Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
No bio...
User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1mo ago
The Disney live action projects have been:
Movies
- Sequel Trilogy (Bad)
- Rogue One (Good)
- Solo (Okay/Good)
Series
- The Mandalorian (Okay)
- BoBF (Baaaaaaaad)
- Kenobi (Bad)
- Andor (Great)
- Ahsoka (Bad)
- The Acolyte (Bad)
- Skeleton Crew (Good)
Of ten projects, we have five projects that are bad, two that are at least okay, two that are good, and one that is great. Not an amazing hit rate, and the ST being bad is a massively outsized issue, but probably not as bad as one might think if you compare it against the industry as a whole.
I think if you look at why the bad stuff is bad, it's hard to pull together a coherent throughline other than "get good." The ST and BoBF both flounder not because of particular tone or themes, but because they seemingly had no plan or idea for what they really wanted to do beyond cash in on Star Wars. The Acolyte has a serviceable concept for a movie, but it's drawn out over 5.5 hours (and has piss-poor execution to boot). Kenobi had a clear enough plan, but shabby execution and was something nobody wanted (or rather, getting what you wanted in the most literal sense, but in a way that makes you wish you hadn't asked for it). Similarly, Ahsoka embodies how pandering to existing fans is liable to produce a self-indulgent mess (though FWIW most SW fans I know IRL like Ahsoka, which is proof they have no taste).
Of these live action projects, the only ones that code as particularly woke are TLJ (which was bad) and Andor (which was not). The impression I've gotten from reading about the behind-the-scenes of SW production was not that Kennedy was pushing really hard for a particular vision that no one liked but that she was pretty lackadaisical and didn't impose much discipline on her productions or have a great sense for quality.
Do the Europoors understand how insulting and alienating this is given their concurrent begging for US help against Russia?
It seems perfectly coherent to ask for help against territorial aggression and also hedge against the risk of territorial aggression. This entire Greenland business is absolutely batshit insane on multiple levels. If this were any other president we'd be talking 25A or impeachment.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1mo ago
No our enemies do not hate us "because we're too cool", they hate us for geopolitical reasons that are completely outside the average American's control.
You've misread me. When I say "our enemies hate us because we're too cool" I am deriding the idea that Trump's domestic opponents dislike him because he is too American.
Regarding the TR quote:
If the observation is merely that you can only have one highest priority, it's not wrong, but that doesn't in any way resolve my point. Everyone has divided loyalties, and for relatively few of them is their highest loyalty to their country. Most people will prioritize personal connections over abstract group membership if push comes to shove. Many native-born people prioritize personal social/economic interests over the national interest or the well-being of their countrymen. Religious individuals will tend to prioritize their faith over their country. Despite this, not only does no one suggest you can't be a Christian and an American, but quite a few people think you must be a Christian to be a proper American. The special concern for hyphenated Americans is both historically unwarranted (both today and in TR's time) and a form of special pleading.
The idea of being a pure American is both incoherent and is itself quite un-American.
--
You say that I am conflating American culture with the culture of the South
No, I specifically don't say that. I am saying that many oikophobes think that (and also IME many Southerners also think that, which feeds into the sense of cultural cringe).
However, you then go on to vindicate my other points, e.g. Red Tribers (and Red Tribe-fetishizing Blue Tribe conservatives) conflating American culture with Red Tribe culture* while making questionable claims about the American Left. "MLK was an adulterer", for example, is something far more likely to be brought up by a resentful reactionary trying to tarnish the civil rights movement than a liberal (for whom MLK is pretty much a secular saint). You are mistaking a willingness to challenge sacred cows for a wholesale rejection**. As I mentioned in my other response, there are a lot of things liberals like and admire about the United States. They're just not necessarily the things conservatives like.
The American Right has developed an incredible difficulty with digesting any sort of critical perspective. The kindest theory I can offer up is that while liberals tend to be idealists whose interest in the US relates to values and principles while conservatives engage in a kind of ancestor worship. This creates a huge point of contention when liberals look at the past and note that America often fell short of its stated ideals and participated atrocities. Generally speaking, this is meant as an exhortation to live up to those ideals, not a nihilistic rejection of them. However, conservatives construe this as an attack on the honored ancestors, who are pure and beyond reproach. They might grudging agree that, e.g., the Native Americans got kind of a raw deal if you press them, but it's a passive-voice acknowledgement that refuses to implicate the settlers and cowboys they valorize and bringing the subject up is seen as kind of suspect.
