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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   39318 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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The NYT has dropped a list of the 100 best books of the 21st Century. According to them.

I find the list to be vapid beyond words. The inclusion of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow alone, even in the upper 70s, disqualifies it from being anything except for a circlejerk of the rag. Trash like The Fifth Season cements it.

You can walk through the list and see the same themes being hammered over, and over, and over, and over. It is exactly what you'd expect from the culture war, and the percentage of books written in the last 10 years (much less the last 20) is absurdly high.

A couple years ago I collected what I think are the best hundred songs of all time. A friend's python visualization of my Spotify playlist illuminated that, despite all the deep cuts, I didn't have a single entry from before I was born. My musical blind spots are enormous, and I think most old music just fucking sucks. At least I can admit it's because I'm susceptible to the level of manufacturing that modern music goes through, along with a huge obsession with sick beats. My list is "wrong" for most people.

I can't imagine having this level of navel-gazing weakness in self-reflection. Did nobody look at this list and realize how stupid the title is? Did anyone over 25 contribute to it?

In any case as the number got higher there were at least some decent books listed that you could read without hating yourself. They're all still liberal, by default, but at least have significant redeeming qualities.

  • The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
  • The Goldfinch
  • A visit from the Goon Squad
  • The Overstory

It seems awfully presumptuous to write a list for the 21st century given that we're not even a quarter of the way through with it.

Guess it has a better ring to it that '100 best books from the first quarter of the 21st century'.

Looks like they asked writers to name their favourite books, which was always doomed to failure. It's like asking architects to name their favourite buildings. They've been too exposed to the art form to have normal, human tastes, so they end up chasing weirdness and pretence. Only art forms that are subject to public opinion can produce good work. Fortunately, normal people still read books, so we can get a much better list from them.

Even "100 best books since the turn of the millennium" would sound better.

Just a random, totally out of the blue question here:

What's the male/female authorship ratio here?

I went through the top 20 and it was (surprisingly) fairly even. But a little hard to tell because most of them have uncommon foreign names.

Seeing as women don't try as hard and are less represented among highly intelligent people*, any list of this type that's sex-equal is very suspicious.

*see "greater male variability hypothesis"

Listicles are still clickbait filler even if they're published by notionally-respectable outlets. The purpose is not actually to come up with a comprehensive list of the 100 best books of the 21st century. It's to get people to click on the article so they can either feel outraged at the writer's tastelessness or validated by the writer sharing their opinion. They will then ideally start a fight and share the article with their friends, saying "so true/can you believe this bullshit".

As voted on by 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers — with a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book Review.

It's literally just a popularity contest. They asked a bunch of writers their favorite books and tabulated the results.

and the percentage of books written in the last 10 years (much less the last 20) is absurdly high.

I almost certainly can't find it now, but I remember stumbling upon a list of movies or albums like this that was published decades back, probably in an old magazine, and realizing that it had a similar bias that had aged terribly: half of the then-contemporary ones didn't seem to have been mentioned again, but had heard of all the classics.

At least it's not a new bias, I suppose.

It is profoundly frustrating. I've been attempting to broaden my literary horizons, but my every attempt at finding "Top X Book" lists is cluttered with current year thinly veiled, Gen Z, political slop. Is no one actually curated a list of classics that have endured through the ages? I recall 4chan put together a list of anon's most recommended reading and it was shockingly more representative than you average list from a "Paper of record".

In the November 1996 issues of Computer Gaming World, they put together an article for the 150 best games of all time. And unlike modern IGN or PCGamer lists, CGWs was 1996 probably was truly representative of the entire breadth and depth of the computer gaming history at the time. Maybe it was easier, spanning 15 years tops. The PCGamer list only shares Doom with CGW's, and the IGN list only shares Doom and Tetris.

In some ways I get it. I will plant my flag on this hill and die on it, 1997 was an apex year for computer games. Games that came out before 1997 tend to struggle greatly with graphics, sound and usability. Games that came out after are the complete package, and many from 1997-2000 remain the definitive example of their genre. And that is more or less where history largely stops in the IGN list. Why include Simcity from the CGW list when you can include Simcity 2000 from a year later? Why include WarCraft II when you can include StarCraft from 2 years later? Still, some omissions are shocking, like Day of the Tentacle, probably the fondest remembered adventure game ever, possibly only eclipsed by The Secret of Monkey Island. System Shock, #98 just keeps getting remakes, remasters, source ports, etc.

But I've digressed too far...

In my view, the 1998 Modern Library list of the best 100 novels of the 20th century has mostly held up. As of now I have read 50-60% of the books on the list and was generally glad to have read each one.

https://sites.prh.com/modern-library-top-100#top-100-novels

Something else that you may find interesting to do, is to examine some of the books that were bestsellers in different time periods. In the '50s you had writers like Nevil Shute and A.J. Cronin; later you had authors such as Arthur Hailey and Mary Stewart. However, rather than being slop, I've generally found these writers' works to have held up quite well; to my mind this reflects that at one time, the reading public was much more male, had longer attention spans uncorrupted by digital technology, and had better liberal educations than what prevail now.

It's not a bad list, and it being 1998-1999 there's nothing to be made of certain omissions, but wow to miss Moby-Dick and Blood Meridian. Midnight's Children at least made it, but at #90, lol. Then for the lesser misses, Gravity's Rainbow, and even less so, one of Dick's works, probably Ubik--though remarkable for prescience rather than prose. But it's not like people don't know those books, and also they all made one of Time's lists. Ignoring Neuromancer is probably a miss too, but I say that looking back from 2024.

Speaking of Gibson, and the only point I could say of this, thinking of him reminded me of his short story Burning Chrome. If you (anyone reading this) are familiar with Cyberpunk 2077 but not Gibson's work, read it. A quite short story, published in 1982, and Gibson's the rare science fiction author with real chops for prose.

Note that Moby Dick came out in 1851.

Hot take: Moby Dick is unreadable. It's most notable for being good source material for adaptations.

(doesn't excuse the list, which has Ulysses at the top. Ulysses is famous for being unreadable).

And it has Finnegan's Wake later in the list as well.

Moby-Dick is actually good. Really good. It's also casually unreadable.

There's a stupidly multilayered structure. Under the whale lore and purple prose, it's psychological. Under that it's more Jungian, archetypal. Under that, some sort of Manifest Destiny, Americana, man-vs.-nature primal thesis. You could make one of those iceberg memes or crazy masonic conspiracy diagrams out of stuff that is really, unarguably buried in the book.

But the cruft is there on purpose. The allusions, on purpose. Melville basically inhaled Bible prose for decades and then breathed it into this book, because he wanted to invoke the mythic style. People joke about the homoeroticism, except that's also an intentional move, one that complements the whole indomitable-American-spirit theme, and it's just...The more you pick at it, the more convinced you get that it's all on purpose. Melville was definitely capable of writing a tighter novel, but he wanted to write an epic. It's layered.

I can't do it justice. I really can't. I'm basing this off a really rewarding college class. Yeah, I realize that sounds both stupid and pretentious. But I swear, I god something out of it. It's not just cope. It's not! There's something great in this book.

If I could find the reading list or at least syllabus I'd share it. There has to be a good study guide out there. I hope I can find it.

Moby Dick and Bood Meridian (aka Moby Dick on land) are two of the few books I'll do a focused planned reading day on.

Get up. Breakfast. Read straight and take notes until Lunch. Repeat until Dinner. If mental energy still available, continue until bedtime. No work, no TV.

I thought that, but the header text says

The editors of The Modern Library were privileged to have the assistance of a distinguished Board made up of celebrated authors, historians, critics, and publishing luminaries. In 1998 and 1999, members of the Modern Library Board participated in the “100 Best” project, voting on the 100 Best Novels and 100 Best Non-fiction works, respectively.

Maybe whoever wrote the header forgot that bit, as I'd assume it'd have an obligatory mention.

I have not read most of the books on that list, but from the ones I have it does not bode well. The Great Gatsby is fine, but massively overrated. The same goes for Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Others are mediocre at best with a lot of flaws (Lord of the Flies) or simply execrable (On The Road, a book whose only redeeming quality is that it did an excellent job of making me detest the narrator). And the authors of the list seem to take pleasure in selecting books which had, at one point or another, been banned for obscenity, which certainly sheds some light on their criteria for greatness.

On the other hand, the books they chose not to include are also telling. How can you make a list of the best 100 twentieth-century novels and not include The Lord of the Rings (a contender for #1, and it's not in their list of 100!)? They also seem to think that anything that could be construed as "children's literature" is beneath them, though for my money this includes some of the best literature. Notably omitted is Anne of Green Gables as well as, as far as I can tell, every single Newbery winner (I'd single out A Wrinkle in Time, as well as it's more-mature sequel A Swiftly Tilting Planet (not a Newbery winner), as being particularly good).

All of which is to say, this list surely embodies somebody's idea of a good book, but it's somebody to whose recommendations I'd give negative weight.

The great books list at St. John's college is probably useful: https://www.sjc.edu/application/files/4115/4810/0934/St_Johns_College_Great_Books_Reading_List.pdf

probably the fondest remembered adventure game ever

Myst was literally the best selling PC game of all time for 10 years running.

I said fondest remembered, not best selling.

I have never, literally never, heard anyone start a sentence with "Remember in Myst when..."

Myst is my go to example for explaining what Pixel Bitching is!

Is no one actually curated a list of classics that have endured through the ages?

Surely you have heard of the western canon?

https://www.openculture.com/2014/01/harold-bloom-creates-a-massive-list-of-works-in-the-western-canon.html

I've been attempting to broaden my literary horizons,

In what genres?

Is no one actually curated a list of classics that have endured through the ages?

Despite the endless hours spent using the internet, I am consistently reduced to 'add reddit to the search' when looking for curated media lists, and competently curated information in general. To an extent, this is a personal failure. This stuff must be out there, in whatever form - a book, a blog - but finding it in the sea of slop is tough, and the effort is lost unless one is disciplined in maintaining a proper list.

I sure would love an AI assistant I could outsource this to.

Write list of 100 best books of the 21st century

It’s less than a quarter through the 21st century. Did the people who approved this exercise stop to think, maybe we should wait til 2100 to write this? Like obviously it won’t be a representative sample of the best books of the 21st century when it’s excluding a minimum of 76.5% of the 21st century.

Presumably the “so far” is implicit and they expect their readers to understand that this will not be the last such list that will be published by the paper over the course of this century.

Nowhere in this post did you actually provide an argument about why any of their choices are bad. You just kind of pointed and sputtered at the fact that anyone could have this particular opinion. In what specific ways would your list look different? Why would I “hate myself” for reading the books included on their list?

