*The play's the thing, wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.*

LOL — people were telling me TDS wasn’t real! This is *after* war was averted. View quoted note →

Expecting all the pundits crying about how Trump sold out his base to the warmongers, that he's owned by Israel, to memory hole that hysterical episode entirely! My feed this morning is even more full of TDS! It’s almost as if people are now pissed he didn’t go to war against Iran because it undermined their priors, and the cognitive dissonance is bothering them. Rip Trump all you want for the shitcoins, the free speech violations, the lack of accountability re Epstein and covid — those criticisms are deserved, But people wildly underestimate how propagandized they’ve been for the last 10 years and even longer — how someone like Trump (a man with gaudy taste, who openly boasts, who eats McDonalds and DGAF) is not of the class of people who should be president. The entire educational system has instructed you not to be like Trump, and a lot people went into debt to get the status boost, to learn the right way to be, and they fucking hate it that this dude, this perma-tanned asshole with the McMansion of all McMansions, the white gangsta-rapper of sorts, is now running the show and doing a better job than the self-deprecating, well-mannered “adults” in the room who they aspired to be. I suspect people will be even more pissed if there’s a lasting peace deal between Israel and Iran. People virtue signal their concern about the Iranian people or the Palestinians all the time, but that’s mostly just as fake as the missile exchanges we just saw the last couple days.

The narrative that Trump rugged his supporters before there’s been a single war casualty seems overeager. I can see on this protocol so many people badly want it to be the case. They badly want to believe that Israel owns Trump. Some love to rail about the JOOOOSSSSS, some just love that their TDS is validated, and he really is the bad guy. Maybe So. But also maybe not. And the more I see how badly they want it, the more I feel they’re going to be sorely disappointed, the more likely I believe it is there will be peace, and he might even get a prize for it. The world doesn’t conform to anyone’s preferences. So yes, while holding out hope for peace (and genuinely believing it’s the base case) might feel like “cope” in the face of so many people eager to point out how you’ve been rugged, I think it’s the other way around. The new narrative is the counter narrative. If Trump starts killing people, puts US boots and the ground and gets us in an Iraq-like quagmire, I’ll be the first to ditch him and admit I was wrong to have hoped for better. But until that happens, I think it’s less cope on my part, than dark wishful thinking on theirs that something bad happens so they can be right. Stay frosty af and doubt everything the news media are telling you. View quoted note →

Gonna speculate further here, based on something I experienced in my own life: Bombing Iran in a place that was evacuated was the easiest way to peace. You accede to the demands of the crazies in a nominal and inconsequential way, they let their guard down, then you do the opposite. When I used to host a show on Sirius XM, we had a program director who was always pushing cringey, shitty ideas on us. I used to argue with him, fight him over it all the time while everyone else was willing to comply. He just got more resolute in enforcing his retarded edicts, starting watching everything we did like a hawk. One day I realized that when you’re dealing with certain types of people, persusasion is not the way to go. Just yes them vaguely, give them the nominal version of what they want, then do your own thing. From that piont forward, he and I got along great, and he basically left us alone. The lesson I learned is that sometimes you can live up to your principles better by appearing to compromise than you can by standing on them and making noise. At 30, I wouldn’t have seen this, but in my 40s, I was able to manage it and take control back of the show. Obviously these situations are not the same, but I do think the sentiment is similar: “He bombed Iran when he promised to be the peace president!” Yes, he bombed them nominally, but unless he’s putting boots on the ground or bombing *people*, I don’t see this as especially significant. Might it lead to unforeseen consequences? Of course. Might I be wrong about his intentions? Of course. But sounds more like this is attack theater for a purpose other than war. That’s still my base case barring real escalation.

easiest hedge ever — convert and bet big on NO View quoted note →