Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
Giving conservatives preferential treatment or using a conservative "Czar" to oversee such things is categorically different from that, because ideology - and specifically a diversity of ideology - does directly influence someone's ability to contribute to the organization
This is identical to DEI arguments. As I'm sure you're aware, there has been a great deal of effort invested in the idea that diversity is not an ideological goal, it is a pragmatic benefit. The right-wing argument is that this is not true for, say, women, but is true for conservatives (and only conservatives, not other views with poor representation in academia).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
Indeed, when the media discuss economic issues they are more likely to interview a businessman than an economist.
As an aside, I think it has generally been to capitalism's detriment that people tend to conflate business, finance, and economics when these are three different fields. Businessmen make terrible ambassadors for capitalism.
I don't even understand how exactly viewpoint diversity is supposed to be done?
You're overthinking it. It's affirmative action for right-wingers. You do it by hiring right-wingers into faculty positions until the Viewpoint Diversity Czar is satisfied. The specifics of their viewpoints are largely irrelevant, because the actual point is to try and install a bunch of Trumpist faculty.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
University endowments are not general purpose slush funds for the University administration. They can't just allocate money from the endowment to replace research funding.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
The Trump admin has the power to crush Harvard. They have HUGE reasons to play ball, the things that the administration can do to them are existentially threatening.
The Trump administration has made it abundantly clear that showing your belly is the wrong move, because it won't earn you the tiniest shred of leniency. When the barbarians tell you to throw open your gates and surrender or be destroyed while you can see the smoke rising from the last city to surrender, you're not going to comply. You're going to hunker down and put out calls for aid.
Harvard has a lot of wealthy and influential alumni, and they may reasonably believe that making themselves a beacon of opposition will allow them to weather the storm more or less intact.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
Columbia caved and didn't get their funding back, so there's not much reason for Harvard to accommodate the Trump administration's demands that they install right-wing commissars to monitor the university for wrongthink.
The Fed's letter included contradictory demands. One can't require merit-based admissions and hiring while also requiring viewpoint-diversity admissions and hiring:
Woke Right theory wins again?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
C is highly defensible, but it's far more common for D to masquerade as C. Not even necessarily intentionally/in bad faith - people have their personal hobby horses they fixate on and most of the systems they're complaining about are very complex.
There is substantial overlap between criminal justice reformers who take issue with the US' policy of extreme leniency towards police misconduct and people who take issue with sending people to Salvadoran gulags. Conversely, there is a generalized skepticism towards due process common amongst both hardline deportation advocates and tough-on-crime/back-the-blue types.
That aside, that's not how things worked. If the police violate your rights, you can usually at least get a court order telling them to stop doing that (and potentially scuttling any case against you), even if they can't return the lost time/reputation/emotional well-being. You can often obtain damages as well.
Ever heard of qualified immunity?
Qualified immunity is not what people seem to think it is. QI protects government staff from personal liability in carrying out their duties (shifting the burden onto taxpayers), even when they egregiously fuck up; it doesn't indemnify them from criminal charges. The bigger issue there is simply that the criminal justice system bends over backwards to give law enforcement officers accused of misconduct the benefit of the doubt. If a cop murders you, it's still murder, but it's exceeding rare for cops to get charged and even rarer for them to get convicted.
(For example, the notorious Daniel Shaver case, the city ended up paying about $10m in damages to Shaver's relatives even though the officer was acquitted)
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
The police and whiteness remain conspicuously intact.
"For a change." - this being a deviation from Trumpism's usual scrupulous honesty.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
Probably because during the campaign (and now, for that matter) it was routine for Trump defenders to pretend that he wasn't going to do it, that it was just big talk, take him seriously not literally, etc... Encouraging people not to believe Trump was (and is) standard practice.
"Of course he's not going to do it, that's ridiculous" -> "He said he was going to do it, what are you complaining about?"
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
Short answer: they do change the rules, frequently. HEMA has no unified ruleset. The trouble is that it's very hard to create a ruleset that can't be gamed - introduce a solution to one kind of tactical double and you likely create another (or incentivize some other kind of bad behavior). Insofar as you can they tend to have other problems.
People do occasionally do "first blood" tournaments with mutual loss rules precisely to try and circumvent this situation, but they have a number of practical issues. They tend to exacerbate the problem of low quality judging in HEMA, since a single poor call isn't just disadvantageous, it's decisive. There's also the more prosaic issue that if people are going spend hundreds of dollars traveling to your tournament, they are generally going to demand more than a half-dozen exchanges. The result is that first blood tournaments are usually sideshows.
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.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
You're still talking about the object level impact of the tariffs. I'm talking about the ability of the state to translate will into action when the action involves short term pain.
Willingness to endure pain is not an independent quality - people are more willing to endure pain for an achievable goal they believe in and less willing to endure pain merely to prove that they can.
The tariff proposal elicited a sharp, widespread negative response because it was incredibly stupid and self-destructive. There's never going to be much of a constituency for chopping off your own foot to look tough, and the Trump administration has done a terrible job selling the idea that these tariffs would be a positive force for American manufacturing (probably because they're actually terrible for it).
The motte would be stronger if the bailey wasn't full of people actively dismantling it. US "industrial policy" has been overwhelmingly aimed at protecting jobs and incumbent firms from competition, not preserving or building capability.
Hilariously, this negatively impacts domestic US manufacturing, since it is now massively more favorable to import finished products over importing materials and manufacturing in the US.
