voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
No bio...
User ID: 3622
Obama spent 8 years conducting a massive political purge of the general staff and replaced them all with idiotic loyalists. You just didn’t notice because the media never bothered to mention it.
Whataboutism is cringe, but I'll steelman this and interpret it as "this is just how things work". You're stretching the word "loyalist" pretty thin here. When I say Trump "loyalist", I mean someone like Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz who were metaphorically cucked on live television by Trump only to then bend the knee to suck from the teat. "Idiotic" is a useless epithet, the entire point of the first half of my post, so I'll just ignore it.
I don’t know, but at least he has the mental capacity to not start one and then cover up that he started it.
Based. To meme you right back I'll that I don't think he has the mental capacity to even begin to understand what it would take to start one.
And I’m sure Xi was quaking in his boots over the last President, who could only remember he was President for four hours a day
No argument there, but again, whataboutism is cringe. Thank God we have a strong president who can look Xi eye-to-eye and say 245% tariffs! We know that's the best number because we have formulas! The simplest explanation here Trump is aping foreign policy with tariffs.
Edit: link format
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
2mo ago
Yes, I agree, at least early on in Trump II we at least seem to have some sort of tempering going on (we even saw some in Signalgate). We'll see how long it lasts as it is currently only April 2025, and unless Trump has completely changed character, he has a pattern of executing massive turnover on his teams.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
2mo ago
I often think how cozy it must be to live with the child's view of politics.
Ah yes, the enlightened one. Please grace us with your superior wisdom and reasoning, that we may not err in our ways.
The world is as it has always been because powerful, competent and intelligent people disagree with each other. There are moral judgments to be made sure but oh, does all history stand as the final testament on evil not being synonymous with stupid--nor good with intelligent.
I genuinely don't believe that Trump is stupid, and I'll even extend that to say that I don't believe that Vance is stupid. I would say that even cabinet members like RFK Jr. and Linda McMahon aren't strictly stupid, but rather wildly out-of-touch to the point that anything they say is completely unrelatable and easily interpreted as "stupid".
My whole point is that my concern isn't stupidity, and that "stupid" is a useless epithet that doesn't further the conversation at all. You would seem to be in passionate agreement.
Graciously, I'll ask if you're extending the concept of "stupidity" to "incompetence" - because our disagreement would simply be that you're straw-manning my entire argument: "How juvenile it is to think that powerful people are stupid." I personally think those are two separate concepts, where "incompetence" has the additional dimension of context, but "stupid" is wide-ranging. I'll even argue that Trump is not universally incompetent - and has shown great competence in certain facets both in Trump I and Trump II and during his 10-year electoral campaign. Your examples of a diplomatic visit with NK and a drawdown of some activities in the Middle East are great (although I struggle to see what fruits they've bared in the past 8 years).
I appreciate your counter-example of Stephen Miran. Navarro does not inspire confidence that Trump has a good eye for economic advisors (as signs pretty much indicate Navarro lost his mind somewhere around 2015), but I'll give Miran the benefit of the doubt that he has not yet lost his mind. He seems to be hand-picked to support the conclusions that Trump has already reached, so I'm already skeptical, but again, that is not in-and-of-itself proof of his incompetence. All of that is bailey anyway, where the motte is that actually Trump's economic policy is highly calculated and we're aiming for is maintaining our very high average standard of living (at least, for certain classes of people) while also convincing the rest of the world to drop USD as a reserve currency as it presents an existential risk that no one but Trump is bold enough to face head-on. I don't disagree that the world holding USD as a reserve currency is an existential risk, but my main question is: why does it have to be 5D chess? Does the success of the strategy rely on none of the world (including his own constituents) being privy to exactly why certain economic policies are being executed? Is that the secret sauce? It has to be 5D chess or we won't be able to both maintain our standard of living while also convincing the world that they shouldn't hold USD? This is my issue broadly with many Trump strategies - I'm told I just don't get it and it's all part of a bigger plan. Well, it would be great if we were told that plan. To put it simply, when someone says "trust me bro", I instantly do not trust them, bro.
Back to the topic of the OP, the thrust of my point is that I've observed a certain type of arrogance over my lifetime that has been tightly paired with the rejection of expertise, and that I'm seeing the same pattern daily coming out of the executive. That's my signal through the noise. I tie that arrogance (and apathy) back to something that I thought everyone here might be able to relate to, the "pit in your stomach" when you realize you've fucked up because you're out-of-depth. I also tied it to the worst amphetamine-fueled mistake that an authoritarian made during WW2. Your critisicm is basically that my interpretation of the situation is juvenile?
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
2mo ago
Yeah that was kind of my whole point. Is there a way to argue the blue tribe's concern without resorting to "they're stupid". I did not make the argument coherently enough because the main rebuttal I've received is basically ~ "why are you calling them stupid".
My argument is that they're arrogant and out-of-depth, and my evidence is their wide-ranging rejection of expertise. The argument against would be that they do truly know better than the experts they're purging and alienating and there's nothing worth worrying about.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
2mo ago
Thank you for what appears to at least be a sincere response. I recognize your username as one of the ones that I disagree with the most on the Motte (I don't always find the need to respond), so I'm not shocked that it provoked this type of response, but hey, at least my post did provoke a response instead of slowly sinking into irrelevance. I made the comment here because I wanted harsh and honest feedback, rather than on other platforms that skew hard liberal where it would just disappear into the circle-jerk.
