curious_straight_ca
No bio...
User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
5mo ago
I think if anything it conveys he'll back down in exchange for small concessions to avoid hurting markets? Like he could have just said 'hey, commit to doing this trade deal or tariffs go on in a month'. Instead we got this.
curious_straight_ca
3mo ago
They really aren't. You could predict AI being a big deal much better by reading blogposts than looking at stock prices.
curious_straight_ca
5mo ago
The big issue is the co-occurence of the 1/6 riot and the fake electors thing and the attempt to get Mike Pence to not certify the election. I agree it wasn't a real risk to democracy, but if you believe the continuation of democracy is desirable, that should be concerning, when it looks like the leadership of a major party isn't invested in following election results (yes, this depends on a judgement that election fraud allegations are false, imo they are, and we've discussed that to death and they're just not very smart), and is willing to play along with admittedly feeble attempts at violence. (And if you believe democracy isn't desirable, the childishness of the half-assed attempt to overturn it shouldn't be exciting either)
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
(I meant to do a bigger post about this but never got around to it) Sure, Hegseth is a "warfighter". He's still not qualified, though. I'm not talking about cheating on his wife, and cheating on his second wife, both of which blatantly violate the UCMJ, and although that's already very selectively enforced, this really can't help. Nor am I talking about his reported alcoholism (also a UCMJ issue), which many sources had claimed led to him being forced out of leading a veterans organization. Nor am I talking about allegations he abused his wife, nor allegations of sexual assault (which I don't think had enough evidence to be worth considering here anyway). All of those are modifiers - things that might make you not hire someone who you'd otherwise hire. It's just, directly, his lack of experience. Any given 'warfighter' wouldn't make a good secdef, you need to manage an incredibly large bureaucracy, which is a distinct skill, and also just make good decisions. There's just no strong reason to pick him instead of many other very qualified candidates. Fox news host?
I agree with criticisms of Biden's Lloyd Austin pick - he's obviously a diversity hire. When you pick the best black person, instead of the best person, you'll get a worse person, and in critical leadership positions that matters! It'd matter even without HBD, with which the best black person will usually be significantly worse than the best person. But, if you believe that, that it's very important to pick the best person, how do you get Hegseth? Austin was at least qualified:
Shortly after brigade command, he served as Chief, Joint Operations Division, J-3, on the Joint Staff at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. His next assignment, in 2001, was as Assistant Division Commander for Maneuver (ADC-M), 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized), Fort Stewart, Georgia. As the ADC-M, he helped lead the division's invasion of Iraq in March 2003.[9] Leading the fight from the front, Austin traveled the 500 miles from Kuwait to Baghdad in his command and control vehicle. The division reached Baghdad and secured the city.[14][15] Austin was awarded a Silver Star, the nation's third highest award for valor, for his actions as commander during the invasion.
On December 8, 2006, Austin was promoted to lieutenant general and assumed command of XVIII Airborne Corps, Fort Bragg, North Carolina.[17] In February 2008, Austin became the second highest ranking commander in Iraq, taking command of the Multi-National Corps – Iraq (MNC-I). As commander of MNC-I, he directed the operations of approximately 152,000 joint and coalition forces across all sectors of Iraq.[18] He was the first African American general officer to lead a corps-sized element in combat.[15] Austin assumed the mission during the period when the Surge forces were drawing down. He expertly oversaw the responsible transition of forces out of the country while ensuring that progress continued on the ground.
Austin became the commander of CENTCOM on March 22, 2013, after being nominated by President Obama in late 2012.[37][38][39] Austin was preceded as CENTCOM commander by General James Mattis, whom Austin would later succeed as secretary of defense. In his capacity as CENTCOM Commander, General Austin oversaw all U.S. troops deployed and major U.S. military operations around the area of Middle-East and Central and South Asia. The area consisted of 20 countries including Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Egypt and Lebanon.[40]
Whereas Hegseth 'served first as an infantry platoon leader and later as civil-military operations officer' and then 'returned to active duty in 2012 as a captain' in Afghanistan. And then went into politics, and then became a Fox News host. All that should be respected, but qualify you to be secdef?
curious_straight_ca
5mo ago
I think the chance is nonzero because Trump's sometimes unpredictable, but it's quite unlikely. The US has the technical ability to do it, sure, nobody outside can stop us. But it's a terrible idea politically. Just the deaths from Afghanistan withdrawal - which was a popular campaign promise - seriously hurt Biden, sending American troops to die to develop waterfront Gaza property will stop appealing to voters when Americans start dying. It cuts strongly against the 'no foreign wars' wing of the new GOP. It sounds like yet another Iraq or Afghanistan. Nearby Arab countries hate the idea, rightly recognizing it taking in millions of Gazans as a serious threat to their security and even sovereignty. And I don't think anyone other than Trump or Kushner in American politics really want it.
