MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
No bio...
User ID: 896
A moderately interesting interview with Eric Trump just dropped in the FT. (Limited-use gift link - the article is paywalled but may also be accessible on a 5/month basis with free registration)
The headline is "Eric Trump opens door to political dynasty." It isn't explicit, but applying bounded distrust it looks like the FT reporter raised the issue and Eric responded mildly positively. It is consistent with the Trump family's general approach of keeping the idea of an illegal 3rd term and/or a dynastic successor in the public eye while maintaining plausible deniability about actually doing it.
I don't find Eric's denials that the family is making money off the Presidency interesting - the Mandy Rice-Davies principle applies. Eric is lying here and the FT makes this clear to a reader who is paying attention while avoiding words like "lie" and "falsely". It is an interesting example of a political reporter trying to write about a lying politician without engaging in either hostile editorialising or "opinions about shape of earth differ" non-journalism.
If I had to guess, Eric is positioning himself, personally for a future move into politics. Over the last few years Eric has been running the Trump Organisation while Don Jr and Barron support their father's political operation. With Barron taller and more talented, but still a long way off 35, Don Jr is the obvious dynastic successor at the moment. But the bit of the interview about a Trump dynasty is explicitly about the idea of Eric and not Don Jr being the politician.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8mo ago
Does anyone have any ideas about what is going on with Marco Rubio as SecState?
Rubio's substantive political views are those of a swamp neocon on foreign policy and a conventional GOPe conservative on domestic policy. He isn't noted for his personal loyalty to Trump (to put things lightly). So what is Trump's motivation for appointing him? Rubio is a Ukraine war sceptic, but there are lots of Ukraine war sceptics with foreign policy experience who are closer to Trump. This looks like the same mistake Trump made appointing Tillerson in his first term.
This is sufficiently hard to explain that I am finding the left-wing conspiracy theory plausible (that the point isn't to get Rubio into the Cabinet, it's to get him out of the Senate, and Trump has already agreed with DeSantis on who will be appointed to the vacant Senate seat, probably a Trump family member).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
FDA vs Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, the mifepristone case, was decided by SCOTUS. Full verdict here. The anti-abortion plaintiffs lose 9-0 on standing, with (quite properly for a case lost on standing) no discussion of the merits. Kav writes for the majority, with Thomas concurring on a technical point of standing law (on one of three theories of standing advanced by AHM the majority think they lose on the facts, but Thomas admits that this is correct under current precedent buy under a correct reading of the Constitution he thinks they lose on the law instead).
Quick thoughts:
- The unanimous opinion treats this as an easy standing case. It is somewhat longer than an opinion needs to be in an easy standing case, which suggests that at least some of the justices wanted to benchslap Judge Kacsmaryk and the 5th Circuit panel.
- Standing requirements make lawfare harder. If the right-wing Justices wanted to unleash a campaign of right-leaning lawfare then they could have decided this case differently, so it looks like the small-c conservative aversion to lawfare is holding up even with a right-wing Court.
- Nevertheless, I suspect the pro-life movement can find a plaintiff with standing - perhaps a Catholic mail carrier who objects to delivering abortifacients could sue under the Comstock Act (which looks like the plaintiffs' best argument on the merits). But nothing is going to be decided before the election if a plaintiff wiht standing files a new suit.
- The Project 2025 says that an incoming Republican administration should aggressively enforce the Comstock Act (which is prsumptively constitutional post-Dobbs) against pharmacies posting mifepristone to patients. This would render this litigation irrelevant.
Indeed, it's a humiliation ritual. Again, I cannot even name one statue of Stalin or Lenin that suffered the same fate.
Neither Stalin nor Lenin betrayed their country. This kind of ritual humiliation was SOP for traitors, which Lee was - or at least an unsuccessful rebel, which counts as a traitor under the traditional rules. You can argue that Lenin was a traitor to the Kerensky government, but he was a successful rebel so it doesn't count.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3mo ago
The things Trump says are sufficiently horrible that SOP for his supporters ever since 2016 has been saying "Take him seriously, not literally" and calling out people who take him literally as TDS sufferers. And now he is in power his opponents who are not doomposters have been using the same approach as cope. The only people for whom "Trump is just as bad as he says he is" is a comfortable thing to believe is the minority of his supporters who are straightforwardly malignant, and professional Blue Tribe doomposters.
