Liberals In Open Primary States Should Vote For Nikki Haley. By Brian Beutler

Read time: 5 minutes

BRIAN BEUTLER

JAN 3, 2024

Liberals In Open Primary States Should Vote For Nikki Haley

Yes, even after her rake-stomping Civil War gaffe-a-thon

(Photo by Megan Varner/Getty Images)

In early 2016, a loose coalition of liberals and anti-Trump conservatives, along with more than a few Republican opportunists who simply feared Donald Trump would lose the general election, began pleading with independent and Democratic voters in states with open primaries, to cross over and cast their ballots for Marco Rubio. Trump was already running away with the nomination at that point, but the hope was that, with enough wind at his back, Rubio might be able to catch him. 

I was not a fan of this idea. Like most people I believed Trump would lose to Hillary Clinton. But I wasn’t cocksure, and that wasn’t really why I argued against it. It was more that intervening in GOP politics to help Republicans nominate a more electable candidate—in exchange for nothing—struck me as a poor bargaining proposition. Republicans wouldn’t and couldn’t offer Democrats anything to sweeten the deal, so the onus for denying him power should fall on them alone. They could either defeat him in the primary or do what was right for the country and sit out the general election. Bailing them out of their own mess cut against my sense of fair play. 

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To be honest, it still does. Almost nothing leaves a worse taste in my mouth than Democrats paying ransoms to Republican hostage takers. But eight years later we don’t need perfect foresight to know Trump is electable, and how terrible his second term would be; we don’t even have the luxury of head-to-head polls suggesting Trump will lose the election handily. Which is why—much as I hate to admit it—I’d vote for Nikki Haley three weeks from now if I were an undeclared voter living in New Hampshire. I’d discourage national Democrats from trying to prop up Trump’s candidacy by gratuitously piling on his rivals. And I’d encourage Joe Biden to stop worrying and love the thought, however remote, of Donald Trump losing the GOP nomination.

I was kicking around a different version of this piece before the holiday, during which Haley (once again) disgraced herself by effectively absolving slaveholders and the institution of slavery for plunging the country into Civil War. 

Haley probably never stood a chance against Trump, even in New Hampshire where she’s managed to pull within a mere 19 points of him. (Lol.) But New Hampshire isn’t South Carolina, and her slavery apologetics may have doomed whatever slim chance she had.

Still, it’s hard to think of any legal means of stopping Donald Trump that aren’t worth pursuing, and voting for Haley in open or semi-open primaries is one of them. Haley is an unprincipled person driven by little more than pure ambition. Even when she showed a flash of humanity at the last GOP debate and called Vivek Ramaswamy “scum,” it rang hollow because she’s hitched a ride on the Scumbag Express for the past seven years. 

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She would be a terrible president who would empower even worse people—people much like Ramaswamy, in fact—to undermine the country’s freedoms and punish its liberal enclaves, where most people live. In a just world nobody who’s too scared to stand up to neo-Confederates would ever hold any office. 

But she’s a person of higher character and more ethical purpose than Donald Trump. She’s running for president because she wants to win a big prize (a bad reason) not because she wants to stay out of prison (a worse reason). If she were to lose the election, she’d probably admit it, which is more than we can say about Trump who will once again insist it was stolen.  

To say Haley is of higher character than Donald Trump is no compliment! Haley is someone it would be very important to beat; Trump is someone we have to protect the country from. 

That isn’t to say Joe Biden or anyone else should give Haley a pass for omitting “slavery” from her list of causes of the Civil War. I thought Chris Christie’s response was very good. But there are ways to condemn her comments that implicate the whole GOP rather than Haley alone. For instance: She wouldn’t have made them if she weren’t keenly aware that succeeding nationally in Republican politics requires pandering to bigots. 

As I noted in the pilot episode of Politix, what she said indicts the party, not just herself. Other Republicans understood this, which is why they chimed in, like Tom Cotton, to contain the damage with party-line bad-faith trolling: Yeah, the Civil War was about slavery—Democrat slavery! They realize it reflects poorly on them when their leaders deny the country’s original sin altogether. 

But if you read between the lines of their messaging, Democrats seem eager to undermine Haley specifically. They seem inclined, as they have for many cycles now, to elevate the nuttiest Republican primary candidates and undermine their less-unhinged opponents, in the hope of drawing more beatable general election opponents. 

In 2022 I wrote for the New York Times about why, in the Trump era, this strategy was both intolerably risky and unnecessary. Risky because occasionally the crazies win! Unnecessary, because the whole GOP has stained itself with Trumpism, which means even “establishment” candidates are complicit and vulnerable to the Trump backlash.

All the Democrats have to do is tell the truth. Republican candidates run the gamut from people who participated in the violent insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, to ones who supported it from afar to underdogs who will stand idly by and let Mr. Trump take another run at ending the American experiment in self-government.

This applies just as much in the GOP presidential primary now, and to Haley’s slavery gaffe. Her comments reflect her party’s deeper rot more than anything uniquely objectionable about her.

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And they serve as a reminder that if she somehow wins the primary, Democrats will still have plenty to work with: They’d be able to attack her for pandering to Lost Cause mythologists, and for being against Trump, before she was for him, before she was against him again, before she was for him again. They might even get a leg up from Trump himself, who’d likely claim Haley stole the nomination from him, and turn his loyal supporters against her. 

The only reason to wonder whether he might accept defeat with a little more grace than usual is that his freedom would depend on her winning. She has promised to pardon Trump if she becomes president, providing Democrats a great wedge even if Trump turns on her. Perhaps she’d flipflop on that, too. 

