Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being a reactionary post-modernist fascist neo-conservative neo-liberal conservative classical liberal critical theorist Nazi Zionist imperialist hypernationalist warmongering isolationist Jewish-Polish-Slavic-Anglo race-traitor masculine-feminine bitch-man. No one yet has guessed multiple people, or a scholar. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
Dean
Flairless
2mo ago
In a start to the new week in Europe that is certainly a start, the Iberian peninsula has reportedly just been hit by a major power outage affecting both Spain and Portugal, including their capitals, and parts of southern France. The power outage occurred during the day, and is disrupting activities down to the public transportation level. Power is being gradually restored, though how long for full restoration is unclear.
There is no identified cause (yet), but this sort of outage on such a geographically diverse scale does not usually happen by accident. The Spanish government is probing a possible cyberattack.
While it is possible for problems in parts of the European energy grid to cause problems elsewhere, and there was a fire recently affecting a Spanish-French high-voltage cable, I am unaware of any analogous incident where a power grid failure on the Spanish-French side would affect the Portugal side of Spain as well. (For Americans, this is roughly analogous to an incident in eastern texas leading to outages in western Texas.)
Timing is a soft-indicator that supports, but do not prove, a hostile intent.
Purely mechanical system outages tend to either be random breaks or a result of load shifting. Random breaks (key thing somewhere breaks at a bad time) is more randomly distributed over time and thus more likely on weekends and nights rather than week days. Load-shift outages can occur when a power grid fails to properly balance when raising to meet daily production. This increases the impact on the mornings, when industrial centers increase energy demand for the daily work shifts, or possibly afternoons, when post-work tool-downs create a new load-balance challenge. However, this outage reportedly occurred mid-day, when the power load is relatively stable.
Weekday afternoons, and especially early in a work week, are more valuable hostile-disruption windows. Noon and afternoon attacks affect more people out in their days, and cause more social panic as parents are separated from children or trapped without working public transportation. Mondays in particular are the inverse of the 'bury bad news by publicizing it Friday' rule. An event on Mondays is more likely to dominate public discourse and media coverage for the new work week.
Correlation is not causation, and that does bear reminding here. However, that reminder does not mean correlation is irrelevant to anything else. Expect cyber-security paradigm discussions to grow, particularly if a benign fault can't be identified. Even if a benign fault is identified, awareness of the scale of vulnerability is likely to be used either in other messaging efforts, or as inspiration for copy-cat attacks.
My best wishes for anyone affected, and hope for everyone to stay safe and have a power outage plan.
More Trump policy: Trump is promising to try to raise the military budget from the current $892 million to about $1 trillion. Source.
Unsurprisingly, Politico doesn't mention that the administration mooting an up-to 90,000 reduction in the active-duty component of the Army, out of current US Army size of about 450,000 active-duty.. This is about 20% of the total size of the active-duty US army. It is also in the ballpark of the total number of US forces in Europe in 2025. That doesn't imply an intent to withdraw every last soldier in Europe, but it does create a Europe-force-sized-hole in the US army.
Nor does it factor in how the US navy is advancing some long-mooted concepts of buying warships from allies and leaning into foreign shipyards for naval shipyard capaacity, like the South Korean shipyard MOA signed... today. Which has implications for things like the multi-year backlog in the American naval yards mentioned in the linked article.
In other contexts, 'we are looking at cutting the Army by the size of peacetime forces in Europe and want to re-orient investments towards the neglected Navy' might be considered a notable defense policy adjustment worth acknowledging. It reflects a substantial cut in status quo capacity in some fields (current Army activities globally), with potentially relevant implications for the next conflict- say a naval conflict.
On the other hand, Trump bad, and here is a Politico article to encourage that sentiment.
The Great Le Pen Conviction Saga
Yesterday, Marine Le Pen, a French politician sometimes called a (female) French Trump and once called the Devil's daughter, was convicted in France of embezzling EU funds in the early 2000s. She is to be sentenced to house arrest for two years, and barred from politics for five.
The significance? That takes her out of the next presidential election, in 2027, where she is the current front runner.
The other problem?
When the original sentencing judge says Le Pen and other co-defendants didn't enrich themselves personally, 'embezzling' may have the wrong connotations. The judge who made the ruling preferred a 'democratic bypass that deceived parliament and voters.'
How does this lead to a leading political candidate getting imprisoned and disqualified in a leading western democracy?
Oh boy. This is a long one.
TL;DR: Banal political corruption insinuations ahead. And more. And more. Bless your innocent hearts if you have high trust in government, and don't be surprised if what follows starts to echo in your culture war interpretations in the months and years to come.
Disclaimer: What follows is a mix of plentiful citations, and some things that can only be noted with an eyebrow. Which is to say- some pretty hefty suspicion of impropriety, in ways that aren't exactly public record. However, if you want to believe that all governments are innocent unless proven guilty, by all means. Be ye warned.
What is this scandal?
It's more of a funding-code issue that results when you deliberately overlap organizational interests but establish conditionals that can be used as gotchas depending on whether the anti-fraud office wants to pursue.
EU funding for european political parties is normal. The overlap between national parties and EU political parties (Members of European Parliament, or MEP) is normal. The transition between national parties and nominally distinct EU parties is normal. Money is fungible. Even political aids are fungible- an aid who helps in one respect of a politician's work load enables the politician to work on others.
What Le Pen is charged / guilty of is that EU MEP party-member funds were used for someone who was working for Le Pen, the National Party leader, rather than Le Pen, the MEP party leader. Part of the basis of this claim is where there aid worked from- MEP assistants getting EU funds are supposed to work from / near the EU parliament, but around 20 of Le Pen's aides worked from France. As a result, they did not qualify for the funds they drew for being an aid to MEP-Le Pen, since Le Pen's MEP-aids are supposed to be geographically bounded.
Hence, embezzlement. Did the aids help with MEP work from France? Not actually relevant. Did the aids enable Le Pen to better focus on her MEP duties, as was the purpose of the money-for-aides? Also not particularly relevant.
What gives the saga more backstory, and scandal potential for those who think it's a gotcha, is that it's part of a much, much longer multi-decade saga.
Who is Le Pen?
Marine Le Pen is the daughter of Jean Le Pen, her father who founded the party. In short, he was the political outsider / far rightist / probable fascist sympathizer / possible nazi sympathizer, or at least dismisser, who was absolutely hated by the French political establishment. He's the guy who's synonymous with the National Front, unrepentant French far-right of the post-WW2 variety .
One of the key notes of Le Pen is that he ran the National Front like a family business... not successfully. Whether by purely coincidental mismanagement, personal bilateral animosity with French industry, or possibly indirect state pressures after the National Front's surprise and embarrassing showing in the 2002 presidential election, the National Front had some troubled finances.
And by troubled finances, I mean that by 2010 the French Government was progressively revoking the government's political party stipend that made up a plurality of its funding, even as Jean Le Pen was unable to get bank loans from French banks and unable to find a buyer for the 10-to-15 million Paris HQ to raise funds in 2008.
Where does the money come in?
The financial situation is where Marine Le Pen really enters in earnest. Marine Le Pen was given control of the party by her father in 2010. This was notably after she had already entered the European Parliament for over a half decade. Marine Le Pen was a MEP from 2004 to 2017, which is to say she inherited the National Front- and its financial issues- when she was already a MEP with no particular issue.
Marine's political priorities in the early 2010s was the rehabilitation of the National Front as a party. In 2013, she was still being called the Devil's Daughter by publications by the Atlantic. In 2018, this was when the National Front became the National Rally.
But the other part of Le Pen's job was to right the fiscal ship to keep the party viable. This is why across the 2010s Marine Le Pen was seeking foreign bank loans from abroad, including from US banks. This was where the Russia bank loan line of attack starts, since it was a Russian bank in 2014 that ultimately ended the credit embargo, but also saw Le Pen adopt a more pro-Russia rhetorical position. This challenge / options for loans has endured, and is why Le Pen more recently got a loan from Hungary in 2022.
So, to restate- Marine Le Pen was a reasonably-long-standing MEP in the 2000s with no major alleged issues at the time. In 2010, she took control over the national front. At this time, the NF was in financial distress.
This is the context where the misuse of European funds arose.
The Start of the Scandal
The Marine Le Pen allegations arose in Feb 2015, when European Parliament President Martin Shulz, a German MEP, raised complaints against her. Le Pen's party promptly counter-accused one of Shulz's own aids of a similar not-in-the-right-location violation. This didn't exactly get anywhere, because as noted at the time-
Machmer explained that one of Schulz’s assistants organizes study trips for a local branch of the SPD, but said this was “in his spare time, for free, because it is his hobby.”
Remember: it's embezzlement if you take EU money and work for the party. It's not embezzlement if you voluntarily do national party work for free as a hobby.
Who was Martin Schulz?
Well, in 2014, the year before he initiated the Le Pen allegations were made, Schulz was generally considered a bit... lacking in ethical enforcement. He was one of the European leaders who may / may not have turned a bit of a blind eye to notorious Malta corruption. After his time in the EU parliament, he made a brief but ambitious play in german power politics as the actual head of the German SDP in the 2017 German election. He lost to Merkel, of course, but so do they all. But he had the ambition to try, and had a history of building favors and friends.
But back to the earlier 2010s for a moment. Besides being President of the European Parliament at the time, he was a member of the Party of European Socialists in the European Parliament. He was also a (clearly important) member of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in Germany, i.e. part of the key governing coalition which itself is part of the Franco-German alliance that is the heart of the EU. Schulz was in the running for being the German foreign minister following the 2017 German election,, which might have some relevance to foreign relation implications with France.
Why does Martin Schulz matter?
Why does this party orientation possibly matter?
Because in 2015, the President of France, Francoise Hollande, was a French Socialist. Unsurprisingly, French Socialists tend to caucus well with the European socialists in the European parliament, though party politics being what it is I'll just ask you believe me on that.
Did they get alone? It's hard to say. But in May 2015, just a few months after the le Pen allegations were leveraged, Hollande was among the heads of state awarding Schulz the Charlemagne prize 2015. The Charlemagne prize is bestowed to those who have advanced european unification, which means as much or as little as you think it means. Typically it's an insider's appreciation award for strengthening European Union politics, which is to say strengthening the Franco-German influence on the continent because that is, in most practical respects, what EU centralization entails.
More relevant was that Schulz's very diplomatic interest in working with French rose above partisan politics, such as his notably high-profile willingness in 2017 to work with Macron, the current (but currently troubled) French president whose political fortunes have gotten a bit better with Le Pen's disqualification.
Would a German politician-
- with a spotty ethical record
- who stood to personally benefit
- from a political favor
- to the ideologically-aligned current French president
- or the subsequent french president
- who they might closely work with in their post-EU political career
-ever leverage a politically motivated ethics complaint against a MEP with a decade of non-complaints, over an issue that they themselves might be guilty of?
Heavens no, that's absurd.