Trump said he would blow up the global economy with tariffs. His opponents said he would blow up the global economy with tariffs. His non-retarded supporters said "Lol TDS - of course he won't actually do that." He is now blowing up the global economy with tariffs, and his non-retarded supporters are split between the ones still claiming that he doesn't mean it and this is a madman strategy negotiating move (and repeating his lies about the tariffs other countries impose on the US in order to do so) and the ones trying to reverse ferret into "Actually blowing up the global economy is good."
The model "Trump is as bad as he claims to be, but the damage was limited in the first term because of GOPe moles in the administration" has an increasingly good track record of making correct predictions. But most people don't want to make correct predictions, they want to appeal to readers. And right now everyone who can read wants to believe that Trump is not as bad as he appears to be - so there is a lot of demand for theories where Trump does not mean what he says.
The most likely candidate I can think of is an amendment regularising the administrative state if it appears to be under serious threat from the conservative majority on SCOTUS. Nobody wants to live in a world where the clownshow that is Congress has to deal with the technical detail of bank capital adequacy or aviation safety, and very few people want to live in a world where those things are not regulated at all.
Before the McCarthy speakership fiasco, it looked like an Administrative Procedure Amendment would pass easily if needed with votes from Democrats, moderate pro-business Republicans, and conservative Republicans bought by the incumbent banks, airlines etc. I suspect in today's climate a lot of Republicans would be afraid of being primaried if they supported it (a majority of the voters in low-turnout non-Presidential Republican primaries appear to be the kind of anti-establishment conservative who would be happy to watch the world burn if libs were sufficiently owned as a result), so it would be difficult to get the required supermajority.
* IANAL, but my reading of the Constitution is that the administrative state is unconstitutional for the same reasons as the Air Force under any sensible interpretation scheme other than "living constitutionalism". But both the administrative state and the Air Force are good ideas, and should have been regularised by constitutional amendments which would have passed easily at the time.
Trump derangement syndrome is an escalation, but the blue tribe thought the Obama-Kenya conspiracy theories were a huge escalation and didn’t really distinguish between the randos who said it and the GOP higher ups who explicitly disavowed it. If Rubio had won the 2016 election we may well have been seeing the same level of derangement, admittedly with less ammo.
The "randos who said it" included Donald Trump - who became a GOP higher up when he was nominated for President. Both Trump's popularity with the anti-establishment right and his extreme unpopularity with the pro-establishment left (and large parts of the pro-establishment right) start here. When Obama published his birth certificate, Trump claimed the credit for making him do it. Per Wikipedia, Trump didn't publicly acknowledge that was a US citizen until September 2016 - i.e. after fighting the Republican primary as an ambiguously-repentant birther.
Falsely claiming that a major party candidate is ineligible is an attack on American democracy. The GOP primary electorate nominated Trump despite (definitely) or because of (probably) his willingness to do it anyway. Trump's base within the GOP is people who think that Democrats always cheat, that they get away with it because the GOP establishment are cucks, and that Republicans should cheat back harder. This is more obvious post-Jan 6 than it was then, but Trump's opponents brought receipts in 2016.
Fundamentally, the scary thing about Trump is that he behaves as if American elections are kayfabe on top of an underlying system of raw power politics, and his supporters love him for it. If American elections really are kayfabe, this makes him someone who breaks kayfabe and gets away with it, which any wrestling promoter knows can destroy the franchise. If you think that American elections are not in fact kayfabe, then he is the worst threat to American democracy since elections really were rigged in 1960's Illinois. In either case, he needs to be stopped.
One of the main reasons why politicians are so freaked out about Ukraine is that they lied as much about Ukraine as they lied about every other war and they are afraid of the piles of lies being exposed. One day would could have a Ukrainian Ed Snowden or Bradley Manning.
You can make a strong argument for helping Ukraine defend itself based entirely on publicly-available information - that Russia invaded Ukraine is not in doubt, Putin has repeatedly said that his goals in invading Ukraine include annexing territory and forced Russification of the inhabitants (i.e. technical genocide), and Putin has in fact annexed Ukrainian territory and kidnapped the inhabitants' children for purposes of forced Russification. If you think stopping these things is worth $100 billion or so, then nothing the US might have lied about is relevant to the argument. All a Ukrainian Ed Snowden or Bradley Manning could do is demonstrate that NATO was opposing Russian interests in Ukraine in a way that would mean Putin's invasion was smart and evil rather than crazy and evil.
