MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5mo ago
Canada didn't capitulate. They reannounced the same $1.3 billion border security package they already announced in December, allowing Trump to declare victory.
Trump got the same deal by going full psycho that he already got by speaking quietly and carrying a big stick, except that some of the backchat from the noise he was making cost his pal Elon a $100 million Ontario government contract.
On a scale of kayfabe where SpaceX is 0 and WWE is 100, the Canada/Mexico tariff rows have been about 80, and the Colombia row north of 90.
I think the "Cultural Marxism" discourse on the Motte tends to go down rabbit holes due to arguments about the meaning of words. The core facts are:
- The thing that right-wingers are talking about when they say "Cultural Marxism" is real, is broadly on the left, and is bad viewed from both a liberal and a conservative perspective.
- The thing changes what it calls itself frequently in order to avoid being named by its political opponents. (See Freddie de Boer).
- At some point in the past, some but not all of the people doing the thing called it "Cultural Marxism", but they stopped when right-wingers started using the term.
- Some, but not all, of the people doing the thing consider themselves Marxists. Almost all the people doing the thing agree that it rejects certain tenets of orthodox Marxism, they just disagree on whether they reject enough to make them a continuation of Marxism, or to make them something else.
- The orthodox Marxists that still exist (including Freddie) are very clear that they do not consider the thing to be Marxism. Mostly, they hate it as much as we do.
- All the people doing the thing are influenced directly or indirectly by Marx, but that isn't saying much because everyone (including his opponents) is influenced by Marx. In most cases this line of influence passes through Gramsci.
The argument about whether or not "Cultural Marxism" is really Marxism is analogous to the argument about whether Mormons are really Christians, and is equally unproductive. From the perspective of outsiders using the word to attack something we dislike, the more interesting question is whether thinking of "Cultural Marxism" as a form of Marxism helps or hinders our efforts to defend against it. *
From a liberal perspective, "Cultural Marxism" and orthodox Marxism are bad for sufficiently different reasons that lumping them together makes you dumber. In terms of epistemics, orthodox Marxism claims to know things which aren't true, whereas "Cultural Marxism" wrongly accuses its opponents of knowing nothing. In terms of political impacts, orthodox Marxism rejects individual action because it might lead to economic inequality, whereas "Cultural Marxism" tries to prevent effective collective action by saying it is impossible until we have all completed therapy for our internal systems of oppression. I oppose using the term "Cultural Marxism" because orthodox Marxists, most "Cultural Marxists", and intelligent liberals all agree that "Cultural Marxism" is not a subset of Marxism, so the word is misleading.
From a cultural conservative perspective, both "Cultural Marxism" and orthodox Marxism are godless, anti-cultural, and anti-us, and lumping them together is harmless. I think this is a bad case of outgroup homogeneity bias, but I understand where the cultural conservatives are coming from.
FWIW, I call the thing "Wokism"
* In the Mormon analogy, it is logical for anti-Christians to think that Mormonism is Christianity regardless of the theological arguments because they oppose it for the same reasons.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo 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
4mo ago
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.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9mo ago
Major career decisions
- Overestimating how much ScienceTM still worked like it did back when Richard Feynmann was still alive, causing me to waste five years of my life doing a PhD rather than going into finance straight out of undergrad.
- Thinking that the 2009 rebound in conventional bank-based finance careers would continue and therefore not making more effort to jump into fintech before my skillset developed in a way which makes that difficult to do now.
Politics
- I supported the Iraq War on the basis that Blair's career wouldn't survive being caught lying about WMD (false), that if he was lying the risk of getting caught was very high (true), and that therefore he must be telling the truth (false conclusion follows from false premise). I also assumed that the Bush Jr foreign policy and national security team would be competent, because the exact same group of people were competent when they were the Bush Sr team dealing with the messy collapse of the Soviet Union.
- I over-estimated how damaging minimum wages could be - the UK minimum wage is now at a level that I assumed would cause French-style unemployment, but empirically it hasn't done.
