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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   30164 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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There is a recent poll on DEI[1][2][3]. DEI seems to be viewed more favorably than not.

A majority reject the following:

  • DEI discriminates against white people: 33% - 41%
  • DEI is a threat to public safety: 29% - 47%
  • DEI has made the U.S. military weaker: 34% - 45%

They agree that:

  • DEI compensates for the discrimination faced by people of color and women: 36% - 31%
  • DEI crease a more egalitarian society: 31% - 22%
  • DEI promotes better decision making by enabling the exchange of diverse perspectives: 48% - 27%

There are a number of questions about whether people should receive DEI training; a majority is in favor of DEI training in all cases, most strongly in the case of police officers (69% - 31%) and least strongly for private sector employees (64% - 36%).

The document provides some comparable numbers which are claimed to come from October 2024, but that appears to be a mistake; the previous polling on DEI was done in January 2024[4].

A lot of the public doesn’t have strong views on DEI. 92% of respondents have heard the phrase “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (up from 72% in January 2024), but when given the option “neither agree of disagree,” many respondents chose it. For the DEI training questions, “neither agree of disagree” was not an option.

When asked what the top three priorities of the Trump Administration should be, 2% selected ending DEI programs as the top priority, and 10% included it in one of the top three. 19% of Republicans, 6% of independents, and 2% of Democrats included ending DEI in their top three priorities.

The poll didn’t ask about people’s own experience with DEI, but I found a Feb. 2023 poll that did[5], which presumably gets a more knowledgeable pool of respondents. People who worked at a place that had a staff member whose primary job was to promote DEI said that having such a person was:

  • Very positive: 23%
  • Somewhat positive: 37%
  • Neither positive nor negative: 29%
  • Somewhat negative: 7%
  • Very negative: 4%

In the same poll, 56% of respondents said that “focusing on increasing diversity, equity and inclusion at work is mainly a good thing,” 16% said it is mainly a bad thing, and 28% said it is neither good nor bad.

So DEI seems to popular but controversial, with one third of the country and 65% of Republicans saying that DEI discriminates against white people.

Links:

[1] https://www.umass.edu/political-science/about/reports/2025-8

[2] Top line results: https://umass-my.sharepoint.com/personal/poll_umass_edu/_layouts/15/onedrive.aspx?ga=1&id=%2Fpersonal%2Fpoll%5Fumass%5Fedu%2FDocuments%2FPoll%20materials%20uploaded%20to%20website%2FViews%20on%20DEI%2C%20Trans%20Rights%2C%20Higher%20Education%2C%20and%20AI%20National%20Poll%20%2D%20April%2022%2C%202025%2FToplines%20Views%20on%20DEI%2C%20Trans%20Rights%2C%20Higher%20Education%2C%20and%20AI%20National%20Poll%20%2D%20April%2022%2C%202025%2Epdf&parent=%2Fpersonal%2Fpoll%5Fumass%5Fedu%2FDocuments%2FPoll%20materials%20uploaded%20to%20website%2FViews%20on%20DEI%2C%20Trans%20Rights%2C%20Higher%20Education%2C%20and%20AI%20National%20Poll%20%2D%20April%2022%2C%202025

[3] Crosstabs: https://umass-my.sharepoint.com/personal/poll_umass_edu/_layouts/15/onedrive.aspx?ga=1&id=%2Fpersonal%2Fpoll%5Fumass%5Fedu%2FDocuments%2FPoll%20materials%20uploaded%20to%20website%2FViews%20on%20DEI%2C%20Trans%20Rights%2C%20Higher%20Education%2C%20and%20AI%20National%20Poll%20%2D%20April%2022%2C%202025%2FCrosstabs%20Views%20on%20DEI%2C%20Trans%20Rights%2C%20Higher%20Education%2C%20and%20AI%20National%20Poll%20%2D%20April%2022%2C%202025%2Epdf&parent=%2Fpersonal%2Fpoll%5Fumass%5Fedu%2FDocuments%2FPoll%20materials%20uploaded%20to%20website%2FViews%20on%20DEI%2C%20Trans%20Rights%2C%20Higher%20Education%2C%20and%20AI%20National%20Poll%20%2D%20April%2022%2C%202025

[4] https://www.umass.edu/political-science/about/reports/january-16-2024

[5] https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2023/05/ST_2023.05.17_Culture-of-Work-DEI_Topline.pdf

hmmm those are pretty surprising results; let’s look at the poll study author

Tatishe Nteta

Oh

This is so low effort it's barely even a critique. Normally I'd leave it at that, but you've now been told about eight times to stop the low effort sneer-posting and that you were heading for a permaban. I dislike permabanning someone for a post that would normally be just a warning, even if it is like strike nine, but I think it's appropriate at this point for you to go away for a while. Thirty days, and don't come back unless you're going to stop doing this.

30 days seems harsh considering they did bother to look at the poll closely enough to notice a relevant fact and then bring it to light for further discussion. I think it’s a valuable comment broadly and got the point across without padding the post with extraneous words. I understand you’d want to discourage low effort posting on average but 30 days for this specifically seems unwarranted in my opinion

What was the point, in your opinion?

I can't see anything other than bare-faced racism because the name doesn't mean anything to me.

Black people with moderate opinions on race, or even 'when we say "kill all white people" we don't really mean "kill all white people"' opinions on race, do not name their children 'Tatishe'. African immigrants use biblically inspired names, Caribbeans use normal Anglo or Hispanic names, and AADOS use distinctive AADOS names which might be weird but which are recognizably not deriving from the Niger-Congo languages.

Tatishe

I tried finding that name, and it had two hits worldwide (0.001% of "Steven", for reference). The second result in my search was the study author, and the third was a Spanish (or at least Spanish-language) musician. Maybe I have to brush up on my linguistics, but I still don't see any notable connection between that name and any region, let alone any political stance.

Your multi-sentence specific explanation wasn't enough to convince me, so I stand behind my criticism of their brief dismissal.

It flags a very obvious conflict of interest.

"Discriminating in favor of black people is good and popular, says study by black man" naturally invokes suspicion.

Yes, it's an ad-hominem argument and not a replacement for drilling carefully down into the details of the study (assuming it's not one of those surveys where they just make up the results, which are rare but do exist). But the prior for this study's rigor and truthfulness should be set lower than would otherwise be the case.

When it comes to categories like race/sex/age/nationality, some level of presumptive conflict of interest is inevitable. Would a White researcher come off as unbiased in race research in your opinion?

No, of course not. That’s why everyone likes a convert - somebody who benefits from or was attached to position A telling you that B is true instead.

Would a White researcher come off as unbiased in race research in your opinion?

In the social climate of the past 30 or so years? Quite possibly, though if the researcher themselves capitalized white that would be a signal that increases the prediction of bias. That's part of how we ended up with Biden.

