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Notes -
Forgive me in advance for what is mostly supposed to be a cathartic post, but also a request for criticism because it's how I'm making sense of the my observations right now, as well as the conclusion that I think is most likely.
Trump is not stupid
Or, at least, calling Trump stupid is not supported by enough evidence for it to be productive for anyone to claim that he is stupid.
The evidence against stupid
No matter your political leanings, one must admit that Trump ran one of the most impressive political campaigns, perhaps, of all time. For ten years, from 2015 to 2025, Trump was campaigning strategically without pause across the United States, building a big-tent party full of nearly every type of conservative. The Republican party was in its death throes. The Tea Party was not enough to invigorate the base. Trump performed the most impressive resurrection in over two thousand years. It was intellectually exhausting and demotivating for all of his opponents, to the point where any opposition within his own party simply quickly folded and pretended they never opposed him at all.
There's plenty of snark that Trump was born with a silver spoon and that none of his financial success is noteworthy because if had simply invested his gifts and inheritance he would have a higher net worth.[1] But if he were truly stupid, he would have simply lost all of that money with nothing to show for it.[2] Trump at least retained his wealth, which is much better than many lottery winners, drug dealers, sex workers, professional athletes, and "influencers" have to show.
It is also undeniable that Trump has a gift for delegating effectively, especially with regards to his campaign and consensus-building strategies. There is very little chance that Trump himself was in charge of choosing where to have his next campaign event, who to coordinate with locally, how to scam that podunk town out of its money, etc. The meme is that he doesn't know how to read, but if he's delegating effectively, he doesn't need to read in order to accomplish his goals. He has people for that, and they have served him especially well on the campaign trail for the past 10 years. He's also somehow able to get everyone to leave his cabinet meetings with a singular mission and idea, and the commitment is unfailing.
Trump has also trained his tongue to be sharp and clever. Like the Platonic ideal of the schoolyard bully, there has not yet been someone capable of rising to the occasion to out-Trump the Trump. Trump is completely immune to any type of attack that he himself has already mastered. Even crazier still is that Trump single-handedly killed left-wing satire and exposed it as snark. One of the most powerful tool liberals had against figures like Bush Jr., Romney, and McCain was completely neutralized by Trump. This is not something that happens accidentally: it is cold, concentrated talent, combined with years of practice. Trump is quick-witted, and that's anything except stupid.
Stupid, as a rhetorical device
The word stupid, fundamentally, is not terribly descriptive. Out of the people I know, spanning family, friends, coworkers, friends-of-friends, and significant others thereof, I can only count two individuals who I could never begin to defend against the epithet "stupid". I suspect both of these individuals have pretty significant learning disabilities. I have confirmed that they are the type that could not understand what an interest rate is, and how it affects their personal finances, no matter how long or how carefully the concept is explained to them. Their contribution to meaningful conversation caps out at, "Wow bro, that's crazy."[3]
Why even call a political figure stupid? Well, it is useful for forming in-groups and out-groups based on whether one agrees or not, or even feels compelled to agree or disagree. But that doesn't have much utility, especially because there are plenty of other methods for forming in-groups and out-groups. Let's be generous and give the benefit of the doubt that the protestor holding the "Trump is stupid" sign[4] is doing so because they seek to persuade others to change their mind regarding their support for Trump, as if those supporters will have some sudden epiphany that yes, Trump is stupid!
The fun thing about cults of personality is that any insult against the head of the cult is taken as a direct insult of members of that cult. Members of the cult aspire to be strong, smart, virtuous, and bold just like their dear leader. Their leader represents a more perfect version of themselves, so their leader must also be smarter than them. But if their leader is stupid, that makes those cult members even more stupid! Well, they know they're not stupid, so their leader must not be stupid. The members of that cult of personality will have to be "deprogrammed", as it's commonly referred to in the context of cults, in order to even begin to accept a reality where their leader is not strong, smart, virtuous, and bold.[5]
So, every time I catch someone calling Trump stupid, or anything remotely similar, I cringe. It's not supported by evidence. It's not a useful rhetorical device. That being said...
That pit in your stomach
I'd like to think that everyone has had that prototypical humbling experience, especially in your youth, of being woefully underprepared or completely out-of-depth. Maybe you forgot to study for an important exam, or to begin working on that rather important diorama. Maybe even later in life, you've made a mistake that you realized could have cost you your life. I once realized that the bushes that I had parked next to completely obscured the nearly-vertical cliff on the side of the road, and now two out of my four wheels were basically teetering over the edge. I was overconfident and unfamiliar with the terrain, and when I realized I was inches from certain death, my stomach fucking dropped.
I'd like to think that one of the most iconic photos of George W Bush captured that moment of visceral humility when he realized his presidency wasn't going to be spent reading stories about pet goats to elementary students.
Professional sports fans love to overestimate their abilities versus their sports idols: how many yards could you get on a designed run play against an NFL defensive line? There's the meme about a vast majority of American men claiming to believe the could land an airplane if they needed to. Rarely does anyone get to live the experience of testing their arrogance, although if you're a fan of some Olympic events you could go try to run a sub-4 minute mile and revel in the humility. I'll give E-Sports some credit here, because their transparent MMR system does typically convince the player base that compared to the top-level players, most players are complete trash.[6] It seems that humility is a learned trait that doesn't come naturally, and rarely do humans come face-to-face with their own mortality because of a lack of humility.
Humility, in general, brings to mind some people from grade school, middle school, and even high school who seemed to never have that "oh shit" moment during childhood. They either immunized themselves with apathy ("This grade doesn't matter.") or arrogance ("I don't need to prove anything."). Most of them were not wealthy, and therefore, continue to live relatively unremarkable lives based on their Facebook postings. I don't say this judgmentally, rather as an observation that success in school, either through good grades or learning how to work hard and take things seriously, is one of the only ways to be socially mobile in the United States. But what if they were wealthy?
My working theory is that Trump and everyone he has surrounded himself with are wildly out of their depth, in a completely unsubtle way. Do I even need to mention autism, A1 sauce, and 245% tariffs? It's not subtle, right? A major part of this is that I think they're precisely the type of people who have immunized themselves to this type of valuable introspection through apathy and arrogance. When I look at the people leading the executive branch, I see Kyle. But...is that the point?
