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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   32735 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025

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Apparently Trump admin is demanding that Japanese Phd student, father of five kids leave the country in 15 days for speeding and catch-and-release fishing without a license?

Crayk [-his lawyer] said he’s learned through court filings that the government is using AI technology to locate any criminal activity amongst student visa holders and revoke their visas. He said this is being done without human cross-references.

Sounds ominous.

Maybe immigration authorities have racial quotas to fill so as not to look prejudiced or something?

Three adverse law-enforcement encounters over the course of one’s college career is not a particularly good record. I’m sure the decision was made that we have too many foreign students in the country (honestly a completely reasonable opinion if you’ve ever spent a significant amount of time on a major university campus), and they decided to revoke the visas of the xx% least law-abiding F1 holders.

(honestly a completely reasonable opinion if you’ve ever spent a significant amount of time on a major university campus)

...why?

The fact that the US attracts a ton of foreign talent is a feature, as is the fact that many of these students bring money into the country. The national security pretext is largely irrelevant (we're mostly talking about undergrads and it's not especially difficult to vet or just exclude foreign nationals when dealing with genuinely sensitive research).

It’s largely aesthetic reasons, but grad-student TAs who speak unintelligible English are a well-known and yet unaddressed practical problem.

It is alienating and subconsciously hostile to one’s innate sense of community when the prevalence of myriad exotic accents reaches a certain level.

Also, the Chinese nationals are totally spies for the PRC. It’s fine if you’re not a China hawk (I’m not either), but it’s obviously happening.

Hopefully this tech will become portable soon enough that anyone can just take out their smartphones and pop in their earbuds to get around the issue. https://x.com/shweta_ai/status/1912536464333893947?t=45an09jJZmFgYosbqbajog&s=19

At least from personal experience, I suspect it's unaddressed because it's an incredibly minor problem.

It is alienating and subconsciously hostile to one’s innate sense of community when the prevalence of myriad exotic accents reaches a certain level.

Speak for yourself. I truly do not get the visceral disgust people experience from hearing other accents or languages.

Also, the Chinese nationals are totally spies for the PRC.

Really? All of them?

See, I am a China Hawk, and I think it is absolutely braindead not to siphon off every bit of human capital from them we can. The risk of the occasional PRC spy pales in comparison. You don't have to give them jobs designing ICBMs.

Speak for yourself. I truly do not get the visceral disgust people experience from hearing other accents or languages.

When those accents are Saxon, Bavarian, Swiss, Austrian or possibly even the rare breed known as French, fine. I can live with that.

But migrantisch pisses me off. Doubly so when ethnic Germans adopt it, but let's skip that case for now. It highlights that those people are not part of the same community but in fact either of a different parallel one or of none at all. Either way they can't be fully trusted.

And that's for accents. Foreign languages are tourists at best, but all that arabic, turkish and russian isn't tourism but a full-blown fifth column of opportunistic parasites who couldn't give less of a shit about this place if they can't even be assed to speak the local language. Trust or a feeling of community aren't even a factor at this point; this is migration warfare the way the Völkerwanderung or the colonisation of the Americas was. We may be at the turkey-eating stage right now, but if those Pilgrims don't stop speaking English soon, then I think I know where we're headed.

See, I am a China Hawk, and I think it is absolutely braindead not to siphon off every bit of human capital from them we can.

The question is, do they stay siphoned? They may not necessarily have loyalty to the state, but they have a sort of loyalty to the land and the people that said state controls, and they also may have family that can be leveraged to achieve whatever goals the state dreams up.

I suspect it's unaddressed because it's an incredibly minor problem.

Really? What major were you? Because having an utterly worthless TA for 90% of my math and programming courses was brutal. The few that did have a native American TA were lightyears different.

I am a China Hawk, and I think it is absolutely braindead not to siphon off every bit of human capital

Really? The number of Chinese students we retain is awful (under 50%, sources are all wildly different) and has been dropping continuously since 2004. We're not siphoning human capital at all! We're building it up in exchange for full-tuition cash and cheap bodies to fill TA positions!

Really? What major were you?

Math for undergrad, stats for grad school. Had a Chinese professor who was pretty terrible, but I also had several other Chinese and Korean professors who were totally fine and a number of American professors who were also pretty bad.

The TAs were always fine, even the ones who weren't native English speakers.

The number of Chinese students we retain is awful (under 50%, sources are all wildly different)

Probably because we don't try very hard.

Speak for yourself. I truly do not get the visceral disgust people experience from hearing other accents or languages.

It's not aimless disgust. It's frustration. Thick accents make communication difficult. They add friction to every aspect of an interaction. I don't dislike foreign-born doctors because I just think they're icky for no reason because I'm vanilla and lame. I dislike them because I have to strain every scrap of my ability to parse what the hell they're saying, and a misunderstanding might actually be a very big deal.

Imagine spending a few hours providing customer service for Karens who speak English at a roughly kindergarten level. Imagine spending fifteen minutes and using multiple devices with translators, to try to explain the difference between a square and a circle to a woman who just looks at you sadly, says "No comprendo...", and then goes back to asking for a square circle.

Also, the Chinese nationals are totally spies for the PRC. It’s fine if you’re not a China hawk (I’m not either), but it’s obviously happening.

Could you please provide evidence in proportion to how inflammatory this claim is? (I am more of a China hawk than many, but I'm also an unsupported-claims hawk.)

Also, the Chinese nationals are totally spies for the PRC. It’s fine if you’re not a China hawk (I’m not either), but it’s obviously happening.

This guy is not Chinese though, so this is a total non-sequitur for this case.

It’s largely aesthetic reasons, but grad-student TAs who speak unintelligible English are a well-known and yet unaddressed practical problem.

Professors, too. I once bombed a midterm in an otherwise easy A math class because the professor asked the literal exact opposite of what he thought he was asking for a major section of the exam. Apparently he noted nothing amiss when all the best students got 100% of the questions in that section wrong.

The Canadian reddit posts about "should I be upset all my grad seminars are in hindi?" are a real eye opener about how much worse things can get.
We already have the perfect counter-example to people going "woah, why do you even care bro, how does this affect you personally, seems kinda sus, I don't care about hearing funny accents and eating nummy ethnic food, you must be racist"

Maybe worry about too many foreign academics after you deal with millions of illegal immigrants first?

Three adverse law-enforcement encounters over the course of one’s college career is not a particularly good record.

I think you're using legalese to try and make an impression that this guy's record is much worse than it actually is. I remember when the liberals were twisting themselves into pretzels to describe Rittenhouse's act of self-defense as "crossing state lines with an assault weapon" – technically correct, but completely unhelpful and deliberately misleading.

Describing a citation for violating fishing regulations (that was later dismissed in court) and two speeding tickets over the course of 5+ years of being in the country as "three adverse law-enforcement encounters" is not a good-faith way to summarize this guy's record (which does not seem to merit kicking a random PhD student out of the country).

Maybe the cops in Utah are different, but speeding and fishing without a license are both incredibly low catch-rate offenses. There are hundreds, if not thousands of individual offenses for every recorded encounter. You have to commit a lot of minor infractions to get caught three times.

Is this an attempt to mount an argument that speeding tickets in 5 years is a very good reason? There's no amount of lipstick you can put on this pig!

I visited Utah once and drove three miles per hour over the speed limit on the freeway and got pulled over (no ticket though).

No idea about the catch rate, but when I attended my local district court in Middle of Nowhere, San Diego County (for my law merit badge in boy scouts) every single case was either speeding or fishing without a license.

More effort than this, please.

In similar vein:

Two German teens get treated like hardened criminals by Customs and Border Protection.

Their experience was described as shocking and surreal, according to the outlet, after they were strip searched, had full body scans, and were handed green prison uniforms.

Conditions in the facility were said to have left them sleeping on moldy mattresses, rudimentary toilet facilities, and being warned by guards to avoid eating expired food.

The following morning, the young travelers were taken back to Honolulu airport and deported.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14630155/reason-two-hawaii-tourists-jailed-deported.html

These stories are worthless without including the base rate of these types of incidents under previous administrations.