Is Nteta widely known? I've never heard of them, so highlighting the study's author, alone, doesn't provide me any insight.

It’s not concise, it’s not valuable. Is everyone supposed to know who this is? If so, the comment is straightforwardly disallowed; if not, I think as part of the compact of making non-sneering comments you are obligated to at least gesture at saying something informative and you know, make an actual point.

I agree that the commenter should not have darkly hinted, but I feel like you're being deliberately obtuse here...

To make the point explicit - the name "Tatishe Nteta" strongly suggests that the author's race is sub-Saharan African (and we can look at his faculty page to clear up any doubt), so the fact that he carried out a poll that supposedly shows public support for DEI (i.e. state-backed anti-White discrimination) gives another example on a long list of non-White (but especially Black) intellectuals for whom almost all of their published works are attempts to critique and undermine White people/identity.

I'm guessing, beyond the poor forum ettiquette, you also take issue with what is actually being darkly hinted at here. Perhaps you just don't believe in HBD (in which case there isn't much to say, since I would agree with academics like Ntete under ~HBD) - but if you do believe in HBD, then what do you think is wrong with what Magus implied?

My honest first reaction was simply what I said: “is this guy supposed to be famous or is there some in-group reference I’m missing?” Even linking his faculty page like you did would have been a more effective point and IMO a valid comment. In fact, pointing him out as someone with an obvious career stake and bias towards finding bias IS a good point. I just strongly believe (and the rules are aimed at) putting a little extra effort into being explicit about things is healthier for discussion. It’s not good to habitually rely on people guessing at meaning, and deliberately underbaked comments allow the worst kind of motte and bailey because it necessarily involves some degree of projection.

My honest first reaction was simply what I said: “is this guy supposed to be famous or is there some in-group reference I’m missing?”

You're saying that you didn't think to yourself - "that sounds like a Black man" (even given that the topic of the OP was DEI in the US, a practice that heavily rewards Black people)?

Even linking his faculty page like you did would have been a more effective point and IMO a valid comment. In fact, pointing him out as someone with an obvious career stake and bias towards finding bias IS a good point.

Sure, but that is an additional point, going beyond the original comment. The point of the original comment is just to point out that the author is Black - we can infer he has a particular bias towards finding bias because he is a Black intellectual (so the alternatives to systemic racism would be especially unflattering to him) - Magus' point still makes sense even if we couldn't see any of his works/publications.

You might believe that judging him on his race is morally or factually wrong. But I don't think that expressing such beliefs should count as a rules violation if done plainly and in a calm tone, so while this comment is rule-breaking, the implied point should still be expressible on the forum (e.g. if Magus had explicitly said "the author is Black"), without having to add further justifications and context about his career choices, publications, etc

I had the same reaction as @EverythingIsFine - the name, alone, isn't clearly indicative of anything (unless you're attuned to what seems to be tacitly acknowledged to be a genuine racial dog-whistle). See, also, the comment by @ulyssessword about the name:

I tried finding that name, and it had two hits worldwide (0.001% of "Steven", for reference). The second result in my search was the study author, and the third was a Spanish (or at least Spanish-language) musician. Maybe I have to brush up on my linguistics, but I still don't see any notable connection between that name and any region, let alone any political stance.

More comments

Tatishe Nteta" strongly suggests that the author's race is sub-Saharan African

It also strongly suggests he was raised to be an activist. Normie Africans name their kids things like ‘John’ or ‘Mary’ and normie AADOS use names which are, yes, dumb, but recognizably Anglo.

Normie Africans name their kids things like ‘John’ or ‘Mary’

Not uniformly. African-origin names are common in many Commonwealth Southern and West African nations.

  1. You can embed links by enclosing the link text in brackets: “[[1]](https://www.umass.edu/political-science/about/reports/2025-8)” becomes “[1]”.
  2. A summary of links is not, on its own, enough substance for a top-level comment. Please try to add some of your own commentary, theorizing, etc.

Thanks. I'll keep these in mind for the next time I post.

DEI discriminates against white people: 33% - 41%

It remains interesting that people are simply misinformed about the facts. DEI policies, factually, are discrimination against white people (and Asian people). They literally cannot accomplish their stated goals without doing so, they are definitionally policies that implement discrimination. That's not an ironclad argument for or against them from where I sit, it's just the starting point that we all need to be aware of in order to have these conversations.

I would guess that when a person says that DEI policies don't discriminate against White People (and others depending on context), what they understand the question to be is something like "Are white people, on net, discriminated against as a result of DEI policies?" Which is a tougher question, and one that one can interpret in a lot of different ways once one starts slicing and dicing what counts as White and what counts as Discriminated Against.

This was the form of cope I most frequently ran into at selective law schools regarding DEI policies of the time: that they didn't really matter. Sure, as a result of diversity initiatives black kids might get a +1 while white kids get a -1, but for a whole host of other reasons black kids were already functioning with a -5 and white kids were carrying a +3, so on net it doesn't matter, there's no real discrimination against white people.

The point of the linguistic judo has always precisely been not to have the discussion and indeed to make the discussion impossible to have or think about. And specifically stated as such by the people who coined all these terms.

Even the terms that make the acronym themselves are subversive language tricks to an Orwellian degree.

Have you ever heard people call initiatives or departments "100% diverse"? And what to say of "Equity", a term so transparently designed in a lab to supplant "Equality" because it sounds too absurd to normal people when you're justifying discrimination in the name of equality.

DEI is just Applied Cultural Marxism. And I'm allowed to say this because I learned about it in university in those terms before its activists started to pretend that correctly identifying their ideology is a conspiracy theory.

Can we have a survey on how that is perceived by the public mayhaps?

DEI is just Applied Cultural Marxism. And I'm allowed to say this because I learned about it in university in those terms before its activists started to pretend that correctly identifying their ideology is a conspiracy theory.

I’ve heard this term bandied about for years but never directly encountered someone who uses it. Can you explain what on earth it means?

Some potential meanings I’ve considered and discarded:

  • dividing the world into oppressor and oppressed
  • some sort of natural outgrowth of Marx from the Frankfurt school
  • Marxist analysis somehow applied to culture?
  • centered on critique of capitalism
  • use race or sex instead of class

Most of the “applied cultural marxists” and postmodernists seem to outright reject Marx and any similarities in their thinking (e.g., oppressor and oppressed) seem to pre-date Marx.

So I’m left not understanding what people mean by it precisely. It seems to me at this point the phrase is meant to just tar by association, but I’d really like to hear if there’s something more meaningful to it.

This was my resource on Critical Race Theory, and seems relatively even-handed. It covers some of the inspiration from Marx and Critical Theory.

Link

I’ve heard this term bandied about for years but never directly encountered someone who uses it.

