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Comment by johnklos | Hacker News Reader

We do know. Don't both-sides here.

That seems like a common trope recently. How am I both sides-ing this?

Edit: trope may not be the right term here. "Don't both sides it" is a baseless claim meant to shut down a discussion rather than refute, debate, or discuss it.

It could not have "gone even worse". Anti-competence regimes are a disaster. Destroying America's alliances, international relations, leadership, soft power, environment, leadership in renewable energy, and more are all disasters that will take decades to recover from if ever (I'm personally leading towards Pax Americana being over and never recovering).

We do know that Gore would have been president in the absence of a corrupt judiciary.

Our corrupt judiciary allowed all of the things you mentioned to happen.

How do we know that? We don't know what judicial appointments would have been made, we can only guess and assume they would have been better.

Gore won in Florida after the votes were counted, but Bush got the electoral college votes.

No honest judge would rule with the majority of the current supreme court.

Sure, I get that. But how does that allow us to know how the last 20ish years would have played out? And how does that let us know as a fact that it would have been better (that's where this thread started)?

But you simply have nothing to compare against. Are you honestly saying there is absolutely no reality in which those years could have gone worse if the elections went the other way?

The Iraq was was entirely unnecessary. It cost $3 Trillion[1], the lives of more than 500,000 Iraqi civilians, the lives of more than 8000 US troops and contractors, and so much more. It built a wave of anti-American sentiment in the middle east and the world. Literally nothing Gore could have done could have come close to that cost.

The Bush Administration turned a moment of universal world support for the US into cynicism and hatred by wasting goodwill on pointless wars. They turned a nearly balanced budget into huge deficits. The Trump Administrations have been, somehow, infinitely worse. No, there is no world in which things went worse.

[1] https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/true-cost-iraq-war-...

I agree with your points here. I disagree with the proposal that we can assume whatever alternative history we could have had would have been better.

The argument is that, of all the outcomes of presidential elections we had, we lived the absolute worst possible outcomes possible. That argument just seems ludicrous on its face.

We do not, and by definition cannot, know what would have happened in a hypothetical alternate timeline. You're entitled to your beliefs about what could've happened, but don't inaccurately state them as known fact. Moreover, "both-sides" as an accusatory term is hostile and not conducive to a good discussion. You shouldn't do that.

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