I don't think it's difficult to figure out why the list sucks, even if I've read only ~10% of the books on it. You can read each blurb since the Times can't help but virtue signal even in this format:

A {not white | not straight | not man} struggles in {not contemporary America} against {struggles we think exist in contemporary America}. But the book is about more than that, it also deals with themes of {living | laughing | loving}.

Lazy writing with mediocre prose and crappy anachronisms is what will make you hate yourself, just for wasting your time. As I've gotten older I've gotten smarter at sniffing out when things won't get better after the first 20% of the book.

What are the best books from the 21st century? (In the genres included here; not math textbooks or something.)

Could you paste the list or give an archive link? Would rather not sign up for such a site.

I spent most of the dinner I took my wife on Saturday debating this list, so thanks for posting it!

It was quite obviously political, in ways that are so blatant as to be silly. It was snobby, in ways that come out stupid. On both counts: how do you not throw a single Harry Potter book on there? Or any of GRRM's stuff? Both have been vastly influential, much moreso than fifty seven books that amount to Girl with Ethnicity finds herself through interactions with friend/mentor/historical figure/sapphic love object.

But ok, let's see what you've got: what are your ten books that should have made the list? When I tried to, I realized I don't read much new fiction, so with a strong non-fiction bias I came up with:

1 Moneyball by Michael Lewis. Absolutely essential reading for understanding American sports since 2000, and most of American business and politics too.

2 Game Change by Halperin and the other guy. Holy shit this book was everywhere when it came out. It was the whole attitude of the Obama era.

3 Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin. The best book for digging into the financial crisis. It amazes me that crises since have not been understood in light of '08, despite it being in such close memory.

4 Storm of Swords by GRRM. The best of the GoT/Asoiaf books, with the most iconic set piece in fantasy, definitely of the century, possibly ever. The last of the books where he knew where he was going, and the one whose events made the show what it was.

5 Dawn of Everything by Davids Graeber and Wengrow. Synthesizes a huge amount of Anthropology into a coherent vision of alternate versions of human society.

6 Circe by Madeleine Miller. Stands in for the entire genre it spawned of female views on Homeric epic. Engaged with the material, didn't sugarcoat or pussyfoot.

7 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by JK Rowling. This was where the series peaked, the next three books suffered from mistakes made here, but this was her best world-building and swashbuckling.

8 Catch and Kill by Ronan farrow. Massively important, but also well written and entertaining, mixes Nancy Drew with genuine reporting. Benefits from reread and reflection, as important for what Farrow didn't write as for what he did.

9 Baudolino by Umberto Eco. Eco always explores forgotten vistas of history, this is his swing at the medieval legendarium of the near and far orient.

10 The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk. Honestly at times I didn't love it reading it but so many things from it really stuck with me. A fascinating window into Polish society and Jewish history.

I would throw the black swan by Taleb there as well. Great way of thinking about risk.

I would pick Fooled By Randomness over the Black Swan, but either way Taleb deserves a spot for sure.

Black Swan captured more of the zeitgeist as it was close in time to the 2007 collapse.

Taleb could definitely be added, but unless I'm putting together a much bigger list I'm not sure I have room, I wouldn't want it to turn into a list of books about cognitive biases and decision making.

In my mind Moneyball is the best written entree into the field. Between that and Too Big to Fail you're gonna end up in Kahneman, Taleb, etc. while also being the single most influential touchstone of the set.

I came across Game Change organically a few weeks ago when looking into Obama’s reasons for running so early for President and it landed on my to-read list I keep. What is the cultural background or bias behind the book that you’re aware of?

Read it and it will be obvious. It was probably the last great Washington Consensus book, the exact moment of Obama triumphalism when the GOP says gonna go left.

What made you choose Circe over Song of Achilles? I have only read the latter, which was published first (and thus is the true beginning of this genre), and I found it completely amazing.

I love both, I like Circe more as an alternative angle on the story. I've always liked those, Rosencrantz and Guoldebstern are Dead may be my all time favorite play.

Huh, you'd rate Goblet above Prisoner of Azkaban?

I haven't heard that one before - I thought the usual take was that Azkaban was the peak, whereas Goblet was, though still readable and fun, starting to show the bloat and lack of discipline that would be at its worst with Phoenix, but still on display until the end of the series.

I think you can argue between the peak being end of Azkaban or beginning of Goblet, but for the purposes of a 21st century list: Azkaban was 1999. I do think Goblet gets extra "influence" credit on a top x list because I felt, as a 10 year old at the time, that it clearly pushed YA fiction into longer pagecounts.

...oh, well, that makes sense. I didn't check the publication dates. That's fair. I do agree that Goblet is definitely the best of the latter four Potter books.

I'm not sure I would give Harry Potter the credit for pushing YA fiction longer? Azkaban is the first 'large' Potter book - I believe Philosopher's Stone and Chamber of Secrets are both around 200 pages? And Azkaban was, as you say, 1999. But consider, say Northern Lights - that's a 1995 YA novel, it was quite successful, and it was 400 pages long.

1 No Country For Old Men

The movie was excellent, but it missed one major feature that the book had. Specifically the sheriff's monologues at the start of each chapter, which give a moral framing to the entire story. The sheriff doesn't really do much throughout the entire story, he acts more as a witness to the events and to a world which is simultaneously getting worse every day while also always having been this bad.

I thought the movie was excellent despite the sheriff's moral framing. He kept dilly-dallying and whining about the way of the world instead of doing his job, and this led directly to a few deaths. Very glad to not have heard even more from him--I don't want to hear moral grandstanding from a morally reprehensible person.

7 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by JK Rowling. This was where the series peaked, the next three books suffered from mistakes made here, but this was her best world-building and swashbuckling.

Back when I was dating I used to frequently use 'do you prefer the first half or second half of the Harry Potter series' as a conversation piece, and I found it very interesting that men seem to be very inclined towards the first half and women very inclined towards the second half. Over a good sample of educated women who felt very passionately about Harry Potter, plus general social occasions for men to chime in. Personally feel the whole enterprise goes off a cliff as the word counts expand and the magic contracts from Phoenix onwards, but also potentially a good indicator of women preferring a more emotionally-driven story.

Huh, weird. I fall into that too.

In my mind GoF screwed up in creating the killing curse, which neuters all the magical dueling opportunities; and in bringing V back two thousand pages before he'd get killed. Keeping him awake but in the wings for three books was too strung out, leading to the weird need to do Horcruxes + Hallows in the last book.

There were some decent set pieces in the second half, but for the most part the whimsy came off.

Yeah. Vibes-based but I feel like the last 3 books contained like a tenth of the worldbuilding and new magic introduced compared to the first 4, especially since Goblet was very much 'Look at this vibrant world of wizardry' then 'bang we must gaze at our navels and be sad for 3 books'

Heh, sounds like a good trick. That's probably true, or at least it used to be back in the 2010s. Now it seems like every woman absolutely hates the entire Harry Potter franchise because of the whole Terf thing with its author. Seems ridiculous to me that peole can't separate one political opinion of the author from the books, but I guess they really liked the politics of the books originally.

Possibly relevant= the books were originally aimed at a young male demographic, that's why she initialled her name and made the main character a boy. As it got more popular she got more freedom to express herself.

Now it seems like every woman absolutely hates the entire Harry Potter franchise because of the whole Terf thing with its author.

I'd say it's firmly in the guilty pleasure channel for most young UMC women, but definitely get a lot more 'literally Hitler' from those born before 1997 or so.

I used to frequently use 'do you prefer the first half or second half of the Harry Potter series' as a conversation piece, and I found it very interesting that men seem to be very inclined towards the first half and women very inclined towards the second half

Interesting, I agree that the first three books have a certain magic and innocence to them that's strongly diminished in the fourth and practically gone by the last three books. It almost felt like they were written by two different people. Personally I'd say book 3 was the best.

Magic and innocence is an interesting perspective; when I saw this question, my immediate thought was that the first half was very much "books for children". There is an innocence there for sure, but also a simplicity, with a distinct lack of logic involved in the world and plot (as HPMOR demonstrated).

Rowling's characterisation remained a weak point throughout the series, but the later novels at least managed more coherent, logical plots as well as a greater maturity in themes and even prose. The two halves are very much written for different audiences. A child coming to the series now would enjoy the first half and probably struggle with the later entries. A child who grew up with the books probably found them all enjoyable. An adult returning to the series would probably speed through the first half to get to the more interesting latter books. An adult reading them to a child would likely enjoy the whimsy of the initial books and grow weary of the length and tedium present in the later entries.

It is interesting that Rowling seems to have shifted the age of her books’ intended audience at about the same pace that her actual audience aged. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any other author who did that. But then, I suppose I can’t think of any other children’s authors who had such a massive and devoted following while they were in the middle of publishing a series.

Hot take: Philosopher's Stone is the best Harry Potter book. As the books go on, the worldbuilding and plotting stand up less and less well to the more serious subject matter (this becomes very clear by the end of Goblet of Fire), and the tone shift is dertimental to the series overall. (Yes, I get the idea of "books and audience grow up with the character", but it just doesn't work all that well.) Philosopher's Stone is an excellent children's book; the later books are still probably better than average for YA (not that I could be sure; most YA is of the sort that I've never been interested in reading), but are only as beloved as they are because people liked the first book(s).

(My wife agrees with me that Philosopher's Stone is the best, but has a higher opinion of the end of the series than I do.)

I loved the fact that she tried to dip into things that were more serious with Goblet of Fire, things became far more "real" with the introduction of other schools, and I thought the length was more appropriate to what would happen in a school year.

That said, I've re-read Philosopher/Sorcerer's stone at least 6 (?) times and Goblet of fire ~3. The later books I've probably only re-read once. I don't think you can beat the first one all-in-all.

I think the thing about the setting of Harry Potter is that almost all fantasy (whether by male or female authors) is written by worldbuilding autists who have a 2000 page lore codex / community wiki either in their head or on paper before they finish the first half of the first book. Rowling isn’t like that, she didn’t and doesn’t care about canon, the setting and its internal consistency and its rules were not hugely or even at all important to her except in the vague sense of what ‘felt’ right, she is not in that Tolkien tradition, she’s more like earlier authors of fairy tales, maybe. Personally I like that quality, it makes the stories feel quite different to most other fiction in the genre, lends it almost a surreal feeling.

The problem is not the HP setting is too fairy-tale-like and unsystematic (as you say, this is very much a valid choice), but that (in the later books) it tries to have it both ways. The magic in HP is actually much more well-delineated and "systematic" than in Tolkien. The problem is that (a) rules for how things work + (b) ignoring the rules when they don't suit + (c) taking things seriously, adds up to something that just doesn't work well. You can have perfectly good stories with any one or two of these, but all three together, not so much. In HP, (a) and (b) were kind of baked in by the style of story (and naturally increased over time as more material piled up), so quality decreased as (c) increased.

