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We seem to have gone through a remarkable series of destructions of what appeared to be timeless bits of the ancient and especially post WWII universe.

A current working list:

Israel as a bit of democratic light in the middle east
NATO
The United States as global policeman and ally and protector of the west
The Conservative party
The Labour party
The two party system
The UN
The WTO
The rules based order
The monarchy
Nuclear non proliferation
The deal following the fall of the Berlin wall.

Things fall apart; the centrist dads cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Billie Eilish might have lost the mid-terms for the Democrats.

https://x.com/cspan/status/2018801306731749705

.@SenTedCruz: "Are we right now on stolen land?"

Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos: "I have no idea of the history of this land."

Warner Bros. Discovery exec Bruce Campbell: "Nor do I."

Cruz: "That speaks volumes...that neither of you are willing to say 'hell, no.'"

While I think Billie Eilish is great, I doubt her comments are going to have much electoral impact.

But she's right. The US is all stolen land.

No it is absolutely not all stolen land.

Much of the land was not previously inhabited, so who was it stolen from?

And many Native American tribes willingly sold land to settlers. How is purchased land stolen?

Some was stolen. All is just nonsense.

What parts of the US were not previously inhabited? OK, maybe bits of Alaska.

Yes, you are right some plots of land were willingly sold to settlers, although most deals were coercive or the tribes and settlers had very different ideas over what rights were being sold.

So, the US is mostly stolen land.

An estimated 10% of the US was either farmed or had other human use prior to the arrival of European settlers, and that is from a source not attempting to minimise the impact on native Americans by those Europeans: https://theworld.org/stories/2019/01/31/european-colonization-americas-killed-10-percent-world-population-and-caused

Of course the areas that are densely inhabited today are also the areas that did have native Americans, eg the Pacific Northwest, the Mississipi Valley, the Southwest and Eastern woodlands were all well-inhabited.

Much of the Great Basins, Rocky Mountains and parts of the Great Plains had no permanent inhabitation.

4. Trump can say anything he likes about who he thinks is an elected member of Congress, he has absolutely no role in this whatsoever.

I'm not saying he won't try anything but what we've seen with this administration is that most of what we've seen him try is incompetently executed, with the exception of the corruption.

The concern I think is that Trump will say 'we won every seat' and at least some of the press will repeat "they won every seat' and at least some of the voters will think 'they won every seat'

The erosion of truth will be Trump's true legacy

I mean sure but so what? Some of the voters (40%?) think dinosaurs and humans coexisted. What matters from the point of view of Betfair punters is what Betfair thinks happened, and what matters from the point of view of US legislation is, if a bunch of election losers get together and say vote for a budget, does SCOTUS think it authorizes the government to spend money?

41% in 2015: https://today.yougov.com/society/articles/12615-jurassic-world

Only if fair* elections happen.

*which would be a novelty in the land of gerrymandering and voter suppression.

We already know about the gerrymandering situation. I think voter suppression in the mid-terms is going to be hard to do. They don't have that many goons, and the courts are still functioning and will do things like ordering polling stations to stay open if people have been blocked from voting. If they try to stop people voting in one place then even if they succeed in doing that in that particular place, they'll light a fire under Dem turnout everywhere else.

The presidential election is more dangerous because a lot of people have committed crimes and they'll have nothing left to lose but if the Dems can get a decent swing this time they'll control most of the legislatures and governor jobs, which closes down one of the main avenues Trump would have in a overturning a lost presidential election, namely to get the states to sign off on the wrong electors, then get SCOTUS to say, "it's not our place to second-guess the states".

"the courts are still functioning and will do things like ordering polling stations to stay open" - the problem there is that this administration simply carries on, when the courts rule against them.

OK, how many polling stations are they going to do this at, with whose army? ICE can't even subdue Minneapolis, city #46 by population.
[edited]

There is one Rubicon which Trump and the republicans have not yet crossed:using violence to discipline their own side.

The protesters were able to pressure ICE, despite it's greater fire power, because although the ICE goons are themselves destroying it, in their heads they are still living in a democracy in which the opposition of the pubic can outweigh orders from above. That's not the case in Russia,where ordinary grunts know their officers can and do have soldiers shot.

In Germany, a significant turning point was the Night of long Knives, where Hitler took out Rohm and the leadership of the Sturmabteilung, which was a Nazi paramilitary organisation.

