Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
Has Trump tried to encourage anything like this?
His actions in LA and DC immediately jump to mind.
Right-wing political violence in the US is almost always carried out under the guise of law enforcement, and at the moment the Trump admin is trying to build out ICE into a massive organization full of people who owe effectively personal fealty to Trump.
(Of course, I think it would be a mistake to attribute this to some sort of 4-D chess plan - Trump just has the mind of a thug and thinks having an army of brownshirts with a veneer of police authority is super cool)
they can't really even recognize actual human leadership as anything but some kind of pathology.
Yeah, I don't think that's it, unless "actual human leadership" is code for "personalist strongman". Trump is the argument by demonstration against charismatic leadership, but left-of-center people have their own favored leadership figures as well. Obama was and is highly admired, Sanders has his own faction of die hard, etc... Any argument that rounds off to "they're intimidated by how cool we are" is probably wrong.
Where they recoil from Trump is his staggering lack of character combined with his rejection of limits or accountability. It doesn't help that his loudest supporters tend to be quite reactionary and openly cheer for authoritarianism.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
Until the 2020 election, Trump's opponents were mostly crying wolf.
Less crying wolf and more underestimating the efficacy of checks in the US political system. It has largely been memoryholed here, but the first Trump admin was constantly going for executive power grabs. He simply had not consolidated power within the GOP to the same degree and was facing a less friendly judicial environment. Likewise, there was an incredible amount of corruption, and while the presidential pardon has never been applied very fairly in practice, Trump was exceptional in the self-serving nature of his pardons.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
It's not great, though as I understand it it's better than it sounds because the organization picks up a lot of your living expenses.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
I think what you are seeing is less a difference in kind between WW2 and WiA and more that a) the memory of WW2 is heavily sanitized b) there are marked values dissonances within American subcultures.
In a modern context, compare and contrast reactions to, e.g. the Haditha Massacre and the Eddie Gallagher case. Nobody was like "actually the Haditha Massacre was good". There were excuses and denials, but approximately nobody was pro-massacring civilians. By contrast, the Gallagher case was divisive. Plenty of people were appalled, but no small number took the view that Gallagher did nothing wrong. Sure, he murdered a prisoner and desecrated the body, but the victim was ISIS so the whole thing was really an act of justice.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
society is still okay with disposing the disposables and is now more than happy to turn it into a multi-billion dollar industry.
Any values set has pathologies - ways in which dysfunctions manifest, and negative outcomes it is willing to tolerate. To take the Annunciation schooting topic you allude to: American gun rights advocates are generally willing to tolerate elevated homicide and suicide rates as well as semi-regular mass shootings as a cost of protecting civilian gun ownership. I don't think it's right to say they're more than happy with those outcomes.
It's true that we are collectively not as sensitive to certain kinds of dysfunction among young men, but it's also true that these problems are largely seen as an expression of genuine preference and thus None of Your Business. A heroin addict might thank you after the fact for forcing him through rehab (though he certainly won't during); a young man is significantly less likely to feel the same way if you confiscate his weed, porn, and gambling. The US has generally accepted the idea that certain kinds of anti-social business model are acceptable as long as the participants know what they're getting into (for small values of 'know what they're getting into'). It's your God-given right to blow all your money on drugs, strippers, and gambling, and fuck anyone telling you you can't.
What strikes me about this phenomenon is that both sides of the argument broadly come from the Right: social conservatives decry the public toleration of vice and masculinists object to what they see as the exploitation and neglect of young men, while business conservatives adamantly oppose anything that would curtail their ability to fleece the peasants.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
It makes WW2 look nice by comparison
WW2 involved deliberately flattening German and Japanese cities. Allied strategic bombing alone is estimated to have killed over a million civilians in the space of about four years. And that's before we talk about the Soviets or the Axis.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
As with many things in the digital era, the distinction is friction. Having to go to a casino or a brothel (or, I suppose, a strip club might be more analogous to OF) applies a measure of braking force on vicious impulses. The ability to pick up your phone and indulge sets the bar for self-control vastly higher than needing to go out. I also suspect that for some people, the physical act of spending money triggers more aversion than an equivalent digital transaction.
