Book review - Robert A. Heinlein: Starship Troopers (1959)
Trump 2.0 - quick takes on domestic issues
After taking a look at how Trump senselessly ended Pax Americana, undermined the most successful military alliance in history, eliminated American soft power, and gave a lifeline to the enemies of the United States when they seemed to be on the brink of collapse, all that in just 2 weeks, let's see what's happening inside the US.
A lot of Americans think that although things are going bad, all the hysteria about American decline is overblown. The US is a country of strong democratic institutions and robust civic culture, it will weather this period out.
I'm sorry, they are mistaken. The health of the US is not a question we are waiting for the answer to. That ship has sailed. A sitting president tried to stay in power after losing an election, first by trying to pressure the DOJ to declare the results invalid, then attempting to steal it through his fake electors scheme, then finally, inciting an insurrection. And four years later, half of the American people voted for him. Trump being elected a second time proves two things. One, the people's tolerance (putting it very mildly) for a wannabe fascist was not a historical aberration, but a permanent fact of reality from now on. Two, the laws, courts, and other institutions are not enough on their own. Modern society depends on norms, which have proven to be much more fragile than anyone had thought before. The justice system had four years to act on Trump's 97 criminal indictments and failed. America is broken in a fundamental way. Even after Trump is gone, trying to steal elections, lying about it blatantly, and inciting political violence (and dozens of minor issues like dining with neonazis) are just part of the new norms, and one of America's two big parties will build on it.
Now all these above were a bit abstract so let's go down to concrete facts. Just a few, I don't have all day. Starting with Trump's appointments.
The new Head of National Security Agencies, whose job is to collect the information provided by the different intelligence services, is Tulsi Gabbard. There is one question about Gabbard no one seems to know the answer to. Is she a paid Russian asset, or is she just an America-hating idiot who never met a bloody dictator she did not support against her own country? In the former case, one can argue that Gabbard has been put into the position because Vladimir Putin doesn't have time every week to fly to Washington himself.
The Defense Secretary is Pete Hegseth, former FOX host, who has been mostly known for the fact that his colleagues regularly have to carry him away from office parties once he is too drunk to walk himself and has already harassed his female colleagues. Ah yes, he is a white nationalist and Christian fundamentalist, too.
Kash Patel, the new head of FBI has been a strong Jan 6 supporter of Trump. His main claim for fame is writing a children's book in which Trump, the good King, is undermined by his evil advisors, but Patel, the court magician comes and saves the day. No, I'm not joking. He started with tenure demanding the names of FBI agents who worked on Jan 6 cases. The purge has begun.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the Health Secretary, is probably mentally ill, in a medical sense. He is a man who believes vaccines cause autism and would like to get rid of them if it's up to him. All vaccines. Against polio, measles, cholera, you name it. To be frank, I wish for him to succeed, just stop all transatlantic lines before he gets to work. Then let's catch up after the first cholera epidemic.
In normal times, one could hope that the robust civil service will dampen the damage the President and his idiots will inflict on the system. These are not normal times. Elon Musk has got bored faking being an engineer and now he is faking to be an accountant who can find fraud and waste in government. It's a permanent illusion among Silicon Valley types that leading a government is like leading a business company. Even if it were true, it's not clear why exactly Musk is the man for the job, whose last business venture was buying the world's most influential social media platform and reducing it to less than a third of its value. Notwithstanding, the world's richest imbecile is bulldozing through government offices, canceling programs, firing people, and exposing sensitive data without any legal authority. In the long term, he will probably save millions, with the chaos and destruction costing billions.
Ah, by the way, X's CEO Linda Yaccarino is going around telling companies to advertise on X, or they will get no government contracts. Ah, and by the way, the administration is purging not only the FBI, but the CIA as well. The timing is perfect because Musks's schlepp must be teeming with Russian spies, for whom DOGE is just an espionage bonanza.
If the Russians had a free hand to destroy US interests globally and its system domestically, they couldn't do it better. Paid, blackmailed, or brainwashed, it's irrelevant. Trump and Musk are Russian assets, hellbent on destroying America, and liberal democracies overseas.
