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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   38607 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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Former President Trump has picked JD Vance to be his running mate.

I must say that this is probably the best pick he could have made if we restrict the selection to just the people on his short list. Vance is the most populist of the potential picks. He has some obvious strengths with a demographic that cost trump his victory in 2020 (white males). The left seems to hate him more than any of the other potentials. He is certainly the most MAGA of the bunch, however it's hard to tell just how mercenary he is. I like that he at least had a life before politics and was a successful person before he came on the scene.

Haley, Rubio, Scott, Burgham, Youngkin. MAGA sees them all as neocon swamp creatures. They were the more moderate choices that would have put the VP just one more assassination attempt away from getting things back to business as usual.

There is a lot to digest here. Trumps statements since Saturday indicate that he wants to run on a Peace, Unity, and Love platform. I think this is a great idea, especially with Vance as VP. He should offer the country an opportunity to unite on his (our, MAGA) terms. It would be a tricky thing to pull off and Trump would need some softer language and a perfect delivery, but I think it's do-able. Let the left reject the call. Trump is perhaps in a unique position to pull this off right now. Vance gives him cover to do this.

It's also been said that VP picks rarely or minimally affect the race. I tend to think that is true which also is a reason to double down on MAGA with Vance. If its not going to be that important to the vote count, might as well go for someone that is ideologically aligned.

Wild speculation on my part - might this also be a strategy of deterrence, providing an heir who is strictly not a friend of Trump's enemies, so as to disincentivice further assassination attempts? Along the lines of "if we kill him, the next-in-line is even worse!".

People said the same thing about Mike Pence's appointment.

Seems to have worked! AFAIK nobody tried to kill him at the time.

The left seems to hate him more than any of the other potentials.

Why is this an advantage? My second biggest complaint about Trump's first term is that the left's nonstop ear-splitting hysteria impeded a lot of the stuff that a normal President would be able to do, and created a lot of collateral damage too (e.g. burning a bunch of cities, engaging in ritual defamation of the police, getting totally deranged on race relations). Generally politicians aim to energize their base, not the other side.

As stated above, deterrence. If he picks a standard republican candidate, then the incentive to try again is high because if Trump doesn’t continue as president, the VP does, and a middle of the road candidate is preferable to them. And secondly, it signals to the base that he’s committed to their causes rather than being a standard politician.

Hysteria from the left is already at 1000% and would remain that way regardless of Trump doing anything other than withdrawing from the race and jumping off a cliff. No point in caring about it.

OK, I disagree, but regardless, that doesn't explain why it's an advantage.

Am I correct in labeling Vance as Grey Tribe and not Maga?

They’re not mutually exclusive. He’s probably culturally grey/violet- one of the eccentric blue tribe subgroups(at some point red tribe subgroups like that need to be pointed at- they’re more real than either the grey or violet tribes). Maga is just a political agenda around immigration restriction and reshoring, that probably comes with some additional ideas like a certain degree of law and order and cultural conservatism.

WTF is violet?

I think this piece by Vance gives a pretty good background on his perspective. He's firmly anti-libertarian and believes that the government should aggressively and proactively use its power to create good outcomes. "Good outcomes" in his book being largely family-centric rather than business-centric. He cares a lot about declining fertility rates for example.

The main thing that I think doesn't quite come through in that article is his high willingness to play hardball. For example he has advocated for defying court rulings that obstruct a new administration's ability to fire bureaucrats and replace them with their own people.

I don't know how you categorise "grey tribe" versus "MAGA" but I would say Vance combines Trump's willingness to defy norms and break the rules with a much more coherent and strategic sense of what he seeks to achieve by doing so.

Left has been busy improving Vance's wikipedia page and turned Vance from a populist guy sympathetic to Grey Tribe / NRx ideas into a an alleged neoreactionary.

Welp, I wasn't sure about this Vance guy, but now I'm sold.

Maybe a bit of everything, in different respects?

Depends heavily on how you're reading the tribes. If they're about political allegiance or what clothes you wear, yeah. If they're about how you were raised and what things you value, it's... well, at least dependent on how much you trust Vance's story. His upraising and claimed norms are incredibly lower-middle-class Borderer, in a lot of ways that are pretty heavily opposed to Grey Tribe aspects and auspices, and not just in ways that are pandering to social conservatives.

But he's a politician, and his mouth is moving. So he's lying, it's just a matter of what direction.

As someone whose life story was a bit like Vance's (except in rural north Alabama instead of small town southern Ohio), it's weird. I grew up not really fitting in with the place (was too much of a nerd) and as an adult would rather hang out at the bar with your average blue tribe dilettante (I really like smart right wingers and or grey tribe types, but they're rare in my local college town social scene and or keep their mouths shut. I'd much rather talk to a liberal lawyer/law student than some low-info Boomer Gen X Reaganite or Trumper who hasn't updated their talking points since the 1990s.) than your local rednecks (I can talk enough about cars and football to fit in, though, and one of our regulars was impressed that I was the first non-tradesperson he'd met who knew what a glazier is.), but I don't really share their values. Somehow, in spite of not having been raised in the church, I turned out a fairly conservative person. I don't know what separates me from the average hicklib (There are plenty of those to be found in an SEC college town scene.), but at some point in my late teens/early 20s I felt it necessary to forgive my classmates for not having accepted me, to thank my teachers for what they did do, and while I'm not a churchgoer I've made my peace with God. Most of the people in the ruralville I'm from are decent and mean well, and as for the ones who aren't, there's trash everywhere I guess.