A new model of "expertise"
When your cause is righteous, you cannot be wrong. He who saves his country, breaks no laws. Now, feelings don't care about your facts. We're operating off of vibes only from here on out.
The old model of "expertise" is out the door: it was ideologically captured by liberals. A new model of "expertise" must be created, one that by design serves not just conservative, but reactionary interests. Much like "Christian Science" is held to the constraint that any conclusion must be consistent with an American-Evangelical interpretation of the bible, this new model of "expertise" must be held to the constraint that any conclusion is consistent with reactionary ethos. And that ethos is driven by vibes, brother.
If you're a biologist that doesn't support HBD? Good bye bucko. Climate scientist that doesn't support a "things will work out, trust me bro" view on energy production? Have fun flipping patties. Economist that would dare suggest that tariffs won't even work out in the long run? Hah.
But this is surface-level snark here, and aside from disrupting careers and potentially accelerating some climate doomsday, I don't think it's worth focusing on. No, what I care about is national security, especially as we slide into authoritarianism.
Wargaming
Trump has selected heavily for loyalty, and now he's surrounded by sycophant grifters and real-life ghouls that would fit right in to any authoritarian administration you could think of: Mussolini, Pinochet, Stalin, etc. I'm not even sure if some of these people are reading history books and simply ad-libbing the speeches of these despots, or if they genuinely think they're clever and this time it will be different because of that learned apathy and arrogance. Reactionary rhetoric is like pop music, it's always the same four chords. How many pop artists succeed on vibes, and how many pop artists study the greats and emulate their formulas?
It's debatable whether the war could have had any other outcome, but Hitler didn't come face to face with true failure until Stalingrad.[7] He had drunk the Kool-Aid and genuinely believed that the German army was more righteous and mighty than any other force on Earth, combined. Despite intelligence warning him otherwise, he pushed for an offensive that overextended his army and left him on the back foot until he finally held the pistol up to his temple. He was wrong before, but it never cost him like it did that time. His mistakes never cost his country as much as they did in Stalingrad.
Hitler's mistake brings us to Wargaming: simulations that ensure that, when facing adversaries of roughly equal might and intelligence, one has the greatest chance of success. In the context of the USG, Wargaming is not limited to the Department of Defense. Wargaming is not limited to wartime activities. Wargaming is not limited to simulations that happen behind closed doors. Wargaming requires a deep trust in experts who have spent their entire careers studying mundane things like seasonal global crop yields on the 40th parallel. Wargaming is an activity that explicitly selects against loyal and uncontradicting parties.
Everything that I see from the executive branch these days indicates to me that they have lost the capacity to meaningfully wargame, and it threatens a catastrophic downfall of the United States. The military brass that have been selected for loyalty, rather than expertise, were the worst losses, but it doesn't stop there. Do you believe that RFK has the mental capacity to handle a human pandemic, let alone a livestock one? Do you believe that whoever Trump replaces Powell with will have experience running simulations on various levers the Fed can pull? I can't help but think Xi Jinping is laughing behind closed doors at the moment that he's up against such an arrogant and out-of-depth adversary.[8] Say what you will about the "Deep State", but those entrenched bureaucrats won us the cold war, and kept us on top of the world since the 1990s. And right now we're trading it for reactionary vibes.
Edit: I forgot that at one point I had meant to integrate the concept of "aping" or "cargo-cult" into this post. I thought the leaked Signal chat was an incredible example of a surface-level understanding of how a properly-executed military operation should be spoken about at the cabinet level. The cabinet is aping experience and expertise, and it won't cut it in the year 2025.
"Well actually" you have more than 0% chance of landing a plane with less than 100% fatality rate if you have a good guide speaking to you second-to-second. Source: attended an actual industrial simulation training once and only once, as a novelty.
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I often think how cozy it must be to live with the child's view of politics. They disagree with me, those idiots!
What is stupidity, what is intelligence? What is their value? With intelligence as a descriptor we attempt to measure and describe something else. It's IQ and g, the thing itself, "it." What is it? It's building skyscrapers plural with your name on them and being elected POTUS twice with the most powerful media machine in the world standing against you. Trump has it, so when someone says he lacks intelligence, maybe! But he doesn't lack it, so if he lacks intelligence its value is far less than we think, if it has any at all.
It's the most complicated game and just because Trump has it doesn't mean he always or even often makes the right decisions. He made plenty of bad decisions in his first term, but here I must observe in those areas firmly under the executive's direct purview, where he didn't have to delegate it into an adversarial bureaucracy or broker with an ambivalent-at-best congress or wait and hope for the court's approval, he delivered two unequivocal aces. No further adventurism in the Middle East, and his strong attempt to normalize relations with North Korea. Had it been Obama with Un on the DMZ the picture would have won a Pulitzer and Obama would have won a second Nobel Prize. Instead, like so many truly historic pictures of Trump-as-President, it's just another icon ghettoed to where few beyond his supporters both know and appreciate. When Trump can play the game without an arm or both tied behind his back, he wins, and this is indicative of it.
As for his cabinet and advisors, I'll only talk about one: Stephen Miran. The last few weeks has seen a lot of discussion on the tariffs, including one particular user who opened his brief fluff of criticism by repeatedly calling Trump a retard. Is Miran? Because it's his work, his exploration of the potential hazards of holding the reserve currency and holding trade deficits and how tariffs might correct these hazards, that is influencing the Oval Office (after Trump's old affinity for tariffs). When your adversary does something incomprehensible, it's the vapid feel-good shortcut to say it's because they're stupid. They can be wrong, and the sum of everything that makes them wrong may be an indict of their reasoning, but that conclusion isn't useful. It doesn't help your own decision-making. It's a belief, or it may be true outright, but either way it doesn't pay rent. What does is knowing that everything: what do they read, or what do the people they listen to read? What do they believe, what ideas do they hold, what's their ethos? Assuming necessarily they reached their conclusions through reason, what were those reasons? I've lately been arguing here very strongly in favor of absolute sovereign authority to expel foreigners with the minimum possible due process. I know the people disagreeing with me aren't stupid and I don't think they're evil. I'll be the first to say if they were right, their fears would be justified entirely, and I don't fault them for those fears either, it's eminently rational, their conclusions logically follow from their premises. We differ in premises, and I would be doing myself a disservice let alone everyone else if I just said "Of course you believe that, you're stupid." They're not, and Trump isn't either. The establishment left certainly isn't, yeah I'm here on record calling Biden demented behind the wheel, but the people who were actually making the decisions behind him are competent, are intelligent, and did a damn good job, though thankfully not enough, at the end.