Visa reinstated

Either he's actually done something worse than that, or the government erroneously thinks he has, or the government is deporting people over chickenshit (note the fishing violation was dismissed with prejudice; it was not a conviction). His lawyer has filed for a restraining order so he should find out which. Speeding isn't a crime involving moral turpitude, so it shouldn't make him deportable unless he was driving so fast it was a felony.

https://floridaphoenix.com/2025/04/17/u-s-born-man-held-for-ice-under-floridas-new-anti-immigration-law/

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/us-born-citizen-detained-ice-immigration-florida-rcna201800

A Florida State Trooper claimed a natural born citizen admitted to entering the country illegally. Thankfully, his family was able to prove his citizenship to a state judge. Unfortunately, ICE requested Florida keep him in custody, for an as-yet not-public reason, and Florida has done so, despite the citizen not being charged with any state crime, other than an unenforceable statute against illegal immigrants entering Florida, of which he was already proven innocent, even if it were enforceable. He was later released, thankfully.

Any data on the rate of these sorts of things happening, in the past? Should or shouldn't this be worrying and why?

One of the problems with judges is that there is no accountability for legislating from the bench unless extremists are in power. Under moderates or even principled radicals, judges can be impeached for personal misconduct, but not for bad rulings that run contrary to the basic desires of most people. This inevitably drives radicalization.

For several decades, in both North America and Europe, judges have ruled on immigration cases in ways that fundamentally violate the popular will, and have unjustifiably prevented the deportation of people that most citizens did not and do not want to share their countries with. Unlike politicians, the people cannot really even try to remove judges, because while some are technically political appointees, the ‘profession’ has largely wrangled the ability to regulate itself away from legislatures in both spirit and practice.

The historical Anglo-Saxon judicial tradition upon which the Common Law is based always afforded judges the right, and indeed in many cases implicitly obligated them, to respect the people’s will. If a crowd of people clamor outside the courthouse for a man’s innocence or guilt, judges were and should be swayed by it. For millennia, and to the great detriment of the Jewish people, Christians blamed the Jews (the civilians) and not Pilate, who ultimately sentenced Christ, for his execution. Less (although sometimes not much less) controversially, there are countless cases in the English legal tradition in which judges heeded the popular call for a specific kind of justice.

I don’t want to live in an unaccountable dictatorship, in the Chinese legal system in which lawyers are either set dressing, fixers or enemies of the state or powerful officials with a very short career and freedom expectancy. But that is inevitable in the West unless judges use their verbal ability to sense the way the wind is blowing on immigration and start giving the people what they have so often and so politely requested.

The historical Anglo-Saxon judicial tradition upon which the Common Law is based always afforded judges the right, and indeed in many cases implicitly obligated them, to respect the people’s will.

They are required to respect the people's will as enacted by the legislature, not the people's will as reported in a pew opinion poll or an online forum.

If a crowd of people clamor outside the courthouse for a man’s innocence or guilt, judges were and should be swayed by it.

Oh, we tried the will of the people thing in Germany. The legal phrase was gesundes Volksempfinden (the healthy moral sentiment of the people).

"Punished is he who commits an act which is made punishable by the law or which according to the rationale of the criminal code and the healthy moral sentiment of the people deserves to be punished".

It closed all the loopholes with minimal legislative effort. Of course, it also really lowered our ranking with regard to rule of law, so we were persuaded to give it up.

A judge should apply the laws, not bent them to what he perceives as the will of the people. If the outcome of a trial depends on whether there are demonstrators outside rooting for a conviction or an acquittal, then we can safe a ton of court costs and just let the mobs with their nooses run the show instead. (The popular sentiment will certainly influence the jury, but even there -- with the contested exception of jury nullification -- the task of the jury is to reach a verdict based on the evidence, not popularity. Arguing that someone is a terrible person and should be punished no matter if he did the act he is accused of is not how things should be done.)

If the framers of the constitution had wanted the judges to just follow the way the wind is blowing from the Trump administration with regard to immigration, they could just have given the president the right to replace any and all federal judges whenever he felt like it. They did not, and I do not think that was an oversight on their part.

Do you mean that the court of public opinion could de jure influence outcomes in the court of law?

For several decades, in both North America and Europe, judges have ruled on immigration cases in ways that fundamentally violate the popular will, and have unjustifiably prevented the deportation of people that most citizens did not and do not want to share their countries with. Unlike politicians, the people cannot really even try to remove judges, because while some are technically political appointees, the ‘profession’ has largely wrangled the ability to regulate itself away from legislatures in both spirit and practice.

Can you be more specific? In the USA, immigration courts handling individual cases are "administrative courts," within the Executive, so the judges can be changed with each administration. "Article III" Senate-confirmed, appointed-for-life judges rule on applicable statutory and constitutional questions.

The problem is not with these immigration “judges”, but with actual Article III judges like Boasberg or Xinis, who override the determinations of Article II examiners at will, making it effectively impossible to enforce law at scale. If every illegal gets Article III judiciary proceedings before finally getting removed, we will never be able to actually enforce the law. Imagine if military had to get a court decision before being able to kill an invading soldier.

like Boasberg or Xinis, who override the determinations of Article II examiners at will, making it effectively impossible to enforce law at scale

What in the world are you talking about? In the Garcia case (that's in front of Xinis), it was the Article II examiner (in 2019, under Trump!) that signed the order withholding removal.

I really don't comprehend how you character this as overriding that determination. If anything, Boasberg is doing the polar opposite -- enforcing it.

Boasberg doesn’t have anything to do with Garcia

Ya mixed them up. Fixed.

The problem is not with the withholding order. The problem is that apparently everyone expects infinite process before you’re actually able to execute any removal.

In the Garcia case, the government made a mistake by not complying with that withholding offer (I’ll assume that it was indeed a mistake, and not deliberate flouting of the order, because otherwise the below argument doesn’t apply). Liberals, moderates, and centrists seem to believe that the outcome at hand means that the Garcia’s right to due process was not met, and district and some appellate judges seem to believe that too. There is an implication here that if Garcia’s due process rights were met, he would not have been deported to El Salvador. This is not so. There is no amount of due process that will prevent government from ever making mistakes of this sort, and excessive efforts of judiciary and activists using the judiciary to prevent mistakes meaningfully detract from the Executive’s ability to execute its core function.

The simple fact is that there is absolutely no existing process that could have prevented this mistake. Garcia had final, confirmed on appeal order to be removed. He had no further ability to appeal it. If the government removed him to a different country, that would have been it. This is how the process works, not just in immigration, but in every case.

For example, imagine you’re a tenant who stopped paying rent. Landlord goes through legal process to get you evicted, you appeal, but since you’re clearly in the wrong, ultimately you get a final eviction order. Accordingly, you get a notice from sheriff’s office that you’ll get evicted on May 1st, approved by court. However, on April 30th, the sheriff looks at the calendar wrong, and thinks that your eviction date is today, and evicts you. A clear mistake, in violation of court order to remove you on May 1st. However, is it a violation of your due process? No, there was absolutely no judicial process that you were not given access to, that would have prevented your too early eviction. What is the legal remedy that you should be accorded after the fact? I actually don’t know. I would actually be fine with no remedy or damages at all: the government does extremely detrimental things to people all the time that have no remedy whatsoever, the sovereign/qualified immunity and all that, but if you insisted on some damages, I’d accept the sheriff reimbursing you for any actual cost caused by too early eviction, like eg. one night hotel stay.

Now, imagine a judge ordering the sheriff to kick the landlord out of the freshly vacated home, and effectuate your return to the home that you were about to get evicted from anyway. It just so happens that you were also a wanted fugitive on federal charges, and as you were getting evicted by state officers, federal officers use the opportunity to arrest you and throw you in federal prison. The judge then require the state sheriff to somehow “facilitate” your release from federal prison, without specifying in any way whatsoever as to how exactly you are supposed to do it, or what that even means. Lastly, it issues a statewide injunction on any evictions unless you get one more hearing after final (already appealed) eviction order, with another ability to appeal the outcome of that hearing, to prevent additional future eviction mistakes.

Most people would see this as a mockery of justice, an excessive concern for the rights of someone who is clearly in the wrong, and meaningful making it even more difficult for people who are in the right to have their rights enforced. And yet, here we are.

In the Garcia case, the government made a mistake by not complying with that withholding. There is an implication here that if Garcia’s due process rights were met, he would not have been deported to El Salvador.

