Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
8d ago
Greer is a major China hawk, though. And Hegseth isn't.
Virtually no one in the Trump administration is. Even nominally anti-China measures are more about domestic grandstanding than effective action against China. This is a political movement that is fixated on persecuting internal enemies and shaking down allies. I know I harp on this obnoxiously, but it really is the thought process of a bully: avoid dealing with China because they're tough, prey on the people who depend on you because they can't really fight back. And of course, this thought process filters down military organizational thinking: bring back hazing, double down on the cult of special forces, etc...
It's also hard not to see some of this as the consequence of putting an infantry lieutenant in charge of the military. Some of this tough guy attitude might be tolerable or even desirable in a guy whose job is to lead 40ish other men directly into combat, but he's thinking about things from that perspective. He's not a systems-level thinker, and I find it hard to believe he ever would have made it to a senior leadership position on his merits.
This paradigm seems like it's committing the common sin of trying to generalize a particular set of values to the entire human race. But I would also ask: what is the purpose of this paradigm? It seems obfuscatory to me, because it implies a certain equality of significance between 'hard' and 'soft' factors when soft factors outweigh hard ones to an almost unfathomable degree.
Status is also highly particular and contextual, Trump being a perfect example. He is practically worshipped by his core supporters and absolutely despised by about half the country. There are, of course, no lack of other examples: a gang leader is a big swinging dick in his little corner of ghetto, but his position carries negative weight in broader society. Prince William is high status, but only by association with the institution of the British Crown. A lot of professional athletes are showered in praise and money, but Respectable People would generally not be thrilled if one of them was dating their daughter.
Hard status for men is measured in physical power that exists as an extension of nature. This is, essentially, the kind of power that the man alone in the jungle wields. This is measured in a combination of physical strength, height, masculinity, physical presence, muscularity, weight, aggression, age, and any other number of tangible, measurable physical characteristics.
All that and five bucks will get you a cup of coffee. No, seriously. None of this reliably translates into status. Depending on some of the soft factors, they may even count against you. In developed countries (and tbh most countries anywhere), the term for a tough, aggressive young man physically asserting himself is 'criminal'.
Similar things could be said for the 'hard status' criteria for women. Hot women are not actually hard to find - with the right diet, fitness routine, and surgeons, we can literally make them (but we don't have to). Being hot may be a foot in the door, but there's a reason why professionally hot people don't actually get paid very much until they hit celebrity status, and a lot of work that involves leveraging your looks for money (e.g. stripper) is actively harmful to your social status.
Which brings me back to: your hard status is not really status at all. These physical attributes might be leveraged to gain status in certain contexts, but in modern societies, relying on your physicality is almost always low status.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
8d ago
There's a glimmer of that, but it's hard for me to shake the impression that a lot of it is just a certain naive faith in the efficacy of brutality. It's also why get people proposing things like bombing drug cartels or sending the military in to fight crime, why you have an entire American film genre whose recurring central theme boils down to "police brutality is good", why back in 2003 you had people bragging we were going to turn Iraq into a parking lot, why you have people who think hazing is good, etc...
The failures in the GWOT make these types angry and frustrated because it contradicts their desire for decisive, dominating wins, but the tolerance/appetite for violence predated those failures.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
8d ago
Very few Somalis would share this sentiment if the shoe was on the other foot, which is the problem with modern ROE.
Why? The shoe isn't on the other foot, will not be on the other foot in our lifetimes (if ever), and if somehow the shoe did switch feet it would involve a Somalia so transformed that any comparison to present Somalia would be useless. "What would the Somalians do in this situation?" is irrelevant to what we should do in the situation we are dealing with. Punishing people for the infractions of their hypothetical counterparts is counterproductive to your actual goals.
They work when its Americans fighting Germans or the English.
I'm not sure what this means. The US' last war against Germany was fought under very different circumstances, with different goals, and with different ROE than the GWOT.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10d ago
And lest you say this is being uncharitable to Hegseth, as yunyun33 noted, he is on record campaigning for war criminals to be pardoned. If you think it's unfair to hold soldiers accountable for murdering prisoners, I think it's fair to characterize you as being pro-war crimes.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10d ago
The US has a lot of concerns where total annihilation would be wildly excessive and counterproductive. Obliterating Somalia because some enterprising fishermen decided to moonlight as pirates would be silly on top of appalling. It's a level of deranged collective punishment that would instantly turn the rest of the world against the US because nobody is sure when we're going to make an absurd demand at nukepoint. And it wouldn't even work, because the strategy immediately fails against any sort of decentralized opponent.
