site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30207 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

3
Top Bottom New Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

SpaceX just caught the booster of the Starship rocket, launching a new age of man made space exploration.

Despite this getting relatively little news in the mainstream media, I am convinced this development marks the beginning of an entire paradigm of space. The cost of kg to orbit should now go down about an order of magnitude within the next decade or two.

This win has massive implications for the culture war, especially given that Elon Musk has recently flipped sides to support the right. Degrowth and environmental arguments will not be able to hold against the sheer awesomeness and vibrancy of space travel, I believe.

We'll have to see if the FAA or other government agencies move to block Elon from continuing this work. If Kamala gets elected, I worry her administration will attack him and his companies even more aggressively. This successful launch, more than anything else in this election cycle, is making me consider vote for Trump.

What are your thoughts? Do you agree with my assessment?

I believe that inexpensive space-flight may actually be beneficial to the environment, insomuch as it allows us to re-locate endeavours with adverse ecological impacts outside the environment.

The long-term environmental damage caused by StarBase may very well be literally less than nothing!

I agree. Long term if we continue to grow our population and live at a comfortable level we just need to go to space for minerals anyway.

Environmentalists who are anti-space really aren't thinking ahead. Or they're degrowth lunatics.

I have seen some IMO reasonable arguments in favor of some environmental limits on space development. I don't think the idea that there is some value in completely untouched wilderness is completely crazy, but I'm not sure where I'd draw the line. I'd definitely be opposed to defacing the Earth-facing side of the moon, for example.

One thing about Mars I particularly want to preserve is the possibility of checking for lithopanspermia. There are a limited number of locations in Sol system capable of checking that hypothesis.

Gonna be extremely funny if building stuff on Mars and then shipping them all the way to Earth ends up being cheaper than shipping them from somewhere on Earth due to the longshoreman union and the Jones Act.

LMAO. "We can easily imagine colonies on mars with a significant industrial base as well as regular transit of materials from Mars to Earth, but breaking up the longshoremen union and repealing the Jones act? That is beyond the realm of science fiction."

Wouldn't SpaceX rockets be Jones Act compliant anyway? They are built in the US, owned by a US company, registered in the US, and (in so far as they are crewed) crewed by US citizens.

The idea that wet Jones Act shipping between Miami and Puerto Rico costs more than space Jones Act shipping between Starbase and a US Mars Colony is scarily plausible. So is the idea of angry longshoremen trying to fix this problem by picketing Starbase and being zapped with Elon's latest death ray.

That would be the ultimate carbon offset scheme. Excuse me, I am setting up my extrasolar carbon credit synthetic swap. I will be messaging you all from my carbon neutral space mansion soon enough.

Obtaining rare earths in a place where the toxic lakes the size of Delaware don’t matter would certainly be a benefit for the environment. If we can stop being retarded about building nuclear uranium supplies might be worth it too.

But I’m unclear on the economic incentives behind space travel. Mars and Venus are the most terraformable planets and would still require centuries worth of government subsidies. Without FTL(let’s say heim theory turns out to be true, or there’s a breakthrough that develops a working Alcubierre drive, or someone figures out how to build a krasnikov tube) there’s no shirtsleeve environment out there, so people don’t want to live there. You might wind up with the equivalent of oil rigs in space but I doubt you’ll have major colonies.

Wrong. The human will and imagination will make it happen. As we advance in technology this will become easier and easier.

First Mars, then the stars.

Ok, but terraforming Mars takes what, 100 years minimum? Who's going to keep funding going for that for 100 years when it definitionally doesn't earn a return?

I guess there could be a structure such that running oil rigs in space requires taxes to fund a terraforming project. But whoever those taxes get paid to has every incentive to iron law of bureaucracy those taxes into conferences in the Bahamas about current thing in terraforming.

You could fund the terraforming of Mars by leveraging the equity of the total value of the theorized real estate.

In other words, a mortgage the size of a planet.

Except that, even after spending trillions in Terraforming Mars, you'd end up with land worth less than land than Earth due to extreme cold, proximity to amenities, ability to grow things, etc. No one but crazy rich people would want to live on Mars until Earth becomes largely uninhabitable.

Obtaining rare earths in a place where the toxic lakes the size of Delaware don’t matter would certainly be a benefit for the environment. If we can stop being retarded about building nuclear uranium supplies might be worth it too.

I will point out here that lithophile elements are literally the worst things to get from space as far as relative difficulty of mining them goes. Atmophiles are found in much-greater quantity in the outer system. Siderophiles (which include literal gold) are far more accessible on asteroids because on Earth they sank into the core. But lithophiles (which include rare earths and actinides) are strongly concentrated in the crusts of planets; Earth is a great place to find them, only matched by other rocky, differentiated bodies (which have notable gravity wells and frequently atmospheres greatly increasing the expense of sending stuff back).

Ok, sure, bad example. But there’s resources(uranium, osmium) and industrial processes(titanium smelting) that genuinely make more sense in space once costs come down. Just that those economic justifications aren’t good reasons for permanent habitation.

Uh, uranium's an actinide (and thus lithophile), the thing I just said is highly concentrated in Earth's crust (see e.g. here for Sol System vs. here for Earth's crust; note that this somewhat understates the effect because both are normed to silicon being 10^6 and silicon is mildly concentrated in the crust compared to undifferentiated rocky bodies/epically concentrated in Earth as a whole compared to icy bodies). Sorry if that wasn't clear.

The yellow region in the second graph is the highly-siderophilic elements (plus tellurium), which are strongly depleted in the crust, and indeed osmium's one of them.

Couldn't we also find this stuff on the moon? Why not the moon? I would presume every crater has something interesting at its center. It just seems like the most obvious place to start but I rarely see it mentioned or discussed.

I'm not super up-to-date on all the latest space exploration talk, so maybe someone can give me the tl;dr.

Degrowth and environmental arguments will not be able to hold against the sheer awesomeness and vibrancy of space travel, I believe.

Anecdotally, I showed my wife the video of the Mechazilla catch yesterday. She was blown away at just how awesome it was. Previously, her opinion of Musk was "He's that billionaire that bought Twitter so he can troll people." After watching the video, she commented that if Musk was going to do amazing things like that, he gets a pass on all the Twitter trolling he cares to do. And she's not particularly "into" space flight and technology, it was just the sheer awesomeness that captured her attention.

Yes, it was cool as fuck. I’m sorry I missed it live. I don’t know about price per kilogram, but this is instantly recognizable to the layman as something out of science fiction. Here’s to a new generation of space ops.

No, this means next to nothing for the culture war. Most people are not supporting their team due to a calculated future trajectory of humanity. They are assessing the personal economic impact, the respectability of their social circles, the overall sense of security. Rocket milestones are remarkably insulated from all of those in the short term.

I’d say it remains a shockingly gray-tribe issue. Degrowth is (thankfully!) not as influential as you suggest. Climate activism remains strong, but oddly technocratic, even as it incorporates the trappings of idpol. See the NSC’s Call to Action. Meanwhile, most of the right wing doesn’t care unless the topic can be linked to American exceptionalism.

Which brings us to Trump. I would argue that he has personally dragged the Republican Party further from laissez-faire, libertarian politics even as he has enacted some of those policy goals. The niche which was, in 2010, occupied by Tea Partiers now hosts outright populists and social conservatives. This election is a referendum on any number of social, economic, and personal-conduct issues before it’s about the future of space exploration.

Please don’t vote for Trump on the basis of Musk’s political drift.

Predictions: I do not expect the Biden admin or the Harris campaign to speak out against SpaceX. The latter might snap at Musk, but it will be for his Twitter remarks, not for anything about space exploration. I particularly do not expect the FAA to “block” Elon, especially since Flight 6 allegedly got approval already. Neither a Harris nor a Trump admin will move against private space companies, Musk or otherwise.

The Biden administration is suing SpaceX over its hiring having disparate impact to asylum seekers.

According to Musk, they're explicitly prevented from hiring migrants due to Federal ITAR rules, which means they're being sued by the Feds for obeying a Federal law.

Haven’t those already been dismissed?

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/spacex-walmart-court-wins-imperil-dojs-immigration-bias-probes

I’m sure the DoJ appealed, but I can’t find anything newer than April.

The cost of kg to orbit should now go down about an order of magnitude within the next decade or two.

The cost should, but the price might not. The first orbital boosters to ever undergo a powered landing or be reused were the ones for Falcon 9, and the second orbital boosters ever to undergo a powered landing were ... the SpaceX successor to Falcon 9?! They're literally more than a decade ahead of nearly all their competition. The only thing I've seen at the same scale as Starship is a Chinese concept that's at the "powerpoint presentation" stage, and even in vaporware form they're only talking about starting testing in the early 2030s and regular use in 2040.

And just like SpaceX are still selling $70M Falcon 9 flights even while their internal marginal costs are likely to be down to ~$20M, I bet they'll feel free to sell Starship flights for something like $150M (for a full, 10x the F9 payload, granted), even if they ever actually manage to get its cost under $10M, until they get some real competition.

The biggest question among their competitors is New Glenn, I think. Blue Origin got started earlier than SpaceX without yet reaching orbit, seemingly progressing at half the pace ... but they now have a rocket nearly ready to launch, something like 4x more powerful than F9, for the same price. If everything works as planned and they can manage to ramp up the cadence then I could definitely see SpaceX prices being pushed down to that level too.

Monopolies do not always charge maximum price. If one person wants a product at $100 but 20 people want it at $10, its better to charge $10 (as long as marginal costs aren't eating that additional $100 in revenue). Of course, that means you need more customers at a lower price. And I think Elon starting up Starlink is a sign that he lacks customers. I'm not sure where that leaves us.

A profit maximizing monopolist increases production and lowers prices when their marginal costs decrease, the same as in a competitive market.

Yeah, but how much a monopoly lowers those prices depends on how the elasticity of demand varies with price, and I'm not sure what they can count on there. Over the past few years they've managed to double their number of commercial+government launches in part by being the cheapest option around, but still the majority of their launches are now Starlink. Bezos wants to put most of the Kuiper satellites up on New Glenn, and China's putting the Thousand Sails constellation up on Long March, and all the other satellite constellation plans out there are for tens or maybe hundreds of satellites, not thousands, so there's not a big external market in the wings that they can sweep up.

They can probably keep Starship busy with more internal payloads, which will be great for them, since they've got a more powerful Starlink design waiting on Starship because it's too big for Falcon, but this doesn't affect their prices to others. To have incentive to cut prices they need the cuts to essentially create new markets. New markets would be awesome if they happened, I admit. The first "12 universities design a nanosat and we launch the winner" programs started up shortly after I left undergrad, which was awe inspiring, and at Starship costs we could afford "1000 high schools design a nanosat and we launch the winning 100" instead. But that only scales so far, and most markets with lots of room for growth are very speculative. The one obvious growth market right now is high-bandwidth low-latency communication, but Musk+Bezos+China seem to have that sewn up already.

On the other hand, prices here aren't determined by a spherical monopolist, but by Musk. He actually seems to be serious about the cities-on-Mars thing, and Starlink seems to be lucrative enough to pay for it even if he doesn't maximize profit from other customers, so it wouldn't be completely out of character for him to just lower short-term profit margins speculatively, on the theory that even if the short-run demand elasticity isn't there it's more important to create new markets in the long run.

I'm not sure if anybody asked this yet but why does the mechazilla need to catch it? Instead of just landing like the Falcon 9? Is it the size?

My understanding is that there are a couple considerations. First, the studs used for catching are much lighter than legs used for landing. Lighter weight for the landing components means more payload.

The other part is that the engines produce blast shockwaves which reflect off the landing surface and back into the engines, causing stress and potentially damage. Catching the rocket well off the ground prevents this.

Been asked in this thread https://www.themotte.org/post/1207/spacex-starship-live-reaction-space-on/259100?context=8#context

EDIT: accidental post due to race condition.

Teehee I already posted it bud. But I'm glad i got your attention!! and I like what you added

Must have threaded the needle between my loading the page and pressing 'Comment'!

I have removed the re-post and moved my comment to a reply to yours.

The PRC's doing another round of drills around Taiwan.

There's a real possibility that this one is the ruse of war that the others were meant to make believable; all the stars have basically aligned. The charm offensive failed in 2019-20 with the Darth Vader stunt on Hong Kong, there's a shitshow of a US election campaign in progress (two assassination attempts plus a disqualification attempt), the US President is significantly demented, William Lai got elected Taiwanese President earlier this year, and October's a good month in terms of weather conditions for amphibious assault, plus Beijing's adversaries are re-arming and Biden will be gone before April so that puts some degree of time pressure on them.

I wouldn't panic just yet; even if this is the big one (and it may not be), my guess is that they won't open WWIII with a nuclear first strike on CONUS/Europe/Australia (pre-emptive ASAT use to wipe out US satellites - and probably destroy all other low-earth-orbit satellites as collateral damage - is a possibility, though, so you may lose any communications dependent on those). But anything that you might have trouble doing later - beating the rush to buy bottled water/non-perishable food/aluminium foil/iodide tablets or whatever (not all of those are applicable to all of us), or maybe starting construction of a fallout shelter - this is your advance warning. As far as Guam/Japan/South Korea go, there may be pre-emptive missile attacks on US bases, but I still wouldn't expect cities nuked as part of the opening move so my advice is mostly the same. But if you're in Taiwan itself, I'd suggest getting out; if this goes hot there'll likely be a blockade attempt by the PLAN, so you may not be able to get out later.

To be clear, I'm more worried now than I've been since at least 2017 (the Trump-Kim yelling match) - and I was in Melbourne then, and thus personally at risk. I was mildly nervous back in April of this year, but you'll note that I didn't make a post like this then.

Remember that your life is worth a lot more than a few hundred bucks; it is rational to take action even if you rate the chance of nuclear war as "small but significant". Remember also that it is good to survive; while QoL might suck in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear war, we'll recover, and if you have any ideological goals you will in almost all cases help them more if you're still around to advocate and act for them (note that if you're in the military or can otherwise help win the war, that's a worthy cause; I'm not advising desertion). That said, good luck to us all and I hope I'm worried over nothing.

m9m out.

EDIT: The drills seem to have completed; we seem to be safe for now.

Why would China be willing to go for WW3 and destroy much of the planet just to win Taiwan?

  1. They might underestimate the West's willingness to fight. This is particularly exacerbated by the PRC's hypernationalism; overconfidence is the classic pitfall of such regimes.
  2. Once combat starts between the USA and PRC directly, there's a constant threat of false alarms, particularly on the Chinese side. If it goes on long enough, eventually you're going to get an Arkhipov making the wrong call, or a Petrov incident or Duluth bear not realised as false in time. My estimate is ~1% per day, and an acquaintance in the business said that's the right order of magnitude. Also, once they pull the trigger, backing down would severely damage the CPC's legitimacy; their fundamental policy promise is that they'll bring China back to world leader status, and this is more load-bearing than most Western policy promises given the CPC's lack of democratic legitimacy. So they might not immediately pull back after it's clear the West is coming in.

They don’t expect to start WWIII. They expect to win the war quickly.

They don't even expect a war. They're playing positional chess, focusing on developing areas of influence. Each individual step will be a micro-escalation: too small for anyone to start a war over, and giving the PRC the space to deescalate if necessary without loss of face. Then, repeat.

At some point they'll need to start exchanging some major pieces, but if they position themselves appropriately beforehand, every exchange from then on will be to their benefit.

Imperial Japanese imagined that Americans were weak and would not choose to fight. They didn't think they were signing up for WW2.

"The war will be over by Christmas" type sentiments are common historically. People imagining quick and easy victory in which the other side doesn't choose to fight back.

Imperial Japanese imagined that Americans were weak and would not choose to fight. They didn't think they were signing up for WW2.

This is not true. It's a common historical myth, driven in part by some of the Japanese rhetoric at the time. Yes, the Japanese hawks did say things like "Americans are weak, and we will crush them with our bushido spirit!" But the reality is that most of the Japanese government and high command was well aware that they could not win a war against the U.S. and really wanted to avoid it. Yamamoto's Peal Harbor scheme was basically a hail mary; he was hoping they would do enough damage to cripple the US for months, during which Japan would secure its gains and by the time America was ready to gear up, we wouldn't have the will to actually go to war. And even he knew it probably wasn't going to work.

Countries do go to war underestimating their opponents and their will to fight, but it's rarely with completely delusional takes about how easy it will be.

China might convince itself that they can take Taiwan quickly enough to avoid an all-out war with the West, but I doubt they are dumb enough to think that the US won't react, or that there isn't a serious risk of a major war.

To be clear, I'm more worried now than I've been since at least 2017 (the Trump-Kim yelling match) - and I was in Melbourne then, and thus personally at risk. I was mildly nervous back in April of this year, but you'll note that I didn't make a post like this then.

Way to undercut your credibility, lol.

2017 was practically an archetypical example of American ethnocentricism of thinking their internal political squabbles reflect how other key actors view the world. No one who remotely paid attention to Korea for any amount of time was particularly surprised by rhetoric that wasn't matched by mobilization by North or South, and no one whose seen a 'don't hold me back, bro' moment of bar-posturing would have missed the caveats on both sides were using throughout. Variants of 'If you attack me, then you will regret it' were blatantly (and politically) being misrepresented and misreported by actors whose motive was to inspire panic and fear in the audience.

Meanwhile, in Korea, coverage of the 'crisis' had far more of a 'wow, the American media are talking' tone than one of concern... if they covered it at all. Certainly the South Koreans weren't mobilizing their society for a conflict.

