Shrike
4mo ago
Stays and injunctions will start pouring in as district court judges stop fearing that their orders will be simply ignored.
Did you know that you can appeal stays and injunctions on an emergency basis all the way up to the Supreme Court? This isn't a slam dunk to way to a hearing, let alone a win, particularly since you now need to clear emergency hurdles as well as prevail on the questions on the merits - but the court system can move surprisingly quickly when it wants to. And recently, on balance, I would say that it is likely to be deferential to the executive, particularly on these sorts of questions. Trump v. Hawaii is a relevant case here, both in terms of SCOTUS' deference to the executive and in terms of the fact that the case was heard by SCOTUS within a year of the Presidential action in question.
...which brings me to my next question: did you know that people sometimes attempt to provoke lawsuits on purpose?
I have no idea if Team Trump is that smart, but one potential strategy is to draw litigation on an area that you know is favorable (in this case - executive branch's management of its own employees!) and get a ruling from SCOTUS that is in your favor and maybe just a bit broader than absolutely necessary. Now you use that ruling to cover your next round of broader, slightly less precedented actions - and this time your enemies are thinking twice about suing you because they don't want to lose before SCOTUS again and give you cover for whatever your next move is. Really, if you can be confident that the courts are on your side (and they might not be, this stuff is a bit arcane to me so idk) you're in a win-win scenario at this point - either you get away with doing what you want, or you get to do what you want after a short break and you set precedent that lets you do more in the future.
TLDR; I don't think a single lawsuit means DOGE is dead.
Maybe Congress can tap in…
I do think this will be necessary for Continued Trump Winning. I might try to flesh this out more as a top-level post, but basically while DOGE is whipping up the true believers into a feeding frenzy, setting a right-wing narrative about, say, USAID, and perhaps getting solid reform, letting Elon run the narrative has a serious problem: unless you're following along with every Tweet (and most Americans are not) you're sort of vaguely getting splattered by a firehose of information. Now, you'll recall how well that approach worked during the Stop Trump push. Instead of focusing on one clearly bad thing, Team Anti-Trump hit him from 40 different angles and ultimately none of the attacks stuck narratively even if they stuck legally.
Letting Elon Tweet this stuff out in bits and pieces is great for Team Trump morale, but to get a win that sticks in the mind of America Team Trump needs to find a clear-cut case of (ideally criminal) malfeasance by an ideological enemy and then either make hay out of the criminal prosecution or have Congress make a big stink about it. (Ideally don't have Elon tweet about it before it hits the newspapers, that can have an inoculatory effect in some cases.) The narrative needs to be something extremely simple, no more complex than "Under our political opponents, $400 million in fraud was facilitated at USAID," and then they need to get their allies in Congress to do nothing except talk about that exact message until USAID and their political opponents are discredited - and then move on to the next target.
I'm not saying the discombobulating series of actions are bad - it's actually a very good strategy, I think - but for it to have lasting effect, there also needs to be a very simple narrative that everyone can grasp and that everyone can hear. Think Watergate, or even better the Lewinsky scandal.
At least, that's my sense. I'm not trying to argue that it's good or bad for America, I leave that up to you, but in terms of what works, I think America needs to hear something simpler and louder than Elon tweeting for four years. Congressional hearings might just do it.
Shrike
7mo ago
Don't set ridiculous red lines that are easily broken. Don't threaten a massive response if you were never serious. You will lose face.
This might be a good lesson if Putin did this. Did he? You don't cite any evidence of this in your post.
What exactly, did Putin say? Here, on a quick Google, according to Newsweek:
In September, Putin changed Moscow's "nuclear doctrine" to include potential responses to an attack that poses a critical threat to the sovereignty of Russia, carried out by a nonnuclear power with the participation or support of a nuclear power.
"Aggression against Russia by any nonnuclear state, but with the support of a nuclear state, is proposed to be considered as their joint attack on Russia," he said during a televised meeting of Russia's Security Council.
"Russia will also consider the possibility of using nuclear weapons when receiving reliable information about a massive launch of means of aerospace attack and their crossing of our state border."
He added: "This includes strategic and tactical aircraft, as well as cruise missiles and drones, hypersonic and other delivery vehicles. Russia reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in case of aggression, including if the enemy using conventional weapons poses a critical threat."
So (at least here) he actually did not threaten nuclear war in the event of ATACMS strikes. He reminded everyone of Russia's nuclear doctrine. Which – newsflash! – is the same as or arguably more restrictive than US nuclear doctrine in this regard (the United States, unlike some nations, does not have preconditions on nuclear use.)
