EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
I know what you're here for. What's his bias? Politically I at least like to think of myself as a true moderate, maybe (in US context) slightly naturally right-leaning but currently politically left-leaning if I had to be more specific.
User ID: 1043
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
That may well be your opinion and you may well be right (voters don't always know what they want), but still I think it's worth pointing out that voters surveyed disagree. Specifically, one of the tested messages was:
The Democratic Party stands for a lot of the right things, but they have no real messengers who can convince people they’re right. Democrats used to have people like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama who could connect with the whole country. Now it just feels like a bunch of half-rate politicians who can’t get their story straight or stay on message.
which sounds very similar to your claim... but it tested smack dab in the middle of the pack, a perfect 50% score. The only "committee" aspect of the polling was that the surveyor is strongly Democrat-aligned, and the specific set of 10 messages were crafted by the pollsters themselves.
I think the element that you highlight that was very strongly supported however was that voters want a clear and pro-action "we want to do X" message, not a "we're against Y" message.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
- pet issue
- policy changes
- really big policy change
- vague vibe
The current system can actually accommodate this kind of thing, and I mean it completely sincerely when I say it is possible, but it requires some form of organization, ideally in the form of a movement. So, unironically yes, you should build it. Think Tea Party or something - it took a few years, but we see now the fruits of what they planted on a wide range of issues, and it all started from a strong local groundswell of sorts. But first you'd have to find some way to package at least some of it together in a sensible way. Right now these things don't neatly fit into the packages offered by the status quo. I could theoretically see it sliding in either on the left (housing, green energy, people-centric) or the right (healthy living, lower regulations, cultural prosperity) just as well, though starting on a particular 'side' isn't mandatory.
I'd call it something along the lines of Human Basics, just have a heavy emphasis on health and housing, I could see that blending into a "package", with a reasonable vibe. I think something is brewing at least on the housing front, so your best bet other than starting from scratch would be to try and push the packaged mini-ideology onto an existing and on-the-ups housing advocacy group. Or, if you want to be institutional, if you could find a powerful state government to run a housing-regulation overhaul, that could be a good trial balloon if you can convince some powerful people directly. That's probably the only way to actually sidestep the movement requirement.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
I mean this tension isn't unique to politics. I think a music analogy is also appropriate here. Is the most popular, listened-to music actually the best? Personally, I do actually think that popular music must ipso facto be almost definitely of decent quality, but if you ask most people on the street if they think the current top song is actually good music, they might often disagree. You brought up film, which is a good analogy, but I think you make a mistake in limiting the analysis to just poor performing films = must be bad films. The dynamics of unpopular things is not fundamentally the same as popular things. A film can not do well because it has a niche audience in the first place, but a film can do well because it does all things at least somewhat competently, even if it does nothing particularly well or best-in-class. At least that's my take on the popular vs quality tradeoff that's present in many forms, including politics. But many films don't even explicitly attempt to do well - not every Oscar Best Picture winner expects to top the box office, and in fact often there is a concession that the two goals are often mutually exclusive. That's why I think the analogy isn't perfect, because in politics, the goal IS to get the top box office! You can't redefine electoral success. I don't think Democrats have deluded themselves into thinking something other than electoral success is the goal. And honestly, I don't think they are doubling down on guilt-based politics either. At least, not yet. Right now they are just in the "milling around confused" phase still.
Reporting from Politico describes the polling conducted for the Democrats, by the Democrats (source poll now released here). It's interesting stuff. When asked (all voters) about the Democratic response to Trump so far:
- 10% The Democratic Party has a good strategy to respond to Trump and it’s working
- 24% The Democratic Party has a strategy to respond to Trump but it’s not working
- 40% The Democratic Party doesn’t have any strategy at all for responding to Trump
- 26% Not sure
Pretty damning. If you lump in the "not sure" with those that actually explicitly say the Dems have no strategy at all, that's a good 2/3rds of voters, and even less than a third of those who think the Dems do have a strategy think it's a good one! And that's before the State of the Union, which seems to only have reinforced this impression. They tested a handful of opinionated claims about what direction the Democrats should go, presented in pairs and asked about which were, relatively speaking, more persuasive if they were to go that direction. Specific matchup data or party affiliation breakdowns wasn't published but overall, some notes about what did particularly well or poorly:
- "Back to Basics" defined as "Protecting Social Security and Medicare, reproductive freedom, workers rights, and an economy that works for everyone" did the best.