That's not true, there was certainly a way to meet his rights and still deport him to ES. At the very least, the executive ought to dissolve its own order.

There is no amount of due process that will prevent government from ever making mistakes of this sort

Seriously? There is no amount of due process that will prevent the government from not following its own orders?

I feel like "there is a reliable central database run by a group half as competent as the dude responsible for delivering burritos" isn't even an amount of due process, it's a basic measure of government competence.

and excessive efforts of judiciary and activists using the judiciary to prevent mistakes meaningfully detract from the Executive’s ability to execute its core function.

I'm not sure a case about the judiciary restraining a dysfunctional government is really meaningfully detracting the government from getting its shit together. If anything, a kick in the ass might actually help them realize that in order to execute their core function, they first need to achieve operational competence.

At the very least, the executive ought to dissolve its own order.

No, because they were not aware of that order. They should have, but they weren’t. That’s why it was a mistake. If they were aware of this this order, they would have either followed it and deported him elsewhere, or seeked dissolution before deporting him to El Salvador. Your retort only makes sense under assumption that they knew about the order but chose to ignore it nevertheless. In my previous post I explicitly assumed this to not be the case, and said that if it was the case, then the situation and the analysis is completely different.

There is no amount of due process that will prevent the government from not following its own orders?

Yes, exactly, because after following all the due legal process, someone can still make a mistake. Think about my example of sheriff looking at the calendar wrong. I’m not saying that what they did was right. It was wrong. However, it was not a wrong that could have been prevented by scheduled due process.

I feel like "there is a reliable central database run by a group half as competent as the dude responsible for delivering burritos" isn't even an amount of due process, it's a basic measure of government competence.

I actually think that the US government does not have nearly enough databases of its citizens and present non-citizens, but yes, I fully agree that what happened here was incompetence. The point is, incompetence will occasionally happen, due process cannot and will not prevent all incompetence-induced errors, and it is not possible to prevent every case of incompetence before the fact with some pre-defined process without significantly compromising effectiveness in executing basic functions.

If anything, a kick in the ass might actually help them realize that in order to execute their core function, they first need to achieve operational competence.

Maybe, but I suspect that what happened here is that they wanted to actually execute their core function before activist judges tarpit them, and rushed things so much that they missed an order that someone failed to input properly into database back in 2019, or something like that. This is not meant to imply that they didn’t do anything wrong, it’s just operating in hostile legal environment will cause mistake rate to be higher.

I think we agree on a number of things: this was incompetence and that due legal process will not prevent all incompetence-based errors.

I think where we disagree is that this particular error was incompetence of such degree as to be a violation of due process (all but conceded by the government anyway) and that violations of this kind (ignorance of a duly entered legal order that they had a legal duty to know about) are the kind of things that can be prevented. One doesn't need to think that every error can be prevented to believe that such a glaringly obvious one can be.

Maybe, but I suspect that what happened here is that they wanted to actually execute their core function before activist judges tarpit them, and rushed things so much that they missed an order that someone failed to input properly into database back in 2019, or something like that. This is not meant to imply that they didn’t do anything wrong, it’s just operating in hostile legal environment will cause mistake rate to be higher.

I think they are quickly going to learn that this strategy. And the sooner they internalize that if they don't do so, they are going to be restrained from doing anything, the sooner that lesson gets passed up the chain that if their leadership wants anything done, they better do it properly.

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Most people would see this as a mockery of justice, an excessive concern for the rights of someone who is clearly in the wrong, and meaningful making it even more difficult for people who are in the right to have their rights enforced.

What bearing does being "in the wrong" have on a persons rights? How does what's happening in the Garcia case make it more difficult for people who are in the right to have their rights enforced?

Americans are in the right to want to deport tens of millions of illegals, and excessive concern for the rights of illegals make it meaningfully more difficult to enforce the right to remove them.

Americans are in the right to want to deport tens of millions of illegals

I'm one of them!

and excessive concern for the rights of illegals make it meaningfully more difficult to enforce the right to remove them.

Who are you to say my concern is excessive?

Christians blamed the Jews (the civilians) and not Pilate, who ultimately sentenced Christ, for his execution.

Because the New Testament correctly attributes the cause of Jesus’ death to the Jews who instigated His crucifixion. The Romans were the useful golem who achieved the Pharisees’ ends; the Roman provincial leadership were never much interested in what they perceived as internal Jewish squabbling over another potential Messiah. To wit, from 1 Thessalonians 2:14-15.

“For you, brothers, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea. For you suffered the same things from your own countrymen as they did from the Jews, who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out, and displease God and oppose all mankind…”

I’m not really interested in arguing over who was to blame for the death of Jesus. Clearly It was obviously extraordinarily historically convenient for the later extremely successful proselytizing of the religion to Roman elites that the singular Roman elite who factually ordered the death of and chose the method of execution of (and had the power to spare) Jesus was absolved of all responsibility and even venerated by many early (and some current) Christians, but that is not an argument in and of itself.

Not a theologian, but the whole conversation strikes me as Big Dum. How is Jesus supposed to die for our sins, if he does not, in fact, die? If anything the Jews should be seen as the same kind of useful golem to Gods grand plan that he says the Pilate was.

He had to suffer, but not through you.

He had to be dishonored, but not by you.

He had to be judged, but not by you.

He had to be hung up, but not by you and by your right hand.

Melito of Sardis, "On Pascha," writing sometime between 120-160.

It's important to remember that Christianity rejects Consequentialism - even if God can bring good from evil, it's still bad to be the one whose hands are in the cookie jar. It was God's role to save, not humanity's role to pin Him down into a specific method of salvation.

Yes, but what I was taught was that what killed him was our sins (I'll take a guess that this is what is meant by "by you" here), not the specific actions of the Pilate, the Pharisees, or the population of Jerusalem.

Specifically here, Melito is explicitly talking about Jews. There may be some devotional aspect intended, that recalls to us our sins and their consequences, but look at the context:

O Israel, what have you done?

Is it not written for you: "You shall not spill innocent blood"

so that you might not die the death of the wicked?

"I" said Israel. "I killed the Lord."

Why? "Because he had to die"

You have erred, O Israel, to reason so

about the slaughter of the Lord.

He had to suffer, but not through you.

He had to be dishonored, but not by you.

He had to be judged, but not by you.

He had to be hung up, but not by you and by your right hand.

This, O Israel, is the cry with which you should have called to God:

"O master, if your son should suffer,

and this is your will,

let him suffer indeed, but not by me.

Let him suffer through foreigners,

let him be judged by the uncircumcised,

let him be nailed in place by a tyrannical right hand,

not mine."

I think the point of Jesus’ death is that he was killed by the legal leaders, religious leaders, and the general public. It wasnt one party but the whole.

I think it's fair to blame some Jews (not even all Jews) of the first century for Jesus' death. The real error that Christians made was a) blaming all Jews for this, and b) transferring that guilt onto their descendants. No crime is so monstrous that an entire race of people should carry that guilt. There were plenty of Jews even at the time who were innocent of the crime (for example, Mary, all the apostles minus Judas, etc), let alone their descendants centuries later.

The gospels are very clear that guilt for the déicide transfers to the unconverted descendants of the Jews(that’s what ‘orémus pro perfideis Judaeaorum…’ actually means).

transferring that guilt onto their descendants

If the New Testament is to be believed (and I believe it) the Jews that killed Christ willingly chose to transfer that guilt to their descendants (inasmuch as such a thing is actually metaphysically possible I suppose, but I'm not here to debate Original Sin):

"And all the people answered and said, 'His blood be on us and on our children.'"

Matthew 27:25

The clear and uncontested facts are that a US district judge enjoined Florida (specifically the AGs of Florida) from enforcing 811.102, yet this person was arrested (Case #2025 MM 000739 A001) under 811.102. This clearly seems contradictory, yet it still happened.

Let's delve into what might happen in this case. Let's say that Florida (or more specifically Florida officials) just want to YOLO disobey the order. Ex parte Young says that any state officials who disobey the order can be held in contempt of court, which could result in an unpleasant visit by a bunch of federal agents. So it's probably safe to say that none of the defendants are going to disobey this order, unless they have the balls to try to overturn Ex parte Young.

