TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
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User ID: 373
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
The casual scamming is really doing a number on perceptions of India like you say, and Kitboga is at least a little uncomfortable that people are noticing all his targets are Indians. I can't believe an entire country is so relaxed about being known as casual scammers, and will lash out at you if you criticize this behavior with whataboutisms or saying white people deserve it. It's like the country has taken the worst aspects of the left (obsession with race, hatred of whites, constant indignation) and the right (hypernationalism, also constant indignation) into a horrible synthesis.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
That sort of thing (tough publicly, cordial privately) happened back in the Reagan years between the two parties, but mostly died after Clinton to my knowledge. It might have happened to intra-party disputes between different factions afterwards, but it's definitely not the modal outcome when dealing with Trump. He's very concerned with personal honor and his obsession with "loyalty" is thinly coded for "does what I want". If any R goes against Trump, he'll privately construe them (in his head, and to his aides) that they're disloyal traitors. Trump has been more obsessed with heresy-purging than actually winning against the Ds. All of this is a recipe for genuine dislike between the actors.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Read the link I posted a few replies above. Hanania explains it quite eloquently.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Sure, but voters are bad at punishing politicians for specific transgressions in the best of times. If Desantis really wanted to snub Trump he could likely get away with it if he staged it correctly, and didn't go too far like nominating a Democrat. That's not to say that that's likely to happen, just that it's a possibility, which is part of why it's implausible that Trump has some 4D plan in his head. It's far more likely that one of Trump's advisors put Rubio's name forward, Trump went "oh yeah, that guy, he's alright, he didn't vote to impeach me" and that was it.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
She's followed quite a similar arc that RFK Jr. has, initially being a Democrat but being very out of step with any major faction. She also has a big thing for conspiracies, like claiming the Syrian gas attack was a false-flag by the British, or being very worried about "biolabs" in Ukraine that Putin was using as fodder for innuendo that the US was creating a supervirus to mass-murder Slavs. The Gribble faction loves stuff like this.
I owned up to the Selzer poll being wrong, specifically about thinking it would be off by less than 10 points. The arguments against it were pretty uniformly medicore, along the lines of "nah, it just feels wrong" or crosstab diving or "unskewing", against a pollster who had a track record of proving her critics wrong over and over (e.g. in 2020, when she was far more pro-Trump than most of the competition, and ended up being right). Obviously it ended up being incorrect, and now Selzer has a lot of egg on her face.
Also, I'm not a fan of ad hominem attacks so this will probably be my last response to you.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Desantis was the one who was quickest to see where the winds were blowing and endorse the guy without reservation.
He only endorsed when it was very clear that Trump was going to trounce him in the primaries. Haley was the only semi-major candidate left in after Iowa. And his endorsement was more like a detente at the time.
By comparison, I still remember when Trump's nickname for Rubio was "Little Marco."
What does this have to do with anything? Ron's nickname was "desanctimonious".
And it is also obvious that replacing a Senator is a much higher-leverage move than replacing a house member, in general.
Not when Trump will likely have a 53-47 majority in the Senate, vs a very narrow majority in the House that's known for being chaotic and unpredictable.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
She's a crank with similar vibes to RFK Jr. or Ron Paul, although they have very different voting records. The fact this group has ascended now is thanks to the Republicans being dominated by the Dale Gribble voters.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
They're not bitter ideological enemies, but they are political rivals in the same vein as Sanders vs Warren.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
All I see on your chart is the nominal amount of money going to government employees going up, but it's not indexed to inflation, so it's useless.
I'm not sure what point you're making about budgets that I haven't already addressed. Federal headcount is declining as a percent of the total workforce. Federal salaries are declining as a percent of total government spending. I've never heard anyone claim people become bureaucrats to get rich (they'd do it for benefits and job stability).
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
I'm not sure what your chart is supposed to be showing. You should be able to share it by pressing the button in the bottom left that says "share links". That's how I did mine.
The best comparison would be to compare a government position to an equivalent private sector position (controlling for things like title inflation, responsibilities, etc.). I don't have that data on hand, but if I did, I reckon it would show government compensation (ex. benefits) is slightly lower than the private sector.
The notion that government employees are vastly overpaid by hiding salaries in higher pay grades seems farfetched to me. I don't doubt there's more federal employees on the higher end, but that's to be expected given change in technologies. If they e.g. wanted to digitize a federal service, they'd need to hire a computer programmer, which isn't cheap.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
If you only take the raw number of employees across time then it's confounded by population growth and labor force participation. It's like not adjusting a monetary metric for inflation. So sure, the total headcount has only dropped slightly from the 90s, but if that's put into context then it's clear that the federal bureaucracy has been quite constrained as a percent of the overall labor force.
In terms of of whether using the term "budget" is correct here, you're slightly more correct but I'd say you're being pedantic. It should have been clear that I was talking about personnel budgets specifically, given the context of the sentence. Also, for the record "slashed" probably is less true than "constrained, especially in regards to inflation", but I digress.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Oh goodness.
Yes, Trump's grand move is to empower Desantis, the man who tried to kill the king less than a year ago, with whom there's still bad blood privately, and who has only begrudgingly fallen into line. To replace Rubio... a senator who hasn't really made an anti-Trump stink since 2016.
Why not do this against Murkowski instead, a senator who voted to impeach Trump?
Alternatively, why not do this to a House seat, given that chamber is likely to be far closer.
And Rubio gets fired as SecState inside 2 years, probably.
