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PaperclipPerfector  24d ago (text post)   29647 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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I came across an interesting X post by a right wing Christian religious man on the topic of young people and dating and would like to share:

Jack Reacher Won't Ask Girls to Dance

I’ve had a front-row seat to the social breakdown hitting our young people. You can see it in a lot of places, but one of the clearest examples came from a mom in our church who’s helped run a homeschool prom for several years. She told me something recently that I’ve been stewing on.

When she first got involved, it was normal for boys to ask girls to dance—especially during the “snowball” dances, where the DJ tells you to rotate partners every thirty seconds. That’s the whole point: go find someone new, talk, move, risk a little awkwardness.

But this year? The boys wouldn’t do it. They stood around, clumped up with friends, goofed off, and refused to initiate. Some danced with each other, ironically of course. Meanwhile, the girls were standing around the edge of the dance floor—waiting. Eventually, they gave up and started dragging each other onto the floor. Some even went over and tried to coax the guys to come out. It didn’t work. There were 2 girls for every guy.

The DJ repeatedly re-explained the rules and purpose. Didn’t matter. Nothing changed. He was baffled by it. It didn't use to be like this.

The next day, one of this mom’s younger daughters said something that sums it all up: “I’m graduating, and I’ve never danced with a guy.” Contrast that with her older sister, who just seven or eight years ago came home from prom having danced with seven or eight different young men in one evening.

Something’s shifted. It’s not just social anxiety or awkwardness. It’s paralysis. It’s absence. And yeah—it’s unsettling.

The same trend was the focus of a recent video from Charisma on Command, titled “This Shift in Masculinity Is Scary.” It uses the Reacher series on Amazon Prime as a cultural case study. Reacher is a walking male power fantasy: big, competent, calm under pressure, lethal in a fight. And yet, in the modern adaptation, he is oddly passive with women. He never initiates anything romantic. In fact, the women have to all but throw themselves at him just to get a kiss.

This isn’t how Reacher was written in the books. And it’s not how male leads used to behave. Go back and watch The Girl Next Door or Casino Royale. Whatever flaws those movies had, the men at least wanted something—and they acted on it. Desire was visible. Rejection was a possibility. And risk was part of the reward.

That’s what’s missing now: initiative. Reacher has been reimagined into a man who wins without wanting. He gets the girl without having to pursue her. There’s no risk, no rejection, no emotional vulnerability. He’s strong in every arena except the one that requires personal agency.

And the problem is—it’s not just fiction. The video rightly points out that more and more young men are living like this in real life. They aren’t avoiding women because they’re ascetic or holy. They’re avoiding women because they’re afraid. Afraid of rejection. Afraid of misreading a situation. Afraid of being embarrassed, canceled, or misunderstood. So instead, they scroll. They lift. They build. They wait. They distract themselves endlessly, preparing for a moment they never plan to seize.

I thought this was overstated, but I digress.

It’s not that they don’t want anything. It’s that they’ve lost touch with how to act on what they want. They’ve been taught to suppress desire instead of disciplining it. They’ve learned that passivity feels safer than pursuit.

I used to think this was mainly a problem in my own circles. I’ve harped plenty on the socially stunted sons of Reformed households—the boys who can quote Theologians from memory but can’t make eye contact. But let’s be honest: this isn’t a Reformed problem. It’s a cultural one. We’re just producing our own brand of it.

A lot of young men today have rightly rejected the old “just be yourself” lie and embraced the call to “improve yourself.” That’s a good shift. You see more of them focusing on fitness, career goals, and personal discipline. But that growth often stalls out when it comes to relationships—especially with women. They’ve learned how to level up, but not how to move toward someone.

They’re told to develop themselves but warned off pursuit. So they become hesitant, uncertain, stuck. What’s needed now is the courage to carry that same sense of purpose into the social realm—to risk, initiate, and act with clarity and resolve, even when the outcome isn’t guaranteed.

So maybe we need to say this to our sons directly: If you like her, ask. If you want something, step up. If you get rejected, survive it. But don’t stand on the edge of the dance floor waiting for someone else to make the first move.

P.S. This is merely one angle of the dilemma. I know there are issues with the girls as well. Next time.

The replies to the post range from supportive and understanding to hostile. One that caught my eye said:

I genuinely mean no malice when I type this: this showed up on the time line, I got three paragraphs in, and thought "I bet this is a Based Pastor or something." A few seconds later I figured, girldad. I'm right on both counts.

You write effeminately. You don't seem to have any fellow feeling for young men as young men. Until you reckon with that, you and your dj are going to remain confused.

A 'girldad' has either all girls or a mix of boys and girls, and holds the girls to a standard that elevates them while holding the boys to a standard that denigrates them. It's why Con Inc. tells boys not to go to college and work in factories, and girls to work in STEM.

I like this reply since it has a little edge to it, but I am left wondering, to what extent does empathizing with young men just translate to validating their crippling anxiety and fear over interacting with the opposite sex? Does that do them any good? To me a lot of the replies about fear of getting 'cancelled' just seem like an overblown and hyperbolic expression of that anxiety and fear. The real question should be why that anxiety and fear exist in the first place. And to what extent the responsibility to overcome it rests on young men rather than someone else.

The next day, one of this mom’s younger daughters said something that sums it all up: “I’m graduating, and I’ve never danced with a guy.” Contrast that with her older sister, who just seven or eight years ago came home from prom having danced with seven or eight different young men in one evening.

I'd say there's a high probability that the younger daughter is homely-looking and standoffish, comes across as sassy and somewhat insufferable, whereas her older sister was both pretty and demure or at least didn't come across as hostile/difficult, and therefore stood out. Regarding the seven-to-eight-year timeframe I guess it may seem too short but I think it makes sense. Cultural changes generally happen in cascades/waves I think, with more remote/isolated communities experiencing changes later, to a lesser degree or almost not at all. We can generally tell that there was a period in the US culture war when gender was absolutely at the forefront of it, but it's entirely possible that a community such as this was not yet reached by this back in 2017/18.

A lot of young men today have rightly rejected the old “just be yourself” lie and embraced the call to “improve yourself.” That’s a good shift. You see more of them focusing on fitness, career goals, and personal discipline. But that growth often stalls out when it comes to relationships—especially with women. They’ve learned how to level up, but not how to move toward someone.

The problem here seems to be one of active vs passive virtues. One becomes strong in the weightroom through developing active virtues: discipline, endurance of pain, consistency, intelligence and research. One avoids being a creep or a fornicator or a player, on the other hand, through passive virtues: not doing anything bad, resisting temptation, not saying the wrong thing.

The problem being that the passive virtues are maximized by never doing anything. One can never rape if one never has sex. One can never say the wrong thing if one never talks. One can never hurt anyone if one never moves.

I recall reading somewhere that one should compare one's aspirations against a corpse, and if the corpse would be good at what you're aspiring for, you should reject those aspirations and find new ones, because your aspirations are anti-life. This is the problem here: the evangelical teenage boy has been taught chastity is a virtue, but chastity is a virtue best practiced by the dead, and the Good Christian Boy who never causes trouble with girls is often revealed to be homosexual or to lack healthy desire altogether. We're only just now grappling with how to deal with this question.

One avoids being a creep or a fornicator or a player, on the other hand, through passive virtues: not doing anything bad, resisting temptation, not saying the wrong thing.

The problem being that the passive virtues are maximized by never doing anything. One can never rape if one never has sex. One can never say the wrong thing if one never talks. One can never hurt anyone if one never moves.

I recall reading somewhere that one should compare one's aspirations against a corpse, and if the corpse would be good at what you're aspiring for, you should reject those aspirations and find new ones, because your aspirations are anti-life. This is the problem here: the evangelical teenage boy has been taught chastity is a virtue, but chastity is a virtue best practiced by the dead, and the Good Christian Boy who never causes trouble with girls is often revealed to be homosexual or to lack healthy desire altogether.

I’m reminded of a saying from Sir William Marshal as he was on his deathbed.

The context is that William has had an extremely successful career beating other knights in tournament, and at the time the earned reward for that was taking the loser’s equipment. The church argued that this was an unlawful taking and William had to make amends for it for the good of his soul.

The Marshal replied: ‘Bear with me a moment, Henry. The clerics are too hard on us! They shave us too close! I’ve captured five hundred knights and kept their arms, their destriers and all their gear. If that means the kingdom of God is barred to me then that’s that – I can’t give them back! I can do no more for God, I’d say, than yield myself to Him repentant of all my misdeeds, of all the wrongs I’ve done. Unless the clergy mean to see me damned they should stop their harrying! Either their claims are false or no man can have salvation!’”

We live in an age when the priests have accrued too much power, no one has the capacity yet to tell them to get wrecked, and it will keep leading to passivity until the fever breaks.

IDK if my experience is relevant, but ...

As part of junior orientation at the math-and-science high school I attended, there was a dance. Having avoided all school dances up to that point, I decided to see what all the fuss was about, and also there were two girls I hadn't spoken to who went out of their way to find me beforehand to be first in line, so w/e. I had no experience or education on anything dance-related other than one squaredancing class in 4th grade PE, so the girls did the leading.

Going from "I bearly know your name" to hands on swaying hips for minutes at a time was kinda traumatizing and I spent the rest of the event curled into a ball on a bench trying to sleep.

This was 2004. This school also had a weird gimmicky rent-a-senior day, and all I remember about that was that someone used this to force an outspoken Republican student to stand in the cafeteria with a pro-Democrat sign at one point, and when I was in earshot, he reacted to one of the people wisecracking at him with "Yeah; we should just give everyone money," in a bitter voice. And I thought, "lol silly hyperbolic republican, acting like democrats want to give-everyone money." The slope seems way less slippery at the top.

If @hydroacetylene is to be believed, these are homeschooled christian conservative kids, or at least something close to it. I'm not sure how wise it is to project their problems from modern liberal dysfunctions, as much as I may dislike them.

If I compare what he's describing to my own upbringing - german conservative catholic mainline christian, not exactly the same but somewhat related - it's unclear how this can even happen. At 14-15 everyone, and I mean everyone, even the atheists and heretics protestants would start dancing school here. They would teach a pre-defined list of dancing styles popular in the entire region (primarily disco fox, secondarily wiener & regular waltzer, as well as the basic steps for some completely different styles such as latin). If you didn't, people would laugh about you. It's pathetic to not go, and even if you wouldn't formally be excluded from much, you'd be de-facto excluded from a large number of social gatherings. And at the ones you can go, partner dancing would still be present and you'd be very much negatively noticed.

This culminates in a big ball at 16, similar to a prom. At that point for us, everyone would already have a fixed primary dancing partner which we would bring to the ball, would be familiar with dancing with other girls, and would be capable of dancing to almost any music that is played. Your partner would be extremely pissed about you in particular if you then just wouldn't dance with her. You'd be eager to show off proficiency in some of the lesser-known styles, or just generally. Even shy & socially awkward guys like me didn't struggle particularly with the expected basics. At most, you'd only dance with your primary partner instead of asking out other girls, which is slightly looked down upon but generally accepted.

The only way how something like what he is describing could happen would be a complete breakdown of the supporting infrastructure. So it's hard for me to blame the guys here. One of the advantages of conservative societies is that you can do this: You can blatantly push people into certain behaviour on little more than "this is how we do things, and you'll make an ass of yourself if you don't". But you need to actually do it. Evidently, the parents and other guardians didn't. Imo this is a general problem with some neo-conservative groups, that they basically try to cargo cult traditions without understanding which parts make them work. Especially the parts that require effort, or require enough pressure to seem mean.

On the topic of dancing, I think a portion of the problem is that this guy’s church comes from an American Protestant religious conservative background, and that grouping of people has, at best, an ambivalent relationship with dancing.

The kids aren’t going to feel comfortable dancing if they aren’t taught, as you point out, and then courting rituals have to be emphasized and valued, rather than somewhat grudgingly put up with.

at best, an ambivalent relationship with dancing

And at worst, it's full-blown hysterical about "grinding", "Leave Room for Jesus", etc.

The hysteria is, in my experience, the more typical route.

That sounds like an average 6th grade dance, from what I remember. Up until a certain age, kids think romance is gross and embarrassing. Then in about high school it flips, and having a gf becomes cool. As an incel, I distinctly remember completely missing this change, not realizing that people were going on unironic dates. Even then, it's nowhere near as direct as boys asking girls to dance. That would be trying too hard, which isn't cool. The actual courtship happens behind the scenes, without adults watching.

If these are high school kids, then it's a little weirder, but since they're being homeschooled maybe the process is delayed.

My experience was probably atypical, because I went to a boys' school. It had a parallel institution, a girls' school, and the idea was that they would occasionally crossover for social events. The girls' school was both much older and much larger, so it had a significantly larger student base.

I remember at social events and dances, what usually happened was that the boys were maybe 20-25% of the room, and they would all bunker up defensively in a corner, unsure of the female strangers who made up the rest of the room, and likewise the girls would eye all the boys nervously. There was a large gap between them and neither side crossed it.

This was before smartphones so I don't think you can blame it on that. This is all millennials. It's just that when your social scene is extremely segregated by gender, you're naturally going to cluster with your friends whom you trust, and nobody wants to draw attention to himself or herself by being the first one to try to cross the gulf.

(There was, for what it's worth, zero mention of homosexuality on either side - neither ironic nor serious. I attribute this mostly to them being conservative religious private schools. I don't think I fully understood the concept of homosexuality until after I had graduated. In many ways I wish for that innocence back.)

I distinctly remember seeing the "ironic homosexuality to avoid asking a girl to dance" strat at our first high school dance, because it wasn't exactly common behavior to ape the gays.

It was mostly just anxiety I think. People grew out of it before the next year.

I like this reply since it has a little edge to it, but I am left wondering, to what extent does empathizing with young men just translate to validating their crippling anxiety and fear over interacting with the opposite sex? Does that do them any good? To me a lot of the replies about fear of getting 'cancelled' just seem like an overblown and hyperbolic expression of that anxiety and fear. The real question should be why that anxiety and fear exist in the first place. And to what extent the responsibility to overcome it rests on young men rather than someone else.

While its been a while since I was in high school, I do recall quite vividly that the anxiety to asking out a girl was very strong even back then. Overcoming this and asking girls to prom/homecoming/etc has always been a thing many boys struggle with. What has changed isn't that situation, it is the girls. Frankly, the options out there seem middling. The stats are in. The girls are fat now. The ones that aren't are getting 10000 swipes on Tinder, yes even the high school girls. They lie to the app and purloin booze from some 21 year old "loser" instead of going to prom at all. Its not just the stats, I believe my lying eyes. I used to live next to a high school. The hotness recession is real. I had little to no lecherousness that needed suppressing.

By the way, the guys are fat and ugly too. They know this, thats additional points for their anxiety about being rejected being justified.

How to fix? Take PE seriously. Make BMI and 5k times into strict graduation requirements for women, and pullups and 400M times for men. And then stick to them. The law is a teacher after all. Currently it teaches bad things. We should have it teach good things.

The obvious hypotheses are valid, but boring. Yes, men are worried about being cancelled. Yes, online alternatives (dating apps) disincentivize in-person courtship. Yes, if women have better outcomes than men, they don't need men. Yes, by forcing men to be same as women, men aren't doing the things men were supposed to anymore.

I want to go in another direction : 'Revenge of the Nerds '

Culture reflects the traits of economically ascendent groups. So far, the 21st century belongs to introverted tech-nerds. Therefore, the next generation has traits of introverted nerds.

Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG. A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.

Vivek is correct, about his youth at least. 90s Cincinnati was a place that valorized the Jock. Aspirational Americans looked to become a partner at McKinsey, BigLaw litigator or to own a Auto showroom. IE. to be a charismatic man in a suit.

But Vivek appears to have missed the last 30 years. Right after his youth came Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. The nerd became cool. Over the late-90s/early-2000s, the nerd was an ascendent underdog. But, NY Finance clearly stood atop the American caste system. Then 2008 happened. The financial crisis destroyed finance's chokehold on the American psyche and nerds swooped in with the 1-2 punch of the Social network & Iron Man. It was done. Nerds won. The first generation that's grown up under nerd-supremacy is reaching high school, and families can now see the fallout.

Woke culture, dating apps, asexual movie leads can be traced back to tech & nerds running the show. Influencer-media allows basement dwellers to become role models overnight. Like it or not, that's nerd culture.

I don't dislike nerds. I like them and am one of them.

But I dislike 2 aspects of nerd culture.

  • Anxiety
    • Nerds are anxious. And nerd culture is built to work around these anxieties.
  • Repression
    • Nerds are horny and embarrassed about it. On sexuality, nerds are dishonest. Their dishonesty leads to a weird disconnect between their behaviors behind the scenes and media they endorse.
    • Nerds want to wield power and are embarrassed about it. On the surface, they endorse universality and equal treatment. Power corrupts, and now they too want to wield their newfound power. Once again, disconnect between stated ideologies and the irresistible temptations of power.

This worst aspects of nerd culture aren't more or less degenerate than what came before. But Nerd culture (and as a result our culture in general) has failure modes that are a result of this unique tendency towards anxiety and repression.

Personally, I'll take a jockish and fertile culture over a nerdy and barren one any day.

I think this analysis is interesting but fundamentally off the mark. "Jocks" and "nerds" aren't real, except in a descriptive sense. They're polyphyletic groups. There are jock and nerd behaviors, by which we assign the labels, but no jock or nerd etiology. There are multiple causes that might cause a person to externally present as either, and no cause common to either party. It may or may not be correct to say that kids nowadays want to be more like nerds, but trying to attribute deep social changes to that is fundamentally futile. Even if it's true, these kids don't want to be more anxious, or more socially awkward, or pastier-- they just want the positive attributes associated with nerdity... intelligence, education, high-paying jobs. But they aren't copying the monomaniacal focus on studying that creates the "true" nerds and their social problems.

Now, I think you're onto something about the impact of 2008-- but you're missing the root cause. It wasn't the GFC, it was facebook, youtube, and the iphone. Modern kids don't idolize tech founders, they idolize influencers! (Streamers, youtubers, social media stars, etc.) Think about the dynamics of that. From their own perspective, an influencer is just a person-- they're constantly concerned with social approval, and constantly afraid of failing. But from the perspective of an impressionable media-consumer, every influencer is constantly succeeding, because failing or quitting just means means they're seamlessly replaced with another aspirational influencer selling the same vision of success. So the narrative they're fed is: all the most successful people in the world are hyper-vigilant about social consequences and also glued at all times to the drama-and-suffering machines we all have in our pockets.

But Vivek appears to have missed the last 30 years. Right after his youth came Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. The nerd became cool. Over the late-90s/early-2000s, the nerd was an ascendent underdog

Thats because what Vivek is actually complaining about is the absence of sufficient credentialism (in his eyes, I imagine many Americans think there's already too much).

He wants some South Korean/Indian model where people are told what to grind and then rewarded for meeting the goal with the right certificate.

The actual computer nerd hero origin story is about breaking the path, one way or another. You're cooler for dropping out of Stanford or some such school that an immigrant child would kill to get a degree from to do something amazing.

The Social Network has a scene laying this out. Zuck doesn't need the class. He's that good. That's the dream. Not getting a nice shiny A.

As for Woke Culture being the fault of nerds...debatable. I recall when nerds were the irreverent types. If anything, that was the line of attack: nerds were low SMV types who were inordinately pleased with themselves and resentful at women for not agreeing.

I remember when feminists were hunting nerds for wearing the wrong shirt or having the wrong opinion.

I'll cop to the dishonesty with which nerds approach their own sexuality. But , even here, we're downstream of a generation's worth of negative messaging about what nerdy men actually like. The overly-online "Step on me mommy" stuff is viscerally disgusting but it is safe/"unproblematic" after constant objectification discourse around unapologetic nerd thirsting for their sex symbols. In the real world it doesn't matter as much. But people don't want to be continually whined at or browbeaten online.

Why wouldn't it just be that what happened to everything else happened to nerd spaces too, especially since a lot of successful nerds were within the academy or tech companies in liberal states and nerds can be quite secular and progressive?

As for Woke Culture being the fault of nerds...debatable. I recall when nerds were the irreverent types. If anything, that was the line of attack: nerds were low SMV types who were inordinately pleased with themselves and resentful at women for not agreeing.

There's a strand of woke culture which comes from women in tech -- "Geek Feminism" is probably the term to search for. Some of these women were various sorts of hangers-on (looking at you, Shanley Kane) but some were actual female nerds who despised male nerds for whatever reason (probably mostly the same reasons non-nerd women do). I believe a lot of earlier woke male nerds got woke trying to impress or appease that group.

some were actual female nerds who despised male nerds for whatever reason (probably mostly the same reasons non-nerd women do)

Were they? There are some male nerds who are even despised by other male nerds, but it's almost a tautology that the "Star Trek posters in the workplace are Not Inclusive and Not Okay" sorts of woke blather were coming from non-nerds; actual female nerds were more likely to be Star Trek fanfic (or actual Star Trek novel, for that matter) writers. There are many male nerds who are basically perceived as romantically undesirable by most female nerds, as in the old "the odds are good but the goods are odd" joke in so many gender-lopsided environments, but there's a big difference between being unloved and being despised (although I'm sure that difference feels academic to the chronically unloved).

Consider the crime of Landing On a Comet While Wearing The Wrong Nerdy Shirt: there's a reason why it took a fashion writer out of her depth to call the guy out, despite both his boss and the creator of the shirt being women.

Were they? There are some male nerds who are even despised by other male nerds, but it's almost a tautology that the "Star Trek posters in the workplace are Not Inclusive and Not Okay" sorts of woke blather were coming from non-nerds;

Yes, much of that was coming from non nerds. (in fact, you can name the person -- Dr. Sapna Cheryan -- who gave academic backing for that particular one). But there was some which was not; there are female nerds who are not particularly enamored with some of the trappings of nerd culture (male nerds too, but no one cares), and they were happy to use the weapons provided by the non-nerds.