Okay. How about this- are you competent enough to judge competence?
Are any of us? I don't think we should blindly trust those at the heads of our institutions, and I think we should be even more critical when they represent an extreme shift in the status quo. So here's my attempt at being critical of their competence. I'll ask you genuinely, do you have strong evidence of their competence (especially with regards to my main point, that they are weak on what I'm calling "wargaming")?
You start off early with a claim that the mid-2010s the Republican party was on its death throes. This, uh, is a way of describing a party that was the House Majority for 6 of the 8 years of the Obama Administration, and swept out 10 state governors (a 20 state swing) in 2010.
I'm surprised this isn't consensus? I did not think that me saying Trump rejuvenated a party that was having an identity crisis leading up to the 2016 election would be controversial, but I'll adjust my priors on that. I had thought that both left and right-wing thought leaders saw Trump as an opportunist that took advantage of the Republican Party's situation, and remolded it in his own image. But if it was a strong party, that doesn't really contradict my main point that Trump isn't stupid, because it makes it even more impressive that he overtook a strong party than a weak party.
In the space of three words you make a pejorative equivalence to... Mussolini, Pincohet, and Stalin.
Yes, "the space of three words", also known as a "list".
Not exactly Bad People known for having the same sort of flaws, beyond historical category of Bad People.
As I said in the sentence prior, they were all known as authoritarians, used authoritarian rhetoric, and surrounded themselves with sycophants who echoed the same authoritarian rhetoric. I chose three names out of a hat, but I suppose I could have chosen more carefully and provided specific examples of Trump's sycophants sounding like historical sycophants.
You raise wargaming... but cite as proof of failure a leadership level that wouldn't actually be involved in running wargames.
I didn't intend to simply raise it, I intended it as my main point: that ideological purity testing and loyalty testing are purging the competence we had built up leaving us vulnerable against adversaries who haven't recently purged their most experienced ranks. You seem to be implying that you think Trump's appointments / retentions at the levels relevant to what I'm calling "wargaming" must be more competent than the people whose positions are more visible? I would say that's a pretty generous assumption.
without addressing how the most recent pandemic squandered public trust and credibility in the experts that RFK is known to be at odds with.
The fun part about a pandemic is that any time a governmental response is sufficient (i.e. saves lives), the response can be deemed a failure by overreaction because clearly not enough people died to warrant a response. That's a digression, though, because replacing leadership with someone lacking not only any expertise, but any credentials at all, seems like a juvenile retribution, no? But I guess that's reactionary revolution in a nutshell. That's actually at the core of the "out-of-depth" that I was describing in the OP that leaves you with two tires hanging off the edge of a cliff.
If all you want to do is 'Trump is dumb, lol,' you certainly put effort into that post. Consider catharsis achieved. If you want to make sense of the Trump administration, 'they are all idiots and I'll use the political language of their political opponents accusing them of all being idiots' is probably not a good place to spend time.
My point was to bring something new to the table, and extend a bit of a fig leaf to Trump supports by saying that Trump is not stupid. But, he is making the same mistakes that many arrogant leaders have made before him. And I think the root of the reason why he's doing that is because he lacks the humility to realize that he is not special.
I will throw your critique in the trash with all of the other opinions from people who hate me and want me broke and dead.
I don't even know you? I don't even have hate for any type of person, though I do feel frustration when I think of various stereotypes of people (who I can also consciously acknowledge are just stereotypes and don't exist). If I were to make a shot in the dark about you: I actually empathize for the plight of a lot of Americans (especially rural) who feel left behind / under-served, and think the neoliberal status quo was untenable for them. But I don't think a reactionary "burn it down" federal government is going to be a win for those Americans in the end. Look how Putin sends the peasants of the hinterlands to the meatgrinder in Ukraine for a sneak-peek of how authoritarians treat forgotten classes of people.
I doubt that when liberals subjected our institutions to decades of rot that you ever wrote a screed about how and why they were doing so, and why we must stop them.
What have those decades of rot delivered? The most advanced technological society in history, with the deepest understanding of the physical universe to-date? I almost think the exploitation of those institutions (e.g. Google, Facebook, etc. and other brainrotting social media and advertising companies capturing a generation of our greatest engineering minds) are more sinister than the institutions themselves.
I am genuinely coming from a place of interest: this my best effort of putting my thoughts and coinciding fears down. What have I missed? Is the criticism you provide literally just "Your threat model is wrong, my threat model is better"?
Edit:
when liberals subjected our institutions to decades of rot
Also, I'm not sure why it's always presented as a given that "liberals" are guilty of any decline in the value of our societal institutions, as if it was part of an orchestrated agenda? Why do we never talk about perverse incentives? Is it because people in those institutions, or that those institutions produce, are generally liberal? Why is that so often presumed that this is due to indoctrination? I'm not going to rehash the entire sides of both arguments here, but it's such an entrenched assumption whenever it comes up...