Race heresies
- I thought that black African immigrants in London would be worse neighbours than black Caribbean immigrants because of the greater cultural distance and the fact that the source countries are more shitholey. In fact the Africans are better neighbours (and employees) because the process by which they got into the country was more selective.
- I thought that nepotistic Jewish networks in high finance was an anti-semitic trope. They do exist, and there are certain financial career paths that it would be foolish for me to pursue because I am not welcome in them. (For the avoidance of doubt, they are much less powerful than left-wing anti-semites think they are).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4mo ago
When Musk bought Twitter, one of the ways he reduced the amount of his own money he had to put up was to borrow a large sum (roughly $13 billion) from a syndicate of banks. The deal is structured so that Twitter is the borrower, not Musk - if Twitter can't pay then Musk has the option to put more of his money in, but the standard result is that Twitter files Chapter 11, the banks end up owning it, and Musk is not on the hook for any more money than what he has already put in. The crucial point is that if Twitter goes bust, the lenders lose $13 billion less whatever they can get for Twitter in a fire sale.
The interest rates on these loans are floating - calculated as SOFR (the rate at which US banks make secured overnight loans to each other, considered a risk-free rate, and which tracks the official Fed Funds rate set by the Federal Reserve very closely) plus a spread. Typically these deals are structured in layers with senior debt (which gets paid first in a bankruptcy) paying a lower spread than the subordinated debt. In the case of Twitter, there is $7 billion at SOFR+4.75%, 3 billion at SOFR+6.5% and 3 billion at SOFR+10%. These are high interest rates, reflecting the risky nature of the deal (even with a relatively low loan-to-value ratio for a leveraged buyout). SOFR+2% would be more usual for the senior paper in this kind of deal. The floating rate means that the value of the loans isn't particularly sensitive to interest rates - if they are worth less than par, it is because Twitter is less creditworthy than when the deal was done.
The business model of syndicated lending is that the banks in the syndicate are hoping to sell the loan to investors. But if something bad happens in the gap between the deal being agreed and the deal closing (in this case, it becoming clear that Musk had drastically overpaid for Twitter, and was going to make things worse by making a high-risk change to the business model) then they can't sell the loans for face value. In this case banks often hold onto the loans rather than selling at a loss.
It looks like the banks have finally been able to sell a big slice of the loans for 97 cents on the dollar. (Which could be enough to break even - the normal arrangement fee on these deals is 2%, but Musk might have paid 3%.) But the fact that they are still selling at a small discount suggests that Twitter is less creditworthy than it was at the time the purchase was announced. Whereas if Musk had successfully executed a turnround, Twitter would be more creditworthy than it was, and the debt would trade at a premium reflecting the high interest rate.
Calculus - You can teach this to any decently intelligent 17 year old kid nowadays, but, while there were some remarkably close predecessors to it in ancient Greece (the method of exhaustion), it was not formalized as a rigorous concept and method until about the 18th-19th centuries.
Calculus doesn't become low-hanging fruit until you have co-ordinate geometry. Descartes publishes La Geometrie in 1637 and Newton publishes Principia in 1687. In between you have a lot of work that develops calculus - most notably Barrow's proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus in 1670. (Barrow is conventionally listed in academic genealogies as Newton's PhD-supervisor equivalent.) The first analysis proof that is considered rigorous by modern standards was Rolle's theorem in 1690 and the first important result in analysis is Taylor's theorem in 1715. That is a much faster development than implied by your post, although I suppose you can argue that something that should have taken years took decades.