Tolkien is kind of interesting as a comparison point. His world and its history are incredibly detailed (though it's not really correct to say that he had a huge fixed canon that didn't change as he wrote -- it's really only the published materials that stayed consistent with each other, and even then he retconned The Hobbit), and he's good about making things like troop movements and strategy and so on check out. But the magic is not well-defined at all. The Wizards and the wielders of the rings of power (and many of the more powerful Elves) clearly have magical, uh, powers, but what exactly those are is never made clear. What's more, it's actually important for the tone of the story that this is the case! If Gandalf's or Saruman's or Sauron's (or Galadriel's or Elrond's) powers worked according to some Brandon Sanderson-like magic system, or for that matter like Rowling's (even setting aside the inconsistencies), The Lord of the Rings would be very different, and much worse, for the change.

Back when I was dating I used to frequently use 'do you prefer the first half or second half of the Harry Potter series' as a conversation piece, and I found it very interesting that men seem to be very inclined towards the first half and women very inclined towards the second half.

That's fascinating. As a male who read the 4th-7th books when they came out, I primarily recall being severely disappointed by the 7th book, in a large part because of the quality of writing in the action scenes. And perhaps I'm seeing connections where there aren't any, but I have to wonder about this apparent male/female pattern and the terrible quality of action in so many movies and TV shows that are pushed for their female leads and female production team these days.

Off the top of my head, the awful combat action in shows like Disney's Echo and Amazon's Rings of Power come to mind, but perhaps the most stark example is The Matrix: Resurrections, which was directed by the woman version of one of the male directors of the original Matrix trilogy, and which was about as severe a drop-off in quality of action as you can get in a franchise, with the combat barely comprehensible half the time and not making any sense from the combatants' point of view all of the time. This is in contrast to the first film (and even its 1st 2 awful sequels) which had very clearly visible combat where each movement by each combatant made sense (within this fictional wushu-inspired universe) and flowed into one another as if they were attempting to mime out what a real fight would look like where 2 combatants are really trying to kill each other with all their might. Unlike the 4th film (directed by a woman), the 1st 3 films (directed in half by the same person, but as a man), displayed an understanding that a fight scene is more than just 2 people waving their feet and fists around each other in fancy looking ways.

And this is where I'm probably projecting or jumping to conclusions, but with the well-known difference between men and women in terms of "thing-oriented" and "people-oriented," I wonder if men are more scrutinizing about action scenes actually making sense, while women are more accepting of them if the underlying emotional thrust is there. As a man, when I read/view a scene in which 2 people are fighting, I pay attention to how each person reacts to each punch or kick and get disenchanted when I see them behaving in ways that don't make sense given their motivation in the moment to survive and kill the other guy; for women, perhaps they're less bothered by it and just think the important part is "A defeated B at the cost of C, which leads to D," and the how that defeat occurred is just extraneous details.

I only read through them once some years ago.

Book 3 was generally pretty good, but I disliked the time travel, because I wanted things to make sense (in retrospect, a little odd of a desire, given, for example, that quidditch exists). I didn't especially care for book 5. I didn't like the hallows in book 7. Book 6 was probably my favorite overall.

Joe Abercrombie (at least his first five books. I would argue for #2, Before They Are Hanged, as his absolute best) is a pretty reasonable contender for top fantasy author in this timeframe. The worldbuilding is kinda thin next to Martin, but the characterization is some of the best in the genre.

Storm of Swords would still make my top ten though.

But ok, let's see what you've got: what are your ten books that should have made the list?

By year of publication:

  1. 1632 (2000) by Eric Flint
  2. The Blank Slate (2002) by Steven Pinker
  3. Freakonomics (2005) by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
  4. Lights Out (2005) by David Crawford
  5. The God Delusion (2006) by Richard Dawkins
  6. Sexual Utopia in Power (2006) by F. Roger Devlin
  7. The 4-Hour Workweek (2007) by Timothy Ferriss
  8. The Martian (2011) by Andy Weir
  9. The Rational Male (2013) by Rollo Tomassi
  10. Rationality: From AI to Zombies (2015) by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Archive link for those of us who don’t care to make a NYT account.

There’s more than one way to define “best.” Given a bunch of conflicting inputs, you would prefer using a logical AND. You’d only consider calling your playlist “the best” for someone who loves modern production and loves sick beats and shares your blind spots.

This NYT list is pretty upfront about choosing to OR their picks. They got unrelated inputs from a laundry list of authors and commentators. The reader is clearly expected to apply their own AND:

▫️I’ve read it
Liked it? Try “Missionaries,” by Phil Klay or “Hystopia,” by David Means.

▫️I want to read it
Read our review. Then reserve it at your local library or buy it from Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble or Bookshop.

So this a list intended to contain a “best” list. You’re using it correctly by filtering out the ones which don’t fit. For somebody—perhaps the sort who buys books off the NYT—that “best” list is different.

It is exactly what you'd expect from the culture war, and the percentage of books written in the last 10 years (much less the last 20) is absurdly high.

No, it's not. It's "books of the 21st century" i.e. written in or since 2000, and 42/100 are 2014 or later. It's been about 24.5 years since Jan 1 2000, so you'd expect 42.8% to be in or since 2014.

You're right about this - after posting I realized this point was silly, even if it leans closer to 2024 than 2000.

I'd expect great art to take a little bit of time to marinate/be discovered, though

Of course, the assumption that the top 100 books of this century have already been written is a level of pessimism on the NYT's part which makes Eliezer Yudkowsky look like a hopeless optimist by comparison.

A couple years ago I collected what I think are the best hundred songs of all time. A friend's python visualization of my Spotify playlist illuminated that, despite all the deep cuts, I didn't have a single entry from before I was born. My musical blind spots are enormous, and I think most old music just fucking sucks. At least I can admit it's because I'm susceptible to the level of manufacturing that modern music goes through, along with a huge obsession with sick beats. My list is "wrong" for most people.

I was at a bar over the weekend and a woman who was probably in her early 40s was complaining about the music her husband was playing on the jukebox — classic country like Waylon Jennings and Ronnie Milsap. She said it was "old people's music". I sided with the husband and told her that she's not so much complaining about the music itself as she is the cultural connotation. For example when I listen to music I focus on the melody, the harmony, the rhythm, the arrangement, the competence of the performers, the emotional impact, etc. Year of release doesn't really factor into it much. I might dock a song a few points from a critical perspective if it's merely a lazy retread of what's already been done, but that's ultimately a minor consideration. As I'm in the process of very occasionally updating my own list for this site, I'd be curious to see yours.

Here's a dump of tracks, also following the rule of limiting the number of songs per artist to 1. Otherwise a ton of artists would show up multiple times.

Side note: Excellent exercise to do with friends, and it's about the same length as a monstrous road trip. Highly recommend.

So, you have some of my absolute favorite bands on here (especially happy to see The Band CAMINO get a shout-out) but I find it very strange that you enjoy those bands but can’t find anything to like about the bands and genres that directly influenced them. Like, a number of these bands are clearly very inspired by 80’s New Wave and arena rock, as well as 70’s disco and power pop. Like, if you’re into slick production, multilayered instrumentation, and bubblegum melodies, I think it’s very odd not to have any interest in, say, Def Leppard, ABBA, Prince, and Cheap Trick. Even if you think that music has moved in a direction of pure improvement, taking the raw clay of Boomer Music and fashioning into the Actually Good Music of today, surely you can see that there’s at least some music from 1990 and earlier which still holds up?

If you want me to give you a list of some older music that has all of the same important qualities as the music you’ve listed here, I’d be happy to provide it.

(Also, I want to shill my favorite band Marianas Trench here, as it seems you’d love their music based on the genres you’re into.)

I've heard from multiple people secondhand that one cool thing about Camino is the members are also mostly normal and good dudes. I'm going to get to see them on this tour which I'm psyched for.

I wouldn't say that I can't find anything to like about old music at all. I enjoy a good chunk of it, it just doesn't get pushed into making the cut here. If I tried to pinpoint why, a few things come to mind:

  • I am constantly on a musical treadmill. I save playlists of what I'm listening to for literally that season of my life, and then hear more of what's produced and add to that and so on. It's almost a blessing that I'm single-driven as opposed to album-driven nowadays since some 320kbps MP3s of what I listen to would take up a lot of disk space.
  • Old music is played a lot. I love Hotel California, but after hearing it once a night every night while closing at a restaurant, I don't want to hear it again.
  • My peers as a kid generally had more limited musical tastes and I was the one making mixtapes. This was rectified by college but then I was fairly set in my ways.
  • Some of my favorite genres are younger. It's a bit of a hot take, but hip-hop and rap have undergone a lot of "pure improvement" since their inception.

Bottom line though: I'd love to have a sample playlist of your suggestions. I would prefer to rectify this blind spot rather than leave it hanging.

How big a playlist do you want? As I told the last person here for whom I made a playlist, my autistic fixation will quickly overtake me if I’m not given a limit.

Twenty songs.

Twenty songs? That’s barely a warm-up! We’re trying to bring this man up to speed on four decades of music! We need to let this thing breathe.

You asked for limits, man! Work with them!

More comments

The bigger it is the longer I'll take to report back. 25 or 50 is ideal IMO.

Alright, I tried not to overthink it. Whittling down a list of 100 down to 50 was an interesting challenge, and there’s a lot more I’d like to include, but I think this is a good representation. It’s weighted toward the 80’s, with a good smattering of 70’s and a bit from the 60’s. I started with a few mega-hits but tried to stay away from songs that I’m sure you’ve already heard a million times, although I’m sure there’s a few on here you’re already very familiar with. Many of these are, of course, very well-known bands, and in those cases I tried to use somewhat lesser-known songs rather than the ones everyone already hears all the time. A few - for example, ABBA and Def Leppard, two of my all-time favorite bands - were very difficult because I would have loved to include a number of their songs, but decided to stick with just one each.