The world is as it has always been because powerful, competent and intelligent people disagree with each other. There are moral judgments to be made sure but oh, does all history stand as the final testament on evil not being synonymous with stupid--nor good with intelligent.
That's not terrible prose but how do you square the idea that Trump isn't stupid with the fact that he apparently doesn't know how his beloved tariffs work?
I talked about the int-econ101 theory of tax incidence last week, if you don't trust the sophisticate version https://www.themotte.org/post/1827/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/316188?context=8#context
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Miran covers this is in his paper, presenting his argument of China as having effectively paid for the 2018-2019 tariffs.
If tariffs cause the average consumer to pay +$1800/year when they don't make +$1800/year, or simpler, if tariffs are causing people to spend money in excess of increased wages, what would they care of a stronger dollar? Miran also covers this:
The game of tariffs appears far more complex than "cost passed to consumers" but I'm just copy-pasting Miran, I don't know economics.
His argument is that in essence China can opt to weaken Yuan proportionally to the tariff, and simply decrease the costs of exports to the extent that their new prices in USD + tariff overhead ≈ old prices in USD; alternatively, Chinese suppliers themselves can secretly be operating with a massive margin and drop the prices directly. Well, I don't know if this will fly this time, especially if the dollar itself weakens. In any case, China can simply not do any of that.
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There’s enough ambiguity in the chain of causality that anyone can be said to ultimately pay for something. Trump also said mexico will pay for the wall. The people love to hear the tale of the paying foreigner, it really gets them going.
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Ah yes, the enlightened one. Please grace us with your superior wisdom and reasoning, that we may not err in our ways.
I genuinely don't believe that Trump is stupid, and I'll even extend that to say that I don't believe that Vance is stupid. I would say that even cabinet members like RFK Jr. and Linda McMahon aren't strictly stupid, but rather wildly out-of-touch to the point that anything they say is completely unrelatable and easily interpreted as "stupid".
My whole point is that my concern isn't stupidity, and that "stupid" is a useless epithet that doesn't further the conversation at all. You would seem to be in passionate agreement.
Graciously, I'll ask if you're extending the concept of "stupidity" to "incompetence" - because our disagreement would simply be that you're straw-manning my entire argument: "How juvenile it is to think that powerful people are stupid." I personally think those are two separate concepts, where "incompetence" has the additional dimension of context, but "stupid" is wide-ranging. I'll even argue that Trump is not universally incompetent - and has shown great competence in certain facets both in Trump I and Trump II and during his 10-year electoral campaign. Your examples of a diplomatic visit with NK and a drawdown of some activities in the Middle East are great (although I struggle to see what fruits they've bared in the past 8 years).
I appreciate your counter-example of Stephen Miran. Navarro does not inspire confidence that Trump has a good eye for economic advisors (as signs pretty much indicate Navarro lost his mind somewhere around 2015), but I'll give Miran the benefit of the doubt that he has not yet lost his mind. He seems to be hand-picked to support the conclusions that Trump has already reached, so I'm already skeptical, but again, that is not in-and-of-itself proof of his incompetence. All of that is bailey anyway, where the motte is that actually Trump's economic policy is highly calculated and we're aiming for is maintaining our very high average standard of living (at least, for certain classes of people) while also convincing the rest of the world to drop USD as a reserve currency as it presents an existential risk that no one but Trump is bold enough to face head-on. I don't disagree that the world holding USD as a reserve currency is an existential risk, but my main question is: why does it have to be 5D chess? Does the success of the strategy rely on none of the world (including his own constituents) being privy to exactly why certain economic policies are being executed? Is that the secret sauce? It has to be 5D chess or we won't be able to both maintain our standard of living while also convincing the world that they shouldn't hold USD? This is my issue broadly with many Trump strategies - I'm told I just don't get it and it's all part of a bigger plan. Well, it would be great if we were told that plan. To put it simply, when someone says "trust me bro", I instantly do not trust them, bro.
Back to the topic of the OP, the thrust of my point is that I've observed a certain type of arrogance over my lifetime that has been tightly paired with the rejection of expertise, and that I'm seeing the same pattern daily coming out of the executive. That's my signal through the noise. I tie that arrogance (and apathy) back to something that I thought everyone here might be able to relate to, the "pit in your stomach" when you realize you've fucked up because you're out-of-depth. I also tied it to the worst amphetamine-fueled mistake that an authoritarian made during WW2. Your critisicm is basically that my interpretation of the situation is juvenile?
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Apparently Vance, Hegseth and others were calling for caution on striking Iran. Trump's administration is still more capable and moderate than George W. Bush. Many of Trump's sycophants and grifters may still be above-average US policymakers!
Yes, I agree, at least early on in Trump II we at least seem to have some sort of tempering going on (we even saw some in Signalgate). We'll see how long it lasts as it is currently only April 2025, and unless Trump has completely changed character, he has a pattern of executing massive turnover on his teams.
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Obama spent 8 years conducting a massive political purge of the general staff and replaced them all with idiotic loyalists. You just didn’t notice because the media never bothered to mention it.
I don’t know, but at least he has the mental capacity to not start one and then cover up that he started it.
And I’m sure Xi was quaking in his boots over the last President, who could only remember he was President for four hours a day
How do YOU know that it happened?
I remember the grumbling about it as it was happening and what the veterans on veteran blogs were saying.
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Whataboutism is cringe, but I'll steelman this and interpret it as "this is just how things work". You're stretching the word "loyalist" pretty thin here. When I say Trump "loyalist", I mean someone like Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz who were metaphorically cucked on live television by Trump only to then bend the knee to suck from the teat. "Idiotic" is a useless epithet, the entire point of the first half of my post, so I'll just ignore it.
Based. To meme you right back I'll that I don't think he has the mental capacity to even begin to understand what it would take to start one.
No argument there, but again, whataboutism is cringe. Thank God we have a strong president who can look Xi eye-to-eye and say 245% tariffs! We know that's the best number because we have formulas! The simplest explanation here Trump is aping foreign policy with tariffs.
