It’s been such a long time since we’ve opened the Argument Clinic. But, these times are desperate and many people are upset and agitated, yet they do not have a strategy that will be effective. We
Is this the right room for an argument
are sorry to say this, but simply standing at a march with a sign that says “Trump Is a Pedophile” or whatever, isn’t going to do anything. Why? He already knows he’s a pedophile. He already knows we hate him. None of this will leave a mark. But, according to the principles of Argument Clinic, there are two things we can do, both of which involve “going meta” and telling the truth.
The most powerful way to hurt a person is to tell them the truth about themselves. Because if it’s not the truth, they’ll slag you off as just lying or trying to hurt their feelings. Sun Tzu teaches us the key to the problem: defeat our opponents’ strategy. There are many different interpretations of this advice from the great strategist, but they all boil down to the same thing: figure out what it is your enemy wants, then keep it from them. The “keep it from them” part is where you model how they are likely to try to get it, and then your job is to close down those pathways. If you want to be nasty about it, your side-quest is to think of how to make those closed-down pathways hurt. Realistically, it doesn’t matter, because if your analysis is honest and trenchant, you’re not even being mean to your enemy, you’re just summarizing their reality in a way that points out how much it sucks to be them.
There is only one problem with this strategy, which I feel obligated to mention: if your opponent is a golden retriever, or a saint, or Albert Camus, you will lose. Because either, their existence is a long roll in the sun, or they have already embraced the suck. The strategy of targeting your enemy’s wants does not work if they are already fulfilled: you have lost, and are just being annoying. Let us forward that analysis to Donald Trump: complaining about “no kings” is not effective against a guy who has, actually, corrupted the government and installed himself as virtual dictator. He is literally doing exactly what he wants, and we are pumping him up by acknowledging it.
Everyone dies alone. The question is: “how did you live?”
Our strategy must be to appeal to higher, nastier, truths that cannot be changed or deflected. We must constantly remind Donald Trump of the things that poison his life, unavoidably.
1) He is dying. That much is obvious. All this crap he is putting us through is only temporary and we are willing to keep our heads down and wait.
2) Everyone hates him. Except for the people who he is bribing to pretend to be his friends. He has no friends, only flunkies, because he’s a rotten human being. It sounds like his best friend was another sociopathic pedophile. He doesn’t know what a friend is. Everyone will be glad to see him go. On the day he dies, the entire planet will take a day off and party in the streets. He is less loved than Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, combined.
3) True happiness is unachievable for him. His parents loathed him, he has never had any real friends just employees, and women only notice him when he buys them. He (used to) compulsively have sex with many women but none of them were interested in him aside from his money.
4) His parents hated him. They made no effort to raise him to be anything other than a sociopathic piece of crap. Even he knows this.
5) He has no taste. He desires the elegance of power and old money, but he never managed to be anything but a sleaze merchant.
6) He is a coward. Like many sociopaths, he wants to see people hurt but lacks the courage to do anything but hurt women he manages to isolate where he can take advantage of his size. He’s not comfortable with real conflict; not engaging in anger with anyone unless he can hide behind social media or security. That is why he blusters so much: he couldn’t confront the reality of his own power and had to hide behind endless stupid executive orders that won’t last 20 seconds past his last breath. He never says nasty things about someone when they are in a position to slap the crap out of him; he even only derides women when they are too far away to stand up to him. He talked relentless shit about Hilary Clinton and Kamala Harris but when he was actually in their presence he hung back, as if staying out of reach.
Now, let us build those facts together into a real heartbreaker: None of those things can ever be fixed. No amount of money or power can fix the holes in his soul, because – if they could – he’d have done it already. His parents never raised him to ask for help, or learn anything, so he’s just stuck as the big gawky kid nobody liked, with the ridiculous hair and the body odor. He never did anything to improve himself when he had the chance, in fact it seems that the closest thing to a friend he had was a manipulative paedophile he shared sociopathic behaviors with.
