Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
No bio...
User ID: 1226
Could Zelenskyy not keep his pride contained for a few hours?
Counterpoint: could Trump not keep Putin's dick out of his mouth for a few hours? Saying Zelenskyy ought to be more polite is a tactical remark at best, and given that Trump and Vance appear to have been spoiling for a fight I'm not sure it would have mattered. Conversely, Trump apologists are continually telling me that I ought to respect Trump as president of the United States, but also that he can't be held responsible for what he says or does. If he's president of the United States he ought to act like it.
Ukraine needs the US much more than the US needs Ukraine.
I don't think people grasp that this goes way beyond Ukraine. This is just the latest in an escalating series of actions from Trump demonstrating to American allies that the alliances are dead - that Trump will abandon American commitments on a whim and prefers Russia to NATO. Even if the next president is a hardcore internationalist, everyone is going to remember the fact that America elected Donald Trump and the rest of the GOP fell in line behind his every temper tantrum.
And yes, the US does need its allies. It's not 1941. Autarky is retarded, and we're going to quickly find it's a lot harder to strongarm the rest of the world than have friendly negotiations.
I find it pretty distasteful to give up anthropology to positive feedback loops, and let our history become a mockery when it is within one's power to just raze it.
The fundamental problem the Red Tribe/American conservatism faces is a culture of proud, resentful ignorance. They can't or won't produce knowledge and they distrust anyone who does. They don't want to become librarians or museum curators or anthropologists. The best they can manage is the occasional court historian or renegade economist, chosen more for partisan loyalty than academic achievement and quite likely to be a defector. The effect is this bizarre arrangement where rather than produce conservative thought, they are demanding liberals think conservative thoughts for them.
Occasionally rightists will plead weakness to rationalize their lack of intellectual productivity, but this is nonsense. They have had plenty of money, plenty of political power, and a broad base of support. Unless we accept the Trace-Hanania thesis that they literally just lack human capital, we're left with the conclusion that the right-wing withdrawal from intellectual spaces is a sort of distributed choice. Razing institutions because you can't be bothered to make your case is just barbarism.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
Tangential: the 'total ideological capture of the academy' by the left is in significant part a product of right-wing anti-intellectualism. If you're going to adopt the position that anything but business, finance, and engineering are parasitic and quite possibly degenerate, it will not be surprising that a) existing academics shift away from you b) smart conservatives avoid academia* in favor of business, finance, and engineering and new academics overwhelmingly lean left c) a feedback loop emerges where conservatives and academics increasingly view each other with hostility because the former (largely correctly) believe the latter don't share their values and the latter (largely correctly) believe the former want to destroy them.
*(This is also why American conservatism is intellectually bankrupt and relies on Catholics, a small number of converts, and borrowing critiques from woke-critical centrists for basically all of their intellectual firepower)
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3mo ago
Sorry for the heat, but it's probably more honest than what you usually get.
No, I actually hear stuff like this on the regular from gainfully employed relatives and acquaintances, loudly telling anyone who will listen how they're not allowed to speak their mind for fear of dire consequences.
For reasons that I don't understand, a lot of right-wingers simultaneously openly, viciously loathe liberals but also seem to crave their respect and approval.
It reinforces my view that Trump is an intemperate, childish bully who worships power and is a massive Russia simp. I don't think Trump needs to be a Russian asset - though he could scarcely be doing a better job if he was - when he clearly admires and defers to Putin.
The "America First" mindset is nonsense from petulant idiots whose core grievance seems to be that our allies don't lick our boots hard enough. Literally weakening America for the sake of wounded pride (and absolute children are going to applaud this because this is their idea of "strong leadership").
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
I think a lot of the outrage about "European ingratitude" from the American right is caused by right wingers failing to realize that European 2025 is not the Europe of 1950, or even 1990.
As I said downthread: a lot of the outrage about "European ingratitude" is caused by a) an imaginary Frenchman that lives rent-free in the heads of many red tribers b) taking a world that defers to American interests for granted.
To steal a turn of phrase, America is a country afflicted by "big country autism". Most Americans have no idea what other countries are like and mostly don't think (or care) about them. The average American voter has no real strong opinions on foreign policy beyond liking flashy, muscular actions because 'Murica. This has led to a half century of foreign policy that is, outside of a few big wars, mostly technocratic. I think the idea that American conservatives are outraged by some dissonance between their expectations of Europe and reality is faintly comical.