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I feel that arguing him not being "stupid" might be a bit of a straw man. Few people would literally claim that he has an IQ of 85. I am 90% sure that I could outperform him in math-y intelligence and 99% sure that he would utterly crush me in political intelligence. There was also a tendency here at the motte to see him as a 5d chess master who has planned twice as many moves ahead as the other players. This is also not supported by evidence.
Trump's great asset has always been that the elites hate him, and that it is common knowledge that they hate him. He has an uncanny instinct for politics and a showed a ruthless disregard for the truth since he started his political career backing the Birther conspiracy.
That being said, stupid is as stupid does, and he has made plenty of stupid mistakes. Most of his first presidency was uneventful. Sure, you had all the drama and frequent changes of secretaries which you would have expected if you put a narcissist reality TV star in the White House, but apart from putting a few migrant kids in cages and making every other news broadcast start with "President Trump tweeted today", he did not accomplish much, good or bad. Then he under-estimated COVID, went on to say to some book writer that he was purposefully downplaying it not to tank the economy and utterly lost the 2020 election to some back-bencher who seems about 50 years older than Obama seemed.
Denying the election results was evil, but not stupid. He thrives on controversy, and it meant that he got to keep his cult of personality going. However, I would argue that J6 was indeed intended to stop the senate from certifying the election, and it was a stupid plot which was never going to work and made him show his utter disdain for the political process. (Some might argue that the real goal was to get some MAGA shot and turn him into a Horst Wessel, which would be less stupid.)
In 2024, the Democrats handed him the election. They had won against him with a weak candidate, and for some reason decided to test how much weaker a candidate could win, because they were largely caught in their own woke filter bubble.
Since then, there have been clear signs that Trump II would be different from Trump I. Before, Trump already had a weird loyalty fetish, but now he is pretty open about selecting for loyalty long before considering ability. Luckily for the world, there are not a ton of people who are both competent and willing to swear eternal homage to Trump. The US in 2025 is not medieval Europe, where the most qualified people might have been minor nobles educated in a monastery who would swear allegiance to you in a heartbeat if you dangled a fief in front of him. The Ivy League is not only producing woke people, they produce (some) highly competent woke people, most of which will stay way clear of Trump's cabinet. And in general, I think that DC lacks the culture of personal loyalty which Trump likes so much. At most, you get some loyalty to the party, but if you want to find someone in civil service who will put Trump before the combined forces of the constitution and their self-interest, you are indeed scraping the bottom of the barrel.
The tariff debacle was stupid for the interests of the US from its inception to the announcement that electronics from China would be exempt, and I am confident that if there is another chapter to this saga, it will be just as stupid. The steelman for Trump's intelligence here is that he is utterly uninterested in the economic outcome and only engages in market manipulation, or is under some geas to produce a certain amount of news and outrage every week.
If it's a straw man, then it's a very common one: it's a cliche Redditism, at the very least. Blue Tribe will always call their enemies stupid: even Vance is called a Appalachian hillbilly when he is arguably one of the most self-made men of our times. It stems from the belief that their enemies are stupid and evil. You can't possibly be good and smart and oppose what they do.
Yeah that was kind of my whole point. Is there a way to argue the blue tribe's concern without resorting to "they're stupid". I did not make the argument coherently enough because the main rebuttal I've received is basically ~ "why are you calling them stupid".
My argument is that they're arrogant and out-of-depth, and my evidence is their wide-ranging rejection of expertise. The argument against would be that they do truly know better than the experts they're purging and alienating and there's nothing worth worrying about.
Haidt's foundations of morality is a good basis for this.
Imagine you are in a kindergarden and you open up your lunchbox and find out your mother has packed you a candy bar, and the kid immediately besides you starts whining to you to share (fairness). But you were given this chocolate bar by your mother, and it is yours (liberty). Eventually, the kindergarden teacher comes over and obliges you to share with the whole class (authority).
Now, I bet you can come up with results where fairness is liberty, and sometimes that does line up. But in many cases, equality to all means coercion to some, and to the conservative mind that is intolerable. It's a difference in terminal values that is irreconcible, but it's not evil. And if experts (authority) are not on the side of liberty, then it doesn't matter how much they know (or claim to know.)
The kindergarden teacher may have infinite knowledge compared to a kindergardener but it never feels great to be coerced to do the right thing. There is no such thing as an expert in moral authority (the absence of the philosophical numina known as God.) The experts, lacking omniscience, are merely imposing their moral preferences on you without attempting to convince you and that is fundamentally against freedom as a value.
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Okay. How about this- are you competent enough to judge competence?
Your choice of political metaphors is all over the place, and your choice of partisan framings are not exactly indicating great insight. You start off early with a claim that the mid-2010s the Republican party was on its death throes. This, uh, is a way of describing a party that was the House Majority for 6 of the 8 years of the Obama Administration, and swept out 10 state governors (a 20 state swing) in 2010. The pitfalls of the emerging democratic majority theory haven't exactly been a secret for the last decade either.
This seems typical for your level of political metaphor. In the space of three words you make a pejorative equivalence to... Mussolini, Pincohet, and Stalin. Not exactly Bad People known for having the same sort of flaws, beyond historical category of Bad People. You raise wargaming... but cite as proof of failure a leadership level that wouldn't actually be involved in running wargames. You raise the spectre of the new administration mishandling a mechanic... without addressing how the most recent pandemic squandered public trust and credibility in the experts that RFK is known to be at odds with.
If all you want to do is 'Trump is dumb, lol,' you certainly put effort into that post. Consider catharsis achieved. If you want to make sense of the Trump administration, 'they are all idiots and I'll use the political language of their political opponents accusing them of all being idiots' is probably not a good place to spend time.
Thank you for what appears to at least be a sincere response. I recognize your username as one of the ones that I disagree with the most on the Motte (I don't always find the need to respond), so I'm not shocked that it provoked this type of response, but hey, at least my post did provoke a response instead of slowly sinking into irrelevance. I made the comment here because I wanted harsh and honest feedback, rather than on other platforms that skew hard liberal where it would just disappear into the circle-jerk.