And for those who think that the system only needs to hold on for four years, here is what has a real chance of happening in 2028. I said it already in front of an audience overlapping with the New Vac Times readership, so I'll be brief. In 2028, Trump's second term ends. If he is still alive and his brain has rotten enough, he will say, "I don't care, I'm not going anywhere". Republicans already started floating suggestions to eliminate the two-term limit. Everyone would fall then in line. If he is happy to step down, he will put Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr, or some other family member as the nominee, so the grift can be passed down to the next generation.
Here is the next step. There is a 50% chance that Republicans lose the election, as is always. Luckily, certifying the results is the job of the incumbent VP, who happens to be J.D. Vance. Vance had one question from Trump, and one only, when he was selected as a running mate: "In the place of Mike Pence, would you have followed my orders to accept my elector slates instead of the real ones?". So that problem is solved. If protests erupt, Trump has Pete Hegseth and the new top brass of the military (he has just fired the current ones) who will be happy to shoot into the crowd if asked. Trump has already asked for this during BLM protests and was politely declined, as we know from the memoirs of his former Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper.
For those who think that Trump will be dead, or too old, or too lazy to care anymore and the next nominee will be J.D. Vance, who might be a creepy, spineless fucker, but he is not crazy, ponder what Vance said in 2021: “We are in a late republican period...If we’re going to push back against it, we have to get pretty wild, pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.” Considering how comfortable a lot of conservatives are right now, exactly what do you think he had in mind? What do you think?
If you think that all of this is an exaggeration, you will get over it. Denial is the first stage of grief.
Trump 2.0 - quick takes
Time to take a quick stock of the Trump 2.0 so far. I have no stomach to sweat out some not-so-clunky prose on this dismal subject, so I will just iterate through a couple of points. Starting with the geopolitical ones.
Tariff war against Canada and Mexico. It's an easy one to be wise about because it happened already. Trump threatened with tariffs, Canada (I suppose Mexico as well) answered with their threats, then Trump blinked. Canada and Mexico reiterated promises they already made last year and Trump declared a great victory. Fyi for those who think that this 5-dimensional chess grandmaster just pretends to be the madman who uses outlandish threats in service of his cold hard calculations. He didn't achieve anything beyond uniting Canada as a nation against the US. Well played.
I almost forgot, he also would like to annex Canada, I guess that's postponed now.
Greenland. Shitting on allies is one thing, but concretely threatening them with physical force unless they give up some of their territory? I just love how conservatives piss blood while trying to spin it. Nevertheless, I don't think anything will come out of it.
Gaza-a-Lago. As obvious from the previous posts, I'm on Israel's side in the wider Israeli-Palestinian conflict (but not on the far-right opportunistic/batshit-crazy Israeli government's side). But simply shovel 2 million Palestinians away and build condos where they lived? Anyway, it would be a diplomatic and logistical nightmare, nothing will come out of it.
Ukraine. Everyone knew that Trump would sell Ukraine out. Niall Fergusson, Douglas Murray, Konstantin Kisin, and all the other "principled conservatives" now act indignantly as if Trump just broke a personal promise to them. The poor snowflakes will get over it. However, America actually taking the side of the Russians? Demanding half of Ukraine's natural resources for "protection"? Blocking the UN resolution that states that Russia started the war? I hope all Republican congressmen start their days by taking a good look in the mirror and vomit. Coming to think of it, I hope his voters do the same, too.
What will happen? Ukraine will reject the "offer", and keep fighting. Will the Europeans actually put soldiers on the ground? Unfortunately, I don't think so. There are no Churchills here. Furthermore, and here comes my wild conjecture, if Europeans did that, Trump would threaten them with tariffs, or directly with military force.
No one (sane) ever raised the question: what if America decides to attack Europe? Not that people thought the idea impossible, it never even came up (outside of the mind of Noam Chomsky and other useful idiots). Now, it does come up, and it's no longer impossible. This is just mind-blowing.