”Kiss” - Prince

“And She Was” - Talking Heads

“Fat Bottomed Girls” - Queen

“Peace Of Mind” - Boston

“What You Need” - INXS

“Don’t Bring Me Down” - Electric Light Orchestra

“Open Your Heart” - Madonna

“Youth Gone Wild” - Skid Row

“Soul Man” - The Blues Brothers

“Saturday Night’s (Alright For Fighting)” - Elton John

“Vacation” - The Go-Go’s

“Surrender” - Cheap Trick

“Roam” - The B-52’s

“Jungle Love” - Steve Miller Band

“This Charming Man” - The Smiths

“Dreams” - The Cranberries

“Wasted Years” - Iron Maiden

“Rio” - Duran Duran

“Waterloo” - ABBA

“Friday I’m In Love” - The Cure

“Do You Believe In Love” - Huey Lewis & The News

“Bad Reputation” - Joan Jett & The Blackhearts

“Oliver’s Army” - Elvis Costello & The Attractions

“War Pigs” - Black Sabbath

“Higher Love - Single Version” - Steve Winwood

“Emotions” - Mariah Carey

“Fox On The Run” - Sweet

“Freeze-Frame” - The J. Geils Band

“Land Of 1000 Dances” - Wilson Pickett

“Dance Hall Days” - Wang Chung

“Everybody Wants You” - Billy Squier

“Down On The Corner” - Creedence Clearwater Revival

“Hysteria” - Def Leppard

“Lido Shuffle” - Boz Scaggs

“Would I Lie To You - ET Mix” - Eurythmics

“Kiss Me Deadly” - Lita Ford

“Paradise By The Dashboard Light” - Meat Loaf

“You Can Call Me Al” - Paul Simon

“China Grove” - The Doobie Brothers

“Breaking The Law” - Judas Priest

“Tell It To My Heart” - Taylor Dayne

“We Belong” - Pat Benatar

“Nightrain” - Guns N’ Roses

“I Was Made For Dancin’” - Leif Garrett

“Stand” - R.E.M.

“Take It Easy” - Eagles

“Young Hearts” - Commuter

“Cold As Ice” - Foreigner

“Dreaming” - Blondie

“Don’t Worry Baby” - The Beach Boys

Maybe I’ve underestimated your knowledge of this era, and this list will all be stuff you know well. (Or, conversely, perhaps I’m assuming too much, and should have just gone with a list of 50 mega-hits. Who knows?)

Your list is sorely, sorely lacking in classic rock. The closest you have to it on your list in some 1990-2010 era alternative rock, but that's basically a whole other world of music. And you're just missing stuff from before the 90's in general. And all the amazing music before the modern era.

A few gems for you to try:

Princes of the Universe - Queen The Spirit of Radio - Rush War Pigs - Black Sabbath Layla (both the electric and acoustic versions) - Eric Clapton Blackbird - The Beatles Rainbow in the Dark - Dio Pressure - Billy Joel The Lark Ascending - Ralph Vaughn Williams Jupiter - Gustav Holst

Kavalier & Clay portrayed the German American Bund guy as mentally ill and not some sinister fascist. And the Nazi soldier Kavalier briefly encounters in the arctic is just some soldier, not a monster.

Nazi Germany was really really awful, but the book is able to show that without... making it too cartoony. Which I think is better. Part of the reason why is that K & C isn't a good vs evil story, so it had to be done this way.

It's been so long since I read it I've forgotten many details, but not that I loved it for some of the same reasons you stated here.

Anyway, looking him up, I found a recent article he wrote entitled It All Comes Down to Race. I read it carefully, twice, and I'd like to engage this community because I don't know any other place where this can be critically discussed.

You aren't aware of anywhere else on the internet that allows criticism of white nationalism? Seems fishy...

I genuinely don't think there are all that many places that allow both white nationalism and criticism of white nationalism, especially within a liberal conversational framework. DSL maybe, as another rat fork.

Elsewhere it'd just be called racist and booed, and at best picked apart in bad faith. Here, it'll be picked apart in neutral-ish faith.

To be very fair, critical discussion of a position is different from criticizing the position and often the latter looks nothing like the former.

True, but this guy is/was just presenting a bunch of taboo links, and then criticizing them. Never really defended taboo. Surely there is some Kos / SRS / sneerclub dedicated to this important work. These attempts are in a bind between actually advocating for taboo versus hiding effectively.

In any case, illegal immigrants are just small portion of the total immigrant population.

This might have been true 4 years ago but things have changed

Is this that poster who makes ambiguous posts related to white nationalism and we can’t tell what his motivation is, and then they delete their account? Why don’t you just plainly state your motivation. Then people will reply at length and in good faith. No, you didn’t go from making a teary-eyed post about your parents to reading an Amren article. I genuinely can’t tell in which direction you are trying to persuade people. If you’re trying to shill people into reading Amren there are better ways; if you are trying to argue against white nationalism, why don’t you do that without the subterfuge and fibbing? If you are some activist or whatever who hates where nationalism you can just post that and be honest, that would be an acceptable post and then there could be a debate.

Your sources do not say what you think they say. What you call “path to citizenship” actually says “path for some illegal immigrants”. (Well yeah, did he graduate from MIT or something?). Your anti-immigration point mixes up legal and illegal migration, and the increase is anti-legal migration is complex and multifaceted. Being sympathetic to illegal immigrants is totally irrelevant to any policy, you can be sympathetic to those who must be punished because justice demands it. Then you ignore compounded demographic change when you mention the “low” level of illegal migration.

In practice, I just don't think most Americans want to separate from their neighbors and friends to create a white ethnostate

The more serious question is whether a reasonable white American who is fully informed on the matter would agree with such a proposal. If you show a reasonable white American (1) global demographic trends, (2) the views of their ancestors, (3) crime data, (4) genetic differences, what would they say then? The unique problem today is that if trends continue, white people will simply die out as a population with any global influence. If you tell a white person that only white people are going to be replaced in the countries they founded, whereas Africa remains African and Asia remains Asian, what would the say? They have a strong evolutionary instinct as a mammal to not want their unique genetic group to be replaced by foreigners. That’s a primitively persuasive political argument, we can literally imagine Hunter Gatherers being motivated by the same concern. At an evolutionary level, knowing that your group is going to be replaced saps motivation to do anything. There is no longer a reason to live or build anything permanent or useful, knowing that it will be handed over to other groups and your own progeny will be replaced.

My post about my family's immigration situation didn't go down well. In retrospect, that makes sense given how scatterbrained it was. But one of the responses got me thinking about national identity in a way I never had before. In turn, it got me reading a lot of posts on this website and I came across a back and forth about white nationalism, which then led to the cited

No. You've been doing this schtick for years. Roll an alt, adopt a naïve persona, oh hey, check out all these white nationalist articles I've just happened to stumble across in a crazy random happenstance!

No one is fooled, you are immediately and obviously recognizable the instant the link spam starts.

Banned for egregious obnoxiousness.

Thank you for your service.

Didn’t we just reclassify illegal immigrants into legal immigrants. Asylum seekers are technically “legal” though hugely abusing the system.

But one of the responses got me thinking about national identity in a way I never had before.

I guess this troll is farming us for racist screen shots. But why bother? Just send people links to SecureSignal's user profile and skip the "innocently just found out that white nationalism exists, what do you guys think?"

No response to my previous comment, plus this—yeah, definitely a troll.

As real life continues to contain a lot of stuff, my posting continues to be more occasional, so this is a twofer.

First, Ben Christopher for Calmatters, "Los Angeles’ one weird trick to build affordable housing at no public cost". (Part of an itinerant series on housing, mostly in California. Also at TheSchism.)

"Affordable housing" in California generally means deed-restricted subsidized housing, discussed in depth here. It involves specialized nonprofit developers, a "layer cake" of various granting agencies, a web of everything-bagel requirements from union-only labor to LEED Platinum that really add up.

In December of 2022, the Mayor of LA, Karen Bass, signed Executive Directive 1, which put a sixty-day approval timeline on 100% below-market rate project and skip the discretionary and environmental review processes, but without adding the usual everything-bagel requirements. These projects also get so-called "density bonus" concessions, which allow them to ignore or soften a variety of local restrictions on setbacks, density, height, and so on.

As a result, no public subsidy is needed, and the market just... produces these things.

Though publicly available data on financing is sparse, an early analysis of the program by the pro-housing advocacy group Abundant Housing LA estimated that roughly three-fourths of affordable units proposed through the policy are doing so without any public money.

More details from Benjamin Schrader here and from Luca Gattoni-Celli here. It's especially important because the Bay Area is planning on shoveling enormous amounts of public money at the problem (meme form here), and maybe there's another way.

The key thing here is to Voltron together "ministerial approval and sixty-day timeline" with "unlimited waivers and super density bonus", without sandbagging it somehow. As one of the developers in the article puts it: “To go from acquiring a lot to putting a shovel in the ground in less than a year is kind of unheard of.”

However, nothing good can last; this was accidental, kind of like the time Rhode Island legalized prostitution. David Zahniser for the Los Angeles Times, "Faced with community complaints, Mayor Karen Bass retools her affordable housing strategy".

But ED1 also sparked a backlash from some community groups. Tenant advocates said too many ED1 projects are triggering the demolition of rent-controlled apartments, upending the lives of renters. Homeowner groups complained that ED1 projects have been proposed in historic preservation districts, raising the specter of six-story apartment buildings sprouting up next to stately Victorians and rows of Arts and Crafts bungalows.

The changes would exclude sites with twelve or more rent-controlled properties (regardless of residents' incomes), historic districts, and very high fire hazard severity zones (which might make sense, but you can still build everything else there). Everyone wants to dip their beak.

Pete Rodriguez, Western District vice president of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, said any permanent ED1 ordinance should include provisions that create “more middle-class jobs,” such as requirements for a prevailing wage.

Cindy Chvatal, co-founder of the group United Neighbors, which has pushed back against proposals to rezone lower-density neighborhoods, was far more upbeat. She credited Bass for working with an array of community groups over several months to address concerns about ED1, including the encroachment into historic districts.

(United Neighbors is closely related to Livable California, one of the state's preeminent NIMBY organizations.)

It's unclear how much of an actual effect this will have. Much will depend on whether the policy is expanded or curtailed, going forward.

It’s still far from clear how much of an effect the latest changes will have. Of the more than 200 project applications filed so far, 10 were proposed in historic districts, according to the mayor’s team. Fewer than 10 were proposed on sites with 12 or more rent-controlled apartments, they said.

Also, this week in Berkeley, land of the historic homeless encampment, remember the sacred parking lot, last seen in 2021 where the developer won a ruling?

Ally Markovich for Berkeleyside, "Berkeley will buy Ohlone shellmound site, return it to Indigenous land trust". In March, the city bought the property (mostly with money from one of the indigenous-activist groups) and gave it to the tribe.

The Berkeley City Council unanimously approved an ordinance today authorizing the purchase, making Berkeley among the first in the country to outright return land to Indigenous people. The city will purchase the property with $25.5 million from Sogorea Te’, an Indigenous-led land trust based in Oakland, and $1.5 million from the city’s general fund.

How, might you ask, did the Sogorea Te' get twenty-five million dollars, which seems like a lot for a local band of busybodies?

The money for the purchase comes primarily from the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. Bolstered by a $20 million contribution from the Kataly Foundation, a family foundation funded by Regan Pritzker of the Hyatt hotel chain and her husband Chris Olin, Sogorea Te’ appears to be the best-funded organization in the nationwide land-back movement, based on tax records reviewed by Berkeleyside.