Ahem. Sorry. Back to 2017 for a minute?
2017: Enter Macron
2017 is when Macron enters the Le Pen tale, since the 2017 election is what established them as rivals.
The 2017 French elections were notable for that they benefited both Macron and Le Pen as anti-establishment candidates. The election saw the collapse of the French establish right and left, and while that left a vacuum for Macron, it also benefited Le Pen. Macron ultimately won by the French firewall when the French socialist-left voted for him and against Le Pen, but it was historically remarkably close.
What was also remarkable is that Macron's party position has gotten worse over time. His party did very poorly in the 2020 municiple elections, though this was more a collapse of his left than a rise to Le Pen on the right. Macron pulled out another win in the 2022 election, where Le Pen, again, made it to the final round after a stronger-than-most showing.
This creates a certain... shall we say complication for the 2027 election, because Macron can't run for re-election in 2027, and he's known to not like that. Macron managed to beat Le Pen twice- was arguably the only person who could have- but the 2027 election would see him leave the stage and Le Pen be... well, a clear leading candidate, if by no means a guarantee.
Unless, of course, the judicial block-out is coincidentally underway even before the 2022 election is over.
And starting in a way that is- coincidentally- convenient for Macron's re-election.
2022: The Year the Scandal Returns In A Most Convenient Way
Five years after Macron takes the presidency, and nearly 7 after the Le Pen EU funding scandal starts, it returns in ways whose implications to the surrounding context become a bit clearer if you lay out relative dates of events. (Most of these dates are in the above al jazeera link.)
11 March 2022: The European Anti-Fraud Office provides the French prosecutor's office it's report on Le Pen.
Clearly the French government was taken by total surprise, and had no hand or insight into this EU process delivering this package.
12 March - 9 April 2022: No mention of or publicity is given to this report in most media. As such, no voters are aware of the duplicitious deception of French voters by a former MEP for whom this is an old scandal, forgotten scandal from over half a decade prior.
Which might have been slightly topical, given that...
10 April 2022: The first round of the French Presidential Election occurs.
After the French government sits on the report for a month, Le Pen places strong but somewhat distant second place, out-performing some expectations and underperforming others. 28% Macron, 23% Le Pen. The third-place runner up, and thus the potential second-round candidate party is a leftist party that garnered... 22%.
Which is to say, the French Prosectors really did Le Pen a favor by keeping that potentially embarrassing and undemocratic revelation a secret! Why, if she hadn't made it to the second round, Macron would have faced a broadly united left against him rather than for him in the name of the anti-le pen firewall!
It's a good thing that this virtuous adherence to principle applied for the rest of the campa-
17 April 2022: French prosecutors announce the new (actually old) Le Pen fund appropriation report
Coincidentally, 17 April 2022 was a Sunday, meaning this would be one of the opening media report for the next week's media cycle.
24 April 2022: The second round of the French Presidential Election occurs. Macron wins, 58% to 42%.
Fortunately, Macron's presidential margins are great! Any effects from the timing of the report probably had no result on a 16% gap.
June 2022: Unfortunately, Macron's parliamentary margins in the June 2022 elections are dismal, as his party loses control of the parliament and Le Pen's party gains 81 seats to become a key power player in government (in)stability for the next year and a half.
July 2022-February 2023: No particular action or movement is made on the Le Pen case. Nominally this is when the French prosecutors are developing their case, but given the substantial prior awareness in practice the case remains where it was since between rounds 1 of the election: available as a basis of future prosecution if and when desired.
The key point of 2022 is that the Le Pen scandal resurfaced coincidentally in time to shape the 2022 Presidential Election, where it was sat on when it might have hindered Le Pen's ability to get to the second round, but publicized right at a time to maximize Macron's electoral margins. Afterwards, it was further sat on until future timeliness.
2023 - 2024: A series of Correlating Progressions
March 2023: After Macron does the eternally popular thing of cutting welfare in the name of reform, the Macron government (in the legislature) comes less than a dozen votes from falling in a no confidence vote after Le Pen's party largely votes for no confidence.
June 2023: After about a year of political paralysis and parliamentary instability, a Macron ally who totally likes him for real guys raises the prospect of amending French constitution to give Macron third term. This totally-not-a-trial-balloon proposal flops like something that has no life.
October 2023: Just kidding about before, Macron makes a personal call for constitutional amendment for a third term.
8 December 2023: The French government announces Le Pen's trial will start in March 2024.](https://www.france24.com/en/france/20231208-french-prosecutores-order-le-pen-to-stand-trial-in-eu-funding-scandal)
20 December 2023: Le Pen does the unforgivable, and gives Macron a 'kiss of death' by forcing him to compromise on immigration legislation in return for support. This actually triggers an internal party rebellion for Macron. Unrelated, establishment French media wonder how Macron will manage Le Pen's ever-rising rise.
The 20 December events aren't particularly causal in the process, but are amusing context.
The more relevant point of 2023 is that Macron's decision to prosecute Le Pen, an act which would bring favor from the French establishment, comes amidst his very unpopular bid to extend his time in office, which would require support from the French establishment. At this time, the Macron administration adopts a Tough-on-Le Pen position of 10 years- a period of time that would easily take her out of two elections- that will later be taken down to two years out of [insert choice here].
Also notable in the August 2023 initiation of prosecution of that it is both a starting block for the timer, and all future events. Whether there needed to be a 7-month gap between the announced intent to prosecute and the trial or not, had the prosecution train been started seven months earlier- during the large gap after the 2022 elections- then the future 2-year house arrest would have by consequence ended before, rather than probably after, the 2027 election. An 18-month bar, for other cases, would have been even less likely have a presidential election impact... had that been desirable.
2024: The Trial of Political Opponents with Absolutely No Political Parallels Or Impacts Elsewhere
March 2024: The Trial of Le Pen starts, about 24 months after the French government received an EU report of the 2015 report nearly 108 months prior. Truly the gears of French justice turned as fast as they could.
These are completely unrelated. Just because three major democracies of mutually-sympathetic ruling parties had parallel legal cases against leading opposition parties that threatened incumbent interests, and just because they did so on similar narrative themes/justification sof protecting democracy and rule of law themes, does not mean there was any sort of wink or nod or feeling emboldened by the example of others. Every case was independently moved forward on its own merits, with monetary judgements appropriate to the severity, and the mutual commentary by the states on the other's prosecutions was exactly what you would expect.
Also also coincidentally, this happened to be timed to roughly the same time that a UK court not only rejected a Trump lawsuit over the Steele dossier that was the root of the Russiagate hoax, but ordered Trump to pay 6-figures in legal fees, which was helpfully noted as adding to the half-billion in legal fees Trump had accrued so far that year and not at all contributing to pressures or efforts to drive Trump into bankruptcy analogous to the Le Pen experience earlier in the experience. Note that was before the historically unprecedented further half-billion fine from the New York judgement.
Now, admittedly, the Trump fiscal correlation must be a total distraction. Reputable democracies do not try to bankrupt their oppositions out of politics, and France failed to force Le Pen into fiscal insolvency years ago. The French government would only seek a 300,000 euro fine against Le Pen. And a 2 million euro fine against her party. And opened up a new case in September 2024 alleging illegal financing of the 2022 election.
This, clearly, is utterly unrelated to any other aspect of handling the Le Pen case, and not the initiation for a future basis to further fine and disqualify Le Pen from politics in the future after the current judgement runs its course.
And returning to the only relevant case itself, Le Pen trial that began in March in turn would certainly have no impact on...
June 2024: Surprise! Macron triggers snap elections in effort to overturn political gridlock and break his dependence on Le Pen. Perhaps the ongoing Le Pen trial will at last get rid of this troublesome opposition party?
July 2024: It, uh, doesn't work. Le Pen's party gets about 1/3 of all votes, and about 13% more than Macron's party.
The snap elections are generally considered a strategic mistake for Macron, doubling-down on his issues.
They also, coincidentally, totally kill any talk of Macron's constitutional reform for a third term candidacy.
A candidacy that- remembering previous elections- would have been substantially improved with a Le Pen in the field to rally a resentful Left to his side.
But now that Macron's political hopes for a third election are dead and buried...
November 2024: The French Government announces it seeks 5 years in jail, on top of the political bar, for Le Pen. However, conflicting reports say 2 years., with judgement expected in march 2025
Notably- even a 2 year sentence from vaguely April 2025 to April 2027 would release Le Pen right on / after the 2027 election, and thus totally unable to compete. And, depending on the terms of the house arrest, unable to speak or influence.
31 March 2025 (Yesterday): Le Pen is sentenced to 4-but-2-if-she-behaves years of prison, 2 of them under house arrest and 2 suspended, and a five year bar from political office. She is allowed to appeal but...
Even if she does appeal the ban on public office, only an appellate ruling could overturn it and restore her hopes of running, although time is running out for that to happen before the election as appeals in France can take several years to conclude.
Gallic shrug
I am sure the French government that took a decade to bring this conviction about will speedily process the appeal of the Le Pen who recent French polling suggested was somewhere in the 40% voting range for the first round. (Usual French first round poling disclaimers abound.)
Functionally, this ruling conveniently clears the deck for France's nominal establishment left and rights to make a return, without Le Pen in the way.
Call it Macron's farewell gift to French democracy. It's not like he disqualified his own presidential election opponent...
...though that's more because he failed to get the constitutional change he wanted that would have allowed him to run again...
...in which case, perhaps prosecutorial discretion might have leaned another way.
Summing It All Up
Le Pen (Senior) was an all-around tosser and more or less enemy of the French establishment, if not the French State per see
- Le Pen (Senior) embarrassed the French Establishment in the early 2002 election where he made the second round of the presidential election
- Le Pen (Senior) thereafter suffered years of unfortunate financial prospects that would have driven the Le Pen party out of politics
- Misfortune including perfectly neutral reductions in state stipends for political parties, a bank blockade, and an inability to sell a multi-million dollar property in Paris
- Le Pen (Senior) is politically toxic, and fiscally insolvent, before his daughter takes over the party
Le Pen (Marine) is Le Pen's daughter who inherited his mess, and his enemies
- Le Pen was an unexceptional MEP for over a decade with no notable scandals or accusations of fraud of this sort at the time
- In 2011, Le Pen inherits the party, and its finances, from her father. Money is tight.
- During this time, and probably before, Le Pen deals in the technically-illegal-but-totally-not-widely-practiced practice of paying national party members with EU funds.
- No one cares.