Taiwan. A year ago, I would have bet money that China wouldn't try anything. The Ukrainian war probably made Xi Jinping ponder, "Is my military the same type of Potemkin army as Putin's, or is it even shittier?" Now I would bet that they will attack Taiwan. Trump not only won't lift a finger, he will gleefully comment on how his tough guy buddy crushes the Taiwanese. A caveat here is that I don't know how Taiwan's fall would affect the business of Trump's Silicon Valley ass-lickers. If it does, they will try to influence Trump.
I forgot the Panama Canal. No, that would require some organization, too.
Iran? This gives me a bit of a pause. I'm 50-50 on whether Trump will order American attacks on it. But, on second thought, nah, probably not.
To summarize, Trump won't do anything direct abroad, because he cannot. He is not capable of managing anything more complicated than...I can't even find a metaphor. He is not a chess master, he doesn't have a world-view, he is a witless ape throwing shit on the wall who enjoys hurting other people. His administration is made up of warring factions of lunatics, and lunacy is the only thing that we will see from the outside. He will introduce some tariffs, then call them off the first day when they start hurting Americans. He will threaten former US allies and back off at the first sign of resistance.
And that was my geopolitical prediction batch for the next four years.
Can I call them Nazis?
A conversation is effectively finished once a Nazi or Hitler comparison is made.
- Godwin's law
I always found Godwin's law pretentious bullshit on some visceral level, without ever consciously articulating exactly why. It's definitely not Godwin's fault, as the quote above is not from him. It is a twisted version of his original observation and thus mistakenly attributed to him. The real one, as I learned recently, states that
"if any online discussion continues long enough, then eventually someone in it will compare something to Adolf Hitler or the Nazis"
which is hard to disagree with, on strictly statistical grounds. Nevertheless, the people invoking Godwin more often than not refer to the first version.
The point Godwin was making is obvious. He highlighted the fact that Nazi comparisons are made too frivolously in online discourse, to the detriment of it. This is a factually valid observation. My dislike stems from the smugness of people misusing it, indicating that bringing up Nazis in a conversation about current political events at any time is just a sign of unsophisticatedness.
This post is obviously prompted by the previous one, which in the eyes of many clearly violated Godwin's law, so before I try to figure out why exactly I detest the bastardized version, let's dispel some possible misunderstanding right at the start.
Last time, I made a very categoric statement that Trump voters would have elected Adolf Hitler as chancellor, had they lived in the 30s Germany. This perhaps deserves some afterthought. After great disappointments, one tends to be carried away with emotions, in written form as much as in person, and sometimes expresses opinions in a needlessly offensive, problematic manner, which he later regrets once emotions cool down and common sense prevails. I want to reassure the readers of the New Vac Times that this is absolutely not the case with the previous op-ed. I really do despise half of the electorate. Not as humans in everyday life, not their morality necessarily, but as citizens. I stand by this opinion, and everything that came out after the elections of Trump-supporting intellectuals, media personalities, and tech billionaires supports my belief. So do some friends and family, too, sadly.
I agree with everything The Dispatch's Nick Cattogio wrote before and after the election. If the paywall stops you, you can listen to Tim Miller reading up a piece of it from 35:05. If you listen to it a bit longer, you will hear the succinct version of the argument, from Tom Nichols:
"- You can't judge these people!"
"- The hell I can't!"
By the way, I didn't describe Trump voters as Nazis. I merely claimed that they would have voted for the Nazis, and everyone can draw their own conclusions from this.
Here are mine.
90% of these people are ignorant not only about cold hard facts that are well within their effortless reach but are also unable to comprehend the importance of the rule of law, liberalism, institutions, and many other fundamental building blocks of modern society, more than an average kid does at the age of 12. This is arrested development on a global scale.
Arguably, most people are simply not interested enough in these topics as much as others are not interested in chemistry. There are only 24 hours in a day. But, if you listen to Donald Trump (and you could not listen to him for hours aggregated in the last 8 years) and think, this is the guy I'd rather see leading the world, you lack something more than just information.
