netstack
Texas is freedom land
No bio...
User ID: 647
netstack
Texas is freedom land
11mo ago
You were going somewhere good, or at least interesting, until you had to make a hard turn. Caricaturing your enemies as moral mutants has never been appropriate. Neither from a Christian perspective nor from the standpoint of this community.
Also, I guess I disagree with you about Hitler.
Why does he capture the imagination? Why is brushing against the imagery of his movement instant social suicide? Why is he the mark against which every tinpot dictator and overbearing personality must be measured?
“There but for the grace of God go I.”
Not “I,” personally, but our society. He took those appealing, admirable aesthetics of loyalty and duty and he took them further than they ever should have gone. Ideals and people alike were tools, applied in service to the state and then discarded. By welding everything to the apparatus of his government, he created a very, very specialized machine.
Hitler represents the closest we ever came to a boot, stamping on the human face, forever. And we know how he did it. We’ve all felt it. That righteous anger, that burning indignity. Christianity tells us to stay our wrath, for ours is the kingdom of heaven. Liberalism, following in its wake, reminds us that by lashing out, we risk others doing the same unto us. The Golden Rule was the greatest invention of its age.
Nazi Germany taught us exactly how far we could get by shunting all that petty liberalism aside. It was an object lesson in the rhetorical value of an Other. Me and my tribe against the Polish, the French, the Jews, the World.
Isn’t that seductive? Don’t you think the Nazis, for a brief, beautiful moment, felt like rightful kings?
They were wrong. Hitler’s machine was no generalist. It was unfit to make peace, and it was even unfit to handle war. No good father leads his children to their deaths. He does not lie to tell them they are invincible. The full arc of fascism ends in collapse as it spirals out to new and unconquered horizons.
That’s why, whenever a demagogue starts to gesture at the Other, we think of Hitler. He demonstrated that full arc, from growth to apex to disaster. What can fascism do? How does it fail? And knowing both, why would anyone choose it? Hitler’s story provides succinct answers to all three. It speaks to the revanchist in all of us, and it reminds us just what there is to lose.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
7mo ago
Sigh. You won’t see this on account of the block, but I think you’d find this interesting. Or perhaps it’s what inspired you.
The Original D&D setting is weirder than one might expect. Dinosaurs and cavemen, Martians, random encounters with 40d10 goblins. Characters who reached the lofty heights of 7th or 8th level were expected to draw an income from their peasants as they founded settlements in the wilderness. They could encounter non-player settlements following similar rules, down to the expected number of gryphon-riding aerial knights looking for a joust.
There’s an old stereotype of “linear fighters and quadratic wizards.” In 3.5, becoming a high-level fighter gave you more health and better attacks. Meanwhile, wizards grew to break the rules over their scrawny knees. To compensate, the early game was much more forgiving for a fighter. This does stem from old D&D, where a 1st-level wizard would spend most of his time shanking sleeping goblins, if he was lucky. What’s less often mentioned is that old-school fighters enjoyed better magic items, strongholds, and acquisition of followers. Yes, that wizard could do a pretty good impression of a siege engine. But you could bring a regiment of spearmen from your personal castle.
Besides, not every character was suited for wizardry. In modern D&D, it’s common to choose the spread of your attributes. But in the older rules, you were probably rolling 3d6 in order. Little Timmy’s frail constitution meant he probably shouldn’t become a fighter, and didn’t have a chance of representing the Church as a paladin. Class selection was (in theory) not about maximizing your combat, but about modeling how different people would fare at different jobs. It’s a simulationist approach which is largely absent from the modern game.
I would love to play a hexcrawl in this weird, foreboding world.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1mo ago
In this thread: users asking why now, what was so bad about recent actions, is there a possibility for leniency.
Also in this thread: users rejoicing like the UK on Thatcher's death.
I'm going to provide a little more context in hopes of reconciling these two extremes. If nothing else, it'll serve as a eulogy for a guy I genuinely respect.
Over the last week, the mod queue saw a lot of action. And after any of us cleared out the obvious warnings and bans, there were always multiple comments from Hlynka left sitting at the bottom. Turds on the doorstep.
- Dripping with disdain for the outgroup.
- Ending an actual response by suggesting his interlocutors are either sockpuppets or stupid.
- Accusing multiple users
He was last banned two months ago for this turd. Before that it was a different driveby. Before that, another. And another. And another.