As for the borderer stuff, I don't know if Vance was or wasn't hamming some things up (The gist of his family having been part of the Great Migration strikes me as accurate, and while my father's side aren't from Appalachia they did migrate from the south to the rust belt and have been badly hurt by that area's economic decline and their own dysfunctions. My mom's side were the hillbillies, and apparently meeting them was something of a culture shock to my dad who'd grown up middle class in the Midwest.), but he nailed the toxic push-pull relationship between Mom and Mamaw (I do not believe that he was lying about that.) such that I was unprepared for that trip down memory lane and spent some time in tears.

I will say that I sympathize deeply with Vance's reactionary streak, even if I'm not sure (and I don't know if he's sure either) what the answer is.

Venture capitalist Thiel acolyte, Ivy grad, married an Indian woman he met in grad school.

"He's literally me, but pudgier and with a better beard."

I'm calling him as grey, but also a bit of a chameleon who conveniently goes along with what's popular.

"He's literally me, but pudgier and with a better beard."

He looks eerily like Adam Scott (the obnoxious new manager) in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

This is incorrect.

Trump picked Peter Thiel as his VP.

J.D. Vance is the in-game skin downloadable content.

This is partly sarcasm, but I don't know how much.

The trouble with Vance is that we don't know who he is. Hillbilly Elegy is a good character origin story. But what follows? After serving with distinction as a Marine Corps ... Public Affairs ... yeah, nevermind ... he went Yale Law School and time at Thiel backed venture capital firm where he invested in ... an agribusiness?. Vance lived mostly in San Francisco before running for Senate in Ohio. He's a Catholic Convert married to a non-practicing-anything. His children are Ewan (not Evan), Mirable, and Vivek.

In 2016 he's a Never Trumper. When he runs for Senate, DJT helps get him over the finish line (along with Mitch McConnell but, hey, the real one's always operate from the shadows). In the Senate, he's staunchly pro-Israel, questions support for Ukraine, and says Lina Khan has done a good job.

As a VP pick, the move is to try to lock down Pennsylvania's electoral votes. Anointed as Trump's successor? Dyed in the wool MAGA? I think not. Another commenter mentioned Palin. I think that's a good comparison.

Trump has been moving to the middle on everything this cycle besides immigration and tariffs. The true believers are already losing their primaries (Bob Good in Virginia). OG MAGA (which was Tea Party 2.0) is on the way out. MAGA 2.0 is really riding a lot of the currents that popped off with COVID and BLM riots. Throw in a bunch of Grey Tribe Tech Bros and Vance makes a ton of sense.

The real question is when Trump finalized the decision - before or after the assassination attempt?

His children are Ewan (not Evan)

Really leaning into that borderer thing, eh?

This is low effort and antagonistic enough that I considered reporting it for a moment. I am, however, generally opposed to reporting (there have been some exceptions).

Can I invite you to explain what you mean here in more detail?

I'm not sure why it's antagonistic. Vance is of Scots-Irish (i.e. "Borderer") descent and the name "Ewan" is derived from Scottish Gaelic; him having a kid named Ewan fits pretty perfectly with his origins (and with Hillbilly Elegy; Albion's Seed claims many Borderers migrated to the Appalachians)

The scots-Irish are not in any way Gaelic. Ewan probably comes off as Irish-Catholic to most Americans, an actual borderer name might be something like billy-bob or Ray.

Ewan probably comes off as Irish-Catholic

The first "Ewan" I think of is Ewan McGregor, who is straight Scottish from Perth, Scotland. Also "Billy-Bob" is more redneck than hillbilly.

I mean I would assume a native born American named ewan to be Eoin but badly spelled.

I know a kid named Eoin, pronounced "Owen". Is "Ewan" pronounced the same way?

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And in fact that probably explains Vivek. The first boy got the ethnic gaelic name, so the second boy gets the ethnic indian name.

Maybe if his first kid is Evan, the second is Victor. Maybe not.

Ohio

Always has been huh, at this point they should start putting Ohio's flag on rockets and space ships instead.

His children are Ewan (not Evan), Mirable, and Vivek.

Not to leap to this one politician's defense too much, but: marry a foreign woman, have enormous understanding for and accommodation of her ways. Of course he has a kid named Vivek. His wife is from India. And if she wants a bunch of other Indian stuff in their household, he'd better smile and say "yes, dear". That's what marrying a woman is buying into.

I do notice his thoughtful writings on modern American Christianity that sort of forget about his non-American (to the best of my knowledge)-non-Christian wife.

His wife is from India.

No, she's from San Diego.

Oops. I thought she was Indian Indian.

Anyways, his ethnically Indian wife gets to have a son with an Indian name.

Nothing at all wrong with marrying a foreign man or woman. Nothing at all wrong with naming your progeny using his/her cultures names. All very well and good and points to a healthy marriage.

