Discussing "that incident" and the crapshow that is following...

 So, I have a lot to discuss in this thread. First of all, I'm just going to say it seems like I was dead on with my Georgia predictions. I figured I would be because Georgia had the least polling error of all swing states I looked at. But I'm not here to talk about that. This victory for democrats has been overshadowed by a much larger event. 

On January 6th, a bunch of rioters, insurrectionist, larpers, whatever you wanna call them, basically attacked the capitol. There was a protest outside of there, egged on by President Trump just minutes before, and it got unruly. People broke the barricades, ran into the capitol, and this disrupted the election certification process taking place in Congress's chambers, causing the members of congress to flee. None of them were hurt, but a few "protesters" were, and one member of the capitol police. The capitol police were overwhelmed, and they didn't take the building back for four hours. President Trump seemed to be a factor in delaying the response, as he refused to mobilize the national guard. He later gave a speech telling people to go home in peace, but that this was still a rigged election. 

This, is a cluster****. First of all, the event. This was apparently planned. people brought a noose to hang Mike Pence, twist tied to bind members of congress, etc. This was nothing short of an insurrection for some people. At the same time, I doubt everyone involved in this had the same intent, I think as the mob got out of hand, many people followed. At the same time, a lot of people are blaming Trump for inciting this and I'm not sure you can call it that. I listened to Trump's rally before the event afterwards, and I don't see any language suggesting that people should storm the capitol. Don't get me wrong, he laid on the salt thick about losing the election, claiming it was rigged, and he called on people to march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the capitol, but that in and of itself isn't "incitement" IMO. If it is, well, then you can construe anything as incitement. We'll get to that later

The big issue I had here was why wasn't law enforcement prepared for this? After watching a militarized law enforcement crack the skulls of peaceful protesters over the past year in relation to BLM protests, most of which were peaceful, by the way, you would think security at the capitol would be tight. And that any riot that breaks out would be met with a swift, and powerful response. Again, we've seen it happen all year. But suddenly you get a bunch of (white) people storming the capitol and the response is...what. They just let them in? And it takes hours for them to mobilize a response? This should be the second most protected building in DC. You have the white house, and then you have the capitol. Arguably perhaps some military oriented sites like the pentagon warrant stricter security, but generally speaking I would think the capitol should be one of the most protected buildings in the country. And, you would think, if terrorists took it over, that the response would be swift, certain, and severe. I understand these are American citizens. This isn't quite "white house down" or "olympus has fallen" here. But at the same time, I don't see why they don't deserve the same teargas and rubber bullet treatment BLM protesters got. 

Apparently Trump might have been responsible for that. Trump was the "law and order" president when black people rioted or even peacefully protested, but when it comes to his own supporters? Eh, run wild! I'll go more into what I think about Trump later on, as that's part two of this post, but honestly? This was a huge dereliction of duty. And he should face consequences for that. 

So eventually, at 6 PM, there was a curfew, the protesters left, and many of them have been identified and arrested later. These guys aren't very smart. They took pictures of themselves looting stuff, sitting in Nancy Pelosi's office, trashing the place, and the FBI is very interested in finding out who these people are and arresting them. Good, serves them right. There SHOULD be consequences if you basically commit sedition and attack a building central to the heart of democracy while it is in session. I'm not normally a "lock them up" kind of guy, but this stuff cannot stand and these people deserve what's coming to them. 

Now, part 2. While I have little mercy for those responsible for this crisis, my ideal response is balanced by a good sense of respecting the constitution. If there's anything I learned from previous national crises, like, say, 9/11, it's that while the event is bad, the response to it can be worse for America long term. Between the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and what we did at home with our own national security state, I would say our response to 9/11 is more damaging than the event itself. And I kind of fear that this is happening here, again.