And history is going to wipe its ass with him. To put it bluntly. He has a good chance of going down in history as the most unpopular and ineffective, ignorant and uneducable leader that ever lived. History is going to rate him as a few steps down from Caligula. This isn’t just us trying to be nasty: there are historians right now writing histories of Donald J. Trump and what a useless piece of garbage he turned out to be. He took the United States, which was a dominant empire with a great economy, strong alliances world-wide, and a dominant military – and turned it into a train-wreck. And the worst part was that, the whole time, people were trying to advise him how not to, but he was too proud to take advice and relied on his own “genius”. And, when he died, the entire world held a dancing-in-the-street festival for a couple days, then hunted down his minions and put them against the wall.
These are the memes we should be deploying, clearly, concisely, without hurrying, and without emotion. Does anyone today get excited about how Caligula managed to waste a historical opportunity to make something of himself? Or do people argue over whether Henry VIII was an embarrassing slob who literally rotted to death while he was alive, or do they just record him as someone who spent his life chasing women and killing them because of his own erectile dysfunction? Donald Trump was his own lost cause – a man who managed to scam a great deal of money, but died alone, surrounded by people who hated him. Historians will describe his death, when it happens, as “Stalinesque” – someone will find his body face down in his own vomit, ultimately reduced to just another dead guy in a bag. All the people who make speeches about him – they’ll be lying, too. All of the funeral ceremonies will be insincere. There will be a brief cottage industry of writing about how embarrassing and horrible he was in meetings, then it’ll be over.
If you think about what we just wrote, can you see any of it that is not true, or even a bit generous? These are the memes we need to pre-load into our civilization, to keep his minions from spin-doctoring him into something more than he was. He’s just another entitled rich white guy who never did an honest day’s work, who’s going to die alone and unlamented. He was a man who had inherited and squandered an amazing opportunity: to lead the world’s pre-eminent power, what Teddy Roosevelt called “The Bully Pulpit.” Leaders like Roosevelt used the power vested in them to try to continue nudging things onto a better trajectory. Trump’s vision ended at stealing the Resolute Desk from the Oval Office.
Marcus, you are being too kind with his face color and his stature/weight in the picture.
I’m pretty certain that once he dies or is out of power (whichever comes first) it will mysteriously turn out that no one was his supporter! Those red hats will be wood-chipped and disposed of in compost piles across the nation, at night and in secret.
In the meantime, I’ll work on some memes because this is brilliant.
Drugstores will sell laxatives named Trump.
Marcus says:
“And, when he died, the entire world held a dancing-in-the-street festival for a couple days, then hunted down his minions and put them against the wall.”
This is something that SHOULD happen, but I worry that it WON’T happen. The US government and the population in general have a problem with “Looking forward, not backward.” There was a small amount of trying to correct Nixon’s misdeeds via congressional hearings. A few laws were passed to put some mild controls on presidential power. Some of his henchmen even saw prison time. But it seems that each successive–primarily republican–administration gets away with more and greater atrocities and after they leave office, nothing is done to prevent similar mis-rule in the future or to hold accountable those who abused the power of office. Although the scope of the damage done by the current corps of criminals is beyond anything that has happened before in this country, I’ve become resigned to the same thing happening again, which of course will be more atrocious than the last round.
@#3: perhaps instead of taking a dump, we can take a trump.
You can wrap a turd in gold foil, but it will still remain a turd.
Gold on the outside, shitty on the inside.
A “Death of Stalin”-esque, long running comedy series, set on a Scottish gold course, called “Filty, gildy, guilty man”, with Billy Connolly as a Glaswegian anti-trump.
oops, GOLF course
Effective strategy requires that first we must understand our objectives. Political protest usually has several objectives, but “making the person you’re protesting against feel bad” is not generally one of them. (Although making the supporters of the person you’re protesting against feel bad certainly might be.) The ultimate goal is to effect political change, and protest is a tactic which seeks to achieve objectives towards that goal. Who gives a shit about how Trump feels about anything? It’s not important in the slightest. He’s not going to give up and go away, dismantling the entire MAGA movement along the way, just because people hurt his feelings. Even if he gets so upset he kills himself, that’s not going to draw the poison from America’s gangrenous body politic. They’ll just find some other belligerent arsehole to fill the Trump-shaped hole at the head of the movement – it’s not like there’s a shortage of them.