But your median to less-than-median Appalachian white trash (I get to use that word. It's our word) is going to, at the least, point and laugh at your goofy kids' names. And that's fine - fuck those morons, right?! J.D. Vance went to Yale Law School and did big tech things with venture capitalists in California and now he's the Vice President!

Except, wait, no, he gets those Appalachian / Rust Belt people because he is so totally still one of them. Oh, there are problems with the culture, but he is one of you!

And he totally also gets law and the economy because he went to Yale (did I mention that already?) and then helped Peter Thiel build crypto-mars or something.

The point I'm trying to make is that you have to know who you are and be it. If Vance wants to tell the simple (and good!) story of "Hey, I almost fucked up my life when I was a kid, but then joined the Marines etc....I now realize a lot of my cultural upbringing led to some bad perspective and habits and I don't think it's a good thing" then more power to him. I have forever been waiting for the Black candidate who will publicly state a similar repudiation of what was once called "inner city" culture. (Fun fact: both of these groups adhere to highly male versions of an honor culture.) People get to change and you aren't defined by the zip code within which you came of age. It's helpful if you clearly state this.

If he wants to tell the story of "I represent the lost Appalachia / Rust Belt. Those swamp creatures and Washington have killed us!" that's fine too. But mixing them gets really dangerous because it leads to a lot of just so stories and cherry picked emotive reasoning. I don't think Vance has ever published anything that's factually inaccurate, but I think he weaves a narrative that gives some interesting (and highly varying) emotional perspectives on things.

But does it even matter, isn't it all about policy anyway? Yes. That's the point precisely. Policy is inherently tricky and if you can't commit to your own personal story, how will you commit to a policy (or, hopefully, a cohesive political-economic philosophy) and not say "Fuck it" and follow whichever way the weather vane of your base is pointing? If Trump is serious about tariffs on steel, then Vance will be part of the final nail in the coffin to whatever remains of the Rust Belt. But listen to his story about memaw!

Except, wait, no, he gets those Appalachian / Rust Belt people because he is so totally still one of them. Oh, there are problems with the culture, but he is one of you!

And he totally also gets law and the economy because he went to Yale (did I mention that already?) and then helped Peter Thiel build crypto-mars or something.

Yes, he gets to sit on both these chairs.

The simple issue is that elite is different from non-elite, and a culture that heartily rejects all things elite as alien to it is a dead culture, a beheaded culture, a discarded trash culture, a District 9 prawn culture, that will have no champions and must die in irrelevance. "Hillbillies" have no viable notion of political elite – I posit that being a rich son of a bitch who has inherited some franchise isn't it. You are seeing this class being defined, and it proves to be very similar to the template of general modern American aristocracy. Multiracial, well-connected, well-educated, socially aggressive. Just with some borderer flavor.

This is - incredibly sadly - perfectly accurate.

I hate to see HBD in everything but the reason you see - rust belt town kid - repudiates culture and joins blue/grey tribe is because there are a lot of them. It’s a very common path.

I think these towns may be starting to run out of high IQ stock as they are filtered out but they are relatively young in the filtering process. Like a generation back. These are coal mine or steel mill immigrant communities 70-100 years ago. The mills closed in roughly the ~’80s.

Baltimore just doesn’t have the stock to have these people emerge in large numbers.

It's been happening far longer.

The opening line of "One Piece at a Time" by Johnny Cash is;

"I left Kentucky in '49 / went to De-troit working on the assembly line".

The rust belt / Appalachian natives of today (and certainly of Vance's childhood) are either directly involved in or one step removed from aggressively anti-social patterns of behavior. Mostly substance abuse related. It's compounded my multiple generations of degeneracy. The Johnny Knoxville documentary The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia does a good job of showing this in detail. It papers over some more thoughtful commentary with goofy fun (hey, it is a Johnny Knoxville movie).

But this is why it's so important for people who "make it out" to turn around and point out that what passes for normal and expected in these communities is anything but that. When everyone from memaw to your parents, brothers, sisters, and cousins are actively participating in government benefits fraud, small time drug dealing and abuse, and constant alcoholism, you can't expect a child to look around and go, "oh, I should really focus on that linear algebra course [that isn't offered] at High School."

Correct. In the dying rural area where I'm from (in north Alabama, not southern Ohio), the Silent generation was the last really "normal" generation that mostly stuck around even though they mostly transitioned from farming to working in factories (I had several relatives who ran vestigial hobby farms in their spare time/retirements.). Boomers and onwards tended to move to suburbs closer to where the jobs/amenities were (and even Huntsville starting to get expensive hasn't revitalized the area where I'm from yet; it seems to be sprawling northward and I grew up on the other side of the river) such that my neck of the woods started dying in the 70s and was a sitting duck in the 2000s for the meth epidemic to take over and turn what was left into a white trashville as the retired Silents sat in their houses and wondered what the Hell went wrong.

With that, my other side of the family wound up in a crappy part of the rust belt thanks to the Great Migration (My grandparents also took part, but returned home and eventually George Wallace brought a GM factory to us for my grandfather to work at. My parents met each other in the Marines because the military was how Gen X got out of dodge.) and it's striking A. how much worse off my Millennial cousins are up there than mine from Alabama and B. how low the standards are up there. Like, I'm a fuckup by the standards of being college educated but I have a full time job, pay my own bills, have never had a problem with illegal drugs, and haven't been to jail so to them I'm a success. Maybe they were just worse to start with and my dad was the outlier success story on their side and my mom one of the worst on her side (Her sister was very much like J.D. Vance's mom from Hillbilly Elegy. Mom was...a cartoon villain tier psycho who put on an epic of domestic violence and dead pets.) but it's depressing nevertheless.