For a long time now Democrats have been torn between their competing instincts to stop Trump at all costs and treat him as a foil. But after all the damage he’s done and all Republicans have done to enable him, it’s no longer such a pure binary. And in 2024, it’s clear which way that scale should tip. 

The Arguments For Placing Trump Above The Constitution Are Glib And Shrinking. bbb uBrian Beutler

www.offmessage.net

2 - 3 minutes

(Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)

One of the only amusing things about the debate over disqualifying Donald Trump for the presidency is watching conservatives throw originalism overboard in favor of Whatever Interpretive Legal Method Might Salvage Trump’s Candidacy. 

Self-professed originalists claim to believe that the Constitution and the law should be interpreted as understood by their framers at the time of adoption. Conservatives typically extol originalism because limited interpretive methods make it easier for them to treat right-wing dogmas as binding on governments and citizens. The framers didn’t understand equal protection or due process to create civil equality for gay people, so the Constitution can’t be read to establish a right to same-sex marriage. Ta-da! 

Their difficulty now stems from the fact that the arguments for disqualifying Trump on 14th amendment grounds are originalist in nature. Trump supporters and anti-anti-Trump conservatives (and even some squeamish liberals) thus have two choices: mangle the construction of the 14th amendment in various ways, or retreat to a kind of living constitutionalism (disguised as “judicial restraint”) in which the 14th amendment doesn’t apply to Donald Trump because applying it to him feels somehow inapposite. 

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Nevertheless, if I’m being honest, in the realm of elite discourse, they seem to be winning the argument. Republicans are howling in bad faith about the sanctity of the democracy they tried to overthrow; Democrats are, as usual, hiding from the controversy, leaving their frontline members like Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME) to undermine the anti-Trump effort; and they sum to this kind of credulous news coverage in which Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election is relegated to the footnotes.

The political establishment’s unease with accountability for elites or with upsetting militant Trump supporters may give his allies may have a leg up in this spin war. But on the merits, and on their own terms, they’ve already lost.

Taking And Leaving The Best And Worst Of 2023. By Jesse Singal

jessesingal.substack.com

12 - 16 minutes

Happy almost-New Year! Here are some things from 2023 I’d like to take with me into 2024, because they are good, as well as some things I’d like to leave in 2023, because they are bad.

That’s it. That’s the setup.

It won’t surprise any of my longtime readers that I really enjoyed American Fiction, the critically acclaimed and Oscar-buzz-generating film based on the 2001 novel Erasure by Percival Everett. After all, the film is about a black English professor and writer named Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, who hails from an upper-middle-class family of doctors in Boston. Having achieved merely middling success, if that, writing highbrow books stuffed with references to, like, ancient Persian wars or whatever, Ellison realizes what the core audience for books (white liberals) is really into: black suffering. So he dashes off a fake memoir called My Pafology under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, supposedly a fugitive gangbanger, as a middle finger to the publishing industry, and has his agent send it out on a lark, not expecting anyone to actually bite. And then. . . well, I’m sure you can guess what happens next. (Fun fact: Cord Jefferson, who directed and cowrote [with Everett] this film, wrote for a blog I helped edit almost 20 years ago at the Center for American Progress, before moving on to much bigger things and becoming one of the most highly regarded young-ish screenwriters around.)

This film hit at the perfect time. American racial essentialism has crested lately, especially since the death of George Floyd, and a rather pernicious and dunderheaded identitarianism has set in. American Fiction skewers it brilliantly, but is also a touching, humane story in its own right, since Monk has a lot more going on than just his frustrations with American race talk and his own career. It’s just a really, really good film, and in addition to treating race with the complexity the subject deserves, it refuses to turn anyone into a straightforward hero or villain, which is of course the right way to go about telling this sort of story.

Go see it! Also watch Beef on Netflix if you haven’t. Beef isn’t about race per se, but it is set among a group of Asian American characters in Los Angeles. The plot, which is kick-started by a road rage incident, actually gets satisfyingly tangled, and it’s too much to sum up here, but I highly recommend this show if you haven’t checked it out yet. The characters happen to be of certain racial backgrounds, and this comes up in various ways, but there’s very little essentialization or tokenization or haranguing of the sort often favored by white liberals. Instead, it’s just good, gripping television. This makes a lot more sense to me as a model for representation than the churning out of shows where the Korean American characters, like, stand around talking about how Korean American they are, and how worried they are about hate crimes, and so on. Most Americans’ views on race — their own and others — are much more nuanced than that. So I hope there’s more stuff like Beef and American Fiction in 2024.

Having lauded American Fiction and Beef, I’d be remiss if I didn’t take a parting shot at Robin DiAngelo, the high empress of white liberal racial nonsense. One of her more ardent high-profile critics is John McWhorter, the Columbia professor linguist and New York Times columnist (not to mention the host of the excellent and fascinating podcast Lexicon Valley). McWhorter’s views on race are characteristically nuanced and definitely non-woke, and in an interview DiAngelo recently said of him: “His record [on race] is very, very conservative. I would put him with Ben Carson and Clarence Thomas and other folks like that.”

This is, of course, ridiculous, and it suggests DiAngelo doesn’t know the first thing about one of her most prominent critics. If I were DiAngelo, I’d of course accuse her of racism for lumping McWhorter in with other figures who have much different views from him (he’s an Obama liberal) simply because they, too, happen to be black. Instead, I’ll merely accuse her of idiocy.