If a FDR-era Ed Snowden or Bradley Manning had come up with smoking-gun evidence that the US was acting against Japanese interests in a way which made Pearl Harbor smart and evil rather than crazy and evil (and the Axis-sympathetic US right thinks they have one, not entirely without justification) it wouldn't change the moral or practical case for defending America after Pearl Harbor. The situation in Ukraine is broadly analogous.
Iraq is different - both the "Iraq is helping Al-Quaeda" lie and the "Iraq is building scary WMD" lie/mistake/high-on-own-supply motivated deception arguments were based on non-public information where you had to trust the US government. And those were the best arguments for the Iraq war. If you try to defend the Iraq war based entirely on publicly-available information you end up with an argument that makes Bush look crazy and evil - something like "We need to invade a third world country every ten years to remind people that we can, and Iraq is convenient."
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2yr ago
I think pet of the issue here is that the prior on Joe Biden being corrupt is low, so you need more than circumstantial evidence to make people who are not already anti-Biden partisans care.
The theory that the MAGA crowd are pushing is that Joe Biden decided to run a large scale influence peddling operation, employed his junkie failson as a key fixer in it when he could have hired a professional, and then didn’t spend the money. That is possible, but it is not likely compared to a junkie failson ripping off clueless foreigners by selling influence with Dad he didn’t have and spending the money on blow and hookers.
Two frames for the argument about less-skilled migration and similar supply-side tradeoffs
A thought inspired by this article on the UK's ConservativeHome. John Oxley's article criticises the Starmer administration for not saying how they are going to recruit British care workers to replace the immigrant care workers they are cutting visas for. Everyone agrees in principle that pay and conditions for care workers will need to improve to make this happen, and that this is all right and proper as long as the Magic Money Fairy pays for it.
Oxley writes about the problem from the perspective of money flows - if we want to pay care workers more, we will need to funnel money into care homes, either by increasing charges to residents (and therefore making Granny sell her house to pay for care), by raising taxes, or by cutting spending on other things.
I tend to prefer the flipped frame which focusses on the flow of goods and services. If we send British workers (and, in particular, physically healthy British workers with a good attitude - this mostly rules out the argument that better-paid care work would magically bring back all the people who have been claiming disability benefits since the pandemic) into care homes, then the work they are currently doing will not get done. In this frame the median voter will be poorer because their favourite restaurant disappears (people are wiping butts instead of waiting tables), they have to spend time in grubby shops, offices, schools and hospitals (people are wiping butts instead of cleaning), and they have to deal with more unexpected items in the bagging area (people are wiping butts instead of manning tills). The tax rises, spending cuts, or even deficit-induced inflation are just a way of making this impoverishment stick in a market economy.
Whichever frame you use, this doesn't answer the question - there could easily be costs of less-skilled migration which mean it is net-negative for the country. But both are ways of forcing you to confront the tradeoff. I prefer the real resources frame because it makes clear that the tradeoff is inexorable and there is no way out through financial jiggery-pokery.
Do Motteposters have a view on whether thinking about this type of question in terms of money or in terms of real resources is more helpful?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7mo ago
In contrast, I think even moderate drinking or drug use is fairly risky for developing brains, and I think the laissez-faire attitude towards it is dangerous.
Teen drinking is universal outside the US, near-universal in the US, and lindy. "Moderate drinking at 17 damages developing brains" is only relevant if you think everyone was brain-damaged in a relevant way back in the day. Unless you are trying to raise your kids teetotal for religious reasons, you are raising them in a culture where drinking is ubiquitous, and the distinction between "drinking sensibly" and "drinking too much" is far more important to teach than the one between drinking below and above an arbitrary cutoff age. The punishable misbehaviour in that anecdote was travelling to a secondary location without informing the parents, which is a basic safety issue, particularly for girls.
Andrew Tate, while execrable, is reasonably widespread and popular among teenage boys. I don’t think treating him as an irresistible gateway drug to the alt-right is useful or true; most of the teens that watch him manage to do so without falling down some rabbit hole of extremism.
