Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being a hilarious 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 idiosyncratic party-line Fox News boomer. No one yet has guessed a scholar, or multiple people. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
That was neither the claim nor the assumption, and entirely within the estimation.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I'd dispute Dominic Cumming's framing as provided.
Political patronage networks are- and have remained- an integral part of the western political establishments over the last centuries, hence the political appointments for American cabinet ministries and why european parliamentary democracies negotiate coalitions on the basis of which party gets which postings. Those postings come with influence, not impartiality, and a large part of the influence comes from the power to appoint or promote personnel to key positions.
Similarly, it's not exactly hard to see partisan-by-proxy systems throughout the bureaucracies. Yes Prime Minister is more famous than FDR's opposition to public-sector unions, but they both point to a that nominally apolitical agencies do not necessarily remain apolitical or interested in enacting government policy. The main reason in the US that there haven't been multiple-centuries-old one-party political machines in various states is that there was a civil war less than two centuries about that reshaped the political map. Even then, urban-center political machines in the state capitals that dominate state politics aren't exactly new or novel.
But aside from that, one of the key points of meritocratic reforms is that they were only able to advance when the meritocrats were perceived as, well, non-partisan and honest. When they lose that honesty and start being perceived as partisan, they just get recategorized as 'special interests' in the same way that treason doth never prosper.
To return to a point about professions- one of the key distinctions of professions from a craft of trade is the autonomy and deference to the professional provided on the basis of public trust. The doctor gets deference from the patient, and the mayor, because they maintain a collective level of trust across the profession. They maintain that level of public trust as a consequence of not only their personal actions, but how they hold their fellow doctors to account for violations. Without it they lose the ability to be a profession.
Professional government workers- meritocratically selected administrators, if you prefer- are much the same. The ability to retain trust is a key merit for the professional, and thus something an honest meritocracy will prioritize exceptionally highly.
Shakes, I read this in the voice of William Spaniel, and he ever reads that acronym on his channel I will suspect the funniest.
You misunderstand. The primary argument isn't that the private sector is better social lining- that's the secondary/silver lining argument.
The primary argument is that many of the 'capable employees you don't want to lose' weren't considered 'capable' or 'not want to be lost,' because the people engineering the buyouts had a lived experience where many of the most 'capable' government employees- i.e. those most capable at playing the bureaucratic politics and subverting policy without being caught- had been trying to prevent the policy directives in various ways that were only clearer in retrospect.
Put another way- the people doing the layoffs had a strong, and occasionally warranted, distrust of many of the 'most capable government employees.'
The silver-lining argument comes in as a salve/rationalization that any 'innocents' lost in the buyouts aren't tragically or wrongly harmed, but rather took opportunities for good things even as dead wood was cut.
A successful DOGE push out would have to be one in which the bad employees who couldnt find new jobs or who thought they would get fired or who were in unproductive jobs outweigh the "bad" cuts.
This is confusing the goals of an market-motivated corporate downsizing with a political-control-motivated government downsizing. The metric of efficiency isn't employee performance or 'productive jobs'- it's whether the institution as a whole advances policy within a relevant time frame.
This is an extension of a common misconception about meritocratic employment systems. What would normally be dismissed pejoratively as 'political reliability' is actually an incredibly important merit in any system. A system staffed by hypercompetent people in productive jobs who use those positions of productive-power to foil you is not, in fact, a particularly meritorious system. An employee who isn't trusted to advance policy is a bad employee, regardless of how well they perform by traditional market performance metrics.
The general employee cohorts that DOGE engaged had already lost trust during the Trump 1.0 administration or before. Removing them was the 'good' cut that outweighs the 'bad' cuts from the policymaker's perspective, because it resulted in institutions (and employee cohorts) that the policy makers did trust to implement and advance policy. That trust in turn allows the policy makers to focus on other issues of policy, rather than prioritize internal HR evaluations.
Dean
Flairless
4d ago
What else am I supposed to call choosing to side with a child rapist fugitive and his enabler over a victim?
Contemptable? Detestable? There are certainly a large range of words to convey judgement, without making a false accusation.
