popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
popocatepetl
3d ago
"woe to him who has the full backing of the board—he is a dead man walking.”
It's the same with starting quarterbacks. By the time a head coach has to answer questions about benching them, it's over.
"Trust arrives walking and departs riding."
The political value of maintaining moral high ground here does not pay the cost of letting your opponents keep a chilling effect superweapon for their exclusive use. Do I want rando home depot employees fired for venting political frustrations on Facebook? No. But given conservatives are laboring under a system where they often can't be caught misgendering someone online, letting democrats do a "haha just kidding... unless?" routine for political assassinations is insane.
Yes, that would be entirely legal. (Though difficult to imagine in practice, because a large part of the GOP is still legacy republicans). What Vance suggested, though, was "when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say 'The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.'"
Why wouldn’t this work?
I do not believe TPTB will allow the populists to win through the normal methods. This is just a prior, not a position I have proof of, besides observing Lucy pull away the football on many occasions. If the above program were seriously approaching accomplishment through legal methods, the establishment would throw a coup of their own.
popocatepetl
10d ago
By this standard Biden has couped too. The border and student loans would both be considered illegal actions.
As I understand it, Biden accomplished these by slithering through legal loopholes, not disobeying the courts. When the Supreme Court overturned student loan forgiveness, the Biden team did not say "Screw you, Clarence Thomas, let's see you stop us" and strike the ledgers anyway; they set lawyers to find every technicality on the books. Same with opening the borders.
Of course, I am not implying moral superiority on the Biden side. Merely that, as Scott wrote about populism vs. the deep state in Turkey:
"The populace can genuinely seize the reins of a democracy if it really wants. But if that happens, the government will be arrayed against every other institution in the nation. Elites naturally rise to the top of everything - media, academia, culture - so all of those institutions will hate the new government and be hated by it in turn. Since all natural organic processes favor elites, if the government wants to win, it will have to destroy everything natural and organic"
Coups are necessary for anti-establishment side of a populist vs. establishment showdown. The establishment side can just let the systems run and get their way.
popocatepetl
10d ago
If you intentionally break the law by firing bureaucrats on partisan grounds
I would think that the plan would be to fire them based on lack of merit?
He's not saying to fire bad bureaucrats or incompetent DEI hires; he's saying to fire democrats.
I don't understand this. We had this system for nearly two hundred years and nobody called it a coup when the old guy's people got cleaned out and the new guy's people got installed.
And then we passed civil service reform acts, which are still on the books. If you intentionally break the law by firing bureaucrats on partisan grounds, and then ignore the courts ordering you to reinstate them, you have made an illegal power grab and set the constitution aside. In my mind this can reasonably be called a coup.
popocatepetl
11d ago
His segments were largely about dishonest media, cancel culture, GOP politicians betraying their base, and the administrative deepstate. You can call this "carrying water for Trump" because the people who vote for Trump also complain about these things. To me, it was "accurate political commentary".
Just a reminder that Tucker Carlson is a proven liar and despised trump during his presidency.
Yes, this is what Reddit said about that. But I don't recall any Tucker segments from around then where he lavishly praised Trump? I consider Trump a narcissist and mostly a fool, and I thought his presidential term was horribly ineffective. Nevertheless, I agreed with Tucker segments at the time. I understand that many progressives learn third-hand that Tucker Carlson Tonight was the "Praise God-Emperor Trump Show", but was there actual lying here or just a clickbait insinuation of it?
I've been looking into this guy. Peg me as shocked that, if only superficially, neoreactionary thought has penetrated the highest levels of GOP politics. Vance cites Curtis Yarvin as one of his influences and follows BronzeAgePervert and Steve Sailer on X. He advocated for dismantling the federal bureaucracy and ignoring legal challenges to it in a 2022 Vanity Fair interview — which they correctly characterize as a coup.
All this feels like nothing more than watching 2012 Tumblr ideas leap into the Democratic platform overnight. Whether Vance's NRx ideas are sincerely held or not, it's fascinating. As an NRx favorite, Mosca, said:
In reality the dominion of an organized minority, obeying a single impulse, over the unorganized majority is inevitable. The power of any minority is irresistible as against each single individual in the majority, who stands alone before the totality of the organized minority. A hundred men acting uniformly in concert, with a common understanding, will triumph over a thousand men who are not in accord and can therefore be dealt with one by one.
So a tiny gaggle of too-online neoreactionaries triumph and take command of MAGA, quite ignoring the mass of tens of millions of boomer normiecons.
I agree that normies love stability. the problem is a bland democrat is the same is a bland republican.