Now, I'm not saying it's not saber-rattling when Putin comes out and reminds everyone of Russia's nuclear doctrine every few months. But Ukrainian ATACMS strikes are very unlikely to pose a critical threat to the sovereignty of Russia. And while people insist on interpreting this as an aggressive deterrent, it's also worth noting that if you read it literally Putin is telling the United States that if they let Ukraine use a few ATACMS inside of Russia
- Russia will consider it a joint attack (and as I understand it the US would be, legally, considered a co-combatant, so this isn't surprising)
- Russia is very unlikely to launch a nuclear retaliatory strike unless the launch is "massive" or poses a "critical threat."
You could see a contrarian newspaper reporting this as "Putin indicates limited ATACMS strikes inside Russia will not draw nuclear response." People always assume the point of these sorts of communications is to threaten, which isn't untrue, but it is also to communicate what is and isn't likely to trigger a genie you can't put back in the bottle, which is very important when two nuclear powers are fighting a proxy war.
Now, if Putin said something else that is actually a red-line, please feel free to comment so I can update my databanks. Otherwise, I think the nuclear portion of this won't be relevant until and unless Ukraine launches so enough ATACMS at critical Russian infrastructure to threaten the safety of the state.
And please, please understand that news stories saying stuff like "RUSSIA UPDATES NUCLEAR POLICIES TO INCLUDE A NUCLEAR RESPONSE TO CONVENTIONAL WEAPONS" are substantively the same ones that have appeared for years every time Russia tweaks its nuclear doctrine (seriously, my second link here links to my third link!) because this is in fact a longstanding part of Russian nuclear doctrine, which has acknowledged that certain conventional attacks may warrant a nuclear response since 1992.
Shrike
5mo ago
Musk is running around shutting down agencies with no accountability to the bureaucracy or the courts.
Musk is acting on behalf of the executive branch as a government employee, and DOGE is an executive branch agency. If the executive branch doesn't have oversight and control - up to and including the ability to shut down - its own agencies (again, USAID was created by an executive order!) then we don't have a representative constitutional government with checks and balances.
Shrike
4mo ago
I think the critics from the right are at least partially correct that Donald Trump wasn't "supposed" to win, that after eight years of Obama and nearly unmitigated cultural Ws many on the left had convinced themselves that the pendulum would not swing back, that they would never have to live through eight years of George W. Bush again, and then...
There's obviously a danger that the pendulum will swing back on the righties, but if Elon keeps going like this for four years it will take more than four years to rebuild the absolutely gutted institutions. And it's quite possible (looking at Trump's favorability ratings, the meh Democratic slate, and the popularity of downsizing measures) that the GOP will get another four years or more.
Which is why I think people on the left and the right should be careful about memeing "Brazilification" into being. Maybe instead lefties should take this opportunity to consider the many benefits of federalism that righties have been screaming about for literal centuries and maybe righties should let them beat a graceful retreat back to California instead of fighting to the death over the scepter of federal power that was never meant to be.
Shrike
5mo ago
I think part of the problem with the federal government is that ~all expenditures look very reasonable if you go and talk to the program manager for half an hour. There are very, very few "no duh this is stupid" cuts to be made, unless you are RonPaulLaserEyes.gif or have either an in-depth investigation or literally magical awareness of government inefficiency.
If you think the feds are spending too much (they are, obviously) then from a certain standpoint it is best to slash everything and then closely reevaluate which good stuff we should be spending cash on. By changing the status quo from "spending insane amounts of cash" to "spending next to zip" you can shift the burden onto the would-be spenders instead of on the would-be slashers.
Shrike
5mo ago
Trump and Biden as dueling time-travelers sent back by rival political factions who occasionally slip up and say things from the world as they experienced it?
Shrike
7mo ago
What's Tulsi going to head, DHS?
Yes please, I want to find out if they put her on a watchlist (which almost certainly should be eliminated anyway) for partisan reasons. If the answer is yes, DHS should be dissolved. It's a newer agency anyway and I think the actually useful parts can just go back to being standalone or parts of other agencies. Nonsense like that should be punished severely and publicly.
Shrike
2mo ago
I suspect part of the issue here is that Trump actually has a pretty good carrot for Putin to end the war – sanctions, and frozen assets. But the problem is that it's hard to make that offer expire – even if Trump threatens to take it off the table, if Russia keeps winning, at some point Ukraine will be in such a bad place that they will beg him (or whoever is president at the time) to put it back on again. So Russia does have an incentive to make peace, but it's really at their leisure, once they get everything they want out of the war.
