Dean
Flairless
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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.
Dean
Flairless
6mo ago
Yes, though it's less about weapons than regulation affecting coordination.
Timothy McVeigh's truck bomb was made with large amounts of agricultural fertilizer, diesel fuel, and other elements, many of which would normally be seen together. It also occurred in 1995, where the internet was reaching a point to facilitate cross-country and cross-agency coordination, which is how an 'untraceable' purchase- the anomalous cash purchase of his vehicle- became the investigation's cue that he was a primary suspect (as opposed to someone whose vehicle might have been stolen for the plot).
This applies to other examples and cases, including drug processing. As a result, it's a pretty common practice internationally that stores that carry regulated materials of interest (ie truck bomb or illegal drug precursor inputs) have to maintain and report transactions of even legal/unrestricted items at certain thresholds. When certain thresholds or combinations are met- say you start buying tons of agricultural fertilizer when you aren't in the business of farming- then a system flag registers and later a regulator and/or investigator comes to ask a few questions, possibly with a warrant if you aren't feeling cooperative.
What this means for terrorism is that would-be terrorists have to resort to less and less capable alternatives to avoid automated detection thresholds, as the things more capable are also more regulated and easier to detect. Hence our fireworks car bomb rather than a fertilizer car bomb, or Britain facing knife-attacks rather than gun attacks. But these alternatives are less regulated precisely because they are less dangerous, and you get to a point where even actual IEDs- like to pressure cooker bombs used in the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 kill fewer people (3) than just driving a vehicle into a crowd.
This is a similar effect from the role of domestic surveillance technologies used to limit the ability of terrorist cells, and leading to lone wolf terrorism.
If you can monitor mass communications, you can pick up the coordination messaging between group members.
If group members can't coordinate, either they find more secure forms of communication- losing the benefits of the higher-tech comms (such as coordination over distances, access to experts/advisors)- or they decrease the number of members in a group (fewer members = fewer potential comms).
Since the lowest number of members is 1- who by definition has no need to actively coordinate with anyone else- this makes that person very hard to detect in the coordination phase. Typically reports of found would-be lone wolfs either find them in the radicalization phase (where you watch whose talking with radicalizers), or in the preparation phase (where they get caught due to poor tradecraft due to not having the coordination with advisors on what to do and how).
Start stacking these effects together, and gradually you go from 'a group of middle eastern terrorists coordinating how to hijack a series of airplanes simultaneously' to 'guy rents truck.'
Has the DOGE Buyout/Firing Campaign Been Setup for This Year's US Budget Negotiations?
In 'culture war developments easily missed in interesting times,' around 60% of the US Department of Justice Civil Rights Division is expected to resign rather than stick around for the Trump administration's change of focus on civil rights priorities.
To quote the set-up...
"No one has been fired by me … but what we have made very clear last week in memos to each of the 11 sections in the Civil Rights Division is that our priorities under President Trump are going to be somewhat different than they were under President Biden," Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, told conservative commentator Glenn Beck during an appearance on his show at the weekend.
"And then we tell them, these are the President's priorities, this is what we will be focusing on—you know, govern yourself accordingly. And en masse, dozens and now over 100 attorneys decided that they'd rather not do what their job requires them to do."
Over a 100 is vague. 100 lawyers isn't cheap, but scale matters. How does this compare to the office?
There were around 380 lawyers in the civil rights division when Trump returned to office in January, according to The New York Times. The newspaper, citing unofficial estimates of the number of people planning to resign by Monday's deadline, reported the division would soon have about 140 attorneys or possibly even fewer.
140 of 380 is a 37% retention rate.
63% turnover is an organizational-culture-destroying amount. Just in terms of base-load responsibilities dropped as no longer supportable, an organization is fundamentally changed on what the members expect to do. If the organizational mission shifts...
Newsweek's 'Why It Matters' frames the difference in focus.
Why It Matters
The DOJ's civil rights division, founded after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, initially focused on protecting the voting rights of Black Americans. But Congress later expanded its responsibilities to include protecting Americans from discrimination on the basis of race, national origin, sex, disability, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity and military status.
But Dhillion reportedly issued a series of memos earlier in April detailing the division would be focusing on priorities laid out in Trump's executive orders, such as the participation of transgender athletes in women's sports, combating antisemitism and ending diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
Obviously the framings are their own, and may / may not properly characterize what was done / what will be done.
This article, and a few others this week as the second-round buyout tallies come in, are raising the implications of the upcoming US federal... 'exodus' is probably too strong a term, though appropriate in the DOJ Civil Rights division. 'Buyout' is more accurate
You may remember the initial DOGE buy-out from February, which about 75,000 Federal Employees took. The general offer was pay and benefits through September, the end of the fiscal year. This was less than the desired target (about 3.5% of work force to a 5-10% target), and was part of the general legal injunctions as it and other firing actions were taken to court.
Last month, the Trump administration offered a second round of buyouts, and media reporting from the last week suggests the court-confusion / insecurities / etc. have let more to take the offer. In the USDA, less than 4,000 took the initial buyout offer, but over 11,000 have taken the second. It's unclear how typical this is- I didn't find many first and second round stats at this time- but it does suggest that the last three months have increased, not decreased, the Trump administration's ability to shake the federal bureacracy.
A (non-supportive) Politico E&E article reviewing different agencies affected emphasizes not just numbers, but levels of departees, with an emphasis on more senior personnel. While the article emphasizes ways that will hurt Trump's policy agendas, I suspect many of the red tribe will see this 'problems' more ranging from 'acceptable costs' to 'good.'
For example, when the article raises-
While Trump administration officials have applauded the staff downsizing as a much-needed curtailing of federal bloat, former and current employees say the overhaul is driving a historic loss of institutional knowledge. The losses could be hard to reverse, damaging the government’s ability to craft and implement energy and environmental policy for years to come, they warned. Potentially, the personnel losses could also undermine the president’s pursuit of his “energy dominance” agenda.
-I suspect the Trumpian right doubts the personnel lost would have supported rather than undermined Trump's agenda anyway. That may be an inaccurate doubt, or at least not universally justified across every buy-out departee, but it is a foreseeable consequence of the Resistance strategy played in the first trump administration.
Other quotable quotes by agency include-
“You can’t understate the expertise and institutional knowledge we’re losing,” said one career staffer at the Department of Energy. “Directors and senior leaders who have run programs and offices that release hundreds of millions of dollars annually.”
A sweep of resignations and retirements have emptied key leadership posts across Interior bureaus and agencies like the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service, forcing other employees to take on the managerial responsibilities in an “acting” capacity, according to internal documents viewed by E&E News.
Thousands of workers leaving the DOE are spread across the department, working on bolstering the U.S. electric grid, deploying renewables, meeting national climate goals and even building out Trump’s own agenda around supply chains. Career staffers inside the agency say the losses are hitting policy offices hard,
(EPA) But as the Trump administration heralds plans for an unparalleled series of regulatory rollbacks, one former top official predicts that the exodus could hamstring efforts to turn that agenda into reality. “It’s going to be very difficult to get anything done,” said Stan Meiburg, whose 39-year career at the agency included a stint as acting deputy administrator from 2014 to 2017.
Speaking to the North American Agricultural Journalists on Monday, Bonnie said he worries many other senior employees are on the way out as well, including Forest Service employees qualified to work on wildfire mitigation.
Overall, Reuters estimates that about 260,000 federal workers- over a quarter of a million- have been fired, taken a buyout, or retired early since Trump came into office.
So, what else does this mean, besides an increase in job applications for DOGE-scrutinized federal workers?
I think this buy-out process is best understood in a similar light- as a deliberate culture-change strategy to change the institutional culture of the Executive Branch administrative state. You can even see the outlines a corporate turnover strategy.
I've noted before the organizational-culture implications of the Trump administration trying to relocate federal agencies out of the hyper-blue DC area to other places in the country.
I submit that the current government curtailment efforts look to have been part of a deliberate phased process to reach this buy-out point in preparation for the mid-2025 budget negotiations.
End-Jan: At the end of January (29Jan), the initial buyout-offer was made and set to expire on 6 Feb. This was the initial offer. It would receive some court resistance. As previously addressed, it didn't get as much traction as the Administration wanted.
Feb: February is the month of DOGE fear, starting with the USAID takedown. I wrote in February about how the takedown and releases were enabled by the dual-hatting mechanics of Secretary of State Rubio becoming USAID director. This was a unique legal dynamic due to USAID's specific legal structure, but it served to create insecurity in the work force. Similar dynamics like the OPM '5 bullets' email. Requirements for complaince build credibility in DOGE-threats.
March: Transition from DOGE-fear to Secretary Management. In mid-march, Trump signals that DOGE will take a supporting role to the department heads. This was conveyed in the time as Musk having his wings clipped. How much was stage-managed kabuki theater is up for debate. Regardless, Department heads are now 'backed by' DOGE-threats, without having had to make the threats themselves.
March-April: Early Trump lawfare as efforts at initial cuts / firings / etc. are resisted in public and in the courts. While courts create setbacks for Trump, this actually increases uncertainty overall. Trump is able to get enough wins enough of the time such that the threat of reductions in force (RIFs) / future firings are credible.
April: Buyout 2.0 offered. The anti-Trump resistance in the courts gets ominous foreshadowing that the Supreme Court may strictly limit the sort of injunctions being used to stop Trump's federal efforts. As the public chaos / pressure over jobs occurs, more federal employees take the buyout.
May: On 1 May, Trump announces his budget priorities for FY 2026. This includes cutting $163 billion from various US government programs, with the NYT choosing its highlights.
May now: Here we are
So, where does the clickbait title come in?