Can the GOP front a bland republican? It seems to me the Democrats are fairly successful at channeling their radical wing's energy into bland-seeming manager politicians. By contrast, the MAGA wing will veto non-MAGA candidates, who in turn spook the normies; this is to my eyes what happened in 2022 with the red wave that never materialized.
The core difference is that, for all of BLM and antifa's blustering about the revolution, the American red tribe is a whole lot angrier about the state of politics. Psmith is only somewhat exaggerating here when he says 100% of the revolutionary energy in our own society is on the right today. Blue tribe meanwhile knows it's playing defense.
Just this week in the UK, the MAGA equivalent in Britain blew up 14 years of Conservative rule to vote for the radical populist Reform, allowing Labour to waltz into power with a laughable third of the vote. This is what I expect in the US if 2028 Republicans try to field a Nikki Haley or Mitt Romney-like.
popocatepetl
19d ago
What were the actual sharings-in-bad-faith or misrepresentations that he was worried about?
He never offered any explanation to my best research. About a year ago he updated the first essay with "I beg you to read anything else I've written other than this piece. I beg you", followed by deletion in December.
popocatepetl
20d ago
or mildly competent bureaucrats in boring constituencies without major insanity. This last category is a GOOD category that the dems have, but theyre not gonna be winners.
Are you confident of this? I don't think Biden won in 2020 due to personal magnetism. At least until the boomers die, any politician that goes on the stage and says "I will be boring and keep the status quo, I'm not scary, no sirree" can siphon of votes from otherwise culturally conservative aging population — enough to win elections at least.
Even if boomers don't like guatemalans or transkids, the ones I know all have clay feet and spook at any politician seriously threatening to reshuffle the established order. They're winding out the clock on their comfortable retirements, after all. Consider that the democrats are still 40% likely to win according on betting markets, despite the last four years and their presenting an optically horrible candidate.
popocatepetl
20d ago
Are those Archive links he links to in his Substack faithful to his original postings?
Unless he's in cahoots with archive.org, they must be. And the content doesn't seem different from what I remember.
I guess he should be applauded for giving a link, at least, even if he refuses to put the arguments under his own name for some reason.
popocatepetl
20d ago
The worst case was him deleting his most popular substacks, "Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand" and "Of Course You Know What 'Woke' Means", because conservatives found his arguments good and started linking them. He seems afraid to be seen building bridges with non-fellow travelers, even when their interests and beliefs align with the old-style left perfectly.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
One result that jumps out is single women over age 40 are not very interested in dating (71-29 against dating). In the 18-39 age range the interest is pretty comparable across sex. 67% of single men and 61% of single women are interested in dating.
I suspect this, like the bitter comments of venerable ladies above, is rationalized hopelessness. "It's impossible to get what I want, so I don't want it." In young men this manifests as MGTOW.
So does the average expert, apparently
No, because the "experts" are left wing, and "fascists" are right wing. "Socially conservative/fiscally liberal" is the fascist quadrant, "socially liberal/fiscally liberal" is the progressive quadrant.
You seem to be operating from a bizarre definition of fascism. "All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state" certainly reflects the views of the expert class more than those of the maga hat wearing normie republican, as do the fascists' many vigorous attempts at social engineering and geopolitical aggression.
To be clear, I do not think "the experts" are meaningfully fascist. There has been a concerted attempt by all politically sides to liken their enemies to fascists, which has lead to the word being a largely useless tangle of negative mental associations.
Voting is pointless because political power is 90% divorced from the formal constitution, and your vote would not be decisive anyway. But I don't relate to anything you said.
a political system that caters to extreme ends of platforms
American political parties cater to an incredibly narrow ideological window. The Trump movement represents the most radical deviation from a ten millimeter band at the center of the overton window in my lifetime, and it amounts to "actually enforce immigration laws on the books". And I guess Current Year Democrats espouse similarly deviant beliefs about one and exactly one topic (trans kids).
the two major parties bickering back and forth at each other like immature children, would I want to vote in this upcoming election? I have to be honest, I'm completely dissolutioned from voting now with the way politicians talk to each other and disrespect each other and their opposing constituents.
This is an odd perspective I get a lot from boomers. They seem to care an awful lot about the decorum of politicians and their being harmonious and "statesmanlike". To me, the lack of heated argument between candidates suggests there's no significant difference between the two. That would make voting even more pointless.
If voting in this election is worthless, voting in every election in your life has been worthless. This time there is at least a black swan chance of a constitutional crisis or illegal political purge.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
Good writeup.
