Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
I watched the original they linked, and I honestly can not see what their problem is.
The Republican Party is the Trump Party now. Using past Republican luminaries to criticize Trump is therefore out of bounds. It's not just an attack against the tribe, it is an attack against the tribe's mythology.
It seems that he is mentally sorting people into two buckets, the ones who support him and are loyal to him, and the ones who are opposed to him. This is basically the world view of a toddler.
This is the worldview that got him elected. Trump has always been the electorate's id manifest, and in particular plays to a particular kind of impulsive, thin-skinned voter who thinks this is what strong, tough leadership looks like. To ask what his thought process is here is to suppose a kind of analytical mindset Trump very obviously does not have.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
Am I sure? No. But I didn't start thinking this because of news reporting on individual homicides. I formed this opinion when looking into DGU statistics* and concluded that many (if not most) self-reported DGUs were really unreported assaults (the wielder having essentially threatened somebody by pulling a gun). And further observing that a large proportion of homicides were the result of arguments between two men who were either armed or had guns near to hand.
And the thing is that I don't think the problem is necessarily a matter of bad faith/lying. In most cases these people are reporting their own actions positively. Likewise, if you get two twitchy, dominance oriented idiots, it's very easy to get a feedback loop where they push each other towards a violent outcome. Whether or not this gets classified as murder or self-defense can come down to nuances of the situation and the caprices of the local justice system.
To be clear, my position is not that most self-defense homicides are actually murder (though I would posit that many are). It is that
a) many self-defense homicides would be easily avoided if neither party were armed (and would not result in a regular homicide instead)
b) the act of carrying a weapon publicly in the name of self-defense is usually a net negative for public order/safety. The genuine self-defense case is outweighed by the 'guys carrying guns for self-defense instead commit crimes or have accidents' problem.
To the second point in particular, the presence of weapons (especially firearms, although it applies to any weapon to some degree) changes the dynamic of any adversarial interaction. Weapons don't cause violence, per se, but they are lubricants to violence (and also make violence deadlier). If some guy is being loud and pushy, that's annoying. If some guy is being loud and pushy and he has a gun, that's scary. And if I have a gun in either of these situations, things can get even messier.
Tangentially, I think it also complicates the task of law enforcement, since LE has to square the circle of high potential of encountering someone armed with the fact that carrying a weapon is not illegal.
*Specifically, John Lott's numbers, which are commonly cited in defense of carrying weapons. The problem is that they rely on self-report and are literally unbelievable.
@birdcromble
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
Yeah, pursuant to my comment below: I think confrontations at your home have a different practical calculus than ones 'out in the world'. This strikes me as the kind of case you'd wheel out to argue for more permissive self-defense laws. The fact that the guy's son was there was unfortunate, but not a whole lot you can do about that.
A retired Las Vegas police officer walked free after fatally shooting a retired computer network engineer during a dispute over who had the right of way in a Walmart parking lot. Both men got out of their vehicles. Both were armed. The ex-officer said the retired engineer pointed a gun at him first.
This is a helpful demonstration of why I've pretty much completely soured on the idea of people carrying weapons for self-defense. Adding weapons to the mix is almost inherently escalatory, and the cases of genuine self-defense seem to be massively outnumbered by instances of simian chest-beating that got out of hand or someone pulling a gun to win an argument. I'm not sure I believe the survivor's claim, but who acted first in this instance is almost irrelevant. Both of these people decided they needed to bring lethal force as backup to the world's stupidest argument.
edit: I don't really care if you own an M1 Abrams for home defense or an M61 for plinking, but actively carrying seems to be overwhelmingly downside for just about everyone.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
Different intentions.
The main purpose of quoting the Bible to religious conservatives is to needle them over their hypocrisy. This is not especially productive, but it is satisfying for the people doing it. Watching them get huffy is the point. Only the most naive people expect it to actually change minds.
This ad is pretty clear aimed at persuasion, or at least raising the salience of the issue. It doesn't directly attack anyone, it appeals to a well-liked American leader, etc... The question of whether or not Ford personally likes Reagan is immaterial. If I'm trying to persuade someone, I'm going to try to appeal to their values and preferences, not mine.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
I think you should be careful just using the 25-54 age range, as that excludes any trends for early retirement and delayed starts.