Now, there’s certainly scope to argue that the protests have not been well thought out, or that they’ve not been very effective at achieving any of their actual goals – although personally I think it’s far too soon to say – but to argue that they’re ineffective because they’ve not made Trump personally upset is to miss the point entirely.
Bret Devereaux has a great article that deals with some of the objectives and strategies of protest here: Collections: Against the State – A Primer on Terrorism, Insurgency and Protest. It’s well worth reading.
rwiess @ #5
In the UK (and maybe elsewhere in the anglophone world) a ‘trump’ is a fart so we’re alreaady most of the way there. A ‘Trump’ I suggest should be a fart with follow though, it includes the shit and the lack of control, which are both very Trumpian.
Yeah, no. The point of protest is to bring we the people together to sway public opinion.
As a resident of the Twin Cities, where is ICE? Where is Bongino? Where is Gnoem? Where is DHS funding? Obviously the protesting was effective, though the fight isn’t over yet.
Even IRAN stands with us! Definitely did not have ‘ The Ayatollah sends comforting messages to Americans on my bingo card. It’s truly a mad world.
This is the only bit I disagree with.
He didn’t turn the US into a train wreck. He revealed it to be a train wreck. He pulled aside the curtain that cleverer men and women had been maintaining since about 1963. Or 1945. Or 1776. Pick a date.
Speaking from a country that already had its slide into utter irrelevance through the 20th century, the coming slide into utter irrelevance for the US is NOT Trump’s fault. He may, possibly, have slightly accelerated it, but his only effect really was making it more obvious. When I look back to 2016, I can remember thinking (and I’m pretty sure saying, here) that one thing you could say in favour of Trump was that he was much less likely than Clinton to start a war with Iran. She really was banging the drum around that time and coming across as hawkish, whereas his only redeeming feature was his apparent complete lack of interest in foreign policy at all. And indeed in his first term there was a remarkable lack of kinetic action, compared to what I’m pretty confident in saying would have happened under Clinton. Dementia and the removal of any non-lickspittles from the administration have changed the calculus somewhat since 2024, of course.
I don’t know how seriously to take this observation – I’ve not done the diligence on the source – but I wonder if anyone in the US administration even understands the implication:
https://www.coreinsightsintl.com/post/iran-offers-eu-access-to-strait-of-hormuz-but-there-s-a-catch
If I were Starmer at this point I’d be doing whatever I could to turn the UK on that map a lovely stripey yellow – like it used to be. Whatever else happens, we in the UK can thank Trump for making it abundantly clear that our future lies with and within Europe, and the US is not merely unreliable as an ally, it is a duplicitous enemy. Even the Trump arse-lickers in Reform have had the good sense to shut the fuck up recently, after initially attacking our PM for not throwing our lot fully in with the septics from day one. The public backlash was swift, and while they’re venal and corrupt they’re not actually stupid.
What about the 3.5% solution? This is driving a lot of the advice on things like the “No Kings” demonstrations. I don’t know quite what to believe in regards to it.
https://bigthink.com/the-present/the-3-5-percent-solution/
ahcuah@#13:
What about the 3.5% solution?
I’m skeptical. My dad, the historian who specialized in revolutions, says that the deciding factor is when the military breaks and starts joining the rebellion. The reason is simple: the remaining military will be reluctant to fight them.
If we stick just within an electoral construct, the 3.5% rule was – I thought – what the ideological evangelicals hung their plan to turn US politics right-war, upon. I seem to recall reading that, somewhere. Yet, it doesn’t hold water because the right wing evangelicals have not been satisfied with such a narrow margin, and have tried to manipulate more votes. After all, they have at least 3.5%.
I don’t think that the facts support it. There is also the question of “which 3.5%?” Mao started out with a handful of followers, an old bolt-action rifle, a hunting shotgun, and took over China. They had a level of commitment that was relevant.
