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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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So Trump had a fun day on the golf course.

While golfing yesterday, he got the news that Colombia will not be accepting two jets full of repatriated criminals. So he goes on TruthSocial and posts that, immediately, Colombia will get slapped with 25% tariffs, as well as visa revocations for ruling party members.

This causes an immediate reaction from Petro, the unpopular socialist leader of Colombia, who offers to fly convicts back to Colombia in his Presidential jet.

There is much celebration and dunking from Trump supporters.

Not so fast. It turns out Petro might have been drunk, because he later goes on to post this insane rant on Twitter and then threatens the U.S. with retaliatory tariffs.

Now the Democrats are celebrating (because obviously it's good to hurt Trump even if it's bad for America). We are driving Colombians into the arms of China! Who will work our coffee fields? That kind of stuff.

The evening goes on. Trump finishes golfing. Petro sobers up and probably gets some, um, interesting phone calls from prominent Colombians who will have to pull their daughters from American finishing schools. Petro apparently caves, as the White House posts this, announcing that Colombia will accept unlimited flights. No tariffs for now, but the visa restrictions remain in force until Colombia follows through.

It's hard not to see this as a massive win for Trump and for America as a whole. He accomplished more in a few minutes, while golfing, than a normal administration would in weeks. Sometimes you can just do stuff.

MSN reported it like this: Donald Trump starts massive diplomatic crisis with Colombia while playing round of golf.

I think 'move fast and break things' is something applied to Silicon Valley but is also something that should be applied to government as well. Bureaucracy slows things down so significantly, it's refreshing to see someone like Trump just go ahead and do it, damn the pearl clutching of teams of lawyers saying he shouldn't or can't.

My sister is a bureaucrat and she moves fast and breaks things...most of them are mine. I don't like it at all.

In all seriousness, I work for a start-up with just this sort of mantra, but I think the idea that anyone is moving so fast they haven't considered first or second level consequences is not really representative of how stuff actually gets done. I don't love the meme because I don't think it's accurate. In our case we literally can only move at the speed of the CFTC and our customers, so 'moving fast' is extremely relative.

On one hand I agree with you, but on the other hand when established practices are proven to be increasingly ineffective, breaking them to try something new can be an important tool for innovation and hopefully more effective governmental tools.

You're preaching to the chaos choir over here.