A proposal sponsored by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) to impose new sanctions on Russia and 500 percent tariffs on countries that buy Russian oil, gas and aluminum has received broad bipartisan support in the Senate, possibly even a veto-proof majority.
This would probably completely bork US relations with India, right? Doesn't India buy oil from Russia? Probably won't happen, right?
Ukrainian defense guaranteed by Europe
It seems like this was also a missing part of the puzzle: Europe is unwilling or unable to put boots on the ground in any significant number.
I keep being told that Europe is going to actually get real, for real this time, they're going to militarize, it's going to be gnarly, the US will regret ever awakening the European dragon, they're going to pivot to China...and then I see stuff like this.
It's really a shame, since I actually think (even under pivot-to-Asia conditions) the US can make a very good deal with Europe/NATO that is mutually beneficial while still drawing down the US commitment to Europe.
I would tell Europe that the US is trimming its army and pulling out most of its units (I'd leave tripline forces there so that if Russia shoots at Estonia or something it's uncomfortably likely to kill Americans; their job in a real war would be to coordinate joint efforts). But the goal of pulling those forces will be to reinvest that funding into the US Navy and into mass munitions stockpiles. Ultimately the deal with European NATO, I think, should be as follows:
- The US provides strategic bombers with a deep stockpile of weapons
- The US provides the blue-water navy, aiming to keep the sea lanes clear in the event of a Russian invasion of NATO
- The US provides tactical aviation and force enablers like cargo aircraft and refueling aircraft, although not necessarily forward-based in Europe
- The US continues to cut Europe into R&D, selling munitions, aircraft like the F-35, &ct. to keep Europe's teeth sharp and short.
- The US will continue to cooperate on cybersecurity and intelligence
- The US provides the nuclear-stockpile-of-last-resort that is a counterweight to the massive Russian nuclear arsenal (to increase strategic uncertainly from Russia's POV, France and the UK should be encouraged to continue to maintain their own nuclear stockpiles)
The main thing the United States is not aiming to provide in this scenario is ground forces or day-one aviation. In the event of a war with Russia, the United States is still prepared to come save Europe's butt, but this will be by air and by sea.
European NATO is responsible for:
- The Army. Tanks, air defense, infantry, tube and rocket arty, the whole shebang.
- Reciprocating their R&D advances with the US (I know this is already a thing!)
- Green/brown water navy (this means conventional submarines, minelayers/sweepers, missile boats and pocket forces of surface combatants)
- "Day one" tactical aviation assets in sufficient numbers to fight – we can plan for these to be supplemented by a surge of aircraft from the United States as a war drags on, but Europe should have its own air force in sufficient numbers to be able to fight after a Russian "day zero" cruise missile attack.
- Building infrastructure like airfields and munitions depots
This arrangement provides Europe with a lot of confidence in its ability to deter Russia on its own, even if the United States derps off in a fit of isolationist rage (we're building a Russian-equivalent ground force here) while also providing the United States with assurance that Europe isn't going to develop as a rival superpower (the US navy will remain without peer). It saves Europe billions in developing and maintaining a massive nuclear arsenal while also saving the US billions in maintaining a peacetime army that is expected to fight the Russians at the drop of a hat. And it funnels US production into capabilities that are flexible – forget about the 600 ship navy (well, no, don't, let's do that too) but have you considered the 6 million missile military? A robust navy and in particular tens of thousands of cruise missiles can be aimed just as easily at China as they can at Russia. Thus, instead of endangering global peace by being not-quite-strong-enough to fight Russia or China (while still trying to maintain security commitments – or ambiguities – that contain both) the US is able to continue to provide its traditional role of ruling the waves and backstopping local allies.
And, ultimately, I think it's reasonable. In many ways, this sort of split already exists, or at least did during the Cold War, where nations like West Germany focused on their army and coastal fleets while the US focused on its air force and navy, so doubling down on it should be easy and natural (it's not like asking Europe to develop ICBMs and field them in 5 years, or something). European NATO is getting the good end of the financial bargain, too, since fielding troops and tanks is cheap compared to aircraft carriers and intercontinental bombers. The European Union's economy is only slightly behind the US, in purchasing power parity. Since the end of the Cold War, we've "flipped" some of Warsaw Pact's most feared enemies, like Poland and East Germany, into allies. So, ultimately, it should be very doable, on paper, right?
