Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being an insufferable reactionary post-modernist fascist neo-conservative neo-liberal conservative classical liberal critical theorist Nazi Zionist imperialist hypernationalist warmongering isolationist Jewish-Polish-Slavic-Anglo race-traitor masculine-feminine bitch-man Fox News boomer. No one yet has guessed a scholar, or multiple people. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
My position is that you are still crying wolf, and replacing 'racist' with 'fascist.'
Dean
Flairless
6mo ago
Which would seem to indicate Trump's willingness is conditional on legality, not merely annoyance. And legal deportations are typically not considered just disappearing people.
You could imagine the Trump administration just disappearing people they find annoying.
We could also imagine Trump wearing just a tutu, which would also be unseemly. Is there any particular reason to substantiate imagination?
Dean
Flairless
6mo ago
Secondly, What are these 'chores' and how is there a debate about whether it was work or not? How does ICE even know that said 'chores' even happened?
Given how 'chores' were equated to labor, emotional and otherwise, and thus unfair/uncompensated wage disparities in past media epicycles, I am unclear if I am supposed to be upset that that this does or does not conflict with a worker visa on grounds of work.
Dean
Flairless
6mo ago
Appreciated, though it was something of a new year's resolution to try and post less about it this year.
Dean
Flairless
6mo ago
Does anyone know, or have access to information about how many Federal employees have been furloughed?
The amount matters less than the distribution. Some departments (Education, USAID) are getting hit far, far, far, far more than others. Even in others, cuts are often occurring more at the new-employee level more than the old-employee level, where alternate tactics- such as the early-retirement offers- are being used.
The key point is to look to the employee's relevant secretary. Since DOGE's reigning-in from the 'all employees say what you did' email, the Secretaries appear to have been given primacy in deciding how to approach their workforce.
Dean
Flairless
6mo ago
Might want to specify which claims you're counting as counts, since there are more than two involved.
Would recommend a followup in 4 months regardless, though I don't think we have an iRemindMe feature here.
Your youtuber doesn't seem to have addressed the relevant question of 'what makes this time different than the last failed predictions of Trump the warmonger?'
This list of supporting arguments is not new. Most of them applied to the previous Trump term as well. Setting aside the selection and framing biases in them, why should predictions that Trump is going to invade countries now supposed to be treated more credibly than previous predictions that Trump was going to invade countries? Particularly since one of the greatest points of diplomatic contention between Trump, the Europeans, and even the Trudeau government, has been a lack of interest in military expenditures?
Dean
Flairless
6mo ago
The lack of detail is less confusing than the lack of attribution. I'm not critiquing the moderating decision on sock puppets who troll, but the mod-end comments comes across as a discussion which uses nothing but pronouns with an insinuated but unclear subject.
Which, in other contexts, would (appropriately) come with a prompt to speak clearly for others to understand.
Dean
Flairless
6mo ago
Which one of the chronic returnees is this person again?
I know we have a / a few chronic returnees, but I've long since forgotten/conflated the original strains. It's reached a point where it's receiving a callout it's no longer clear who is being referred to.
Dean
Flairless
6mo ago
For comparison, see, for example from 19th century, war of 1870. War ended with great victory for Germans, great humiliation for French. France lost two provinces, lots of cash and honor.
What happened afterwards? Peace. Bad feelings remained, but diplomatic relations were restored, French could travel to Germany and vice versa, no walls and barbed wire on the borders. Not thinkable today.
...well, that's certainly one reading of the war that did more than anything else to set up two world wars and the repeated future ethnic cleansings of Germans.
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.
Dean
Flairless
6mo ago
And thus you have abandoned the small-quantity defense, in favor of a qualitative difference defense.
Which is fine. But this is still a retreat from the bailey back to the motte, and still doesn't answer the question you tried to dodge.
A slippery slope argument rests on the premise that you aren't already at the bottom of the greater warned costs.
I am not arguing that if you spend 1.59 on libraries, you will spend 60k on more. I am noting you are already spending 60,000.00 on more if you are a taxpayer, of which 1.59 on libraries is one of many, many such 'small' costs.
The attempt to separate 1.59 from 60,000.00 is simply budgetary salami slicing. Who takes issue over one slice of salami?