How and why the Americans would wage a war against North Korea without South Korean support or ascent was, of course, rarely if ever raised and never addressed beyond possible dismissals of 'the South Koreans don't have a choice.'

Remember that your life is worth a lot more than a few hundred bucks; it is rational to take action even if you rate the chance of nuclear war as "small but significant". Remember also that it is good to survive; while QoL might suck in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear war, we'll recover, and if you have any ideological goals you will in almost all cases help them more if you're still around to advocate and act for them. That said, good luck to us all and I hope I'm worried over nothing.

Well, you're certainly demonstrating the classic failure mode of utilitarians, who struggle to conceptualize or deal with conceptual infinities and start doing irrational things on the basis of existential dread spirals.

No, the Chinese are not about to try and cold-rush Taiwan, or try to start a war via blockade that would be publicly jumped on by both US political parties for electioneering purposes. No, there isn't any particular grounds for panic-buying resiliency goods beyond the universal basis to have a stockpile for emergencies. No, the nukes (and the satellites) are not about to fall.

You are doomposting. Go back to bed and sleep it off.

Well, you're certainly demonstrating the classic failure mode of utilitarians, who struggle to conceptualize or deal with conceptual infinities and start doing irrational things on the basis of existential dread spirals.

No, the Chinese are not about to try and cold-rush Taiwan, or try to start a war via blockade that would be publicly jumped on by both US political parties for electioneering purposes. No, there isn't any particular grounds for panic-buying resiliency goods beyond the universal basis to have a stockpile for emergencies. No, the nukes (and the satellites) are not about to fall.

You are doomposting. Go back to bed and sleep it off.

You have the right to ignore my warning if you so wish. As I said, I might look paranoid in a few days.

(In case I don't, though, no memory-hole for you.)

Not only am I ignoring your warning, I am recommending for your own health- mental as well as possibly physical- to get some rest.

You are doom posting. Go sleep it off.

Not only am I ignoring your warning, I am recommending for your own health- mental as well as possibly physical- to get some rest.

You are doom posting. Go sleep it off.

FYI:

Went to bed Monday morning around 4AM. Got up about 3:30 PM. Posted the top-level at 9:10 PM. Went to bed Tuesday morning at 3AM. Got up around 1:30 PM. Posting this at 2:45 PM. I do not retract my concerns.

I'm a night owl, not insane from lack of sleep.

And yet, Taiwan remains unblockaded, the nukes are not flying, and the satellites are not falling. Instead, in the last 48 hours, the Chinese ships returned, nuclear sabers were not rattled, and one of the most impressive technical feats of a decade has foreshadowed an even greater resilience of the space economy.

Yesterday was not the start of a war. There was no particular reason to believe that yesterday was the start of a war. That the many various reasons why not were beyond to are what demonstrated a lack of basis for your judgement and justification for fears, much as your lack of perception in 2017 led you to be 'nervous' and believe yourself 'at risk' during a propaganda cycle. The world does not function as you think it does, and the way you think it does is a result of fear mongering you decided to try and spread to others.

You are not charged with insanity. You are charged with a lack of sound judgement.

The world does not function as you think it does,

You seem to have been correct about this incident.

Is there some reason I should go with the hypothesis "Dean knows what the CPC is up to better than I do" rather than the hypothesis "Dean is a Rock Cultist who was right this time"? I'm open to persuasion of the former, but there are lots of Rock Cultists, including many smug Rock Cultists.

My model of the PLA drills around Taiwan is that one of them is not going to be a drill, and the rest are both practice runs and decoys to make people think the real one is another drill and thus gain tactical advantage. To guess which ones might be real, I look at various indications regarding their chances of success and consider whether enough of them point in the direction of "this is the best shot they'll get for a while". March/April/October is one sign, since those are the best months for amphibious operations (though they do have other options). Unusual/temporary weakness in US leadership is another. Unusual/temporary weakness in Western militaries is another. Mood in Taiwan is another, as I certainly accept that the PRC would rather take Taiwan peacefully, though this one's basically stuck in the "on" position at this point since it's now been years since the crash of unificationist sentiment to lizardman following the Hong Kong fiasco (i.e. they have had time to plan and prepare to follow "non-peaceful means" now that the "possibilities for a peaceful re-unification [are] completely exhausted"; quotes are from the PRC's Anti-Secession Law).

The 2024 US election cycle was predictable as a shitshow since 2021, so I predicted well in advance that October 2024 would be a solid time to invade. Biden going senile (and not seeking re-election) and the West re-arming due to Ukraine also create the potential of a temporary vulnerability. So I considered it plausible that this might be the real one; this is the best chance they have for a while (until 2027 or so, unless something goes very wrong in the USA, but even if it does that won't be predictable so to be as good a shot it'd have to be very bad). I knew that they might not do it, and I made that quite clear.

Vague mockery is not going to convince me. You have to be able to spot and explain a problem in the above argument if you are going to convince me that we didn't just get lucky.

  1. Based off of Dean's posting history and areas of knowledge he does have potentially relevant domain specific knowledge.

  2. Other indicators (financial markets, lack of U.S. ramp up, etc.) indicate no reason to be worried as of yet.

  3. Good news: China is a more competent adversary and isn't going to light the world (and themselves) on fire. Well bad news but good news here.

Sure. Let's start with 'pattern recognition.'

This is not the first time China has conducted a military exercise simulating a blockade of Taiwan. In all exercises simulating a blockade to date, Taiwan has not, in fact, been blockaded. Therefore, there is no causal relationship justifying a claim that a Chinese military exercise simulating a blockade of Taiwan is evidence of imminent blockade of Taiwan, as there must be other distinguishing features for the former to lead to the later. This takes even more meaning when there is a separate pattern of China conducting threatening exercises, but no attack or blockade, in protest to some Taiwan official statement or another. Again, distinguishing factors needs to be observed to justify claims of deviating from historical patterns of behavior.

We could go further with the advanced concept of backwards reasoning. If China were making a deliberate decision to initiated a military blockade of Taiwan, then what would we expect to see China do in the context of a deliberate leadup to war that would not be seen in the historical pattern of exercises-that-were-not-starts-of-war. This might include, for example, a pre-event propaganda campaign providing initial narrative buildup or international legitimization for the immeninent actions, particularly propaganda emphasizing the historical nature of rectifying the century of humiliation. It might include the mobilization of the Chinese navy, which is to say the social media reflections of the recall of shore leaves, the noticeable trends of all the Chinese naval groups readjusting their movements to start adopting both reinforcement of a blockade and preparing to intercept any efforts by regional naval actors to block it. It might include things like minimizing sanction exposure risk by a sharp withdrawal of PRC state-controlled economic funds from western financial institutions, demands made of the Taiwanese, and threats against external intrusion.

We would expect, in other words, to see actual effort correspond to the sort of actions that would be taken to launch a blockade, and not just the adjacent fleet sailing around for a day not actually stopping anyone going to Taiwan.

We can go further if you'd like, but it'd be punching more than a little down. As an alternative, I propose we let you memory hole this oops of a catastrophizing and then slightly more embarrassing attempt to reserve the right that you told me so.

Did you predict the 2022 special military exercise? What were the visible actions that were not part of the historical pattern of exercises-that-were-not-starts-of-war? There wasn't some big propaganda push afaik, and neither was there a withdrawal of the hundreds of billions in economic funds that subsequently got trapped in western banks.

More comments

This might include, for example, a pre-event propaganda campaign providing initial narrative buildup or international legitimization for the immeninent actions, particularly propaganda emphasizing the historical nature of rectifying the century of humiliation.

They've been doing that for decades, including to Western media with extortion via access to the Chinese market and diplomatically via bribing the countries that recognise the ROC to switch. Certainly, this hence isn't something that was in my court for "they're about to do it now" (and I didn't claim it as such), but I don't think it's in your court either as a sign that will be there but wasn't. It's a sign that is always there (well, I suppose it'll stop being there when they go for it and either win or get "you are not allowed to keep insisting that Taiwan isn't a country" rammed down their throats the way the Opium Wars ended with "you are not allowed to keep insisting that Western nations are barbarians begging for your scraps" rammed down their throats, but at that point this discussion will be moot), and I'm not sure what good it would do them to increase the amount of it that is going out right before an invasion.

Now, that aside: most of the things you mention are things I didn't check because I don't know how to/have access to check them, which means I couldn't take them into account before making my decision of whether to warn. If you had mentioned them to me at the start of this conversation rather than literally 100% of your first two posts' reasoning being (significantly-although-not-wholly-inaccurate) bulverism of my mental state and absurdity heuristic, I would probably have retracted immediately. And, if you either teach me how to find out such things, or agree to tell me such things if I get worried again, I can take them into account before deciding whether to issue warnings in future (though it will likely be some time before that happens)!

You chose to treat me as a drooling insane child rather than a reasonable person not in possession of all the facts. This was not only immensely rude, it was useless; we just went around in circles for six posts until you actually started saying something meaningful. What the fuck was the point of all that?

try to start a war via blockade

What's your take on the likelihood of a "soft blockade"/quarantine/enhanced customs inspections? How would Taiwan and allies respond?

Seems to me to be more in line with China's grey zone approaches so far, and it has more opportunities for escalation/de-escalation.

What's your take on the likelihood of a "soft blockade"/quarantine/enhanced customs inspections?

In the current week / imminent days, as the OP fantasized? Below negligible, particularly without a corresponding buildup of forces or chinese domestic narrative campaign.

If the OP wanted to say this was a drill normalizing conditions for an attempt to establish a blockade, sure. And whatever- that's not actually a blockade. But that wasn't the position.

How would Taiwan and allies respond?

In current week / month / year, October 2024?

The Biden Administration publicly identifies the effort, denounces, and announces an intent to break the blockade while moving multiple carrier groups towards the region. Harris issues as-fiery-as-she-can speaches on the need for American strength and unity against the Chinese threat, while being conspicuously present in official photos of Biden and the National Security aparratus taking response, even as a new rush of adds characterize the Democrats as the party of defense and appeal to the neocons once more while social media sites like Reddit begin to mock Trump for bonespurs and Vietnam avoidance. The Republicans, in turn, offer full throttled support (for the Troops, not Biden), seek to out-hawk Biden even as Republican propaganda elevates Biden's China-corruption links and attacks Waltz on his links and otherwise claims this as the vindication of every objection to Ukrainian aid (regardless of how little of it would be relevant or useful in the current week/month/year).

Taiwan and allies quietly watch in horror and try to silently wave down the Americans for overreacting to yet another Chinese drill where the US overreaction might increase Chinese counter-reaction in ways that the Chinese will continue doing even after American attention drifts away a few news cycles later.

Keep in mind Taiwan elected a new President and just gave a speech last week about resisting annexation, I believe. The other possibility is this is China trying to publicly remind him and the public of who he's dealing with.

I don't think the PLA Navy is ready yet. I don't think they'll be ready for a few years. But with the ongoing rearmament of Japan and Australia as well as a growing awareness in Taiwan and the USA, there may be a threshold where China decides that future gains in readiness are not worth waiting for given the potential of increased western capabilities to resist.

But in any case I highly doubt that this war would ever go nuclear. China simply does not have the nuclear stockpile to destroy the US; we're not in a MAD situation here so neither side has the incentive to strike first, or strike at all.

Striking before they’re ready is a known problem for irredentist authoritarians.

I don't think the PLA Navy is ready yet

Is it even trending towards "readiness"? Admittedly that's a moving target against adversaries who are also preparing thenselves, but as seen in Ukraine it may be a question of whether Taiwan can build anti-ship missiles faster than China can build targets ships, not ship-to-ship. A blockade would be terrible if it could be maintained, but Taiwan is well-positioned to at least deter shipping to most of China's ports alone, and last I checked both are pretty heavy importers of food. It'd be pretty messy, even before considering the actions of the rest of the West.

Not betting heavily on Taiwan, but if they chose to fight I don't think it'd be easy to dislodge them.

Anti-ship missiles (and where they launch from) are targets every bit as much as ships are. China wouldn't sit idly by while Taiwan shot down all its ships, and it's likely their opening salvo would substantially degrade Taiwan's ability to launch missiles.

Embargo-wise, neither China nor Taiwan are going to be doing much commerce anyway in the event of a war, but they're both calorie self-sufficient. Energy is the trickier bit, but China produces more of its own energy and also has a couple hundred thousand barrels/day of overland capacity.

I'd agree anti-ship missiles can be targets, but the Ukraine example suggests they can be a pretty potent force multiplier for an outgunned navy. Did any analysts seriously predict that neither side would have firm control of the Black Sea? Is China equipping it's flotilla with adequate anti-missile defenses? Taiwan also has submarines and torpedos.

Not convinced it's a guaranteed win, but it's certainly a bit of an unknown.

I think the pressing issue is 'how do the F16s hold up to Chinese planes?' and 'how good the Chinese Air Force is compared to the Taiwanese?'. I believe that attempting to do a naval invasion without complete air superiority in the modern day is a messy and painful form of suicide. The carriers won't be enough, so they'll have to sorty from the mainland...

Even if China is weak at sea, if they can blow up ship decks and dockyards with bombs and missiles from aircraft, enough marines can potentially make a landing. The entire issue may be settled by the success or failure of PLA saboteurs in Taiwanese airfields.

I've said before: as long as China is ascendant there is little reason to force the issue today. Prior comment here. So the assumption that China is going to act aggressively now depends on the idea that Chinese leadership thinks that things are going to get worse for China rather than better. I'm not going to rehash prior points about "faked" Chinese economic and population statistics and HBD, but looking at the headlines today:

-- Has the PRC seen news that makes them think the USA is going to get stronger in the near future? While Biden is an uninspiring leader, I don't see much improvement on the horizon. Kamala is singularly inexperienced and disrespected. Trump is chaotic, and while he's no fan of China he also isn't going to be in favor of tremendous foreign aid to Taiwan. If Trump succeeds in reshoring manufacturing, decoupling in any material way is ten years or more away. In the short term, I don't see tremendous upside for the USA.

-- Is the news about China's economy worse than we think? Maybe this is the big one, or at least some people in China think it might be? I've been reading the China Property Bubble Bursting story for what feels like five years now, but maybe it's actually happening? Does the PRC, related to faked stats in population etc, feel that their economy is about to pull back in such a way that they won't have the capacity to invade?

-- Is there an unknown unknown in Chinese culture that I'm not aware of? Some crisis within the leadership or population that makes this necessary?

-- Totally unfounded speculative conspiracy theory: China makes the move now because they've made a deal with Trump, by which Trump agrees to publicly oppose any US intervention and allow the annexation to happen in exchange for some deal once he's in office. Biden would not be able to act practically speaking if Trump put the kibosh on it, without Republican cooperation action in congress is impossible, and if Trump spoke out hard enough you start to worry about officers in the Navy following orders. That's one unique weakness of this moment: Trump wouldn't even have as much power to hand it to them after the election.

-- More speculation: China has some wunderwaffen they feel will allow them to win the conflict, and wants to act before it is discovered or countered by the USA.

-- Speculative AI timelines?

Any other reasons to do this today, rather than continue to wait and watch?

I broadly agree, but I'd like to add one point:

-- Speculative drone warfare timelines? Ukraine has shown us what you can do with a couple of months, a couple of jetskis and a couple of tons of explosives. Maybe China is afraid of what Taiwan/western MICs can do with years and billions in funding. How do you blockade an island, let alone run an amphibious assault against one, that has thousands of maritime suicide drones attacking in swarms? Drones that are better at diving, much higher range, higher speed and more autonomous than what we've seen in the Black Sea?

Surely blockading an island is much easier thanks to these drones, rather than the other way around? Chinese can swarm any ship going towards the island with the said drones. Cherry on top is that vast majority of the quad drones used in Ukraine by both sides is made in China.

I get what you mean, but the Chinese navy is purpose built to blockade the island anyway, and innovation that is making this easier isn't really helping them much. Instead, it moves the power balance towards parity in favor of Taiwan, who now will have a much easier time attacking ships than they had before. At the same time, it is of course also moving the power balance from a US carrier group towards China - for the same reason. And sure, I have no doubts that China's drone capabilities will be (or most likely, already are) top of the line. The thing with drones is just that offense is vastly easier than defense.

I also think that marine drones (as in: relatively large drones that are swimming and/or diving) will have a bigger impact on the Taiwan situation that quadrotors will have.

That is correct. The unvoiced assumption of my post was that Taiwan is not self-sufficient and cannot survive without open shipping lanes and so any technology that makes it easy to sink ships is very bad news for it

While Biden is an uninspiring leader, I don't see much improvement on the horizon. Kamala is singularly inexperienced and disrespected.

Biden is actually demented, which in case of war will immediately trigger a crisis over whether to 25A him in favour of Harris. That is a distraction during the crucial first few days. If they stick with Biden, he's not going to be up to the job, which will hamper the US somewhat. If they make Harris Acting President, she probably hasn't been briefed on things to a sufficient extent (as she's been focussing on the campaign), which will also hamper the US somewhat until she gets up to speed (or until the election, if she doesn't abort campaigning in order to concentrate). All of that's a plus for Beijing versus going during a pre-existing Harris presidency (at least up until 2028, and to some degree even then).

Is there an unknown unknown in Chinese culture that I'm not aware of? Some crisis within the leadership or population that makes this necessary?