Double-edit: Regret responding to this low-effort response because it's spawned a bunch of subthreads that have nothing to do with my main point in the original post: that the rejection of experts on ideological grounds inhibits our ability to effectively wargame against our adversaries, and we will make mistakes as a country.
Forgive me in advance for what is mostly supposed to be a cathartic post, but also a request for criticism because it's how I'm making sense of the my observations right now, as well as the conclusion that I think is most likely.
Trump is not stupid
Or, at least, calling Trump stupid is not supported by enough evidence for it to be productive for anyone to claim that he is stupid.
The evidence against stupid
No matter your political leanings, one must admit that Trump ran one of the most impressive political campaigns, perhaps, of all time. For ten years, from 2015 to 2025, Trump was campaigning strategically without pause across the United States, building a big-tent party full of nearly every type of conservative. The Republican party was in its death throes. The Tea Party was not enough to invigorate the base. Trump performed the most impressive resurrection in over two thousand years. It was intellectually exhausting and demotivating for all of his opponents, to the point where any opposition within his own party simply quickly folded and pretended they never opposed him at all.
There's plenty of snark that Trump was born with a silver spoon and that none of his financial success is noteworthy because if had simply invested his gifts and inheritance he would have a higher net worth.[1] But if he were truly stupid, he would have simply lost all of that money with nothing to show for it.[2] Trump at least retained his wealth, which is much better than many lottery winners, drug dealers, sex workers, professional athletes, and "influencers" have to show.
It is also undeniable that Trump has a gift for delegating effectively, especially with regards to his campaign and consensus-building strategies. There is very little chance that Trump himself was in charge of choosing where to have his next campaign event, who to coordinate with locally, how to scam that podunk town out of its money, etc. The meme is that he doesn't know how to read, but if he's delegating effectively, he doesn't need to read in order to accomplish his goals. He has people for that, and they have served him especially well on the campaign trail for the past 10 years. He's also somehow able to get everyone to leave his cabinet meetings with a singular mission and idea, and the commitment is unfailing.
Trump has also trained his tongue to be sharp and clever. Like the Platonic ideal of the schoolyard bully, there has not yet been someone capable of rising to the occasion to out-Trump the Trump. Trump is completely immune to any type of attack that he himself has already mastered. Even crazier still is that Trump single-handedly killed left-wing satire and exposed it as snark. One of the most powerful tool liberals had against figures like Bush Jr., Romney, and McCain was completely neutralized by Trump. This is not something that happens accidentally: it is cold, concentrated talent, combined with years of practice. Trump is quick-witted, and that's anything except stupid.
Stupid, as a rhetorical device
The word stupid, fundamentally, is not terribly descriptive. Out of the people I know, spanning family, friends, coworkers, friends-of-friends, and significant others thereof, I can only count two individuals who I could never begin to defend against the epithet "stupid". I suspect both of these individuals have pretty significant learning disabilities. I have confirmed that they are the type that could not understand what an interest rate is, and how it affects their personal finances, no matter how long or how carefully the concept is explained to them. Their contribution to meaningful conversation caps out at, "Wow bro, that's crazy."[3]
Why even call a political figure stupid? Well, it is useful for forming in-groups and out-groups based on whether one agrees or not, or even feels compelled to agree or disagree. But that doesn't have much utility, especially because there are plenty of other methods for forming in-groups and out-groups. Let's be generous and give the benefit of the doubt that the protestor holding the "Trump is stupid" sign[4] is doing so because they seek to persuade others to change their mind regarding their support for Trump, as if those supporters will have some sudden epiphany that yes, Trump is stupid!
The fun thing about cults of personality is that any insult against the head of the cult is taken as a direct insult of members of that cult. Members of the cult aspire to be strong, smart, virtuous, and bold just like their dear leader. Their leader represents a more perfect version of themselves, so their leader must also be smarter than them. But if their leader is stupid, that makes those cult members even more stupid! Well, they know they're not stupid, so their leader must not be stupid. The members of that cult of personality will have to be "deprogrammed", as it's commonly referred to in the context of cults, in order to even begin to accept a reality where their leader is not strong, smart, virtuous, and bold.[5]
So, every time I catch someone calling Trump stupid, or anything remotely similar, I cringe. It's not supported by evidence. It's not a useful rhetorical device. That being said...
That pit in your stomach
I'd like to think that everyone has had that prototypical humbling experience, especially in your youth, of being woefully underprepared or completely out-of-depth. Maybe you forgot to study for an important exam, or to begin working on that rather important diorama. Maybe even later in life, you've made a mistake that you realized could have cost you your life. I once realized that the bushes that I had parked next to completely obscured the nearly-vertical cliff on the side of the road, and now two out of my four wheels were basically teetering over the edge. I was overconfident and unfamiliar with the terrain, and when I realized I was inches from certain death, my stomach fucking dropped.
I'd like to think that one of the most iconic photos of George W Bush captured that moment of visceral humility when he realized his presidency wasn't going to be spent reading stories about pet goats to elementary students.
