Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1d ago
Not really. Most people are racist, but very few Americans publicly gloss their racism as racism. There's almost always an excuse or deflection or pretext. You might not find them very convincing in a given context, but they're there.
My guess at the most obvious explanation would be that the pro nazis are just pro nazi to begin with and any excuse they give is just that, an excuse.
You have people like Daryl Cooper and Tucker Carlson who may not be full-on sieg heiling but look an awful lot like they think the Nazis were directionally correct about maintaining national purity. For them, rehabilitating the Nazis is an important of legitimizing their own political program. As long as the Nazis are the Worst Thing Ever and not just one among many authoritarian movements, that's a major impediment to the respectability to reactionary authoritarian ethnonationalism. Hence the efforts to downplay Nazi atrocities and/or cast them as wartime misfortune while shifting the blame to others (e.g. Churchill).
Of course, that's much too subtle for the rank and file.
Now maybe we could say that it's because "Nazism" as a term has become diluted, like how "Communism is when the government does stuff" happened among many youth.
A significant point is that there are lots and lots of socialist movements, including democratic socialist movements that have at least occasionally governed in western democracies to something less than absolute disaster. Liberals, socialists, and traditional conservatives alike can all point to something, say "that's what I want", and have the thing they're point to not be something totally atrocious. If you're a fascist or fascistically inclined, you've got Hitler and Mussolini.
"Nazi" might be diluted as an insult, but it's not diluted as an ideology. There's no moderate, democratic fascism.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1d ago
Available evidence suggests that a lot of young conservatives ironically pretend to be omega-level authoritarian bigots to hide the fact that they're merely authoritarian-curious and extremely bigoted. Comedy (for weak values of comedy) gets deployed as ablative armor because being aggressively, overtly racist isn't quite socially acceptable yet. You just laugh at the libs for taking your jokes seriously before you go back to fulminating about how blacks and latinos and enfranchised women are ruining America.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3d ago
Obesity is a complicated subject in that the question "why do Americans live sedentary lives and have terrible diets?" is one without an obvious answer or easy solutions. It is not a complicated subject in that the proximate cause of the obesity epidemic is that Americans live sedentary lives and have terrible diets.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5d ago
I don't wanna go to a tiny ass overpriced bodega. I want Walmart.
Comments like this make me suspect anti-urbanists have no idea what dense urban areas are actually like. I live five minutes from a full-sized grocery with substantial better (and higher quality) selection than Wal Mart is going to give me. I can add about 5 min to add another two. All three deliver as well if I feel like contributing to the downfall of America, and I also have access to dozens of more specialized retailers.
10-15 minute walk is doable depending on the urban layout but that's pushing the distance where you start considering driving.
This is half of why Americans are obese. (The other half is what they buy inside). If you're driving to avoid a 10 minute walk, it better be December in Minnesota.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
11d ago
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.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
14d 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
14d 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
14d 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
16d 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
16d 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
16d 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
16d 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
18d 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
19d 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
19d 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
21d 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
22d 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
22d 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
22d 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
23d 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.
No.
Yeah, but they're not saying that. They're peddling ahistorical nonsense to try and whitewash Nazi aggression and Nazi crimes while shifting the blame for these things to their enemies for having the temerity to resist. Cooper wants to paint Nazi atrocities as tragic accidents in a war they were forced into, using arguments make little sense and that can be trivially debunked if you possess basic factual knowledge^1. This suggests that Cooper is either an idiot or a liar, and I see little else to indicate that he is an idiot. If Cooper is deliberately misrepresenting WW2 in a way that minimizes the crimes of Nazism, it raises the question of why? Given that he's on record praising reactionary authoritarianism, it's probably because he's sympathetic and thinks it's useful to soft-pedal Hitler.
Are these people full on fascists? Don't know. Clearly, however, they do find an interest in trying to rehabilitate fascism.
1: for example, blaming Churchill for the escalation of the German invasion of Poland into general European war
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