They are starting to take reputational damage by not going for Taiwan. Entirely self-inflicted by their propaganda, of course, but the fact that it's their own fault doesn't change their incentives. I don't think that issue is at crisis levels yet (if they don't make the 100-year deadline they're in trouble, but that isn't for another 25 years), although their failure on COVID might make them anxious for a victory.

China has some wunderwaffen they feel will allow them to win the conflict, and wants to act before it is discovered or countered by the USA.

I mean, this isn't very relevant, but on this front I suppose there is the possibility of using TikTok/ByteDance to try to influence the US public away from intervention, which will (mostly) go away when the ban comes into effect.

Any other reasons to do this today, rather than continue to wait and watch?

XJP's ego (East Asians live a long time, but he's no spring chicken and he wants this to be his achievement).

(To be clear, none of this makes it a certainty. Like I said, this might not be the big one. I'm just noting stuff in the categories you asked for.)

A few things:

-They don’t want to do it while Trump Is president. Trump’s reputation is different in China. He’s not considered a hapless buffoon. He’s kind of a Vladimir Putin figure. They don’t like him but they see him as extremely ruthless and cunning.

-China was worried by what they saw during the Ukraine War. Blitz offensives have become a thing of the past. China doesn’t want to give Taiwan another decade to turn themselves into an even spinier hedgehog. Especially since there’s a bipartisan consensus in America to give them tons and tons of weaponry.

-America is uniquely distracted and overstretched at this point. Ukraine is taking up a lot of energy and weapons. No matter how the Ukraine war ends, it will eventually end, and America will likely be free to finally focus all its energy on the Pacific. The Middle East is also exploding, and could end up in an a full open war between Iran and Israel. China has its best military shot if it goes now.

-America is weak and divided, but there’s no guarantee it’s going to stay that way. America has had plenty of stunning comebacks in its history and it’s very possible that 2030s America is much stronger and more United than it is now.

-Peter Zeihan’s frantic proclamations of imminent Chinese collapse are overstated, but China will probably have a weaker hand in ten to twenty years. And aging population, fewer expendable young men, a slower economy.

-Taiwan’s attitude has been hardening up for years now. They increasingly see themselves as as their own separate political and cultural thing. Peaceful reunification is going to get harder, as would any military occupation.

-The AI race: military action against Taiwan would at least temporarily or permanently knock out a lot of America’s best chip fabs, and possibly allow China to actually take them. Either would give China a considerable leg up.

Trump’s reputation is different in China. He’s not considered a hapless buffoon. He’s kind of a Vladimir Putin figure. They don’t like him but they see him as extremely ruthless and cunning.

Huh, really? Where'd you find this out?

One of the biggest mistakes Western China watchers make is hyper focusing on the opinions of like 20m ultra online netizens who regularly discuss international geopolitics, an extreme minority of the Chinese public.

But what does that mean for the above question, exactly?

Well put. My read is that currently the US is eager for a war around Taiwan, not China, and so significant US escalation is the prerequisite for war. Repeat of Ukraine the ideal scenario, war to the last Taiwanese male and intact piece of infrastructure, no real interest in Taiwanese victory.

Maybe US will make some hard to miss, public move - I'll start worrying then. Maybe it will be a threshold of minor moves only someone closely following the region would notice - I'm doomed to be taken by surprise then.

The U.S. does not want a war, either. No no no no no. Not without some radical changes to infrastructure and onshoring.

The risk is that one side tries to exploit that unwillingness but overestimates it.

I am extremely happy that, living like a mile from the heart of British government, MAD would hopefully mean a fast and relatively painless death, vaporized after a Russian nuke hits Buckingham Palace or Downing St. I have no heart for life after the apocalypse and do not particularly care to suffer it; if it happens, I’m happy leaving the future to hardier people.

Yeah same, if China nuked the U.S., San Diego would likely be one of the first targets (what with the Naval bases and shipyards) so I and everyone I care about would be deleted before we knew what hit us. I too am unfit for the post-apocalyptic lifestyle.

Isn’t China’s nuclear arsenal quite a bit smaller than the US and Russia’s, so their targeting would be relatively limited by necessity?

Depends on how you count. E.g. https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2022/12/07/china-may-have-surpassed-us-in-number-of-nuclear-warheads-on-icbms/

I'd take that guesstimation with a large grain of salt, but China likely has at least 100 nuclear ICBMs that could reach the USA. Supposing an 80% failure/interception rate, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops.

I'm guessing those 100 nukes are not targeted evenly across the country. DC, Cheyenne mountain, and Pearl Harbour probably absorb the lion's share. So, yeah, in agreement there.

Oddly enough, even DC might be secondary: I'd assume the Naval shipyards would be the primary targets. If the US can't repair/maintain/rearm ships (no concern with building, since modern ships take forever), the US can't project forces across the Pacific, and is therefore almost entirely impotent.

I mean, I’m assuming that San Diego would have very significant military value, such that it would be a worthwhile target for a nuke no matter how limited their supply is. Perhaps I’m overvaluing it as a target.

I wouldn't panic just yet; even if this is the big one (and it may not be), my guess is that they won't open WWIII with a nuclear first strike on CONUS/Europe/Australia (pre-emptive ASAT use to wipe out US satellites - and probably destroy all other low-earth-orbit satellites as collateral damage - is a possibility, though, so you may lose any communications dependent on those).

China has possibly the most credible no-first-use policy of all the nuclear powers. They traditionally maintained a very weak deterrent and only recently started to get serious about MAD. As far as I know, they are still debating about going up to launch-on-warning, which the US and Russia have been at for ages. It would be illogical (and very out of character) for them to launch a nuclear first strike when they're outgunned at least 10:1. The US nuclear deterrent is very hard to crack, the meat of it is all in submarines. Going counterforce (targeting launchers) would do very little and invite a devastating counter-attack, going countervalue (targeting cities) would result in massive and disproportionate retaliation.

I suspect that China's advantages are still increasing, it makes sense to keep waiting and reduce the costs and risks of any war. The US Navy will keep shrinking till 2027. The Chinese Navy grows continuously. Their nuclear forces are growing rapidly. Western munitions stockpiles will remain depleted for some time and it's not like US munitions production could be anywhere close to Chinese munitions production, considering the sizes of the industrial bases involved. India remains weak.

The US seems to be increasingly distracted by the Middle East situation, further dispersing strength away from Asia.

China is pulling ahead in most scientific fields. More and more ethnic Chinese scientists are migrating back to China.

They're producing more and more energy domestically, though imports are higher than ever. Huge stockpiles of food and fuel have been built up. The sanctions weapon seems to have bounced off Russia and hit Europe, there is reason to think it will be ineffective against China as well (and/or cause incredible pain to the West): https://en.thebell.io/inside-russias-budget-taxes-borrowing-reserves/

Salaries in real terms are set to rise 7% next year, down from 9.25% this year. By 2027 the annual increase will be 4.1%. Real disposable incomes — a key measure of living standards — are set to slow even faster due to increased utility charges and expensive borrowing fees. They will rise 7.1% this year, then 6.1% in 2025 and 3.4% in 2027.

I'm frankly staggered that this anti-Putin outlet is putting out these numbers and trying to spin them as bad news for Russia. Likewise, Chinese real disposable income per capita keeps rising at a pretty respectable 4-5%. That's pretty good economic performance. The US is at 2%, most of Europe is below 2% and Australia has sunk to 2018 levels.

Anyway, China may expect further positive surprises in the future. If the US gets dragged into a struggle with Iran, if the political crisis in America heightens further, if Ukraine goes under and Russia ties down more troops in Europe...

The biggest uncertainty for China is some major advancement in AI where the US seems to be retaining an edge.

It's extremely unlikely that there will be a full blown war over Taiwan at all, in my opinion. The Chinese have no need to risk it all to secure territorial integrity, and as other commenters have suggested, there's no rush for China either. Economic warfare (cessation of PRC-ROC trade rather than outright blockade) is more likely. AFAICT the mainline scenario is where the US continues to onshore the useful productive capacity of Taiwan (chip fab), with possible human capital absorption as well. Eventually, the value of Taiwan for the US will decrease to the point where it isn't worth going to war, and a Hong Kong style handover will begin. This would disrupt the island chain strategy of course, but the reality is that as the Taiwanese economy becomes increasingly reliant on the PRC, and the value of it to the US decreases, there's only one likely direction of travel. Plenty of unknowns but I'd put a 40% likelihood on this kind of scenario playing out in the next 5-10 years or so, much more likely than a hot war involving the 2 superpowers.

Agree, China doesn’t want all the most valuable chip production to be in Taiwan. If they could press a button tomorrow and turn Taiwan into worthless farmland inhabited by a few peasants they’d do it in a heartbeat. They are clearly willing to wait for production to slowly move elsewhere (both to the US and China proper) and then to move when the island is no longer strategically as valuable to the West.

Reposting from the final hours of last week's thread, as requested (and have no fear, it is still 11 PM on the 14th here, so it's still the anniversary!):

Today is the one year anniversary of Australia’s Voice to Parliament referendum. It received a good deal of discussion on the Motte at the time, so I thought it might be worth looking back at what’s happened since then.

As a brief reminder, the referendum was about amending the constitution to require a body called the ‘Voice to Parliament’. The Voice would have been a committee of Aboriginal leaders with the power to advise and make submissions to the elected parliament, but not to do any legislation itself. Despite early signs of support, that support decreased as referendum day approached, and the proposal was soundly defeated, with roughly 60% nationwide voting against it.

On the political side of it: on the federal level, the Labor party seems to have responded to the defeat by determinedly resolving never to speak about it again. The defeat of one of their major election promises reflects badly on them, so it’s understandable that they seem to want to memory-hole it. What’s more, the defeat of the referendum seems to have warned Labor away from either more Aboriginal-related reform, or from any future referenda on other matters. They’ve silently backed away from a commitment to a Makarrata commission, which would have been a government-funded body focused on ‘reconciliation’ and ‘truth-telling’, and they’ve also, in a reshuffle, quietly dropped the post of ‘assistant minister for the republic’, widely seen as a prelude to a referendum on ending the monarchy and becoming a republic. Labor seem to have lost their taste for big symbolic reforms, and are pivoting to the centre.

Meanwhile the Coalition seem to have been happy to accept this – they haven’t continued to make hay over the Voice, even though a failed referendum might seem like a good target to attack Labor on. Possibly they’re just happy to take their win, rather than risk losing sympathy by being perceived as attacking Aboriginal people.

On the state level, the result has been for Aboriginal issues to fade somewhat from prominence, but there has been little pause or interruption to state-level work on those issues. Despite a few voices suggesting that state processes should be ended or altered, notably in South Australia, not much has happened, and processes like Victorian treaty negotiations have moved ahead without much reflection from the Voice result.

To Aboriginal campaigners themselves…

For the last few days, Megan Davis, one of the major voices behind the Voice, has been saying that she considered abandoning the referendum once polls started to turn against it. Charitably, that might be true – you wouldn’t publicly reveal doubts during the campaign itself, after all. Uncharitably, and I think more plausibly, it’s an attempt to pass the buck, and she means to shift blame to politicians, such as prime minister Anthony Albanese, who was indeed extremely deferential to the wishes of Aboriginal leaders during the Voice referendum. It’s hard not to see this as perhaps a little disingenuous (notably in 2017, Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull had knocked back the idea of a Voice referendum on the basis that he didn’t think it would pass, and at the time he was heavily criticised by campaigners; does anyone really think Albanese would have been praised for his leadership if he had said the same thing?), but at any rate, the point is more that it seems like knives are out among Aboriginal leaders for why it failed.

The wider narrative that I’ve seen, particularly among the media, has generally been that the failure was due to misinformation, and due to Peter Dutton and the Coalition opposing the Voice. Some commentators have suggested that it’s just that Australia is irredeemably racist, but that seems like a minority to me. The main, accepted line, it seems to me, is that it failed because the country’s centre-right party opposed it, and because misinformation and lies tainted the process. The result is a doubling-down on the idea of ‘truth-telling’ as a solution, although as noted government specifically does not seem to have much enthusiasm for that right now.

To editorialise a bit, this frustrates me because I think the various port-mortems and reflections have generally failed to reflect upon the actual outcome of the referendum, which is that a significant majority of Australians genuinely don’t want this proposal. ‘Misinformation’ is a handy way of saying ‘the people were wrong without maximally blaming the people, and it feels to me like the solution is to just re-educate the electorate until they vote the correct way in the future. Of course, I wouldn’t expect die-hard Voice campaigners to change their mind on the issue, but practically speaking, the issue isn’t so much that people were misled – it’s that people didn’t like the proposal itself. I confess I also find this particularly frustrating because, it seemed to me, the Yes campaign was just as guilty of misinformation and distortion as the No campaign, and as magic9mushroom documented, many of their claims of ‘misinformation’ were either simply disagreements with statements of opinion, or themselves lies.

The whole referendum and its aftermath have been much like the earlier marriage plebiscite in 2017 in that they’ve really decreased my faith in the possibility of public conversation or deliberation – what ideally should be a good-faith debate over a political proposal usually comes down to just duelling propaganda, false narratives and misleading facts shouted over each other, again and again. The experience of the Voice referendum has definitely hardened my sense of opposition to any kind of formal ‘truth-telling’ process – my feelings on that might roughly be summarised as, “You didn’t tell the truth before, so why would I trust you to start now?”, albeit taking ‘tell the truth’ here as shorthand for a broad set of good epistemic and democratic practices, not merely avoiding technical falsehoods.

The wider narrative that I’ve seen, particularly among the media, has generally been that the failure was due to misinformation, and due to Peter Dutton and the Coalition opposing the Voice. Some commentators have suggested that it’s just that Australia is irredeemably racist, but that seems like a minority to me. The main, accepted line, it seems to me, is that it failed because the country’s centre-right party opposed it, and because misinformation and lies tainted the process.

While the "misinformation" angle was garbage (I appreciate being cited), I think Dutton and the Liberals were actually pretty important in the No result; the polls show a substantial signal when the booklets went out, Labour wanted to scrap them (and allow the government to run other pro-Yes material, WorkChoices-ads-style), and they'd probably have accomplished that if the Liberals hadn't called them out on it. His JAQ was also IMO pretty effective. On this point my only real disagreement with the people mad at Dutton is "I think the No result was good, actually"; it's possible we'd still have gotten a No, but it would at least have been much closer in the counterfactual.

I suppose I'd distinguish two scenarios there. The first is one where Dutton supports the Voice, but the rest of the party does not necessarily. In this case, much like same-sex marriage, the Voice becomes an effective wedge against the Coalition, splitting the Liberals from the Nationals, and potentially getting Dutton, who became opposition leader on a strong, right-wing image into trouble with his most dedicated supporters. The second is one where we presume that the entire Coalition, or at least the entire elected/institutional Coalition, goes all in to support the Voice.

In the second scenario, the Voice likely succeeds, I think. In the first, though... I don't know. The first is more plausible, but the fragmenting Coalition, while worse off overall, might not provide the push to get the Voice over the line. There is an issue that, no matter how much institutional support the Voice had, and it was indeed drowning in it, it runs counter to the moral instincts of a great many Australians. I tend to agree with Jim Reed - Australians will vote to treat everybody the same, but not to treat everybody differently. The Yes case's biggest hurdle was that it was unavoidably a proposition to enshrine permanent privileges for one group of people on the basis of their ancestry, and even if both major parties had endorsed it, I think there would have been some resistance. It's not inconceivable that Australians vote to structurally favour certain people on the basis of ancestry (the White Australia Policy was genuinely popular in its day), but the more multicultural Australia gets, the less that will seem viable, I hope.

Or, well, it's either "treat everybody the same and ignore race" as the most viable truce, or a competition between every ethnic group imaginable to secure legal privileges for itself, and the latter would be disastrous, and I hope most Australians can see that.

It was doomed from the start. The "No" ads practically wrote themselves. The Yes campaign had no path to victory. In the Republic referendum, the No campaign argued technicalities "Even if you like the idea of a republic, this specific proposal is bad" - and that would have worked here too. So they gave almost no details and tried to coast through on vibes, then rightly got criticised for asking the public to sign a blank cheque.

As someone who cares about indigenous rights, I was angry at Albanese for introducing the legislation and it all played out pretty much as I anticipated. I did vote yes for idiosyncratic "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" reasons. The whole debacle set back indigenous relations at least a decade I reckon. Anecdotally, I've seen a marked decrease in "acknowledgement of country" lip service before events/meetings etc in the last year. And now everyone turns a blind eye to the goon squad that rounds up blackfellas in the CBD and dumps them in a park somewhere.

To set the stage: apparently David French is a progressive liberal, now? I had heard he endorsed Kamala Harris based on his own personal cafeteria Christianity. But on Thursday he also wrote a flagrantly false-consensus-building article for the New York Times, arguing that the Supreme Court needs "reform" in the form of term limits--and furthermore, that this could even be done through legislation without being blatantly unconstitutional.

Dan McLaughlin then took him to task over at National Review, in one of the better discussions I've seen on this issue.

First, to call the Democrats’ proposals “reform” is to take partisan sides by parroting one side’s loaded talking points. . . . Second, these proposals are not “in the air.” They are not emanating from multiple sources in different places on the partisan and ideological spectrum. They are not generated by an impersonal History, before which we must simply stand aside. We would not say that building a wall across the Mexican border is “in the air.” These are the specific ideological demands of one political party. They have been pushed by a particular coterie of activists, all of whom have essentially the same desired policy ends in mind. They arose out of one party’s presidential primaries and its Senate Judiciary Committee members. They were on nobody’s agenda until after Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh were appointed to the Supreme Court. We heard a quite different tune in 2016 when Mark Tushnet was arguing for a triumphal march of liberal and progressive ideology through the courts on the premise that “right now more than half of the judges sitting on the courts of appeals were appointed by Democratic presidents. . . . Those judges no longer have to be worried about reversal by the Supreme Court if they take aggressively liberal positions.”