Unfortunately my confidence in the ability of Europe to achieve even this limited goal is falling by the day. The US maintains about 100,000 troops overseas in Europe. If Europe can't deploy a quarter of that number to Ukraine as peacekeepers, how much help are they actually going to be if they actually have to defend Estonia or Latvia?
Sorry for the digression! This turned into a bit of a monster of a comment. I have my dissatisfactions with the United States and the way it has handled itself. But at least it's pretty clearly still a live player.
Shrike
4mo ago
a truly meritocratic system
FWIW, I don't want a purely meritocratic system.
Right now there is a fight (to make a sweeping gesture) "America is a proposition nation" and "America is a Nation Of Founding Stock" which, purely on the immigration question, seems kinda like a moot argument if there's no effort to ensure that America remains a proposition nation. Team A and Team B fight over whether immigrants should share American values or American characteristics, and somehow neither are winning – or so it seems to me.
You would know more than me – are there any efforts to substantially screen people to ensure they agree with American ideology? Specifically American ideology, no generic 'Western democratic values' – I'm talking no-holds-barred free speech, right to bear arms, rule of law and private property, a federalized system where the states are important and sovereign, freedom of religion.
From what I understand there's a quiz, some sort of background check, and maybe they check your social media to make sure you aren't a terrorist or something. I'm not really sure that is selecting for people whose beliefs are American.
Anyway, setting citizenship at $1 million or $5 million or $15 million or nothing + meritocracy doesn't really solve for that either way.
Shrike
3mo ago
I don't think the Signal Chat Debacle is Fine, Actually, even if it didn't involve classified intel (unless it was on purpose as a 16-dimensional chess move, in which case hilarious) but I am old enough to recall when Germany had an video call about selecting Russian targets for weapons systems (which also mentioned that the UK had troops in-country!) that was recorded and released by the Russians and I don't recall any news stories about how NATO allies were nervous about trusting the Germans with classified intel after. Instead the Germany defense minister announced that said NATO allies weren't annoyed and that he probably wouldn't be firing anyone.
My point isn't to downplay the seriousness of the incident so much as it is to suggest that perhaps other countries are selective about their criticism of intel goof-ups.
ETA: to be clear, it seem quite possible to me that regardless of what Congress was told, classified material was disclosed in the Signal Affair. My point is that even if it wasn't, it's worthy of criticism.
Shrike
4mo ago
All of the examples that you list have the culture-war-equivalent of an entire army (NGOs, legal funds, press outlets, media strategies etc.) mobilized to do battle for them.
People generally aren't trying to mess things up. They are just wrong about the consequences of their ideas
Okay, but in what way is this not a conflict? The Communists
- very clearly bought into conflict theory - a class struggle!
- Definitely were wrong about the consequences of their ideas
- Definitely thought they were making the world a better and brighter place through conflict.
It's not particularly comforting to have someone explain to you that they are doing this for the greater good as they level a Tokarev at the back of your head. "This is all a big misunderstanding!" is what a lot of people thought right before being executed.
And while, thank God, we are not so far gone today, you see this in contemporary politics too, whether it's tearing down heteronormativity or "owning the libs." Mistake and conflict aren't diametrically opposed, they feed into each other.
But the average politician or corporate leader just doesn't understand how the world works.
The average politician is, I think, well aware that creating conflict is better for their electoral chances.
Shrike
6mo ago
I think, technically, the pro-life position is "do not abort your child" - but it's true that Pro Life Tribe is bigger than that, and does have broader positions.
I don't understand the complaint you have here, though - based on the article, there's no recommendation of trailer-park behavior like getting pregnant at 15. There's an isolated instance where, from what I can tell, someone chose not to abort their child and has now been married for 34 years and has grandchildren. (It's unclear to me if she married the father of her child). This outcome seems good to me and I don't take the story to be recommending the route used to get there. Similarly, given that some number of people will, I am told, get pregnant at 15, keeping the child and getting married seems to me to be a preferable outcome to aborting the child and remaining unwed.
Maybe you can elaborate on what you find objectionable? Or did I miss something? As far as I can tell, National Review is not promoting out-of-wedlock teenage pregnancies as being a starting route to successful marriages, and if Veronica Keene married as a teenager the article doesn't mention it.
Shrike
11mo ago
One of the interesting things about the United States currently is that you can have people who see themselves as rallying against oppressive power by supporting the incumbent President and the nation's various intelligence agencies and the like.
The political divisions in the US of course are imho such that both "sides" have at least some credible basis to perceive themselves as the underdogs (or at least sticking up for the underdog) fighting The Man.