The city has, in total, spent five and a half million dollars on this.

Berkeley is still on the hook for $4 million for mishandling the application to build housing on the site. In February, an Alameda County Superior Court judge fined Berkeley $2.6 million for violating the Housing Accountability Act when it denied Ruegg & Ellsworth’s application for a housing project on the site. Berkeley was also ordered to pay $1.4 million for attorney fees.

(This may seem like a lot, but Berkeley's annual city budget is over half a billion dollars, or about five thousand dollars per resident.)

The people who now have the land are celebrating.

“We set down a prayer here when we danced just now,” said Gould. “We are using our bodies to put down those prayers because underneath this asphalt our ancestors still hear us and they are calling on us to continue. This is not the end of it. This is the beginning of a new chapter.”

As noted in the 2018 EIR, this is not actually a shellmound or burial ground, but the Ohlone believe that it is, and everyone here is respecting their beliefs. (This is not noted in the article. I've requested a correction.) I remember, but cannot find, some initiative to use "indigenous ways of knowing" or the like in public policy. This is what this looks like in practice.

As noted in the 2018 EIR, this is not actually a shellmound or burial ground, but the Ohlone believe that it is, and everyone here is respecting their beliefs. (This is not noted in the article. I've requested a correction.) I remember, but cannot find, some initiative to use "indigenous ways of knowing" or the like in public policy. This is what this looks like in practice.

LMAO. These people are pathetic (not the native Indians, the whites who fold as easily as a deckchair). Separating them from their money would be a net positive for humanity were it not for the fact that they are playing with public money and will just tax everyone more if you took if from their hands.

  • -11

You’re doing the thing again. Stop it.

Deregulation to increase housing development feels like the biggest bang for your buck pro growth policy out there.

Just ease the regulations and let private investment handle the rest. Parking may get more difficult for some but to me that’s a fair trade.

Parking may get more difficult for some but to me that’s a fair trade.

More than fair, considering that's what the environmentalists wanted in the first place.

It's doubtful that most environmentalists want to help the environment at all.

If we look at their actual actions and proposals, many are quite harmful to the environment. Therefore, environmentalism is best modeled as an aesthetic movement that prefers naturalistic forms to technological ones, and decay over growth.

I think environmentalists want to help the environment, although aesthetics is definitely a major aspect, but they are dumb and don't understand what actually helps the environment. A lot of the people who vote for rent control don't want there to be an under supply of housing; they just don't get how economics work

I consider myself mostly a conservationist rather than an environmentalist simply because of my observations of how little most environmentalists understand either about how modern technology works or how the environment works.

On the modern technology side, a lot of what they want would make modern technologies unworkable. You simply cannot power an entire city with wind and solar — both of which are dependent on weather. If they were in favor of nuclear and hydroelectric power it’s plausible, but you need a lot of power to run a city. And the acres of wind turbines or solar panels needed for the task destroy the environment anyway.

On the environment side, most environmentalists I have talked to are urban or suburban dwellers, often quite well off. They don’t spend much time in rural areas or in nature— to the point where many of them didn’t seem to understand that carnivores eat other animals. They don’t understand that rotting things are normal.

I think the way to save the environment is through finding balance between what people need and what nature needs and doing so with technology.

On the environment side, most environmentalists I have talked to are urban or suburban dwellers, often quite well off. They don’t spend much time in rural areas or in nature— to the point where many of them didn’t seem to understand that carnivores eat other animals. They don’t understand that rotting things are normal.

If they're suburban, they're not paying much attention (which is rather likely). Rotting things are really common (even if most of the rotting animals are roadkill). And literally in my own back yard (in northern New Jersey) I've seen a juvenile hawk take a squirrel, a cat take a chipmunk, and a fox teaching its kit how to hunt using a (presumably just-caught) rabbit as a prop.

There's definitely a massive disconnect among pretty much everyone between how much they sympathize with and care about any animal they see or hear about, even just in a book or video, and how much meat they eat. I'm not a vegan, but I'll whole heartedly admit to not actually consistently following my principles in real life, and I respect vegans who shape their lives around their beliefs.

I just accept that most people are not very self-aware.

Some form of JJ's razor applies here; whether it is malice or ignorance in creating the same shitty outcomes is irrelevant, because you still have the shitty outcome. Given that everything is subject to vibes-based politics in 2024, the not do things/do more things dichotomy is actually more useful. Doing nothing is a vibe, desiring green spaces is a vibe, hating litter and people who litter is a vibe, lecturing people who aren't as green is a vibe. Learning about economics is very much not a vibe, or at least less of a vibe than throwing rocks at people in houses going "just stop charging so much for rent".

I used to be strongly in the do-more-things camp, but given that the western world somehow forgot how to make or do things and subcontracted it all to the lowest bidders they could find globally, I don't think they could do anything without fucking it up.

However, there's a particular form of optimism I subscribe to. I think people will do the right thing, after first exhausting every other option. I think we'll eventually science our way out of it, likely just before the whole species is collectively doomed and the surface becomes inhospitable to all life.

Cynically, every movement is just a cover for one of Scott's backscratching clubs.

However, this does not mean that the people in the movement are cynics who just pay lip service to the movement for status gain. The best way to pass for a true believer is to be a true believer. Humans are very capable of believing anything, while their subconsciousness keeps a careful lookout for their self-interest.

I think that most environmentalists want to help the environment, but often do not pick the solutions which offer the most bang for buck, and sometimes may be indeed net-negative given a specific set of goals.

The fact that their goals are actually tractable exposes them to criticism. I mean, nobody is giving the Christians shit about how raising kids is actually a terribly inefficient way to populate heaven, and the utility of running embryo-farms which could produce a baptized soul for a few dollars each would be much higher.

It is always easy to say 'person P took an action X which was not the best action towards goal G, thus by revealed preference P does not care about G', because modelling humans as a single rational actor is a gross oversimplification.

That’s like saying Nazis didn’t really want Germany to succeed. No, it was just an aesthetic movement that preferred jackboots to street wear?

Environmentalists also have the excuse of being a big tent. “Buy organic” doesn’t come from the same philosophy as “fuck coal plants,” but they both get called environmentalism because of that aesthetic overlap.

You should be more specific about which proposals you’ve got in mind.

It's doubtful that most environmentalists want to help the environment at all.

There are two different things called "environmentalism" I've seen described as 'Green' and 'Gray'.

Green environmentalism is fighting development to save the forest or save the stream or save the neighborhood. It's judging how much harmony you have with the environment by counting the trees you can see from your front porch. It's "we tread lightly on the earth here". It's this tweet showing an aerial picture of Manhattan with the caption, "reminder that the people lecturing you about Earth Day today live here". It's a conviction that we will only be saved by not doing things.

Gray environmentalism is shutting up and multiplying, and is primarily concerned with climate change. It's judging your environmental impact by calculating your carbon footprint. It might be getting an electric car, but it's even more so moving to a city and getting an electric bike instead. It's heat pumps and rooftop solar and nuclear power if we can ever manage to get costs down. It's living near a park instead of having a huge backyard. It's this tweet, dunking on the above by pointing out that Manhattanites have some of the lowest per-capita carbon emissions in the country. It's a conviction that we will only be saved by doing things.

It would be nice if these groups could get along, but they really don't have that much in common.

Deregulation to increase housing development feels like the biggest bang for your buck pro growth policy out there.

This is literally true. See Hsieh and Moretti (2019) and Caplan's addendum; the fact that people can't move to opportunity is a horrible drag on the economy as a whole.

Parking may get more difficult for some but to me that’s a fair trade.

Parking issues are down to economic illiteracy. Parking is scarce because the price is too low (zero almost everywhere), though the cost is distributed elsewhere. We value the time of people seeking parking at zero, so rather than charging enough for parking that there's a space or two free on every block, we mandate ever-larger parking craters in cities. Here's a summary of Donald Shoup's work on parking economics.

I had a post on last week's topic where I suggested that the civil war would be takers vs makers, and I got asked how I would tell them apart.

This is how. You see those people building shit? Makers. You see those people complaining and trying to prevent them from doing so? Trying to get handouts and secured employment and concessions? Takers.

Regulations and taxes are the tools of the takers, wielded against the makers.

Your mistake is thinking these are different groups of people instead of the same people at different times of day.

It's still a useful distinction, even if not everyone is 100% maker or taker.

Sure but NIMBYism is a near uniquely bad litmus test for Maker/Taker. By that test in a lot of cases you'll get answers like "Tech CEO is a TAKER because he doesn't want his beach town to have a new low end high rise hotel put up" or "Union Carpenters are TAKERS because they want Union labor on Gov subsidized work."

Most NIMBYs are, or at least were, successful employed people who want to "protect" the lifestyle they feel their work entitled them to.

Most tests suffer similarly, unless you're ready to bite the an-cap bullet at least a few times.

NIMBYism is unusual because it is important enough to be politically unavoidable but doesn't align with any of the other obvious dividing lines in American politics. The fact that it isn't a federal question helps - in the UK it is enough of a national issue that the logic of partisanship eventually forced politics into a "YIMBY Labout NIMBY Tories" alignment.

But not (if taken seriously) a politically productive one given that the vast majority of the population are takers from birth to the early 20's, makers during their working life, and takers in retirement.

Given the number of right-populists who try to use maker/taker framing, it is very easy to have fun with the fact that makers voted for remain and takers voted leave, but in fact that just reflects the generational divide in British politics.

But not (if taken seriously) a politically productive one given that the vast majority of the population are takers from birth to the early 20's, makers during their working life, and takers in retirement.

That once was the vast majority of America, but it's closer to a bare majority today, and the share is shrinking. There have been policy and especially immigration decisions which have caused this.

I don't think that it is - at least not in a political sense. Conceptually it's an easy distinction to make, but in practice it's just arguing over whose subsidies and legal privileges don't count.

Then we should encourage people when they act like makers and punish people when they act like takers.

Unfortunately, democracy means you get to vote to take money from your neighbor's pocket, and most people are willing to choose that option.

I have to disagree.

The steelman for regulation is keeping people from trampling the commons. Even if they Make something by doing so, they’re Taking it from everyone. It’s possible to Make something with zero or negative value to everyone else.

For taxation, it’s solving a coordination problem to do things enough people would like done. You can get a net positive out of Taking.

I had a post on last week's topic where I suggested that the civil war would be takers vs makers, and I got asked how I would tell them apart.

If there is a civil war, it will be some approximation of Red vs Blue. California is not going to align with Texas, Civil War style, against a coalition of Taker states.