The year 2023 was also a very bad one for Ibram X. Kendi, whose Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University fell apart amid accusations of mismanagement, including some very shady-seeming financial dealings. 

Look, I don’t wish DiAngelo or Kendi ill. But they both peddle a deeply misguided, swashbuckling form of oversimplification that does little to heal America’s brutal history of racism, and that really accomplishes little other than making more work for them and their ilk, and, very much related, making a certain type of gullible white person feel bad, and therefore that they need to seek more training, reading, and so on.

Let’s hope that 2023 is the last year these folks have much of an influence on American racial discourse, unless and until they become much more sophisticated and less grift-y in their approach. You’ll gain more intellectual sustenance out of listening to McWhorter talk about the nuances of black American English for five minutes than you will reading an entire book by Kendi or DiAngelo.

2019

One of the most urgent mysteries in American life is why breakfast burritos have not enjoyed full penetration into our culture. Even in New York City.

I was lucky to spend more time than usual in California this year, and whenever I’m there I go out of my way to eat as many breakfast burritos as possible. (Okay, not literally as many as possible, but you know what I mean.) I know what you’re asking: Jesse, what was the most satisfying breakfast burrito you had? 

Don’t worry, the answer is easy: the food truck Crazy Tacos on 9th in downtown L.A. It was September and I had decided to come to L.A. on a whim both to attend a Free Press event and to stay with my oldest friend and his family afterward. I had a nightmare time getting from LAX to the hotel, and by the time I arrived it was approximately 2 a.m. East Coast time, and I was almost as hungry as I was cranky. As I checked in I asked where I could get decent tacos at that hour and, like all good Angelenos, the staff informed me of two nearby options: the less-good one, which I should avoid, and the more-good one (there should be a word for that), which I should go to. The gooder one was Crazy Tacos on 9th.

I got a breakfast burrito and chips and salsa. Was it, by most objective metrics, an amazing breakfast burrito? Probably not. But oh my God did I need a breakfast burrito at that moment. It is one of the most comforting foods there is. This one really, really hit the spot, instantly revitalizing my jet-lagged and rapidly aging body

How is it the case that there aren’t trucks or stores selling breakfast burritos every few blocks in New York City? The situation is slowly but surely improving, to be clear — far be it from me to catastrophize — but I hope breakfast burritos continue making inroads both here and everywhere else where they are not yet entrenched parts of the culinary scene in 2024. 

Journalists, even very bad ones, are not “enemies of the people,” the latest fad theory belched out by academia is not “a threat to Western civilization,” and not every person you disagree with is a fascist, a racist, a groomer, or even a mere idiot. Not that you would know it from social media.

To quote Los Campesinos, Can we all please just calm the fuck down? If people don’t stop using such overheated language all the time, I swear to God I am literally going to explode into a trillion pieces with the power of a billion quintillion supernovas. 

It is not healthy for people to exist in a state of constant furious lather (unless that’s your kink). This is a large part of the reason so many people who spend too much time online feel burnt out, like they’ve blown several important circuits.

You see that screenshot? That’s from Talented, a game in early access on Steam. It cost me $2.17 after tax to buy on December 7 and I have played for almost 40 hours since then.

I haven’t been this into a game since Slay the Spire, which I racked up a sickening number of hours playing.

Why’s Talented so good? It’s got that classic mix of complexity layered atop simplicity. The core gameplay is very, very basic: your character can’t even move. He’s stuck there in the middle, and all he can do is point himself in one of the four cardinal directions and use his main attack (free) or one of his up to four talents (all of which cost one resource or another) to fend off wave after wave of enemies. The goal is to survive 20 nights, and while Night 1 features a pleasant, if not too slow, conveyor belt (you can actually speed things up if you want), by Night 20 you are being fire-hosed with enemies.

Luckily, if you play your cards right, you will basically be a god by then. Progression entails poking your way around a totally randomized talent tree — each night you get points to spend on it that you can use to buff your base stats (damage, chance to parry, etc.) or to gain “Talents,” basically “spells” or “abilities” or “attacks,” depending on your character class. There are four of them — Archer, Wizard, Warrior, or Summoner — with at least two more to come.

As you can see in that above screenshot, during that particular run, playing as a Warrior, I killed more than 1,400 enemies in a row and counting during one night. I had a bunch of very satisfying runs like that, which is how I was able to max out all four character classes, and even pull off one flawless run where I didn’t get hit once. The runs were satisfying because the tactics and synergies get surprisingly deep given how simple the core gameplay is. Each class has multiple types of viable builds, and you really need to respond on the fly to the randomness of the talent tree if you’re going to survive.

For now, I’m not playing the game anymore, because I’m out of stuff to do! It’s in early access, after all. There’s definitely some stuff to be ironed out: for one thing, the strongest abilities are seriously OP compared to the weaker ones. I had a couple runs where I got one of these abilities early in the game and in both cases, I was immediately like, Oh, okay, I am going to win this run now. And then I won the runs. Ideally, that wouldn’t be the case. The difficulty is also a little on the easy side, but 1) that may have been in response to early criticism the game was too hard, and 2) there’s an entire “Challenge Mode” that isn’t even unlocked yet, and using my powers of deduction I can confidently predict it will be challenging. 

I think those of us who don’t make games probably can’t comprehend how much fine-tuning goes into the process, and this game is still rather early in its development. Plus, the developers, who have a very detailed devlog, are clearly listening to the small community that has already formed around the game, and a lot of improvements appear to be on the way, including some that will address the aforementioned issues. The only reason I’m even noting these critiques is because of how blown away I am that a game that cost me two greenbacks has already delivered so much depth and satisfaction. 