What happened was terrible, it should not have happened, but the response to me, is punishing those involved in legal, constitutional ways, and being more prepared for the next one. This was ultimately a security failure in my opinion. Not many people died. Of those who did, most were protesters. Most damage from this event is symbolic, and property damage. It could have been far worse. This was a failed insurrection. No permanent damage, outside of the five or so lives lost.

But the democrats...is it just me or do they sound more and more like Bush era neocons in recent years? Here they are using this crisis as an opportunity to go on a witch hunt and crack down on opinions they don't like.

First, they are trying to remove Trump from office. While I'm not necessarily against doing this, I think we need to tread carefully. Their particular argument was that Trump incited violence. I don't believe he did. He gave a speech, he said his supporters have to fight, but what does fight really mean? They're claiming he meant they should attack the capitol building. Whereas I'd be inclined to interpret that as assembling outside of the capitol building. We do have a right to free speech, including assembly after all, and I see nothing wrong with Trumpers assembling outside, peacefully. Nothing in his language here indicated he sparked on a riot. Even worse, social media banned him because his response to the crisis was basically that the protesters should be peaceful, as the republicans are the law and order party, but he understood how he felt and the election was stolen. Now, I'm gonna be honest, I dont believe it was stolen. I covered it here, and Trump had a 12% chance of winning. And he lost. If anything Trump vastly overperformed and still lost. But he claims he won. Apparently this is the "incitement" of which is spoken. So...basically lying is now incitement. I don't agree.

  Look, this is very dangerous territory to tread on. If what Trump did can be construed, legally, with a binding precedent, as incitement, than anyone who makes any claim criticizing the system is incitement and should be censored. That is dangerous and basically comes off as a power grab by establishment centrist liberals who have an authoritarian streak who want to censor anyone who disagrees with them. And we've dealt with that a lot in recent years. Remember, after 2016 when the dems were salty themselves they claimed both Trump supporters and green voters like me were Russian bots and crap. These guys are not good faith actors here. They are not doing this out of good will, they've been wanting to crack down on opinions they don't agree with for a while. And they've been working with tech companies like Facebook and twitter to do this. These people believe in flat out deplatforming people they don't like. And if you deplatform Trump over such thin allegations, I fear that this might lead to larger deplatforming of anyone with unconventional views. This is dangerous. 

And while many people will claim that free speech applies to the government, not corporations, they can police who they want, well, I'm going to make an analogy given my own views previously expressed. So, we have the 13th amendment banning slavery. No involuntary servitude. Okay, formally, slavery is banned. But you still need to work don't you? You still don't have access to resources needed to survive so you're forced to work, often for corporations who give you crap hours and crap pay in exchange for large chunks of your life and personal autonomy. This is known in some circles as "wage slavery". And while you might not be a slave on paper, in practice you kind of are.

The same applies to speech in my opinion. The freedom of speech centrist libs want is basically the freedom to not be persecuted by the government, but to have private companies who control access to a platform deplatform people they don't like to ensure they don't have a voice. Basically, censor people without calling it censorship.

Look, I get it, if Trump was actually telling people to storm the capitol, YES, ban him. Without delay. But if you're gonna suppress people and communities you don't like because you don't agree with them or merely think their ideas are potentially dangerous, then that represents a grave threat to free speech, sorry it does. And while the argument is then, well, why don't you make your own platform? Well, right wingers did. It was called parler. And now that's shut down because companies vital to its infrastructure saw to that. Now, for the record, I'm not really shedding a tear for Parler here. Apparently the exact reasoning for shutting them down was because they were so lax with moderation they were allowing people to basically plan attacks on there. So that's fair. But at the same time, I do want to draw a line and point out how much power corporations actually have to influence your speech rights. They can shut you down for any and every reason, and people think that's okay, because they own the company. But if people rely on that infrastructure to access the marketplace of ideas, that's dangerous. And there should be more fleshed out procedures to explain when its acceptable to remove people. And it should probably come down to posting speech not protected by the constitution in my opinion. The fact is, this is the same argument made for net neutrality years ago, and how impartial providers should treat all data equally, because anything less represents a corporate threat to free speech. Democrats were for net neutrality by the way. Trump's FCC director shot it down. But now democrats are acting like neocons so it's weird. 