Shrike
3mo ago
Let me register my response to this: AAHHHHHHH
Let me register a more mature response. I think it is good that there is a move fast and break things outlet in the world. There's more than zero good in that.
But it is also good when people spend several months researching a high-confidence story or essay and write it carefully, thoughtfully, and deliberately. I think our society would be much better off as a whole if they were willing to wait on things before having an opinion.
People I think have come around to distrusting the centralized system because they recognize that a centralized system is a bottleneck of information that, if tainted, corrupts the entire information ecosystem. But what I think is overlooked is that propaganda has for decades been able to work by being fast. Think of the "Iraqi soldiers threw babies out of incubators" story. A lie that succeeded in part, I would say, due to corruption in the centralized nodes, but the mainstream media eventually did call BS on the story! The problem was that by then it was too late, the story had already succeeded.
And optimizing for speed over centrality doesn't shut propaganda out, but lets propaganda shift into moving quickly rather than corrupting a node. It's the classic "headline lies, correction on page 20" problem, just retooled for the information age.
Shrike
3mo ago
Why hasn't it already?
My wife worked about five years ago at as a credit analyst, where part of her job involved determining whether or not to extend extra lines of credit: the easiest thing in the world (I would think) to automate. Really, a very simple algorithm based off of known data should be able to make those decisions, right? But my wife, using extremely outdated software, at a place with massive employee retention problems due to insanely high workloads, was tasked with following a set of general guidelines to determine whether or not to extend additional credit. In some cases the guidelines were a bit ambiguous. She was instructed by her manager to use her gut.
As I think I've mentioned before, I work with AI for my IRL job fairly extensively, although mostly second-hand. The work we do now would have required much more human effort prior to modern AI models, and having been involved in the transition between "useless-to-us-GPT" and "oh wow this is actually good" I can tell you that our model of action pivoted away from mass employment. But we still need people - the AI requires a lot of hand-holding, although I am optimistic it will improve in that regard - and AI can't sell people on a product. You seem to be envisioning a world where an AI can do the work of 10 people at a 14 person company, so the company shrinks to 4 people. I'm living in a world where AI can do the work of 10 people, so we're likely to employ (let's say) 10 people instead of 20 and do 100x the work the 20 people would have been able to do. It's quite possible that in our endeavor the AI is actually the difference between success and failure and when it's all said and done by 2050 we end up employing 50 people instead of zero.
How far that generalizes, I do not know. What I do know is that "capitalism" is often extraordinarily inefficient already. If AI ends up doing jobs that could have been replaced in whole or in part by automation a decade before anyone had ever heard of "ChatGPT" it will be because AI is the new and sexy thing, not because "capitalism" is insanely efficient and good at making decisions. It seems quite plausible to me that people will still be using their gut at my wife's place of employment at the same time that AI is giving input into high-level decisions in Silicon Valley boardrooms.
I definitely believe that AI and automation change the shape of industry over the next 50 years - and yes, the next 5. What I would not bet on (absent other factors, which are plenteous) is everyone waking up the same day and deciding to fire all their employees and replace them with AI, mass pandemonium in the streets. For one thing, the people who would make the decision to do that are the people least likely to be comfortable with using AI. Instead, they will ask the people most likely to be replaced by AI to study the question of whether or not to replace them with AI. How do you think that's going to go? There's also the "lobster dominance hierarchy" - people prefer to boss other people around rather than lord it over computers. Money and personnel are a measuring stick of importance and the managerial class won't give up on that easily.
Shrike
7mo ago
I think this would be a huge unforced error by the Biden administration, inviting comparisons to Nixon. If Team Trump prosecutes a member of Team Biden and he gets acquitted, it makes Team Trump look bad. If Team Biden starts accepting pardons left and right, it makes them seem like a pack of crooks.
Shrike
3mo ago
eugenics as a solution, but we know what reputation that has today
Interestingly I think eugenics is still extremely widespread, it's just been re-framed from a state-run often involuntary program to a voluntary program. Pregnant women take tests to screen their infants for likely fetal anomalies, and then they often have the option to abort them.
Shrike
4mo ago
I'm not sure they are necessarily at odds. Musk seems pretty famous for prioritizing speed over getting things right the first time and yet this doesn't stop him from not only getting things right but getting them right faster than others. For instance, IIRC he spent millions on complex machinery for Starship before deciding that it should be made out of stainless steel and had to basically eat the loss; Starship is still poised to be the heaviest-lift reusable rocket ever built at a time when other reusable rockets are still struggling to compete with Starship's smaller predecessors.