But maybe the defendants aren't right in this case. I looked at the complaint in courtlistener: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.686918/gov.uscourts.flsd.686918.1.0.pdf and it only lists the AGs in Florida. This seems to be the general procedure for this kind of suit, and it's consistent with other suits filed challenging criminal law in other states. (Checking some other constitutional challenge cases, some name the police as defendants, but others don't. Not sure exactly when it's warranted) But I wonder if there is a loophole, since it doesn't actually apply to any of the cops involved in the process, and it doesn't seem like the police organ of the state is under the AG umbrella. So that means maybe that cops can freely arrest people for violations of 811.102 at will.

Of course in general cops won't want to arrest and jail people who won't ever have charges filed. This is partially why criminals are allowed to run free by the cops in districts with Soros prosecutors, because the police feel it's futile to arrest people who will just be released immediately. But that doesn't mean the cops can't arrest them, they just generally won't. But maybe in this case since they can just hand the illegals over to a cooperative ICE as soon as charges aren't filed, so it's still a happy ending.

If this is indeed the case, then the entire thing is simply the result of a technicality. The plaintiffs will have to amend their case to add the proper police officials, serve a bunch of people, and ask for another TRO. But again if that's the case, this loophole only works once, as plaintiffs in the future will need to remember to add the extra defendants in future suits.

Which specific officials or entities get sued depends on what claims the plaintiffs are making and what relief they're seeking. Basically, who is responsible for the bad act you're challenging, and who is capable of giving you the relief you seek. Here, the plaintiffs are making what's called a facial claim, meaning they are challenging the constitutionality of the statute "on its face." They're claiming it's inherently unconstitutional in all possible applications. They therefore only need to sue the state-level officials, as the actions of individual officers are almost irrelevant. By contrast, an "as-applied" challenge merely claims that a particular application of a law is unconstitutional (e.g., a police search conducted without a warrant), not the underlying law itself. In that case, you would sue the individual officers responsible since they're the ones who acted in error.

Even so, the AG has no power over the police in general. So at least at this phase of the litigation, it would seem that the TRO would only affect the defendants of the lawsuit, which would include the AG and anyone under their control.

That's not how it works. First, the police do not have the authority to enforce the law, strictly speaking. Their job is to investigate crimes and provide evidence to the local prosecutors, who are the ones actually in charge of enforcing the laws; no matter how good a case he thinks he has, a cop can't force prosecution if the DA drops the charges. That out of the way, there are some practical reasons why the AG is the defendant in these kinds of cases. While the AG generally doesn't have any supervisory authority over local prosecutor offices, they are still officially responsible for enforcement of the laws in the state. When a plaintiff mounts a facial challenge to a law, the state invariably takes a position on that challenge. If instead you require suits against 67 county prosecutors you get 67 different positions depending on what the DA thinks, and none of those positions may be in accordance with what the government thinks. Similarly, if your guy is in rural Bubb County and out of expedience you only sue the Bubb County prosecutor now you have some rural, part-time prosecutor charged with taking a position on a law that could affect the entire state going forward. If you change the procedure so that the court ruling can only affect Bubb County, then you wind up with a situation where you have a law that ostensibly applies in the entire state but has 67 different meanings depending on what county you're in. Having the AG stand in as defendant allows the Florida government to argue a position on how Florida law should be interpreted.

This suit is actually against 69 different county prosecutors, so your logic is flawed. Check the linked pdf in my top comment.

Press is working overtime to turn the public against deportations. It’s giving “kids in cages” narrative-crafting energy to me, it’s amazing how quickly people forget this stuff

Basically every state that I know of has statutory holding periods for crimes that the officer merely has probable cause on, but not enough evidence to charge yet. 48 hrs is very standard for this time period. By way of example, imagine you are drinking in a bar and are hammered, a car driven by another guy who is also drunk off his ass speeds into a red light right in front of you, T-Boning a car and killing all 4 occupants. The driver of this car flees his vehicle and tosses you the keys. You are too drunk to know what is going on and start walking home with them. Police arrest you a few blocks away, you being the drunk guy with the keys.

Of course you are going to be held even though you are innocent. The police dont know you are innocent yet, and you are a very good suspect. This is why most states have a 48 hr charging clock. Some have longer, but few as far as I know. Solving crime takes time. Fleeing the cops when you know you are a suspect does not.

Oddly, in this case, the police UNSOLVED a crime, despite an admission from defendant in 48 hours. That is crazy good police work! Imagine if a pedophile admitted to raping a child in a taped interview and police, on their own accord, went out and grabbed surveillance video from a hospital showing he was not at the rape location. Unheard of.

What was the crime? Florida's statute was ruled unenforceable, according to both articles. What was the probable cause? If someone with very poor English skills admits to a crime, when directly asked by LEO, isn't them having misunderstood the question more probable than them providing facts?

Florida's statute was ruled unenforceable, according to both articles.

This is false. There is a temporary restraining order (TRO) blocking Florida from enforcing the statute, but no ruling or judgement was made on the merits of the case.

Not at all. Cops don't just learn facts from the air. They run background checks which take time to run, and are, frankly, difficult to read.

A person who not only doesn't speak English, but doesn't speak a language that a police station is likely to have an available translator for is going to have a long interaction just because a lot of that time is going to be finding a translator

If he needed a translator, doesn't that cast further doubt on the claim by the arresting officer "who wrote in his report that Lopez-Gomez said he was in the country illegally" that the interaction indicated Lopez-Gomez was confessing to a crime?

But doesn’t that cast further doubt on the suspect?

Everyone legally in the country being fluent in the lingua franca would be nice, but not speaking the lingua franca is not evidence of being in the country illegally.

It isn’t dispositive but it is evidence

Have you ever tried to have a conversation with someone who has little-to-no English language skills about something? It's entirely possible the dude repeated a combination of sounds back at the officer without really understanding what he was saying. Or that he was knowingly admitting to skipping border checkpoints.

It's entirely possible the dude repeated a combination of sounds back at the officer without really understanding what he was saying.

That's my point.

I mean, if we were introducing that "confession" as evidence at a trial, you may have a point. What actually was happening when he was being held was he was in custody pending an investigation. This guys statements were basically the jumping off point for the investigation which eventually revealed he was a US citizen by birth. Its not like the police would have had that information available on a street corner when they were probably having trouble getting enough information on him to even run a proper criminal background check.

It's entirely possible the dude repeated a combination of sounds back at the officer without really understanding what he was saying

To quote My Cousin Vinny, "I shot the clerk!?"

  • The guy was born here, but left the US as an infant
  • It's highly probable that he did not have a passport or else they'd have mentioned it, so it's very likely he returned to the US through illegal means and not at a lawful port of entry.
  • He did not speak English.
  • He was arrested with two other likely illegal immigrants from Mexico.
  • He was held but released after his citizenship was verified.

If anything this proves the system is favorable to people like him, or at least working as intended.

It's highly probable that he did not have a passport or else they'd have mentioned it, so it's very likely he returned to the US through illegal means and not at a lawful port of entry.

Florida's statute was ruled unenforceable, according to both articles. ICE should have flagged him at the border, but asking Florida to continue holding him solves nothing.

Florida's statute was ruled unenforceable, according to both articles.

This is false. There is a temporary restraining order (TRO) blocking Florida from enforcing the statute, but no ruling or judgement was made on the merits of the case.

I was hastily imprecise, but, for the duration of the TRO, I think it is reasonable to say that a TRO is a subtype of "ruled unenforceable" and/or that a TRO vs a ruling on the merits is a distinction without a difference, in discussing an applicable case.

The distinction is actually quite important. At this point in litigation, the law is still on the books and fully valid and enforceable. The only obligation coming from the court order applies to the defendants, and they are temporarily restrained from enforcing this law. Anyone else involved in the legal process in unaffected.

In this sort of suit, assuming things go in favor of the plaintiffs, the judge will generally also enter declaratory relief if requested, which sets precedent that the law is unconstitutional according to US courts. At that point, police trying to enforce the law need to start watching their backs, because enforcing a clearly unconstitutional law can be considered a wrongful arrest.