There are many male nerds who are basically perceived as romantically undesirable by most female nerds, as in the old "the odds are good but the goods are odd" joke in so many gender-lopsided environments, but there's a big difference between being unloved and being despised (although I'm sure that difference feels academic to the chronically unloved).

It's not just "unloved", it is "despised". One reason given for this is that the women would be romantically approached by male nerds they found undesirable, and this was wholly unacceptable and makes male nerds despicable. However, as with most things in the area of male-female relations, that reason probably should be taken with a grain of salt.

nerds

jocks

Everyone needs to go watch a Studio Ghibli movie right now. We should aspire to be well rounded people who aren’t specialized weirdos. People in other countries understand this. Why do Americans want to flatten their identities into one weird thing? Someone thinks they’re a nerd so now they’re absolved of the responsibility of being attractive or the expectation that they can hold a conversation. Someone else believes they’re a jock so now they don’t have to suffer the irritation of being corrected by pedantic relatives or be expected to work at a computer all day. It’s so exhausting and reductive. Why aren’t we supporting everyone to be a well rounded person who is as capable as anyone else at all the various parts of life we’re going to have to deal with? It’s really sad to see people waste away their potential in identities pushed onto them by family and schoolmates at an early age.

The pastor is blinded by his preconceptions. These boys aren't crippled by anxiety, they've simply developed class consciousness.

The common logic of the old world was this: "Women will never make the first move, therefore men have to." This is the one-sided logic of the bourgeoisie factory owner who says to his workers, "You need me more than I need you," and deludes himself into believing it. When your negotiating partner refuses to come to the table because they think they hold all cards, the only recourse is direct action.

The boys aren't stunted, they're on strike. Your move, girls.

It can be both.

"Both" in practice puts all the burden on the boys.

I mean, boys are both stunted (obviously) and also on strike.

They're not really on strike, though. In a strike, the workers are hurting themselves in the short term for benefits in the longer term. And they're coordinating it. The boys here have left the job because the working conditions are terrible and the paychecks aren't coming.

From "More Ominous than a Strike" by Dalrock:

Dr. Helen has a thoughtful post up asking if the title of her book [Men on Strike] is an accurate description of men’s response to the changes in the law and culture. While the title of her book is extremely effective in opening the discussion (which is what it needs to do), it isn’t an accurate description of problem we face in the West. A strike can be negotiated with; offer them a bit more and they’ll get back to work. Better yet, offer a few of them a side deal and break the cohesion. True strikes require moral or legal force to avoid this sort of peeling off. The problem for the modern West is far worse. What we are seeing isn’t men throwing a collective temper tantrum, noble or otherwise. What we are seeing is men responding to incentives. Even worse, inertia has delayed the response to incentives, which means much more adjustment is likely on the way.

There was an old joke in the Soviet Union to the effect of:

We pretend to work. They pretend to pay us.

The problem for the Soviets was this wasn’t a movement. They knew how to handle a movement, and Siberia had plenty of room above ground and below. The Soviets were masters at coercion through fear, but the problem wasn’t a rebellion, it was that they had reached the limits of incentive through fear. In the short and even medium term fear is a very effective motivator. But over time if overused it loses some of its power, especially when it comes to the kind of productivity which requires creativity and risk taking. Standing out is risky; you don’t want to be the worst worker on the line in a fear based system, but you also have reason to fear being the best worker on the line. This doesn’t happen so much by conscious choice, but due to the influence of the incentive structure on the culture over time. Conscious choices can be bargained with, and threats of punishment are still effective. The culture itself is far harder to negotiate with. No one is refusing anything. So the Soviets had no choice but to assign quotas, and severely punish those who failed to meet them. But while the quota/coercion system keeps production running, it works against human nature. If you become the best producer you end up being assigned a larger share of the quota burden; from each according to his abilities. Over time the logic of this works its way into the culture, as everyone gets just a little more inclined to go with the flow and not do more than required. The problem is while momentum causes the response to be slow, it also means it is very difficult to deal with once you have enough of it to recognize.

The problem we presently face in the West is similar. While we have a small number of men who have decided to slack off as a form of protest, the far more insidious risk to our economy is the across the board weakening of the incentive that a marriage based social structure creates for men to produce at their full potential. We’ve moved from a mostly reward based incentive structure to a model the Soviets would have been proud of.

You can see this at the micro level with a man whose wife goes Jenny Erikson on him. The courts understand that throwing a man out of the home and taking away his children naturally reduces the man’s normal incentive to work to support his family. How could it not? It isn’t that most men in this situation will stand by and watch their children starve, but they won’t be motivated to produce quite as much. You can confiscate a percentage of his income in the form of child support, but he no longer has the incentive to fight his way quite so high up our progressive tax structure. This is why the courts have to assign the man an income quota he has to meet, Soviet style. Imputation of income isn’t incidental to the child support family model; it is essential to the function of the model. Note that this doesn’t mean the courts have to formally calculate an income quota for each man who ends up in the new child support family structure; in most cases the man has already assigned himself a quota based on past production. All the family courts need to do in most cases is make sure he doesn’t fall below this quota.

I like this reply since it has a little edge to it, but I am left wondering, to what extent does empathizing with young men just translate to validating their crippling anxiety and fear over interacting with the opposite sex? Does that do them any good? To me a lot of the replies about fear of getting 'cancelled' just seem like an overblown and hyperbolic expression of that anxiety and fear.

I think it's about cost-benefit ratios. Suppose you're an adventurer going out to slay a monster. Maybe you'll go for a band of goblins for 40 gold pieces, or a dragon for 1000 gold pieces, a knighthood and universal fame. You wouldn't go out to slay a dragon for 40 gold pieces not because you're cowardly but because the risks and dangers aren't worth the reward.

Young men are notorious for being the bravest and most fearless. Young men do the fighting and dying in war and crime, they found startups and create new things for good or ill. So long as the incentives match up, young men are perfectly prepared to take risks.

I think the incentives don't match up for the bulk of young men to go out wooing girls like they used to. The status of being a boyfriend is fairly low, there are semi-common complaints about going out on a date being like a job interview (in other words a humiliation ritual/interrogation). There are significant financial costs maintaining relationships. There are cultural expectations that the man mustn't do anything wrong like sleeping with a drunk girl while drunk or approaching in the wrong ways and these are strong expectations, a huge amount of power is going into 'don't be a creep/sex pest'. There's a huge political divide between the sexes these days, it's semi-commonly expected for the man to lie about his true beliefs.

Moving on to marriage, again the status of the husband is not very high. He is not really the man of the house unless there's a burglar or something. Marriage is not 'till death do us part'. There is not really much he can do about nagging or a dead bedroom except an expensive divorce. As far as the legal system is concerned, he is clearly the second parent when it comes to raising (incredibly expensive if done the high-status way) children. Possibly the third parent, behind the state education system. And there's all kinds of media that presents the husband as a loser/fool while the wife is strong and wise.

My point isn't so much the classic 'porn cheaper' discourse so much as it's a matter of status and respect manipulation. Of course it's easier and safer to stay at home and not go out to war. But the status of warriors used to be kept very high, people would sing songs about the glory and valour of these proud defenders of the fatherland. And once he reached the front, there was cameraderie and morale, a mission to achieve that kept him fighting even through death and disease. Militaries are underrated as social institutions, they did an amazing job getting people to do things one would naively imagine to be impossible.

It's not just "Why looks-max, develop game, get fit at the gym, develop hobbies that bring one into contact with women without actively seeming lecherous, learn to interpret these complex semi-passive signals, woo a woman, take her out on appropriate dates and wield good sexual skills... when I have Biggus Tittus from anime, custom-tailored to appeal to me for free?"

The key thing is status here. Many would do all those costly things to end up in a high-status position. Look at South Korea, they exam-max super hard to get into Samsung and the opportunity to work even harder competing with the other elite rat-race enthusiasts. Then there are the gigachads who sleep with hundreds of women, that's a high status position in our culture. Of the looksmaxxing high-effort young men, I expect that's more their goal than the socially desirable 'loyal productive monogamous husband'. They're not going to do all that for a low-status position. Incels aren't satisfied with Biggus Tittus the anime girl or even a prostitute, they want status and respect.

Obviously there are many exceptions and many people who are perfectly happy in relationships. However, I think more effort needs to go into nerfing the dragon (making relations between the sexes less tense) and/or buffing the reward (making married men higher status, not just in cheap words of conservative speeches but real privileges).

"Don't be such a pussy, go kill that dragon on minimum wage" isn't going to cut it.

Asking a girl to dance shouldn't be anything like slaying a dragon, and if the social scene is managed appropriately, it's higher risk to stand there doing nothing while the girls are making eye contact from a few feet away, and then gossiping about how lame he was for not taking the hint. Clearly, it was poorly set up. Perhaps they should revert to the more conservative circle dances.

You realize these are teenaged boys? Approaching a girl in a way that gestures at the romantic is very intimidating the first few times you do it. Given the social stratum they’ve almost certainly not done this regularly before.

Being scared to ask a girl to dance is indeed something they should get over, but it’s very normal and understandable in context.

On the one hand I agree totally that asking a girl to dance shouldn't be anything like slaying a dragon... but they're still not doing it according to Michael Foster.

On the other hand, I think this is precisely the wrong idea. Young men go through their consent training in school and/or have the message sink in culturally, don't be creepy or whatever... Then they're to be gossiped about if they don't approach - 'don't be such a pussy loser, man up and ask her to dance'? There's already lots of that. I imagine that this room was full of immense awkward tension. Didn't work.

The logical conclusion from this mixed messaging is just not to attend dances.

Yep, as they say: Out of sight, out of mind. Just don't attend one of these dances and nobody will even think about you enough to gossip. Instead the right way of doing things is to hold a meeting with both the boys and girls present some days beforehand telling them of expected etiquette and warning the girls in full view of the boys that it is expected that any boy might approach them during the dance and to not attend if they don't feel comfortable with that happening (rejecting a dance with a boy is fine, but each girl must at least be open to being approached by anyone). That way all the boys will know at the very start of the dance that any girl present will be open to a request to dance and won't be so scared of breaking norms.

Far be it from me to be so unrealistic as to expect all relationships or even marriages to be founded on love - but I do find it disturbing that your thorough analysis of the costs and benefits of pursuing a girl completely omits love from the list. Across history and fiction, what leads men to risk life, limb, and reputation in pursuit of a woman - the 1000 gold pieces reward - is love. Actual, passionate love, which can only be satisfied by entering a relationship with that specific woman. It's not a desire for the social status a relationship brings, and it's certainly not sheer undirected lust. The Internet didn't invent masturbation, and if that wasn't enough, brothels and prostitution were commonplace in the old world.

I myself have never asked a girl out because I generically wanted-to-have-a-girlfriend for nebulous status reasons, or because I idly wanted to have sex with her. That always seemed stupid to me, like forcing yourself to eat when you're not hungry. I asked girls out if and when I had crushes on them, because having a crush made me really want to spend time with her, and that in itself was a big enough reward to get over the rejection anxiety. Is that really so rare? Have people stopped falling in love? I'm not asking for sweeping fairy-tale romances, but even a flimsy, fickle crush would do. You just need a push of confidence at the crucial moment. Lust or social ambition alone can't get you there, unless you're exactly the kind of lecherous, materialistic creep which any sane girl would turn down as a serious romantic prospect!

('Course, in pre-modern times, another powerful factor you leave out was literally just money. If "figure out why boys don't fall in love anymore" is too hard a piece of social engineering, there's always that.)

It wasn't supposed to be a thorough analysis (who can thoroughly investigate such a huge topic?), though I guess that this line was a little pathetic as a qualifier when I spend the rest of my words saying the opposite: "Obviously there are many exceptions and many people who are perfectly happy in relationships."

Love is powerful but its strength is finite and its effectiveness context-dependent, that's what I'm trying to get at. There are going to be easier and harder environments to fall in love and have that work out. People are still capable of falling in love but we live in a society that redirects or suppresses much of that energy. Consider the simps moderating Pokimane's twitch chat for free or sending their money to onlyfans girls who provide a (often outsourced to low-paid Pakistani men) simulacrum of a relationship with a woman. On the female side there are those who fall into a Stockholm syndrome like infatuation with their rapist/abuser. That's a kind of love but it's not quite what we're talking about, it's not achieving what it's supposed to be and it's pretty pathetic. Circumstances matter.

"Don't people love their country, why aren't they joining the army?"

Some people of course love their country and will fight and die for it regardless. But money and glory help get others over the line and keeps them in the trenches. Being assured that you won't be prosecuted for war crimes helps. Adventure helps. Watching people die writhing from FPV drones hurts... Siegfried Sassoon poems hurt... Chaotic military bureaucracy hurts... Seeing other people boo veterans, support the enemy and flout the draft hurts...

And people come to love their country less and less if the latter is more prevalent.

Consider the simps moderating Pokimane's twitch chat for free or sending their money to onlyfans girls who provide a (often outsourced to low-paid Pakistani men) simulacrum of a relationship with a woman. On the female side there are those who fall into a Stockholm syndrome like infatuation with their rapist/abuser.

These all seem like social diseases of the disaffected twenty-something. I don't think it explains what is preventing high-schoolers from getting crushes on their classmates. (Of course, the pastor from the OP was talking about homeschooled teens.)

Fair dos on your opening disclaimer, but besides being very cursory, it's also addressing a somewhat different points. Many people nowadays wind up in loving relationships that started as casual dating not motivated by anybody having an organic crush on anybody else. That's fine, but not the same thing as relationships starting because one party falls for the other, and therefore gets sufficient motivation to ask their crush out from the prospect of dating that person alone. (And of course there's no guarantee that a relationship which $starts* this way will be a long-lasting, happy relationship!)

Far be it from me to be so unrealistic as to expect all relationships or even marriages to be founded on love - but I do find it disturbing that your thorough analysis of the costs and benefits of pursuing a girl completely omits love from the list. Across history and fiction, what leads men to risk life, limb, and reputation in pursuit of a woman - the 1000 gold pieces reward - is love.

Sure! But love is very rarely 'at first sight' and even more rarely 'at first sight' in a way that is totally requited. You have to have a base of initial attraction, interest, and liking for love to blossom. Seeing romance as something that just falls out of the sky and immediately demands passion from both sides is actually a big part of the problem -- it usually doesn't!

I'm as big an advocate for romantic love as can possibly be conceived, but I'm also a realist. Young people aren't falling in love not because they're "lecherous, materialistic creeps," but because they learn to silence the impulse based on frequent rejection or messaging that, as you do, tells them that "the worst thing she can say" isn't "no thanks," but "you're a creep!" As it turns out, people are responsive to operant conditioning and social messaging.

If I understand him correctly, @RandomRanger is talking about people not even getting to the stage where love can develop. That's the problem.

I never said anything about it being requited or demanding passion from both sides! What I'm talking about is one person (typically, the boy) developing an infatuation, and being motivated thereby to ask out the other one (typically, the girl). Hopefully, in the course of dating, the askee comes to reciprocate. Hopefully, if she doesn't, it's because the two of them don't really click in a romantic context, and this causes the initial crush to fade. Perhaps using the L-word confused things; I'm not speaking about the full bells and whistles, necessarily. Just about its precursor. A crush. An infatuation. Whatever you want to call it.

Of course, falling-in-love with/developing-a-crush-on someone necessitates already knowing them and hanging out with them frequently for non-dating-related reasons. Luckily, we have a social institution for locking largeish numbers of boys and girls together in a room for months on end until they are forced to get to know each other; it is called "school". By the end of any given year of middle school or high school I'd spoken to most of my opposite-sex classmates a few times, worked on class projects with several, and befriended a few platonically. Even without direct interactions, I'd seen enough of literally all of them to have a working sense of their vibe and personality. That's quite enough to develop a romantic infatuation that goes beyond the carnal (as it did yearly for me) and might motivate you to eventually ask one of these girls out on a date (as it did a few times).

That brings up part of the oddity of the story about the homeschool prom. Do the teens not know each other? Are they strangers?

I don't remember ever dancing as a homeschooled teen. There was an evangelical youth group event where we were playing games like musical winks, where the girls were in a circle, and then the boys were around them in a larger circle, and when the music stopped we had to make eye contact and wink. Something like that. I didn't like it at all, but maybe they had a point. Several of the youth group members did in fact get married to each other.

As far as the homeschool prom goes, before making any galaxy brained pronouncements about the sexes, one might want to enquire: have they taught the kids to dance? Did they teach them dances that are compatible with the songs they are playing? Do the boys know how to play the role of lead in a partner dance?

One prom I witnessed as chaperone, many of the kids had learned folklorico as kids, and maybe line dancing or something, but the DJ was mostly playing R&B. So they mostly didn't dance, or very badly, or by themselves, until some Mexican folk came on every great once in a while, and then they danced.

Once, I went to a Baptist ball for college students. They had three practice sessions before hand, where they taught the dances and organized the pairings if necessary, since everyone was expected to learn and dance every dance. It was polkas and waltzes and such. They were very explicit that the men were expected to dance at least half the time. Most people danced.

Another dance I went to was Greek Orthodox, with an emphasis on the Greek. They were circle dances, and the priest's wife taught them for a couple of weeks before hand at coffee hour. Everyone danced.

There was a quirky Alaskan group I knew that all sang and played music, and liked to dance things like the Virginia Reel. It was very clear that no one was making any kind of long lasting commitment by asking for a dance, and that the lame thing was to stand around while a girl looked around hopefully. Another Alaskan group I knew decided to play rap music at their school dances, but actually taught the kids fan dances to accompany a drum circle. They did not dance at the school dances -- it's really very difficult to dance to rap without looking a fool, and requires a high skill level.

In general, most people will dance the two or three folk dances they know and are comfortable with, and will not dance the ones they don't know, or especially lead when they don't know what they're doing.

The DJ is largely to blame in playing music intended for couples dancing when the kids were clearly not comfortable with that.

It probably is related to the larger social scene, where it's unclear how someone should go about asking for a date -- that the social script has become largely illegible.

Do the boys know how to play the role of lead in a partner dance?

This is not necessary. Learning how to lead properly takes 4+ years if you put effort into your dancing (by this I mean frequent lessons etc.). For people just starting out it's better for both the leader and followers to be responsible for their own steps, otherwise it just feels (and even worse, looks) awkward.

have they taught the kids to dance? Did they teach them dances that are compatible with the songs they are playing? Do the boys know how to play the role of lead in a partner dance?

I can certainly say from experience that this applied to me (and still does, though I'm married so I am past the point where dancing matters for forming romantic connections). I have no idea how to dance beyond "sway back and forth and step side to side a bit" during slow, intimate songs. As a result, I am well aware that if I try to dance (outside that context) I'm going to just flail around and look like a fool. So I don't dance.

The only time I can remember really enjoying dancing as a young man was when I went to a salsa night in college. Nobody was expected to know how to dance salsa, nor even bring a partner, so they split people up into couples and taught us all how to dance. And honestly? It was a blast! But at every other dance I went to, I had no idea what I was doing and had a miserable time.

I wanted to highlight a reply to this that I thought was insightful.

Every species has mating rituals. If those mating rituals cannot be performed, they will not breed.

That's why we say of some animals that they "won't breed in captivity". It isn't because they have abstract philosophical ideas about freedom and want to take a stand. It's because the zoo environment has some restriction that disrupts their mating rituals.

In humans, these rituals are partially instinctive, but also must be adapted to culture, so parts of them must be learned.

If these parts are not taught, because they're not understood, or because speaking of them openly is politically off-limits, the next generation will have trouble mating.

If you put a group of unattached young boys and girls, in a room with music, and they don't dance with each other, that disruption, that failure to teach, has clearly happened.

But most people don't understand what was disrupted, or how it's supposed to work... and that's why they can't teach it.

They think that young men are supposed to just have the courage to approach girls. That this is a failure of character.

Wrong.

That's not how the human mating ritual works at all.

If that was how human mating worked, young men would not be afraid to approach women. They wouldn't just be "brave enough" to do it. It wouldn't be scary at all, because the men who were scared by it would have less descendants.

If you're a keen observer of old books and movies, you already know what the basic human mating ritual really is.

But if you aren't, it can be logicked out from what boys and girls are afraid of.

Girls are afraid of embarrassment from being too forward.

Boys are afraid of embarrassment from being rejected.

So, it's pretty clear that girls aren't supposed to be overt, and boys aren't supposed to cold approach. Which tells us everything we need to know.

Correct human mating rituals are covertly initiated by the female.

She signals interest or, at the very least, availability. But she does so in a plausibly deniable way.

He then perceives the hint, and decides if he wants to pick it up. If he does not, she avoids embarrassment because she can pretend there was no hint. If he does, he can approach with confidence because he has been invited.

That's how it actually works.

But for this to work, young men need to know how to pick up a hint. And young girls need to know how to drop one.

And before they can learn how to do it, they have to learn that this is what they need to do.

If you don't understand this, then you try to shame young men into cold approaching, then girls complain about being cold approached, because they instinctively don't like it, and it takes a lot of charisma to overcome that.

Don't bother me at the gym, don't bother me at the coffee shop, don't stop me on the street out in public, etc, etc, etc.

But when men ask them, when should we approach you, then, they immediately bluescreen and start giving nonsense answers, because the real answer is they only want to be approached by men they like, and even they realize that this is impossible without telepathy.

Because they've never been taught how to send a signal that says "I want you to come talk to me" with no telepathy required. They don't even know that's what they are supposed to do.

And with zero instruction or examples, young men would be equally inept at spotting the hints she doesn't know how to drop.

Idealistic political notions about how people "should" be hurt everyone, because they prevent us from dealing with them as they are.

Great reply. This is why the “groomer” discourse* is so wild to me. Modern parents precisely are NOT grooming their children. I imagine that much of tribal and traditional child rearing involves educating children and adolescents into how courting/mating/reproduction operate, and it is at the exact moment that straight parents fail to teach this to their children that they choose to project their failures onto nearby drag queens or trans people. If you don’t do it yourself they’re going to pick it up off the street. Are the parents not possibly creating sexual minorities (which are to some degree sexual dysfunction in my opinion) in their children through the lack of education surrounding courtship ritual?