- Le Pen spends the next years working to rebuild fiscal solvency, including taking foreign loans to break the Parisian bank blockade
- The foreign loan most in question is Russian, marking a turn towards a more Russian-friendly narrative line, and increased institutional and international suspicion
President of European Parliament Shulz was a totally-not-corrupt German politician who totally didn't do a political hit job on the rival of an ally in furtherance of his own political ambitions
- Schulz had a notable, internationally-reported reputation for corruption, including on a similar issue
- The issue that will be the basis of the scandal is, uh, not unknown in his circles
- Schulz takes a particular stab at the political rival of a major political partner
- and potential future diplomatic partner who could help Schulz's ambitions come true
- Schulz definitely doesn't get awarded for services rendered for French-appreciated interests
- Or eagerly try to sustain the relationship with surprise arrival Macron
- But Schulz is not the villain
- Merely the tool providing the French establishment their means to prosecute Le Pen when desired
President Macron was totally not letting Le Pen stay in politics as a foil to bolster his personal electoral prospects against the French left
- It's not like Le Pen automatically invoked the support of the French left in every second round election
- Or bolstered his parliamentary prospects against the left that would, absent her, happily no-confidence him
- Or that his administration hid scandalous information that might have let her fail to be the foil when his left flank was weak
- It just takes an additional half-decade to complete investigations to find prosecutable evidence of something that was recorded and reported on more than half a decade prior
- You know, to develop the case until the time is right
Macron was totally not prolonging the case management by months or years in parallel to anticipation of extending his own political career
- Extending his jupiter-style presidency to a third term would have been more unpopular than he was
- In which case a free Le Pen sure would have been useful for those second-round elections
- But keep her and her party in a slow boil post-2022 with unclear intentions or scope
- As insurance policy, or leverage on the parliamentary politics
But Macron's efforts to garner support for a constitutional amendment failed
- And Macron's snap election gambit to regain control of government failed
- And when it failed, so did his prospects at constitutional change
- And if he's not running again, there's no electoral advantage in Le Pen to run again
Which makes it naturally the best time to announce the intent to jail and disqualify the clear frontrunner
- A merciful 'mere' 2 years house arrest just coincidentally scheduled to time to the next election cycle
- It certainly could not have occurred earlier, and thus mitigated the perception of intentional procedural manipulation
- This is justified because embezzlement of EU funds is a critical subversion of democracy the voters should know about
- Just not when it might have harmed Macron's electoral prospects
- Or by letting voters vote accordingly against Le Pen with the knowledge
In Conclusion
Is there a 'benign' explanation for all this? Sure, if you want.
Is this a sketchy-but-will-be-claimed-above-reapproach series of events? Also yes.
The Le Pen saga doesn't actually require some all-encompassing conspiracy. La Pen (Senior) can have his own political feuds with the French establishment separate from La Pen (Marine). Schulz was a means, but hardly the start or the end of the Le Pen family feud with the French establishment. Macron was (probably) never involved in the early phases of whatever French state pressures may or may not have been used to try to bankrupt the Le Pen party.
But unless you believe the French prosecutor's office is completely independent of Macron and only coincidentally schedules things to align with electoral milestones and key dates to Macron's benefit, the Macron-era Le Pen saga has plenty of its own implications of, shall we say, politically considerate handling.
And those Macron handlings were built on a history of the Marine Le Pen handlings. And the Marine Le Pen handlings were built on the Le Pen (Senior) handlings. This has been a political fight for longer than some of the posters on this forum have been alive.
None of this means that Le Pen didn't actually 'defraud' the EU of however many manhours of political aid hours she charged the EU. If that's all you care about, this can be 'just,' sure. Let justice be done though the heavens fall, and all that.
But the other part of 'just' is if this is handled the same as other cases. And to an extent this is impossible, because no one else in France gets handled like Le Pen, because no one else represents what the Le Pen family represents, or threatens, to the French establishment.
What Next?
Don't be surprised if this becomes a significant reoccurring propaganda / european culture war theme for the anti-establishment skeptics, on both sides of the Atlantic.
Establishment European media are already signaling an expectation of further political chaos in France, and trying to coax/signal Le Pen to 'help her party' over 'seek revenge.' (Politico) The National Rally remains in position to topple the government by contributing to a no-confidence vote if the other parties oppose Macron.
The New York Times, which is broadly sympathetic to the French government effort and hostile towards Le Pen with the NYT's characteristic framing devices, concedes that-
Ms. Le Pen, like it or not, may now become another element in the Vance-Musk case for European democratic failure.
This is surrounded by all the appropriate signals that this is bad thought, of course, but it is unlikely to be solely an American critique. Various right-of-center politicians across Europe were quick to condemn, and the culture war lines will write themselves.
Not all are unhappy or afraid, though.
In Paris’ Republic Plaza, where public demonstrations often unfold, Le Pen detractors punched the air in celebration.
“We were here in this square to celebrate the death of her father,” said Jean Dupont, 45, a schoolteacher. “And this is now the death of Le Pen’s presidential ambitions.”
Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the National Front and a figure long associated with racism and Holocaust denial, died earlier this year at age 96.
Sophie Martin, 34, a graphic designer, was among those in a celebratory mood. “I had to check the date — I thought it was April Fool’s Day,” she said. “But it’s not. She’s finally been knocked down. We’ve lived with her poison in our politics for too long.”
I know you're more of an expert on armed forces and geopolitics than I am, would love to heart some scenarios.
You send multi-million dollars worth of equipment into Northern Mexico. Drones costing a few hundred to thousand dollars blow them up. Rinse and repeat until the American taxpayer gets tired of seeing the celebratory videos on the internet while foreigners simultaneously mock them and highlight every American-caused casualty as an atrocity.
But it feels like as far as neighborliness goes, Mexico has been hitting defect pretty insistently. It ain't no Mr. Rogers. Well actually we've always been fucking you over slowly seems like a weak argument.
Assuming you are an American- please show some self-awareness when accusing who of fucking over who, particularly when you are advocating an act of war against a neighbor.
This sort of behavior from a neighbor that's the junior partner seems intolerable. It would never be accepted by Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, or any sane country.
I repeat the earlier point: you are making poor geopolitical analogies.
Or rather- when Russia decided it wouldn't tolerate a sovereign neighbor doing sovereign policy things, it led to one of the biggest blunders of post-WW2 Russian strategic policy, costing over a million casualties and the loss of significant global power and standing. When China wouldn't tolerate Vietnam's behavior, it invaded the north and had such an embarrassing lack of success that Vietnam has sparked not just a detente, but budding partnership, with China's main strategic rival.
These were both terribly stupid policies by the 'senior' partner, neither of which actually got what they wanted as a result.
The other countries have been less incompetent, and so have generally let their disgruntlement with troublesome neighbors remain disgruntlements rather than casus belli.
I guess the real disconnect is that I think if it does escalate to combat between one or more cartels and the US, the cartels would capitulate in less than 60 days, making it a fait accompli.
That would indeed be a real disconnect, and one that strongly suggests a lack of attention to the experiences of the Iraq and Afghan wars.
The Americans have not been able to make organized criminal groups inside the US 'capitulate' in 60 years. The US lasted about 20 years in Afghanistan, and considerably less in Mogadishu against worse-equipped criminal warlords. The idea that you would be able to totally defeat inernational cartels in 60 days by occuping a fraction of a country, in a country that you do not speak the language of, over a border zone you have never been able to seal, is not serious.
And even if you can initially disrupt, what then? Say you somehow clear them from area X in 60 day, but on day 61 you go home. What do you think happens on day 62? Or day 63? Or [however many days you stay]+1? What- besides grabbing clay and building forts to compel indefinite military threats- is your compliance plan?
Yes, I know, four day operation to Kyiv and all, but we're not threatening their nationhood or trying to grab clay. If they're at all businessmen they'll realize that we can make them bleed and lose treasure very hard very fast.
And you think this achieves anything... why?
You're not thinking like a cartel. Or rather, you seem to think cartels are unitary actors who a singular 'they' can capture, as opposed to coalitions of autonomous rivals who often fight over profit share. Life is cheap, and the cartel's losses are not your own- instead, the cartel's loss is a chance for your own gang to take out rivals and maneuver yourself for a bigger cut of the American drug-purchasing money. As long as there are americans willing to pay tons of money to buy the drugs, then there is a lot of money to be made selling despite the risks. That other people in the business lose out isn't an issue, it's an opportunity- especially if you can use the American intervention as a way to knock out rivals / settle scores / make way for yourself.
If the individual cartels test each other out and have areas of control and neutral zones, does not pushing back on their expansion mean you're just rolling over?
No, it does not.
Counts for what to who?
Is 'Scalia' in this context supposed to count as a proxy for 'shares Scalia's worldview and judicial philosophy?' Or does it count more as a talismanic shield, akin to 'he worked for a conservative, therefore he must not be politically biased?' I imagine 'Scalia clerk' counts for either, but to different people.
What else is 'Scalia clerk' supposed to mean? Was Scalia known for only employing clerks who agreed with his philosophy, and thus they are proxies for his professional reputation? Are Scalia law clerks as a class any less prone to culture war shenanigans than the rest of the legal profession? Was Scalia known for characterizing deportation as being cast into Dante's inferno, or viewing deportation as oppression?
If I look up Adam Unikowsky's professional bio, should I expect to see Scalia-esque disagreement with the lawfare practices of the last administration to shape the election, or should I expect to see concurrence as many other respectable professionals felt it was right and proper?
I am informed, in fact, that this forum is overrun with Russian Propaganda, such that some no longer wish to participate. This is lamentable if true, so I thought it might help to prompt some elaboration of the pro-Ukraine case.
If the doubt over Russian Propaganda is the basis of raising questions, then you have an odd way of going about clarifying the potentially lamentable situation.
For example, your first 8 questions are-
How much aid would you provide? Weapons? Money? No-Fly Zone? Air support? Troops on the ground? Nuclear umbrella? Something else? What is the end-state your policy is aiming for?
Set aside that many of these are badly structured questions in and of themselves. More importantly, what possible answer could any of these questions provide from a pro-Ukrainian supporter that would or would not illuminate the prevalence of Russian Propaganda in this forum?
If your theory that the forumites answering are only saying [Big Amount] because of Russian Propaganda on this forum, as opposed to other sources of information or non-Russian Propaganda? Would [Smaller Amount] provide any meaningful contrast? If a pro-Ukrainian says 'no, I don't support a No-Fly Zone,' does that... mean anything regarding the forum propaganda that a pro-Ukrainian saying 'yes, I do support a No-Fly Zone?' would indicate?
If not, why are you asking the question as a means to gain elaboration about the thing that would be lamentable-if-true? Where is the light? A 'just asking questions' inverse gish-galloping- demanding a host of extensive answers from low-effort questions- is certainly a technique, but it would be a technique far better suited for generating heat, particularly given the ease of anti-supporters to selectively pick at the answers they find most vulnerable and ignoring the rest, without having to justify (or provide) their own views to the same questions.
Moreover, and this is an even more basic structure question, why aim the question at the supporters of Ukraine aid, as opposed to the opponents of Ukrainian aid?
Again, if your stated basis of concern is to believed, then the best survey audience with whom to evaluate the prevalence of Russian Propaganda on the forum is to start with the people most likely to have adopted Russian propaganda. Then you could ask questions where you know what a Russian propaganda line answer, and then compare the answers that align with the Russian propaganda line versus those that differ. This, in turn, could allow comparison and contrasts, and see how much of opposition to a thing is due to reasons aligned with propaganda versus those that are not.