Basically, the next few months are the typical annual US budget negotiation season. Its far from the only thing going on, but the first federal budget of a new president is kind of a big deal. It's where the new administration goes from inheriting the policy priorities of the previous administration to making their own, and this year in particular is the start of a (probably brief) Republican trifecta. The US entered a (somewhat surprising) rest-of-the-year budget stability when back in March Senate Minority Leader Schumer decided to support Trump's spending bill out of concern of the increased power Trump would get if there was no budget or only continuing resolutions.
I bring this up now, because the DOGE-Buyout plan is, itself, a lever / tool in the next year budget cycle, where Congress discusses not just budgets, but manpower authorizations for agencies.
Government shutdown politics change when there a quarter-of-a-million fewer federal employees suddenly out of work and not getting paid. Federal employees out of work are free to do stuff. Ex-Federal employees go on with their non-federal jobs. The bigger the federal bureacracy, the more painful it is to get into these kind of fights. On the other hand, the smaller, the easier.
Position vacancies are also a big implication for program cuts. It's politically easier for Congressional negotiators to cut billets / positions / parts of agencies that are currently (or will be predictably) empty than parts that are filled. Part of the reason few things are as hard to end as a temporary government program is because there is a person whose job is on the line, and a department supervisor whose authorities / money / personal influence network hinges on the people they have. These are not the only obstacles, but they are diminished when relevant leaders take a buyout and aren't there to advocate to the death.
This is particularly true when partisans negotiate over politically sensitive institutions that a former partisan 'owner' may or may not want to see fall into 'enemy hands.' The DOJ Civil Rights Division, for example, has a reputation for being Democrat-aligned in political sympathies. It was 380 lawyers, and is expected to go down to 180 lawyers. That is a 200-lawyer gap.
Does an arch-progressive true-blue Democrat really want to insist in the DOJ-authorization bill that Trump must hire 200 lawyers to get back to 380 lawyers? Even though that will almost certainly mean 200 red-tribe lawyers who now form a majority of the civil rights division?
Or do they maybe feel that 180 mostly-old-guard lawyers are preferable, and deny Trump the influence of reshaping CRD composition? Hoping that- next presidency- they can re-expand the government service?
Even if that happens, my final point is that nothing that's going on right now is so easily reversed as the next administration in 4 years simply going 'reverse all that.' Even if an alternate Democratic trifecta emerges with the next Dem president, things will have changed.
- Buyouts and early retirements are removing a lot of the institutional knowledge from the Blue tribe favored programs, and thus ability to recreate as-were
- Former federal employees will be either long-gone or long-since employed elsewhere, mitigating the the potential flow-back population
- DC-divestments will make it harder for the sort of geographic-socialization to create a social consensus across as many agencies
- Blue-tribe distrust in red tribe institutions will complicate 'rehabilitation' when the distrust is at a composition and not just leadership level
- Even future anti-Trump/anti-MAGA purges of 'red' bureaucracies will only make the institutions more vulnerable to further changes
However these dynamics play out, I suspect the Trump administration's effects will still be felt decades from now. But this year of DOGE so far has been setting the stage for the budget negotiations that will make these changes far more long-term than they would otherwise be.
(Finally- none of this is any sort of dispute / counter / negation of the warning/accusation/predictions that the federal drawdown will hinder Trump or the Republicans in predictable/unflattering/unhelpful ways in the future. To quote H. L. Mencken, Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.)
Do We Live In the Dankest Timeline?
Or
Is the United States Going to (Re)Join the British Commonwealth?
(Probably not, but this is funny.)
Earlier this month, @hydroacetylene gave a flattering compliment about how if he ever lucked into power, he'd consider me for an advisor. However, I deferred at the time and now must formally defer in favor of another Motte poster, who has a geopolitical creativity I would never have thought of despite dropping their hints in ways that only most perfidious minds of Albion could make appear unserious at the time.
Specifically-
@FiveHourMarathon, care to explain how you convinced King Charles that all he had to do was just ask Trump to join the British Commonwealth?
Because according to Trump... Sounds Good!
More seriously(?), emerging reporting of the hour(s) is that Trump has pre-empted (via his Truth Social, no less) a planned-but-not-yet-extended invitation by the British government to bring the US into a voluntary association agreement with the Commonwealth of Nations, aka the British Commonwealth, aka the post-British empire talking club.
As a geopolitical unit, the British Commonwealth... isn't? The wiki page summarizes obligations as-
Member states have no legal obligations to one another, though some have institutional links to other Commonwealth nations. Commonwealth citizenship affords benefits in some member countries, particularly in the United Kingdom, and Commonwealth countries are represented to one another by high commissions rather than embassies. The Commonwealth Charter defines their shared values of democracy, human rights and the rule of law,[12] as promoted by the quadrennial Commonwealth Games.
A no-obligation talking club isn't the worst thing in international politics. It offers a channel to communicate, nice summit opportunities, and engagement opportunities. Not much, but not nothing either.
So... why now?
The Independent speculates-
Having America joining the Commonwealth, even as an associate member, could be a way for Charles to smooth over tensions between Washington, London and Ottawa that have erupted over Trump’s frequently-stated desire to make Canada — a Commonwealth founding member and one of the 15 nations that still counts the King as head of state — the 51st American state rather than the fully independent nation it has been since the 1982 Canadian constitution removed the country’s vestigial legal dependence on the British parliament.
Would Commonwealth-association defuse the trade war? Probably not.
But it will be a heck of a funny if the British government tries to run with this opportunity(?) of a generation.
It will also be funny to watch how European (social) media covers this story, if it goes anywhere. A significant policy effort by the Europeans of late has been to try and get the current Labour government more and more involved with EU projects vis-a-vis US engagements. This is... not necessarily a reversal, but at the same time anything that lets the UK play the US of the EU (or vice versa) complicates efforts at reversing British disentanglement from the EU that followed Brexit.
Plus, the memes will be funny.
I imagine some British foreign policy experts (cough @FiveHourMarathon cough) have an interesting weekend ahead of them from this Trump tweet-leak.
Yes. I would re-emphasize the 'part' as in 'is not the whole,' but I would consider it a significant part of the rise of Trump in the Republican party, and later Trump's rise in the broader American electorate.
I don't think you're asking if such tactics were used in the culture-war, so I'll just gloss over the basic point with re-stating that emotional pressures were not only used, but often major elements of the culture war. One of the psychological points of a twitter mob or cancellation campaign is the public shaming ritual dynamic, a significant point of the progressive stack concept is to re-align emotional sympathies for whoever claims the best position deserving of public support against others, and a key function of the 'lived experience' justification was that one's personal views and emotions were on their own basis for deferrence and grounds to dismiss counter points. Resisting these techniques requires resisting the prioritization of emotional appeals / pressures intended to change your position.
For the Republicans, Trump's rise in republican circles was part of a voter-base revolt against what one of our former posters called the Republican patrician class- the Republican elites including the Bush-Cheney dynasties, the Romneys, and other dominant parts of the party in the pre-Trump era. They had been dominant in part because of their alliance with the evangelical / religious-interest wings of the party, i.e. the moralizers of the right. Just from an intra-republican power struggle perspective, Republican party culture would need to develop cultural antibodies to defy and dismiss the religious right moralists (who were a very significant force in the early 2000s, albeit running out as a national movement by that point).
What made the Patrician class discredited to the Republican base, beyond just technocratic failures such as Iraq or the 2008 financial crisis, was their reputation / perception for compromising on Republican base positions for the sake of left-framing media coverage. This was the model of Republican Party wants position A, left-aligned media raises sympathy argument against position A and dares patrician polity to do the unsympathetic thing, Patrician folds / strikes a compromise legislation which trades away base interests for [thing the base doesn't care as much about]. Base was then told it was necessary / just / moral / the best they could expect.
Trump's surge in the Republican primaries for the 2016 cycle was in large part because he was willing to fight on despite to moral condemnations. This was most notable on the topic of immigration, where Trump would do things like counter 'think of the innocent and desperate refugees' with 'rapists and criminals.' This itself was a politized distortion of the full quote, but the reason the quote was a Trump success rather than a slam dunk is because it demonstrated Trump was willing to defy the sympathy-paradigm that was trying to be used. A similar point exists for the failure of the Clinton campaign's October surprise of the lockerroom talk tapes. It could only fail because the electorate was not moved by the attempts to incite and manipulate them via emotional instigation. In other words, the American electorate was sharing in the cultural antibodies against that sort of shame-and-disavow technique.
As the culture war continued, my view is that this tendency got stronger. It's been further by the discreditation of technocrats in the COVID crisis, and with it those covid policy justifications that often ran on emotional appeals (hug a chinese person to show you're not racist; don't protest against covid restrictions because think of others; protest despite covid restrictions for cause more deserving emotional support). But it was also discredited by the people often conveying those emotional appeals (particularly media intermediaries) themselves being discredited as a class, for- among other reasons- pretty transparent attempts to manipulate for political interests. (The conformist pressures against anyone who raised the Biden age-electability issues; the manufactured joy to try and build Harris support during the period of the campaign which ended shortly after she had to commit to public speaking.)
It's a dynamic I feel is visible now with Trump's disruptions to the American federal government, like the shutdown of USAID. This is a policy that is popular despite the stories by anti-Trump/pro-USAID medias about those in desperate need abroad, or think of the former government workers who are living in uncertainty, and so on. These are empathy / sympathy appeal stories. They also are not changing the general electorate- and by extension cultural- willingness to press on despite them.
Because the appeal to emotion is, while not dead, has been scarred as a result of it being used to flagellate the non-compliant. Now the formerly non-compliant are moving against the interests / preferences of those who did, and in many cases still are, attempting to use emotional appeals and emotional pressures and please for compassion / accusations of cruelty.
It is not that 'cruelty is the point'- it is that the accusation of cruelty is no longer sufficiently deterring. And since people tend to attempt to be internally consistent, a resistance to emotional appeals on one front increases the tendency to resist emotional appeals on another front.