This is the classic religious indoctrination problem, and it would be helpful if the Reddit mums grokked this. If you want your children not to adopt the lowest-common-denominator version of the locally prevailing culture, you either need to present them with a better (by their light, not yours) alternative, or control their information diet by heavy censorship. (This can be done - fundies in the US seem to do it successfully until the kid is 18 and goes off to university or gets a job at a non-fundie-owned business). And unfortunately it is hard to present civilised behaviour as a better alternative to what Tate is selling until he is finally convicted and jailed.
My sons are too young for this to be an issue yet, but I am reasonably clear that the product I am selling is a working marriage (and children), that In This House We Belive that Andrew Tate is a gypsy's prison bitch, and that part of men raising men is letting them know the well-known true facts about women that the RedPill crowd present as a new and subversive discovery. The reason why people like Tate have an audience is that both mainstream red-tribe Christianity and mainstream blue-tribe feminism are lying about what women want. The rest of the culture need to find a non-toxic way of sharing the truth if they don't want to be outcompeted. I used Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynmann when I was a kid.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9mo ago
Very huge issue if true.
The fact that 100% of the anons promoting this meme insist on misnaming Fort Liberty in honour of a slaveholding traitor strongly suggests that it is partisan bullshit. Unless you favour calling it Fort Bragg in honour of Braxton Bragg's noteworthy contribution to the Union victory in the Civil War, which I suppose would kind of make sense.
Can anyone explain America's love affair with the pickup truck? This is prompted by this Matt Yglesias post talking about abundance politics, and acknowledging that for working-class Hispanics (among others) owning a pickup is a key measuring stick for material prosperity and that it would be politically stupid for abundance-orientated Democrats to argue this point.
This isn't a question about why Americans drive much bigger personal vehicles than people in other countries - that is obvious. (Generally richer country, cheaper fuel, wider roads, more idiot drivers such that "mass wins" is seen as an important part of being safe on the roads). I think I understand why so many of these are built on a truck chassis (mostly CAFE arbitrage). But the thing I don't get is why the pickup as the big-ass form factor of choice. If you look at the big-ass personal vehicles in the London suburbs, you will see at least 5 full-size SUVs (as in the US, the most common form factor in affluent suburbia is the crossover, which no longer counts as big-ass) for every clean pickup. And if you look at work vehicles, you will see at least 10 vans for every pickup. Most of the work pickups I see in the London suburbs are owned by landscapers who regularly haul large quantities of fertilizer, so "ease of cleaning the bed" is the obvious reason for them. The pattern seems to be the same in other European cities, and googling "Tokyo traffic jam" brings up pictures with more pickups than Europe, but still many fewer pickups than vans or big-ass SUVs.
So my small-scale questions are:
- Is it true that there are more clean pickups than full-size SUV's in the US? Everywhere or just in Red/Hispanic areas?
- Is it true that there are more work pickups than work vans in the US?
- Does anyone have a sense of why Americans choose pickups over other big-ass form factors?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5mo ago
Do people have advice for enriching online curriculum for a gifted autistic 8-year-old?
My son was kicked out of our local private school after less than a term for being too autistic for them to handle, and we have finally had to pull him from the local state school because the SEN support he had in place wasn't working this year. So we (mostly my wife - I work a City professional job) are now homeschooling an autistic 8-year-old mini-STEMlord. We started using Doodle Learning which is based on the English National Curriculum - after entry assessments he is within months of being ready for secondary maths (i.e. roughly 3 years ahead) and 1.5-2.5 years ahead in English. When he started school, his non-verbal IQ was assessed at 99.9th percentile.
He enjoys the Doodle Maths online exercises, but refuses to do the English ones unless paid. My memory, and as far as I can determine online, is that if you are more than 1-2 years ahead in maths you need enrichment (more conceptually difficult work and problems that require deeper thinking) rather than acceleration (going through the standard curriculum faster). The UK has a good system of maths enrichment for secondary schools organised around a tiered set of competitions leading up to the IMO, but I am not aware of anything for primary.
More broadly, my son has engineer-brain, which is close to my scientist-brain, but different enough that I don't know how to motivate him or get him to build things more complex than Lego. Do people here have advice? He loved forest nursery when he was little, and built things that a 4-year-old shouldn't be able to build. He has stopped since then.
There used to be a whole genre of fiction praising men who choose plain moral women over femmes fatales, and this general wisdom is so hard to kill that it even bubbles up in modern fiction (to wit, Knives Chau's obvious moral superiority over Ramona Flowers).