But at this point the court, from a legal perspective, is still leaving it open as to whether or not the law is unconstitutional. So the QI shield on the officers will likely not be broken. And as non-parties to the lawsuit, the police have no worries of being held in contempt.

How does that apply to the individuals in this case?

They can cite the TRO as persuasive authority when arguing their case charges should be dismissed. Not having read it, I don't have any conclusions as to the coherence of the judges ruling on the TRO.

So, are we inferring he's an anchor baby all grown up? That his noncitizen mother came here for a short span of time to have him, and then left?

Look, I understand the current legal framework that makes this foreign national a "citizen" on paper. Justify it to me though, morally or philosophically. What makes him a part of the same polity as me? Is this the sort of person we want eligible to become President one day? Is he, and those like him, going to craft and enforce government policy against me one day?

Well... more than they already have...

All I see is a legal tangle of obviously immoral and nation destroying nonsense, where all the viable solutions are extralegal.

I don't see any legal tangle, it is pretty clear that he is an american citizen. He even seems to be gainfully employed in the construction industry. Will he become President? That's a long shot, but not grounds for taking preemptive 'extralegal' actions against him. (What a darling you are.)

Yes I think blanket birthright citizenship is a mistake and we should at the very least repeal it for those whose parents came here illegally.

So, are we inferring he's an anchor baby all grown up? That his noncitizen mother came here for a short span of time to have him, and then left?

We don't need to infer it, various articles state it outright.

ICE likely requested Florida keep him in custody because Florida told them "Hey, we got a guy here who doesn't speak English, who we found in a car with a guy driving with no license". At least by Federal law, the judge was wrong when she said she could do nothing; non-commandeering means an ICE detainer is a request, one which would be overruled by the order of a judge.

Under anti-comandeering, the state has no legal obligation to the federal government to honor the detainer. But a state may have its own laws governing how it wants to cooperate with ICE. Delving into google gives this result: http://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&Search_String=&URL=0900-0999/0908/Sections/0908.105.html

Upon determining that the immigration detainer is in accordance with s. 908.102(2), comply with the requests made in the immigration detainer.

For purposes of this subsection, an immigration detainer is deemed facially sufficient if: (a) The federal immigration agency’s official form is complete and indicates on its face that the federal immigration official has probable cause to believe that the person to be detained is a removable alien under federal immigration law; or

So it appears that under Florida statute, state officials are required to honor all valid ICE detainers, meaning that the judge has no legal power to release the person unless he has an argument that the statute or his detention are actually unconstitutional.

908.105(1) and (2) bind law enforcement, not the Florida judiciary. 908.104(2) would bind the judge with respect to "with respect to information regarding a person’s immigration status", except that the information the judge had is "this person is a US citizen". So as far as I can tell, a judge knowing a person is a US citizen can order his release, but that does put law enforcement in a double-bind (follow the statute or follow the judge's order).

The judge cannot (or at least isn’t supposed to) order anyone to disobey the law. Judges are supposed to say what the law is. So if the judge were to find that 908.105 is unconstitutional when applied to a U.S. citizen, or that the legislature didn’t intend section 908.105 to apply to U.S. citizens, the judge could order the U.S. citizen to be released.

I remember something like it happening once during the first Trump administration. Guy was born in Texas to a Mexican immigrant mother. Details are fuzzy, but the gist was that the mother was playing games with the son's citizenship status when he was little to make it easier to travel back and forth from Texas to Mexico and didn't actually have proof that he was an American citizen. The situation ended up getting resolved after it made the news, and a retired maternity nurse remembered the mother and scrounged up some sort of personal memento (thank you note on hospital letterhead or something) that helped confirm the guy's status.

From your first link:

The 20-year-old’s first language is Tzotzil, a Mayan language, and he took a long pause when he was asked if he wanted to hire a private attorney or obtain a public defender. He lived in Mexico from the time he was 1-year-old until four years ago, when he returned to Georgia, his mother told the Phoenix.

I wonder if there's some similar thing where even though he's a citizen, he traveled internationally in less-than legal methods.

I wonder if there's some similar thing where even though he's a citizen, he traveled internationally in less-than legal methods.

Florida's statute was ruled unenforceable, according to both articles. ICE should have flagged him at the border, but asking Florida to continue holding him solves nothing.

  • -10

Florida's statute was ruled unenforceable, according to both articles.

This is false. There is a temporary restraining order (TRO) blocking Florida from enforcing the statute, but no ruling or judgement was made on the merits of the case.

I know you are responding to a post that is identical to another and I believe it is valuable to use the same format to highlight the problem, so I don't mean to target you but I feel like I have a brain injury while reading the motte now.

If you read to the end of the linked article, he seemingly was released, except possibly for an unrelated drunk driving charge, the article gets a little vague there.

ICE should have flagged him at the border,

I'm hypothesizing that he came in the same way as his illegal friends and never stopped at a border checkpoint. I don't actually know who is responsible for dealing with a US citizen who has been hopping borders without bothering with any of that pesky visa/passport business. Google searching does seem to indicate ICE being involved in those investigations. Florida holding him for a reasonable time frame until ICE can question him about that seems like it would be germane to solving a potential visa/passport issue.

I'm hypothesizing that he came in the same way as his illegal friends and never stopped at a border checkpoint

ICE should have caught him at the border (... and then let him in), in this case.

It bothers me that I was born a citizen by blood, but my parents still had to do more paperwork to establish that than these guys who slip across the border and don't speak English.

I’m a bit unsympathetic to the idea of people claiming US citizenship when they’ve basically always lived in another country. It’s bad faith. Your mother gamed the system by giving birth in America (jackpot! US citizenship!) but then as soon as she’s medically cleared she goes home and raises the kid as (in this case) a Mexican, doesn’t pay taxes, doesn’t teach him English or about the USA. Like, he should not be a citizen as he has no actual connection to America other than his mother crossing the border specifically to give birth, and even then could not be bothered to pay for supporting documentation. Birth tourism is not something we should allow.

A criterion like 3/4's of your life spent in the US if you're under 18 and 3/4's of your childhood in the US if you're over 18 would be much better. On the other side of it, there are people whose parents moved when they were infants, are fully connected to the US and have no memory of living outside, and don't get citizenship.

I'd also say it's likely that the people who enshrined jus soli for the United States could never imagine a world where a (common) pregnant women could not only travel, but also give safely give birth in a foreign land that they were not intent on living in for the rest of their lives, or that they would even want to!

I'm curious how opposition to jus soli has evolved over time to match the world that we live in due to technological advances (e.g. maternal mortality rates).

I think it need at minimum an establishment of residence of some sort, preferably several years. If you have to live in the country legally, pay taxes, have a residences within the country, I get that. But I just cannot logically justify the idea that I could cross the border while in labor, go to the emergency room in Brownsville TX, pop out a baby, and that baby being legally American. I’m not even sure you couldn’t push this to absurdity— like if only my Uterus enters the United States and the baby comes out at the border, is that enough to satisfy jus soli or does the entire woman have to physically cross the border for the baby to be a citizen?

Imagine a pregnant woman sticking her butt through the bars in the border wall and pushing the baby out though the crack.

It a legitimate thought experiment. I mean there’s a point at which you reach absurdity and singularity and quite often can point out the problems with the idea in question. If I can basically stick my ass through a fence and pop the baby out and it’s a citizen of the country, I think the absurdity of the idea is clear. You just can’t coherently have citizenship grant rights and not have at least some form control over who gets the benefits.

Jus Soli was never intended to be enshrined for birth tourism of any kind, and 1865 isn't so long ago that those people couldn't have imagined better boats and people coming in from Mexico temporarily. There is a reason Wong Kim Ark is about the child of legal permanent residents and there is a reason the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 had to be passed to grant Indian's citizenship, and that reason is that the 14th Amendment does not contemplate expansive jus soli as currently defined. Instead, it applies to people borne her who have no other foreign allegiances, and those who have taken substantive steps to submit themselves to US Jurisdiction as subjects of the nation.

And, of course, it goes without saying that in 1865 the idea of a dual citizen would have been considered absurd by all the people involved.

should not be a citizen as he has no actual connection

It's only consistent, as the US rather aggressively applies citizenship. There's a basket industry for "accidental citizens" who first discover they're American upon receiving a 6-7 figure bill for back taxes and renouncing citizenship incurs a tax on all assets. Further, because of FATCA, they suddenly get debanked.