As for aggressively anti-social behavior, I did find it amusing that once Mom moved to a city with actual police it didn't take her long to start winding up in jail for her bullshit (Twice in a year, once for domestic violence and once for stealing from her job.). Luckily she finally succeeded in her decade-long quest to draw disability and now gets something like 90% disability from the VA, so she's not really my problem anymore and can go around making a mockery of "disabled veteran" (Lol the local diversion program for disabled veterans did spare her quite a bit of jail time for that DV charge. Apparently that wasn't her first offense for that, to which I can only reply "no shit".) with all the plate and stickers on her car.

Khan. I can’t figure her out. She’s blocking a mid-tier luxury hand bag merger but Microsoft got to buy Activision for $68 billion. Google just announce they are buying Wiz for $23 billion. I’m actually concerned about big tech getting bigger but some mid tier consumer garbage she targets? Perhaps google just thinks the deal doesn’t close till she’s out of a job.

I’d like to know more on Vance’s thoughts here.

I'm fairly certain they did fight hard on Microsoft-Activision, they just did it poorly

Maybe. I don’t have the inside baseball on these things. Michael Kors getting bought the stock is trading like it won’t be approved.

Is this just a case of the luck of the draw on the judge draw? Both judges though were appointed by Biden.

Honestly, the U.S. just needs to approve a merger tax and then stop regulating this shit.

Start at 10% for buying a $1 billion company, then add another 10% for every additional order of magnitude. Problem solved. Google wants to buy Wiz for $23 billion? Cool. No problem. Pay the U.S. government $3.13 billion and you're all good.

If the EU wants to add its own tax then we let them but then also increase the wine and handbag tarriff accordingly.

All of the airlines would merge within a week under that regime, and then we'd all be paying monopoly rents to Amalgamated Airlines for the rest of our lives whenever we wanted to travel more than a hundred miles. And all of the other industries too. A 10% tax on deal consideration wouldn't even rate.

Couldn't competitors still come along?

Not if they can't get slots at the airports they need.

Fuck it, just make them pay ME personally a % of that sweet sweet profit. Make it a good amount.

The airline industry is the one industry that sort of has the go ahead to break antitrust law. The combination of high fixed costs, no moat, and marginal revenue maximizing pricing of $0 makes them go bankrupt too much. Their CEO’s already get to answer questions talking about anti competitive behavior with only a thin plausible deniability.

It's funny to think that airlines don't have a moat, since it's a ridiculously expensive business to run. But I suppose if you define moat that way then they don't.

Correct, their actual moat is airport slots and routes which are now meticulously tabulated when DOJ considers airline merger agreements after US Airways / American Arlines merger empirically resulted in higher fares.

It’s less of a moat in many cases than people think; the experience of euro budget airlines like Ryanair and EasyJet shows that consumers are happy to go to airports 100 miles out of town for fares 1/4 of the legacy airlines. Startup costs are extremely low with the leasing business the way it is. I’m skeptical that looser competition laws would dramatically worsen the situation for consumers.

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Great point. We should also add a market cap tax along the same lines. Perhaps 1% per trillion per year, adjusted along the same lines. (So 0.001% per billion, etc...)

This would prevent excessive consolidation.

The point is that the government, being so very bad it, should not intervene in the free market but should simply extract a simple and fair tax from excessive profits. The simpler the better.

from excessive profits.

There is no such thing.

You can sustain your profit margins through a fantastic product, a moat, whatever else. Or, they gradually erode to competition. Sure, software margins look eye-popping but the deeper financials bring the back to earth. Also, remember that, because of bad tax policy developer salaries were able to be categorized as R&D expenses for years instead of COGS, which artificially boosted margins.

Much more likely, your margins come back down due to competition. That's how the market works and it works well.

In the Government Contracting world, so much of pricing a project comes down to a "fair and reasonable" standard that is (a) loosely defined and (b) ultimately, subject to the whims of a mid level bureaucrat. How do they determine "fair and reasonable?" largely through vibes based "Gee! that seems like a lot!" reasoning. Bear in mind, too, that the GS pay scale tops out at maybe $160k (even in places like LA, NY, DC) and these gov't employees know that the VPs on the other side of the table from them are north of $400-$500k, and it does come down to pretty Kafka-esque jealousy sometimes.

The result?

Government Contracting, especially for weapons platforms and airplanes, is THE poster child for cost diseases, budget overruns, and takes-forever delivery. The government gets to feel smug for its penny-pinching at the unit margin level, meanwhile there's an ocean of cash they light on fire over 20+ years.

This is staggeringly ignorant on many dimensions. To pick one at random, Mark Zuckerberg would happily manage his market cap down to $20MM and compensate his employees with cash if it meant he could rely on his sole shareholder vote to retain control and consolidate the entire tech industry into a behemoth that bestrides the world. Your proposal is a road to Soviet style serfdom, and not even a long road.

Trump picked Peter Thiel as his VP.

