Which is more important? Saving your conscience or saving democracy?

We all (or most of us) have thresholds for what we will or won’t do. It’s called “personal ethics.”  For example, as a 55+year vegetarian, I’d say nothing could make me eat animal flesh. 

Supposing someone holds a gun to your head and says “Do X or I pull the trigger.”  Will you do X?  You may say “no” when not faced with that prospect for real, but I guarandamntee you that if it was a reality, you’d say, “How high should I jump?” Or, in my case, “Give me that fucking hamburger,” and I’d gag it down somehow.  IOW, you will do X no matter how disgusting you find it.  Self-preservation runs THAT deep. 

There is a political gun pointed at our collective “high moral standards” heads this November. Will you help the perpetrators pull the trigger, out of your prioritized conscience?  Will you choose your conscience over democracy?

For you third party or write-in voters, that’s what this November election comes down to. Your vote for Stein, or RFK, Jr., or Mickey Mouse is just a wasted vote. That is a cold hard objective fact. 

BUT… your conscience will be clear. It, your conscience, helped enable/catapult a psychopathic madman into the leader of the “no longer free as we’ve known it” U.S. world. (see Project 2025)

Am I wrong about this?  Do you still plan to vote third party or write in?  

Make your case in view of my scenario. Tell me why I’m not seeing clearly?

(by PrimalSoup)

The NYT editorial board calls DJT unfit

The NYT writes (not paywalled):

OPINION

DONALD TRUMP IS UNFIT

TO LEAD

BY THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.


Next week, for the third time in eight years, Donald Trump will be nominated as the Republican Party’s candidate for president of the United States. A once great political party now serves the interests of one man, a man as demonstrably unsuited for the office of president as any to run in the long history of the Republic, a man whose values, temperament, ideas and language are directly opposed to so much of what has made this country great.

It is a chilling choice against this national moment. For more than two decades, large majorities of Americans have said they are dissatisfied with the direction of the country, and the post-Covid era of stubborn inflation, high interest rates, social division and political stagnation has left many voters even more frustrated and despondent.

The Republican Party once pursued electoral power in service to solutions for such problems, to building “the shining city on a hill,” as Ronald Reagan liked to say. Its vision of the United States — embodied in principled public servants like George H.W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney — was rooted in the values of freedom, sacrifice, individual responsibility and the common good. The party’s conception of those values was reflected in its longstanding conservative policy agenda, and today many Republicans set aside their concerns about Mr. Trump because of his positions on immigration, trade and taxes. But the stakes of this election are not fundamentally about policy disagreements. The stakes are more foundational: what qualities matter most in America’s president and commander in chief.

Mr. Trump has shown a character unworthy of the responsibilities of the presidency. He has demonstrated an utter lack of respect for the Constitution, the rule of law and the American people. Instead of a cogent vision for the country’s future, Mr. Trump is animated by a thirst for political power: to use the levers of government to advance his interests, satisfy his impulses and exact retribution against those who he thinks have wronged him.

He is, quite simply, unfit to lead.

The Democrats are rightly engaged in their own debate about whether President Biden is the right person to carry the party’s nomination into the election, given widespread concerns among voters about his age-related fitness. This debate is so intense because of legitimate concerns that Mr. Trump may present a danger to the country, its strength, security and national character — and that a compelling Democratic alternative is the only thing that would prevent his return to power. It is a national tragedy that the Republicans have failed to have a similar debate about the manifest moral and temperamental unfitness of their standard-bearer, instead setting aside their longstanding values, closing ranks and choosing to overlook what those who worked most closely with the former president have described as his systematic dishonesty, corruption, cruelty and incompetence.  

That task now falls to the American people. We urge voters to see the dangers of a second Trump term clearly and to reject it. The stakes and significance of the presidency demand a person who has essential qualities and values to earn our trust, and on each one, Donald Trump fails.

In my opinion, now the MSM's Biden vs. DJT playing field is leveled, at least for the NYT. This is overdue, but it will do. 

The opinion is very long and broken into sections Moral Fitness, Principled Leadership, Character, A  President's Words, and Rule of Law. The Rule of Law section starts with these arguments against DJT:

The danger from these foundational failings — of morals and character, of principled leadership and rhetorical excess — is never clearer than in Mr. Trump’s disregard for rule of law, his willingness to do long-term damage to the integrity of America’s systems for short-term personal gain.