This seems like a non-story because Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez was released the same day as his court hearing.

Here's an article that includes timelines: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/us-born-american-citizen-ice-hold-florida-released-rcna201854

It looks like Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez was arrested on Wednesday (possibly Thursday, very early AM). He saw a judge on Thursday afternoon. He was held for a few hours after the hearing because of an ICE request, before being released on Thursday evening.

I don't want to say that an incorrect arrest is ever good; but if the cops were acting in good faith, then nothing here seems to shock the conscience. It feels like the equivalent of the police seeing someone breaking into a car at 3AM, getting an explanation of "But officer! That's my car! I just misplaced my keys!" and then releasing the person the next day when it's proven that they do - in fact - own the car.

Even the "Immigrations and Customs Enforcement" hold (which was apparently a few hours) doesn't seem that stunning. Federal law requires everyone - citizens included - to cross the border at an authorized checkpoints. So, if the police believed that Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez crossed the border illegally then ICE could want to talk to him about not complying with customs rules, even if he's a citizen.

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.

  • [1] Probably not anymore, or for much longer, now that criminal bribery has a much higher bar for proving quid pro quo.
  • [2] Here's a clickbait article about "idiots" who lose all their money: https://www.businessinsider.com/lottery-winners-lost-everything-2017-8
  • [3] As a digression, they are both Trump supporters, but I realize that's a tired dunk and hesitate to even bring it up.
  • [4] Would love to have a peek at what everyone reading this line imagined when I brought up this "protestor".
  • [5] Not every Trump supporter is a member of his cult of personality, but that cult is debatably the vanguard of his electoral success.
  • [6] I say that, and yet there are robust markets for MMR boosting just so people can lose against the best.
  • [7] Maybe it was Kursk, maybe it was El Alamein - I'm just using Stalingrad rhetorically.
  • [8] https://www.newsweek.com/china-responds-us-tariffs-245-percent-trump-trade-war-2060875

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

when liberals subjected our institutions to decades of rot

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.

What have those decades of rot delivered? The most advanced technological society in history, with the deepest understanding of the physical universe to-date?

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.

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 worse than that. Under that definition I have no idea whether I myself am a woman, or not.

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?

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

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.

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"?

The whole "what is a woman" thing is just a "gotcha" that abuses the fact that words have different meanings in different contexts.

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.

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.

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.

I was hoping a response would be more about the threat of epistemic collapse

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.

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:

is exactly what we're seeing with things like male rapists being sent to women's prisons.

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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The whole "what is a woman" thing is just a "gotcha" that abuses the fact that words have different meanings in different contexts.

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.

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 would say The Long March Through Institutions qualifies as a strategy.

Is it because people in those institutions, or that those institutions produce, are generally liberal?

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?

This is just a rephrasing of "reality has a liberal bias", the veracity of which is being tested now.

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 The Long March Through Institutions qualifies as a strategy.

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)?

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.

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 feel more strongly that the painting of universities as institutions of liberal progressive indoctrination deny entire cohorts of students their own agency in developing political beliefs

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.

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.

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.

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)?

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.

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.

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?

Prospiracy with significant conspiracy elements.

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.

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.

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

“When I am Weaker Thn You, I ask you for Freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am Stronger than you, I take away your Freedom Because that is according to my principles.”

but the sentiment goes back to at least 1843,

When you are the stronger, you ought to tolerate me, for it is your duty to tolerate truth; but when I am the stronger, I shall persecute you, for it is my duty to persecute error.

-- Thomas Babington MacCauley.

The MacCauley quote is, I think, a better representation of the woke position.

Stick around, new kid. Time in this community will thoroughly disabuse you of that notion

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.

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.

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.

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.

Are you aware that at least a majority of the people arguing right-wing views here used to be doctrinaire liberals?

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

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 would say [the Long March Through Institutions] also qualifies as a conspiracy theory.

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.

What have those decades of rot delivered? The most advanced technological society in history, with the deepest understanding of the physical universe to-date?

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.

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.

The mod log shows previous warnings, and no AAQCs.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I often think how cozy it must be to live with the child's view of politics.

Ah yes, the enlightened one. Please grace us with your superior wisdom and reasoning, that we may not err in our ways.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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

Miran covers this is in his paper, presenting his argument of China as having effectively paid for the 2018-2019 tariffs.

During his campaign, President Trump proposed to raise tariffs to 60% on China and 10% or higher on the rest of the world, and intertwined national security with international trade. Many argue that tariffs are highly inflationary and can cause significant economic and market volatility, but that need not be the case. Indeed, the 2018-2019 tariffs, a material increase in effective rates, passed with little discernible macroeconomic consequence. The dollar rose by almost the same amount as the effective tariff rate, nullifying much of the macroeconomic impact but resulting in significant revenue. Because Chinese consumers’ purchasing power declined with their weakening currency, China effectively paid for the tariff revenue. Having just seen a major escalation in tariff rates, that experience should inform analysis of future trade conflicts.

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:

Second, Cavallo et al find that the price hikes occurred for prices paid by importers, not prices sold by retailers, limiting the ability of tariffs to result in increases in consumer prices but squeezing margins. That means that for the measures of inflation commonly prioritized, like the Consumer Price Index, or the price index for Personal Consumption Expenditures, there was little consequence. That helps reconcile the micro- and macro experiences. However, it would be bizarre for economies with sufficient competition not to see importers over time restore their margins by shifting suppliers if currency weakness isn’t passed through.

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.

The military brass that have been selected for loyalty, rather than expertise

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.

Do you believe that RFK has the mental capacity to handle a human pandemic, let alone a livestock one?

I don’t know, but at least he has the mental capacity to not start one and then cover up that he started it.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I don’t know, but at least he has the mental capacity to not start one and then cover up that he started 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.

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

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.

Edit: link format

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.

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.

Okay. How about this- are you competent enough to judge competence?

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")?

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.

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.

In the space of three words you make a pejorative equivalence to... Mussolini, Pincohet, and Stalin.

Yes, "the space of three words", also known as a "list".

Not exactly Bad People known for having the same sort of flaws, beyond historical category of Bad People.

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.

You raise wargaming... but cite as proof of failure a leadership level that wouldn't actually be involved in running wargames.

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.

without addressing how the most recent pandemic squandered public trust and credibility in the experts that RFK is known to be at odds with.

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.

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.

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.

Are any of us?

Sure.

I'm surprised this isn't consensus?

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.

Yes, "the space of three words", also known as a "list".

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.

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 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.

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?

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.

My point was to bring something new to the table,

You really, really did not.

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.

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.

  • [1] "wargaming" here being my broad definition, not your narrow definition
  • [2] I'll throw you a bone here: it's also likely that you view contrary evidence (either correct or incorrect) as too deeply entrenched in our institutions themselves and to deny the evidence would be to deny the institutions

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.

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.

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 a competence-of-evaluation 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.

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?

However, 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.

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.

  • [1] I agree with posts beyond the obvious leftwing posters, for the record. Some of the things I agree with may even surprise you if you have a simplified model of the political opinions I represent. It's that specifically any analysis of the actions of the current executive branch that I find lacking.
  • [2] Caveat for the moderators, I don't actually view myself as a shitposter. Make the Motte a better place and all that.

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.

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

Should I just read Project 2025

Yes.

and take it as gospel,

No.

despite the counter-hysteria during the campaign season?

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.

What is the bar for competence-of-evaluation for an average citizen to judge the worthiness of their executive branch?

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.

Should no one protest the actions of their government because they're not qualified to evaluate the competence of those who took those actions?

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.

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?

Heavens no. If they posted their arguments on the motte inviting pushback, they would receive the same gentle handling.

pied piper campaign

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.

"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.

The vibes are a shiftin'

MAGA experienced a wave of euphoria from Trump's election until about around the time of the trade disputes. They felt like they were on top of the world, and that nothing could stop them. They notched a few wins against wokeness, but their major victory was in the realm of vibes.

