Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
No bio...
User ID: 1226
Ownership exists because many (most?) things are rivalrous - if I have it, you can't, and vice versa - and finite. Even things which are not rivalrous or finite are generally produced with such things (e.g. software may be functionally free to reproduce, but producing it in the first place took real labor effort and material resources). Different ownership schemes are different ways of determining who gets to decide to use/have/dispose of various rivalrous things.
You can't escape from this. A communal ownership arrangement is still an ownership arrangement. If the question is "why private property?" the short answer is that private property with regulation has so far proven to be preferable to alternatives in most cases.
Here's something from years back, before I'd zeroed in on the perverse nature of ownership: ...Capitalism is psychopathy with a makeover.
This is a word game, intent on framing things as negatively as possible by drawing a dubious analogy. There's a fair point about how original title is often rooted in a claim asserted by violence, but there's an equally fair counterpoint of "so what are we going to do about it?" Someone is getting final say over the disposition of stuff. That's not a distinctive feature of capitalism - the State (or Community or whatever entity you imagine) asserting their right to dispose of resources is no less arbitrary - so the real question is what gets us the best outcomes (or at least better outcomes)?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
I'm fairly sure consensus within the discipline is that corporate taxes mostly fall on labor and consumers. They're politically popular because tax incidence is illegible to most voters.
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
3mo ago
I feel like one should consider the possibility that JD Vance was just running his mouth, didn't really think about what he was saying, and is now trying to backpedal from an obviously ridiculous statement without admitting anything.
I thought one of the goals from disentangling from Europe was so they could build up their own military capabilities to defend Europe. If so, why insult the allies (well, maybe no longer allies in the near future) who you want to accomplish this task? Why even make snide comments at all?
I think the most likely explanation* is that this was a performance for domestic audiences, but one view of Trump/Vance-ian foreign policy re: Europe is that they want to bring Europe to heel, not cast them adrift. Europe is supposed to build up their own military capabilities, not so they can forge their own path but so they can better support US goals. Essentially reimagining NATO as vassals rather than allies. In that view, the snide remarks are supposed to remind Europe how much she needs the US so she stops looking for divorce lawyers.
*I think the actual most likely explanation is Vance trying to deliver a dunk and not thinking his statement through.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
American manufacturing is actually really strong
A relevant point to the "why do I never see 'made in USA' labels" is that US manufacturing strengths are not low-end consumer goods like textiles or plasticrap. The US does a lot of high-value manufacturing, but those products are often sold to other businesses.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3mo ago
To be fair to Vance, the historical track record of Operation Bomb Dirt is quite poor. Seeking divine intervention in the hopes that the next round of desultory air strikes will be more productive than in the past is not so unreasonable.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3mo ago
Peter Navarro, Trump's senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, was just on Fox News discussing the tariffs on imported Canadian goods. The headline I've linked highlights his most sensational claim: "Canada has been taken over by Mexican cartels."
Trumpism is a movement defined by outrageous statements, only some of which they are serious about and it's up to you to guess what. Does Navarro (or Trump) really believe that Canada has been taken over by Mexican cartels? Probably not, but you can't dismiss the possibility. Either way, why not say it?
In his speech to congress that same night, Trump discussed tariffs as part of a larger plan: nothing to do with fentanyl, and actually about correcting perceived economic unfairness.
Trump's messaging on tariffs has been incoherent. On the one hand, tariffs are industrial policy, meant to bring back American manufacturing. On the other hand, tariffs are a negotiating tactics, to be dropped in exchange for concessions. On the mutant third hand, tariffs are a revenue alternative - a way to replace income taxes with consumption taxes (though Trump clearly doesn't think of them that way, quite possibly because he doesn't know how tariffs work).
The problem is that at most one of these things can be true. Taking it as a given for now that tariffs-as-industrial policy is effective, you need to maintain the tariffs (so no dropping them as a concession) and you need American consumers to shift to American-made goods (so tariff revenues must decline substantially). If tariffs are a negotiating tactic, you're giving them up for whatever objective you're pursuing and therefore forgoing both industrial development and revenue. If tariffs are supposed to be a revenue stream that substitutes for income taxes, you need Americans to keep buying imports, which means not buying American-made goods at the scale you're expecting for an industrial revival driven by domestic demand.
(In reality, the only one of these that makes any measure of sense is tactical tariffs)
All of which is to say that what Canada can do to reverse the tariffs is probably lobby members of Trump's inner circle to try and change his mind. The likely (but unfortunately not overwhelmingly likely) outcome is that someone prevails upon Trump that this idea is really fucking dumb and Canada makes some symbolic concession so Trump can feel like he got a win. But, there are also quite a few people in the Trump administration who unironically think tariffing everyone is a great idea, so who knows.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
8mo 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.
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.
American casualty tolerance isn’t near what it was in Vietnam, and even that became too much toward the end.
"Casualty tolerance" (or lack thereof) is overrated. What matters is whether or not the populace believes the war is valid and winnable. What did in the Vietnam War was not that the casualties were unbearable but that the American public increasingly believed they were dying for nothing - that the cause was bad, the war was unwinnable, and the government was lying about it.