Another premise about the big protests is that they give you a chance to network, and maybe find like-minded people in your area who are willing to form a community action group. Those are valuable (look at Minneapolis!) but they are also valuable for the FBI. Palantir exists to map out and visualize inter-group relationships (that is one of its modules) to determine, by communications patterns (what they used to call “traffic analysis”) – anyone forming a group based on casual meetings may as well just go turn themselves in.
I’m going to say the things one is not supposed to say. Democracy is a way of counting heads to see who’d probably win if we all picked up clubs and spears and “voted” that way. 300,000 protesters in knit pussy hats are worth about 60,000 protesters who are silent, armed, and marching with purpose. I mean, it doesn’t take a lot to realize which of those the establishment is going to take more seriously. The danger in doing that is that the establishment takes you seriously enough to try to get a jump on the violence, which they usually consider their prerogative.
Now we’re segueing from how to argue to how to start a revolution. One of the things professional revolutionaries get right, which we do not appear to be doing here, is communicating to the regime. E.g.: “if you try to steal the midterms we will a) publicize about how you tried to do it and b) 800,000 of us will show up in Washington late some night and barricade Penn Ave and the Capitol and place it under seige. (this is actually why the capitol has an underground railway to the west wing and another to union station) We will keep any of you we find as our “guests” while we sort it out. And unlike the previous times, when you used violence against us and we responded peacefully, violence will be met in kind. It’ll be like Jan 6 with guns and when we overthrow your regime and establish a new one, we’ll pardon ourselves. OK?
[What I just described there was the train of thought in the French National Assembly, after the left and right argued eachother to a draw, and a young artillery lieutenant named Bonaparte rolled cannon-fire with grape-shot into one of the mobs and suddenly everyone stopped arguing, bigly.] At that time, 100% of the army and about 10% of the population was actively political and 70% of the inactive population had some favorite direction or other.
@ahcuah#13
The article handily provides its own refutation. It was written during the mass protests in Hong Kong, and appears to assume they will be succesful based on sheer mass of numbers. We know now they were not.
That is not true. Consider the sleepy bus driver, or the suicidal airline pilot.
Caligula is perhaps not a great example of the mad tyrant that we can use, for several reasons. Ancient historians have been engaged in reassessing his evil reputation since there have been ancient historians.
The main problems are that a) he was murdered and his uncle Claudius installed in his stead by the Praetorian Guard. What this meant was that it was in the best interest of everyone in power from then on to paint him as a mad tyrannical monster who desperately needed overthrowing. The legitimacy of Claudius’s rule depended on Caligula (or, rather, Gaius as he called himself, because it was his name) being so bad that the coup was necessary for the good of the state. It is rather telling that we use the insulting childhood nickname his enemies dug up for him today – their campaign of anti-Gaius propaganda was so successful it became the normal way of referring to him. The damnatio memoriae worked so well it is hard to dig beneath it.
Then there’s b), he was only the third emperor Rome had, and the office was still very much in flux at the time. Augustus and Tiberius had impressive military reputations to bolster their legitimacy, Gaius was of the first generation that didn’t fight in the civil wars. As such, his own legitimacy was in question, and he needed something else to make him seem like a legitimate autocratic ruler at a time when republican sentiment was still just about there, and the republic was a living memory for many older senators. What he alighted upon was borrowing elements of Hellenistic Greek kingship in presentation, ceremonial and religious practice, which made many traditional Romans uneasy, given Rome’s long-standing hostility to overt displays of foreignness or the trappings of a king. He was very right to fear that not seeming a legitimate ruler would be a problem for him – it got him murdered in the end!