This wouldn't be the end of a genuine search for truth, of course, as not all capital-P Propaganda is false. Sometimes Propaganda boosts rather than causes the narratives of the target audience. Independent convergence is a thing. But you would at least have chosen a more appropriate survey audience.
And this is without poisoning the well with a bad question like-
Is there an end-state or a potential event in the war that you think would falsify your understanding of the war, and convince you that providing aid was a bad idea? Another way of putting it is, do you think your views on the Ukraine war are falsifiable, and if so, what evidence would be sufficient for you to consider it falsified?
Yes, this is a well-poisoning question. We are both aware we are on a rationalist-adjacent forum where intellectual integrity is prioritized. Most of the audience has internalized the principle that good theories need to be falsifiable, because non-falsifiable is itself evidence that no amount of evidence or reason can reverse the premise. which is Bad in a community that prioritizes pursuing Truth and Reason. This is also a cornerstone of the scientific process, practically an axiom of rationalist discourse, and anyone reading this can recognize the follow-on insinuation. If someone says no, they are being unreasonable since reason demands being open to being disproven (falsification), and if they are being unreasonable in this they are being unreasonable in the rest as well.
What not everyone will recognize is that you are not only asking a leading question, or that you are leading with a variation of the hindsight bias (the mental error of looking back and thinking an eventual result was obvious all along), but that you are insinuating an axiom outside of its appropriate paradigm. The Ukraine War is not a laboratory hypothesis for the scientific method. It is a strategic conflict between multiple strategic actors, and this means that paradigms of strategies and game-theory apply.
And because fewer people are familiar with those paradigms than they are rationalist-adjacent forum norms or maxims regarding the scientific method, they wouldn't recognize that the premise of the question doesn't make sense. Or even that 'yes' is the irrational answer that should invite doubt. Not just because doing so would reveal susceptibility to the hindsight bias invitation- the validity/soundness of a decision is the decision made with the information at hand on the time, not information unavailable to them- but just on the matter of strategic paradigm itself.
Outcomes do not falsify strategies.
Outcomes are results, but results are not a strategy, nor are strategies predictive devices in and of themselves. Strategies entail predictions, but equating the two is a compositional fallacy, believing what is true of a part of a thing is true of the whole of the thing. Even ignoring that potential fallacy, believing that results falsify a process (strategy) that leads to them is a first-order mistake. It is a common mistake, particularly among the sort of people who believe that a strategy that fails is axiomatically a falsified strategy, but this is a bad axiom. And like bad axioms in any field, anyone whose theoretical understanding of a field rests on bad axioms is building their understanding on poor foundations, whether the user acknowledges it as an axiom or not.
This is much easier to see when politically loaded topics are substituted by less political topics, which can be done by some basic coding to produce less politically contentious analogies that rest on the same argument structure and axiom of outcome-falsifies-strategy.
For example, this-
Is there an end-state or a potential event in the war that you think would falsify your understanding of the war, and convince you that providing aid was a bad idea? Another way of putting it is, do you think your views on the Ukraine war are falsifiable, and if so, what evidence would be sufficient for you to consider it falsified?
-could be represented for an axiom test as-
Is there an end-state or a potential [outcome of a high-stakes process] that you think would falsify your understanding of [the high-stakes process], and convince you that [engaging in the high-stakes process] was a bad idea? Another way of putting it is, do you think your views on [the high-stakes process] are falsifiable, and if so, what evidence would be sufficient for you to consider it falsified?
-because the axiom has to apply to all models for it to apply as an axiom. The Ukraine War, in turn, is a [high-stakes process], and events including but not limited to how the war ends are outcomes of that process.
However, the axiom-test is just as valid if applied to-
Is there an end-state or a potential [outcome of a high-stakes process] that you think would falsify your understanding of [the high-stakes process], and convince you that [not engaging in the high-stakes process] was a bad idea? Another way of putting it is, do you think your views on [the high-stakes process] are falsifiable, and if so, what evidence would be sufficient for you to consider it falsified?
-because despite flipping the 'engage with high-stakes process' with a 'not engage in high-stakes process,' the axiom of outcome-falsifies-strategy does not depend on what the actual strategy is. That is why it is an axiom, as opposed to a special pleading rhetorical device / argument-as-soldier to advance the strategist's favored (or dis-favored) positions.
Now consider this in a less ideologically charged- or propagandized- process where a strategic paradigm applies... like gambling. Which has substantial literature overlap with issues of strategic competition, risk-management, and so on. The field of game-theory was named because of the various meta-analysis commonalities, and has been foundational to the field of international relations and conflicts, including the school of Realist theorists.
Now just as we substituted [Ukraine War] for [high-stakes process] for the purpose of the axiom, we can substitute [high-stakes process] for something like...
Is there an end-state or a potential [outcome of high-stakes [gambling with your life's savings]] that you think would falsify your understanding of [high-stakes [gambling with your life's savings]], and convince you that [not engaging in high-stakes [gambling with your life's savings]] was a bad idea? Another way of putting it is, do you think your views on [high-stakes [gambling with your life's savings]] are falsifiable, and if so, what evidence would be sufficient for you to consider it falsified?
Somehow, it is less pejorative if someone says 'no, there is no result from gambling with my life's savings that would falsify my understanding that gambling with my life's savings is a bad idea, and convince me that my strategy of not gambling with my life's savings was a bad idea.'
And that somehow is because people will reflexively drop both axioms- the axiom that outcomes falsify strategies, and also that they must be willing to falsify their theories of strategy to be logical and reasonable- on topics of strategy or risk. Not least because they are not valid axioms on topics of strategy and risk. Which is really not surprising to anyone with any notable experience in games of strategy of uncontrollable factors, or risk management.
As anyone with experience in games of cards or dice should know, even dominant strategies don't always win. Sometimes the other party has a better hand, and statistically improbably things happen all the time. Similarly, there are times where high-risk/high-reward strategies are the only plausible strategies for [victory], whether it's because you're making up a deficit or because playing safe is a guaranteed loss. There is no axiom-level 'your strategy is falsified if you lose' principle in play- there are only disputes about the sort of assumptions should go into evaluating the tradeoffs. And, as with most subjective value systems, there is no axiom that people must agree on shared valuations, or defend their own valuation system to your own, regardless of whether you find it convincing or not. The player who tries their hardest to maximize their probable draws or avoid a lose condition, and the player who throws hands to keep a weaker player in the game because [reasons], are playing fundamentally different games for what [victory] even is, even as they play by the same nominal draw rules.
Similarly, a strategy of risk management doesn't get disproven if the risk manifests regardless. Most forms of risk mitigation are about mitigating the frequency of a negative outcome, not the total impossibility, and so it could well be worse to change strategy after a bad-outcome than to stick the course. Again, examples are not hard to find. The negative consequences of false positives driving unnecessary (and sometimes deadly) medical interventions does not disprove the value of screening for deadly diseases at a point where the risk of surgery can pre-empt the risk of no intervention. If someone asked what sort of outcome from a car crash would make someone falsify their belief that safety belts are a good idea, they would be looked at with suspicion and rightly so, regardless of whether they were a bad-faith actor for [special interest group against safety belt laws] or merely incompetent. Nor are the suspicious being irrational or unreasonable for not engaging with a question about what sort of result of [car accident] would make them falsify their strategy of [maybe we should make seat belts mandatory by law], even if there are possible negative outcomes like malefactors trying to race away from the cops and running over children and wouldn't someone think of the children?
Because, again, outcomes do not falsify strategies. Even emotionally-evocative outcomes chosen to try and shift the strategic choice.
Outcomes can justify a re-evaluation of strategic assessments. Outcomes may reveal new information to update strategic assumptions. Outcomes may even drive changes in strategy as decision-maker's tastes change rather than anything underlying information in and of itself. But outcomes do not 'falsify' strategies. The fact that a strategy turns out poorly (or well!) is independent of the validity of the strategic choice, as good strategies can still fail, and bad strategies can still succeed. And this is because judging the ultimate outcome is judging by [information] that- by its nature- is not available at the time of decision about the strategy. It could only be included if one used that as an assumption.
Which- since the point of a strategy is to try and manage risks and opportunities for the future- is assuming the conclusion to justify a decision on how to approach the future.
Which also is not a good practice as a general point of strategy. But it can work well as a propagandistic frame-setting trick when paired with discrediting pejoratives that dares the target audience to self-identify themselves with the alternative.
I saw this article and was saving it to write an effort post, and now you beat me to it. A shame, but I guess I should put the outline to use anyway.
My intent would have been to use this article to highlight my concern about the AI revolution, and share my perspective on a topic I've never really gone into.
I am on record on being a skeptic / doubter on AI singularity fears (or hopes). I broadly think the 'the winner of AI is the winner of all' is overstated due to other required dynamics for such a monopoly of power/influence to occur. I think other technology dynamics matter more in different ways- for example, I think the drone revolution matters more than the AI revolution for shaping geopolitical contexts in the decades to come. I think that AI technologies under human control are more likely to do something irrevocably stupid than AI-controlled technologies deciding to paperclip everything and somehow having the unique ability to compel all other AI to align with that.
I do think it's fine to characterize AI as a significant disruptive technology, even if I think the inherent limits of LLM are more relevant to certain fields (especially anything novel/emerging without substantial successful learning material) than is commonly appreciated. Something doesn't have to be world ending to be a major disruption. I just think it's one of many, many major disruptions in the decade to come, and not even necessarily the worst. (Though disruptions do compound.)
What scares me isn't the AI singularity, but the AI-educated youth.
Specifically, I fear for- and fear from- people who might otherwise have learned critical thinking skills in how to not only search for answers, but organize and retain answers, to things they didn't know at the start. The example in the articles covered people using AI not only in lieu of finding a solution, but even knowing what the solution was. (The students who didn't know their own essay's response.) I don't think AI is bad for students because the answers AI provide are bad, necessarily. Getting an answer from AI isn't that different from getting an answer from a first-few pages search of google. (Even before they were the same thing.) It's more that if you don't even know how to do a tailored good search, or you don't know where other alternative answers are, you can't compare even that result. And if you're not retaining the solution- if you don't understand 'why' the solution is correct- the student is missing the opportunity. What's the point of passing a test if you, the student, haven't learned?
And I think the process of learning is important. In fact, I think learning the process of learning is among the most important things to learn at all. How to find an answer you don't know. How to distinguish good answers from bad answers. How to detect and distinguish bias from error from manipulation. How to generate a new solution to a complex problem when there isn't a proven solution at hand, or if the old solutions aren't accessible because [reasons]. And finally, how to both organize and communicate that in a way that other people can use. 'Knowing' a lot is not enough. 'Communicating' it can be just as important. All of these are skills that have to be practiced to be developed.
