Musings of an anarchist misfit
Published at 07:21 on 20 June 2023
That is my question: Was the current right-wing Hindu nationalist (read Hindu supremacist) government in India in any way involved in this and other similar crimes in Canada? I am not saying they definitively were, mind you, just that they might have been (such things are entirely in character for such a regime), and the possibility needs to be seriously investigated.
Published at 22:52 on 15 June 2023
I worried earlier about the threat of petulant centrists helping elect Trump in 2024. Now, this is still a worry (No Labels is still around, after all), but it seems that many other centrists are being realistic about things and appreciate how truly dangerous No Labels really is. Take the canonical centrist Democrat group Third Way, for example. Fully three of the four articles currently featured above the fold on their main page are about the dangers of No Labels.
Which, to reiterate, is definitely good news, but then again No Labels is still around, which is not-so-good news.
Published at 20:17 on 8 June 2023
Time to reiterate a few points I made earlier in the wake of the New York indictment:
What this all means is that when it comes to a trial, they are highly likely to convict, because they have already done Trump the favor of being double super sure that the case against him is ironclad.
And then what? Most likely, house arrest. Sorry, Nice Liberals: the system is not very likely to lock up someone that powerful in a normal prison. Plus, house arrest neatly solves the problem of Secret Service protection, to which all ex-presidents are entitled under the law. It will probably become part of their mission to supervise the conditions of his house arrest, perhaps in conjunction with Federal marshals.
Published at 22:02 on 1 June 2023
This is how a member of the center-right might want to see Florida politics, because it lets him play pin the blame on the liberals, but it really doesn’t explain what happened very well.
The Florida Democrats already tried the hardcore centrist strategy. In 2022, in fact. And we all know how well that worked out. Charlie Crist, their candidate for governor, had previously served as the Republican governor of Florida.
The Florida Democrats fail, not because they tack to the right or to the left, but simply because they are grossly incompetent as an organization.
I have told this story before, and I will now tell it again: I have done some volunteer work for the Florida Democrats. It entailed making get-out-the-vote calls. They gave me a spiel to use which had been invalidated by recent news stories. I contacted them for an updated spiel. They had none. I had to spend the first thirty minutes of my shift coming up with a spiel on my own. This is just about the absolute last thing you want your volunteers to do. You want to put out a unified, coherent message!
And it gets worse. The list they gave me was out of date as well. I called people who had already voted early or absentee. I called people exasperated because they had requested to be on the do not call list, some of them multiple times. This is very basic stuff. If someone tells you to stop calling them, you honor their request. You do not want to piss people off by continuing to call them!
Florida could be a competitive swing state today, as it once was not too long ago, were only the Florida Democrats capable of campaigning their way out of a wet paper bag.
Published at 07:53 on 31 May 2023
The Russians call it “terrorism,” of course. And, guess what? They are right! By pretty much any measure, such things are terrorism.
They are also totally to be expected in a wartime situation. During World War II, there were routine acts of terrorism in the belligerent nations. Often, their enemy nations were involved in some fashion.
War is unpredictable. Always has been, probably always will be. Putin was supremely foolish to believe that something as high risk (and as much a stretch strategically) as attempting to invade and subjugate all of Ukraine would go smoothly, according to plan, and expose the Russian heartland to only minimal risk.
So far as this undermining support for the war in Russia, probably not, sorry. Hitler thought the Blitz would do that to the United Kingdom, and it had precisely the opposite effect, despite imposing much more hardship and danger on the British public than the few insignificant pinpricks that we have seen so far against Russia. Putin’s line has after all long been that this whole “special military operation” is about Russia’s security, and now that Russia is getting attacked well inside its borders, this whole “we are fighting because our security is in danger” line now has more traction.
What it will do is boost morale inside Ukraine even more. It is always good news when a war goes far worse for one’s enemy than that enemy ever believed possible.
But yes, it’s all quite ugly. News flash: war itself is ugly. Don’t like the ugliness of war? Don’t start one! If you have started one, stop it! Putin could totally kneecap Ukraine’s causus belli by negotiating a ceasefire and withdrawing back across Russia’s internationally recognized borders.
Until that happens, however, as Garrison Keillor once quipped: “If you didn’t want to go to St. Cloud, then why did you get on that train?”
Published at 21:50 on 30 May 2023
The guy the West wanted to win, Kılıçdaroğlu, lost. Erdoğan, Turkey’s longstanding president with an authoritarian streak, won yet another term in office.
But here’s the thing. Kılıçdaroğlu sounded positively Trump-like in his non-concession “concession” speech, going on as he did about how the election had been stolen from him. And his anti-refugee stance (he promised to summarily expel all refugees from the country) also comes across as more than a little bit Trump-like.