I'm not even necessarily against removing Trump from twitter or facebook, however, it's the reasons they did it that are concerning. Trump has regularly and repeatedly violated TOS there, but he got away with it because presidential privilege. So to me it makes sense he should either be allowed to stay on twitter until he's out of office and becomes a normal citizen, or he should have been banned a while ago. Banning him now, with the claim of incitement in particular is what I have a problem with, because I think calling this incitement is questionable for reasons already stated.

I feel the same about impeachment, really. While I understand calls to impeach Trump, the fact is we should've done this, and did do this, a while ago. He has done so many questionable things that I think there are many many many cases to impeach him. My problem is with the incitement accusation. This is more on a legalistic government ground, and the first amendment does apply here. And honestly, I believe Trump, for as wrong as he is, has a right to be wrong. That's free speech. That's him using his power as he sees fit. He didn't tell people to storm the capitol. His language could easily be construed in ways to give him the benefit of the doubt there. That said if you're going to impeach him do it for something like dereliction of duty. The guy refused to send in the national guard for hours. He failed in his presidential responsibility in a malicious way. If anything Trump did deserves punishment, it's this. You can give him the benefit of the doubt on the speech in itself, but if the larger pattern of behavior implies allowing things to happen, well, he's shooting himself in the foot there and should reap the consequences. 

The point I'm trying to get at here with all of this, is this. Look, this is a terrible event and those demonstrated to be responsible should face consequences. But we are also a nation of laws and rights. And restrictions are put on government power in order to ensure that the government does not become tyrannical or overstep its bounds. When thinking about how we respond to this crisis, we have to tread carefully. While people deserve the book thrown at them in many instances, people are also entitled to their rights, and their rights should be protected. We should not engage in witch hunts against people like Trump, or his supporters, simply because we don't like them or agree with what they say. They have rights, just the same as us. And if we start trampling on those rights because we don't like them, well, that is bad for all of us. We should not allow centrist democrats acting like neocons use this incident to shock doctrine their way to removing our rights. Because to me, that is just as, if not an even graver threat to our freedoms than the events themselves. Gotta love how hypocritical many democrats are on that. They claim to be against freedom and democracy in attacking Trump, but as I've pointed out time and time again on here, they'll destroy your freedoms themselves if it is politically convenient to them. Resist Trumpism all you want, Trump is a jerk authoritarian who has little to no redeeming value as a public figure. But don't let the democrats push you into making faustian bargains that sell out your long term freedoms and interests.

So who is going to win the Georgia runoffs?

 So, I kind of misunderstood the Georgia races when they were going on. I thought GA2 was doing ranked choice voting, but in reality they were doing runoff voting, meaning there's a second round of voting between the top two candidates on January 5th. And because both candidates in GA1 failed to clear 50%, there's going to be a runoff rematch between them also on January 5th. And because the democrats did such a terrible job down ballot, the best case scenario is for a split senate assuming the democrats win both of these races, which essentially amounts to democratic control because Harris is tie breaker. That said I'm going to look at the polling and this time I won't be removing trafalgar or anything. While Georgia seemed to be the least off of the states I studied this past election, I still feel like removing trafalgar ended up being a bad decision. While Trafalgar obviously did bad data and was right for the wrong reasons, the fact is removing them skewed polls to be more democratic leaning than they turned out to be. So I'm going to include them this time for now. That said, let's get to it.

Georgia 1: Ossoff (D) +0.8%

So the democrat is actually ahead here narrowly. Now, this is very much in contentious territory. When you're below a point, things could easily swing either way. Heck, in this past election, anything within that 98% confidence of 8 points either way is going to be technically in place. But at this level of polling, Ossoff only has a 58% chance of winning the election, and Perdue still has a 42% chance. That's toss up territory. 