But that just pushes the problem back a step. Co-ordinate geometry was low-hanging fruit for the 1800 years between Apollonius and Descartes. I think the explanation here is that mathematics got stuck on a local maximum. Apollonius developed the classical geometry of conic sections to the point where (for the few people able to master it) it was more powerful than co-ordinate geometry without calculus. There is also a weird status thing going on. The mathematical brain finds co-ordinate geometry ugly and hackish. As late as the 1990's, part of an old-school mathematical education was the idea that submitting a correct co-ordinate geometry proof when a classical one was available would get you full marks and the lasting scorn and derision of the examiner. In the 17th century, this was compounded by the problem that calculus arguments (though not co-ordinate geometry without calculus) could not be made as mathematically rigorous as geometric ones because modern analysis hadn't been developed yet. Barrow lectured on co-ordinate geometry (that's how Newton learned it) but he published on classical geometry (he started his career as a classicist and his work that was most prestigious in his own lifetime was new translations of the great Greek geometers). Both Barrow and Newton published work that to modern eyes was clearly done using co-ordinate geometry and pre-calculus, but was re-derived using classical geometry for respectable publication.
Antibiotics - As far as I know, there is nothing about penicillin as an antibiotic agent that could not have hypothetically been developed and systematized 2000 years ago - this would not have required any modern technology. To be fair, there may have been ancient cultures that had an intricate knowledge of plant-derived drugs and so on that are at least relatively comparable... but to my knowledge, none of them developed something like modern antibiotics, which revolutionized the world and basically immediately did away with the whole literary genre of "lonesome poet dies at 30 from tuberculosis".
Fleming's original discovery could have been made by anyone, but actually synthesizing penicillin in useful quantities required (in our timeline) modern industrial chemistry. I think it could have been done 50-100 years earlier if alt-Fleming takes his discovery to the brewing industry (the hard part is growing fungus cleanly on a carbohydrate feedstock) rather than pharma, but not before that.
It makes me wonder what kinds of insights might be lying around these days, which future generations, if we do not discover them, might wonder what took us so long.
I think the physical sciences have been picked pretty clean by now - my best guess of where to look next is that there could be simple models of the human brain that will be obvious in hindsight to someone with access to 2050's neuroscience and psychology that isn't neutered by political biases, but that could be discovered today.
It is a small local example, but the discovery of superconductivity in MgB2 in 2001 was an example of unpicked low-hanging fruit in solid-state physics - the stuff had been available in obscure chemical catalogues since the 1950's but nobody had tested it for superconductivity.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
I can't advocate anyone legally able to CCW to go to a Gaza-focused protest without CCW.
I can't advocate anyone able to avoid it going to a Gaza-focused protest at all. "Don't go near political protests" is standard travel advice offered by every country about every country for good reasons - and essentially nobody in the West has a stake in Gaza that makes it worth protesting about.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
and offer Ukraine vague European security guarantees
This is the rub. Russia has always cared more about Ukrainian "neutrality" than they do about the exact position of the border - the demands immediately before the invasion related to "neutrality" and not territory, and the Istanbul negotiations broke down over the issue. Russia has said that troops from NATO countries in Ukraine is a red line - and if you accept the Mearsheimer realist view of Russian goals then it should be one. If they are willing to accept peacekeepers from European NATO countries then that is a major move. And the vagueness from the Trump administration on this point suggests that they are not. And on the flip side, Ukraine has no incentive to accept a deal that doesn't leave them more defensible than they are now, given the risk of Russia reneging and restarting the war in the future.
The hard part of negotiating a Russia-Ukraine deal is the security arrangements. By default any arrangement which makes it easier for NATO to defend Ukraine from a Russian attack in future is something that could, in theory, make it easier for NATO to attack Russia from Ukrainian territory. If the security arrangements are TBD (as they have to be if the countries that will actually be guaranteeing Ukraine's security were excluded from the negotiations) then there isn't a deal.
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.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3mo ago
How much of that is that is housing?
Saying people prefer to live in states with abundant housing is somewhat misleading - at the margin people have to live in states with abundant housing because of the pigeonhole principle. What we actually see is that people are willing to pay a premium to live in California and not Texas, but there isn't enough housing in California to accommodate them.
This is still a government failure, but it is a quite specific one rather than "people would rather live in more economically libertarian states".
(FWIW, I think Texas is sufficiently well-governed that quality of government is an important pull factor, but other fast-growing red states are not).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
16d ago
The good argument is that serious attempts to enforce such a law involve criminal investigations of miscarriages to see if they were induced deliberately, and having criminal investigations of miscarriages is worse than failing to prevent the vanishingly small numbers of abortions that (a) actually happen and (b) the British public want to ban.