While we're quoting dead presidents, let me throw in a favorite quote of my own:
It may be argued that there are certain conditions that make necessities and impose them upon us, and to the extent that a necessity is imposed upon a man he must submit to it. I think that was the condition in which we found ourselves when we established this government. We had slavery among us, we could not get our constitution unless we permitted them to remain in slavery, we could not secure the good we did secure if we grasped for more, and having by necessity submitted to that much, it does not destroy the principle that is the charter of our liberties. Let that charter stand as our standard.
This encapsulates the attitude that undergirds liberal reformism in the US. Crucially, it does not reject the past, but it does not hold it as sacred either.
--
for a lot of people that is simply not acceptable coming from someone who is supposed to be "above them" in social station.
In a sense you're right, but in another, more important sense, you're quite mistaken. Bill Clinton had/has a lot of the same superficially 'low-class' behavior but is pretty widely liked by liberals. To steal a quote from the internet:
I think the disconnect between Atlantic elites is that Americans think Donald Trump is a kid getting to drive a monster truck for Make A Wish and Europeans and Canadians think Donald Trump is the president of the United States.
You can strike out European and Canadians and insert "liberal Americans". You're ascribing it to classism*** when the central issue for Trump's critics is that Donald Trump is a bad person and really, really bad at being President. He is bad at the performance of leadership (and it is a colossal mistake to confuse this for simply being 'low class'). He is bad at long term planning. He refuses to accept reality and treats bad news as a conspiracy against him. He is comically dishonest. He is openly sadistic. He is openly corrupt. I could go on naming Trump's vices for a long time, but the underlying point is this: he's exactly the kind of man liberals think shouldn't be president. Many of his inadequacies in the realm of competency and intellect would be tolerable if he was a basically decent guy, but then he wouldn't be Trump.
--
* Of the items you list, the only ones that are convincing red-coded are cowboys, pick-up trucks, and John Wayne.
**obviously, you can find people who engage in that sort of wholesale rejection, but they are on the margins of the movement. Republicans love to highlight them, both because it is politically useful to highlight weirdos in the opposition and because they make them genuinely furious, but you end up with a situation where you're comparing social media personalities to, like, the President of the United States and his senior advisors.
***it should probably be noted that Trump is not so much low-class as classless. Inasmuch as there is a socio-economic class angle to liberal antipathy for Trump, it is Brahmin vs Merchant, not rich versus poor. Trump is, himself, a very rich man
This is why I don't buy any of the mental gymnastics about the strategic value of Greenland and how the Euros are just being obstinate to stick it to Trump over a very reasonable request. Denmark has historically been very accommodating and for some reason Trump decided that we (the US) needed to threaten to mug them.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1mo ago
it just seems a weird drum to bang on
It's especially weird because the US already has access to Greenland.
I'm all in. Nothing ever happens
Absent outside intervention, regimes fail when security forces defect or desert. If the US (or someone else, I guess) isn't going to intervene, the IRGC can just keep shooting protestors until the survivors get the message. The only other possibility is that the rest of the military decides to intervene on behalf of the protestors, but my (extremely uninformed) impression is that, in true police state fashion, the Iranian military is largely neutered precisely to avoid that outcome.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1mo ago
Temperance can specifically refer to abstaining from alcohol, but it more generally means moderation in personal conduct.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1mo ago
I've never seen the Newsroom, so I'm going to need you to clarify what you're trying to get across here.
Those ideals being... what, exactly?
Liberty, Truth, Justice, the American Way, Human Rights, Democracy, Transgender For Everyone...