This explanation is certainly too pat, and there's more nuance to be explored, but do you think this is more or less the direction in which things are heading?
No. I think the central ideological divergence is within the United States, between Trumpian nationalists (who view European nations as unruly vassals who need fall in line and be grateful for whatever they get) and internationalists/atlanticists (who view European nations as strategic and ideological partners who need to led, not commanded). This is almost entirely an elite conflict, with voters either tuning out entirely or following the lead of their political leaders.
Within Europe, this mostly seems to come down to the question of what you think about the US' long term reliability, which is very much a developing situation. Right now, European nations cede at lot of de facto sovereignty to the US (e.g. on trade and foreign policy) in exchange for US security guarantees, but Trump's erratic, Russophilic behavior combined with the cultlike support he receives within his own party calls into question whether or not those guarantees will actually be matched. Right now the only NATO country to have invoked Article 5 is the United States and the current president has strongly hinted that he wouldn't reciprocate. Of course, given how erratic Trump is this could all change in a week. It's possible that assurances are being made behind the scenes that grandpa won't be allowed to do anything too disruptive (I wouldn't count on it though - per above, Trump is the party establishment).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
12d ago
Does anyone have anything to say about the OBBB being passed
Nothing that wouldn't make me sound like a broken record: an unparalleled triumph of sycophancy, fiscal conservatism is a scam the barons use to con the peasants, dream of Argentinafication, etc...
I find it largely to defy discussion.
It definitely looks like trump is making a military force loyal to him personally because he doesn't trust the loyalty of the existing forces.
The Trump administration is run by people who are genuinely rabid xenophobes who view Hispanic day laborers as an existential threat, but I suspect this is in the back of their mind as well. Well, less of a military force per se and more of a political gendarmerie. You want someone you can count on to shoot protestors and whose fortune is tied to the regime.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5mo ago
"Gulf of America" is some freedom fries-tier petulant nationalism and everyone who supports it deserves to be mocked relentlessly for their lack of dignity.
If you're a white man under 50, then you've experienced things being renamed as something that is done to your people
Speak for yourself.
Renaming thing can be good or it can be bad, because who and what we choose to honor says something about ourselves. Nor are we bound for eternity by the preferences of those who came before us. We don't expect Latvians to keep up Soviet monuments or Germans to preserve the aesthetic decisions of the Third Reich.
Renaming things that bear the names of Confederates is good, because it is a repudiation of tyranny and white supremacy. The best you can say about these men were that they were good generals (usually not even that), and we're not lacking for pillars of martial excellence that weren't traitors. Renaming things named after, say, Jefferson is bad, because while Jefferson had many less-than-admirable qualities, they're not why we honor him. I'm pretty mixed on Columbus Day, because while Columbus was pretty terrible even by the standards of the time, it's meant to be a celebration of Italian American heritage, not exploitation and genocide (though, as above, I think we could probably dredge up a less notorious alternative who was also actually American).
The Right is, of course, free to rename things, but of late the people and things they seem to want to honor have a tendency to vindicate their critics.
Also, Denali is a vastly superior name name to Mt. McKinley.
I think it's a good move
Has Trump ever done anything you didn't consider a good move?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3mo ago
Do you ever wonder what they don't say to you, you seemingly being clearly hostile to their entire worldview
Considering that several of them are openly sexist or homophobic and routinely make outrageously bigoted comments about blacks and latinos to my face, with seemingly no expectation that I might find any of that objectionable, I can only imagine the true opinions they're hiding are that George Wallace was right.
(to be fair, at least one of them seems to grasp that it's not appropriate to openly say all our black coworkers are incompetent, but he either thinks I privately agree with him or at least trusts that since he outranks me I just have to put up with it (he's correct on that last point)).
I think you will understand this position better when you are made to bow.
What makes you think I haven't? I don't think conservatives understand that the reason their ideological adversaries are unsympathetic is not because they don't understand what it's like to have to bite your tongue, it's because many of them have had a boot up their ass their entire lives.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
12d ago
Maybe it's cruel, morally, but I fail to see the connection with patriotism at all.