How many other distinct topics are you willing to let others obligate you for $1.59 each before you consider it a not-small price below the level worth arguing over?
Ten line items? Hundred? Thousands? Tens of thousands?
Naturally, each and every one could use the same defense- it's only a few pennies or dollars.
In time, though, you reach the total government spending / # of residents, which in the US is somewhere north of $30,000 per citizen... or roughly $60,000 per taxpayer, going by your taxpayer estimate versus rough American population.
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.
Why do you believe this would be a reasonable- as in, reason-driven- as opposed to a pathetic- as in, pathos-driven- compromise?
Keep in mind that weaponized emotional appeals- including appeals to sympathy for social compact violators and shaming campaigns against those not showing enough pity towards preferred beneficiaries- have been a hallmark of the American culture war for decades now, and which the current political context is part of a political revolt against.
This is particularly relevant to this example, as a 'let's compromise on amnesty for immigration reform' was bargained in the past, except that the amnesty given did not lead to actual immigration enforcement afterwards.
Now your proposal is a compromise of further amnesty instead of enforcement for... what, exactly?
Dean
Flairless
6mo ago
I am fairly sure American conservatives were not in the cultural driver seat for the other 5 thousand years of human history either.
Do you simply concede that it's not going to survive and the US accepts that since its continuation is not worth or not feasible fighting for?
No. I tend to not concede to strawmen of arguments I did not make.
Do you argue that people like Palmer Luckey, Alex Karp, Alex Wang, Dario Amodei, Sam Altman are, similarly to me, clueless and in disconnect with your political culture?
A second no. I thought it was clear that I argue that you do not understand how well connected people like they are or are not to the dominant American (or western) political cultures.
Do you write it off as inconsequential self-interest of individual players, because the vote of salt-of-the-earth rednecks is more influenced by price of eggs?
A third no. Though I do applaud you for ever-consistent efforts for an acerbic condescension, Ilforte.
It's particularly perplexing that @Dean claims my "economic narrative waves aside the property bubble" when I specifically wrote about it.
Perhaps it perplexes you that you were not the subject of that comment?
Your own comment on the subject of the property bubble was certainly wrong- the overproduction of buildings and ghost cities were not issues that were resolved by 'filling them up'- but I did not make a claim about your specific argument because I was not addressing your specific argument.
Isn't OP's very point that we, the West, have lost, because we can't get our heads out of our asses, honestly look at the world and act?
Is it? I've known the poster formerly known as Ilforte for years, and the fact that he defined 'theory of victory' in terms of-
And by victory I mean retaining hegemony, as the biggest strongest etc. etc. nation on the planet, and ideally removing all pesky wannabe alternative poles like Russia, China and Iran. Russia and Iran are not much to write home about, but what to do with China?
-strikes me as both characteristic enough of him and disconnected enough from American political paradigm to move on without further engagement or consideration, had you not invoked me by name.
The OP certainly has enough viewpoint differences with members of this forum and broader political coalitions that I would doubt his ability to characterize, let alone speak for 'we' or 'the west,' let alone defer to his judgement or assessments on the world. For example, it is certainly a common enough perspective to believe the American end-state is hegemony as a goal in and of itself. But that perspective demonstrates a general lack of cultural awareness of how dominant American political conceptions often view American geopolitical power as a means to an end, rather than an end in and of itself. There are certainly elements of American politics which value geopolitical power for power's own sake, but the reason that the American electorate has gone for the domestic-priorities President for every election for the last 30-odd years is because those foreign-affairs interests are not dominant. It is a cultural inclination which almost only the Americans get to afford thanks in no small part due to geography and geopolitical separation from revanchist and ethnic-solidarity cultural paradigms.
At which point, consideration of what that the goal of US policy and thus 'victory' would be needs to be something 'the West' would agree upon. Whether that is Americans in a comfortable isolationism even if the world burns, or America ensuring other states don't get devoured by blobbing neighbors, or any other American paradigm of what the American goal is- would be rather relevant to what a theory of victory would be.
Put another way-
IF American victory is being the hegemon, then lack of hegemony is failure and China wins by being individually strongest.