The Alice and Bob model is inherently deficient when talking about politics because you're not talking about unitary actors but distributed groups of tens of millions of people. Bob isn't angry because Alice defected. He's angry because he heard Alice's third cousin defected. There's also the distinct matter of asymmetrical vindictiveness. If Alice and Bob 'cheat' at a similar rate, but Alice is (relatively) forgiving while Bob is hypervigilant against cheating and believes in escalatory retaliation, you get a situation where Bob is constantly saying he has no choice but to flip the table to restore balance despite being no better behaved (at best). (See: the GOP's efforts to overturn the 2020 election)
It's deficient for another reason as well: if Alice collectively represents liberals and Bob collectively represents conservatives, there's a problem with the cooperate/defect model, because Alice and Bob have different values and thus different ideas of what it means to cooperate or defect. To pick a high profile historical example: the confirmation for Robert Bork. The Democratic view was that Republicans defected by putting forward a deeply unsuitable judicial nominee. The Republican view was that the Democrats defected by rejecting a perfectly qualified nominee on spurious grounds. Voting rights/voting access are another standout area where normative differences lead to mutual perception that the other team is trying to cheat.
I don't think the Intel deal ties into the revenge narrative except insofar as Trump's supporters have extended him near-infinite deference in exchange for promises of vengeance against the libs. (More generally, the fact that conservative voters tend to be more tribal and less ideological gives the Big Men a lot more freedom to act out of bounds)
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
"Look what you made me do" - man doing what he was going to do anyway. The thing about unprincipled people is that they think everyone else is just like them and that principles are for suckers. There are enough other unprincipled people that it's extremely easy to sustain this belief even in the face of clear evidence that you're well below average in terms of behavior simply by telling yourself others would do it if they could.
Why political revenge narratives don't make sense to me.
Political revenge narratives make more sense if you consider them as a gloss on crude dominance seeking. You can't just come out and say "I enjoy having power over my enemies" because you'll scare your less dominance-oriented political allies (who may start to wonder when the jackboot is coming down on their face). Framing it as revenge lets you justify it as a balancing of the scales - both punishment for misbehavior and a necessary reminder of why you shouldn't be fucked with. Actual misbehavior or unbalanced scales somewhere between optional and a negative.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
The US has a very peculiar arrangement where you don't buy healthcare. Your insurance provider buys healthcare on your behalf from healthcare providers, (except when they don't). But at least you buy health insurance, so if you get bad service from your insurance provider you can switch Your health insurance, in turn, is bought for you by your employer. Basically everyone in the system has terrible incentives.
- Healthcare providers are incentivized to overtreat because it mitigates risk (less likely to get sued for malpractice), allows them to charge more, and the patient (usually) isn't footing most of the bill, so they're often price insensitive. (Also, the patients are clueless so they have no real ability to argue with the doctors about treatment plans)
- Health Insurers are generally trying to sell the cheapest product possible to employers and pay out as little as possible to providers. They're not terribly worried about customer service quality beyond an absolute bare minimum, because their customers have limited ability to leave. So they stiff patients and deny coverage whenever they can get away with it.
- Employers are generally trying to conform to their legal obligations and need to retain employees as cheaply as possible. Fortunately for them, your employees aren't sick most of the time, so you can actually get away with buying them fairly low quality health insurance.
- The patient wants treatment, but lacks the information and expertise to make an informed decision. Almost as importantly, they want to avoid being left holding the bag. If the doctor recommends it and insurance approves it, they'll probably agree to it, because better safe than sorry. After all, it's (mostly) not their money (until it is).