It may not be a central part of the electorate revolt, but I would consider it a part of it, in the same sense that destroying the method of abuse is a part of the revolt against an abuser, even if there are more central reasons for the revolt in general.
Dean
Flairless
5mo ago
While the discussion here is focusing on the grand-dynamic of USAID's disruption, I'd just throw out that the organizational change is liable to be almost as important longer-term. At the very least, if the Trump administration keeps and formalizes USAID as a part within the State Department, this has a decent chance of being a grudgingly kept reorganization that a future Democratic administration is less likely to reverse.
Put very briefly- in organizational terms, orgs. like USAID are competitors with foreign policy establishments, loose canons who take resources away and can undermine deliberate efforts by virtue of not answering to the nominal heads of foreign policy.
In most countries, foreign aid is understood and viewed as a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. You offer aid as an incentive for countries to do what you want them to do, you withhold it as a response to things you don't want them to do. It is a lever for advancing national interests. Note that this is reflected in some of the Trump-bad arguments, that USAID is good because it advances American interests.
But USAID's reputation in some ways is the inverse of the premise: an organization that sees its purpose being to spend money for [good things], in and of itself, without the 'selfish' elements of state interest. It is supposed to be 'apolitical,' offering aid regardless and building bridges, figuratively (and maybe a little literally). The goodwill of the American people, made manifest, etc. etc. etc.
What that means, however, is that if the State Department or Ambassador in a country wants to reign in support, and the USAID teams want to go forward... well, the State Department isn't the boss of USAID, and so the bureaucratic turf fights mean they might work together, but that it's personal rather than institutional. In turn, local actors know that- those who can are able to leverage USAID for funding even if the Ambassador disapproves, even though the Ambassador is supposed to be the lead US representative.
Worse, from an institutional perspective, is that the funds that go to USAID are funds that are not going to the State Department, which is already a not-particularly-resourced wing of the US government. And to make that worse, many lay-persons think that they are aligned... and so that spending on one (the USAID feel-good side) benefits the 'other part,' even though they aren't one in the same. Resources are a zero-sum goal, and resources for USAID for foreign policy purposes aren't, well, going to the foreign policy institution.
As a result, the significance of Rubio being 'acting director' is that USAID, if not dissolved outright, will almost certainly be folded into the State Department. And that means that the local state department leads- which is to say the Ambassadors and Embassies- will be able to trump the USAID bureaucrats in any turf battles, bringing them into line or replacing recalatrant administrators who were used to a far different culture.
You do not have to think well of Trump to appreciate that change. And when the post-Trump changeovers happen, even if those new Ambassadors are dyed-in-wool Democrats and political allies... well, they aren't going to want to lose their Embassy resources and control, just in the name of anything-but-Trump.
So, just on a organizational self-interest angle, the USAID reorganization is liable to stick. A lot of the protests we're seeing now from the grant side or the Trump-bad side are contextual objections of those who stand to lose money, or those who would oppose any change by Trump. But when those patronage networks are dissolved, I'd be surprised to see them recreated out of any sort of nostalgia.
Rotherham is in large part the reason I don't comment on this forum anymore.
And here I thought it was because you got a job as a self-employed writer.
It's certainly not like this community has changed much over the last decade. In so much that this community consisted of cucks, faggots, and race traitors, it certainly never stopped you from comfortably nesting here and regularly returning like birds of a feather. The Rotherham abuses are more than two decades old, have been talked about for more than a decade, which is to say they largely predated this forum. It never stopped you from joining or staying or casually shooting the breeze with your peers, those cucks and faggots and race traitors whose company you preferred rather than not coming around again and again.
No, what changed was that you struck it big(ish) with substack, and now you're in the same social-economic context of self-employed persons everywhere, particularly those who start to make money from their hobbies: there is no such thing as a paid holiday.
Any time you spend posting in your old hobby jaunt for free is time you're not spent producing content for your patrons and sponsors. Moreover, they are paying for the schitk, and you are under the economic pressure to conform. Fortunately the schtick isn't as an actual revolutionary of any sort- heavens knows you've never taken the sort of stands at personal risk you've demanded of others if they were true to their beliefs- but that's the charm. No one expects you to, anymore than anyone expects the old man at the fireplace who lectures the young vikings on the virtues of bravery and sacrifice and dying in battle rather than growing old and tending to the fire. It's comforting and interesting and if it ever gets inconvenient, the easily accessible irony can be used to dismiss the messenger.
But it does require writing to keep the audience of paying consumers who would listen to the words of a man who chose the company of cucks and faggots for a decade. The requires a regular grind for content, all the more so because, what, 10% goes to substack and its certainly not-Jewish founders? If you write elsewhere- like here- for free, you aren't being paid for it.
It's a rough life, being a cog in a not-at-all-Jewish capitalist media machine. Who can blame you for being led by the profit-motive elsewhere?
Dean
Flairless
2yr ago
His argument has a few parts but the major thrust of it is that there is no better alternative--when everything is tallied up the MSM is far more truthful than competitors like Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh, Alex Berenson, etc.
Yes? And? So what?
This is not an argument that the media is honest or good. This is an argument that the media is more honest and better, but without making the case that it's good enough. This matters, because in a great number of things 'better' is not 'good enough'- a runner with only one broken leg, only an ounce of sewage in a bottle of win, a teacher who usually wears a condom when tutoring a student one-on-one. These may all be things that are strictly preferable to alternatives, but that does not mean that a lack of alternatives means any are acceptable, or not worse than going without.
To quote the article-
The problem with taking a nihilistic posture towards the MSM is that there’s nothing to replace it with. If someone spends all their time complaining about capitalism without making the case for a realistic alternative, what they’re advocating for is chaos, or more likely, socialism, which is much worse. Likewise, simply trying to discredit the media when it’s in many ways the only means we have to acquire accurate information about the world should be understood as advocating for making society dumber.
To which one might as well respond- and where are you going to start describing what's the problem with nihilism?
Setting aside that the Hanania doesn't identify how society is actually being made smarter by the current media, he also doesn't identify what society being 'dumber' even means. He raises the spectre of nebulous chaos as bad not because chaos is bad, but because of what the effects of chaos can do to a healthy society... but if the society is already sick or insane- and Hanania pre-emptively concedes that the other side has 'lost their mind' on extremely fundamental issues on social composition- this doesn't actually mean it's getting worse. 'Not having any words left to describe Queer Studies or much of bioethics' is not a loss when the the superfulousness of words to describe them is already bringing about the bioethics of queer studies to the applause of the media that is being defended.
If the consequences of a dumber society with no common media environment are different than the consequences of the current media environment, that doesn't mean it's worse. Hanania presupposes that everyone accepts the current dynamics as good enough and that an alternative is worse. While this is a fundamentally status quo bias that's understandable for how Hanania himself has personally benefited, it makes no such appeal to those who have not, or who have been harmed, or who see their long-term interests of the trajectory as being threatened by the very institutions supporting positions Hanania himself calls crazy.
Yes, a lack of common shared vision of the world will create a low cohesive society. This is not the same as making the case for why people should commit to a cohesive society that disagrees with them on a fundamentally cultural level.
As with Scott's attempt awhile ago, this falls into the trap of 'we must have something common and good to all believe in.' Hanania frames it as a resistance to nihilism, but it's really not. This is just the rationalist tendency to want other people to support social cohesion for its common good effects, without grasping on how dynamics like social cohesion come about. People do not subscribe to common beliefs because social cohesion enables good things- social cohesion comes about when people subscribe to common beliefs, which define what good things are. Appealing to people to submit their view of what is good for the sake of maintaining the benefits of social cohesion is fundamentally missing the cause and the effect.
Hanania wants people to separate the insanity he admits is fully present in the system. The system is broadly comfortable and profitable for him. It is not broadly comfortable or profitable for others, who he makes no case are being well served by the current institutions that 'only lie a little', and the fact that the lack of a superior alternative will make the lack of a single information sphere less comfortable for a lot of people is not, in fact, a compelling reason for others to defer to the established institutions who see them as the problem.
Curious what you all think.
I think he's self-centered and blind to his own mediocrity. No one so self-flattering of their own IQ should be making so many basic mistakes of argument, history, or social cohesion.
I've seen estimates of Academia as high as 20-to-1 on left-right splits, which is to say less than 5% right. Saying they'll vote 'more' blue is reaching levels of statistical impossibility- you can't have a 5% swing if less than 5% of the voter base is up for grabs.
Why should we believe you think the US credit scoring system is bullshit if you're using a LLM to demonstrate it?
We certainly wouldn't think you a special forces sniper if you played call of duty, a hardened criminal if you run over civies in Grand Theft Auto, or a crime against humanity if you play any given Paradox game. Why should we believe you are what you do with another computer toy?
Dean
Flairless
5mo ago
Why would something need to harm you personally for you to be justified in being against it?
I'm not particularly aware of any other category of harm that requires that- certainly you can be anti-murder without being murdered, anti-theft if you aren't the one being stolen from, and so on. Nor does your family have to have suffered, or your close friend group, or your extended friend group, or any other varient of increasingly extended relations. Some of the evils of history are stopped not by those who personally suffered, but those who were entirely orthoganal (outside intervention) or even responsible (anti-colonialism movements).
It would seem by plethora of examples that [things that harm others] is also a valid basis of prioritizing issues. At which point, the condition of 'personally' is just semantic gerrymandering.
Dean
Flairless
5mo ago
If you want good-faith engagements, it would probably help not to poison the well by categorically dismissing all previous (but ambiguous) engagements as bad-faith and aligned with a general political tribe.
Particularly when you base it on a conclusion as a settled point (relative financial cost) without even making a position on the elements that make it a disputed premise. (I.E., what the relative costs are by what metric, what you believe the relative costs would be if you remove imposed regulatory burdens from one side and regulatory subsidies/requirements on the alternatives, what the relative costs of the political advocacy/opposition dynamics were reversed, etc.).
