Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
No bio...
User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
11mo ago
It's very hard to tell on this forum.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
11mo ago
You're the first person I've encountered who claimed that the economic problems his base have been talking about just don't exist.
I am saying the problems afflicting the rural working class and poor (as distinct from the suburban conservatives who make up much/most of Trump's base and who are generally doing more than fine) are not the product of the urban professional class, immigration, or free trade as Greer hints. These people have, by and large, chosen to side with political leaders who favor economic and labor policy disfavorable to them for social/values reasons. Insofar as this represents their priorities, fair play, but to turn and blame low standards of living in the rural midwest or deep south on the urban professional class is nonsensical.
I don't know if you are accurately representing the body of Greer's argumentation, but if the way you characterize it is accurate, it's sort of giving away the game. US manufacturing dominance in the mid 20th century was a bubble of anomalous circumstances that was never going to be sustained. Europe was always going to rebuild, East Asia was always going to industrialize, economic growth was always going to make American manufacturing less competitive internationally, automation was always going to make manufacturing less labor intensive, etc... Even a maximally protectionist policy regime wouldn't fix this (ignoring the harm inflicted on the rest of the economy in the name of manufacturing fetishism), because it wouldn't fix the fundamental issue of a world that had grown beyond US manufacturing. Japanese and later Chinese industry frequently ended up beating US industry on both price and quality.
I'm not going to say that nothing can be done about the US' relative position in global manufacturing, but it isn't what Trump is promising and it isn't what a bunch of 60 year old ex-factory workers from Ohio want. It probably means more immigration, not less, more international partnerships and less protectionism, more capital/automation-intensive facilities, and more federally directed industrially policy. It also requires acknowledging that no, the US is not going to go back to manufacturing most of the world's steel or cars.
I feel like this is extremely uncharitable - this is the mirror image of the argument that Trump haters are simply immature people who hate their fathers, and that sense of childhood grievance is what actually informs their opposition to him.
A major distinction is that Trump haters don't say this, whereas many Trump supporters cite the arrogance, condescension, and judgment of 'coastal elites' as a reason for supporting him. They frame it more sympathetically than I do, but it's coming from their own mouths.
He actually spent quite a while living in the areas he's talking about, and he's old enough that he actually has childhood memories of the 60s. He was actually there!
He was literally four in 1966. If he has any expertise on the socio-economic conditions of the 60s, it is purely incidental to his personal life. (TBF, it wouldn't be appreciably more credible if he was ~20 instead, though he could at least cite a singular adult perspective).
As I said, I don't think he's lying. I think he's bullshitting.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
11mo ago
Mary Todd double-tapped Abe while Booth was distracting everyone by jumping on stage.
What’s the big actual object level disagreement between the reds and the blues here?
The proper way to live and the ordering of society.
(More practically, most Americans are way too comfortable (and in many cases, literally too fat) for anything like an actual civil war. Something like the Troubles is more likely, though even that I find doubtful, if for no other reason than the most dedicated Reds and Blues live in different places)
Listicles are still clickbait filler even if they're published by notionally-respectable outlets. The purpose is not actually to come up with a comprehensive list of the 100 best books of the 21st century. It's to get people to click on the article so they can either feel outraged at the writer's tastelessness or validated by the writer sharing their opinion. They will then ideally start a fight and share the article with their friends, saying "so true/can you believe this bullshit".
As voted on by 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers — with a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book Review.
It's literally just a popularity contest. They asked a bunch of writers their favorite books and tabulated the results.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
11mo ago
Your mistake is thinking these are different groups of people instead of the same people at different times of day.
I don't think that it is - at least not in a political sense. Conceptually it's an easy distinction to make, but in practice it's just arguing over whose subsidies and legal privileges don't count.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10mo ago
I can assure you the English Tories I worked with 10-25 years ago did not fit the blue tribe stereotypes you are mentioning here.
This should not be surprising, since the Blue/Red tribe paradigm is attempting to explain subcultural divisions amongst White Americans. Applying it to the British seems wrong-headed.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10mo ago
Change the structure of working environments. The dominant mode of employment in developed countries is calibrated around the assumption of either a childless worker or a parent (i.e. husband) who has no obligations that might interfere with working hours and a parent who stays home to take care of the kids and do domestic labor. Needless to say, while single-income households with children still exist (and were somewhat less universal in the past than is commonly supposed), it is no longer typical, especially as you move up the socio-economic ladder. This is problematic for TFR because a dual income household has to either pay for childcare for any young children (often cost prohibitive, eating up most of one partner's salary) or have a partner (almost always the wife) drop out of the workforce (highly non-normative for people in developed countries, especially middle class and up). Throw in some extremely high standards for what constitutes an acceptable minimum level of parental attention and you have a recipe for even fairly affluent couples deciding they can't afford more than one child.
If you're right-wing, you may favor more women leaving the workforce. If you're left-wing you may favor childcare subsidies. I think the former fails for normative reasons. It's going to be very hard to persuade women to go back to being housewives, even with big pro-natal propaganda efforts, and most people will find the proposal unacceptable in any event. The latter struggles on economic terms - the same people who advocate for childcare subsidies want childcare workers to be paid more and tend to push for a lower ratio of children-to-worker (basically, childcare is already very expensive for your average family and they want to make it even more expensive). In a world where we expect most people to have several children, you can't have everyone pay someone else to raise their kids.
This brings us to option 3: Retvrn, but not like that. For a very long time, it was normal to work out of the home for both men and women, so the question of who was going to watch your kids was straightforward. We can modernize the concept via a mix of encouraging permissiveness with respect to WFH and encouraging/requiring workplaces to be more accommodating to parents with young children. It should be entirely acceptable for a parent to bring their very young children to work with them and reasonable accommodations made for them. This reduces financial and attention pressures on parents. (If you don't like poor people, this has the added benefit of disproportionately favoring middle class+ families).