To steal a turn of phrase from someone I spoke to several years ago who was probably quoting someone else without attribution, "the truest form of patriotism is a desire to see your countrymen prosper." A political program which constantly castigates your fellows as parasites, regards their welfare with indifference, incites hate against them, or treats them as means to an end is not, in this paradigm, at all patriotic.
As evidenced by the whole patriotism thing: a Republican is quite literally less likely to listen to you, because they will get the impression that you hate the country and hate their values.
I think this is backwards: American conservatives want to define patriotism as equivalent to conservativism. Patriots must be conservative; conservatives cannot be unpatriotic; liberals are unpatriotic by dint of their politics. This is fundamentally unworkable because it is a paradigm that demands ideological submission as price of entry.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9mo ago
That might sound weird, given the murderous pedophile thing, but to me supporters of those theories generally just seem like they are stupid and prone to weird fantasies and LARPs but have always been that way, whereas people who are existentially shattered by Trump seem like they might have been different at one point, but then suddenly Trump appeared in the corner of their reality and traumatically inverted it into some new configuration of dimensions.
This epitomizes general differential expectations of conservatives and liberals. Conservatives are regarded (and to a shocking degree, regard themselves) as lacking in agency to the point of being almost animalistic. When a conservative raves about cities are shitholes full of degenerates and criminals, that's just how they are. FEMA death camps, Birtherism, Jewish Space Lasers, etc... They're dumb, they're ignorant, they can't help themselves and we shouldn't expect anything of them. We practically talk about Trump supporters in anthropological terms with all these fucking Ohio diner ethnographies. It's on the rest of us to manage them.
Liberals, though. They're supposed to be better, smarter, more accountable. Apparently. When they think a guy who says he wants to be a dictator wants to be a dictator, they're supposed to exercise some critical thinking and realize he's not serious, that's just him being bold and masculine. They're not supposed to say West Virginia's a shithole full of drug addicts even though it objectively is. They're supposed to be adults in the room.
The riots in 2020 were triggered by one guy dying under sketchy circumstances.
This seems like a spectacular failure to grasp the deep, unresolved tension in the US over how law enforcement conducts itself. There were anti-police protests in 2014 under Obama as well. You can't attribute these things to a single police murder.
then make a big deal about fulfilling that promise.
This is not making a big deal out of enforcement. It is ostentatious cruelty (one might even say the cruelty is the point :v).
You've also got things like ICE going after valid visa holders, calling immigrants "invaders", and the DHS declaring intent to "liberate" LA from the socialists.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3mo ago
The red tribe produces plenty of petroleum geologists, clergy are generally quite intelligent, has successfully engineered affirmative action for themselves in the legal profession despite the legal profession trying to do the exact opposite.
All of this just seems to me to be implicitly conceding the point. My contention, contra Hanania, is not that Red Tribers are literally stupid. It is that Red Tribers are somewhere between uninterested in and actively hostile to intellectual/cultural production (by which I mean things like scholarship or art). But they are still very much interested in those products, hence my remark that they want liberals to think conservative thoughts for them. They want (liberal) artists to create conservative-inflected art, (liberal) historians to write conservative historical narratives, etc...
I think it's correct to say that conservatives don't care about academic status and prioritize income/general social status - that's my point. Nothing wrong with that on an individual scale (I'm certainly not one to talk), but a side effect of this taken across a whole society is an extraordinarily vulgar* culture that produces little thought, little art, and can't handle critical perspectives.
*for lack of a better term. I do not mean that it is rude/inappropriate.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
What strikes me about most of the people in the "surrender for their own good" camp is that they would never in a million years apply the same logic to themselves.
Donald the Dove strikes again. I'm beginning to think Trump really is a Manchurian candidate :V Simultaneously looting the country while tanking foreign relations and the economy. Xi Jinping really could not have asked for a better agent.
Just, like... what. There's helping an ally out and then there's doing a bit of light ethnic cleansing on their behalf.
Prediction: this is something Trump came up with on short notice (possibly suggested by Netanyahu) and didn't run by anybody and got defensive when people started poking him on it. It will be quietly dropped within a couple of weeks because simply admitting it was a terrible off-the-cuff idea would make Trump look weak and we can't have that. In the intervening time, Trump supporters will convince themselves that this is actually a great ideal; afterwards they will insist that he was misrepresented and the fact that you care about it is proof you have TDS.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10mo ago
Harris will deliver a mediocre performance that will look positively masterly next to Trump's old man ravings. It will have minimal impact because every aspect of Trump's incapacity is priced in. Practically speaking, Harris can't win, she can only lose.
what do you think the policy strengths/weaknesses will be?