However-
IF American victory is China not establishing military domination of eastern Eurasia, then raising potential costs of Chinese intervention to degree that China doesn't engage in territorial conquest on revanchist grounds against its regional neighbors / military intervention spree in east asia is victory, regardless of whether China or the US is individually the strongest.
It could even be regardless of a Taiwan scenario outcome. A loss over Taiwan / successful Chinese conquest over American objection would certainly be a defeat, but if the Chinese experience is bad enough that the next 50 years are spent on Chinese internal stability issues rather than trying to blob like Russia when it thinks it has a shot against the former soviet sphere, that would still be a begrudged 'victory' by a 'China doesn't dominate eastern asia' standard. It would be a victory even if the Americans are globally considered a secondary power compared to the glorious China. It would be victory even when people who insist that the American position is just cope for having lost hegemony weigh in.
Victory conditions are typically pre-defined if they are to be useful. Pre-definition requires accurate characterization of a party's goals or objectives.
This is the distinction from judging victory by a relative power relationship paradigm rather than an outcome paradigm, and more specifically which outcome. And this distinction, in turn, leads to different considerations- such as whether the US needs to be Number 1 at all times, or just be close enough for China's long-term issues to constrain its middle kingdom ambitions.
Now, presumably OP believe more of the former- it's hist standard that requires hegemony. However, it is not clear at all to me that 'the West,' or at least the Americans and their Asian allies who matter in Asia, do not believe the later. And if the OP believes one way, and 'the West' believes another, it is not obvious that it is only heads-in-asses to blame for not deferring to the OP's paradigm.
Which will probably be taken as some hostile insult by the OP, when it is not, since we get along like that.
(I love you too, Ilforte, and I'm glad you're safe and still writing even if I am unconvinced by you.)
Legally for various civil servants and state-owned enterprises (which dominate the economy in general), generally tacit for the rest.
China approaches foreign travel of citizens as a necessary risk / national security issue to manage in general, and so isn't adverse to curtailment on any number of grounds. Like with many governments with tight business connections, if a business can frame an action in terms favorable to the state's interpretation, it can often get away with things that might have an ulterior motive. Businesses in turn can have their own interests in demanding someone turn over their passport, though I'm not aware of it being any sort of widespread business abuse in China.
Since part of Xi's model for China is that every business or organization of consequence needs strong ties to the party-state, this implicitly favors a two-party veto on foreign travel: the government can restrict passport-travel for its reasons, and/or businesses can restrict it for their own.
Dean
Flairless
6mo ago
In addition to the primary role of population control purposes (it's easier to monitor foreign activities by domestic individuals if more stay domestic and fewer go abroad), it's also a (small) part of the post-2010s Chinese capital control policy.
Back in the mid-2010s there was a major surge in capital outflows when China announced a surprise devaluation.. Because the devaluation wiped out the value of the Chinese-held savings, as such devaluations do, it prompted a major exodus of Chinese privately-held wealth as people wanted to get it outside into 'safer' investments less subject to devaluation (or, in the Chinese property market's case, crash).
There are indicators there is currently an... I don't want to say identical, but analogous, outflow. Rather than devaluation, however, this is being driven more by market uncertainty of the Chinese in the domestic economic prospects which- while already heavily dependent on state-led investment for growth- is also dealing with things like, say, the Trump trade war policies, which became more and more credible as last year went on.
Passport control is a (small) part of limiting private savings going abroad, rather than staying inside China. Chinese citizens have relatively limited ability to legally move major sums of money out of the country. For various reasons, it's easier to do so if they are able to go outside of China more easily. Withholding passports is how you can limit things like citizens carrying hard drives of crypto-currency bought inside of China to cash out outside of China.
This isn't the sort of capital control countries boast about, but it is part of why China's foreign investment action plan plan for facilitating foreign investment includes one-way movement improvements under point 19, Facilitate the movement of personnel. The goal is to facilitate the movement of people with money into China, not out.
There are many types of illegal things, of which I am fairly sure you would concede are neither equivalent to or predictive of other illegal things. I am also fairly sure you would even concede that Biden did some illegal things as well. I am not convinced you would take them as evidence of specific accusations of willingness to disappear political annoyances... and Biden actually was part of (at least) two administrations that targeted political opponents.
More options
Context Copy link