Because people were using it back in the 80's and maybe late 70's, and when the term started attracting too much negative attention, they promptly started pretending it's a conspiracy theory.

Also, "never met someone who uses the term directly" is an argument that's applied extremely selectively.

Most of the “applied cultural marxists” and postmodernists seem to outright reject Marx and any similarities in their thinking (e.g., oppressor and oppressed) seem to pre-date Marx.

Critical Theory proudly takes inspiration from both Marx and postmodernism.

Some potential meanings I’ve considered and discarded:

Those are fairly decent nutshell descriptions, and there's no reason to reject them.

Can you point me to some instances of people self describing in that way from the 70s and 80s? That is the most compelling argument I think—that they described themselves this way until it became a liability.

I didn’t mean it as an argument, my point was I haven’t had to chance to ask someone what they mean so I’m eager to seize the opportunity.

If those are decent nutshell descriptions then let’s take “oppressor/oppressed analysis” for instance. What’s the justification for calling that Marxist specifically? Is the claim that he invented or pioneered it in the form of his class war analysis? It just seems incredibly vague making the tie to Marx specifically tenuous to me.

Can you point me to some instances of people self describing in that way from the 70s and 80s?

Emily Hicks, Richard R. Weiner, Douglas Kellner.

If those are decent nutshell descriptions then let’s take “oppressor/oppressed analysis” for instance. What’s the justification for calling that Marxist specifically?

That Cultural Marxists themselves thought that they are taking inspiration from Marx:

We are, in Marx's terms, "an ensemble of social relations" and we live our lives at the core of the intersection of a number of unequal social relations based on hierarchically interrelated structures which, together, define the historical specificity of the capitalist modes of production and reproduction and underlay their observable manifestations. ”

— Martha E. Gimenez, Marxism and Class, Gender and Race: Rethinking the Trilogy

This is extremely helpful and exactly what I’ve been looking for—thanks!

And specifically stated as such by the people who coined all these terms.

Mind if I ask your source? I'm certainly well aware of SJ's extraordinary capacity for deliberate meme warfare; I would just appreciate receipts on this particular one.

The best way to convince yourself of this is to read Herbert Marcuse and see how his ideas inspired the scholarship around what is now called DEI.

I think much of One Dimensional Man is applicable, but a seminal work that is now of obvious significance is Repressive Tolerance which I encourage you to read in its entirety as well as his Essay on Liberation. You'll come back with I think the same conviction I do that SJ ideas and tactics have this New Left lineage and that they are indeed deliberate tactics rather than any emergent production.

I could go into more detail but I think it's a bit pointless to do it in extenso when the one thing that James Lindsay can be commended for is that he fairly accurately mapped out all the philosophical underpinning of this political movement. His video on Marcuse's influence I find to be broadly accurate to what I've been taught and seen for myself.

Now of course Marcuse isn't the whole of the school of Critical Theory and kritik isn't the sole influence on this movement, but it is the main source of their political tactics, hence their focus on language and control of the frame rather than more traditional Marxist struggles.

If you want to trace this influence closer to DEI itself, you can look for yourself throughout the scholarship of the 80s and 90s. For Equity's origin as a linguistic weapon, you'll be able to find its genesis in all the papers that discuss the "dilemma of difference".

DEI seems to be viewed more favorably than not.

I mean, yes? Duh?

DEI is racial spoils politics for non-whites. And, to some degree, depending on context, spoils for white women as well. People like it when you give them free stuff. The majority of people alive are not white men. So, most people by default will be predisposed to viewing DEI pretty favorably. And a lot of white men have been convinced that it’s a good thing too, even though it actively and explicitly harms them. So that tilts the scales even more.

It takes a rather strong principled ideological commitment to arrive at the position that DEI is a bad thing, so it’s unsurprising that it’s a minority view.

A majority reject the following: DEI discriminates against white people: 33% - 41%

It's hard to interpret survey answers like this, presumably the 41% are expressing support by picking the more positive-sounding answer but how durable is that support? How they would respond to additional information or a different context? How much of this is pure partisan affiliation that doesn't translate into supporting specific policies at all?

Lets say they were working as recruiters and their managers said "The DEI report indicates our numbers aren't good enough, please trash all applications in the hiring pipeline from candidates that aren't female, black or Hispanic." What percent would respond with "Sure! Some bigots would call it discrimination to throw out the white/asian male candidates, but DEI isn't discrimination against white people."? What percentage would say "I thought DEI didn't entail discrimination! This is wrong and I won't do it."? What percentage would be somewhere in between? And of course most aren't going to be personally involved in implementing DEI policies, so how would they respond to more distant narratives, like a political debate about a discriminatory policy that has more specifics than just the DEI label?

53% of the people in this survey said that their employer-mandated DEI trainings were "very helpful" or "somewhat helpful". That's the baseline against which all numbers in this survey should be judged.

I talked about two different surveys. The “DEI discriminated against white people” question was from a poll of the general public. The one on about whether workplace DEI trainings and/or meeting were helpful comes from a survey of workers. If you didn’t find DEI training/meetings helpful, that would place you in a minority. That could be a reflection of the DEI training you received; perhaps most people would rate that particular training as unhelpful.

If you wouldn’t have guessed that large numbers of people find DEI training/meetings helpful, that’s the point of conducting surveys: to learn what people are actually thinking, rather than generalizing from you own experience or the experience of a few people who happen to be in the same bubble as you.

The report that a majority of people report that they find DEI training helpful is surprising to me, yes.

Everywhere that I have worked, from retail to food service to white-collar knowledge work, such "training" is "watch this endless slideshow of videos in which corporate HR types give banal examples, and then take a trivially easy quiz at the end (which you could have passed using common sense immediately without watching the videos, except that the course is mandated by law to be at least 2 hours, and then print out a certificate for HR to file away in a drawer forever".

Given that, some hypotheses that would explain the 53% number:

  1. People actually learn a lot from the slideshow of videos saying that you can't use slurs in the workplace.
  2. Most workplaces put more effort into these trainings and I just got unlucky at every place I've worked at long enough to have to take one of these trainings.
  3. The slideshows suck, but most peoples' actual jobs suck more and they're paid the same to watch the slideshow.
  4. People lie on surveys.
  5. The set of people who will answer a survey like this is not fully representative of the general population.

I personally expect it's mostly (5), with maybe some (3) thrown in there.