The other argument being widely made by feminists is that medication abortion should be available to women who have a reason for avoiding the medical system.
What is really going on is that about 20 women got abortion pills by telemedicine during the pandemic in order to illegally abort post-viability fetuses and were prosecuted for it, and this made the issue salient to the abortion-up-to-birth-for-any-reason feminists but not to WTF-don't-kill-viable-babies normies.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Academics sound extremely lazy and whiny about trying out the most obvious solution: ditch all course-work based grading in favor of oral examinations and comprehensive graduation exams.
You mean like Oxford and Cambridge were doing back when Roger Bacon and Duns Scotus were alive and never stopped? The lindiest thing ever to lindy (apart from death, taxes, and revivalist movements calling out decadence and corruption in the Cathedral)?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
the America of the Founders
The more American history I read, the more I think this is a misleading concept. The way I see it is that the Founding Fathers didn't found America - both in the sense that America already existed (founded by the Pilgrim Fathers et al.) and in the sense that the United States established in 1789 wasn't a nation-state.
The Founding Fathers were founding a sovereign state (in the technical international law sense of that term) that was itself a federation of sovereign States (in the sense of the States in 1789 being separate free self-governing political communities). They were building political institutions, and in order to do so they deliberately punted on three questions that go to the heart of "what is America as a country?" The first is the slavery question, which we all know about. As it turned out, America couldn't remain a country without resolving that question, and I don't think that would have surprised the founders. The second is the democracy question. The 1789 Constitution deliberately doesn't establish a right to vote - the founders were agnostic as to whether the republic they were establishing would be democratic or oligarchic. But by the Jackson administration the fact that America is a democracy is part of the national identity and rolling back universal white, male suffrage would be unthinkable. And the third was the religion question (both in the sense of "Is America a Christian nation or just a nation where the population happens to be majority-Christian?" and in the sense of "What does it mean to be a Christian country when you are committed to neutrality between mutually excommunicate Christian denominations?"), which America is still successfully punting on.
Semi-serious troll opinion - the United States of the 1789 Constitution was an artificial political entity with a similar nationhood deficit to the modern European Union. It became a country as a result of the Monroe and Jackson administrations.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5mo ago
The @DOGE team discovered, among other things, that payment approval officers at Treasury were instructed always to approve payments, even to known fraudulent or terrorist groups.
They literally never denied a payment in their entire career.
Not even once.
The main job of the US Fiscal Service (the agency of the US Treasury that Musk and his staff have rooted) is to make payments which have been authorised by other parts of the government. Given Musk is tweeting first and asking questions later, what he almost certainly means here is that (for example) when the SSA tells the Fiscal Service who to pay Social Security benefits to retirees, the Fiscal Service doesn't run any additional checks beyond the ones already run by the SSA. In the case of Social Security, this is obviously the right thing to do - the government should be paying Social Security to otherwise-eligible retirees who are suspected terrorists. It's not just a good idea, it's the law. Whether the Fiscal Service should be acting as a second line of defence to deny payment if e.g. the Department of Defence contracts with a local ally who might be a terrorist is a legitimate question about how to organise the government, with "no" being a perfectly reasonable answer.
There are two plausible stories for what is going on here:
-
The benign one is that Musk got read-only access to the database, which he wanted because downloading the entire database of US government disbursements (including payee, date, amount, and source of authorisation) is the easiest way to do what he wants to do with @DOGE (as opposed to the DOGE established by Trump's executive order, which is something else) and the Fiscal Service was the easiest way to get the data.