AI can compromise critical thinking and skill development. AI can compromise learning how to look for answers. AI can compromise how to retain the answers. AI can compromise the ability of people to respond to unclear situations with incomplete information or no baselines. AI can compromise the ability of people to convey their ideas to other people.
I had a great big screed on how I think AI is ruining youth... and then I looked back to that first mention of google, and asked myself 'what is so different?'
I grew up in an era where the pre-AI internet promised unparalleled information access. An era where seemingly infinite libraries of fiction (fan or otherwise) were open to anyone with an internet, with more to read than a lifetime of book purchases. Access to other people's opinions would break people out of their small-minded closed-worlds. The truth was out there, and the internet would help you reach it. In one of the earlier versions of Civilization, the Internet was considered a world wonder, and would give the civilization that developed it first (eventual) access to any technology that at least two other states knew.
But I also grew up in an era where people bemoaned that google was ruining the ability of people to find anything not on the internet. Documents that were never digitized, people who never wrote down their thoughts, the subtext that comes from investing things in person rather than from a distance. You can think you know how hilly a hike is from reading it, but a picture of it is worth a thousand words, and actually hiking it yourself in the heat and humidity and while carrying dozens of pounds of equipment is something else. It's hard to capture the sublime beauty of nature, and thus understand why people would value nature preservation for its own sake, if you don't go out to it.
(Then again, I did go into it. I also didn't like it. My sympathies were never exactly with anti-industrial environmentalism after that.)
And it's not like the pre-AI google-internet wasn't directly facilitating cheating. Who here was ever introduced to SparkNotes? The best friend of anyone who didn't want to actually do the required reading, but still needs a talking point or essay about a famous book. It advertises itself as a 'study guide' site these days. It condensed hundreds of pages into a few small pages of summary, and that was Good Enough.
Similar points could be made about cheating. I remember when facebook was not only young, but mostly a college student thing. And I remember how schools wrestled with students sharing answer sheets to quizzes, past essays, and so on. Even if I didn't partake, I know people did. Were they getting substantially more critical thinking skills than the modern AI exploiter just because their cheating methods were a bit more taxing on time or effort?
Maybe. But then, what's so different between the pre-AI/post-internet student cheating, and the pre-internet student cheating?
Were cheating circles any less of a thing in eras where colleges had notorious stories of famous historical figures basically fooling around until last-minute cramming? Were those cramming sessions really imparting the value of critical thinking not only to the Great Figures of History, but their less memorable peers?
Or information. If you're getting all your politics from AI, that was pretty dumb. But then, I remember when it was (and still is) a common expression of contempt to dismiss people who watched [bad political TV station], or read [biased partisan news paper], or listened to [objectional radio figure] rather than the other alternatives.
But were the people who were turning into [good political TV station] being any more critical thinking for listening to the 'correct' opinion shows? Or was it just 'my noble voters know I speak truth through their own critical thinking, yours are misled by propaganda that critical thinking would negate'? Were radio listeners decades prior any less mono-tuned for having even fewer alternative stations to listen to? Were regional or municipal newspapers any partisan when there was less competition outside the influence of political machines? Were their readers any more objective critical thinkers when there were fewer easy alternative options?
Has there ever been a golden age of critical thinkers, schooled to think well, untainted by the technology of its era, or the character of its students?
Or has critical thinking been consistent across history, with most students of any era doing the least possible to get through any required courses, and missing the point along the way?
And- by implication- some minority of critical thinkers existing and emerging regardless of the excuses of the era? And often out-competing their contemporaries by the advantages that come with critical thinking?
The more I think of it, the more convinced I am of the later. Most people in history wouldn't have been great critical thinkers if only they had access to more or even better information. They'd still have taken the easiest way to meet the immediate social pressure. Similarly, I doubt that the Great Critical Thinkers of History would have been ruined by AI. Not as a class, at least. They already had their alternative off-ramps, and didn't.
Critical thinking can always be encouraged, but never forced. The people who do so are the sort of people who are naturally inclined to question, to think, or to recognize the value of critical thinking in a competitive or personal sense. The people who actually do so... they were always a minority. They will probably always be a minority.
So on reflection, my fear about bad students isn't really warranted by AI. There has always been [things degrading critical thinking] that the learners of the era could defer to, or cheat with. If I'd been born generations earlier, I'd have had an equivalent instinct 'warranted' by something else. My fear is/was more about the idea of 'losing' something- an expectation of the critical thinking of others- that probably never existed.
Realizing that made me fear the effects of AI a bit less. As silly as it sounds to put my updated prior in this way, and the sillyness is the point here, there was no golden age of critical thinking and enlightened education that just so happened to be when I was maturing. Just as [current year] wasn't the first time in human history moralistic college students felt ideal social morality was obviously achievable, a downgrade of critical thinking didn't start after I left college either.
So when I read that article about the south korean kid who viewed Ivy League not as a chance to learn in an environment of unparalled access to quality minds and material, but as a change to meet his wife and co-founder of some company, I shouldn't- don't- despair. Instead, I shrug. As it was before, so it shall be again.
Two centuries ago, his mindset would have been right at home in his home country. He would probably only have cared about the material the nominally-meritocratic gwageo civil service exams assessed (including classical literature) to the degree it let out-compete other would-be competitors and join the yangban, a relatively comfortable aristocratic-social class. If he had the ability to cheat at the civil service exam and get away with it, I imagine he would have.
I doubt the social sanctity of meritocrat exams would have bothered him anymore than the espoused value of critical thinking in a progressive academic institution.
What is so different?
Dean
Flairless
4mo ago
I know that Belisarius thinks I'm a far-leftist (lol), but I think that a fair reading my post history will show that I am what I present myself as, more or less a classical liberal who hates both the left and the right.
No, not particularly?
You come off as a pretty standard Blue-Tribe American democrat with left-leaning sensibilities. You reliable tend towards the left framing paradigms, complete with regularly adopting left-fronted framings of what goes on, and this has been true of Trump in particular for who knows how long. Your dislike of the progressive-left comes more from irritation at friendly fire in your direction than a distrust of statist / establishment-dominated politics in general- it's just a who, whom, rather than anti-left.
I think you reversed the order of money allocation...?
If the money is appropriated for a purpose, that means it can't be allocated whenever- it can only be spent for the purpose the legislature appropriated it for from the start, and thus does not come with the opportunity cost of a later allocation decision. The money would not have been there for FEMA for the first place if it wasn't for the purpose it was appropriated.
This is the difference between being given $20 to do what you want and spending it irresponsibly, and only getting $20 to use towards a thing you may / may not care about. Not using the $20 for the thing you do not care about does not convert it into $20 you can use how you want.
You can argue the wisdom of an annual budget for spending on things you don't care about, but the initial appropriate can't send signals that care more about a previously planned thing over a later shortage because the initial appropriation for a fiscal year is on the assumption that it would meet forecasted needs.
Which is why the normal thing for a national government is to later appropriate more money on a more ad hoc basis later in the fiscal year.
I agree that Ukraine was always a mistake. But you could say “we will provide XYZ (better weapons compared to what they have today)” while telling Ukraine “if we want you to take deal “ABC” and you don’t, then you get nothing.
Who do you think has the ability to ensure Ukraine gets nothing?
It's certainly no American- the Americans haven't even been the majority supplier of aid to the Ukrainians. The single biggest supplier, yes, the single most important yes, but EU institutions have given more financial aid to Ukraine than the US has given in value of all combined military / financial / humanitarian, and this is without addressing European national contributions.
Even if the US gives nothing, Ukraine still gets quite a bit. And if the cause of a cutoff is Donald Trump- and I'll just note that people have long downplayed his willingness to conditionally support Ukraine to take his opposition as a given- the Europeans are not going to meekly follow him, when both their own domestic-political interests and strategic interests remain with supporting Ukraine even, or especially in definace to, American pressure otherwise.
I could basically see it freezing the lines roughly where they are today. I guess that’s a surrender. But realism needs to hold sway here.
Why do you think Realism is any friend of freezing the fight along the current lines and surrendering?
Realism would note that the current war is at least the third continuation war Russia has pursued against Ukraine since the initial invasion of Crimea. (The first continuation war being the astroturfed Nova Russian campaign intended to spark a civil war, and the second continuation war being the direct military intervention when the Nova Russian uprising failed and was on the cusp of complete collapse.)
Realism would note that the Russia's leadership intentions and objectives that drove the current war are still unresolved, and thus the motivation basis remains for a fourth continuation war.
Realism would note that Russia's terms of cease fire and negotiations have for years hinged around limiting Ukraine's ability to resist a future incursion, and thus been conditional on the conditional basis for a fourth continuation war.
Realism would note that the center of gravity of Russia's conventional military strength at a strategic level, the Soviet inheritance of stockpiles, are being expended at unsustainable and functionally irreplaceable rates, and that once they are expended Russia's long-term capacity to conduct a fourth continuation war would be removed.
Realism would note that Russia's military edge is ebbing, that it's current rate of expenditures are unsustainable, and thus that relative negotiating position power will decrease away from Russia's favor of the coming years, and thus potentially create the conditions for negotiations that would not lead to a fourth continuation war.
Realism would note that the Western coalition, on the basis of supporting Ukraine against Russia, is actually mobilizing the political and economic capacity to scale military production, productions that must be greatly scaled to meet other major global competitors but which historically have observably not been invested in solely on the notional basis of those other competitors.
Realism would note a great many things that would work against arguments for a ceasefire in the near term.
'Realism' is no more a legitimization of 'what I want' than trying to claim to be a 'Rationalist' means your positions are any less monkey-brained than your opponents.
And yes, the sanctions removal isn’t a huge benefit for them (and was a massive mistake for the US) but it is some benefit.
It would be interesting in hearing why you think the sanctions strategy was a massive mistake for the US, given that the US/European sanction strategy has clearly delivered it's intended goals of limiting Russian economic capabilities (which is why Russia's only meaningful growth is now a result of a militarized economy rather than it's civilian economics), restrict access to global markets (which is why Russia has to pay significant mark-ups and risk-premiums on both imports and sales, and gets stuck with things like it's India Rupee savings), and done so in a way that didn't cripple the pro-Ukraine coalition's economic and political viability in the midst of major economic input rearrangements (the Europeans haven't cratered their own economies in the process of building up import-substitution infrastructure, and negated the Russian energy blackmail threats).
Is this going to hinge on arguments that the US didn't go far enough to try to enforce some sort of global embargo on Russian exports- which it wouldn't have had the political capacity to do? Or that the Europeans continued to import energy from the Russians- when building the physical infrastructure to import from other sources was going to take time? Or that Russia is expanding its economic dependence on China- a factor which has led the Europeans to be far more concerned and willing to distance themselves from China than they were before?
Can I convince you to try old children's cartoon series, like the original Digimon Adventure anime?