[1] https://www.umass.edu/political-science/about/reports/2025-8

[2] Top line results: https://umass-my.sharepoint.com/personal/poll_umass_edu/_layouts/15/onedrive.aspx?ga=1&id=%2Fpersonal%2Fpoll%5Fumass%5Fedu%2FDocuments%2FPoll%20materials%20uploaded%20to%20website%2FViews%20on%20DEI%2C%20Trans%20Rights%2C%20Higher%20Education%2C%20and%20AI%20National%20Poll%20%2D%20April%2022%2C%202025%2FToplines%20Views%20on%20DEI%2C%20Trans%20Rights%2C%20Higher%20Education%2C%20and%20AI%20National%20Poll%20%2D%20April%2022%2C%202025%2Epdf&parent=%2Fpersonal%2Fpoll%5Fumass%5Fedu%2FDocuments%2FPoll%20materials%20uploaded%20to%20website%2FViews%20on%20DEI%2C%20Trans%20Rights%2C%20Higher%20Education%2C%20and%20AI%20National%20Poll%20%2D%20April%2022%2C%202025

[3] Crosstabs: https://umass-my.sharepoint.com/personal/poll_umass_edu/_layouts/15/onedrive.aspx?ga=1&id=%2Fpersonal%2Fpoll%5Fumass%5Fedu%2FDocuments%2FPoll%20materials%20uploaded%20to%20website%2FViews%20on%20DEI%2C%20Trans%20Rights%2C%20Higher%20Education%2C%20and%20AI%20National%20Poll%20%2D%20April%2022%2C%202025%2FCrosstabs%20Views%20on%20DEI%2C%20Trans%20Rights%2C%20Higher%20Education%2C%20and%20AI%20National%20Poll%20%2D%20April%2022%2C%202025%2Epdf&parent=%2Fpersonal%2Fpoll%5Fumass%5Fedu%2FDocuments%2FPoll%20materials%20uploaded%20to%20website%2FViews%20on%20DEI%2C%20Trans%20Rights%2C%20Higher%20Education%2C%20and%20AI%20National%20Poll%20%2D%20April%2022%2C%202025

[4] https://www.umass.edu/political-science/about/reports/january-16-2024

[5] https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2023/05/ST_2023.05.17_Culture-of-Work-DEI_Topline.pdf

> Be me

> Load entire thread into a text to speech app

> Surely no one would just dump incredibly long naked links into the motte dot org.

> go upstairs to fold laundry

> oh a naked link, that's fine, how long can it be

> literal minutes later go downstairs to make this comment.

By quoting the links in their entirety all you've done is ensure that when you get back to relistening to this thread now you'll be spending twice as long listening to garbage!

For reference, from the link, the questions were

  1. Overall, how do you think each of the following affects people’s ability to be successful where you work (Being white / Being black / Being hispanic / Being asian / Being a man / Being a woman): (Makes it a lot easier to be successful / Makes it a little easier to be successful / Makes it neither easier nor harder to be successful / Makes it a little harder to be successful / Makes it a lot harder to be successful / Not sure / No answer)
  2. In general, do you think that focusing on increasing diversity, equity and inclusion at work is mainly… (A good thing / A bad thing / Neither good nor bad)
  3. When it comes to how much attention your company or organization pays to increasing diversity, equity and inclusion, would you say your company or organization pays… (Too much attention / Too little attention / About the right amount of attention / Not sure)
  4. Regardless of how diverse the place where you work is, how important is it to YOU PERSONALLY to work at a place that… (Has about an equal mix of men and women / Has a mix of employees of different race and ethnicities / Has a mix of employees of different ages / Has a mix of employees of different sexual orientations): (Extremely important / Very important / Somewhat important / Not too important / Not at all important / No answer)
  5. Regardless of how accessible the place where you work is, how important is it to you personally to work at a place that is accessible for people with physical disabilities? (Extremely important / Very important / Somewhat important / Not too important / Not at all important / No answer)
  6. How well do each of the following describe the place where you currently work (Has about an equal mix of men and women / Has a mix of employees of different race and ethnicities / Has a mix of employees of different ages / Has a mix of employees of different sexual orientations): (Extremely well / Very well / Somewhat well / Not too well / Not at all well / Not sure / No answer)
  7. How accessible is the place where you work for people with physical disabilities? (Extremely accessible / Very accessible / Somewhat accessible / Not too accessible / Not at all accessible / Not sure)
  8. As far as you know, does the company or organization you work for have any of the following (A staff member whose main job is to promote diversity, equity and inclusion at work / Trainings or meetings on diversity, equity and inclusion at work / Policies to ensure that everyone is treated fairly in hiring, pay or promotions / Groups created by employees based on shared identities or interests / A way for employees to see the salary range for all positions): (Yes / No / Not sure)
  9. What type of impact do you think having each of the following has had where you work (A staff member whose main job is to promote diversity, equity and inclusion at work / Trainings or meetings on diversity, equity and inclusion at work / Policies to ensure that everyone is treated fairly in hiring, pay or promotions / Groups created by employees based on shared identities or interests / A way for employees to see the salary range for all positions): (Very positive / Somewhat positive / Neither positive nor negative / Somewhat negative / Very negative)
  10. Are you personally a member of an employee affinity group or Employee Resource Group (ERG) – that is, a group created by employees, based on their shared identities or interests such as gender, race, or being a parent?
  11. In the past year, have you participated in any trainings on diversity, equity or inclusion at work?
  12. Overall, would you say the diversity, equity or inclusion trainings you have participated in at work have been… (Very helpful / Somewhat helpful / Neither helpful nor unhelpful / Somewhat unhelpful / Very unhelpful)

Who are these 53% of people who think that their mandatory DEI trainings through their employer are helpful? That result makes me pretty doubtful of the results of this survey as a whole.

In case it isn’t clear to anyone following along, we are talking about the 2023 poll of workers. About 10% of the workers were self employed or owned their own business. Another 8% worked for organizations with fewer than ten employees. 52% of the remainder, or about 43% of the total sample, said their company or organization had DEI training or meetings.

My impression is that DEI training is very common in the corporate world and pretty close to universal in government, so the numbers don’t seem implausible to me.

Specifically, what I was referring to with "53%" was

ASK ALL EMPLOYED ADULTS WITH ONE JOB OR A PRIMARY JOB AND IF WORKS AT A COMPANY/ORGANIZATION WITH AT LEAST 10 PEOPLE, AND PARTICIPATED IN DEI TRAINING AT WORK (DEITRAIN1=1) [n=2,099]:
DEITRAIN2 Overall, would you say the diversity, equity or inclusion trainings you have participated in at work have been…
[DISPLAY RESPONSE OPTIONS IN SAME ORDER AS DEIPOLICY2]
BASED ON NOT SELF-EMPLOYED (JOBTYPEMOD=1-3,5,99) [n=2,086]:
Feb 6-12, 2023

15Very helpful
38Somewhat helpful
34Neither helpful nor unhelpful
8Somewhat unhelpful
6Very unhelpful
0No answer

15% + 38% is 53%, and this is the 53% I was referring to. I was not referring to what fraction of the sample of workers who worked for certain organizations had DEI training or meetings.