Professional sports fans love to overestimate their abilities versus their sports idols: how many yards could you get on a designed run play against an NFL defensive line? There's the meme about a vast majority of American men claiming to believe the could land an airplane if they needed to. Rarely does anyone get to live the experience of testing their arrogance, although if you're a fan of some Olympic events you could go try to run a sub-4 minute mile and revel in the humility. I'll give E-Sports some credit here, because their transparent MMR system does typically convince the player base that compared to the top-level players, most players are complete trash.[6] It seems that humility is a learned trait that doesn't come naturally, and rarely do humans come face-to-face with their own mortality because of a lack of humility.
Humility, in general, brings to mind some people from grade school, middle school, and even high school who seemed to never have that "oh shit" moment during childhood. They either immunized themselves with apathy ("This grade doesn't matter.") or arrogance ("I don't need to prove anything."). Most of them were not wealthy, and therefore, continue to live relatively unremarkable lives based on their Facebook postings. I don't say this judgmentally, rather as an observation that success in school, either through good grades or learning how to work hard and take things seriously, is one of the only ways to be socially mobile in the United States. But what if they were wealthy?
My working theory is that Trump and everyone he has surrounded himself with are wildly out of their depth, in a completely unsubtle way. Do I even need to mention autism, A1 sauce, and 245% tariffs? It's not subtle, right? A major part of this is that I think they're precisely the type of people who have immunized themselves to this type of valuable introspection through apathy and arrogance. When I look at the people leading the executive branch, I see Kyle. But...is that the point?
A new model of "expertise"
When your cause is righteous, you cannot be wrong. He who saves his country, breaks no laws. Now, feelings don't care about your facts. We're operating off of vibes only from here on out.
The old model of "expertise" is out the door: it was ideologically captured by liberals. A new model of "expertise" must be created, one that by design serves not just conservative, but reactionary interests. Much like "Christian Science" is held to the constraint that any conclusion must be consistent with an American-Evangelical interpretation of the bible, this new model of "expertise" must be held to the constraint that any conclusion is consistent with reactionary ethos. And that ethos is driven by vibes, brother.
If you're a biologist that doesn't support HBD? Good bye bucko. Climate scientist that doesn't support a "things will work out, trust me bro" view on energy production? Have fun flipping patties. Economist that would dare suggest that tariffs won't even work out in the long run? Hah.
But this is surface-level snark here, and aside from disrupting careers and potentially accelerating some climate doomsday, I don't think it's worth focusing on. No, what I care about is national security, especially as we slide into authoritarianism.
Wargaming
Trump has selected heavily for loyalty, and now he's surrounded by sycophant grifters and real-life ghouls that would fit right in to any authoritarian administration you could think of: Mussolini, Pinochet, Stalin, etc. I'm not even sure if some of these people are reading history books and simply ad-libbing the speeches of these despots, or if they genuinely think they're clever and this time it will be different because of that learned apathy and arrogance. Reactionary rhetoric is like pop music, it's always the same four chords. How many pop artists succeed on vibes, and how many pop artists study the greats and emulate their formulas?
It's debatable whether the war could have had any other outcome, but Hitler didn't come face to face with true failure until Stalingrad.[7] He had drunk the Kool-Aid and genuinely believed that the German army was more righteous and mighty than any other force on Earth, combined. Despite intelligence warning him otherwise, he pushed for an offensive that overextended his army and left him on the back foot until he finally held the pistol up to his temple. He was wrong before, but it never cost him like it did that time. His mistakes never cost his country as much as they did in Stalingrad.
Hitler's mistake brings us to Wargaming: simulations that ensure that, when facing adversaries of roughly equal might and intelligence, one has the greatest chance of success. In the context of the USG, Wargaming is not limited to the Department of Defense. Wargaming is not limited to wartime activities. Wargaming is not limited to simulations that happen behind closed doors. Wargaming requires a deep trust in experts who have spent their entire careers studying mundane things like seasonal global crop yields on the 40th parallel. Wargaming is an activity that explicitly selects against loyal and uncontradicting parties.
Everything that I see from the executive branch these days indicates to me that they have lost the capacity to meaningfully wargame, and it threatens a catastrophic downfall of the United States. The military brass that have been selected for loyalty, rather than expertise, were the worst losses, but it doesn't stop there. Do you believe that RFK has the mental capacity to handle a human pandemic, let alone a livestock one? Do you believe that whoever Trump replaces Powell with will have experience running simulations on various levers the Fed can pull? I can't help but think Xi Jinping is laughing behind closed doors at the moment that he's up against such an arrogant and out-of-depth adversary.[8] Say what you will about the "Deep State", but those entrenched bureaucrats won us the cold war, and kept us on top of the world since the 1990s. And right now we're trading it for reactionary vibes.
Edit: I forgot that at one point I had meant to integrate the concept of "aping" or "cargo-cult" into this post. I thought the leaked Signal chat was an incredible example of a surface-level understanding of how a properly-executed military operation should be spoken about at the cabinet level. The cabinet is aping experience and expertise, and it won't cut it in the year 2025.
- [1] Probably not anymore, or for much longer, now that criminal bribery has a much higher bar for proving quid pro quo.
- [2] Here's a clickbait article about "idiots" who lose all their money: https://www.businessinsider.com/lottery-winners-lost-everything-2017-8
- [3] As a digression, they are both Trump supporters, but I realize that's a tired dunk and hesitate to even bring it up.