An honest accounting would be frank about the fact that these proposals came about for only one reason: There’s a conservative majority on the Court for the first time since 1930, and liberals and progressives don’t think it’s legitimate for our side to ever get what their side has enjoyed in the past.

The sole reason we are talking about restructuring the Supreme Court is that liberals and progressives are unhappy with the outcomes of its decisions. That’s the thing. It’s the whole thing. It’s the only thing. It’s the entirety of the thing. It’s 100 percent of the thing. There’s no other thing. And if you are endeavoring now to make a purportedly conservative (or at least non-ideological) case for restructuring, you need to first explain why it is that liberals and progressives being unhappy with outcomes is, in and of itself, a crisis. Why is it not a permissible result of a political process that liberals and progressives get something they dislike? Why is that not legitimate? Why, specifically, does it change the legitimacy of a system that was acceptable when it delivered outcomes that liberals and progressives liked?

French speaks of “instability and anger that harm the court and threaten the rule of law.” Whose anger? Why is the anger of progressives an infallible sign that something must be given to them to assuage it? Do we treat conservatives, let alone MAGA Republicans, as if the mere fact of their anger requires a restructuring of the existing rules to let them win? French typically treats the anger of Donald Trump’s devotees as a problem for the system to resist, not a cause for it to give them more of what they want.

Sorry for the length of that quote, by the way, I'm trying to not just cut-and-past the whole article, but it's really, really great. In particular, something he doesn't say outright but which I noted recently is that Democrats are "doing everything they can to disassemble any part of the system that doesn't guarantee their victory and continued ideological dominance."

Are Republicans doing the same, in reverse? I think I see as much at the state level; state legislatures, (R) and (D), seem to do their damnedest to gerrymander permanent majorities while flying just beneath the radar of watchdog authorities. But something that does not get discussed often enough, concerning the Supreme Court, is that while the Supreme Court has been dominated by progressive justices for almost a hundred years, it has also been overwhelmingly controlled by Republican-appointed justices since Nixon was in office. But for some reason, moving to Washington D.C. and taking a lifetime sinecure tends to shift people's politics leftward. Or, stated a little differently--these people are highly prone to losing what Rudyard Kipling once called "the common touch."

So here's my wonkish take for the morning: The United States of America is drowning in historically unprecedented wealth. This makes governance too easy. Keeping people happy enough to not revolt ("bread and circuses") is trivially achievable. Somehow, you can mismanage cities to the point of transforming San Francisco into an open-air sewer and still maintain total ideological dominance over the voting population. This sort of thing suggests to me that political competition just isn't happening at the object level. Party politics is approaching 100% meta--which could help to explain how a turn-of-the-century Democrat became the darling of Republican populism circa 2024. Politicians no longer offer competing visions from which voters can select--indeed, too clear a vision can be a liability to "big tent" rhetoric! The goal is not to demonstrate one's merits as a leader, a visionary, or an intellect; it is all pure meta.

Here's where someone slaps me with an "Always has been" .jpg, right? But I think that's not quite right, though I'm not sure I have anything original to say about it. I think that, throughout American history, we have had a fair number of politicians of vision and intellect, who established their merit and provided real leadership. Televised debates were probably the beginning of the end of that, but maybe just "mass media generally." We have become a nation in which politics has become the practice of demanding consensus on issues of real disagreement, even when that consensus is flatly contradictory with some other portion of the consensus.

Fake "term limits" where a lifetime appointment becomes "de jure" but not "de facto" justices is not a legitimate Constitutional approach; I suspect it is only being floated because the Constitutional approaches are politically unpopular. While Court packing (or, even more aggressively, Court impeachments) is a legitimate Constitutional approach to reforming the Supreme Court, doing do for nakedly political reasons is politically risky. People may in general be okay with politics at the meta, but if you make it too obvious, people demanding object-level politics start to look less crazy, which threatens to upend the apple cart.

So in an attempt to be the change I wish to see in the world here's an object-level take: I feel bad for David French. I would say he has lost the common touch. I definitely don't go out of my way to read his essays the way I have sometimes done in the past. I think circa 2015 I enjoyed most of what he had to say. His criticism of Trump in 2016 was not unwarranted. But the right-wing meta reacted very strongly against him, and he also gained some wealth and notoriety; he has been on a steady leftward trajectory ever since (not unlike the trajectory of some Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices)--though he maintains that it is others who have changed, not him.

Well, it's possible for two things to be true at the same time.

-though he maintains that it is others who have changed, not him.

That article is not very beleivable. I am thoroughly reminded of the many many 'hate crime' hoaxes that turn out to be just that. Those anecdotes of continuos in-person racism sound so incredibly made up, and exactly what an echo-chambered yankee would think sounded real about 'southern racists'.

A teacher at the school asked my son if we had purchased his sister for a “loaf of bread.”

I guarantee this never happened.

I notice that the accusastions of racism serve as a convenient reason not to engage with actually well made disagreements with him as a panelest. It reads like he's got a victim complex, and a huge sore spot about not being accepted and praised for his wisdom, and he's using made up or exaggerated stories about racism as a shield for his ego.

I guarantee this never happened.

I don't know, there are a lot of people in the world who say a lot of things. This sounds like a really weird thing to say so maybe in context it made more sense? I tend to believe it, I just don't think it actually matters, doubt there was any animus behind it, and overall think that hypersensitivity to microagressions tends to make racial relations worse.

David French's current views overall are garbage, though.

not unlike the trajectory of some Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices

Let's talk about this.

Thomas and Alito don't seem to be on a leftward trajectory. Roberts, of course, seems to love being the middle, or the counterbalance to the right. Kavanaugh seems cut from the same mold, thus far. Barrett I expect to swing leftward on everything and anything not abortion, and in particular I expect her to undermine any anti-immigration or tough-on-crime policies that come before the court, especially given the makeup of her family.

And then there's Gorsuch. Neil "We will abide by the treaties" Gorsuch. Neil "Butt-for Bostock" Gorsuch. Is he shifting to the left as he moves from Colorado to DC? Or is he simply ornery and stubborn in his own interpretation of the laws? To me, it comes down to his rulings on gun rights. There's no way you can read the Civil Rights Act as guaranteeing protections for transsexuals, but not read "Shall not be infringed" as forbidding pretty much every gun law in the land.

Of course, none of them have tried to take an axe to the FISA courts or curtail the massive surveillance state on third or fourth amendment grounds, so I'm not actually hopeful that I'll see a constitutionalist on the court in my lifetime.

Gorsuch hates the administrative state. There he is quite strident.

Speaking as a left-leaning social democrat who dislikes all the Republican judges for obvious reaosns, Gorsuch is the only one who actually seemingly has an identifiable philosophy ala Scalia (except actually better) that I can at least respect, even though I think it's personally terrible. Maybe Thomas did 20 years ago, but he's fallen into a FOX News brained duo alongside Alito for basically the entirety of the Trump era.

Man, I've been a Thomas fan since Law School, and I think what we're seeing now is a guy who has almost all the same convictions he did 30 years ago, but he's finally gotten to implement them rather than just writing terse and pithy dissents.

There HAS been an uptick in reporters and other platforms attempting to make Alito and Thomas' conduct off the bench out to seem somehow abberrant and worthy of removal, though.

There's something at the core of this all, from progressives, that I fundamentally have a hard time wrapping my head around.

I grew up in the 80s and 90s in the South in a conservative religious family in a conservative community. The view of the Supreme Court was overwhelmingly that it had behaved as an unelected, anti-democratic, civilization wrecking dictatorship for half a century. If you valued freedom of religion and freedom of association in a more traditional, de Tocqueville-ian sense (with a strong emphasis on the ability of people to form and police their own communities with their own values and their own norms and their own boundaries), the Supreme Court had behaved as a wrecking ball. And particularly if you were sensitive, as most smarter conservatives I knew were, to the ubiquity of second order effects in society, the Supreme Court came across constantly as a body that was totally indifferent to, and totally insulated from, the disastrous second order effects of its dictates and airy social engineering.

BUT... well, Reagan won in a landslide, and the country had turned back to the right, and with that level of political domination, at some point the Supreme Court was going to have to reflect that political reality... or so we thought. And besides, conservatives value authority and institutions and fear chaos. There's a very deep awareness of Chesterton's Fence on a gut level. So despite those wide spread, deeply held beliefs about the Supreme Court, we just marched ahead, accepted their rulings, and tried to steer our lives around the damage they inflicted. (Also, the federal government had made it clear earlier that they would send in Federal troops from time to time to enforce Supreme Court rulings at gun point, and most people were ready just to move on with their lives)

But of course, over time, all the pipeline issues about the judiciary did become more apparent - the political domination of Reagan conservatives really SHOULD have resulted in a much more conservative judiciary than actually resulted, with much, MUCH more radically conservative rulings on all sorts of things like abortion and affirmative action and disparate impact back in the 80s and early 90s, if you were going by the feelings of voters at the time. But it took too long for conservatives to recognize the problems about where you get those judges from, and by that point, the country had moved on... or so it seemed until Mitch McConnell played the hardest of hard ball, fate intervened, and former Democrat Donald Trump got 3 supreme court picks after not winning the popular vote.

Anyway, that's my baseline for how people I grew up around viewed the Supreme Court.

And so when I see enraged public progressives and fellow travelers like David French railing against the current Supreme Court and its legitimacy, the thing I keep thinking is, the progressives I'm thinking of have built their ENTIRE moral universe around other citizens respecting all sorts of previous (as their opponents see it) destructive Supreme Court rulings from roughly the 1940s to the 2010s. Much of their moral progress stories require other citizens to simply bow down and accept and actively prop up those other rulings. They gain from the legitimacy of the Supreme Court in a way that the traditionalists I grew up around absolutely don't. Given that, it's very difficult for me to imagine a future where people upset by the current Supreme Court manage to publicly delegitimize it and mess with it AND also their opponents still accept the legitimacy of previous generations rulings. And if I'm right about that, it seems like progressives have vastly more to lose by having a much more weakened Supreme Court.

I've noted before that I often get a "born on third, thought they hit a triple" vibe from progressives when it comes to the institutions they've inherited, and their overwhelming sense that it's just natural for different institutions to lean their way - and the Supreme Court is absolutely a place where I think that is true.

Another way of putting is is that for more than a century, the Supreme Court has been the primary instrument of transforming the federal government and its sphere of influence following the progressive program. Conservatives only in our lifetimes wised up enough to set up the pipeline, as you put it, and it has only just borne any fruit in the form of walking back a bare handful of the most extreme points of that program.

We shouldn't be surprised that progressives would turn on it so quickly, because it has always been a question of what means would achieve the necessary end of transforming America and being on the right side of history. The Supreme Court was their darling because it was the most effective tool, not because of any underlying principles about the primacy of the judiciary over other branches of government.

Pre-Reagan, there was no conservative pipeline to set up. Not a lot of libertarian lawyers, after all.

It was the aftereffects of Roe that gave the federalist society ammo. When Catholics broke with the democrats there was suddenly a source of lawyers who had gone to the kinds of law schools judges go to. Before all this, there simply weren’t strongly conservative lawyers to appoint as judges.

It's a great point that the conservative judicial pipeline is almost exclusively Catholic and that Roe v Wade had a huge role in motivating intellectual Catholics to rethink their progressive association.

In Latin America, where abortion was simply off the table until quite recently, the Catholic Church tended to be associated with either the authoritarian right or center left.

This is largely because the center right is a ‘free markets first’ phenomenon, which jives poorly with Catholic teaching. Both authoritarian right wing priorities and the broad centrist center left do much better. In the USCCB there’s a division between bishops that align themselves as extremely moderate democrats and the currently dominant wing which is basically eccentric right wing republicans. Neither are particularly libertarian.

So here's where someone slaps me with an "Always has been" .jpg, right? But I think that's not quite right, though I'm not sure I have anything original to say about it.

I don't think it has "always been" like this.

I am usually the one who contradicts the catastrophizers, the doomers, and accelerationists by bringing up whatever American history book I have most recently read to point out that we had extremely hot culture wars in the past, with politicians literally assaulting each other on the floor of Congress, with ideological camps deriding each others' partisan cures for epidemics, with very real, widespread and sometimes laughably blatant voter fraud, etc.

But at least in my lifetime, we mostly grew up with the idea that we might live in a two-party system with drastically opposing ideas, but nobody actually wanted to delegitimize and disenfranchise the other side. If you lost an election, that sucked and you could be unhappy about it, but you set about trying to win the next one.

The Motte being the place it is, most people perceive the Democrats to be the villains here, and right now, they are, because they are in power and because the left has the upper hand in the culture wars. But it was during the Clinton years when I first noticed a radical shift amongst right wingers; Clinton was not just a bad president, he was illegitimate. He was a monstrous, degenerate, nation-ending catastrophe. Liberals were traitors. Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter rose to prominence on the strength of their invective.

This wasn't a particularly unique period in American history and I am not (quite) saying "Republicans started it," but I am saying that was about the time when I noticed, in the modern era, an end to our civic-minded Schoolhouse Rock version of American politics where Republicans and Democrats could still grill together. I know for certain that Congress was a more congenial and bipartisan body (and a lot of people criticized it for that, arguing that bipartisanship was bad because it meant making compromises and concessions with the enemy - well, those critics got what they wanted).

So I feel what you are saying, and what your National Review article is saying. I feel it every time I talk to my liberal friends. I feel it when I visit my hobby boards which have become essentially a chorus of daily agreement about leftist talking points. That someone could be a good person and still vote Republican is basically unthinkable. That you could be a liberal and remain friends with a Trump supporter is considered a logical contradiction, like saying you're a Jew who's friends with a Nazi.

I have seen liberals arguing that packing the court is a perfectly legitimate measure, that controlling free speech on the Internet is essential to combat disinformation, that the Constitution is fake and gay, and it's very clear that:

liberals and progressives are unhappy with the outcomes of its decisions. That’s the thing. It’s the whole thing. It’s the only thing. It’s the entirety of the thing. It’s 100 percent of the thing. There’s no other thing.

This makes me sad and frustrated and gloomy, but while I am not going to say Republicans started it, I'm not not saying that either.

No, seriously, you can probably pick whatever ideologically-motivated starting point fits your narrative, but it didn't used to be like this.

You can't really win. Once your side starts winning, the people interested in only power and status switch sides. They then morph and corrupt your "principles" into excuses to pursue their power and status. They may fly the same flag and use the same phrases and words to justify their actions, but none of the symbols or words mean the same thing for them. But this process of curruption takes time, and for a while it can seem like your winning. Eventually, you're going to have to switch to another team and begin the whole thing over again, but once your new side starts winning, well ...

Can’t we purge these entryists? Do they belong to an identifiable demographic?

Yeah. “Humans.”

I really want to contradict you and drop a lizardman joke, but even at my tinfoiliest I have to admit you're right on this one.

By their nature they tend to be those who are exceptionally good at blending in, at 'hypnotizing' the masses, at deflecting blame, and navigating social environments to favorable ends.

So just because you manage to identify them doesn't mean you can rally enough support/power to keep them out or to oust them. They're the ones who will sacrifice virtually every other value to maintain power, and you, as a normal person, have people and things you value which can be attacked or threatened to get you to back off.

They look and sound just like you!

To add to @faceh's point, entryists can sometimes even do a switcheroo and use a purge originally intended for them to get rid of newcomers that are loyal to the old ideals. It's not impossible to wrangle them, but it's often much safer to stay under their radar and not allow them to get a hold in the first place.

Imo something like this has happened in science as well, where we enjoyed a few decades of science/scientists having a good reputation, but nowadays it's gotten so bad that "the science says" is just run-of-the-mill partisanship.

You can, but only if your side has a principled, self-interested commitment to truth as an asymmetric weapon married to a genuine, shared concern for the mutual welfare of its adherents.

So in short, it's impossible for any group larger than Dunbar's number and also impossible for most of the groups smaller than it.

Power in general is like a bug zapper lamp to flies.

No, seriously, you can probably pick whatever ideologically-motivated starting point fits your narrative, but it didn't used to be like this.

Yeah, I suspect that which "starting point" people lean to will be a combination of their ideology and their age. I tend to reflexively regard the Bork hearing as the major inflection point in today's political partisanship, but that couldn't have happened without the Warren Court, and that couldn't have happened without... (on ad infinitum) There are not really events, only points along a process continuum. "Nothing ever happens."

But I agree! It didn't used to be like this. One suspicion I have is that our values pluralism has gotten the best of us. "Values pluralism" for most of our country's history has meant "you can live out any flavor of the European Christian good life imaginable!" When most of the nation shares fundamental values--even the people who opt to live differently, in an "I know I'm a bad person but I just can't help myself" sort of a way--then political parties aren't existential threats, they're just competing visions for implementation. Somewhat boring, really--"we're all welfare statists arguing about the optimal balance between taxation and redistribution." The retreat from values-oriented politics to identity-oriented politics did not happen all at once, but I think it has certainly happened, and the rise of the "alt-right" was just the inevitable result of certain "conservatives" finally getting the message that the time for discussion and compromise was over, and that a new age of tribalism was upon us.

I would like to find a way to reverse that trend, but the Motte is one of the few places I can even discuss it without encountering an outright refusal to engage on the merits.

