustingly myopic self-interestedness is pretty dang unstable, and I know that fascism itself is inherently unstable. So, as long as we are allowed to have free and fair elections (and I would not be surprised either way), and as long as the American public remains so enthralled to being neither decent nor smart, the Republicans will lose sooner or later, and that particular cycle will continue. But America as the luminary of the world...those days are over. (And I don't want to hear it from self-hating anti-Western leftists that they never existed; they absolutely did. Just save the time and block me, because I ain't arguing with you on that.)

But here's the vaguely positive note I actually came here today to share:

Having put the tempest of news and politics firmly outside of my daily behavior and internal headspace, after having been closely engaged for over 25 years, has taught me an interesting lesson:

That stuff is poisonous. It is toxic. Significantly more so than I realized, even when I had had enough of it and was trying to quit. Only the relative cleanness of my "sober" point of view now can fully draw out just how horrible it is to be plugged in to national news and politics. It is caustic to the very soul.

Life feels significantly better now. Objectively, life is worse: The goddamn fascists just took over the country for the first time. America genuinely might not survive this. But life feels so much less bleak and horrible and hopeless, simply because I am not exposed to that daily onslaught of negativity, outrageousness, and evil which I am helpless to stop. It was time for me to stop, well past time. And if the fascists come for me and throw me in prison or murder me, because I wrote liberal things, or have a Jewish background, or don't worship their Jesus cult figurehead, or believe that males and females are equal, then fine. That's how it shall be. My reading the news isn't going to change that.

I'm not saying that people in general shouldn't follow the news. Most people in this country are so insanely, obscenely ignorant that they ought to be tied down and forcibly exposed to the news. But "following the news," and being an activist, is not so different from going to war, at least psychologically. The physical privations are obviously much less awful, but mentally, emotionally, the damage and trauma that can accrue are very similar. I am a veteran of that, and I can take no more. That doesn't mean younger people who are more ignorant and/or more energetic shouldn't keep following the news. But for those who have put in the long hard years of learning how this country works and what its current affairs are, I am here to report, positively, that cutting out news and politics has been the right thing to do, a liberating thing, a massive positive for my mental health, and has not been nearly as hard as I thought it would.

I suppose it was an addiction of sorts. The hardest part of it—the only truly hard part—is not clicking those links. Just not clicking. If you can do that, you're going to be fine. I don't miss the news. I had just not been able to not click. And now I'm significantly better at not clicking. And life goes on—and is better off for it.

Social media are evil. And they are trying so, so hard to get me to click on all their Trumpy clickbait. I know he's the president now. I know he's doing horrible things. So be it. That's the path this country chose.

I am not going to click.

[liberatingreality]

The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it's conformity.

Rollo May

[lazyarrogance]

Rhetoric and Oratory through eyes of Aristotle !!

[queercodedangel]

"There must be something rotten in the very core of a social system which increases its wealth without diminishing its misery" - Karl Marx, New-York Tribune

[philosophybits]

Cold water added to cold water, makes no disturbance. Error added to error causes no jar. Selfishness and selfishness walk together in peace, because they are agreed; but when fire is brought in direct contact with water, when flaming truth grapples with some loathsome error, when the clear and sweet current of benevolence sets against the foul and bitter stream of selfishness, when mercy and humanity confront iron-hearted cruelty, and ignorant brutality, there cannot fail to be agitation and excitement.

Frederick Douglass, "The American Apocalypse (1861)"

[ymmyglitz]

You guys talking about wanting a hot older man to use you and just play with you

I need an older nerdy boyfriend who reads, likes politics, tall, funny, not addicted to porn, and who simply just worships me. What do you mean you wanna marry me and all you’ve done for me is open the door.