If I despise these people, that feeling is nothing compared to what I feel towards right-wing intellectuals and self-described centrists. The staff at National Review, Wall Street Journal, Unherd, and likes of popular historian Niall Fergusson or "journalist" Piers Morgan, or the dozens of podcast hosts with millions of followers. Pretentious assholes playing high-brow intellectuals for the highest bidders. They would have fit in nicely with Albert Speers, Carl Schmitts, and Martin Heideggers, or just the run-of-the-mill functionaries of that era. Fergusson made some indignant noises when Tucker Carlsson interviewed Nazi apologist Darryl Cooper ("the most important historian of the United States today") who claimed that the real bad guy of the Second World War was Winston Churchill, a puppet of his Jewish financiers. In five years, when another slimy little "historian" will voice similar claims, it won't make such ripples, and Ferguson will just shut the fuck up and find something quickly on the Democrats' side to complain about.
As for the tech bros, like Peter Thiel, David Sacks, or Elon Musk? In case you'd think that there is a charitable interpretation of their sycophantic behavior, Thiel just spared you the trouble on Piers Morgan recently, when he gloated about how the time has come to demolish the "ancienne regime", by which he meant, liberalism. It's not clear which part of liberalism he detests. Rule of law? Judicial independence? Free press? Or just voting rights for the hoi polloi? The less said about another self-proclaimed big thinker, Elon Musk, the better. Actually, I can't resist quoteingDestiny: "... Elon Musk is a 97 IQ man who masquerades as a 137 IQ man and all of his followers are 85 IQ so they all believe that he's as smart as he says he is". Zuckerberg, Bezos, and the rest? These are just miserable cowards. They required no prison or threat of physical violence to cave, just the prospect of losing some profit.
In short, everyone named above would have gone along with every right-wing regime in the 20th century. In the unlikely event that Trump really starts rounding up people by the millions to deport, they will explain why it's still better than a Democrat president. Rotten bunch. They deserve a post on their own.
Yes, this argument is not constructive, but again, a medical diagnosis can be valid even if there's nothing good coming out of it.
That was more long-winded than I expected. The intended main topic of the post will probably end up shorter. So here we go: is it ever justified or useful to call someone (or liken to) a Nazi? I can think of some obvious cons, and some pros as well.
The cons come easy to mind if you open a left-leaning newspaper. The "Israel is the Nazis of today" Soviet propaganda which originated in the seventies when Israel aligned itself with the US is still going strong and will do so as long as the public remembers the Second World War. After that, we might just revert to the old, time-proven habit of calling Jews God-killers. The fascist label is basically on everyone who criticizes BLM, or its next incarnation. Go to the Left enough (no need to travel far, just a step beyond the Guardian) and you will live in a world where everyone but you and your friends (and Facebook soulmates) are fascists.
These people are grinding away one of the best social taboos humanity has come up with, the taboo against racism, one chip at a time. Another metaphor might be even better. Words as vehicles of magic. The word "Nazi" puts a powerful stigma on its target, like the mark of Cain, banning him or her from society. But the magical potential is finite and the power ebbs away at every use, even faster by every misuse.
Having said that, all the above doesn't categorically imply that the comparison is never justified or helpful. To make a convincing argument in a good-faith debate, or to have any real debate at all, the participants need to establish a common ground, from which point they can reach some conclusion following the rules of logic. There is not much common ground left. When even basic facts are controversial, the agreement that Nazis are bad is one of the few remaining ones.
Therefore dogmatic reverence of avoiding Nazi comparisons is silly. If someone chants "Jews will not replace us" or uses the word "vermins" to immigrants who "poison the blood of the country", then obvious analogies come to mind. The burden of proof to justify their position is not on those who point out the glaring similarities but on the ones who have a knee-jerk reflex to dismiss drawing any Nazi parallels. As is the burden on the person who chants and blabbers racist crap to clarify "I only borrow phrases from the Mein Kampf, but I wouldn't follow them up with actions".
Election 2024 - after the results
Peter: This is the trouble with the public, they're fucking horrible!
