crushedoranges
No bio...
User ID: 111
crushedoranges
4mo ago
I have suffered wounds in online debates defending realism (and Mearsheimer's offensive realism) by liberal idealists seemingly oblivious to the failures of GWOT, confident that the Ukrainian proxies would succeed where the Iraqi ones failed. The world would have been much better off letting Russia quietly rot away in private, keeping its neighbors in post-Soviet dysfunction until it was too enervated to do anything. But the evil gremlins of the US State Department had their way, and the rest is history.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
"He can't keep getting away with it..!"
Yes. Yes he can. He's the President of the United States.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
I'm not American, but I understand realpolitik.
Trump could be the most pro-slavophile Manchurian agent, literally handpicked by the FSB to bring down America from within, and it still wouldn't matter - he's the American president. He holds the fate of not only Ukraine, but of many nations in his whim. When you're a leader of a nation, when you hold the welfare of millions of your countrymen with your every action you do whatever is necessary to ensure their prosperity and happiness. And that includes winning over the leaders of foreign nations, even if you don't like them. Especially if they're more powerful than you.
Zelensky makes the mistake of thinking he is the equal of the US president. He's not. He's the leader of some backwards Eastern European state that most Americans couldn't point to on a map, even after two years bombarded on the news. And not only that, he's coming hat in hand to ask for blood and treasure - He's asking for an American security guarantee. Trump can get away with humiliating the Europeans because he has the hard power to do it. Zelensky - and Ukraine by proxy - cannot afford to morally grandstand for the Europeans when his nation's very existance is at stake. The strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
Jesus Christ. Zelenskyy, all you had to do was eat your humble pie and suck up to Trump for an hour or two. Macron and Starmer have been working day and night to coax him back. All for nothing!
crushedoranges
4mo ago
I feel that 'appropriate plan' is hiding a gargantuan amount of assumptions where you ask the civil service to reduce headcount and they return to you and say that they need to hire more. It's a Yes, Minister bit, but it would be exactly what would happen. If the civil service had the ability to de-bloat itself we wouldn't have a ketamine-fueled billionaire taking a chainsaw to the institutions. There is no 'best way' to do it: you're going to be Washington Monument'd for a papercut, you might as well go for the head.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
There's a saying in sports: "If you're not cheating, you're not trying hard enough." If people are willing to do incredibly unethical things to alter the outcomes of something that tops out at sports betting, why not politics?
Once you get over the sacred, idealistic form of government, it really is just another ruleset to be gamed. Banging the table and insisting that the Impoundment Act is unconstitutional and doing whatever you want while it winds its way through the courts is just clever brinksmanship. Only the rules that have been formally written down matter: regulations, gentleman's agreements, and norms can be ignored without consequence. Because ultimately what defines legality is how much the institutions are willing to push back against you. If you can get away with it, it becomes precedent.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
Because it would look (and be shamelessly) corrupt. When you shine a light in a dark place, the cockroaches scurry - not from any intellect, but from billions of years of survival instinct. Being quiet and hoping the bear eats you last is the play here: making a scene just makes you a priority target for the vengeful Trump administration.
You're forgetting intersectionality.
Ironically, the ideology that presumes to be about collectivist organization is, in practice, extremely individualist. There are no factions, not in the traditional sense: but thousands of extremely self-interested individuals who have been handed a superweapon to destroy the 'pale, male, and stales' in their way of sinecures and political power.
When you get cancelled, the factions cease to have all meaning.
All of their hands are stained with this blood. Internally, they are just as paranoid as Stalinists. They may internally not believe in idpol but they are forced to because there are hundreds of people after their jobs. They are all replacable, mediocre nobodies that can have everything taken away from them because all they have was given and that is by design.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
The fact that their first instinct to oppose him is to open up a lawsuit is telling. It may have been more effective in a previous era, but it relied on a high-trust society which saw the institutions of government as legitimate. They really have absorbed the Asimovian morality of 'violence is the last resort of the incompetent', but hoping that historical forces give you victory isn't strategy. It's not even tactics. It's assuming that the universe will award you with moral victories without developing virtue.
crushedoranges
4mo ago
Let me take the neutral ground and say that GamerGate wasn't the precipitating event, but it was pivotal insomuch as videogames were (and still are) a universal hobby of young men. And when confronted with the blunt and obvious truth of Noticing the blue-hairs ruin everything, one could either go down the trail of Noticing everything else or sticking your head in the sand and saying it's a good thing. The 4chan/Resetra divergence, the chud/woke speciation.
It was the universal radicalizing event of the generation, and even those who were normie enough to not care were inculcated with the memes (on both the left and right.) No one questions the cultural impact of music or movies. Video games as a medium are larger than both combined. At some point, video games transitioned from being influenced by political trends to making them. Comparing the financial success of chudgames vs wokegames has become a tribal sport.
