Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5mo ago
This is why metaphors are overrated outside of poetry. They tend to obscure at least as much as they illustrate. If you want to stick with the fat guy metaphor, DOGE's "economy" drive is hectoring the patient for eating a salad for lunch while ignoring that he eats two pounds of bacon for breakfast and a box of Krispy Kreme donuts for dinner. You would discuss dieting plans where you step down food consumption and coming up with a plan the patient could actually follow and doesn't harm them. You wouldn't just say "you're going on a starvation diet now, figure it out."
But in actual fact the USG is not a fat guy. Spending is not food. It's not going to drop dead of a heart attack if it has irresponsible fiscal policy. The worst case scenarios involve a lot of economic turmoil, but the US isn't going to collapse because social security becomes insolvent.
Moreover, the US has a lot of tools with which to solve its fiscal problems, but no one wants to use them. Conservative elites are primarily focused on cutting taxes for conservative elites and weakening consumer/labor protections; electoral success dictates protecting transfers to elderly and rural voters. So the obvious solution of trimming entitlements and raising taxes is a nonstarter and instead we get a pantomime of cost savings* as a cover for re-legalizing banking scams.
*high confidence prediction: these will not result in meaningful government savings over the long run and will incur higher social costs
*intermediate confidence: they will actually increase government costs over the long run as even more Federal staff are replaced with more expensive, less efficient contractors
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5mo ago
You aren’t fighting a war
On the contrary, they are fighting the culture war, and what's a war without some war crimes?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5mo ago
more and more it is looking like that might not be true
Is it looking that way? Fiscal 'hawks' have been promising for decades that they're going to lower costs without impacting services by cutting fraud and waste and it keeps failing to manifest. What new indicators have surfaced to suggest that This Time Is Different and we really have uncovered the massive fraud that's going to save us hundreds of billions per year? Because penny-wise cuts in the civil service ain't it.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5mo ago
The courts don't have very many divisions
This is an anti-civilizational ethos. When you say "fuck the rules, stop me if you can", you can't then complain if people take you up on your invitation. And, uh, the outcome of that is a massive lose-lose.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5mo ago
While he is a fictional archetype, he is representative of a number of people I know in real life. The general pattern is that he has fairly moderate (albeit nebulous) policy preferences but doesn't engage with politics very much and is strongly negatively polarized against anything vaguely left-wing. He definitely didn't vote for Obama.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5mo ago
If your definition of centrist is 'even 50/50 split in preference for prevailing political parties', perhaps, but that is an unreasonable standard and also a faintly ridiculous one. It would require ignoring actually existing politics in favor of maintaining a dubious notion of balance. Intellectual alignment is not partisan alignment and you don't get to vote for what you want; you get to vote for what's on offer. One can have authentically centrist preferences and still feel one party consistently offers something more aligned with your preferences than the other.
One may also align with one party or the other for more basic reasons. TW has been pretty unambiguous about why he's not aligned with the American Right, and it's not because he's actually a doctrinaire leftist; it's because the American Right thinks he deserves fewer rights and preferentially wouldn't exist.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5mo ago
Should we not though?
No. People have widely disparate reasons for voting for a party. The fact that a conservative centrist and a neo-nazi both have strong preferences for Republicans doesn't imply that the conservative centrist is actually a neo-nazi or the neo-nazi is actually a centrist.
His voting preferences are indistinguishable from something like an anarchist voter just trying to push the Overton window left
John Grillington, lifelong center-right suburbanite, has voting preferences indistinguishable from a literal neo-nazi. One shouldn't draw overly strong conclusions from that. I can understand why Trace writing the right off might be annoying, but it doesn't make him a fake centrist.
I think he is deceiving himself when he says he's a centrist
I actually think this is backwards, both specifically and in a more general sense. The rat-left are mostly pretty moderate and hold normie center-left policy preferences. They like meritocracy, institutions, pluralism and tolerance, etc... They hold some odd beliefs, but those are orthogonal to their politics. The rat-right, such as it is, is far more prone to fairly radical political beliefs (e.g. neoreaction, HBD).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5mo ago
Conspiracy theories are the default mode of thinking, and people need to be trained out of them. It is not a coincidence that less educated/less intelligent people are more prone to believing in conspiracy theories (though education is by no means proof against them). People literally have to be taught to not think in conspiracy theories.