J.D. Vance is the in-game skin downloadable content.

I don't think I believe this. Sure, Thiel will have a lot more of a voice than otherwise. But I don't think he'll have much actual power over Vance, and Vance is intelligent enough to want to decide things for himself.

Apparently Vance got Don Jr in his corner (whose advice is weighted highly) and deliberately appeared on TV defending Trump a lot (which he knew Trump would love), and I’m pretty sure Burgum was #2 but Jr convinced Trump that Burgum was too establishment. One article mentioned showing Trump media reports that he was backed by Karl Rove which Trump did not like at all. Rubio was tanked by the residency constitutional issue.

Does Don Jr have any personal ideology whatsoever? Did he before his father ran for President?

He likes guns, so I think he's at least been pro-2A for a long time.

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.

There's an important distinction to be made between NRx taking over RNC, and RNC assimilating NRx. The alt-right learned that lesson the hard way. I'll keep an open mind as to what Vance represents, but given that he already seems to be beating the drum of war with Iran my bet is Vance represents the Neo-Con reconstitution under a different banner and aesthetic. Many of us have been pointing at NRx for being esoterically or even exoterically Zionist for some time, and Vance seems likely to me to be the expression of this fact.

Many of us have been pointing at NRx for being esoterically or even exoterically Zionist for some time

Can you point to this pointing?

My thread here was related to the fallout of the Lomez dox (JD Vance follows Lomez on Twitter by the way, along with Steve Sailer). This entire circle pushes edgy criticism towards everything: liberalism, Protestantism, White Womyn, Catholics, except they hold mainstream sensibilities when it comes to Jews, and they counter-signal criticisms of Jewish and Zionist influence. If Vance becomes the pinnacle of NRx influence in the White House it is most likely going to express as ultra-Zionism rather than any pro-white or reactionary political influence.

My prediction is that Vance is going to represent the RNC assimilating NRx edginess and aesthetics as a Trojan Horse for ultra-Zionism, just like the Neocons before them.

Many of us have been pointing at NRx for being esoterically or even exoterically Zionist for some time,

Why are the jews your only issue?

Like, objectively, there seem to be far more important things to life in the US than whatever minor portion of the budget gives aid to which parties in the middle east.

Nowadays, it's more of the Indian Question (IQ), imo. The newer wave of overtly nepotistic ingroupers is bound for a Noticing, any day now.

Seconding this question, I've asked /u/SecureSignals the same question before and he didn't respond.

I've long been perplexed by the phenomena of super smart people getting obsessed with Jews, and unfortunately the people who fit that description appear to be universally averse to public introspection.

Why are the jews your only issue?

The bigger question is why am I the only one to notice Vance advocating for war with Iran, and complaining about Biden not doing enough for Israel? Why am I not dazzled by Vance's flirtation with NRx which is giving others cause for optimism? Because I know better, that's why. I can see what's going on, and it's the trajectory that has been predicted by people that know better for some time. The Thiel network is finally bearing real fruit, and it is already showing itself for what it is.

You're still dodging the question. Why the obsession with jews, what makes you think the JQ is so much more important than everything else?

Imagine we are in alternate world, where anyone who is someone says that South Africa is our greatest ally, that "our values" came from Pretoria, that United States would not exist without South Africa, where every American politician travels to South Africa to honor the Voortrekker memorial and swears to support South Africa to the end, supply it with unlimited money and weapons, and send US armed force to defend South Africa if necessary.

And when someone objects,people are asking: Why are you so obssessed with Afrikaners? Why you hate them so much? Do you want to send them to concentration camps again?

This is a Culture War thread, the JQ is highly pertinent to Culture War problems including the most important of our day, on issues ranging from foreign policy to media influence, academic influence, identity politics, social media censorship, Hollywood culture-creation... The importance of that issue is also relative to the fact that it's a completely taboo topic in political and cultural discourse. So it's an extremely important issue to Culture War, and it's actively ignored or countersignaled by the establishment Right Wing. This has to change. Instead, you get stuff like NRx that collapses into a JD Vance "Vote Republican, support Israel" like every other "right-wing" movement which ignores or countersignals the issue.

Instead, you get stuff like NRx that collapses into a JD Vance "Vote Republican, support Israel"

What.. even ? To a person who think a nation that mines 200-300,000 tons of coal daily but couldn't spare enough to burn ten thousand corpses , yes, the entirety of the NRx collapses into 'Vote Republican'.

Pay no attention that most NRx guys are not very hot on Israel, or that any politician who'd even wish to do anything about the Israeli lobby would have to spend years pretending he's okay with them.

To a person who think a nation that mines 200-300,000 tons of coal daily but couldn't spare enough to burn ten thousand corpses

According to the lore, they didn't use coal, they used freshly cut wood or harvested brushwood. And they allegedly burned an average of five thousand every single day, on makeshift open-air pyres, with a few dozen workers in a small camp of less than 5 acres. ChatGPT estimates for its part that cremating 5,000 people would require burning 750 cords of wood, or about 1,500,000 kg as a daily requirement. There are no documents or accounts for the transport of these mass quantities of fuel to the camp, which was a well-known camp in the surrounding area. There have also been 0 excavations proving the existence of any cremated remains of the allegedly ~1,000,000 people who are said to have been cremated on that site, despite the claimed burial areas being precisely known.