If there's a civil war, the battle lines aren't going to fall along neat ideological lines and a lot will depend on which military units stationed wherever will side with whichever side. If you look at the Spanish Civil War battle lines (with the caveat that they moved a lot, of course) and compare them with the preceeding election, there are parts where the Nationalist/Republican territories match the left/right election map and parts where they don't.

Hence the qualifier "some approximation of". The vast majority of Reds will end up on one side, the vast majority of Blues will end up on the other side, and exceptions to that will be exceptions rather than the rule.

It might start out that way, but major ‘maker’ states are better served in the short run carving out their own little empires in the hinterlands, so it’ll turn into 3-5 dueling imperial cores.

Of course I don’t seriously think that there’s about to be a second civil war. But if there is, Texas, California, etc would be strongly incentivized to preserve their own citizenry’s standard of living(remember, these are democracies where one party always wins by being good at convincing the public they’re responsive to local needs) in the face of wartime hyperinflation and shortages by transitioning into micro-empire builders, and that’s a recipe for a shift to realpolitik.

While I think "civil war" isn't the right lens through which to examine most divisions (can you imagine all the boomers fighting all the millennials, somehow?), I think you might be interested in Ilforte's two-by-two matrix of left/right, build/retreat, as a lens.

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.

I remember reading this book review of Hillbilly Elegy on /r/slatestarcodex years back. Hard to believe this guy is now the favorite to be vice president of the United States out of nowhere. From the review, Vance sounds like a smug liberal; rural Americans just seem to suck on a deeply personal level. I’m also seeing on Twitter that he had some choice words for Trump back in the day. I can imagine that Washington changes people.

There is exactly one question that matters for any Trump running mate. Will he count the votes on January 6, 2029?

Reading that it’s interesting to note that Armco Steel was the mill in Vance’s town and Butler.

On Scott’s notes of Vance being relatively clean and not doing a lot of bad things - I think in that area the smart kids realize they just need to put their head down until their 18 then run off somewhere.

The book tries to draw up something more complex -- his grandmother being his primary caregiver and if she had been a hellion in her youth she'd at least tempered with age; his biological father got enough religion to take enough responsibility to provide some anchoring force not long after; having moved or been moved from some of the more hillbilly areas -- but I think for the most part he didn't get out clean, so much as the space between clean and dirty is a gradient with a steep slope :

I didn’t know it, but I was close to the precipice. I had nearly failed out of my freshmen year of high school, earning a 2.1 GPA. I didn’t do my homework, I didn’t study, and my attendance was abysmal. Some days I’d fake an illness, and others I’d just refuse to go. When I did go, I did so only to avoid a repeat of the letters the school had sent home a few years earlier—the ones that said if I didn’t go to school, the administration would be forced to refer my case to county social services.

Along with my abysmal school record came drug experimentation — nothing hard, just what alcohol I could get my hands on and a stash of weed that Ken’s son and I found. Final proof, I suppose, that I did know the difference between a tomato plant and marijuana.

((This is also part of why I'd caution against operating solely from reviews. One person's take on a story won't be the same as the story. For another example, "Bob" in Vance's example ends up having a different set of problems than listed in the review, likely as a result of going offhand: he misses fewer days a week on average but spends much longer in restroom breaks, and dormin1111's "nearly physically assaulting the boss" is just "he lashed out" verbally in the original. Maybe they mean the same things, but they're not the same statements.))

There's a view where these aren't the Real Sins.

Vance had to lie to keep his biological mother out of jail (allegedly threatening him with vehicular murder-suicide at 12), but he always had a different house to fall back to. He had a crappy GPA, but never flunked out of a grade. He had to forge a parent's signature to keep from being found truant in a legally-fraught way, but he was never kicked out of a school. He fought, viciously, with not!family who didn't buy into the borderer culture and could have gotten arrested over, but he never was so violent that someone tried to have him charged over it. He drank and smoke pot, but he didn't get addicted to narcotics. His mother saw him as useful for little more than piss (literally, to pass a drug test), but his grandmother pressed him to keep a passing grade.

The view Vance is pushing -- whether or not he believes it -- is that there's a very narrow step from one side of that gradient to the other, and that while he never recognized the slope in his youth, he sees it now. It's pretty explicit:

Thinking about it now, about how close I was to the abyss, gives me chills. I am one lucky son of a bitch.

((Though I think to an extent, Vance did benefit by having distractions. Hillbilly Eligy only mentions the TI 89 calculator and trading cards and television, but the man entered high school in 1998, and turned 18 several months after 9/11. It's quite possible that his version of 'acting out' was watching banned television shows, plinking with a BB gun, or passing around bootleg cassettes and nudie mags and beer and pot, because he had too many better things to do with his time: much of his worst behaviors were opportunistic. Similarly, modern-day borderers can kill someone three-dozen times for making fun of their mom, and then do it all again with laser swords-only: if it's in Halo the cops don't care. But sometimes that just puts off some of the issues.))

From the review, Vance sounds like a smug liberal; rural Americans just seem to suck on a deeply personal level

No, the smug liberal would at least insist that they sucked but it's an understandable or unavoidable result of various material forces and structures.

Vance just thinks they suck because of who they are.

(In light of that, it's actually interesting that this book picked up steam post-2016 election)

From the review, Vance sounds like a smug liberal; rural Americans just seem to suck on a deeply personal level.

Sometimes this can actually resonate with the target audience. It's kind of a classic in self-help seminars: Life isn't hard! life is easy, you suck!

I think the draw is, if someone's problems are their own fault for sucking, at least that's something that they can understand and change. It's a weirdly hopeful message- you have the power to stop sucking and turn things around! If you tell someone instead that their problems are from deep socio-economic issues that screwed them over before they were even born, well... it can feel nice to know you're not the one to blame, but it's also deeply depressing to think there's nothing you can personally do. That's more of a message for politicians and other influential people, who can think like "oh the problem with rural appalachia is that they just don't good schools, but if I fund $1 billion of education there I can save them!"

I wonder if this is one of those red/blue tribal divides. Something like, the Red Tribe wants to be told you suck because then they can stop sucking, whereas the Blue Tribe wants to be told society sucks because then they can stop blaming themselves.

Not a whole worked-out theory here or anything, just something that sprang to mind upon reading your comment.

Probably some correlation there, yeah. Also somewhat related: the famous Bertrand Russel quote: "While economics is about how people make choice, sociology is about how they don't have any choice to make." Probably not a coincidence that economics is more right-wing while sociology is more left-wing.

It's a weirdly hopeful message- you have the power to stop sucking and turn things around!

Right. He spends much of the book complaining about his mother being a dysfunctional addict (and life being made much harder than it had to be by bad financial decisions rather than real poverty), but apparently she sobered up (Maybe the book was a wake-up call?) and they reconciled. He brought her to the RNC and bragged to the crowd that she's nearing 10 years sober, suggesting that she should celebrate her 10 year anniversary at the White House.

I don't love the pick. Vance used to call Trump xenophobic and anti-Muslim only to about-face on immigration and many other issues once it was time to run for Senate and change his views so he could win the election. He did not even vote for Trump in 2016!

For instance, here is an except from a 2016 National Review article by Vance:

"The institutional offshoots of this peculiar moment have monopolized the conversation. Donald Trump is the voice of poor white America. The Black Lives Matter movement is the voice of dispossessed blacks and their sympathizers. Yet if these voices have monopolized the conversation, they certainly haven’t monopolized the good ideas. Trump’s policies, such as they are, offer little substance to those suffering from addiction, joblessness, and downward mobility. And the Black Lives Matter movement, focused primarily on police violence, cannot alone address the full spectrum of problems faced by the black underclass."

But we're supposed to believe that this guy is suddenly a populist? I'm not sure that Vance's "change of heart" is anything but opportunism.

That resonates with me, I used to buy the media narratives on Trump as well.

“You used to say bad things about Trump” is going to be true for a lot of Trump voters in this election.

You were complaining about Islamophobia in 2016? It's one thing if you're a voter but another if this guy is potentially going to be the president. It shows that Vance either has poor judgement or is willing to change his mind to please whatever crowd he's grifting off of at the moment.

You were complaining about Islamophobia in 2016?

I think a lot of people on this forum bought into media narratives pretty heavily when they were younger. I know I did.

If Trump's going to accomplish anything in a second term, he needs to work with people in this bucket. The supply of smart conservatives is small enough as it is.

I bought into the “Muslim ban” framing, yes.

As an example. this popular twitter post was retweeted by Elon and seems to be resonating with many people. Of note, other twitter users argue she's just engagement farming because she's posting so frequently, but some people are just weird and actually do that.

Especially swing voters, who matter most.

If anything, a former never-Trumper who has just been so disgusted by the dems that he's reluctantly come around to MAGA seems like the exact thing Trump should want in a running mate. This whole election seems to be dominated by that vibe, and I know A LOT of disaffected centrists who are planning on holding their noses and voting for Trump for the first time in November.

From Trump's perspective, that's a feature, not a bug.

What Trump requires, more than anything else, is loyalty. He was furious at Pence because Pence didn't deliver that in a crisis, because Pence had commitments that preceded and overrode loyalty to Trump. That's not an issue with an amoral opportunist. The opportunist will follow Trump for as long as it's in his interests to do so, and you can trust him to follow those interests.

Trump is not a principled or ideological politician, much less a man. He focuses more on deals, favour-trades, and personal allegiance. I think Vance makes sense for him.

The opportunist will follow Trump for as long as it's in his interests to do so,

It hardly seemed obvious on January 6, 2021 that it would have been in Trump's VP's own interest to engage in a Scooby-Doo-esque scheme to steal the Presidency just because the incumbent had a mental break after losing the election.

If Vance had a Damascene conversion to Trump as a consequence of Trump gaining power, one should consider the possibility that he'd have had the inverse conversion as a consequence of Trump losing power.

I dunno, I have been and am pro-Trump and I mostly agree with this:

Trump’s policies, such as they are, offer little substance to those suffering from addiction, joblessness, and downward mobility.

Trump doesn't have much of a vision, he operates on 110% perceptions and vibes. I've been saying since 2016 that I vote for him not because I think he will fix America, but because he's a metaphorical Molotov cocktail thrown through the window of the Uniparty HQ. 2016 Trump was just one Molotov and failed to do lasting damage, and so I hope 2024 Punished Trump will be a dozen of them and will actually catch the structure on fire and opens space for people with actually good ideas to maneuver. Vance has to flatter Trump's ego to have a shot at changing America in the way he would like. I think he's too smart for his apparent conversion to be real. He's riding coattails and waiting for the right moment.

Not a Trump fan by any means, but my feeling is that because Trump operates on perception and vibes, he has no goal for being President beyond status. Which means that beyond a few personal crusades, he simply lets the Uniparty in Congress do whatever they want. Beyond the media circus surrounding Trump in everything he does, was his first term substantially different from a hypothetical generic Republican President? I don't think it was and I don't think a 2nd term would be, because if it doesn't interest him he doesn't care.