At the same time, Hlynka reliably generated a lot of actual contributions. I'm not just talking about the quality stuff, though there was plenty of that. (Notice, also, how that last one leads to throwing shade at Nybbler. Some things are eternal.) No, I mean the fact that Hlynka could be relied upon to show up, present his ideas, and poke holes in others--maybe even with some tact. He provided real value to the Motte. He kept doing so up until his ban, so long as you steered clear of the wrong topics. Hell, with the appropriate encouragement, he remained perfectly capable of giving a level-headed defense on those topics, too, once he stripped out the call-outs and persecution complex.
But as time has passed, those topics have gotten more and more attention. I couldn't say whether that represents a shift in the Discourse, in the makeup of our userbase, or in Hlynka himself. At the very least, there is a nasty little feedback loop where his reputation as a partisan strangles productive discussion in the cradle. You could basically guarantee that if he wrote anything about race, half a dozen users would show up to fight, and vice versa.
So here we are. Warnings have done next to nothing. Bans have failed to leave a lasting reminder. They've worked well as a cooldown period, but Hlynka doesn't really need that--he's perfectly capable of switching modes and writing a nice comment about movies or sports or the Fermi paradox or another user's excellent story. That's Hlynka.
I'll miss his work.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5mo ago
God, I hate to play the “both sides” card, but…who actually does this? Are there center-right Fox News hosts or Shapiro types saying “wow, that thing the libs said five years ago was totally right! Guess we didn’t own them after all.”?
I don’t think so. In most situations, there’s no alpha in public apology. This isn’t partisan; it’s bog-standard tribalism. Few groups want to signal accuracy so badly that they let the outgroup score free points.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5mo ago
Willingness to trade is not orthogonal to war-waging ability. Exhibit A: this message, written to you using military-grade technology.
Go back 200 years, and it’s gunboat diplomacy. 400, and the European powers are wiping out whole legions of natives to set up their mercantile empire. 600 and we see the early “Free Companies” of roving sellswords, but the concept of mercenaries goes back much further.
Getting closer to the Greeks, Romans didn’t shy away from conquest or trade. They had a bunch of social and economic technology that let them fold ridiculous amounts of territory into their sphere of influence.
The idea that trading civilizations tend to be soft and conflict-averse probably owes a lot to our sense of fair play. (Uncharitably, that means video game balance teams.) But there’s a reason war is called “spending blood and treasure,” and acquiring more of their treasure without spilling your blood is usually a good deal.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
7mo ago
I was surprised by this.
The low-effort rule, as described in the sidebar, seems to be targeting “three-word shitposts.” This does not feel like a shitpost to me. It has a fact (which I had not yet seen) and two legitimate questions—what happens next, and is it likely to shift the Senate one way or another? More importantly, it steers relatively clear of cheap shots.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
10mo ago
It's part of the worldwide strategy to literally eradicate the disease. This has been relatively successful. Before that, it was several times more common, and hit a wider swath of society.
About 9,000 of the 18,000 children [per year, before the vaccine] infected in the first 10 years of life caught the virus from their mother during birth. However, many young children didn't catch the disease from their mother. They caught it from either another family member or someone else who came in contact with the child. Because hepatitis B can be transmitted by relatively casual contact with items contaminated with the blood of an infected person, and because many people who are infected with hepatitis B virus don't know that they have it, it is virtually impossible to be "careful enough" to avoid this infection.
50% of kids weren't getting it from their mothers, and I doubt they were shooting up or having gay sex. They got a little bloody or handled someone's razor. I wouldn't want to go back to those days. Not for the sake of a couple days discomfort.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
11mo ago
My employer recently held a DEI week. One of our Human Resources VPs sent out an email with information about this “dedicated” event. The main course was a series of videos. Managers were expected to replace a normal staff meeting with one of these videos followed by a “conversation.”
Needless to say, this did not occur. Our monthly staff meeting went exactly as planned—brief program updates followed by technical presentations on recent tasks. Not a peep from our manager, who probably had to take some sort of training. This foiled my plans to write a review of our corporate strategy and emphasis, because I’m not watching a video version if I don’t have to. Instead, a few remarks on the framing.
Much emphasis is placed on “employee-driven” culture, putting the onus on managers and employees. At the same time, the initiative is very open about being “CEO action,” a coalition for executives to pledge how much they like DEI. Roughly half the subjects appeared to be advertising actions already taken at the corporate level.