Trump's biggest policy strength is simply that he is the challenger and can thus run on vague promises instead of his actual record. Whenever he talks about specifics, it's embarrassing (but again, priced in - no one expects Trump to know what he's talking about). His biggest vulnerability on that front is that he's surrounded himself with extremist weirdos who have fairly radical ambitions and Trump has a history of being pretty milquetoast with respect to his advisors, so he may suffer if those attacks stick to him. "JD Vance pals around with mask-off authoritarian billionaires" is probably a more fruitful line of attack than "your proposed economic policies are positively Argentinian", even though the latter is more substantive.
Harris' biggest policy strength is that she's not Trump and can thus talk about policy in a way that doesn't threaten to have your brain self-deport through your ear canal. Her biggest policy weakness is that her policy proposals are still very bad and she's not going to get graded on a curve like Trump will be.
5% chance Trump refers to Harris with a racial slur. 50% chance Trump makes some implausibly deniable misogynistic remark.
It's always helpful to remember that Donald Trump a) will never intentionally admit he did anything wrong b) is a fully post-truth individual. I don't think Trump has been all there in a while, but he's also a narcissist and a pathological liar.
On a different note, this interview helpfully provides an illustration of how Trump likes to pretend to be retarded but is also just an idiot. They're quite easy to tell apart. Compare:
TIME: The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that you have to bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia. You haven't done so. Aren’t you disobeying the Supreme Court?
Trump: Well, that’s not what my people told me—they didn’t say it was, they said it was—the nine to nothing was something entirely different.
TIME: Let me quote from the ruling. “The order properly requires the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia's release from custody in El Salvador.” Are you facilitating a release?
Trump: I leave that to my lawyers. I give them no instructions. They feel that the order said something very much different from what you're saying. But I leave that to my lawyers. If they want—and that would be the Attorney General of the United States and the people that represent the country. I don't make that decision.
to
TIME: Well, I mean, the question is, how can CEOs make long-term plans and investments if our tariff policy can change from day to day and still remains so uncertain?
Trump: How can they make long-term investments? I'll turn it around. How can they make long-term investments if our country is losing $2 trillion a year on trade?
TIME: Will you consider giving exemptions—
Trump: No wait, just so you understand. How can we sustain and how is it sustainable that our country lost almost $2 trillion on trade in Biden years, in this last year. That's not—when you talk about a company. I had the head of Walmart yesterday, right in that seat. I had the head of Walmart. I had the head of Home Depot and the head of Target in my office. And I'll tell you what they think, they think what I'm doing is exactly right.
"Golly shucks, I'm just the president of the United States, what do I know about one of my banner policies?" vs defensive gibberish.
If your goal is to radically change the legal status quo, US governing systems are generally arranged in such a way where you have to win everything by large margins. The right is generally in favor of this whenever the left wants to do things.
including the entire judiciary at every level and every non-political hire in the bureaucracy (which means they have to be willing to, after winning, use the political capital necessary to fire everyone and replace them with their own)
Given the strong propensity of American conservatives to treat these groups as hated enemies regardless of their behavior, the long-run trend will always be that these groups end up aligned against them. Until such a time as the right can overcome both its ideological hatred of civil servants and its human capital problem, it's not going to produce any solution more sophisticated than either serial arson or bringing back the spoilers system.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
The left, via their march through institutions as well as their early control over new media, gained access to a super weapon; the ability to point the whole of society against any individual.
This isn't really true*, but it gestures towards something true: the fairly novel experience for social conservatives of not being in the normative driver's seat. For a very long time, social conservatives defined collective norms while social liberals rebelled against them. Every so often the liberals would win a fight and move consensus, but the center of gravity remained with conservatives. Even institutions that tended to be dominated by liberals in composition (e.g. Hollywood) still had to submit to a broader conservative consensus.
In the Obama era, this was upended and for the first time conservatives were in the uncomfortable and bewildering position of being censured for failing to adhere to liberal values rather than vice versa. The cultural center of gravity shifted away from conservatives. Liberals were defining standards of public behavior, and generally not in ways conservatives found agreeable. The entertainment industry shrugged off the aforementioned conservative consensus and started pushing overtly progressive themes (e.g. LGBT/minority representation) in a way that challenged conservatives' sense of rightful cultural hegemony.