Digimon was a 1999 children's monster anime from Japan centered around a group of children who meet at a summer camp and find themselves in another world. There they are met by monsters both friendly and not as they try to survive and understand the new world they find themselves in, even as their goal is to find their way back home and return to their families. The story follows the children's efforts to survive, which depends on their personal growth, their relationships with each other, and their partnership with the monster-partners who met them on arrival claiming to have been waiting for them from the start. The later is part of the mystery of the plot that unfolds over 54 episodes, each less than half and hour.
This was isekai before isekai became a power fantasy cliche, more Swiss Family Robinson than Sword Art Online. While the format of the show is a literal monster-of-the-week setup, at nearly every stage of the adventure the children are the underdogs running from a far, far more powerful adversary. Rather than an escapist fantasy from Japanese life, it is fundamentally a story of lost-and-seeking-to-return to home and family.
While the production quality is terribly dated by modern standards- late-90s era animation, pre-modern adaptation practices, etc.- it also had strong character writing. 'Came for the monsters, stayed for the children' is how I fondly remember it. Now, that is on the admittedly biased recollections of a children's show from literal decades ago, but japanese anime has (had?) that trait of sometimes smuggling better writing into anime than American children's media of the time.
(There are various sequel series- some direct sequels, some in other settings. The third series, Digimon Tamers, starts as more of an urban fantasy genre, but arguably is better polished due to a smaller character caste and thus more focus on individual character arcs over time.)
What makes me think this might be appropriate to your ask is that the series (or at least the earlier iterations) is that the series is fundamentally a bildungsroman- a narrative focusing on the protagonists' formative years and spiritual education.
The series is fundamentally a collection of character development stories, in which the monsters and the adventure are the framing device for the children to grow, with that maturation being the narrative payoff as much as the ultimate outcome of the adventure. This isn't a mere 'the power of friendship means we win' spiel either- the series takes an Aristotelian approach to character traits, in which a virtue can become a flaw both by its absence and its excess. And this struggle is the basis of character arcs that track the entire series, even as this process is central to the world-building system.
So I thought of this when I read your criteria.
By line...
I am looking for story where group of characters (family or friends) form together a group that is NOT dysfunctional.
I think this qualifies. The groups that form have internal conflicts, but they are conflicts that are worked through. When there is an enduring conflict, it is character-appropriate and often plot-significant.
As a bildungsroman, the story is characters forming into better people. This does mean they start as worse people, but this is generally in terms of 'good-faith kids who are out of their depth and not yet mature' rather than malicious / incompetent / immoral. There is a generally consistent sense of progression, as the character development of the episode is generally permanent going forward rather than something forgotten in the next episodes.
Them dealing with problematic/oppressive/bureaucratic/evil world is fine, in fact I want to have some conflict. On the other hand I do not want them to win effortlessly or get some insanely OP powers that invalidate any opposition. I do not want tragic/bad ending, I also do not want obvious 100% perfect absurd success thanks to blatant plot armor.
Digimon Adventure starts as a survival story in which the world is dangerous, but with heavy distinctions between evil, morally flawed, and dangerous. Most of the series entails the children on the run or otherwise hiding from the Big Bad.
I also want story to not feature blatantly stupid setting or characters that make no sense whatsoever. Initially I phrased it as "no unrealistic stuff" but I am in fact fine with dragon-flying slave traders as antagonists, as long as suspension of disbelief is achievable.
The series is an isekai. The nature of the isekai isn't exactly a meta-mystery (digimon = digital monsters), but is one to the character cast.
If you can adopt the lie of the isekai premise, it is consistent enough in that context. It reflects a now-archaic 'the internet as a wild new frontier, both dangerous and amazing' mentality rather than any current political concept like disinformation or some such.
I strongly prefer avoidance of current politics in either direction, I have seen remarkably few cases where it was done well. I also do not want books that would be recommended only due to current politics, quality of that is even worse.
The series is a Japanese series that predates the post-2000 culture war. It also predates the Japanese moe-phase or isekai-escapist trends of the late 2000s/2010s.
Story may be small scale.
As an episodic series, there are many smaller-scale stories within the larger plot. While there is a constant the-stakes-are-survival context from the start, many individual stories are fundamentally smaller-stakes, like imposter syndrome, overcoming personal failures and guilt, or familial challenges born of love and complication. There is even a story about trying to help a friend who is being scammed and feeling like you are being dragged down with them.
The series does grow in scale and stakes as the internal mysteries are developed, but they fundamentally start at much, much lower scale in their initial premise. The first series starts with a survive-and-return-home premise, and keeps that for most of the series.
(The urban-fantasy series 3 starts as 'how do I keep my baby dinosaur a secret and out of trouble' child's-secret-pet tale, before the real adventure is about trying to find a lost friend. Again, everything else is framing for small-at-heart struggles.)
...so, have I gotten you to consider watching a 25-year-old children's cartoon with terrible-by-modern-standards production levels for your serious fiction fix?
You could imagine the Trump administration just disappearing people they find annoying.
We could also imagine Trump wearing just a tutu, which would also be unseemly. Is there any particular reason to substantiate imagination?
If the courts are ICE's own, this emphasizes rather than undercuts the legal catch-22 characterization. Then this is not an issue of lack of authorities or fundamental human rights, but merely misfiled paperwork. If the issue is merely misfiled paperwork, then it may be a fuckup but hardly the most egregious or the most damaging of the last half decade, or even the last half year.
Note- I do buy into to the Court's position on the process issues. I am speaking instead on the basis of the political reaction.
Has Musk's DOGE Capacity to Cut Been Reined In By Trump?
Less importantly- did a prediction from a AAQC from last month play out already?
Last month (February 2025- it feels so long already), Elon Musk made the news and Motte discussion when he sent out an Office of Personnel Management (OPM) email where it directed employees respond back with 5 bullet points on what they did in the last week. Implicit in the demand was an 'or else' if they did not, or if their answers were unsatisfactory.
This caused what I believe is technically terms a 'kerfuffle,' and confusion across the US Federal Bureaucracy, which subsided (a bit) when institutional leaders provided their own guidance clarifying who did need to respond, and how. For example, the Secretary of Defense issued two rounds of guidance- first telling DOD civilians to not respond, and then later giving guidance on how to.
During the Motte discussions on it, I opined that I thought it might have been Musk overplaying his hand rather than 5D chess, since it started to establish boundaries on what Musk could, and could not, do without the support of the Secretaries and institutional heads that make up the rest of Trump's Cabinet.
Well, if a new New York Times article from yesterday is to be believed, that may have been what happened last Thursday- though the way the NYT tells it is emphasizing a lot more about fireworks between Musk and Secretary of State Rubio, who as I noted in a post on Dual Hatting government positions is the one who 'really' has been taking apart USAID.
(Yes, trusting the NYT is a bar to clear... but there is a reason why when people within the US government want to air dirty laundry that would be embarrassing to Republicans, they'd often like to go there first.)
Marco Rubio was incensed. Here he was in the Cabinet Room of the White House, the secretary of state, seated beside the president and listening to a litany of attacks from the richest man in the world.
Seated diagonally opposite, across the elliptical mahogany table, Elon Musk was letting Mr. Rubio have it, accusing him of failing to slash his staff.
You have fired “nobody,” Mr. Musk told Mr. Rubio, then scornfully added that perhaps the only person he had fired was a staff member from Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
Mr. Rubio had been privately furious with Mr. Musk for weeks, ever since his team effectively shuttered an entire agency that was supposedly under Mr. Rubio’s control: the United States Agency for International Development. But, in the extraordinary cabinet meeting on Thursday in front of President Trump and around 20 others — details of which have not been reported before — Mr. Rubio got his grievances off his chest.
Mr. Musk was not being truthful, Mr. Rubio said. What about the more than 1,500 State Department officials who took early retirement in buyouts? Didn’t they count as layoffs? He asked, sarcastically, whether Mr. Musk wanted him to rehire all those people just so he could make a show of firing them again. Then he laid out his detailed plans for reorganizing the State Department.
Mr. Musk was unimpressed. He told Mr. Rubio he was “good on TV,” with the clear subtext being that he was not good for much else. Throughout all of this, the president sat back in his chair, arms folded, as if he were watching a tennis match.
And how did Trump (allegedly) respond?
After the argument dragged on for an uncomfortable time, Mr. Trump finally intervened to defend Mr. Rubio as doing a “great job.” Mr. Rubio has a lot to deal with, the president said. He is very busy, he is always traveling and on TV, and he has an agency to run. So everyone just needs to work together.
The meeting was a potential turning point after the frenetic first weeks of Mr. Trump’s second term. It yielded the first significant indication that Mr. Trump was willing to put some limits on Mr. Musk, whose efforts have become the subject of several lawsuits and prompted concerns from Republican lawmakers, some of whom have complained directly to the president.
Cabinet officials almost uniformly like the concept of what Mr. Musk set out to do — reducing waste, fraud and abuse in government — but have been frustrated by the chain saw approach to upending the government and the lack of consistent coordination.
Thursday’s meeting, which was abruptly scheduled on Wednesday evening, was a sign that Mr. Trump was mindful of the growing complaints. He tried to offer each side something by praising both Mr. Musk and his cabinet secretaries. (At least one, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who has had tense encounters related to Mr. Musk’s team, was not present.) The president made clear he still supported the mission of the Musk initiative. But now was the time, he said, to be a bit more refined in its approach.
From now on, he said, the secretaries would be in charge; the Musk team would only advise.
Now, these are claims. But there are some claims that may (or may not) bolster your view of the article's claims, if you want to verify them yourself.
In a post on social media after the meeting, Mr. Trump said the next phase of his plan to cut the federal work force would be conducted with a “scalpel” rather than a “hatchet” — a clear reference to Mr. Musk’s scorched-earth approach.
Here's a link to an Axios article covering that.
Mr. Musk, who wore a suit and tie to Thursday’s meeting instead of his usual T-shirt after Mr. Trump publicly ribbed him about his sloppy appearance, defended himself by saying that he had three companies with a market cap of tens of billions of dollars, and that his results spoke for themselves.
This would be more telling, given Musk's signature style to date, but I'll admit I haven't gone diving for image evidence. I haven't seen any counter-claims that that suit-claim is false as a disprooof against these stories, however.
The article does not claim that Musk was only at odds with Rubio either.
But he [Musk] was soon clashing with members of the cabinet.
Just moments before the blowup with Mr. Rubio, Mr. Musk and the transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, went back and forth about the state of the Federal Aviation Administration’s equipment for tracking airplanes and what kind of fix was needed. Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, jumped in to support Mr. Musk.
Mr. Duffy said the young staff of Mr. Musk’s team was trying to lay off air traffic controllers. What am I supposed to do? Mr. Duffy said. I have multiple plane crashes to deal with now, and your people want me to fire air traffic controllers?
Mr. Musk told Mr. Duffy that his assertion was a “lie.” Mr. Duffy insisted it was not; he had heard it from them directly. Mr. Musk, asking who had been fired, said: Give me their names. Tell me their names.