The signaling strategy is obvious. Executives are more coordinated and socially skilled than 99% of the company, so they get to read the room and sign on to initiatives which they think will be well-received. HR departments make that intent into a program. Managers and employees enact it—in proportion to how much they already buy in. And in the end the company gets a few sympathetic stories for the executives to advertise next board meeting.
I want to emphasize how short this falls of the consultant-driven, aggressive approach which gets skewered on social media. No one is asking defense engineers to hold struggle sessions or reflect on whiteness. Twitter would like to show you the most dramatic, offensive version. If your workplace looks more like Twitter than like this…consider moving to Texas.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
13d ago
Deus Ex released in May 2000 with memorable writing, interesting choices, and a deliriously complicated setting. Between the cool factor and the memes, it’s remained relevant for decades.
Daikatana also released in May 2000, featuring…none of these things. It’s best known today for its questionable marketing.
I don’t take this as evidence of a trend in game writing or production. Our impressions are formed by outliers rather than the mean or median or even modal game for a year. We still get vivid, cohesive experiences from developers with a vision. Have you played Disco Elysium yet?
Today, as I wait in an enormous line for an off-year election, I figured it was as good a time as any to go through our ballot propositions. There’s a lot of boring stuff on there about bond issuance. But what feels more exotic are the constitutional amendments.
That’s right! We can reenact the California proposition experience right here in our own state. Join me on an adventure through Texas state politics.
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Should we enshrine the right to various outdoors industries—fishing, timber, etc.—in the constitution? Why? Apparently, city growth has led to risk of over regulation. But this is already covered by statute. Putting it in the constitution is one of those overreaches that Scott makes fun of. Frustratingly, none of the comments I found online cared about bloat, instead choosing to fuss about factory farms. I expect it’ll pass, but I’m voting No.
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Should we allow local governments to issue property tax exemptions for child care? This is supposed to be an anti-inflation measure, subsidizing one particular good. Seems like a roundabout way to do it.
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Should we ban wealth and net worth taxes? Texas doesn’t have one, and it remains, as far as I know, wildly unpopular. Sounds like political hay to me. This time, opponents remembered that unnecessary amendments might be a bad thing.
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Should we expand a tax exemption and also boostpubliceducationfunding? Burying the lede, are we? Actually, there’s a complicated relationship between this tax and the public school system. I get the impression of many precariously balanced plates…Regardless, supporters are pretty open about wanting property tax relief. Maybe I’m just biased as a non-home-owner, but it feels like treating a symptom rather than a disease.
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Should we modify the state research fund? Supposedly this is about spreading the wealth to schools that aren’t UT or A&M. I guess I’m fine with that. Except, wait, it also ties that fund to revenue from the state rainy day fund? Is that really how we want to use that money? Is the constitution the way to do it?
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Should we create a fund to manage water projects? This hasn’t been a problem up here in DFW, but maybe has caused trouble elsewhere in the state. Opponents correctly note that we already have a water department. Just fund that instead.
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Should we authorize funding to modernize the electric grid? My first instinct is “please, God, yes, this should have happened years ago.” Which leads me to believe that something is horribly wrong with it. But no, it does what it says on the tin, authorizing investment in backup capacity and infrastructure. Maybe this is a place for free-market solutions…but those really dropped the ball in the last few years. Infrastructure is the central example for public goods. So let’s go for it.
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Should we finance high speed broadband? In theory, I guess this is another form of infrastructure. But proponents keep dropping phrases like “digital divide” that make me wonder if it’s what the kids call FOMO. If we’re only funding it this way because some senator heard the phrase, maybe it shouldn’t go in the constitution. Still, the opposition consists of people worried it will detract from federal funding for broadband. That’s pretty weak as far as complaints go.
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Should we boost teacher pensions? This is literally helicopter money, but for old people. It’ll probably pass. I ask myself how many yes voters feel the same way about federal social security.
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Should we add some medical and biomedical tax exemptions? This sounds boring, but really centers around a broader effort to “regionalize manufacturing.” Texas likes to think it’s an island. In this case, we’re not really unique in trying to lure investment, so…okay, I guess.
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Should we let the state let certain El Paso conservation districts let El Paso county issue bonds? I feel like I’m losing my grip on reality just reading this sentence. I don’t understand how this is a state issue.
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Should we abolish the Galveston County treasurer? Screw that guy, I guess.
