FtSoA
17hr ago
the sock-puppeting of civil society, the media manipulation of public opinion in the interest of stability ?
I don't know how much of this I'd sign on for as you've characterized it. As a classic liberal/gray tribe rationalist type, I very much would prefer to see a return to limited government and greater economic freedom on many fronts. But most things aren't plots, and I usually take a very dim view of the MAGA approach, even when I agree there is a problem with Progressive Ideological Capture in any given institution. I'm a bit to Scott's right on several fronts in the Culture War, and I'm less EA-pilled. I generally agree with Garrett Jones about democracy and immigration.
In terms of foreign policy, I also have many gripes with both the Left and MAGA Right. For example, in my view we should use free trade agreements against China. And we should arm Ukraine and Israel to the teeth to unleash on Russian and Iran.
All of this is to say that, even with the faults of "the way liberal democracy functions in practice," we still have it pretty good in the US.
FtSoA
1d ago
Ideology is the mind killer, almost always.
Well, not mine.
I also doubt there are very smart committed liberal hegemonists. I've yet to see a single one. Feel free to provide an example though.
By some definition of "liberal hegemonist" I would fit the bill. But I also believe in the "constrained vision," so that keeps a lid on a lot of wild ideas.
People who believe in the "unconstrained vision" and apply that not only to domestic policy, but to international policy, are bound to do some stupid shit.
But, I do firmly believe that the US is better off if it exists in a world order that is trending towards liberal democracy and capitalism.
I call it "Neoliberal Neorealism."
FtSoA
1d ago
Unless you think they're filling up their Utah data center with cat videos.
That is what would happen if the US IC was doing mass scale domestic surveillance, yes.
The Simpsons teaches us this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=2CVTH3_Bf-I
FtSoA
1d ago
Well, I'd argue "bureaucracy" is an overly narrow conception of what the problem is with "big government."
I don't know how much "revolving door" you think there is, but it's not all that much in my experience in the DoD/IC. Mostly, people leave federal/mil service to become a contractor for more money doing much the same job.
Mostly though, the idea that you can map any given government agency onto a model where it always or by default seeks to maximize its size/budget/power/whatever is empirically false. That is often true, but it's a loose assumption. Or often various subunits of a given agency have ambitious careerists trying to maximize their impact via mission growth, but that is a zero-sum competition by default as the overall agency has a set budget.
Mostly, as someone with a (past) career and professional education in government bureaucracy, I get a bit up in arms about simplistic notions of government bureaucracy because it leads to obvious idiocy like DOGE, instead of actually getting us limited, effective government.
FtSoA
1d ago
You can always make a new market with a new deadline.
In my experience, the fun thing about many people who overconfidently believe total nonsense are also overconfident that they will be proven right in short order (for current events). You'll see!
So inasmuch as Epstein Fans believe this whole case is gonna get blown wide open they also might believe it's likely the Reddit account issue will be definitively resolved in their favor.
FtSoA
1d ago
The Foreign Service is who runs State (leaving aside the whole appointee issue). I don't know what the downsizing breakdown was. But that's not what we've been arguing.
You need to understand that monetary comp is but one thing people look for in their careers. And that many ambitious and highly capable people optimize for something other than wealth in their utility function. The IQ -> Income correlation is positive, but weaker than merely "smart people do things to make more money." Salespeople, for example, can be talented and wealthy from hard work and charisma, more than being "very capable" in the same dimensions as a biologist making far less money researching some fly.
Inasmuch as the FSOT is g-loaded at all you're getting pretty smart people into the Foreign Service. But you're also getting ideologically self-selected people. Same general issue as much of academia and teaching and government at large.
You don't want 90th percentile, you want 99.9th percentile people for your important diplomatic roles.
The funny thing about this is how much of US diplomacy is not carried out by career diplomats. Dang appointees.
FtSoA
1d ago
I assure you that you have no idea what you're talking about. They get plenty of applicants for the FSOT.