And all of that's a pity, because, if implemented competently, it's a great idea, and one of the only things that could properly resolve the conflict, and lead to a good outcome under liberal values. Move almost all of Gaza's population to a new area where we've built a bunch of buildings and control security and the flow of goods in and out makes suicide bombing and terrorist resistance a lot harder. And then, without a civilian population, you can obliterate whatever of Hamas remains underground with less collateral damage. Israel's Arab population proves that, whatever their average IQ, Palestinians aren't destined to be economically net-negative, so if the culture of the new settlement was managed well enough it could become self-sustaining economically reasonably quickly. This would all, of course, involve truly massive expenditures of money and manpower, and also something existing America would fail badly at if they tried, but if one really, really cares about the plight of suffering Gazans or Israeli victims of terrorism, it's the best solution. It's very unfortunate to be forced out of your ancestral homeland, but it's less bad than just dying or perpetual conflict. This is also plan moldbug.
curious_straight_ca
3mo ago
But especially for children this doesn’t make sense. Kids are impressionable, they tend to believe and accept what adults tell them
Yeah, this is the key. And it's not just that kids will believe facts you tell them, they'll absorb anything, often randomly, from their surroundings. Show someone ballet on TV? Maybe the kid (usually a girl, but sometimes a boy), will want to do ballet. I know someone who wore skirts for a few years around age 12, just because they said they wanted to and their parents didn't care. (It wasn't even associated with anything else gender-related, they were otherwise typically male). Raise a child on an isolated farm somewhere, appearing to genuinely claim that Zeus is a real god of thunder you worship and do rituals around, and there's a good chance they'll have spiritual experiences about the reality of Zeus. Of course if trans is a thing that kids read about, some kids will decide they're trans for no particularly strong reason.
I think the social contagion-ness of trans is definitely true, but bit overstated - at least in MtFs, it's also tapping into a very real tendency that exists independently of the contagion.
Something that more centrally embodies social contagion theory imo are eating disorders among teenage girls. Zack M Davis pretty persuasively explained how he had urges clearly identifiable as transgender, or as he'd describe it AGP, a while before he had any idea what transgender was. But just by searching #edtwt on twitter and browsing for a while, I don't see how one can avoid the conclusion that this would almost disappear without the social factor. I find it insane that twitter will ban saying 'kill yourself', but not this.
curious_straight_ca
5mo ago
Now is in fact the best time to post some LLM junk, given nobody'll read it! Asking an LLM to make a post for you just does not pass the effort rule.
curious_straight_ca
3mo ago
Trump's actions have not been mere ribbing. Trump also brought up something much more fundamental. He told Mr. Trudeau that he did not believe that the treaty that demarcates the border between the two countries was valid and that he wants to revise the boundary. He offered no further explanation. Also:
One such call was between Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick — who at the time had not yet been confirmed by the Senate — and Canada’s finance minister, Dominic LeBlanc. The two men had been communicating regularly since they had met at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s home and club in Florida, during Mr. Trudeau’s visit there in early December.
Mr. Lutnick called Mr. LeBlanc after the leaders had spoken on Feb. 3, and issued a devastating message, according to several people familiar with the call: Mr. Trump, he said, had come to realize that the relationship between the United States and Canada was governed by a slew of agreements and treaties that were easy to abandon.
Mr. Trump was interested in doing just that, Mr. Lutnick said. He wanted to eject Canada out of an intelligence-sharing group known as the Five Eyes that also includes Britain, Australia and New Zealand. He wanted to tear up the Great Lakes agreements and conventions between the two nations that lay out how they share and manage Lakes Superior, Huron, Erie and Ontario. And he is also reviewing military cooperation between the two countries, particularly the North American Aerospace Defense Command.
And, sure, it's Trump, the main reason he's saying these things is because it makes this kind of news. He's probably not going to do any of that, and annexation seems implausible.
If I were named Canada's Trump wrangler, I'd call him up and have frank negociations on what he really wants (as opposed to the excuse to give him the power to do it, Fentanyl). What he wants and expects tariffs to do is reshoring, right? Canada can help! Canada could offer to match US tariffs on China; we've been having a tense relationship with China in recent years anyway, and it would increase the market for american manufactured goods.