I cannot wait to see where this game goes in 2024, even if it doesn’t get its 1.0 release until more than a year from now.

Via Getty (the photo, not the guy)

This is not an original observation, but Elon Musk’s destruction of Twitter has been astonishing to watch.

I’ve zigzagged a little on this, because in my opinion certain doomsayers started freaking out a bit prematurely the moment he took over Twitter, before we had a clear idea exactly what was going to happen to the platform and before his takeover had any noticeable impact (other than people complaining about it). But he has just screwed up everything. I mean, maybe it’s for the best given that Twitter had been a truly noxious place for years, and one that was awfully destructive to journalism, academia, and discourse more generally, but still: I’ve never seen it this dysfunctional. I mean that in both the sense that there’s more crazy garbage on my timeline than ever before (which is saying something), and also that basic features simply don’t work. For example: I’d like to download my data, which has long been something you can do by clicking a thing and then waiting a while and then receiving an email. You just. . . can’t do that anymore? Like, you click the thing, and you wait, but you never get the link to your data. It’s a very basic functionality that’s just. . . gone.

I think there are going to be some amazing magazine articles or even books written about Elon Musk’s time at Twitter. I hope he has lost some fans about this — his behavior, every step of the way, has been indefensible, as has been just about every choice he has made. But he’s got a bit of a cult of personality surrounding him so it wouldn’t surprise me if his disciples remained loyal.

***

That’s it! I hope you guys all have a great New Year’s Eve and that 2024 is a happy and healthy year for you and your loved ones. Thank you so much for reading my newsletter.

Questions? Comments? Your own takings and leavings for 2023? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com. Image: GPT-4’s take on “a very strange new year's party, cartoon style, wide format.”

My 2024 predictions. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

My 2024 predictions

Matthew Yglesias

11 - 13 minutes

I have been dreading the need to do my annual predictions post — so much so that I strongly considered not doing it this year — because I didn’t want to have to think about what I got wrong last year.

But when I reflect on what I originally wrote in “How to be less full of shit,” the point of a predictions post is that it’s not supposed to be fun. What’s fun is to say stuff that’s interesting and maybe a little insightful and edgy and then not ask too many questions about whether it was actually true. The point of making explicit predictions and then looking back on them is to temper that impulse a little bit and to interrogate your own real views and levels of confidence more clearly.

And the good news is I am getting better.

My first year’s predictions were terrible, but I got better in year two, and this year’s calibration is better yet. Still not great, but pretty good.

    Things I said I was 90 percent confident in actually happened 100 percent of the time.

    Things I said I was 80 percent confident would happen actually happened 92 percent of the time.

    Things I said I was 70 percent confident in happened 65 percent of the time.

    My 60 percent forecasts happened 72 percent of the time.

    My 20 percent forecasts came true 20 percent of the time. 

This is pretty good. The two main flaws are that I was under-confident about my confident predictions, and I was no good at distinguishing between degrees of moderate confidence.

The importance of calibration and disciplined forecasting is particularly on my mind right now, because I’m, of course, thinking about the 2024 election. I think it’s important to recall that during the 2020 campaign, Donald Trump very confidently predicted that if Joe Biden won, the American oil industry would be shut down, the murder rate would surge, and we’d have rioters burning down our cities. None of those things happened — in fact, Trump was directionally incorrect in all of those predictions and we had more oil, less murder, and fewer riots under Joe Biden. Of course in politics, lots of people make claims about their enemies that turn out to be overstated; certainly Hillary Clinton made some overstated forecasts of doom related to a Trump victory. But it’s striking when people make forecasts that actually go in the wrong direction. It suggests there’s something fundamentally inaccurate in the conservative movement’s understanding of the underlying forces working on the policy areas that they themselves say are important.

So before we get to this year’s predictions, let’s look back and see what we can learn.

Here’s a fun example of the difference between good epistemics and good content. I wanted to put some sports predictions into last year’s list, so I just googled around on the internet for 10 different sports outcomes where the betting odds were about 20 percent. Some of those were related to a sport I actually follow closely (the NBA) or at least am broadly familiar with (the NFL), but two of them were related to the UEFA Champions League. And the only reason I even know what that is that after registering the official predictions, I looked it up.

The upshot is that I was perfectly calibrated, with exactly two of the things I said had a 20% chance of happening coming to pass:

    False: Celtics win finals (20%)

    False: Grizzlies win finals (20%)

    False: Bucks make finals (20%)

    False: Bruins win Stanley Cup (20%)

    False: Avalanche win Stanley Cup (20%)

    False: Bills win Super Bowl (20%)

    False: Eagles win Super Bowl (20%)

    True: Chiefs win Super Bowl (20%)

    False: Bayern Munich win Champions League (20%)

    True: Manchester City win Champions League (20%)

Of course, you don’t get a result that on the nose without a bit of good luck. But it illustrates that trusting the conventional wisdom can be underrated — especially in circumstances where people have actual money on the line in forming the conventional wisdom. I had no particular reason to believe that Manchester City had a one-in-five chance of winning the Champions League, but if sports gamblers say it’s true, then that’s pretty reliable.

None of this changes the basic reality that I have no value as a sports pundit, but I at least did an okay job of strategically manipulating my stats.