One thing I noticed about politics Now vs 2000 is that basically politics itself has become much more of a lifestyle than it used to be. There are entirely different default activities, and different fashion sense and different music and so on. And now there are political themed shopping — bulletproof coffee and the like. And I think that’s making polarization worse, as it makes almost every decision made at least potentially political. I find it kind of exhausting tbh to have so much be political when it doesn’t matter that much.

as it makes almost every decision made at least potentially political.

It's darkly hilarious to see this complaint because it's such a horseshoe moment. The rightwing has fully embraced the idea that the person is political-- along with all the annoying drawbacks thereof. It's like a carcinization of politics... every ideology descends inevitably identitarian marxist populism, including the ones that hate all three of those things.

I like to think of it in terms of a multi-generational cultural-economic debt model:

  1. Greatest Generation: Inherits the economic memory of the depression and prosecutes WW2. Their just reward is the American economy 1958-1968. 20 years of "it's raining money". They also inherit the traditional culture of their parents - WW1 veterans and earlier - who grew up in a highly localized and federated political system mostly because technology and communication meant that Washington D.C. injecting itself into the daily concerns of say, Tulsa, Oklahoma, was impossible.

  2. Baby Boomers - Inherits amazing economy, prosecutes Vietnam - but this is the start of "War is for the poors" and objecting to military service (unthinkable in all previous generations) is hailed. They inherit just enough of their parent's traditional cultural norms that monogamy and family-as-center-of-political life maintains, but, combined with the sexual revolution and the pill, that starts to fade in strength considerably. The top 20% of them end up getting a bonus 30 years of economic prosperity (being a white collar worker 1968-1998 was like 30 years of being a FAANG engineer).

  3. Gen X / Elder millenials - Problems start. They don't inherit much of the economy prosperity of their parents because the 1970s inflation makes it difficult and the aforementioned top 20% of baby boomers capture a lot of the wealth generation as Gen X / Elder-M begin their careers. Culturally, there is no Big War - Gulf War 1? That was like, one summer, right? The last frayed stands of traditional family are exploded by 1970s welfare programs etc. Feminization of the culture is in full swing.

  4. Mainline Millenials - They come into their teens / early adulthood with 2008. 8 Years later, half of them sincerely believe Trump is Hitler. Economically, it's not just that the top 20% capture some of the wealth being generated, it's that they're capturing all of it. There are no more families, there's a decent change you grew up in a divorced household. Religious and community based institutions are non-existent. The babyboomers are now retiring and their built up national debt is now your concern.

So, no, there isn't a single "starting point" but you can see the accumulation of degeneration economically and culturally. Do I blame this on the baby boomers? You bet your ass. Winning World War 2 created such an advantageous structural position for the US on a planetary scale that not engaging in decadent behavior was close to impossible. It wasn't winning the lottery - It was the Super Bowl champion quarterback being made president of the world's biggest company with an unlimited credit line from the rest of the human species.

The failure mode began in the 1960s but really compounded in the 1970s. I don't know what was in the water, but there seems to have been so many concurrent social, political, and economic moments of "what the actual fuck?" in those 10 years. 1990s Republicans (Newt, in particular) based a lot of their macro-strategy on trying to roll back 1968-1978.

Baby Boomers - Inherits amazing economy, prosecutes Vietnam - but this is the start of "War is for the poors" and objecting to military service (unthinkable in all previous generations) is hailed.

Previous iterations of the draft were widely dodged, to the point that wealthy men weren’t expected to serve at all. There were often explicit wealth disqualifications- the civil war, for example, granted exemptions to men who could pay for a substitute. Being an officer was often high status but joining the army as a private is more common and accepted for middle class boys now than in 1900. The difference is that before ~1960 everybody was poor.

Previous iterations of the draft were widely dodged, to the point that wealthy men weren’t expected to serve at all.

Yeah, it's not so much that today's situation is uniquely bad as the previous era (say 1900–1950) was uniquely good in a lot of ways.

In WWI and WWII, the upper classes participated in the dying just as much as the lower classes.

That is rare (although not unprecedented) in history. Nevertheless, we are retreating from the high water mark of class unity. And, when it comes to perceptions, it's the direction of change not the absolute level that matters.

People are absolutely right to be concerned that elites avoid military service while still supporting wars abroad. Dick Cheney (he of five deferments) exemplifies that trend.

@jeroboam @hydroacetylene

Fair points! I didn't know some facts, and also didn't understand context. Thanks!

This is ridiculous. Being a white collar worker from 1968 to 1998 was nothing like 30 years of being a FAANG engineer, and I speak as someone who was in both positions (though not for 30 years). And the boomers only "prosecute[d]" Vietnam in the sense that they got sent there to kill and to die; they weren't running the country at the time. The 1970s inflation hit the boomers more than the Xers, who were children at the time. The earliest Gen Xers in fact graduated into the start of the Reagan Boom; later Xers weren't so lucky.

Being a white collar worker from 1968 to 1998 was nothing like 30 years of being a FAANG engineer.

You're right - it was probably better. You still had company provided pensions for tenure of service. Company cars, relocation assistance, mortgage assistance was somewhat common.

And the boomers only "prosecute[d]" Vietnam in the sense that they got sent there to kill and to die;

This is correct. But @jeroboam and @hydroacetylene did a much better job of highlighting my shortcomings to this point.

The 1970s inflation hit the boomers more than the Xers, who were children at the time.

Children don't experience inflation?

The earliest Gen Xers in fact graduated into the start of the Reagan Boom; later Xers weren't so lucky.

Much like their millennial counterparts 20 years later, Gen Xers walking into the workforce in the Reagan years found obstinate Boomers hogging all of the upward mobility. Again, the economic miracle of the 1980s and 1990s went disproportionately into the pockets and accounts of boomers, often in indirect ways; real estate prices going up for ever, the wealth transfer scheme of subsidized college loans.

This is ridiculous.

This makes me feel bad. And I feel like it's on purpose. You and I don't get a long much. Sometimes you are right. Sometimes I am right. Please be cordial.

You're right - it was probably better. You still had company provided pensions for tenure of service. Company cars, relocation assistance, mortgage assistance was somewhat common.

Did you miss the part where I did both? It wasn't. Company-provided defined benefit plans were on their way out already, and 401ks from FAANG are superior. Company cars were a workaround for super-high taxes and the concomittant low salary. Relocation assistance exists in FAANG companies if you move for them. Mortgage assistance was another workaround for super-high taxes.

The 1970s inflation hit the boomers more than the Xers, who were children at the time.

Children don't experience inflation?

It generally does not affect their career progression.

Much like their millennial counterparts 20 years later, Gen Xers walking into the workforce in the Reagan years found obstinate Boomers hogging all of the upward mobility.

The oldest Boomer was 42 at the end of the Reagan presidency and 44 when the 1990 recession hit. It's "obstinate" for people of that age to stay in the workforce? All those Boomers moving up were replaced by younger people. It's true that the Boomers got more benefit in dollars from the Reagan expansion, since they were in later, more lucrative parts of their careers, but it was still pretty good for the younger Xers. Real estate values did not go up forever in this time; there was a slight drop, then a boom, followed by a bust.

we mostly grew up with the idea that we might live in a two-party system with drastically opposing ideas

Where by "we" you mean the first world, anyway. I saved this pamphlet excerpt explaining the idea as soon as I read it for the first time:

"One of the most difficult concepts for some to accept, especially in nations where the transition of power has historically taken place at the point of a gun, is that of the "loyal opposition." This idea is a vital one, however. It means, in essence, that all sides in a democracy share a common commitment to its basic values. Political competitors don't necessarily have to like each other, but they must tolerate one another and acknowledge that each has a legitimate and important role to play. Moreover, the ground rules of the society must encourage tolerance and civility in public debate.

When the election is over, the losers accept the judgment of the voters. If the incumbent party loses, it turns over power peacefully. No matter who wins, both sides agree to cooperate in solving the common problems of the society. The opposition continues to participate in public life with the knowledge that its role is essential in any democracy. It is loyal not to the specific policies of the government, but to the fundamental legitimacy of the state and to the democratic process itself." - "What is Democracy?", U.S. Department of State

Great lesson to teach the democratizing developing world, but we might want to start printing up extra copies to hand out to other Americans too.

Where are your hobby boards though? Reddit?

Nice try. ;)

that was about the time when I noticed, in the modern era, an end to our civic-minded Schoolhouse Rock version of American politics where Republicans and Democrats could still grill together.

Rush Limbaugh came to prominence by imbuing his show with the concept that the Democrats were not just eroding the bedrock of America, but using civility itself as a mask to hide their deeds in plain sight.

Thus, we right-wingers were to investigate any calls for civility as if they were cover for nefarious deeds being planned. Trump took this to the next level in his Tweets from 2012 onward. And here we are.

This wasn't a particularly unique period in American history and I am not (quite) saying "Republicans started it," but I am saying that was about the time when I noticed, in the modern era, an end to our civic-minded Schoolhouse Rock version of American politics where Republicans and Democrats could still grill together.

Of course, it wasn't a particularly long period; families were at daggers drawn over culture war and political activism in the 60's and 70's (famously, thanks to Bryan Burroughs' Days of Rage, with actual bombings and shootings), and even Reagan had quite a lot of dedicated haters in the more progressive parts of the country.

I think the information age is what hypercharged it. Kojima_was_right.tiff

"Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever "truth" suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large."

"The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right."

Thanks to the internet, people found out for the first time what others really talk like, think about, and do, and the conclusion was that this is intolerable. It's trivially easy to find the lizardman's constant online. Here's a guy who believes we should have sex with toasters. Here's a woman who thinks that left-handed people are instruments of the devil. Here's an engineer who doesn't believe in melting points. Here's a teenager who thinks everyone who isn't him should die, etc. And people are wireheading this, mainlining it, sipping this crackhead energy direct from the source. A million howling voices screaming to be heard...

...and what follows is curation. You have to do it in order to remain sane in 2024, if you are connected to the internet in any way at all. You have to pick and choose. People build their own bubbles.

Within the bubble, everyone outside looks fucking crazy or evil or both. Gas 'em all, shoot em, whatever. If they were worthwhile, they'd already be in the bubble, where the Good People are. If you were Good, you'd be in the bubble, which means you're not Good if you're outside it. Of course, the alternative explanation for this phenomenon is that you are simply bad at curation and you can't tell, or your bubble has become sufficiently isolated that you've actually managed to push away reality.

We can hang reality, it's alright.

On one hand, there's a fun discussion about how this stuff does genuinely seem to ebb and flow, both at large scale and at small ones, such that people can point to different cruxes and changes and be genuinely correct.

On the other hand, there's a certain tendency for this to be... hard to discuss. It's easy to fall prey to a Great Man of History argument -- you yourself jump from "delegitimize and disenfranchise" in general to Clinton specifically -- in ways that obfuscate the comparisons you're making (eg, for gunnies, Clinton opened his Presidency with Ruby Ridge and the Waco Siege, then jumped over a controversial and painful assault weapons ban, all while ). That's true even where it limits your own political aisle! (eg, the early 90s gay politics were Not Great Bob)

On the gripping hand, it's worth discussing the extent political power has grown from this sort of delegitimization. In the Dubya and early Obama era, there were long and compelling arguments about the tradeoffs between helpful persuasion -- hoping for political change by providing the best arguments and understanding and respecting opponents -- against change as churn -- where political success comes from emphasis on recruiting incoming players while the opponents age out.

And the answer pretty resoundingly has become neither, to such a point that the question is an obvious Morton's Fork and false dilemma today: whether gay marriage, trans rights (from the right and left!), public education (ditto!), college debt, the Affordable Care Act, statues, public protests (ditto again!), it's not just possible but obvious that victory could and did come by persuading people not that your cause was correct, but that opposition or even caution to it was so evil that it could not be tolerated in even hushed whispers. Whatever concern backlash might once have had, it's wrapped up around situations like BLM or school vouchers where the 'backlash' to (sometimes literal) arson was at worst not maximizing territorial gains, or matters like the rise of Trump or Coates that justified only more and harder.

It's Dan Savage's world -- bullying kids as part of your anti-bullying campaign, smearing your opponent's name in literal shit, and all. We're just stuck living in it.

((On the other gripping hand... this is a post where it's really hard for me to resist pulling quotes from the past. Really, Clinton?))

I feel like Brazil has some odd similarities to the US that go underrated. Both are very large nations, by far the largest (in population) in our respective continents. Both rather spread out, with large chunks of wilderness. And we are both former slave-owning, plantation socities, which imported huge amounts of slaves and had a weird legal code for hundreds of years regarding race. That kind of thing leaves an impact. I feel like Brazilian politics are more similar to the US than Canada is.

I think the partisanship and the entrenched powers points in the other direction— hypernormalization. The hyper-normalizing simply means that most people have simply accepted that this is how it is and ever will be because the people in charge simply have no solutions to the issues at hand. This goes for democrats and republicans, and I think it explains the Cult around MAGA and Trump. Trump is popular because he’s giving hope of a world actually better than what we have now, and doing so in a way that’s very concrete. Not “slow the growth of inflation by X% over the next Y months” but “I want you to be able to afford groceries and gasoline again.” Not “we’re going to deal with the root causes of X,” but “we’re going to actually fix this.” Not “well, we should give illegals a court date,” but “we’re throwing them out.” It’s a similar appeal to other populist candidates— they’re addressing the real needs of real people with a promise that they can actually fix it, and of course they get very popular with ordinary people who want things to be more like the past where one income would feed and house a family (in an actual house even if it was small), where social deviance was not taught as normal to elementary school kids, where walking down the streets in major cities was not an open invitation to be assaulted and robbed, and where you didn’t see drug dealers selling openly on the streets.

I don’t think any party can actually deliver on getting us back to the turn of the last century where such things were possible. It’s the slow decline of the western world into moral decadence, sloth, corruption and decay. Such has been the way of every other civilization to exist. We’re in the late empire stages of decline. And unless we right the ship, she’s going to sink into darkness until some other civilization pulls up from the ashes of the Rules Based International Order to create something brand new.

Or, stated a little differently--these people are highly prone to losing what Rudyard Kipling once called "the common touch." [...]So in an attempt to be the change I wish to see in the world here's an object-level take: I feel bad for David French. I would say he has lost the common touch.

There's something kind of funny to me about accusing French of losing "The Common Touch" because of a disagreement on what is ultimately a pretty arcane constitutional provision. Seriously, I'm anti-term limits, but if some future Gibbon wrote the history of the decline and fall of the American empire, I can already feel the bored teenagers of some future century, their eyes glazing over trying to understand why this obscure fight over the appointment for certain bureaucrats was so pivotal to world history. It would be like trying to explain the intricacies of doctrinal disputes in medieval Christianity, the kind of thing that just seems monumentally obscure.

This isn't to say that liberals haven't lost The Common Touch, it takes a real galaxy brain to explain why the people burning down a Target are fighting for equality or something, you just can't explain that to a peasant. But it sorta feels like The Common Touch as you use it just means "agrees with me." The American common men are definitionally Conservative, and if they aren't then they aren't really American common men. The common touch is talking about immigration and inflation. It's talking about the constitutional right to bear arms. It ain't term limits.

They were on nobody’s agenda until after Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh were appointed to the Supreme Court. We heard a quite different tune in 2016...An honest accounting would be frank about the fact that these proposals came about for only one reason: There’s a conservative majority on the Court for the first time since 1930, and liberals and progressives don’t think it’s legitimate for our side to ever get what their side has enjoyed in the past.

This feels off to me. Term limit proposals for SCOTUS were a debate in my AP US Gov textbook in 2008. They were picked up as a major policy proposal in 2020. But there's a long history of proposals for reform of SCOTUS terms.

I'm glad you acknowledged that Republican appointees have held the majority since 1970. Once again, a Conservative majority is defined by McLaughlin as "agrees with me." Particularly, agrees with McLaughlin on social issues to the extent he'd like them too. Ignoring the various other rulings made on a thousand other issues. As you note, Republican justices have historically drifted over time...which would be a really good argument for term limits? It would allow Republicans to refresh their appointees with fresh blood, rather than allowing a Kennedy to remain on the Court making mushy-headed legislation until he dies.

But at what point does ideological drift become a skill issue for the other major party? When you say:

Somehow, you can mismanage cities to the point of transforming San Francisco into an open-air sewer and still maintain total ideological dominance over the voting population. This sort of thing suggests to me that political competition just isn't happening at the object level.

Why are you granting the Democrats hyper-agency and turning the GOP into NPCs? The GOP held the Governor's mansion in California as recently as 2011. They've held the presidency for the majority of the last 70 years. Fox News, their partisan outlet, has been the top rated cable news channel for 22 consecutive years, and the top basic cable channel period for 8. And yet, let's rephrase your question:

Somehow, in a two party system, your opponents can mismanage cities to the point of transforming San Francisco into an open-air sewer and still maintain total ideological dominance over the voting population while you continue to lose every election. This sort of thing suggests to me that political competition just isn't happening at the object level.

Why is the GOP so incompetent that they can't get wins out of the supposed rank incompetence of Democrats? Is that Mr. McLaughlin and the National Review's fault, or are they just helpless passengers over at one of the major ideological organs of one of the two major political parties?

Then again, the NR folks have sure seemed to be helpless passengers against a certain short fingered vulgarian, so perhaps when they talk about conservatives finding themselves helpless against the least dirty trick from Dems, they're just describing themselves.