- Tied for the best was a message that basically said "Democrats have no message, no plan of their own, and no one knows what they would do if they got back into power"
- Pro-working class/ordinary people and non-ideological emphasis, almost explicitly populist, did well.
- Interestingly, calling out purity tests or snobbish language as being counterproductive didn't do well at all, despite the earlier finding about them being too ideological. Telling them to be less woke was modestly positive but still middle of the pack.
- However, a call to "embrace the fact that they represent the left wing of American politics" and be true progressives also did badly, actually the worst of all of them
- Criticisms of leadership or specific leaders (including Biden), wanting better communicators, as well as wanting new younger leaders, even calling out current leaders as corrupt, were all a bit of a wash
- Advocating for a foreign policy "party of peace" did terrible.
I found the contrast pretty interesting. Voters seem to think that a moderate, mainstream Democratic party would be most effective, but at the same time didn't think that talking down to people was necessarily an issue. Of course, all these reasons were relative to others, not framed in absolute terms, but still. The fact that "Democrats have no message" was found to be MORE persuasive than many of these other reasons, yet a statement calling them to double down on explicitly leftist policies seems to suggest that the Democrats are in a bit of a hole beyond just identity. A lot of people here seem to think that woke language is the millstone, but many voters don't seem to agree. If there's a big takeaway here, it's that voters are probably increasingly favoring short-term, domestic results in their motivations to vote. They don't think the messengers are that flawed, only the message itself, which is super interesting. As such, if I were the Democrats, I'd lean hard back into restoring CFPB-like programs and putting in to place better health care reform as midterm messages. After all, I think a lot of voters still look favorably on the Obamacare reforms. A final note is that this Democratic-aligned polling outfit didn't even bother to include an immigration-specific message! Perhaps because on their version of a Trump approval poll, Border Security and Immigration both received top marks at +10 and +8 favorable. Inflation and healthcare got -10 and -10, emphasizing my point about good points of focus.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
Rather than contort it into an ethnic group, or any group, I think it's best to go back to tried historical principles and consider this modern strain of thought as an ideology. We can think about it the exact same way, because it's the same thing. Along those lines, I think it's becoming a little clear to me that classical liberalism is a distinct and different ideology than this new ideology, which still needs a good name (I don't think progressivism is the right word, for two reasons: there's older progressivism which is different, and two current progressives are a bit distinct in a number of ways). In history these ideologies affect large swaths of society despite having harder cores of specific adherents.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
I think a lot of this presupposes that the peacekeepers actually get involved in the nuts and bolts, nitty-gritty of war. Isn't the whole point of a European aligned peacekeeping force to put a little skin in the game and be a tripwire force? Obviously a large part of that would depend on how stable the truce would be, but if Russia were committed and the Donbass separatists didn't get up to trouble then it's entirely possible a buffer zone would be somewhat peaceful, not Iraq 3.0.
Or do you think that training in violence is provided by military base training alone, no actual combat required?
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
In addition to air pollution which was mentioned, and the simple fact that other organs can get cancer also with no apparent cause, there’s also radon. At least which I’m located, many basements have unsafe levels of natural radon which can significantly boost cancer risk. Not a doctor. Estimates of how much radon causes lung cancers overall vary but the link itself is pretty strong and has been known for decades, it’s often listed as the number 2 cause in a lot of literature.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
Salt Typhoon is a nation state hacker though, not really what OP is talking about.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
They are occasionally targeted. There’s a growing scam where a coordinated group will hack in, carefully watch company email for a few months, and then when it looks like a big deal might be going through they bust out some targeted social engineering. For example, they might email and text the CEOs secretary with a panicked tone about needing to make a wire transfer ASAP, they have email control and maybe spoofed a SIM, it looks legit and some poor employee actually wires away millions.
But there are a few brakes here. One, sometimes the English or social engineering skills are actually medium rare, and you need a specific set of skills to make the whole thing work. Believe it or not, but the supply of well organized foreign hackers is actually moderately constrained. Second, there’s the discoverability problem. These companies, they also are small enough that many even would-be legitimate employees don’t know about them until they post on Indeed. How is a foreign hacker supposed to find them if job seekers sometimes even can’t?