Although in the movie Knives Chau gets tossed and the Good Ending involves Scott getting Ramona. My take on the movie (I haven't read the comic) is that the screenwriters want to, but don't explicitly, condemn the Scott-Knives relationship as inappropriate because she is still in school and he isn't.
Also, I don't think Ramona is supposed to hotter than Knives in the movie - her most prominent feature apart from being taller than Knives (who IIRC is tiny) is her electric pink buzz-cut hair - this is not something that is attractive to most hetrosexual men. Ramona is supposed to fun (unspoken subtext - slutty) in a way which an Asian-Canadian middle class teenager is not.
And they're off. Rishi Sunak has called a (technically early) General Election in the UK, Polling Day is 4th July. Effortpost to follow. Feel free to post questions you want me to cover.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4mo ago
If I'm advising a hypothetical DeSantis administration (i.e. accepting the basic premises of MAGA foreign policy thought, but ignoring Trump's personal beefs with Zelenskyy and apparent mancrush on Putin) then my strategic analysis is along the lines of:
- Ukraine is in Europe.
- The aims of US policy in Europe are (1) to encourage the Europeans to pay more of the cost of defending Europe [unspoken - from Russia] and (2) to prevent Europe (and the EU in particular) from developing the ability to act in a coordinated way contrary to US interests. This is hard because these aims are almost but not quite contradictory.
- In particular, Taiwan (and containing China more broadly) is worth more to the US than Ukraine (and containing Russia more broadly), but this matters less than you think because a land war going on right now and a possible naval war in the future draw on different weapon stockpiles with different supply chains.
- The so-called "rules based international order" is valuable to America, most importantly because it discourages nuclear proliferation. A world where Putin gets what he wants because he is a nuclear madman and DeSantis isn't is a world where a lot of countries are going to build nukes, and a few are going to act like nuclear madmen.
- Russia's goal is to subjugate Ukraine (probably by installing a pro-Russian puppet government similar to Lukashenko in Belarus). Putin has been explicit about this. "Neutrality" is a furphy - a "neutral" Ukraine would not be able to avoid subjugation without some kind of western security guarantee which Russia would consider a violation of neutrality. In the failed Istanbul negotiations, Russia was far more concerned about "neutrality" than territory, and their idea of neutrality incorporated an explicit treaty commitment by the USA, the UK, and France not to intervene if Russia attacked Ukraine again. Note that from a European perspective, a "neutral" Ukraine is also one that wouldn't be able to prevent Russia crossing its territory in order to attack other European countries.
- The key known unknown is Putin's intentions after subjugating Ukraine. The Mearsheimer view is that Russia wants to incorporate Ukraine into their sphere of influence, that this is reasonable because Ukraine is a natural part of the Russian sphere of influence, and that once Russia controls its natural sphere of influence Russia will not, for realist reasons, want to engage in continued aggression. The Putler view is that Russia is engaging in what lefties call "imperialism", Paradox players call "blobbing", and academics with sticks up their asses call something like "opportunistic expansionism". 200 years of Russian policy suggest that Russia sees its natural sphere of influence extending at least as far as the Vistula, and public statements by Putin administration officials are consistent with this, as is Russia's campaign of cyberattacks, election interference, WMD terrorism etc.
- If the Putler view is correct, then failing to defend Ukraine is a mistake. It is a survivable mistake for the US, but a catastrophic one for Europe. (To paraphrase Churchill, if we appease Putler in Ukraine then the US will get dishonour, but the EU will get war).
- Apart from Putin's intentions, there are no important secrets here. The Russians, Ukrainians, Europeans, Chinese etc. all know the same things we do. In particular, the Europeans know that Ukraine is near-existential if the Putler view is correct.
- A strategic deal with Russia is not worth it if it means throwing Europe under the bus, because Europe is an order of magnitude more valuable as a trade partner and as an ally against China.
And the resulting policy recommendation is:
- In the early days of the war, support for Ukraine is cheap and there is an outside chance of solving the Russia problem (if Russia either cuts and runs or offers a reasonable deal once it becomes clear that they can't win quickly). The Biden policy of providing cheap help like intel, and older weapons which were going to be replaced in the next 5-10 years anyway was a good one.
