Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2yr ago
This imo underscores an important truth to the ultra principled who believe in free speech absolutism and neutral institutions, the overton window won't shift the other way just to punish the "heretics" who've assailed this sacred virtue.
Alternatively, it suggests that right wing "free speech" warriors never had a principled commitment to free speech as a value and were just angry that they were getting moderated and criticized.
Alternatively alternatively, it suggets that Elon Musk never had a principled commitment to free speech as a value and given the opportunity will punish people who criticize him.
this could just be the first legitimate W for the right.
What is a "legitimate W" and why would this be the first?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3mo ago
To be fair to Vance, the historical track record of Operation Bomb Dirt is quite poor. Seeking divine intervention in the hopes that the next round of desultory air strikes will be more productive than in the past is not so unreasonable.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3mo ago
Peter Navarro, Trump's senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, was just on Fox News discussing the tariffs on imported Canadian goods. The headline I've linked highlights his most sensational claim: "Canada has been taken over by Mexican cartels."
Trumpism is a movement defined by outrageous statements, only some of which they are serious about and it's up to you to guess what. Does Navarro (or Trump) really believe that Canada has been taken over by Mexican cartels? Probably not, but you can't dismiss the possibility. Either way, why not say it?
In his speech to congress that same night, Trump discussed tariffs as part of a larger plan: nothing to do with fentanyl, and actually about correcting perceived economic unfairness.
Trump's messaging on tariffs has been incoherent. On the one hand, tariffs are industrial policy, meant to bring back American manufacturing. On the other hand, tariffs are a negotiating tactics, to be dropped in exchange for concessions. On the mutant third hand, tariffs are a revenue alternative - a way to replace income taxes with consumption taxes (though Trump clearly doesn't think of them that way, quite possibly because he doesn't know how tariffs work).
The problem is that at most one of these things can be true. Taking it as a given for now that tariffs-as-industrial policy is effective, you need to maintain the tariffs (so no dropping them as a concession) and you need American consumers to shift to American-made goods (so tariff revenues must decline substantially). If tariffs are a negotiating tactic, you're giving them up for whatever objective you're pursuing and therefore forgoing both industrial development and revenue. If tariffs are supposed to be a revenue stream that substitutes for income taxes, you need Americans to keep buying imports, which means not buying American-made goods at the scale you're expecting for an industrial revival driven by domestic demand.
(In reality, the only one of these that makes any measure of sense is tactical tariffs)
All of which is to say that what Canada can do to reverse the tariffs is probably lobby members of Trump's inner circle to try and change his mind. The likely (but unfortunately not overwhelmingly likely) outcome is that someone prevails upon Trump that this idea is really fucking dumb and Canada makes some symbolic concession so Trump can feel like he got a win. But, there are also quite a few people in the Trump administration who unironically think tariffing everyone is a great idea, so who knows.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
8mo ago
My husband insists that if things were as bad as I think, the US Army could get everyone out of Western North Carolina in a day. He knows more about the military than I do - he never made it past basic training due to being underweight but has two siblings in the military, one of which who has made it pretty far across 20 years of service. My husband has a very high opinion of our military's capabilities, but I wonder if his model is outdated.
The US Army probably couldn't evacuate Western North Carolina in a day under ideal circumstances with a perfectly compliant population, never mind in the wake of a major natural disaster. That's not some recent degradation of capability nor a comment on the urgency. Getting a million people out of a mountainous 10k square mile area is going to be an ordeal no matter what.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1yr ago
Why are Indians so bad in India but ones that come hear and get a taste of American corporate structure so good?
Selection effects + magic dirt. Indian workers in the US are going to tend to be of a higher caliber than their counterparts that didn't emigrate, but they are also plugged into American institutions rather than Indian ones. It's hard to understate the degree to which institutional quality can impact the performance of individual workers.
The argument is that Kissinger enabled genocides/mass murders in Cambodia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, East Timor, etc... and thus bears responsibility for millions of deaths.