The crux of pro-nuclear arguments is that the technology provably exists and does not require assumptions of future technological breakthroughs, many of the more often cited relative costs are either imposed (regulatory over-engineering requirements no other power sector has to fail) or selective (concerns over nuclear-related costs in excess to equivalent welfare risks from others), that nuclear is effective baseload power (which is needed for sustained industrial economics at scale) rather than intermittent (which functionally requires additional baseload generation regardless for load-balancing, see Germany), and that many of the premises of 'low emission' energy sources just smuggle away the relative costs (such as not considering the extraction / processing / recycling / end-of-lifecycle costs) or have never been feasible requirements for the goals they were meant to support (i.e. the required amounts of rare earth minerals to supported estimates being magnitudes beyond actual rare earth mineral production) in ways that are both highly grift-able and grifted (see carbon credit markets relations to organized crime).
Dean
Flairless
7mo ago
So anyway, next time you see some dude in a dress, with long hair and breasts but a face and voice obviously male despite his best efforts, think about what kind of emotions must have driven him to that place, and have a little empathy.
And enforce rules he or she does not like anyway even if they occur at their expense, correct?
'Empathy' is not an exception to social regulation. It may be used to claim it, or demand it, or insist that it should, but the fundamental purpose of government is to tell people 'no' and enforce that objection by force if necessary. This includes, and is especially true, for demands by one on the part of others- be it life (no, they do not have to give you their lives), property (no, they do not have to give you their possessions), conscience (no, they do not have to follow your religion), or presence (no, they do not have to let you into their personal spaces).
It is precisely because the government is in the business of allocating resources and punishments that governments are ethically obliged to not do so on the basis of empathy. Empathy is, after all, easiest for those we already care about and in scarce supply for our rivals or opponents. Empathy is, additionally, easy to fake and yet hard to measure- there are any number of performative appeals to empathy, but few metrics to actually identify those who need it (often because they cannot speak for themselves). A society ruled by empathy is an often cruel place, as it is one which takes from those less emapthizable with and gives to those who are most successful in bullying social pressure to claim the profits for themselves.
This is why virtuous governments are ruled by laws, not empathy. Empathy may be a consideration in the laws a just society creates, but only in accordance with any other virtue or favor, and refusing to enforce socially validated laws in the name of empathy for a select groups is a lack of empathy for other groups.
Dean
Flairless
11mo ago
I'll just note that some of the bigger primary drivers for change in the Northern Triangle sending countries were largely driven by factors beyond Harris's influence, and even against Administration preferences.
One of the big ones, for example, has been the decrease from El Salvador... which almost certainly was caused by President Bukele's draconian tough-on-crime policies which broke the back of the local criminal gangs that increased instability-driven migration. However, this crack down came againt the objection of, not with the support from, the US State Department. Regional efforts of emulate such tough-on-crime issues and restore local perceptions of security are more often opposed rather than supported by the US. (This is because these legal authorities come at the cost of due process rights and have potential for authoritarian abuse- a concern I'd want to emphasize is valid, but also not one shared by much of the local population.)
Another is the implications of the rise of Darien Gap migration. Not only did this change the proportion of non-Northern Triangle migration sources of a whole (increasing absolute numbers of migrants, reducing relative numbers), but it provided local countries a means to pressure the US to gain migration concessions in exchange for access / cooperation, which is to say by offering more opportunities for legal northern triangle migration (reducing absolute numbers of illegal migrants by transitioning them to the legal migrant category). This does come with some genuine benefits that shouldn't be discounted- a greater willingness of the northern triangle countries to take back migrants kicked out for criminal reasons, cooperation if someone of actual concern is recognized- but it's also a bit of a categorical shell game on how to count numbers.
There have also been two non-Northern Triangle factors in particular that have grown in relevance of the last year for increasing the non-Northern Triangle numbers. Again, the US really hasn't had much influence here.
One of these is the role of Nicaragua. Not only is Nicaragua not in the northern triangle by definition (it's considered part of the southern triangle), but over the last years it has deliberately facilitated migration trough it, such as with direct charter flights which- if you're willing to pay- you can fly directly to Nicaragua and then as long as you're gone within the time limit, they don't care if you go north (wink wink). This is similar to migration-practices Belarus did during the 2021 migration crisis on the Polish border, as way both to make money and pressure a neighbor who you have more confrontational relations with.
But more important is the role of social media in making it ever-better known that migration to the US is possible, and the bottom-up facilitation networks of de jure legalization making it safer and better known (and thus better able to support larger volumes). There was an excellent NYT story- a Ticket to Disney World iirc- late last year on how this process works, and suffice to say American 'don't come here' stories pale in comparison to social media channels dedicated to the 'how to' combined with local authorities who can make more money facilitating migration through than by paying to stop an unstoppable flow.
And how do you think running Venezuela into the ground by sanctioning them will impact migrant flows?
Why should anyone believe that US sanctions are 'running Venezuela into the ground' relative to the effect of the Venezuelan governance?
The Venezuelan government even 20 years ago was led by a clique who struggled with basic concepts like 'if you dictate that private businesses sell items at or below cost of procurement, private businesses will stop stocking items' or 'if you send people with guns to take over specialized businesses, the business people with specialized knowledge will leave.' It instituted a deliberate system of personality cult, attacks (literal and legal) on opposition actors and political opponents, and cultivating gangs as a national security strategy who then went on create a domestic security climate on par with Iraq. It routinely picked diplomatic and economic fights with its biggest trading partners while willfully and eagerly trying to align with countries less known for their quality of governance and far more known for their police states and party-empowering corruption. These were all chosen through the agency of Venezuela's own governmental leaders, for two arguably three political generations now. The same general clique of incompetents is still in power, and has been for long enough for an entire demographic cohort to have grown up under their management.
By contrast, you believe the relative impact of the US sanctions is...?
(This is a direct question, by the way.)
For all that you regularly like to cite US malfeasance as the cause of whatever cause of whatever blowback of the hour, I don't believe I've ever seen you actually provide a position of relative blame of US actions vis-a-vis other actors. Without any sense of relative allocation of input to output, this is just the cliche hyperagency/hypoagency paradigm that leaves agency with the US while everyone else is a passive recipient of their will, where even their own policy decisions are forced upon them by the US rather than, well, chosen both in response to and to shape US policy themselves.
While this is certainly flattering to US prowess in the same way that anti-semetic propaganda is empowering for the mythical Jew, it's not particularly well informed, and rather patronizing to the many invested and career anti-american politicians around the world who work hard to make their own policy disasters with hefty externalities but do so without American direction or demands. Give them their credit!
Dean
Flairless
2yr ago
The Big Serge has a good overview of the RU-UA war. The TL;DR is that Ukraine has burned through multiple iterations of armaments and is now reduced to begging for active NATO matériel, hence Germany's reticence to send Leopards.
...what?
Ukrainian ammo shortage has been the story of Ukrainian requests for aid since the very start of the war, when Zelensky memorably asked for ammo, not a ride. The entire early war Western response was focused on trying to get Warsaw Pact equipment and ammo to Ukraine in the near term to enable to keep fighting for the long-term effort of an eventual shift to NATO-produced material. These efforts were why Europe did 'ring swaps' of having various countries give their Warsaw Pact gear to Ukraine in exchange for getting NATO surplus. This also came with the obvious point that, because NATO does not produce Warsaw Pact material, would have to gradually train up the Ukrainians to western equipment in order to sustain a meaningful war effort.
This has been a very long-running item since the initial 'will the Ukrainians last another month' phase of the war passed. This is not new, nor have the Ukrainians been 'reduced to begging' for active NATO systems. Transitioning to NATO equipment has been the point for months now.
There's certainly plenty that could be said about Germany's reticence, but it's not because Ukraine is begging from a position of weakness. Germany is reluctant because Ukraine is asking from a position of strength, and if it got the tanks it was asking for the German government position is that it's afraid the German tanks would be enabling Ukraine to beat the Russians so badly the Russians might escalate. Take the German position with a graint of salt, but it's nowhere near a position that Ukraine has burned through everything, it's a fear of the Ukrainians doing even better.
As for this overview being 'good'...
A very cursory look at this account is that 'The Big Serge' was one of the 'there is no Russian panic' sort of accounts during the Kharkiv offensive last September, which is memorable for just how paniced the Russians were and how much war material they abandoned to the Ukrainians. On 9 September, this person was writing how Ukraine could not and would not make meaningful progress towards operational objectives towards Izyum. This was after the Ukrainian breakthrough had begun, and two days before the Russians announced a formal withdrawal from Kharkiv oblast.
This was after a six-month retrospective piece which characterized the Russians as fighting an 'intelligent' war, typical revisionism of the scope and objective of the Russian advance on Kyiv at the start of the war, right down to the 'it was a feint, bro' narrative, and of course the 'Europe's economy is going to crash this winter' predictions. These were accompanied by predictions that the 'rest' of the Ukrainian capabilities were in the process of being attrited to the point that static defense would no longer be possible, and Western support would dry up in the near future... as of half a year ago. Ukraine would have no hope of waging a successful offensive, and of course "Ukraine cannot achieve strategic objectives - all they can do is trade the lives of their men for temporary tactical successes that can be spun into wins by their propaganda arm."
This writer has not, shall we say, had a good run of analyzing the war so far, or for staying clear of the pro-Russian propaganda tropes in the course of resisting pro-Ukrainian ones.
Serge's prediction that Ukraine will lose the war "gradually, then suddenly" seems plausible given Russia's attrition strategy.
...what?
Serge's prediction has been that a Ukrainian attritional collapse would be happening any month now for over six months now, which is another way of saying that he's been saying it for over half the war now. Notably, Serge was claiming this before one of the largest Ukrainian resource infusions of the war at Kharkiv, as well as the successful Ukrainian attrition campaign at Kherson.