The quantity of coal mined across the entire German industry doesn't solve the problem of how this small camp cremated 5,000 people per day on crude open-air pyres with nobody noticing and with no shipments of fuel.

All the factorio in the world hasn't been able to help you see a real-world logistical impossibility in front of your very eyes, you are still gullible.

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I appreciate you responding, though I must admit I was more curious about any psychological insights than culture war analysis.

The importance of that issue is also relative to the fact that it's a completely taboo topic in political and cultural discourse. So it's an extremely important issue to Culture War

You will find that topics absent from the discourse are much more commonly so for reasons of being completely unimportant/uninteresting to anyone than vice versa...

You will find that topics absent from the discourse are much more commonly so for reasons of being completely unimportant/uninteresting to anyone than vice versa...

Yes?

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The topic is certainly not absent from the public discourse, it is the most important issue in the public discourse. The Holocaust narrative, being pro-Israel, "fighting anti-Semitism", these are all expressions of this issue and they are treated with utmost importance by everyone on both sides of the political aisle. What is lacked is any critical perspective because of the consensus held by both sides of the political aisle.

Does this look like a guy who thinks the issue of Jewish influence is uninteresting and unimportant? No, it looks like someone who is ritualistically submitting to Jewish influence, and whatever exposure to NRx he had hasn't helped him. "Vote Republican and support Israel", same old same old.

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This is a good point. Can the mods force him to answer this if he wants to keep jew posting?

  • -10

I’m going to go with “no.” That’d be a whole new level of micromanagement.

I agree in general, and I do think people should be able to have opinions I find odious, but if you are going to make it your thing, some level of forced engagement instead of just drive by jew-posting might be better than just straight up banning/ongoing warnings of "chillllllll."

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There is a rule about posting on multiple subjects. Past some point, if he keeps doing this he becomes a single issue poster.

A war would be more serious; fair enough.

I'm not dazzled by his flirtation with edgier corners of the internet; radicalism has a lot of downside risk.

The Thiel network

Does this mean you're a follower of Fuentes?

Does this mean you're a follower of Fuentes?

Nope, beyond that I agree with some of his criticisms of NRx. But I'm not a Christian Nationalist either.

They're obviously the most powerful and dangerous group of hyphenated Americans.

That isn't really an answer to the question.

What answer are you looking for?

I suppose I was asking something closer to foreign policy, not domestic policy.

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.

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. I don't see any reason to call it a coup when you could instead call it the return of the spoils system.

I take it back, I see the reason to call it a coup: to whip people into a frenzy, such that they'll do anything to avoid that outcome.

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.

I have an idea:

  1. Win the presidency and both houses of congress.

  2. Eliminate the filibuster.

  3. Repeal the Civil Service Reform Acts.

  4. Repeal the Administrative Procedure Act.

  5. ???

  6. Unleash total executive power over federal agencies and regulations. Very legal, very cool.

Why wouldn’t this work?

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.

By this standard Biden has couped too. The border and student loans would both be considered illegal actions.

Changing bureaucrats is above competency at enacting your agenda - Democratically. The outgoing people may be competent but they are partisan robots too that will interfere with your agenda and not do their job. Intellectually and functionally competent but they will still not execute the executives policy.

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.

They pretty much did tell the court fuck you. They were told it’s unconstitutional. They did it anyway. Cases take a long time to make it thru the system. He did it anyway. Sounds like a coup to me.

Choosing not to enforce the border and abusing the meaning of the word “asylum” while importing voters and using tax payer money is a coup in my book. Words have meanings. Asylum when the law was written meant something very specific - as in facing direct violence due to political belief. Biden decided it means I make $1 an hour in Guatemala and want American money.

You can say this is “exploiting loopholes”, but laws and words are always going to have a great deal on inexactness to them. And as the years go by people change the meaning of the word.

I don’t even know what you are complaining about with bureaucrats. They aren’t elected people. How is that a coup? It’s not like importing millions of voters, banning proof of citizenship, and changing election results.

They were told it’s unconstitutional.

Only in the trivial sense that every time the President breaks a law he also violates the Take Care clause. Biden v Nebraska was a statutory interpretation case which held that the clause in the HEROES act allowing the Secretary of Education to waive or modify student loans in connection with a national emergency (which COVID qualified as) didn't extend to the kind of broad-based loan forgiveness that the Biden administration wanted to do.

They did it anyway.

Having been told that he couldn't use the HEROES act, Biden looked around for other sources of statutory authority which didn't involve such a big stretch. The biggies are Publicig Service Loan Forgiveness (The statutes say that the government can discharge student loans if someone works for the government or certain other "public service" employers for ten years. This used to be almost impossible to claim because of paperwork requirements, but Biden just cancelled the loans for anyone whose employment record showed the required ten years of public service.) and income-based repayment (The statute allows the Secretary of Education to define rates and thresholds, and Biden made them a lot more generous). These are also going to end up in front of SCOTUS, but if statutes are interpreted to mean what they say Biden would win. But this Supreme Court has tended to interpret delegations of power more narrowly than you or I would based on reading the statutory text because they don't trust Congress to protect its own Constitutional role.