The problem with war with Iran is not that America can't bear taking casualties. It's that the constituency for war with Iran is John McCain's ghost. For most of the country any number of casualties is too great because the USG doesn't have the credibility to pick that kind of fight.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
If you are going to do protectionism, tariffs are better than subsidies.
I disagree. Subsidies give you (the protecting government) more control over whatever it is you're trying to accomplish. If, e.g., you're trying to build/maintain export competitiveness, with tariffs you're hoping domestic producers decide to do that instead of collecting rents from their captive market. With subsidies you can enforce export discipline by withdrawing support from firms who don't do that or rewarding successful firms.
(Both are, of course, susceptible to corruption or throwing good money after bad)
The primary feature of tariffs strikes me as aesthetic - the payer see the transfer as a tax rather than the indirect subsidy it actually is, the beneficiary gets to pretend they're not getting a handout, and fiscal hawks don't have to bear the indignity of seeing it on the wrong side of the government balance sheet.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3mo ago
Red Tribers have a great deal of use for knowledge. It's just usually directly applicable knowledge.
This is my point. I want to reiterate: I am not saying that Red Tribers are stupid or have no skills. I am saying they have a general disdain for knowledge production. Which, bluntly, the rest of your comment and my own personal experience does not dispute. Knowledge is either inherited or received from trusted community members, and updated only slowly. It's not just that they don't want to personally do academic research, they don't trust the entire process because it's not part of their epistemological paradigm.
I lived in a small Red town in the US for a number of years
So did I. I've lived in Red America in one form or another (it's important to note that "red tribe" != rural) for most of my life. I went to private evangelical schools until I left for college (to my original point, my high school's college counselor advised against going to any but a select list of private Evangelical colleges). Most of my extended family is from the rural Midwest. My perspective on this is personal, not sociological.
(Something I find deeply frustrating about this forum is that it is taken as a given that criticism of the Red Tribe or Red Tribe-adjacent things are coming from a distance)
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?
Canada should be annexed by the US.
If you want further US-Canadian integration, this is pretty much the dumbest possible way to go about it. Not only is it all stick, no carrot, it's being packaged in an extremely humiliating manner.
any Anglo-Canadian identity that stood out from American identity has, as our dear friend Kulak has chronicled, vanished almost entirely.
I don't think that this is true, and Kulak claiming it makes me less likely to believe it, given his... ambitious analytical tendencies. Canadians in general appear not to believe it is true, given the backlash to the proposal. The US and Canada being very similar culturally in some respects* is not the same as Canadians lacking a distinct identity.
*I think the cultural similarity is overstated. Ontarians having significant similarities to upper Midwesterners is one thing - I don't really know that the Quebecois and Floridians have that much in common.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
"Don't resist oppression because you'll lose anyway" is a tactical argument which may or may not be correct depending on circumstances; "it's your fault for trying to resist" is a moral argument. Most people would not say that if the mugger tries to move into your house, it's your fault for trying to kick him out instead of giving him the living room and kitchen in the hopes he doesn't ask for more.
I hate hate hate modern journalism.
Direct quote from the press conference:
Being in its presence just has not been good and it should not go through a process of rebuilding and occupation by the same people that have really stood there and fought for it and lived there and died there and lived a miserable existence there. Instead, we should go to other countries of interest with humanitarian hearts, and there are many of them that want to do this and build various domains that will ultimately be occupied by the million Palestinians living in Gaza, ending the death and destruction and frankly bad luck.
I think Haaretz' paraphrasing is fine. You can try to put a positive gloss on it, but the plan is explicitly that Palestinians would be moved elsewhere. Trump isn't pretending that it's going to be temporary, and even if he was, once the Palestinians are gone I doubt the Israelis are going to let them back.
He is calling for the construction of an international zone in Gaza
Is he? Trump reiterates that the US will own the Gaza strip
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.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1mo ago
Francis' critics and fans outside the Church both seem to have a wildly exaggerated idea of how progressive he was. He was more tolerant (and I use the word advisedly) on certain social issues and was a vocal proponent of the religious humanitarianism* that is pretty standard for the Catholic Church, but he was still fairly socially conservative. He might have be liberal for the pope, but that isn't saying much.
*which, granted, puts him at odds with the... lifeboat capitalism of the contemporary American conservative movement
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
The fundamental error is supposing there's some huge reserve of able-bodied but idle people sitting around. Prime Age LFPR is near an all-time high. Most of the people who don't have a job have a good reason for it (e.g. caretaking, education, age, disability) or are looking for one.
Isn't that just... wonderful? Isn't that exactly what Trump's base voted for? Isn't that, quite literally, how you make America great again?
Why is it wonderful? I actually don't think Trump's base voted for a plan to make everyone so poor we have to flog the elderly and disabled back on the assembly line.
How seriously should we take this reproach? Is it just another tactic to extract concessions from Ukraine before sitting down with them to negotiate a potential deal?