Doing nothing is comparatively reasonable, but still suboptimal, since having your shipping go unmolested is kind of a big deal.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10d ago
I composed this before Hegseth gave his "war crimes are badass" speech, though I'd argue it vindicates my remark about "warrior ethos" posturing. In practical terms, it is an ethos that glamorizes brutality as an expression of strength and doesn't appear to give much thought to the use of the military as a political tool beyond "kill people until they do what we say" (an approach which has a decidedly mixed record). Thus you end up getting arguments like "we failed in Vietnam/Iraq/Afghanistan because we weren't brutal enough" when the reality is that these efforts stumbled because the US didn't have a real plan for victory (and in the meantime we killed a lot of civilians). It's not quite a stab-in-the-back myth, but it's the same flavor of copium over the failure of pure force.
At least for now the military is limited to blowing up narco boats
*alleged narco boats
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10d ago
Even for non-catholic groups, they were still Christian.
I think you substantially underestimate the intensity of Anti-Catholicism in 19th century Protestant nations. Nowadays the Protestant-Catholic conflict is pretty much dead outside of a couple of marginal weirdos, but that wasn't true 150 years ago. It obviously wasn't as spicy as it was in, say, the 17th century, but Anglo Protestants were liable to view Catholicism as backwards and politically threatening.
Also, uh, there's presently an incredible amount of animosity directed towards overwhelmingly Catholic Latino immigrants.
I think it's harder to assimilate now because people are showing up with basic values structures that are either vastly different than even the most modernized (not progressive) pop culture American values or, more commonly, without a functional values system at all.
I think the claim that contemporary immigrants are not assimilating is not really in evidence and (to the extent it's not just a gloss on general nativism) rests on an incorrect view of historical assimilation as being far less contentious amongst natives than it actually was. Intermarriage rates are high, language uptake is faster than ever, etc... I strongly suspect that most of the angst over immigrants not assimilating is not actually based on immigrants failing to assimilate but a) fearmongering from the subset of anti-immigrant types who really do just hate immigrants b) more importantly, proxy concerns over domestic culture wars. Like, Indian and Chinese immigrants assimilate superbly, but they mostly assimilate to the Blue Tribe.
The claim that many immigrants don't have a values system at all strikes me as absolutely wild - where are these deracinated sociopaths coming from?
People like to sneer at the white underclass because they're getting outcompeted by recent immigrants.
People like to sneer at the white underclass for a lot of reasons, most of which have nothing to do with immigration, but with respect to immigration they get sneered at because they've opted to use immigrants as a scapegoat for their own problems.
For a somewhat lower stakes culture war topic:
The culture war aspect here is twofold:
- "The Department must remain vigilant in maintaining the grooming standards which underpin the warrior ethos" - SecDef Hegseth
- Waivers are primarily issued to black soldiers (who are more prone to shaving-related skin issues)
To the first, I have never been particularly impressed by the "warrior" posturing. Most proponents of it that I've met been underwhelming human beings (at best), but that might be forgivable if it cashed out in superior performance. However, if the performance of the Russian Army (or the IJA or...) is any indication, boring competence and logistical capability seems to heavily outweigh posturing about warrior spirit when it comes to combat performance. (These are not strictly in tension, but leaning into "warrior ethos" seems to go hand in hand with disdain for unglamorous organizational work).
It's also not really clear to me how beards compromise warrior ethos (especially since vets seem to love them), but I've also never been in the military, so it's possible there's a piece of experiential knowledge I am missing.
To the second: while I strongly doubt this is a scheme to purge the military of black soldiers, I struggle to think of a practical justification for this policy. The traditional rationale is for gas masks, but that doesn't apply to special operations forces (who are presumably so high speed and low drag that they outrun the poison gas) and beard-compatible respirators already exist.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
12d ago
a) I think you are underestimating the historical levels of animosity Anglo Protestants had towards Catholicism, especially in the first half of the 19th century. Anti-Catholicism was a major animating force behind the original nativist movement. b) Indian immigrants have assimilated absolutely fine so far c) I would also point towards the current level of animosity being directed towards the overwhelmingly-Catholic, European-descended immigrants from Latin America (despite protestations to the contrary, this is not confined to illegal immigrants). There's not nothing to the cultural compatibility argument, but it strikes me as being very weak, especially in an American context, and mostly deployed as a pretext for garden-variety racism and/or classism.