Especially since a false accusation doesn't call 'choosing to side with a child rapist fugitive and his enabler over a victim' anything. It's a change of subject, not an adjective.
Dean
Flairless
4d ago
AUKUS is a symptom, not the cause. The root of the ship-building spinup is China. AUKUS is more of a bet/trade on short-medium term constraints for medium-longer term capacity gains.
Dean
Flairless
4d ago
That depends significantly on the 'you' and what 'you' prioritize. For a non-trivial part of the DOGE-coalition, cutting down the employee count is a benefit in its own right, even if all the employees were high performers. Cases like your family members would be a 'win'- after all, that person is making more in the private sector, which 'you' could value/prioritize more than the government sector.
At some point I think this is worthy of a larger conversation. I'm of the contrarian opinion (I know it's contrarian) that DOGE succeeded. Massive federal layoffs, ongoing deregulation. The gutting of USAID was significant. The actual DOGE employees all got assimilated into other departments or projects and have mostly all become more powerful. DOGE's successor program Tech Force is quietly achieving a lot of the same goals without attracting almost any attention.
More than this, DOGE was the Trump 2.0 administration's opening move to tame the bureaucracy that had been one of the cornerstones of the Trump 1.0 'Resistance.' It wasn't just the downsizing of large parts of the bureaucracy, but who took the buyouts, and why.
The USAID takedown was a not-subtle shot across the bow of the largely non-legislatively-defined executive branch what had existed more by convention/inertia than as a statutory-defined structure. The instigating incident where USAID leaders tried to physically stop USAID from accessing facilities and classified information was practically tailor made for the most Trump-favorable legal resolution on established American national security law- that the US President is the ultimate authority of executive branch (classified) information, and that no one beneath the president could overrule the president on accessing the president's information. (The exception to this- US nuclear secrets- are not the president's information, but rather covered by acts of congress.)
The USAID takedown demonstrated that the administration could, and would, take physical custody of US federal government information systems, and that there was no real legal recourse against it. Various inside-the-fed resistance activities from the Trump 1.0 period, such as the national-security channel coordination used in the Russiagate abuses, or the 'fortify the election' meetings that were bragged about after post-Trump-1, or the Pentagon subverting directives to withdraw from Syria, were not going to stay hidden inside federal servers. Similarly, the DOGE requirement that employees justify what they did that week- even taken over by the Departments at DOGE's expense- had a similar effect of demonstrating that federal employees could be required to provide information on their activities.
There was more to the downsizing than just that, of course. The whole DOGE campaign read like a pressure campaign leading up to the downsizing like out of a business 'how to make organizational change' text. But the people most likely to take the buyouts included the people most able to see the writing on the wall about executive branch compliance efforts, and could see the risk to themselves for past or potentially current opposition.
In this framing, the success of DOGE has little to do with DOGE as an organization, or even counter-corruption. It has more to do with changing how, and whether, the executive branch follows presidential directive. In Trump 1.0, it wasn't exactly uncommon for the framing to be that 'the adults in the room' would limit what Trump would do. That wasn't just a matter of secretary-level appointments. It also is far less a factor in Trump 2.0.
It's fine and fair to not like that. It is harder to argue that more bureaucratic insurgency in your favor is a more efficient government organization.
Dean is not as active as he once was: Last year, @Dean made so many posts or comments which were included in Quality Contributions Roundups that many commenters independently made the facetious suggestion to rename the Quality Contributions Roundups to the "Dean's list". My analysis bore this out: he easily topped the 2025 leaderboard with one-third more contributions than the second-place contributor, and was the only person in either 2025 or 2026 to produce 5 distinct Quality Contributions in a single month. I guess real life got in the way because he hasn't been as active a commenter this year.
Yeah, about that. Funny stories behind this, which I'll share since it would be shaping the data and it's not quite what some people suspect.
Back in 2025, there was a point that I realized I had a many-month streak going, albeit by accident. Out of curiosity / ego / an inebriated bet to myself, I wanted to see if I could make a year straight of AAQCs, just to see if I could. The 'so you want to get an AAQC' thread at the end of 2025 was the culmination/reflection of that deliberate effort. The early posts in 2026 were just trail of from that- the one in January about Maduro was literally typed in an airport waiting for a flight after a new years trip.