Yes, I'm excited about this pick. Vance, more than anyone else, doesn't strike me a phony. He's not Trump, but he was saying the same kinds of things before Trump was the nominee in 2016, and he's been saying them since. I think he's also a great choice for the republican nominee in 2028.

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.

I don't think so. It would be doable, if it were not for all of the people whose livelihood rests in the leftist milieu. Nobody working for the New York Times, NPR, or the Washington Post is going to bite on a national unity ticket, and they will do their best to make sure their audience doesn't, either.

I think he's also a great choice for the republican nominee in 2028.

That's a great point and Trump has done well here to think of his legacy.

There will be a Trump-sized hole in the Republican Party come 2028. Whoever comes next will need to have Trump's ability to talk to the working class in a way that Generic Politician does not.

I think Vance fits the bill nicely.

I expect Trump to run in 2028. Either directly or thru very apparent proxies.

I don’t think it’s wise to assume his political career will end with this term. I fully expect him to be the most powerful American politician in 2028 regardless of who holds the official title.

I think this was a common conservative complaint about Hillary in 2016: the "Copresidents" line was from an SNL skit, but I think it resonated at least as well as the "I can see Russia from my house" (also an SNL quote). If you're so concerned about long-term influence like that, it seems that almost electing a candidate that already lived 8 years in the White House seems like it should also be worrisome.

I don't completely discount your concerns, but Trump will be four years older in 2028.

I am not complaining. I want him in the race in 2028.

I guess you could say I don’t believe Democracy/Republic scales and it seems painfully obvious we need reform.

I mostly expect to vote for Donnie Jr in 2028. Probably add an ADU for Trump.

You may have had an argument for that yesterday, but I think the choice of Vance as VP pretty much cements him as the heir apparent.

The point isn't to secure actual unity. It's to extend the hand in good faith, so that when they slap it away they're doing so in as obvious and public a manner as possible. Erosion of Blue Tribe social consensus is the name of the game. Very little else matters more than that, because unless Blue Tribe social consensus can be broken, Reds and probably the nation as a whole are screwed no matter what else happens. There is no peace or prosperity available in continuing to allow Blue Tribe to do our thinking for us, without accountability or recourse.

Vance lacks accomplishments. He wrote one acclaimed book. The rest of his career is a junior big law stint and then I guess he was good at befriending rich people and became a VC of which I see zero prominent investments.

He has never held a job long enough to do anything. I think it’s questionable “he had a life before politics”. He had internships to become a politician. Even Democrats who wanted to be in politics would spend 3 years in military service before going off to law school back in the day. He’s no Desantis in that regard.

He though is solidly blue tribe. Classic smart white guy marries Asian/Indian.

I don’t think he does much to extend the base. Maybe he helps to push engagement in Pennsylvania which is probably a swing state. Trumps biggest weakness is governance not winning the election. That may not matter for the election but in terms of getting things done Vance is a lightweight.

He reminds me a lot of Palin but with better education. I don’t even think Dems will fear him. He doesn’t remove the assassin risks with Trump.

Didn't he underperform in 2022 as well?

No. He was a non incumbent running against a popular congressmen. Can’t compare with an popular incumbent running against a nobody.

2024 Vance resume = 2008 Obama resume.

Which, to be fair, people criticized Obama as inexperienced. But in the end, it was a pretty hollow critique and Obama led competently for 8 years (whatever you think of his politics).

Lighter resume I would agree. Though I would argue that Obama had a previous life. A decade plus as a law professor at UC. Vance’s professional career is just 3 years at big law and then being Thiel’s buddy, calling himself a VC, and investing in Rumble.

Obama you would obviously call an academic lawyer. I don’t think you would call Vance any particular career.

I have a much lower opinion of academic lawyers than guys that pal around with Peter Thiel for a living.

But law professorships are worthless sinecures that do and produce nothing of value. His stint as a community organizer was unironically much more important and impactful.

I wouldn't call Obama an academic lawyer (or really much of a lawyer at all--I don't think he's ever really practiced). He doesn't have a PhD, he never published any original research (I think he may have co-authored a couple of law review articles of no significance), and he kept an unusually light course load. He spent relatively little time on campus and apparently did the absolute bare minimum required of him while he was there (from what I can recall, it's been a long time since I looked into this).

He was a charismatic local politician with a part-time adjunct professor job teaching introductory con law. And even that is fairly charitable--I would not be surprised if his TAs did almost all of the work apart from his actual lectures (and sometimes even those), as was the case with both of the "celebrity" professors I've had the displeasure of taking classes with.

Obama governed horribly -- Obamacare, IRS political targetting, enshrining disparate impact, fast and furious, Benghazi, ISIS, etc etc

As someone who voted for him one time and stayed home the second, it didn't feel like he governed horribly. I think subsequent events have revealed extremely serious problems with his tenure, but at the time, in a blue information bubble, he seemed like the best president in quite a while.

Don’t conflate wicked with impotent. That’s a long list of political accomplishments, even if you think they’re malevolent!

Democrats don't think he governed horribly. Obamacare was a generational success for Democratic policy goals and more than makes up for the rest. The biggest problem of the Obama administration is that he left the economy perpetually understimulated, letting the nation languish for years in a sluggish recovery from the great financial crisis and leaving the door open for Trump to adopt a more expansionary fiscal policy and revitalize the economy.

I think the bigger problem was too much stimulus. Rip the band aid off.

He though is solidly blue tribe. Classic smart white guy marries Asian/Indian.

Is he one of those dark elves that Moldbug talked about?

vice president isn't a normal job where you need experience. The "job" is basically to give TV interviews and make the main guy look good. Maybe run for president in the future, but not now. It's a very strange job. For that, he's as qualified as anyone.

The job varies. Some people elevate the role. Dick Cheney was powerful. Desantis I think would have been a get shit done VP.

Maybe run for president in the future, but not now.

The whole reason that Trump is winning right now is that 1/ Obama thought this way when picking his VP in 2008, and 2/ Biden thought this way when picking a VP in 2020. Choosing a VP is monumentally consequential for your party. You need to make sure you are choosing the right guy if you care at all about the future of your party. And how can you think you have taken the measure of a man to know where he will be in the next decade or two when he's already a completely different man from what he was a decade ago?

It's not that monumentally consequential in a healthy political party. Part of the Democrat Party's problem is this weird desire to keep passing the Presidency to anointed successors instead of actually allowing any kind of party democracy to occur. That's how they got Clinton in 16, Biden in 20 and now look stuck with Harris in 24. But it really doesn't have to be this way, and it wasn't so long ago that it was quite normal to hand the Vice Presidency to an empty suit like Spiro Agnew or Dan Quayle.

Biden won a competitive primary in 2020. If he was Obama's annointed successor (he wasn't - part of the reason why Obama chose him as VP was that Obama thought he would be too old to run in 2016) he would have been on the ballot in 2016. If the "party decided" in 2020, then almost everyone who mattered in the Democratic Party would have endorsed Biden, when in fact the endorsements were all over the place.

Fundamentally, Biden won because none of the wonkier centrist candidates could win the support of the black political machines who deliver a plurality of the Dem primary vote, so the other centrists (by the time the voting started, that meant Buttigieg and Klobuchar) had to drop out and endorse Biden if they wanted to crush the Sanders/Warren wing. This was obvious to anyone who understands Democratic party politics after the South Carolina primary.

The fact that the best available talent on the centrist wing of the Democratic party in 2020 was Biden, Buttigieg and Klobuchar says something less-than-positive about the state of the American centre-left.

Biden won a competitive primary in 2020.

Ahh yes - the competitive thing where everyone simultaneously dropped and endorsed you after a lot of backroom dealing.

A lot of the current mess dems are in could be traced to them trying to stop Bernie twice.

Deal with the devil.

There were shenanigans around the primaries, but Bernie fundamentally wasn't sunk because of them. He lost because he was a rando with extremely out-there political views from a tiny lily-white state, who didn't resonate with the Democratic Party as a whole. (It bears pointing out that the online activist/college student crowd, although having outsized influence on media, are not at all representative of the Democratic base.)

If elite and donor contempt was enough to sink a candidate in a primary, Trump would never have been able to win his.

A lot of the current mess dems are in could be traced to them trying to stop Bernie twice.

this reasoning is just straight forwardly poor. Bernie only looked like he had a chance because the centrist lane was crowded. When it became uncrowded he had no chance. This isn't "trying to stop Bernie". This is a group of 20 friends, 2 of which want to eat at the same slop house and the remaining 18 of them each preferring a different steak house deciding on a particular steak house that was only one guy's first choice rather than take a vote at the restaurant level and end up at a coordinated minority's preference.

A tremendous amount of people came out of that primary thinking that they should have been allowed to win because other candidates were obligated to keep splitting the ticket 8 ways in order to give him an opening. It's ridiculous.

The fact that the best available talent on the centrist wing of the Democratic party in 2020 was Biden, Buttigieg and Klobuchar says something less-than-positive about the state of the American centre-left.

I think it's more about the party base than its leadership. Like you said, the black political machine is huge in Dem primaries, and they came out big for Biden. Buttigieg and Sanders did great in the early, mostly-white states of Iowa and New Hampshire. But then along came South Carolina with its huge black population and just absolutely crushed it for Biden. Almost half of the vote to just one candidate in a multi-way race, and more than half of the delegates in a fairly large state. No one else could touch him after that.\

It's an interesting question as to why he won so much black support. You might think Harris would have won their support, since she's part black. Or maybe someone more progressive. But no. They went hard for the fairly moderate guy who was also Obama's VP. In that case, being VP meant a lot. But I don't think that, say, Mike Pence would enjoy a similar bump- even the most ardent Trump supporters don't really like Pence.

even the most ardent Trump supporters don't really like Pence.

I think this is tied to some specific events in January of 2021.

did they like him before that though?

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He’s fairly moderate, tied to Obama, a bit quirky, very party insider, known quantity, straight man, professional politician. That’s what the black political machine seems to like.

I'm convinced it's something about his personality/charisma. Bill Clinton had a similar effect on the black community. It's like the affable alpha male politician who looks like he's having a blast whenever he's campaigning.

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Fundamentally, Biden won because none of the wonkier centrist candidates could win the support of the black political machines who deliver a plurality of the Dem primary vote, so the other centrists (by the time the voting started, that meant Buttigieg and Klobuchar) had to drop out and endorse Biden if they wanted to crush the Sanders/Warren wing. This was obvious to anyone who understands Democratic party politics after the South Carolina primary.

And this was the moment of anointing. Biden did not enter the primaries anointed- Biden was anointed into the primaries by how the inner-party party reacted in the face of an emergent threat to their control of the party as a whole, rather than allow an outsider wing raise as a result of voter preference in the primaries.