Also, a member of the Foreign Service gets their life heavily subsidized when overseas. It's one of the most competitive entry level jobs out there. https://old.reddit.com/r/foreignservice/comments/1dtl17q/pipeline_funnel_numbers/
Plenty of brilliant people make career decisions based on considerations other than monetary compensation as the primary concern, especially if an early career choice is also considered a good stepping stone for a pivot. (Do you know how much academics make?)
A number of prestigious government careers have a model where effectively it's deferred career compensation, and/or a unique job you can't do elsewhere.
FtSoA
1d ago
Man, my APUSH class included a lot of leftwing stuff, like reading a good chunk of A People's History of the United States. (And it was not because the teacher was a real lefty or anything--he was very focused on doing what we needed to pass.)
But in general I'd say everything you described was "classic center-left polite society civic religion of the professional class" and not "classical liberalism," even if one can still see the archeological roots. And then I have no idea exactly how bad it's gotten since, but all signs point to "not great" on matters of both economics and the Culture War.
I do think it's oversold how much the Founders got wrong and undersold how much they got right--particularly regarding a limited government as a strong guiding principle. Post-FDR, that's been out the window with only a bit of neoliberalism to at least focus on economic efficiency.
That's a pretty good collection you have going. I'd love to have the ~full U.S. inventory for WWI and WWII at some point (if a replica in some cases).
FtSoA
1d ago
The problem is almost never that an agency outlives the original purpose, like horses becoming largely irrelevant.
The problem is that the original purpose is inflated, particularly in a regulatory way. But that's usually not literally the agency's fault. It's usually a combo the Congress and the courts, and/or a presidential initiative. So the Department of Transportation is forever, horses or not. "Do they have good policies?" is the real question and a harder one to answer.
We have the system we have because "we" "wanted" it. Manual reapproval would be very hard to even design--look at how there's gridlock for the budget. Scaling that up won't help us get an effective limited government.
FtSoA
1d ago
Every year, technically, agencies have to justify their budgets. Any given agency could be eliminated by Congress at nearly any time, if they so chose. The USAID demolition for example is a problem procedurally because Trump is trying to use the executive branch to effectively nullify what the legislative has done in creating and funding it. If you think a weak legislative branch and a lack of separation of powers is a big problem, this is not a positive development overall.
Sunset clauses always sound better in theory than they work in practice as an accountability mechanism. (Just ask the haters of FISA 702 about that.)
Nothing but mandated fiscal responsibility solves the overall problem of government spending growth. Regulatory growth is a harder nut to crack, since no budget is necessarily required. Perhaps law sunsets could help there because they would at least force a review, but that also generates a lot of work that itself could be a pretty big drag.
FtSoA
1d ago
In general, yes.
But consider that the State Department has continued to use a very selective hiring process, starting with an exam, this whole time and was corrupted by other forces.
This is not really true.
Wilson's Bureaucracy does a good job of showing empirical cases where agencies resisted growth and scope creep, but it was hoisted upon them.
Public choice theory is great overall, but Wilson pointed out where it got a little overdone in some respects.
Oh, and it's true because the bureaucracy grew a ton starting in the 30s, but in terms of government civilians it's been flat (and therefore proportionately lower) for some decades now. Of course, spending and regulation has gone up, overall including spending on contractors and NGOs.
There should always be the countermeasure of "can we afford this?"
Deficit spending outside defined emergency conditions ought to be unpermitted.
FtSoA
1d ago
Oh I completely agree. The theory was something like: "The sniper was shooting around Trump, not at Trump, and Trump had a blood capsule to burst on his ear." People had to die to really sell it.
Nothing here makes sense in terms of risk/reward. And there's objective evidence to disprove it.
And yet.
I'm honestly surprised the shooter was just good enough to narrowly miss a headshot, but then couldn't even get a body shot for his follow ups. He got off at least three controlled shots before Trump ducked down.