Thanks for posting the questions. Note that 11 doesn't specify mandatory trainings or training content, beyond the DEI buzzwords, so 12 may be influenced by self-selection or normal "workplace orientation" having been given DEI window-dressing.

what kind of sample has a majority its participants go through a formal DEI training? That excludes almost the entirety of the blue-collar and tradesman, as well as a plurality of the service industry. I hate to go diving into crosstabs to discredit a survey, but this sounds very suspicious.

5 and 7 are about building accessibility. If they conflate 'wanting your building to have wheelchair access' with 'I support DEI', they are being willfully dishonest.

ADA is pretty closely aligned with the literal meaning of the words "equity" and "inclusion".

Right. That makes it completely different from DEI.

This is funny to me.

I mean, my interpretation of your comment is that DEI is everything indefensible (from your perspective), and everything that's defensible is not DEI.

I mean ADA can't be DEI, it's one of the most successful programs in the history of the world in terms of creating real outcomes for people who do not have the same abilities that the median individual has.

So I guess we just have to wait for that gentle slide of the Overton window for it to turn into DEI?

I mean, my interpretation of your comment is that DEI is everything indefensible (from your perspective), and everything that's defensible is not DEI.

Wouldn't it make more sense and be more charitable to distinguish that the ADA predates DEI as an acronym by 20 years?

I see. So any policy that predates "DEI" as a boogeyman is safe from being labeled DEI? Bummer that affirmative action was collateral damage.

The literal meaning is kind of useless. Is a truck with duallies "four wheel drive" just because its drivetrain is connected to four wheels?

Yes. I will die on this hill.

Upvoted for boldness and your flair. Do you call also "all wheel drive" cars with four wheels "four wheel drive?"

Yes, and I call onewheels all wheel drive.

If a four wheel vehicle with all open differentials loses traction on one wheel and spins it, while the remaining three stop receiving torque, is it four wheel drive, one wheel drive, or zero wheel drive (or something else)?

How should the ability to link wheel speeds be denoted, in your opinion?

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I hope that hill isn't too poorly graded or sandy, then. :)

I'll be fine, my truck is 4 wheel drive.

Its more the 'You aren't against wheelchair access are you? Then approve our racial quotas!' that gets me riled up.

They bundle these things together to get 'inclusion' to do the heavy lifting for 'diversity' and 'equity'.

I have come across some interesting "The ADA is one (of several) well-meaning laws that keep us from building cool stuff" takes that, while I still endorse the broad principle, have made me question some of its aspects.

Can you give some examples?

Sure! The universal requirement for ramp and elevator accessibility in most places is probably the biggest culprit. It sounds great on paper, but in practice makes it really hard build new things outside of greenfield construction.

  • NYC is still trying to bring subway stations into compliance a generation later, and only plans to have 95% compliance by 2055. It's also clearly hampering expansion: of 472 stations, none were built between 1989 (the ADA passed in 1990) and 2009. Only five have been built post-ADA. New York is perhaps the most obvious example, but I think any older places will have the same sorts of issues.
  • As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, it requires scope creep for modifications to non-compliant (often historic) structures that can make landlords put off nontrivial renovations. ADA-compliant spaces are larger (wider bathroom stalls, wider hallways for wheelchairs to pass and turn, wider doorways, ramps) in ways that clearly add to the cost of a building -- this may be worth it, but it shouldn't be swept under the rug.
  • It limits architectural freedom in subtle ways: split-level designs and walk-up apartments are hard to build. There is a certain "planar-ness" to ADA designs that, while I suppose functional, feels a bit grating after you see it everywhere ("the bar area is two steps higher than the dance floor, letting you see out over it to the stage").

It limits architectural freedom in subtle ways: split-level designs and walk-up apartments are hard to build. There is a certain "planar-ness" to ADA designs that, while I suppose functional, feels a bit grating after you see it everywhere ("the bar area is two steps higher than the dance floor, letting you see out over it to the stage").

That's what I was looking for - challenges of updating pre-ADA designs are one thing, but "keep us from building cool stuff" is another.

The interaction between historical preservation and disabled accessibility is particularly problematic. There are a lot of buildings where the options boil down to "stay in the lane that allows you to be grandfathered out of disabled accessibility" and "abandon the building and the lot it stands on because it is too historical to refit or demolish".

My first impression of this is that the press release was written before the study, with some blanks filled in. And I noticed some of the odd results others noticed in the crosstabs. Hopefully the name of the author Tatishe Nteta isn't itself worthy of a ban. The linked page has his capsule bio as

My research interests lie at the intersection of the politics of race and ethnicity, public opinion, and political behavior. More specifically, my work examines the impact of changing demographics and shifts in the sociopolitical incorporation of racial minorities on the contours of American race relations, campaigns, policy preferences, and participation.

The word "intersection" seems a bit forced there, honestly; it's like he's trying to write a bio that doesn't actually show his biases while dog-whistling them loud and clear, but dog-whistling doesn't work -- that's a train whistle.

His undergraduate was in African American Studies. His name, though, he comes by non-politically; his father was lefty activist Christopher Nteta a black South African immigrant to the US.

His past work includes papers claiming to demonstrate that "racial resentment" really does measure anti-black prejudice and not just conservative belief, and that Nikki Haley lost because Republicans are sexist.

I would not consider a study authored by him to be reliable. In theory, scientific methods work regardless of who uses them. In practice, there's a lot of ways to put one's thumb on the scale.

My post was about the poll, which was conducted by YouGov. YouGov is a legitimate polling organization; FiveThirtyEigth gave them a B+ rating. It’s unclear who wrote the press release, which quotes Tatishe Nteta and three other professors.

YouGov ran the poll under Nteta's direction:

“Hours after assuming the presidency, Donald Trump signed a string of executive orders aimed at ending the federal government’s DEI programs, policies and mandates,” says Tatishe Nteta, provost professor of political science at UMass Amherst and director of the poll.

About a year ago I made a post (with motte discussion here) about an immigration reform bill that would have handed Republicans a major victory on the issue with the most conservative comprehensive reform in a generation. Dems would have agreed to the bill since Biden's whoopsie defacto-open-borders made the issue a huge liability for them. Trump tanked it for purely cynical reasons, and the discussion hinged on whether the legislation was somehow a "trap" since Dems were agreeing to it, and whether Republicans should risk getting nothing if they lost in 2024. I contended that Republicans should take the deal and then maybe do additional legislation that was even more stringent if they won, that way they'd have something even if they lost, which was about at a 50% chance on betting markets at the time. But MAGA and Trump won out, going all-in on the double-or-nothing strategy.