Anyway, I don't take for granted that Musk is necessarily making the best decisions or the right ones in his newest venture, but I also don't think that "smart outsiders led by a certified genius" and "percussive maintenance" are at odds inherently.
Shrike
5mo ago
I'm left with the impression that Musk and MAGA are being more truthful than NPR, and maybe the Agency does deserve to go into receivership.
I suspect that "The Agency" is an...apt term to describe USAID.
People are thinking a lot about
- The message shutting down US foreign aid sends to US citizens, and
- The message shutting down US foreign aid sends to foreign governments who want to receive US aid funding,
Missed in this is the question of 3): What message is being sent to foreign governments by shutting down a branch of the US intelligence apparatus*?
*Yes, I think this is an overstatement, but think about it from the perspective of a foreign government: once USAID serves as cover for a hostile covert op aimed at overthrowing a government, you have to assume the entire agency is serving as a CIA arm. And this is without getting into even the "soft power" or perhaps "propaganda" aspects of what USAID does.
Shrike
8mo ago
Gonna be extremely funny if building stuff on Mars and then shipping them all the way to Earth ends up being cheaper than shipping them from somewhere on Earth due to the longshoreman union and the Jones Act.
Shrike
19d ago
Of course there are perhaps more moral parallels with the extreme abolitionists, but in terms of contempt for the constitution, federal authority, and inability to understand the game theory of their opponents, the anti-ice protestors remind me a lot more of Jeff Davis and Robert Toombs than William Lloyd Garrison or Abe Lincoln.
William Lloyd Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution while calling it "an agreement with hell." In many ways I think the radical pro-slavery South Carolinian Fire-Eaters gave the other side a free win by splitting from the USA first, saving the radical abolitionists from the unpopular position of "destroy the Constitution and abolish slavery by any means."
I see a lot of parallels between the South's position in the 1850s and perhaps surprisingly the pro-immigration crowd in California/other Blue States.
While I understand where you're coming from (and wouldn't necessarily disagree in some respects) I actually think their position is closer to the North's in a specific aspect that is under-discussed.
A lot of the anger in the North towards the South wasn't due to the abstracted question of slavery, it was because slaves would escape from the South to the North, settle someplace like Massachusetts that would welcome escaped slaves, and build a new life for themselves...until federal officials showed up, tore them away from their family or friends, and returned them to the South, as was required by the Constitution. What caused the South to secede wasn't that the Constitution didn't favor their position, it was that they were getting locked out of conventional power by the more numerous free states (that's why South Carolina bailed when they did, after it became clear the federal government was going to be hostile to them due to a presidential election, even though the pro-slavey side had been racking up Wins like the Dred Scott decision just a few years earlier. (In this respect, I think your blue-states-as-South analogy is arguably very apt: the center of gravity in the electoral college is shifting redder and redder every census, and the Supreme Court's decisions haven't been cutting towards the blue states either.)
Interestingly, the Lincoln-Douglas debates saw the introduction by Douglas of the "Freeport Doctrine" which essentially said that even when slavery could not be legally prohibited, if the local government exercised its authority in such a way as to be inimical to slavery it would constitute a de facto ban.
It seems pretty clear to me that the blue states (or at least some of them) have been running their own version of the Freeport Doctrine as regards illegal immigrants and get upset about ICE for much the same reasons as Northerners were upset about slave catchers. And while that might function for a while, it seems unlikely that the United States can survive with each state having its own immigration policy any more than it could survive half slave and half free. Returning to your casting, it seems to me that the administration is quite content to dangle Fort Sumter in front of the other side, not necessarily in terms of secession but just in the reality that violent demonstration against the governmental authorities will radicalize reds and blues, but it seems plausible to have a net effect that favors the administration's position. Perhaps just as firing on Fort Sumter gave the abolitionists on a platter what they otherwise were arguably decades away from being able to seize by conventional political means, so too the protests against ICE in California (no matter how popular they are in California) will enable the Trump administration's previously radical push to aggressively deport illegal immigrants writ large.
Are there other examples that you can think of where the attention span and deep thought that Postman aspires to have helped cities/nations get through tough political challenges?
Off the top of my head, the Revolutionary War might be the best example. Unlike other examples (such as World War Two) the Founding Fathers were having to make up a lot as they went along because they had to create the institutions they needed to be a nation as they went (yes I know the state Congresses were already a thing, so there was actually less of a jump there than one might think, but still!) and from what I can tell they did a lot of it on sheer "I have read history for 1000 hours and we're remaking the Roman Republic from scratch but better this time" energy. (Back to the Civil War: the South actually aspired to emulate the success of the American Revolution and saw their secession as an ideological successor but failed in part because George Washington could afford to retreat from the British in a way that a slaveholding agrarian state fighting for its independence against a neighboring country could not.)