I made three different predictions about inflation, one of which was a bad miss:

    True: Inflation below 6 (80%)

    True: Inflation below 5 (60%)

    False: Inflation above 4 (80%)

In retrospect, I was under-confident about the Fed’s determination to bring inflation down, especially because I also wrongly predicted that the stock market would be down on the year. I should have thought that through better. My thinking on the stock forecast was that the Fed would be willing to really slam growth expectations in the name of bringing inflation down. But if that’s what I thought (and I think it was the right thing to think), then I should have been more confident on the Fed driving inflation down below five and more open to the possibility that it would get below four.

My other economics and politics predictions were pretty good, albeit under-confident, with one glaring exception: I said that Ron DeSantis would be leading the polling for the GOP nomination. I’m honestly not sure why I thought that, the guy is too short to be president.

Here was a more subtle miss:

    True: At least two bills pass that violate the “Hastert Rule” (80%)

    False: Kevin McCarthy ends the year as Speaker of the House (70%)

I don’t think it was crazy to think McCarthy had a decent chance of surviving conditional on violating the Hastert rule, but I was under-confident about the need to break the Hastert rule, which led me to be too bullish on McCarthy’s chances of making it through the year.

I made a bunch of international election forecasts and did a decent job of predicting that a lot of incumbents would lose. But I displayed some left bias and predicted an incumbent win in Berlin and an incumbent loss in Alberta, neither of which came to pass.

This group of predictions was more interesting:

    True: No Chinese attack on Taiwan (90%)

    True: No new countries join the European Union (90%)

    True: No countries leave the European Union (90%)

    True: No nuclear weapon use (90%)

    True: No peace deal in the Russia-Ukraine war (80%)

    False: Turkey and Hungary approve the accession of Sweden and Finland to NATO (70%)

    False: This year Israel and Saudi Arabia really do normalize relations! (60%)

    True: Biden visits Vietnam (60%)

    True: Some further easing of sanctions on Venezuela (60%)

    False: The U.S. and Canada really do reach a deal on the softwood lumber dispute (60%)

Obviously the 10/7 attacks and Israel’s response (in part, likely, by design) helped scuttle that Saudi-Israel diplomacy, which seemed like it was going pretty well previously. But perhaps another bias of mine is that when I see win-win deals on the table, I’m inclined to expect the deal to get done. It’s really annoying that neither NATO accession nor the softwood dispute has been worked out.

All things considered, though, I feel pretty good about my predicting.

Last year, I had a bunch of correlated blown calls that involved underestimating the political impact of Dobbs. This year, I think I did a better job of seeing the whole field. I don’t know about 2024, though, because I think it’s hard to stay objective about such a big American presidential election that’s going to correlate with a lot of other political outcomes.

Y’all already know my secret here, so I’m just gonna write these down and not say much about it:

    Denver Nuggets win NBA championship (20%)

    Philadelphia 76ers make the NBA finals (20%)

    Phoenix Suns make the NBA finals (20%)

    Luka Doncic wins the NBA MVP (20%)

    Baltimore Ravens win the Super Bowl (20%)

    Philadelphia Eagles make the Super Bowl (20%)

    New York Rangers make the Stanley Cup finals (20%)

    Las Vegas Golden Knights make the Stanley Cup finals (20%)

    Bayern Munich wins the Champions League (20%)

    Real Madrid wins the Champions League (20%)

Go Bayern!

We’re clearly on track for a good election for Republicans next year.

Whenever I point that out to friends, they push back, saying that a lot can change, that polls a year out aren’t predictive, that economic perceptions are likely to improve, and other things that are certainly true. What I think people often forget, though, is that “things can change” is symmetrical. Biden’s tenure as president has been marked by a number of somewhat unexpected pieces of bad luck — starting with the way the SARS-Cov-2 virus turned out to mutate rapidly so that vaccination didn't create an unambiguous end to the pandemic.

I’m not especially predicting any unexpected bad news for Biden (or America) next year, just trying to remind people that while the president could absolutely catch some lucky breaks, he may also catch some unlucky ones.

    Donald Trump is elected president (60%)

    Republicans maintain their majority in the House (60%)

    Republicans gain a majority in the senate (90%)

    Democrats lose at least one senate seat outside of WV/MT/OH (60%)

    Kelly Ayotte elected governor of New Hampshire (60%)

    Josh Stein elected governor of North Carolina (60%)

    No Biden change in Biden’s cabinet (80%)

    Donald Trump is the Republican nominee (90%)

    Joe Biden is the Democratic nominee (90%)

    No Supreme Court vacancy (90%)

    Immigration/border/asylum legislation passes (70%)

    At least one government shutdown (60%)

    Pro-GOP electoral college bias diminishes from its 2024 level (80%)

    Net electoral college bias continues to favor the GOP (60%)

    No split between the popular vote and the electoral college (80%)

Economically, though, I do think things will be looking up:

    Fed cuts interest rates at least fifty basis points (90%)

    Fed cuts interest rates at least 75 basis points (70%)

    Fed does not cut interest rates by more than 100 basis points (70%)

    Last CPI print of the year shows annual inflation below 3% (80%)

    Last CPI print of the year shows annual inflation above 2% (80%)

    No recession in 2024 (90%)

    Positive RGDP growth for each of the next four quarters (Q4 2023 - Q3 -2024) (70%)

    Unemployment rate stays below 4% (80%)

    Unemployment rate stays above 3% (80%)

    S&P 500 is up for the year (80%)

    US oil production hits a new record in 2024 (90%)

    GPT-5 is released (90%)

    Prime age EPOP falls short of its year 2000 peak (70%)

    New housing starts average over 1,500 per month (70%)

    Food prices more expensive in December 2024 than December 2023 (60%)

    African National Congress loses its majority in the South African National Assembly for the first time ever (60%)

    Claudia Sheinbaum elected President of Mexico (70%)

    Nicolás Maduro re-election (or “re-elected” if you prefer) in Venezuela (80%)

    KMT wins the presidential election in Taiwan (60%)

    Social Democratic Party (the center-right party) leads the next government in Portugal (70%)

    Vladimir Putin re-elected in Russia (90%)

    Far-right Freedom Party will be largest in Austrian Parliament (70%)

    Nayib Bukele re-elected as president of El Salvador (90%)

    Belgium won’t be able to form a government between their election and the end of the year (70%)

    Alexander Stubb elected President of Finland (70%)

Feel free to share your own predictions in the comments, and check back next year to see if I’m right about anything!