Integration and assimilation was both expected and enforced
Immigrants assimilate faster now than they did in the 19th century. I'll admit that I can't speak to the British experience, but here in the US the common critique that immigrants aren't assimilating isn't borne out. Immigrants learn English if they don't already speak it, intermarriage rates are high, etc... This is largely a conflict between the norms/aesthetics of (white) liberal and conservative Americans with immigrants as props, not between natives and immigrants.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
13d ago
the fact that there was far more intense pressure to assimilate in centuries past than in the current historical moment
I don't think that's actually true. The central group of contemporary concern, Hispanics/Latinos, are assimilating extremely quickly. The major difference I perceive between 1900 and 2025 is the acceptability of explicitly racism - everybody is still more than a little bit racist, but almost everyone agrees, on paper, that racism is bad and feels the need to launder racist claims through other paradigms.
analyzed voting patterns and political affiliation among different demographic groups and found distinct differences in political alignment among the present-day descendants of these 19th-century immigrants.
Assuming this is substantively correct, it doesn't meant much on its own. Different immigrant groups were not uniformly distributed around the country. Germans were heavily concentrated in the Midwest, Italians on the East coast, etc... These places have their own regional politics that will confound efforts to trace an ideological lineage through immigrant populations.
I’ll ask you: in the absence of assimilationist pressure
I think this hypothetical is nonsense. It's not far off asking, "in the absence of air, would you be happy taking a plane from NYC to London?"
The pressure to assimilate doesn't come from having people lecture you about the importance of assimilating. It comes from being immersed in the host society, from unavoidably picking up the norms and values of that society, from the countless petty conveniences of conforming to that society's expectations, from having your children grow up in that society. To a large degree it comes from being allowed to assimilate.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
13d ago
became normal accountable government officials who behave kindly and civilly
Behaving kindly and civilly would be counter to their purposes. Looking at how the Trump admin presents its conduct and how Trump supporters react, it is quite clear the jackboot theater and terror tactics are the point.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
15d ago
Can you clarify what you mean by 'differences'? Because I feel like you are eyeing suggestively in the direction of HBD theories, which I find to be non-credible. Obviously, Germans, Japanese, and Indians are different groups of people, but no, I don't think there is some fundamental, underlying difference that makes Germans assimilable in the US and Indians not.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
16d ago
Some of the more successful fantasies of the past decade or so have been YA series Throne of Glass and Shadow and Bone (by Sarah Maas and Leigh Bardugo, respectively) and approximately 11 zillion copycats. The books are nominally aimed at people in their late teens, but it turns out people in their twenties have more money.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
16d ago
Goddamn, I thought people were joking
I'm not saying this is a stitch up, but if it was this is about the level of effort and competence I would expect.
Fucking hell. "I'm going to write 'Anti-ICE' on one single bullet of a five round clip." Maybe it was a galaxy-brained move by the shooter to make it look like the admin was framing leftists. (It wasn't)
A more serious possibility is that the guy really did have left-wing motives, but didn't leave any obvious indicators to that effect so he's getting a posthumous OJ treatment.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
16d ago
Very simply, "A country is not an economic zone" rebuts the idea that policy should be made purely for economic gain above other goods.
Advocates for immigration do not contemplate immigration policy purely in economic terms. At least in the US, and to my knowledge in Canada, Australia, and Britain as well, support for immigration is often pitched as an expression of values or a crucial part of national greatness. More than a few progressive immigration advocates are averse to making economic arguments for immigration, preferring to couch it as a humanitarian obligation.
But, to be more direct: there is a massive unfilled gap between "A country is not an economic zone" and ideological ethnonationalism. The US is more than an economic zone now. It was more than an economic zone in the mid 19th century when it had functionally open borders. There is no actual substance behind saying "a country is not an economic zone". The people who say it are not cultural traditionalists, nor are they concerned for solidarity with their fellow citizens (and are in fact often openly disdainful of their well-being).