There's something kind of funny to me about accusing French of losing "The Common Touch" because of a disagreement on what is ultimately a pretty arcane constitutional provision.

This seems like a pretty aggressive way to miscast what I wrote in that paragraph, which concerned the arc of French's ideological evolution over the last decade. I guess I don't really associate "New York Times Columnist" with "the Common Touch," but I suppose YMMV. Ditching your congregation over political disagreements and then later publicly shaming them for ditching you over political disagreements is also pretty lofty stuff. His bad take on the Supreme Court is in this context just the latest capitulation to his new social group, for whom he seems to serve as a highly convenient "token conservative."

But it sorta feels like The Common Touch as you use it just means "agrees with me."

Not at all. Very roughly, I'd say it means that the grounding of your beliefs is noticeably more substantial than "whatever the Cathedral is saying today." As far as I have been able to determine, French--who has a lot of published positions!--has somehow never thought to endorse term limits on SCOTUS justices until it became a talking point for the Democrats in this election cycle. Even if term limits for SCOTUS justices is a fantastic idea, getting conspicuously behind it now seems like a pretty clear (and potentially even costly) signal, not that you believe anything in particular about the structure of our government, but that you are Team Blue.

As you note, Republican justices have historically drifted over time...which would be a really good argument for term limits? It would allow Republicans to refresh their appointees with fresh blood, rather than allowing a Kennedy to remain on the Court making mushy-headed legislation until he dies.

Indeed. And yet even though it would have been politically beneficial for them to do so, conservative presidents and legislators declined to exercise any authority, Constitutional or otherwise, to undermine the Court. They continued to accept their defeats, eventually won some control of the Court through the usual means (and a whole lot of luck), and then it became a good idea to reform the judiciary? I feel like you have to be giving McLaughlin a shockingly uncharitable read to characterize his problem as merely "these people don't agree with me."

Somehow, you can mismanage cities to the point of transforming San Francisco into an open-air sewer and still maintain total ideological dominance over the voting population. This sort of thing suggests to me that political competition just isn't happening at the object level.

Why are you granting the Democrats hyper-agency and turning the GOP into NPCs?

I didn't do that at all. If I wanted to attribute a lack of agency to the GOP, I would have said so. My point was precisely that political competition isn't happening at the object level, and your flipping of the hypothetical to "GOP electoral incompetence" instead of "Democrat managerial incompetence" only illustrates the same point in a different way: political battles are no longer about governance, or at least they are less about governance than they once were (and ought more to be). They are about the meta, they are about tribes, they are about picking a winner and ensuring that the loser never gets a chance to make a comeback. And I think that all of these criticisms apply very well to a great many Republicans, too, such that your closing paragraphs are, at best, ill-targeted rhetoric.

Very roughly, I'd say it means that the grounding of your beliefs is noticeably more substantial than "whatever the Cathedral is saying today."

Fair enough, that's not at all how I'd read that Kipling line. I would read The Common Touch as referring to the ability to speak and relate to the common man, the ordinary sort of citizen, the "crowds" referenced in the prior line. After all, it makes little sense to oppose retaining the common touch to

talk[ing] with crowds and keep[ing] your virtue,

If the common touch is the ability to keep your virtue when the crowd is going the other way.

Properly, I'd probably contend that French (and most conservative justices) didn't lose the common touch recently, he was never in the same zip code as the common touch. Writers for the National Review are no closer to the common man than is the NYT editorial page.

Which I think is where we're at cross understandings.

I would read The Common Touch as referring to the ability to speak and relate to the common man, the ordinary sort of citizen, the "crowds" referenced in the prior line.

Yes, exactly. People who take their cues from the Cathedral cannot do that, because "the ordinary sort of citizen" has their views grounded in a mix of practical reality and community ingroup signalling, rather than taking their cues from universities, corporate news media, and DC elites.

Properly, I'd probably contend that French (and most conservative justices) didn't lose the common touch recently, he was never in the same zip code as the common touch.

For starters, "never" can't possibly be right. The first particularly stand-out thing French ever accomplished was to attend Harvard Law School, and even after that he did a lot more public interest work than most Harvard grads deign to undertake. I never got the impression, in 2015, that French was taking his cues from universities, corporate news media, and DC elites. Today, he is clearly taking his cues from the Cathedral, as McLaughlin articulates.

Writers for the National Review are no closer to the common man than is the NYT editorial page.

That may have been true in the era of William F. Buckley, Jr. but I don't think it has been true for, oh, three decades? By the mid 1990s at the latest, National Review was much, much closer to the "common man" than anything the New York Times had on offer. Fittingly, I think that becomes less the case around 2016, for much the same reasons that French goes off the reservation.

That may have been true in the era of William F. Buckley, Jr. but I don't think it has been true for, oh, three decades? By the mid 1990s at the latest, National Review was much, much closer to the "common man" than anything the New York Times had on offer. Fittingly, I think that becomes less the case around 2016, for much the same reasons that French goes off the reservation.

Thanks for picking that year, as that is the earliest Press Kit I can find for NR easily available online. It gives a breakdown of what their readership looks like* for the purposes of selling advertising. The NR audience is nearly three quarters men. 5% of their subscribers live in DC, less than a fifith of one percent of Americans do. The median NR reader is 66 years old, and 82% of them are over 55, as compared to numbers for America of 38 and ~30%. A little under 40% of Americans have college degrees, while 80% of NR Online readers have one. 43% of NR readers have a net worth over $1mm, only 5% of Americans meet that number. The NR represents a group that is vastly richer, older, more educated, more politically active than the Common American.

And that's what has made the NR an important publication! They've represented an alternative to the tides of mass opinion AND to the Cathedral. But the common man? They are not and haven't been. There are multiple ideological alternatives to taking orders from The Cathedral. A Catholic bishop does not represent "The Common Touch," and he doesn't take orders from that Cathedral; rather he follows his own intellectual tradition. Following any intellectual tradition ("If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue") in the face of popular opposition is admirable, and important for a publication to maintain intellectual integrity. But imagining that the National Review represents the common man's viewpoint is a very common error in assumptions that will produce bad conclusions.

To imagine that the Common Man looks like an NR reader requires excluding from your definition the vast majority of actual Americans, it makes "salt of the earth" an honorific rather than a description.

*I found a similar breakdown for the NYT here. Unfortunately, they don't use the same numbers in their statistics, so I'm not sure how to parse the comparison accurately. They list the number of 18-34 print subscribers (29% as compared to 20% nationally) and the median net worth for all subscribers ($508k, 54th percentile nationally). The gaps in the data are such that I'm not sure the two groups couldn't look more or less identical but reported differently, so I don't want to push the contrast analysis too far. It's reasonable to assume that both groups are wealthier, more educated than the median American, though the NYT numbers look much closer to "normal" there is some portion of their subscriber base that is looking for local NYC news, one can even imagine a guy who buys it primarily for the sports page, where the NR is essentially just the NYT Sunday magazine.

Thanks for picking that year, as that is the earliest Press Kit I can find for NR easily available online. It gives a breakdown of what their readership looks like* for the purposes of selling advertising

You probably could have saved yourself some time, if you agreed on this metric ahead of time. Personally, it seems like a pretty bad approach to measuring who's more in touch of the common man.

Huh?

I might be misunderstanding the intentions in your previous comment, but I was under the impression you're trying to come up with some objective measure to see if this statement from Naraburns is true:

By the mid 1990s at the latest, National Review was much, much closer to the "common man" than anything the New York Times had on offer.

If that's what you're going for, looking at the demographics of each paper seems like a pretty bad approach.

More comments

They've represented an alternative to the tides of mass opinion AND to the Cathedral.

That seems like a nicely succinct way of saying it talks with crowds but keeps its virtue, and walks with kings but keeps the common touch.

Retaining the "common touch" doesn't mean "to be the modal person." It means retaining an ability to relate to, and communicate with, people of no particular importance. Some examples of having lost the "common touch" in policy debates might be, say, pushing new identity terms on people who don't want them, or pretending that student loan forgiveness isn't a handout to the wealthy.

I don't know what I said to inspire such tenacious contrarianism in you, but like... at minimum, you could try disagreeing with me without putting words in my mouth.

while the Supreme Court has been dominated by progressive justices for almost a hundred years, it has also been overwhelmingly controlled by Republican-appointed justices since Nixon was in office. But for some reason, moving to Washington D.C. and taking a lifetime sinecure tends to shift people's politics leftward.

Is it that? Or is it that for decades, there were tremendously few years where Republicans controlled the Senate, and therefore any candidates nominated by a Republican president had to be those that would appeal to the Democratic senators?

I've actually been personally pleased by many of the recent SCOTUS rulings that have many libs so worked up, but I do think there is an issue that needs to be addressed here. Not necessarily term limits; I think there should be a maximum age with forced retirement for the SCOTUS, Congress, and the President. The SCOTUS is probably the smaller problem here; the Executive and the Senate being more impactful. Personally I think 75 is probably workable, but I'd be fine with 70, or even younger. My opinion of their politics aside, people like Feinstein, Ginsberg, or Thurmond clinging lich-like to the power and status of their political office far beyond their ability to be a useful, or even coherent, public servants is sickening. Feinstein was especially bad. Biden probably would have done the same thing if he won a second term, with all the same enablers giving him the same bad-faith cover they gave Feinstein. Anyone under the cut off can run for the office and finish the term, then they retire. Presidents that pass the maximum age in their first term cannot run for a second. This would need to be in the constitution, just like the minimum ages are, which means its probably extremely unlikely as it would require the cooperation of the very people who's damage it seeks to limit. This problem will only get worse in the next 20 years; Boomers will never willingly relinquish even the smallest scrap of power and status. I apologize for the tone of this post.

There has been yet another assassination attempt against President Donald Trump. A man was apprehended at Trump’s rally in Coachella California. The man was carrying multiple firearms, and a fake VIP pass to allow him to pass through into the central rally area where President Trump was speaking. The man was also carrying multiple passports showing various different names and identities. The man connected to the Ukrainian foreign legion who attempted to assassinate President Trump in Florida also had a similar collection of fake passports.

This is like…the third time you’ve announced some Trump situation via a one-paragraph press release. Where are you getting this stuff?

Where are you getting this stuff?

It's been doing the rounds on Twitter for like a day. I actually wanted to correct this post earlier today, but I couldn't be arsed to dig out the source.

There’s dozens of news articles about it on multiple mainstream media outlets including the New York Post, Time Magazine, and the LA Times.

https://nypost.com/2024/10/13/us-news/third-trump-assassination-attempt-thwarted-when-armed-man-arrested-outside-coachella-rally-sheriff-says/

…but it is 100% worth discussing.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-10-14/la-me-no-assassination-trump-coachella

On one hand, the perpetrator is an outspoken Trump supporter, running an advocacy org to expose the Deep State.

On the other, he runs an advocacy org to expose the Deep State. I don’t think that selects for the most stable individuals.

On the gripping hand, the guy is taking fake IDs and fake weapons into a restricted area with his fake license plate. He’s lucky to be alive.

“You can't keep snakes in your backyard and expect them only to bite your neighbors. You know, eventually those snakes are going to turn on whoever has them in the backyard.” ― Hillary Dawg Clinton to Pakistan

Trump and his lackeys have fed conspiracy theories for a full decade, which are now coming back to bite them in the ass.

It's a familiar story. The radicalization of Bangladesh and the Maldives are examples from the last two years. You can't give ammunition to the crazies and then be surprised when the crazies start shooting (figuratively and literally).

The deep state isn't some nefarious ingroup. It's a useful umbrella term to capture the emergent ideology of DC's upper-middle-class bureaucracy. But that’s it. It personifies the incompetence inherent in all bureaucracy. It is as faceless as it is boring. However, Trump's rendition of the deep state is akin to a singular eldritch horror that seeks to destroy all that we hold dear. In this narrative, the deep state is held responsible for all of America's problems, and Trump is heralded as the savior.

Of course the crazies ate it up. And given Trump's recent behavior, of course they're turning against him.

It's a uniquely American problem. High trust is usually synonymous with the first world. High trust and civic sense drive efficiencies that help the first world stay ahead. First-world Europeans and East Asians do not have this deep-rooted suspicion towards authority. Even functioning third-world nations have sweeping rations and welfare (low quality as it may be) to help with survival. So, the citizenry retains a base level of goodwill towards institutions.

America, since its inception, may be the only first-world country that's remained low-trust. The Second Amendment and the union-of-states structure start things off with suspicion between smaller organizations and national organizations. As time went on, you got the Wild West, stranger danger, dilapidated inner cities, and more recently, drug addiction-driven homelessness. Can't trust anyone. Usually, this would be unstable. But America has so much money that it brute forces its inefficiencies away. The entire American debt and insurance industry is propped up as a band-aid solution for all the missing trust.

In such a zeitgeist, violent conspiracy nuts become a unique failure mode for American society. Somewhere along the way, these kinds of conspiracy nuts are beaten down into compliant citizens. But not here. The country feeds this distrust, through its scriptures and decentralization. Now the nuts are crazier than ever, they have guns, and they're pointing to the source of their distrust: national leaders. With the disempowerment of pacifying institutions such as mainstream media and traditional churches, the nuts continue spiraling. America is dry tinder, and Trump is a whole-ass blowtorch. For the sake of this nation, I hope he loses and quietly fucks off to Mar-a-Lago for good.

America has remained low trust? There are a multitude of economic counter arguments one can make. The simplest is that few people would invest in a low-trust society, and yet the American economy remains the envy of the world. The US dollar is the world’s reserve currency. The US routinely runs current account deficits, as foreigners just seem to love holding US-denominated assets. The legal system has its foundations in common law, which requires a great deal more trust than civil law. American industries operate quite profitably based on trust such as banking, and anything that relies on brands.

What I think you’ve identified, quite appropriately, is the mistrust that reasonable Americans now have toward the people and institutions who have betrayed them. Technology has made it harder for politicians and journalists to lie. Television showed Americans what was going on during e.g. the Vietnam War. The Internet gave Americans more perspectives that were censored or ignored by the mainstream press. Social media allowed Americans to communicate with each other without needing a propagandist to soft chew their ideas for them. And it turns out that many conspiracy theories turned out to be conspiracy facts, and Americans realized that the faceless bureaucracy supposed to represent the better angels of our nature actually had its own self-serving motives. So maybe the ‘conspiracy nuts’ were previously the ‘compliant citizens’ who woke up to a nation that—somewhere along the line—stopped being theirs. Is it any wonder, then, why some of those people might resort to taking their nation back by force?

The American people and American institutions are distinct. I agree that the world's institutions trust American institutions. The modern world order has been sculpted by post-WW2 America. It is less so trust, than the world being a vassal state to America.

To be clear, I don't say this with resentment. I consider US to be history's most benevolent global superpower. I'll take Pax Americana 100 times over the superpowers it replaced.

For my previous comment, I meant interpersonal trust and citizen-domestic institution trust.

The deep state isn't some nefarious ingroup. It's a useful umbrella term to capture the emergent ideology of DC's upper-middle-class bureaucracy. But that’s it. It personifies the incompetence inherent in all bureaucracy. It is as faceless as it is boring. However, Trump's rendition of the deep state is akin to a singular eldritch horror that seeks to destroy all that we hold dear. In this narrative, the deep state is held responsible for all of America's problems, and Trump is heralded as the savior.

It’s not nefarious no, but it’s also completely absurd that people aren’t allowed to distrust the organs of state that rarely serve their purposes, and quite often serve to stymie peasant attempts to better themselves economically. The organs of the deep state are finely tuned to follow procedures that protect themselves from scrutiny, and provide deniability to anyone that might be blamed if something goes wrong. It is not geared to serving its purpose and regulating without being destructive.

OSHA is supposed to protect workers, but quite often the opposite happens as rules that do little to prevent serious injury often make it difficult to impossible to run a business. Which makes it a much cheaper and often better idea to have things made in China or India so they aren’t fined because of some cosmetic problems that have nothing to do with safety.

FEMA is so regulation heavy that it’s more a hinderance than a help in a disaster. Much of the aid in Helene is getting through despite FEMA, not because of it. And because of this the people no longer want FEMA around. I can’t blame them when a bunch of construction workers with heavy equipment can rescue more people in a couple of hours than FEMA and those they contract with can manage in a week.

It’s poor customer service. The people are not getting better transportation from the department of transportation, better education from the department of education, and so on.

Of course the crazies ate it up. And given Trump's recent behavior, of course they're turning against him.

They’re not necessarily “crazy”. I think they’re wrong in the sense that these groups don’t wish them to suffer. But at the same time the deep state serves the deep state and is mostly a jobs program for elites who are otherwise unemployable who have no idea how to get things done. They follow procedures off cliffs because they are not skilled enough to know how things actually work so they can’t or won’t bend the rules to get things moving in the right direction.

It’s not nefarious no, but it’s also completely absurd that people aren’t allowed to distrust the organs of state that rarely serve their purposes, and quite often serve to stymie peasant attempts to better themselves economically. The organs of the deep state are finely tuned to follow procedures that protect themselves from scrutiny, and provide deniability to anyone that might be blamed if something goes wrong. It is not geared to serving its purpose and regulating without being destructive.

Whether you admit that, people do believe it is nefarious, or at least speak as if they genuinely believe it. And that it is organized.

Agencies are built to be standardized, both due to logistics of coordinating between agencies and at scale, and to try to prevent both actual and perceived bribery or kickbacks.

They’re not necessarily “crazy”.