This Week in Discourse: Dealing with Nazis. By Jeremiah Johnson

www.infinitescroll.us

10 - 13 minutes

Who has two thumbs and has been delaying the regular blog schedule because of Holiday laziness? This guy! We’ll be back to the regular two-per-week schedule in January. Happy new year!

blogger sitting at computer dressed as german military, substack sign in background, cartoon

AI generated, prompt: blogger sitting at computer dressed as german military, substack sign in background, cartoon

We talk a lot here about Content Moderation, and how you can’t ever win no matter what you do.

That drama, predictably, has continued to rage here at Substack. The debate is around ‘Nazis’, some of which are just generic right wing bigots and some of whom do seem to be actual, legitimate Nazis. To recap: after a piece in the Atlantic talked about Substack’s Nazi problem, lots of people wrote about it. I wrote about! (link below)

A group of writers came out with a statement, Substackers against Nazis, asking the site to deplatform Nazi blogs. Another group of writers signed a letter saying Substack shouldn’t decide what we read. Founder Hamish McKenzie released a long note you can find below on the situation, defending the choice to continue to platform Nazis.

I’ve written before that I’m sympathetic to Substack’s decision to essentially toss up their hands and refuse to play the content moderation game:

    I don’t think that extreme free speech is the right approach for most sites, but the urge to just throw your hands up and surrender? I get that. No matter what you do, people are going to hate you. There are going to simultaneously be people mad that you’re doing too much and people mad that you’re doing too little. In any conflict, people will accuse you of bias for and against any given side. Content moderation is a whack-a-mole game where every mole is Nazis or child abuse content, and there are ten moles popping up every second, and the moles literally never stop. If you miss even one mole, the mainstream media labels you the Nazi and/or child abuse site.

But while I am sympathetic, there are a couple of inconsistencies with Hamish McKenzie’s statement above.

McKenzie is essentially making claim Substack wants to just be a neutral service-provider and this is why they take the free speech stance. Essentially like saying "Gmail doesn't reject nazis from having a Gmail account" or “Verizon doesn’t test your ideology before selling you an iPhone”. Substack is a neutral tool like a phone or a hammer, which can be used for good or for bad. There’s also the claim that since Substack is just a tool, it doesn’t really effect you if a Nazi is there. You don’t have to read the Nazi blog! It’s not like a social network, where virality and spread matters. Just don’t go to the Nazi parts, the same way you don’t go to Nazi websites. That's the argument.

But the issue I see is that Substack is increasingly doing a lot of social media network things. They have Notes, which is clearly an attempt to steal Twitter users and start a quasi-social service. The site is getting more and more social-platform features like leaderboards, restacks, algorithmic recommendations, etc. And social networks are not neutral service providers. Social networks by their nature require moderation. Substack is in an awkward space where it’s not quite a private, individual communication platform like Gmail and it’s not quite a true social network. But it’s trending in the direction of social network over time.

The other issue with McKenzie’s statement is that you can't really claim "I just favor free speech even if the people are terrible" but then also suck up to guys like Richard Hanania publicly and repeatedly. Hanania is an outright racist with the thinnest possible layer of deniability. McKenzie claims that he wasn’t aware of Hanania’s views when he had him on his podcast and later complimented him, but this is an incredibly weak evasion. Nobody with a functioning brain was surprised by the revelation that Richard Hanania had a history as a white supremacist. Oh, the guy who constantly writes about ‘black crime’ and says “We need more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people. Blacks won’t appreciate it, whites don’t have the stomach for it” had a secret white supremacist past? Who could have predicted this?

If that is McKenzie’s genuine reasoning, he should stop any attempts at being a public figure with a podcast and a blog and go back to just being a founder/CEO who doesn’t make statements. If you couldn’t see ahead of time that Richard Hanania of all people was a racist, consider that you might not be qualified to express cultural and political opinions. Perhaps you should just not talk in public.

And on a deeper level, Substack needs to decide what they want to be. If they just want to be neutral service provider, a Gmail equivalent, so be it. But they keep edging towards being a social network while trying to avoid any content moderation, and that’s eventually going to come back to bite them.

I quite enjoyed this video from YouTuber CoffeeZilla on a scammer who’s been taking advantage of various streamers and YouTubers.

The video’s a little over-produced for my taste, but still high quality. A merch company called Revolt was partnered with quite a lot of prominent content creators to sell branded merch. This was a real business - branded merchandise is quite profitable for most content creators - and they seemed to make legitimate money in the beginning. The company was headed by Ryan Piasente, who was also a part of The Misfits, a YouTuber collaboration group.