If you are disturbed to imagine parents providing sexual or courting education (which is a response I might expect from this post) I don’t really disagree with you but it also reinforces my point. I don’t really know how to create an environment more conducive to courtship today but the clinical answer of high school sex ed isn’t very sexy and doesn’t seem to be working.

*Groomer discourse referring to straight people calling trans and/or homosexuals “groomers”

Modern parents precisely are NOT grooming their children. I imagine that much of tribal and traditional child rearing involves educating children and adolescents into how courting/mating/reproduction operate

That's because social norms are moving too fast and parental dating advice is as cringe as their job-seeking advice.

The part of traditional child rearing that might still work is children hanging out without parental or pedagogical supervision in mixed-age groups. Since being forced to hang out with older siblings, spending the summer at your grandparents' farm and being friends with your neighbors are the things of the past, we need to come up with more ways to force children to observe the courtship habits of those slightly older than them.

My proposal is mandatory student-led school clubs with equally mandatory 33% sex quotas. This won't help homeschooled kids much, but at least those going to public schools will have to interact (in person!) with students of different sex both older and younger than them.

Modern parents precisely are NOT grooming their children.

Time after time I see otherwise-competent Boomer parents utterly fail to delegate effectively or otherwise inspire the want to risk/reward in their children. They think giving their teenagers literal societal puberty blockers is the height of parenting- or more charitably, failing to administer the appropriate antidote to puberty blockers society forces down their throats (and then those of a traditionalist bent freak out when progressives take that to its logical conclusion).

I have yet to encounter a case where this has worked well; when it occurs, it occurs by accident.

I don’t really know how to create an environment more conducive to courtship today but the clinical answer of high school sex ed isn’t very sexy and doesn’t seem to be working.

Just make young men more attractive to women (again). This will require the old and women to pay some socioeconomic or sociopolitical taxes, or as is just as often the case, for a war to break out.

Are the parents not possibly creating sexual minorities (which are to some degree sexual dysfunction in my opinion) in their children through the lack of education surrounding courtship ritual?

Yes, they're taking tops/potential active partners and turning them into bottoms/passive partners (I call this transgenderism, because statistically men are meant to top and women are meant to bottom, but most people do not share that definition). This is why Boys [must] Beware- because they try it, actually get some fucking validation for the first time in their lives, and stay there without progressing back to the top/active role (or they get turbo-AIDS and die).

This functions independently of actual orientation, but most people don't actually understand that distinction because they're too focused on "peepee in but", much like how most people don't understand that consent for tops and consent for bottoms functions differently.

straight people calling trans and/or homosexuals “groomers”

Oh, that's just traditionalist men failing [intentionally or otherwise] to understand how female sexuality works. If they knew how it worked, they could combat its excesses (in the gay case, where older men take younger men-who-would-be-tops off the market, and in the trans case, where women with a castration/sissification fetish encourage younger men-who-would-be-tops to castrate themselves, or lie to them that people will still want them after the modifications), but they are unwilling or unable- so they're reduced to that characteristic impotent screaming.

*Groomer discourse referring to straight people calling trans and/or homosexuals “groomers”

What's your take on people using the term "groomer" to refer to a person in a position of authority who uses that position to secretly involve themselves in a child's sexuality?

A huge portion of the debate very clearly centers on authority figures lying to parents to hide information from them about what's going on with their kids. Surely you are aware of the many, many documented cases where this has been the center of the controversy? How can you frame teachers and administrators "teaching" kids about aberant sexuality, explicitly urging the kids to hide this information from their parents, and then lying to the parents when they ask what's going on, as a matter of policy, as parents "failing to teach" their kids?

Correct human mating rituals are covertly initiated by the female. She signals interest or, at the very least, availability. But she does so in a plausibly deniable way. He then perceives the hint, and decides if he wants to pick it up. If he does not, she avoids embarrassment because she can pretend there was no hint. If he does, he can approach with confidence because he has been invited. That's how it actually works. But for this to work, young men need to know how to pick up a hint. And young girls need to know how to drop one.

This was probably the most important lesson I gained from the PUA community (replace 'aerial combat' with pick up and fighter pilots with 'PUA'). Not just the words of it, but the experience of it in repetition to truly grok it.

Learning what Indicators of Interest looked like was critical. In generations past there was all sorts of weird things girls could do to show interest, like dropping a handkerchief, but luckily most can be done with nothing at all and are just as relevant today.

Eye contact was pretty much rule zero for getting a warm opener when approaching a woman. There were a lot of other minor behaviours to notice, like a girl standing in proximity or brushing past you, but at the end of the day, eye contact was always the go-to. What was funny is that I think some girls would instinctively look at you in a particular war and be genuinely surprised when you approached them, but would still be warm. And that 'particular way' is difficult to explain, but I think many people know it when they see it. Some girls knew exactly what they were doing ("took you long enough") and others really believed 'it just happened'.

There's something twisted about the whole 'We want you to know how to approach women. No not like that. You aren't meant to learn, you're just meant to know.' thing.

You aren't meant to just know, though, is the thing. You're meant to just not know. You're meant to be eugenically filtered out.

Luckily finding a cheat code by learning and not getting caught doing so is a perfectly acceptable strategy towards mating success.

It's not an acceptable strategy, which is why the whole PUA thing is so despised.

Hence the "not getting caught" clause.

Glad you posted this one. I wanted to discuss it as well in conjunction with a different post written by Foster, but the OP was lengthy enough as is.

This reply is very PUA or maybe more classically 'RedPill' adjacent. Which I found surprising considering the crowd one might expect to find following a pastor. But reading more of Pastor Fosters work, it looks to fit right in.

There seems to be an odd synergy of old /r/TheRedPill type dating advice woven into the otherwise traditionalist presenting pastor. As seen here.

The post goes over things like abundance mentality, 'sarging' to get over rejection, not being needy, friendzoning women and getting them talking, he even goes into text game... And every piece of advice there is underlined with verses from the Bible.

Whilst modern problems sometimes require modern solutions, this endeavor is certainly not coming from Biblical or 'traditional' channels, as far as I know. Foster seems to stumble into this fact when replying to a negative comment:

With your PS statement in mind, I'll say this:

Improving yourself has shown that 1) women bring very little, if anything, good to the table, 2) women do not improve, as they are raised to believe they're perfect from a very young age, and 3) the risk is not worth the reward

Foster replies:

This is really a loser mindset that rejects basic statements in Scripture.

What follows is a deluge of comments from negative posters dancing around the fact that the modern American Christian woman and the dating market as a whole are not exactly in line with Biblical norms.

On one hand I am sympathetic to Fosters position. There seem to be a lot of negative posters who, I suspect, might not be very representative of the people Foster is trying to reach. Anonymous X accounts can be anyone. On the other hand, this is an indirect participation in a long debate regarding the gender wars. As such, one would hope that people like Foster would have a more holistic approach to the issue at hand. That issue being that we are not just dealing with people who want to engage with the opposite sex but don't know how. But people who seemingly do not want to engage with the opposite sex or view it adversarially. Throwing the Bible at them might not be a solution with a very wide audience.

To underline that point I'd remind those who missed it that RedPill and PUA dating advice was looked upon with great scorn back in the day. The assertions against it being that it was explicitly and implicitly misogynistic. And to an extent I would have to agree. Though maybe for the wrong reasons:

The pastor is warning the young male sheep of his flock that the potential love of their life might simply reject them and their potential lifelong union because he, in his infatuation, posts cringe texts...

There is some disconnect here between the Bible and RedPill/PUA philosophy, at some level. Even if I'm not quite smart enough to articulate it.

This reply is very PUA or maybe more classically 'RedPill' adjacent. Which I found surprising considering the crowd one might expect to find following a pastor. But reading more of Pastor Fosters work, it looks to fit right in.

Devon Eriksen is an indie sci-fi author. He's a polyamorous libertarian with multiple wives. He's "redpill adjacent" in the same sense that folks like Eric S. Raymond are - anti-woke and evpsych aficionados (when it fits their priors) but not really part of the manosphere.

Ironically, Eriksen came to my attention through TracingWoodgrains, who positively reviewed his book. (I thought it was good enough that I'll read the sequel, though it's got some rough edges.) Eriksen also hides his power level a bit, probably because he wants to sell books.

This isn't the first time I've seen a somewhat improbable coalition of vaguely right-aligned people online, conservative Christians rubbing shoulders with libertarian atheist SF authors, united mostly by their hatred of woke. Often these affiliations fracture on their fault lines - KulakRevolt probably lost a fair bit of his audience once he started going hard on "Christianity is a pussy simp Jew religion," and the only time Eriksen gets pushback from his mostly rightie followers is when he reminds them he's a polyamorous atheist. (He probably gets a bit of a pass on the first because his situationship seems to be closer to "harem" than "polycule").

Does he lean in hard on the poly-am thing?

Every time I run into one of his tweets or a tweet from his marketing wife, it distinctly sounds like a harem. Is there reason to think there is another guy in the mix?

Not really, he just mentions his wives regularly. Afaik he's the only penis in the mix.

This certainly describes a social technology that used to exist and has in large part corroded away, but I'm unconvinced by the claim that it's instinctive enough to resist attempts to replace it with some other social technology (or indeed literal technology, eg dating apps). Being afraid of embarrassment might be a spontaneous response, but I don't think it is written into the Y chromosome that being rejected is inherently embarrassing, and I especially don't think it's written into the X chromosome that being romantically or even sexually forward is inherently embarrassing. Sexual taboos are social. Women who were raised to have none, or in whom they didn't 'take', need feel no such embarrassment.

I think "homeschool prom" says it all right there. First of all, as much as homeschool parents like to protest that, no, their kids don't have any problem socializing because we make sure they have plenty of friends, etc., how many of these kids were ever in a situation with a member of the opposite sex who wasn't a family friend? I've known a lot of homeschool guys in my life and none of them were exactly players in the dating world until they figured it out with the help of friends who weren't homeschooled.

More importantly, though, I don't think this guy knows what a prom is. Prom is an event where it's expected you come with a date. It would be socially awkward for a member of either sex to show up without one, if only because 95% of the people there are going to dance with their dates all night. It's a formal event, not a dance club. What he's describing is a middle school dance, and it sounds like most of these kids are acting like one would at a middle school dance.

Prom: A musical festival held during the summer at the Royal Albert Hall. Can recommend.

This guy is a homeschooling confessional Protestant aka a fundamentalist in the original sense of the word. The attendees probably weren’t allowed to take a date and probably aren’t allowed to dance with the same person all night.

Yeah, calling this ‘prom’ might be dumb, but that’s because it doesn’t fit the cultural context to have prom.

I see this as part of a larger problem of our system basically beating initiative out of the population. It shows up in dating because that’s pretty obvious, but teachers report that kids don’t really try to figure out how to solve problems on their own, and often end up “stuck” until an authority be it teacher or parent does the problem for them. They also tend to seek out adult help with any social problems that tend to crop up. If some kid is mean to them, they don’t try to solve that issue between the kids, they go straight to an adult.

Partially, I think it’s a lack of time away from adults and with other kids, especially when the adult doesn’t know exactly what’s going on. Most kids have their lives arranged for them — they play sports after school, they have activities. They have playdates. And of course, the cellphone means that someone always knows where they are and can call them if they deviated from where mom expected them to be. How do you learn to take risks and initiative when you live an arranged life? When you have never been in a situation where you do something awkward and discover later that it’s recoverable?

The other thing is that school and parents tend to be overly worried about the kid making a mistake that will follow him around. Maybe he tries to figure out that homework problem and gets it wrong and loses his spot on the honor roll. Maybe he makes a mistake with a girl and gets accused of sexually harassing her. Maybe he does something stupid when he’s out with friends and ends up in trouble or does drugs or drinks underaged. Any of those can stick around for a while. Parents know this and kids pick up on it. So between th3 both of them, it’s better to just not try those things.

Ok, I actually live in a fundy bubble that, from a quick glance at this guy’s timeline, is more similar to what this guy experiences than a typical motteizean. I have a few words. Probably less than 100% generalizes to his situation but more than 80% do.

First off, #metoo is not occurring to these young men as a negative outcome. Probably some of them haven’t even heard of it(homeschooled conservative Christian youth aren’t really allowed to have Twitter), but for the ones who know about it they think it’s something that happens in liberal secular world, not ‘here’. They may be worried that people will laugh at them for getting rejected, maybe that a young lady’s father will be mad at them for taking excessive interest, but ‘get cancelled’ is not an outcome that they would spitball. This probably does not make them brave.

Secondly, teenagers are not allowed to have relationships with each other. This is taken seriously, and there is much more effort put into this than into getting young people married when the time comes for that. The results for local marriage rates are predictable; the shift in social roles, especially in young men, does not happen as a result of wish casting by a third party. Obviously the young women have some share of the blame here but it is fair to discuss the two things separately.

Thirdly, this is a culture where men lead. That means that relationships are initiated by the young men. I notice from his timeline that he is also skeptical of ‘courting’. For those who don’t know, this is a partially-aborted conservative Christian attempt at replacing dating with something like an arranged marriage but lacking the parts that make arranged marriages work. The idea spreads through fundy homeschooling networks independent of denominational lines, and it tends to vary from place to place, but the gist is that a young man develops an interest in a girl(who is, to be clear, in her twenties and still living at home- in these kinds of circles a girl isn’t a woman until she’s married and pregnant- and women don’t live independently either) without talking to her very much and then asks her father for permission to court her, which he gives or declines following whatever process. The ‘courtship’ is measured in weeks or low single digit months, is chaperoned, and doesn’t feature many displays of affection. This should be distinguished from ‘courting/courtship’ which is just what classical moral theology uses as a catch-all term for things leading up to marriage- dating in our culture but it could include talking to a matchmaker in cultures which use those, background checks on a potential spouse in India, etc. Given that he lives in a bubble where the former kind of courting(if you’d like to see it in practice, I believe there’s some episodes of 19 Kids and Counting(never watched but been told they do this) showing it) is widespread enough that he feels the need to counter signal it, and it also doesn’t work very well because it’s missing some steps at the beginning, he is addressing a very different set of problems from those of broader society. I think, if I had to guess, that he’d actually put more blame on church elders and heads of household than on young people themselves.

Finally, conservative Christians mostly believe two things, rightly or wrongly- that their communities’ survival depends on continued high(and in many cases higher than currently) fertility rates(there is functionally no group of church attending Christians with below replacement fertility in the USA btw. Everything we know about actual fundamentalists is that they have fertility rates varying from 2.5-4 depending on the sect, individual church, etc) and that their within marriage fertility rates cannot be increased by much at all. YMMV on both, of course, but neither of them are totally unreasonable beliefs and when they’re your assumption, the need to raise marriage rates is a pressing issue. This guy wants to do it by giving young people more leash(I know it doesn’t sound like that, but he can’t just say it out loud. He has to dress it up in ways his audience will accept). There are people- I’m guessing people he’s arguing against in person- who have different ideas about how to do this, but his audience is not who you think it is.

Secondly, teenagers are not allowed to have relationships with each other. This is taken seriously, and there is much more effort put into this than into getting young people married when the time comes for that. The results for local marriage rates are predictable; the shift in social roles, especially in young men, does not happen as a result of wish casting by a third party. Obviously the young women have some share of the blame here but it is fair to discuss the two things separately.

How do you try and combat this for your own kids, if you homeschool?

They’re nowhere near that old yet.

Ok, then, interpret @TheDag's comment as a future tense question: How will you try and combat this for your own kids, if you homeschool?

Hah, ty. I second this response.

The plan is to a) pay attention to families whose children marry in a timely manner and copy them and b) emphasize hitting maturity/developmental milestones(jobs, driving, making their own schedule, etc) while the boys are still at home.

If that sounds vague- sure, maybe it is. But I don’t have a son out of diapers. A detailed and specific plan will probably do more harm than good.

Yeah, heaven only knows what things are going to look like in 10 - 20 years. No point in getting locked into a flowchart.

I was homeschooled and dated and married basically entirely "within" the broader conservative religious universe – which wasn't necessarily 100% homeschoolers but had a lot of overlap, and I personally was homeschooled. I met my wife, who had a similar background, at a college with a statement of faith and we married shortly after we graduated. I have zero regrets about any of the above and plan to raise my children relatively similarly.

To the extent that I've had a better outcome than the stereotypical homeschooler (which might not be the case – in my experience homeschoolers often turn out fairly well) it might be in part because my parents were always very confident in their children and our ability to succeed outside of the house and "in the real world," whether that was in romance or on the job or in areas of basic life competency. My parents never really expressed anxiety about our ability to work, or find a wife, and never seemed fearful about our future, or overprotective. They were never hectoring about the "basic life script" but there was an implicit assumption that we would follow it, not because they insisted on it but because we were capable of it.

One concrete thing I would say is that my wife and I both took a few community college classes in high school and found that very good for starting the transition out of the home. I think it's worth considering even if your kids are in public or private schools – it's a good introduction to the college format.

My experience doesn't support this. When I go out, I see many young men in their early 20s doing really well with women. There are young couples everywhere. I don't see any difference between zoomer men's confidence with women and my generation of men's confidence with women. This is anecdotal, sure. But it makes me wonder how many of the articles and posts about this supposed problem are based in reality.

I agree with hydroacetylene's reply. No offense meant, but your argument is the equivalent of the "I don't know anyone who voted for Nixon" meme.

The zoomers doing badly are by and large the ones you don’t see.

But also this guy’s bubble is not representative of the general population. Homeschooled high school boys being a bit too shy with girls for their own good in a context where it’s normal to need parental permission before a first date(skim his profile, he’s talking about that) is utterly predictable.

Is it so much crippling fear and social anxiety as much as it is not socially acceptable? It isn't anxiety that prevents people from eating pasta with their hands in a restaurant as much as it is simply not how it is done and people would think you had an episode if you did. Most people wouldn't even consider the option of enjoying a carbonara with their hands a restaurant because that is not how it is done.

Social etiquette has been changed to the point where hitting on women isn't socially acceptable. So people don't do it. Just like people don't wear bathrobes at work or listen to music without headphones in an airport.

Very likely these men aren't standing there trembling with fear, they are simply not even considering the option of wandering way outside the realm of the socially acceptable. They are sticking with convention and the standards of behaviour their society set.

Online dating is popular because it is the socially acceptable way of interacting with the opposite sex. Mutually matching on an app is the HR approved way of initializing an interaction with both parties consenting by swiping right on each other.

New podcast idea - you take interesting people out to fancy restaurants to discuss controversial topics and eat carbonara with your hands. Call it The politesse functor.

How is that a functor?

It isn't one lol, it's just his name - that's also why I used politesse instead of something more normal like etiquette or behaviour - it's a set up, if you have a passing familiarity with the words in the title (which is true of most educated people) it sounds very smart and classy, but if you actually know how to use those terms they don't actually make sense together like that. And then you discover that the fancy thing you are about to watch is actually two people cramming fistfuls of eggy pasta into their faces.

You think it is socially unacceptable for middle/high school boys to ask girls to dance at a school dance?

The boys know it’s ok. Sure, if they’re particularly young they might worry a little about their peers razzing them for taking an interest in the opposite sex but it kinda sounds like these guys are too old for that. It’s just social anxiety in the youths.

It is socially acceptable to ask girls to dance at a school dance, but boys don’t want to dance. They want to fuck (or get married if you’re feeling charitable). The discourse is unproductive because they have abstracted away the thing that everyone knows young boys want.

It is socially acceptable to ask girls to dance at a school dance, but boys don’t want to dance. They want to fuck (or get married if you’re feeling charitable).

That's an oversimplification. Teenage boys also have feelings for girls, and want to express them and have those feelings reciprocated. They aren't just walking erections. That means that yes, boys do enjoy dancing with girls on occasion even if it doesn't lead to sex.

Yeah, but those boys have both shit ends of the stick; the left thinks that they're rapists-in-waiting who need to be castrated or gaslighted into turning gay, while the right thinks that if they have any positive feelings for women aside from maybe lust then they're as good as gay already and need to be beaten. (Ignoring the normie/boomer faction of the right that's just a reskin of the left.)

Your description does not match any portion of the right I've ever interacted with. Would you care to provide some evidence along with your inflammatory statements?

Go flop around on Twitter or /pol/ for a short time.

So basically you heard it from a guy?

More comments

They have been told it's unacceptable everywhere else, why would a school dance be any different? Look where you are, posting in an offshoot of an offshoot of a culture war blog made notable in part by this very issue that boys are still experiencing. How many of us are ultimately here because a young man asked a woman out in a elevator because he thought the worst she can do is say no.

Weird far leftists being mentally ill at each other has no bearing on what these kids think.

"Weird far leftists being mentally ill at each other" have had a major impact on mainstream culture, and if we're hearing about these kids, it is unlikely they are actually as isolated from that as their community would prefer.

I think I've said this before, but I agree with the "girl-dad" criticism. And I reject this notion that empathizing with young men just translates to validating their anxiety and fear. One thing that is almost inescapable watching almost any medium of modern culture is that women act like cunts, while the men tiptoe around them begging forgiveness. I mean, just for instance, compare the Dune novels and David Lynch's adaptation, where the love between Paul and Chani is a fated historic romance. In the newer adaptation I don't think Chani so much as smiles at Paul once, and they supposedly love each other? "Romance" according to modern media is a woman treating a man like garbage, something that got stuck to her shoe that she can't seem to get rid of, and the man gets to feel thankful she settled for you. Being an absolute cunt to someone you ostensibly love is viewed as some political project to reject being a "Stepford Wife".

Unsurprisingly, young boys raised in this environment aren't sold on their role as eternal abuse victim in this new model of "romance". And I sincerely doubt you can get them "step up" into the role by brow beating them, or educating them about their proper gender role being the initiator. They see all around them that even if they "win" they still lose.

You want better men, you need to raise better women.

David Lynch's adaptation, where the love between Paul and Chani is a fated historic romance. In the newer adaptation

You're sure this isn't just Kyle MacLachlan and Sean Young vs. Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya?