Consider the example of Japan for a minute.
I don't find this hypothetical to be interesting or relevant because it has no relationship to the actual reality of immigration policy anywhere. Whereas, "what if we had mass immigration" isn't even a hypothetical. It's American history. About ten million Germans and Irish immigrated during the 19th century. There was a great deal of anxiety about this: they were largely poor, many were (shudder) Catholic, they were uneducated, they were acculturated to despotism and would make poor citizens of a Republic, etc... Spoiler alert: it was actually fine, and nowadays anti-Irish/German bigotry is a punchline to suggest someone is a next-level racist. Similar things were said about the Italians, the Poles, the Japanese etc... and now they're all just Americans. By far the majority of conflict and integration problems that have arisen from large-scale immigration in the US have not been from immigrants but from nativist backlash against immigration.
Now, if you were deeply attached to maintaining the purity of superficial elements of Protestant Anglo-Scots culture, this was probably extremely distressing, but the reality of how humans act was bound to disappoint anyway: culture is dynamic everywhere and American culture had already substantially diverged from its British roots by the time of independence. Obsession with ethno-cultural purity thus strikes me as irrational.
I'm partial to this argument as it's something that is not really in dispute outside of the West.
Broke-ass losers I don't really know that that is indicative of much other than liberalism mostly being a western phenomenon. Outside of the West, ethnonationalism/ethnocentrism seems to have very mixed results. It certainly does not seem to promise harmony, stability, or prosperity. Conversely, here in the West it is very normal for immigrants to be scapegoated for issues they have little to do with (e.g. housing, economic stagnation) or simply serve as a focal point of resentment (e.g. Red staters mad that immigrants to Blue states take advantage of social services they don't have in their own states).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
17d ago
Sanderson is very good at what he does. What he does is crank out easily digestible lowbrow epic fantasy. Sanderson novels are the MCU films of contemporary fantasy literature. He's a self-admitted mediocre prose artist, but he has a reasonably effective plot formula and has a genuine knack for writing fantasy action scenes, which make his books fun to read if you're into that sort of thing. The gimmick-based world building and magic systems appeal to the nerdism of fantasy fandom and gives a sense of novelty to what are otherwise fairly forgettable stories.
Sanderson is YA, but aimed primarily at men in their early twenties rather than women in their early twenties. The fact that his writing is not on the level of GRRM is the point - almost every higher caliber SFF writer I can think of is also significantly heavier, which is not necessarily a plus.
The most egregious is on the sentence/paragraph level, where Sanderson literally repeats himself.
I have an ungenerous theory: this is a plus for two reasons. The first is that epic fantasy is a genre that implicitly equates bulk with quality (you compare it to LotR, but LotR is quite modest in length compared to later epic fantasies), so a padded writing style helps there. A lot of readers want the pointless fluff. The second is that it makes it easier to read without paying close attention. It's okay if you miss details because Sanderson will just tell you again.
overall he looks like he's half asleep, without his normal punchiness
He's always like that when he's making prepared statements. He's generally far more energetic when he's running his mouth.
Trump has been absolutely cooked for years, but it's priced in. No amount of rambling word salad, unhinged rants, or basic factual errors will impact people's perception of his faculties. Short of stroking out on camera, no one cares.
what's actually going on in the administration?
It's pretty clear that Trump is living up to his reputation for agreeing with the last person who talked to him. Just today he made a TS post aggressively in support of Ukraine and Europe against Russia, which is yet another flip-flop in that regard. Most likely he had a conversation with some Russia hawk who flattered him while telling him Putin was making him look like a fool, so he's an Atlanticist until the next time he talks to JD Vance. See also: the confusion over the new H1-B fee, with different agencies contradicting each other over what the policy actually is.
My general impression is that Trump doesn't actually care about the details of governing, but he likes it when people kiss his ass, so it's really easy for his subordinates to talk him into doing something. However, he doesn't actually care enough to make sure everyone is in alignment and there isn't enough commonality of interest or values for an alignment to occur naturally.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
17d ago
The winning move is to get the cop to beat you up without doing anything a reasonable-to-moderately unreasonable observer would construe as deserving (ideally while shouting "come and see the violence inherent in the system"). The insight of people like Gandhi and MLK Jr. was that while the Boot of Power does not tolerate face to face defiance, it ultimately derives its power from a body politic which can, very occasionally, be shamed or disgusted into punishing abuses done in its name.