Which is to say... if someone plays a piece of media for thousands of hours, having it consume every waking moment of their lives, of course it would effect their political values. New Atheism and BLM are dead and gone but people are still mad that they got rid of Tracer's ass wiggle. I think you're just disconnected with what young men back then and now consider important.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
But Catholicism is a monotheist faith, which denies that any other religion has validity and it is the one true path to salvation.
To get away from the analogy, it would be like say that Wokism is a tolerant and diverse sociological lense, but it doesn't consider any other interpretation to disparate impact other than racism.
It is trivially easy to assert that your parochial views are actually universal unpartisan principles. Or 'just being a good person', as I've heard it being told.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
I feel called out at the moment, so, first, my mea culpas.
@Amadan I am aware that being a rightist partisan is not very conducive to the kind of space that the moderates wish to nurture. I, myself, personally moderate spaces where I have to manage people being political. Knowing this makes my behaviour even more unacceptable, and for that I apologize. I don't really have an excuse for my rhetoric, for liking the heat instead of the light. But I am not a passing internet troll, or fishing for responses from outraged liberals. I have been here in one form or another, and I actually like being here.
Moving forward, I will try to not clog up your moderation queue with my hot takes. I'll try.
@4bpp I disagree with the notion of reports as an enforcement mechanism because it is trivially easy to game, if one is a motivated bad actor. If an individual post is bad, one can downvote it. If it annoys one sufficiently, one can rebut it (although I concede the effort may not be worth the squeeze in nearly all cases.) Reporting is the tool of last resort, when something is noisome and of no value whatsoever.
But you report so much that the lack of response feels like a waste of effort?
I can't recall the last time I reported anyone. That's how little I use the feature. Do you want to be a moderator? You have a thousand posts... a lot more than me. Obviously you have opinions on what the Motte should be. But the demos has an opinion, too. Expressed through upvotes. Metathoughts about the pernicious nature of such social media systems nonwithstanding, is that not the fairest way of determining the merit of what someone is saying?
(I admit that the proposition of 'being maximally evil in posture to EA people' is horrifying, but no more so than the people who constantly talk about 'race realism'.)
I am also aware that the Motte has problems with ideological diversity. But that isn't my fault, that those on the left evaporatively leave. It's not like I'm running around conspiratorially reporting the TracingWoodgrains of the world. They left. Cannot I talk to those of a similar ideological bent? It's not like I'm pretending to be objective or anything. Am I being asked to keep it down to make sure the last leftists don't just pull up stakes and leave, leaving the Motte a witch-chamber?
I've been on a hot streak of hot takes recently, so I'll probably take a step back for a while. But if you have a problem with my posts or you believe that I don't belong here, you can say so. You don't have to write me up in a post complaining about moderation. That's all I have to say.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
I was speaking circuitously: what I meant is that 'conservatives should act as if the value foreign lives at zero'.
This serves a tactical purpose, as to defang reflexive knee-jerk appeals to sympathy.
But also strategically, in shining a spotlight on the revealed preference of their enemies as to the value of foreign life. If foreign lives are valued at one to one, and conservatives are through inaction killing them, then liberals are put in a moral dilemna to overthrow the government or reduce their valuation in contrast to their rhetoric. More likely, however, there will be a downward correction: and then the true work of negotiation begins.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
I believe that the entire US federal government and civil service is an obstacle to conservative victory. There's only so many times you can play kayfabe and watch your politicians be devoured by DC and come out as creatures of the American imperium. It was a mistake to believe that the institutions would abide by the popular will and not act in their own self-interest. At some point Elrond has to push Isildur into the volcano instead of hoping he won't be tempted.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
All I am asking is for conservatives to put the same level of value on the lives of foreigners as their domestic opponents do on fertilized human embryros. That is the level of commitment that they will need to win. If they can endure that level of opprobrium then the battle is already won. Do you believe that pro-choicers support abortions to 'own the cons'..? On some level, maybe. But they have a genuine belief in the liberty of women, unshackling them from the tyranny of biology. We must similarly have cruel principles that put our own well being over the needs of others.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
You flatter me. I have a sophist's love of rhetoric: but if politics is serious - if it is about human life - then it should be taken seriously. I find it less moral to equivocate, to pretend that there is a difference between 'save some lives' and 'save all'. Removing the room for argument is the only way to reduce the size of government otherwise you are merely a ratchet on Leviathan's appetite.
Seventy years pro-life activists have called their opponents baby-killers and it did not swerve their opposition's resolve by one inch.