Are any of us? I don't think we should blindly trust those at the heads of our institutions, and I think we should be even more critical when they represent an extreme shift in the status quo. So here's my attempt at being critical of their competence. I'll ask you genuinely, do you have strong evidence of their competence (especially with regards to my main point, that they are weak on what I'm calling "wargaming")?
I'm surprised this isn't consensus? I did not think that me saying Trump rejuvenated a party that was having an identity crisis leading up to the 2016 election would be controversial, but I'll adjust my priors on that. I had thought that both left and right-wing thought leaders saw Trump as an opportunist that took advantage of the Republican Party's situation, and remolded it in his own image. But if it was a strong party, that doesn't really contradict my main point that Trump isn't stupid, because it makes it even more impressive that he overtook a strong party than a weak party.
Yes, "the space of three words", also known as a "list".
As I said in the sentence prior, they were all known as authoritarians, used authoritarian rhetoric, and surrounded themselves with sycophants who echoed the same authoritarian rhetoric. I chose three names out of a hat, but I suppose I could have chosen more carefully and provided specific examples of Trump's sycophants sounding like historical sycophants.
I didn't intend to simply raise it, I intended it as my main point: that ideological purity testing and loyalty testing are purging the competence we had built up leaving us vulnerable against adversaries who haven't recently purged their most experienced ranks. You seem to be implying that you think Trump's appointments / retentions at the levels relevant to what I'm calling "wargaming" must be more competent than the people whose positions are more visible? I would say that's a pretty generous assumption.
The fun part about a pandemic is that any time a governmental response is sufficient (i.e. saves lives), the response can be deemed a failure by overreaction because clearly not enough people died to warrant a response. That's a digression, though, because replacing leadership with someone lacking not only any expertise, but any credentials at all, seems like a juvenile retribution, no? But I guess that's reactionary revolution in a nutshell. That's actually at the core of the "out-of-depth" that I was describing in the OP that leaves you with two tires hanging off the edge of a cliff.
My point was to bring something new to the table, and extend a bit of a fig leaf to Trump supports by saying that Trump is not stupid. But, he is making the same mistakes that many arrogant leaders have made before him. And I think the root of the reason why he's doing that is because he lacks the humility to realize that he is not special.
Sure.
If you are surprised, that would be indicative.
The continued and future viability of the Republican party in the mid-teens was so evident that Obama spend the later half of his time in office trying to reverse his down-ballot impacts on the Democratic party, including a multi-year court and supporting media-campaign trying to prevent Republican-drawn redistricting maps in states that saw Republican takeovers in the 2010 elections. Half a decade later, the Hillary campaign actively attempted a pied piper campaign to pump up what she thought would be the only candidate in American history to be even more unpopular than her.
A list of unlike things that can only collectively be equated in broadest boo terms is not a useful list.
It is a useful basis for judging the quality of the argument which presents the list as a serious supporting argument.
The argument that Trump purged the people who conduct "wargaming" does not understand that the political-appointee layer and the "wargaming" layers are different. This is an actor-to-role mismatch that suggests a misunderstanding of how the US government works.
It also neglects the role the 'loyalty,' or lack of it, plays in the ability of the executive branch to achieve a president's policy objectives. An analysis that condemns loyalists as incompetents without addressing the relative success or subversions by an ideologically opposed bureaucracy, particularly with examples from circa 2017-2020, is not a sound analysis.
To bring a historical metaphor: once upon a time, a Roman governor of egypt was advised that sheep were for shearing, not flaying. A province must be in a certain state to be productive. The inverse extreme is not better, though. A province in revolt is not a productive province either. A revolting province is also not led by capable administrators, no matter how fine their noble or academic pedigree or how loyal they were to another consul.
Framing the consequences of a breakdown in trust and credibility as juvenile retribution would be demonstrating the flaws that led to the vulnerability of credentialists.
You really, really did not.
I am not convinced you have any particular idea what he trying to do, or under what model he might be operating under, let alone how well specific actions do or do not move to that position.
I'll try to break the back-and-forth of condescending snark from cherry-picked lines, but you've at least matched my level so kudos.
My main issue with your interpretation of my post is that you're reducing my use of the word "wargaming" to a very literal activity that happens behind closed doors with a couple military brass at most. I could have chosen a better term that would not have evoked such a specific image in your mind, so mea culpa. What I mean by "wargaming" is broadly any strategic, adversarial simulations with starting conditions based on scenarios that are executed in order to relatively evaluate the outcomes of different actions.
Anyone claiming to know precisely what "wargaming"[1] is within the context of the USG either oversaw it, took part in it, or is talking out of their ass. Civilians are probably equally aware of how the USG executes "wargaming" as much as they are aware of the USG's intelligence on "UFOs": any knowledge is highly speculative at best. My personal definition of competent "wargaming" would bring in unconventional expertise, like experts from something like the Department of the Interior, to get accurate fact sheets on e.g. the likelihood that Yellowstone erupts and what the domestic and military response would have to be. My fear is that such information would be overlooked in the current administration, due to the arrogance and apathy referenced in my OP. It is not evidence-based decision making, it's vibes-based decision making.
But maybe that's at the core of our disagreement. You, and others who feel as passionately as you do, are done with "evidence-based decision making", at least since we've had since we elected a black man president. To continue with "evidence-based decision making" would be an existential error. The solution for you isn't necessarily the rejection of evidence, as that's irrational. Your solution is still rational, it's just that you will not actively seek that evidence as you fear that what you may find contradicts your conclusions.[2] Your cause is righteous and therefore correct.
No, that's what I understood you to mean. And that is why I find your analysis lacking as even a starting premise. Your claim that the people who do this were purged in favor of loyalists is more characteristic of a partisan narrative-level understanding than familiarity with what's happened in the US government over the last few months.
This is an initial-evaluation level issue. Call it a 'vibes-based analysis' if you will. It is consistent with your vibes-based understanding of history, both contemporary-american and broader leader issues. It is not consistent with accurate model-building of people or efforts outside your vibe, which so far you have not demonstrated.
The nature of being a vibes-based analyst is that contempt / condemnation of other people for being vibes-based decision-makers rings more than a little hollow. This is particularly true if you cannot model what other people outside your vibe are trying to achieve, or why they believe certain actions will advance that goal, without building in a back-handed basis of dismissal.