In my view, the question is not whether the Trump regime can organise electoral fraud, but whether they can intimidate those hedging their bets - which includes both R and D politicians - into going along with it. If we see significant political figures being subject to violence or extrajudicial action especially Republicans , that is a sign that the danger level has gone up a lot. Trump obviously has no issue turning on his allies - eg, the whole of the rest of NATO. But doing so against US politicians would risk breaking his alliance, unless he has some casus belli.

Billie Eilish might have lost the mid-terms for the Democrats.

https://x.com/cspan/status/2018801306731749705

.@SenTedCruz: "Are we right now on stolen land?"

Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos: "I have no idea of the history of this land."

Warner Bros. Discovery exec Bruce Campbell: "Nor do I."

Cruz: "That speaks volumes...that neither of you are willing to say 'hell, no.'"

While I think Billie Eilish is great, I doubt her comments are going to have much electoral impact.

But she's right. The US is all stolen land.

No it is absolutely not all stolen land.

Much of the land was not previously inhabited, so who was it stolen from?

And many Native American tribes willingly sold land to settlers. How is purchased land stolen?

Some was stolen. All is just nonsense.

And all those slaves were purchased too. Everything is cleansed by a commercial transaction, wouldn't you agree.

Only if fair* elections happen.

*which would be a novelty in the land of gerrymandering and voter suppression.

We already know about the gerrymandering situation. I think voter suppression in the mid-terms is going to be hard to do. They don't have that many goons, and the courts are still functioning and will do things like ordering polling stations to stay open if people have been blocked from voting. If they try to stop people voting in one place then even if they succeed in doing that in that particular place, they'll light a fire under Dem turnout everywhere else.

The presidential election is more dangerous because a lot of people have committed crimes and they'll have nothing left to lose but if the Dems can get a decent swing this time they'll control most of the legislatures and governor jobs, which closes down one of the main avenues Trump would have in a overturning a lost presidential election, namely to get the states to sign off on the wrong electors, then get SCOTUS to say, "it's not our place to second-guess the states".

"the courts are still functioning and will do things like ordering polling stations to stay open" - the problem there is that this administration simply carries on, when the courts rule against them.

OK, how many polling stations are they going to do this at, with whose army? ICE can't even subdue Minnesota, city #22 by population.

They manage to frighten off minorities, quite well. See the reports of business seeing a collapse in customers.

Sounds like a recipe for voter suppression.

It sounds like a recipe for voter suppression but also a recipe for incredible turnout organization. ICE target people who are on their own and bundle them into vans. Once communities see signs of this they're going to organize early voting, and organize people to go together and protect each other. There's loads of institutional knowledge about this in the US from the era of Black voter suppression, plenty of people had to deal with it in living memory. Activate that kind of threat in an election that usually only gets like 45% turnout and you could easily increase the opposition vote.

The plan is multiprong

Voter suppression. Change the rules so that only some people can vote, and only in person.

Voter intimidation. Try and keep people away from polling stations.

Rig the vote. Buy the companies that make the voting machines or install 'supporters' at the counts.

Deny the results. Even if enough people vote and the counts are true, Trump will declare the results are fraudulent and he won anyway

Sure but we're talking about the mid-terms:

1. The places that can do this are already doing it to the extent that they can get away with it, we mostly know what the rules are and I don't think they'll be markedly different?

2. Is what we were just talking about. Probably not enough guys to do this on a scale larger than the boost it'll give the other side.

3. Voting machines aren't what they used to be, you have verifiable paper trails.

4. Trump can say anything he likes about who he thinks is an elected member of Congress, he has absolutely no role in this whatsoever.

I'm not saying he won't try anything but what we've seen with this administration is that most of what we've seen him try is incompetently executed, with the exception of the corruption. Unlike much of the US system government the election systems are actually designed adversarially, you assume someone is trying to steal it. So if you're thinking of betting on something like "which party will control Congress" or "who will win VA-02", I don't think it figures as a big consideration. There may be localized exceptions but at scale I think it's hard to rig it.

PS One thing you might consider over (4) is how markets will settle. If Trump says "we won the House" and he demands that his underlings also say this, I wouldn't be totally confident that Polymarket or Kalshi would settle the market correctly. I imagine Betfair will be fine though.