I'm not sure how much I buy that argument. Kissinger generally reacted to these events with callous indifference and took the position that they shouldn't affect US foreign policy (see also, his illustrative remark about Soviet Jews: "If they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern."), but that sort of indifference is pervasive in international politics and Kissinger was mostly just crass enough to be on the record saying it instead of mouthing platitudes. While it doesn't exactly speak well of his moral character, attributing responsibility to him in particular mostly seems to stem from the tendency to treat the US as the only country with agency.
his role in normalizing relations with China probably saved way more Asian lives than he killed.
Almost nobody actually thinks in these sort of brute consequentialist terms.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2yr ago
Meanwhile, probably half of the white victims' own family will back the cops over the victim.
I think a crucial distinction between white people shot by police and black people shot by police is that a) white racial consciousness is relatively low and black racial consciousness is quite high b) white people are generally positively disposed towards the police while black people view the police quite negatively. The result is that white people don't see the police murdering a white person as an attack on white people the same way black people do and they're much more likely to accept the police's official story or write it off as an isolated incident.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2yr ago
If I was at a show to see a comedian and some unfunny nerd took the mike, I'd probably boo as well.
I mean, I wouldn't, I was raised to think talking in the theater would lead to immediate divine retribution, but I can easily see why someone would (especially given that comedy show audiences have a tradition of heckling if they think you're not funny).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
Trump acts all tough and doesn't back down publicly, but China actually doesn't back down.
Something that was always apparent if you paid attention but has become increasingly hard to ignore: Trump is not a master negotiator. He plays one on TV.
American casualty tolerance isn’t near what it was in Vietnam, and even that became too much toward the end.
"Casualty tolerance" (or lack thereof) is overrated. What matters is whether or not the populace believes the war is valid and winnable. What did in the Vietnam War was not that the casualties were unbearable but that the American public increasingly believed they were dying for nothing - that the cause was bad, the war was unwinnable, and the government was lying about it.
The problem with war with Iran is not that America can't bear taking casualties. It's that the constituency for war with Iran is John McCain's ghost. For most of the country any number of casualties is too great because the USG doesn't have the credibility to pick that kind of fight.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
If you are going to do protectionism, tariffs are better than subsidies.
I disagree. Subsidies give you (the protecting government) more control over whatever it is you're trying to accomplish. If, e.g., you're trying to build/maintain export competitiveness, with tariffs you're hoping domestic producers decide to do that instead of collecting rents from their captive market. With subsidies you can enforce export discipline by withdrawing support from firms who don't do that or rewarding successful firms.
(Both are, of course, susceptible to corruption or throwing good money after bad)
The primary feature of tariffs strikes me as aesthetic - the payer see the transfer as a tax rather than the indirect subsidy it actually is, the beneficiary gets to pretend they're not getting a handout, and fiscal hawks don't have to bear the indignity of seeing it on the wrong side of the government balance sheet.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3mo ago
Red Tribers have a great deal of use for knowledge. It's just usually directly applicable knowledge.
This is my point. I want to reiterate: I am not saying that Red Tribers are stupid or have no skills. I am saying they have a general disdain for knowledge production. Which, bluntly, the rest of your comment and my own personal experience does not dispute. Knowledge is either inherited or received from trusted community members, and updated only slowly. It's not just that they don't want to personally do academic research, they don't trust the entire process because it's not part of their epistemological paradigm.
I lived in a small Red town in the US for a number of years
So did I. I've lived in Red America in one form or another (it's important to note that "red tribe" != rural) for most of my life. I went to private evangelical schools until I left for college (to my original point, my high school's college counselor advised against going to any but a select list of private Evangelical colleges). Most of my extended family is from the rural Midwest. My perspective on this is personal, not sociological.
(Something I find deeply frustrating about this forum is that it is taken as a given that criticism of the Red Tribe or Red Tribe-adjacent things are coming from a distance)
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1yr ago
In my opinion, the greatest fault of Capitalism, and the real problem that is behind it, is that it is so productive that can share money to unproductive people, creating a new caste of Priestly Propagandist
Is that a fault of Capitalism? Most societies, including non-capitalist/pre-capitalist ones, have/had some kind of priestly/moral class. Such as literal priests.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2yr ago
Merchant class aesthetics updated for the modern era. Ostentation is for the extinct warrior aristocracy or noveau riche clods with no taste. Pursuit of beauty is for the priestly class. Merchants are supposed to be frugal, modest, and vaguely sterile.