I've an easy time seeing the fated romantic erotic relationship in the Lynch movie.

I can't see Harvey Weinstein casting Zendaya, current year seems to be purposefully trying to be unattractive. I don't want either of them taking off their still suits.

I grew up in the 90's and 00's. I always had the sense that women did not enjoy sex and barely tolerated men. This somehow came up in a drunk conversation with my mother at some point and she was a bit horrified. "No I never told you that! Women like sex! Your dad and I..." I cut her off at that point, didn't need to hear more. But it feels pretty clear to me that I picked up this idea from media sources. And yet I can't point to a single particular example.

I can't imagine how things have gotten even worse since that time.

I do feel that putting the onus on parents to either raise better men or women is misplaced. I'd first turn to Hollywood or other culture makers and say "stop making such shitty culture". I have memories and can point to specific times when my parents took the right approach with me. My dad telling me that he was never willing to have sex with a woman he didn't want to have a kid with (he seemed to want kids though, so I don't know how much of a restriction that was), and him making jokes about not sticking your dick in crazy. My mother being concerned for my emotional well being after silly breakups in middle school, and her insisting on us watching a discovery channel show that was basically sex ed. Them telling their kids that they wanted grand babies, just not while we were in highschool or college. I remember them showing signs of affection towards each other, and forgiveness after they fought with one another.

TV shows and movies still managed to do a number on me, and on those around me. After all I can't count on how other kids are raised but I can usually count on them having a similar cultural soup they grew up in.

From a practical perspective applying the social responsibility to cultural producers also seems easier. It feels like they've weaseled out of that responsibility somehow. I'm happy to reward shows like Bluey that have good parental figures. But they seem like rare glowing exceptions instead of the rule.

Should we expect all parents to explain to their teen kids how Chani's love in Dune seems slightly off, or should we lean on Dennis with criticisms of the film that his interpretation of love sucks. Of course we can do both, but the latter seems fat more effective for the level of effort involved and reward expected.

From a practical perspective applying the social responsibility to cultural producers also seems easier. It feels like they've weaseled out of that responsibility somehow

Quite the opposite. All we hear about is how cultural producers have vast control over the general society and how they should use those powers for good instead of abdicating their responsibility.

The rise of endlessly and self-consciously didactic work is a product of moralism not its absence.

This guys is a homeschooling fundamentalist using this as window dressing to talk about the problems he perceives with courtship norms in his subculture. These kids have fairly limited media diets and aren’t really looking to Hollywood for guidance.

But we should also bear in mind that he is not addressing the general public here.

Not sure if the media has much to do with it. Boy meets girl narratives in the 90s/00s, same as now, are one of the most popular types of narrative in media, including obviously among women as well as men, and rationally speaking, that would be weird if women did not like sex and just liked all the other things about erotic relationships. Naturally, it can be hard to be rational about such things when one is young and has not yet had direct first-person experience that women like sex. But that doesn't necessarily make it the media's fault.

Maybe one issue for a lot of guys is just that sex is biologically asymmetrical. One penetrates, the other is penetrated. For a straight man, even a virgin, it is easy to understand that he would enjoy penetrating a woman, but it can be hard to understand why anyone would enjoy being penetrated. Hence the confusion.

Johnny Bravo has done a number on the psyche of a huge subset of men and kids from the 90s-00s.

Ha! Yeah thinking back on that cartoon, it must have been written by the nerdy stereotype that hated those kinds of guys. Johnny Bravo types in reality were pulling all the babes.

Well the joke with Johnny Bravo is that for most of his life he was a scrawny unattractive nerd, and though he finally hit his growth spurt and got big and handsome he still internally struggles with a lack of confidence and doesn’t really know how to behave around women. Which actually has a lot of relevance to the self-improver type OP talks about in his post.

I mean, just for instance, compare the Dune novels and David Lynch's adaptation, where the love between Paul and Chani is a fated historic romance. In the newer adaptation I don't think Chani so much as smiles at Paul once, and they supposedly love each other?

Huh? She smiles throughout the entire main romance scene.

I don't think that Zendaya is a particularly good actor and the romance subplot wasn't handled all that well, but come on.

to what extent does empathizing with young men just translate to validating their crippling anxiety and fear over interacting with the opposite sex?

I think there's a politically-aligned difference here in what "validate" really means. Neutrally, it just implies "yes, there is [well-founded?] anxiety and fear." The way it's used in left-leaning (and even in just describing left-leaning) spaces, it comes with an implication that this is justified and insurmountable. I think there's a right-leaning take on this that can go the other way, though: "Yes, asking girls to dance is scary. Yes, they might turn you down. And Yes, you should do it anyway." There are so many parenting moments that are largely about overcoming fear and inspiring confidence ("Yes, you can walk to school alone"), and this is just another example of how we've come to coddle the median child in ways that are probably detrimental.

But it certainly isn't helping that the way the modal male hero is written has swung from Bond womanizing to platonic, chaste action heroes. Surely there's a happier medium in there somewhere.

I think there's a politically-aligned difference here in what "validate" really means.

In the context of the original post and its respondents, the salient distinction seems to be between old school personal conservatism and more modern social anti-liberalism (I don't really have a punchy term for this phenomenon). The former prescribes manning up. The main problem is boys refusing to step up and take risks. The latter focuses primarily on anti-feminism and identifies girls' attitudes as the primary problem.

The former prescribes manning up. The main problem is boys refusing to step up and take risks. The latter focuses primarily on anti-feminism and identifies girls' attitudes as the primary problem.

I suspect part of the reason that the former is popular in certain circles isn't because there's necessarily a denial of the attitudes of some women, but because the idea is "you don't want to marry that sort of woman anyway."

Which, on the one hand, might be true. On the the other hand, it might be good for there to be more of the sort of woman "you" would "want to marry." On the gripping hand, it's often considered unseemly for men to tell women how to comport themselves, which tends to explain why men often restrict their public advice to other men and boys (or, if they do give women public advice, is along the lines of telling them that they deserve good marriage material in a man, which, while not necessarily bad advice, is at least to some degree indirect advice to men about what sort of men they ought to be).

Has the DOGE Buyout/Firing Campaign Been Setup for This Year's US Budget Negotiations?

In 'culture war developments easily missed in interesting times,' around 60% of the US Department of Justice Civil Rights Division is expected to resign rather than stick around for the Trump administration's change of focus on civil rights priorities.

To quote the set-up...

"No one has been fired by me … but what we have made very clear last week in memos to each of the 11 sections in the Civil Rights Division is that our priorities under President Trump are going to be somewhat different than they were under President Biden," Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, told conservative commentator Glenn Beck during an appearance on his show at the weekend.

"And then we tell them, these are the President's priorities, this is what we will be focusing on—you know, govern yourself accordingly. And en masse, dozens and now over 100 attorneys decided that they'd rather not do what their job requires them to do."

Over a 100 is vague. 100 lawyers isn't cheap, but scale matters. How does this compare to the office?

There were around 380 lawyers in the civil rights division when Trump returned to office in January, according to The New York Times. The newspaper, citing unofficial estimates of the number of people planning to resign by Monday's deadline, reported the division would soon have about 140 attorneys or possibly even fewer.

140 of 380 is a 37% retention rate.

63% turnover is an organizational-culture-destroying amount. Just in terms of base-load responsibilities dropped as no longer supportable, an organization is fundamentally changed on what the members expect to do. If the organizational mission shifts...

Newsweek's 'Why It Matters' frames the difference in focus.

Why It Matters

The DOJ's civil rights division, founded after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, initially focused on protecting the voting rights of Black Americans. But Congress later expanded its responsibilities to include protecting Americans from discrimination on the basis of race, national origin, sex, disability, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity and military status.

But Dhillion reportedly issued a series of memos earlier in April detailing the division would be focusing on priorities laid out in Trump's executive orders, such as the participation of transgender athletes in women's sports, combating antisemitism and ending diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

Obviously the framings are their own, and may / may not properly characterize what was done / what will be done.

This article, and a few others this week as the second-round buyout tallies come in, are raising the implications of the upcoming US federal... 'exodus' is probably too strong a term, though appropriate in the DOJ Civil Rights division. 'Buyout' is more accurate

You may remember the initial DOGE buy-out from February, which about 75,000 Federal Employees took. The general offer was pay and benefits through September, the end of the fiscal year. This was less than the desired target (about 3.5% of work force to a 5-10% target), and was part of the general legal injunctions as it and other firing actions were taken to court.

Last month, the Trump administration offered a second round of buyouts, and media reporting from the last week suggests the court-confusion / insecurities / etc. have let more to take the offer. In the USDA, less than 4,000 took the initial buyout offer, but over 11,000 have taken the second. It's unclear how typical this is- I didn't find many first and second round stats at this time- but it does suggest that the last three months have increased, not decreased, the Trump administration's ability to shake the federal bureacracy.

A (non-supportive) Politico E&E article reviewing different agencies affected emphasizes not just numbers, but levels of departees, with an emphasis on more senior personnel. While the article emphasizes ways that will hurt Trump's policy agendas, I suspect many of the red tribe will see this 'problems' more ranging from 'acceptable costs' to 'good.'

For example, when the article raises-

While Trump administration officials have applauded the staff downsizing as a much-needed curtailing of federal bloat, former and current employees say the overhaul is driving a historic loss of institutional knowledge. The losses could be hard to reverse, damaging the government’s ability to craft and implement energy and environmental policy for years to come, they warned. Potentially, the personnel losses could also undermine the president’s pursuit of his “energy dominance” agenda.

-I suspect the Trumpian right doubts the personnel lost would have supported rather than undermined Trump's agenda anyway. That may be an inaccurate doubt, or at least not universally justified across every buy-out departee, but it is a foreseeable consequence of the Resistance strategy played in the first trump administration.

Other quotable quotes by agency include-

“You can’t understate the expertise and institutional knowledge we’re losing,” said one career staffer at the Department of Energy. “Directors and senior leaders who have run programs and offices that release hundreds of millions of dollars annually.”

A sweep of resignations and retirements have emptied key leadership posts across Interior bureaus and agencies like the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service, forcing other employees to take on the managerial responsibilities in an “acting” capacity, according to internal documents viewed by E&E News.

Thousands of workers leaving the DOE are spread across the department, working on bolstering the U.S. electric grid, deploying renewables, meeting national climate goals and even building out Trump’s own agenda around supply chains. Career staffers inside the agency say the losses are hitting policy offices hard,

(EPA) But as the Trump administration heralds plans for an unparalleled series of regulatory rollbacks, one former top official predicts that the exodus could hamstring efforts to turn that agenda into reality. “It’s going to be very difficult to get anything done,” said Stan Meiburg, whose 39-year career at the agency included a stint as acting deputy administrator from 2014 to 2017.

Speaking to the North American Agricultural Journalists on Monday, Bonnie said he worries many other senior employees are on the way out as well, including Forest Service employees qualified to work on wildfire mitigation.

Overall, Reuters estimates that about 260,000 federal workers- over a quarter of a million- have been fired, taken a buyout, or retired early since Trump came into office.

So, what else does this mean, besides an increase in job applications for DOGE-scrutinized federal workers?

I think this buy-out process is best understood in a similar light- as a deliberate culture-change strategy to change the institutional culture of the Executive Branch administrative state. You can even see the outlines a corporate turnover strategy.

I've noted before the organizational-culture implications of the Trump administration trying to relocate federal agencies out of the hyper-blue DC area to other places in the country.

I submit that the current government curtailment efforts look to have been part of a deliberate phased process to reach this buy-out point in preparation for the mid-2025 budget negotiations.

End-Jan: At the end of January (29Jan), the initial buyout-offer was made and set to expire on 6 Feb. This was the initial offer. It would receive some court resistance. As previously addressed, it didn't get as much traction as the Administration wanted.

Feb: February is the month of DOGE fear, starting with the USAID takedown. I wrote in February about how the takedown and releases were enabled by the dual-hatting mechanics of Secretary of State Rubio becoming USAID director. This was a unique legal dynamic due to USAID's specific legal structure, but it served to create insecurity in the work force. Similar dynamics like the OPM '5 bullets' email. Requirements for complaince build credibility in DOGE-threats.

March: Transition from DOGE-fear to Secretary Management. In mid-march, Trump signals that DOGE will take a supporting role to the department heads. This was conveyed in the time as Musk having his wings clipped. How much was stage-managed kabuki theater is up for debate. Regardless, Department heads are now 'backed by' DOGE-threats, without having had to make the threats themselves.

March-April: Early Trump lawfare as efforts at initial cuts / firings / etc. are resisted in public and in the courts. While courts create setbacks for Trump, this actually increases uncertainty overall. Trump is able to get enough wins enough of the time such that the threat of reductions in force (RIFs) / future firings are credible.

April: Buyout 2.0 offered. The anti-Trump resistance in the courts gets ominous foreshadowing that the Supreme Court may strictly limit the sort of injunctions being used to stop Trump's federal efforts. As the public chaos / pressure over jobs occurs, more federal employees take the buyout.

May: On 1 May, Trump announces his budget priorities for FY 2026. This includes cutting $163 billion from various US government programs, with the NYT choosing its highlights.

May now: Here we are

So, where does the clickbait title come in?

Basically, the next few months are the typical annual US budget negotiation season. Its far from the only thing going on, but the first federal budget of a new president is kind of a big deal. It's where the new administration goes from inheriting the policy priorities of the previous administration to making their own, and this year in particular is the start of a (probably brief) Republican trifecta. The US entered a (somewhat surprising) rest-of-the-year budget stability when back in March Senate Minority Leader Schumer decided to support Trump's spending bill out of concern of the increased power Trump would get if there was no budget or only continuing resolutions.

I bring this up now, because the DOGE-Buyout plan is, itself, a lever / tool in the next year budget cycle, where Congress discusses not just budgets, but manpower authorizations for agencies.

Government shutdown politics change when there a quarter-of-a-million fewer federal employees suddenly out of work and not getting paid. Federal employees out of work are free to do stuff. Ex-Federal employees go on with their non-federal jobs. The bigger the federal bureacracy, the more painful it is to get into these kind of fights. On the other hand, the smaller, the easier.

Position vacancies are also a big implication for program cuts. It's politically easier for Congressional negotiators to cut billets / positions / parts of agencies that are currently (or will be predictably) empty than parts that are filled. Part of the reason few things are as hard to end as a temporary government program is because there is a person whose job is on the line, and a department supervisor whose authorities / money / personal influence network hinges on the people they have. These are not the only obstacles, but they are diminished when relevant leaders take a buyout and aren't there to advocate to the death.

This is particularly true when partisans negotiate over politically sensitive institutions that a former partisan 'owner' may or may not want to see fall into 'enemy hands.' The DOJ Civil Rights Division, for example, has a reputation for being Democrat-aligned in political sympathies. It was 380 lawyers, and is expected to go down to 180 lawyers. That is a 200-lawyer gap.

Does an arch-progressive true-blue Democrat really want to insist in the DOJ-authorization bill that Trump must hire 200 lawyers to get back to 380 lawyers? Even though that will almost certainly mean 200 red-tribe lawyers who now form a majority of the civil rights division?

Or do they maybe feel that 180 mostly-old-guard lawyers are preferable, and deny Trump the influence of reshaping CRD composition? Hoping that- next presidency- they can re-expand the government service?

Even if that happens, my final point is that nothing that's going on right now is so easily reversed as the next administration in 4 years simply going 'reverse all that.' Even if an alternate Democratic trifecta emerges with the next Dem president, things will have changed.

  • Buyouts and early retirements are removing a lot of the institutional knowledge from the Blue tribe favored programs, and thus ability to recreate as-were
  • Former federal employees will be either long-gone or long-since employed elsewhere, mitigating the the potential flow-back population
  • DC-divestments will make it harder for the sort of geographic-socialization to create a social consensus across as many agencies
  • Blue-tribe distrust in red tribe institutions will complicate 'rehabilitation' when the distrust is at a composition and not just leadership level
  • Even future anti-Trump/anti-MAGA purges of 'red' bureaucracies will only make the institutions more vulnerable to further changes

However these dynamics play out, I suspect the Trump administration's effects will still be felt decades from now. But this year of DOGE so far has been setting the stage for the budget negotiations that will make these changes far more long-term than they would otherwise be.

(Finally- none of this is any sort of dispute / counter / negation of the warning/accusation/predictions that the federal drawdown will hinder Trump or the Republicans in predictable/unflattering/unhelpful ways in the future. To quote H. L. Mencken, Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.)

I agree that the mass firings aren't something that can easily be reversed, and that the effects of this will reverberate for years to come. Ironically enough, this actually makes the Democratic position stronger when it comes to shutdown politics, not weaker, as you imply. The reason Schumer and some Democrats buckled the last go-round was because of a widespread perception that the party refusing to play ball will get blamed for the pain caused by the shutdown, and electoral consequences may follow. Less cynically, some may have felt that a shutdown was a losing effort that wasn't worth the collateral damage to those who would suffer because of it.

The events of the past few months, though, have made the Republican endgame pretty clear. If the Democrats can sell a government stripped to essential services as the inevitable result of Trump's cuts, then why bother passing a budget in the first place? It's a slow march to perdition. It will be easier for them to salvage what they have if congress makes a strong statement that it intends to keep government working as it had been regardless of presidential caprice.

It will be easier for them to salvage what they have if congress makes a strong statement that it intends to keep government working as it had been regardless of presidential caprice.

And they’ll do this by shutting down the government?

The main argument from the Democrat point of view against shutting down the government is that it will make it easier for Trump to dismantle it. In a shutdown he can pick and choose which agencies to furlough and which to keep open, he could wipe out whole departments for the duration of the shutdown. If you believe Trump is trying to dismantle the government and you think that’s a bad thing, why would you make it easier for him to do it?

If you believe Trump is trying to dismantle the government and you think that’s a bad thing, why would you make it easier for him to do it?

Because a brief shock is much better than a gradual erosion, and temporary furloughs aren't as damaging long-term as permanent layoffs. Trump with the power a shutdown would give him gives America a sneak preview of how his political philosophy would play out if he had the unfettered power he seems to be looking for. He isn't going to be scrambling to do whatever he can to preserve the status quo; you're exactly right that he's going to use it as a blank check. America operating a shutdown with Trump at the helm isn't like a shutdown under Obama where it's a temporary setback while a budget is in the works—it's the ultimate destination of a Trump government. It's what America looks like if Trump gets everything he wants, and it's what America will ultimately look like if they keep passing Republican budgets that legitimize Trump's illegal impoundments. The only chance we have of getting out of this mess is if congress is willing to make a stand, and Democrats and a few Republicans would be the only ones willing to make that stand.

Would Trump 47 be able to show his his true colors in a shutdown or is much of the unpopular stuff in a shutdown is actually required by law?

Trump will do his best to do the most enjoyable shutdown possible. For example, in previous shutdowns, the national parks closed, including spending money to ensure the closure of isolated trails. Maybe in a Trump 47 shutdown, they stay open to the public, but are free since no one is paid to collect money at the entrance.

If Trump 47 gets to show his true colors, then it would look completely different than the shutdowns of yore. If not, he can blame all the bad results on the Dems (and still enjoy the dismantle-whatever-he-wants superpowers the shutdown provides).

Can Trump just… not reopen the government?

Good write-up. I’ll just offer my own personal experience here, as a federal government employee of many (10+) years.

  • In my office (outside of DC), about ten percent took the voluntary buyout in February. One was a staunch conservative and Trump supporter, who is competent to get a private sector job. Another was ex-military. These are not #Resistance types. My guess is that those who took the buyouts are disproportionately more competent and able to land on their feet with a private-sector job. Animosity to Trump was not a motivating factor. This kind of evaporative cooling will make the surviving federal workforce weaker.
  • My workplace is being offered a second round of buyouts, but this time it’s targeted at the more politically charged functional areas. If enough of those positions don’t get buyouts, then there will be a RIF (reduction in force, i.e. layoffs), again starting with the political areas and then moving to the general workforce as needed to get up to a certain percentage of employees gone.
  • The more damaging, long-term policy is the hiring freeze, which applies to the entire federal government. Every agency needs a pipeline of new employees to replace those who retire, quit, etc. Recruitment will also suffer especially if Congress cuts federal benefits like pensions, in addition to remote work curtailments.
  • Increasing the scope of Schedule F is the only thing I really agree with the Trump administration so far. Most of the federal employee workforce—contrary to popular opinion—are not Democrat slugs entrenched in #Resistance ideology. But many of the top policymakers and agency heads are, and they should go. (And many have gone, through early retirements of their own accord.)

When you disrupt people’s workplace culture and benefits, they become resentful. Apolitical and even pro-Trump employees will become opposed to the administration, and DOGE is a stupid idea for this reason. It plays to the Fox News audience well. But this will undercut Trump’s long-term efforts to reform the bureaucracy. Government services will suffer and the voting public will blame him for it.

This presumes government services provide benefits. I’m sure most government employees believe they provide a benefit (it’s hard to function believing you offer no value while getting a paycheck) but it’s possible (maybe likely) that many government programs are simply make work.

And if that’s right then DOGE is a massive successive because it proves the civil service is unnecessary and outdated.

it’s hard to function believing you offer no value while getting a paycheck

Private sector here, but this is me, and I'm perfectly fine with it.

If the law says that such-and-such projects need to get permits from the such-and-such agency after such-and-such analysis, then reducing the staff issuing those permits is increasing the burden of the government, not decreasing it.

then reducing the staff issuing those permits

This is probably true, but many of those same sorts of staff are the ones writing regulations requiring new types of permits. You can go to regulations.gov and see all of the new proposed rules as they're available for comment. I'm not going to, at the moment, say that any particular rule there up for comment is "make work", but I will observe that the ensemble of all of them has definitely increased workload and doesn't seem to always actually improve things efficiently: see the Ezra Klein/Jon Stewart discussion of rural broadband spending. I could be convinced (but don't have evidence on-hand) that pausing new regulations might be a temporary win over the exponentially expanding administrative state, despite some or even most of those regulations being reasonable and well-meaning.