As we’ve noted, Mr. Trump’s disregard for democracy was most evident in his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to encourage violence to stop the peaceful transfer of power. What stood in his way were the many patriotic Americans, at every level of government, who rejected his efforts to bully them into complying with his demands to change election results. Instead, they followed the rules and followed the law. This respect for the rule of law, not the rule of men, is what has allowed American democracy to survive for more than 200 years.

In the four years since losing the election, Mr. Trump has become only more determined to subvert the rule of law, because his whole theory of Trumpism boils down to doing whatever he wants without consequence. Americans are seeing this unfold as Mr. Trump attempts to fight off numerous criminal charges. Not content to work within the law to defend himself, he is instead turning to sympathetic judges — including two Supreme Court justices with apparent conflicts over the 2020 election and Jan. 6-related litigation. The playbook: delay federal prosecution until he can win election and end those legal cases. His vision of government is one that does what he wants, rather than a government that operates according to the rule of law as prescribed by the Constitution, the courts and Congress.

A poll about the two candidates

The WaPo reports:

Most Democrats want Biden to drop out, 

but overall race is static, poll finds

Most Democrats nationwide say that President Biden should end his reelection campaign based on his performance in the presidential debate two weeks ago, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll.

The poll results contradict Biden’s claim that only party elites want him to step aside. He has said that positive interactions with supporters on the campaign trail have helped persuade him to stay in the race after a debate in which he trailed off and occasionally appeared confused. But the poll finds that 56 percent of Democrats say that he should end his candidacy, while 42 percent say he should continue to seek reelection. Overall, 2 in 3 adults say the president should step aside, including more than 7 in 10 independents.

The poll finds Biden and former president Donald Trump in a dead heat in the contest for the popular vote, with both candidates receiving 46 percent support among registered voters. Those numbers are nearly identical to the results of an ABC-Ipsos poll in April.

That finding is at odds with some other recent public polls. Across eight other post-debate national polls tracked by The Post, Trump leads by 3.5 percentage points on average, compared with a one-point Trump edge in those same polls before the debate. Biden led Trump by between nine and 11 points in averages of public polls at this point in the campaign four years ago. He ended up winning by 4.5 points.

The survey finds little change in Biden’s job approval, with 57 percent disapproving, identical to the percentage in an April ABC-Ipsos poll. Among Democrats, 75 percent approve of Biden’s performance while 22 percent disapprove, also little changed in the past few months. Americans’ views of Trump and his performance as president has also changed little since before the debate, with 43 percent approving and 52 percent disapproving.

The incredible difficulty a lying demagogue presents to democracy: Bullshit Artillery

The Atlantic published an article by Tom Nichols that describes the extreme difficulty a liberal democracy with free speech has when dealing with lying authoritarian demagogues like DJT:

The Double Standard in Trump-Biden Coverage

It’s real, and it’s not going anywhere

After President Joe Biden’s disastrous recent public appearances, he and his supporters are attacking media outlets for a double standard in coverage of him and his opponent. They’re right, but that double standard is structural and, unfortunately, will not end during this campaign.

The president’s crisis is of his own making. Biden is clearly no longer up to any kind of prolonged extemporizing, but his campaign gambled first on a debate and then on a hastily arranged interview, both of which went badly. Many of Biden’s supporters are blaming members of the media for a pile-on of negative coverage, but there is no planet on which Biden’s behavior isn’t a major and continuing news story.

But critics of recent media coverage of Biden are dead right about one thing: Many outlets have for years been employing a significant double standard in covering Biden and his opponent, Donald Trump. When Biden stumbles over words, we question his state of mind; when Trump acts like a deranged street preacher, it’s … well, Tuesday. If Biden had suggested setting up migrants in a fight club, he’d be out of the race already; Trump does it, and the country (as well as many in the media) shrugs. Recognizing this inequity is the easy part, but here’s the harder realization: The double standard is a structural problem, it won’t change, and everyone in the prodemocracy coalition needs to grit their teeth and accept that reality.