Mr. Duffy said there were not any names, because he had stopped them from being fired. At another point, Mr. Musk insisted that people hired under diversity, equity and inclusion programs were working in control towers. Mr. Duffy pushed back and Mr. Musk did not add details, but said during the longer back and forth that Mr. Duffy had his phone number and should call him if he had any issues to raise.
Trump did allegedly have a characteristically Trumpian thing to contribute to this point- an expression that I wouldn't actually expect the NYT to be able to invent on its own.
The exchange ended with Mr. Trump telling Mr. Duffy that he had to hire people from M.I.T. as air traffic controllers. These air traffic controllers need to be “geniuses,” he said.
There are a few bits more, but the NYT article concludes-
Most cabinet members did not join the fray. Mr. Musk’s anger directed at Mr. Rubio in particular seemed to catch people in the room by surprise, one person with knowledge of the meeting said. Another person said Mr. Musk’s caustic responses to Mr. Duffy and Mr. Rubio seemed to deter other cabinet members, many of whom have privately complained about the Musk team, from speaking.
But it remains to be seen how long this new arrangement will last.
So. Thoughts.
Is this story true?
I find it plausible enough, though reasonable people may differ and I wouldn't be surprised if some distortions are in. Even setting aside credibility of the NYT as an institution, this is a pretty typical 'leak to the press to air grievances for personal advantage' type of story, and the person who is providing their own information has their own interest, even if the NYT reported what they heard 100% faithfully. It's not the NYT alone that's reporting the story either, for what that's worth.
Part of why I find it plausible is that I have been expecting something along these lines regardless- which might make it a confirmation bias vulnerability, but a bias is not the same as a fallacy. Musk has been making moves, but he has also been making moves against the interest of other secretaries and cabinet members. People taking that to the press should be expected, since Musk has rivals inside the government and not just outside.
Is this outcome expected?
I'd also say yes. The idea that Trump was going to side with Musk over everyone he paid political capital to appoint was about as reasonable as expecting Trump to fire those same people for not going along with DOGE. DOGE was not a blank check for Elon Musk.
I'd also say reining in Musk was also a way for Trump to assert himself in a not-burning-the-bridges fashion. The suit would be one such, as was discussed last week about the Ukraine-Zelensky respect/disrespect theme. Siding with Rubio or Duffy is another. Yes, it stings for Musk... but at the end of the day, Musk has had no formal government power beyond Trump's favor.
At the end of the day, DOGE's only power is the power that is inherent to, and supported by, the Chief Executive. But said Chief Executive also put other people in key positions for his purposes. Trump is always going to prioritize Trump's vision over Musk's, and those Secretaries will stay as long as they advance that, and so while Trump has a role for Musk, it will be on Trump's terms.
What does this mean going forward?
As predicted last month, expect to see DOGE working with and through, not around or over, the Cabinet Secretaries. Expect DOGE to shift from government destabilizer (your employees owe reports to us... or else) to external consultant (DOGE comes in, looks at data, and proposes things that the heads may or may not take up). DOGE will not go away, but it's relationship to agencies, and thus their federal employees, will change.
Elon isn't out, but he may be increasingly sidelined going forward. With the Secretaries being prioritized over DOGE, DOGE- as an institution- may have more visibility and presence than Musk himself. As long as it is the Secretaries who have the agenda-accepting, and thus agenda-setting, power of DOGE, Musk can't force the agenda. If he can't force the agenda, he'll only be present where he and the Secretaries agree he can / should be. And that, in turn, will depend on Musk's relationships... which, unsurprising in a field as full of primo donnas as politics, isn't ideal.
Watch out for a flame out- and encouragements for a flame out. While the articles on this cabinet meeting seem to emphasize that Trump isn't trying to push Elon out, that doesn't mean Elon won't self-combust on his own, or be 'encouraged' to it by hostile media coverage. Whatever you think of Elon's emotional stability on his medical routine, you should expect every disagreement to be a crisis, and every difference a chasm in coverage going forward. Elon's made political enemies on the left, and while he seems aware enough of Trump's political patronage, that doesn't mean he won't lash out if prodded, or even if not. As with many Musk achievements, expect it to be great and glorious and worse all in one.
And that is all. I was just surprised we hadn't covered this story yet here on the Motte, and- while not unexpected- might update some people's views on Trump's strategies as a disruptor, and the value of coming in with a big shock to make later and smaller measures easier to make.
Jeroboam and you both seems unfamiliar with governmental budgetary practices. The order of money allocation does alleviate a falsely accused injustice because the order of money allocation renders the charge baseless.
FEMA cannot be swindled out of $300 million if FEMA never had $300 million that could be allocated for other purposes. If the money is only appropriated to FEMA for the purpose of migrant support, it'd be more accurate to say FEMA received $300 million more than it otherwise would have with the potential for ancillary benefits of dual-utilization investments that would be absent Congress had chosen another agency to help disperse the appropriated funds. Since American budgets work more along the lines of Purpose -> Funds -> Agency rather than Agency -> Funds -> Purpose, it is wrong to claim spending on one cause stole from another, even by the same agency, unless those are specifically the same funding line.
Since gaining $300 million you otherwise wouldn't have but for the action has considerably different moral and ethical implications than losing $300 million you could have used but for the action, this would if anything be the opposite of a swindle.
This is the distinction between an appropriation and an allocation.
Dean
Flairless
3mo ago
Equivalent to the Pope claiming Catholicism is the one true way. If he wasn't saying that, he wouldn't be the Pope.
Hannia's brand is basically to present himself as the much neglected wiseman that the right should be listening to. Leveraging this self-styled reputation is how he makes money.
Dean
Flairless
3mo ago
Early 2000s anime had some interesting takes on internet implications. It's something of a time capsule- plenty of acknowledgement of danger / risk / threat (viruses as monsters, etc.), but also mystery / ambiguous potential.
Sword Art really ruined the genre by turning it pure isekai MMO power fantasy.
That's who I'm blaming, anyway.
Did the other guy provide proof that he sent the contract?
Since everything is looking like a Trump win now, what are your actual predictions for the trajectory of the Ukraine war?
Mostly the same trajectory as the last year: Russia continues to make slow, steady, and small gains in the Donbas while continuing to overheat its economy, western aid comes in fits disrupted by internal politics, and the Ukrainians continue not to cascade-collapse. Some pro forma attempt at peace talks are attempted, but Russia's inability to compel war termination, the wrong-actor coordination issue of various Russian war demands, and Putin's own habit for strategic procrastination in hopes of a more favorable deal later lead to the failure of talks and a more or less continued western sustainment of Ukraine. Already-underway western industrial expansion continues, and starts to approach Russian production of some key items (particularly artillery ammo), but falls behind 2023 predictions of the 2025 catch-up because of (a) implementation issues in 2023/2024 and (b) the addition of major North Korean arms flows into Russia.
On looser predictions of what 'new' things happen... Putin attempts new and probably counter-productive pressure efforts to try and coerce the Europeans / US into concessions but which also further undermine casefire prospects. If Russia manages to seize the administrative boundaries of the Donbas, Putin attempts to declare a unilateral ceasefire and end the war declaring it won and that Russia would only be fighting in self defense, but I also expect any such effort to fall flat and Russia to attempt to build coercive leverage by attacking elsewhere, further undermining ceasefire prospects. European aid efforts shift as Europeans deal with consequences of Trump. What those shifts mean varies from country to country, but efforts led by France at least to consolidate European military aid at an EU level in the name of European strategic autonomy.
As for talks themselves... maybe late 2025, but probably inconclusive.
Trump is a wild card, but less because there's any particular reason to believe that Trump would cut supplies to force a truce and more that he's been deliberately unforthcoming and his margin of winning from last night means he has previously-non-existing incentives to continue support.
That narrative that Trump would compel a truce is largely based on the reporting covering two non-Trump Trump advisors whose Ukraine proposal was included limits to aid if Ukraine refused to participate in talks, but which also included a lot more aid for Ukraine in general and conditioned nothing on accepting terms Russia was willing to agree to. In short, viewer projection is required to assume what Trump's view of a reasonable deal is, and that the Russian offer would meet it, and that Trump would / could compel Ukraine to accept it, and most of these viewer perceptions were deliberately shaped so during the US election season.
By contrast, Trump has not expressed his own view of Ukraine war termination in any meaningful way in the last two years, and probably won't for another half-year yet as Trump's political priorities are domestic rather than foreign. For Trump to prioritize Ukraine means putting it ahead not only of Israel-Palestine, which he had a personal hand in due to the Israel-Arab normalization efforts he led, but also domestic priorities including domestic agency staffing and removing Biden/Obama opponents. This is not 2016 where Trump thought the opposition would go away, and I have not heard a compelling reason why Trump should care more about ending Ukraine than other issues, particularly when tying support to Ukraine to his own domestic priorities is probably the most credible way of breaking the Democratic attempts at party unity.
My personal prediction is that this is actually the main interest that will motivate Trump regarding Ukraine, and will push him to provide aid conditional on Democratic policy concessions rather than conditional on Ukrainian acceptance of Russian terms. The Ukraine (and to a lesser extent, Gaza) wars will complicate Democrat efforts to recreate the 2016 maximum-anti-trump opposition stance, since that iteration lacked the Ukraine (or Gaza) wars that the ruling party could frame budgetary opposition to as hindering. With the Democrats deeply divided by the Gaza War, and heavily politically invested in the Ukraine War, supporting funding will be a way to break off Democrats to support / bolster narrow Republic majorities, which in turn gives Trump more leeway within the Republican coalition.
Since that will be most relevant in fiscal year budget negotiations, which will be taking place across mid-2025, and which also provide the negotiating leverage of Ukrainian aid to raise against Russia, I wouldn't expect Trump to make a priority of Ukraine until fall 2025 at the earliest.
Further- and even more important to the timing- is the Europeans.
Just from a Putin acceptable-terms perspective, Putin is a strategic procrastinator who often delays when he thinks he can wait out a foe for better conditions and thus better terms. This will most notably come with the end-of-September 2025 German elections, in which the current pro-Ukraine coalition will likely be replaced with something... well, more plausibly less pro-Ukraine. My position across 2024 was that Russian was over-extending its economy and military expenditures (including manpower, material, and monetary) in unsustainable ways to maximize perceived Russian gains in a period of relative industrial advantage and to hopefully shape elections (such as the US one). This same line of logic applies into 2025 for the German as well- the industrial gap momentum will possibly be reversing by the end of 2025, providing the window of relative advantage, and the Germans are the key stakeholders in the European Union budget providing equally-critical economic assistance. Whatever Trump may / may not be willing try to compel, Ukraine could likely be compelled to concede more with a less favorable German government.
So this means that 'serious' talks won't occur until likely until November 2025, when (a) the nature of the new German government has been identified and thus a sense of how much Putin can push for on that end, and (b) when Trump has been able to make political hay out of Ukraine aid to divide Democrats and bolster his domestic priorities.