Indeed, my concern isn’t with those regulations, necessarily, it’s about places where Congress is mandated certain kinds of analysis and given their parties the ability to sue over it.

If the Sierra club or whoever gets to delay your project because of some administrative short coming, then either Congress is going to have to fix it or else. The agencies are gonna have to do their job.

I think you're right that the effects of this will be felt years from now, bit that you're completely wrong about the form that will take. Trump's actions are what I'll call "concentric escalation". They fully encapsulate previous democrat tactics re: ignoring administrative norms to enforce control (a conservative would point to "lawfare) which in in term encapsulate previous republican tactics that did essentially the same thing (re: "starve the beast" government shutdown brinksmanship) and so on and so forth since the whighs fought the federalists.

The next step won't just be the democrats trying and failing to assert control over an altered federal bureaucracy, it will be another concentric escalation-- another attempt to make the previous cycle of escalation totally moot. Republicans sidestepped democratic control ofer the courts and agencies by ignoring the courts and agencies. Democrats will sidestep republican control over the budget and military by sidestepping the budget and military. I don't think we'll be at outright vanguardism just yet... But property rights are not a natural law. The government provides them as a service, and services can be cut. Republicans have made an effective bulwark against redistributive taxation, but taxes are not the only means by which property can be redistributed. It doesn't particularly matter if people actually succeed at at adversely posessing or controlling property... raising security requirements alone becomes de-facto redistribution toward the prospect-less young men most likely to get hired for security work.every night watchman, every gated community guard, is a win for the democratic base.

Interestingly, no coverage of a hot-button recent CW issue.

TL;DR: a low-class looking married mom of 2 had an altercation on a playground in Rochester, MN. Her story is that a kid stole from her bag and she alled the kid the gamer word.

Then, a Somali man who was also present on the playground and who then was due for court over a '22 rape this week confronted her, phone in hand and recorded the confrontation. {obviously, multiple instances of gamer word in the video, from both parties}

She called him the gamer word too and flipped him the bird. Cue online outrage, she is collecting donation to relocate.

After this blew up, the rape charges against the guy who made the video were dissmissed. (see bottom of post, links). It's fairly close to a textbook perfect 'scissor' event, seems to me.

The video was amplified by some sleazy music video director and the mom claims they are getting death threats. People who went through his old tweets found..interesting stuff, he is some sort of perv. Needless to say this isn't his first rodeo - he's been chasing view by covering race and other hot-button nonsense online.

A recent development I just found about while writing is, the man who made the video had the rape charges against him dismissed 'in the interest of justice'.(local news link). It wasn't just some silly statutory rape - he and his brother offered shelter to a runaway from the foster system and supposedly raped her multiple times. The two defendants of course maintained it was all made up.

All in all, it's an interesting development. I don't understand how someone can just dismiss rape charges (more detail including a link) like this. I haven't read the court documents though.

Pursuant to Rule 30.01 of Minnesota Rules of Criminal Procedure, the State of Minnesota hereby dismisses the Complaint in the above-entitled action dated August 29, 2022, charging the offense(s) of Criminal Sexual Conduct - 3rd Degree - Penetration under 18 - Use coercion, Criminal Sexual Conduct - 5th Degree - Penetration - Nonconsensual for the following reasons: In the interest of justice.

^^this seems like really, truly bad optics. Is there an innocuous explanation - e.g. the case was really flimsy etc? But if it was flimsy why was the court system keeping it going for almost three years only to dismiss it now. The news article makes it seem the trial was set to begin on May 5.

'The gamer word'

Is that needed here of all places? We're not on reddit anymore. The considerable efforts of the admins are wasted if nobody uses the fruits of their labour, one of which is use of language that would rack up bad-boy points on other websites regardless of context.

Far be it for me to police the language of a post about language-policing but really, if we're talking about the word 'nigger' then this should be made clear.

As a more substantive point, the donations for both Karmelo Anthony and Shiloh's have both been censored now, though this hasn't stopped people doing the funny 'make username of N' trick to spell out nigger that 4chan loves so much. Some of the comments: https://x.com/tsarlet2/status/1918360755977748550

Clearly givesendgo wanted to suppress that kind of thing while retaining a certain perception of even handedness. There was plenty of time to censor the 'fuck white people' genre of donation comments earlier.

Many websites auto-censor or downrank posts that have bad words, so it's a good habit to get into to always use ***.

It's literally Orwellian. I keep seeing these screenshots with even less naughty words like 'retard' but they've MS Painted so the word isn't clear enough for bottom-quality OCR. The world is turning into Roblox where you have to tell people to 'game-end' themselves since kill is too edgy. What use is free speech if they just take the words instead?

/images/17464486304690273.webp

Personally, I find it hilarious. Something about the lengths people go to, to get past the filters, and the absurdity of the metaphors, just make me chuckle. Like, I remember some guy on /r/stupidpol, who ended up dating a zoomer, tearing his hair out because she wouldn't stop using code even IRL. They were talking about rape, and she would not stop saying "grape" instead.

If it's Orwellian, there's an optimistic twist to it, as it only shows the folly of the newspeak project.

The George Floyd one is pretty good. There's something inherently hilarious about the juxtaposition of chuddery and heart icons.

But darn, I didn't even realize GiveSendGo usually allows comments to go with donations. It was already only usernames by the time I got to take a peek at Shiloh's donation history, largely motivated by the amount of pearl-clutching and Streisand Effect'ing over it.

I remember seeing a username based around "Nate Higgers," one about whites in South Africa, one with "White Pride" in it, and one or two about Jews, but for the most part the donations were just innocuous or anonymous. No TNDs, "DESPITE..."s, 13/52s, or attempts at N-trains, but I also didn't scroll for very long (it got kind of boring quickly).

Nate Higgers

The most eyeraising spoonerism I've seen is "BigDiggerNick", this was as a username on MagicArena which is ultra anal as a platform about what letter combinations it allows in usernames which includes banning certain 3 letter substrings enitrely from anywhere in the username.

Dude was playing a next level toxic deck too...

Wtf is the "gamer word"? What is "gamer" about the n-word, if that is what is referred to?

KnowYourMeme article:

Gamer Word is an internet slang term sometimes used to reference the N-word, a racial epithet toward Black people. The phrase "gamer word" came to be associated with the racial slur after PewDiePie's PUBG Livestream N-Word Controversy in late 2017 and after a Twitter user defended PewDiePie's use of the word by calling it a "gamer word" instead of a racial slur.

Mildly interesting how, originally, the phrase referring to PewDiePie's utterance of "nigger" was "heated gaming moment" and only later was "gamer word" derived from it, but the latter is now far more entrenched in internet memelore and consciousness. It reminds me of "Beam Me Up, Scotty!"

Seeing as I'm one mod report away from being permabanned because of forgetting to speak nicely about followers of Nick Fuentes late at night two weeks back or so, I didn't want to risk any reports related to the 'word of power'.

More like you can't read the room or you're playing games. "Word of power"... You won't get a warning for saying "nigger" in the context of a story. No one's getting banned for quoting Mark Twain. You just can't call someone a nigger.

The mods aren't upset about language so much as meaning. I too have a low opinion of Fuentes, he's like a lower-class Richard Spencer but normal people have a blessed ignorance of this eceleb lore that should be cherished and preserved where possible. They can't be expected to know about these guys.

You can easily get modded for the gamer word here.

For using or for mentioning?

I can't find the post. Making me think it might be on the old site. It was a play on the Norm MacDonald joke 'I love niggers'.

Yeah old site had to deal with reddit-wide Anti-Evil Operations (actual name they chose to use), this site does not. The use/mention distinction is functional here.

Not in a way fundamentally indistinguishable from any other word/combination of words when replaced, though.

I’ve never had a mod address me for “nigger” despite having used that multiple times here, and the ability to use it is very useful to me when discussing “it’s OK because they’re less than human, with all the same justifications we used here that may or may not be grounded in fact or science” discriminatory events: I need to evoke the state of mind used [by everyone else] to justify saying that to the demographic it describes in the first place, and nothing else does that better.

Thus the fact I get to use it is good and proper.

A recent development I just found about while writing is, the man who made the video had the rape charges against him dismissed 'in the interest of justice'.(local news link).

The charges were dismissed 2 months ago, March 14th 2025. The reason listed is "Dismissal by Prosecuting Attorney". Per a quick internet search, "Dismissed in the interest of Justice" is a catch-all term whenever they dismiss a charge for whatever reason. The news article was only updated yesterday though, presumably related to the attention it was getting.

Found by inputting the case number from your link 55-CR-22-817 here:

https://publicaccess.courts.state.mn.us/CaseSearch

I can't easily checked as like many US sites it blocks foreign IPs.

Huh, worked through TOR on the first try. How did I miss the date on the pdf.

None of these documents for the case is likely to have a summary of the evidence gathered by the police right?

Has there ever been a more apt occasion for this clip?

From my point of view, no, not really.

I come from a place where our own racial underclass is not treated in a sacred manner and there's no equivalent of the gamer word. You might become a bit of a social pariah at a humanities faculty of a big university if you were filmed doing something like this, perhaps, but moms around the country would understand and forgive.

I don't think the taboo around the word is in any way reasonable and that such taboos should not be enforced or tolerated. I much prefer the situation here where before there's actual violence the parties in a dispute tend to use all the strongest expletives at the loudest possible volume. Keeping it 'fake' helps cut down on wasted police time and all that.

A recent development I just found about while writing is, the man who made the video had the rape charges against him dismissed 'in the interest of justice'.(local news link). It wasn't just some silly statutory rape - he and his brother offered shelter to a runaway from the foster system and supposedly raped her multiple times. The two defendants of course maintained it was all made up.

Rape charges get dismissed a lot, to the point where it's implausible that they're all being dismissed in the interest of advancing left wing ideas. Pretty good chance this was for the usual reasons rape charges where underclass teenagers are the victims get dismissed as opposed to some sort of more culture-war heavy reason.

It also seems like it should be noted that the mom seems to be a grifter herself.

It also seems like it should be noted that the mom seems to be a grifter herself.

Why? There isn't much known about her. Do you know of anything suggesting she staged this ?

Rape charges get dismissed a lot,

I'll grant you that there's a lot of spurious crap out there, but why dismiss charges

  • one day after a spicy incident hits the internet
  • almost three years after it happened
  • two days before the case is due to go to court (the news article said the trial was to start on May 5)

That seems pretty odd but then I'm not a criminal lawyer. Maybe a pattern of dragging unpromising cases before dismissing them just before they're due to happen makes a lot of sense in the context.

IIRC it's pretty common to drag spurious cases on and on in the hopes the defendant takes a plea bargain and then blink at the last minute. The spicy incident is probably just coincidence.

I am entirely willing to believe that a somali who gave a 16 year old runaway from foster care a ride back to his place from a gas station was not honestly concerned with getting her out of the rain. That is not, however, the legal standard(if I had to guess what actually happened she agreed to go back to his place and have sex with him in exchange for -whatever- and then decided the deal wasn't to her liking, but the DA mischarged it because she told a different story to make herself look better- and it's now revealed the charges are wrong and he was going to win at trial if he just calls the prosecutor's bluff, so they're dropping the charges at the last minute because he did that. That's just speculation but it's the sort of story which is fairly common).

And the mom seems like a grifter because she keeps raising the goal in her fundraising goal.

My guess would be the dismissal is because the victim either recanted or refuses to testify. But it might also be because "in the interests of justice" allows left-wing activists free rein, as in this case:

https://climatedefenseproject.org/media-alert-judge-dismisses-charges-against-aubid-goodwin-and-laduke-in-the-interests-of-justice/

It looks like the dismissal (of this case) was in march '25.

The guy who took the video looks to be Sharmake Beyle Omer, whose criminal history is not very rich. Some 5th degree assault charges from '21 that were mostly dismissed and he was convicted of disorderdly conduct, and some light traffic related stuff.

There's a comedy skit in there about how much of a weenie you have to be to get all the way down to Fifth degree assault... "What did you do, slap someone with a rubber chicken?"

But that makes it more likely it was because the victim won't co-operate and less likely left-wing chicanery.

Credible threats are 5th degree assault. He may have engaged in hard talk that's technically hypothetically assault.

Source

A part of this that hadn't occurred to me until I saw it pointed out is that there seems to be a sort of donation duel between this lady's case and that of Karmelo Anthony, who's a black teen charged with murdering a white teen during a track meet by stabbing him in the heart during a dispute over seating. I think there was a top-level comment here about this incident before, but there was a substantial amount of support on social media for Anthony on racial grounds, including fundraising for his defense. I get the feeling that a lot of the motivation to donate to this lady is by people who feel that the support Anthony has been getting on racial grounds has been unjust, and supporting her is a way of "balancing the scales," as it were. This isn't the instantiation of "if you tell everyone to focus on everyone's race all the time in every interaction, eventually white people will try to play the same game everyone else is encouraged to" that I foresaw, but it sure is a hilarious one.

Now, one conspiracy theory that I hope is hilariously true, is that the guy who recorded this lady was in cahoots with the lady herself and staged the whole thing in order to cash in on the simmering outrage over the Anthony case. But I doubt that anyone involved has the foresight to play that level of 4D chess.

It is kinda funny seeing all the equivocation of the Gamer Word with literal murder coming out of this.

first_time.jpg? A black-on-white homicide is a statistic to be forgotten ASAP; a white person calling a black person a "nigger" is a tragedy and a scandal.

Even Austin Metcalf's own father has taken the route of "that's what upsets me most about a black youth stabbing my son to death, people saying mean things about blacks." He has publicly forgiven Karmelo, but has denounced so-called white supremacists for doing some Noticing. He'd likely sooner donate to Karmelo than Shiloh.

I don’t see many people claiming they’re equivalent, just that this has clearly turned into a game for online racial activists where they’ve each taken a ‘side’.

The black activists don’t actually care about the kid (countless young black men are arrested every year for violent assault of white people, and almost none of them draw any widespread attention in the black community), just like the white activists don’t actually care about this woman (single mother, tattoos, possibly an addict according to some online gossip, exactly the kind of white woman these guys typically clown on). It’s just a competition now.

There’s a lot of people, including people who made their schtick about Violence Always Being Wrong, that have at least had to pointedly say that murder and slurs aren’t equivalent in the abstract, categorizing both as race war, while having nothing to say about this case specifically

That’s because most people outside of the progressive left are in strong agreement that African-Americans have a strong ethnic identity and that widespread low to medium intensity ethnic resentment toward whites is common in that demographic group. Nothing about this case is really interesting, it’s been 30 years since this happened on a much greater scale with the OJ Simpson case.

It is reasonable to say that the motivations of donors in both cases is likely ethnic hostility and that that is what is being discussed, not the actual acts the recipients of the funds (a largely secondary matter) did.

Then why not donate to Dylan Roof, as the xitter compares? Ethnic hostility can still be about particular circumstances, such as the norms around the nuclear word.

The point has been rightly made that if a black man had instead raped and murdered Shiloh at the park the general public would likely never have heard her name.

Curious: what would be the legalities involved in running a scam like your conspiracy theory? The demand for this kind of stuff seems to far outstrip the supply of it. Could I go hire two people off of Craigslist, engineer a scripted social media outrage that results in one or both being able to successfully fundraise for ???, and then split the proceeds with them? Assuming I'm not paying them to do anything actually illegal.

The hardest part would seem to be me getting my cut (no real reason for them to pay me anything once they realize I'm not assuming any real risk or doing anything). Or maybe use an AI generated video with no other real people involved?

That’s already a thing on YouTube to try and get views. Various politically charged incidents supposedly occurring in various classrooms across America, then someone on 4chan happened to notice that they all seemed to be occurring in the exact same classroom, and only the participants changed.

Where did you see this? Is there documentation on this? I could believe it.

Could I go hire two people off of Craigslist, engineer a scripted social media outrage that results in one or both being able to successfully fundraise for ???, and then split the proceeds with them? Assuming I'm not paying them to do anything actually illegal.

This sounds pretty close to the stunt Jessie Smollett pulled. It didn't pan out the way he hoped.

The wire fraud statute is pretty broad and seems like it would cover this kind of thing.

To be fair about the Anthony case, at least the initial wave of support wasn't for his defense per se. Anthony was initially given a 1 million bond, which was reduced to $250,000 after a hearing, and his family was able to post the bond. Some fringe right-wing websites decided this was unacceptable and protestors started showing up outside the family's home and sending death threats. The fundraiser was initially to pay for alternative lodging for the kid, since being forced into hiding isn't easy for people of modest means.

Facts are: he was trespassing, he had a knife in a place where he shouldn't have had one and then when confronted stabbed a guy who objected to him being there.

To me it seems outrageous a bond is even allowed. He is being charged as an adult. Letting murderers walk free for months until there's a court case? That's not how thing are supposed to go.

Letting murderers walk free for months until there's a court case?

Technically speaking, innocent until proven guilty still holds in this country. Or would you have had Kyle Rittenhouse held until trial also?

Texas law required bail to be offered; changing this is a priority for Gov. Abbott during the current legislative session, but it's not like this kid is a flight risk.

Make bond a trillion dollars then. By the way, judge who reduced the bail is black too.

You forgot the best part, she's Republican.

Many a boomer patted themselves on the back for "not seeing color" after putting her in that position of power, I am sure.

The US has regulations against excessive bail you know. It's literally called the 8th Amendment and part of the bill of rights.

How is it excessive - can you unmurder the kid for cheaper than that?

The purpose of the bail is for it to be realistic to raise. If the purpose of the bail was to not be realistic then there wouldn't be such a thing as bail.

I dunno, I could imagine one of his legion of donors offering him a chance to defect, under cover of night, to a sympathetic foreign country (Russia? Venezuela? South Africa?) where he will spend the rest of his days eating from that government’s trough and parroting the lines they spoon-feed him about “white man bad” to throngs of starstruck admirers on TikTok

Trump government is pissed enough with South Africa thanks to millenials who have had it with the rainbow nation being in positions of power. South Africa wouldn't risk it. Russia isn't stupid or nasty enough to do this - they protect killers who acted in the interests of the state, not useless young thugs..

I don't think Venezuela is that big on black power either.

White nationalist James Kirkpatrick is complaining about how Indian slop accounts are taking his job:

Won’t change my posting as it was always just a bonus but payouts have been gutted even after biggest month ever. Foreign slop merchants really have nuked it for all of us.

https://x.com/VDAREJamesK/status/1916090488584622527

Notice that Richard Hanania isn't having this problem. Much easier for some Bihari peasant to grok and replicate Trumpism. Something to think about if you want to be the next big populist influencer.

  • -20

The other possibility that I haven’t seen brought up is that Elon uses X payouts as a giant dial to control how much money he spends on political influence. Elon has partially given up on DOGE, so he doesn’t need as much political cover.

Notice that Richard Hanania isn't having this problem.

How do you know? Where did he post his payout?

I was going to say, didn't Hanania have several public tantrums on his blog about Elon, largely because his twitter derived income fell off a cliff?

Even if he is having this problem (I doubt it), Hanania is classy enough to not throw a public tantrum.

That made me laugh.

What can I say, I aim to please.

Honey wake up. The US Fiscal Year 2026 Budget War started today.

Earlier today, the Trump Administration published its discretionary budget request for next year, fiscal year 2026 (FY26). The USA Today has a media-level summary here. You are probably going to be seeing various other coverings as various federal agencies report their relevant equities, and media coverage of these.

More interesting (to nerds, accountants, or political prognosticators who wouldn't trust a media summary) is the White House's own summary here.

The Discretionary Budget request is basically what most people think of as 'the budget,' but is really 'everything that is not an entitlement.' This is the part of the budget where Congress and Presidents really haggle over year-by-year. The US President's Request is just that- a request- but generally serves as an initial input for the rest of the Congressional process to work off of.

Which- since this is a year of Republican trifecta- makes the following opening a bit... spicey. (For a bureaucratic proposal.)

(As a disclaimer- the following should be read as raising implications, not advocacy or predictions of success. I am not making any moral argument on the proposal at this time. Feel free to hate or like the budget proposal as you will.)

The President’s topline discretionary Budget holds the line on total spending while providing unprecedented increases for defense and border security. Defense spending increases by 13 percent, and appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security increase by nearly 65 percent, to ensure that agencies repelling the invasion of our border have the resources they need to complete their mission. These increases would be made possible through budget reconciliation, which would allow them to be enacted with simple majorities in the Congress, and not be held hostage by Democrats for wasteful nondefense spending increases as was the case in President Trump’s first term.

**Nondefense spending is reduced by $163 billion or 22.6 percent while still providing support for our Nation’s veterans, seniors, law enforcement, and other critical priorities for the Federal Government. Savings are achieved by reducing or eliminating programs found to be woke and weaponized against ordinary working Americans, wasteful, or best left to the States and localities to provide.

Well, maybe the partisan jabs are spicier to most. But the point of planning to pass through reconciliation is an opening salvo of an intent / threat to pass without seeking Democratic buy-in. That doesn't mean there will be no negotiations or concessions for votes, but it is signaling an interest/willingness to brute force through the legislature as needed.

This is very much maximizing the value of a trifecta while you have it. It can also galvanize an opposition party to call 'bet,' and try to target / pressure vulnerable Republicans to flip their vote, and thus make it fail. In which case, either the Republicans compromise, or a government shutdown results. This is what some Democrats wanted Chuck Schumer to do earlier this year, rather than pass the Republican budget through the Senate.

Keep a pin on that shutdown. We'll come back to it later.

The budget says it prioritizes three main things. This is the surface-level 'what they want you to know'-level priorities, not what specific elements are more important than others. Just in general terms, they are-

Rebuild our Nation’s Military. The Budget request for the Department of Defense builds on the President’s promise to achieve peace through strength by providing the resources to rebuild our military, re-establish deterrence, and revive the warrior ethos of our Armed Forces. In combination with $113 billion in mandatory funding, the Budget increases Defense spending by 13 percent, and prioritizes investments to: strengthen the safety, security, and sovereignty of the homeland; deter Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific; and revitalize America’s defense industrial base.