The structural issue is that in an open society, almost all views may be expressed in the public square—even outright falsehoods. This principle of liberal democracy leaves Trump free to lie and propagandize, which he and his footmen do confidently and effortlessly. These tactics have been highly effective among a GOP base whose senses have been pounded into numbness by relentless propaganda, a daily barrage of Bullshit Artillery that leaves a smoking, pockmarked no-man’s-land in the mind of almost anyone subjected to it for long enough.

Media outlets cannot counter this by responding with a similar “truth barrage,” in part because there are simply not enough hours in the day. But it is also inaccurate to say that media outlets have not recently tried to cover Trump’s bizarre behavior.

The real double-standard problem is not about coverage, but about interpretation. This is not “bias” in the political sense. It is, as Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg put it, a bias toward coherence, the inability to accept—and say—that one of the presidential campaigns is completely bonkers. “Trump overwhelms us with nonsense,” Jeff notes, and so, when confronted with Trump’s obvious mental instability, we work backwards: “Trump sounds nuts, but he can’t be nuts, because he’s the presumptive nominee for president of a major party, and no major party would nominate someone who is nuts.”

The result of this bias is that the press too often continues to present what should be appalling, even horrifying information as if it is just part of the normal give-and-take of a political campaign: Trump goes to Las Vegas and rants about sharks, and the press, likely trying to appear unbiased, instead pulls out a dull nugget about Trump’s mention of not taxing tips. Trump vows to destroy the American civil service, and the headlines talk about his “plans to increase presidential power.”

Why? Because it is not in the American journalistic tradition to say: Today in Las Vegas, one of the two major candidates said things so rabidly toxic and incoherent that they raised doubts about his sanity.

Media outlets should stop embracing the bias toward coherence; this is now a struggle between a free press and a would-be dictator. But people cannot expect journalists to provide a daily flood of truths about Trump—and they are sorely needed—while also ignoring grave questions about Biden’s presidential fitness. A free and honest press committed to the truth doesn’t work that way.

I am not counseling defeatism. Rather, I am counseling focus and perseverance. Trump’s allies would love for major news outlets to call on him to drop out: They’d reprint it and fundraise off it. Instead, the media should report on Trump’s behavior and emphasize that American candidates—and normal people—do not refer to their fellow citizens as “vermin” or muse about having them prosecuted by military tribunals. A steady recounting of Trump’s ravings and his hideous plans is important—not because it is political, but because it is true, and the public needs to know about all of it.

Setting up a defensive perimeter around Biden won’t change the fact that Trump stands at the head of a cult completely sealed in its own information bubble. .... Many Americans are sophisticated enough to discuss multiple worrisome issues, but a fair number refuse to pay attention to politics at all. They don’t like hard-edged partisanship. They are also put off by relentless bombast. They are especially not interested in abstract debates over fascism. I remain convinced, however, that seeing a fascist every day, along with a reminder that this is not the American way, will have an effect on them. Indeed, understanding that Trump is an unhinged menace is what makes Biden’s future such a crucial story for all of us.

Commentary on White nationalism

A LA Times opinion opines:

Opinion: The force propping up Trump that we still don’t talk about

There are legitimate and pending questions about Biden’s ability to serve another four years. But in terms of a leadership crisis, his age and health do not begin to compare to Trump’s moral decrepitude and general unfitness. The idiotic equivalency of this election season — that both men are unfit on a similar scale, though for different reasons — is deeply, dangerously false.

And it distracts from what’s really dragging us down.

Whatever his age-related problems, Biden is not alone in the confoundment he showed on stage at the debate. Face to face with Trump, the president’s fatigue and bewilderment mirrors what so many of us feel in response to an intensifying moral MAGA mudslide that is overwhelming, not just politically but emotionally.

As usual, Democrats relied on numbers and recitations of policy successes to parry Trump. The Biden administration’s achievements are indeed important. Truth and reality do matter. Except to roughly half the country, which has settled willingly into white nationalism, which runs not on facts but on emotion, specifically resentment and entitlement. It represents the very antithesis of a multiracial democracy that Biden’s policy successes support. You can talk about the importance of low-cost insulin or student debt forgiveness until you’re blue in the face — or until you’re stumbling over your words or losing your train of thought — but that doesn’t budge white nationalists at all.