It's increasingly seeming like those days are over. Scott Sumner's article details who's up and who's down over the past few weeks:

Who's Up:

-Neoliberals

-The experts

-TDSers

-The elite media

-Chinese and Canadian liberals

-Deficit hawks

-Principled conservative free speech advocates

-Integrity hawks

-Rules hawks

-Critics of bullying

Who's Down:

-Mercantilists

-The populists

-Anti-anti-trumpers

-Fox News

-Non-US nationalists

-Deficit doves

-Unprincipled conservative free speech advocates

-Issues people

-Autocracy advocates

-American exceptionalists

Edit for more opinions per moderator request: I agree with this article that the vibes have definitely shifted, as it's been clear in my (adversarial) conversations with MAGA that the mood has changed from combative (pre-election) to triumphalism (post election until a few weeks ago) and then back to combative with a hint of disillusionment (today). Any opposition movement is going to have principled believers and cynics, e.g. people who think we should have free speech as a general rule and people who only claim to like free speech but really want to censor their opponents when they come into power. Winning means these splits that could be swept under the rug get blown out into the open, and the pendulum starts swinging back the other direction. Hopefully we don't swing back to crazy wokeness, but I'd pretty much take any alternative at this point. A decade ago I would never have seen myself cheering for The Experts or The Media, but I've seen the alternative now, and it's just so much worse.

  • -10

Indeed, when the media discuss economic issues they are more likely to interview a businessman than an economist.

As an aside, I think it has generally been to capitalism's detriment that people tend to conflate business, finance, and economics when these are three different fields. Businessmen make terrible ambassadors for capitalism.

To paraphrase something I once saw in an econ textbook: "'Pro-market' is not the same as 'pro-business'"

The tariffs were a big mistake.

It was probably a mistake applying them to everyone (including our allies) at once. But the two overarching policy goals (reindustrializing the US and isolating China) are good. And neither are likely to happen without a major kick in the ass to force people to move in that direction. So I'm hesitant to just flat out call the tariffs a mistake.

I correct myself - Tariff implementation and execution was a mistake.

I think it would have turned out ok if he'd stuck with them though, or at least not backed down the way he did.

It was kind of a retreat, but look at financial markets - they are very clearly saying that the April 2 tariff annoucements and their negative impacts are largely still in place. April 9 changed the country, but it did not change the fundamental policy misconception by Trump.

The bond market was starting to act up. Nothing good could have come from that.

Tariffs are a tool, not a policy. The policy that was being implemented by the Trump tariffs was not a policy to reindustrialise the US and isolate China.

Given the how much the form theyve taken will lower the odds of sticking, and poison the well going forward, I think they are flat out a mistake.

Worse than a mistake, they are a blunder.

If you wanted to isolate China, you wouldn't immediately tariff their neighbors, you'd try to woo their regional neighbors to join your own aligned bloc. Ideally you'd do it in a group fashion to present a unified bloc and get more leverage -- a kind of organization of countries in the area.

I would call it the Across Asia Organization -- or AAO.

If you wanted to isolate China, you wouldn't immediately tariff their neighbors, you'd try to woo their regional neighbors to join your own aligned bloc. Ideally you'd do it in a group fashion to present a unified bloc and get more leverage -- a kind of organization of countries in the area.

Interesting proposal, except the obvious counter-point that the parties involved would have obvious incentives to expect bribes in various forms in the name of being wooed, but then defect against a common tariff front against China in exchange for Chinese bribes. 'Play both parties off eachother for personal gain' is not exactly a hidden policy preference.

Breaking this defection option is why the EU makes surrendering trade sovereignty a precondition of the unified block, uses coercive instruments regularly against less powerful constituent members to punish/deter cheating, and is generally understood to be dominated by the more powerful members and regularly advances reforms to further centralize power to the net benefit of those central leaders.

Perhaps your read is different than mine, but I see no particular reason to believe the asian countries in mind are inclined to be bribed into a trade conflict with China, or into a EU-style trade block.

They all signed the TPP and we didn’t …

The TPP did not include anti-defection options for a common trade war block.

It was the anti defection option

If you ignored what it could or could not compel the participant states to do or not do.

Unless you care to cite the chapter and section providing the punishment mechanisms?

Is there any reason beyond the words of random partisan hacks to believe that those allegedly "up" are indeed up and that those allegedly "down" are indeed down?

Are you calling Scott Sumner a random partisan hack?

I'd hadn't heard of him before today but the top result for the name "Scott Sumner" in my search bar was "Economist at the University of Chicago and Vocal Critic of Donald Trump".

If his opposition to Trump and Tarrifs is notable enough to show up in his academic profile and Wikipedia I think its safe to say that he is not an unbiased observer.

He has strong opinions about Trump. That doesn't make him partisan or a hack. He's also not a random person but one of the most famous economics bloggers.

As i said, i hadn't heard of him before yesterday, but based on the first page of search results he's notable as much for his politics as for his work in economics. And as @Dean says, being popular doesn't mean he is not "a hack".

Now if his description had been "Economist at the University of Chicago and Vocal Libertarian" or "Vocal Socialist" I might not have come away with the impression that the article was written with the sole intent of trashing Trump and his supporters, but it didn't and I did.

I didn't say he wasn't a hack because he's popular. I said him not liking Trump doesn't make him a hack.

You admittedly knew nothing about but called him a hack. If you want to know if he's a hack, you need to become familiar with him. You're currently in no place to be making the judgment, which shouldn't be based on your impression from a two second Google search.

He's not even an economist at the University of Chicago.

That makes him a statistically uncommon person. Statistically uncommon people come up in random person pulls all the time.

It certainly isn't a counter-argument to him being a partisan hack. Being a hack would go a long way to explaining why a notoriously dry, convoluted, and highly technical subject matter is keeping enough non-expert attention to justify a claim of fame. Another famed economist and partisan hack was Paul Krugman from the NYT. Krugman wasn't the NYT's go-to economist because of his economic insight and objectivity- he was the go-to economist because he would reliably tell the readers why [current democrat thing] was good and smart and why [current republican thing] was dumb and evil.

Krugman was certainly an uncommon partisan hack, but he was indeed both a partisan and a through that partisanship a hack. What separates Scott Sumner in nature, if not scale of popularity?

You're obviously not familiar with Scott Sumner. He criticizes both sides. He plainly isn't partisan.

His being famous for writing about economics doesn't need explanation just because you find the subject boring. Many people don't find it boring.

Did I misremember him being anti-populist?

Krugman was certainly an uncommon partisan hack, but he was indeed both a partisan and a through that partisanship a hack. What separates Scott Sumner in nature, if not scale of popularity?

It's been a loooong time since I followed him, but I don't think he's as bad as Krugman (who is?). As far as I remember he's a pro-establishment libertarian-lite, who will occasionally side with either party, so strictly speaking not "partisan" (though deranged on the issue of populism).

Given how populism has been handled in western media over the last decade, I would absolutely consider that a partisan flag, even if it's a partisanship that's willing to shoot members of a broader policy coalition. Establishment partisans are still partisans.

Most leftists agreed that they were in total turmoil just a few months ago, but that soul-searching is pretty much done now. This article doesn't present a lot of evidence that any of this is true, but it matches what I've seen anecdotally. If you think it's wrong and that MAGA is still feeling as triumphant as they did on election night and that leftists are still just as dejected, feel free to make the case.

This site is a lot more bearish on Trump than it was a few months ago, but that’s because people on this site hold an unusually large amount of stock, unlike most Americans. Unless there start to be actual bread-and butter negative effects on the economy that the middle and lower classes participate in, no one is going to care. It’s the reverse side of the coin of all those “why are the people living in cardboard boxes and eating rats so unhappy about the great economy?” articles you saw during the Biden administration.

My portfolio is only down a couple percent since Trump took office. "Stonks down" is not a substantial reason for me to be bearish on Trump. But prior to Trump taking office I held a sliver of hope that Trump actually meant what he said about making America great and making government efficient and effective, and then his actions so far have just been tearing down the few institutions and policies that still were contributing to making America great one after another. Mostly my increased bearishness is just that sliver of hope being extinguished.

That’s the conflict theory view, which doubles as a zero-sum, ‘cosmic balance’, perfect information narrative. The stock market and the “elites” lose money, while the regular man will likely prosper in all the new tinsel factories. The ‘debate’, if it can be called that, is the vocalization of each side’s interest.

