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
For it to be deserve to be turned on his supporters as much as his detractors, his supporters would need to not understand his intentions as much as his detractors.
I am far from persuaded this is the case.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
Sadly, the attempts to equate two different crimes of differing severity led to the hyperbolic accusations of one and with it the discreditation of the other.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
Eight or nine years ago, it became clear Trump says things he doesn't plan on doing because he values the reaction he gets in politics/negotiations. He's been doing this for a decade and likely longer. He (or someone) wrote a book where saying shocking things while hiding what you want is how one should behave in business. And yet, every single time this happens people take Trump at face-value and attack/criticize the proposal.
This, more or less. It's the literally vs seriously division all over again, and about as interesting as it was last time.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
'Used to'? 'But now'?
You're acting as if they claims didn't already exist. Conspiracies inflating USAID are more common in those countries, not less. There was nothing preventing the powers from making those claims or objections before, not least because they have made such claims before. This doesn't introduce a new dynamic.
Moreover, the reason most countries let in USAID regardless is stronger if USAID is rolled into the State Department, not weaker: picking a fight over it is picking a fight with the American embassy in your country. When USAID and the American Embassy are divided, it's a lower political cost (if at all) to block them- hence why there are more countries with US Embassies than USAID. When USAID and the Embassy are one in the same, blocking USAID now a constant issue with the Ambassador... who, of course, can block other aid / assets / diplomatic favors / etc. until you want in.
And sure, there are some countries that write that off... but these are countries where USAID was not active regardless.
Whereas for any country that wants to maintain American economic inputs in addition to all other sources (i.e. trying to maximize money gained), an argument of 'we won't accept your money because it comes with your influence efforts' is not particularly compelling if your country accepts significant amount of money from China which similarly comes with influence efforts. Unless, again, you are the sort of country where USAID is already not active regardless.
The same people who let it in before. That USAID members and advocates fancied it in a certain way never meant that other actors shared in that view. Iranian activists weren't exactly being supported from inside Iran, and the Ukrainians who are getting support aren't exactly at odds with the Ukrainian government.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
Not recently, no, though I am familiar with the line of argument. I will admit I don't find it particularly compelling- the argument is basically 'we do more and better apart than together,' when most strategies are about aligning synergistic efforts that reinforce eachother. It also relies on the assumption that Development + Diplomacy gets more money than Development-unified-Diplomacy, which I don't find particularly compelling... and which the recent action rather disproves, since USAID is currently getting the axe for a lack of institutional/political protection that it would have had with the State Department.
Dean
Flairless
8mo 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.
No. Indirect economic "harms" are trade-offs. For example, if the price of chocolate rises, then some people cannot afford the amount of chocolate they used to buy. That's not a harm — yes, the chocolate buyer is worse off, but there is a chocolate producer on the other end, who would in turn be worse off if the price were lower.
Many economic trade-offs are harmful. You are aware of this, hence why your economic example is of someone not getting a luxury confectionary, as opposed to someone losing their job, losing access to affordable housing, having to live in less-safe / more dangerous neighborhoods, enduring significant stresses and related health and social consequences due to economic consequences that benefit other people.
And this is without further accounting for the not 'just' economic changes that can accompany macroeconomic changes, such as changes to culture, crime rates, and various other things that come with the macroeconomic trends and hurt people.
I'm after a precise definition of "harm" here, because that's relevant to my core values, Humanism. Do not harm human beings. One primary source of harm is loss of integrity of your own body (being subject to violence, …). Higher chocolate prices are ok, a threat to your existence is not. Let me call it "bodily harm" for the sake of discussion.
No, you may not, because the discussion is that you do not get to waive aside harms on the basis of semantic gerrymandering just because you do not want to acknowledge that your policy preferences hurt people, but you don't want outright admit you find that acceptable. You especially don't get to on the basis of a 'core value' that is routinely violated by both any action or inaction at a policy level.
Don't dodge the discussion, make your stand: does mass migration cause no harm, or does it cause harms but you are okay with that?
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
8mo ago
It's not more difficult if you don't insist on semantic gerrymandering. It does not matter if it is harmful on a 'personal' level- it matter if it harms, period, because all harms are personal on some level.
Indirect economic harms are still economic harms. Harms to social trust by unilateral disregard of legitimate laws is still harm to social trust. Criminal harms by criminals who partisans protected from deportation because they wanted to spite or defy their outgroup are still harms. Self-righteous support for human trafficking that corresponds with the significant smuggling of addictive and harmful substances that fund violent criminal groups domestically and abroad even as the smuggled migrants compete with citizens for public goods and services while disrupting local social equilibriums is a whole host of harms to be encountered by various people in various ways at various times.