The Russian attrition strategy for months now hasn't been meaningfully based on attriting the Ukrainians at a military level, but the western support at an economic-warfare level. This was the crux of both the Ukranian power grid attacks- which, you might note, have decreased in effectiveness and frequency- but also the gamble on European winter energy. The gamble for some time has been that the Europeans would have to capitulate and seek concessions based on the winter energy crunch.
This has not, shall we say, turned out as the Russians or pro-Russians like Serge were predicting in the summer and fall. European energy is rough, and the long-term impacts will be considerable, but there's a reason that questions of aid focus more on whether Republicans will be sufficiently overwhelmingly supportive in general to avoid embarassing trips rather than the capacity of Europeans to keep funding.
I keep hearing hysterical rhetoric that the West must win this war or... something something bad. It reminds me of the flawed 'domino theory' that was used to justify the Vietnam intervention. While I don't think NATO will ever proceed towards direct intervention á la Vietnam, I can't help but think that too many of the West's elites have trapped themselves rhetorically where Ukraine's importance is overblown for political reasons (so as to overcome domestic opposition towards sending arms) and it has now become established canon in a way that is difficult to dislodge.
Appeals to the flawed domino theory tend not to address the fact that when Vietnam fell, there were successive communist successes in the region of SE Asia. Not just South Vietnam, but also Laos and Combodia did fall. If you want to analogize Russia and Ukraine to the Domino Theory historical results, it absolutely would imply that Russia keep going, and/or that other countries will seek nuclear breakout capability, whichever your historical metaphor target is.
Dean
Flairless
2yr ago
It seems to me more likely that Putin took a gamble, a good gamble, which had positive expected value, and came up absolutely snake eyes on the heroism of a relative handful of Ukrainians. It’s wildly unfair to blame Putin for not expecting this guy would start acting like a Slavic Churchhill, when one could have expected a performance more akin to Ghani or at best like Tsikhanouskaya.
Ukraine wasn't a disaster because of Zelensky. Ukraine was going to be a disaster because a critical mass of the Ukrainians were plainly and already primed towards an insurgency that was going to be a disaster where instead of stay-behind actors doing rear-area spotting for artillery strikes behind the front lines in a conventional conflict, the flood of MANPADs and ATGMs going into the region from NATO were going to make Iraq look quaint. The cause of this sentiment isn't because Zelensky is popular, but because Russia was already hated by so many, and only going to get hated more when they moved in and started executing their pre-planned targetting lists of anti-Russian/pro-western actors. The same sort of people who manned territorial defense units will to go out and launch attacks on Russian armored columns are also the sort of people who would be ambushing Russian counter-insurgency columns.
Zelensky isn't the guy who made it cool to oppose the Russians, he's the guy who kept the Ukrainian government together, keeping a conventional war going instead of an insurgency war. Cratering the Ukrainian government was a clear Russian intention, but Putin's initial invasion force wasn't any better set up to deal with an insurgency than it was serious conventional resistance. Remember, one of the 'war isn't going to happen' arguments pre-invasion was that Putin's buildup was too small to do a meaningful occupation of the country.
Putin's fundamental mistake is that he discounted the relevant of the Ukrainian public's views, not because he didn't foresee Slavic Churchuill. Not taking into account the viewpoints of the nation you are invading is kind of the opposite of a good basis for a gamble.
Why not bother?
By the sounds of it, you've become disillusioned by a sense of your impotence at changing others to your preferred views. Congratulations! You are recognizing a truth that already existed.
Be at ease. You have not become less persuasive over time, nor have humans become more unreasonable. Political tribalism did not begin in the last decades. The internet just brought the filters that already existed into clearer focus, by putting people who were previously behind regional media filters in contact with each other. The nature of connecting people is that you can now disagree with people who you previously never would have known strenuously disagreed with you.
But again, this was already the case. What has changed isn't the circumstances, but your cognition. If you only bothered to talk rather than fight because of a flawed and faulty cognition let you convince yourself that you were cleverer and more persuasive than you actually were, then perhaps you should not bother. (With either, obviously- if you can't trust your judgement on how well you can talk, you certainly shouldn't trust your judgement on whether and when to fight.)
But bothering doesn't require that sort of self-importance. And thanks to that, even if you can't force others to change, you can change your own thinking, and thus your reason to bother.
Why bother continuing to argue (and especially why bother continuing to argue online- an exercise in futility if I ever heard one!) when doing so is unlikely to change the other person's mind?
Why do you believe changing the other person's mind is the point of a public argument, as opposed to shaping the audience's opinion?
An internet forum is called a forum precisely because it involves more than two people. There are the debaters, and there is the audience, and the prize of any public debate has always been the opinion of the people not directly speaking. This is why the public fora have long been the political centers, and why part of rhetoric has been how to manage the appeals to the audience's sensibility.
The audience is almost never the opponent in the exchange. The audience is, by its nature, curious enough to pay attention, but ambivalent enough to not be taking part in the first place. The stage of a forum is for those who show up to speak, but the audience is many times larger. The prize is when successful arguments get echoed by people other than your opponent at the time, and/or when someone else re-iterates your previous rebuttal if the opponent tries that same line of argument again. Or, in a specific argument, when someone else enters with an unexpected concurrence, because you've written in a way that gives them something to build off of rather than focus on a solely personal bickering.
However, it is very hard to sway the audience if you do not bother to show up and try.
Why bother continuing to argue when the people I'm disagreeing with seem to have beliefs & experiences so wildly opposite of my own that I have to wonder if we're even living in the same country?
Because you live in the same country regardless of what you wonder, and your audience knows it.
If you are posting on this forum, you are part of a continental-scale civilization. There is no 'everyone has the same experience' commonality when some people face burning summers and others freezing winters, let alone more nuanced local institutional effects. Local political machines, dominant themes and trends in schools, different religiosity (let alone which religion), and so on. If you are only able to bother disagreeing with people who you have very similar beliefs and experiences, that is a limitation on your ability to persuade.
This limitation on persuading the audience is best addressed by.... interacting more with people whose beliefs and experiences contrast with your own.
Why bother continuing to argue when people I disagree with just seem like they fundamentally can't be reasoned with at all?
Because the validity of fundamental reasonableness is a judgement for the audience, not the arguer.
To paraphrase a certain book, if a man accuses his fellow of being fundamentally unreasonable, one of them is. If there are specific people you want to write off as being in bad faith, then by all means do so. The ignore feature is there for a reason. But when speaking with categories of people, part of intellectual humility is recognizing that we can stand accused of the same things. You can make any accusation you want, but the merit / weight it has comes from the people needing to be convinced. Namely, you have to convince the audience that you are not the unreasonable one.
Fortunately, the best way to win a challenge of reasonableness, and thus disqualify the other person's influence on the audience, is to publicly and persuasively be a more reasonable person.
And especially why bother continuing to argue when doing so is only likely to be """rewarded""" with mass-downvotes and distributed dogpiles by commentators on a forum you don't even really like, and only stick around on out of some sort of... IDK, perverse masochism, I guess?
Because there is an audience here that will recognize good effort, and good rhetoric.
The Motte is a place of contrarians, not conservatives. It is not hard to be north-of-neutral on even contentious topics if you phrase well. Distributed dogpiles, on the other hand, are consistent indicators of often substantial issues. This could be a lazy pejorative, blatant bias, or letting your personal contempt for others show through.
This is valuable insight to learn about one's self. If one actually wants to become persuasive, then they need to learn to recognize, and mitigate, their bad habits.
So I ask again- why bother?
Why not?
Are you the sort of person who only bothers to engage people you disagree with when you expect to win?
Is the time for talking over?
If the time for talking wasn't over during much larger and more violent political violence years ago, why would it be over now?
That Obama tried to circumvent the treaty process by creating a treaty in all-but-name without getting the domestic political support for the not-treaty to exist beyond his own partisan tribe's span of power, mostly by trying to argue that the consequences of ending it were too big to let it end.
This was both bad statecraft and bad precedent, and would have posed exceptional risk to US policy stability if Presidents got accustomed to trying to engineer too-big-to-fail international agreements to bind their opposition-party successors. International relations is a field that relies on stability and predictability, which is undermined if you build castles on sand and then dare your political opponents not to shake them too much. This is a bit like building near a fault line but hoping there isn't an earthquake, and the best way for sound building codes to be enforced is for the occasional reminder of why building codes are needed.
The end of JCPOA was a salutory reminder to most parties involved that (a) if you want an agreement with the US get it in binding writing, (b) if you want a binding written agreement with the US it needs to be politically palatable to the American democratic representatives, and (c) if you want a proposal to be palatable to American democratic representatives, you should probably not be killing Americans via a proxy warfare policy.
Dean
Flairless
1yr ago
Why do you believe Woodgrains pushback is based on things completely unrelated to the current post?
Tracingwoodgrains condemnations of Gerard include both explicit and implicit themes that Gerard is malicious, deceptive, dishonest, and taking exceptional effort in order to negatively shape others perceptions of his political opponents. The evidence of this goes back years, more than a decade ago. This is presented as to be contemptable, especially as he is unrepentant, a critic of this community, and doing this in obvious self-interest (in this case, ideological).
Tracingwoodgrain's LibsOfTikTok hoax was also malicious, deceptive, dishonest, and took exceptional effort in order to negatively shape others perceptions of his political opponent. The evidence of this goes back years, not even half a decade ago. Tracingwoodgrains is also unrepentent, a critic of this community, and doing this in obvious self-interest (in this case, self-publicity).
There is the surface-level subject of a post, and the meta-level subject of what a poster likes to talk about or return to. Woodgrain's thesis lacks sting or sincerity when its themes are things he is likewise guilty of (of kind if not degree), and noting this when he attempts to assert a moral high ground is not merely a matter of grudges, but of topling the meta-positioning of the argument.