In a sense that bet paid off, since Trump won and got a trifecta! There's just one little problem: he's not actually trying to pass any comprehensive enduring immigration legislation. There was the Laken Riley act, but it's quite small in scope. Overall, it's back to his first term tactics of mangling the interpretation of laws through executive orders, and hoping the courts don't stop him. It's likely to be about as successful as it was in his first term. Why do it this way? Why not just ask Congress to give you the powers to do what you want so you don't have to gamble on the courts? Matt Yglesias has a potential explanation in his mailbag post

I think this is pretty easily explained as the intersection of the filibuster, Trump’s authoritarian temperament, and Republican Party domination of the Supreme Court.

We saw progressive versions of this kind of thinking in things like The American Prospect Day One Agenda from 2019 or the late-Obama effort at dramatic climate (Clean Power Plan) and immigration (DAPA) policy via executive branch rule making. But Democrats get much less leash from the judiciary than Republican do, because the Supreme Court is very conservative. We never got to see what the universe in which Biden halts all new oil and gas leasing on federal land looks like, because he just lost in court.

At the same time, Biden genuinely did not have the Trump-like aspiration to be a plebiscitary dictator. When he lost in court, he mostly folded and moved on. If anything, his administration was happy to be able to tell the Sierra Club that he tried and then reap the economic benefits of record oil and gas production. Biden really enjoyed legislative dealmaking, was very good at getting bipartisan bills like CHIPS and IIJA done, spent decades in the US Senate, and was frequently the Obama administration’s “closer” on the Hill. There’s a reason Frank Foer’s admiring biography of Biden is titled “The Last Politician.”

To Biden, shooting the shit with other elected officials and striking bargains was the peak.

Trump, despite the art of the deal bluster, has never shown any interest in legislative dealmaking. At no point during either of his terms has he attempted to engage with Democrats on passing some kind of immigration bill. He spiked the bipartisan border security bill from the Biden era, and has never gone back and said something like, “If we tweak these three provisions, I’m okay with it.” It’s just not of interest to him — he wants power. And the broader conservative movement has become weirdly deferential to that, both because it’s a bit of a personality cult and also because the filibuster has acculturated everyone to thinking of this as being the way the government ought to work.

A bunch of people have asked me whether the 2024 election outcome doesn’t make me glad that Democrats didn’t scrap the filibuster. But honestly, I feel the exact opposite. I would be much more comfortable with a world in which the answer to the question “Why don’t you just get Congress to change the law?” wasn’t just “Well, Democrats will filibuster if I try.”

So MAGA as a political movement has a better chance to change immigration than Republicans have probably ever had, and they're pissing it away with Trump cultism. They'll try to hide behind excuses like the filibuster, which could be ended with 50 votes in the Senate, and Republicans have 53 right now. Alternatively they'll try to hide behind political nihilism and say that passing laws doesn't matter since Dems could just ignore anything they pass -- this is wrong because the laws could help Trump (or other Republicans in the future) do things while there's a friendly president in power, and they could do a variety of things to try to force the Dem's hand when out of power like writing hard "shall" mandates in laws, giving Republican governors or even private citizens the standing to sue for non-enforcement, attach automatic penalties like sequestration-style clawbacks if removal numbers fall below some statutory floor, add 287(g) agreements with states giving local officers INA arrest authority, create independent enforcement boards, etc. None of these are silver bullets obviously since Dems would always be free to repeal any such laws (there are no permanent solutions in a Democracy, just ask Southern Slavers how the Gag Rule went), but that would cost them political capital or otherwise force them to try gambling with the courts if they tried to circumvent things by executive fiat.

But doing any of this would require telling Trump he needs to actually do specific things, and potentially punish him in some way if he fails to enact an ideological agenda he (vaguely) promised. That's very unlikely to happen.

As an aside, I think it's in bad taste to use the term MAGA as if it was some kind of entity or group. You only do it once in the top-level post, but you use the term frequently in your replies below.

First of all it's extremely vague. There is no club of MAGA card-holders. You're just using the term to vaguely gesture in the direction of Donald Trump's supporters. When you say "MAGA won" what exactly do you mean by that? What is MAGA and what did it win? If you're referring to the Republican Party's trifecta victory in the 2024 election, I think it would be more appropriate to refer to them by their proper name. If you're referring to something else, then I think you should define what this "MAGA" entity is and what exactly you believe it won.

Secondly, it's disrespectful to refer to an entity or group by a term it does not use to refer to itself. I would say the same thing to someone who went around ranting about "SJWs" or "Feminazis" or "the Deep State." If you have something important to say about the United States civil service or a particular group of activists, your point is not diminished by calling them by their proper name. If you need to refer to them by a derogatory nickname to make your point then that's a clear sign that you don't actually have one.

I use the term MAGA specifically since I was advised to use it as opposed to "the alt right" that I used on my old article. The Trump-aligned right is now doing the same voldemorting tactics that the woke left used to use, so I can post FDB's old article and flip the partisan valences and it'd be correct. It's pretty telling that you don't actually tell me what alternative I should use.

I think it's pretty telling that you switched from the vague term "the alt-right" to the equally vague term "MAGA" without ever stopping to define who it is you're talking about. Especially since it's not at all clear that "the alt-right" and "MAGA" even refer the same group of people.

This isn't Voldemorting. I can define any term I care to use. My question is, can you? I still have yet to learn what it is you mean by the term "MAGA," despite the fact that you replied to my post. How can I tell you what alternative to use when I don't even know who this "MAGA" group is supposed to be?

Is it all Republicans? All Trump voters? Donald Trump himself? Is Joe Rogan MAGA? Is TheMotte MAGA? Is Pierre Pollievre MAGA? Inquiring minds want to know!

MAGA would generally refer to the political movement of Donald Trump along with his supporters, especially those who strongly identify with his policy agenda, style, and brand of populist-nationalism. Most people readily understand what I mean when I use the term. Again, your line of argument very closely mimics the old debates we'd have against wokes/SJWs/social justice leftists/political correctness/identity politics. If you truly think another term is better, please state it rather than further charging out into the bailey of "because you use this descriptive term I don't like, that ought to give everyone carte blanche to ignore everything you're saying". This new term would need to fulfill the following conditions: 1) people intuitively understand what it means without having to define it every time I use it; 2) the rest of MAGA could get behind the term and would see not see it as just another step on the euphemism treadmill; 3) the term is short enough that it flows nicely. I could find + replace every time I use MAGA with "supporters of Donald Trump, especially those who strongly identify with his policy agenda, style, and brand of populist-nationalism", but that would be extremely tedious and wouldn't flow well at all.

Wokes could never find a reasonable term that satisfied all 3 conditions, and I doubt you could in this situation here either.

MAGA would generally refer to the political movement of Donald Trump along with his supporters, especially those who strongly identify with his policy agenda, style, and brand of populist-nationalism.

Is there a reason you can't just say "Trump supporters" or "Trump and his supporters"? Or, heck, how about "Trump's political movement"? That seems to fit in nicely with what you're saying.