I would apply that term to a Trump supporter that tries to assassinate Trump. Unless it was some 4D chess move to pretend to try to assassinate Trump to give Trump a polling boost.

I've found myself in a lower managerial position of a large corporation. I've had my share of processes that are meant to add traceability to both the tasks themselves and my workload, and the incremental increase in the number of steps added. I hate it, but I'm not throwing away my job over it.

I’m not going to deny that at least some people think it’s nefarious. It’s just that it’s much more likely that FEMA is bean counting supplies gathered by other charities before letting them through to satisfy a process that’s in their handbook. Standardizing is generally okay. But then again this is a situation where time loss means dead bodies and everybody knows it. It’s not exactly the same as managing accounts in an office. The time spent adding traceability to a process in an office job and even using that to trace that information isn’t going to cause much of a problem because you have the luxury of as much time as you need to do that. If the cost of traceability is death, then I think honestly it’s a bit more critical to push back and say “why is it important to have a complete inventory of what First Baptist Church of Asheville is distributing when that will delay aid by a whole day and people will die without food?” Sure, there are some bits that you need to hold the line on, but trying to follow a checklist to the letter in a disaster zone just adds delay where none was needed.

The Maldives have been trending more Islamist for 30 years, but I wouldn’t call the events of the last couple of years further or more rapid radicalization. In fact the middle class youth seem less radical, fewer hijabs, less modesty in general than they did ten years ago, tempted more by new money consumerist Dubai culture than anything else. They’re watching Dubai Bling on Netflix (though who isn’t?).

What’s changed is that anti-India animus has grown, but that was always inevitable under a Hindu nationalist government. Most of the anti-Indian insults on Maldivian Twitter also weren’t / aren’t Islamist in character, they’re more the same stuff you find on /pol/.

This doesn't make any sense... if this were true you'd expect to see the opposite. You're going to blame Trump for stirring up the crazies with wild conspiracy theories, then say that HE is the one to blame for it when he gets attempted assassinations?

If this were attempts against Joe or Kamala, I could maybe see this. In fact I'd probably agree to some extent. But the idea that Trump is the one who is going to get assassination attempts when he has been 'stirring up the crazies' against the other party, yet the other party has 0, is farcical.

Most violence happens within the ingroup. 54.3 percent or people murdered were killed by someone they knew. The same doesn't exactly hold for assassinations, but there's a trend of assassins having more in common with their targets than their targets' political enemies. Charles J. Guiteau was definitely on Garfield's "side." Lee Harvey Oswald was closer politically to Kennedy than Nixon. John Hinckley Jr was nonpolitical, but at the same time had been attempting to become an entertainer.

And given how the US presidency works-- with the designated survivor being the vice president-- this really makes perfect sense. If you hate the president, replacing him with a vice president you also hate that meanwhile becomes much more radically against you is a terrible idea. But showing "your side" that they shouldn't risk betraying your cause/better go even further in your direction makes more sense.

With all that being said, I wouldn't blame specifically trump for the assassination attempts since it's not like his rhetoric exists in a vacuum. But it's not like we're not seeing equivalent forms of radicalism in the democratic base. See: BLM, pro-palestine protestors sabotaging their own side. Trump's base just happens to be more male, more armed, and therefore more violent.

The deep state isn't some nefarious ingroup. It's a useful umbrella term to capture the emergent ideology of DC's upper-middle-class bureaucracy. But that’s it. It personifies the incompetence inherent in all bureaucracy. It is as faceless as it is boring.

I feel like "Yes, Minister" should be required watching in Civics classes.

The deep state isn't some nefarious ingroup. It's a useful umbrella term to capture the emergent ideology of DC's upper-middle-class bureaucracy. But that’s it.

The concept of "Deep State" is one of the only exports of Turkish political discourse to the wider Western world (you are welcome).

While some Americans such as you came up with explanations as to how it "actually" denotes something else more inline with your own worldview, no the actual concept of Deep State very much describes an inner polity that actually runs the country while staying embedded deep inside the visible state.

This makes a lot of sense in the local context of Turkey and similar shakier Western-aligned countries (Greece, Egypt etc but even for example Italy). These countries often had a core of NATO aligned bureaucrats and military/intelligence officers who coordinated with each other to manipulate or bypass the wider political process for important decisions. These structures were on hyperdrive during the Cold War but they did not disappear overnight afterwards and usually morphed into different shapes.

As the world nears a new era where there is genuine competition and danger for the US Empire, and the politicians and regular bureaucrats cannot be trusted with certain decisions, it is not a coincidence that some of these groups are reactivating and flexing their muscles.

America has not been high trust in the modern era. We’re a Latin American country which is so wealthy it can brute force its way past most of the usual Latin American social ills, or at least mitigate them. We’re not a bigger wealthier first world country. This isn’t England or Japan in the new world. It’s Brazil with seven times the GDP per capita.

I think that's a direct restatement of what DirtyWaterHotDog said. Was that your intention, or were you trying to argue with him?

This is horrifying. Can anyone compare this to previous elections? I hadn't seen any news coverage but I imagine it would be a bigger deal.

When is the last time there was even an assassination attempt against someone? Obama?

The fact that we've had four in a handful of months should be deeply concerning to anyone wanting to keep America free from bloodshed. Look at how the Roman empire fell if you want an example. Trump needs massively beefed security, immediately, whether you like him or not.

Trump needs massively beefed security, immediately, whether you like him or not.

The good news is that after the first attempt, they seem to be catching the would-be assassins before they get a chance to do anything.

True but every attempt needs another OOM of security imo.

Trump getting assassinated is the only real doomsday event for the republic I see at the moment. At least the largest probability one. Once the spiral of political violence starts it's nigh impossible to stop.

Four? By my count, this would be number three. The bomb and/or dog thing didn’t pan out.

Though apparently there were two attempts years ago! One by an autistic UK tourist who didn’t know about retention holsters. Another by a forklift thief.

A Canadian lady apparently tried Ricin.

For this incident, my current understanding is that the only evidence that he intended an assassination attempt is a loaded weapon in his trunk, while he denies any such intention, and appears to be an enthusiastic Trump supporter. My bet is that he was not actually an assassin.

Against: his political advocacy, the official statement from Trump’s campaign.

For: fake ID, fake plates, multiple weapons, bringing all these things into a security checkpoint??

I dunno, it’s hard to apply normal logic to a guy who thinks this was a good idea. Only time will tell.

concur that time will tell, and if there's any solid evidence of intent, I'm open to hearing it.

My understanding is that the fake ID and fake plates is standard sovereign citizen behavior. they make their own license plates and IDs routinely (or use novelty reproductions) because it's part of the sovereign citizen memplex; they believe they're the "real" united states government, so they issue themselves "official" ID. I've heard he claims not to be a sovereign citizen, but I'm not sure if that's just a permutation of the meme, where he'd claim to actually be a "free citizen traveling" or whatever not-actually-a-distinction.

Multiple weapons isn't that weird. When I travel with guns, I usually travel with more than one.

Don't forget he's also a Sovereign Citizen -- he probably just told the FBI that they can't touch him because he's a Free Man on the Land, and they knew that they had to cover the whole thing up if they didn't want to face an Admiralty Tribunal!

Do you remember when in December 2023, Poland finally voted out the the far-right PiS party and moderate Europeans rejoiced to see Tusk become the prime minister?

Well, it seems that this joy might have been a bit premature. You see, Poland is currently being flooded by migrants from Belarus. Per the BBC:

Dozens continue to attempt to cross the border daily.

Dozens a day might add up to ten or twenty thousand over a year. Of course, most of them don't want to stay in Poland in the first place:

Many of the migrants who cross into the country from Belarus do not stay, instead entering Germany.

The population of Poland is around 38M, and there a about 1M refugees from Ukraine in Poland without civilization ending, but the migrants via Belarus seem to tax the Polish state beyond the breaking limit.

Thus, the ultima ratio of a state fighting for its survival:

“One of the elements of the migration strategy will be the temporary territorial suspension of the right to asylum,” the prime minister said. “I will demand this, I will demand recognition in Europe for this decision,” he added.

There are some things a government or legislature can suspend at will. If Tusk decides to suspend a civil servant or a subsidiary for farmers, that is his prerogative.

The right to asylum is not something you can suspend at will. I mean, if you are in the middle of a zombie virus apocalypse, a case might be made, but Poland is very much not on the brink of collapse.

Obviously, I am not suggesting that all the refugees entering via Belarus should get asylum. Likely, almost none of them qualify. But they should have a right to make their request and get a speedy rejection, followed by an appeal speedily denied by a judge and a plane ticket back to their country of origin.

Yes, this will mean that for every plane ticket that Belarus buys (or makes some migrant pay for), the EU will also need to pay for a plane ticket, but realistically that is the only way out of the situation. We do not want to compete with Belarus in "who is better at terrorizing delusional migrants", because that game can only be won by shooting more unarmed civilians than Belarus is willing to shoot.

This is feasible because the GDP of the EU is much higher than that of Russia (which also likes to spent its income on other stuff, such as killing Ukrainians). We can match them plane ticket for plane ticket. There are places where the number of migrants/refugees/asylum seekers reaches numbers where one might discuss how one can handle all the people. The border between Poland and Belarus is not such a place.

There is, of course, a third solution- deport them to some third country which is such a shithole that it can’t stop it, and publicize this fact widely. South Sudan is a much much worse place to live than Iraq which is a worse place to live than Belarus which is a worse place to live than the EU. Even if the south Sudanese government has to be bought off, they’re so poor it’s cheap.

Australia does this with Nauru and Papua New Guinea. There's a policy where no asylum seeker who arrives by boat will be resettled in Australia. Europe however is short on unpleasant pseudo-colonies these days, there's no politically reliable, nearby, unpleasant place they could be sent. Maybe France could set up a facility in French Guyana?

There's a lot of poor, cheap to buy off countries in sub saharan Africa, and Europe can afford a lot more plane tickets than Belarus.

Just look at the Rwanda solution, Britain's laughable attempt to emulate Australian policies. Subsaharan African countries are quite proficient at exploiting European aid providers and the British ran the project in a clownish and unserious way, the whole thing collapsed in a heap of scandal and delays.

This isn't a matter of cash, it's a political issue. The reason Belarus is using these tactics is because they have structural political advantages and know it. Belarusian human rights lawyers either operate outside the country or sleep with both eyes open.

In Europe, human rights lawyers and NGOs run wild. The EU coats everything in a suffocating layer of law. It is possible to break through like Denmark has. But the question is fundamentally about willpower and organization, about the internal conflicts within the Union and within individual countries. Belarus isn't outspending Europe, they're inducing division.

The right to asylum is not something you can suspend at will.

Then your state is not sovereign. Most people want to, and believe that, they live in a sovereign state, and the cynical abuse of asylum is one thing that will force the issue. Either they can, and will, suspend asylum because Poland is in fact sovereign over its territory and borders, or they simply cannot, in which case they are ruled from Brussels. Poles, naturally, don't want that.

The sooner the system of asylum breaks somewhere, the sooner it breaks everywhere, and I hope to see it this year or next, not this decade or next.

Your view of a sovereign state is antiquated, it seems to stem from the days of Lois XIV.

Modern states are very much limited in what they can do. Internally by these pesky little things called constitutions (some of which give rights even to non-citizens!), and externally by international laws and treaties.

If Poland wants to exit the EU and renounce the 1951 refugee convention along with all other international laws, there is a process for that.

The reason modern states are so limited is that they aren't sovereign, they are clients of an empire.

There is no such thing as international law, because law can only exist with a monopoly on force that grants the monopolist sovereignty. Sovereign states are in anarchy, and if they have normalized processes of interacting with each other there is an ultimate authority in those matters who actually is sovereign over them and itself lives in anarchy.

In practice, the British Empire (who invented the concept of "international law") routinely broke its own norms when convenient, and so does its successor in the United States. This should tell you that they aren't confederal norms formed by spontaneous consensus, but imperial commandments that aren't opposable.

The process doesn't matter, sovereign is he who can decide the exception to that process. Just because Western propagandists have decided to rebrand the concept of sovereignty with something that isn't it doesn't make the concept spontaneously vanish.

I honestly don't even see how it's in America's interest to enforce this current status quo on Europe. Would America have blinked if Merkel never changed her mind on Syrian refugees? My impression is that most Americans don't really care and even the atlanticists have other concerns.

It doesn't seem that different from the same tangle of laws and ideology that makes solving the homeless problem in the US so intractable, which certainly can't be blamed on America's hegemon.

Imo it's more correct to say that we have an empire with an international elite that has already mostly supplanted the US, but which still has the strongest overlap with the american elite. For this elite, any and all immigration restrictions are a hassle - they want the freedom to both travel and live anywhere, at the drop of the hat - and they have minimal personal contact with any of the negative repercussions of open borders, either. Due to this, they think that most negative stories are at the very least greatly exaggerated, if not outright fabricated. And they have a whole moral system build up that makes it easier for them to believe this! As well as the money to actively insulate themselves if need be.

aren't the pushbacks justified, as they're not trying to enter legally via the border crossing, but run through the woods to cross illegally, without getting involved in the asylum process? they don't want to make any requests, they want to pass over to germany or wherever. why should any country let them in? I agree with ppl emphasizing, that securing the borders is one of the basic reasons for the state to even exist. migrants are used as a weapon by belarus and exploited by smugglers. by accepting them we just encourage more to come.

as they're not trying to enter legally via the border crossing, but run through the woods to cross illegally, without getting involved in the asylum process?

Ideally, people could just apply for asylum in EU embassies worldwide, and would be sheltered in there until their claim is processed, with a plane ticket to EU for anyone whose application has been granted. In that case, entering illegally would be frowned upon.

Realistically, we don't do that because it would make it too easy to apply for asylum. Most asylum seekers can not simply board a plane to EU and make their request at the passport control, because we explicitly penalize airlines who transport such passengers. I am quite sure that if the migrants under discussion were walking to a border station on the Polish/Belarusian border and made their request for asylum there, they would not be let on EU soil.

If we close all legal pathways to the EU, and also say that people who have entered the EU illegally do not have a right to claim asylum, then we have de facto abolished asylum in the EU.

@MadMonzer referred to article 31 of the 1951 refugee convention:

  1. The Contracting States shall not impose penalties, on account of their illegal entry or presence, on refugees who, coming directly from a territory where their life or freedom was threatened in the sense of article i, enter or are present in their territory without authorization, provided they present themselves without delay to the authorities and show good cause for their illegal entry or presence. [...]

Granted, making the case that your life was in danger due to your protected status in Belarus will be a hard case to make, but it is not impossible.

The right to asylum is not something you can suspend at will.

The right to asylum has already been suspended in the EU, the catch is that it is suspended in favor of the refugees. They get all the protections of the asylum laws, they follow none of the obligations.

The laws say "you must apply in the first safe country" - doesn't happen.

The laws say the asylum seeker must be fleeing persecution or serious harm in their country of origin - almost none of them are.

The laws say that asylum seekers must be returned to the first safe EU country they arrived in for said country to decide asylum - this never happens.

The laws say asylum seekers must return when their case is denied - almost none of them do.

If others can selectively apply the asylum laws why can't Poland? What justification does the EU have for enforcing this law when the EU itself doesn't follow it?

Yes, this will mean that for every plane ticket that Belarus buys (or makes some migrant pay for), the EU will also need to pay for a plane ticket, but realistically that is the only way out of the situation. We do not want to compete with Belarus in "who is better at terrorizing delusional migrants", because that game can only be won by shooting more unarmed civilians than Belarus is willing to shoot.

This is a false dichotomy between "give migrants more money" and "shoot migrants". Might I humbly suggest a third option, which is to simply not offer rights and money to outsiders in the first place?

As much as I don't like it at a very visceral level, a state unwilling to enforce it's rules by force has, in practice, no rules at all. In modern times we seem to have acquired a very Banksian view on enforcing laws in ways that I don't think we have the material wealth to back up, or even that such a level of wealth is necessarily possible. We like fining people who can't (and won't) pay anyway and feeling good that we've phased out "cruel" punishments that might dissuade anyone not at least middle class.

If you are referring to the Culture series by Ian Banks I have not read it, so the reference goes over my head.

If you are unsatisfied with his view on laws, might I suggest Heinlein? I find it more realistic.

Major Reid paused to touch the face of an old-fashioned watch, "reading" its hands. "The period is almost over and we have yet to determine the moral reason for our success in governing ourselves. Now continued success is never a matter of chance. Bear in mind that this is science, not wishful thinking; the universe is what itis , not what we want it to be. To vote is to wield authority; it is the supreme authority from which all other authority derives — such as mine to make your lives miserable once a day. Force, if you will! — the franchise is force, naked and raw, the Power of the Rods and the Ax. Whether it is exerted by ten men or by ten billion, political authority is force ."

Interestingly, even Banks doesn't see mass migration as a feature of the Culture.

It's always fun to see just what a person given free reign to create their personal utopia leaves out or insists on. Banks stacks the deck with basically infinite material wealth but then goes back and insists that certain cultural traits (also including sex-swapping and universal promiscuity) are apparently necessary

In general the Culture doesn't actively encourage immigration; it looks too much like a disguised form of colonialism. Contact's preferred methods are intended to help other civilisations develop their own potential as a whole, and are designed to neither leech away their best and brightest, nor turn such civilisations into miniature versions of the Culture. Individuals, groups and even whole lesser civilisations do become part of the Culture on occasion, however, if there seems to be a particularly good reason (and if Contact reckons it won't upset any other interested parties in the locality).