If you want to argue that immigration doesn't harm anyone, then just say immigration doesn't harm anyone. But if you can't do that because it wouldn't be believable, don't try to introduce a qualifier that only serves to disqualify all the types of harm that might be relevant to others.
Dean
Flairless
8mo 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
8mo ago
You halfway described stereotypical male versus female relationship dynamics.
Dogs, like men, are simple, direct, and consistent. It's not that they can't have changes of mood, or are always friendly, but there are strong, direct, and dominant dynamics that are less likely to chance on power dynamics. If your dog suddenly grew to the size of a car, it would certainly be bigger and more prone to dangerous accidents, but if you called it would still come.
If your cat suddenly dwarfed you, however, your relationship would likely substantially change. Cat relationships- precisely because they are fickle and thus often conditional love- are highly contextual, playing to its moods and the power dynamics involved. It can go from signaling contentment to displeasure far quicker, which totally has no gender stereotype equivalent.
Of course, and just like with men and women, stereotypes are not always truths, and there are a lot of overlaps, including the capacity for sincere and committed relationships.
But stereotypes do exist for reasons, or at least often enough for a reputation to be formed and sustained.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
The issue with Chinese HSR is that it became a sort of flagship national pride / soft power / foreign influence vector during the post-2008 stimulus period.
For various (mostly American-adjacent) geopolitical-meets-green reasons, high speed rail became an international symbol of being a 'modern' and 'advanced' country, particularly because the Americans weren't into it. (For pretty sound economic reasons, but that doesn't stop good propaganda.) Building more and more HSR was not only a quote-unquote 'easy' way to beat the US at a metric of global prestige, but it was a complimentary infrastructure investment with the construction boom and the early Belt-and-Road infrastructure project wave (and thus a Chinese jobs program / influence investment overseas). China was a Train Power who could spare trains and track for a reasonable price and no strings attached* (*terms and conditions apply), and all that.
The issue on the domestic front was that the construction boom was a bubble, and the dynamics of the Chinese system that led to ghost cities also led to high speed rail to those sort of ghost city projects, even though the fundamental issue- like in a lot of places- is the human geography dispersion. People need movement within cities, or from suburbs to cities, more than they need movement between cities.
Rationalists have always had the ability to rationalize their conclusions. It's in the moniker, even as leagues of human behavioral science and decades of examples have demonstrated that rationalization is often done to justify what people wanted to do anyway, i.e. rationality is often a cover rather than a cause of behavior. People who pride themselves on their ability to rationalizeare in some ways more vulnerable to self-deception or rationalizing their irrationalities due propensity to confirmation bias on the basis of their own presumed rationality/IQ compared to those opposing them, particularly those who don't engage on the paradigm they're claiming from the start.
Just like it's hard to convince people who believe they will go to heaven for an eternity of bliss if they die killing the right people that living in the flawed reality is better, it's hard to convince people who have abstracted their actions and consequences into independent / imaginary spaces (parallel world lines, abstract group-level competition) that they are working against their defined interest. It doesn't matter if the consequence negatively affects this current context- the promise / payoff is outside your bounding context.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
TLDR: The White House wants project Star Wars 2.0, kinetic fires and possibly lasers in space. If successful the true age of militarisation of space will have begun.
Already started years ago.
Even aside from last year's claims that Russia intent to put a totally-not-a-nuke nuclear device in orbit for anti-satellite EMP, the premise of 'move your satellite to crash into the other satellite,' i.e. kinetic, has been in play for some time. Just earlier this month the Chinese put out a 'look at we can do' study of how 99 Chinese satellites could 'approach' 1,400 starlink satellites in 12 hours.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
Soros is an American jewish progressive neoliberal whose spends significantly (as in, something like over 30 billion USD) on progressive political advocacy networks that support, among other things, liberal migration policies.
No_one is insinuating that European migration policy would not have happened absent Soros lobbying, rather than Soros having like-minded partners in Europe and boosting already existing political dynamics.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
In order: I have no idea, I hope not, I would not be the least surprised, and yeah.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
It could give people a fake audience of AI humans who appreciate their wit and wisdom. This technology is definitely coming soon. Already, we see a small group of mostly neurodivergent people who spend hours a day talking to AI chatbots. There's no reason to think this won't grow. In the future, everyone will have an audience of adoring robot fans, hanging on their every word. If you can get over the fact that it's all fake, it might be the best of all worlds.
I'm reminded of... I wouldn't call it a study, but a post I remember that characterizes many of the most popular video game companions as professional sycophants whose role in the video-game power fantasy of the self-projection protagonist was to affirm how awesome and attractive you.