"Trump's political movement has a better chance to change immigration than Republicans have probably ever had," is shorter than what you actually wrote, and it's very specific about who and what it's referring to. Doesn't it feel so much more professional? Especially when you compare it to using MAGA as a noun, which has real screenshot-of-tabloid-headline-posted-on-Facebook-by-Boomer-relative energy.

Again, your line of argument very closely mimics the old debates we'd have against wokes/SJWs/social justice leftists/political correctness/identity politics.

I really don't think it does.

The takeaway from that fight was not that using derogatory nicknames is good. The takeaway was that you must name yourself or you will be named by others.

The thing is, you're just referring to Donald Trump and his supporters. This is not a nebulous political movement championed by thousands of activists who often contradict each other and yet all push in the same direction. It's one guy and the people who voted for him. He already has a name, so you can and should just call him by his name.

"Donald Trump and his supporters" has a moderate clunkiness issue, with it taking 31 characters (or 24 if "Donald" is omitted) as opposed to 4 for "MAGA". More importantly it's fairly ambiguous on what "supporters" means here. To a lot of people that could plausibly mean anyone who voted for him, or to people who are supporting him on specific issues. But that would be overbroad, as a reluctant moderate who voted for Trump as the lesser of two evils against Kamala is not who I'm typically referring to when I talk about MAGA. Likewise, Mitch McConnell is a Republican like Trump, and explicitly supports him on issues like SCOTUS nominations, but he's not part of MAGA.

So are they wrong for acting like "MAGA" is "some kind of entity or group"

I don't know because, as I clearly said, it's unclear what "MAGA" is supposed to be. Is it everyone who voted for Donald Trump? Is it the so-called "base" of diehard Trump voters? Is it the Republican Party? Is Ted Cruz part of MAGA? Is Mitt Romney part of MAGA? Is Joe Rogan part of MAGA?

The answer is that it's wrong in two different ways: It's using a disrespectful nickname for some collection of people, and furthermore it's also badly-written because it's unclear exactly who it being referred to by said disrespectful nickname.

The proposed deal would have allowed in thousands of migrants a day, over a million a year, iirc.

I covered that in my post that I linked. The notion that the bill was "open borders up to 5000 migrants per day" was just egregiously false.

Yeah it was actually open borders all the time forever with no limits, because it would have handed 100% of the control of the border to a small cult of DC activist judges.

This wasn't true to any serious extent, other than how laws are always interpreted by the judicial system

How many illegals are here?

How did they get here?

Given that they are in fact illegal, how and why did existing laws and enforcement mechanisms fail to keep them out or remove them once they were in?

Why were these failures not anticipated when the laws were written? Should they have been?

If many previous laws did not work, why should we believe that passing additional laws would change things?

To what extent are these failures the result of willful policy? How would the new laws prevent such policies?

The last major legislation was in 1986, and it was a mess of compromise and had some incoherencies that would later become evident. Add those issues on top of being 40 years old, and yeah, I'd say it's hardly a surprise things aren't exactly in the best shape today.

The reform bill in 2024 would have gone a long way to fixing it. With that dead, Republicans could have (or could still do, I guess) their own party-line bill now that could fix a lot of the issues.

Is there something specific you're looking for? I'm not sure how much of what you wrote were genuine questions, or whether they were just gesturing at political nihilism and implying that since we didn't get it perfect 40 years ago then there'd be no point in doing anything ever.

The last major legislation was in 1986, and it was a mess of compromise and had some incoherencies that would later become evident.

The last really significant federal gun control legislation was also in the 1980s, IIRC. This does not appear to have impeded enforcement of those laws when the Federal Government considered such enforcement desirable, despite similar "compromises" and "incoherencies". We also see very inconsistent and lackadaisical enforcement of these laws in a large majority of cases, the straw purchase prohibitions being a particularly egregious example, but it really does seem to me in these cases that the problem exists between chair and keyboard, not within the text of the laws. We also have examples, several of which @gattsuru has laid out at some length here, of how legislation Blues find inconvenient is simply ignored; the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act is my preferred example, but it seems to me that there are plenty of others.

It seems to me that political nihilism is spreading because it offers superior predictive value to the process-is-legitimate frame you prefer. If you disagree, I think it behooves you to engage on the details, rather than simply arguing by assertion. We can directly observe that the Feds and the courts routinely decline to enforce laws they don't want to enforce and have been doing so for decades, and often enforce "interpretations" of laws that do exist that converge on simply making shit up. We can directly observe that even repeated Supreme Court "victories" on specific questions of law change nothing, and we can infer that the Supreme Court backs down when faced with sufficient resistance from the states and executive.

The reform bill in 2024 would have gone a long way to fixing it.

How? What is the core of the problem? Is it that laws say "may" rather than "shall"? Where can we see this actually making a difference in this or other issues of public policy? Why did they write the law so poorly, and why should we be confident that a new law would be written better? Because the nihilist argument is that ten years from now, whoopsy-daisy, it turns out this new law also had "compromises" and "inconsistencies" that, gosh darn it, mean we have to let in another twenty million illegals wouldn't you know it shucks howdy.

Is there something specific you're looking for? I'm not sure how much of what you wrote were genuine questions, or whether they were just gesturing at political nihilism and implying that since we didn't get it perfect 40 years ago then there'd be no point in doing anything ever.

I'm looking for anything specific. I'm looking for a nuts-and-bolts argument about why the process you're pointing to actually matters, preferably with examples of it mattering in a way that resulted in durable facts-on-the-ground wins for my tribe, because the alternative is that we are being invited to accept paper "wins" that will turn out to not actually be wins when it's too late to do anything about it. I think our interests are better served by taking a blowtorch to the legitimacy of our "shared" political institutions, rather than trying to reform them. I'm open to arguments that I'm wrong, but it seems to me that table-stakes for such an argument is some actual examples of my side winning through the "legitimate" process. Otherwise, if your argument is that every law my side writes just turns out to not be written properly to give us what we want, and every law the other side rights is unquestionably perfect and does even more than they claimed it'd do when they wrote it, that seems odd to me.

You're running out of trust. The institutions run on trust. If one person doesn't trust the system, that person has a problem. If a hundred million people don't trust the system, the system has a problem. It's pretty clear to me that at this point, the system has a problem. You may think that's stupid and unfair, but at some point you have to engage with the realities of the situation.

If you're looking for any specific thing, my old article goes into the asylum fraud loophole that the bill explicitly would have fixed. And yes, "may" vs "shall" is a very important distinction when writing legislation. Most things are written in "may" terms as a rule to give the Executive flexibility to respond in reasonable ways if situations change. Of course that leeway can be abused which happened with immigration, and that's when "shall" is necessary if you think the Executive isn't going to do its job. If you want an example of this in action, look up 8 U.S.C. §1226(c) and court cases Nielsen v Preap as well as Johnson v Guzman Chavez

If you want another example of what legislation could fix, look up US v Texas (2023). Republicans tried to sue the federal government to get them to enforce immigration restrictions, but were thrown out for lack of standing. That's something that could be addressed by legislation.