- Once it becomes clear that this is a long war, and that support for Ukraine is going to start coming out of the budget rather than existing idle resources, the goal is to maintain a leading role while dumping the economic cost on Europe. So say, first quietly and then loudly, that the US is happy to continue helping Ukraine, but after some reasonable period of time (3-6 months) they are not going to do so for free. Then follow through - based on the above analysis the Europeans will grumble, but pay up. The US should chip in enough to retain a seat at the table - say 10-20% of the cost.
- Engage in some performative show of strength in the Pacific to make clear that this is a pivot and not a bugout.
- Support the European-funded response. Sell anything the US can produce that Ukraine wants on normal commercial terms. Encourage US arms manufacturers to prioritise orders bound for Ukraine (which is at war) over orders for the US (which is not). Share intel if you already have it or can acquire it cheaply. If Musk refuses to provide Starlink service to the AFU on normal commercial terms, then he doesn't get US government contracts.
- Support the economic war against Russia, particularly in ways which directly promote US interests. (An energy-rich America is an economic competitor to Russia). Drill, baby, drill. Tank the oil price. Build out LNG export capacity. Name and shame the German businessmen who are trading with Russia via Kyrgyzstan.
- Points about public diplomacy which shouldn't need saying but apparently do - don't lie for the benefit of a domestic audience, because everyone can see you lying. Don't take sadistic pleasure in selling out Ukraine, because it strongly suggests you would sell out Taiwan as well. Don't endorse Russophile right-populist parties in western Europe. Talk like you are leading a coalition, stamp US flags on US-made weapons the Germans are paying for, etc. etc. - the whole point is to gain the benefits of leading the free world while shirking the cost.
- What is the win condition? We were seeing it in January/February this year. The combination of the cumulative impact of sanctions, the increasingly effective Ukrainian drone war, and the lame-duck Biden administration's decision to allow Ukraine to use western weapons to attack targets on Russian territory means that Russian logistics are falling apart. (The west, on the other hand, has near-infinite logistical capacity). If Russia doesn't come to terms while they can still supply the army in Ukraine, then the army is destroyed and they lose everything including Crimea - so they probably will.
- If Putin does come to terms, offer face-saving concessions (Ukraine in the EU but not NATO, possibly international recognition of Russian rule in Crimea if they still control it) but not substantive ones.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
I don't. Jews who are paying attention can see the rising anti-semitism on the right. (And in particular, Jews who care about Israel know who was blocking the aid bill). Left-wing anti-semites are more dangerous individually (because they are more violent) but the anti-semitic right arguably includes people like Elon Musk and has far more access to the corridors of power than the Columbia protestors do.
Will more anti-semites be invited to the White House in a second Trump term or a second Biden term (not counting Gulf Arab diplomats etc. who are discreet about their anti-semitism)? It is a surprisingly difficult question to answer.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
The UK and US have announced a trade deal.
Key terms (based on press releases - apparently the text hasn't been agreed yet):
- US continues to charge a default 10% tariff on imports from the UK
- Up to 100k cars per annum are exempt from the 27.5% tariff on cars, but still pay the flat 10%. Not clear whether car parts are included.
- British steel, aluminium, and aeroplane parts (this mostly means Rolls-Royce jet engines) enter the US tariff-free. The US announcement implies that there is going to be some still-to-be negotiated quota arrangement on steel.
- UK will be exempted from future pharma tariffs
- Both sides cut tariffs on agricultural products, including beef and corn ethanol. The tariff cuts are reciprocal but benefit the US more than the UK because of the balance of farm trade. Scotch whisky is not included.
- The US announcement says that the UK will cut non-tariff barriers on US agricultural exports, the UK announcement says that the UK is not going to relax food safety standards.
- The US is trying to rhetorically link the deal to a $10 billion order for Boeing planes that "a British company" (presumably British Airways) is going to announce imminently.
- Nothing on services - in particular the UK isn't going to cut our Digital Services Tax (which is mostly paid by US tech companies on their UK revenue).
Initial thoughts:
- This is a thin deal. Both sides are drastically overegging it in their press releases.
- This is worse for the UK than status quo ante (because of the 10% flat tariff), although given the current salience of steel in the UK Starmer has a good chance of spinning zero tariffs on steel as a big win. The US has aggressively protected its steel industry for a long time (under administrations of both parties) and US tariffs on British steel have been a long-running grievance.