My prediction is that we're going to end up with a swiss-chess-like set of trade barriers that mostly has the effect of negatively impacting American firms and the overall economy, but isn't disruptive enough to cause real economic disaster.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
The crackpot theory would be that the dumbassery is the point - the Trump administration doesn't have the ability to engage in deportations on the scale it desires without spending a bunch of money building a large and invasive immigration enforcement apparatus that will alienate the general public. What it can do is terrorize immigrants with an arbitrary and capricious enforcement regime in which you may be irretrievably sent to a black hole prison, regardless of your notional legal protections. This serves the dual purpose of providing a spectacle for hardcore nativist voters and creating an atmosphere of fear that will encourage immigrants to leave and discourage more from coming.
However, per my flair I think this is probably giving them too much credit and they are simply incompetent and view things like due process as an obstacle design to protect criminals.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
That would make significantly more sense. I'd gotten too used to people sarcastically calling June 2020 that.
Why would 2020 be a discontinuity and not, say, the Civil War (or the Civil Rights era or the Great Depression or...)?
edit: misunderstanding, though I don't know that it radically changes my point
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
you wouldn't want them to be anyway
I agree, which is why I'd really rather the Trump administration stop trying to pilot the US into the ground. I quite like the state of affairs where the US is on top - though I am admittedly biased by being American - but I don't think that means it is the only possible state of affairs under which 'globalization' persists. OP is right to observe that China presently depends on international trade, and a world where the USN isn't securing freedom of navigation is one where China is likely to feel compelled to step up to secure its own interests.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
I think it's important to note that the traditional requirement for HEMA is a source. For example, we do not generally consider people doing Viking combat reconstruction to be doing HEMA because we have no sources for it. The reconstructors are working in (notionally) accurate reproductions of the historical weapons, but they're ultimately guessing as to how they were used. HEMAists are... still guessing, but they're guessing with a reference to historical texts. Sometimes the texts are very straightforward, sometimes they are borderline useless (cough, Talhoffer).
The "main" disciplines of HEMA are, in rough order of popularity:
- longsword - if HEMA ratings tournament count is any indication, roughly as popular as the rest put together. Typically divided by whether you study German or Italian sources.
- rapier (and dagger) - overwhelmingly draws from various Italian sources, though there's a growing body of people looking at Spanish sources. Somewhat unusually for different schools of swordsmanship with similar weapons (where the differences are often relatively small or relate more to tactics/philosophy than specific techniques), Spanish and Italian rapier are quite different. There are sources from other countries as well, though they're often derivative of one or the other.
- saber - though this seems to be gaining popularity rapidly and I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up overtaking R&D.
- sword and buckler (a buckler being a center-gripped shield roughly the size of a dinner plate) - tends to be split into arming sword and sidesword, though you can find sources discussing using a buckler with a number of weapons.
There are a number of other disciplines as well, though generally less popular (and some are amalgamated into one of the categories above for competitions, e.g. many saber tournaments won't bat an eye if you show up with a broadsword/backsword). Messer, broadsword, sidesword, singlestick, arming sword, sword and targe/rotella, and more I've probably forgotten. Also worth noting that many of these distinctions are modern. It's not clear that historically people would have seen much of a distinction between what we now call sideswords and rapiers, nor is it uncommon to find sabers referred to as broadswords.
Many of the older sources have significant gaps in what they cover - either due to the fact that they're incomplete or because they're not intended for new fencers and thus don't spend much time talking about the basics of how to fence. More recent (as in 18th/19th century) often have the opposite problem: they're extremely barebones systems that are meant to train someone who has never held a sword to bare minimum competence in bare minimum time. And virtually none of these sources assumed you'd be using them as a primary source of instruction - even the Saber for Dummies manuals are meant to be reference material for instructors.
Modern HEMA is unlike its historical counterpart. We use different equipment, different rules, and have different social mores* around fighting compared to the original practitioners. There's also just the reality that many techniques become less effective as your opponent becomes more skilled and everything collapses down to fundamentals like distance, timing, and tactics.
The result is that if you're trying really hard to win tournaments, you're going to be less strict about adhering to the sources. You're going to mix-and-match systems and incorporate things from other martial arts or modern fencing. You're also going to end up constrained by the rules in ways that affect your fencing - a scored match is an artificial construct (a "real" swordfight is never going to have a situation like "I'm down by 1 with two seconds on the clock, better dive head first across the ring"), certain historical techniques are constrained or off limited (e.g. S&B tournaments tend to restrict or disallow buckler punches for safety reasons), and you may game afterblow rules in ways that would be insane in a serious sword fight ("I'm going to leave myself wide open and go for an uncovered afterblow" is something nobody would do if life or limb were on the line but might make perfect sense if you've got a lead and just want to burn time off the clock).
*the people whining about hand snipes might actually have a point, historically, for example, and there's some reason to think thrusting was considered semi-off-limits in certain contexts.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
It's not clear to me why the US abdicating global hegemony leads to the collapse of globalization. It seems much more likely to me that China steps into the void.
Trump’s strategy might be to prep the U.S. for that collapse.
Don't make me tap the sign. The pump-and-dump theory is more plausible than a scheme to prepare the US for global economic collapse (especially because if you were prepping for that, you'd want to be tightening trade relations with your big neighbors to the north and south, not pissing them off).
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?
...why?
The fact that the US attracts a ton of foreign talent is a feature, as is the fact that many of these students bring money into the country. The national security pretext is largely irrelevant (we're mostly talking about undergrads and it's not especially difficult to vet or just exclude foreign nationals when dealing with genuinely sensitive research).
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