- [4] Would love to have a peek at what everyone reading this line imagined when I brought up this "protestor".
- [5] Not every Trump supporter is a member of his cult of personality, but that cult is debatably the vanguard of his electoral success.
- [6] I say that, and yet there are robust markets for MMR boosting just so people can lose against the best.
- [7] Maybe it was Kursk, maybe it was El Alamein - I'm just using Stalingrad rhetorically.
- [8] https://www.newsweek.com/china-responds-us-tariffs-245-percent-trump-trade-war-2060875
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
2mo ago
Shouldn't? Or doesn't?
The factoid I'm familiar with comes from Malcolm Gladwell's book "Outliers", in which he dubs the concept "accumulative advantage": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book)
Allegedly, elite Canadian hockey players tend to have birthdays earlier in the year.
Edit: this medium post shows the results of a very rudimentary data gathering exercise relevant to the topic: https://medium.com/market-failures/birth-months-and-hockey-players-further-validating-gladwells-observation-1187f4deb63b
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
2mo ago
Operation Wetback
Thanks for the link and jogging my memory, because I am loosely familiar with this and very familiar with Harlon Carter (amazing how history rhymes so much: parallels to be drawn between modern figures and historical figures).
My takeaway from (admittedly, briefly) reading about this operation is that the "success" wasn't strictly that the executive was able to act with impunity absent judicial oversight, but also that the Mexican government was equally enthusiastic about stemming the tide of migrants.
I still hold the position that the legislature is where the solutions to immigration should lie, and that any interaction between the executive and judicial is fundamentally suspect. I appreciate your comment, but I'm not certain that I can be convinced otherwise.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
2mo ago
I just want throw you a kudos for introducing me to the concept of a "deepity", I think it has a lot of utility for me in all aspects of my life: professional, personal, political, etc. I thought actually writing this "kudos" out would be more meaningful / bring more visibility than simply upvoting you as I'd like to specifically encourage this type of introduction of novel concepts that people may not be familiar with.
A rhetorical device I've been using with coworkers is a solution simply stated is not a problem simply solved, basically just to draw attention to the fact that if you're a middle manager and you can describe a solution in a few words it doesn't mean your underlings can quickly implement it and solve the problem. Unsure if that passes the threshold for "deepity", but I may be more careful with what I say in the future as to not use "deepities" as a crutch.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
2mo ago
if that variation is true, why don't we see it in life expectancy and althetic records?
I'm reminded of the factoid that most professional hockey players have birthdays towards the beginning of the year, because the peewee leagues have cutoffs on New Year's Day. So you get more attention because you're statistically larger / have 11 months more growing time as a January peewee player than a December peewee player. It didn't require a proper scientific study, but someone just looking up professional hockey player birthdays and going, "huh".
I would be surprised, but maybe no one has done significant birthday analyses with regards to life expectancy and athletic records because it would feel like silly astrology. That's kind of why even analyses that can be painted as "silly" in a soundbyte, say, during a Presidential Address to Congress, might have a legitimately interesting motivation: are you doing this analysis because of "astrology" or because of epigenetic effects based on seasonal variations during gestation?
Either way, I think you're striking at the heart of the issue: we probably don't need to hook people up to devices that measure vitals in order to determine if there are measurable differences based on the calendar dates of their gestation. If the difference is meaningful, we should be able to see downstream effects in, as you said, life expectancy and athletic records, and other examples as well.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
2mo ago
The most fundamental authority of a sovereign entity is determining who is permitted within its borders.
I don't necessarily disagree with this. I was literally just mocking ("tongue-in-cheek") the hyperbole of the OP that was brought forth without much forethought: reactionary doomposting.
When the federal bureaucracy had its small departments with narrow scopes, soon enough they became massive departments with broad scopes.
The world has changed significantly. People used to show up on our shores with nothing more than a name on a ship manifest. Now passports with electronic components are ubiquitous and traveling without one is unimaginable. Bureaucracy must exist to manage this, no? Or do we simply turn away all foreigners based on a "vibe check" from the current executive? Bureaucracy shouldn't be judged by its size, but by its outcomes (I'll touch on that later in this comment).
Racism, sexism, religious bigotry. If we were so racist, so sexist, so bigoted, if we were so tyrannical for so many, then how were we ever liberated?
This feels like a non-sequitur so I'm just going to ignore it after quoting it...
But there was a point when we could deport foreigners with minimal hurdle, and now we can't.
What days are you hearkening back to? I struggle to think of any notable mass deportations in the modern era. Japanese Internment Camps with FDR? Trail of Tears with Andrew Jackson? Or even further, when you were simply accepted into or rejected from based on skin tone and accent?
who checks the judge?
The legislature, which originally ceded its power for short-term political gains (thanks Newt Gingrich), but has now ceded its power for reactionary political revolution (thanks Mike Johnson).