Genuinely: do you have a recommendation of who to read in order to gain a non-partisan narrative-level understanding of what has happened with the US government over the last few months? I'd like to get away from some of my regular sources of information and into ones that provide a higher signal-to-noise ratio.
For example, analyses of the actions of the executive branch here on the Motte contradict each-other on a week-to-week basis as more information comes out. I come here to find takes that would temper a "partisan narrative-level understanding", but often find most posts that analyze the actions of the executive branch as highly speculative ("5d chess")[1]. Should I just read Project 2025 and take it as gospel, despite the counter-hysteria during the campaign season? Is the executive executing reactionary revolution? What is the bar for competence-of-evaluation for an average citizen to judge the worthiness of their executive branch? Should no one protest the actions of their government because they're not qualified to evaluate the competence of those who took those actions?
Yes, but to an outside observer I'm just a shitposter[2] on a political forum, and they're the supposed leaders of the free world. Different standards, no? I do have models for the actions of those in the executive branch. I think they're mostly of disreputable character, as are many politicians and people in positions of power, but they're not irrational or stupid. It's their failure to disclose the honest motivations behind their actions that limits the effectiveness of my model for their behaviors.
There are no non-partisan sources. There are ways to get a balance of partisan readings over time. News aggregators that make a point of aligning different sources on the same general topics- such as the RealClear portal or Ground News
Yes.
No.
The hysteria over Project 2025 is precisely why you should read Project 2025, to understand what it says, what its detractors claim it says, and recognize the difference.
But you should also read it so that you can correlate what it says to what specific members of the Trump administration say, so that you can recognize differences between what the Project 2025 organizers want and what key policy makers in the administration want so that you can make an informed judgement as to how influential it actually is, as opposed to how influential it is accused of being.
There is no bar. However, the credence given to their judgement generally scales with their ability to demonstrate a general level of awareness of political history beyond their partisan media bubble, particularly on events in living memory of their audience.
You can protest the actions of government no matter how competent you are at characterizing them. The saving grace of democracy is that it protects the roles of the incompetents to contribute to policy debates, by forbidding would-be elitists from disqualifying the uncredentialed lacking elite recognition or support.
This is a good thing. There are many good reasons for considering the views of unwise masses. It would have been a perfectly fine defense to make that a challenge to your own competence was irrelevant.
However, doing so would have undermined your condemnations of other peoples' incompetence, unless you could defend your own.
Heavens no. If they posted their arguments on the motte inviting pushback, they would receive the same gentle handling.
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What's the moral/point of the fairy tale, to you? This has been a long question for me. Your mention right here is quite interesting, alluding to blowback at first glance.
Thou shall not attempt a managed opposition strategy in which the ruling party, or would-be ruling party, tries to interfere with internal-party processes of other parties.
Granted, it is telling indicator that a party-of-government may not feel a political party faction is actually a threat to democracy if it donates significant aid to boost that faction's political prospects. However, there's far more costs than just the 'oops, we succeeded too well' tradeoff.
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I doubt that when liberals subjected our institutions to decades of rot that you ever wrote a screed about how and why they were doing so, and why we must stop them. I will throw your critique in the trash with all of the other opinions from people who hate me and want me broke and dead.
Everything you have written here may well be true, but what is certainly true is that this comment is not how one initiates a productive conversation. This forum exists to facilitate productive conversations. You are not required to participate in any particular discussion, but when you engage, the rules require you to engage as though you are actually attempting to have a dialogue. This comment is a pretty good example of the opposite of that.
[EDIT] - The mod log shows previous warnings, and no AAQCs. I am banning you for a day. Please re-read our rules and make some attempt to internalize their spirit. If you continue to post in this fashion, bans will rapidly escalate.
To what extent are AAQCs a mitigating factor and why?
We have a permanent mod log, so the longer one participates here, the more likely one is to accumulate warnings and even bans. If we operated only off negative mod actions, the expectation would be that likeliness of a permaban would scale in proportion to quantity of participation; it would scale slower for better posters, but unless a person was absolutely perfect all the time, they would still accumulate warnings and then bans of increasing length.
AAQCs provide a balancing effect, a positive to counter the negative. They also give a way for users to impact the process indirectly, since AAQCs are drawn from user submissions. If someone gets a couple warnings, and then produces a bunch of AAQCs, and then gets another warning, this shows us a pattern of corrected behavior, which gives us confidence that they will correct their behavior based on a warning now. This means we probably don't need to go right to escalation of consequences, since warnings worked previously and might well work again. We also attempt to at least consider the nature of the warnings/bans, rather than just treating them as blunt integers, which is why many people get multiple warnings before a ban, and why some peoples' bans escalate faster than others. Some people do appear to be attempting to follow the rules. Other people apparently don't understand the rules. And some people understand them perfectly well, but hold them in contempt.
That's my understanding, at least.
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I don't even know you? I don't even have hate for any type of person, though I do feel frustration when I think of various stereotypes of people (who I can also consciously acknowledge are just stereotypes and don't exist). If I were to make a shot in the dark about you: I actually empathize for the plight of a lot of Americans (especially rural) who feel left behind / under-served, and think the neoliberal status quo was untenable for them. But I don't think a reactionary "burn it down" federal government is going to be a win for those Americans in the end. Look how Putin sends the peasants of the hinterlands to the meatgrinder in Ukraine for a sneak-peek of how authoritarians treat forgotten classes of people.
What have those decades of rot delivered? The most advanced technological society in history, with the deepest understanding of the physical universe to-date? I almost think the exploitation of those institutions (e.g. Google, Facebook, etc. and other brainrotting social media and advertising companies capturing a generation of our greatest engineering minds) are more sinister than the institutions themselves.
I am genuinely coming from a place of interest: this my best effort of putting my thoughts and coinciding fears down. What have I missed? Is the criticism you provide literally just "Your threat model is wrong, my threat model is better"?
Edit:
Also, I'm not sure why it's always presented as a given that "liberals" are guilty of any decline in the value of our societal institutions, as if it was part of an orchestrated agenda? Why do we never talk about perverse incentives? Is it because people in those institutions, or that those institutions produce, are generally liberal? Why is that so often presumed that this is due to indoctrination? I'm not going to rehash the entire sides of both arguments here, but it's such an entrenched assumption whenever it comes up...