No real surprise. Generally ambiguous / non-specific.

Secure the Border. Amounts for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in the 2026 Budget complement amounts that the Administration has requested as part of the reconciliation bill currently under consideration in Congress. The resources provided would empower the DHS to implement the President’s mass removal campaign and secure the border.

This is notable not because it's a surprise, but because budget laws are a key way for the US government to be granted authorities to do things. Part of the current judicial holdups on the Trump judicial programs have centered on 'you can't use that law in this way' objections. While the administration is likely going to argue in court that they do and see what it can still do, expect the cases they lose to lead to language in these bills giving a more modern congressional authorization.

Achieve American Energy Dominance. The Budget supports the President’s commitment to unleash America’s affordable and reliable energy and natural resources. The Budget cancels over $15 billion in Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) Green New Scam funds provided to the Department of Energy for unreliable renewable energy, removing carbon dioxide from the air, and other costly technologies that burden ratepayers and consumers. The Budget reorients Department of Energy funding toward research and development of technologies that could produce an abundance of domestic fossil energy and critical minerals, innovative concepts for nuclear reactors and advanced nuclear fuels, and technologies that promote firm baseload power. The Budget also cancels an additional $5.7 billion in IIJA funding provided to the Department of Transportation for failed and unnecessary electric vehicle charger grant programs.

Hostility to renewable energy spending is not a surprise. The emphasis on baseload power is consistent with Trump's arguments of reshoring domestic manufacturing, as baseload power dynamics are a major consideration for energy-intensive heavy industry.

The next three pages are 1-paragraph summaries of specific lines of effort. Call these sub-priorities, and expect these to be the Trump-aligned media's preferred framings for various efforts.

Due to the formatting dynamics, I can't copy-paste the whole thing. Instead, I will bring the main section headers, and what I think are the most interesting implications to the motte cultural war thread audience.

Make America Healthy Again (MAHA). The discretionary Budget request builds on the President’s MAHA Commission. The Budget provides resources to the Department of Health and Human Services that would allow the Secretary to tackle issues related to nutrition, physical activity, healthy lifestyles, over-reliance on medication and treatments, the effects of new technological habits, environmental impacts, and food and drug quality and safety.

Generally unobjectionable. However, don't be surprised if progressive medical policies (particularly for transgender health) get involved in the medications and treatments section.

Support Our Veterans.
Includes a proposal to allow veterans to see local community providers, rather than go to specific Veteran Affairs installations.

This proposal will allow Trump to cut Veterans Affair federal employees due to offsetting care to the private sector. This is part of a reoccuring theme of 'things that would allow the Federal government to reduce workforce.' Expect it to be raised as cutting care for veterans, but also to be a popular-ish proposal with veteran groups depending on how it's done.

Preserve Social Security. The Budget also includes investments in program integrity, to reduce fraud and abuse in Social Security programs, and in investments in artificial intelligence to increase employee productivity and automate routine workloads.

The social security fraud angle will almost certainly tie into authorizing DOGE to access to social security data, which was subject to an injunction and was part of the mid-April media cycles. The AI-to-automate is the first mention of AI use, and is an enabler of a key theme of reducing the required government workforce.

Streamline K-12 Education Funding and Promote Parental Choice. To limit the Federal role in education, and provide States with more flexibility, the Budget creates a new K-12 Simplified Funding Program that consolidates 18 competitive and formula grant programs into a new formula grant, and a Special Education Simplified Funding Program that consolidates seven IDEA programs into a single grant. The Budget also invests $500 million, a $60 million increase, to expand the number of high-quality charter schools, which have a proven track record of improving students’ academic achievement and giving parents more choice in the education of their children.

Grant program conditions are occasionally subject to criticism for which criteria they favor. Consolidating them not only provides a more uniform dynamic, but- again- reduces workforce requirements to manage.

A more than 10% increase in charter fund support, which is completely compatible with undercutting public employee teacher unions, which are a significant Democratic party interest group in various states.

Make America Skilled Again (MASA). The Budget proposes to give States and localities the flexibility to spend Federal workforce dollars to best support their workers and economies, instead of funneling taxpayer dollars to progressive non-profits finding work for illegal immigrants or focusing on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Under this proposal, States would now have more control and flexibility to coordinate with employers and would have to spend at least 10 percent of their MASA grant on apprenticeship, a proven model that trains workers while they earn a paycheck and offers a valuable alternative to college.

Ignoring the (expected) DEI jab / defunding, this both (a) uses the grant model to decrease federal administrator roles in determining how grants are used, as opposed to checking for violations in state use, and (b) increases a local-state emphasis on manufacturing / 'apprenticeship' jobs. This later is consistent with the broader re-shore industry premise of other policies.

Support Space Flight. 7 billion for lunar exploration, 1 billion for Mars-focused efforts, and a reductions in 'lower priority' research for a 'leaner' workforce.

Expect 'lower priority' to go after environment-science related areas.

Realign Foreign Aid. The Budget reorganizes the U.S. Agency for International Development into the Department of State to meet current needs and eliminates non-essential staff that were hired based on DEI and preferencing practice.

Codifying what was already de facto being done under the Rubio dual-hat arrangement at the beginning of the administration. The probable expectation / intention of codifying this into law should update people's understandings of why the USAID shutdown went about the way it did, and view it as part of an opening move in the months that followed.

End Weaponization and Reduce Violent Crime. The Budget ends the previous administration’s weaponization of the Department of Justice (DOJ), and instead prioritizes the Department’s key functions: combatting lawlessness; restoring order to America’s communities; fighting crime; and supporting America’s men and women in Blue. To that end, the Budget proposes to eliminate nearly 40 DOJ grant programs that are duplicative, not aligned with the President’s priorities, fail to reduce violent crime, or are weaponized against the American people.

Expect this to be the shoe to drop on parts of the FBI that Trump has a suspicion / skepticism / has felt internally opposed by, but which have been protected by their establishing laws that limit USAID-style Executive-only actions against them.

Maintain Support for Tribal Nations. The Budget preserves Federal funding for the Indian Health Service and supports core programs at the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Bureau of Indian Education, sustaining the Federal Government’s support for core programs that benefit tribal communities. At the same time, it streamlines other programs for tribal communities, to reduce inefficiencies and eliminate funding for programs and activities found to be ineffective

This matches a general theme of 'healthcare to Americans is not the target; administrating programs that disperse it and other types of programs are.'

Address Drug Abuse and Mental Health. This includes redirecting DEA’s foreign spending to regions with criminal organizations that traffic significant quantities of deadly drugs into the United States—Mexico, Central America, South America, and China. The Budget also proposes to refocus activities that were formerly part of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, by eliminating funding for programs that duplicate block grant funding, or are too small to have a national impact.

This is actually the first budget-level section focused on foreign countries, and it's focused on the Western Hemisphere. This is particularly notable due to Trump designated the drug cartels as terrorist organizations. This- and the earlier DHS- indicate an expected / intended increase in emphasis in Latin America efforts, which... could be not well received, depending on how Trump goes about it. (Or- alternatively- foreign agreement in cooperating is a basis of ongoing tariff negotiations.)

The second sentence of programs that duplicate block grant is notable as part of the block grant trend. For those unfamiliar, in the US block grants refer to money given to states and localities directly to use for specific programs, as opposed to programs managed by the government. It's basically delegating to state levels, as opposed to a federal bureaucracy. Advocates typically argue on grounds of efficiency / local expertise. Opponents of block grants have claimed they are a back-door to reducing programs, and/or make it harder to monitor.

Support Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Research. The Budget maintains funding for research in artificial intelligence and quantum information science at key agencies, to ensure the United States remains on the cutting edge of these critical technologies’ development and responsible use.

Quoted in full for the interested. There are no cuts advocated here, but also no increases claimed.

Improve Wildland Firefighting. Federal wildfire risk mitigation and suppression responsibilities currently are split across five agencies in two departments. The Budget reforms Federal wildland fire management to create operational efficiencies by consolidating and unifying Federal wildland fire responsibilities into a new Federal Wildland Fire Service at the Department of the Interior. This new service would streamline Federal wildfire suppression response, risk mitigation efforts, and coordination with non-Federal partners to combat the wildfire crisis.

Further reorganization / consolidation / implicit reduction in overall scope.

And that's it! At least on the White House summary.

Something not mentioned- but which may be hidden in the non-public spending- was anything about relocating federal agency headquarters out of DC. I made a point last month about how relocating agencies out of DC could be expected to have long-term effects on their political alignment with hyper-blue DC norms. I would be surprised if that doesn't come up.

But- to bring back to an earlier point- how likely is this to pass?

A lot of this is naked culture war politics. That's not surprising, even if the previous administration used different political interest language in its proposals and such. There are also some pretty clear institutional interests. In so much that any agency is seen as 'too friendly' or 'too hostile,' reorganizations, reductions, and so on, any reduction is a risk in future allies and influence. Or a mitigation, depending on your perspective.

So, that's going to be a major question of the next few months. Coincidentally, right as Trump reduces his interest in Ukraine after the mineral deal, freeing up decisionmaker space for ongoing tariff negotiations and then the later budget battle culminations.

What will happen? Who will win? Will the Democrats be able to peal off enough Republicans and deny the budget the votes it needs to pass? Will the Democrats compromise and support a bill that guts treasured programs and threatens some interest groups? Will the Democrats be able to save their institutional allies?

Or will the Republicans lose, and be forced to take blame with a government shutdown?

In a respect, that last option may not matter. When it comes to saving certain agencies, this budget may be heading for a 'Heads I win, Tails you lose' dynamic.

Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer ignited a party rebellion by averting a government shutdown earlier this year. He has been accused of being too weak on Trump, of not picking the fight the democratic base wanted. I can fully see one occurring again, but worse, with a few more months of political pressure.

But Schumer had his reasons for not doing a government shutdown earlier this year- reasons that still apply for a shutdown into the next Fiscal Year

As bad as passing the CR is, as I said, allowing Donald Trump to take even much more power via a government shutdown is a far worse option.

First, a shutdown would give Donald Trump and Elon Musk carte blanche to destroy vital government services at a significantly faster rate than they can right now.

Under a shutdown, the Trump administration would have full authority to deem whole agencies, programs, and personnel “non-essential,” furloughing staff with no promise they would ever be rehired.

The decision on what is essential would be solely left to the executive branch, with nobody left at agencies to check them.

In short, a shutdown would give Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and DOGE, and Russell Vought the keys to the city, state and country.

...

Many federal employees and government experts are rightly worried that a temporary shutdown could lead to permanent cuts.

Second, if we enter a shutdown, Congressional Republicans would weaponize their majorities to cherry-pick which parts of the government to reopen.

In a protracted shutdown, House and Senate Republicans would pursue a strategy of bringing bills to the floor to reopen only their favorite departments and agencies, while leaving other vital services that they don’t like to languish.

...

Extremely troubling, I believe, is that a shutdown could stall federal court cases – one of the best redoubts against Trump’s lawlessness. It could furlough critical staff, denying victims and defendants alike their day in court, dragging out appeals, and clogging the justice system for months or even years.

I will note in this last section that judges legally cannot require the Federal government to spend money on programs Congress has not authorized money for in a budget or continuing resolution.

So each of those judicial-injunction fights? The ones stopping Trump from closing a program now / demanding employees be re-hired / spend money on the already-passed budgets? Money that would be legally unavailable for the government to spend without a FY26 budget?

...yeah... you can't injunction a shutdown of government agencies during a government shutdown...

A lot of the ongoing DOGE fights aren't necessarily about shutting programs literally right now or not at all. In some respects, they should be thought of as preparatory actions. Testing limits, generating early wins for the base and provoking some doomed fights from the opposition, seeing what polls better or worse with the electorate they care more about. Setting conditions for the FY26 budget that Trump's team was planning for.

And baiting out the nation-wide injunctions, so that the ongoing Supreme Court case about them can limit a current go-to policy obstacle. Which- whatever the outcome- will clarify the legal environment, and Trump's legal strategies, for the next few years.

So... who wants to register predictions on a US government shutdown later this year?

Make America Skilled Again (MASA)

Rather unfortunate acronym, especially when a disproportionate amount of the funding will be going towards black people...

They should have obviously gone with MEESA /s.

Why? As far as I know, none of the funding is going to Gungans…

Make Electrical Engineering Solely for Americans?

At the risk of contributing to a subthread that could have come straight from Reddit save for the edge, there's also Make Eastern Europe Soviet Again...

I'd take that deal if it got us 80s pop culture, music and movies again.

Will be used by Hispanic people in practice, different stereotype for masa.

Seems like a recipe to massively increasing the deficit even further. Everyone loves spending, nobody likes taxes. That's the one thing both parties agree on.

Schumer: Under a shutdown, the Trump administration would have full authority to deem whole agencies, programs, and personnel “non-essential,” furloughing staff with no promise they would ever be rehired.

So the same thing that's been happening for the last 3 months?

Also, the fact that Medicaid remains untouched and the defense budget is actually increasing demonstrates once and for all that these guys were never serious about curtailing spending.

Trump is not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid. If he does it won't be until after he's cut so much from DC and NGOs that the average Trump voter feels that those orgs have sacrificed enough.

So the same thing that's been happening for the last 3 months?

No.

What has been happening for the last 3 months is a result of the different legal authorities for government agencies existing.

While Congress is the root authorizer of all money for the government, Congress is not the origin of all agencies. Certain agencies / offices exist because Congress says so, and some exist because the President thinks it'd be a good idea. When Congress funds the later, it tends to be in a far more open-to-executive discretion way. Instead of 'spend X amount on Y program for Z purpose,' where a failure to spend is against the law, the authorizations may be structured more like 'here is X amount for you to figure out how to spend best for Z purpose.' The last 3 months has been, in effect, the Executive branch saying 'we don't need all this after all' in the agencies where the Executive gets to make greater calls in what to spend on.

What Schumer is referring to is what happens when Congress does not pass a spending bill at all, and/or shifts to a continuing resolution model. Which has far more expansive in implications.

Last week there was a conversation on here about a potential peace deal in Ukraine. I claimed that the peace deal seemed fake since if you knew the background on peace efforts, you'd know that both Putin and Zelenskyy were playing a goofy game trying to pin the other one as the one who "doesn't want peace" in the eyes of Trump to try to direct Trump's ire in the other direction.

We now have pretty good confirmation that no peace deal will be forthcoming in the near term. JD Vance has said that the war won't end anytime soon. This backs up further reporting following the mineral deal that Trump's team was looking for ways to compel Russia to come to the table, and didn't really find any options that they liked.

The bull case for a Trump-brokered peace deal was the idea that the US could use its power to demand that both sides come to the table, and if either side tried to walk away then the US could force them back. This worked halfway, as the US has a lot of leverage over Ukraine for things like intelligence gathering, air defense, and to some extent other military deliveries. Much of MAGA hates Zelenskyy personally, and Trump was more than willing to exercise that leverage when Zelenskyy snubbed him at the WH meeting. The problem was that the other half of the puzzle was missing. Some claimed that the US could threaten Russia by promising to "drown Ukraine in weapons" if Russia didn't come to terms. However, Trump has been unable or unwilling to do this, so we had the situation where Trump could compel one side quite effectively, but when the other side did something Trump didn't like all he could do was tweet "Vladimir, STOP".

Peace is good as a general rule, and it would have been good if Trump could have gotten a peace deal along the lines of "ceasefire at current lines of control, Ukrainian defense guaranteed by Europe" so it was worth a shot. But alas, it seems like the war will continue.

Trump could just commit not to fund Ukraine and it would have to surrender, but then he would "own" that outcome and be blamed for whatever fake or false flag (or real, the political calculus is the same) atrocities would follow. Trump will enable the current horror to continue just as long as he can blame anyone else for it (currently he's blaming Biden).

The problem is Russia feels like it can simply win outright, at this point. Therefore, to achieve a peace that reflects the current EV of the war, Ukraine has to accept a deal that is worse than the current status quo. They will never do this, so the most likely outcome is a complete victory for Russia.

Russia has been thinking this for 3 years now. It wasn't true in 2023 and it wasn't true in 2024.

Assuming 1v1 in a vacuum, Russia is the most likely winner in a war of attrition due to bigger population size and more natural resources. Since international support is declining for Ukraine, the situation is heading more to the "1v1".

Winning a war of attrition isn't usually a good thing.

Beats losing a war of attrition, usually. Certainly did in WWI. Russia seems willing to take the hit. This seems crazy to me, but as far as I can tell Putin really wants a Ukraine that's part of Russia and/or under Russia's thumb, and is willing for his countrymen to pay the price to get it.

At this point I just feel horrified for the Ukrainians. They're stuck in a war they can't win, led by a "president" with no elections, and a universal draft that just keeps getting lower and lower in age. Their men are not allowed to leave the country since they're all property of the state. People talk about how this war is a pyrric victory for Russia, but I think the early success was also a pyrric victory for Ukraine, since it tricked them into thinking that if they just stay committed enough they'd be able to win. Now Zelensky and the generals feel like they can't possibly give up any land for peace, so they'll fight to the bitter end.

I guess the Soviets should have just let the Germans roll over them, then, as soon as they started surrendering by the hundreds of thousands. 20 million dead could have easily been avoided if they had just seen the writing on the wall and given up.

Should the South Vietnamese fought harder against the North Vietnamese? Should we have supported them longer and harder? How much longer and harder? Should we have maintained troop commitments?

I don't think that would have resulted in fewer dead....

Yes, this whole war is clearly just a ukronazi scheme to keep Zelensky in power. They don't even have elections! (let's conveniently ignore the fact that wartime elections are illegal according to Ukranian law)

They really should just follow the will of the Ukranian people and give up instead of following the deeply unbased metrosexual libtard agenda of (draws card) remaining sovereign and not ethnically cleansed.

Why is that for people like you and @Rov_Scam, every single war is WW2? There isn't a single other war in history that we could take lessons from?

I would argue that WW2 was actually highly unusual. Very few wars have a fully militarized society bent on large-scale invasion and genocide. A more normal outcome is to fight for a short while, then give up a small slice of land while glaring at each other until their desendants forget about it after a few hundred years.

I'd argue that the better analogy here is the breakup of the Soviet Union. Russia had been fighting the cold for for decades, mostly "just" through mass conscription and spending, but occasionally going hot also. At the start it was sort of even, but by the end they were obviously, massively outmatched by NATO. Meanwhile their economy was in freefall. Gorbachev saw the writing on the wall and thankfully ended it, mostly peacefully. But hardliners like Putin and wanted to keep fighting forever to hold onto every last scrap of territory no matter the cost. So ironically you're thinking more like Putin.

There's also the small problem that if Ukraine somehow did win this and took back the Donbass and Crimea... those areas are mostly filled with ethnic Russians who only speak Russian and are more loyal to Russia. So Ukraine would likely have to do some ethnic cleansing to actually take control of those regions.

Because for them, it might as well be. The war you're describing about giving up a small slice of land isn't the war Ukraine is fighting. Since the beginning, Putin has been consistent in his rhetoric denying Ukraine's existence as a separate people, attempted to take the capital at the beginning of the war, and is demanding terms that would not only cede larger amounts of territory than this "small slice" but also effectively end rump Ukraine's existence as anything other than a Russian satellite. I'm not sure how this is anything close to the breakup of the USSR, or what you're even getting at, really. What foreign power launched a full scale invasion of the Soviet Union with the goal of integrating territory into its own country?

So Ukraine would likely have to do some ethnic cleansing to actually take control of those regions.

Why? Those regions were part of Ukraine for over 20 years without any ethnic cleansing.

Why do people like you keep acting as though there is a Russian offer of a ceasefire along the current line of control on the table that Ukraine is rejecting out of nationalist spite? The only terms offered so far that I am aware of have included demands that Ukraine cede vast swathes of territory never occupied by Russia, including the city of Zaporizhia, as well as Treaty of Versailles-style demilitarization and Finlandization. Maybe you still think that Zelensky should have accepted those terms because an unjust peace is better than a just war, but surely there is a difference between rejecting those specific proposals and the generalized unwillingness to cede territory under any circumstances that his detractors attribute to him?

remaining sovereign and not ethnically cleansed.

The question is at what point this is recognizably not an option. Wales might have a thing or two to say about it.

Ukraine fell for the Vietnam, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria trick of divide and conquer. Just like in Syria were groups of extremists started a war that drove ethnic tensions and collapsed the country Ukraine has become far more ethnically divided and forced into a more militant position.

It is painfully obvious that Ukraine will end up like every other neocon project. For some reason liberals think that Poland is the expected outcome of becoming an American puppet. The west bank, Afghanistan and Iraq are much more typical examples. The Ukrainians must first realize who the real enemy is and stop falling for divide and conquer tactics.

Some claimed that the US could threaten Russia by promising to "drown Ukraine in weapons" if Russia didn't come to terms.

What weapons? Who were 'some' ? Even though US has some thousands of armored vehicles in storage, it's known all the critical weapons -air defense, artillery are in short supply. Any sort of useful weapon system (good air defense, cruise missiles) that might make big trouble for Russians is in very short supply. At this point, only some sort of wunderwaffe like AI-powered FPVs AND China not cutting off supplies of parts there in a brutal manner could save Ukrainians. US Stinger production is at a level of 60 a month!

Raytheon told FlightGlobal it was ramping up to achieve production capacity of 60 Stingers monthly. A separate $700 million contract from NATO headquarters in 2024 added 940 missiles to be split among Germany, Italy and the Netherlands

That peace was not going to happen has been clear since the year started. Russians are confident they can keep this going and Ukraine will give in, so why'd they accept a peace that'd not solve the issues they have

American missile production is insufficient, very insufficient..

In 2022, Ukraine was able to maintain a highly effective defence against the aggressor’s air and missile arsenals, mainly due to post-Soviet long-range S-300 systems. However Ukraine has lost as many as 80 fire units and has used the majority of its estimated 5,000 interceptors. Apart from an S-300 battery delivered by Slovakia, so far transfers of these systems from Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Greece have not been finalised.