I don't even think this is "exploiting loopholes" at this stage. Congress intended to give the Executive broad discretion to write off student loans for borrowers who were struggling to repay them, and they did. Congress may or may not have intended that discretion to extend as far as Biden is taking it - the answer is probably mu because Congress notoriously doesn't have a brain and can't intend things other than explicitly. If America had a functioning Congress, Congress could have said what it meant. As we are, the administration and the Courts are butting heads over who gets to decide questions that Congress negligently chose not to.

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?

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?

In his own words, "fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people", to "seize the institutions of the left" as a "de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program".

He's not saying to fire bad bureaucrats or incompetent DEI hires; he's saying to fire democrats.

He's not saying to fire democrats; he's saying 'fire bureaucrats who won't take direction from the executive'. 'Disobeys the boss' is grounds for firing literally everywhere.

This seems like a sane-wash. Vance did not say "fire bureaucrats who won't take direction from the executive". I agree that doing that would be proper (and presumably legal). He says "fire every single midlevel bureaucrat", which doesn't seem to suggest leaving in place those who do take direction.

The fact that Vance goes on to advocate defying court rulings against the move suggests heavily that he acknowledges his preferred path would be explicitly illegal and that he doesn't care.

This seems like a sane-wash. Vance did not say "fire bureaucrats who won't take direction from the executive". I agree that doing that would be proper (and presumably legal). He says "fire every single midlevel bureaucrat", which doesn't seem to suggest leaving in place those who do take direction.

That seems like kind of an in-sane wash to me -- do you really think Vance plans to fire tens of thousands of people?

(and replace them with other people -- to be clear there are probably quite a few mid-level bureaucratic positions that could be eliminated altogether a la Millei)

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The full video and (admittedly autogen'd) transcript is here, with the relevant quotes starting around 23:00 to 30:00 (probably not worth listening to). I'm not a big fan of the Andrew Jackson worship, but the question itself assumes that said bureaucrats will be defying executive direction.

Could you quote the part where he's saying that? I've read the article and what I'm seeing is only what popocatepetl quoted.

You are seeing "we want to fire Democrats" in the article? I'm not.

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Vance cites Curtis Yarvin as one of his influences and follows BronzeAgePervert and Steve Sailer on X.

Good. We want people who are not afraid to listen to diverse influences even if they don't agree with them.

Remember when they went after Clinton for smoking weed? This is the 2024 version of that. The world improves for the better when bullshit attacks fail to stick.

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.

No, elected officials dismantling the unelected bureaucracy is the opposite of a coup.

You’re completely right.

It’s not a coup, it’s a restoration.

The irony is that it’s what normiecons have been dreaming about for generations but they’re by and large too cowardly and squeamish to actually go through with what’s needed to achieve it.

I bet he does follow the neoreactionaries because he seems like a person who would follow that stuff. But I think he has a lot of shared background with me. That is what high IQ rust belt guys do.

I feel like the only difference between me and him is he wrote a book and gives better speaches.

The only difference is he is a lot more successful!

I say in jest as a fellow rust belt kid. I could relate to a lot of what Vance wrote in Hillbilly elegy.

Read the book awhile back, my wife was interested so we watched the movie last night. I didn't remember him attempting to steal a TI-89 in the book, though there was a scene showing this in the movie. Checking just now there's no mention of attempted theft in the book, just that Mamaw made sure he had one.

Meanwhile, in my life, one of my delinquent friends helped me out by lifting a TI-89 from Wal-Mart.

And it seems to have been added to his wikipedia page an hour ago, so expect this to be heard.

White women love Hillbilly Elegy. This is a great pick.

I don't love Vance, but he's definitely better than the swamp creatures. I doubt the VP pick matters electorally, but the selection is important to define the future of the party and the country. Imagine Trump was incapacitated, senile, or otherwise incapable of exercising the duties of the Presidency: who do you want to be the new torchbearer?

I doubt the VP pick matters electorally

If Vance can move the needle in Western PA it might be big. Almost all of Biden's paths to victory involve winning Pennsylvania.

He can speak a language they understand and tell them “I’m you.” I’m from western PA. He can relate.

There's no reason to think he can. He was a below-value-over-replacement candidate in Ohio, winning by less than all other concurrent Republicans winning state elections in the same cycle. It's like expecting that Ted Cruz would have an advantage in winning over New Mexico.

New Mexico actually hates Texas(we invaded them twice). Running a Texan in New Mexico would be dumb.

Ted Cruz might have an advantage in Oklahoma or Louisiana, however. I don’t see how that’s implausible.

The point is that an unpopular Republican who barely squeaks through in a blood-red state is not an obvious choice to win over the more liberal neighboring state, even though they are neighbors.

He also didn’t have an incumbency advantage AND was going up against an unusually strong democrat.

As someone who lives in Western PA, I have never heard anyone around here mention his name. Trump supporters may like him, but, at this point, he looks just like a Trump clone to anyone who's not a Trump supporter. There's no latent admiration for Vance here or anything.

I think this is a naive take. Yes why would they be focused on JD. But now they have a reason. He is going to be in western PA a lot (eg new castle). He is going to try to run up the vote in the not overly densely populated areas. And he will be able to genuinely speak a language western PA folk will understand. If he can get 50-75k more votes in Western PA that could be the difference between winning or losing.