Emma: Peter, you can't say the public are fucking horrible.
Peter: Yes, I can, I've met them.
- The Thick of It (2005)
US election 2024 prediction
Okay, let's get it out of my system. What's going to happen on November 5 and shortly after?
I'm in a state of cognitive dissonance simultaneously holding three different mental models in my head.
The Rational Ignorant
When sliding into the first one, I'm sure anyone who claims to know who will win the 2024 presidential election is full of it. American politics is effectively a two-party system with calcified electorates, where the elections are almost always decided by very small margins. Any of the major parties could put forward a German Shepherd and have a non-negligible chance of winning (the Republicans are so sure of this that they test their luck and put forward a Putin-loving convicted rapist and insurrectionist). At the last election, each of the seven swing states was won or lost by mere tens of thousands of votes. Biden carried Arizona with 49.4% of the votes against Trump's 49.0%. There is no way of telling where fractions of a percentage will go.
The Scared
The second mental model draws its power from the mood inside my information bubble, which is dark. Most Never Trumpers and pundits foresee a Trump victory. But being worried is the default state of liberals, which allows me to...
The Confident
...find solace in the third one. God knows I need it. With this hat on, I predict Kamala a landslide victory. I base this on personal gut feeling and on the analysis of Peter Zeihan who agrees with my gut that Trump is a loser with a capital "L". After 2016 he managed to lose every single election where he chose to make himself the center of the vote. The 2018 midterms, the 2020 general election, the 2021 Georgia runoff elections, 2022 midterms. In 2020, he himself was ejected from office (making him the first one-term president of the last thirty years), and for the rest, the candidates he endorsed failed miserably.
He was never popular. He won 2016 with 45.9% of the popular vote (against Hillary's 48.0%) and his approval rating hovered consistently in the low 40s. The elections are decided by swing voters and a substantial proportion of them have developed a loathing of Trump as intense as his fans' devotion.
For the reasons above, until his disastrous debate performance, I was quite sure Biden would win, and even after that, I thought he had a nigh even chance. However, with Biden stepping down, the pent-up energies of democrat voters frustrated by their candidate's age blew up in an overwhelming surge of enthusiasm for Kamala. And in the last couple of months, she has done reasonably well. Her debate performance was spot-on (thanks to her preppers, who after 9 fucking years finally figured out how to talk to The Donald), and her interviews were good enough. Not good, mind you. But good enough. I believe that she is the dream candidate of few, but the preferred one of the tight majority in this binary race.
Trump on the other hand went to full idiot ("cat-eating Haitians") and full fascist (MSG-rally) mode, beyond anything we have seen before, and that's saying something. On the bright side, I don't think he has gained many new voters with that nor with his creepy shithead VP-elect Vance.
After November 5
Assuming that the last model proves to be the most accurate, what will happen after Trump loses?
I believe that bloodshed will happen. Trump and the imbecile half of the country won't accept the results. There will be instant lawsuits, as is normal, demands to stop the counting, as is moronic, and then a couple of other actions, which are criminal: Republican election officials sending in fake electors and/or refusing to certify the results, attacks on election officials, death threats to politicians, and mobs on the street. The constitutional crisis can last for weeks, giving constant opportunities for violence.
January 6 and the years since then normalized this behavior. Eighty-year-old taboos against political violence, Nazi slogans (and dinners guests and apologists) and even questioning democracy are broken. There is nothing hyperbolic or unhinged about the picture painted in the previous paragraph. Every single piece of it already happened four years ago. There are three crucial differences this time, however.
One, the Trump voters have been fed with the Big Lie for four years now. They are angry, they are shameless, and they won't accept another defeat.
Two, Trump has nothing to lose by attempting to grab power by violence and can't afford to lose anyway. If he fails to get back to the White House, he will spend his remaining days in courtrooms if he's lucky and behind bars if we are.
Three, there is no one by his side who would even try to restrain him. His people are the ones who just held a 30s-style rally in Madison Square Garden.
This is gonna be very ugly.
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