Ukraine used thousands of S-300 missiles and now has basically none. US is, with great fanfare planning to increase its production of Patriot missiles to 650 per year.

In December 2023 it was stated that production of Patriot interceptors was 550 a year and would be increased to 650 a year in 2024.[55]

Really, it's hard to put in words how depressed one should be here. E.g. Poland is expected to have <1000 Patriot missiles in its air defense. How long would the Poles last against Russia, which is making ~600 Iskander missiles a year according to Ukrainian information. Since Iskander is a maneuvering and fast missile, interception is by no means assured with a single interceptor either as it'd be against simple ballistic missiles or planes.

Typical NATO air defense would be utterly exhausted within a few weeks by a determined foe spamming improved cheap drones like the Geran, especially ones with better avionics that could fly themselves low and thus would be hard to intercept from the ground.

These are problems which could, in principle, be solved by spending US taxpayer money.

Naturally, you can't get a factory ready for production in a month, but possibly in less than a year.

This presumption is based on the fact that it is common knowledge that in modern warfare, whoever can field more weapon systems will have an advantage. So a state (e.g. the US) which is working under a strong presumption of not having to switch to wartime economy might never the less invest to shorten the critical path to start mass-producing weapon systems in earnest.

Arguably, developing new weapon systems is part of this. For peacetime capabilities, developing a new weapon system and then building a few of them is likely worse than just using that budget for building the previous generation of weapons. But when you enter a big war and your defense budget increases by a factor of 20, R&D will be obviously a critical path, and not having done it beforehand will greatly diminish your capabilities.

Likewise for production. Keeping enough machines around so that half your working population can manufacture munitions is not effective when in all likelihood, these machines will just gather dust. But hopefully, there is someone whose job it is to worry about how quickly one can scale up production quickly. Perhaps this means keeping a lot of machines which build machines which build missiles around, or subsidizing certain key dual-use industries to keep them on-shore.

Of course, the US would face certain hurdles when trying to spend more money on manufacturing without being themselves in a shooting war, all the rules about having bidding processes, NIMBY/environmental lawsuits et cetera might still delay things. But compared to civilian manufacturing (i.e. the US on a whim deciding to invest 10% of the GDP into manufacturing hard disks onshore), I would still expect that military manufacturing -- especially of single-use items like missiles -- could be scaled up very quickly.

Naturally, you can't get a factory ready for production in a month, but possibly in less than a year.

Modern weapons are complex. Building a factory to make something simple today might happen under a year, but for high-tech production of stuff with proprietary components that can't be bought from several vendors it just gets vastly more complicated. This simply isn't the 1940s when the most complex weapons may have had some electronics. Something like radar seeker heads is extremely specialised tech. Solid rocket fuel either, zero civilian use. Missiles are absolutely unused in civilian world, so are probably missile parts like those specialised servos etc. Expanding production in wartime requires having the entire specialised supply chain ready and waiting, so you existing workforce can train new people. This rarely or never happens.

but hopefully, there is someone whose job it is to worry about how quickly one can scale up production quickly.

No. Not happening. We aren't in WW2 era where you could convert an auto plant to an airplane plant with relative ease. Scaling production quickly is now really hard. You need whole mothballed plants with crews keeping the production going at low volume to maintain the ability. This is something only governments with money to spare such as Russia or China can manage. It'd never fly in any pensioner-heavy democracy, nor in the US.

If you look into this more closely, 'streamlining' and lowering cost was popular. US ended up with having problems of this type:

https://theweek.com/us-military/1023025/us-production-of-bullets-shells-and-missiles-sidelined-by-explosion-at-1

There's no reason to worry. US is going to abandon Europe and nothing really bad could result there, worst case Turkey or Russia conquers some unimportant part. The war with China in the Pacific is almost certainly lost on a numerical basis alone, so there won't be a big war. Maybe something silly like US Navy letting Taiwan hang but blockading Malacca strait etc. US itself is pretty safe.

At this point, only some sort of wunderwaffe like AI-powered FPVs

Is this such a far-fetched wunderwaffe to be holding out for at this point? Between the ChatGPT-plays-geoguessr posts, the circumstance that Ukraine already gets the vast majority of its kills with superior FPV tech (currently still using human operators), and them having access to much more infrastructure that would enable the technology's deployment once it is created (unsanctioned supply chains, Starlink), the bet that these will happen in the next 2 years and will be a significant game-changer seems at least as good to me as the "Russia will run out of missiles any moment now" cope of the early months of the war.

that Ukraine already gets the vast majority of its kills with superior FPV tech

According to the people operating it, their tech is not superior to the Russian one. This is from fall of '24

That has since changed. Now, enemy drones outnumber Ukrainian ones six to one. But superior tactics and innovation still keep Ukraine competitive. Ukraine tends to be first in developing and adopting new technologies, driven by a policy of diversification. Russia’s advantage in mass production means it can adapt and scale up much faster. The pace of change is frenetic, with feedback loops meaning that some software is updated every few hours. By the time Russian drones reach the front lines, Ukraine has sometimes already developed counter-measures, Colonel Sukharevsky claims. “Quantitatively Russia is ahead, but qualitatively we are keeping them at parity.”

Now look how wikipedia puts it

Comparing Russian and Ukrainian drone warfare, he said that the enemy has more drones, as they are better at mass production, but that Ukraine is first with innovations.

I understand why people want to believe in the narrative of Ukrainian tech superiority and why Wikipedia selectively quotes the same article to make it look like Ukrainians are out-innovating Russians, but it's mostly unwarranted. They're basically the same people with a slightly different culture. The difference between Russians and Ukrainians is that Russians have more resources and people, possibly mitigated by a less flexible MoD.

Making such a tech 'safe' would require putting some sort of transponders on every piece of Ukrainian equipment and making such network secure and hard to exploit - the codes would have to change frequently etc. This is hard, logistically, there are spies in the Ukrainian army etc.

Without that, your only bet would be having AI modules on drones that would only activate once the drone is indisputably in enemy territory. How do you make that in a foolproof manner? Inertial navigation of some sort? You could use terrain / map matching but that's a whole another layer of of AI complexity you'd need to make reliable.

But what then if someone fires off the drone in the opposite direction to the front ? Both sides routinely used basically civilian vehicles for transport and transport is one of the primary targets. Any misactivation would result in grief.

In addition, FPV cameras are fairly cheap and low resolution, they AFAIK always rely on recon from another drone. An autonomous drone would require better sensors.

There's a fair amount of complications. I'd not rule this out before war ends, but I think it's more likely to happen after the war. Maybe Ukrainians will get last-40m targetting or something like that, which could really help radio-shadow near the ground.

What weapons? Who were 'some' ? Even though US has some thousands of armored vehicles in storage, it's known all the critical weapons -air defense, artillery are in short supply. Any sort of useful weapon system (good air defense, cruise missiles) that might make big trouble for Russians is in very short supply. At this point, only some sort of wunderwaffe like AI-powered FPVs AND China not cutting off supplies of parts there in a brutal manner could save Ukrainians.

I think I disagree with the idea that thousands of armoured vehicles are useless and I suspect that Ukraine would agree with me, I can think of at least a few good uses for a large quantity of Bradleys and Abrams, hell even the M113 could be put to use. The Russians seem to be pretty close to burning through their soviet inheritance of armoured vehicles, hence the increasing presence of things like Mad Maxified Ladas and golf cart riding stormtruppen, so armoured vehicles that are donated from now on should produce a greater impact on the battlefield as the Russians become increasingly resource constrained.

Russians are confident they can keep this going and Ukraine will give in, so why'd they accept a peace that'd not solve the issues they have.

It probably is worth mentioning here that Putin was confident that the "special military operation" would have been over in days and that he also has a tendency towards "missing the bus" when it comes to strategic decisions, procrastinating and making decisions weeks and months after they would have had the most effect. Putin is quite lucky that the western world lives in abject terror of actually winning a war for change (Defeating your enemies? Sounds awfully escalatory that) and that we are instead treated to this tragic comedy of errors.

The Russians seem to be pretty close to burning through their soviet inheritance of armoured vehicles, hence the increasing presence of things like Mad Maxified Ladas and golf cart riding stormtruppen,

That's the impression people doing PR for Ukraine want others to think. But in the absence of enemy heavy weapons fire, light vehicles make sense to use. That the various storage areas are emptying out is likely not just down to attrition, but because Russia is creating vast new units in reserve.. Newly produced equipment is rarely even seen near the front line now.

Russia is tailoring its rearmament plans to meet the needs of the new troops to be stationed along its NATO border. Those units will get much of the new equipment. Most of what is being sent to the front line in Ukraine is old and refurbished Soviet-era arms. “Very rarely are newly built vehicles observed or destroyed lately,” said Dara Massicot, senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment, who wrote a report on Russia’s military reconstitution.

Another great quote:

“The Russian military is reconstituting and growing at a faster rate than most analysts had anticipated,” Gen. Christopher Cavoli, commander of U.S. forces in Europe, told a Senate committee this month. “In fact, the Russian army, which has borne the brunt of combat, is today larger than it was at the beginning of the war.”

"We were all wrong and actually, Russian army isn't getting destroyed in Ukraine."

All in all, if NATO continues with business as usual- being ineffectual, stuck in the past due to lack of bloody experience, and Russians settle the conflict and absorb all the lessons of the war, something which used to be only possible in BAP's alcoholic imaginings such as 'Russia swooping through Poland' might stop being very fanciful.

Putin is quite lucky that the western world lives in abject terror of actually winning a war for change

How could the West 'win a war' when a typical NATO army has only enough ammunition for couple of weeks of operations?

The West has an economy based on valuations of Boomer owning expensive real estate and selling each other services. It has consistently fallen short on delivering weapons to Ukrainians, it can't make weapons in large numbers. Most real industry is declining or gone. These days you can read how they're struggling to source cellulose for artillery charges. The West is simply not a serious geopolitical force, it has zero sane ideas, it's a collection of dysfunctional countries that hate their own citizens, whose main interests is keeping the old-age pension scam going for a few more years and where and power is held by people who just want to die comfortably without having to make a real decision.

According to someone who was a serving intelligence officer, NATO is more of an organisation that provides sinecures than a real defence organisation.

I mean weapons do not fire themselves. You can arm Ukraine all you want — they are still toast more or less. And Ukraine is rapidly running out of people. If you’re resorting to abducting senior citizens off the street to fuel your army, you are in no position to defend much. And this is the calculation that NATO missed — Ukraine didn’t have the population to sustain this effort, and so any weapons given were useless because eventually you’d have no one left capable of firing them.

Ukraine lost about a half million in casualties in three years of combat, in a country with a population of about 38 million. In World War I, Germany lost about 6.3 million out of 65 million total before calling it quits, and even then it was controversial. At a consistent rate of attrition, it would take Ukraine another 20 years to hit those kind of numbers. While you can argue about the population pyramid being more favorable to Germany, this is balanced by the fact that the relatively slow rate of attrition gives Ukraine a much bigger pool to draw from, including people not yet born. After all, Germany started another war 20 years after than one ended and managed to double their casualty numbers. Those of us who have never lived through a serious war don't understand how huge casualty numbers can get before they become unsustainable.

It’s not just the men literally killed, it’s also people fleeing the country. And a lot of people have fled already.

True, but most of the Ukrainian refugees left at the beginning of the war. It's not like war casualties where there's a continual drip drip for years. In 2023 and 2024, Ukraine had one of the highest rates of in-migration of any country, almost all of whom were returning refugees.

Also just prosaic stuff like small arms, bullets, vehicle replacement parts, tires and gasoline. A big part of the reason for the complete collapse of the German Army in 1945 was that you had entire surviving units going combat ineffective because they couldn’t operate their vehicles and had no guns or bullets to shoot them with.

I suspect part of the issue here is that Trump actually has a pretty good carrot for Putin to end the war – sanctions, and frozen assets. But the problem is that it's hard to make that offer expire – even if Trump threatens to take it off the table, if Russia keeps winning, at some point Ukraine will be in such a bad place that they will beg him (or whoever is president at the time) to put it back on again. So Russia does have an incentive to make peace, but it's really at their leisure, once they get everything they want out of the war.

A proposal sponsored by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) to impose new sanctions on Russia and 500 percent tariffs on countries that buy Russian oil, gas and aluminum has received broad bipartisan support in the Senate, possibly even a veto-proof majority.

This would probably completely bork US relations with India, right? Doesn't India buy oil from Russia? Probably won't happen, right?

Ukrainian defense guaranteed by Europe

It seems like this was also a missing part of the puzzle: Europe is unwilling or unable to put boots on the ground in any significant number.

I keep being told that Europe is going to actually get real, for real this time, they're going to militarize, it's going to be gnarly, the US will regret ever awakening the European dragon, they're going to pivot to China...and then I see stuff like this.

It's really a shame, since I actually think (even under pivot-to-Asia conditions) the US can make a very good deal with Europe/NATO that is mutually beneficial while still drawing down the US commitment to Europe.

I would tell Europe that the US is trimming its army and pulling out most of its units (I'd leave tripline forces there so that if Russia shoots at Estonia or something it's uncomfortably likely to kill Americans; their job in a real war would be to coordinate joint efforts). But the goal of pulling those forces will be to reinvest that funding into the US Navy and into mass munitions stockpiles. Ultimately the deal with European NATO, I think, should be as follows:

  • The US provides strategic bombers with a deep stockpile of weapons
  • The US provides the blue-water navy, aiming to keep the sea lanes clear in the event of a Russian invasion of NATO
  • The US provides tactical aviation and force enablers like cargo aircraft and refueling aircraft, although not necessarily forward-based in Europe
  • The US continues to cut Europe into R&D, selling munitions, aircraft like the F-35, &ct. to keep Europe's teeth sharp and short.
  • The US will continue to cooperate on cybersecurity and intelligence
  • The US provides the nuclear-stockpile-of-last-resort that is a counterweight to the massive Russian nuclear arsenal (to increase strategic uncertainly from Russia's POV, France and the UK should be encouraged to continue to maintain their own nuclear stockpiles)

The main thing the United States is not aiming to provide in this scenario is ground forces or day-one aviation. In the event of a war with Russia, the United States is still prepared to come save Europe's butt, but this will be by air and by sea.

European NATO is responsible for:

  • The Army. Tanks, air defense, infantry, tube and rocket arty, the whole shebang.
  • Reciprocating their R&D advances with the US (I know this is already a thing!)
  • Green/brown water navy (this means conventional submarines, minelayers/sweepers, missile boats and pocket forces of surface combatants)
  • "Day one" tactical aviation assets in sufficient numbers to fight – we can plan for these to be supplemented by a surge of aircraft from the United States as a war drags on, but Europe should have its own air force in sufficient numbers to be able to fight after a Russian "day zero" cruise missile attack.
  • Building infrastructure like airfields and munitions depots

This arrangement provides Europe with a lot of confidence in its ability to deter Russia on its own, even if the United States derps off in a fit of isolationist rage (we're building a Russian-equivalent ground force here) while also providing the United States with assurance that Europe isn't going to develop as a rival superpower (the US navy will remain without peer). It saves Europe billions in developing and maintaining a massive nuclear arsenal while also saving the US billions in maintaining a peacetime army that is expected to fight the Russians at the drop of a hat. And it funnels US production into capabilities that are flexible – forget about the 600 ship navy (well, no, don't, let's do that too) but have you considered the 6 million missile military? A robust navy and in particular tens of thousands of cruise missiles can be aimed just as easily at China as they can at Russia. Thus, instead of endangering global peace by being not-quite-strong-enough to fight Russia or China (while still trying to maintain security commitments – or ambiguities – that contain both) the US is able to continue to provide its traditional role of ruling the waves and backstopping local allies.

And, ultimately, I think it's reasonable. In many ways, this sort of split already exists, or at least did during the Cold War, where nations like West Germany focused on their army and coastal fleets while the US focused on its air force and navy, so doubling down on it should be easy and natural (it's not like asking Europe to develop ICBMs and field them in 5 years, or something). European NATO is getting the good end of the financial bargain, too, since fielding troops and tanks is cheap compared to aircraft carriers and intercontinental bombers. The European Union's economy is only slightly behind the US, in purchasing power parity. Since the end of the Cold War, we've "flipped" some of Warsaw Pact's most feared enemies, like Poland and East Germany, into allies. So, ultimately, it should be very doable, on paper, right?

Unfortunately my confidence in the ability of Europe to achieve even this limited goal is falling by the day. The US maintains about 100,000 troops overseas in Europe. If Europe can't deploy a quarter of that number to Ukraine as peacekeepers, how much help are they actually going to be if they actually have to defend Estonia or Latvia?

Sorry for the digression! This turned into a bit of a monster of a comment. I have my dissatisfactions with the United States and the way it has handled itself. But at least it's pretty clearly still a live player.

I suspect part of the issue here is that Trump actually has a pretty good carrot for Putin to end the war – sanctions, and frozen assets.

Weren't the vast majority of the frozen assets held by the Europeans, who didn't seem to be keen on playing along with any Trump-brokered deal?

I don't recall, good point! But if they were never going to use them as a carrot, I don't understand why they are still "frozen" – the "give the frozen assets to Ukraine" idea has been floating around for a bit but as far as I know hasn't even partially materialized. Presumably they are still on the table for a reason – although perhaps that's less strategy and more bureaucratic/legal hang ups somewhere.

I don't recall, good point! But if they were never going to use them as a carrot, I don't understand why they are still "frozen" – the "give the frozen assets to Ukraine" idea has been floating around for a bit but as far as I know hasn't even partially materialized

It's illegal, there's articles about this. Russia would sue and win and get the assets back. The current idea is to give profits from those assets to Ukraine but AFAIK that idea hasn't gone anywhere either (and it is also legally dubious).

Weren't the vast majority of the frozen assets held by the Europeans, who didn't seem to be keen on playing along with any Trump-brokered deal?

I can't see a world in which Trump and Zelensky and Putin all agree but the Europeans queer the deal.

The US maintains about 100,000 troops overseas in Europe. If Europe can't deploy a quarter of that number to Ukraine as peacekeepers, how much help are they actually going to be if they actually have to defend Estonia or Latvia?

The Europeans as a collective have huge forces, they just don't want to use them. They have 2 million active troops and huge potential mobilization. It's taken Russia ages to chew through the population of Ukraine, barring all else the EU could just throw meat at them over a huge front until they win. I guess it's unlikely they'd have the will to do this but that brings us back to will, not capability.

It makes no strategic sense to send peacekeepers to Ukraine. Why take risks for no reward? What are the benefits of moving into Ukraine? Hans and Roger and Jean don't see it as their war, they're just not that enthusiastic about supporting the enterprise, risking their lives.

There's a media cinematic universe where Putler must be stopped and we must show Resolve and Defend the Rules Based Order and in that world it makes sense to send troops to Ukraine. Otherwise Putler will keep on invading the Baltics or Finland or wherever else. But why would he do this? How do the cost-benefit ratios weigh up for Russia?

From the European perspective (albeit not the Polish or Baltic perspective), the most valuable thing in Ukraine is gas transit routes to Russia. Not pretend rare earths reserves or gas resources that are a fraction of Russia's. These can't be defended by frustrating Russia, quite the opposite.

EU policy is trapped between reality and the MCU, so they need to fight for freedom but not so much that they'll actually win. I think it's all a giant façade. This is the best explanation for the humiliating 'yes we will, no we won't' approach by Keir Starmer and Macron, they're in a dreamy state between the MCU and reality.

I'm aware of a research report by some neocon think tank that said 'if we lose Ukraine then the EU will have to station all these troops in Romania and the Russian air defence zone will advance forwards and that will leave us weak in the Baltics. I don't understand this line of argument, if you have more of everything save nukes then you ought to win, regardless of whether the front line becomes marginally shorter or longer.

If the much richer, more advanced, populous EU can't beat a corrupt Russian oligarchy without the US despite the enemy having a fraction of the resources then there's no point in defending it, there's no point strategizing to advance its position. Clearly the entire political system is grossly inadequate, EU corruption and demoralization must be far greater than Russian... Or they can win and there's no need to worry.

I think that almost nobody in Western Europe, in their heart of hearts, really believes that Europe will fall to Putin if he manages to turn Ukraine into Belarus 2.0.

If his special military operation had gone differently, Europe would not have mounted a counter-attack to free Ukraine. The preferred phrasing is "Europe is willing to defend Ukraine to the last Ukrainian soldier".

From a point of view of maintaining the rule based international order, it makes sense to punish defectors like Putin as long as it is costing us little (compared to WW3) to do so. (Yes, we did let him get away with Chechnya, but that is his backyard, while Ukraine is his front yard. The IRBO states very clearly that the only country which is supposed to get away with intervening where-ever they like is the US.)

From the point of depleting the stockpiles of weapons and recruits of a potential adversary, supporting Ukraine is likewise great. Perhaps Putin is genuinely uninterested in extending his sphere of influence over Eastern Europe and just wants to control what he considers Russia, just like it would have been possible that Hitler only wanted control of the territories with a German majority in Austria and the Sudetenland, but either is hard to know beforehand without being able to read both his mind and the mind of his successors.

If Putin instead had tried his regime change op in Poland, the European reaction would have been on quite a different level, because Poland is NATO. My guess is that at least 80% of the NATO countries would be willing to send troops to their death in Poland, and the ones who do not will functionally quit NATO. Article 5 is a promise, and if you defect from that promise, then NATO is dead and Putin is free to attack European countries one by one. (Of course, given what we saw in Ukraine, it seems unlikely that he would win the war for Poland against European forces even without US support, but that just makes it that much easier to commit to fight.)

With regard to guaranteeing what remains of Ukraine, the question for me is if it would make sense to allow whatever will be left of Ukraine into NATO. There are quite a few pros and cons to that. On the one hand, Ukraine is the one country which has serious combat experience fighting Russia, and they are indeed positioned well to strike for Moscow, so a NATO Ukraine would force Russia to deploy a lot of defensive troops in that area if she ever becomes serious about starting the next world war. On the other hand, Russia seems to have a bee in her bonnet about getting Ukraine heim ins Reich, and if there is a 10% chance that Ukraine in NATO will lead to global thermonuclear war, then that is not worth it in expected QALYs or from a European geostrategic point of view.