Here’s the hard truth of the last eight years: America leans at least as much toward white nationalism as it does toward democracy (and that’s being optimistic). Nobody says it out loud, on either side, which is obscuring the real shape of Showdown 2024.

The GOP cult is clearly racist and anti-equality but claims not to be, despite rapidly mounting evidence to the contrary. Trump brags about how much Black folk love him, how much he’s done for civil rights. These are absurd claims, but they stand because the party needs to keep up the pretense of “all men are created equal” fairness, however threadbare. Fairness, civil rights and democracy are still America’s brand, as everybody knows (to quote Trump).

Meanwhile, Biden can’t call out white nationalism because he’s afraid of tarnishing the positive U.S. brand, which glorifies the “heartland” and “hardworking people” and “ordinary Americans” — code terms for “white.”

The president is in a bind: He must be the publicist in chief, saying we’re all good and well-intentioned people, but the MAGA phenomenon proves him wrong in the most obvious way. He’s tried to walk a line by criticizing MAGA extremists, but if those extremists number in the tens of millions and have seized one of the major political parties, what they espouse is not extremism, it is mainstream-ism.

The problem of having to name this problem without really naming it literally makes Biden tongue-tied, which is not a good thing for a man who has dealt with a stutter his whole life. The entire Democratic Party and its white fellow travelers further to the left have stifled themselves on this matter too, subconsciously or because they think talking too directly about white nationalist rot would be self-defeating politics. As disgusted as Biden and others may be by MAGA, they do not, will not call out white people about toxic whiteness. And so the rot spreads unchecked.

There is a silver lining. The storm is bearing down only because diversity is on the rise. Diversity is who and what America is. For most of us, this is an uncontroversial fact, the fulfillment of the founders’ promise of a truly democratic nation. But for Trump and his aggrieved nation within a nation, that ascending promise is a frontal attack that must be fought for however long is necessary, with whatever means is necessary.

It’s past time for the majority of us invested in the promise to employ whatever means is necessary, too. The crisis Biden revealed to the world last week is not about age. It’s about courage.

This opinion really resonates personally. The last sentence in particular “It’s about courage” hits home. I have occasionally framed the authoritarian problem as one of a failure of moral courage. The pro-Trump MAGA radical right does not have the moral courage to face the ugly reality of the bigoted, mendacious, kleptocratic authoritarianism they support. They deny they support what they actually support because they do not have the moral courage to face actual reality. 

But the opinion here also argues that the left has also failed on moral courage grounds. That is a great point. It isn't made often enough.

The left does not have the guts to call the MAGA movement out as bigoted (White-centric, sometimes or often racist) kleptocratic authoritarianism. The mainstream media rarely calls it what it is, but seems to be slowly, reluctantly dragged by reality in that direction.  

By contrast, the MAGA media and adherents never calls MAGA what it is but instead, shamelessly slanders and insults the left, political opposition and Democrats with false accusations of anti-White racism, corruption, socialist tyranny, pedophilia, massive election fraud, massive violence, microchips in the vaccines, etc. In essence, MAGA is mostly what MAGA falsely asserts what its political opposition is.

There is no way in hell anyone can rationally debate the FTZWS tactic that DJT used in the debate with Biden. The rules allowed all lies and slanders to stand unchallenged by moderators and a minute or two for a debater to respond. It is literally impossible to have a debate with a FTZWS participant under those rules. It wasn't a debate. It was a cornucopia of crap. 

FTZWS - flood the zone with shit, the accurate name that Steve Bannon (now in jail) gave to the propaganda tactic that lying kleptocratic authoritarians routinely rely on to deceive, confuse, divide and disinform. 

FTZWS isn’t just for the media any more --

it’s for everyone all the time, including the MAGA base

Some data about corporate support for DJT

Here’s some data.

https://yale.app.box.com/s/caegd9h9titzh03h7jb3cj045vdemtyk

also cited by Axios

https://www.axios.com/2024/06/25/trump-ceo-low-support-republicans

The NYT June 23, 2024 (not paywalled):

Recent headlines suggest that our nation’s business leaders are embracing the presidential candidate Donald Trump. His campaign would have you believe that our nation’s top chief executives are returning to support Mr. Trump for president, touting declarations of support from some prominent financiers like Steve Schwarzman and David Sacks.