The video alleges that after some initial success, Piasente ran the business into the ground and began committing all sorts of crimes to cover it up. He allegedly was spending company money on lavish lifestyle perks for himself and friends. The company failed basic quality controls and wasn’t even correctly shipping merchandise much of the time, leaving customers out to dry. The company was constantly on the cusp of collapse, but in a Ponzi-like scheme kept signing bigger clients and paying past clients with new client money.

Like all Ponzi schemes, it eventually collapsed after a MrBeast merch drop didn’t sell as well as expected. CoffeeZilla’s video then shows documentation that Revolt engaged in financial fraud, altering invoices from manufacturers to overcharge MrBeast and other creators. They also allegedly didn’t pay many content creators, with many publicly claiming that they’re owed hundreds of thousands of dollars. The whole video is a wild ride, and concludes with the shocking revelation that Piasente was not only engaged in criminal financial fraud - he was also a sexual predator who used Revolt and Misfits company money to pay women for nude pictures, including requesting those pictures from underage girls.

There’s an obvious hook here - it’s a juicy story of a creepy predator, financial crime, and extremely popular online personalities. But the deeper story goes beyond one creep. It’s interesting how easy it was for a guy like this to make it so big in the influencer world before being exposed, and how frequently it seems to happen.

Successful influencers, I will posit, are uniquely easy to scam. They’re typically very young. They are small business owners, but they usually don’t actually know much about running a business. They’ve become big via their content creation skills, not via business savvy. They are typically eager to make deals to turn their fame into money, but aren’t always sure how to make that happen. And there’s a sort of fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants vibe to content creation that encourages rash decision making - good for viral content and creativity, bad for business. And creators don’t have any formal unions, formal organizations or standard industry practices - ties are often informal and many creators don’t know how to check with others about what companies and situations to avoid.

Mix all this together and it’s no surprise you see stories like this all the time, with influencers making stupid deals and falling for common scams.

More depressingly, it’s also not surprising that sexual predators abound in an industry like this. Social media is what some economists call a ‘glamour industry’. That’s a technical term of art, not a description of the inherent glamorous nature of Twitch streaming. It means that an industry is dominated by a small number of superstar individuals who get all the returns to fame, while a massive number of others try and fail to get any work at all. Think about acting - A-listers can make millions per movie, but 99% of actors in America are unknown bartenders and waitresses making essentially nothing. The same dynamic applies to publishing novels, making music, and being an online content creator. There’s a never-ending supply of people trying to make it big in those areas. Only a few ever will, but if they do the returns are huge.

Working in one of these industries is essentially playing the lottery - you’re almost certainly going to fail, but if you win then you win big. And demographically most of the people playing this lottery are young and attractive, and desperate to make it. This makes it all too easy for abusive figures in the industry to prey on people who want to make it, or who are just blinded by proximity to fame and success. It’s why you hear so many predatory stories from Hollywood, from the music industry, from social media - making it is insanely difficult in those industries.

I am giving this its own separate section to impress upon you that you really, really should watch this video. It’s incredible.

I suspect something like this is the future of music/video/art/etc. The lyrics here are human-written but performed by AI-generated voices of SpongeBob, Mr Krabs, Squidward and other characters. The animation is human-created but with advanced tools that border on AI. A mix of human ingenuity and AI tools will make it easier than ever for people to make the wildest and most creative art we’ve ever seen, especially when it involves remixing existing IP.

    LeBron James might start livestreaming. Both Twitch and Kick are making public pitches for James to use them as their streaming platform. I’ve been skeptical of Kick’s long term viability, but a sign I’m wrong will be if they can start to lure stars like James better than Twitch can.

    Elon Musk continues to suck up to huge YouTubers like MrBeast, unsuccessfully. MrBeast very politely dropkicks him here, explaining the economics of his own platform to Elon.

    Twitter/X is also in a legal fight with California over a new content moderation law. Meanwhile, they’re still being sued over unpaid bonuses and are still unable to combat blue-check bots.

    A real lesson in determination

    CyberTruck in the wild!

    A good resolution

    Your new goal for 2024

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Some developers are pushing back against violent video games

Hands up, don’t shoot

Gratuitous bloodshed and the rise of female gamers have contributed to a backlash

A still from the video game Venba shows a young son watching his mother cook.

Brandish your weapon—I mean, spoonimage: youttube/playstation

Aug 31st 2023

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Atamil mother, recently immigrated to Canada, stirs biryani. Her young son looks on, sniffing the delectable aromas. This is a scene in Venba, a recently released video game attracting attention. Through a series of cooking puzzles—in which players learn to prepare ingredients in the correct order or work out the various items missing from recipes—it offers an emotionally intense family saga, serving up topics like immigration and identity, alongside Tamil food.

Unlike the noisy, big-budget productions that dominate gaming and its public image, Venba is peaceful and gentle. It cost less than $1m to make but quickly managed to break into the top-sellers on Steam, a pc gaming hub, sitting alongside rivals that cost as much as $100m. It might not get the recognition or nearly as many users as “Call of Duty” and “Assassin’s Creed” do. But Venba is important, because it is part of a growing trend of non-violent games attracting both game developers and players.

Recently Steam held a sale, offering nearly 250 “wholesome” games that do not feature any violence. Such a notion would have been impossible until the recent past: there were just so few games that did not involve bloodlust. “The Best Non-Violent Video Games”, a new book by James Batchelor, a gaming expert, celebrates 300 peaceful games from the past 50 years, all the way back to Pong (an early game that features a ball and two paddles, like a virtual game of tennis). More than half of them came out in the past ten years.