Does it have any resemblance of a common culture
This what Scott Alexander coined the phrase "Blue Tribe" to refer to. American culture is not the Red Tribe. Plus, to be honest, I think there's just a general failure to model their adversaries' preferences on the part of right-wingers, where the weirdest, most idiosyncratic are assumed to stand in for the whole. Libs also like football, cars, car commercials featuring George Washington running over the British, and so on.
you're hard pressed to find a group of similar scale that doesn't have such contempt and outright hate.
Most of them? The takeover of the American conservative movement by people who hate America and Americans is fairly recent. While they're playing on pre-existing sentiments, the severity of the rot comes from the top.
The problem with "far more likely to be critical" is that they seem to never find one godforsaken occasion to be positive... It became too declassee to think that one's country and culture is something to be loved instead of apologized for.
This is another failure to model liberals' beliefs/preferences, or why they have an issue with vulgar tribalism. It is not that there is nothing to be proud of - libs are happy to celebrate* the space program, WW2, the abolition of slavery, rock and roll, the civil rights movement, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the US Olympic team etc... The disconnect is that they feel conservatives want to be proud of things that are shameful or whitewash sordid elements of the past.
*this list is not meant to be exhaustive; it's just stuff that popped into my head
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1mo ago
American regional accents in general aren't that strong and have gotten substantially weaker.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1mo ago
Over the years I have often heard cosmopolitan liberals express a sentiment to the effect "the United States has no culture".
Define "cosmopolitan liberals", because I have also heard this over the years. Based on that experience, I think you are probably overreacting to a couple of oikophobes* (or, if you're on the internet, Europeans), who are themselves overreacting to some chest-thumping chauvinists with a highly exclusionary conception of American culture. In that sense, this is a perfect microcosm of the modern culture war in general: people getting worked up over minor or even imagined issues, often involving a fantasy strawmen (or, at the very least, cherry-picked weakmen) of their opponents.
The major difference between liberals and conservatives with respect to America is their willingness to adopt critical attitudes. Liberals are, in general, far more likely to become disappointed/critical if they perceive the US to be failing to live up to its ideals and are far less interested in performative patriotism. The latter in particular I think right-wingers tend to mistake for antipathy. Conservatives, by contrast, are much more adaptive in their principles while demanding uncritical loyalty ("love it or leave it") and deeply love patriotic pageantry.
he gives off this vibe of being quintessentially capital-A AMERICAN in a way that I don't think any US President really has since the Cold War.
"Our enemies hate us because we're too cool."
People hate Trump largely for the reasons they say they hate him: they see him as distinctively - almost uniquely - loathsome and stupid individual. He is distinctively American only insofar as we basically elected Florida Man as president, but that certainly doesn't set him above our other post-CW presidents in being AMERICAN. He is perhaps the most declasse president of the post-Cold War era, but to say that makes him more quintessentially American is an example of the exclusionary conception of American culture I mentioned earlier.
I broadly concur with @LiberalRetvrn here: Trump is a vulgar tribalist (at best) of the kind that can be under any rock in any corner of the Earth. For all the flag-waving and shallow patriotic verbiage exhibited by Trump and his supporters, I find that they are people who have contempt for the history and values of the United States, as well as outright hate for their countrymen.
quoting Teddy Roosevelt (I'm not bothering to quote the full passage)
With all respect to TR, he was just wrong with this one. The persistence of superficial identification and cultural elements was not and is not a problem. German Americans are one of the most prominent examples of this: German American culture endured until it was more or less forcibly suppressed during WWI (Chester Nimitz grew up in a German-speaking household, for example). However the problem there was not German immigrants, who were quite well-behaved, but fearful xenophobes. We can go through a list of immigrant groups and see again and again that the fears of immigrants being disloyal or not assimilating is largely unfounded.
Conversely, the most prominent expressions of disloyalty in US history came from the unhyphenated, and one of the ironies of the "a country is not an economic zone" shibboleth is that the people saying it are by far the worst about treating their country and countrymen as things to be exploited rather than a community of common interest.
As an aside, TR is making a common and understandable but nevertheless important error: divided loyalty is inherent in the human condition. You cannot be American and nothing else. It is not entirely without merit to note that immigrants often have interests other than pure loyalty to their new country, but the singling out of immigrants is a distinct double standard. The same concern could equally apply to, e.g. religious affiliation or personal loyalty (a very real risk, as we saw in 2021).