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(Aside: a lot of pro-natal policies can be helped along by avoiding reactionary framing. Child tax credits are popular, taxing childlessness is not. This despite the fact that they're functionally the same thing).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10mo ago
Housewives aren't unicorns, but women's prime-age LFPR is 75-80% (cf. ~90% for men). This isn't just professional women having outsized presence; the vast majority of adult women have jobs. And it's not just liberal women - the vast majority of working-age conservative women are employed as well.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10mo ago
Why on earth would you jeopardise these favourable battlefields to tilt at ideological windmills that the large majority of Americans and Westerners consider sacrosanct? Bad and stupid ideas, but also bad and stupid strategy.
As a poster here (actually back on reddit, but same diff) once trenchantly observed, bigots can't help themselves. The reason people from the New Right keep getting caught out doing Nazi apologia is that the New Right is shot through with Nazi sympathizers. Maybe they're not champing at the bit for an expansionist totalitarian dictatorship, but they often think Mr. Hitler had some interesting ideas about the use of state violence to enforce racial/cultural purity and fight degeneracy.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10mo ago
The biggest negative element on most social media platforms (not just twitter) is recommendation algorithms that optimize for engagement by stoking outrage and other negative emotions. I think there's a decent change we see significant regulation of algorithmic content recommendation in the near future, and that the present state of social media is looked back upon in much the same way we view the pre-60s state of affairs with respect to smoking.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10mo ago
It's a bit weird how late the Republican party was to discover wokeness
The allegations that the Republican party is anti-intellectual are essentially correct, and one of the consequences of this is that they have a very limited perspective of expert institutions. Namely, an exterior view which tends to write off the whole edifice as a wretched hive of degenerate commies. The result is that the right is virtually always late to the party intellectually and their efforts to participate in the discourse are often pretty unimpressive (in this case, their constant efforts to equate the post-liberal bent of 'wokeness' with any sort of social liberalism mostly just delegitimized center-left left critics of the far left).
What am I missing?
Trump is the Republican nominee for president
a) Trump appointed the SC majority that overturned existing precedent on abortion. b) Democratic voters believe (correctly) that many Republicans want to ban abortion nationwide and many more Republicans are happy to go along with that.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9mo 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.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9mo ago
She and her staff may not share my belief. Also, they may believe (possibly correctly) that not debating is worse than the likely outcome of an unimpactful debate.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9mo ago
None of this seems to make sense.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. It seems perfectly sensible: anti-immigration activists are repeating a rumor that supports their preferences. It might be true, it might be exaggerated, it might be a complete lie. Why bother checking? After all, even if it's not true, the fact that I could believe it really says something about society.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9mo ago
I think my point is reasonably clear and plain: people are signal boosting rumors with a reckless disregard for the truth because they don't care about whether the particulars are true. Given the context of the rest of the not-very-long post, I'm not sure how someone would read some other meaning into that sentence.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9mo ago
does this new evidence change your view
Not even a little.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9mo ago
I don't know why US figures survived this kind of stuff.
Many American politicians have figured out that you can just ignore this stuff and people will probably forget about it. If you're sufficiently shameless you're basically scandal-proof. Also, the structure of US politics makes it harder to get rid of someone. A minister can be sacked, a PM can suffer a leadership challenge, an MP can be kicked off the party list. In the US, an elected official is only really accountable to their voters, and that goes double for state officials. Re: Covid specifically, it helped that basically everyone was ignoring the substance of Covid restrictions anyway.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9mo ago
I sure hope it doesn't take as long to deliver aid to North Carolina as Ukraine. Hopefully fewer fights over it in Congress as well. Maybe there should have been more funding for FEMA in the continuing resolution?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9mo ago
Does FEMA need additional funding?
Partly I am taking a shot at the claim that comes up every time there's some kind of disaster in the US (see also: Hawaii, East Palestine, wildfires, etc...) that foreign aid has somehow compromised our disaster response capabilities - often by the same people who oppose funding disaster preparedness - when in fact the US has capabilities for disaster relief so we don't have to respond in an ad hoc manner like we do with foreign events. When the question comes up: why aren't we doing X grand gesture of relief, the answer is usually that we have something more practical but less grandiose that we're already doing.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9mo ago
mine are that we seem to have unlimited money for Ukraine or Israel (or anybody else, actually!) but when it's our own citizenry, then everything is somehow jammed up.
Can you elaborate, because I keep seeing people say things like this, and I don't get it? It just seems like a kneejerk disaste for foreign aid tied into the topic of the day*. The big Ukraine aid bill took like half a year to negotiate and almost failed. The Federal government spent ~$6 trillion in FY23. Somewhere around 1-2% of that was foreign aid and included support for the largest conventional war of the century.
*what's even more frustrating is that many of the same people who do this also object to spending money on disaster readiness
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9mo ago
My husband insists that if things were as bad as I think, the US Army could get everyone out of Western North Carolina in a day. He knows more about the military than I do - he never made it past basic training due to being underweight but has two siblings in the military, one of which who has made it pretty far across 20 years of service. My husband has a very high opinion of our military's capabilities, but I wonder if his model is outdated.
The US Army probably couldn't evacuate Western North Carolina in a day under ideal circumstances with a perfectly compliant population, never mind in the wake of a major natural disaster. That's not some recent degradation of capability nor a comment on the urgency. Getting a million people out of a mountainous 10k square mile area is going to be an ordeal no matter what.
...Reagan was severely wounded and Kennedy was literally dead.
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