[camgunz]

Man, you're a smart guy. Just once I want you to like, do the reading and argue in good faith. I'm sure a lot of people on HN respect you, including me!

Let's say that any donation to any Democratic campaign makes you a Democrat (ignoring for a moment that being against Trump isn't the same as being for Democrats). By that logic maybe half of the signatories on that letter are Democrats--and also a few are Republicans. Also many "Democratic" signatories signed a letter against Obama when he revoked Brennan's security clearance, so how in the tank can they really be? Also the main way the Hunter Biden emails were "authenticated" was via DKIM, which would allow you to mix fake emails in with real emails (we recently learned you could do this with $8 of server time). Too farfetched? The Russians did it to Macron in 2017. Also let's not equate creating a false basis for a full on war with 51 intelligence professionals raising doubts.

[rayiner]

I’m arguing in good faith. The Iraq War was the biggest mistake in recent American history. Which is why the realignment of pro-Iraq War republicans to democrats—and democrats’ acceptance of them—is so shocking. Liz Cheney should be politically radioactive. Instead Biden gave her a medal. Harris campaigned with her.

I think you may have the causation reversed. I voted for Biden in 2020. But the intelligence community has no credibility and are just trying to get us into war with Russia. That letter never should’ve been taken seriously by real democrats.

[tptacek]

You've been a proud Republican since you were a student, and openly so here. That's fine, of course, but it's odd to see you talking about "real" Democrats. Democrats broadly opposed the Republican party; whether or not the Republicans responsible for the Iraq War fled the party post-Trump, they do not characterize the Democratic party today.

I really don't give a shit about how credible the US IC is; no part of my identity is invested in how well they do their job. But the attempt to generalize this out to the parties themselves rankles, and is trollish.

[kasey_junk]

The Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, this year, used Cheney on the campaign trail. When Trump called her ‘war hawk’, rather than trying to defend that very legitimate condemnation, they attacked it as anti-woman.

I think where I disagree with rayiner is that I believe she _was_ toxic. Her endorsement is certainly one of my grievances with the party, as a Democratic voter, and we saw the big tent collapse because of, in part, the current hawkishness of that part of the leadership.

[rayiner]

I would clarify that there’s a disconnect between what the party leadership thinks (Schumer with his “we’ll pick up two moderate republicans for every working class white we lose”) and the base. My dad is a straight ticket Dem voter and he stayed home this year, and Cheney and Blinken were part of the reason. But I also think the base is a little in denial about how many Romney 2012 folks are now in their coalition. Obama-Trump voters were 13% of Trump’s coalition in 2016. They were obviously replaced by a bunch of Romney-Clinton voters because the race was close overall.

[camgunz]

Here's the full quote:

"She is a radical war hawk. Let's put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let's see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face."

Trump has a (literal) record of advocating for and perpetrating violence against women and minorities. I don't know of any elected Dems who called it anti-woman (there's a trend of taking any Dem on X as representative, which isn't a good survey), but if they did that's the nicest thing you could say about it.

---

FWIW I agree the Cheney thing was boneheaded, and the defense of "she offered to campaign" is... prrrrrrretty wimpy. Some people argued you needed to shake people in the middle free, but no one in the middle likes Liz Cheney; she's mega conservative.

[kasey_junk]

No. That’s not the full quote. The full quote was minutes long and rambling. But you removed this for instance that was near that quote “You know they're all war hawks when they're sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, 'Oh, gee, let's send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy”.

Cheney comes from a family of chicken hawks and lots of people have had similar quotes about them.

[tptacek]

I don't think this was as boneheaded as you both do. I think the Cheney political legacy overall is odious, but none of Liz Cheney's recent supporters are there for her foreign policy; it's because she sacrificed her political career to stand up to Donald Trump, which is admirable, and because Trump took the bait and cast her as an enemy of the party, which raised her profile. The idea was that there was some material faction of the GOP that was persuadable by dint of Liz Cheney's mistreatment by GOP nominee.

The Cheney thing reminds me of people's attitudes towards John McCain. His history in the GOP: also not great. But in the end, he did have some principles; it's not unreasonable to celebrate them.

None of this is really germane to the thread, I just get irritable when directly partisan Democrat vs. Republican politics end up here.

[camgunz]

I mean, you can't expect me to paste multiple paragraphs as a quote here. If you think Trump's clumsy ersatz nod to "Fortunate Son" contextualizes putting Liz Cheney in front of a firing squad, OK then. If you can find elected officials threatening to execute other electeds who were pro-Iraq War (so, so many people), go ahead and post it.

[rayiner]

> perpetrating violence against women and minorities

Trump’s comment is a common way democrats have criticized hawks since the Vietnam war: asking if they’d be singing a different tune if they were the ones in the trenches getting shot at.

The fact that you’d invoke the “women and minorities” card to defend Liz effing Cheney is proof that the CIA has learned how to use wokeness as a psyop to eviscerate the antiwar left.