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Should we raise the retirement age for judges? Something tells me there’s a particular guy behind this one. I don’t know who, but I don’t like it. Personally, I think 75 is already too high.
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Should we create a Centennial Parks Conservation Fund? This is the one I didn’t have time to read before making it to the front of the line, much to my chagrin. Thus…No comment.
Edit: Apparently everything passed except for raising the judge retirement age. Sorry, Hon. Nathan Hecht. You’ll have to maintain your grip on our reproductive organs from the shadows.
In all seriousness, he seems like a competent judge, and I don’t actually have a personal distaste for him. When I saw the text of the amendment, I immediately thought “this must benefit one guy in particular,” and voted against making exceptions. I wonder how many other Texans had the same gut reaction.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5mo ago
Middle management: Command economy edition.
Like one of those supply chain games, except everyone’s always lying about quotas, and you don’t know exactly what’s even possible. A new steel process is invented and factories which roll it out are lagging behind. Is it just growing pains? A flawed process that isn’t actually more efficient? Or perhaps the old numbers were just fake? Make it about trying to cope with this imperfect information.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
10mo ago
Wow, it sure is convenient that your outgroup fucking sucks. I mean they are some real assholes. Some irredeemable excuses for human beings. How dare they converge on different solutions than you? And to do so while being both stupid and unattractive?
Seriously, you’re engaging in the lowest form of complaining. Why not ask one of the more interesting questions, like:
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What would it take for me to empathize with these guys?
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Cui bono? Whose incentives got us into this situation?
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What might right-thinking people do to fix the mess?
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Why am I anywhere near Cook County?
Edit: oh, right. I like my superfluous rifle collection. It’s a nice luxury with, in my case, no practical value. If you haven’t been shooting, you should try it at least once, especially if you have any affection for machinery.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
11mo ago
This weekend, I visited my friendly local gun store, idly browsing for shotguns and learning about interstate purchases. Then I drove to my parents and spent the evening playing board games. It was a nice night with good food, drink and company.
Meanwhile, five minutes up the highway, some lunatic was murdering random strangers at a local shopping mall.
No one I know was killed. No one I know personally was present—though a friend of a friend was. I didn’t hear about it until the next morning. Big nothingburger, right? And yet I’ve been to that mall. I’ve been to the bar across the street with my coworkers. If I’d had an errand or three to run, instead of visiting my family, I might have been cowering in a storeroom or staring at a splatter of brains on the sidewalk.
I’m not linking to any articles. Partly for the thinnest veneer of opsec, partly because media coverage is predictably terrible. All sympathetic pictures and, as we’d say here, recruiting for a cause. Nothing good will come of this. Either we’ll force through a knee-jerk bill with symbolic limits on firearms, or we’ll (correctly) dismiss that as posturing and (incorrectly) do abso-fucking-lutely nothing.
It’s not like I can do anything about it. I don’t know what I would actually expect to work, and if I did, how could it be brought about? State, even local politics is as tribal as it gets. Enjoy your a la carte selection of two options, and one of them is out of stock.
Meanwhile, I guess the best I can do is pick up some CCW training and a good holster. Fuck.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
11mo ago
Could this person be the leader of some nonprofit or advocacy group? I’m struggling to imagine how that would be possible.
There are databases of active investigations (server issues?), pending cases, and incidents, but none make the plaintiff’s name public by default. Maybe this database has something? I’m not optimistic—if only a fraction of those 8,000 complaints are founded, they’re not going to be obvious in the active lawsuits.
Why doesn’t the Title IX office disclose this name? For obvious reasons, he or she is unlikely to be personally involved in most, if not all, of the cases. Privacy shouldn’t be an issue. I wonder if this is something that can be FOIA’d.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3mo ago
No bet on mentioning the daughter.
As for the marriage rate, a lot of prominent Republicans are from the South. There are a lot more black people in the South. Case closed?
Today in minor CW news: Naomi Biden’s Secret Service detail takes shots at carjackers thieves breaking in to a USSS vehicle. The vehicle in question was not occupied, so it wasn’t literal self-defense, but I am willing to assume it’s within protocol.
I’m bringing this up here to take predictions on the level and type of attention this will receive. My prediction is that the most vocal coverage will be conservative Twitter/substack trying to make this about Democrat hypocrisy with regards to crime. There’s just not enough material to make it personal about the Biden family. While I don’t doubt that spicy takes will exist, I’m wondering if they’ll make it to cable news.