Double-edit: Regret responding to this low-effort response because it's spawned a bunch of subthreads that have nothing to do with my main point in the original post: that the rejection of experts on ideological grounds inhibits our ability to effectively wargame against our adversaries, and we will make mistakes as a country.
I would say The Long March Through Institutions qualifies as a strategy.
This is just a rephrasing of "reality has a liberal bias", the veracity of which is being tested now. Maybe they wouldn't have produced so many adherents of the regressive left if Ayers and his fellow terrorists received tenure in prison, rather than academia?
It was specifically sidestepping the nearly-20-year-old Colbert meme, but I guess you caught me. Maybe I am inclined to believe that those who seek truth for the sake of truth do tend to come out with a "liberal" bias. But more importantly, I feel more strongly that the painting of universities as institutions of liberal indoctrination deny entire cohorts of students their own agency in developing political beliefs, and equal-and-opposite mirror of the claim that FoxNews has indoctrinated an entire generation of cable news subscribers. Like you, I look forward to the results of this "test".
I would say it also qualifies as a conspiracy theory. I am curious, though, is your theory that the Long March Through Institutions was a concerted effort, with agents who collaborated and took specific actions? Or one that happened more "naturally" due to the perverse incentives of a [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_education](liberal education)?
This is a tautology, but the reason they come out with a liberal bias is because these people are in fact worthy of the individual rights liberalism suggests exist inherent to every man simply because they naturally do this.
Not all who claim to be liberals are actually liberal, though- hell, that's why progressives call themselves "liberal" in the first place! The problem for true liberals post-1980 or so is that, because socioeconomic opportunity started to dry up around that time (as compared to the '50s-'70s), society started selling those rights with the belief they'd be rewarded with other things that, while they feel good to have, are less aligned with the truth. Short-term moral gains at the expense of long-term advancement: affirmative action, gynosupremacism/feminism, [inorganic at the time] gay marriage, further destruction of negative rights (parental rights, self-defense rights, "freeze peach", free association), etc.
So progressives dressed their corruption in the skinsuit of what liberalism was and carried on with the slogans. And this worked, for a time; the transition kept otherwise low-information liberals believing that they had inherited the movement, and so did the details of being for things like feminism and non-straight sexualities.
Around 2013 there was a Great Awokening... but it wasn't the progressives that woke up, it was the liberals realizing they needed to take back their own label. They found natural allies in the enemies of the progressives (which is why the average liberal is seen as "right-wing"- classical liberalism is a conservative view now) because they know, and knew, that liberals oppress them less than progressives will.
I think that for any student in a liberal arts degree (including those who are only capable of that, and assuming this education is an accurate assessor of intelligence- the people for who that is not true tend not to emerge as progressives) progressivism is a natural adaptation because these people are in massive oversupply, and their policies are a natural reflection of this fact. That's why they need the absurd amounts of illegal immigration- after all, the easiest way to correct a problem of "too many chiefs, not enough indians" is simply to import a shit-ton of indians (literally, in many cases). As we might expect, academia was simply ahead of the curve here, because they were championing this stuff 20-30 years before this would become apparent to the average citizen.
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Are you aware that at least a majority of the people arguing right-wing views here used to be doctrinaire liberals?
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It's no secret that students are allowed "agency" to develop a very specific set of beliefs. Believe Women, No Human Is Illegal, ACAB, Black Lives Matter, Trans Women Are Women - funny how this liberalism-afforded agency only extends to things left of center. Additionally, these beliefs are constantly proselytized in an "everything not forbidden is mandatory" fashion.
I'm not sure how it can be both, so I'll ask for clarification of what you mean. As for the "natural occurrences" of left-liberalism based on incentives - what is the source of those incentives? Did they just change on their own in the 20th century, or, perhaps, it occurred because the composition of the incentive makers was changed by putting a thumb on the scale? Ayers and Kaczynski received wildly different treatments for some reason.
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Stick around, new kid. Time in this community will thoroughly disabuse you of that notion, presuming you can avoid the traditional leftwinger meltdown and flounce-out when you realize that other people are going to continue to be allowed to argue back.
Prospiracy with significant conspiracy elements. Something like a third of professors openly admit they would refuse to approve of the hiring of a conservative, no matter how qualified. Iterate that attitude for the better part of a century and here we are.
No, I think people with that view do indeed tend toward liberalism.
The mistake is in assigning the word "liberal" incorrectly; social justice isn't liberal, it just (in the USA) has been wearing the word (and Officially Designated Intellectualism) like a skin-suit.
I very much agree, as a personal idiosyncrasy. In most cases, I just mentally replace all liberal->progressive whenever it's used by someone who isn't e.g. Glenn Greenwald.
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The existence of a niche forum whose membership selects for right-wing views and truth-seeking does not disprove the idea that all else being equal people who strongly value truth for its own sake will be more likely to be liberals.
I dunno, I am pretty left wing (by the standards of the Motte) and while there are certain brands of bullshit popular here, it's more that this forum selects for truth-seeking regardless of who it offends, and that, as a side effect, selects for contrary rightist or dissident leftist opinions. I literally don't know of any other left-leaning or so-called "neutral" forum, for example, that would let someone argue that trans women are men or that IQ is both hereditary and has a racial component, or that deporting illegal immigrants is good, or that Trump is not a fascist. I don't mean that any of those propositions are necessarily true: I'm saying almost anywhere else, you can't even debate it. You might get away with suggesting it, but after the subsequent dogpile, if you persist, you will be banned as a Nazi. No exaggeration, I've seen that happen... almost everywhere else.
As a liberal it's disheartening and annoying. I don't think rightists actually have a closer relationship with the truth, per se. But they do put a higher value on truth as a terminal value, whereas leftists today regard truth as secondary to social approval and psychological comfort.
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Thanks, bro. Genuinely, I'd like to. It would be far too easy to comment somewhere that I receive no push-back, but then I wouldn't be sharpening my mind at all, would I? Unless you're not interested in also sharpening your mind, I would imagine you wouldn't want this to devolve into a reactionary circlejerk?
I'd buy it. But I'd also push-back that it was a one-way street and that conservatives had no agency in the matter. It's almost as if it would be convenient that academic institutions were one day able to be simply "deleted" for wrong-think.