They have done this, it's part of how they got the initial set of tariff delays, but Trump has not been clear about what he wants or how Canada could actually accomplish it!
curious_straight_ca
5mo ago
Come on, are we really supposed to believe that every new account with only a few past comments that makes a post about some dissident right current thing, from the perspective of a liberal, who definitely disagrees with the thing he's posting, and that always writes with the same tone, are all unrelated? This doesn't happen for any other topic.
curious_straight_ca
7mo ago
I mean with 300M people in a country, if just 5% of the top 99.99% at english lit talent want to be academics that's 1500 full-time jobs, too much for the top 10 institutions.
curious_straight_ca
5mo ago
impartially enforcing the laws against your own kin is a lot to ask
it's something we ask of everyone in government, especially people involved in prosecuting and judging crimes, and it's very reasonable and useful
curious_straight_ca
2mo ago
Trump could've just asked Bukele to say "I won't let you take gang members back, of course" and then Trump would've said "oh well". Instead, though, Bukele said "I can't smuggle a gang member back into the US", implying Trump's stance stance was not allowing him to come back.
I dunno, government shutdowns due to ineffective governance and republican infighting sounds exactly like the first Trump administration. Springing this on congress a few days before the deadline when they thought they had everything worked out isn't a great way to introduce your administration, they hate working holidays. And it doesn't work as a show of power if you don't get your desired bill through, it just looks uncoordinated and capricious.
curious_straight_ca
7mo ago
I'm not sure the concept of 'status' as this drive we semi-unconsciously pursue adds any explanatory value. The reason that having kids isn't 'high status' anymore is that the moral values we hold and express have shifted away from ones that name having children and a family as a duty, and a good, to ones that name 'freedom' from the coercion of patriarchy as a good. So if people are having fewer children, it's because they value them less. That it's higher status in Amish and Haredi communities to have children is just a direct consequence of them valuing children more! A reasonable number of people in liberal communities have two children, and some have 3+, because they, personally, value it, even though it's 'low status'.
I think removing that layer explains why this is harder than the government merely telling citizens they should have children - the reasons we value children less are very deep ideological ones tied with the growth of liberalism and progressivism over the past few centuries. And the reason the government isn't doing that is because the people in government, and the voters, don't value having more children. If everyone (or even all elites) valued having children as much as you or Elon do, the game would already be over!
curious_straight_ca
6mo ago
When the best ramen shops in Tokyo don't hike up their prices despite massive queues
... Is that good? Not hiking their prices doesn't eliminate the scarcity, so people still end up competing to pay in time waiting in queue, which just burns value in the form of time rather than exchanging it in the form of money. American companies reducing quality when they get big is very common and quite bad though.
curious_straight_ca
3mo ago
most IEPs are not that
this is true, but I think a lot of the expenses from IEPs are from the hard cases - it costs a lot more to pay a specialist to 1:1 a kid every day than it does to give someone extra time on tests
The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden
The president’s mental decline was like a dark family secret for many elite supporters.
By Olivia Nuzzi
Just read the whole article. If not, the best parts:
Obsessive efforts to control Biden were not a new phenomenon. But whereas in the last campaign, the incredible stagecraft surrounding even the smallest Biden event — speaking to a few people at a union hall in rural Iowa, say, or in a barn in New Hampshire — seemed to be about avoiding the so-called gaffes that had become for him inevitable, the stagecraft of the 2024 campaign seems now to be about something else. The worry is not that Biden will say something overly candid, or say something he didn’t mean to say, but that he will communicate through his appearance that he is not really there.
...
In January, I began hearing similar stories from Democratic officials, activists, and donors. All people who supported the president and were working to help reelect him to a second term in office. Following encounters with the president, they had arrived at the same concern: Could he really do this for another four years? Could he even make it to Election Day?
When they discussed what they knew, what they had seen, what they had heard, they literally whispered. They were scared and horrified. But they were also burdened. They needed to talk about it (though not on the record). They needed to know that they were not alone and not crazy. Things were bad, and they knew things were bad, and they knew others must also know things were bad, and yet they would need to pretend, outwardly, that things were fine. The president was fine. The election would be fine. They would be fine. To admit otherwise would mean jeopardizing the future of the country and, well, nobody wanted to be responsible personally or socially for that. Their disclosures often followed innocent questions: Have you seen the president lately? How does he seem? Often, they would answer with only silence, their eyes widening cartoonishly, their heads shaking back and forth. Or with disapproving sounds. “Phhhhwwwaahhh.” “Uggghhhhhhhhh.” “Bbbwwhhheeuuw.” Or with a simple, “Not good! Not good!” Or with an accusatory question of their own: “Have you seen him?!”