Or rather, people have a really hard time grasping larger-than-immediate-community institutions and scale of action. This is not a natural frame of thinking, in much the same way thinking in terms of statistics and data rather than anecdotes is not natural. My armchair evopsych bullshit theory is that humans are adapted to living in small communities with and their manner of thinking reflects that. Specifically, in a community of 100 people, if something suspicious is happening, blaming an individual or small group of malefactors is fairly credible. It may not be right, but it's not ridiculous. Conspiracy theories arise from applying this intuition in frames where it doesn't make sense (usually with an added dose of paranoia).
The term 'conspiracy theory' is schizo-coded, but if you interrogate the average person about their beliefs, you'll quickly find they believe a lot things that might not have you wondering if they're off their meds but do conform to the general pattern of conspiratorial thinking. Which is to say, they're quick to explain facts about the world as coordinated action by a group of people, even when that explanation makes no sense. A silly, mostly non-political example: a remarkable number of people I know believe that the vestigial pockets ubiquitous in women's clothing are a scheme to sell purses. This is the sort of thing that doesn't hold up to any sort of scrutiny , but it does past a casual intuition test and (wrongly) explains an annoying fact about the world.
I hate hate hate modern journalism.
Direct quote from the press conference:
Being in its presence just has not been good and it should not go through a process of rebuilding and occupation by the same people that have really stood there and fought for it and lived there and died there and lived a miserable existence there. Instead, we should go to other countries of interest with humanitarian hearts, and there are many of them that want to do this and build various domains that will ultimately be occupied by the million Palestinians living in Gaza, ending the death and destruction and frankly bad luck.
I think Haaretz' paraphrasing is fine. You can try to put a positive gloss on it, but the plan is explicitly that Palestinians would be moved elsewhere. Trump isn't pretending that it's going to be temporary, and even if he was, once the Palestinians are gone I doubt the Israelis are going to let them back.
He is calling for the construction of an international zone in Gaza
Is he? Trump reiterates that the US will own the Gaza strip
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5mo ago
I am not convinced that Trump is serious about this. I get the impression he's trolling.
I feel like there's this consistent sanewashing two-step going on with Trump's behavior. Whenever Trump picks a pointless fight, he's demonstrating toughness and making people understand they have to take him seriously. Whenever Trump says something indefensibly insane, he's trolling... which signals that people shouldn't take him seriously.
Donald the Dove strikes again. I'm beginning to think Trump really is a Manchurian candidate :V Simultaneously looting the country while tanking foreign relations and the economy. Xi Jinping really could not have asked for a better agent.
Just, like... what. There's helping an ally out and then there's doing a bit of light ethnic cleansing on their behalf.
Prediction: this is something Trump came up with on short notice (possibly suggested by Netanyahu) and didn't run by anybody and got defensive when people started poking him on it. It will be quietly dropped within a couple of weeks because simply admitting it was a terrible off-the-cuff idea would make Trump look weak and we can't have that. In the intervening time, Trump supporters will convince themselves that this is actually a great ideal; afterwards they will insist that he was misrepresented and the fact that you care about it is proof you have TDS.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5mo ago
Maybe Carol is an asshole.
In a hypothetical universe where those territories weren't already part of the US, I would be asking the same question of someone who suggested conquering them in 2025. Guam and American Samoa are at least strategic. More significantly, they are already part of the United States, so it's about as relevant as asking what benefits the US currently gets from ruling over West Virginia.
But to go beyond that and make explicit the implied point of my question: annexing Canada and Panama are extremely costly actions with very little upside. Canada and Panama are allied nations (though Trump seems to be working on that) with which the US enjoys generally favorable economic relations. We already get most of the benefits we'd get from them being part of the US. Coercing your allies into accepting your direct rulership is going to immediately resolve any broader question of who it is preferable to partner with in favor of China.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5mo ago
The Trump administration seems to be wagering that they can get away with acting illegally and just ignoring injunctions. Given that most of the organs traditionally responsible for holding the executive accountable are either subverted or have effectively abdicated their responsibilities, it seems increasingly likely they're correct.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5mo ago
What material benefit does this provide to the U.S.?