[tptacek]

Isn't this practically an American election tradition at this point? The designated Republican at the DNC, and Democrat at the RNC?

[kasey_junk]

Yes. And they chose a war hawk instead of all the others they could have grabbed.

[tptacek]

It seems to me they chose the highest-profile Republican who would serve the role.

[rayiner]

I understand democrats have kicked all the social conservatives out of the party but I didn’t think it was retroactive! I was a registered Democrat until 2017. I went to Wingdings in Iowa in 2019 as a Tulsi Gabbard supporter.

Hawks are by no means the majority of democrats, but Romney 2012 types are the margin democrat voter. And while the majority of democrats aren’t hawks, the party’s dominant principle as of late seems to be trusting credentialed experts, which makes them suckers for the intelligence community.

[tptacek]

Romney 2012 types are obviously not the marginal Democratic voter.

[rayiner]

The Harris 2024 coalition is a lot closer to the Romney 2012 coalition than democrats want to admit: https://x.com/patrickjfl/status/1854645395856482568. There’s been a huge swing of college educated whites, who Romney won decisively, to Democrats.

Also, Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney suggests that her campaign thought that Romney 2012 voters were their marginal vote.

[yndoendo]

A truly intelligent person is independent and not attached to a political part. By doing so, this latches to the "Yes men" mentally where those in power are always right even when wrong and probable through the most simplistic means. [0] Polarization leads to stupidity and ignorance to real world statistics and out comes, even in medical treatment.

Self identifying with a political party erodes critical thinking skills. Unless you can criticize the stupidity of all, including those you vote for, you are limited by your own stupidity.

Self identity ignorance is prominent in religious cultures where the church must be protected. The congregation will protect a priest or pastor that is sexual predator and pretend their actions didn't take place to protect their community. They loose their identity when their church is harmed, same with latching to political parties.

[0] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2216179120

[rayiner]

Majoritarian democratic systems require group coordination to achieve desires outcomes. Political parties are just a vehicle for doing that. If you care about outcomes, you should have some party identity, because that facilitates compromising less important goals for more important ones to achieve a coalition that can carry a majority.

I agree parties shouldn’t be so ideologically rigid, and for the most part they aren’t. Jamie Dimon and AOC are both in the same party, as are Marco Rubio and Tulsi Gabbard. People who refuse to work within a party unless the party agrees on every issue are simply not interested in outcomes. That’s fine too!

[camgunz]

I wanna try and weight my reply right. I like a lot of your posts and learn from you not infrequently. I also respect the way you think. Sometimes though, you toss out a very Fox News talking point, which confuses me! Before Trump's reelection I was fine letting this kind of thing stand, I mean who has the energy. But it's clearly gone too far. Here's another great example: "the intelligence community [is] just trying to get us into war with Russia." I mean, what a fuckin bonkers claim with no evidence. What are you doing?

[rayiner]

> Here's another great example: "the intelligence community [is] just trying to get us into war with Russia."

I mean this respectfully: how old are you? Because that isn’t a “Fox News” comment at all! Until five minutes ago, Democrats were the ones who criticized Bush-era republicans for their fixation on Russia and efforts to keep fighting the Cold War: https://youtu.be/T1409sXBleg?si=Pz2Yd_vY4ZARbcvs

And yes, the intelligence community has been trying to get us into a war with Russia or its proxies since the 1950s. The whole idea that Americans have “allies” or “interests” in Eastern Europe is a Reagan-era CIA psyop.

[camgunz]

Haha well, I think we're in the same cohort? I was a senior in HS when 9/11 happened. I've worked in Democratic politics in some capacity for over a decade, although I recently took a break to have kids. I know Russia's our enemy because I was working on the Hillary Clinton campaign when Trump asked them to hack into Hillary's emails and watched them actively trying to hack us; and they've since compromised a bunch of (dumb, like crunchyroll) accounts of mine.

I don't want to parse through everything here, and you definitely won't find me defending the intelligence establishment. All I'm saying is what tptacek said up there: stretching the Hunter Biden laptop letter signatories into "Democrats" stretches too far, and if that's the evidence you're bringing against the Iraq War and Valerie Plame you're coming up short. You have a big platform here; I think if you were a little more judicious about the claims you make you could do a lot of good, and I think we need that right now.

[rayiner]

We must be the exact same age. You saw what I saw. How could you trust Clinton on foreign policy after that? I don’t think she even regrets the Iraq War, and wishes we were still in Afghanistan. She sounded like the Weekly Standard the way she went after Tulsi Gabbard for trying to keep us out of a war in Syria.

I don’t know what’s in the inner minds of other democrats. But out of the two parties, they’re cuddling up to all the ones who have been wrong for the last 50 years about foreign policy.

[camgunz]

> We must be the exact same age.

See I knew there was something I liked about you haha.