That is far from the truth. They didn’t flock to him before, and they certainly aren’t flocking to him now. Mr. Trump continues to suffer from the lowest level of corporate support in the history of the Republican Party.

I know this because I work with roughly 1,000 chief executives a year, running a school for them, which I started 35 years ago, and I speak with business leaders almost every day. Our surveys show that 60 to 70 percent of them are registered Republicans.

The reality is that the top corporate leaders working today, like many Americans, aren’t entirely comfortable with either Mr. Trump or President Biden. But they largely like — or at least can tolerate — one of them. They truly fear the other.

MSN: 

While Sonnenfield said that Trump has yet to get the support of Fortune 500 companies, there is also a possibility of top bankers in the country showing their support instead, including Steve Schwarzman of Blackstone.

Moreover, many CEOs still greatly oppose choosing Biden, primarily due to the administration’s antitrust policies and support for stronger capital gains taxes. However, many CEOs are still optimistic about supporting Biden in the next run.

"Nobody’s saying that the Biden policies are perfect, and there are some problems. But they are dwarfed by the pernicious threat to inflation, economic stability, and, most importantly, democracy presented by the prospective Trump presidency," Sonnenfield told Fortune in a separate interview.

Market Watch:

Not one S&P 500 CEO is donating to Donald Trump

Published: Nov. 8, 2023 at 7:00 a.m. ET

Among the 2024 Republican presidential hopefuls, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley and Chris Christie score the most contributions from CEOs of S&P 500 companies

In my assessment, the amounts that those CEOs are donating to non-Trump candidates is piddly. Does that data really represent all the cash, e.g., dark money PACs we know nothing about? In view of their wealth, why do any of those CEOs bother with those pipsqueak donations? This data makes zero sense to me. None at all.

Despite my deep suspicions, the data above indicates that CEOs of the 500 biggest corporations do not support DJT. But what about CEOs and major executives of mainstream media? Also what about those corporations acting as legal entities called human beings? A CEO can support one candidate, while the CEO’s corporation quietly, secretly supports another. If major executives generally do not support DJT, then why does the MSM treat the less corrupt, pro-democracy Biden far worse than the far worse kleptocratic, anti-democracy candidate DJT? What the hell is going on here?

Regarding predictability

For everyone who knows that they know what they are doing, consider some commentary on research indicating that most experts, pundits, politicians, propagandists and blowhards usually do not know what they are talking about when they make predictions about how things will turn out if we do things their way:

“The core function of political belief systems is not prediction; it is to promote the comforting illusion of predictability. .... Human performance suffers because we are, deep down, deterministic thinkers with an aversion to probabilistic strategies that accept the inevitability of error. We insist on looking for order in random sequences.”

Or this:

A “defining feature of intuitive judgment is its insensitivity to the quality of the evidence on which the judgment is based. It has to be that way. System 1 can only do its job of delivering strong conclusions at lightning speed if it never pauses to wonder whether the evidence at hand is flawed or inadequate, or if there is better evidence elsewhere. . . . . we are creative confabulators hardwired to invent stories that impose coherence on the world.”[1]

Most superforecasters shared 15 traits including (i) cautiousness based on an innate knowledge that little or nothing was certain, (ii) being reflective, i.e., introspective and self-critical, (iii) being comfortable with numbers and probabilities, and (iv) being pragmatic and not wedded to any particular agenda or ideology. Unlike political ideologues, they were pragmatic and did not try to “squeeze complex problems into the preferred cause-effect templates [or treat] what did not fit as irrelevant distractions.”

What we face are two complex choices with unpredictable outcomes. Get rid of Joe, replace him with a better candidate and take our chances. Stick with Joe and take our chances. I am not a superforecaster. I do not know what the best option is.

Footnote:

1. And that is why in a debate with very limited time, when one person ignores honest debate and simply lies, slanders and crackpots, it is impossible for their opponent to formulate and deliver responses in a couple of minutes. The only way to at least partly respond well to a cheating liar in a debate like that is to plan for the lies and formulate short responses in advance.

In Biden’s debate preparation, he was not prepared to face a lying, slandering crackpot like DJT. He should have been prepared, but in my opinion he was not. If my opinion is correct, the failure is on the people who did Biden’s debate prep, maybe on Biden himself too.