Finally c), we ourselves don’t have very much information about the actual four years he was on the throne. The thing about Roman emperors is that they weren’t really all that important in the grand sweep of Roman society. What they got up to, their policies, their interests and so forth had only the slightest of impacts on everyone else. Rome was about as far from a totalitarian state as you can get – they simply didn’t have the manpower for it – and while those in the emperor’s personal orbit could suffer hugely from his whims, most Romans just saw a different face on the coins and statues and hanging beneath the regimental aquilae on the battlefield. So we have bits of palace gossip, rumours, salacious conspiracy theories and the odd misremembered public action given a thick layer of spin by hostile historians loyal to those who overthrew him. He allegedly built a causeway from the palace up to the capitoline temple of Jupiter, so he could go and talk with the god whenever he liked, and sat between the statues of Castor and Pollux outside their temple, so people would worship him at the same time. These have come down to us as narcissistic bits of public sacrilege, but you could easily see how they might just be misrepresentations of an entirely ordinary policy of public works, and a peculiar choice of location from which to address the citizenry (the temple of Castor and Pollux is right at the heart of the forum, and would make a good choice for visibility).
Even people like Suetonius (we don’t have Tacitus on Caligula, sadly). only go as far as “people said he wanted to make his horse a consul” and “people said he had sex with one sister below him and another on top of him”. Many think these are nasty misrepresentations of jokes he made or willful mistranslations. He was probably sat around one day joking with his ministers “my horse would make a better consul than you lot!”, and that was recorded as a sign of madness. Likewise “supra” and “infra” in Latin were used for places at table, not just sex positions, and the verb “recumbo” means “lie back”, as you did on dining couches, so “he reclined at dinner with one sister to his left and the other to his right” could be willfully misconstrued as “he lay there with one sister underneath him, the other on top”. The throughline of madness and incest is a peculiarly Roman theme, because it says something about how Romans were dealing with the novelty of autocratic rule at the time. Power was meant to be shared between the powerful middle-aged men of the aristocratic elite, not kept in one family where women and slaves could influence it! It was meant to be filtered through debate and reason, so it represented the interests of the entire ruling class, not just sprung full formed from one man’s mind. Traditional Romans thought hereditary autocracy very akin to incest and madness, so that’s how it was painted. Gaius was also very young for a Roman leader. He never made it out of his 20s, and the standard age one could stand for a consulship was 42. Middle-aged Romans smarted at having some callow youth tell them what to do, and so his reign was interpreted as flighty, ill-thought-through and self-serving. It would get even worse a couple of centuries later with Elagabalus, who was only 14.
Which is not to say the emperor Gaius was entirely misunderstood, and didn’t have cruel, tyrannical and maniacal sides. The truth is so deeply buried and everything we do know so open to varying interpretations and coloured by Roman prejudices, fantasies and presumptions that we really don’t know for sure what he was like as a ruler and as a man. He didn’t reign long enough to leave much by way of a lasting mark that might help us judge him by other standards.
At any rate, it is an insult to Caligula’s memory to say he was worse than Trump. With Trump we know all too much, and none of it is good.
Marcus@14:
I really appreciate your taking the time, effort, and knowledge in putting this together. Thank you. I had some inchoatic thoughts that made me uncomfortable with it, but your analysis was really helpful. This 3.5% is pushed by a lot of the liberal progressives supporting “No Kings” I see on social media, about how this would get it done without resorting to violence, but what worried me was, what happens if the regime just ignores it? I was worried about the mechanism by which it “works”.
Again, thank you for the clarity.
And, of course, correlation does not imply causality.
(Secondary thank you to Dauphni@15.)
@17 Cartomancer,
So Patrick (Capt. Picard) Stewart kills John (chest-burster) Hurt and Derek (Cadfael) Jacobi becomes emperor. I have now exhausted all of my knowledge of the Roman Empire–yes, watching I Clavdivs is all I got ;)
Actually though, I quite enjoy reading your nuggets of wisdom about the ancient world in these pages from time to time.
And your description of how most Romans didn’t pay much attention to the intrigues of the palace and what the Emperor was getting up to, as long as the bread & circuses kept coming they didn’t care whose face was on the coinage. Sounds a lot like the USA, particularly after WWII when we had superpower status. As long as we can get cheap gasoline, could follow our favorite sports teams and entertainers, live in our suburban homes along with Coca-Cola and McDonalds hamburgers, we don’t much care about what goes on in Washington DC. That could be changing now that it becomes more and more apparent what happens when you have a dictator/wanna-be emperor in the White House.