I'm not defending the current asylum system, as the impression that it can be abused has brought us to a less-than-optimal political "middle-ground" where a few hundred judges are assigned to hundreds of thousands of cases to determine whether someone's asylum claim is authentic or not. Conservatives are on record opposing legislative immigration reform for more than a decade. Progressives do not have political power at the federal level, even if you can find soundbytes on YouTube of them getting "owned". The neoliberal Democrat centrists have never been opposed to immigration reform, and have brought forth multiple bills delivering exactly what their conservative counterparts have asked for (thanks again Newt Gingrich, who needs bipartisan legislation when we can just swing a massive pendulum between 2 shitty alternatives every couple of years).
To go even further: I do think there are going to be really difficult pills to swallow in the coming decades regarding mass migration, not even outside of borders, but within our borders as well. I don't think it's unreasonable to think that there is some potential future where we will be watching masses of people starve through binoculars across the Rio Grande. It'd be great to figure out how we can, as a nation, navigate those turbulent waters without regressing to animalistic authoritarianism, but over the past 10 years I have lost faith more and more that that's even possible.
All of this is just a play for more executive power. I don't trust that executive power won't be abused, especially given that the current executive seems to get off (sexually?) on flaunting abuses of power. But maybe there's where you and I differ in concerns about real dangers to our freedom in the coming years.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
2mo ago
Not to blackpill too much, but the country is basically doomed. When judges can override issues of national sovereignty - literally there is NOTHING more important than a country deciding for itself who to let in and who to expel - the illegal immigration issue in the US will never be solved. It's over, there's just no way to solve it. The millions who came in will never leave.
Every time I read something hysterical on this forum I always flip what is being talked about in my head:
Not to blackpill too much, but this country is basically doomed. When cabinet appointees can override issues of human rights violations - literally there is NOTHING more important than a government being forced to respect the rights of its citizens and residents - the social justice issue in the US will never be solved. It's over, there's just no way to solve it. There will always be a subjugated class of people in the US.
Less tongue-in-cheek, it seems like the firebrands on the topic of immigration on the US are pretty much cheering for the suspension of habeus corpus: deport by any means necessary, due process be damned. It's unfortunate that it's gotten to this point. But I also dread the unintended consequences / friendly-fire. I guess at least if you're on the conservative side of the political spectrum you don't have any fears of political persecution under this administration.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
2mo ago
Original comment:
Because the US government is the only hegemon in history willing to expend resources for a rules based system.
Your response to me bringing up Rome:
Rome did not protect trade for foreign nations (even trade Rome wasn't a participant in) without a demand for absorption into the Roman state.
This is a bit of moving the goalposts, no? They were a hegemon, and they expended resources to establish a rules-based system.
I'm just positing a more complete theory of world powers throughout history that neatly explains everyone's behavior, rather than trying to put one more notch on the bedpost for American exceptionalism ("the only hegemon"!). World powers establish rules, and then use those rules for profit - somewhere on the spectrum between "fair trade" and "pillaging".
Building infrastructure within your own borders and pushing back on the barbarians on the periphery are simply standard expectations for all states not free trade policy.
I mean, it does count as "within your own borders" once you conquer those peoples and expand your borders I guess. People frown upon that these days but I'm sure without our modern views on sovereignty, the US would have "expanded" its borders a few more times in the past couple of decades. (But sovereignty seems to be a concept that some world leaders seem to want to leave in the 20th century, so who knows.)
Likewise, I'm sure if Rome had the capability to remotely ensure stable trade outside of its borders in the early AD centuries, it would have. A more stable silk road / spice trade? Easy to agree to. It wasn't for lack of desire ("willing"), but lack of technology.
I have read hundreds of different pet theories on the "strategy" behind what has happened with the tariffs, and the vast majority of the time, I've come to the conclusion that the theory is basically a reflection of the writer's own bias.
I think in all likelihood this is simply a result of everyone agreeing (even his supporters) that you simply can't trust anything that Trump says as a reflection of his own motivation. I'll add a caveat, though, that there are some people who insist that his actions are entirely consistent with his rhetoric, but I have not yet been convinced.
So it's not so much "no theory of mind", as much as "no mind worth theorizing about". It's intellectual terrorism. People are bending over backwards spending precious thought cycles that could be spent on work or with their family trying to rationalize what can only be reasonably described as irrational.
I'll even add my own pet theory to the end here: Trump wants to push buttons and feel powerful. House Republicans have blessed him with the "tariff" button. Trump pushes it. Trump feels powerful. The end.
(Edit: this sort of dovetails with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory, first associated with Nixon. Maybe great for foreign policy, but when practiced on your own electorate, I think "intellectual terrorism" is a fair descriptor.)
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
2mo ago
There's as much to learn by what isn't being voted on.
Just want to highlight how good of an observation this is - no matter who is in power.
One could even measure how duplicitous legislators are based on how much they campaign on something vs. how much they legislate on it. Would sure be a disappointment if the golden goose that serves as a war drum for your supporters was a problem that was suddenly solved by coherent legislation.
Tinfoil hat: there's little incentive for American conservatives to create any legislation around immigration. Action through executive enforcement, while not as effective as legislation and reform, will keep the base energized and conservatives in power. What's the equivalent for the progressives? Taxes on the rich?
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
2mo ago
Because the US government is the only hegemon in history willing to expend resources for a rules based system.
Rome built roads and pushed back on the barbarians in the north.