Shrike
4mo ago
These programs weren't secret, all the info was on the web!
Assuming you trust what's on the web, which maybe you shouldn't given that USAID has channeled funds ostensibly meant for Pakistan into "making Cuban Twitter" as part of a scheme to somehow undermine the Cuban government.
One potential benefit of these sorts of purges is that it helps consolidate US spending into something that's more legible to the executive branch (and Congress). Now, given that the executive branch has a history of lying, not only to Congress but also to the Executive himself I think it's good that the entire system is flushed from time to time and programs restarted from scratch to ensure that there can be proper oversight and accountability. I mean, think about it - if we just wanted Good Government Programs to run with minimal confusion, we'd get rid of democracy and elections and call it a day.
However, frankly, it is hypothetically possible that every single program is doing something Good And Useful. It does not then follow that no programs should be cut. If the national debt is actually going to be a problem (and probably it is) we should not spend beyond our means. Just as in our personal lives, that means that there will be some good things that we can't have. I won't be particularly sad about INL (which is a shady bunch in my book) being temporarily shut down in Mexico. Possibly the US government would want to shut it down any way as they might be approaching the problem of drug flow from Mexico a little differently, I'm not sure.
Shrike
4mo ago
You shouldn't need to pass a law to get rid of USAID; USAID was established by an executive order pursuant to the Foreign Assistance Act. I don't see any reason why executive orders cannot eliminate USAID and replace it with, let's say, USHELP as long as the Foreign Assistance Act was being carried out.
I agree about the US Department of Education (which was established by law) but I do think it's within the purview of the President to reorganize it.
If they want to pass a law to rename The United States Digital Service
The US Digital Service is part of the Executive Office of the President it seems very silly to suggest Congress needs an act to rename it. I don't think they have any real authority or say over what the EOP structures itself.
I think the United States seems to be heading for a form of democratic tyranny, with few checks and balances. I don't know if there has actually been an "autocoup", but I do think there are shades of it in what has been happening the last few weeks, and I think any lover of American liberty and prosperity should be a little bit worried as well, even if they like the effects of a lot of these unilateral actions by the Executive.
Well, yes – I agree with this. Now, I don't think, from what I can tell, anything that's happened is atypically illegal or tyrannical, and the GOP majority is so thin that I don't think a danger of democratic tyranny will emerge unless he governs so well that he gains a supermandate (in which case will he really need tyranny?) In fact, some of the things that have been done, such as the temporary funding freeze, I honestly think perhaps every administration should consider. But with all that being said I think there is always danger of a backlash going too far. On the preference of "my rules, enforced fairly, my rules, enforced unfairly, your rules enforced fairly, your rules, enforced unfairly" people often prefer them in that order, but under a representative government with a rule of law the idea that the rules are enforced fairly is explicitly more important than whose rules are at play.
However, if your rivals have been enforcing their rules without regards for fairness, good things can actually come of returning the favor and enforcing your rules with no regard for fairness. This can remind people why fairness is important. But it is hard to tell when a retaliatory defection is returning everyone to a default cooperate mode or setting off another round of tit-for-tat.
I think there are also some interesting higher-level considerations about whether it is possible to prefer "fairness of enforcement" over "whose rules" when a society is not morally and culturally homogenous enough to actually agree on most rules. The Civil War happened in part precisely because the extremes on both sides explicitly decided that ensuring their rules were enforced was more important than the fairness of enforcement, because following the rules of the other side was a travesty. And most people today agree with them: slavery was so grievous that it was worth bending or breaking the rules to be rid of it. If this is true, it is worth considering whether it is possible to put fairness of enforcement over outcome in a sufficiently divided society. (In fact interestingly DEI is explicit about prioritizing outcomes over the process but that's a whole other can of worms...)
TLDR: yes, people should (always, and not just under this administration) be vigilant about their liberty and concerned about the powers of the state. But people should also consider, if they want those powers to shrink, how to best engage with a potential tit-for-tat spiral to ensure that it resolves into cooperation instead of an open-ended tit-for-tat. Finally, people should perhaps be honest with themselves about whether or not they want to cooperate (as opposed to be willing to win or lose a tit-for-tat spiral) and under what conditions.
Shrike
8mo ago
I think that a lot of people are under the impression that "wait until everything goes back to normal" is a viable strategy for dealing with whatever their pet problem happens to be.