Let me ask you this: what material benefits do you expect the US to obtain from having ~45m disenfranchised imperial subjects that we couldn't already obtain through normal trade and treaty arrangements?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5mo ago
I don't know, but Trump seems weirdly persistent about it and I don't think he's overly concerned about legal details.
I'm guessing someone gave him the idea that Canada wasn't a real country and Canadians were really Americans who had been propagandized into believing they were a separate nation.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5mo ago
Being able to get people to cooperate with you on economic, military, and political matters. We have neither the ability nor the interest to obtain everything we want by coercion, and the more we try the worse the case for working with us versus our rivals becomes. If you're going to start mashing the defect button just to prove you can, eventually your partners are going to look for someone more reliable. If you're going to start running around trying annex your neighbors, people are going to start forming alliances against you.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5mo ago
What are his actual motivations?
He's in the tank for Xi Jinping
The hysterical critics were correct. Donald Trump is a thug who thinks he can extort concessions from Canada because they are weak and the US is strong. Best case he wants to get some symbolic concession in exchange for dropping the tariffs so he can tout it to his guileless supporters as proof of what a tough negotiator he is. Worst case, he's really serious about trying to use economic coercion to force Canada to accept annexation, which will almost certainly fail, but will have the added side effect of absolutely shredding American international standing. Somewhere in the middle is thinking he can force Canada to equalize the balance of trade between the two countries.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5mo ago
Not every subgroup of the population is equally likely to make political donations. In particular, during the Trump era Democratic voters are significantly (~2x) more likely to make campaign contributions as Republicans. Certainly, if we took donations as indicative of political leaning, Harris should have won a historic landslide instead of a narrow loss.
(Also, since anecdotes are considered a valid form of evidence on this forum, I'd note that the idea that civil servants are a bunch of woke progressives is high comedy. It's correct to say that they lean left, but lean is the operative word. Plenty of them are quite conservative, especially socially. Not terribly surprising - they're significantly older on average than the general US workforce)
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5mo ago
As I noted elsewhere, donations are a bad indicator.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5mo ago
That niche group appears to be running much of the federal government regardless of election results
That seems like an extraordinary claim. What is your basis for thinking a small group of redditors constitutes the unelected shadow government of the United States?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5mo ago
Donations are not a good proxy for voting intentions, not the least because Dems are more likely to make donations. A Federal Times survey indicates civil servants do indeed lean left, but nowhere near as dramatically as many conservatives like to imagine.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5mo ago
What's really interesting to me about that group is that they're an incredibly niche subreddit while their right-wing equivalents are running the Republican party.
"Economic collapse" covers a range of outcomes from Mad Max to austerity. If this economic apocalypse described really is looming, then DOGE is in chair of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. A project to streamline federal bureaucracy - even if successful - is not going to cover budgetary shortfalls, reverse the rise of China, or bring back
the 60sUS manufacturing dominance. It's not even going to cushion the fall. Neither is cutting foreign aid to zero.Which bring me back to my point: the US has the tools to manage its fiscal issues, but there is no good faith fiscal conservatism in the US when it comes to Federal politics. There are serious conservative proposals for bringing spending under control, but they have no traction with actual politicians. If you think harsh fiscal discipline is the only way to save America from economic disaster, you should be yelling at your leaders to stop grandstanding over trivial savings and a) raise taxes b) cut entitlements. The 'every little bit helps' excuse is, in fact, wrong.
To illustrate what I mean, we have the current House GOP's budget proposal. Now, it's just a proposal and it probably undergo major changes, but it does demonstrate what I am talking about. Johnson has floated cuts to Medicaid (hey, something substantial!) among other things, but not in aid of deficit reduction. No, the plan is to cash in all of the savings (and likely then some) on tax cuts that will increase the deficit.
So let's not pretend DOGE is about radical measures to save money.
If this analysis is correct, it is a huge argument in favor of US foreign involvement. It suggests we are getting absolutely staggering returns for our role as global hegemon and the fact that it isn't coming in the form of annual tribute is immaterial. Pretty much the last thing you'd want to be doing is running around alienating people by abruptly cutting off trade and aid.
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