But also, is it really that controversial to suggest that the USG has been engaging in various forms of pillaging throughout its entire history?
Seems to me that there's always been a balance between expending resources for establishing rules, and then also pillaging. I don't think world powers establish rules out of benevolence, but because it allows lower-risk extraction of resources outside of its own borders - sometimes best-described as "fair trade" and sometimes best-described as "pillaging".
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
2mo ago
I think you've assumed that I think that critical theory is the only type of academic history? It's part of this "overcorrection" that I see that whenever a historical figure is pointed out as being not worthy of our praise, it must be "woke".
The difference is, "woke" history is "whig" history - trying to read back present day moral notions and fashions back into the past as if they were objective (they're not).
This is pretty much explicitly what I did not mean when I said "academic history". Academic history is digging up primary texts, learning obscure languages and scripts, and doing a lot of the dirty work that others may consider unimportant because it represents a fraction of a fraction of the story of human history.
Actual good history doesn't sugarcoat the past; it immerses you in it so you can understand the actual norms and mores of the time and thus figure out for yourself who was being a giant piece of shit given the society they were in.
I find actual "good" history to be incredibly boring. It's basically translating and regurgitating primary texts (as previously mentioned). There's very little immersion. Primary texts are awful - humans were not particularly great at forming narratives before Gutenberg. Some of my shopping lists have more narrative complexity than some of the primary texts I've been exposed to.
I think Columbus would be my pet example of anti-woke overcorrection. His contemporaries found him to be a giant piece of shit. Lots of people around him were saying, "Damn, Columbus, slow the fuck down with the atrocities." But he did something notable - he dug up the funding for a moonshot project for which many sponsors doubted the ROI. So his name got slapped on everything. Pop history (grade school-level history) gave a very uncritical treatment of him for decades. But his shittiness, even for his times, is pretty obvious in the primary texts - one does not need to use critical theory or employ "whig" history to figure that out.
(Tangential hot take: give Italian Americans their own holiday worthy of their community's cultural spirit, and Columbus will disappear.)
trying to read back present day moral notions and fashions back into the past as if they were objective (they're not)
I appreciate your comment though, because this line did really make me give pause while writing my reply. Personally, I do think there are some universal morals that do transcend time, but at times throughout history it was simply not feasible to act in accordance with those universal morals: there's only enough food for 3 families to survive the winter but there are 4 families in the village. Should we judge people who were otherwise great, except for "universal moral" failings that were simply a product of their time?
I'm totally fine with future generations being appalled at me for continuing to consume factory-farmed meat even though I know the immense suffering that it causes near-human-level intelligence animals, so I guess I will continue judging people of the past because I have a feeling that deep down, they knew better.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
2mo ago
Like... literally brawling? I would say sports would have to take the cake, with the city of Philadelphia holding the crown for most unhinged sports fans.
Heated verbal arguments? I would say politics, but you disqualified it. Even local (city) and hyper-local (neighborhood / HOA) disagreements fall under politics imo... So that leaves anything to do with work or family: coworker or boss mistreating you, or cheating and dishonesty.
Good-natured disagreements? Definitely food, or other regional cultural rituals. It's almost like regional culture is advanced during the small wins and losses during those disagreements, "No, we're going to do things this way." Then suddenly 200 years later your county is known worldwide for having high quality whiskey.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
2mo ago
What changed? Is politics today just much harder to succeed in without being a cutthroat monster?
It all started when Kennedy put on some make-up for his televised debate with Nixon (/s, sort of).
I think you might be falling prey to some sort of rose-tinted lens bias when looking into the past. Americans love to deify the founding fathers and other notable people in our national mythology, but there's not really too much evidence that they were not (and I don't say this lightly) giant pieces of shit - horrible, awful people. Especially for the most charismatic ones you can find accounts of them being duplicitous, deceitful, and all-around lacking in personal morals that betray their virtuous musings in various publications.
I've noticed a tendency in pop history to equate "doing something notable" with "being someone good", whereas within academic history, historians are much better about maintaining an objective distance from the figure being studied. I think it's pretty telling that this objective distancing is often labeled "wokeness", but that's a digression.
Coming back to the present, there's plenty of people who are now "doing something notable", but you're realizing that you have plenty of access to the information that they are not "being someone good". So something must have changed? No, my hypothesis is that notable people have always been giant pieces of shit: back to 1700AD Louis XIV, back to 750AD Charlemagne, back to 30BC Cleopatra, back to 1300BC Ramses I, etc.
I'm not sure how many people I speak for, but I've always dabbled with the thought of personally unseating my local congressperson. But there's nothing really remarkable about me as a person that people would want to rally around. I write well, I speak well, and I rise pretty quickly in whatever companies I happen to jump between. Because of that competence, I guess I would be an ideal bureaucrat in a world where bureaucracy would have to exist.
I want to improve my community, but running for office seems to be even more performative than making sure to pick up litter at rush hour, rather than picking up litter for the sake of picking up litter.
You can't run moonshot companies like as is literally the case for SpaceX, or Tesla, if you don't make sure you've done your best to account for all relevant factors.
As someone in the tech industry, I actually have the exact opposite take, to say the least.