Edit: immediately after posting, I see the next Twitter link is some guy with triple parentheses talking about how crime is so normal in DC. I swear I hadn’t seen that when I made my prediction.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
10mo ago
Could it be because Twitter is a shithole with next to no incentives for reasonable debate?
I don’t even disagree with your hypothesis. The HBD battle lines have been drawn for vibes-based and sometimes historical reasons. But goodness, number of retweets is an abysmal proxy for valuing academics! Making numbers is not well correlated with making sense. The fact that this guy isn’t getting retweeted says that his commentary isn’t useful as a bludgeon.
Compare COVID discourse, which was dominated by tweets hamming it up for the audience.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
10mo ago
Ever since the ACX guest review of two Jane Jacobs books, I haven’t been able to get the idea out of my head.
Take a city like Detroit. When Detroit’s exports (primarily cars) decrease, Detroit gets no feedback about this, because its currency is the United States dollar, and the United States dollar’s value depends on much more than Detroit. It depends on other cities whose foreign exports might be increasing at the moment. And on rural regions that are selling resources like oil abroad. Also, trade between Detroit and other cities that use the United States dollar — i.e., American cities — is structurally unable to provide any feedback whatsoever. So Detroit doesn’t get the signal that it should buy less stuff from other cities and replace the missing imports with local production. Instead, it just declines.
Jacobs focuses on this “import replacement” as the force of actual quality-of-life improvement. Replacing imports means capital investments pay back into your own city. Otherwise you’re just getting wealth siphoned off to someone else. Someone with a cooler city.
Here we have our analogy to Turchin’s wealth pump. Elites concentrated in the most effective city. A precariat born of those lower-class, fortunate enough to occupy the city regions, who transition to a service economy. And proles populating the rest of the country, unable to share in the proverbial rising tide.
So nations and empires will embark on every possible solution to reverse the decline. All of their solutions will look like good ideas at first, and yet fail at helping the peripheral regions. Worse, these solutions will weaken the cities, thereby destroying the only real wealth of the country and bringing untold hardship for everyone. …
Jacobs calls these false solutions transactions of decline.
Her three categories are military production, specific types of unbalanced trade, and…oh. Welfare. Turchin’s prescription cannot make more successful, growing city regions. It just delays the descent of flyover country into open rebellion. (Wait, now I want to read an application of this theory to the National Socialists.) Jacobs’ outlook is quite grim, and the closest thing she gives to a solution is secession. I guess that beats the mass die-offs hypothesized by Turchin?
There might be a third way. Jacobs notes the importance of “city regions,” hinterlands surrounding a productive city core. These sort of reap the benefits of that city investment, engaging in some form of import replacement. They’re explicitly much better off than the periphery of her model. Can we incentivize development of these regions wherever past nations, with worse transportation and less surplus, might have sucked them dry?
Turchin seems to say—it doesn’t matter. Fill a nation with productive, import-replacing regions, and you’re just going to overproduce elites faster. Human nature ensures the rest. I am very uncomfortable with this conclusion! I don’t want the future to converge on separatist social Darwinism, nations doomed to collapse or fission. Neither does Turchin, I suppose. Maybe he can keep the intelligentsia busy until we work something out.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
11mo ago
You know, every time I see your username, I involuntarily scan ahead to see where you make the turn. Sure, equate a few months of lockdownism to the Holocaust. Remember that time they gassed the antivaxxers?
@The_Nybbler has the right of it. Do you think a Holocaust film is trying to downplay the evil? Pointing out banality is a reminder not to assume something is good, or even okay, just because it is pedestrian. One must engage with the actual merits and flaws. In that sense, there’s no irony to the Guardian’s coverage. They will tell you with a straight face that lockdowns were good.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3mo ago
Option 1: the time doesn’t actually predict it, because “polarization” is not the same as “discord.”
Option 2: massive advances in information storage and search have stifled innovation. No need to write sci-fi speculating on gender roles when Ursula K LeGuin has already done it for you. Harder to make novel music when you have to delve into microtones instead of just slamming down a blues progression.
Option 3: “lol”. People do make weird sci-fi, complete with gender commentary. They do vicious, post-ironic synthesis satirizing previous generations. Adventure is out there. Oh, and
[the 60s were] the last time you saw many black musicians and guitarists be better than their white counterparts
I see you truly value the contributions of Vanilla Ice.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3mo ago
I remember hanging out in a fraternity basement with a bunch of fellow engineering interns. Several were gathered surreptitiously round one guy with his laptop. They were excitedly discussing the latest newsletter from ISIS.