Who was actually in charge? Nobody knew. But surely someone was in charge? And surely there must be a plan, since surely this situation could not endure? I heard these questions posed at cocktail parties on the coasts but also at MAGA rallies in Middle America. There emerged a comical overlap between the beliefs of the nation’s most elite liberal Biden supporters and the beliefs of the most rabid and conspiratorial supporters of former President Trump. Resistance or QAnon, they shared a grand theory of America in 2024: There has to be a secret group of high-level government leaders who control Biden and who will soon set into motion their plan to replace Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee. Nothing else made sense. They were in full agreement.
...
[April 2024] The first person I saw upon entering the subterranean space was the First Lady...
In the basement, I smiled and said hello. She looked back at me with a confused, panicked expression. It was as if she had just received horrible news and was about to run out of the room and into some kind of a family emergency. “Uh, hi,” she said. Then she glanced over to her right. Oh …
I had not seen the president up close in some time. I had skipped this season’s holiday parties, and, preoccupied with covering Trump’s legal and political dramas, I hadn’t been showing up at his White House. Unlike Trump, he wasn’t very accessible to the press, anyway. Why bother? Biden had done few interviews. He wasn’t prone to interrupting his schedule with a surprise media circus in the Oval Office. He kept a tight circle of the same close advisers who had been advising him for more than 30 years, so unlike with his predecessor, you didn’t need to hang around in West Wing hallways to figure out who was speaking to him. It was all pretty locked down and predictable in terms of the reality you could access as a member of the press with a White House hard pass.
I followed the First Lady’s gaze and found the president. Now I understood her panicked expression.
Up close, the president does not look quite plausible. It’s not that he’s old. We all know what old looks like. Bernie Sanders is old. Mitch McConnell is old. Most of the ruling class is old. The president was something stranger, something not of this earth. This was true even in 2020. His face had then an uncanny valley quality that injectable aficionados call “low trust” — if only by millimeters, his cosmetically altered proportions knocked his overall facial harmony into the realm of the improbable. His thin skin, long a figurative problem and now a literal one, was pulled tightly over cheeks that seemed to vary month to month in volume. Under artificial light and in the sunshine, he took on an unnatural gleam. He looked, well, inflated. His eyes were half-shut or open very wide. They appeared darker than they once had, his pupils dilated. He did not blink at regular intervals. The White House often did not engage when questioned about the president’s stare, which sometimes raised alarm on social media when documented in official videos produced by the White House. The administration was above conspiratorial chitchat that entertained seriously scenarios in which the president was suffering from a shocking decline most Americans were not seeing. If the president was being portrayed that way, it was by his political enemies on the right, who promoted through what the press office termed “cheap fakes” a caricature of an addled creature unfit to serve. They would not dignify those people, or people doing the bidding of those people, with a response.
My heart stopped as I extended my hand to greet the president. I tried to make eye contact, but it was like his eyes, though open, were not on. His face had a waxy quality. He smiled. It was a sweet smile. It made me sad in a way I can’t fully convey. I always thought — and I wrote — that he was a decent man. If ambition was his only sin, and it seemed to be, he had committed no sin at all by the standards of most politicians I had covered. He took my hand in his, and I was startled by how it felt. Not cold but cool. The basement was so warm that people were sweating and complaining that they were sweating. This was a silly black-tie affair. I said “hello.” His sweet smile stayed frozen. He spoke very slowly and in a very soft voice. “And what’s your name?” he asked.
Exiting the room after the photo, the group of reporters — not instigated by me, I should note — made guesses about how dead he appeared to be, percentage wise. “Forty percent?” one of them asked.
“It was a bad night.” That’s the spin from the White House and its allies about Thursday’s debate. But when I watched the president amble stiffly across the stage, my first thought was: He doesn’t look so bad. For months, everything I had heard, plus some of what I had seen, led me to brace for something much more dire.
As context, Nuzzi's writing was critical of Biden's age in 2020, and Biden people have had a grudge against her ever since.
And from a tweet, when asked why she's reporting this now and not earlier:
I work on most of my stories for months. This piece is about a conspiracy of silence that made people reluctant to talk. I’ve been chasing down what I heard since January. That’s how long reporting takes. Debate changed people’s calculations about how candid they would be, and even then not on the record.
Not a great look, and especially bad to only publish it now. All that work covering it up, and it accomplished nothing for the Democratic Party, just significantly increased the chance of Trump winning. Few could put together the bravery to speak out about the age issues of the eighty year old, despite this being The Most Important Election Of Our Lifetime v3. Sadly, no competent elites in smoke-filled rooms pulling the strings. At best Ezra Klein with a column and podcast or two saying maybe we should replace him.