The situation seems to model as a cooperate/defect situation. Leftists were able to gain a foothold precisely because enough of the old guard were swayed by arguments about academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas. And enough of those leftists do not return that consideration that they were able to slowly grind out their outgroup.
We've seen the same dynamic play out in a thousand venues, from forums to corporations.
And we were warned! The usual formulation nowadays is from 1976's Children of Dune
but the sentiment goes back to at least 1843,
-- Thomas Babington MacCauley.
The MacCauley quote is, I think, a better representation of the woke position.
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That's like praising the Mafia for running a lot of great Italian restaurants when nobody else is. The reason that nobody else is running Italian restaurants is that the Mafia won't let them, not that the Mafia is particularly good at running restaurants.
You don't get credit for doing X when your rivals didn't, if the reason your rivals didn't is that you didn't let them do much of anythng at all.
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The crux of my argument without getting too far into the weeds about politicization of the sciences and "expert consensus" is that "the most advanced technological society in history, with the deepest understanding of the physical universe to-date" has delivered us a significant population of elites and voters who cannot define what a woman is.
Epistemic collapse is my threat model.
Genuinely, I am here to get into the weeds so I would love to hear the line drawn between "cannot define what a woman is" and "epistemic collapse", and the threat that "epistemic collapse" poses, especially since throughout scientific history we've updated words to better match the scientific consensus of the model of our universe and our existence within it. I do assume you have more evidence for epistemic collapse beyond the "definition of a woman"?
I, too, have deep antipathy towards the perverse incentives within current academic institutions, and the actors who exploit those perverse incentives. Maybe you and I actually have some common ground there?
The epistemic collapse is that if a woman can be anyone who says they're a woman then we can't know what a woman is without asking everyone what they are, and taking their answer at face value. It's not an ultimate erasure of any meaning whatsover, but it's not really much better. It doesn't produce a model of our universe, it destroys the consensus and replaces it with an idiosyncratic label. What I call X he calls Z, and what he calls Z she calls Y. At that point you effectively are unable to talk about "women" in a meaningful manner.
Beyond women, what does violence mean? What does Nazi mean? If I tell you that violent Nazis are active on a local university campus do I mean that German centenarians who were members of the NSDAP are there physically wounding people, or do I mean that somebody mocked my objections to their putting up a Trump poster? Or what if I say that Europe was rocked by Nazi violence during the 1940s? Do I mean Belgians were upset about some Hitler posters they saw, or that stormtroopers kicked their doors in and killed them while tanks rolled through en route to Paris? You'll have to ask me what I meant to be sure because a consistent meaning has collapsed and now we can't talk about violent Nazis until you do so.
This is bad for the people who pushed it too because now there's no need to become a woman when they can simply say they're a woman without any other changes, and when people hear warnings about violent Nazis we can justifiably assume they're neither violent or Nazis.
It's worse than that. Under that definition I have no idea whether I myself am a woman, or not.
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Isn't the line, in this case, a dot? The entire point being that epistemology has collapsed to the point that the world's top experts in the field of gender can no longer define a commonly used word?
We're not talking about the definition changing, let alone changing to be more in line with any kind of science (or even scientific consensus), we are talking about the definition becoming incoherent, and experts outright refusing to give an answer about what they mean by the term.
The definition has done no such thing. People who refuse to give a straight answer to the question are trying to avoid political backlash for endorsing the radical ideas which are the necessary bedrock of a coherent and non-evil definition of "woman" (perhaps because they don't believe it themselves and are trying to have it both ways); not because no such answer exists.
Some might be avoiding political backlash, but some (the majority of academics vocal on the subject, in my estimation) are true believer queer theorists. Their basic belief is that anyone can (or should be able to) identify however they want, and express themselves however they want, that's why they see any constraint beyond a person wanting to be a woman as unacceptable. This is why they have to avoid even a "social" definition of "woman", and always put forward the circular self-ID based one.
Well, yes. I am a queer theorist. (Not in the sense that I do it for a living, but this is what I was referring to as the coherent, morally-correct, but unacceptably-radical-if-you're-a-mainstream-politician position.)
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I was hoping a response would be more about the threat of epistemic collapse, rather than the certain evidence of it. But I'll bite.
The whole "what is a woman" thing is just a "gotcha" that abuses the fact that words have different meanings in different contexts. Very few words evoke a singular meaning in our minds. It's like asking "what is water"? Well, are you asking about the thing I can drink? The thing I can swim in? The chemical composition? My take is that if you asked people before the concept was politicized, very few people would spit out the answer "someone with a vagina". They would probably describe quite a few gender-coded concepts, thinking that you were asking something that had more philosophical depth than the most obvious answer. Just like when you ask me "what is water" I don't immediately go "H20, dumbass." Matt Walsh is a hack and this paragraph sums up his entire strategy.
More importantly, within our legal documents the word "water" takes many different meanings as well! Why not "woman"?
I disagree, there's no gotcha. This is literally a case where the group that refuses to give a non-circular definition does so, because they don't want to constrain the category. They will not give a biological definition, because they want to allow for transition, but they will not give a social definition either, because that means being a woman requires imposing a certain set of social expectations and that would contradict their ideology as well.
Their only option is to not give a definition at all, which is what they're doing. I think your explanation is incapable of explaining this behavior, so I don't think it's correct.
I don't think so, but even if you're right, that's a strictly superior situation to the one we're in right now.
Well, I'd say it's pretty obvious. If you can't tell the difference between your dog and your chair, you might sit on your dog, and take your chair out for a walk, which is exactly what we're seeing with things like male rapists being sent to women's prisons.
See that's the line I'm interested in. How do we go from "gender and sex are different concepts, and woman is attached to gender, not sex" to "Whoops I sat on my dog because I can't tell the difference between a chair and a dog?" That's the bailey and:
this is the motte. It's a real problem that I can't argue against. Why can't we update our institutions to be sensitive to the rights of inmates in general? Why does it take a "male rapist" being sent to a "women's prison" for us to give a shit?
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No, it's a "gotcha" that uses the fact that the people "got" are using the word in a very non-standard way. Human beings are divided (not quite perfectly, but more perfectly than most things in biology) into two sexes and the term "woman" refers to a large subset of the individuals of one of those sexes. Those being "got" do not agree to that and so are stuck.
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