Georgia 2: Warnock (D) +1.8%

Warnock seems to have a much stronger lead vs Kelly Loeffler, as Warnock seems more popular and Loeffler is making many missteps that are alienating people, but like GA1, this can still go either way. Warnock has a 67% chance of winning, and Loeffler has a 33% chance. 

That said...assuming the trend model between the two, democrats have a 58% chance of control the senate while republicans have a 42% chance. Democrats can still pull it off, but ultimately they need both seats. All republicans need is one and they maintain their majority.We'll see how this plays out in a few days but this is going to be a close one.

It's official, democrats are no longer the party of FDR

 You know, I talk a lot about how parties have changed throughout the years on this blog. Party realignments are a huge part of my paradigm insofar as viewing political cycles, and a huge part of how I view politics going forward. A huge goal of mine is explicitly to cause a party realignment that brings the democrats back to the left, like they were under FDR. However, speaking to many self described democrats and liberals, there really isn't a lot of support any more for FDR or his politics. 

I personally consider FDR to be one of the greatest presidents we've ever had. This is not to say he's perfect. As a matter of fact, even the best American presidents are often very flawed people. And if I wanted to be super critical of all of them, I'd start sounding like Howard Zinn. But obviously, while I believe Zinn has a point, I try to avoid going full on Marxist in my analyses of the country, and I would think "liberals" would have some appreciation for at least the best presidents, especially someone who has been so influential to the democrats over the years.

But whenever FDR comes up, most liberals I come across these days seem to HATE FDR. As in, FDR doesn't represent their politics, and they don't want him back. These contentions seem to come down to primarily two things. First of all, racism, and second of all, his refusal to abide by "established norms" as they call them. And honestly, these are such weird, milquetoast centrist things to say.

First, racism. Let's just clear the air here. I do NOT want to repeat FDR's legacy on race. FDR presided over the country in the 30s and 40s. Jim Crow was a thing, the country as a whole was extremely racist as fudge, and on social issues both republicans and democrats were so out of synch with 2021 standards that you can't really compare the two. Social progress is something that has evolved significantly over American history, and will continue to evolve. And past presidents are going to look like dinosaurs in a modern context. The founders owned slaves, Abe Lincoln wanted to deport black people back to Africa, and FDR worked with southern racists and interned the Japanese. Yes, yes, we know. It would be nice to have a conversation about FDR these days without some holier than though modern day SJW screaming about how he interned the Japanese. Yes, we get it, it was crap, I'm not defending it. No one defending FDR these days would defend it. It just sounds like this stupid superficial contrarian thing to do to throw out a figure like FDR because someone from the 1930s sucked on social issues. Of course they sucked on social issues. The political realities of the day dictated he would suck on social issues. If he was a morally pure SJW by modern standards, he would be like an alien and he would never get elected. He might at best find a place in the socialist party and the likes of Eugene Debs. And while I have nothing but respect for the old school socialist parties, they never had a legacy in office because they never won an election.

The fact is, I believe we can respect FDR's economic legacy while divorcing ourselves from his social politics. After all, his economic policies and ideology are still relevant, his social policies were always some sort of deal with the devil or necessary evil due to the times in my opinion. Most people back then were racist, and America was a deeply racist country. I just feel like past leaders sometimes need to be graded on a curve especially as far as social issues go. I think if you grade past leaders by modern standards you'll find that there are no heroes and everyone before 1960 (and even many after) was a giant racist jerk. 

So, okay, racism bad. FDR's internment policies bad. Working with southern democrats to maintain jim crow bad. We get it. Don't need to be reminded of it every 5 seconds. For the record I believe the future of progressivism should be more closer to Bernie Sanders or something which is basically FDR's economic legacy combined with modern social policy. I don't believe we need to necessarily choose between one or another, unless the neolibs try to force such a choice on us to get us to support their crappy platforms. Which happens disturbingly a lot. When I discuss my plans on trying to win back some disaffected Trump supporters in the rust belt, they seem intent on keeping them out of the party. Once again, because racism. They believe in order to achieve social equality democrats must abandon economic ambitions and be centrist. And I just find that unacceptable.