The IRBO states very clearly that the only country which is supposed to get away with intervening where-ever they like is the US.

It also states in smaller letters that if you're a sufficiently big and important country, 'human rights' are an optional part of dealing with secession crises(which is what Chechnya was).

I guess it's unlikely they'd have the will to do this but that brings us back to will, not capability.

While I take your point, I kinda disagree. A lack of will is a lack of capability. It also seems like there are real questions about the actual capability of Europe sans American support right now:

Europe lacks heavy transport aircraft, military cargo ships and the specialized vehicles required to move tanks and armored units.

The article as a whole is about NATO sans the US, not an EU peacekeeping force in Ukraine, and I do think that Europe could manage to get together such a force if it had the will. But I do think it's worth noting that there are actual capability gaps that only the United States can fill right now. If Europe and the United States can figure out an equitable division of responsibilities, it's not necessarily a problem, but if Europe needs to send tanks to Ukraine and it can't transport tanks, that's a problem even if Europe has the will.

It makes no strategic sense to send peacekeepers to Ukraine.

I think the point of sending peacekeepers to Ukraine is to raise the stakes for a second Russian invasion by making it likely you'll spread the conflict elsewhere. Whether or not that makes strategic sense depends a lot, I think, on if Europeans think that Putin will come for them, next, if it can "finish off" Ukraine, but also on their economic prospects within Ukraine, and on the cost-benefit analysis of whether ending the war sooner is worth the increased risk of sending peacekeepers (assuming here that a European willingness to commit troops will help end the war sooner, which perhaps it won't.)

Not pretend rare earths reserves

These are real, right? But it looks like the US of A got there first, so it might be sort of pointless for Europe now? Not exactly sure how the trade deal shakes out. Certainly Europe could benefit from a diversified control of rare earths.

I think it's all a giant façade. This is the best explanation for the humiliating 'yes we will, no we won't' approach by Keir Starmer and Macron, they're in a dreamy state between the MCU and reality.

This definitely seems plausible to me. But I also wonder if EU politicians really believe they need to do something but then realize that what would be necessary to actually accomplish such an effort is unpalatable, so they bounce back and forth between wanting to do something and failing to do it. Modern democratic politics does in theory, I think, have a sort of trap wherein cutting programs is political suicide, raising taxes is political suicide, and so it can be very hard to actually do something about threats that are real but not immediate. Not sure if that's what is happening here.

if you have more of everything save nukes then you ought to win, regardless of whether the front line becomes marginally shorter or longer.

European NATO doesn't have more of everything except nukes. They have an edge in tactical aircraft, I think. They might have an edge in tanks and IFVs right now, particularly with Russian losses, but the Russian industry can probably surpass them in 3 - 5 years of postwar production [my source for this is vibes, I am open to correction on this!] I've seen claims they have an edge in artillery, but I question if this is including older systems that aren't nearly as relevant in modern warfare. Either way, Russia has a huge edge in shell production. Russia has vastly more surface-to-air-missile systems. I am pretty sure Russia also has (or again, will quickly have once they stop shooting them) an edge in cruise missiles, and as far as I know no European nation (except, I think, Turkey) has produced a tactical ballistic missile, which the Russians use regularly. Europe has no strategic bombers (Russia has more than 100, a combination of Tu-92s, Tu-22Ms, and Tu-160s, the last of which has reentered production). Russia has an edge in nuclear submarines (Europe has ten nuclear attack submarines, Russia eleven plus four Oscar cruise missile submarines plus an extra ten that Wikipedia says are not in frontline service but either placed in reserve or undergoing a refit. Ballistic missile submarines are unlikely to be frontline combatants but of course Russia has an edge there too, with nine active and three being refitted or overhauled, versus eight in the Anglo-French nuclear deterrent). The Europeans will have more conventional submarines (although they are much less capable in terms of range than nuclear submarines, so it's worth asking if e.g. Grecian submarines will be able to meaningfully participate) and I think a larger surface fleet, although the Russian fleet might actually be better equipped as an anti-surface force as a general rule (I think at the end of the day Europe still has the edge as long as the single French carrier isn't in drydock, but Russian anti-ship missiles are no joke). The Russians will also, I am quite confident, have a massive advantage in mine warfare both on land (with potentially literally millions of mines in their inventory, although who knows how many were used in Ukraine) and at sea.

I'm not really a fearmonger about Russian intent. I don't particularly think Putin wants to invade Germany or something. But I do think it's important to understand why Europe is uncomfortable about having Russia on its borders (particularly now that they have done their darndest to kill Russians by the hundreds.)

If the much richer, more advanced, populous EU can't beat a corrupt Russian oligarchy without the US despite the enemy having a fraction of the resources then there's no point in defending it

Yeah, I mean that's the big question isn't it? Europe seems quite mad at the United States for having the audacity to consider a pullback and pivot to Asia, even though the EU is the world's largest economy and even by purchasing-power-parity has, I believe, a tremendous edge over Russia. So why can't they handle this ~on their own?

These are good points and make sense but I keep getting the sense that there are people trying to force down this framing on us, that the EU really needs Atlantic unity. Like you say, the EU is mad about the US heading off for Asia.

Jannik Hartmann, a fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations, confirmed that a U.S. pullback — from Germany's Ramstein Air Base, for instance — would leave Europe without basic loading gear like ramps and flatbed wagons. Europe also has few forward stockpiles of military hardware, whereas the U.S. has pre-positioned supplies across Germany, Poland and the Netherlands, Kruijver said.

Really, the EU can't rustle up some flatbed trucks and ramps? How hard is it to get some trucks (insert joke about Wehrmacht mechanization here)? Or trains suitable for tanks and heavy vehicles, shouldn't they have them? They can't expect the US to bring trains with them over the Atlantic surely. I don't know for sure but I suspect the German Council on Foreign Relations may be manipulating the facts somewhat. US pre-positioned supplies would obviously be useful but how much is really needed? Satellites and enablers are another matter but the EU does have their own satellite constellation in Galileo.

How do 160 million beat 3-4x their number in an offensive war? I just don't see them prevailing even with their shell advantages, battle-hardened troops, SAM batteries, ECM... Even if they have a qualitative advantage in all domains Europe is just bigger in population and industry. Size predominates in industrial, attritional warfare. Superweapons like HIMARS, PATRIOTs, Challengers, T-14s, T-90Ms or Su-57s aren't what's swaying this war, it's quantity of men, quantity of shells and quantity of drones.

And even then, Russian advantages in shells, missiles and manpower haven't yet cracked Ukraine, they're slowly burning through the population in attritional fighting. Against Europe it would be much slower either way.

A united Europe can defend itself or at least induce enough doubt that Russia wouldn't attack. Against a divided Europe (presumably the whole world's gone to hell in this scenario), nuclear blackmail could achieve effortless Russian victory. Just wipe Warsaw off the map after the initial demonstration if they still haven't surrendered unconditionally.

These are real, right?

Ukraine's rare earths exist but they're not valuable in any significant sense.

https://www.spglobal.com/market-intelligence/en/news-insights/articles/2025/2/ukraine-rare-earths-potential-relies-on-soviet-assessments-may-not-be-viable-87318842

Exploration efforts were abandoned after a 13-year assessment process, and no attempts have been made to develop the Novopoltavske deposit since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, according to experts.

"To my knowledge, there are no economically viable rare earth deposits in Ukraine," said Tony Mariano, an independent geologist consultant with expertise in rare earths exploration. "I have evaluated clay deposits in Ukraine thought to have potential for rare earths but found them not to be viable. This doesn't mean there aren't any, only that further exploration and evaluation needs to be done."

I don't know for sure but I suspect the German Council on Foreign Relations may be manipulating the facts somewhat.

Really funny if true, because I suspect the normal American response to this will be "get your act together" rather than being more inclined to help.

How do 160 million beat 3-4x their number in an offensive war?

First off I would remind you that this sort of feat of arms is historically pretty normal. Small European detachments operating alone conquered entire kingdoms. The United States and its allied conquered Iraq in less than a month with about 600,000 men against an army of 1.3 million in a country of nearly 25 million.

I realize it's very popular at this point, of course, to say "well Arabs can't fight in modern wars" – but can Europeans?

With all that being said, though, I tend to agree with you that Russia just meat-grindering through Europe is very unlikely.

Let's take what I think is a more realistic scenario (inasmuch as it does not presume Russia is acting like an omnicidal entity):

  1. Russia, perhaps out of paranoia over NATO preparations to put more troops in the Baltic states, decides to seize them. It decides to launch a three-pronged assault from Kaliningrad, Belarus and Russia proper, cutting through Lithuania and Latvia to secure a land bridge to Kaliningrad and isolating Estonia. Because none of these nations have military capabilities to speak of (about 8,000 active personnel in Estonia, about 20,000 in Latvia and Lithuania each, and currently no tanks, no fighter aircraft or attack helicopters, although there is a NATO air policing mission there, very limited air defenses, etc. etc.) the Russians, after a preparatory barrage, are able to cross the border without meaningful resistance and cut logistical lines flowing from Poland to Narva. Rather than attack large towns, the Russians simply put blocking detachments with ATGMs and tanks outside of them. The Latvians do not have a navy to sink, so the Russians steam their least valuable destroyer into the Gulf of Riga and park it there to interdict commerce.

  2. Russia then begins to lay literally three million land mines between Belarus and the Baltic sea. Russian troops surround Estonia but do not invade. The governments of the Baltic states are given 72 hours to agree to neutralization. Although all three countries have large reserve forces they can call up in theory, Russian cruise missiles have hit all telecoms and VDV detachments have seized the power plants via heliborne assault – the power is out nationwide. Spontaneous disorganized resistance with small arms might be effective against an occupying force, but the Russians are less occupying and more raiding. Commerce is stopped, and any troop concentrations are dispatched via Iskander or Su-34, but the Russians aren't trying to go door-to-door. In order to fight them, the Latvian military and reservists who survived the blitzkrieg are going to have to attack Russian positions that they are fast preparing. Just as the Russians were able to slice off and fortify parts of Ukraine, they also expect to be able to, at a minimum, cut out and hold a land belt between Belarus and Kaliningrad by direct force while using a stranglehold on energy and communications to force the now-isolated Baltic states to the table. And, unlike Ukraine, the Baltics have no strategic depth. Russian helicopters and attack aircraft can operate throughout the region, and artillery from Kaliningrad and Belarus can cover the entire Polish-Lithuanian border.

Now in this circumstance NATO's entire point is to uphold the sovereignty of its member states. But it can't win this fight by waiting for the Russians to run out of men to push through the meat grinder. Instead they have to have enough forces in Poland to contain Kaliningrad and push Russian troops out of the Baltic states quickly before they are able to build fortifications (or, alternatively, have the ability to clear three million land mines) systematically while under fire and hoping that the population of the Baltics doesn't freeze to death in the intervening period.

Obviously for the sake of the scenario I granted the Russians the ability to pull this off, which is probably debatable. (I think they could easily beat the Baltics, the problem would be being sneaky enough about preparing to beat the Baltics that the US or someone didn't move an armored division there while you were preparing.) But you see my point about the need for a military force that can do more than just attrit the Russians over a long period of time. Just like the Ukrainians, if they wanted to preserve their full sovereignty, needed to be able to protect or reclaim Crimea, NATO as a whole needs to be able to protect or assemble a force that can reclaim the Baltics. Ukraine failed unambiguously. I don't think Russia cares that much about the Baltics, but if you're NATO, you have to have some means of assuring the sovereignty of your member states.

Ukraine's rare earths exist but they're not valuable in any significant sense.

Hmm, I hope we're able to scrounge some up regardless. I'm given to understand the problem with rare earths is more in refining them, rather than finding them?

European NATO doesn't have more of everything except nukes.

They definitely don’t have more of those. Europe without America has about 500 nuclear warheads. Russia has 4500. Even keeping back a lot to point at the US they could easily double the EU’s.

Yeah, I was responding to Ranger's phrasing, which was saying that Europe had conventional superiority. But the phrasing might have come out wrong...

I also suspect, functionally, that if there's any big USA/EU split, England will go with the US. So if we count the US out, in some scenarios France is the only European nuclear power.

At the risk of self-reference...

19 April: "In Which Dean Points to New and Upcoming News as Reason to Expect the Ukraine War to Continue For Some Time"

Points made at the time, with a supporting premise from each section-

Point one, it's not necessarily as time sensitive as it is being presented, as opposed to being part of a possible multi-week push for a truce.

This creates a risk that even if all parties wanted to end the war, they could miss the opportunity if some (Russia) attempt to draw out negotiations in the name of trying to get more.

We're at 2 weeks after that post. We'll see what else, if anything, progresses, but VP Vance and Secretary of State Rubio are both signalling an expectation of a longer war, without threatening to cut off Ukraine aid.

Point two is option two- the (unlikely) prospect that Russia reigns in its demands to accept a cease-fire deal is likely sooner than later.

But the more unlikely it is, the more likely any window-of-opportunity with the Trump administration is to close. And re-opening a window can be much, much harder the second time than the first.

Russia did not accept a Trump proposed cease-fire. Russia announced its own micro/unilateral cease-fires, such as the easter cease fire, but maintained many of its maximalist demands throughout the rest of the month, including

  • Ukraine must commit to not joining NATO
  • Ukraine must confirm neutral and non-bloc status
  • Ukraine must address “neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv” formed after the “coup in February 2014,” particularly regarding policies affecting Russian language, media, and culture
  • International recognition of Russian control over Crimea, Sevastopol, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia oblasts
  • Legally binding agreements with enforcement mechanisms
  • “Demilitarization and denazification” of Ukraine
  • Lifting of sanctions against Russia
  • Return of frozen Russian assets

Demands 2, 3, 6, and 8 in particular are the sort of lower-cost demands that Russia would likely drop in a non-grasping proposal.

Point three is what Trump 'passing' on the peace process means for Ukraine if it does occur.

My position is that a collapse of US-Russia negotiations means sustained, not diminished, US aid for Ukraine.

1 May: Newsweek: Donald Trump Opens Ukraine Military Sales Tap After Minerals Deal

The Trump administration has told Congress that it intends to give the go-ahead for roughly $50 million of defense-related products to be exported to Ukraine through American industry sales direct to Kyiv, according to a new report.

Note that this sale is after the signing, but before the ratification of the mineral deal by the Ukrainian legislature. 50 million is not 'a lot' in the context of the war as a whole, but military sales as opposed to military aid is a notable distinction.

Point four- parallel negotiations as a means of leverage on each other.

As noted above, if the Ukraine-US mineral deal goes through, that undercuts the US leverage against the Russia position. And if the leverage against Russia fails, then the war goes on.

1 May: AP: Ukraine and the US have finally signed a minerals deal. What does it include?

The agreement — which the Ukrainian parliament must ratify — would establish a reconstruction fund for Ukraine that Ukrainian officials hope will be a vehicle to ensure future American military assistance.

This structure of military sales / assistance rather than aid matters because-

Point five - the importance of having tried and failed, over having never tried at all, and covering the costs with a skeptical-but-not-hostile electoral base.

I'm not here to argue which you should believe is right. My point is that both of these readings suggest that the potential news of the coming weeks- the Ukraine mineral deal and Russia peace deal- may shift the Republican coalition towards a greater 'right amount or more' coalition balance for further Ukraine aid.

We'll see when future polling comes out, but I suspect that any increase in disapprovals for Trump over the next month will be far more about trade policy than Ukraine arms sale policies.

Point six - how the deals (and Trump walkway from a ceasefire) may shape Trump's base into a more pro-Ukraine-aid direction.

This is where the Ukraine mineral deal can start prying apart the 'too-much' coalition, because expected future gains can offset costs. And the more Democratic / international media criticizes the deal as 'extortionate,' the more credible it can be to an otherwise unfamiliar base that, hey, aiding Ukraine is not just [cost].

The NYT is not calling it extortionate- leaving that to the 'early' versions. The anti-Trump right National Review does call it sordid but logical. The WSJ is approving. Newsmax reported a Russian position that the deal forces Ukraine to pay for weapons with minerals.

Final Point - The Trump Effect: If Trump Supports Aid It Can't Be Wrong

This means that once (if) Trump takes a position that negotiations are no longer something he's going to pay political capital for, but that mineral deal/etc. make continued Ukrainian aid acceptable, then the political influence of the [any aid is too much] factions is going to wither. They will still exist, but they will not have the platform or the following if they try to critique Trump-support for Ukraine like Trump signal-boosted their condemnations of Biden-support for Ukraine.

We'll see what it turns to, but initial media responses don't suggest any sort of 'Trump's base is about to revolt over selling weapons to Ukraine.'

There is likely to be a Republican base... maybe not revolt, but internal struggle, over next year's Fiscal Budget. Trump avoided a dispute over the recent budget for the rest of the fiscal year by promising steeper cuts in the coming budget fight.

Which led to...

Summary / Conclusion - What Does This Mean?

In the next few weeks we may seeing the start of a political transition to a more stable US/Republican support for Ukraine aid for the next year(s).

This won't be immediately apparent, but will be observable over the months to follow, particularly by the fall when the 2026 US budget negotiations culminate. How Ukraine aid factors into that will indicate a lot about the new state of the Republican party and Ukrainian aid politics.

And coincidentally, the FY 2026 budget proposal was presented... today.

Which supports the 'Trump is serious about walking away from the Ukraine Peace Talks,' because the Washington budget war for the next year, including a $163 billion in proposed cuts, is just getting started. And this includes the formal cuts to programs he's already ordered dismantled, including some actions frozen by courts, which would get around judicial freezes if passed by Congress.

Some claimed that the US could threaten Russia by promising to "drown Ukraine in weapons" if Russia didn't come to terms.

Is that claim true, though? Like obviously the USA could give Ukraine nuclear warheads but come on with that. What ‘within the realm of might actually happen’ thing could the US do that a) threatens Russia and b) hadn’t already happened? Even the most paranoid theories about the deep state supporting Ukraine over America don’t think Ukraine is getting f-35’s or anything.

I agree that giving nukes to Ukraine is not on the table, and while you can never be sure with Trump, I don't think he would go for that particular brand of craziness.

I think that the main thing the US could do is to just send more of the same. Quantity has a quality of its own, after all, and conventional missiles are likely materiel-constrained, not personnel-constrained. If my math is correct, the US is currently spending 3/1000th of its GDP (175G$/27T$ in about two years -- though I don't know how much of the 175G$ figure is Hollywood accounting). If they decided to triple that figure, that still would not crash their economy, but might create a headache for the Russians.

OTOH, this might not be enough to force Russia to negotiate in earnest, wars are not always won by the side with the larger budget, after all.

And I also don't see Trump doing this. Given his animosity towards Zelenskyy and his friendliness with Putin, I think the most he will do is keep the military aid to Ukraine at the Biden level.

There are two theories here. One is that the US has imposed restrictive rules of engagement on Ukraine's use of US-provided weapons (and possibly more broadly as an unofficial condition of continued support) and could unrestrict them - the theory here is that Russian logistics are sufficiently shaky enough that enough missile strikes on supply lines could collapse the army in Ukraine. Personally I don't find this theory plausible - officially the Blinken rules were cancelled by Biden during the lame duck period, and Ukraine's attacks on Russian territory seem to be capability-limited.

The other is that Russia know they have no path to victory with continued US support for Ukraine and Putin's plan is basically to wait out Trump's limited patience with Zelensky. In this scenario Russia will come to the negotiating table once it is sufficiently clear that Trump is not in fact about to come out as the Putin ally that TDS-sufferers think he is. I can't evaluate the plausibility of this theory because of the fog of war.

Personally I don't find this theory plausible - officially the Blinken rules were cancelled by Biden during the lame duck period, and Ukraine's attacks on Russian territory seem to be capability-limited.

My read is that Ukraine has politically-limited a significant part of its drone campaign since Trump came in due to the cease-fire process. The Ukraine drone strikes on Russian refineries earlier this year sharply curtailed after the Zelensky-Trump-Vance summit blow-up and subsequent Ukrainian alignment to the US for ceasefire talks. The capabilities almost certainly exist, but the peace process- or rather the US demands to support the peace process- were prioritized.

We don't / probably won't know what the new restrictions are, but I wouldn't be surprised if the post-talks status quo shifts to 'the US will not help, but will not prohibit, Ukraine using Ukrainian arms deeper into Russia.' That just needs to come after the US formally ends the cease fire process.

The three major restrictions America is placing on Ukrainian rules of engagement are:

(1) Attempting to kill Putin or very high level Russian government officials using American weaponry. This is the type of thing that could provoke in-kind retaliation against US government officials or other drastic retaliation measures. It is rumored that the US government was informed by the FSB of an attempted assassination of Putin just a few days before it was to be carried out and had to scramble to tell Ukraine to stop it. This was actually reported on in mainstream news media six months or a year ago.

(2) Actions designed to threaten or disable Russia’s strategic nuclear capabilities. Again, this actually happened, the Ukrainians used a NATO supplied missile to destroy a Russian ICBM early warning radar installation, a strike that has no inherent strategic value to Ukraine.

(3) Actions that would hurt Russia and are strategically valuable to Ukraine but would collaterally cause the collapse of the European or global economy. This is why the strikes on oil infrastructure got throttled back, Europe is still using a lot of Russian oil and gas and they can’t just go cold turkey on it.

To some extent, maybe? The US hasn't sent Ukraine everything in its reserves since the US repeatedly said that it wasn't willing to compromise its own readiness in the case that a conflict emerged elsewhere in the world. The US could use those reserves, although obviously that would come with (potentially catastrophic) drawbacks. The US could also maybe go to a wartime economy and really start cranking out weapons for Ukraine, but there's just no political willingness to go down that road.

In any case this was never a point I myself made, it was something I just heard when interacting with some MAGA folks who were opposed to Biden's slow-burn approach, and instead wanted a "escalate to de-escalate" policy from Trump.


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