I would argue that the US actually sees a remarkably low level of internal hacking all things considered. You’re right, if you were malicious you probably could make some money. Part of it is the FBI actually is somewhat effective (Anonymous for example was absolutely picked apart, and US jurisdiction and subpoenas and such are relatively easy and effective compared to international stuff). Part of it is if you have the skills you can earn more money for much less risk working a legit job. All this leads to a less favorable risk-reward. There’s also maybe morals coming into play?
But finally, smaller and smaller companies are targeted each year. You may have noticed for example that smaller regional hospital systems get occasionally hacked. Also some corporations especially smaller ones don’t ever admit when they are hacked, or if they do you don’t hear about it. Smart hackers of course tend to avoid hacking hospitals because it draws US federal attention, which does sometimes successfully strike back.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
What an absolutely bait comment. Interesting kernel of discussion in the middle there about the possible impact of immigration on social spending attitudes, or about some economics, and then you just chuck a couple bombs at the end. That’s tired and overdone and lazy.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
First of all I think us vs them is not some kind of inevitability or natural default state. It’s occasionally a helpful heuristic but also many times a harmful one. After all, you can slice any group any number of ways - granted, immigrants might have some notable clusters but I think viewing everything is an ethnic conflict lens is largely just an intellectual trap (for liberals and conservatives alike, horseshoe style).
Other than that, speaking about an “erosion of common culture” is ahistorical and a weird framing. Culture doesn’t have some kind of entropic principle where the inevitable state is chaos, disorder, and decay. Culture changes, and just like people it changes on its own even in the absence of other influences, due to the ever-present pressures of time and history. I think part of your misconception here too is that every cultural topic and belief is a binary scale. No! Ideas and concepts and practices merge and change and contort and remix in any number of degrees. It’s not like every single issue has a slider. Historians apply sliders as a post hoc analysis tool, but it is a grave error to see only the tool and take it at face value. The same thing happens in statistical modeling - just because a linear model works well doesn’t mean you can jump right to causal inference (imperfect analogy but idea of tools not necessarily representing the whole picture is still important).
Another part of your error seems to be an undercurrent of idealization. Like you mention ideas about God as clashing but the history of ideas about God even within ‘classic America’ have been anything but stable. Even the role of religion in America has fluctuated wildly, even in times without major immigration pressure. I’m not saying immigration has zero effect, but I am saying that more humility is needed. I see so many people make not only claims of outright cultural superiority, which I think is oversimplified but I don’t care too much about, but claims that they can somehow predict the exact way that a culture will mesh and change with another. No! Absolutely not! We can’t predict these things well, we’re not Hari Seldon. The beautiful and interesting and unpredictable change and melding of cultures and ideas and events doesn’t work on those simple levels, especially in the medium time scales we often discuss, especially here.
As an example, it might well be that despite seeming “incompatibility”, Islamic beliefs end up boosting general American church attendance even among Christians because the attitudes mix in a new and unpredictable way, rather than lead to some massive sectarian civil war, creating a third Great Awakening or something.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
First of all, I think appeasement is a decent framing because Putin has long been suspected of wanting to take over some of the Baltic states, also former USSR, also long-time actual NATO members. A lot of people seem to have fallen into the trap of thinking that if it wasn't Ukraine wanting to join NATO, there's no issue. I think that was false then, and still false now. If Ukraine gets rolled, those Baltic countries are still on the table, though the longer the war goes on and the more Russia bleeds it does become less likely.
Second of all, the Korean war... exists? I know, the US didn't like re-mobilize the whole country for total war, but it still had an absolutely massive military with tons of WW2 surplus stuff. The US put quite a bit of effort into winning the war and ended up in a stalemate. That's an absolutely massive counterexample such that we don't even need to talk Vietnam (where we dropped an absolute fuckton of bombs and literally drafted people... I fail to see how much more decisive we could have been!)
I think there's still an argument to be made lost in there about appeasement and Communism, but most historians seem to think that Containment wasn't super effective. But replacing it with a more aggressive military policy doesn't make a lot of sense either since the whole MAD thing was already a major factor as early as 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis. That means in the short 15-year window of time before that, during which we did fight a major war which we failed to win, is the only possible time period. What would you have done differently in the, what, 1955-1960 window?