Alternatively: function over form. As others have noted, people don't spend a lot of time looking at their own house. If Gates finds the design serves his needs better, he probably doesn't care that it looks drab.
Alternatively mk 2: countersignalling. Gates is one of the richest and most successful people on the planet. He doesn't need to impress anyone.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2yr ago
Ryan Grim is not someone I would have recognized as wary of critiquing leftist shibboleths, but I have no explanation for the uncharacteristic lack of pushback he displayed throughout the interview with Tema Okun.
To be a little uncharitable, having not listened to the podcast, past experience indicates that the best argument against Tema Okun is listening to Tema Okun. If you start pushing back, she may retreat into the Motte whereas if you let her talk without opposition, she'll hang herself.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2yr ago
It's always been low, security has just gotten better*. The clever high functioning psychopaths are working in finance or law. A large share of presidential assassination attempts pretty much boil down to "weirdo with a guns walks up to president, tries to shoot him."
*and arguably many of the historical examples got pretty lucky.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
This seems to be diven by torrent of fake news articles
Can you clarify what's fake about these news articles?
Canada should be annexed by the US.
If you want further US-Canadian integration, this is pretty much the dumbest possible way to go about it. Not only is it all stick, no carrot, it's being packaged in an extremely humiliating manner.
any Anglo-Canadian identity that stood out from American identity has, as our dear friend Kulak has chronicled, vanished almost entirely.
I don't think that this is true, and Kulak claiming it makes me less likely to believe it, given his... ambitious analytical tendencies. Canadians in general appear not to believe it is true, given the backlash to the proposal. The US and Canada being very similar culturally in some respects* is not the same as Canadians lacking a distinct identity.
*I think the cultural similarity is overstated. Ontarians having significant similarities to upper Midwesterners is one thing - I don't really know that the Quebecois and Floridians have that much in common.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
"Don't resist oppression because you'll lose anyway" is a tactical argument which may or may not be correct depending on circumstances; "it's your fault for trying to resist" is a moral argument. Most people would not say that if the mugger tries to move into your house, it's your fault for trying to kick him out instead of giving him the living room and kitchen in the hopes he doesn't ask for more.
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
11mo ago
Your mistake is thinking these are different groups of people instead of the same people at different times of day.
But what got them into trouble was taking the wrong side on Zionism.
Prior to last Friday, taking an anti-Zionist stance would have gotten you applause in progressive circles. For that matter, you're still clear to say "I'm anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic" as long as you can resist the urge to openly celebrate massacres of Israeli civilians. Before Friday, you were clear to say Israeli civilians should be massacred.
This seems to imply two things
Alternatively, it implies your model is wrong. That it's not as simple as "people higher up the progressive totem pole get to do what they want and Jews are at the top".
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2yr ago
"Twitter, but for SJWs" go live? And will that work out any better for them?
No. Normies are the lifeblood of social media, and any ideologically inflected alternative is going to suffer from the fact that normies aren't going to be interested in switching platforms to hang out with a bunch of fanatical weirdos. Being slightly more reputable that right-wing conspiracy theorists is not enough.
Many also use Discord but for some reason don't seem to think of Discord as "social media."
Most people are operating off a vibes-based rather than rigorous definition of social media. "Social media" means the big, talked about platforms - Twitter, FB, Instagram, etc... Not private forums, the comments section of a news site, or a blog.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2yr ago
I think Hillary was a massively flawed candidate because it was so close. 2016 was a cripple fight, not a clash of the titans. Trump was an appalling candidate and in 2016 he didn't have incumbency or anywhere near the fully developed cult of personality he did by 2020. Clinton had a trainload of baggage, including an active FBI investigation and decades of GOP attacks. I think it's quite probable that if Tim Kaine (or almost anyone basically competent who wasn't as politically radioactive as Clinton) had been at the top of the ticket then the Democratic candidate would've won handily and we'd be talking about how weird it was that the GOP nominated an insane reality tv star as their candidate. Conversely, someone like Rubio or Jeb might've been mediocre candidates in the grand scheme of things but they probably would've mopped up Hillary.
It's never 4d chess.
It's his company now. If he wanted to fire everyone and bring back Dorsey as CEO he could just do that. There's no need for the Mad King routine.
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