 Second, the authoritarianism. FDR broke a lot of norms. He threatened to pack the courts, and he ran more than twice. He fought his party a lot. Mainly because his party was full of the same corrupt establishment people who still exist today more or less. He also fought a system hostile to his politics. And that meant playing hardball. That means when the supreme court threatens to shoot down his new deal legislation or make the minimum wage unconstitutional, he basically threatens to pack the court. Basically, he said, look we need these for the good of the American people, america's institutions are falling apart without them. If you oppose these wildly popular measures by taking a strict constitutionalist stance on politics, I'm gonna flood the court with justices that WILL allow it to pass. And because he had control of congress and the presidency, the courts backed down. 

The fact is, if FDR played by the rules, he wouldn't get anything done. But the modern democrat so glorifies rules and decorum and being completely and utterly worthless, the idea of FDR comes off as a tyrant to them. They LIKE worthless democrats like Biden or Clinton. They like these nice sounding people who sound presidential but push comes to shove, are like "I can't do that'. Like Biden. A lot of pressure is being put on him to forgive all student debt by executive fiat, and he's refusing to. He's also refusing to consider a nationwide mask mandate and instead settling on asking citizens nicely to wear masks and maybe calling some governors and getting them to do something (and they won't, because they're republicans and don't answer to you, Joe).  Now, would Biden potentially face a constitutional challenge if he tries to do this stuff? Sure. But that's up to the courts to decide. I feel like a past democrat like FDR or Truman would've tried and then fought it in the courts later, and if they lost, they lost. Biden won't even try. 

Here's my big issue here. This comes off to me as a conservative position (see constitutional conservatism). Just a few years ago, republicans were obsessed with the idea of executive overreach. They were the ones obsessed with the constitution and rule of law. And while in a moderate sense it is good to be respectful of such things, I also think there are times when democrats should fight. And I believe when you got a major crisis going on that you can solve, but you refuse to, much like Biden and modern democrats are doing, you must as well be republicans to me. To me, in a two party system, it's good for the right wing party to play the referee in terms of the rule of law and stuff, and for the left to push for things. Ideally the two constructively improve on the other where the right keeps the left in check but the left keeps the ball of progress toward a better future rolling. But when the left starts doing the right's job, progress grinds to a halt and no one is going to solve any problems. That said, Biden, and modern democrats that like him, are essentially conservative to me, and we got two conservative parties.

This is not good. I've been kind of fearing a party realignment in which instead of the democrats moving left and re-embracing FDR in the form of Bernie Sanders or Andrew Yang or something, that we would get a right wing realignment in which the neolibs win. As such, democrats are not just abandoning the politics of FDR but look back at him with contempt. They are so lost that they view him as a tyrannical racist who has more in common with Donald Trump than the modern democratic party. This is the worst timeline electorally in my opinion. Because with the upcoming trump coalition looking more like fascism than anything FDR was, and the democrats being the new constitutional conservatives, where does that leave the left? Up a creek, where it belongs if you ask the rich and powerful in this country. 

We are losing the fight for the soul of this country. By we I mean the left. People who believe in progressivism and improving our social institutions to make them work for the people. People who believe in FDR's economic vision for America, or something close to it. These attitudes among democrats alarm and disturb me. Because I still believe the democrats are the only thing that stands in the way to right wing control of this country. And rather than fight the right and change our institutions for the better they focus more on being stewards and playing by the rules, becoming complicit to the right's ideological supremacy. Maybe Howard Zinn is right after all. Something to think about. If so, no wonder so many other anti establishment progressives are drinking the socialist kool aid as of late.