Two factors are contributing to the rise of kinder, gentler games. One is a backlash by those who design games. Many independent developers, who can choose their own projects (versus those who work for larger firms), do not want to spend their careers designing games about killing, says Mr Batchelor. Job Stauffer, a game-industry veteran, contributed to violent productions such as the “Grand Theft Auto” series, but has started refusing to work on brutal or murderous ones. “We see media reports of mass shootings and wars day after day,” he explains. “I decided that I didn’t want to be a part of the problem, creating entertainment that involves firing rockets into buses,” he adds.

Chris Chancey, a Canadian game developer, was in the midst of making a combat and adventure game when he learned that four-fifths of the games demonstrated at a leading gaming convention involved violence. This prompted him to change course and design something that cut against the trend. In the resulting game, “Rainbow Billy: The Curse of the Leviathan”, players speak instead of kill each other. It is popular with parents. “I get a lot of messages from parents who want to play games with their kids, but who don’t want to expose them to gore and violence,” he says.

As gaming becomes a pastime for the entire family, it is becoming more diverse, and this is fuelling demand for titles that do not involve pixelated machine guns or swords. When people think about gamers, they often picture them as male and on the cusp of puberty. Some are. But in reality, the average age of people who regularly play games is around 33, and about half are female. Wren Brier, developer of the popular narrative puzzle game “Unpacking”, says the tastes and preferences of women gamers have started to influence developers; many are looking for play where caring and friendship are on display, instead of shooting and domination.

Just like real life, however, peaceful experiences can exist alongside conflict and bloodshed. The most lavish productions and biggest commercial successes in gaming still usually include slaughter. (Many of the biggest Hollywood films do too, although they are not seeing the same backlash from film-industry folk or viewers—at least not yet.) “As soon as we attach a certain dollar amount to a project, it’s like violence becomes as understood a feature as having graphics,” says Laralyn McWilliams, a game developer. She hopes this will change in the future, as more developers and gamers choose a side. But of the 20 top-selling premium games so far this year, 15 feature combat. ■7

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2024 will be stressful for those who care about liberal democracy. By Zanny Minton Beddoes

In theory it should be a triumphant year for democracy. In practice it will be the opposite

Nov 13th 2023

More than half the people on the planet live in countries that will hold nationwide elections in 2024, the first time this milestone has been reached. Based on recent patterns of voter turnout, close to 2bn people in more than 70 countries will head to the polls. Ballots will be cast from Britain to Bangladesh, from India to Indonesia. Yet what sounds like it should be a triumphant year for democracy will be the opposite.

Many elections will entrench illiberal rulers. Others will reward the corrupt and incompetent. By far the most important contest, America’s presidential election, will be so poisonous and polarising that it will cast a pall over global politics. Against a backdrop of conflict, from Ukraine to the Middle East, America’s future direction—and with it the world order American leadership has hitherto underwritten—will be on the line. It will be a nerve-racking and dangerous year.

Some elections will be obvious shams. In Belarus or Rwanda, for instance, the only question is how close to 100% the incumbent’s vote-share will be. Having illegally changed the constitution to remove term limits in 2020, Vladimir Putin will doubtless win a third consecutive term (and fifth overall) as Russia’s president.

Most ballots cast will be in Asia. Its biggest democracies—Bangladesh, India and Indonesia—will all go to the polls. Unfortunately, the danger is of growing illiberalism. Under Narendra Modi, India is enjoying remarkable economic and geopolitical success, even as the prime minister condones anti-Muslim chauvinism and a dismantling of institutional safeguards. Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo, seems focused on entrenching a political dynasty. Bangladesh has already taken an authoritarian turn, with opposition leaders jailed and no dissent brooked.

America’s poisonous and polarising election will cast a pall over global politics

Africa will be the continent with the most elections, but its voters are increasingly disillusioned with how democracy works. Coups are becoming more common: nine regimes have seized power by force since 2020. Polls suggest that growing numbers of Africans might be willing to go along with a military government. South Africa’s election will be a reminder of serial disappointment. Three decades after the anc swept to power in the first post-apartheid election, it will limp to power again in a country ground down by corruption, crime and unemployment.

The news is not all bad. Mexico will elect its first female president: both leading contenders are women, and less populist than the incumbent. British voters will (at last) have a choice between two competent candidates. After 14 years of Tory rule a Labour win is likely, but few outside Britain will notice much change.

Some elections will have a disproportionate impact beyond their country’s borders. Whether Taiwan’s 18m voters plump for the incumbent Democratic Progressive Party or the Kuomintang (kmt), the more China-friendly opposition, will affect relations across the Taiwan Strait and, as a result, the level of us-China tensions. In the short term a kmt victory might reduce the odds of conflict. But in the medium term Taiwanese complacency might later increase the risk of Chinese adventurism and, potentially, a great-power clash.

Nothing, however, will compare to America’s election, either for grim spectacle or potential consequences. It is hard to believe the most likely outcome is a rematch between two old men, both of whom the majority of voters wish were not candidates.

Donald Trump’s very candidacy undermines American democracy. That the Republican Party would nominate a man who tried to overturn the results of the previous presidential election dims America as a democratic beacon. A second Trump term would transform America into a loose cannon with isolationist tendencies at a time of grave geopolitical peril. His fondness for strongmen, particularly Mr Putin, suggests that his boast to end the Russia-Ukraine conflict in 24 hours would be at Ukraine’s expense.

Mr Trump may not become the nominee, and if he does, he may well lose. But the odds of a second Trump term are alarmingly high. The consequences could be catastrophic—for democracy and for the world. ■A

zanny minton beddoes, Editor-in-chief, The Economist