What language does Vance speak that Trump doesn't? He may have a better backstory but he doesn't really bring in the kind of voters that aren't already considered Trump's base. It's not like he's going to have some special in with minorities, or suburban women, or professionals, or any other constituency that could give Trump any real advantage he doesn't already have. I'd also add that I while I think a bad VP choice could potentially cost you votes (see Sarah Palin), that a good VP pick gets you any votes is less clear. Pence may have helped Trump among Evangelicals, but in the states that decided the election in 2016 the Evangelical vote isn't particularly important.

If he can get 50-75k more votes in Western PA that could be the difference between winning or losing.

He's not getting that many votes by running up the total in places like New Castle. In 2020 Trump got 4,310 votes in New Castle and Biden got 4,491, making it close to a 50/50 split. If Trump somehow manages to get 75% there (which isn't likely) that's still only about 2,000 more votes. There aren't 25 places like New Castle in Western PA. Being this generous lets him squeeze a few thousand more votes out of Sharon and Farrell, but after that it's slim pickings. Maybe some in the Beaver and Upper Ohio valleys. After that most of these areas are tapped. The mid-Mon Valley, where I'm originally from, is pretty tapped; white working class areas are already going for Trump by wide margins, and the blue areas are either heavily black or have high student populations. The Lower Mon Valley is pretty much a no-go zone for Republicans.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that Trump isn't going to win PA by leaning harder into his base; he actually needs to get back voters from 2016 he lost in 2020. And those aren't in places like Lawrence and Mercer counties that actually increased their share of the Trump vote in the last election. Looking at an area that already has 65% Trump support and making the election ride on getting that up to 70% doesn't seem like a winning strategy, especially when these areas don't have particularly high populations. He'd be counting on a 5–10% increase in each one of these areas just to get him to the 50–75 thousand you mention, which, by the way, still doesn't win the state for him. He needs votes in suburban Pittsburgh, which Vance isn't going to get him. He needs votes in NEPA, which I don't know enough about to know whether Vance can get him. And while they'd be welcome, he doesn't need more votes in places like Lawrence and Mercer Counties.

I of course just threw out new castle as an example. But yeah, you can look at more at a county level instead of town (Hermitage, Sharon, New Castle, etc).

It is a two prong attack. Trump is going to go to eastern PA / black areas and will try to play the role of uniter. He will tell suburban mom’s that they can trust him not to push abortion restrictions. He can talk to them about inflation. He can talk about the border. He can talk about how illegal immigrants are getting a better deal than minorities. He can talk about how much he wants to unite the country and how that has taken on a new meaning after the attempt on his life.

Vance can go to the more rural areas. He can talk about his background. How he isnt just some politician wanting their vote, but that he is one of them. That he grew up in towns not that unlike Sharon that went on hard times when Sharon Steel closed. He understands their struggles. And that Trump and he are wanting to fight for them. Again, maybe it isn’t 50-75k; maybe it is 25k-50k but it helps solidify a state that is looking like it leans Trump.

The problem is that Sharon Steel never closed and neither did the Armco Mill in Middletown, OH. They quit pouring steel at Sharon in the 90s and the ownership changed, but the rolling mill at Farrell and the galvanize line at Sharon are still open. Armco is owned by Cliffs now but the integrated mill is still in operation. Incidentally, jobs in the mills are easier to get now then they were in the 60s and 70s, when you probably had to know somebody. The problem with Sharon Steel is that they were disposing mill sludge by dumping it over embankments decades after they should have known that it was no longer an acceptable practice, and when they finally got dinged (in the middle of a recession nonetheless) by the EPA the damage was so bad that the fines forced them into bankruptcy. There was no broader economic reason for them to go under since they made specialty steel that wasn't affected as much by cheap imports. Other specialist companies like Allegheny Ludlum that at least pretended to follow the rules didn't have the same problems.

Every bad person I've ever met in a lifetime in Washington was aligned against JD Vance.

Every single one of those people in a line that would extend from Milwaukee to Chicago was lined up over the last week to knife JD Vance. Not on personal grounds...but because they thought he would harder to manipulate...that he would be an impediment to their exercising power.

This is what I like to see, this is what I want to hear.

Well, no. What it means is that Vance is at best useless and at worst a liability when it comes to convincing lawmakers to back Trump's policies.

I think perhaps the point of this pick (if we allow Trump at least 2d chess) is that in his next administration "I cannot spare this Man; he Fights" will be more important (to Trump) than "can he make deals".

Just a reminder that Tucker Carlson is a proven liar and despised trump during his presidency. I would take what Tucker Carlson says with a heavy grain of salt, if you choose to even believe it at all.

I'm not sure I understand this point - Vance also despised Trump at the start of his presidency.

From where I'm standing, both Vance and Carlson seem to fundamentally be opportunists, flexible seekers of power and influence who are willing to reinvent themselves, to re-cultivate their public personas, to suit changing times. In this specific case, they both shifted populist as the Republican centre-of-gravity moved.

I agree that Carlson's stated political views are probably insincere, or at least, a mixture of sincere-if-vague conviction with tactically shifting to match the equally shifting and inchoate views of his audience. But I doubt Vance is much different either.