In other words, it really doesn’t look like the narrative in the Western media of a brave liberal democrat challenging an evil entrenched authoritarian is all that accurate. Maybe if the opposition hadn’t chosen such an obviously flawed figure as their standard-bearer, they would have fared better?
Published at 21:46 on 3 April 2023
Trump has far better chances of winning in 2024 than some informed observers seem to think.
It all rests on what the group No Labels does. They have been rightly castigated as being mostly a benefit to Trump, and boy could they ever.
You see, despite how the media loves to fawn over them as the rational and reasonable ones, centrists have a really seamy and dare I say even militant underside. They know what they want, they want it really bad, and they will act on those wants, even to the ultimate detriment of their preferences.
It is exactly the same criticism often made of the Left, but it applies to centrists even more. Those of us on the left are at least constantly being lectured to about the dangers of refusing to compromise. But the same chattering classes that never tire of sermonizing the Left tend to see the Center as intrinsically “responsible.”
Witness what happened to Humphrey in 1968 (lost votes on the left) and McGovern in 1972 (lost votes in the center). There’s no shortage of voices blaming Humphrey’s lost on voters to the left sitting it out. By contrast, when it comes to McGovern those same voices… blame left/liberal voters for having selected McGovern in the first place! In other words: if you don’t support our preferred candidate, it’s all your fault, and if we don’t support your preferred candidate, it’s also all your fault.
Many centrists are so beset with feelings of entitlement, and so coddled and pandered to by the media, that they are largely shielded from being confronted with the downsides of their own political behavior. And many of them to this day have trouble seeing their hypocrisy.
It is in this light that the seriousness of a threat by a centrist No Labels candidate can fully be seen.
To the above you can add that Republicans tend to be more extreme and inflexible in general, meaning it will be much easier for a centrist to peel votes away from the Democrats. No Labels itself is aware of this; here is one of their initial projection maps showing how they hoped to win. Note how most of the states they think they can flip went for Biden in the last election:
They probably won’t do that well, of course. All it would take is them failing to flip Texas and Florida and boom! Second Trump term.
Published at 08:45 on 31 March 2023
It matters because it breaks the precedent that presidents and ex-presidents are above the law.
It does not matter because of the seriousness of the charges. The particular charges of the indictment are still not known, but all sources claim they have to do with a fraudulent payment of hush money to keep Stormy Daniels silent about an affair she had five or more years ago now. An affair is really not a major political scandal (despite how much Republicans wish it was when Clinton was caught having one).
But the precedent is now broken. That having been done so, it becomes more likely that indictments might be filed over inciting the January 6th putsch and/or the attempted corrupting of the vote tabulating process in Georgia. Both of those, by contrast, are truly serious charges; they relate to acts that are direct attacks on democracy.
If other, more serious charges are not fired, it will be as Judge Luttig has said: a great disservice to democracy and to the rule of law.
And there is still a lot of moral rot in the system. I may have been wrong about Trump not being indicted for anything, but I am not wrong about that general observation. That there still is, is evidenced by a more serious indictment being a sufficiently unsure thing that Luttig is openly worrying that it might not happen. Luttig is a lifelong conservative. It is not personally convenient for him to come to the conclusions he has. It is much more convenient for a conservative to conclude that our existing institutions, representing the wisdom of tested experience, are functioning relatively well.
And Luttig is hardly the only conservative running around saying how alarming Trumpism is. There are enough of them, in fact, that a special term has arisen to refer to such individuals: never-Trump conservatives. It has long been a key insight of mine that when there is a significant group of individuals asserting something they are ideologically inconvenienced by, that something is almost certainly a relevant political fact that should be paid serious attention to.
Published at 17:40 on 30 March 2023
And I am very happy to be wrong. It means the disgusting precedent that the president is above the law is looking more and more like a has-been of a precedent. It means the danger of a transition to fascism is distinctly less than it was just this morning.
Nobody won USD $100 out of it, by the way, because nobody took me up on my offer. Which, of course, is now void now that the outcome is no longer in doubt.
Now we get to see a number of other questions be answered:
This is a precedent-setting moment, but there were really two options here:
Published at 20:45 on 27 March 2023
There are basically two types of Republicans left these days:
That’s it. There are effectively no other types of Republican. The ones who couldn’t stand Trump have, basically to a last person, left the party.
Therefore, if by some miracle DeSantis wins the primary, Trump will yell “Rigged!” and the Type 1 Republicans will either cast write-in, independent, or third-party votes for Trump, or sit at home and sulk on Election Day. Either action dooms the Republicans, who cannot afford to lose any votes.
So if DeSantis wins the primary, the Republicans lose the general. Guaranteed.
While if Trump wins, the odds are still against them (Trump has high negatives), but still not as dismal as if DeSantis wins. To reiterate, Trump managed to win once already, and he could do it again.