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The malign one is that Musk wants to control the Fiscal Service because Musk and/or Trump are planning to cut spending at the bill is paid, not the point where the expense is incurred. (This is consistent with the way Trump ran the Trump organisation until he tanked his credit rating, and is also something Musk did at Twitter). A world where (even if an invoice is approved for payment by the government department who bought the thing) @DOGE is arbitrarily blocking payments because they don't like the politics of the payee is a world where nobody competent will want to contract with the government. And if the same stunt is pulled with Social Security payments, federal payroll, or heaven forfend bond interest, the results are catastrophic. Trump and Musk are reckless enough, and Trump has joked about defaulting on the debt, so I can't rule out the possibility that the plan is to default on the federal debt, and that taking control of the Fiscal Service is the way to forestall a legal challenge.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8mo ago
The laws say "you must apply in the first safe country" - doesn't happen.
Slightly oddly, the Refugee Convention doesn't say anything about applying for asylum at all - it assumes that everyone already knows who the refugees are and that they are already in their destination countries. This makes sense given the historical context, which is that the Refugee Convention was written to cover the specific situation of post-WW2 refugees who couldn't be repatriated for various reasons. The Refugee Convention was never fit for purpose as the a forward-looking instrument and the body of refugee law that has built up around it is incoherent as a result. I have an effortpost planned on this point once my sons stop bringing viruses into the house.
The idea that refugees have to apply for asylum in the first safe country comes from a misreading of Article 31 of the Refugee Convention, which says that refugees can't be penalised for illegally entering a country if they are crossing from a dangerous country to the first safe country. But a refugee doesn't cease to be a refugee just because they illegally cross from one safe country to another - the second safe country can prosecute them for illegal immigration but this doesn't solve the problem that you can't (without violating the Refugee Convention) get rid of them without finding another safe country willing to take them.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9mo ago
It interesting that although we all understand the intended meaning of this expression (and it is true when given the meaning that people expect), it is not an accurate description of how lawyers and used car salesmen lie.
Creating a false belief using a carefully-curated set of technically-true statements is no more effective in an adversarial environment like a courtroom or a negotiation than creating the same false belief using false statements. The normal technique of a lawyer representing a rich-but-obviously-guilty client is to flood the zone with shit. This works best in criminal trials, where if the jury can't understand the case they are supposed to acquit based on reasonable doubt, but it also works in civil trials if the other side can't keep up. Lying by omission is explicitly prohibited in litigation (this is why discovery exists) and in some but not all negotiations.
Used car salesmen working for commercial dealerships, on the other hand, are trying to outnegotiate unsophisticated parties, which is exactly where "lying like a lawyer" is helpful. Making a technically-false statement creates legal risk and isn't necessary if you are good at your job. The people who tell blatant lies when selling used cars are private sellers, who are effectively gone once the cheque clears. Real estate agents are in the same boat - they will tell blatant lies, but they would much rather mislead you in legally safer ways.
So who does lie like Donald Trump? In my experience, the main groups are cheating spouses, toddlers caught with their hands in the cookie jar, and actual conmen. Trump, of course, belongs to at least two of these groups.
Who does "lie like a lawyer?" Well the main group is politicians not called Donald Trump. Politically biased journalists do, as do tendentious academics. Basically, exactly the people who form the "establishment" Trumpism is against. In each case it is because it is a lot easier to work a sympathetic ref if you got caught making a true-but-misleading statement than if you told an outright lie. But working the refs in that way doesn't work on normies, and doesn't work on neutral or unsympathetic refs.
Unfortunately this means that the saying reduces to "Trump lies like Trump, the liberal elite lie like liberal elites." This is tautological, but to someone who has been paying attention it is even truthier than the original. It also avoids calumnising innocent lawyers and used car salesmen by associating them with politicians and journalists.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3mo ago
The work of Ha-Joon Chang has convinced me that
- Most (but not all - in particular Hong Kong didn't) of the Asian development success stories relied on smart industrial policy rather than laissez-faire
- Depending on what your industrial policy is, tariffs are often a useful tool to execute it.
But there doesn't seem to be an industrial policy behind the Trump tariffs - in the sense that I can't work out which industries Trump wants to promote and which he doesn't.