- This is probably the best deal the UK could have got. It is better than any deal we could have got quickly as an EU member, but not necessarily better than the deal the EU could have got after a protracted trade war with pain to both sides.
- The benefits to the US are pretty trivial - the farm tariff cuts affect about $1 billion of US exports. The US's biggest ask in trade negotiations with European countries is on food safety standards, and they didn't get it.
- The two sides are sufficiently confident that they can fill in the details that they announced the deal before the text was finalised. I find this surprising - there are a couple of major bear pits where the two sides announcements are not aligned. The obvious one is non-tariff barriers on food. The less obvious one is that the US announcement claims a $5 billion opportunity from changes to UK public procurement, but not what they are. This is an extremely politically difficult area in the UK because of NHSism.
Thoughts on the politics:
- The US announcement explicitly calls out the US cutting tariffs on British aeroplane parts as a win for US manufacturing. I think this is the most public acknowledgement to date that tariffs are hurting American manufacturing by disrupting supply chains.
- Trump admin spin (though not the official White House announcement) is that the big win for the US is that the 10% tariff stays in place, and this represents the US collecting $6 billion in taxes on British businesses. That is what you say if you are defending a thin deal.
- Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has attacked the deal as worse than status quo ante. A few dissident Conservatives have praised Starmer for taking advantage of Brexit to get a better deal than we could in the EU.
- The Liberal Democrats are not attacking the substance of the deal - we are saying that Parliament must have a chance to approve the final text.
- The Scots are going to say that their whisky industry was thrown under the bus.
- Farage hasn't spoken yet.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5mo ago
Was there ever any non-fake disagreement between Colombia and the US here?
Per centrist Twitter, deportation flights to Colombia had been running smoothly in civilian planes, Trump switched to using military planes without asking permission, Colombia turned the planes round due to lack of permission, Trump asked for permission (impolitely), Trump got permission, and everything will continue in an orderly way, apart for both sides spending the length of a round of golf trolling each other on social media.
Whether this is a win for America depends on whether you think being gratuitously boorish when you can get away with it is good diplomacy (because it makes you look tough and dangerous) or bad diplomacy (because it makes you look like a boor). This is a point of genuine partisan disagreement in 21st century America.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5mo ago
Normies are a lot less bothered about LGB than you imply by lumping it in together with T.
The case against homosexuality (both in its Abrahamic and secular versions) is based on the same logic as the case against post-sexual revolution liberated straight sex, and normies find that logic unpersuasive. Empirically, when the LGBs were offered normalisation on the same basis as the sluts, rakes, unrepentant adulterers, frivorcers etc. they took it, and aren't doing anyone any more harm than the straights did when they took up ubiquitous non-procreative sex. Despite gay marriage, straight marriage is in a better state than it has been in since the introduction of no-fault divorce. This is happening within the plain sight of normies and their families, so they know.
You can make a secular socially conservative case against sexual liberation for gays and straights (empirically, it crashed the birthrate and launched a bastard epidemic). You can (and should, if you take the Bible seriously) make a conservative Christian case against it. But making either of those cases makes you like like a wierdo - it is the epitome of normie-unfriendly conservatism. Given what we can see in front of our noses, arguing for sexual restraint for gays only just makes you look like a self-hating closet case seeking moral support. (It is also intellectually incoherent, but normies don't care about that.)
LGB (but not T) is the one early-C21 woke issue where normie public opinion has swung behind the woke position.
T is different, because the difference between men and women matters in the way that maintaining a ban on one particular subset of non-procreative sex doesn't.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9mo ago
It seems to me that a question we ought asking is "is Trump really lying?". Not in the sense of whether a given statement is false? so much as in the sense of is he really deceiving any one or otherwise behaving dishonestly?
"They're eating the dogs" is a statement intended to induce the false belief in listeners that immigrants are stealing and eating pet dogs. Even if the rumours Trump based the claim on had been true, they were about cats, not dogs.
The fact that Trump doesn't care about the factual truth or falsity of the words that come out of his mouth to the point where he says "dogs" when he could easily have said "cats" and been making a defensible claim about facts that were in dispute at the time is a perfect piece of smoking gun evidence as to what is actually going on. In the Harry Frankfurt sense, Trump is rarely lying but he is constantly bullshitting.