Unironically plausible, given Trump is so utterly capricious with his nominees. Rubio could be setting himself up to get the same fate that befell Jeff Sessions.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Unions could be a source of savings, but only like 1/3rd of federal employees are in unions, and part of what makes federal employment bearable is the benefits and job security that such unions have been able provide. If Elon thinks he can get a workforce that has private sector benefits + job security, but with the paylevel of the federal government, I have a bridge to sell him. The notion that there exists huge swathes of the government where employees sit around doing nothing simply because "they can't be fired" is illusory.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
No. He was willing to stay in dumb wars far longer than we should have (e.g. his endless delays on withdrawing from Afghanistan) because actually exiting would lock in the losses that had been practically inevitable for a long time, which "would look weak". One could say that being in the Middle East at all is a serious misallocation of American resources.
I don't deny the logic of not being seen as a pushover on the international stage, but Trump's fear of "looking weak" was far more driven by Fox News pundits than by actual geopolitical perceptions.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
He delayed endlessly, and if he were re-elected there was a good chance he would have delayed even longer past the date he had previously set.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
but I can't stop laughing at putting two executives in charge of the new department in charge of reducing redundancy.
This is a great, hilarious point actually!
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
I highly doubt Musk will be able to make much progress. He might be able to bag a few high profile wins in a few places at best, but he's not going to get anywhere near the $2 trillion mark he set for himself. There's not nearly that much fat to be trimmed before he'd inadvertently start chopping off bones that people care about and would complain about loudly, and Trump isn't going to let Musk cause too many bad Fox news cycles before he snaps and it becomes a battle of the egos.
If there's anywhere to improve government that could simultaneously reduce costs and improve outcomes, it would be paring back the army of contractors the government has leveraged as a bandaid when people want to get something done, but R's slashed budgets so much that nobody in the government has the competency to do them. But undoing that would mean hiring more government employees and probably paying them more as well, which strongly goes against R vibes and is thus unlikely to be considered.
It's simple: People falsely attribute policies they personally prefer to politicians they like the vibes of. This denial of reality isn't infinite, but it is very strong. Right-leaning isolationists tired of "forever wars" thus falsely think Trump shares their view, or is even an outright pacifist. They use ridiculously overfit evidence like "no new wars happened under Trump", and aggressively ignore everything else like Trump nearly sparking a war with Iran, entangling us further in Israel, not withdrawing from Afghanistan, sending weapons to Ukraine, wafflemaxxing on China, employing hawks like Bolton or Pompeo, etc.
Trump doesn't like war in and of itself, but he hates being seen as "weak" far, far, FAR more. Avoiding situations that "make us look weak" is the amorphous basis of his entire foreign policy.
Although I must say it's entertaining to watch people try to come up with ever more elaborate justifications to resolve their cognitive dissonance. The "4D chess" hypotheses are always worth a laugh.
Trump has a lot of flexibility given his nothingburger answers so far.
The worst-case scenario (for someone like me, who is pro-Ukraine) is that Trump caves to the Tucker Carlson wing and "forces" the two sides to negotiate by unilaterally demanding Ukraine surrender to Russian terms or face a complete cutoff of US support, or even levying sanctions against them. Trump has the space to simply declare Ukraine to be "Biden's mess", claim it was always rightful Russian lebensraum, that surrendering it will bring peace in our time, and throw them to the wolves. There might be some token concessions ("Russia must agree to play nice") that Trump would claim as "balancing both sides", and largely ignore the situation as it deteriorates like what happened with North Korea during his first term.
But Trump's not naturally anywhere near as pacifist as his supporters make him out to be. He could also decide to just muddle along like he did with Afghanistan. He might make a few incendiary tweets, claim the Europeans need to do more, but he could change his mind back to supporting them when he gets a call from Lindsey Graham or some Polish politician.
The path he takes is very uncertain as Trump has always been a waffle, and it may literally come down to whoever talks to him last getting their way.
Conditional on Trump forcing a truce, my modal scenario is actually that in a year's time a stronger Ukraine steamrolls a weaker Russia
This would be a very unusual scenario. The war so far has been completely dominated by hard positional fighting akin to WW1. Unless there's some new innovation that's on par with the tank, I doubt either side would steamroll the other without some massive force-generation problems making one side particularly brittle.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
I definitely think it'll experience something of a modest second-wind, but that it won't be nearly as prominent as during peak woke of the 2017-2020 era. Thermostatic equilibrium is one of the most enduring phenomena in politics that's survived even the extremely polarized environment of the US. Trump will try to crack down on immigration in a hamfisted way, somebody will take a picture of a migrant child in a cage or dead in the desert or whatever, and public opinion will swing back towards being somewhat pro-immigration.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
For what it's worth, I'll cop to the fact that I would have lost the bet. Selzer had a pretty stellar record before, but this was a massive, high-profile mistake that she'll likely never recover from, at least not fully.
They do this by being cordial publicly, but ridiculing Trump privately. Most R senators think Trump is a buffoon, but they do what he wants since he has a long track record of crusading against Republicans who defy him. A good example is how R senators all voted against the Trump candidate for Senate Majority Leader, but they only did so because it was a private ballot and Trump can't accurately retaliate against any of them.
While Trump can hold grudges, they're not permanent since he gets distracted easily. He's willing to go further on grudges than almost anything else, but even that has a limit of 1-3 years, by which point Trump's either usually succeeded or failed at harming them. Vance's transgressions in 2016 likely don't paint him well in Trump's eyes, but it's sufficiently long enough ago that he can portray it as ancient history.
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