And that pushback in turn revealed relevant context via the response- Tracing went from pejoratively opening his characterization with 'longtime malicious critic of this community' to a blistering 'screw you' burnout rant and posts about how bad this community had been for a long time. This is relevant information for the current post. It reveals not only information about the viewpoint biases of the author (by reminding otherwise-ignorant readers of narrator similarities with the subject of condemnation), but it revealed previously hidden information (the private views the writer has of his audience).
Dean
Flairless
2yr ago
To revisit the question and break it apart-
The new conflict that broke out in Sudan - anyone have a good low down on what is happening there, and why? Is this truly a proxy-war between the US and Russia (Rapid Support Forces being Russian proxy, I guess? And Sudan Armed Forces would be US allies..?), or is there something else to this?
The new conflict that broke out in Sudan - anyone have a good low down on what is happening there, and why?
The proximal cause is a breakdown of negotiations over the integration of the paramilitary RSF under the SAF. The SAF wanted this in a short time frame, within years. The RSF wanted a longer time frame, like a decade, but practically never.
These negotiations have been western backed, and in a sense western pushed, since the 2019 but especially the 2021 coup, as a sort of condition for international legitimacy / foreign support. One of the key western interests / some background reasons for their role is the negotiation is the context of Darfur. On top of being a massive humanitarian tragedy in and of itself, it's humanitarian crisis like this that can drive regional instability to collapse governments and see migration flows from Africa towards Europe. Consolidating control of all the military forces under a single military, and that military under the civilian government, is a key point in reigning in warlordism that fuels these conflicts, where profit-maximizing warlords continue their wars without state backing.
In practice, however, Hemetti and the RSF are the warlord being reigned in, since the paramilitary militia are more of a threat to stability than the formal military, and the consolidation of the RSF under the SAF would have decisively subordinated control of his personal economic interests (the RSF-controlled gold and other things) under Burhan and the SAF.
This is the fundamental crux of the current coup / civil war: the RSF Warlord had his interests under threat. A coup attempt makes sense here, because if it succeeds, Hemetti gets even more power and wealth, and if it stalls, then in the negotiations that follow Hemetti can secure concessions that protect his interests.
IF you want to frame this as the west's fault, then having negotiations that put Hemetti's interests at risk is the western contribution to the crisis. The inevitable tankie framing will be that the US forced Hemetti's hand, and that the US drove the crisis, and that the crisis would end if the US used it's great power and influence to force a ceasefire for the good of the people, and only American/western greed and amorality prevents it.
This is generally where I tell people to stop being cultural chauvinists and thinking it's all about the West.
The West was not issuing ultimatums. The West does not control the military autocrat who couped the previous military junta who couped the previous military junta. All negotiations put people's interests at stake- that's what negotiatiosn are. But Hemetti and the RSF were not in a 'coup or die' situation. There was no ticking clock or irreversible end to negoations. Burhan was not, to my knowledge, actually about to militarily move against his Deputy. This is a conflict of choice between two men with their own motives and interests. There is an ambitious warlord who made his wealth and power inflicting great misery and suffering who wanted to not just protect, but expand, his personal power and wealth, in a conflict with another ambitious warlord who made his wealth and power inflicting great misery and suffering in the process of expanding his personal power and wealth.
Neither is an American puppet. They are their own men. And they are causing a mountain of misery in the foreseeable future, as they have supported in the past to varying degrees. They are both quite willing to inflict more for their own advantage, and the logic of the conflict- and factors in it to date- suggest a sustained civil war, not the ever-optimistic 'we can compel negotiations that will end the conflict in our favor' that the RSF seems to have been betting on.
I have, many times, said I have a dim view of any war strategy that rests on the premise of 'and then the enemy will lose the will to fight.' Nothing I see from the SAF suggests that Burhan intends to give up, or that other powers can make him. Multiple announced cease fires have failed, and each failure decreases the chance for the next.
The coup will likely continue into a civil war. There are factors that could limit it, and with the grace of god may they prevail, but if the SAF can retake the capital, the obvious next step for them is to take the gold mines and RSF economic interests, and those interests can pay for a lot of mercenaries and such to resist that. It will be bloody and expensive, but that's a cost both men are likely willing to pay, over American objection.
Is this truly a proxy-war between the US and Russia (Rapid Support Forces being Russian proxy, I guess?
The russian-gold connection, and reported Wagner ties, are not central / drivers of western policy in Sudan. That is a red herring.
There are certainly RSF-Russian ties that the US and the West does not like, but there are many things about the SAF and its ties that the West does not like. The SAF-junta is not a US-backed government in the sense that any alternative to it is a zero-sum loss of American interests. The SAF is a US-backed government in that it is the government, effectively, and in negotiations with the US and other international parties for international acceptance. The US is not Sudan's political/military/economic guarantor. If anything, Egypt is- and while Egypt is a US ally, it's not a Russian foe.
There are some definite RSF-Russian elements that are worth noting here- the RSF opening phase of the conflict has some obvious (though not exclusively) Russian strategic thinking influences, from the role of opening misinformation for information space disruption, the opening targetting/capture of Egyptian forces to create a decision paralysis to delay/disrupt/prevent external intervention, and the overarching strategy of a smaller military power trying to use first-mover advantage and a selective call for negotiations/cease fire from a position of advantage. The RSF timing, down to the point of the Eid Holiday at the end of the first week of fighting, when the pre-planned operations would climax, but the counter-attacks wouldn't have time to marshal, and the foreign diplomatic pressure and religious Eid holiday would increase chance for a natural compellence of cease fire, are all characteristic of how the Russians hybrid warfare theory suggest things should go, and the Wagner ties are absolutely a vector to support that.
But at this time, there's no real indication the Russians, or Wagner, or directly involved or orchestrating or anything else. Framing this as a Russia-US proxy war overestimates the relevance of both sides.
It also overstates the attachment other parties have to either side. If the SAF wins, the US continues relations with the military junta that launched a coup. If the RSF wins, the US would... likely continue relations with the military junta that launched a coup. The US, and western, interest isn't in who rules the country, it's what who rules the country does, and Hemetti would quite likely continue the charade of a military-backed transitionary government in indefinite negotiations for an eventual transition to civilian government that patriotic military leader would oh-so-happily lead.
Whether that person is Hemetti or Burhan really doesn't matter to the west, though Hemetti's personal ties to Russia might be an irritant, and the RSF is a bit more detestable to western sensitivities than the SAF due to the involvement in Darfur and the ill-discipline with how western diplomats have been treated. However, the west cares far more that Sudan doesn't generate a humanitarian crisis that causes regional instability and migration flows.
And Sudan Armed Forces would be US allies..?), or is there something else to this?
Sudan is generating a humanitarian crisis that will cause regional instability and migration flows.
The immediate Western and most foreign nation priorities priorities is getting diplomats and citizens out of what is rapidly becoming a humanitarian disaster zone. Fighters (allegedly, but not necessarily exclusively, from RSF) have been robbing diplomats or attacking refugee convoys as the leave the capital. Diplomatic evacuations have been in the scale of hundreds; thousands to tens of thousands of foreign nationals are in the country. Diplomatic evacuations are ongoing, but the risk to thousands of citizens is quite possibly going to generate calls for foreign intervention in some form.
And risk is real, because infrastructure is contested or failing. The Khartoum capital airport has been shut by fighting since the coup, and it's a 800km / 500 mile drive to the port, which means if you don't have the gas for that there's a good chance you're escaping the war-torn capital on foot. Internet is failing across the country, and foreign aid groups already in the country say they're not able to get humanitarian supplies in, which means there's both less to feed people AND less ability to coordinate it.
And, of course, there's that minor thing about the civil war, where one side was THE designated force for organizing militia to terrorize the country side and steal everything of value. Including, allegedly, robbing evacuating diplomats, kidnapping non-involved soldiers of foreign militaries, and other charming examples of care.
It's liable to be bad. Really, really bad. And I have no faith or confidence in the ability of the West to compel a ceasefire and return to negotiations, and every fear that failure to do so will see the SAF grind the RSF out of the capital and then go for the RSF's economic heart, even if it takes them years of humanitarian crisis to do so.
If I were to try and make a fancy title for my opinion on the Texas anti-ICE attack, I'd call it 'How I Had To Figure My Way Out Of A False Flag Suspicion.'
I was hoping to do a writeup on this incident, since the Antifa attack has some ties to a post last month on how the Democratic civil war will give the Trump administration a lawful basis to go after parts of the background Democratic coalition. Antifa is a fringe part of that coalition, but still a part, and this certainly counts as a basis to go after a network. I was holding off because Ngo's article- while informative- had several 'weird flag' indicators that had me raising an eyebrow and waiting for information to dispel a possible false flag / misattribution.
One of the weird things was the mix of preparation and self-affiliation. Preparation is usually a sign of competence, but self-incrimination is usually incompetent, unless it's intended for a false-attribution, in which case incompetence can be explained by even greater competence.
On the preparation side, there was clear material preparation for first, second, and even third order consequences. From the Ngo article, the plan was to use fireworks and graffitti as a flashy / damaging, but low danger, way to bring out the ICE agents. Then the responders would be ambushed by the gunmen with, well, lethal guns, even as the team had personal radios for their own communication. At least a limited firefight was prepared for with body armor. An electromagnetic blocking device, i.e. a jammer, could then be used to frustrate the secondary response units, any ICE-Police coordinations, and otherwise help with the escape. The assailants appear to have fallen back and retreated through the immediately adjacent woods. They had a getaway car plan as well.
This is a multi-step plan that supports a level of sophistication and prior thought. This is competent, dangerous, and effective small-unit tactics that comes from training and deliberate preparation.