The mistake theory perspective is that people are often wrong and so act against their interests. The stock market is just a reflection. Trump was wrong about the effect of his tariffs on the stock and bond market, and on his trade partners and allies, and soon he will be wrong about its effects on the economy.

It's a funny tactic isn't it. "Hey, so these 'vibe' things let you control people? Then we can 'vibe' too, just like we learned how to meme!"

I do appreciate the strategy involved in using an article about a vibe shift to attempt to shift the vibe here though.

The Kamala joy strategy was certainly a vibes strategy. However, the general sentiment calls to mind the recent talk from the American left about how they needed to create their own Joe Rogan to compete with the American right. The issue isn't a lack of signal or signallers in the media sphere- it's that pushing a vibe-message doesn't make the vibe occur.

FWIW, as a Trump voter in a state where it didn't matter, my vibes were somewhere between skeptical/cautiously optimistic, but mostly skeptical because I fully expected the GOP House and Senate to be useless.

Since then, it's mostly bad. DOGE has been a bigger clownshow than anticipated. Deficit hawks have nothing to be happy about given that the Johnson House is just continuing previous bad budgets. The trade war has been far bigger and dumber than anticipated. Biden's signature win might well have been running up the national debt to the point that any attempt at reform gets the Liz Truss treatment. Senate Democrats want to increase old people UBI spending, so maybe they'll manage to deplete the Social Security trust fund in ~2030 when AOC is President. LOL at spending more time and effort deporting anti-Israel academics than the mass of illegal immigrants. My expectations were low, but this is a fucking joke.

Fuck me, I wanted DeSantis.

A decade ago I would never have seen myself cheering for The Experts or The Media, but I've seen the alternative now, and it's just so much worse.

OK, we've lost some money from dumb economic policy. I've lost money, you've lost money. Stocks down. Schizo tariff policy is dumb.

But is this really worse than what the experts were cooking up in terms of DEI, mass immigration and green economics? Australia has been in an economic meltdown, GDP per capita fell bigly. Housing is massively unaffordable. No politicians have any answers except more plans to pump housing prices even higher, subsidizing first-home buyers. The ponzi marches on! The European economies have been wrecked by the EU. Britain is still being wrecked. Canada has been stagnating, universities turned to degree-mills, massive immigration, houses unaffordable, wages inadequate...

Why is it that schizo tariff policy is worse than deliberate, considered, orderly wrecking of the economy? Is it that famous quote from the Joker?

"Nobody panics when things go 'according to plan.' Even if the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I told the press that, like, a gang-banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it's all 'part of the plan.' But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!"

And I haven't even mentioned the social problems caused by these policies! London is what, 30% English? Isn't the capital of England supposed to be English? Isn't Birmingham supposed to have garbage picked up, it's supposed to be a rich industrial city, not a shithole? Aren't Western countries supposed to be high-trust societies? Isn't it bad when Biden brings millions of migrants into the US?

Trump is not perfect and he probably can't solve many if any of the challenges the US faces, while likely making many things worse. But the other side is fully committed to making things worse, they've worked hard on it and see it as virtuous. I consider DEI, expensive energy and mass migration as core policies of the mainstream right and left, everyone besides Trump and Trump-adjacent figures. As far as I'm concerned, these are bad policies.

Respectable, moderate, reasonable, orderly German centrists are working to raise the price of petrol and diesel and make workers poorer: https://www.eugyppius.com/p/incoming-german-government-from-hell

Chancellor-hopeful Friedrich Merz confirmed that “many workers will have less net income … in the coming years” due to social welfare contributions – particularly pension, health insurance and long-term care insurance payments. He also openly admitted that his party, the CDU, had failed to secure the tax relief for workers on which they had campaigned, because of “disagreement” with the Social Democrats. And when the interviewer asked him to confirm again that this means Germans “will … have less net income … because social welfare contributions are rising, but taxes are not falling,” Merz agreed that “these concerns are certainly not unjustified.”

Yes but the notional balances of retirees accounts has gone down which is a great evil, whilst all these other evils were good for the amount of 0's on the spreadsheet and could be justified by magical thinking in other spreadsheets about fungibility of human labor.

But is this really worse than what the experts were cooking up in terms of DEI, mass immigration and green economics?

That's a sufficiently low bar that we (not you, all of us collectively) ought to be ashamed of it.

I consider DEI, expensive energy and mass migration as core policies of the mainstream right and left, everyone besides Trump and Trump-adjacent figures. As far as I'm concerned, these are bad policies.

I recall Cheney and Bush being excellent on domestic energy production, such that the fruits of their policies were felt well into the Obama administration on lowered natural gas prices.

He also openly admitted that his party, the CDU, had failed to secure the tax relief for workers on which they had campaigned, because of “disagreement” with the Social Democrats

If only there were some other party with which the CDU could have formed a coalition.

There's a rumor Scam Saltman is making a social network ..

Here's the news article.

If you are a bit paranoid and connect the dots obviously what is going to happen he's gonna get EU to ban twitter as extremist whatever and simultaneously roll out that and get people hooked on something that's much easier to police and functions better.

Remember: it's vibes

Neoliberals -The experts -TDSers -The elite media -Chinese and Canadian liberals -Deficit hawks

These people are all out of touch, with the exceptions of maybe Chinese. The perception of being 'up' or 'down' doesn't mean anything. In the long run, reality reasserts itself.

Surely a critical mass of left-wing Twitter has moved to Bluesky now. There's no one left to tempt over to the Shiny New Guaranteed-Fascist-Free Twitter unless you find a way to kneecap Bluesky.

Vibes are very hard to measure, but I do think there's something to the idea that the tariff shenanigans have damaged morale on the right, even if only by causing a rift between Trump supporters who support the tariffs and Trump supporters who see them as entirely self-inflicted suffering. I personally think they'll cause enough economic hardship such that it will actually meaningfully negatively affect Trump support in the long run, but, well, only time will tell.

But this kind of post about vibes just reminded me of a comment I made last year after Harris became the Dem nominee. There was all sorts of talk about how there was some apparent "shift" in the vibes, that Democrats were coming together and becoming energized, and that we were owning the Republicans by calling them "weird," and I thought it all looked like transparent attempts to shift the vibes by declaring the vibes as shifted. I think my skepticism of that turned out to be mostly correct, and I think such skepticism is warranted here. I don't know much about Scott Sumner, but he doesn't seem like a Trump sycophant or even a Trump fan. And only someone who's at least neutral on Trump, if not positive, would have the credibility, in my eyes, to declare "vibes" as shifting away from Trump and towards his enemies, because someone who dislikes Trump would have great incentive to genuinely, honestly, in good faith, believe that the vibes are shifting away from him.

Another issue here is that I don't really see Democrats as being in a good position to capitalize on this apparent vibe shift. People being demoralized on Trump will almost certainly help the Dems, but people can be fickle and vibes can shift back, unless Dems manage to actually lock in the demoralized former Trump fans through some sort of actual positive message.

Your link is already quite content-light. It just claims that $X is "up or down".

Who’s up: The elite media: Elite pro-globalization media outlets like The Economist and the Financial Times are looking better and better.

While I might share some political sympathies, I would argue that the linked article would not cut it as a top level post. This comes across as boo outgroup, yay ingroup. (Tabloid newspapers sometimes have a "loser of the day" or "winner of the day", and this is basically the same. Let us try to do better than them.)

Of course, you turned that content-light article into a mostly content-free list by cutting even the most shallow rationales from the article.

What are the factual claim? If The Economist has twice as many readers as it had in 2024, by all means tell me about it. What is the policy argument? "pro-globalization good" has been argued much more persuasive here in the past few weeks.

(Also, what the hell are Chinese liberals? CCP members who want China to become slightly less draconian? Or human rights lawyers rotting in some jail?)

Also, what the hell are Chinese liberals?

I am somewhat curious about this, too. I imagine ~all of them live in the West to begin with, and as such don't have a lot of influence on the Chinese state. Similarly, I imagine the Maoists are not the least bit mollified by Trump's actions.

I’m…not sure there’s enough here for a top-level. What did you take away from this? Do you think this guy is right? Is that a good or a bad thing?

I added another blurb to the end, hopefully that's sufficient.


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