--
*as an illustrative anecdote, when an acquaintance raised the idea in very progressive company, basically everyone scoffed and told him he was being an idiot. I think you are more likely to find liberally-minded people who don't like American culture than think it doesn't exist, though IME they are making a shared mistake with Southerners in conflating American culture with the culture of the South.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1mo ago
For some of the people confused about why Minneapolis is such a big deal still, it's not a scissor event, it's a mask off moment
TBF it's been mask-off for a while, most people just don't pay attention. DHS comms is openly fash-posting, Trump openly rejects any limit on his powers and tries to rule by decree, political opposition is labeled domestic terrorism, etc...
The only group that hasn't been mask off is CBP/ICE, but they have double down on thuggery
To be fair, most people are pretty myopic everywhere, and it's easy to focus on domestic conflict when it's low-key existential.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1mo ago
Only one of those is even pretending to be an example
You asked for a single example. I gave you a single example.
Seriously, if this is the best you have to offer then ICE is doing a spectacular job.
This is the product of about nine seconds of research to recall the details of a half-remembered case. I see no reason to put more effort into it when past experience has shown that there is no amount of unambiguous evidence that you would accept at face value, let alone as demonstrative of a pattern.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kavanaugh_stop
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/ice-apprehension-of-us-citizens-derided-as-kavanaugh-stops
https://ij.org/client/leonardo-garcia-venegas/
You're welcome. (I'm sure you'll have some explanation for how explicit racial profiling isn't racial profiling)
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1mo ago
It does feel a little weird to me that this case is getting so much attention.
Because the case isn't about the case. It's about the limits of law enforcement in the US and what measures are justifiable in the name of immigration enforcement.
I feel like there's been a lot of big news this week
These are all largely tractionless issues. What is there to discuss about foreign policy? Nobody has any real expectation that Congress has the will to hold Trump accountable for overreaching his authority, and in the meantime it's just arguing about which of the Mad King's rantings are babble and which are dire warnings.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1mo ago
They could train their agents better, conduct themselves in a less escalatory fashion, stop attacking protestors, stop trying to intimidate people for mouthing off to them, not wear masks, prioritize targeted operations over open-ended sweeps, not racially profile people or violate the civil rights of citizens by detaining them on no grounds beyond their skin color...
Like, the conceit of Millerites is that illegal immigration constitutes this overwhelming problem that justifies extreme, unconstitutional measures and massive expense, but it just... doesn't. These sweeps are not preventing some dire outcome. They're satisfying the anxieties and appetites of thuggish nativists.
escalations by ICE officers are predictable, if unfortunate.
It's predictable in the sense that they're bottom of the barrel recruits with limited training working for an administration that tacitly endorses police brutality.
Minnesota has always been at the forefront of fighting reactionary forces in the US
To elaborate a little more, this strikes me as a problem with your perspective. Minnesota - and the Twin Cities in particular - have long been quite liberal for a midwestern state. The Twin Cities have a high rate of educational attainment, so while it's not distinctively woke, it's distinctively unfriendly to the thuggish conservatism of the Trump movement. Add in the Trump administration's desire to hurt perceived enemies, and it's not so unlikely that Minnesota pops up again and again.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1mo ago
A lot of Trumpists, heavily practiced in sanewashing Trump and accustomed to the institutional restraints on his behavior from his first term, have basically become incapable of processing negative attitudes towards Trump as anything other than TDS. It's all a joke/big talk/hardball. Until he actually does it, at which point of course he did it. He said he was going to. The fact that Trump says twenty insane things a week and only follows through on two gives enough cover to act like taking him seriously is ridiculous.
In particular, I suspect the Venezuela operation rattled observers far more than Trump supporters grasp. You don't have to like Maduro to feel anxious about Trump suddenly deciding that rapid, unilateral operations are cool at the same time that he revives talk of taking Greenland.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1mo ago
This leaves us with the question of what the point of the entire drama is if the goal is simply to establish more US bases in Greenland, since the US can already do that under existing agreements with Denmark. Is Trump so thug-brained that he needs to see such actions as taking something rather than exercising a pre-existing option?