Please excuse the loosely associated rambles that follow…
Coming from the UK, I’m astounded by the degree of “Monarchy Envy,” despite everything the Declaration of Independence and Constitution decrying and trying (and clearly failing) to avoid a monarchy in the US.
Recently, I stumbled onto an article about Trump and his f(*&%g baseball caps trying to explain why he wears them. It conveniently left out the obvious reason: “Trump’s hair takes hours to sculpt and sometimes there isn’t time before he has to go on camera.” What utter sycophancy & bullshit!
More recently, I’ve listened to the first 2 episodes on the KKK in “The Rest is History” podcast. The North may have “won” the civil war, but it’s clear that for much of the USA, the opinions held by the South haven’t changed, they were only suppressed. That Trump was able to use overt racism to be elected President twice(!) amply demonstrates the rotten core of the US. I recall years ago someone who’s still my friend trying to argue that birtherism wasn’t, as I put it, “pretty fucking racist.”
My opinion about Trump and the war is that sometime in the middle of last year, Trump got a terminal illness diagnosis. Since then we’ve been suffering his reaction to the news – tearing down as many institutions as he can on his way out. The fact that the rest of the US government is not stopping him demonstrates the complete failure of the US constitution.
@cartomancer:
Which, from some of what I’ve heard, is part of how Octavian/Augustus became Emperor in the first place, by using the relationship with the foreign Cleopatra as a brush to tar Marc Antony with.
As for ‘kings’, I’ve also felt that at least a good chunk of the purpose of the Roman Senate was to give the aristocratic families a place to argue with and stymie each other, largely leaving the actual day-to-day running of Rome and the Republic to the next level down in the hierarchy.
One of the great lessons of governance dating back at least to Roman times, and one which the U.S. tried to take into account at its founding but didn’t do well enough at, is to make sure to have enough positions for the people who feel they should be the ones running things where they can get in each others’ way and jostle for supremacy, while leaving everybody else to actually do their jobs. The people who want to be ‘in control’ have to be insulated from the actual levers of control, which isn’t always difficult because most of such people also believe they shouldn’t need to personally get their hands dirty.
All the rules and checks and balances exist deliberately to slow down government and prevent any one decision from causing irreparable harm. Which, of course, works until you’ve got enough people across all the supposed ‘checks’ colluding together and others who refuse to see that they’re facing an existential crisis until too late.
Re: 3.5% – My understanding is this refers to not 3.5% support in general, and not 3.5% out in the streets once or twice a year, but 3.5% out in the street at high frequency, being very visible yet non-violent (violent movements don’t get to 3.5% regular on the street participants). Think Solidarity in Poland for constancy of action over time.
And yes, the goal is to inspire defections from supporters of the regime. The students in Serbia did it by befriending and empathizing with the cops. Buying them coffee, etc, talking to them about how unpleasant their job was. This led to the police refusing to shoot the protestors when demanded to do so.
Remember: The regime is supported by several pillars. Find the ones you can make some cracks in. That’s what boycotts are trying to do – can we get Big Tech to refuse to work with ICE? We grounded Avelo with an email/phone calls campaign. They stopped (are stopping?) conducting deportation flights. There is a group of Amazon employees and former employees who are trying to get Amazon to dump ICE (they had an event of actually dumping ice in front of the Amazon Spheres -AKA Bezos Balls in Seattle a few months ago). Find ways to bring on the economic pressure.
But there are additional pillars. Is there someone positioned to create cracks in the religious support for Trump? The pastor from Minneapolis who spoke in Seattle’s latest No Kings was a former Trump supporter who realized his congregation was being hunted down.
Can alumni orgs stop donating to universities that are bending their knees? Can organizations like Veterans for Peace send a message that will cause dissent within the military at some point? And so forth.
And see if there is a May Day event near you.
This chap must be a stderr reader …