(But we do have a number of people on this very forum that apply roughly the same level of credulity to Ghislaine Maxwell having a longstanding poweruser Reddit account, clearly authored by a Malaysian man, for actually not even a coherent motive. People want to believe.)
FtSoA
2d ago
God, if only big-business-influenced technical-bureaucratic elites really ran things, instead of the ideologically captured bureaucratic and political and academic progressive elites we actually have (on average, of course). It's so weird to conflate Big Business and Big Government in a world where Lina Khan Thought is popular on Left and Right.
Independent central banks are wonderful inventions it must also be said.
In other words, FDR-loving progressives are responsible for the administrative state's regulatory growth and misadventures, not our kindly corporate overlords, who fundamentally wanna make a buck by increasing consumer welfare.
We have not had "an ostensibly apolitical technocracy" in many government agencies in a long time. The DoD and DoJ were some of the best ones here, but public administration theory gave up on neutrality/objectivity as "impossible" a long time ago as a field.
Sadly, the consistent attempt of political neutrality, or even the pretense, was a load-bearing effort, even if imperfect. Hard to get it back now.
FtSoA
2d ago
Sure, and that's why I specified "attempt" in there, but there ought to be evidence of it.
Not mere allegational delusions.
FtSoA
2d ago
the vast majority of my model overlaps with what they teach to reasonably smart high schoolers.
And that overlaps very much with classical liberalism?
When did you go to high school?
Do they still commonly teach at least the "Hamilton" version of the US, or are we in full-on "1619" territory these days for say APUSH?
I was in high school in a red state like 20 years ago, but I definitely got taught "center-leftish kinda neoliberal but state intervention in the economy is good by default to undo the [exaggerated, imagined] ills of markets" that I know is still all the rage in college and in the Intellectual Elite. So, leaving aside the woke-era Culture War, it was still very much not "classically liberal" on economics. Barely even neoliberal really.
Civil religion was nice when we had it.
And while my own collection is still amateurish, I'm always happy to talk about firearms as a hobby, too.
Fortunately for my finances, my square footage limits my tendencies here.
Whaddya got going?
My best collection piece is technically a loaner from my father-in-law, an M1917 Enfield. It's sporterized, but otherwise in great condition. My grandfather was a WWI vet, so I really like having it. As a hobby, I got a little too involved in modifying my, uh, three Sig P365s. I'm done now. Definitely don't want a fourth to have suppressed. Luckily, I've been more pragmatic with my AR-15 and AR-10 and not actually got into long-range shooting. I did spend a good chunk of change on a sweet steel target setup my family can use in the desert.
FtSoA
2d ago
You're confusing "moral regard" and "competency regard."
Even if I accept Mossad is totally evil, I expect them to be good at it. Unlike this.
FtSoA
2d ago
This is one of those "worst arguments in the world" where "rigged" can now apparently mean "any level whatsoever of voter fraud" instead of what it's commonly expected to mean--major, material effects on or at least attempted changes to an election outcome.
You're just sanewashing Trump's unjustifiable statements for which no actual evidence has ever backed all the myriad theories (and there are accounts where he does admit he actually lost in 2020, by the way.)
FtSoA
2d ago
Wow, who can we really trust here?
Certainly not, as you say "career politicians" or "confirmed criminals."
And there's just not really any hard evidence.
So why believe any of the rumors if you won't believe people trying to deny the rumors?
FtSoA
2d ago
I mean the best argument I got is you don't even have an argument.
You have a belief in an absolutely nonsensical theory, that is also pointless.
If the presently available evidence can't disabuse you of this notion, then in all likelihood you're never going to be disabused.
Betting markets have to have time limits or else things would never settle. It's also a tax on BS.
FtSoA
2d ago
If it is Ghislaine, she was really committed to the bit by making constant small Bri'ish Engrish grammatical errors.
FtSoA
2d ago
The Malaysian man never cared about Malaysia, just US politics. Odd.