I'm at work at the moment but effortpost to follow.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3mo ago
Illegal aliens in particular are owed no due process and enjoy no protections from summary deportation.
The right to a fair trial exists for the benefit of the innocent, not the benefit of criminals. A US citizen who gets picked up by mistake gets the same due process an actual illegal gets - certainly in the UK this turned out to be the problem with a "deport them all" strategy - that a country with no citizen register and no papieren bitte culture doesn't know who is and isn't there legally accurately enough to do mass deportations without deporting an unacceptable number of citizens and legal immigrants by mistake. If you are deporting people who haven't done anything wrong except being illegal in the first place, the politically acceptable number of citizens deported by mistake is close to zero.
Realistically, the Anglosphere countries are going to have to become papieren bitte cultures if we want effective in-country immigration enforcement.
What is true is that (apart from the existence of a law passed by Congress, implementing the USA's obligations under a ratified treaty, protecting refugees, and people with a credible claim to be refugees until it is adjudicated) once you have established that someone is an illegal immigrant they have no right whatsoever to stay in the US - for example it is wicked but not illegal to prioritise immigration enforcement based on 1st amendment protected speech.
Some thoughts on the infamous OPM e-mail:
Whether the OPM e-mail asking federal employees to send a five bullet point list of what they achieved in the last week to a OPM e-mail address apparently controlled by Musk and/or @DOGE has turned into an even bigger scissor statement that is usual for US partisan politics. What is going on? (Well, it seems like it was an unconventional proof-of-liveness check on the federal employee base with no plan to read the responses, but I am more interested in the response)
First point - if this came from management, it would be a completely reasonable request. It would be odd if it came from senior management rather than your direct line manager (does a top executive have time to read all those replies?) but not necessarily irregular. It is the kind of thing I can absolutely imagine the CEO doing at a founder-mode startup with a few thousand employees. But it didn't come from management. It came from HR (literally, in the sense that the sender shows up as "HR" in Outlook, and in practice in that it came from OPM, which is effectively HR for the civilian federal government). Indeed, it came from an anonymous role account in HR. (Musk tweeted that the e-mails originated with him, but two courts have ruled, at Musk's request, that Musk is a notorious shitposter and it is legally unreasonable to take a Musk tweet seriously, so they are still legally anonymous)
If I received such an e-mail from HR in my day job at a bank (and I don't think any other large manager-mode organisation would be different), it would be unprofessional to do what the e-mail says and send a quick response cc my direct line manager. In a normal corporate (or, I assume, public sector) environment, you take at least some steps to make sure you don't accidentally become a patsy in someone else's political maneuver against your boss or department. So if I got such an e-mail, my immediate response would be to forward to my line manager* with a note saying something like "Not sure what is going on here - will hold off on replying until you are able to investigate" - and if I did eventually reply, I would agree the reponse with my manager. But the more likely outcome (unless senior management had been warned about the exercise beforehand) would be that the rapid large-scale escalation would lead to the head of the department sending an all-staff e-mail saying "Please don't respond until we have investigated what is going on here" and trying to get hold of someone in the CEO's office urgently. (And struggling to do so, because every senior manager in the organisation would be doing the same thing).
And this is just looking at the office politics perspective, From the infosec angle, this is worse. The e-mail said "don't send classified information", but if you work in a job where you are actually trying to keep secrets, there isn't a short, safe unclassified summary of what you did last week. I am not an expert on the US classification system, but I do know that producing an unclassified summary of classified information (including, for example, the classified information you worked on in the last week) is difficult work that only a few people in each department are qualified to do. The rule in corporate finance departments at banks (where almost all staff have access to market-moving non-public information such as upcoming mergers) and it is "Do not discuss live deals with anyone outside the department, even in general terms." For a corporate financier, sending a meaningful response to that e-mail would be a firing offence. The various department heads (including Trump's own political appointments like Kash Patel) in national security related departments who told their staff not to respond are doing the obviously correct thing.
tl;dr - the freakers-out are right - sending out an all-staff e-mail of this type from HR was irregular, and would have been massively disruptive to any large organisation other than a startup used to working around a hyperactive micromanaging founder-CEO.
* If the rumours are true that Musk is sending these e-mails from a jury-rigged server rather than an official secure US government system, then the e-mail would show up as external in Outlook, and my actual immediate response would be to report it to IT security as a possible phishing attack.
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