The quiet "Mittelstand" of tech is based on domain expertise, driven by B2B sales, and moves slowly but is actively transforming industries as the largest corporations don't want to be "left behind" with new innovations. This, for me, is calculated and matches your pattern of doing the "best to account for all relevant factors".
Moonshot companies and big tech are strategically opposite: operate on hype-cycles and vibes driven by marketing and build enormous moats that will plug the holes of the flaws of the Version 2 of your product (see: enshittification). This is not only "move fast and break things", but also "fuck you got mine".
Edit: This is also my experience as someone who has worked for both types of companies, one which was sold for $3XXm as a portfolio subsidiary, only to later be shuttered as a $3XXm loss once a hike in interest rates exposed it as smoke and mirrors.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
2mo ago
At some point I'm going to have to start assuming people just don't listen to him.
I actually don't think they do, aside from little quips that are (accidentally?) designed to be repeated memetically.
I would imagine most people form their opinions of Trump following marching orders from their news outlet of choice. If Trump has a truly nuanced take, I'm not sure if it will ever make it past the initial polarization filter of Fox News, Reddit, etc.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
2mo ago
Huh, I always thought the void ray change was because it was overpowered, not because it was awkward within the context of the lore.
Worth noting that SC2 still has the viper (caster type unit) which converts health (of other units / buildings) to energy, and you'll often see Zerg hatcheries on nearly 0 health in end game scenarios because it's used as a battery for the vipers, especially in PvZ.
In true culture war fashion, it seems like there's a dilemma that is "obvious" from either side of the lens.
The strategy from the left is well-documented here: any opposition can simply be hamstrung with "lawfare". This is especially effective since within recent history the left's opposition in the "West" is led by strongmen populists of personality - there's no depth in terms of charismatic leadership within the movement at large, so if you cut off the head the beast is dead. Unfortunately for the left, that's also the case in places like Russia and Turkey, where it seems like it takes a cult of personality to "grassroots" a movement capable of opposing the entrenched right - so the whataboutism is baked in (as seen in your write-up).
But the strategy from the right can't be ignored either: snowball small crimes and cry lawfare on your way up to the larger (antidemocratic) crimes. White collar crimes are hilariously underpunished (unless you've already climbed the "lawfare" ladder), so the risk is extremely low: move a few decimal points here or there on some tax returns, make the SEC slap you on the wrist for misreporting on financial statements, etc. Then, when you're punished for something meaningful, simply appeal to your followers that you're only being punished because of your politics, and bring up all the other cases where white collar crimes were hilariously underpunished as a double-standard.
In fact, to "climb the lawfare ladder", you don't even have to have personally performed the smaller crimes first, like some perverse inversion of "guilt by association". It appears to be possible to utilize the (just) prosecutions of others as evidence that you yourself are being unjustly persecuted. Maybe one could even pardon those individuals, some of them on the left, to cast even more doubt!
Unfortunately for us plebeians of the non-accelerationist variety, I don't see this deescalating any time soon. Reactionary strategists have surely caught on to the pattern, and are probably quite pleased how much the term lawfare has spread like wildfire amongst the even the most moderate conservatives, thanks especially to news outlets that act like a memetic megaphone.
Likewise, the left seems to view a stronger judiciary as one of the only ways of stalling a full-on reactionary revolution - something that some on the right seems to acknowledge as well judging by comments from the Speaker of the House and the once-leader-cum-ex-leader-cum-leader of DOGE. Just browse Reddit for a bit to see how much the left sees the judiciary as the last bastion of hope against a unitary executive and a doormat legislature.
Edit: spelling, formatting
I'll try to break the back-and-forth of condescending snark from cherry-picked lines, but you've at least matched my level so kudos.
My main issue with your interpretation of my post is that you're reducing my use of the word "wargaming" to a very literal activity that happens behind closed doors with a couple military brass at most. I could have chosen a better term that would not have evoked such a specific image in your mind, so mea culpa. What I mean by "wargaming" is broadly any strategic, adversarial simulations with starting conditions based on scenarios that are executed in order to relatively evaluate the outcomes of different actions.
Anyone claiming to know precisely what "wargaming"[1] is within the context of the USG either oversaw it, took part in it, or is talking out of their ass. Civilians are probably equally aware of how the USG executes "wargaming" as much as they are aware of the USG's intelligence on "UFOs": any knowledge is highly speculative at best. My personal definition of competent "wargaming" would bring in unconventional expertise, like experts from something like the Department of the Interior, to get accurate fact sheets on e.g. the likelihood that Yellowstone erupts and what the domestic and military response would have to be. My fear is that such information would be overlooked in the current administration, due to the arrogance and apathy referenced in my OP. It is not evidence-based decision making, it's vibes-based decision making.
But maybe that's at the core of our disagreement. You, and others who feel as passionately as you do, are done with "evidence-based decision making", at least since we've had since we elected a black man president. To continue with "evidence-based decision making" would be an existential error. The solution for you isn't necessarily the rejection of evidence, as that's irrational. Your solution is still rational, it's just that you will not actively seek that evidence as you fear that what you may find contradicts your conclusions.[2] Your cause is righteous and therefore correct.
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