I think my earlier comment that this was a surprisingly bad Biden debate performance was true, and that this wasn't a problem for him in 2020 (and Nuzzi agrees), but I was definitely underestimating his decline.
curious_straight_ca
8mo ago
I had really hoped Vance was smarter than this. If he was baited into it he shouldn't have bitten and if it was intentional then he should have known better.
Why do you think it's a blunder? This is the classic politician move, if you're asked about a losing issue, just deflect. It sounds bad, but it's less bad than actually addressing the question. There's a reason they all do it. It distracts, it muddies the waters a bit. My opponent's asking me this ridiculous question to distract from Border Czar Harris's invasion of migrant criminals and nation-destroying inflation et cetera.
Assuming he can't say "yes" because Trump won't let him, what else should he say?
The real blunder is that Trump won't just shut up about the election and let Vance say he'd certify. People who care about Trump saying the election is rigged are voting for him anyway. There's no harm in just lying here.* I have to imagine Trump and the people around him really believe it!
* obviously it's bad and corrosive but i'm taking the perspective of political strategy here, and they all lie (sorry, strategically take positions) anyway
curious_straight_ca
3mo ago
The reason the libraries are woke is not because any government encourages wokeness, but because the kind of person who'd maintain a liberal arts oriented community space is woke. I don't think we should defund religious soup kitchens because the people doing them are religious, and I don't think we should get rid of libraries because the people who show up are on the other team.
(Libraries in particular are less important now because of the internet, but the same thing applies to museums, which still matter a bit)
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
unless this funding has very explicit earmarks from congress then the administration should be able to just redirect it to fund Trump allied NGOs
Yes, I suggested doing things like this earlier. It might work. (It'd be harder for the programs other than USAID they're trying to cut, USAID is very small compared to rest of the federal government). My big criticism here is that, whatever Trump and Elon are currently doing, they're not optimizing for it working, they're trying to make it big and splashy.
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
Any system that doesn't just unleash total replacement of the native population (see Canada) will inevitably the majority of well-meaning fine people who want in
Letting in all Indians at or above self_made_human's intelligence / merit would not lead to total replacement of the native population, though? They aren't all doctors or FAANG engineers
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
And literally every single program will say that, resulting in nothing changing
... what? Some programs will say "we are destroying fentanyl labs in Mexico", and not get frozen. Others won't say that, because they're funding womens' organizations in myanmar, and will get frozen. It's the exact same thing that's happening now, except the fentanyl one doesn't get frozen.
So? It already exposed who needs constant o be cut
I don't think your logic here makes sense? How does the instant freeze help Musk distinguish between programs that do and don't deserve to be cut, vs just collecting the information without doing the freeze?
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
Making a lot of people enthused is important in politics. You have to ride the wave and short-circuit resistance. Blitzkrieg is a strategy for a reason.
The resistance doesn't feel particularly short-circuited to me. Judges have blocked most of DOGE's biggest cuts.
Giving fundees 90 days to saturate the media and hide all the bad spending wouldn’t work
What does 'hide all the bad spending mean'? How would they even do that? All of the data on their spending is, and was already, public.
The Cathedral likes long drawn-out detail-oriented battles, and the first rule of warfare is not to give the enemy what they want.
IMO, the first rule of warfare is to destroy your enemy, or at least their capacity to wage war. That isn't currently happening. (USAID funding is not even a percent of the reason the liberal media exists). "Not giving the enemy what they want" is, in this context, the first rule of being mad at your enemy on twitter.
(Yes, this is conflict mindset not mistake mindset. With mistake mindset it looks stupid and damaging to do it this way, naturally.)
This isn't about conflict vs mistake! I'm not entirely against all the libs spontaneously combusting. It's about, like, winning the conflict, which is harder than making a lot of awesome posts.
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
results in physical pain
Many manual labor jobs pretty predictably cause physical pain and damage if you do them for your whole career.
loss of a child
No more so than voluntary adoption? Which similarly gives up custody rights, and isn't something that's generally illegal.
There are also some jobs that have a moderate risk of bodily harm and death, and while we regulate these and require clear warnings, we don't ban them if alternatives aren't available.
I don't think surrogacy is an exceptional job by the neutral/lib values you are appealing to. Maybe it is from conservative ones, but you should argue from them directly
Most people who are geniuses in one area are kind of mediocre in other areas. Trump's a genius at entertaining and getting votes, and he's terrible at economic policy. Why are those two particularly related?
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