The example I remember was in the Bioware RPG Mass Effect, where the player plays the Super Awesome Special Forces Secret Agent Officer, Commander Shepard in the multi-species galaxy, where you are (allegedly) an amazing leader ready to make the Tough Choices. The first game's gimmick was not only the claim that your Big Decisions would matter in the future, but also the morality system that let you play a heroic virtuous paragon (who consistently deferred to / agreed with the Alien UN authority figures) or a ends-justify-the-means Renegade (who could be a raging racist). There was even a romance system where you could sleep with your subordinates, including a star-trek esque alien blue woman.
The second game's gimmick, among other things, was the ability to re-recruit most of your other alien squadmates from the first game and sleep with them... even if you were a raging racist infront of them. The player romance fantasy for the totally-not-gypsy coded geeky tech girl might be the dashing captain who was a white night who saved her late father's reputation (by covering up crimes that got a lot of people killed), and hey it's totally romantic if she loves you so much that she's willing to risk killing herself before a critical mission just to sleep with you...
...but she'd make the same doe eyes and declarations of love and how irresistibly attractive you were if you were a genocidal bigot who punched women for mouthing off on live television and turned over an autistic child to have his eyes stapled open and be tortured for Science (TM) after sleeping with an abused trauma victim tormented by the same racial-supremacist organization that you are currently working for and can repeatedly voice support for.
The virtual waifu was, in other words, incredibly popular. And like most of the most popular characters in the franchise, was never anything but supportive and/or adoring for the player self-insert protagonist.
So when you say fake audiences fawning over the player/protagonist... I believe it, because we've already seen it. It was just far more limited and harder to program and write for a decade ago... which is to say, should be in the LLM's training data.
Now, the real capitalism question will be how we get someone to pay for and profit from it, without being so crass as to expect the hosts to. Figure that out, and then we're talking.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
It won't end well for anyone, and ending well for the Americans is what is required for it to be a good idea for the Americans.
This is a bit much. Yes, I agree that cheap drones have really changed a lot of things. Everything about ground maneuver, mounted and dismounted, has changed due to the threat. Helicopters are probably already nearly obsolete in significantly-contested areas. But cheap drones are not yet even close to being capable of taking out F-35s.
They absolutely are... when they are on the ground, as they are most of the time. Hence why the WSJ report on how the mystery drones last year forced the US Airforce to relocate the F-22 squadron from Langley Airbase during the first big mystery drone swarm event.
Drones are not only a credible threat to military equipment when the military equipment is in motion, but also- especially- when it is NOT in motion, or only in slow motion. Drones dropping payloads is one of the easiest modifications to make to a commercial off the shelf drone, and it doesn't take much to functionally ruin things far sturdier than aircraft.
This is why last year's 'drones are flying over airbases' was notable. A drone that can fly over an airbase without permission is a drone that can fly over (or into) an aircraft on the runway without permission, and thus destroy an aircraft without permission.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
Yes. The cartels are in many respects far more dangerous, with considerably greater asset potential than the Muslim fanatics in Afghanistan had access to before the US was negotiating its way out, and considerably greater ability to put those assets to use against American national interests, including within the United States itself.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
What math are you confused on?
You are not fighting a direct war with Russia or China, who can inflict considerable costs and losses against the US if engaged directly. This proposal is a proposal to instigate a direct conflict with cartels, who can inflict considerable costs and losses against the US if engaged directly.
This is a cost / math consistency: do not instigate a direct conflict against those who can inflict consider costs and losses if engaged directly.
There are certainly other arguments that can be made on how to react to someone else's instigation of a conflict, but many of these are voided if made by the same people proposing direct conflict instigation (and are generally not my position regardless).
He replied before I edited in the ISIS false flag part on a whim. Also, that was not satire. Posting such a video seems like an obviously good idea, since the morale effect is the entire point. Claiming responsibility does not, and sowing confusion seems like it would be effectively free with no appreciable downsides.
I acknowledge my mistake of your intent, and will simply adjust by noting I consider this a terrible idea. Providing global audiences, including competitors, skeptics, and wavering audiences, documentary evidence of American war crimes is quite appreciable downsides for American efforts globally, particularly when trying to hide behind false-flag islamic terrorism in a region that notably has a lack of it (because the cartels have a history of not tolerating it).
Come now, of course it's offering protection, and in a way the principles involved would be entirely familiar with.
And yet, it fails the basic protection racket credibility requirements that American counter-insurgency/counter-crime efforts abroad have run into for decades: everyone knows that the Americans will leave, and when they do the people they pushed back will return. A protection racket fundamentally does not work if the protectors are assured to leave.
Hence why it is critical that any intervention be with the consent / support of the local government, and not in contemptuous indifference to their position, as the OP took.
And this is without the issue of the intervention being framed on principles that the intervention is supposed to mitigate, not perpetuate. The propaganda of 'American gangsters are moving in' practically writes itself.