Post-Posting Major Edit: And in other news that may throw this entirely out of whack, within hours of posting this the German government entered a stability crisis when the German Chancellor fired the Finance Minister, setting the ground for a snap election. This obviously changes the previous predicted timeline reasoning, as a snap election could be held in January-March, but removes the October delay incentive.
I maintain the premise that peace talks in the year are dependent on currently unknown factors (i.e. Trump), but this now also depends on the results of the German governing coalition come Spring.
In the spirit of 'what American culture war development aren't we talking about because of the Trump tariffs,' might I offer...
Trump Goes After the (Largely Democratic) Federal Government Labor Unions
On 27 March, Trump signed an executive order titled the "EXCLUSIONS FROM FEDERAL LABOR-MANAGEMENT RELATIONS PROGRAMS." That is pretty vague, and I wouldn't blame anyone who doesn't recognize what it says inside either.
The (very) short version is that this executive order formally determines various executive agencies "to have as a primary function intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work." This is the criteria that allows an exception to normal public sector union formation rights and so on. (You don't want the military or CIA to form a union in case it decides to strike, after all.) That might make sense in principle. What may raise eyebrows are some of the additions.
Newly added agencies determined to have a 'primary function' as national security work or otherwise, include-
- 1-401. The Department of State.
- 1-403. The Department of the Treasury, except the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.
- 1-405. The Department of Justice.
- 1-412. The Environmental Protection Agency.
- 1-415. The National Science Foundation. *etc.
...and you hopefully get the gist. A number of not-usually-considered-national-security departments and agencies have gotten determined to be so. Which, by the law as written, the President can do. Which means also that the public union rules and rights don't apply.
Who does this matter?
Well, for one, public sector unions political action committees (PACs) donate overwhelmingly to the democratic party. $12.5 million vs. $1.6 million in 2023-2024. That's small in absolute political money terms, but shows a significant difference in union institutional support.
But more importantly, about half of all union members in the United States are public sector union members. That's about 7 million public sector members versus 14.3 million total. Further, the ratio of unionization is completely lopsided. Only about 5% (1-in-20) of the public sector employees in the US are unionized. About 33% (1-in-3) of public sector employees are unionized. That's all public-sector unions, mind you, not just the federal government. There are only about 1 million federal public union employees, so 1-in7 of the public sector employees. That's about 14% of public sector employees, or 7% of total union employees. And not all of those will be caught in this recategorization.
Still- last week Trump put in motion a wrecking ball that seems primed to take a major chunk out of what was once a foundational pillar of the of the post-New Deal Democratic party alliance. It seems also likely to defang / weaken some potential internal resistance organizers within the Federal government, which I suspect was the more immediate motive as Trump attempts to shrink the federal work force. But as far as far as the union implications...
Well, not everyone likes public sector unions. Arch-MAGA personality Franklin Delano Roosevelt warned against public sector unions, on grounds that the government couldn't negotiate with itself. The case against public sector unions has been made for many decade. I'll let people read those takes and have their own opinions. What's more important is that these arguments are not new, but have never made significant traction... until last week.
Reactions have broadly been overwhelmed by the media coverage of last week's tariffs and other Trumpian news cycles. The right-leaning City Journal lauds the effort thought it conceeds some of the classifications are a stretch.. The left-leaning Jacobin calls on unions to make a "militant" response. Somehow, I don't think that will exactly dissuade trump, but we will see.
Will this go to court? Already has. Are plaintiff unions liable to find sympathetic judges in the DC district court, where 11 of the 15 district judges were appointed by Obama or Biden? Probably.
Will they win? I don't know.
But I think this does add another bit of evidence that Trump's chaos has some deliberate intent that often gets lost in the media chaos that follows him.
Dean
Flairless
3mo ago
Kulak is LARPing an imagined history, not reading the historical texts that he actually refers to. The ancients were extremely conscious of the perils of violence, and, though not always uncomplicatedly, prized mercy and reconciliation as well.
Kulak has made LARPing a revolutionary his financial income. Back in the Canadian trucker protests he made repeated calls to resistance and violence and called it a moral failing for any man not to risk death or hospitalization for the righteous cause... while begging exception since he was already in a hospital for a medical procedure. Gotta look out for you own health first, right?
Alas, any cause that warrants risking hospitalization to prove virtue is worth leaving a hospital that you might be returned to.
Kulak is a modern day version of the man with their rocking chair by the fire who valorizes the virtue of fighting and glory of dying young to defend hearth and home.
Dean
Flairless
10mo ago
I was about to say the Ukraine War, but then you said it had to involve another Great Power.
Cheek aside, this is just categorical gerrymandering. It's a subjective answer which hinges on the conception of a great power is (it would be definitionally impossible for western elites to win a great strategic victory against great powers if all the great powers are on the same team), what a strategic victory entails, and then adding a qualifier of power disparities that basically applies to no one (the Russians / Chinese haven't been in a war against a great power since WW2 either) but is treated as a mark of failure to only some (the lack of a victory over a GP is evidence of western elite failure) even though the same metric could be used as evidence of competence / succession (western elites successfully accomplished goals without needing a direct GP war).
Dean
Flairless
10mo ago
So, anyone have a read on what a realistic ceasefire deal looks like? Does one exist? Is anyone serious mooting one around in the world of think tanks?
'Realistic' by who's standard?
One of the many issues of a ceasefire is that it hinges on people making realistic demands to people who can deliver on them. To date, the Russians haven't indicated either, creating a tangle of un-deliverable expectations to people who can't deliver them.
As a result, non-Russian ceasefire chatter inevitably requires assuming the Russians will selectively drop various declared conditions, with which conditions the Russians will drop changing based on the biases of the speculator.
Ukraine's winning scenarios have run out at this point. The abortive and telegraphed offensive ate up too much time and material for them to win in any conventional sense. Prigozhin might have been the Black Swan they needed, but he pussied out. The Russian economy is showing no signs of collapse. Some point to a Wunderwaffen or to some chart that shows NATO production coming online at a faster pace from 2025 onward, but I doubt that will make a material difference. Ukraine is basically hoping for a Russian collapse as a result of some as-yet-unknown cause, which is not impossible, but not much of a strategy.
That's certainly a take. Alternatively, Ukraine is no more on the edge of collapse than it has been constantly claimed to be since 2022 and in some respects considerably further away, 2024 has been generally unsurprising and consistent with forecasts made in 2023 bar a far greater expansion in Western comfort in Ukrainian weapon use against the Russians, no one who was unsurprised at Russia not collapsing in 2022-2023 was expecting it to collapse in 2024-2025 either, and the Russian manpower strategy is showing its limits even under the 'just pay more' paradigm.
As a result, absent some collapse of the Ukrainian nation-state (possibly some sort of mass exodus from a power grid collapse, as seems to be a reoccuring Russian point in the witners), the Ukrainians remain on track to continue the many-year process of attriting the Russian's Soviet Inheritance that serves as the military-economic center of gravity of Russia's ability to field larger armies and pose a strategic offensive threat.
Russia's odds of winning much more than what they have so far seem longer still. They're hoping Ukraine just gives up, but that might be longer odds than a Russian collapse, as Ukrainian psychopathic nationalism seems more systemic rather than oriented around a single individual.
Russia's strategy is not that Ukraine gives up, it is that the Americans stop supporting the Ukrainians and push the Europeans to stop supporting the Ukrainians until the Ukrainian state lacks the economic and military capacity to resist.
Calling Ukrainian nationalism pschopathic seems rather shallow as a pejorative goes, particularly given the lack of equivalent for Russia despite Russia' various policies in the war to date.
Neither side is going to win the kind of victory that will make good their losses. So how is a ceasefire outlined that will deliver a lasting peace?
Lasting ceasefires hinge on some combination of a belief in the other party's intentions, and an evaluation of their capabilities. Due to Putin's lack of credibility, a ceasefire acceptable to the Ukrainians and Europeans will be built on Russia's loss of long-term capabilities vis-a-vis the Europeans, who both want Russia to lose the Soviet inheritance and to build their own military production capability so that post-war Russia can't out-arm them.
This is not the structure Putin has in mind at this time, however- Putin almost certainly believes the Americans are the hyperagent whose decision will be decisive, that the Soviet stocks are so indefinite that they are functionally infinite, that if he can de facto control the de jure territory of the separatists oblasts then he can compel western parties to accept the Russian annexation of those regions, and that as part of a peace deal Russia can economically re-connect with Europe and end the various sanction regimes / get back the frozen war chest assets.
This is unlikely to happen, but Putin is also a strategic procrastinator, and absent a critical disaster is likely to keep delaying any decision on EU-acceptable concessions in hopes that one more election cycle in the US / Germany / EU may do the trick.
As a result, the war will likely continue for years more, easily beyond 2026. Putin is likely to try for some sort of negotiations in 2025 with the new US president regardless who wins. It will probably fail due to the difference in the politically acceptable positions between what Putin is willing to offer and what the US/west would be able to legislatively deliver, but he will then hold out hope that the 2026 mid-terms might shape the US president's position. It would be the end of the 2026 campaign season before the results were realized, and by 2027 the prospects of the next cycles will offer the next excuse to procrastinate.
Dean
Flairless
1mo ago
This is all occurring while the Democrats have loudly signaled, and been mocked relentlessly for, plans to find inroads into the minds of young men.
On one hand, I can understand this, but on the other, I have to question the idea that somehow young, disengaged, skeptical men will respond positively if the Democrats only... checks notes... force paid advertisements into youtube videos, in-game video game ads, and sports and gaming podcasts.
These are three hobby spaces that are notoriously known for being escapist hobby vectors for people who do not want to be bothered with Serious Things. Paid ads are not exactly popular in any of them, and the anti-ad industry that, by its nature, is skeptical of establishment forces (that would prefer such bypasses not exist).
One of those spaces in particlar- video gaming spaces- was the subject of a multi-year culture war in which Democratic party allies circled the wagons against a non-trivial part of the consumer base who, among other grievances, felt their hobby space was being encroached upon by partisans who didn't care for them.
It really begs the question of if the person making the proposal had any awareness of Gamergate back in the day, or if they remember the progressive framing but think this is a good idea anyway, or... just what this is supposed to be besides a grift for a wave of blocked/skipped ads that people allready block/skip in mass.
The general irony of the post, but this line in particular, is the Christmas present I didn't know I needed. Truly it could only have come from a self-identified Australian who regularly cites Chinese tiktok as a representative and reliable source of information, who has been an impassioned advocate of deferring to American geopolitical offensive-realists, and whom routinely uses collective self-identification terms with American and European audiences from nearly the literal opposite side of the globe.
(Another irony for non-Australians in the audience being that if you are to rely on the Ranger's opinions to shape your own, you would be opening yourself to treachery and manipulation from a foreigner, the best way to guard against being to disregard any foreigner's opinions. Self-negating advocacy at its most unintentional.)
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