That's the point of the prime age rate. A society where people live longer in retirement and stay in school longer is not without tradeoffs, but it is not indicative of a society dealing with large scale unemployment due to outsourcing.
Unlike earlier decades, there is a smaller ratio of children to adults to explain the lower rate.
Overall LFPR excludes people younger than 16. The proportion of 16-17 year olds working has declined. This is generally seen as a positive, and regardless of where you stand on its moral valence, it is indicative of a society that doesn't feel a lot of pressure to push older minors into the workforce, not a society struggling to find employment opportunities for its people.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
Unless you actually care about the American people and giving Americans jobs?
American people have jobs. Prime age LFPR is as high as its ever been
Protectionism is about allowed favored groups to exploit the rest of the population. If the USG wants specific domestic capabilities, it should pay for them directly rather than grant some firms a license for rent-seeking and hoping they do what we want.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
Free trade destroyed our ability to manufacture physical goods
It didn't. For one: the US still manufactures physical goods. The value of the US manufacturing sector is second only to China. It outstrips the combined output of the European Union.
What happened was that the US went from a position of absolute dominance in manufacturing in the late 70s to having a wide range of competitors today (most prominently China). Short of bombing China, however, this was pretty much unavoidable. It hasn't helped that the US pursued soft deindustrialization policies domestically while the tech sector hoovered up human and financial capital, but US manufacturing supremacy was unlikely to last even with a more favorable legal/financial environment.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
The timing doesn't line up. In 1991, China was still sorting itself out while the US had emerged from the Cold War wealthier, more powerful, and more unchallenged than ever. It wasn't like the US exhausted itself crushing the USSR. You could compellingly argue that the US fumbled its post-Cold War international supremacy through a combination of complacency, arrogance, and sheer stupidity, but that's a matter quite separate from China winning the Cold War.
That won't necessarily stop people from re-imagining Reagan as the guy who sold the world to China, but they'll be wrong.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
The feminine = delusion and the corollary of masculine = truth-seeking take is mostly nonsense
It's just a reheated version of "women are emotional, men are rational"-type thinking with a few sprinkles of facts-and-logic-tm conservatism.
Is this just your uncharitable interpretation of them
No.
People seem to get their panties in a bunch because these two guys don't genuflect to the WW2 mythos that has been handed down to the American public through Hollywood and high school history class, but I'm not convinced that saying something like "actually WW2 was more complicated that just Good Guys vs Bad Guys" is in any way remotely near "full-on sieg heiling."
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
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
I'm aware. The problem is that these surveys overwhelmingly rely on self-reports, which are notoriously dodgy, and the fact that some guy thinks he justly defended himself by brandishing a firearm doesn't mean that he did. In many cases it 'defuses the situation' in the sense that when somebody pulls a gun you decide that the disagreement you were having with your loud neighbor isn't worth continuing. In other cases, it's just some fearful individual jumping (or shooting) at shadows.
That seems... incredibly unlikely. Per the CDC, in 2019 there were: approx. 14k firearm homicides, approx. 24k suicides, and 486 accidental deaths, and approx. 20k non-fatal injuries (not counting people shot by LE, which is outside the scope of this argument; also not considering assaults or other gun crime that doesn't result in injury).
In 2019, the FBI reports 386 justifiable homicides by civilians. Now, that doesn't include people acquitted on self-defense grounds, but acquittal rates aren't that high and acquittals are dominated by people who got off because their lawyer successfully argued they didn't do it rather than a successful self-defense claim. It's not a great start, with accidental deaths outnumbering verified self-defense homicides. But as you note, most claimed DGUs don't involve anyone getting shot.
The problem is that this still entails the claim that brandishing a firearm or similar DGU averted almost 40k murders in 2019 (or merely ~14k if you completely discount suicides). That's an extraordinary claim. Even taking the homicides-only number, it suggests that the US homicide rate would be almost 75% higher but for defensive civilian firearms usage (34k vs 20k in 2019). It's also impossible to substantiate, since the only evidence we have are self-reported survey responses and no real counterfactual. If there are supposed to be thousands of attempted murders being averted, you'd think they'd leave more of a footprint.
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