The result is that the consumer (i.e. patient) is marooned in an incredibly capricious system which is only tenuously interested in his welfare and which may saddle him with a colossal bill as a result of processes completely opaque to him.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
private businesses tend to be focused on the long-term
Private businesses aren't focused on anything, since they don't have minds. The people who make decisions on their behalf are quite often focused on the short-term. As a chief executive, I may be able to sell shareholders on a long-term plan, but often as not they're looking for a good quarterly report and I'm looking to keep my job and score a bonus.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
They're not - the sort of total, top-down mobilization of the economy that characterized the World Wars is fairly unusual. But leaving that aside, these economic arrangements were not intended to be welfare improving for the people living in them.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
In fact thé worst gerrymanders in terms of the difference between popular vote percentages and congressional results are in Oregon and Illinois, a complication for the ‘evil republicans’ narrative.
That's not an especially good metric (though people understandably like to focus on it because it's legible); crucially, it is also not correct. MA, for example, saw Republicans get a little over a third of presidential votes* but precisely zero seats. In Iowa, Democrats got 43% of the presidential vote, but zero seats. Astute observers will note that neither of these states are actually gerrymandered, which perhaps illustrates why that metric is suboptimal.
The metric people who study gerrymandering have converged on for measuring partisan bias is performance relative to other maps that could have been drawn. In MA, for example, it would be very difficult to draw a map where the GOP got a third of the seats simply because of how Republican voters are distributed around the state. Iowa could potentially be better, but not by much.
By those standards, Texas is on-par to a little worse than Illinois.
And, of course, none of this addresses the elephant in the room, which is how the parties have, on the whole, tried to resolve the problem of gerrymandering. Democrats have repeatedly sought a nationwide solution, while Republicans have preferred a "gerrymandering for me but not for thee" approach.
*Using presidential votes as a proxy for general support is imperfect but better than statewide tally of legislative races because many House races are unopposed.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
If the government is going to give out industrial subsidies, why not get something in return?
In the case of US Steel, the government didn't give out subsidies, it simply demanded a payoff for approving the deal.
More generally, it's not philosophically coherent. If the USG expected to get a stake in exchange for subsidies, the most of the South and Midwest would be government property. The general pattern the US has followed is that it may offer subsidies or very favorable lending terms (which amount to subsidies) for things the government wants to promote, but hasn't insisted on receiving partial ownership. Partly this because Americans (and especially Republicans) have traditionally been averse to state ownership, but also partly because subsidies are not generally conceived of as business investments but the state paying you to do something it wants. The CHIPS Act was not the USG dipping its toes in the market to make a little money, it was promoting the development of domestic chip production.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
The US government is seeking stakes in Intel, TSMC, and Samsung, among other firms:
Expanding on a plan to receive an equity stake in Intel in exchange for cash grants, a White House official and a person familiar with the situation said Lutnick is exploring how the U.S. can receive equity stakes in exchange for CHIPS Act funding for companies such as Micron, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co and Samsung. Much of the funding has not yet been dispersed.
Similarly, a few months ago, the Trump administration approved Nippon Steel's acquisition of US Steel contingent on the USG receiving a golden share that gives it considerable supervisory authority:
The golden share gives the US government veto authority over a raft of corporate decisions, from idling plants to cutting production capacity and moving jobs overseas, as previewed in a weekend social media post by the commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick.
It's an interesting turn for the traditionally market-oriented, small government party to start making a play for the commanding heights of the economy. The Federal government has a long history of giving out subsidies as a matter of policy, but it generally hasn't tried to assert an actual stake in recipient businesses (it will sometimes assume control of failing institutions, but this is generally an emergency measure rather than a long term plan).
- Does this represent a leftist turn in the Republican Party's view on the state's role in the economy, leaning more towards a nationalist democratic socialism?
- Are there risks of corruption arising in the Trump administration related to government acquisition of major shares in large companies?
- Does this represent an expansion of executive authority? What do we expect USG to do with its stakes in these companies?