That obviously took a lot of time, and with some long-term predictable things on the horizon for 2026, I made a new years resolution to try and cut back. There were three parts- too much time spent chasing AAQCs, not enough time spent on some personal efforts, but also a resolution to try and cut down on the number of internet arguments I got into this year, especially culture-war related.
I mentioned earlier this year I was taking a sabbatical to play a game that had just come out (MENACE), which coincidentally happened before the whole Iran conflict. It did have impacts to me professionally, but my absence from the motte really was mostly spending my free time playing video games and writing about that on reddit instead of writing in the motte. By the time my pre-planned hiatus resolved, the Iran War discussion seemed toxic enough that I mostly didn't want to get involved.
Then in mid-2026 more personal predictable things happened, and I changed jobs. Which entailed all the typical prep, move, and new faculty familiarization. It also entailed unfortunate property damage, including a personal gaming computer I also used for Motte posting. Which was replaced with a better computer able to actually play more of my backlog, including games that recently got updates.
Now we're approaching US election season, which goes back to the new year resolutions, but it's also bringing back Iran angles for geopolitical reasons as well, which goes back to sitting out the Iran discussions in genneral.
I suspect I'll increase the posting again in 2027. It won't be the artificial highs of 2025, but it (probably) won't be the artificial lows of 2026. I have some personal priorities on the horizon, but I also have some ideas of a monthly effort post series of fun-for-me topics tying nerd media to real world competition.
That aside- for your main questions, I suspect the biggest reason for fewer AAQCs from 2026 is Iran / Trump / AI nexus sucking out most of the oxygen. Fewer people want to talk about much else, especially with the American election year involving all three, but Trump and AI are old topics at this point with fewer new insights, while Iran toxicity squanders the novelty option.
Yet somehow, despite this war goal being accomplished and the war being over, Saudi Arabia is still being attacked by Iran's Proxies..
I have to ask- how competently do you believe this characterizes the situation?
The Saudi-Huthi conflict was in a pause during the recent year, and was a non-factor for the US-Iran conflict which both Saudis and Huthis largely stayed out of. It re-ignited post-MOU when the Saudis tried to block an Iranian flight from landing in Huthi-controlled territory by bombing an airstrip, which was either responded to or provoked to justify a retaliation depending on who you ask. In the last week(s), the Huthis and Saudis have had dueling offensives, with significant increases in missile and airstrikes as the southern front shifts to and fro.
Saudi Arabia and the Huthis have a separate conflict independent not only of the US-Iran war, but predating the Huthi-Iran alliance. Saudi is not 'still' being attacked by Iran's Huthi proxy as a continuation of the US-Iran war because Saudi was not attacked by the Huthis during the US-Iran war in the first place. And also calling the Huthi's an Iranian proxy is wildly misleading of the dynamic. The American war goals in the US-Iran war are orthogonal to the resumption of the Saudi-Huthi conflict, because the war-ending effort of the MOU had nothing in particular too say about the Saudi-Huthi conflict, unlike other Iranian proxies active at the time, and the Huthi-Saudi conflict predates the US-Iran war by a decade.
I get that Shakes' Trumpian triumphalism can be annoying, but this is the sort of pretty bad reading of regional dynamics that gives him more than a bit of a leg to stand. By trying to conflate a separate (and pre-existing) conflict into a rhetorical cudgel regarding the conflict you want to contest the characterization off, you're just giving Shakes a lot to (correctly) reject, and in the process letting him use (well justified) rebuttals to paint the counter-picture that annoys you.
Legal liability, and the policy control to punish/exclude/extort the organizations that don't play along.
Certified regulated entities perform a variety of useful functions, among them being a legal entity to offset legal/monetary blame onto. This is one reason that legal personhood corporations overtook personal-liability ownership models in the first place. An extension of this is that the regulatory/legal superstructure that permits such legal constructs can also use failures to comply/submit as a basis to move against businesses that want to cut those legal-compliance department costs. Typically this is done for deterrence, but it can also be used for other government purposes, ranging from seizing assets (for profit) to strategic advantages (pretext for targeting foreign interests).
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