The enemy of glad-handing client-patron politics is scale, as you say. In ancient history, there is a pattern of large empires growing, fraying the traditional social fabric, and then adopting a universalist religion after the empire's time of troubles. This Confucianism or Christianity can marshal the loyalty of a larger social organism. Likewise, the exploding scale the last few hundred years is continuously destroying old modes of social organizations and spawning totalizing ideologies to mobilize the deracinated masses.
I don't believe civil service reform had much to do with it, except insofar as it was a lever of the above process. "The deep state" or managerialism developed independently from a totalitarian one-party command economy and a liberal federal republic. This convergent evolution suggests that it's the only viable structure for our current level of scale. We could not have chosen differently.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
Welp, first I'd try quiet quitting. If labor laws prevent my boss from firing me for shoddy drywalling, they'll protect me for horribly inefficient boulder rolling too. Unless bossman wants to pay a supervisor to micromanage me all day, there are a million ways to goof off.
But assuming I have to play this thought experiment straight: rigorous mindfulness exercises aimed at reconditioning my perception of time and tediousness. A buddhist would say we should all be doing that. But in a situation so devoid of earthly pleasures it's really the only option.
While I sometimes entertain goofy social arrangements to solve this problem — could you livestream Dad working on excel spreadsheets at daycare to get kids organically playing at number problems? — there are only three, equally terrifying resolutions to the problem of humans getting less and less adapted to the current environment.
- Retvrn. Industrial civilization collapses at a global level. Humanity returns to the original affluent society, with the depletion of easily accessible hydrocarbons preventing complex civilization from ever re-emerging. @RandomRanger's concerns are moot because no efficient rival can appear to outcompete neo-primitives. Uncle Ted fans throw a wild party before getting to the business of the hunger wars that kill off 7 billion or so.
- Abolition of man. Industrial civilization re-writes human nature to be better adapted to what it needs from humans. Probably this is conducted through "voluntary" methods in most countries, though eventually those that refuse modification die off due to non-modified males becoming socially dysfunctional losers compared to the kids who spend 14 hours a day playing at economically relevant skills. This dynamic leads to a transhumanist arms race of unpredictable but probably horrifying, escalating self-modifications.
- Wall-E (or human extinction). Humans become irrelevant to industrial civilization. The optimistic view of this is a human zoo of total emancipation and self-actualization: a Disneyland with children, who play at hide and seek or with VR games or whatever. The pessimistic view is human extinction, with industrial civilization carrying on blindly turning as much of the universe as possible into low entropy structures.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
I think this comment should have been allowed. Almost all of the negative statements about Trump voters here are demonstrating a counterargument to @jake's claim that a Trump voter revolution is nigh. The tone is 20% more biting and recriminatory than the argument itself, but that could also be said of a lot of @FCfromSSC comments I enjoy reading.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
example replies can be found eg here, here, here, here, or here
It's strange. When I visit old /r/themotte threads, the discussions seem hotter and the tone more aggressive, while downvoting unpopular opinions was rarer. You'd figure those two behaviors would move together.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
From podcasts and audiobooks my preferred speed is 1.35x, which makes the speaker sound more energetic and intelligent without becoming artificial or chipmunky. Given Youtube does not allow 0.05x gradations I settle for 1.25x.
The Complete LOADING SCREEN TIPS Ranking in Eu4
I see the Paradox youtuber community is badly in need of that sequel.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
Don't take your political movement that's spent decades building a state with the power to imprison citizens on a whim
The reason Trump exists is because conservatives are dissatisfied with the fruits of the last decades of conservatism. Your post reads to me like, "Trump supporters claim to hate bad things, but if that were true, they'd hate these other things that are also bad!"
Trump voters I know of speak glowingly of Nayib Bukele's law and order in El Salvador, which is to say, arbitrary roundups on police discretion.
Whether supporting uncuffing the police for crackdowns on violent crime can coexist rationally with opposing selective prosecution of political enemies is difficult to say. I'm not sure. It seems it should be possible to square those two stances, but I can see why @FiveHourMarathon sees it as obvious hypocrisy.
Not wild. I'm as opposed to DEI and representationalism as anyone. Here's (what I'll try to make) an unvarnished report of my feelings.
I feel no animosity towards her. From the catbird seat, she will doubtless say things to make me dislike her in the future. But for now, I see her as a minority actress who was chosen to play the wife of an rich white guy in an insurance ad, except instead of playing wife she was playing vice president, and the rich white guy wasn't her husband but Joe Biden.
My animosity is for the people who put her there, both on the supply and demand end. That animosity is fairly strong, more or less whenever I see a BIPOC/gender-nonconforming minority in a leadership position now.
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