- Does this raise potential conflicts of interest, directly aligning the interests of the Federal government with large firms (rather than their merely influential status today)?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5mo ago
I’ll be honest with you that most normies just don’t really care about politics and thus don’t really care if their votes actually count
I don't think this is right - people get extremely mad if they feel their vote is being taken away. What I think is true is that very few people have a sense for the details of politics. They want to show up once every 2-4 years and vote for someone they vibe with and otherwise not think too hard about the substance of policy.
Go to any school board or planning committee meeting — these are things that have a real and lasting impact on community life — and nobody shows up
In addition to the point I raised above, these meetings are often contrived to be difficult to attend and your individual participation is not particularly meaningful. Showing up as an organized group does have an impact (which is why these processes are often dominated by small groups of angry retirees), but that's contrary the central tenet of neogrillism, i.e. only absolutely minimum effort participation in the political process.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5mo ago
To be fair, there's not a correct answer to how districts should be drawn. One view is that districts should be competitive, as this encourages moderation and tends to be more proportional. Another is that districts should do their best to represent communities of interest, as that will make it more straightforward for elected officials to represent their constituents coherently. Yet another is simple compactness: districts should be as regular as possible.
There are arguments for and against all of them, but none of them is obviously right and not all are amenable to algorithmic solutions.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5mo ago
I don't know that you can separate them.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5mo ago
What part of "the most gerrymandered states in the union are all blue; there is no more gerrymandering blue can do here" don't you understand?
The part where it's not true. TX in particular is not gerrymander as aggressively as it could be (though it is still gerrymandered). The same is not true of, e.g., WI, NC, or OH.
Conversely, NY, CA, WA, etc... could be significantly more gerrymandered. The biggest limitation here is not "room" for gerrymandering, but legal constraints for doing so.
Texas being gerrymandered isn't exactly new. Trump et al. just want to make it more gerrymandered.
Prior to the mid 2000s there was gerrymandering in both Red and Blue states, but it was piecemeal and wasn't that impactful because it was largely aimed at protecting state-level incumbents (and, in the South, keeping the wrong people out of power), not generating national political advantage (also it was harder without computers). Still not great, but not a hugely pressing issue.
In the mid 2000s the GOP put together a national strategy for gerrymandering their way to success. They largely succeeded, which is also why they've repeatedly refused offers of mutual disarmament. (That and the tribal mindset of the many conservative struggles with the idea of independent redistricting - a process which isn't biased in their favor must necessarily be biased against them).
Two critical problems with gerrymandering reform: 1) virtually nobody prioritizes it highly enough to mobilize voters against it, and even if they did, gerrymandering makes it extraordinarily difficult for electoral reform to win 2) even when the electorate avails themselves of means to override state governments, it is not uncommon for the state government to simply ignore them.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5mo ago
Note also that Trump isn’t demanding a loyalty test. There is no requirement that universities be Trumpist
The Trump administration has explicitly been angling for commissars DEI for conservatives View Point Diversity Ensurers to supervise the ideological composition of faculty.
When I say "account for that in planning", I don't mean you adjust your forecasts downward X% from the report because they always overestimate by the same margin. Consistently high is not the same thing as 'always high' or 'consistently high by the same amount'. It just means that on average the estimator is greater than the true value (or, really, the quick estimate tends to be higher than the slow estimate).
If the estimator is wrong consistently but in a predictable way... they should be able to be wrong less often?
Not necessarily. Estimation is always dealing with real world constraints liked limited resources and time frame for gathering and analyzing data, sampling bias, unknown unknowns, etc...
I encourage you to read the Nate Silver article I linked. He talks about this significantly more articulately than I can.
I would guess that the number of people who would say this is vastly larger than the number of people who would do it when it came time to pull the lever. "Literally anyone else" has the tremendous advantage of being whatever you can imagine and lets you tell yourself that you only voted for Trump because the Democrats made you.
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