But then you have some of the incompetent aspects that suggest the planners were going for tacti-cool rather than tactical advantage. At least seven of the militants dressed in all black, as opposed to useful camouflage or even clothes to help blending in with normal people on the escape. Pure-black 'looks good,' but it's more a uniform for official police teams to distinguish or play to light contrasts in overt contexts- it makes as much sense in a guerilla force as thinking that historical ninjas actually dressed in all black, as opposed to the black uniform being the stage-show theater dress to make it obvious. They used AR-15s, which are not, despite years of anti-gun campaigning, particularly good rifles for waging war (or insurgency). They discarded their AR-15s, leaving evidence behind in literal walking distance of the target. Some of the discarded AR-15s were found jammed, suggesting poor weapon handling... or, reported later, weapon modification attempts to increase rate of fire. This theory of 'more bullets = better' is not actually better in general, since a good part of the value of a semi-automatic rifle for small teams is that the slower rate forces better shooting fundamentals for reliability per shot, rather than wasting ammo faster for less gain.
And then there's the backpack with antifa literature. Just... why?
This, more than anything, got my 'is this a trick?' allergy going, because this is the sort of thing someone could do to try an inflame political tensions for its own sake as a false-flag action.
Leave behind left-coded Antifa literature to feed the initial view of a blue tribe attack. The right-coded AR-15s as a symbol of red tribe means. The mix of high-competence (a group who knew what they were doing) and low-competence (a group who were making incredibly basic mistakes) that could in and of itself be used to dismiss / deflect initial attributions. 'Of course it's Antifa- the literature matches the motive matches the target in attacking ICE!' could be deflected with 'Of course it's not Antifa- Antifa would be more competent, it's obviously a fake by a red tribe domestic extremist. Right wing extremists are obviously military competent, and look- they used the scary AR-15!'
This is the sort of narrative motivation that could support a broader variety of 'true' actors. Anyone with a 'maximize for heat, not light' could want that sort of recrimination spiral. It could be right-wing accelerationists. It could be the Antifa actors seeking to maximize (in)famy while invoking a circle-the-wagons effect of their left-tribe brethren. It could even be foreign agitators. If you want to accelerate a conflict in another country, the ideal false flag is to do something that elements in the target country would plausible want to or even try to do. It's not like this would be the first Antifa attack on a ICE facility.
To be clear, a false flag is not the assessment I would make from the initial information. But it's not a scenario I would rule out either. One of the most effective ways to do a false flag attack is to do something that non-trivial parts of an existing political coalition's fringes wishes (someone else) would do. And with the recent Democratic politician accounts in the (increasingly visible) Axios "Democrats told to "get shot" for the anti-Trump resistance" article, there are certainly people who think fighting ICE and Trump is the good fight.
Which is why another of the really weird things about Ngo's initial big post was how it didn't support that this was an actual Antifa cell in the first place, particularly when the initial government accounts didn't make that claim.
Ngo didn't actually provide evidence that these people were Antifa in the original article. Ngo makes the claim, but his supporting evidence in his post is that there was Antifa literature in a backpack of one of the caught shooters- aka, the sort of very easy thing to do if one wanted to insinuate Antifa. Ngo also cites fundraising by Antifa-linked people in support of the shooters... but the political tribal sympathy nature of tribal fundraising is also well established, and doesn't rely on prior association. Ngo does not actually cite any Antifa organization / social media / group that claimed the shooters as their own, or cite any of the shooters self-identifying as Antifa.
One reason I'd been holding off posting on this was hoping that follow-on media reporting would clarify the affiliation. It largely did not. The Washington Examiner released an article repeating the claim, but they did not really justify it either. The WE article did include a reachout to the FBI, but didn't attribute any Antifa attribution to the FBI. Then again, the FBI is often mum with ongoing investigations. The New York Times article does not make the antifa attribution... but this could be explained on partisan grounds of omitting politically unfavorable context. (Another weird(?) thing of the NYT article- no comment section. Not all NYT online articles get to have comment sections, but enough do that sometimes it can be seen as a choice not to.)
So I was waiting for yesterday's Department of Justice charging statement. I would imagine that at least some in the Trump DOJ would like to emphasize an antifa connection if they could. But there is no mention of Antifa in the DOJ statement.
So, not Antifa?
Well, not quite. Not only has there not been the sort of firm denunciation/separation that would be expected if a group was not affiliated with the broader political spectrum (as with other politically-sympathetic but unaffiliated political violence attempts over the years), but there's also Benjamin Song.
If you don't recognize his name from the OP article, that's because he was not one of the ten identified in Ngo's initial article, or the NYT article of the incident, or in the initial DOJ statement of charges.
The Dallas Express has published a much more extensive look at a specific (but still at large) suspect, which gives more compelling evidence of a specific connection via one (still wanted) suspect: Benjamin Song.
The Dallas Express writer is not entirely neutral- the left-skeptical political bias of which was probably why they got the presumably FBI-supported information for the article- but it provides a bit more specific claims that are contestable by others. So far none seriously have been, but these are at least falsifiable. To quote-
Song was a member of the militant Antifa group Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, and he had a history of left-wing radicalism.
This, at least, is falsifiable. And elaborated upon, with a history that suggests a clear pattern of 'helping others with violence.'
He was a member of the violent Antifa group Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, known for intimidating people outside drag shows. Song faced a lawsuit for “battery, assault, stalking, and conspiracy” after a confrontation at a 2023 drag show, as The Dallas Express reported. During the event, Fort Worth Police busted violent members of Song’s group.
Song was also reportedly a member of the Socialist Rifle Association. A transgender suspect, accused of shooting and bombing a Tesla dealership, was part of the same organization.
He trained Antifa in firearms and combat in 2022, according to a video uncovered by journalist Andy Ngo.
The account that posted the video – “Anarcho-Airsoftist” – is an apparent Antifa training ground in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Notably, according to his alleged LinkedIn account, Song was formerly a martial arts instructor. The account* showed participants learning to fight.
Before he trained Antifa militants, Song was arrested for “aggravated assault” at a riot in Austin during 2020, according to KVUE.
And, of course, where he got his skill set-
Song was a member of the Marine Corps reserves from 2011 to 2016, when he was dismissed on an “other than honorable discharge,” as The Dallas Express reported. According to LinkedIn, he “managed up to 60 Marines” and “managed, organized, and accounted for inventory worth over $1 million” during his time with the service. His profile stops after this.
For those unfamiliar, 'other than honorable discharge' is the 'you are being kicked out for causes that don't necessarily raise to the level of a felony' that typically accompanies the dishonorable discharge. 'Up to 60 marines' in turn scales to between a larger-than-normal platoon or a smaller-than-normal company. 'Managed' insinuates, but does not imply, a platoon leadership position- rather, when mixed with the inventory metric, suggests an administrative role. This does not imply he was not also tactically proficient, but would explain additional skill sets in organization.
And with this, some of the earlier discrepancy falls into place. We are not talking about a group of an average consistent quality that must be competent or incompetent. We can be looking at a cell with a more-competent organizer, a former Marine who taught tactical skills, and less-competent line members.
Which also helps explain another weird flag in the initial report, of how 10 suspects were arrested... but 12 sets of body armor were recovered.
And why Song is still at large.
From the Dallas Express-
[Song] allegedly bought four guns used in the ICE facility ambush on July 4, which wounded an Alvarado police officer, as The Dallas Express reported. He reportedly hid in the woods near the scene for a day after the shooting, then fled.
This, if true, could be a result of a particularly competent technique. Two, possibly. One way to hide something valuable is to hide it in relation to something extremely visible and attention-grabbing, so that to observer's attention is drawn away. Another is to use a sacrifice play, so that the person who searches finds a first, and expendable, asset, but doesn't know to keep looking for the more valuable, and better hidden, asset.
If immediate police response finds 10 suspects fleeing a scene... what are the odds there is another still hiding for the attention to drift further away, to depart under better conditions once the initial surge of attention starts drifting and looking further away?
Of course, there are limits to this level of competence- limits that are explainable by the limits of Song and of chance. If he was a small-unit-tactics focused Marine for only 6 years, that would suggest limited exposure to the sort of investigation/exploitation awareness that might have led him to plan better on the evidence disposal. He didn't know what he didn't know, and thus didn't prepare for them, which is how investigators could unravel things relatively quickly afterwards. He might have typically-minded his Antifa cell members and not overseen them.
And, of course, the rapid capture of specific members- especially the get-away driver- allowed a rapid exploitation of evidence / safe house / etc. while he was still in his hide-and-escape phase. This was not part of the plan, and was an issue of chance, probably. If that getaway driver hadn't been caught, then the members might not have been captured, the staging base might not have been identified, and so on until Song could get back, clear out, and cover his tracks before the police found it.
Or maybe those preparations wouldn't have been enough either. Point is- the police response that found the getaway driver, something that might have been pre-empted by the jammer or if the police car had taken a different route or any number of things, created a vulnerability in the getaway plan. That's not necessarily incompetence on his part.
Song specifically has since appeared in more reputable, mainstream, and Democratic-Party-respected media like ABC, Newsweek, and CBS. This is consistent with standard media industry practice to support government requests to publicize criminals to increase their profile and make it easier to solicit tips to lead to their capture.
None of the above media sources mention Song's antifa affiliation.
Dean
Flairless
1mo ago
Why does it seem like so many conservatives
Glenn Greenwald is a 'conservative' in the same way that Cindy Sheehan was a conservative for running against Nancy Pelosi.
Which is to say- he was a highly acclaimed / respected public voice when he was criticizing the Bush administration and Iraq War, and then quickly lost support when his criticisms continued despite the party in power changing.
Why would delaying the withdrawal or specifying the anniversary of 9/11 for the pullout date cause the specific failures we saw?
Because in August you can still more or less drive freely in Afghanistan, and in February you can't because the mountain passes are still snowed in.