Conservatives, particularly MAGA conservatives, must harden their hearts as such. In the coming months and years, there will be no end to the wailing. They will beg you in the name that all that is decent and humane to give them the one exception and save many lives. The rationalist crowd will come to you with spreadsheets and lives per dollar and give logical arguments to save lives. You will be constantly bombarded with propaganda designed to psyop you to support the return of the old status quo.
Put on your biggest smile and say no. That's your cross to bear. Resist the temptation to give in, and to be seen as 'one of the good ones'. Mercy and compassion are the luxuries of the victor, and you have not won yet. This is but the first of many battles in a long war. If your opponents say that your proposals will cost millions of lives, say to them: "Billions." And do what you intended to do, and do it so throughly and completely that it does not have to be done again. Embrace the virtue of Lycurgus and destroy what you must to save what you can.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
Popular presidents ignore the constitution all the time. Unless you're arguing that FDR's internment of Japanese-Americans was constitutional. The Biden administration made clear its intent to ignore the constitution when it was searching for a way to make good on its promise to make a handout to the college educated. It's unclear as to the executive branch auditing itself and controlling its staffing is unconstitutional: the Trump administration should ignore the lower courts until a clarifying ruling comes down from the Supreme Court.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
They could. But then Trump could instruct the DoJ not to enforce that ruling.
You see, without the rule of law and trust in institutions, all judges are is old people in unfashionable black robes. They're not wizards. If the judiciary is percieved (and acts) in a partisan way, then the other branches of government can hit back. The people shouting about checks and balances are unhappy it's being used on them.
All of this line-pushing is designed to go to the Supreme Court. It's clear from the Trump Administration's intent that they will no longer tolerate the judiciary getting in the way of their agenda with legalese. They don't regard them as a neutral institution enforcing the rule of law, but one colonized by its enemies.
I predict that the Supreme Court will give way to Trump to preserve its own legitimacy, as the court did to FDR to prevent him from stuffing it with his appointees.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
The judiciary doesn't have any formal mechanism to enforce a ruling upon the executive branch other than by tradition and precedent. If he makes unlawful, unconstitutional orders, Congress has reason to impeach him. But if Congress doesn't want to impeach him, then he gets away with it. It really is that simple. What do you want the judiciary to do? Send in the US Marshals, start a civil war?
Now perhaps there's a constitutional argument to go against whatever the president is doing. Certainly you could make a case for anything. But the vesting clause is very clear that the President is endowed with the full powers of the office. The Supreme Court will not suddenly make a ruling that will formalize any sort of control on the executive branch.
Do you have an argument to bring to bear against the unitary executive? How is the presidency supposed to work? Is there a strong legal theory behind the ability of fifty state judges to have a veto over the President?
crushedoranges
5mo ago
Checks and balances does not mean that your political enemies don't get to do any of their agenda. Sometimes in a democracy things happen you don't like. The judiciary is the least democratic institution in the American republic, the least accountable. If the President defies the judiciary and Congress supports him then the President gets his way. That's the part of checks and balances you probably don't like, and that's probably how it's going to end.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
I have seen too many anthro german shepherds in suspicious outfits to say that he would not be in good company if he did make the change.
It's not that I wasn't sympathetic before. I too, was on the left. But that was fifteen years ago. I feel at this point that everyone persuadable has already decamped and we are in the last stages of Schmittian hyperwar. I can't imagine sharing common ground with those on the left who call TW a fascist. They live in their own partisan hyperreality and attempting to convert them is like being a Christian missionary to the Sentinelese.
I'm sorry. There is no way to survive. You have to pick your lane, or you end up like James Damore. If I have to make a choice between the twitter racists and the race communists, I'm siding with the former over the latter every time. It's not a great choice. But it's better than refusing to acknowledge that one has to make a choice at all.
crushedoranges
5mo ago
No. Obviously not.
Yes.
Despite this, or perhaps because of it: I feel that I have an infinitely easier and gladder task of convincing partisans of my ideological bent to come around to reason then TW does for theirs. Not everyone on my side is an honest truthteller. We have our share of witches and evil liars. But there's the kind of lies that make you feel the ick, and the kind of lies that make planes fall out of the sky. One is a more egregious imposition on reality than the other.
I mean, the Budapest Memorandum could have been made a real paper (just as 'protector of Orthodox Christians' was a thin excuse to meddle in the Ottoman Empire) but Obama chose to not pick it up, and Biden after him. The Monroe doctrine doesn't exist on any formal treaty or legislation but if any European decided to invade a South American country Uncle Sam would magically appear regardless of the lack of justification to do so.
'Law' in this case was just the pretense of legality: if the Americans really wanted to go down to the mat for Ukraine, they'd have manufactured a reason to do so. They didn't, so they fell on the 'do nothing' side of strategic ambiguity.
More options
Context Copy link