A Few Notes on the Culture

YMMV on whether Banks is letting himself off the hook with "it's colonialism". And why.

Well, that’s the tension, isn’t it? The Culture wants to spread its memes, but one of those memes says they shouldn’t. All their material excuses are gone. Contact is their way to either resolve or dodge the contradiction, depending on how cynical Banks was feeling about America that year.

So “it’s too much like colonialism” is precisely in character. Any intervention has to be laundered through appeals to principles, plausible deniability, and maybe a historical study.

The justification for allowing immigration for humanitarian reasons is arguably stronger than the justification for the Culture's rampant interference in everyone's business (to often disastrous ends). It certainly fits an individualist ethos better; the individual is choosing to accept the Culture instead of unaccountable Minds enforcing their will on their entire society through often covert means.

It's "in character" in the sense that it's how I expect a utopian leftist who wants to preserve a certain,um, culture to frame things to escape their discomfort with being able to solve everyone's problems but not being willing to sacrifice the specific character of his own society (you see this today with claims of "brain drain").

I'm just uncertain how seriously to take it as a purely principled position.

The laws say "you must apply in the first safe country" - doesn't happen.

Slightly oddly, the Refugee Convention doesn't say anything about applying for asylum at all - it assumes that everyone already knows who the refugees are and that they are already in their destination countries. This makes sense given the historical context, which is that the Refugee Convention was written to cover the specific situation of post-WW2 refugees who couldn't be repatriated for various reasons. The Refugee Convention was never fit for purpose as the a forward-looking instrument and the body of refugee law that has built up around it is incoherent as a result. I have an effortpost planned on this point once my sons stop bringing viruses into the house.

The idea that refugees have to apply for asylum in the first safe country comes from a misreading of Article 31 of the Refugee Convention, which says that refugees can't be penalised for illegally entering a country if they are crossing from a dangerous country to the first safe country. But a refugee doesn't cease to be a refugee just because they illegally cross from one safe country to another - the second safe country can prosecute them for illegal immigration but this doesn't solve the problem that you can't (without violating the Refugee Convention) get rid of them without finding another safe country willing to take them.

So declaring these people to by blanket not be real refugees is totally possible?

Of course it is. We can declare anyone to be anything. We could declare them to be attack helicopters and ship them off to the front lines in Ukraine. But we would be lying if we did that.

Under both the ordinary English and the technical legal meaning of "refugee", a refugee does not cease to be a refugee if they illegally cross a border from one safe country to another - they just become a refugee who has committed the crime of illegal immigration. The countries that ratified the Refugee Convention said that we were taking "deportation to a dangerous country" off the list of possible punishments for refugees who commit ordinary crimes. (The Refugee Convention includes an exception for refugees guilty of a "particularly serious crime", although judicial interpretations of ECHR Article 3 and, as far as I am aware, the US Constitution don't).

You can declare that you are not going to grant any kind of legal long-term residence to refugees who illegally enter your country from another safe country (and the UK tried to do this) but it won't be effective unless you can find another safe country to deport them to (as the UK tried and failed to do with Rwanda), or violate the Refugee Convention by deporting them to an unsafe country.

I mean, refugee doesn’t have an actual definition, declaring Kurds crossing the border from Belarus to not be real refugees isn’t a lie.

I have an effortpost planned on this point once my sons stop bringing viruses into the house.

Looking forward to the post, and best of luck with building up that immune system!

So it was written for the world wars specifically, by countries which were only beginning to establish a “rules based international order,” when the technological gulf between the first and third worlds was at its peak. And then expanded to everyone by the 1967 amendment. That explains a lot.

The idea that refugees have to apply for asylum in the first safe country comes from a misreading of Article 31 of the Refugee Convention, which says that refugees can't be penalised for illegally entering a country if they are crossing from a dangerous country to the first safe country. But a refugee doesn't cease to be a refugee just because they illegally cross from one safe country to another - the second safe country can prosecute them for illegal immigration but this doesn't solve the problem that you can't (without violating the Refugee Convention) get rid of them without finding another safe country willing to take them.

My understanding is from the below link, which states (emphasis mine):

What is the Dublin Regulation? The Dublin Regulation determines which country is responsible for considering an application for protection. An asylum seeker can only have his or her application considered in one of the Dublin countries.

The main rule is that an application will be processed by the first Dublin country the asylum seeker comes to. If the asylum seeker applies for protection in another Dublin country, he or she will be sent back to the country that has already considered his/her application or that is responsible for considering the application.

https://www.udi.no/en/word-definitions/cooperation-under-the-dublin-regulation/#:~:text=The%20Dublin%20Regulation%20is%20an,the%20collaboration%20as%20Dublin%20countries.

Maybe I am misreading, so I encourage you to post on it.

Exactly - the Dublin regulation says that if an asylum seeker illegally moves from one EU country to another, then they can be returned and, critically, the EU country with primary responsibility is obliged to take them back. If a genuine refugee, they don't cease to be a refugee (the country with primary responsibility considers their application for asylum in the same way as if they hadn't crossed the second border), and they can't be sent back to a dangerous country. There is a similar arrangement between the US and Canada. There could probably be a similar arrangement between the US and Mexico if the US offered the Mexicans a large enough bribe - probably in the form of a large number of visas for Mexican citizens.

The reason why the US can't just deport every Salvadorean asylum seeker who entered through Mexico back to Mexico is that Mexico is a sovereign state and doesn't have to accept them. A huge part of the problem with modern-day refugee law is that every country with a lot of refugees inside its borders is by default trying to get them to illegally enter another country so they aren't their problem any more. (The reason why the US can't just deport them back to El Salvador is a matter of American laws implementing the Refugee Convention).

Involuntary relocations of refugees from one safe country to another (negotiated between the two countries) were a common part of immediately-post-WW2 practice, and are explicitly contemplated by the Refugee Convention in certain situations.

The right to asylum has already been suspended in the EU, the catch is that it is suspended in favor of the refugees. They get all the protections of the asylum laws, they follow none of the obligations.

Governments are vastly more powerful than most humans. This is why we limit what governments can do to people, even in contexts where the individuals often don't play by the rules. For example, even if most criminal defendants are guilty, we still want trials to follow due process.

Of course a lot of people claiming asylum in European countries are in fact economic migrants. And of course many of them will not be swiftly deported. But none of that affects the rights of people with a legitimate claim to asylum.

If others can selectively apply the asylum laws why can't Poland? What justification does the EU have for enforcing this law when the EU itself doesn't follow it?

As an analogy, taxes are a legal way for a government to get funds from its citizens. Suppose that one European country refuses to collect taxes from someone. Should this give another EU country the licence to just confiscate property of some other party at gunpoint, because 'taxes are already suspended in the EU'? Clearly not.

This is a false dichotomy between "give migrants more money" and "shoot migrants". Might I humbly suggest a third option, which is to simply not offer rights and money to outsiders in the first place?

I was not saying 'give money to migrants'. I was saying 'spend money on migrants', which is different. At the end of the day, the migrants in Belarus were shipped there with the explicit goal of annoying the EU. Given the general regard for human rights in Belarus, it seems safe to assume that these migrants can be put under enough pressure that they believe that their lives will depend on reaching the EU, and risk their lives in the process. Under such circumstances, push-backs are ugly affairs.

Governments are vastly more powerful than most humans. This is why we limit what governments can do to people

Where? Governments assert broad rights to deploy mass surveillance, control speech, terrorize people with the police for political disagreement, even arrest people on completely arbitrary grounds if they're deemed to be enough trouble.

For example, even if most criminal defendants are guilty, we still want trials to follow due process.

Of course a lot of people claiming asylum in European countries are in fact economic migrants. And of course many of them will not be swiftly deported. But none of that affects the rights of people with a legitimate claim to asylum.

There's nothing in the constitutions and refugee conventions you keep citing, that would prevent a European government from refusing entry to African "refugees", while following due process.

Should this give another EU country the licence to just confiscate property of some other party at gunpoint, because 'taxes are already suspended in the EU'? Clearly not.

All taxes are "confiscating property at gunpoint", and countries clearly can decide their tax policy.

At the end of the day, the migrants in Belarus were shipped there with the explicit goal of annoying the EU.

This complaint seems a bit incoherent. I'm constantly being told that immigration is a benefit to the host country, how can that be annoying?

I figure that a lot of people on the anti-refugee side do not actually recognise any "rights of people with a legitimate claim to asylum", and think of asylum as a privilege rather than a right. An acceptance regime that produces false negatives is therefore not perceived as anything like robbing people of their rights.

That's not the issue. I recognize that some claims to asylum are legit, but I don't think these claims should enable mass population transfers. I also think such a mass-transfer is a greater violation of rights than a denial of a valid asylum claim.

To be clear - I do recognize "rights of people with a legitimate claim to asylum". I just think that right is legitimate when applied to Olga and her kids from Ukraine, and illegitimate when applied to Mohamad and his cousin/wife from Pakistan.

I may be one of those people, but I do consider all rights as privileges. Right means entitlement absent of any duty, which means somebody else has duty providing you with said right. Even original US set of rights in American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man gives government duties through law to to enforce these rights privileges.

In this case right for asylum means nothing else other than duty of you fellow citizens to accommodate foreigners. If society as a whole refuses these duties, then said "right" is dead. Duties related to rights are not enforced by god who strikes you with lightning and they are not enshrined in trajectories of planets in Solar system. They are social conventions and they are direct results of what duties citizens are willing and capable to undertake - we have all seen what happened to human rights during COVID for example.

As an analogy, taxes are a legal way for a government to get funds from its citizens. Suppose that one European country refuses to collect taxes from someone. Should this give another EU country the licence to just confiscate property of some other party at gunpoint, because 'taxes are already suspended in the EU'? Clearly not.

I think a better analogy would be if the EU agreed to set a minimum tax rate for the EU budget and all signed a treaty that said as much. What happens when, say, Germany decides to not enforce the minimum tax? What gave Germany license to suspend their treaty obligations to pay tax? Why should Poland listen to the EU when the EU tries to selectively enforce the tax treaty? Ok now what gives Germany the right to not ensure fair asylum claims (a fair asylum claim means actually getting them kicked out when they do not qualify)? What gives the EU the right to selectively enforce a migration treaty on Poland?

I will also point out that the EU, and every country, already has a license to just confiscate property at gunpoint. It is called taxes. What happens to those who do not pay taxes? Men with guns come to confiscate their property. Yes the payee generally gets a good deal (civilization) out of this. But force or threat of force is the driver behind the transfer. Confiscating property at gunpoint is what taxes are, EU countries already have this license.

I was not saying 'give money to migrants'. I was saying 'spend money on migrants', which is different. At the end of the day, the migrants in Belarus were shipped there with the explicit goal of annoying the EU. Given the general regard for human rights in Belarus, it seems safe to assume that these migrants can be put under enough pressure that they believe that their lives will depend on reaching the EU, and risk their lives in the process. Under such circumstances, push-backs are ugly affairs.

The migrants all made a conscious and free choice to go to Belarus, and then to either sneak in or lie to the EU about what danger they are in back in their origin country. If any danger to the migrants exists in Belarus it is because they choose to put themselves in danger. The migrants put themselves in this situation, if the EU wants to tell itself it has a legal obligation to fly them back then fine. But I think how it is now is a bad system because those that stand to benefit from abuse of the system (illegal migrants) do not currently pay the full costs for that abuse (getting back home), so they should change the law. It would seem ideal to me (and Poland) by scrapping the right of asylum entirely.

For a moment I thought Poland was being flooded by Belarusian citizens fleeing Lukashenko's government and was wondering why they were complaining about what was clearly some divine plan to make Poland great again by heaping ruin on its neighbors one by one and rejuvenating the Polish population with millions of their Slavic brethren, but I see now that these are in fact the usual migrants.

The way I see it, we can group people who want to move to a new country into three main categories: highly-skilled individuals that basically everyone agrees should be let in, people fleeing active warzones that a majority (albeit a smaller one) agrees should be let in for humanitarian reasons, and then economic migrants who are neither highly-skilled nor in imminent danger but just happen to live in poor places and would rather move someplace better (you probably want a few of these people around to do certain low-skill jobs). The latter group is by far the largest and is what causes the most problems, since if allowed to move freely with open borders they will demographically swamp your population in a way the first two groups will not.

Since any reasonable immigration policy would be able to distinguish between "real" and "fake" refugees, I support maintaining a list of "ongoing conflicts from which people fleeing may claim asylum" (most likely at the national level, allowing for variation depending on financial ability and local tolerances) and deporting anyone who can't prove they are from one of those places, ideally in an interview with some other former refugee from that area hired to screen them and who would be justifiably mad at e.g. some Nigerian trying to pass themselves off as a Syrian. Perhaps some version of this has been tried locally in the past, but clearly not at a scale commensurate with the challenges we face nowadays.

ideally in an interview with some other former refugee from that area hired to screen them

What if they are from two different sides of the civil war? What if one of the sides fractures into opposing factions? You would have to implement a tracking system to ensure your willing helpers are not lying to you.

“Glory to Arstotzka.”

Setting up a protocol to verify which language an asylum seeker can understand does not seem so difficult. Tape recorders should be a sufficient tech level for that.

and then economic migrants who are neither highly-skilled nor in imminent danger but just happen to live in poor places and would rather move someplace better

I'm modestly surprised I haven't seen the trolls of 4chan and similar try to sell this as "Zionism". It seems like it'd be effective because the term is very negatively regarded in (far-)left circles, but also kinda applies if you squint just a little bit: these are outsiders with no recent history coming unrequested to this "Promised Land" -- the American (immigration) Dream has a pretty heavy religious component between "City on a Hill" and "Streets of Gold" -- without regard to how this impacts the current residents or their long-term self-determination.

I'm not really that far right or fond of trolling, but it seems in-line with It's-Okay-to-be-White-posters.

That…doesn’t make any sense. “Zion” has a specific meaning: it’s a hill where David built the original kingdom of Israel. What’s the equivalent to an economic migrant?

The idea of a mythic "promised land" is broader than a specific hill in Israel. Lots of (early) American narrative references biblical history around the concept, from the place names ("Bethlehem, Pennsylvania", and even more obvious in heavily-Mormon Utah, which features Zion National Park and a Jordan River) to the idea of fleeing persecution to practice religion safely. And it's not just White Americans -- even MLK referenced the (more or less abstract idea) in one of his most famous speeches:

I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.

I don't think it's hard to see parallels with the American immigrant narrative -- consider "The New Colossus" inscription on the Statue of Liberty, although perhaps the Jewish tradition of interpreting the history and text there varies substantially.

Okay, but for a random Muslim sneaking from Belarus to Poland to Germany, or a random Nicaraguan looking for a job in SoCal, there’s nothing religious about it. Is there?

Not strictly, I suppose. Although the acceptance of "life will be better if I can move myself over there" without necessary direct evidence strikes me as at least a bit of a cargo cult mentality, it's probably not religion per se.

Mmhmm.

Looking a little further…it might actually be mostly Iraqi Kurds? That’s not a terrible fit, and I can see the irony,

But I suppose drawing attention to the fact that Belarus is apparently encouraging the problem wouldn’t be as funny to channers.

Although the acceptance of "life will be better if I can move myself over there" without necessary direct evidence

What makes you think there isn't direct evidence?

It'd be one thing if we were talking about middle class Indians piling into an inordinately expensive and crowded Toronto apartment and a shitty mall degree. But I think most asylum seekers to Europe are probably right that it's a better deal.

It looks like this is actually a fourth category: people Belarus has lured into making the attempt?? I’m left with a lot of questions.

I’m not sure they fit the usual categories. Maybe 2 if they really are persecuted Kurds. Maybe 3 otherwise. But I have to wonder how many would be there if Belarus wasn’t subsidizing them.

The right to asylum is not something you can suspend at will. I mean, if you are in the middle of a zombie virus apocalypse, a case might be made, but Poland is very much not on the brink of collapse.

I thought that we are beyond this point already. At least since COVID, everybody knows that rights, including human rights can be suspended at will, sometimes based on unilateral decision of governing bodies for what constitutes a crisis. We now hype everything ranging from climate change through mental health or obesity or anything else as crisis, this is the feature and not a bug. It was actually one of my direct examples to many people during COVID - what prevents government to declare some arbitrary crisis and act with heavy hand?

Also this is nothing new, human rights were undermined constantly. Look at declaration of human rights and let's use Article 5

No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Waterboarding is widely deemed as torture and yet it was used by CIA in their War on Terror and to my knowledge nobody was punished for it.

Another one is of course article 12

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

This one is dead, governments routinely spy on peoples electronic correspondence and ignore their privacy. And it seems that nobody gives a shit.

Of course Article 14 is also very sketchy:

Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.

No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

This is my favorite one when I am talking with progressives who are supposedly staunch defenders of human rights. It is interesting to watch how many people are then using legalese to weasel out of this one.

Asylum is part of Article 14:

Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.

This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

Again, many people may bog this down into legal battles of who is asylum seeker, if Belarus is not safe country for many such people trying to cross Polish borders etc. Call me cynical, but I do not see how this should be some barrier nobody will cross.

Barely a year ago Agnieszka Holland, in her movie, was chastizing Poles for their backward preference for a secure border. The elite camp currently in power enthusiastically nodded along, plebs chafed. Somehow I don't buy this change of tune.

In any case, it comes down to our inept attempts at destabilizing Belarus regime. Maybe we're getting enough results to justify the costs of this border issue, I doubt it, I think the window of opportunity is gone.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats