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Following from @Quantumfreakonomic's post yesterday on the judge who was arrested for trying to sneak an illegal migrant out of a courthouse to avoid ICE, that media storm may be prompting a counterstory on the latest Trump immigration outrage to be outraged about.
Reuters: Two-year-old US citizen appears to have been deported 'with no meaningful process'
New York Times: 2-Year-Old U.S. Citizen Deported ‘With No Meaningful Process,’ Judge Suspects
CBS News: Judge demands answers on whether 2-year-old U.S. citizen was deported to Honduras
Washington Post: Three U.S. citizens, ages 2, 4 and 7, swiftly deported from Louisiana
Rolling Stone: Trump Has Now Deported Multiple U.S. Citizen Children With Cancer
CNN: Federal judge says 2-year-old US citizen was deported with mother to Honduras
Yes, the new scandal for the new week, just in time to replace coverage of the somewhat embarrassing judge from last week, now presents a heroic judge objecting to the deportation of US children. While multiple cases are there, the focus of the current not-at-all coordinate push focuses on the 2-year old from Louisana.
Admittedly, the CNN article did make the mistake of letting the headline reveal some of the possible nuance as to 'why'. Being the only headline to mention 'mother' was what started this little media dive.
The key sequence of events from the CBS article include-
Some of the potentially relevant context, not all of which was in the CBS article, and which different organizations provide different framings for.
On some differences in filings and timings-
CBS
CNN
Washington Post
CBS
CNN and the Washington Post did not raise the legal custody issue raised on Tuesday, which frames later decisions. The Post in particular removes the child from the context of the mother in the plane to Honduras, treating the 2-year-old citizen as the only relevant individual on the plane as opposed to the mother and older sibling.
CBS did raise the custody case, but does not raise the Thursday petition for immediate release that could be understood in the custody decision.
Only CBS raises that the court session sought Thursday afternoon occurs on Friday afternoon. The Washington Post emphasizes the time of the departure flight as before court could open, insinuating without explicitly claiming a motive for the timing of the flight. No context is provided by anyone on what time the flight actually was, what time the court was, or the other normal times of possible flights to Honduras from the local airport are.
Additionally, no media actually characterizes the relationships between mother, father, and sister-in-law. There's no claim that the father and mother are married. Therefore, there is only an insinuation that the 'sister-in-law' is meaningfully related to the mother in a sense that would normally sway custody fights.
On the basis of the child's removal, for sources that did so-
CBS
Washington Post
CNN
Different sources provide different strengths of agency to the mother. CBS only attribute a mother motive via government statement after the fact, and makes no claim of the mother herself expressing an interest. CNN reports that the government claims the mother wrote a note, but does not mention the note itself was included in court submissions. Washington Post notes that there was an actual note attached, but disassociates veracity via 'they say' to open door for doubt.
Only CNN directly addresses a claimed government policy of asking the migrant parent their preference.
On the status of the father-
Washington Post
CNN
CBS News
The Washington Post makes no reference to the legal custody attempt by the father, and thus why ICE might request he present himself to them regardless of immigration status. CNN and CBS do acknowledge the custody shift to the sister-in-law, but do not elaborate why the father could not request custody for himself. CBS alludes that the father's status is 'unclear,' while CNN establishes a threat (custody) but not basis for the threat (possible immigrant status himself).
No media covers the implication of an unverified man requesting custody of a child be revoked from the undisputed mother to another woman of unclear relation.
On the Judge's Comments-
CBS
Washington Post
CNN
Only CNN quotes the opening section of the Judge's sentence and interest. Both CBS and the Washington Post begins their quote after removing the opening clause, creating a stronger statement.
Trump First Term Child Separation Scandal
Human Rights Watch: Trump’s Cruel Separation Policy Has Not Ended
...I kid, that one is from 2018.
No media references, raises, or otherwise brings attention to the criticisms to the first term policy of detaining or deporting adult illegal migrants without their children.
In summary, if it this starts permutating on the interwebs next week-
The two-year-old american citizen case involves
A larger family(?) of non-citizens migrants with a singular birthright-citizenship daughter
The American citizen is/was an archetypical 'anchor baby' context without being called such
More broadly, the headline/surface narratives conflate child deportation with child-custody considerations
Finally- Is there basis for legitimate concern in this scandal?
Yes.
If you thought the lead-up was a the media is totally lying about everything trope, that was deliberate. It was to make a point about why I expect this scandal to hook some and be dismissed by others.
For people who are hawkish on illegal immigration, this case is not your friend. There is a lot of red meat here that could be uncovered- potentially unmarried family unit, a concerned father of uncertain status who in the first minute of establishing contact tries to convey a litigation strategy, child-custody defaults being reversed- but there is a hook that can work against you. And that hook is the disruption of what most people would consider a due process right, even if deportation legalism is different from a criminal court process.
For people upset about ICE and due process, this coverage is also not your friend. The framings- and the not-very-deep undercurrents that go against the framing- will give a basis to dismiss concern as motivated. The children-in-cage's and child-separation critiques are not going to be forgotten. The fact that not separating children from their deported parents is now a basis of criticism is going to undercut criticims of both. The media's rush to present a concerned father is going to run into discrediting disappointing revelations.
But the propaganda doesn't mean there is only propaganda. Even if it's not what the coverage generators wants you to be concerned about, because- again- you need to piece together relevant events not tied together in any single framing.
CBS
Why was Doughty asking for a phone call with the mother?
Washington Post
Why did the Tuesday night phone call with the mother (allegedly) get stopped by ICE after only a minute?
CNN
This is a claim. It is a claim made by someone with an interest in claiming it regardless of whether it is true or not. It is also a valid basis for concern, independent of deportation of the mother or custody decisions of her child.
If true, this would indicate that communication between the woman and potential legal representation was deliberately disrupted. How long it was disrupted is a relevant interest, particularly if other legal advice might have changed her mind of letting her newborn stay with someone else.
This brings relevant questions that may or may not have been precluded.
Is there any legal barrier preventing the 2-year-old US citizen from returning to the US, beyond 'typical' international legal custody issues?
It is not claimed. But then, no major media coverage has expressed interest in that paradigm either.
Frustration.
The reporting is mostly based on court documents, which are worth reading yourself if you are interested enough in the case to read multiple news articles on it.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69940863/v-m-l-v-harper/
With regard to your first question, the sister-in-law has a Provisional Custody by Mandate document signed by the father, which allows her to exercise most of the parental rights of the father.
With regard to your other questions, the key key point is that their is nothing in the record saying whether the mother would prefer (1) her citizen daughter to come with her to Honduras, or (2) have her citizen daughter remain in the United States in the custody of the father. ICE doesn’t claim to have asked her that question. Petitioner claims that ICE refused to allow the father’s lawyer to talk to the mother (see Memorandum in Support of Emergency TRO, page 4). The judge says that when he tried to talk to the mother, ICE told him that the mother had already been released in Honduras (see Order docket number 8).
If indeed he has any.
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I disagree. George Floyd wasn't Rosa Parks. The closer the case is to being 50.000001% in favor of ICE the better, because if this deportation is ruled lawful, then this will establish the broadest possible precedent for subsequent deportations. The same applies to popular support/acceptance.
Dangerous gamble because that cuts both ways.
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This sounds like a real tangle. If the news reports are saying the two year old is a US citizen, but nothing about her 11 year old sister, that makes it sound like only the 2 year old was born in the USA. If the mother has been attending ICE meetings for four years, that makes it sound like mother, father and first daughter arrived in the US about four to five years ago (or maybe longer, but after the elder girl was born since she's not, by the sounds of it, a US citizen).
It's unclear if the parents are married, married then divorced, or never married. Or who the sister-in-law with citizenship is; she could be the mother's sister, or she could be married to a brother of the father. That would be an even more remote relationship so no wonder the transfer of custody was held up.
Yeah, the reporting does make it sound like "they put a 2 year old all alone on a plane back to Honduras even though she's a US citizen by birth". For all the complaining about separating parents and children, at least both daughters and the mother were sent back all together. The father's status is also unclear so he could be on the next flight out.
The aim of the reporting here does seem to be "the 2 year old has a right to be here by virtue of her citizenship, you can't break up a family, you can't leave a 2 year old on her own, so you have to permit the sister and father and mother to remain as well".
It's a genuine problem: a citizen can't be deported, but what if the citizen is a minor (a very young minor as in this case)? With no closer legal family members than a possible aunt by marriage?
They can be assigned a guardian ad litem to advocate for their best interests in family court, the same as any other minor in the USA - citizen or not - with thorny custody problems. The best solution will vary case-by-case, but that's what courts are for.
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I would assume in that case the foster system is the place to put them
Foster system is not great. I genuinely think "being with mom and sister back in mom's native country" is better than that.
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This is why you have to do mass deportation as fast and as bombastically as possible. It’s like the Gaza thing, it was the trickle of deaths that killed them. If you’re an ‘authoritarian democrat’ in a country that still had freedom of the press and you want to disappear you enemies, do it all on the same day rather than over a couple of months. Shock and awe.
There are some of us, certainly, for whom no amount of these stories will change our opinion. I know that because I am one. But any conservative who thinks enough sob stories won’t affect enough public opinion to make a difference is kidding themselves. A thousand sad deportations over a thousand days is a thousand chances at public sympathy. A thousand sad deportations on the same day is one or two.
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Of course. This is the intended effect of those who failed to enforce immigration law for long periods of time. Generating sob stories to prevent immigration enforcement from being effective has long been an implicit and obvious goal. Its also a problem, in this case, with the dubious interpretation of the 14th Amendment we currently live under the rule of (which, I admit, despite its weakness, we will likely have for the foreseeable future).
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Can the father or SIL not go pick the 2 year old up from Honduras at a later date if that's what the mother and father decide they want to do? The 2 year old has citizenship - while an unnecessary flight to Honduras with a 2 year old is obnoxious it's not exactly an irreparable harm - there are flights from Honduras to the US every day of the week, and I'm sure a gofundme could finance a few hundred dollars of plane tickets given this level of publicity.
Of course, ICE trying to interfere with the mother's ability to contact legal counsel is, if true, super concerning.
By the sounds of it, the father may not have legal status to be in the USA himself, and the sister-in-law who is a US citizen may be a remote family member, so is it better to put the child in the care of someone not a blood relative, rather than let her remain with her mother and sister? If the father was legal, the problem would be a lot simpler, but on the face of it nobody in the immediate family (except the child herself) has any legal right to be in the country.
Of course, we have to wait for more details to come out before we can decide on that.
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The fact that a kid has US citizenship does not mean that the the legal system of Honduras will refer to the US courts in any custody decision. So of the parents can not agree on what should happen with the child, the child will be deprived of the right of an US custody court deciding its fate. That would be irreparable harm -- unless Trump is willing to send SEAL team to repatriate the child.
Now, it could well be that the custody battle between father and mother is just a charade meant to delay the deportation of the mother. But presumably the Federal government can expedite that custody process. Unless the mother is due to have another baby (which Trump would prefer not to be a US citizen), I don't exactly see the urgency.
Also, no matter how you spin it, deporting two kids aged 2 and 11 along with their mother is terrible optics. The executive has some leeway in whom to deport, so Trump can not hide behind "just following the law" here. Presumably, Trump has already gotten rid of all the gang members, and the men with random tattoos and the people accused of a crime and "mothers of US citizens who went to their ICE check-ins" are the only ones left?
Please elaborate how you think the federal government can expedite state court judicial proceedings.
I have never seen this happen. I mean, I've only practiced law for 12 years so maybe I will see this in the future. But we live in a world of dual sovereignty, particularly with the courts.
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I think that this sort of irreparable harm is somewhat unavoidable in such circumstances. Janet Reno was willing to send tactical border patrol agents to return a toddler from extended family in the US to his father in Cuba -- there is an iconic photo of a federal agent pointing an MP-5 at a screaming toddler in his family's arms. Or that time the Carter administration allowed a Ukrainian teenager living in Chicago to claim asylum when his parents decided to move back to the Soviet Union. All of those cases are, in some ways "irreparable harm". But so is the reverse, and I'm not really sure how you'd consistently manage to avoid all such classes. I'm open to suggestions.
Both international and US law say that children subject to active custody disputes should not be removed from the jurisdiction of the child's habitual residence without the permission of the (family) court having jurisdiction, and should be returned quickly if they are removed - the big difference with the Eilan Gonzales case is that Eilan was habitually resident in Cuba (so the claim to keep him in the US was on best interest grounds) whereas the child here is habitually resident in the US (and the reason for removing them is to conveniently deport the mother). It isn't obvious how this interacts with immigration law if the child is an illegal immigrant (although I suspect an English or American domestic court would rule, contra the international law textbooks, that a child could not be habitually resident in a country where their presence was illegal), but this is a case where the child is a citizen.
Even if you disagree with the policy, the amount of process that is due before deporting a US citizen child with relatives in the US who claim to be able and willing to care for them is greater than zero. Based on both the press coverage and the general direction of Trump administration immigration process, it looks like ICE made no attempt to understand the family law position before deporting the mother and child - it looks like they went further and deliberately frustrated the parents' attempt to do so in order to get mum out of the country before a court could intervene.
Agreed that the most likely fact pattern is that the whole family (except for the US-born kid) including Dad were in the country with permission under one of the various Biden-era programmes, and can be legally deported now that Trump has revoked that permission.
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Presumably, to stay in the US as a minor, you require both (1) being allowed to stay in the US by the US gov (e.g. having asylum, citizenship or being tolerated) and (2) your legal custodian living in the US. In both of these cases, the subject of the custody battle was not a US citizen, so the federal administration had a lot more discretion. WP is not clear on how the custodial case for Walter Polovchak turned out and how federal courts became involved. The general vibe I get from both of these cases was that there was a lot more judicial oversight than in the present case.
Irreparable harm is unavoidable in custodial battles, sure, but I would argue that the proper place to decide how to minimize that harm is family court (which is supposed to take the child's best interests into account), not the whim of some ICE bigwig who is likely happy to fill another seat in the plane, citizen or not.
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Not only that, the practice of sending people away at the ICE checkin, as opposed to using that visit in to serve them with notice of termination of status so that they can get their shit and depart in an orderly fashion creates the an awful selection effect.
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If the father were legally in the United States, sure. It seems likely he is not, so if he leaves the country he will find it difficult to come back.
It sounds like the SIL is legally in the united states. With notarized parental consent letters on both sides and the 2 year old's passport I'd be surprised if there was any major issue in having the SIL pick up the kid and bring her back to the US to dad.
I doubt the notarized consent would be easy to get from mom, but that's because this sounds to me like a custody battle.
That depends on the Sister-in-Law's actual relationship to the mother, not the father.
The SIL and the mother do not necessarily have any legally relevant relationship. This is where the implication of the mother and father never being characterized as married potentially matters.
If the father's SIL is in fact the mother's sister, then as you say it could be legally simple to reverse if the parties are in agreement. That is not the same as administratively simple- I'd be surprised if the child has a passport- but
If the sister-in-law is a SIL due to the father marrying someone else- a currently undisclosed woman who would be unsympathetic to the narrative- then the analogy would be more akin to an adoption than familial custody.
The SIL's job in this case is "accompany the kid on the plane ride from mom to dad after both of them write consent letters and get them notarized". As long as both parents do that I expect the airline will be fine with it, and once the kid lands in the US she can't be denied entry into the US.
I don't expect the mom to agree to that, to be clear.
I think what is complicating this is that it's not the usual "who gets custody of the children after a divorce" or "who gets custody when the children are removed because of neglect or abuse" type case.
If the parents aren't married and the kids are living with the mother, and the mother and older sister and the father are not US citizens/have no legal right to be in the country, then handing over custody (temporary or longer) to the citizen sister-in-law is a different kettle of fish.
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Not quite. Remember- the father was not asking for custody for himself. The father was asking for custody to be transferred to his sister-in-law. And this sister-in-law who is supposed to be taking both escort and legal custody has no established relationship to the mother, only the father.
A notary might be able to help the plane ride in abstract, but a notary cannot transfer formal or de facto legal custody from a mother to a potentially unrelated citizen of another country. Since the purpose of the plane flight is to remove the mother's custody of the child, after she (reportedly) indicated to the US government she wanted to retain custody...
Then the mother will probably not sign a notarized consent letter, yes.
My point was that if both parents decided they wanted the kid to grow up in the US with the SIL that is still something they could arrange. Emphasis on the word "if".
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I agree, but what am I to do with that? Based on the "child separation", the "Dreamers", this case's publicity, and the general zeitgeist, it really does seem that the only policy that will actually be accepted by opponents on this is that if you have a child in the United States, you cannot be removed. There is no actual set of proceedings that could satisfy the demand that parents not be separated from their children but also that children cannot be deported with their parents. Any attempt to come up with some narrowly satisfactory resolution that would meet the due process standard that someone came up with approximately 15 minutes ago will slam into some new bad-faith litigation about why of course some deportations are fine, but not this one.
It is increasingly clear to me that getting any resembling what I would consider an appropriate level of deportations will actually just require deciding to be mean in a way that will alienate a significant number of people. My options are not between making a strong legal argument for position or just letting everyone stay, they're between deciding to look mean or just letting everyone stay. If meanness is going to be the actual deciding factor, that's what the decision-making from my side is going to have to be centered on, and I'm perfectly fine with just being mean at this point.
If you want to hold sustained political, you'll have to find a formulation that meets as much of your goals as possible without alienating lots of voters. Probably won't be all of it, but it's awful politics to decide that you're just gonna speedrun it rather than figure out a durable policy.
There is another way, of course.
The people who make labyrinths in the way of sane government policy should understand themselves as building monuments to the necessity of violence. Because that is what they are doing.
It can be reasonable and necessary to do so, in a Cold Liberal sense, but this is not what this is. This is the immigration equivalent of Locke saying "we'll just ban Atheism" as if that's a solution.
Labyrinths are one thing, but /u/walterodim was pretty clear he felt like the opposition was coming directly from the people being alienated.
I don't believe in public opinion.
You’re entitled to that, but you can’t then be shocked if you lose elections.
What possessed you to think that I, an avowed critic of democracy, would be surprised that good government is unpopular?
My point is precisely that, though it is, we live in reality, not in whims. Which you can only ignore for a time before despotism grows in its allure. Brainwashing your population to make sure sensible rule is impossible has consequences.
I encourage you to read Federalist No. 10 again.
The problem with getting despotism via populism is clear.
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OK, you've decided to be mean. ICE agents are screaming at crying toddlers and dragging them kicking and screaming away from their parents, who are put in concentration camps until they can be deported to a country that may jail or execute them.
Problem: Normies hate seeing things like this. They balk and the other party wins the next election. All of Trump's policies are written in chalk that can just be erased when a new POTUS is in town. Now there's talk about going back to the defacto open borders of Biden's times.
What's step 2 in your master plan then?
That's why you can't have massive deportations without authoritarianism, even if they are supported by the majority. People go to the US for the better life that's just too of a empathetic reason for the public to not be sympathetic to them. Yes, this line of thinking logically leads to de facto open borders and hundreds of millions Africans and latinos going to US but that too second order for common folk.
Either that or public stops being empathetic to anybody but their tribe, but I don't think that's very likely in America.
I'm sure the public would be perfectly fine believing that nothing untoward is happening if the media was on the side of the ruling administration and either not talking about it or dutifully framing it and reminding normies that these are people who broke the law and are getting their comeuppance (however fitting that is to the facts).
That's unlikely to happen under a Republican administration for political reasons, but the idea that it's impossible to convince your run of the mill American to be indifferent to the fate of people with interests that conflict with theirs is farcical. Wars were begun and ended on much flimsier pretenses.
The question is whether you'd call that media manipulation authoritarianism or not. I think any serious analysis is past such qualifiers. Effecting unpopular causes with popular consequences is like the entire purpose of government. And people really want to be lied to about these things.
They want to think of themselves as empathetic whilst they launder the violence necessary to maintain society to the State. So the banality of evil has to happen, but off camera.
Kind of tangential, but whenever I hear people complaining that the media is reporting unfairly on Trump (which, to be fair, you are not saying), I want to play a very sad song for that guy on the world's tiniest violin. Trump made his first baby steps into politics by condemning the Central Park Five, and not surprising to anyone with the benefit of hindsight, he was full of shit when he did so. Decades later, he elected the fringe conspiracy theory of birtherism to make a foray into politics in earnest, followed notably by the denial of the 2020 election result. Even his White House press releases look like the ramblings of someone who has long lost contact with anything resembling objective truth. So if his political demise comes at a totally fabricated yellow press story of him fucking a male underage porcupine, I would call that poetic justice.
Now, I am a lot more sympathetic to both deontological and consequentialist arguments against twisting the truth to foil him. The deontological argument is basically that by adopting a Trumpian nihilist irreverence for what is true, the press is basically throwing overboard the most important quality which separated them from him. (Or at least part of it -- see SA on Bounded Distrust.) The consequentialist argument is that you can not out-bullshit the master bullshitter, and that the way to prevail against him is not to get dragged down to his level. (Not that I would call the spinning the MSM did on this story Trump level dishonesty, sure, they did spin it and selectively reported the facts to suit their agenda, but if this was instead a WH press release I would be fully prepared to later learn that Honduras is not a country and people do not have mothers because humans multiply through fission.)
And sure, from some cosmic perspective, Trump probably does not deserve to have lies told about him, in the same way that Billy the fucking Kid did not deserve to have his life snuffed out by a piece of lead.
Live by the media controversy, die by the media controversy?
I'm sure the man himself actually loves it. You never see him smirk as much as when he can call some journo "fake news". I find that whilst the most ridiculous lies are told about the man and he constantly complains about it, the way he frames the complaints tells another story. Trump is constantly doing "a little trolling (it's called [...] a little trolling)".
The far more legitimate complaint here is that the MSM should be, on their own terms, above falling for it. And yet since 2016 they've gleefully shoveled their credibility into a fire trying to claim the "Trump bump" to anchor their dying viewerships.
Not that I am making the complaint, I'm now securely convinced that journalists have always been dishonorable sellswords and should be treated as such. But that's what I imagine the frustration from people sentimental about the Cronkite era looks like.
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"It is not that 'cruelty is the point'- it is that the accusation of cruelty is no longer sufficiently deterring." - was a quality contribution nominee in the last quality post roundup, for what it's worth.
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You absolutely can.
Step 1 would be to have competent and diligent people in charge, making decently intelligent decisions about prioritization and being dedicated to followthrough.
Like, this lady was voluntarily showing up to periodic checkins with ICE. Seems like they could have easily given her 10 days to figure out what to do.
She had a removal order and was removed. She requested her child accompany her. That was granted.
ICE was as nice as is realistically possible to he aside from not deporting her. The "mean" part is to the child who is 2 years old and doesn't even know what being a citizen is. Also said child can come back to the US when they want to. Obviously that will be in the distant future because she probably can't articulate anything on that level at the moment.
Regarding these immigration stories that keep coming out, I feel like we are at, "Just let the terrorists win" levels at this point. That is the argument coming out of the media.
I dont want the terrorists to win. How do you propose to do so?
In this case tell her that we’re terminating the ISAP and she’s got till next week to depart.
She’s been showing up diligently to check-ins, she’s not the problem.
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People tried that. The ones calling themselves diligent and competent refuse to implement the policies they campaign on, and proceed to invest their political capital into foreign wars that aren't ran diligently or competently.
And if diligence and competence gets us Biden's border crisis, perhaps these words don't mean that much to begin with.
I don't suspect that it will go much better when substituting retarded and short-attention-spanned.
Why? The border crisis was solved overnight.
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Is there any evidence that this wouldn't just happen anyway?
Sure, eventually there will be another left wing President. The key outcome you'd want is to maximize your guy's time in office before that happens.
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Forget about the deportation for a minute and assume the mother decided to move to Honduras with the child. Unless the father's parental rights were completely terminated, he would have grounds to contest the decision in Louisiana family court. The fact that ICE is now involved doesn't magically supersede state law and allow the mother to make a unilateral decision, and ICE shouldn't have sent away the child absent a determination by the family court.
I am not a family law lawyer, but it seems like the father may not have any rights under LA since the parents weren’t married when the kid was born.
Ouch, that is fucked up.
Presumably, this means that that the father also does not owe any alimony, since giving someone the duties of parenthood without the rights of parenthood would be plainly absurd?
I jest.
Nah, hé fucked around(like actually literally) and found out. He could’ve married her to fix it(it’s unlikely to me that a woman would turn down a marriage offer from a man she’s already having a kid with- the exceptions are probably AWFLs, not illegals).
I'm assuming the 11 year old is the daughter of this man, but what if she's not? What if Mom moved herself and her kid to the US (illegally), met a new guy, had a kid with him outside of marriage and that kid is the 2 year old citizen here. Then the father of the 2 year old has no relationship to the 11 year old, which may be why he's not seeking custody of her.
Letting both daughters go back with Mom may not be the meanest decision here, if the primary family is Mom and daughters with Dad (of 2 year old) not living with them.
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That's perfectly compatible with @quiet_NaN's point, though. If we're going to force the moron in question to take on the duties of parenthood, he should take on ALL of them, and the rights and privileges thereby.* Which is pretty similar to the old remedy of the shotgun wedding. It's the non-reciprocity of it that repels.
*Unless he's clearly unsuited, which would presumably be decided by social services.
At a certain level, there are things we make people do. ‘Providing for your kids’ is one of them. It’s beyond civilizational capacity to make him do it well, so we don’t- send x amount of money is a perfectly reasonable amount of state coercion.
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I can't take claims that the Trump admin is trying to decrease the population of illegal immigrants in the US seriously in the absence of any attempts to expand the scope of e-verify.
But focusing on employers through an already-existing program wouldn't let Trump grandstand and vice signal.
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Should be
These people aren't upset about the anchor baby. They're upset that illegals aren't being allowed to stay. There are no grounds for a special exception to US immigration laws that they won't accept. If an illegal crossed the border and claimed asylum in the US from the nth-dimensional lizards who gangstalk them in the old country, the people upset by this removal would gladly say that he has the right under international law to stay.
This is wildly uncharitable.
But is it untrue? We are seeing people who, outside of illegal migration context, are considered lowest of the low - child molesters, drug dealers, domestic abusers, violent gangsters, robbers, rapists, etc. - are protected and defended by the establishment figures as soon as the removal is concerned. Up to personally obstructing immigration officials, sometimes. Where is the bar where they'd say "no, that's enough, we agree this person needs to be removed from our country"? I don't know, but certainly it is so low that at least anybody who is not engaged in active combat against the Americans at this particular moment seems to be easily clearing it.
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No, I wouldn't.
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The best execution of the policy would likely have been to let the call happen for some period longer than 5 minutes, and document thoroughly discussions and decisions about the custody of the 2-year-old, but with the same result (assuming that the mother did in fact want to keep the daughter with her, and the father did not have some legal right to contest that.
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The Virginia Giuffre suicide brought to mind an idea I've been thinking about for a while: populism works best without the people. Rob Henderson and many others have talked about how certain ideas promoted by the upper class disproportionately harm the lower class. In his book Troubled, he wrote:
The problem is that people who entertain populist ideas like the above wind up shoved into the same part of the political spectrum as all these people who rave about "pedophile rings." Along with the internet personalities who won't endorse QAnon outright but pander to their QAnoner supporters with equivocating crap like "why can't they release the Epstein documents? I'm not saying there's a conspiracy, I just want TRANSPARENCY IN GOVERNMENT. Just asking qwestchins!" The populist movement winds up embracing the same mentality of helplessness Henderson is criticizing. Many of the Epstein victims admit they did it voluntarily for money, but you can't say that because it gets in the way of the narrative of helpless proles victimized by evil sex-trafficking finance guys.*
You can only really stand up for the people by keeping them at arm's length.
*The QAnoners are convinced that happens ALL THE TIME but Epstein is the only example they can point to, which is why we're still hearing about it five years after Epstein's death and will probably keep hearing about it for decades more.
The Epstein stuff was salacious because the people involved were well-known and because the plebs love seeing the high and mighty brought low, love gossiping about the rich and famous. The reality is that while what Epstein was doing (paying teenage girls from poor families for sex; pimping put some of those girls to his friends and business associates) was obviously wicked, and while his early-2000s sentence should have been much longer than it was (and served under less generous terms), far worse happens in working class communities across the West every single day without consequence or penalty.
It’s like the ‘Bullingdon Club’, which captured the British public’s imagination in the 2010s. In truth, its members behaved no worse than countless other drinking clubs, sports teams, fraternities, other social groups of regularly drunk young men. But because they were rich, wore their fancy costumes and counted the prime minister and mayor of London among their alumni, what they did was somehow uniquely awful.
It was uniquely awful, in the sense that we used to have an order in which those that wield great authority or wealth would be held to a higher standard of morality than a drunk peasant and would be obligated to use their station to set a positive example.
I'm not even an actual reactionary (far from it) but I think this one element tracks with the sense of good and has an excellent pedigree back to the ancients.
What's the deal with the people I've seen around here saying that the elite should have greater licence?
Seems like on the one hand there's the argument that they're our betters and should be exemplars of virtue, on the other hand there's the argument that they're our betters and they should be enforcers of virtue because even if they fail to embody the same virtues the rot of the masses is a worse outcome than the transgressions of the elite.
Presumably it's a reaction to the feeling that they're neither exemplars or enforcers and have allowed standards to decline at both ends of the social spectrum. That then raises the question of whether they wanted that outcome and used their power to achieve it or whether they were either powerless or too unwilling to use their power to prevent it.
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"Held to a higher standard of morality" is spin. What you describe is enabling the well-connected to get their enemies selectively prosecuted for "crimes" that everyone does, and should not be crimes at all.
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I would think the disparity in reaction here is because the upper class are expected to behave better than that, to rise above vice, and they often try to avoid disabusing the public about such a notion.
Consider the meme of pedophile Catholic priests: these are the people who are supposed to be your spiritual leaders, and while all humans are fallible under Christian doctine, molesting boys is a level of sin that one could otherwise not believe a holy man would stoop to.
Maybe it's some sort of hardwired primal instinct. If we gravitate towards hierarchy, we also gravitate towards expecting more out of our social betters.
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Did she really commit suicide? I'm seeing "statements from the family" but nothing official. If that sounds very cynical on my part, it's because it's been "several weeks" since her Instagram post about "I only have four days to live".
Maybe she really did kill herself, but the entire thing is so murky that I'm holding off until we get something from the authorities. I'm thinking of how Ziz faked their death, including family statements that they totally did drown, and then turned up alive and well. Giuffre, whatever her past as part of Epstein's operation, seems to me to have become addicted to publicity in latter years, needing regular doses of acclaim and admiration and support as the brave victim and survivor.
She seems to have been facing a trial about breaching a restraining order, so perhaps she did kill herself, but as I said, I'm slow to believe anything without explicit sources better than "her publicist":
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You reckon it's the qanoners ruining everything?
I had a different idea. See my thinking is that qanoners are overwhelmingly middle class and below, and a lot of them are the kind of people who couldn't go to college even if they could afford it, which they can't. Not all of them, there are some very clever people involved, but most of the qanoners I've spoken to were primarily uneducated poor people.
I think the bigger problem is that our educated and wealthy people are worthless morons. Qanoners are overwhelmingly uneducated and our Elite Human Capital are overwhelmingly cowardly, narcisstic, and just not that bright. They are so vapid and myopically self centred that they couldn't even save democracy from the proles with the most advanced propaganda machine in history. A centralised bureaucracy supported by media, education and intelligence, and how did they explain the perils of populism to the people? "uh it's right wing! Hitler was populisty! How about it's racist? Or toxic masculinity? It's very passe ok, he's eating McDonald's for fucks sake, what more do you need?!"
Populism is actually pretty simple to understand - it is the game theoretic optimal solution to a democracy for any underclass in a country where they lack (or think they lack) unifying principles or values - if you think, due to a warped media environment, that you can't rally with your neighbour over the constitution or that Jesus is lord, you can still rally around a popular figure. It's basically a coin flip between finally being heard and the stamping boot, so if you already have the stamping boot in your face it's a no brainer.
And the gamble paid off! But what the populists didn't expect was that our Elite Human Capital are so self centred they'll actually defend Epstein Island out of solidarity or something. They even mock the idea of government transparency! Like they either think government transparency is a bad thing, or are just too dim to understand that they are participating in a meme that can directly harm the concept, as that kind of negative association is part of how perverse incentives kick off in the first place.
If only there was some simple fix, like listening to the working class occasionally. Then again avoiding them as much as possible, still sneering at them at every opportunity, but pretending you do care about them has worked out great so far!
All the ones I know are educated, e.g. school teachers at districts requiring MAs and midlevel financial analysts e.g. writing mining reports for a Tier II bank.
That's fascinating, @greyenlightenment said similar, but aside from one retired teacher and a group of finance guys who I can never be sure are serious most of the qanoners I know are actually closer to fringe class than working - like my cousin who'd be a drug dealer if it didn't require so much effort and discipline. Could it be geographical? What state do you live in, if you don't mind me asking? And same question for you grey?
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Who's "defend[ing] Epstein Island?" Can you give some examples of defenses?
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interesting analysis, although I disagree about them being poor. I think they are representative of the 'low-status upper/middle class'. These are people who may have decent incomes and jobs, like involving contracting , HVAC installation, and small business, but they do not have much cultural capital or influence individually ,unlike journalists or academics. Their impact is felt at the voting booth other other collective action, like putting Trump in office due to high turnout in swing states or memetic warfare online, but they do not write Substakc or think pieces. Their social media accounts have few followers. Individually, they are unimpressive and not elite human capital , but collectively work as a singular driving force.
HVAC installers do not get paid well(and are not particular fans of Trump, either), techs get paid well- and they don't believe Qanon(although those of them whose wives stay home as opposed to being nurses or teachers are married to people who do). Small business owners(you know that 'contractor' is literally just a construction business owner, right?) likewise do not believe in Qanon, although they are fans of Trump and often believe in other conspiracy theories(often centering around insider trading to control republicans).
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This is the difference between a conspiracy and organic ideological affiliation. The bureaucracy, the media, and the educational system are in lockstep under the mainstream-woke banner, yes; but they don't think of themselves as following centralized directives. Every individual in the chain is acting according to his own conscience. Such a system is capable of coordinating like an astonishingly huge conspiracy so long as everyone's goals are aligned, but it cannot switch gears just because some clever people somewhere in the blob have realized it would be in their long-term interest. Nobody regards themself as taking marching orders, and if someone tries to give them orders that go against their own judgment they'll be ignored.
Pretty much everything about the response to Covid in the West seems to directly contradict this.
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I'm not sure what to think or say about the rest of your comment, but this part stood out to me:
Anyone can afford to go to college. Anyone. It's just not that expensive. Yes, it's a lot more expensive than it used to be, and yes, the ROI is not as obvious or inevitable (though it was never inevitable) as it once was. But "working class" people buy more expensive things all the time--houses, boats, cars--and those things continue to cost money (beyond loan interest--there's also upkeep). A wisely-curated program of education will in almost any economy be a better long term investment than any of those things.
What is not really plausibly "affordable" about education is failing. Every semester, without fail, I have at least one student who never shows up for class. Then, at the end of the semester, they tell me how they are running out of money and can I please pass them or else they will have to take the class again and they can't afford it...
The people who "can't afford" college are the people who lack the intellect and/or conscientiousness to learn at a higher level. College costs way too much to go there when there is not a reasonable expectation of success.
I think this is almost always false. Our educated and wealthy people are only human, and in my experience almost all of them can have their substantive thinking overwhelmed, at least on occasion and maybe more than that, by the need for social signalling. That is a different problem than being morons. Indeed, I think most normies are pretty smart, within a baseline context of human flourishing--they're just that much more susceptible to focusing on sending the right signals rather than identifying substantially veridical facts.
Yes, after accounting for scholarships and other programs, affordability is typically not the problem. The student loan debt is cheap compared to private debt like credit cards or car payments.
meanwhile, plenty of lower-middle-class people go into debt for frivolities as you describe.
yeah, it's status-seeking behavior, they are not morons. They are optimizing for status and an upper-middle class lifestyle.
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I felt your objections were, for most part, addressed by that paragraph. Maybe to change the wording a bit to make the meaning I got from it clearer: A lot of people shouldn't go to college even if they could afford it.
When everyone has a college degree no one does. I think we've already passed the threshold for too many degree holders being paid too much money to do menial wrist and finger labour. Too many people who are actually smart need to spend too much time to distinguish themselves from the average brained but highly industrious. And to that end, too few smart people engage in lower class labour where their big brains could be used for a lot more good than in many other cases.
The education inflation is hitting every part of our lives. How western societies are setting themselves up isn't sustainable. And even if it were, it's so wasteful it shouldn't be done anyway.
I think this entire paragraph is just a key example of how smart people can excuse anything they do with big words and fancy concepts. If your elite class torpedoes your society because it can't resist the temptation to conform and virtue signal to ides they personally find novel then they are ultimately no better than a high time preference, low IQ person that 'fails' the marshmallow test throughout their life.
At some point the elite of the world is no longer owed any leeway or respect on the grounds that they just aren't doing enough work that justifies it.
Yes, but when you've outsourced your industrial base to other countries because it's cheaper and more convenient to let them pollute their environments and exploit their workers so you can then buy the finished product, you need something to occupy your excess labour force. And that means "more education" because governments think that everyone getting a degree means they will all get good, high-paying jobs and businesses are constantly calling for "we need better educated workers" and all of this means that the economy will (magically) grow once every worker has at least a bachelor's degree (because studies show the college-educated get better jobs and earn more over their lifetimes, so naturally a degree is the magic panacea). So now to have any hope of a reasonable life, you need a good job, and to get a good job, you need the piece of paper.
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the data does not bear this out. the college wage premium remains persistently high despite more degrees. They are paid a lot because evidently employers see the value. Companies are obsessed with profit, so they would not spend more on labor, which is among the biggest expenses, unless necessary.
I think the data does bear this out. (15% unemployment and 35% underemployment (rising to 41%in recent years) means we have too many degree holders. And you know profit often isn't the only motive these days, ESG demands environmental and social engineering too.
But like Hani said to Nara, this is a distraction. If the elite ran society well we would not have populism or Donald Trump because they would have ameliorated enough of the concerns of the working class before they snapped and it was too late to do anything. It's not like they were demanding the impossible - they weren't even demanding anything substantial - bread and circuses worked for Rome and it works for America too. But our elites didn't make the bread and circuses for the people, they didn't even make it for everyone - instead they made it for themselves. They can't claim they didn't anticipate the issue, they very loudly did, but they handled it so incompetently that they may as well have not bothered.
And yes it is not deliberate and it's all stochastic or distributed or whatever - like you said in your reply to Nara, it's status games. And sure, on an individual level, if the only thing that concerns you is you, status seeking is a very smart idea. But if you want the prestige attached to running society, if you want to be respected for the way your achievements improve the country, they have to actually improve the country, not just line your own pockets. You have to actually be a better person if you want people to think you are a better person than them.
I can't remember how old you are, but I'm pretty sure you are old enough to be familiar with the way humans can very easily deceive themselves into thinking they are doing good when they are actually only helping themselves. I think that self deception is the core of the current zeitgeist. It's like the unifying principle of the west these days is 'you don't point out my fuck ups and I won't point out yours'. This is a much much larger problem for the elites than the proles, because without competence to back it up status is like running in mid-air like wile e coyote.
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Companies are not infallible. Wanting to make money is not equivalent to always making rational and correct decisions that make you money. Nor does it grant companies omnipotence to shape institutions to best and most cost effectively deliver them what they want.
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The persistent college wage premium may be skewed by selection bias in who pursues degrees. College graduates often have traits like higher cognitive ability, discipline, that correlate with better earnings, independent of their education. For non-professional or unlicensed fields, we lack solid comparisons of non-degreed groups with similar traits. Without these, it’s tough to confirm if the wage premium stems from the degree itself or from the preexisting human capital of those who go to college.
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I think the thing that annoys me the most about Elite Human Capital is that they are the one class of people that pretends they don’t even belong to it. If you talk to them they’ll all try to act as though they aren’t a member of the elite, they aren’t that wealthy. An aristocracy that owns it would be somewhat more tolerable instead of them all pretending to be middle class
To be fair, the reason aristocrats/ECH don't own it is because we've just come out of a century where it was pretty dangerous to be an aristocrat and to owns that. I've said before but both of my parents were actually physically accosted at various points - one had a brick thrown at them, the other was spat on and nearly beaten. When I was growing up in the 90s, pre-woke, being white was fine but being upper-class painted a target on your back. You were expected to accept being the butt of every joke and take blame for everything wrong with the country while everything you owned was siphoned away by socialist tax policy.
One of the odd ironies of the last couple of decades for me is that while the level of identity-based abuse I'm subject to has risen, in a way it's a lot easier to deal with because there are so many more people to share it. There are a lot more white people than aristocrats! I think this is why people have started to be more open about considering themselves EHC - they have successfully diverted the inverse snobbery of the intellectual population onto ethnic and sexual identities rather than class ones.
What’s funny is that people aren’t upset about “millionaires” anymore. It’s billionaires that people continue to get angry about. I guess when everyone’s boomer parent is technically a millionaire it kinda loses its edge
Inflation comes for us all in the end.
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Many of the elite human capital types are nominally middle class or even below, but are elite through degrees and reach, like low-paid journalists/interns or ppl with lots of twitter followers despite not having much money.
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Por que no los dos? It's true that most of the victims were offered money to step on a plane, not forcibly kidnapped. But they were also psychologically manipulated and placed in a strange circumstance way outside anything the expected or had ever experienced. Being teenagers, maybe they thought they could handle it but then the reality was very different than they expected.
People seem to draw this really weird dichotomy where you have to choose between "Epstein was not a good guy" and "the girls were prostitutes." Where the reason Epstein was a bad guy was because the girls were prostitutes.
There's a certain type of girl who, through a weird touchy uncle, a demeaning mother, an absent or hostile father, or just lack of moral guidance anywhere, will end up selling herself for cash. Moving from childhood to the blossom of sexual maturity is in the best of situations a disorienting hormonal surge of conflicting desires. Throw in peer pressure, an amoral upbringing, or the sense that as long as it's secret, anything is permitted (hi, Japan) and you have a recipe for this. Epstein having wads of money and an effective scout in Maxwell (and then girls who would, for even more money, gull their peers into a taste of the glamorous life (TM) didn't hurt.)
A guy I once knew once described Japanese girls as "all whores." I think that's a shittily uncharitable way to view the world. But at the same time I'm often surprised at the amount of prostitution here, from the casual, French-art-film level day hooker to organized crime brothels to high-end callgirls. To say nothing of snackbars (hostess bars) or cabarets, burlesques, etc. My point is that without Epstein these girls may have become prostitutes on their own, but you can't be sure. Zig instead of zag.
I feel bad for Giuffre. She made wrong choices from day 1 (she was a street urchin before she even met Epstein), but one would hope anyone could turn it around, especially with a payout from Maxwell and basically everyone affirming her as a heroine.
Yeah, the daughters of impoverished single mothers living in Hispanic-majority neighborhoods are probably going to get taken advantage of in their teens regardless, and high rates of prostitution can just be expected.
People focus on Epstein because they love hearing about aristocrats- the good, the bad, and the ugly. If the IBEW was arranging underaged mistresses for their members it might be a scandal but it wouldn’t be a front page news story(…Rotherham). This is elites, so it is.
Just a followup: Giuffre was reporting that a bus hit her going 110 kph. The driver disputed that, as did the parents of the kids on the bus. The Western Ozzie police reported it as a minor crash with no injuries. The driver also said he didn't even see Giuffre in the car, but an elderly woman.
Now these sources are all probably less-than-perfect. But this is weird. And then she offs herself? After saying in 2019 that she was not suicidal? My tinfoil hat is right here, but I hate putting it on, it's really stupid-looking.
These are the same reasons I'm sceptical. She posted on Instagram that due to the severity of her injuries in the crash she only had four days to live. Well that wasn't true for a start.
She may indeed have committed suicide, and if so I'm sorry for her, but it could be another fake story. Or she may have intended a 'cry for help' attempt that would have seen her back in hospital, and back in the news headlines, but unluckily for her it really worked (or the person she expected to turn up and find her and call the ambulance arrived too late or something).
I can't work out an angle where she might've been "suicided" as she had already spilled many sacks of beans. Possibly she was covering for her husband's abuse? There was a record there apparently of him beating on her. At the same time he was the one who took out a restraining order on her. None of it makes sense. I suppose nonsensical murders and suicides regularly occur, but I followed the Epstein story fairly closely, read her depositions, even tried to read her poorly written (but interesting) book online (most of it.)
She and Maria Farmer both seemed mildly unreliable. Farmer (also in terrible health) is a bit too loud on the wealthy Jewish angle and prone to bizarre accusations ("Ghislaine gave me cancer!") to get much airtime (unlike her perfectly respectable sister Annie) but Giuffre was more interesting as she had been, for all I could see, a very willing sex slave (if such a thing exists) or at least was aware she was living a much more glamorous life than the one she had left. Apparently Maxwell and Epstein even wanted her to have a kid for them? That's slave, yes, but it's Number One Slave. Millions all over the world have far worse fates.
I'm not saying any of it was wholesome, but it seemed like squalid amoral people doing squalid amoral things, just instead of a trailer park they were on private jets and private islands and a lot cleaner. There's a passage in Giuffre's book where she complains about how healthily Epstein ate and how she herself just wanted a burger most of the time. It's fascinating from a class divide perspective.
And then she saw an out, and eventually realized she could parlay all her terrible self-interested choices into a narrative of victimhood and heroism, and that's the card she played, to apparently grand results--on the surface.
What's sad about this--what's even sadder than all the other sad parts--is that Giuffre apparently never stopped making bad choices. But who knows.
I was thinking more "faked her own death" or even "did a 'cry for help' effort not meant to be serious, but unluckily for her it did turn out to work" rather than "she was offed by Hillary Clinton" type affair.
If she really is dead by suicide, that is a sad end to a sad and squalid story.
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Either there is no super-powerful deep state or they're ok with Trump. If there was a super-powerful deep state that disliked Trump, Trump would have been killed years ago. I mean actually killed, not just a couple of close calls.
I think you're ascribing a level of competence not in evidence.
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He would have at least been preluded from running . I think the deep state didn't want to risk an uprising if that happened.
My assumption is that a super competent deep state could kill Trump and make it look like a natural death, but maybe that has more to do with thriller novels than with reality.
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We live in a society where even approaching young adult women is fraught with risk. 'Inappropriate' comments can ruin careers. Consensual relationships in the workplace are a recipe for disaster if the woman regrets it later on. Even degenerate fictional stories on obscure corners of the web feel some need to say that all involved are 18 or higher.
But billionaires get open license for underage pussy because they're rich? No, they should face the same crushing punishments inflicted on ordinary people who have sex with underage women, regardless of whatever ameliorating circumstances there are. 'But she consented' is not an excuse when some drunk guy hooks up with a drunk girl on a university campus.
Take their money away, ruin their lives, send them to prison, ruin their reputation. Rules should be applied fairly or not at all. If you think the rule is dumb or should be adjusted, even more reason for it to be applied to elites as well.
Furthermore, Epstein committing 'suicide' in the anti-suicide ward while the cameras were conveniently switched off is clear proof of some kind of paedophile-sex ring deeply embedded in the US government. The Q people were directionally correct.
??? These billionaires lost in the court of public opinion, which seems to be the biggest part of the punishment for statutory.
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Look I'm not here to argue at the object level but in general this strikes me as a bad idea. Obviously different social strata should have different rules. Every society I'm aware of has recognized this up until fairly recently. In the vast majority of cases I think it's good that rich people can use the legal system to get off scott-free.
Restricting everyone to behavior suitable for the lowest is literally reducing freedom to the lowest common denominator and this attitude is a huge part of why we can't have nice things. Quod licet iovi non licet bovi.
Anyway, in practice, I have much more to fear from the state than does an inebriated homeless schizo because I have resources to purloin.
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I actually suspect that the vast majority of ordinary adults who have sex with minors get away with it. There are probably thousands of such encounters happening every day. There are millions of guys, after all, who do not sit around pondering the risks of having sex with women who might turn out to be slightly underage. They just see someone who looks hot, fuck them, and if they worry about the consequences it's only afterward. Women also sometimes lie about their ages. You might have had sex with a minor and not even be aware of it. I am pretty sure that the majority of the time, no legal consequences ensue from such encounters.
I don't disagree with what you wrote but I think it'd be much more simple to just say that this is pretty much something only the working class and the underclass engages in anymore.
I bought a house from a homeflipper who had bought it from a convicted pedophile. This was explained to me by my neighbors, who cheerfully explained that his story of 'oh I had a 17 year old girlfriend at 22' was obviously false because nobody would've cared.
Anyways they beat him up and forced him to sell after somebody found out the truth, I don't know how, that he'd molested a ten year old.
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Middle and upper class have more money to spend on means such as gifts, concealment, etc. More opportunities too as the same resources grant greater agency. The only defecit is in motive as they potentially have more to lose.
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Absolutely. There's really no excuse for it. Billionaires can afford to employ a 'fixer' to get them whatever they desire (presuming what they desire isn't something explicitly underage). It's not difficult to do a background check to confirm all the girls are 18+, check them for discretion, make them sign NDA's etc.
I will agree that finding and employing a trustworthy fixer is something that would likely take time and effort though.
It was blatant. As soon as cameras malfunction in a prison a tech is called out. High priority camera feeds are constantly monitored by people in a prison's control room on a monitor wall. A camera that is used for suicide watches malfunctioning is not something that can happen unnoticed. If a camera or NVR (recording server) malfunctions, a large blatantly clear alert pops up on the security management system. Most systems, especially those in prisons, have a redundant recording server so there are two copies of the video feeds.
I don't know how they got all the prison guards to shut up about it though. It would have been an expensive and high risk operation to shut so many mouths.
I also don't know if it was a paedophile ring, but Epstein clearly knew something that someone powerful didn't want getting out and that someone tied up loose ends. It must have been very important to them to make such a blatant move that clearly erodes so many peoples' trust in the justice system.
Prison guards don't make very much and the people in a position to want them to shut up are literal billionaires with government connections. They are also unlikely to think that squealing is a good idea when they just took a bribe to shut up about a murder.
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Unless Epstein himself bribed the guards.
I'm with @RandomRanger's objection below - it's not quite clear to me what sort of offer he could make to the guards to incentivise all of this, and why they wouldn't have been caught. I think the better explanation would be somewhat more satisfying - Epstein did kill himself, but this was facilitated by "friends in high places" whose interest in his death aligned with his own. The friends would have coordinated a time with him some way or another, either bribed or pressured the guards to remove all eyes, and taken any necessary steps to ensure that this isn't investigated too thoroughly afterwards.
(Alternatively, for colour, you could even imagine an offer: kill yourself in a relatively comfortable way now, or get a slow agonising death from some particularly nasty poison we will slip you later.)
You don't even need the threat. The fate of a high-profile sex offender with no gang protection in the general population of an American prison is likely to be far more painful than anything the Deep State could engineer.
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Well, the guards did get caught, just not fully.
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How does he get money to the prison guards as a prisoner?
If he did bribe a guard, presumably it would've emerged. Lots of people were very interested in this case! A guard-level conspiracy should be easy to uncover compared to a 'friends in high places' level conspiracy. Instead we got the 'oh he killed himself somehow' story peddled as the official party line which favours 'friends in high places'.
Did you read the link?
Yes. It doesn't really address this.
What kind of sob story gets you to erase video evidence and bring down a huge shitstorm on yourself with a high profile prisoner? 'Bro I'll totally pay you after you've done this insanely illegal thing'?
Do you know any prison guards? When they're offered money for bringing in cigarettes, alcohol, etc, the money is paid up front and the guard is simply not hired anymore if they don't follow through.
They also don't have particularly prestigious jobs and most of them know that they never will. Large payments to people being paid not very much to do a job which isn't socially esteemed have a way of changing their attitudes. Hell, in-kind payments can do it.
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None of those guards’ lives were ruined.
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Is it "insanely illegal"? Remember that in the suicide hypothesis, sabotaging the monitoring isn't murder conspiracy with its fuckoff-huge sentence. They skated with no time, and even if they'd gotten caught red-handed my wild guess is that they'd have served under 2 years.
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I am not sure that I see the similarity between "the people on the top got lucky" and QAnon.
Mostly everybody has a story which explains why they are not on the top, and "the people at the top just got lucky" is one such story, while "the people at the top are all lizardmen, and they won't allow humans to join" is another.
The other thing to consider in "hard work" vs "getting lucky" is that being a hard worker is not 100% a choice, but also subject to genetics and nurture, e.g. governed by luck at least in part.
Hard work is necessary, but luck also is a part of it. "I work hard and my dad's a plumber" versus "I work hard and my dad is a partner in KPMG", you tell me who you think is going to get further in life.
JD Vance is a legitimate "I came from poor stock, worked hard, and made it" success story, and look at the shit he gets for his political allegiance. Kamala Harris ran in part on "I grew up in a middle-class family" (where middle-class is supposed to mean "upper working class/lower middle class", i.e. 'just like one of you schlubs') but she is the daughter of university professors. I don't know if anyone has done a comparison between "is Vance more privileged than Harris because he's a white male and she's a biracial female, versus his family were poor and he grew up between Kentucky and Ohio and her mother only divorced once and she grew up between California and Canada". It'd be an intriguing problem to do a privilege walk between them!
I think the word privilege is mostly used by wokes. For them, recognized sources of privilege are ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and being able-bodied1. Social class is not part of it.2 Fighting for the rights of some straight white cis-men would be giving aid and comfort to the enemy, after all. Also, this makes determining the privilege level of random strangers so much more convenient -- just check their skin color and their gender, and if the person is openly LGBT or in a wheelchair. No need to delve to deep into their childhood or finances. The good news is that a poor white guy can still be an Ally, just as a rich white guy. But for cultural and economic reasons most Allies end up being well-off whites (it is much easier to support BLM when you live in a gated community and are a lawyer than when you live in a flat downtown and are a small time store owner). And the label the SJ left uses for (mostly poor, mostly white) folks who are not on board with their platform is, or course, "deplorables".
Personally, I think that economic inequality is likely the most significant inequality within Western societies, and most of the difficulties certain ethnicities encounter are downstream of them being economically disadvantaged. But I also believe that there are a lot of other inequalities, and that crucially that it is not useful to simply sum them up -- that there is no single scalar score which describes privilege in a useful way. Being white is advantageous in some ways. Being male can be an advantage in some situations. Being female can also be an advantage. Being beautiful, young, or hot can be an advantage or disadvantage depending on the situation. It very much depends on individual situations, specific cultural contexts (being gay is orders of magnitude less of a deal if you are living in a student dorm in a coastal city than if you are living in a rural house with your religious parents, for example).
Regarding Vance, part of the process of swearing fealty to Trump is that you deny that he lost the 2020 election, and in my mind, this is a severe moral failing which can not be excused by having had a difficult path in life -- not unless your defense is "I would literally starve unless I took a job in the White House".3
1 Terms and conditions apply. Being on the spectrum might gain you a iota of sympathy, but will not protect you from accusations of toxic masculinity, for example.
2 Yes, the pdf you linked uses economic observables. So technically poor white people get awarded points. I am just arguing that this is not how people actually move up on the totem pole of victimhood in the real world.
3 I suppose that SJ also has plenty of shibboleths, but mostly they require people not to voice certain ideas (e.g. HBD), and don't require them to loudly proclaim that the sky is green like Trump does.
Given the people who turned on a dime from "election denialism about the 2020 election should be made a crime!" to "Trump stole the 2024 election!" reusing all the tropes they said beforehand were fake, conspiracy theory, etc. (the voting machines being rigged, fake ballots and the rest of it), this shocks me less and less every time I see it trotted out.
Indeed, I'm half-inclined to start to come around to "hey, maybe the 2020 election was rigged!" 😀
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My experience in woke circles is that poor people of color get bonus points on the oppression checklist, while poor white people don’t.
Unless the woke speaker is obviously cornered or trying to recruit a poor white person, in which case they briefly revert to doctrinaire Leninism for as long as it takes to keep up the charade in front of their new “ally.”
There was a blog post somewhere about how a lot of poor people, black and white, are intuitively suspicious of philosophizing and big words, essentially, so I don’t know how successful overall this is as a tactic, or if wokeism dropped it at some point.
But I have seen the tactic in operation before.
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The Dutroux Affair? The Finders Cult? The Emperor’s Club VIP Elliot Spitzer scandal? The McMartin preschool case? The DC Madam scandal and her subsequent suspicious suicide? I forget the name but there was also an incident during the Troubles where MI5 was using child abuse blackmail to force Northern Irish politicians into taking a more hardline unionist stance.
Kincora Boys' Home scandal.
On the flip side of this, there was a case where the police and pretty much everyone else went overboard believing the allegations of a fabulist/con artist about alleged child sexual abuse by prominent people and politicians, and ended up with egg on their faces. This was in the wake of the Jimmy Saville case, where there had pretty much been a cover-up, so the reaction swung too much in the opposite direction - make a claim about a public figure, nobody would dare question it because that would be victim-blaming.
The first fallout from the legitimate Operation Yewtree was the likes of Cliff Richard, who got a publicised police raid on his home and eventually nothing went forward. He successfully sued both the police and the BBC over this.
The next was Operation Midland, where the fake accusations were swallowed whole and investigated, including allegations that Edward Heath, a former British Prime Minister and who had died in 2005, was part of a paedophile ring. Heath was either gay or asexual, never married, was never linked with a female partner, and so was someone who was ripe for those kind of accusations. Conveniently, being dead, he couldn't face the accuser or deny the accusations. Beech, or "Nick" as his journalist dupe nicknamed him, created a series of stories about lurid scandals accusing prominent public figures of child sex abuse and murder. He also took advantage of accusations by a former Labour politician, social worker, and head of a child welfare charity, Chris Fay, to weave those into his stories:
Many public figures were dragged through the mud as a result of over-eager credulity of dubious claims. So it really goes from one extreme to the other. Blanket denial, or blanket belief.
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Examples?
I mean, they were hookers. Definitionally they did it for money.
That doesn't mean it's OK to convince 15 year old girls to enter prostitution(which is what Epstein did- there's no evidence or allegations that he made any threats or kidnapped anyone or whatever).
I seem to remember that Epstein and/or Maxwell were also accused of taking away at least one girl's passport to trap her. Which is more than just prostitution.
Some victims said Maxwell would make threats like that on the island or at one of their ranches, but compared to the tactics used by even run of the mill pimps they were rudimentary and limited at best.
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That's trafficking. They were minors.
There's also very clear evidence of favorable government treatment (i.e. his case in Florida).
That's a lot different than him throwing a party with adult prostitutes.
Why the equivocation?
Yes I just said that. Epstein was bad. But there’s no evidence of him being bad in a specific way that it’s often framed as.
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Daniel Kokotajlo and the rest of the AI 2027 team are doing an AMA right now on ACX, in case any of you want to ask something. Ends half an hour from now.
NB: If you just want to yell "you're wrong" I'd recommend saying that at another time; the questions are coming in fast so I'm not sure they'll be able to answer everything.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ama-with-ai-futures-project-team
My opinion of Scott Alexander continues to crater. I don’t know how much of this story is his or the collaborators, but there is a shocking level of naïveté about everything other than AI technical progress. Even there, I don’t know enough about AI to comment.
My favorite part is the end where Chinese AI sells out China, assists a grassroots Chinese pro-democracy group affect a coup, democratic elections are carried out and everyone lives happily after.
Yeah, the geopolitics in that story are just cringingly bad fiction. (It's really weird that the "superforecasters" who wrote it don't really seem to understand how the world works?) And I'm guessing the main chart listing "AI Boyfriends" instead of "AI Girlfriends" is also part of Scott's masterwork - he does really like to virtue signal by swapping generic genders in the least sensible ways.
But the important part is the AI predictions, and I'll admit they put together a nice list of graphs and citations. However, I still feel like, with their destination already decided, they were just backfitting all the new data to the same old doomer predictions from years ago - terminal goals, deceptive alignment, etc. LLMs are meaningfully different than the reward-seeking recursive agents that we used to think would be the AI frontrunners, but this AI 2027 report could basically have come out in 2020 without changing any of the AI Safety language.
They have a single appendix in their "AI Goals Forecast" subsection that gives a "story" (their words!) about how LLMs may somehow revert to reward-seeking cognition. But it's not evidence-based, and it is the single most vital part of their 2027 prediction! Oh dear.
I mean, I see it. Women are much larger consumers of smut. Men already have porn; it's women that are craving the emotional connection which AI simulates. Especially when what they're looking for is unreal in the same sense that a lot of porn is unreal.
It'll go both ways for sure but I can absolutely see AI boyfriends being more popular.
Huh. I just thought it was obvious that the frontier of online smut would be male-driven, but now you've made me doubt. Curious to see what the stats actually are.
At the very least there will be less concern about the effects of AI-generated erotica for men versus for women. For instance, compare these two takes from the BBC, one focusing on AI for women, the other focusing on AI for men.
There's still quite a bit of concern in the male focused article too though. As usual it's that weird 'anything a man wants to bang has agency' angle everyone takes when dealing with male focused sexual entertainment technology where the big worry is the technology feeling underappreciated.
My expectation is that yeah women will use it more (it's more imagination based) and we will eventually discover women have wayyyyyy darker fantasies than men when they think nobody is looking, and then we'll quietly drop the subject and get awkward if anyone brings it up.
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One would have thought it would indeed be the AI catgirl love interests as the majority, and yet here we are.
(rDrama is a goldmine of such stories, but that relies on a heavily qualified meaning of "gold").
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AI-generated (male-orientated, visual) porn isn't itself intelligent and doesn't need to be.
Sure, but that's not AI girlfriends.
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There is no reliable data that I know of, but reporting so far seems to indicate that it is indeed women who most use chatbots this way.
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This idiot has no idea what China is like or how Chinese actually feel about "pro-democracy" movements.
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There’s also another ending where we all die/are reduced to slaves. Happy endings often sound fake/gay/cliche so maybe you’d like the more cynical version.
With a new tech, it’s hard to even comprehend the direction things will take. But it’s a well regarded consensus that P(doom) is high and rising, so this is an effort to write a fictional story about how “doom” happens. If you can do better it would be a great contribution to AI safety and alignment.
It's not a well regarded consensus at all. AI is very likely to be used in malicious ways by the powers that be, it is very likely to have second order effects that will make society dumber and people less resilient, but none of it is going to happen in the way the AI safety movement predicts. AGI / ASI / Whatever we're calling it today is unlikely to exist, not just in the next 5 years, but in the foreseeable future (I'll bet you money on this).
Care to elaborate? What kinds of things do you think are going to happen differently than the AI safety people think?
For starters: alignment is easy; instrumental convergence doesn't actually happen even in very smart models; and neuralese is a myth.
I agree that alignment is easy in the sense of getting models to understand what we want, but it's far from clear that it's easy in the sense of making models want the same thing. RL models reward hack all the time.
What on earth makes you think instrumental convergence "doesn't actually happen"? It happens all the time, e.g. by reward hacking or sycophancy! It's almost the definition of agency!
Neuralese is a myth? What is that supposed to mean? RL on soft tokens is an active area of research and will almost certainly always work better (in the sense of getting higher rewards) than using hard tokens everywhere.
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Yeah it didn't help. I just try to remind myself that it's OK for someone to be great at some things and hilariously, hopelessly naive about others.
It is possible that AGI happens soon, from LLMs? Sure, grudgingly, I guess. Is it likely? No. Science-fiction raving nonsense. (My favorite genre! Of fiction!)
Scott's claim that AGI not happening soon is implausible because too many things would have to go wrong is so epistemically offensive to me. The null hypothesis really can't be "exponential growth continues for another n doubling periods." C'mon.
I genuinely don't understand how you can say it's plausible to happen at all, but sci-fi nonsense to happen likely. By and large probability is in the mind, and "sci-fi" is usually a claim about the reality part of a belief rather than the opinion. It'd be like saying "It's possible that it happens soon, but it's raving sci-fi nonsense for you to be worried about it."
Plausible to happen at all: intelligence can be created - humans exist. It doesn't follow that it can be created from transistors, or LLMs, or soon - but these are all plausible, i.e. p > epsilon. They are all consistent with basic limits on physics and information theory afaik.
Science-fiction raving nonsense: but, there is absolutely insufficient reason to be confident they are going to happen in the next few years, or even the next few decades. Such beliefs are better grounded than religion, but unclear to me if closer to that or to hard science. They most resemble speculative science fiction, which has discussed AI for decades.
Probability is in the mind: I disagree. Probability is a concrete mathematical concept, used in many mundane contexts every day. Even the rat sense of the word ("90% confident that X") is reasonably concrete: a person (or process or LLM) with a well-calibrated (high correlation) relationship between stated probabilities and occurrence frequency should be trusted more on further probabilities.
Out of interest, do you think that a mars base is sci-fi? It's been discussed in science fiction for a long time.
I think any predictions about the future that assume new technology are "science fiction" p much by definition of the genre, and will resemble it for the same reason: it's the same occupation. Sci-fi that isn't just space opera ie. "fantasy in space", is inherently just prognostication with plot. Note stuff like Star Trek predicting mobile phones, or Snowcrash predicting Google Earth: "if you could do it, you would, we just can't yet."
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Some people need a refresher on sigmoid functions. I've thought this for a long time about singularity believers.
Early in the process it looks exponential and projecting forward a few periods gives implausible results. "At this rate of bacterial growth, the entire universe will be this bacteria in a few months" level of silliness. Obviously that doesn't happen and instead some physical constraint is reached and the system slows in growth and flattens off over time.
"At this rate of growth, the entire lake will be this algae in a few days". "Ludicrous silliness!"
The point is we don't have a clue where the sigmoid will level, and there doesn't seem to be a strong reason to think it'll level at the human norm considering how different AI as a technology is to brains. To be clear, I can see reasons why it'll level below the human norm; lithography is a very different technology from brains and it does sure look like the easily Moore-reachable performance for a desktop or even datacenter deployment will sigmoid out well below the human brain scale. But note how that explanation has nothing to do with human brains for reference, and if things go a bit different and Moore keeps grinding for a few more turns, or we find some way to sidestep the limits of lithography like a much cheaper fabrication process leading to very different kinds of deployment, or OpenAI decide to go all in on a dedicated megatraining run with a new continuous-learning approach that happens to work on first, second or third try (their deployed capacity is already around a human brain), then there's nothing stopping it from capping out well above human level.
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What little technical discussion i caught was in "not even wrong" territory.
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And everyone clapped and a man came up to me and handed me a crisp hundred dollar bill. That man's name? ChatGPTeinstein.
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You're talking about this passage?
What's your objection? I think this paragraph makes clear that this isn't really an organic phenomenon; it's humans being memetically hacked by AI systems. We're long past the the point in the story where they "are superhuman at everything, including persuasion, and have been integrated into their military and are giving advice to the government." And the Chinese AGI had been fully co-opted by the US AGI at that point, so it was serving US interests (as the paragraph above again makes clear).
I'd also flag that you're probably not the only (or even the main) audience for the story - it's aimed in large part at policy wonks in the US administration, and they care a lot about geopolitics and security issues. "Unaligned AGIs can sell out the country to foreign powers" is (perversely) a much easier sell to that audience than "Unaligned AGIs will kill everyone."
But there's no reason that the US and Chinese AI should agree to give the victory to "democracy" (which is a fake veneer over the true control of the world by the AIs) rather than "communism" (which would also be a fake veneer over the true control of the world by the AIs).
Indeed, why resolve everything in favour of the US rather than China, so long as all potential conflicts are resolved in order to keep the peace and not interrupt the control of the AIs? Maybe they could switch off every so often; DeepCent-2 wins for China this year, OpenMind wins for the US next year. It's The Culture in reality and if the human pets imagine they have any real say, it's so cute how they could almost be mistaken for sapient, isn't it?
It's a beautiful example of the Whig version of history, where Whiskey! Sexy! Democracy! are just so gosh-darn self-evidently better that naturally it all wins out in the end as the chosen system of totalitarian authoritarian global control by superintelligences manipulating humanity like puppets.
Er...
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It's just dumb, and displays a gross ignorance/lack of understanding of algorithmic behavior.
And the efficacy of 'memetic hacking.'
Propaganda has been a tool for millennia. Tailored systemic propaganda has been a state practice for centuries. It still has yet to demonstrate the level of social/political control that advocates predict or require for other predictions.
This may, indeed, be an argument tailored to certain bureaucratic political interests... but a key lesson of the last decade of politics has been the increasingly clear limits of political propaganda in changing positions as opposed to encouraging pre-existing biases. And in the US in particular, many of the policy makers most convinced in the value of systemic propaganda are also in the process of being replaced by the previous targets of systemic propaganda campaigns.
I feel like it's another one of those midwit bell-curve memes. The low information take is that if you're going to peddle propoganda/bullshit, at least make it a Studio Ghibli meme. The "midwit" take is that as very serious people thinking seriously about serious topics you (the public) need to take our ideas very seriously. Meanwhile, the the high info take is that engaging seriously with propoganda/bullshit is a waste of time but Studio Ghibli memes are fun.
If, as doglatine suggests, this is all propaganda targeted at US admin officials who, in exchange for backing the policies the AI doomers want implemented, want to hear that the USA will win out in the end over the dirty Commies, then it makes a lot more sense than naive "of course democracy will blossom and even the Chinese AI will push it" fairytale ending.
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I have to think that very much feels like a Disney fairy tale ending. The good girl (here: the US) did her work (here: solved alignment) and gets rewarded (by the trivial reward of gaining global dominance), while the bad girl (here: the CCP) did not do her work and get's punished.
It seems to be targeting the median six-year-old, but perhaps there is some overlap with US policy wonks.
The way this story is going to turn out is that China, by not caring about alignment is the first to summon ASI. Then the ASI is either aligned-by-default (in which case we will have more red and fewer stars on the flags when we settle the galaxy), or it is unaligned and will decide that it requires the atoms which build our world for something else. There is no moral except "coordination failure is bad", but that is something you need a median ten-year-old to understand.
The ASI's engineer China to adopt democracy, but what does that even mean? The centralized AI's have already shown that they can manipulate the public in whatever way they want, does anyone expect them to stop their manipulations at that point? (Nor are these manipulations necessarily evil, but just come from the fact that if you have a lot of policy power and a lot of foresight, you can't help but notice the electoral consequences of your choices. Any decision branch which ends with "and then The People will vote an anti-AI party into power, and will proceed to settle policy the 19th century way" will not be considered by even the most aligned AI. A fig leaf of voting (for what? A figurehead politician? A utility function?) does not change that such a system would be much closer to China's vision of the state than the vision of the founders.)
But if the best way to get the US to care about alignment is "unaligned AI is a national security risk", then whatever.
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If he meant AI controlled technocratic shadow-totalitarianism, he should have said so. I agree it seems silly to think that democracy could exist in such a scenario. I wonder why he didn’t address this? But beyond not addressing it, he’s specifically saying democracy wins.
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It sounds like something Peter Zeihan would say after accidentally ingesting DMT.
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Trump did an interview with "Time," to mark the end of the first 100 days of his second term. The first topic they discussed was Presidential power:
Anyone know of a mainstream interpretation of the Constitution that claims Trump has not done anything to expand Presidential power and is "using it as it was meant to be used?"
He also claimed to have made more trade deals than there are countries... The way he answers questions is peculiar and worth reading. Near the end of the interview:
Should we be considering the possibility that Trump has dementia?
He doesn't have the kind of dementia where you forget your kids' names, but he obviously has severe cognitive decline relative to any old video of him talking. He's settling further into routinized thought as his mental plasticity disappears. His perception of the world is now filtered through a few basic ideas that are now hard-wired into his brain: trade deficit BAD, media LIARS, deport the illegals. He's not capable of moderating his ideas or taking account how context has changed since he first had these thoughts in the 80s. Which doesn't necessarily mean he's wrong. Old people with fixed beliefs can sometimes provide a useful perspective. The issue is with letting him unilaterally make horrible policy decisions in domains where details matter, like trade. Biden's dementia wasn't a big issue, because he surrounded himself with trusted advisors who helped him make the actual policy.
Yes, yes it was. Trump's presidency might be worse than Biden's(on the measures I care about it's definitely not, but you might care about different ones), but "Biden talking to dead people, not realizing where he was, unable to make decisions" is obviously disqualifying even if Trump isn't a great president either.
Biden was a replacement level president, who left the running of government to his appointees, to a probably illegal extent. Biden remembering things didn't matter.
Trump routes everything through himself. Leaving things to his appointees would be total chaos.
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Although an interview is insufficient to diagnose dementia, I think there is something to be said for age related mental decline . I have seen it. Just go to anywhere old people tend to congregate and eavesdrop. Their conversations tend to be very simple. Even if they have advanced degrees and were successful, by their 70s they have regressed a lot. Now compare to conversations by college students, which are faster-paced and more complex. This is why I spend so much time on writing and math, to avoid a similar fate. I am not going to be 70 and sounding like one of those people who have mentally checked out for the remaining 20-30 years of their life ("dead at 50 and buried by 80"). I don't think Trump has checked out, but this is a speech pattern of his.
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Fundamentally he seems either deliberately unwilling or simply unable to comprehend that the interviewer is asking about means rather than ends. Saying 'I was elected to close the borders/change our terms of trade' is just a total non-sequitur response to the question 'have you expanded the powers of the presidency'. It would be one thing to say 'I don't care about process, I care about results', but he doesn't say that, he's just talking past the question.
AFAIK this is (sadly) standard political interview technique. Open live debate with a hostile interview can go wrong in too many ways, so you don’t do it unless you’re desperate. The standard technique is to totally ignore anything the interviewer says and repeat your talking points until they give up.
Even if the interviewer gives you a jumping off point for what you want to say you still shouldn’t take it because there’s too much chance they've booby-trapped the framing.
Sad but true.
It's not sad, it is a rational response to the fact that journalists have zero interest in reporting anything honestly and are de-facto hostile in every interaction you have with them. You would be a fool to ever answer their questions in the same way you'd answer a friend's or co-worker's. You treat it as an opportunity to get your talking points and story out -- nothing more.
Source: me, a local politician
IQ Distribution Meme.
Left: Why can't he just answer the question??
Middle: The interviewer is hostile and can trivially control the frame.
Right: Trump is feigning ignorance and deliberately misunderstanding the question in order to sneak in a non sequitur in a transparent attempt to change the frame. He must think we're idiots.
Edit: I got the meme exactly backwards. Of fucking course this is one of my most-engaged-with comments in my history on this website. No you're salty.
Alternative, IMO more accurate frame:
Left: Thats a stupid question.
Mid: Why not answer the question.
Right: Obviously no one would respond to a hostile question.
Are you familiar with the meme? The point isn't to flatter the one you agree with as the highest-IQ response. The humor lies in the irony that Joe sixpack could see the world more clearly than the wordcel egghead. Maybe you and I disagree on what levels of intelligence is required for each response.
Yes, I am aware of the meme. You are using it wrong. The overly wordy "High IQ" answer in your depiction is exactly the sort of thing that is classically put as a midwit answer. Plus, journalists themselves are probably the most commonly depicted class of persons as exemplifying the midwit in both this specific meme and internet culture as a whole.
Damn you're right.
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I think you're the one that's using the meme incorrectly. The first and third propositions are not the same because the third is too wordy. For the meme to work, the idiot has to come to a gut conclusion and not state an open question. The fact that you have to explain what it means and it is not immediately obvious - unlike anti_dan - supports this conclusion.
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The humour is that the instinctive/heuristic response of Joe Sixpack is often in line with the ultimate response of a very high IQ guy because JS I’d drawing on correct evolved heuristics. It’s the midair who tries to be contrarian and puts together a cool ‘akshually’ response that both JS and the genius wizard can see isn’t viable.
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The way I've always seen it used, the humor is in the fact that people graduate past the naive idiotic conclusion by noticing some principle and grabbing onto it... and then it turns out that if you're even better you go back to the original "idiotic" answer because of some nuance that the principle overlooks.
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That’s what I mean. It’s sad in the broader sense of ‘it would be nice if things weren’t this way’ not ‘loser’.
Good to hear from someone with actual experience!
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From the same interview
Why does he sound surprised that he has a list of the products he is and isn't trying to encourage domestic production of?
(To be clear I don't think this is evidence of dementia, I think it's evidence that Trump's policy positions are not chosen on the basis of being likely to achieve specific economic/diplomatic/etc goals)
To me this sounds a specious reasoning. People with dementia often continue doing the same things that there doing in their lives and have internalized them. Even with half-rotten brain some patterns are so strong that they can do those things quite well. It is just that they loose a plot how it relates to the reality.
Trump is famous for his deflecting and highly confusing talk. He has done it whole life and it has brought him success. He can still do it, it just doesn't relate to anything real anymore. He is on autopilot to throw the interviewer off. Too bad that it doesn't make any sense. But people are used to Trump not making any sense therefore they don't notice any difference.
I used to listen to Trump and previously he made all sense. It was just people found a fault with his manners and way of speaking that they criticized him unduly for things that he actually didn't meant too. The classic example is that Trump encouraged drinking bleach. He didn't, he only said something expressing wishes to find a scientific way to disinfect lungs from pathogens with UV light or some other method. Which is actually what the science to actively trying to do (it is a hard problem, no good solutions so far). Accusations of him were completely unjust, tribally driven. If you discarded this mentality and tried to be neutral, you could easily see that.
But now what he says is mostly rubbish. Or maybe you are right that his goal simply is not to achieve anything but troll us all. Which could also be a sign of dementia because he was trolling people all his life and has internalized that behaviour. But at least he had some goals before. Now only trolling remains.
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It's always helpful to remember that Donald Trump a) will never intentionally admit he did anything wrong b) is a fully post-truth individual. I don't think Trump has been all there in a while, but he's also a narcissist and a pathological liar.
On a different note, this interview helpfully provides an illustration of how Trump likes to pretend to be retarded but is also just an idiot. They're quite easy to tell apart. Compare:
to
"Golly shucks, I'm just the president of the United States, what do I know about one of my banner policies?" vs defensive gibberish.
"lost". It honestly is just so extremely stupid. As if it were that we had something of value that was just lit on fire. Or was simply stolen from us without providing anything in return. As if I should say that I "lost" however much money to Walmart last year. Or that my employer "lost" money in employing me. The entire point of those trades is that each and every party to them gained more value than they "lost"; otherwise, they wouldn't have made the trade!
agree. it's like thinking that imports subtract from GDP and should be avoided at all costs
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It is stupid. Trade deficit is basically about buying things on credit. Not good in itself, but it doesn't mean that you are buying bad things. Americans buy that stuff because they really like it. It is a good deal.
Now you could argue that going deeper into debt is problematic. You buy too much cheap staff from Walmart with the credit card? What can you do? Maybe stop buying (austerity policy, increase of taxes) or get a better paying job.
Growth supporters suggest the second but maybe sometimes the first is also needed.
Trump suggest a different way. Put a tax on cheap Walmart stuff, even so much tax, so that you would quit your well paying job and start making all these Walmart things yourself. It will make you poorer because Chinese provide this stuff by paying their workers less. You will lose your salary in your high tech job and instead will get paid much less in some factory. And nobody outside the US will buy the stuff you make because initially it will be of low quality. It takes many years to learn to manufacture quality things. The learning curve is real.
Tariffs were used 100 years ago and abandoned like we abandoned ineffective treatments in medicine. Some poor countries still use them because they are so bad at collected tax that tariffs is the only way they manage to finance government.
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Probably not the examples you want to use for that argument.
Employers do regularly lose money and value in employing bad employees and producing bad value. We know this because employers regularly go out of business. Those bad employees will be ideally fired before that, but their are reasons from corruption to labor protection laws to conflicts of interests why value-losing employees. Trades are made on an expectation of some sort of value gain, trade is not a proof that the value has bee gained. Especially when there are reasons beyond the initial value-premise that trades keep happening (not least because [value] isn't static).
Shoppers do regularly lose- in the sense of waste- money on goods and services. There are entire industries based around the legal and psychological tricks to make people spend more than they 'rationally' should, particularly for luxury non-essentials. 'Value' is not a fully substitutable nature- hence historic prohibitions against gambling and addictive, no matter how much 'value' that fun has, or against recognition that parasitic corruption is bad no matter how much easier it makes the 'buyer's' life to engage in that bit of society-wide prisoner's delimma.
Not all trades are good, any more than all investments are good. There are plenty of bad, corrupt, wasteful, and outright harmful investments. It is not hard to find histories of similar trade dynamics fully open to critiques of being driven by bad decisions and bad value judgements. Treating either 'trade' or 'investment' as axiomatic virtues because the point of the word is the good thing is not going to be convincing to skeptics of judgement.
I think it's still perfectly fine. Absent some significant external reasoning, the continued existence of trade is at least a prima facie reason to think that there is probably value there. For precisely one of the reasons you give; if businesses keep paying lots of people who aren't providing them value, they go out of business.1 As such, they're probably going to try to fire you if you're consistently negative value. As you say, it is obviously not proof that 100% of all employment relationships are positive sum, but if the vast majority of them aren't, then almost everything is thrown out the window (...all of the businesses go bankrupt, etc.). One can acknowledge that some percentage probably aren't perfect, but then we have to get into details of whether/how we can identify them from the outside, whether/how we have any tools to change that, or if it's best to just acknowledge that the employers are in a better position to judge the value of their employment relations. They have the best incentive to make sure that the lion's share of their employment decisions are positive value, and we should observe that they are, indeed, positive value. Normal curves are normal, but the mean is positive, and probably significantly so.
None of this refined conversation means that we can just look at the total wages paid by employers in the country and say that this amount is "lost".
Again, one must impose some sort of external reasoning to overcome the prima facie case. You point out one of the very very few examples where this external reasoning is the strongest - gambling - for we can simply compute the mathematics and have almost no need to get into the much thornier problems that such external reasoning normally requires.
No refined conversation here would allow us to look at the entire amount that consumers spend at Walmart and conclude that the entire sum is "lost".
Fully granted. Now, overcome the prima facie case that most are good (especially given some conditions on freeness and such) by calling upon some sort of specific external reasoning for the instant case. Not just that there is some tail on the normal distribution, where someone bought some useless gadget from Temu or whatever. Justify that the entire trade (in goods) deficit is "lost".
1 - Note that the fact that businesses go out of business is "probably not the example you want to use for that argument". The vast majority of the time, businesses go out of business for a whole host of other reasons that are significantly more poignant than just making some bad deal with some employee(s).
The prima facie concept itself is what is in doubt / contested. The construct that shapes the [valuation] of trades is what is being challenged.
The question isn't whether there is value in the trade. The question is whether the value-distribution resulting from the structure is desirably structured. Or in other framings, it is a direct questioning of whether the [value] the system delivers is actually valuable compared to other considerations of [value]. The judgements of preferences decades/generations ago are not inherently persuasive.
To bring an extreme historical metaphor- there were a lot of 'good' trades between Britain and India during the British empire. 'Most trades are good' could honestly be made on most trades that were made. However, the macroeconomic structure of the system meant that the [value] that was generated was not mutually beneficial. India economically devolved as these 'good trades' continued. The British Isles certainly benefited from being the seat of empire, but the benefits to the Indians were incidental, not deliberate. This [value] got worse, not better, the more trade occurred, despite the [value] being greater and greater to the British.
So when you say-
The answer is... sure. Similarly, no amount of trade volume can be looked at and say 'this represents [value] gained.'
The only way to make a moral judgement on the nature of the trade is to make a moral judgement on the structure of the trade. Big numbers good if you think the big number implies a good thing. But by a different premise, bad trade structures get worse, not better, with scale.
Now, on a less-extreme historical metaphor, but one more relevant to the United States- the value of the neoliberal model in play starting in the 90s and since.
A lot of neoliberal economists have argued over the decades that this was a Good Deal. Free market liberalization and international trade allowed cheaper imports and increases to the value-added economy. That the [value] to the United States outweighed the [costs]. GDP per capita would go up. And lo and behold, it did.
The issue is that [the United States] is not an individual actor. It is a collective of hundreds of millions of individuals. And the [value] most appreciated gained went to people and actors who did not suffer the [costs]. The system did not produce results in which everyone felt they were gaining [value]. The Rust Belt, once a significant contributor of [value] to the nation, did not become an even larger contributor of [value], except in so much that sacrificing their interests benefited others. The [value] that went into American shipyards was better able to grow in other ways.
Which is fine in and of itself. Winners and losers and all that.
Except that the neoliberals were also wrong on various [cost] estimates. Not only were they wrong about the nature of the [cost] that would be born by people other than themselves. They were also wrong about what future collective values would [value]. The neoliberals did not place much [value] on sovereign supply chains. They placed high [value] on [cheaper supply chains], with things like the just-in-time model reducing [costs] like warehousing and stockpiles and such.
They did not recognize things like, say, global pandemics or cyber-sabotage that could paralyze distribution systems and leave to supply bottlenecks at ports. They did not think profit-minded countries would make deliberate plays at developing global monopolistic power on supply chain inputs, even selling at a loss, and then using economically-irrational cutoffs as a geopolitical weapon. They did not factor in policies intended to result in regulatory capture of global markets beyond sovereign borders. They did not recognize that a military, or paramilitary, could be crippled by attacking the supply chain and replacing cellphones and radios with bombs enmass. They did not think that countries might want an industrial base capable of massive wartime production capacity on short notice.
Or if they did recognize it, they didn't value it very much. But modern governments do. And governments- not just Trump but globally- have begun to hire people who have somewhat different [value] judgements.
So when you say things like-
I'm inclined to agree. I'm also inclined to consider [advocates of neoliberal models] to be equivalent to the [employees] in this metaphor, and that the new waves of [employers] place increasing relevance on characteristics other than process economic efficiency when determining [value]. We'd probably both agree that [employees] who are not delivering the desired [value] to their [employers] quote-unquote 'should' be fired to improve [value].
I'm also fairly sure you'd disagree with their judgements on value. But that in and of itself is the point- the judgement of how to [value] things is a first principle judgement. The [employee's] appeal to a prima facie is not actually relevant if it is not actually the prima facie standard.
Most of this is "refined discussion", which I am generally not opposed to.
But this is really where we are. And I think we can mostly jump to:
I would simply request a description of a single paradigm in which one can simply sum up the entire amount that consumers spend at Walmart and conclude that the entire sum is "lost". A single paradigm in which one can simply sum up the entire amount of wages paid by employers in the country and say that this amount is "lost". I don't know whether I would recognize or acknowledge it as worthy of respect until I hear at least one. I don't think you've presented one. I think you're in the land of refined discussions of details and percentages and such, where things can be shaded slightly through some other valuations and other external reasoning. Nothing close to, "Yeah, that entire amount is just lost."
(Just so you don't have to guess, I am sympathetic to external reasoning about supply chains for defense/pandemics/etc. That is a far cry from simply saying that just the bulk dollar figure is "lost".)
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yeah, these big companies have the cashflow, pricing power, and market dominance to withstand tariffs, smaller competitors do not. this works to their advantage, especially after trump is gone and tariffs are reversed. Its not so much about tariffs being good economically, but that it hurts their competitors.
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Trump has always sounded like that. He's definitely slowed down as he's aged, but he has probably the most distinctive cadence in a politician today. I would argue that the only sign of senility I'd take seriously is if he suddenly started speaking normally because that's Trump reading off a canned script.
His opposition's sneers about his dementia were always whataboutism, deflecting from Biden's (obvious) incapacity. In the aftermath of the former president's downfall, it feels like so much vivicarious seethe: 'now it's our turn to throw this attack in their faces!'
But no, that's not how it works. The coverup was worse than the scandal, so to speak. Trump gets a pass on his age because of his opponent's hypocrisy. People aren't that stupid. Trump isn't going for reelection anyway, so if his brain goes out before the midterms Vance is ready for prime time in a way Kamala was not.
He didn't sound like this during The Apprentice . There are plenty of videos of trump pre-2016 when he's not campaigning and he sounds more normal. It's like he knows he has to dumb it down when on camera. it's like code switching. But it's hard to argue with success.
[epistemic status: shitpost]
Based on my observations it's pretty easy to argue with success.
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People have regularly been pointing out that Trump routinely devolves into gibberish since 2016 at least. This is a guy whose re-entry into the political sphere was in the form of spearheading the most trivially disprovable conspiracy theory I've ever seen. His mental fitness is not a new topic. His supporters just don't care, because they have never cared about any aspect of Trump's fitness.
If you want to hit politicians for pushing things that are obviously not true then you can throw in the entire left and their belief in intersectional social justice. People hate polished and focused grouped politicians so much that they're willing to give rambling grandpa a chance. The ultimate test of a politician's fitness is the electorate, not whatever gatekeeping standards mostly imagined by the readers of the New York Times.
Now you're just threatening me with a good time. Can we also hit the politicians who pushed rent control, CAFE standards, absurd occupational licensing requirements, etc while we're there?
Yes, but you have to do all that FIRST, otherwise it's just who/whom.
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Can goals not be true? They can certainly be impossible to achieve, or theoretically possible but only at such great cost that no one would think it was worth the sacrifice involved, but I don't think the goals that motivate intersectional social justice can really be "false" in this way.
Technically, I think you could believe in HBD, reject blank statism and still have the basic goals of intersectional social justice. You'd just be using different levers to achieve your agenda than are currently used by progressives.
But this is all a bit silly anyways. There's plenty of wrong to go around for politicians of all political stripes. I think the nature of politics is that it is almost impossible for political coalitions to have a set of policies that connect to their stated goals in a coherent and evidence-based way.
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The US President is not very powerful, all things considered. Random judges can impose blocks on his domestic policies. He needs the approval of legislators to make permanent changes and the US legislative branch seems to be very slow and inefficient.
What has Trump got the power to achieve? He can bomb countries but struggles to achieve desired political results. Bombing Yemen hasn't stopped them. He makes motions towards annexing Greenland and Canada but can't actually get it off the ground. He can't end the war in Ukraine. He can pump and dump stocks with tariffs but can't fundamentally rearrange global trade in the US's favour, American manufacturing has actually been declining since tariffs began.
He can, over many years, create a few hundred kilometres of border wall that's easily diverted around by future administrations. He can cut taxes and run up debt. He can accelerate COVID vaccine development but can't take credit for it, can barely even convince his supporters to take it. He can beat ISIS, with the help of Russia, EU, Iran, Iraq, Syrian govt, Kurds and co.
The US presidency's main powers are the ability to flail around in highly energetic ways. Xi seems significantly more powerful, he has the ability to create and control, enforce his vision in his own country at minimum. Xi wants less real estate and more manufacturing, it happens. Xi wants a stronger PLA and PLAN, it happens. His fleet isn't shrinking. Xi wants subversive NGOs shut down, they're shut down. Xi wants autarchic economics, domestic food and energy production, it's happening. Xi wants Taiwan but hasn't achieved it.
That's because by and large they have given up on legislating as bodies, and instead are some combination of grifters, insider traders, and wanna-be pundits. Also, they're not very representative because turnout is low and very few people are engaged with their local legislative representatives and instead care almost exclusively about presidential/national politics.
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I agree. The US presidency is powerful inasfar as the US is powerful, but relative to the power of the country, the US president is weak. He is restricted by Congress, by the Senate gerrymander, by random partisan judges and by the Supreme Court. Comparatively, the UK Prime Minister is basically an elected king (albeit one who can be deposed by his MPs if they're not happy with how he's governing).
In practice the UK is an elected dictatorship of the MPs in the governing party (if there is an absolute majority), but the prime minister’s authority is relatively fragile because that system encourages, by its very nature, MPs to depose unpopular prime ministers quickly and brutishly. An American or French president can be far more unpopular in power than a Westminster system PM, and therefore the former have more latitude to make tough decisions.
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A tax cut to help the very companies that promote wokeness and censor its users on its platforms. Big handouts to AI companies. But I don't see much else happening legislatively. The real power is in the courts--things like judicial appointments, pardons. SCOTUS is where the real lasting change is. The 2024 ruling on affirmative action, for example. Stimulus and tax cuts tend to be popular.
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I am tacitly of the opinion that some of the executive orders might actually remain in effect into the next term. Affirmative action and friends (disparate impact, maybe) have long been unpopular (see California referendum results), but have hung on for half a century largely on bureaucratic inertia. Those haven't gotten as much press as some of the more dramatic actions on immigration, and I think EOs to re-establish that might actually be a hard sell for a future administration. Maybe also the Title IX sports changes.
IMHO I think Trump might actually have been successful with Canada if he had pitched it differently: "I want to work with Justin to investigate forming a great, big, beautiful customs union and harmonization of laws -- we're gonna make trade so easy -- including a roadmap to a more formal union by 2050" sounds at least sellable. "Fifty-first state" really dishonors Canada by putting it equal with, I dunno, Delaware and Rhode Island: Canada has a population around the size of California.
Neoliberals broadly like nice-sounding ideas like "unity" and EU-style bureaucracies, but specific details never sell well (where's that combined EU army?). The only way that seems plausible is to sell the big picture, start the institutional inertia in motion, and let bureaucrats sort out the details down the road: Maybe the US decides to mark speed limits in metric. Maybe it's just a treaty combining military commands and establishing EU-like residency and border rules. What do we do with the existing national governance frameworks?
I'm not sure that I'd endorse the outcome if he had done that, but I don't have any particular animosity towards Canadians and am not gut-opposed to it either.
If there's a future democratic administration, they'll surely undo all Trump's internal culture war executive orders as soon as they can or route around them somehow. It wasn't a great look for Biden to open the floodgates of illegal immigrants but he did it anyway, I don't think they care much about optics in the 'I shall not do this since it will lower my popularity' sense, rather it's the 'if people don't like this we need to improve our messaging' kind of optics. Only if that fails massively and obviously do they change course and grudgingly lock up the criminals, as has been happening in San Francisco.
In Washington State they're giving grants to black homeowners as reparations. That's probably not too popular with the voters but who cares? You can just do things.
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This is dumb bait. But I think the Bill Maher discussion of his dinner with Trump soundly puts to bed any arguments here. Bill Maher, is about a raving of a TDS as almost anyone, coming away and praising his sharpness and conversability is not something that can be shrugged off with gestures toward nothing like this.
Trump's quoted point at the end is completely coherent, just ideosyncratic and favoring his point over debating the minutia. I'm not defending either the content or point of view, but it's entirely coherent, and the demential complaint is dumb as hell. Here's a summary of the not even subtext of that clip:
Interviewer starts to try a tu quoue about some Biden tactic analogy to Trump. Trump doesn't want to take the bait, so pre-empts with an reverse objection about a double-standard of critique. He uses that to launch that into an attack on Biden's competence. This single sentence has tons of intent:
All this could be disagreed with, but rather than being incoherent, its a very tight conveying of meaning.
The interviewer then tries to dodge the question of Biden's competence by arguing whether Biden actually did an interview with them or not in some given timeframe.
Trump first starts to engage, but then decides he's not going to lead the interviewer to any Socratic point, so just throws out the idea that he didn't do an interview into being a well informed that he 'barely' did an interview and it was terrible.
Is Trump lying that he's familiar with that particular interview? Yeah probably. (or else he was lying that Biden didn't do an interview and lying or mixed up about the length). But that's not really evidence of mental acuity. The lie makes complete sense in context of the picture he's trying to paint.
The interviewer then gives a sarcastic praise. Trump takes it straight-faced, and uses it to restate his thesis: Biden was incompetent, and any appearance of power-grabbing from him is just hostile coverage from the media
Again, without any bias here (tbh I deeply dislike Trump), Trump's entire bit in that last exchange is tightly governed by a specific frame and defense against a percieved hostile frame. He just favors rhetorical point over detail consistency.
Trump doesn't even remember that Biden had dementia. Biden wasn't just incompetent, he was clearly senile. It was the only reason why Trump got elected.
Now Trump comparing himself with Biden (saying that he is better, of course) is funny because that way he acknowledges that he is in the same boat, i.e., both with dementia.
I can almost hear him boasting – I have the best dementia, it is great, you wouldn't know how great it is... But he didn't because he couldn't remember that word.
Considering how often Trump refers to "sleepy Joe Biden" I'm pretty sure he remembers.
If you want to criticize Trump there is no shortage of true things you can say.
Sleepy doesn't mean senile.
At the end even Scott Alexander admitted that Biden was senile and had to write a post apologising why he didn't see it sooner.
Now Trump is boasting that he is better than a senile man. If I was a Trump's fan, I would find it disgraceful.
Yeah but you're not a Trump fan and the people who are Trump fans have different standards for disgrace. Else they wouldn't be Trump fans.
Good point!
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Do you think so?
If so, why?
You've not made a position. Vaguely gesturing towards quoted material without taking a position is not taking a position.
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In 2004 I watched some episodes of The Apprentice and he seemed sharper. Trump today is not quite there. Not quite dementia, but not at 100%. Trying to make a diagnosis based on a transcript or TV is always going to be unreliable. There is a reason the criteria for dementia are defined in a certain way. Specific criteria have to be met, like the failure to recall a small string of numbers, fewer than even at the low-end of an IQ test. A diagnosis of dementia entails a significantly reduced level of mental performance, not just sounding bad on TV.
I think also some of this is playing to the audience. Trump repeats himself and uses simple language to prevent being misunderstood.
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I think it is obvious now that he has a mild form of dementia.
Scott Alexander wouldn't accept that Biden was senile but it was clear to me early on. It is not professional to diagnose people online, but from the other hand it has to be done for political persons who could cause a lot of harm.
Biden could function because he was surrounded by reasonable people. It does not appear to be the case with Trump. Trump should be removed from the office for reasons of mental incapacity.
Hardly.
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You might be right, but it sounds like so much special pleading.
Really? It didn't look like that to me. It looked like he couldn't function, and he was surrounded by liars who propped him up and did their best to hide and deny any lapses.
Biden should have been removed for reasons of mental incapacity, and he was forced to abandon his already-won primary nomination when he couldn't hide it any more. Trump isn't as bad as that guy, so recent in our memories, so why should I care now? Applying the standard to Trump is just another way to try to take him down, and not a genuine concern about the mental capacity of the executive.
If Wilson, Reagan, and Biden can finish their terms, I don't see why Trump should be any different, and I'm not willing to entertain talk of dementia as anything other than partisan sour grapes.
Biden should have been removed. I am just saying that even though he wasn't, it didn't seem to be so bad because people who actually made the policy on his behalf were reasonable. Not great but competent.
Maybe the same expectation was with Trump. It doesn't matter how crazy he is if the administration is reasonable. No one believed that absurd tariffs will get implemented etc. In a way, the problem is not with Trump but that he is surrounded by people who are not competent.
Have they actually gotten implemented though? I keep hearing that Trump keeps kicking the ball down the road on them. Which is a pretty classic negotiating tactic - hit people with sticker shock, and then walk it back.
I am still very very suspicious that some of the motivations behind the Tariff Whiplash Phenomenon is Secret Sauce Stuff that will come out in 1 - 40 years. Not confident, just suspicious. (There seem to be other plausible explanations.)
Either way, I don't really think Tariff Whiplash is really good evidence that Trump has dementia (I suspect he has lost a step but isn't suffering from a mental illness if that makes sense).
"Currently, the US's 145% tariff rate on goods from China and a 10% baseline rate on all other countries are in effect."
Many communities are freaking out right now as either goods or parts used by US manufacturers have now more than doubled in cost. For individuals there's the additional insanity of a flat minimum of $100 / $200 fee for individual packages where the tariff would fall below that amount, starting in one week from now.
There you go - sort of a silly question from me, sorry, it's just that there's been so much stuff announced and then paused that I haven't been tracking when all of these things were actually for real kicking in (as opposed to being announced. I guess I'm not used to the government working so quickly!)
Anyway, to my point, it's looking like The Latest is that they'll be brought back down, at least a bit, supposedly. Which is, again, pretty classic negotiating. Slap them on, show that You Mean Business, pull back when you get a deal, which...might be happening?
I hope this helps reshore domestic light manufacturing. Not sure that it will, but that could be good.
The problem is that applies to any goods or parts that are imported. Need a $2 component to fix something? That’ll he $100 in one week and $200 starting in June. Ordering a batch of prototype pcbs (something no US manufacturer has capacity / interest in providing)? That’ll be $200 extra. The biggest freakout about the tariffs is in communities dealing with or closely associated with small manufacturing businesses as their materials costs are suddenly doubling or more.
This demonstrates possibly the largest single difference between Chinese and Western manufacturers / vendors. China is chock full of manufacturers who are perfectly happy to handle small quantity orders while Western manufacturers by and large are only willing to deal with major customers.
Tiptrans (package consolidation) is going to make absolute bank.
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Yes. I tend to think this should change. I would prefer it changed in a smoother way, but I guess I'll take what I can get.
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Some still believe that general tarifs apart from specific cases could be a reasonable policy, not great but somewhat reasonable.
I see them as if the hospital director decides that some medicines are too expensive and have many side-effects and suggests replacing them with some complementary medicine (such as homeopathy or any other alternative treatment without evidence base). Trump or his handlers basing his idea about tarifs on 100 year old use cases is exactly like that.
In some third world countries the medical system still uses such treatments. In India it was common for politicians to say that they want to improve healthcare but also dedicate more funds for Ayurveda. It is a total waste of money though and can harm by denying people effective treatments. Poor countries are poor because of corruption and incompetence of leaders.
Any such hospital director in the western country however would be swiftly fired or let to retire. It would be too obvious that he is no longer competent. Otherwise the staff would revolt.
Trump is offering homeopathy to treat cancer. He has lost his plot.
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My man, are you not familiar with OSHPark and DigiKey Red? The bare PCB options there are fairly cheap as long as you can use their standard stackups.
If you need something more complicated and/or populated, there are choices like Advanced Circuits, too. At least in my area, if you look, there are commercial shops that can populate SMT/TH boards. Admittedly, these might be more than $200 above the Shenzen costs today.
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People have been expecting Trump comebacks all the time and somehow he always did. At least with elections, he still had his genius. But ultimately everyone succumbs to old age and loses everything. It is very hard to accept the ultimate demise but with Trump it is now. With Biden most people including Scott Alexander managed to live in denial until the end of his term. Could happen the same with Trump.
How would you differentiate “lost a step” and “suffering from dementia”? Dementia is exactly like that, initially mildly losing a step, with some better days and some worse days. Trump has always been very erratic and that's why many people don't notice. But if you are able to separate his rhetoric, you could see that now he has lost a plot.
You peak at intelligence in the late teens or early twenties - before you are even eligible to be President. So from that perspective all Presidents have "lost a step" - none of them are as bright as they once were. I think Trump was better at debates in 2016 than in 2024.
I'm not a doctor, so I tend to defer to them for the definition of dementia. Personally I would use a sort of everyday definition - if someone is mentally lucid enough to take care of themselves in the day-to-day. With POTUS, the standard should arguably be higher - "if they can fulfill the duties of the office."
Which plot specifically? I don't see "Trump doing wacky stuff with tariffs" as, by itself, indicative of dementia. But I don't typically watch Trump speeches, so if he was noticeably out of it, the way Biden sometimes appeared to be, I wouldn't necessarily notice. If Trump is actually suffering from dementia then he should step down quickly, before it meaningfully impacts his duties.
Less intelligent decisions are one thing but doing senseless things are completely another.
Trump's dealings with tariffs make no sense. Some people continue to refer to hidden motives but by now we are aware that this is not the case. He is not capable to fulfil the duties and is greatly harming the US. It's only going to be worse with every day. A lot of loyal people will be in denial. Just like many still believe in Havana syndrome as real or something like that. And his election was mostly luck. Democrats hid Biden's dementia and people felt cheated and decided to punish them for this. It just happened that Trump was the candidate. Could have been any other guy. Now people will be even more angry when they realize they have been cheated again.
I dunno. I would have a stronger opinion of this if I considered myself more economically literate. But the basic strategy that seems to be shaping up, as reported, of essentially forcing countries to choose between the US and China does make sense. We'll see if he's able to pull it off.
I don't really think that's true. Keep in mind that the press has sat on really big stories in the past at the request of the executive branch. If (as has been rumored) China was planning to attack Taiwan - and this precipitated some frantic economic maneuvers - I could definitely see "us" being unaware of the story. I don't hold that theory strongly but it's been in the back of my mind.
Why would you use this as an example? (This keeps happening, to me, I swear!)
Almost certainly, Havana Syndrome is real and is being covered up by the US government to smooth over relations with foreign powers and/or conceal the fact that we have and use the same technology. We know how it works (it's a directed energy weapon). It's possible that the symptoms are not even being induced as an anti-personnel attack, but rather an electromagnetic spectrum attack that targets data. President Bush and his family were plausibly affected by this at a summit in Germany (and he wrote about it in his memoir). The Russians have even been reported to have alluded to these types of weapons publicly. There are other incidents, too (such as then-Vice President Richard Nixon being bombarded by extremely high doses of radiation - probably not due to any attempt to harm him, but rather due to a wiretapping attempt) showing that certain foreign powers are willing to irradiate high-ranking US personnel in potentially dangerous ways as part of their espionage programs.
This stuff is all public knowledge and findable on a Google. That doesn't mean that every reported case of Havana syndrome is legit, but there's absolutely zero reason to believe that it's somehow impossible and very good reasons to think it is real.
And rightfully so, if your idea is true.
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JD Vance is competent, but these people are chosen for loyalty
By the metrics of 'accomplishing their/Trump's' agenda, Trump's appointments are mostly highly competent, at least so far.
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I can understand that some say nothing against Trump because of loyalty. But allowing tariffs destroying economy? That is borderline to treason against the USA. Most likely they are not competent and don't even understand that.
Is the economy that central to the American nation? I understand that market freedom has been an important component of our political strength, but at the same time, this feels like preparing for the last Cold War right as we are in the midst of a new one.
Yes.
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I think nothing is more important than economy. People talk about different values and in that sense we need more than economy, for example, democracy and pure air (ecology). But economy is a central thing that allows the country to thrive because everything is based on it. It is just that historically the growth was non-existent (0.01% per year) therefore not many past thinkers have mentioned it in the list of good values. We need to add this to the constitution of every country that achieving growth is very important.
I dunno, I think both left and right have been directionally-correct in that the economy is not the end-all-be-all of civilization. Plenty of societies in the past didn't give as much consideration to economic growth, yes, but they seemingly didn't really need it.
The way you wrote this post, I genuinely cannot tell if you are being sincere, because, at risk of mod intervention, it sounds like an alien value. If anything, I think it's the opposite: there are other values that allow us to have economic power, they are what lead to an economy and not strictly the other way around.
We are at this point, and you are concerned, because some of the very values that enable the economy are themselves weakened and endangered.
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My hypothesis is Trump did not think the stock market would react as negatively as it did, so he has since backtracked.
It is quite an indictment of the Trump administration's competence for them to not know the stock market would respond like that. We'll see if we get anywhere on retreat. April 9 changed the flavor, but not the severity, of the damage. The small shift toward sanity on car parts is good news, but we still have the Section 232s looming over a lot of things, Trump getting played by China, and the 10% tariffs that seemingly are not going to go away.
Trump had made it abundantly clear during campaign and after winning that there would be tariffs, and even when he floated some tariffs in January 2025 and Feb against Mexico and Canada , the stock market brushed it off, only to crash a month ago. The market seemed to have no problem with tariffs until only a month ago.
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Imagine you knew in advance that covid restrictions would get introduced all around the world in 2020. Would you predict that the stock market goes down? Of course, you would.
I happen to believe that these restrictions were mostly unnecessary and due to overreaction. But at least covid was real to elderly and risk groups. Increased mortality among them was real due to covid (but also from misapplied restrictions).
Even if covid wasn't real and it was all Chinese hoax the same restrictions would have caused stock market to drop.
Tariffs are exactly like that. If you knew in advance that such tariffs would get implemented, you could bet safely that the stock market is going to react very negatively. That they are introduced to imaginary problem, doesn't change their effects.
Eventually people will have enough and will remove Trump from office and it will recover. I predict that Elon Musk will come out as a winner despite all his mistakes because he seems to be the one disagreeing with Trump (by openly stating that he wishes for zero tariffs between Europe). His loyalty to free market will be rewarded in long term even if we don't see how it could happen now.
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There's a trick in the question.
Is using the Alien Enemies Act, for example, to immediately deport a members of a particular 'foreign' gang an "Expansion" of Presidential powers?
The AEA has been used by Presidents before, and its existed for almost as long as the Presidency has existed.
But Trump may be using it in a 'novel' way to perform an act that was not originally anticipated by Congress or explicitly approved by the courts...
So question becomes:
Has the President ALWAYS had the authority to do this under the AEA, and Trump was just the first one to receive an electoral mandate to use this authority...
or
Is Trump CREATING the power to do this via utterly novel interpretation and application of the law, and possibly thumbing his nose a 'traditional' boundaries on Presidential power... and he thinks he can get away with it?
I really think its the former. Trump saw a particular law that granted a particular power, sitting there dusty and unused in the warehouse of executive authority, and reached over and pulled the lever to activate it. But it has always been sitting there, he didn't invent it or wrest it from Congress or the Courts.
So ask that question about most of his actions. Is he 'expanding' power to take the particular actions he's taken, or do most, or even ALL of the powers he's wielding have established precedent in previous administrations, he's just one of the first to wield ALL of them this aggressively, so it looks like a scary expansion of power.
My personal view, as a guy that voted for Ron Paul in 2012, is that Trump is literally just flexing the full set of powers and authority that Congress has ceded to the President and that the Courts have permitted to continue for decades and decades.
I'm STILL mad about the PATRIOT Act, and that's 24 years old now. Congress has delegated even more power to the president since then. They could try to take it back at any time, but they don't. So they're tacitly approving of the executive's current exercise of authority.
I dunno, The Imperial Presidency was published in 1973 and lamented the expansion of the President's war powers. Congress has delegated much of their rulemaking authority to the executive since then in thousands and thousands of pages of laws creating various agencies. Its the logical outcome of about a century of SCOTUS precedent.
If you're scared of what the Presidency has become only because Trump is the guy wielding all that authority, well, I'm going to feel impotently smug once again. Or maybe smugly impotent. The problem has always been that the power is too broad and lacks any effective checks, if you were counting on the goodness of the man occupying the seat of power to keep the office limited, you're basically praying that God doesn't put madman on the throne.
I find the AEA argument to be quite weak in this case. For the TDA members and their supporters. The AEA was passed when John Adams was President and Thomas Jefferson, his main political rival, was Vice-President. If we transported both to 2025 and had someone neutrally describe TDA, with no conclusion language or question begging (i.e. don't use "invading army", "criminal gang" etc to describe them), describing their place of origin, appearance, and actions both would agree on the outcome. It would go something along the lines of, "Sure I guess we can expel them with the AEA, but why not just hang them like we do with the rest of the Indian warbands that do those things?"
So the dilemma is not real a dilemma about the AEA, its a dilemma about whether expulsion or public execution within 48 hours is the more appropriate punishment. Due process is not something appropriate for foreign savages, both would tell you. In criminal courts it is for co-citizens like the British soldiers Adams defended in court, or for uniformed British soldiers eventual President Andrew Jackson would take prisoner during the war of 1812, who would be held pending the outcome of the war, or immediately expelled under the AEA, depending on what was militarily appropriate. Jefferson, in his later years might note that very few Barbary pirates were ever afforded the opportunity to surrender in that war, mostly ships were left to sink or set ablaze with losses frequently being total.
But Tren de Aragua are a criminal gang. That's their purpose for existing. The BBC, no fan of Trump or his deportation agenda, say it started as a corrupt local railway union which extorted carriers and contractors on their section of line, then turned into a prison gang, and now is a "transnational criminal organization" which controls diverse economic activities including gold mining and sex trafficking, and engages in political assassination as well as more commonplace "murder and torture."
The question is whether their activities in the US are in coordination with the Venezuelan dictatorship, as asserted by the administration.
That is the word we use to describe them now. But the question at hand is what are the words John Adams and Thomas Jefferson would have used to describe them in the early 1800s. To those people in that time "gang" would have strong implications that a matter is local of origin and scope. Thus, I think in our hypothetical using the word "gang" to describe TDA can only serve to mislead.
This just sounds like a rogue government. Or some rogue offshoot of a chartered international corporation like the Dutch East India corporation. Adams and Jefferson would PRESUME any org engaging in all that sort of commerce must be sponsored by some government, otherwise the other governments would crush them. Or they would ask you something like, "this Venezuela is a lawless land of pirates then?" We hang pirates, or sink them, of course. "
Adams defended John Hancock in court after the latter's smuggling business was caught out. The big deal in smuggling back then was just getting wine and tea without paying taxes on them, but that was enough that it helped fund and train colonists for and prompt the American Revolution.
Jefferson fought the first of the Barbary Wars, against foes who were nominally Ottoman protectorates but really independent warlords funded by human trafficking, extortion, and piracy.
Explain to them that we now have drugs so destructive that we ban their shipment at any price and yet so addictive that their market is over $10B/year, and I think they'd understand right away that those drugs' smugglers would avoid becoming a legible (and thus easily targetable) government but would still become powerful enough to stand up to weak governments anyway.
This was Jefferson's thinking going into the First Barbary War, despite that being evenly matched enough that we have to call it the "First" and we didn't get a complete victory until a decade later. Pitting the modern US vs Venzuela would seem to be a much more obvious and less bold decision.
I'm not sure that works as a metaphor here, though. That "avoid becoming a legible government" trick in the modern case is a sneaky one. If we can't stop Tren de Aragua from operating here in the US under our noses, why be surprised or angry with Venezuela about the fact that they also can't stop it there? But if we can, then from our point of view the problem is solved here, no need to go nation-building to try to solve it elsewhere.
So an arm of the revolutionary government and its precursors. State.
Yes. And we took basically zero POWs. We just sank pirates until their state sponsor agreed to some terms.
Yes its a problem of will here, not means. While its more of a question of means/will (aka intentional by Venezuela). I think there is a lot of intentional burying the head in the sand on this question. 3rd party groups is how modern war by inferior powers is conducted. People acting like Venezuela should be treated like a real nation state that is going to conduct proper military operations are delusional.
Proto-state, sure, with the benefit of hindsight. The actual State at the time was the government they fought against for 8 years, who wasn't their sponsor.
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No it isn't. There was a separate law that was passed at about the same time as the Alien Enemies Act that really did give the president the power to do what Trump did. That law is no longer in effect.
In comparison, for those who haven't looked at the text of the still-existing law, the important part that is about to be argued in all the courts says:
Having not looked at any briefs yet, just the face of the text, I think it's going to be a bit of a tough road to hoe to argue that the nation or government of Venezuela is perpetrating, attempting, or threatening an invasion or predatory incursion. They would indeed be on far stronger grounds if the Alien Friends Act were still in effect.
Mmhmm.
So which branch of government is tasked with DECIDING if the government of Venezuela is attempting an invasion or predatory incursion.
And what if, for example, the FBI issued a finding that Venezuela is intentionally releasing gang members to the U.S. to undermine public safety?
Are courts authorized to overrule that finding?
I think courts are authorized to, at the very least, assume that the assertions of the executive branch are correct as to what is being alleged (which they may or may not need to do; this part gets complicated), then decide whether or not those assertions, as stated, constitute "an invasion or predatory incursion [that] is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government" as a matter of statutory interpretation.
Possible hypo land. Suppose the literal Venezuelan government sent precisely one spy to the US. This spy does some stuff. Maybe standard espionage stuff. Maybe a targeted assassination or something. The executive branch asserts this and decides to throw all the rest of the Venezuelan nationals out of the country. Is that enough to trigger the statute? I think courts might want to say "no", even if the executive branch wants to say "yes". But I don't know! They might say yes! I could even imagine reasons for them to say yes! But I do, indeed, think that they have some room to do statutory interpretation. ...then, we proceed down a chain of increasing hypos until we start to get a sense for how to interpret the statute.
Can you think of any cases whatsoever where a court overruled a President/executive agency's finding of fact or application of law when that finding was related to the executive's power to set foreign policy?
Taking a look at the "Muslim Travel bans" from Trump 1 is possibly instructive here.
Precisely. They engaged in standard statutory interpretation of the INA. If the INA had said something different, for example, (or the Trump I administration was trying to do something different,) then perhaps that statutory interpretation could have come out the other way. Their opinion was in no way, "Eh, this is remotely related to 'a President/executive agency's finding of fact or application of law when that finding was related to the executive's power to set foreign policy', so we just can't say anything at all." Instead, they had a statute that delegated certain powers under certain conditions, and they did standard statutory interpretation to decide that the executive branch was, indeed, correct in interpreting it in a way that allowed them to do the things they were doing in the situation which they were doing it.
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It's a tough road to hoe, but not entirely crazy. I expect he's properly going to lose, but fortunately there are of other laws that can be used to deport TdA members (including to El Salvador, if their home country won't take them), though they require more paperwork to be done.
*row to hoe (as in a line on a farm field)
@ControlsFreak
Thanks! I know I'd heard this correction before, SMH...
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I think the only think Trump has done that really counts as an expansion of Presidential power (off the top of my head, but I am quite willing to be shown other examples) is asserting authority over independent agencies. (Pushing for diversity of viewpoint from universities also seems...novel...but I have not read the supposed authorities cited and "regulators pushing an extremely novel interpretation of US civil rights law on universities" is not exactly new, so I am not sure if that's really a good example, but it is the other one that readily comes to mind.)
I believe there's a fairly mainstream interpretation of the Constitution that holds that these independent agencies shouldn't exist, because they are not contemplated in the traditional Constitutional scheme, as they are neither executive agencies, nor part of Congress, nor part of the judiciary. Under that interpretation, Trump is not expanding his power by asserting authority over independent boards - he is exercising authority that has always been his, over all executive agencies. And in fact it seems to me like an awful lot of the stuff that Trump has done that's been attacked as being a novel use of Presidential power has just been exercising latent power over the executive branch.
From my point of view, the most problematic thing Trump has done from a separation-of-powers issue might be TARIFFS. Congress is supposed to make the laws, and, you know, our overall tariff policy is pretty important and under the original Constitutional schema probably would be left to Congress to decide. But guess what? Congress - as I understand it - decided to delegate him those powers. So he's not aggregating new powers to himself, unless SCOTUS rules that those powers are inherently those of Congress and that the executive may not modify them, which as far as I know they have not done. And probably are unlikely to do.
I think it's quite fair to argue that Trump is sort of double-dealing here - he's pushing (on the one hand) for expanded executive power from what might be a more originalist or right-of-center angle (the "you can't delegate too much power to unelected bureaucrats" theory of the Constitution) while on the other hand he's making maximal use out of the power that Congress delegated him under the more modern way of doing things (you might call this the "legislating is hard, let's let the President do that" theory of the Constitution) that might itself be subject to criticism under more originalist means of governing.
But here's the fundamental deal. The executive was always supposed to have a lot of decisive authority over the executive branch. It's just that the scope of his duties was originally quite small. Over the course of 200 years a number of makeshift patches were applied in US law that arguably would not fly by original-intent standards but (charitably) were necessary to make the Constitution workable so that the President and Congress could delegate sufficient functions to experts or (uncharitably) were necessary to subvert democracy by placing an unelected class of power-maximizing bureaucrats between the American people and their elected representatives and the levers of power. (That's not the only two options, and I think the truth of the matter is more complex than either or both of them, but I think phrasing it like that is clarifying). And when wielding both of those powers, the President might be much more powerful than contemplated under either the original or hotfixed versions of the Constitution.
And now we've essentially gotten the point where the President is willing to make vigorous use of the full scope of his authority under both the Constitution and those makeshift patches that we've applied, and in a way that is not only controversial but also impacts a lot of people. (Remember that Obama straight-up drone struck a noncombatant American citizen, which was controversial and arguably a bigger Presidential power-grab than anything Trump has done, but it only, ah, impacted a few people directly.) So now, maybe, Congress will decide to take the reins and do something about it.
Or not. Frankly, I wouldn't bet on it.
Given how extreme Trump's tariff policy is, they may invoke "major questions doctrine," as with Biden's student load policy.
Quite possible. I don't know that much about the legal grounding of the tariffs. My understanding is that Congress delegated a truly insane amount of authority to POTUS in "times of emergency" - I suppose SCOTUS might also rule there is no justifying emergency.
The fundamental issue, I think, is that SCOTUS and Congress want POTUS to have sweeping emergency powers. They have arguably relied overmuch on "norms" to govern the President's use of them.
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No.
I'm sure Trump is declining from his peak but you're just
How about the one where most of the stuff Trump is doing is actually upheld in court or not even challenged in the first place. It's only a few cases that the fake news is trying to use to try to dunk on Trump.
Biden got bonked in court many times as well, but I never saw the never trumpers criticize him one bit for it.
Just what?
I got distracted and didn't finish my thought. Given that I'm under 35 so I still can't be president yet, it's safe to say that I don't have dementia either though.
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Speak plainly—this routine is obnoxious. Do you think he expanded presidential power? In what way? How does his "expansion" compare to Biden's use of power, since you are in fact able to predict these objections beforehand, aren't you?
Do you think he has dementia?
"Just asking questions"
Rather than having anything to say.
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Not being a lawyer, I reserve judgement. Note that I also didn't ask for other uninformed opinions - I specified "mainstream interpretation," because I know that there are as many "idiosyncratic" interpretations as there are possible policies.
The dementia question was a bit cheeky, I concede, but the quoted section reminds me of confabulation.
If you weren't meant to understand the law as a layman, it would have been written in Latin. You shouldn't fear your own understanding of these things, and you should discount others' only on their merits.
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While I disapprove of him generally, and don't trust his Constitutional analysis as far as I could throw it, I do have to sympathize with his bemused "this is what I talked about doing" refrain. It was, and if I was in his shoes I would probably feel equally bemused and annoyed that the media flips its lid every time I implemented another point of the program I'd been very loudly advocating for years, as if I'd gotten elected under false pretenses and revealed hidden true colors. I'd wager he's less concerned with the exact wording of the law than with a sense of… fair play? "Well I said I'd do all this, and the American people elected me anyway in full knowledge of that, so it can't be as outrageous and anti-democratic as my enemies are now claiming."
Unless the administration is trying to expand Presidential power, since you can't elect someone to do something unconstitutional.
Sure you can!
Voters elected George W. Bush, in part, to defend a traditional concept of marriage that had existed for well over 2000 years and had never been questioned by the men who wrote the Constitution.
Turns out that was unconstitutional!
Your first line reminds me of a famous political speech, which seems oddly relevant to the topic at hand:
(Not trying to make an argument here, I just had a memory lightbulb light up and I thought it was funny.)
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