I think the fundamental problem with that is confusing the symptom for the cause. It's certainly possible that Trump is uniquely causal of this voter ID thing. But I wouldn't bet on it going away after he dies. And I think the basic skepticism of election integrity (on the right, but also on the left from time to time) predates his POTUS run.
I don't think things are going "back to normal," if there ever was such a thing.
One of the interesting things about MKULTRA is that it was revealed because a small cache of documents survived a document destruction order by the Director of the CIA. It seems to me we can logically infer the possibility (perhaps even the probability) of similarly audacious programs that have been successfully concealed simply because the relevant documents were successfully destroyed.
I agree with your point that government cover-ups can work, and obviously if some can work for some time it implies some can work permanently, or at least still can be working today. But I also think that leaks, frankly, are not that as damaging to the integrity of a cover-up as one might believe.
The problem is that from the outside leaks just look like random baseless rumor. There is a process for laundering such leaks or rumors into consensus reality, often quite literally via the New York Times. The reason Watergate became a scandal was because the leaker respected the process and got the Times on his side. Amusingly, this is also the exact same reason that everyone is talking about UFOs right now: a small group of media-savvy people made a coordinated effort to get it into the Times. I was aware of the "Tic-Tac" incident long before the Times published it (partially via personal connections that alerted me when it "leaked" all the way into a niche publication) but it was not taken seriously by e.g. Congress until it was laundered into mainstream respectability.
You can sort-of map this on to MeToo. My hazy recollection at least was that part of the premise or background of the movement was that there were a number of predatory people, who were known to be predatory (this certainly, at a minimum, seems to be the case for Harvey Weinstein). It was quite literally an open secret that the guy was engaging in harassment at best and outright rape at worst. But until the open secret was laundered into a mainstream narrative Weinstein went unpunished. I am of course fingering the Times as the standard-bearer of this narrative, but I imagine many similar dramas have played out on smaller scales, even within a family.
Another conspiracy I am curious about is the drug-running out of Afghanistan. Rumors have reached me, both online and in-person, that US military aircraft were used to move large amounts of drugs out of Afghanistan during our occupation of the country. (Similar rumors sprung up and were even published regarding the Vietnam war.) I don't know if these rumors are true (I guess I'll believe them when I read them in the Times) but I frankly would be a bit surprised if anyone in the Times was aware of them, and very surprised if they were investigating such a story, even though I imagine they would concede it was possible. I am not sure I can exactly articulate why, but I think everyone has a sense of what I am saying. Somehow it doesn't seem like the sort of thing that should come out now. Perhaps in 20 years, when it will be long too late to change anything that happened.
Which is part of what makes the timing of this lawsuit interesting. It's based on FOIA documents that were extracted from the bowels of the bureaucracy after a few decades. If the allegations are true (and I am not arguing that they are or aren't, I haven't even read the complaint) it seems like a very plausible outcome is a settlement and no jail time for people who negligently killed hundreds of people at random. But then again, that's exactly what happened on Iran Air 655: a settlement was paid, and nobody was disciplined, despite the fact that the missile was fired under verifiably faulty pretenses (I don't think there was a conspiracy here, just a very, very big mistake).
This is a little meandering, so let me come to a point. I think people believe that if there's a "leak," if a single person talks, then somehow magically the truth will out and we'll all read about it in the papers tomorrow. But that's not how these things work. I think it's something like a preference cascade, where the problem isn't what is true and what isn't. Rather, it is a coordination problem. And if the people in charge of the covert endeavor (whether it's Harvey Weinstein and his PR/legal team, or "the CIA," or the people in charge of ensuring that my medical and legal records remain confidential, or what have you) are better at coordinating than the leakers, the leakers can "leak" all they want, but it won't make its way into the collective consciousness whether that's of a single family or an entire nation. Or sometimes, even if it does make its way into the collective consciousness, it can be too awkward to openly acknowledge. You see this at the level of a family or community, but I think sometimes it happens at the national one as well.
I'd propose that when evaluating the plausibly of keeping something secret, then, we shouldn't evaluate the odds of one person blabbing. Rather, we should evaluate the coordination problem at play, and the incentive structures involved. I think that viewing things through this lens has some good explanatory power as to why some covert endeavors fail, some succeed, and many come out several decades later. After many years, the power balance in coordination shifts. Criminal underlings have less of a desire to protect their pals long after the statutes of limitations have expired; victims of abusers accumulate in number, grow in power, and begin to coordinate effectively; people in office lose their allies due to chance and time.
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