Hopefully this doesn't come across as deflecting or whatever (HRC has a lot of takes I disagree with, I think she would have been a very good president, but I'm more of a Warren or Booker guy). I think being an effective leader in the US at the level HRC was for decades is a lot harder than people really know. I'm not talking about the mechanics (though those are also hard), rather I'm talking about the effect it has on you as a human. I think the act of building a mental model of public opinion is fundamentally corrupting, but if you don't do it, you'll almost certainly lose power to someone who does (or you could be in a super safe seat, but that's not an option for everyone). You probably also think a big part of your job is representing your constituents, so there's a huge amount of balancing divining and representing their positions vs. leading them to where they might not necessarily be. The stakes are also bananas: you're talking about the lives of tons and tons of people. This is all very hard; I can't really overstate how mindfucking it can be.

So to come back around to your point, let's take an incredibly cynical view and say HRC authorized the Iraq War because that was the obvious power politics move. It's not wrong to consider, "I'm pursuing values I think are important, I'm effective at it, the odds of someone doing better or being more principled than I am are very low--after all this game is by itself deeply corrupting to even the best of us, taking a stand here has almost no upside, I do want to be president one day, OK I vote yea". This all really reasonable, then you throw on the pile her changing her vote would've made absolutely no difference, and she's the junior Senator from New York where 9/11 happened, and at least I start having a lot of sympathy for her vote. I don't mean to diminish the full on tragedies Iraq and Afghanistan were, but these are the kinds of stakes and incentives we're working with here.

So I try to be pretty kind to electeds, even on both sides, because the incentives are truly nutso. Maybe you're Trey Gowdy and you don't love having 5,000 Benghazi hearings, but you've got this plum committee assignment you don't want to lose, so here we go. Maybe you're John Boehner and you don't love being asked vaguely racist questions about Obama's birth certificate constantly, but you're finally Speaker and this is the zeitgeist. Anyway, I earnestly think we urgently need some kind of deep governance reform or whatever. It's almost impossible for the system to produce good outcomes. I'm not saying get the torches; I am saying start putting it in party platforms and get candidates on record about it.

Finally, you ask how I could trust her after her Iraq war vote, but Democrats are pretty used to not having our policy preferences represented in office. Again while I think HRC would have been a very good president, there are other people I'd have preferred. But that's what primaries and party politics are for, and that process is... imperfect. I voted for Obama in the '08 Iowa caucus largely because of her Iraq War vote and--hilariously--I liked Obama saying you wouldn't need an individual health insurance mandate (oh to be young). But, to resume a partisan stance, I think the Republican party--and Trump in particular--is dangerous enough to merit fierce and vigorous opposition in a general election. It's hard for me to imagine a Democratic candidate that was so bad I'd stay home on eday.

> I don’t know what’s in the inner minds of other democrats. But out of the two parties, they’re cuddling up to all the ones who have been wrong for the last 50 years about foreign policy.

I'm bad at foreign policy and mostly stay out of it. But my uninformed opinion is that while Democrats haven't done a bang up job, Iraq and Afghanistan aren't on us, and Trump's banging on NATO and creating some kind of comic book villain council of strongmen seem like obvious bad ideas. Strong disagree that Dems are now taking direction from Iraq/Afghanistan architects; I just don't see any evidence of that at all. Biden withdrew from Afghanistan at great political cost, after all.

[idlewords]

You can't tell someone you respect them in the same paragraph where you're accusing them of bad faith.

[camgunz]

Maybe, but I think we're all subject to the temptation to make bad arguments to get one over on people we disagree with. I can respect some things about someone and not respect other things. I guess this comes from being low-key terrified I've been as bamboozled as conservatives have, and I hope if I started parroting various propaganda someone here would have respect enough to tell me respectfully. But, also I get the internet makes cynics of us all.

[idlewords]

Baldly accusing someone of bad faith is serious business, and I believe against the rules of this forum. It is way worse than calling out what you believe are bad arguments, as it's a slur against someone's integrity and character. Rayiner doesn't deserve that.

[camgunz]

I might be misusing bad faith, but honestly I don't think so. I felt like trying to equate the Hunter Biden Laptop letter with the Iraq War was way too polemic to be good faith, designed solely for gotcha purposes rather than to continue or deepen a discussion. I think a good faith discussion would have had some standard by which they were categorizing Hunter Biden laptop letter signatories and wouldn't have equated the letter with all the intelligence fraud behind the Iraq War. I think it's not unreasonable to expect someone with Rayiner's platform on this site (and intelligence) to know that stuff. Maybe (probably?) you clearly take good/bad faith more seriously than I do; I think it's really easy to prioritize winning the argument or mindshare vs. participating in a discussion that benefits us all, and I think that comment had all the hallmarks of it. I don't think Rayiner's a bad person, just that he--like all of us--sometimes could do better (I'm also guilty of this, probably even recently who knows). I'm fine not agreeing on this, but I try pretty hard to criticize behavior and not people, and I think I've held to that standard here.

EDIT: I reread and I definitely gave the impression that Rayiner posts in bad faith a lot. I don't think that, and I apologize.