Unfortunately, this also involves getting beaten up and has a pretty mixed record (bare minimum 1/3rd of the population will say you must have done something to deserve it).
I would more or less agree with this, though part of my thesis is also that progressives are, if not happy, then at least comfortable with the idea of being outsiders (and indeed seemed to struggle with the idea that they had real power even when they were getting people fired), whereas conservatives viscerally hated it.
Conservatives were never really powerless. Even at the height of progressive influence, they still ran half the country, had their own parallel media institutions, etc... (It must be noted that the people most affected by progressive cancel culture were other progressives). But they were in a situation where mainstream cultural institutions gave virtually no deference to their sensibilities (a major change) and where expressing conservative opinions on sex/sexuality, gender, or race risked real social disapproval (not just having a blue-haired college student impotently yell at you). Illustratively, in a very short time frame you went from risking censure for being publicly gay to risking censure for being publicly anti-gay.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
18d ago
Among other things, but not only that. My observation is that (some) conservatives are much more likely to try and 'gatekeep' Americanness and call things they don't like unamerican (progressives occasionally try, but their heart never seems to be in it); they often frame opposition to wokeness as 'reclaiming' or 'taking back' the country. In general, they seem much more inclined to pushing forward a prescriptive vision of American culture than other factions in American politics.
Some of this I will freely admit is a vibes-based assessment that a lot of conservatives were really disoriented and angered by being on the other side of the enforcer-transgressor dichotomy. By contrast, progressives were also disoriented by the flip, but had previously been quite comfortable in the transgressor role and often seem to prefer it.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
18d ago
To many, it seems like the Right now has its own version of woke.
I will maintain my position that the Right has always had its version of woke (meaning in this context, an impulse towards moralistic censorship*) and has always been fairly weak on free speech. Notably, basically every free speech advocacy group is staffed and supported overwhelmingly by liberals. Conservative groups will support conservative causes on 1A issues, but as far as I can tell there's no right-wing equivalent to the ACLU representing the Nazis and there's long been right-wing groups eager to wield social pressure (and state power) to suppress viewpoints and ideas they don't like.
Cancel culture was always a thing, but it became a Thing with the emergence of a faction of illiberal progressives that had the clout to actually apply pressure and a desire to do so. This inversion of the 'proper' order of things was deeply upsetting to the many conservatives who saw themselves as rightful hegemons of American culture.
Helpfully for RW culture warriors, they have something of an advantage in wielding social opprobrium and would probably be even more effective if they hadn't unilaterally retreated into a bubble. They tend to be appealing to a moral lowest common denominator against marginal targets, whereas progressives tend to be morally capricious and avant-garde (which makes them hard to support and leads to frequent circular firing squads).
The Left arguably did this with Bork’s nomination
Aside: Bork is a great example of how differences in perspective lead to mutual perceptions of 'defection'. The Republican view of Bork is that a perfectly qualified candidate was rejected for political reasons. The Democratic view of Bork is that he was utterly disqualified for his role in the Watergate scandal and the GOP was defecting by nominating him in the first place.
Which is why the cooperate/defect paradigm of political analysis is often heavily deficient. There's this tendency to treat political factions as unitary actors who might have different values and goals but at least have the same basic understanding of reality and the 'rules', but that is obviously nonsense. What one side sees as justified retaliation for some infraction, the other sees as unprovoked escalation that demands retaliation in turn.
--
*censorship is being used somewhat carelessly here - this phenomenon is driven primarily by social pressure rather than actual censorship, though the state does occasionally weigh in
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
19d ago
The US isn't just an economic zone regardless of its immigration policy, so it would be helpful if the people saying this would say what they actually mean.
Put it this way, would you be ok with being deported to India if it made numbers on a chart go up? Or do you think you have some sort of right to be here?
You're going to have to elaborate further, because this seems like a total non-sequitur.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
20d ago
No. Not going into specifics, but mostly a mix of prominent tech firms and small startups. A lot of Indian co-workers, but no distinctive complaints.
Have you seen, like, any American cop movie? "Cowboy detective who doesn't play by the rules" has been done to the point of parody, and is almost always portrayed positively.
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