No, Trump wants to be able to say the US owns Greenland, and his reasons for wanting that are almost certainly incredibly stupid and thug-brained.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1mo ago
How does that not boil down to simply "the mob is right when it agrees with me over what laws are illegitimate"?
It can amount to that under sufficient dire circumstances. It doesn't have to boil down to that because no every instance of disobedience will take the form of mob violence.
I think the mistake you're making is thinking of support for "rule of law" as absolutist adherence to the letter of the law. This is a position that virtually no one holds and which is not practical in any event because laws are not code and require interpretation. When people say they support rule of law, it means they support an approach to governing that operates according to rules/procedures rather than the arbitrary judgment of individual leaders. It does not mean that they think any output of such a system is inherently legitimate.
I think people generally feel like they're obligated to follow laws even if they disagree with them
Disagreeing with a law is not the same thing as believing it is illegitimate. I disagree with my local zoning laws, but I accept that they're a legitimate extension the county government's authority (which in turn is legitimate because blah blah blah...). On the other hand, if the county government passed a law making it legal to sell your children's organs, I'd consider that illegitimate. Which is to say, I don't just disagree with it, I don't consider it morally valid or valid manifestation of governmental authority. That in turn justifies more extreme measures to oppose it than zoning laws.
Settling disagreements via voting is preferred, but for sufficiently high salience disagreements it's not going to be enough (especially if - as is the case in the US - the electoral system has contested legitimacy). Also, as I alluded up above and in the edit I made after you commented, this is often resolve in a different way: simply ignoring laws you don't like and trusting they won't be enforced or loudly complaining when they are.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1mo ago
Whining about it strikes me as pathetic LARPing to some extent
The whole point is to whine about it. The purpose of civil disobedience is to shout "come and see the violence inherent in the system" to anyone who can hear. It is to wave the implications of the status quo in the faces of people who would rather not see it - to force authorities to make good on their threats of violence and ask fence-sitters whether keeping segregated lunch counters justified such actions.
What would the purpose of suffering in silence be?
Today the players are the same but the jerseys are flipped.
Identifying arguments as structurally similar is useful if you're studying how people argue, but it's not an especially insightful regarding object level disagreement. Certain patterns of argument frequently recur, but you can't substitute that observation for actually resolving the disagreement, because the substance of the disagreement is in the object level. The question of whether or not Ashli Babbitt was a traitor or a martyr depends almost entirely on whether or not you think the 2020 election was stolen*, not on whether or not you think it is legitimate to resist the government under at least some circumstances.
To put it another way: liberals and conservatives both generally agree that you are obligated to obey legitimate laws and you are not obligated to obey illegitimate laws** (and, indeed, may be obligated not to obey - 'orders are orders' not being considered a good excuse for bad behavior). Observing this doesn't help you adjudicate the differences between cases, because you still need to make judgments about the specific details of the case.
In broad strokes it's clear neither side cares about democracy or rule of law per se
I don't think you can infer that from their actions. If you ask them, they will generally argue that their actions are upholding rule of law and democracy, and for the most part they mean it.
*one could conceivably argue that the shooting was unjustified and the insurrection was unjustified, but that seems to be a marginal position
**In reality, people ignore all sorts of laws all the time, including laws they don't really question the validity of (e.g. traffic laws), which also raises the secondary question of which laws are important enough to care about violations. One could think a law is legitimate, but the measures taken to enforce it are not
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1mo ago
I get the impression that a lot of Iran's badness is exaggerated by Western media. Is the current government of Iran illegitimate? If so, why?
If your country has colossal protests every few years that have to be repressed with significant bloodshed, you probably have an internal legitimacy problem.
It would be good for US geopolitical intrests for the current regime to fall. Does this somehow make angry mobs torching government buildings okay
No. The legitimacy of rebellion in Iran is not based on US interests.
Definitely not just the far left. Highly engaged people across the range of the left were increasingly steamed over the fact that Garland was slow-rolling prosecution trying to maintain propriety (failing to grasp that there was literally nothing he could do to convince Trumpists of his bona fides).
More options
Context Copy link