It is not obvious to me why we can't or shouldn't be, or why refraining from being so is a net-positive. That is not to say that we should begin filming Funky Towns or cribbing from ancient Chinese law enforcement techniques. It is to say that we have access to resources dozens of orders of magnitude greater than theirs, that terror and horror come in many flavors and can in fact trade off with each other, and that this is a class of people who have pretty clearly placed themselves beyond most forms of moral concern.
You do not have access to resources dozens of orders of magnitude greater than theirs.
Even if you just want to compare raw revenue (DoD funding vs. illegal american drug purchase estimates), you are not even looking at two orders of magnitude (2024 estimates being something on the measure of a 840 billion DoD budget versus a US illegal drug market in the 10s of billions- i.e. 1 order of magnitude). If you want to subdivide collective cartel costs between competing factions and dynamics, you also need to provide the same sort of proportional consideration to the US resourcing effort- i.e. what the actual cost-scale for an intervention is supposed to be.
For a basis of comparison- the US costs in Japan and Korea from 2016 to 2019 were less than 40 billion USD, or 40,000,000, 000. For the cartels to have resources a dozen orders of magnitude less than the resources the US uses over multiple years as part of treaty commitments, the Cartels would need to spend less than $1.
Somehow I doubt that represents Cartel spending... or that the new, supposedly intervention-shy administration will spend magnitudes more money on a (supposedly short!) Mexican intervention than years of overseas security spending.
Am I beating up on this obvious turn of phase? Yes. But I am doing this to pivot to the point that you don't need same-order-of-magnitude resourcing to make something terribly costly, which is part of the ongoing technology revolution of military affairs.
Drones themselves are an asymmetric cost-benefit weapon: you can buy 55,000 $2k drones for the cost of one $110 million F-35. It doesn't matter if you can't buy 1 F-35 or 55,000 drones- it matters if you can buy one drone that can destroy a $110 million asset, and then repeat as needed.
Which is absolutely in reach of targets whose signature ability is "having supply chains to move good worth billions of dollars to and through the United States."
There is a reason that one of the main counter-drone defenses on the Ukraine frontlines is 'don't be worth the cost of expending the munition' rather than 'shoot down the drone.' The US relationship with cartels isn't just 'the US could apply far more violence'- it is also that the Cartels could apply far more violence. It's not worth it to them to pick a fight unnecessarily, but if the US is the one to instigate a fight...
Ideally in this scenario, they wouldn't do either. The goal wouldn't be to kill the market, which you are correct to say would be impossible, but rather to modify the behavior of those participating in the market. Sure, they're willing to accept death for a chance at the good life; but maybe they can be persuaded that the sweet spot is actually a bit back from "public torture murder".
Trying to tear down a cartel in a specific operating zone is increasing, not decreasing, criminal incentives for 'public torture murder.'
Cartel violence in Mexico is often highest where there is not a dominant cartel. The violence is generally about the Cartels competing with each other, not with the state or the public. A spike of cartel violence is typically a result of a push into another gang's territory. Where a cartel is dominant, particularly the Sinaloa cartel, such public violence is neither necessary or sought.
This would be particularly exploitable since the best way to tear down a dominant cartel is... to tell the American intervention force that's bombing cartels where your cartel rivals are. Thus the Americans will do the hard work for you, reducing power disparities and opening the way for public torture murder.
Underneath the theorycrafting and righteous vengeance and repartee, though, there's a more substantive concern: I don't think it's a good idea to foster the creation of a society where corruption and brutality are accepted facts of life. When I look at history, there's a pattern I think I see, where things go bad, evil is ascendent, and all the good people either die, leave, or are corrupted themselves. The results of this pattern appear to me to be very bad in the long term, and I worry quite a bit that this is what we have done to Mexico.
And your view on the historical patterns of when the 'Don't just stand there- do something!' instinct in the face of bad things is mixed with policy proposals to attack outsiders because internal reforms are dismissed as 'too hard'?
Setting aside that corruption and brutality are facts of life, and that this proposed intervention would involve plenty of both, the alternative to Pancho Villa Buggaloo is not 'do nothing and be apathetic.' There are alternative forms of action, and if you identify a lack of virtue in the context then you have identified an alternative method to work on. Just because they are hard / incremental / unlikely to succeed in the short term does not mean they do not work over time. No society starts 'virtuous'- rather, cultivation of virtue is something cultivated over generations, over countless setbacks, often with the help of others and over the hinderance of others.
And this is without the ethnocentricism of framing the issue as what 'we' have done to Mexico. The Americans have plenty of things to be responsible for, none more than the drug trade demand, but you do not have a monopoly on moral responsibility for other people's evils. Mexicans are as much individuals with their own moral agency as Americans, even if they have members who do things you'd really rather they not.
It rather does. As a matter of category, a centrist is a balance of left and right. If they write off on half the political spectrum, they are not a centrist.
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