This is part of why we get the peculiar phenomenon where conservatives seem to care far more about what liberals say about them than vice versa. The former were accustomed to being able to demand respect and unaccustomed to finding themselves on the outside;the latter were already acculturated to a certain amount of social opprobrium and often took pride in it.
*social media cancellation overwhelmingly affected people in liberal-dominated spaced and was an emergent behavior rather than a directed one. Rupert Murdoch was in no danger of being canceled even though left-wingers absolutely despised him; we can argue about why Musk shifted right
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5mo ago
The question is if it's purposefully crude
Depends on what you mean by 'purposefully crude'. Most government-waste-cutting enthusiasts have a dubious understanding of the causes of government inefficiency, have an ideological presupposition that government spending is a waste, and have never heard the term 'market failure'. The result tends to be that they approach the problem by driving a bulldozer through Chesterton's fence. My view is that "they have no idea what they're doing" is significantly more likely than deliberate clumsiness.
There's a side problem wherein the major drivers of government spending are politically untouchable but you need to grandstand about how you're making cuts so you attack the Everything Else bucket even though it tends to be short-sighted penny-wise behavior.
The left sees itself as the upper class ruling elites and the conservatives are seen as lower class.
The left sees itself as a mix of hard-working urban middle class + discriminated minorities, while they see conservatives as a bunch of bigoted country club members.
I know of no one anywhere who believes that the Jews have space lasers
I know an unfortunate number of people who think Obama is a secret Muslim, that the government is trying put them into camps or controls the weather, that the 2020 election was stolen with millions of fake votes. Let me be blunt: both parties have more than their share of cranky stupid people, but the major difference is that the Dems have (correctly) corralled their idiots and generally have more of a problem with the galaxy-brained wing of the party. The GOP, meanwhile, has been taken over by the morons and wishes they had enough smart people to have a galaxy-brained wing. Saying it's just an act is cope.
Not even close. If the argument was merely "some people really like Trump" vs "some people really liked Obama", sure, but it's not. It is that you cannot criticize Trump and be a member of the GOP in good standing. Musk tried and very rapidly learned that if you tried to break ranks you were going to be whipped into line.
There's no Obama equivalent to cabinet secretaries beginning meetings by verbally fellating Trump. The degree of personal devotion demand and received by Trump from his followers is pretty much without parallel.
The God-Emperor stuff was both funny and a satire by someone not a fan of Trump
If you mean literal GEoM memes, perhaps yes. If you mean artwork where Trump is portrayed as a heroic and/or borderline deific figure (often in comical contrast to his actual appearance), no. Maybe it was started by some internet troll, but his base picked it up and ran with it.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1mo ago
So what's the deep, unresolved tension surrounding keeping noncitizens in the country?
The competing interests and preferences of nativists, anti-nativists, employers, consumers, etc... combined with a deadlocked political system that effectively leaves immigration policy up to the caprices of executive discretion.
Is there any reason other than "it helps us win elections?"
What is that supposed to mean? Illegal immigrants can't vote, so the "importing voters" theory doesn't hold up so well, and their mere existence alienates the xenophobe vote, so it's hard to call it a winning electoral strategy. Even if you think they're wrong, you should probably take immigration advocates at their word when they offer humanitarian and economic justifications for supporting immigration.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
It certainly does! Most complaints about how the left always gets its way and the right never does are simply selective perception or "not-winning-hard-enough"/"everything-I-want-is-the-bare-mininum" style complaints. The US political system is incredibly status quo biased. Sometimes this helps the right, sometimes it helps the left.
I'm reminded of this comment from a few years ago on the old place:
It's strange, isn't it, how no one feels like they're in charge.
Trump Derangement Syndrome Utterly Vindicated, Season 10, Episode 19.
Trump promised to act in a lawless, corrupt, and abusive manner. Lo and behold. I don't know if the cruelty is the point, but it certainly seems like a KPI.
The trouble is, of course, that admitting the TDSers were right either requires openly admitting that you're evil
Even assuming this is true, crime does not become legal because you do it really fast. The Alien Enemies Act doesn't apply, and the administration claiming they can nullify due process is textbook tyranny.
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