Due to the elevation, topography, and regional climate, the term 'fighting season' in Afghanistan was literal, not just figurative. Fighters would literally drive / ride / walk out of Afghanistan before the winter snows, because if they didn't before they were liable to be unable to (or risk death if they tried, because no help is coming on those roads or in those passes). Civilization basically shuts down, and while there is no hard dates, the fighting season is typically over in October and doesn't start again until March-April, once the passes free of snow and you can get people in
In turn, this made the summer season an escalating tempo, as more reinforcements / seasonal fighters would enter the country, prepare for major attacks in the country, and so on. Typically the there would be a peak during whatever the last major islamic holiday was of the fighting season- basically islamist theology that virtuous actions are holier then- and then the tempo would fall off as militants began to move out for the winter.
In 2021, when Afghanistan fell in August, the offensives that started building the pressure were basically timing to such religious holiday offensives. Specifically, while Kabul fell on 15 August, in 2021 that was 3 days before the Day of Ashura, a week after the Hijra, Islamic new year, and Eid-al-Adba, was 20 July, less than 4 weeks before.
Put another way- the Taliban took over in the middle of a series of obvious, typically, and routinely foreseen religious holiday offenses at the height of the fighting season. These offensives were going to occur because they'd occurred yearly for the previous decade, almost two. The offensive was as fast as it was because you could literally drive from a village that had just flipped to the next village, with the village leader who flipped, and make the point that if he flipped, maybe you should to, and anyone who was familiar with Afghan tribal / clan based politics could have told you the implications that had- which were forewarned more than once.
In the original Trump-era plan, the plan was for the US forces by 1 May 2021. Since the American troops don't literally board the plane the last day, but typically do so over weeks and months, the actual pullout would have been in the preceeding months. That means March and April on the final combat units, before the fighting season is in full swing, and January February for everyone else, still in the winter lull.
Which is to say, the Americans would have stayed in force for the climax of the last fighting season, had an uncontested winter non-fighting season to withdraw in good order, and have the opening months of the first fighting season (March/April) to make a decision of re-surging if necessary before a major Taliban offensive could get the people and material in-country for a country-wide offensive.
That, in turn, would have given the western leaders who wanted to more time to decide to send in a relief force to secure Kabul, rather than be overtaken by events on the ground, and given the Afghan government a gradual escalation of enemy activity rather than a sudden shock of attacks everywhere. Because the situation would have taken longer to unfold, the nature of the system shock that enabled / incentivized the domino cascade would have differed, in part because, again, you couldn't just drive from Pakistan to Kabul.
Kabul might still have fallen, but it would have taken considerably longer without the political cascade effect, and most notably well after the Americans had mostly withdrawn, without the Taliban able to claim the momentum of an uncontested crescendo.
In the Biden plan, which became a thing because Biden tried to abandon the Trump plan but then wasn't able to secure another full year for withdrawal, the Americans withdrew in the middle of the fighting season. Which, of course, the Taliban knew, and the Afghan government knew, and all the tribals elders knew. This, in turn, set the conditions for the sudden offensive shock that saw the rapidity of the cascade we saw in history, as American forces ceased combat support operations in preparation for the multi-month pullout process.
What this also did was mess with the coalition evacuation plans. Up to the year before, the plans to leave Afghanistan if necessary relied on using Bagram Airfield, the major American military airbase in the capital. As long as the US was in Afghanistan, it was the safest / most defensible / easiest to access route for any entry or exit movement. When it was abandoned- because of the summer pullout schedule- various states and organizations hadn't actually updated their plans on how to leave Kabul. Which left Kabul airport, with the results you saw of the American airborne basically flying in to occupy from the inside while the Taliban controlled the gates, rather than having American and their Afghan partners at the guard points.
Further, the nature of the speed- and thus shock- is what led to the American embassy implicitly burning all its Afghan personnel records in the 'burn it all / don't let anything get captured' continency that most warzone embassies have. Except... in part because the embassy hadn't actually had to follow through on the evacuation according to the earlier timetable, the US Embassy in Kabul was the only location with the various documents such as the pre-approved visas for Afghan partners who were intended to be pulled out last moment. Which were supposed to be what cleared Afghan friends and partners to get on the planes to get out.
So when those went into the burn pit, you had literally nothing distinguish -person who helped US soldiers for decade at great risk to themselves- from -person who sees opportunity to get into US / flee the Taliban-. Which is how you got the stories of afghans calling American soldiers they worked with years ago, who called actively serving soldiers at the airport, to guide people to sneak in side doors, using nothing but 'I know a guy who knows a guy' levels of trust and coordination.
Because the partner document packets were burned in a panic that wasn't necessary.
Because the Embassy thought it was going to be overrun in an offensive that wouldn't have been possible 6 months earlier or later.
Because the Embassy thought it had several more months to get around to dispersing the documents because Biden pushed the pullout date back to the end of the fighting season.
Because anything but Trump was the order of 2021, and after his election in 2020 Biden was signaling he was going to redo the pullout (but was 'convinced' not to by his opposite negotiators).
Because Biden wanted a big ceremonial 9-11 anniversary rather than an unceremonious pullout that would have been a minor political critique in his first year.
I'm not a Biden fan, but I do praise him for actually getting us out of Afghanistan.
I, too, approve of actually getting out of Afghanistan. I don't think that was a mistake. I even think biting the bullet and accepting the humiliation was the correct move. History would be significantly different had Biden doubled-down, and had a major military force in Afghanistan when Russia invaded Ukraine.
Likewise, my prior is that the US military should be able to pull out of Afghanistan in good order on a specified date more or less regardless of what the Taliban or the locals do. To date, I've seen no reason not to assume malicious compliance on the part of the military brass, something they very clearly are willing to do given the bragging about straightforward insubordination and deceit under Trump.
What reason would you need to see to convince you that the military was simply compliant as opposed to maliciously compliant, particularly for an order to withdraw at a date that practically guaranteed bad order in pursuit of domestic political advantage?
The American military was not responsible for the decisions to re-adjust the military pullout to the middle of the fighting season. They were not responsible for the decision to handover Bagram, the main military airbase to be used for emergency evacuation plans, or the timeline to do so. They were not responsible for the decision by the Embassy to destroy partner national documentation, or to only have the copies literally in Kabul. They weren't even responsible for sending the airborne to into Kabul airport at the end, where the world then got to see Afghans falling to their deaths off of military aircraft.
And I do not even believe those were all bad decisions to make. Once the offensive was clearly racing forward, embassy purge was not an unreasonable choice to make. Having already given up a military airbase, a civilian airport is not the worse substitute. The Afghan pullout, as much as it is remembered as a shameful defeat, was an unprecedented logistical effort that, coincidentally, got a lot of people- including non-Afghan partners- safely out of Afghanistan when the Taliban took over. Many of the ISAF partners were in more or less the same boat of having no backup plan to Bagram, because they, too, thought ISAF would have time to muster a relief force.
But the Biden administration, including Biden himself, made a significant number of political decisions with easily predictable- and predicted- consequences that led to those reasonable-in-context decisions. Consequences that- had the administration struck to the start-of-the-fighting season pullout- would have substantially reduced the various costs, reputational and otherwise, to the americans in general and to the Biden administration in particular (which certainly did itself no favors by claiming no one warned them and claiming that a 9-11 anniversary just happened to be necessary for a well-ordered pullout).
I'm just going to note that hypersonic is generally used as a buzzword in the Iranian context, not the 'uber weapon to fear' of cutting edge missile technology. It's the difference between categorizing by speed or by form-function.
Basically any form of ballistic missile moves fast enough in the terminal phase to reach velocities of Mach 5 (6100 km/hr or 3800 miles/hr). That's what the Iranian Fattah-1 does. That's what the Cold War SCUD used by Iraq in the Gulf War did. And that's what the WW2 German V2 did. This is basically just the applies physics of gravity on an object high enough and with enough time (distance) to be accelerating. It's not particularly impressive, and it's not particularly hard to defeat in missile defense terms because that speed comes with an increasingly locked-in trajectory that makes interception (relatively) easy because it's pretty clear roughly where a ballistic trajectory is going to end up. And because it is a ballistic trajectory- meaning because it is going high- it can be detected relatively early in the transit process.
Hypersonic weapons in the 'this is scary new technology' are referring more to 'hypersonic glide bodies.' These are the things that are pushing through the air on the power of rockets / scramjets / etc, like, well, hypersonic missiles that are not ballistic missiles. These are far harder to do, because they have to rely on their motors/propellant more than re-entry acceleration, and more significant stresses to critical components. However, because these are taking a far more direct route to the target, and are reaching their hypersonic speeds more as the mode of travel rather than the re-entry criteria, they are doing so considerably faster, and are going to be detected relatively later (and thus with less time to react) due to the reduced ballistic trajectory exposure. This is the scary thing in future wars because of the potential for a hypersonic adversary to first-strike you with almost no-effective warning.
This is a picture from the wiki page on the relative difference. When Iran boasts about its hypersonic weapons, it's using the ballistics but trying to claim the reputation / insinuations of the HGBs. (Such as by claiming that the final-stage re-entry munition is a glide vehicle, and thus furthering the conflation, even though the more relevant capability is the path between launch and final-phase.)
...which is actually one of the reasons the technical claim of yesterday's attack on Israel was met with a relative shrug. It's roughly the equivalent of when Russia boasts about having successfully conducted an attack with a nuclear-capable missile. So many of Russia's conventional weapons are nuclear-capable that it doesn't actually mean anything special. Similarly, when Iran boasts of its hypersonic ballistic weapons, it's generally boasting on the cutting-edge prowess of 60-year-old-tech (hypersonic as a function of speed).
60-year-old tech is certainly still usable, and the Iranian missiles are probably better than anything that could have been built 60 years ago thanks to GPS if nothing else, but it's still a bit of an obvious flex to impress people less familiar with the distinctions.
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