This is a bait and switch argument. At first the claim was "The party has current problems because instead of healthy party politics deciding leaders, they anoint whoever has the most name recognition or seniority in the previous regime", now it's "After a somewhat rigorous and unpredictable primary process with votes and wins all over the place, eventually they coalesced around a candidate who they thought was best (And who did in fact end up winning), which proves he was anointed"

Or, alternatively, it's re-affirming the original argument by not letting the counter-argument smuggle in assumptions (such as that a party-annointing must occur in advance of primaries) that are neither necessary nor disprove the previous argument.

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I kinda of agree. I don’t have anything against Vance specifically. He in fact may turn out wonderfully. I just don’t know him—at all. He hasn’t had the eye of Sauron on him so I can’t trust him.

It’s why I would’ve preferred RDS. Of course Trump feels (I think really unfairly) that RDS betrayed Trump so was never going to happen.

DeSantis has his strengths, but they were on COVID response and anti-woke. I don't expect him to deport anyone and I don't expect him to stand up to China.

He can stay right where he is, it seems to suit him. Or maybe unseat Rubio and join the Senate.

Covid to me is still a big deal. There needs to be accountability for that. RDS also runs a very competent Florida government.

Also RDS showed he would respond to a hostile media without cowering. No reason to think that would change.

He is a very competent administrator albeit not a very inspiring personality.

Yes, I agree with your points, but they don't tell me that he's going to shut down the border or be tough on China. Those were, are, and forever will be Trump's biggest selling points to me, and many others.

I would be happy with him if I thought he would accomplish those things. I don't, especially when it comes to China.

What on earth makes you think Trump is going to be tough on China? He's not even supporting the TikTok ban.

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People are making hay of this old tweet from Vance.

But I'm not surprised by Trump's rise, and I think the entire party has only itself to blame. We are, whether we like it or not, the party of lower-income, lower-education white people, and I have been saying for a long time that we need to offer those people SOMETHING (and hell, maybe even expand our appeal to working class black people in the process) or a demagogue would. We are now at that point. Trump is the fruit of the party's collective neglect. 3) I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler. How's that for discouraging?

Of course, the usual suspects in the MSM are not quoting the whole tweet, just the Hitler part. I think the whole quote is a lot more interesting, and makes a lot of sense.

A lot of never Trumpers (like Vance) are coming to the conclusion that Trump is actually not all that bad. We saw what a first term looked like. It was pretty middle of the road, with some modest successes in foreign policy and taxation.

Now we see Trump on the campaign trail on his best behavior. 2016 Trump might have mocked Biden during the debate. 2024 Trump did not. As President, will he put aside his ego and listen to the smart people in the room like Vance, Thiel, Vivek, Ackman, or Musk? Being entirely unbeholden to the powers that be, there's a sense that a Trump administration can effect real and lasting change. And the assassination attempt has given Trump much needed gravitas which might carry over into a popular mandate.

A lot of never Trumpers (like Vance) are coming to the conclusion that Trump is actually not all that bad. We saw what a first term looked like. It was pretty middle of the road, with some modest successes in foreign policy and taxation.

This is exactly why I have zero trouble believing that Vance is a genuine convert. I share quite a few demographic attributes with Vance. In 2016, I did not vote for Trump, I condemned him as a personally immoral man and worried in text messages about his potentially destabilizing impact on the country. By early 2020, I still thought he was a personally immoral man, but a decent enough President. After Kavanaugh, Covid lockdowns, Floyd riots, and so many more things big and small, I was dead-set against the Democrat Party and voted for Trump, the first time I had ever voted Republican. After what I consider four years of awful governance and an attempted assassination, I'm ready to don a red hat. Maybe Vance is just seeing where the wind blows, but it's not hard at all for me to think that a white guy in his late 30s from the Midwest thinks the things Vance articulates.

it's not hard at all for me to think that a white guy in his late 30s from the Midwest thinks the things Vance articulates.

My dad’s side of the family are West Virginia hill folk that moved to southwestern Ohio for factory work, and I spent the first half of my childhood in Ohio.

Hillbilly Elegy was the first book I read that sounded like stories I used to hear. There was the time the town got a cop car which was burned shortly after. There was the child molester that disappeared and for which it was strongly implied that an uncle had taken care of him. And then the relatives that had chaotic lives of drinking and drugs.

don a red hat

Get it?

I have zero trouble believing that Vance is a genuine convert

There's some joke here about Vance converting to Catholicism and Trumpism recently.

I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler.

I guess he landed on option 1.

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?

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.

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 honestly never understood this point. I used think Marco Rubio was a great politician and would be my ideal president. My views have changed a lot. I can’t imagine anyone who better fits the term “empty suit”.

Tucker was firing off texts blasting trump 5 years ago? So what?

Should we just forget people’s utter hypocrisy? That’s the so-what. In my opinion, Tucker Carlson has been one of the handful of the top most norms-damaging individuals in the United States over the past 5 years. He has shown he is a liar and not trustworthy, so why should we take anything he says now at face value?

Preachy, smarminess of Glenn Beck 2.0 for real but with even more disdain for the truth. I hope he doesn’t manage to somehow launder his own image back to respectable.

Okay, I'll bite. What, specifically, have you found objectionable? I admit that I have limited knowledge of Tucker Carlson except for maybe 3 or 4 interviews of perhaps 1 hour each. He seemed forthright, well-intentioned, and informed. He is wrong about climate change, though. What else is he wrong about?

On a personal level, people say that he is an absolutely kind and wonderful person to be around which counts a lot in my book.

I still have a set of notes floating around for one day I watched a whole show or two back in 2020 election season and recorded my specific takes on it if that would be interesting as its own post? But the abridged version is that he would applaud people who thought differently than him for the bravery of coming on the show and then almost never let them speak. His show repeatedly would contain notable errors that more disciplined journalism would have caught. As Fox argued in court, his show was entertainment. Of course there's also some leaked texts where he both expresses his feelings which were outright at odds with his on-air opinions, strongly suggesting at least some level of disingenuousness. The overall tenor of the show was kind of gish-gallop style, where segments of opinionated commenters would be aired one after another, smashed together at breakneck pace in a parade with little actual engagement other than a furrowed brow and "oh that's interesting" interspersed with mantra-like platitudes such as "THEY want to lie to you but WE tell the truth". It was a ceaseless, unrelenting setup of grievance and pre-packaged thoughts with no space to breathe or even think provided in most all the segments. I think on some level I understand frustration with mainstream media as it is, but the kind of us-vs-them mentality constantly pushed on the show felt incredibly excessive and eminently hypocritical.

Yep. I don’t think he’ll be able to launder it back to respectability, at least for those who are able to detect lies and deceit.

Interesting that he just spoke at the RNC. Looks like he’s back to riding trumps coattails.

Edit: and to be honest I don’t think he’s had any respectability since John Stewart showed what an ass he is on live television.

norms-damaging individuals

Good, the status quo norms got us into Ukraine-sandpit-boogaloo and would get us into a hot WW3 sooner if they would have gotten hilldawg into office.

In my opinion, Tucker Carlson has been one of the handful of the top most norms-damaging individuals in the United States over the past 5 years.

If by "top" you mean something like "top 100K", maybe. That list is absolutely swarmed with all the other journalists, as well as academics, politicians, appointed bureaucrats, judges, captains of industry, artists, etc.

We just had a whole cadre of leftist media (eg NYT, WaPo, CNN) pretend the president wasn’t senile for three years. Yet we are attacking Tucker? Physician heal thyself.

No, I meant top 10.

Well, I think that requires a willful glossing over of all norm breaking behaviors we've seen from the people I outlined, both as individuals, and as a class.

Should we just forget people’s utter hypocrisy? That’s the so-what. In my opinion, Tucker Carlson has been one of the handful of the top most norms-damaging individuals in the United States over the past 5 years. He has shown he is a liar and not trustworthy, so why should we take anything he says now at face value?

Nobody actually cares about people's utter hypocrisy. I have been extremely consistent in my belief that any news organisation or political figure which advocated in favour of the Iraq war permanently destroyed their reputation and legitimacy. The Trump years were full of the same - a mixture of both blatant falsehoods and artful deceptions. Nothing Carlson did even comes close to the WMD case, or the outright lies given professional gloss during the Biden Laptop saga.

That said, if you want to start holding media figures and organisations to account for peddling falsehoods and lies, I'm right there with you - as long as that's your actual motivation rather than some kind of partisan concern.

To Tucker’s credit, he loudly and publicly says “I fucked up on Iraq and it is my biggest mistake.”

Maybe there are others but I think most media just move along. I appreciated that he owned his failure. Maybe it’s an act but he seems to have really taken it to heart. He was probably the only person on Fox that criticized Trump over Solemni (sp?). He was probably the only person on Fox at the start of the Ukraine war to pump the brakes. Maybe it doesn’t come from a well thought out place but being burned on Iraq seems to have made him reflexively against any foreign entanglements.

The biggest mystery to me about Marco Rubio is why anyone likes him. He's weird looking, short, not charismatic, seems perpetually nervous, not particularly articulate, seems not to have ever had an original thought in his life. He seems most famous for 1. dramatically failing to out-Trump Trump in the 2015 Republican primaries, 2. short-circuiting in Chris Christie's gravitational well and repeating the line "let's dispel with the myth that Obama doesn't know what he's doing" at least three times, 3. drinking too much water in some SOTU response, and 4. trying to pass amnesty for illegal immigrants. What is the case for Rubio? I am perplexed at Florida Man's improbable success.

Just a reminder that Tucker Carlson is a proven liar and despised trump during his presidency.

Yes, this is what Reddit said about that. But I don't recall any Tucker segments from around then where he lavishly praised Trump? I consider Trump a narcissist and mostly a fool, and I thought his presidential term was horribly ineffective. Nevertheless, I agreed with Tucker segments at the time. I understand that many progressives learn third-hand that Tucker Carlson Tonight was the "Praise God-Emperor Trump Show", but was there actual lying here or just a clickbait insinuation of it?

Label it whatever type of argument you want. But the fact is Tucker Carlson carried Trumps water for four years. Of course Carlson has always been a hack, but the hypocrisy of his texts are next level.

His segments were largely about dishonest media, cancel culture, GOP politicians betraying their base, and the administrative deepstate. You can call this "carrying water for Trump" because the people who vote for Trump also complain about these things. To me, it was "accurate political commentary".

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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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.

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.

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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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.

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.

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,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

  • -10

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

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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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.

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...

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

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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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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Couldn't competitors still come along?

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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)

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)

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.

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

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.

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.

Maybe a bit of everything, in different respects?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.


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