Ahahahaha, are you not on Twitter at all? There's a notorious guy with this exact gig, and tons of non-Americans are obsessed with our politics.
But he was pretty interested in global politics, not just American. /r/worldnews was his jam.
https://x.com/stillgray?lang=en
But at the end of the day you're approaching this backwards. Coincidences happen all the time. There's no substantial evidence it's her, and even if it were her, it doesn't even matter, right?
The Malaysia placename does check out btw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bukit_Larut
Donald Trump didn't even enter politics that much until 2015-2016. He was mostly just a rich celebrity business mogul. And if you know anything about elites, even the literal politicians, they tend to get along surprisingly well anyway. Maybe the writer has no concept of being friends with people of different political beliefs, but it's a common thing.
I don't think you understand the argument here. If this were Ghislaine, what is she doing here saying derogatory stuff about Trump, her friend? About COVID? To what end? Also the posting went on until 2020, so I really do not understand what point you think you're making about Trump's political timeline.
This is exactly the sort of nonsense I'm talking about! If they're perfectly willing to say "Oh my god the account is still active, just look at this private message" then why are they so unwilling to just make a real post?
The cited PM says the guy thinks this is all pretty funny. I would too, were I him. Or her.
"Large numbers of people" but can only name a single group, the Worldnews moderation team who is directly incentivized to lie, is making suspicious and contradictory claims already
Uh, you're asserting "can only name" but that's not actually true just because the author didn't provide an exhaustive list.
I trust the market: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/7082/ghislaine-maxwell-confirmed-reddit-accout/
Man just skimming https://old.reddit.com/user/maxwellhill/comments/ shows it's very unlikely to be an elite socialite woman doing psyops on the internet. It definitely reads as someone who speaks pretty good Bri'ish Engrish as a 2nd language too, with slight verb, definite/indefinite article, and plural errors.
Examples:
Given the coronavirus situation in UK a couple of weeks ago, shouldn't the heir to the British throne canceled all those engagements? He is 71 years old.
Trump is a vindictive SOB and it’s scary to think that this unhinged US President is sitting on a pile of nuclear arsenals with the key code to unleash hell on earth.
Trump's behaviours such as this no longer tolerated by some European head of states.
WTF?! - how did a pedophile get a job in a children's detention centre in the first place? As this is one of several cases brought to light in recent weeks. So what's being done to prevent such incidents from recurring?
What do you think of the President Xi’s indefinite rule following the removal of presidential term limit? Is a good thing for China?
How would this change China’s foreign polices overal and in particular with the US now that Xi can focus on long term issues over a 10-20 years ahead. Knowing this how do you think Trump will manuever himself in order to cope Xi’s rising influence on the world stage?
So was Ghislaine trying extremely hard to consistently mimic the British English usage of a nonnative speaker spewing out median Reddit libtard views? Why?
I'm sorry if you read the comments from this account and think it's actually Ghislaine Maxwell instead of some Asian dude you have an incurable case of brain weasels. There's nothing but coincidences, tons of counterevidence, and it wouldn't even matter if true.
Oh I agree. But by comparison, at least, the US hasn't gone off the deep end entirely and I pray e.g. the UK's insanity will help us avoid the same fate.
Without getting into a whole thing on Ukraine vs. Russia and also caveating that the US should not be the primary supporter (Europe should), your overall argument is hilarious to me in that Ukraine has been taking on Russia quite successfully for years now with far lower levels of materiel support than we/Europe could have given them. And one technique is simply having the Europeans give their existing hardware to the Ukrainians ASAP. Gotta prime the defense industrial complex pump.
Well the defense tech fellas are trying to fix that.
At present rates of military progress how long do ya reckon that's gonna take? I agree that Putin would love to reassert the ~level of regional control the USSR once had over its neighbors, but boy is that not going well.
I just don't understand how you take the stance this far on that Russia is clearly going to "win" in the sense of a total Ukrainian defeat.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-battlefield-woes-ukraine
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