Trump has a history of dealing extremely generously with Putin and taking him at his word. If Putin or his representatives told him it was really Ukraine's fault, I would expect Trump to repeat that. It's probably not helping that Zelenskyy recently pointed this out, since Trump is notoriously fragile.
“You should have never started it,” Mr. Trump said, referring to Ukrainian leaders who, in fact, did not start it. “You could have made a deal.”
The other half of this is that Trump has the mind of a thug. When the powerful threaten you, you make concessions. If you don't, it's your fault for whatever happens.
Arguably, the manly dignity and self-reliance aspects were a side effect of feudal Europe, or at least an older, aristocratic way of thinking.
I can't really speak to "manly dignity", since I'm not really sure what that means, but self-reliance was never an aristocratic value. It is an eminently middle-class one. One of the notional justifications for aristocratic arrangements was that it enabled the aristocrat to pursue higher callings without having to be bothered about the sordid necessities of life.
yeoman farmers (landed gentry)
Yeoman farmers are pointedly not landed gentry: they might have farmhands, but they work their own land. In a sense, they are agrarian petit-bourgeoisie. The gentry by contrast, manage estates (or, more likely, have it managed for them) of tenant farmers (or slaves, in the pre-ACW US). The idea of doing their own farming would've been seen as distasteful.
I note this not to be pedantic, but to point out that there is a massive, yawning gulf between a nation of yeomen and shopkeepers on the one hand, and an aristocratic one on the other. The former is one that at least permits the idea of universal dignity; the latter is one that sees dignity as a zero sum affair.
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
It is vaguely funny watching political and economic analysts try to make sense of this and talk about this like it's a serious policy and not Trump accidentally outflanking degrowthers from the left.
Unfortunately, the humor is somewhat attenuated by the reality that an insane octogenarian billionaire is trying to wreck my country and make me poorer to satisfy his autarky fetish.
The only saving grace is that Trump is fickle
In principle, Congress could shut this whole thing down, since his authority to do this is statutory and there is pretty blatantly not an emergency.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3mo ago
Other possibility is that it is not a new personality trait, only its magnitude has increased lately: Musk has had a documented habit of pushing not exactly reality based visions when he has been able to get away with it
I think this is correct. Musk can simultaneously be a narcissistic bullshitter and a highly capable manufacturing CEO. Delusional overconfidence can be a benefit in certain endeavors because even if you fall short of unrealistic expectations you may still exceed what was conventionally thought possible and you may stick with projects when less demented determined people would have called it quits. On the other hand, it can also lead you to throw away time, money, and effort on unrealistic projects that go nowhere because no amount of force of will can overcome the technical problems.
It can also lead you to repeatedly fall for obvious nonsense because you think you're too smart to be wrong, and none of your retinue dares correct you.
I think there's a conceptual muddle (everywhere, not just here) between LARPing (silly, low-grade imitation, connoting unseriousness or outright insincerity) and Cargo Cult behavior (imitating superficial elements of something while not understanding what actual produces the results).
When someone talks about the homeschool prom being a LARP, what I think they're really getting at is that the organizers are trying to copy the structure of an adolescent courtship ritual without having all of the actual machinery that powers it. You try to set up a dance, but it doesn't work because not only do these teenagers not have pre-existing romantic relationships, they don't even know each other.
Many of my peers can cite concrete negative experiences as their reason for leaving the church, but for myself and quite a few others in my cohort, the reason 14 years of private religious education failed to stick was precisely that it was abundantly clear to me past the age of about ten how silly and fake the whole thing was. Being made to participate in the rituals negatively impacted my religious identification compared to if I'd done the truly traditional thing and gone to church for Christmas, Easter, weddings, and funerals.
And the thing is: my teachers were not LARPers. By and large they were true believers trying to share their genuine belief. If they had been faking it, it would have been even more ridiculous, though I do think their authentic belief actively blinded them to the absurdity of doing things like asking a bunch of upper middle class white 15 year olds to share their personal testimony of being born again.
Which is to say: it's not that hard to think something is stupid and fake while going through the motions, and that's when the people insisting are themselves fully committed to the idea. I struggle to imagine what it would have been like if the schools had been run by present day tradcon LARPers whose interest in evangelical Christianity was purely instrumental.
Yes, because while many people are persuadable, the most important benefit is isolation. The point of making you participate in these rituals is not to convince you that the underlying ideas are correct (though that may be an added benefit), it's to create the impression that everyone thinks these ideas are correct. Many people are pretty milquetoast and will go along with whatever the prevailing opinion is. The Pledge of Allegiance doesn't make you love America; it encourages you to think everyone around you loves America and you'd best get with the program if you don't want to be ostracized. Likewise with widespread church attendance. It's not about faking it 'til you make it; it's about making your preferred belief system the path of least resistance.
Unless you can actually introduce a general preference cascade towards, e.g., religious fundamentalism or at least get your community to voluntarily segregate from broader society, performative piety isn't going to do much. Substantive indoctrination is going to require something more all encompassing and building parallel institutions requires actually building competitive parallel institutions (which is the real sticking point).
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