There is a separate problem that development-orientated industrial policy is impossible when you are at the technological frontier because the knowledge you need to think about the economy ten years out simply doesn't exist. Whereas if you are trying to go third-world to first quickly you know that you start with textiles because everyone does, do car parts before cars, don't do aerospace or semiconductors until you are ready etc.
The even thornier problem is that the supply chain for high-end semiconductors appears to be too big and complex for one country, even the US or EU, to host a full-stack semiconductor industry. Right now ARM, TSMC, ASML and Zeiss are all close-to-irreplaceable in their niches.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4mo ago
I’ve always understood that the bad thing the Nazis did was load 6 million people or so onto train cars and drive them to industrialized killing factories. The bad part was hunting down people they didn’t like and killing them. It was all the torture and death and so forth.
To the people who lived through the evils of Nazism, there was no doubt that the worst thing the Nazis did was start the most destructive war in human history (and thereby lead their own country to defeat, conquest, ruin, and misery). "Aggression is the supreme international crime." That is the words of the Nuremberg prosecutors relegating the Holocaust to Hitler's second-worst crime - and this was not controversial at the time, and should not have been given the destructiveness of the rest of WW2. The only country for which a majority of the dead were Holocausted Jews was Czecholslovakia. And it isn't clear why the Holocaust doesn't itself count as an incident of the aggressive war - after all only about 200,000 Holocaust victims were from Germany.
Intelligent people who compare Putin to Hitler are doing it because he is engaged in the violent pursuit of lebensraum, not because he persecutes gypsies and homosexuals.
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
7mo ago
The Assistant Secretary for Health (who is head of the Public Health Service, and therefore the direct boss of the Surgeon General who is head of the uniformed Corps) only wears a PHSCC uniform and uses a PHSCC paramilitary rank if they are a PHSCC member - and they don't have to join if they are not already one.
Looking at the list on Wikipedia, there have been 17 senate-confirmed ASHs since the office was established in 1963, of whom 7 had PHSCC ranks. Richmond and Satcher served as Surgeon General and ASH simultaneously, and Mason served as Acting Surgeon General while ASH, so they all had excuses. I am happy to accuse the other four (including Levine) of LARPing as a uniformed public health officer. Interestingly, the four LARPers are four of the five most recent ASHs - something changed under Obama, and didn't change back under Trump.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
I saw this video on YT about the tariffs from the perspective of a dropshipper, and they are actually less than they might seem. In his example, on an item that retails for $600, 50% tariffs apply to the wholesale price of the item of $200, and the overall tariff tax burden is $100, or 17% of the retail price of the item.
If you are doing dropshipping (so no investment in the actual material business of retail, just running ads to send people to your portal to someone else's store) and taking a 200% profit margin, you are hustling idiots. In general retailers aim for a 50% markup, and give back a big chunk of that in discounts. So if the dockside price is $200 and port-to-store shipping is $10, the sticker price will be around $315 and the average price actually paid somewhere in the $250-300 range. So the tariff is taken on well over half the retail price.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3mo ago
The numbers are actually pretty close. US aid to Israel is about 4 billion USD per year, so "in the last 30 years" is c. 120 billion (on an inflation-adjusted basis - the headline figure is lower). The total amount appropriated by Congress in Ukraine aid bills is 180-190 billion, but that includes the cost of new-for-old replacement of old weapons delivered to Ukraine - the highest estimate of the actualSo value of the aid (counting the weapons actually delivered, not the newer weapons the US is replacing them with) is 128 billion (not all of which has been spent) according to this CFR report
So given the difficulty of getting a straight answer to either question by googling, "about the same amount" seems accurate.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3mo ago
Skimming the opinions, Barrett writes the dissent joined by the three liberals (is this a common lineup? I thought Barrett was normally more libertarian than Roberts) and has the better of it if you treat it as a straightforward statutory interpretation case. The majority are right that this could lead to an absurdity (although it doesn't seem to in the instant case - if the facts are as stated then in this case the poor water quality was caused by San Francisco discharging sewage.) But the Constitution gives Congress the power to pass bad laws, and I think Barrett is right that in this case they did.
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:
And the resulting policy recommendation is:
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