It was incredibly professional. Clean graphic design, good typesetting, tasteful imagery. This wasn’t shock content, but the more refined propaganda of a well-funded movement. No sketchy scans and OCR here. The articles were multi-page tracts on Islamic principles, two columns, twelve point font. Each ended, naturally, with the conclusion that this particular group would be the one to bring down the West.
Fascinating indeed.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3mo ago
I just spent half an hour doing research and napkin math about WWII naval vs. aerial bombardment. This was related to suggestion for a Hearts of Iron mod. Partway through the ensuing discussion, one of the devs steps in with his own estimates. They are based on some flawed math, but more importantly, they are a screenshot from Google Bard.
Observation one: it is absolutely insane that you can give a computer word problems and have it spit out formatted, plausible answers, complete with hypotheticals. There were caveats about how the guns were never designed for the proposed use and a table of how the answer would change with lower rates.
Observation two: it is completely insane that you can do this and have the computer lie to you. Not with any malice! But it will give you a wrong, even incoherent answer with the exact same confidence as a correct one. Those symbols get strung together all the time in its training data, after all.
Observation three: well, the third type of insanity ought to go unremarked. I’m not upset that the dev leaned on this AI. I got the impression he was just tossing in his two cents, not defending the position. It does raise the question—
Is it possible to raise the general level of skepticism about AI answers, rather than AI technology?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5mo ago
In doing so while the general state of DC law is much less permissive. A private citizen is definitely not allowed to do this.
I don’t think it’s actually a gotcha, since there is always a gulf between private and state violence. But I suspect it’s got the right optics, the right “gosh look how bad things have gotten,” to make the rounds.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5mo ago
Prior to her death last month, my grandmother spent about two years in a retirement home. They struggled with staffing constantly. I’m not even talking about technical employees giving care, though I’m sure they were hard to find too. I’m talking about cooks, cleaners, and receptionists.
Quality of service fluctuated noticeably. Each time someone quit, the remainder of the staff were more stressed, and the inhabitants were more cranky.
The overall impression was that wages weren’t keeping up. I think the management might have cut them mid-pandemic? Either way, they could not or would not afford to crank up wages. There were rent hikes, but old people are a strange customer base. While they have lots of sunk costs keeping them from moving, they are particularly inclined to raise hell when something goes poorly. Or to just ignore a rent increase—what are you going to do, sue them? I could easily see this become a death spiral if morale got low enough to push out new clients.
Thing is, I don’t know why this would be limited to elder care. Was there a particular reason—COVID restrictions, or some regulatory regime—pushing staff to other industries? Or does every service job in Dallas have a similar level of churn? Is this post going to start another fight about inflation and lived experience?
Since she passed, I haven’t spent much time at her apartment. I doubt that they’ve reached a happy equilibrium. There’s a complex web of rents and reputation pulling against wages and property taxes and material costs. In better days, maybe a vacancy in the kitchen was easy to fill. Today, if frictions really are higher, maybe that gap pulls everything else down with it.
Does this remind you of anyone?
I elided the header, which specified that these were"INFORMAL REMARKS OF THE PRESIDENT, From the Rear Platform of his Special Train" spoken on July 13, 1938 . Consider these remarks, spoken by the most aggressive Democrat in history. Compare them to the informal, off-the-cuff manner of our previous President, Donald Trump. Sure, the occasional choice of words is unfamiliar. But the rest is all there: glittering generalities. Praise for those on board. Rambling anecdotes. All these ghostly remnants of what must, at the time, have been raw charisma.
People like to feel listened to. They like to feel part of a conversation, and be reminded that the person is a real human rather than an unfeeling automaton. The kind of performance which successfully conveys that humanity doesn't always translate so well to a recording or especially a transcript. In the 30s, FDR was winning over the populace with informal remarks and fireside chats. Today, a politician can still cultivate that relationship with his base. But every casual remark is a risk. It will be carefully catalogued, preserved in cheap and ubiquitous recordings, and mined for any advantage. When a detractor watches a 15-second clip on evening TV, there is no suspension of disbelief. None of the casualness with which we'd listen in person. It's not just "two screens." It's one team watching a screen, and one holding a conversation.
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