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
I don't really like this counterfactual because it was never even remotely plausible, so you have to make at least one other massive counterfactual and then we're just too far from reality for the exercise to be intellectually useful.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
I like the endowment tax. But what's the actual game plan here, if there even is one? Fire or force out half the academics and researchers, and then maybe 20 years later the ones who replace them will magically be 50-50 red and blue? Even if you think that this will absolutely happen, that leaves a giant 20-year chasm of scientific slowdown. If some of the "burn it down" people here actually do have some kind of proposal, I'm all ears, but I haven't seen one yet. If such a proposal doesn't exist, this is just a Chinese Cultural Revolution 2.0 and could well lead to an intellectual Great Famine.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
...The whole point of government is that there are some public goods that only indirectly make money, or otherwise increase quality of life in a cost-efficient way due to pooled resources?
Forest fire forecasting and management is almost definitionally something the government should be funding itself - the government owns a lot of fire-risk land, massive forest fires affect broad swaths of society, and the net effect can be monetary (even massively so) but is so indirect that private commercial interests might not have good reason or incentive to fully fund it.
"If it don't make dollars it don't make sense" is an absolutely terrible heuristic for government spending.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
I honestly don't think SpaceX even exists however without the NASA effect. Want proof? How well are non-American private orbital launch companies doing? Exactly, they are doing terrible, and are few in number. US government funded science set the stage for SpaceX to be successful. Saying "well look at SpaceX we don't need government funding" has it complete backwards.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
It's my loose perception that in foreign policy, the masses don't actually drive policy nearly as much as you'd think. Instead, it's all about "personnel is policy" at the diplomatic level (and to a lesser but still important extent, business level). Thus, it doesn't actually matter so much what the people of e.g. Zimbabwe think, it's about the diplomats and top leaders. Did a good chunk of them go to business school in Europe? Who runs in their friend circles? How are the business links? Questions like this, and including shared ideology/cultural history/philosophical affinity, are most impactful. Occasionally, this will also include military links, but again this is going to be often at the officer corps level at the lowest. To that extent, the actual "cultural alienness" of a foreign country's everyman doesn't matter.
If bonds are fraying then I view that as mostly downstream from State Department personnel changes under Trump 1.0 (and 2.0) as well as, honestly, Trump's trade policies, not some fundamental chasm in mindset... though some of it probably bleeds through even to the elites.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
LOL, not my most tactful argument but this forum is about "light not heat" so I'm willing to be less persuasive if it means I'm more intellectually honest.
One of these days I do want to do a top-level post about lobbyists. Maybe this isn't the right spot, but it simply isn't obvious to me that there's anything inherently evil or awful about a collection of lobbyists and special interest groups duking it out on a variety of issues and competing for lawmaker attention. I mean, first of all, what's the alternative? Second of all, how can you tell the difference between a well-meaning non-profit advocacy group and the "bad" kind of lobbying? And finally, it seems objectively true that for better or worse, there are numerous areas where good legislation literally cannot be created by a well-meaning, completely fair, and intelligent individual with a little extra time. At some point you do need people with specific industry/subject matter knowledge, and there's a limited pool of people with those qualifications. And absolutely zero of them are going to be completely impartial.
I highly disagree that adding a single sentence with vaguely DEI-sounding potential benefits to an NSF proposal abstract suddenly makes a researcher into a "political operative". As discussed up-chain, that seems to be the only sin of a large portion of the DOGE-cancelled stuff. I mean I agree that there's some moral failing involved, but you're literally calling this thinking typical of "cretinous rat bastards" and I'm just saying that minor compromises like this are eminently human. It's like being forced to use pronouns in your email signature at work or something. Like, sure, maybe it is compromising your principles. I'm Mormon, I get it, we went through some shit with Prop 8 and gay rights and such and I absolutely admire those moral stands. However, I'm not going to act like that kind of minor moral failing in a flawed system is actually such a huge betrayal that anyone who adds pronouns in their company profile deserves to lose their job... That's just vindictiveness, and of the small-minded variety.
In short, I believe strongly in forgiveness in a society where you have reddit threads telling people to cut off their family for the slightest thing in the liberal space, and calls for unrestricted lawfare on the right. I think it is something both parties need, especially on the granular and individual level. And many NSF grants are for a small handful of professors and grad students each, it's not like all of them are multi-million-dollar boondoggles. And even this moral stuff aside, it's still stupid self-sabotage on a simple practical/pragmatic level.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
Did you misplace your comment? That's not what we're talking about at all and actively misrepresents everything I said with culture war buzz words. My claim is that in an over-competitive environment, attempts to "game the system" naturally rise. That's not indicative of a moral failing on behalf of the candidates (scientists) exactly, it's just a natural thing that happens in competitive environments with poorly set guardrails. It would be mistaken to take attempts to game the funding system at face value, no questions asked. While obviously moral virtue is higher when 'doing the right thing' in more difficult environments, I think we should be careful about how we ascribe moral fault to actors in a broken system. Surely scientists deserve some blame for juicing their proposals with DEI language, but to hang all the blame at their feet is bananas.
Roughly speaking, 1 in 4 NSF grants get funded, which means 3 essentially get denied. Scale-wise, I would say even an increase in the funding rate to something like 40% would have had a disproportionately large effect in decreasing attempts to pander to the left. Also, I think that probably over half of those grants are likely worth funding, no "gay race science funding" required.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
The correct response to bias is not to throw it out - everyone has bias - it is to properly weight the biased evidence and seek other sources to come to a holistic conclusion. It’s bizarre to ignore biased data because underneath the bias there is also the other axis: direct experience. Just as bias is bad, experience is good, and they often co-occur. Tossing everything with a hint of bias also means tossing a lot of experience.
It’s kind of like the lobbyist problem. A lobbyist still has subject matter expertise. You can still meet with a lobbyist. Lobbyists can represent good causes. You just have to also include more effort in seeking out non lobbyist opinions to combine into a conclusion. Unfortunately outlawing lobbyists doesn’t work because there’s no bright line for what counts.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
Ironically however, this was the result of limited and over-competitive NSF funding causing a race to the bottom for existing funding dollars. Increasing the NSF budget allows the (highly relative) “luxury” of being principled. Clearly, the goals of reforming science and saving money are getting insanely conflated here. I argue that it’s better to do one or the other but not both at once, or you get exactly the current shitshow
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
I mean, the rational solution to “it’s not clear who is doing actual science” is taking some time to figure it out, and then making changes. I think that’s what a lot of people expected?
The first time Trump was elected was a vote for flamethrowers. Arguably that’s not what happened: there was a lot of noise but he governed somewhat traditionally. The second was a vote against inflation, with the expectation of more of the first (for most voters). I think people are surprised that Trump showed up to work with a double XL flamethrower rather than more of the same as previously.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
Full disclosure I watched the final 10 minutes, so more than the 5 minute clips floating around but not the whole thing. That clip started with a question about Poland, Trump talks about how he’s aligned with “the world”. Nothing too abnormal for Trump. Trump says “one more question” and then Vance interjects out of nowhere about how actions and diplomacy matter more than chest thumping and words, which failed (talking about Biden’s time specifically). Zelensky then says well, this has been going on longer than the last 4 years, it’s been a decade - and last time, the deal was basically the same! A gas contract (economic ties) and promises (Europe and Obama) didn’t deter the 2014 mess. So he asks: what does “diplomacy” mean, if not that? Those earlier efforts are also diplomacy. It’s a good question.
And then Vance basically says “that’s disrespectful” and calls his points propaganda aimed at the media. What? Nothing in Zelensky’s point was that weird. Again it was a fair question - this new deal sounds suspiciously similar to the old post-2014 “solution” which clearly proved to be non-durable. Vance bringing up respect and throwing a rhetorical punch directly clearly, in my view, kicked off the combative part of the video.
More to the point, it really wasn’t supposed to be such a long thing. Usually, these kinds of media events are 10 minutes of fluff and posing followed by the actual discussion. I’d be interested to know what made this one drag on so long (maybe it was inevitable, actually, given such a long time in a room together in front of cameras). However, remember: Trump literally cut it off and then Vance said wait I gotta say something first (get it off my chest kind of thing). Otherwise, take the question, start the meeting, then negotiations behind closed doors.
Suspiciously high proportion of people who claim they voted, although the population was explicitly registered voters, but actual partisan breakdown is fairly split.
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