I'm not really going to touch the rest of your post on the legitimacy of the system more broadly, since we're so far apart that I doubt it would be productive.

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To add on to this, it seems obvious to me that Trump is focusing on the march through the institutions. He doesn't care about legislation because he's operating under an older theory of power: removing his opponents from positions of power and installing allies in their places.

Given that Trump single-handedly mitigated the vast majority of the border problem in about a month, we now have definitive proof that the entire border issue was a deliberate intentional undertaking by Joe Biden. So we're left with two possibilities:

  1. democrats other than Joe Biden don't actually want an open border. In this case, all a future democrat president needs to do is not deliberately throw open the gates of the border and invite billions in. Seems easy to me.

  2. democrats desire an open border with a fiery passion that burns with the heat of a thousand suns, and they are willing to stop at nothing to facilitate a flood of billions of migrants into the United States. Of course if and only if this is the case, then a future democrat president will throw open the gates of the border and deliberately invite billions in.

If option 1 is true, then no border bill is necessary. Successive administrations can continue the current secure border. Buuuuut, if option 2 is true, then it's extremely positively strong evidence that the democrat written, democrat supported border bill that the democrats tried to pass alone with zero republican support, is actually designed to increase migration.

Of course to your other point some new border laws would be nice, and I hope congress can at least make an attempt to do it. I haven't seen anything indicating they won't try, it's just that congress critters seem preoccupied with other bullshit like the budget fight right now.

Given that Trump single-handedly mitigated the vast majority of the border problem in about a month, we now have definitive proof that the entire border issue was a deliberate intentional undertaking by Joe Biden.

We actually don't. Even assuming your logic behind that (Biden could've done something but didn't) is true, that doesn't prove whether his lack of action was deliberate or the result of incompetence.

Rather than lack of action, it was actually Joe Biden's deliberate action to throw open the border and invite them in.

I covered this in my earlier post. Yes, the flood that happened under Biden was his fault, although it didn't seem deliberate. It seemed like he wanted to roll back Trump's immigration vibes in nebulous ways, but they way they (Biden or his handlers) effectuated that had unintended consequences that were functionally open-borders via loophole. I know a lot of conservatives on this site take the approach of "never attribute to incompetence that which can plausibly be explained by malice if it involves the outgroup", but the Dem response to immigration afterwards sure made it seem like they knew they fucked up and had dropped a grenade at their feet that they never intended.

Coalitions in the US are large and amorphous, so both your points 1 AND 2 can be correct for different Dems, and they occasionally rotate turns at the wheel depending on who wins elections or who has dementia.

Better immigration laws are needed because the US system is fundamentally broken in ways that only Congress can fix. Executive orders can help (or hurt), but they're just bandaids on a bullethole. You can try mangling interpretations of laws created decades ago and hope the courts don't notice, but they have the annoying habit of saying "hey bro, you can't just ignore Congress" and striking things down. In the status quo, the best conservatives can hope for is Obama-era levels of immigration. At worst, they can expect open borders with next to no recourse. Changing the laws on the books could significantly help that.

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the Dem response to immigration afterwards sure made it seem like they knew they fucked up and had dropped a grenade at their feet that they never intended.

Major mens rea issue divining the difference between they incompetently wanted to undo anything Trump did versus they competently wanted (approximately) open borders but backtracked after the last minute once they finally realized it was it was such an electoral albatross.

Joe Biden literally flew in half a million illegals in the chnv program, and kept going until his last day in office. I can't see how that can be unintended, and not a single democrat opposed the program.

That type of program was probably more typical of the type Biden wanted to have overall, i.e. a much higher number than Trump but still "controlled" in a sense of having some numeric cap, with preauthorization and other checks. I still oppose that type of thing, but think it's different from what was happening at the (land) border where anyone could say "credible fear" and be let into the country.

Also I'm pretty sure there were several Dems who did criticize it, like Adams, Hochul, Cuellar, and some others.

Adams, Hochul, Cuellar, and some others.

None of these politicians have criticized chnv at all, or at least I'm not able to find any reference to that on google.

Hochul and Adams didn't criticize it directly by name, but they did complain about immigration's burden on NYC, and many of the chnv arrivals were going there.

Were the complaints about the burden on NYC before or after TX and FL began sending the illegals to NY?

Complaining about burdens is just asking for money, which is right in the Democrat wheelhouse. No deviation from party line really needed. If they demanded a tax cut or repeal of gun control because illegals...then we have something.

the Dem response to immigration afterwards sure made it seem like they knew they fucked up and had dropped a grenade at their feet that they never intended.

When did you start seeing this response? I don't remember any biting policy changes up until election season began in earnest. I think there were some local actions in NY and Chicago (and memorably, Martha's Vineyard) to the migrant busing policies, but I will admit I don't follow politics that closely and I might have missed something.

The vibe I remember felt more like "all in on open borders and accepting any and all asylum claims, up until they saw how that polled with prospective voters 24 months later."

It grew in strength over time. Even in early 2021 there were some rumblings with Kamala Harris making her "do not come" speech (satirized by the right as "do not cum"). Then agreeing in principle on a conservative immigration package that I talked about. Biden doing stuff like trying to reimplement "remain in Mexico", and eventually cutting deals with the country to try to staunch the flow of immigrants without having aggressive enforcement at the border. There were always progressive groups chanting for open borders throughout the process, but the more centrist left realized they had an issue fairly early and gradually picked up steam.

satirized by the right as "do not cum"

This wasn’t a satirization — it was just a very silly meme, especially when juxtaposed with Trump saying “I’m gonna cum… woooah.” (And then brought to new levels of hilarious with “oh yeah, he did score!” from Boris Johnson, and “we must cum together” from Bernie Sanders.)

Obviously I don’t have statistics, but I’m guessing this was a meme that a fairly broad (if generally male) segment of the population found funny.

Not every joke about a thing a politician says is a form of political speech.

Sure. I remember the meme and found it funny.

Have we considered that while Joe Biden and his grand vizier Ron Klein didn't want open borders, the increasing radicalism of the democratic party(and I specifically mean the party, not the base) made it near-impossible to implement non-open-borders policies due to staffers and undersecretaries?

In any case, I suspect the de facto equilibrium is 'when there's a democrat in the white house the borders are open, even to serial killers claiming asylum from bigfoot, but the Texas governor shuts it down and the border patrol just lets him, regardless of actual orders'.

Have we considered that while Joe Biden and his grand vizier Ron Klein didn't want open borders, the increasing radicalism of the democratic party(and I specifically mean the party, not the base) made it near-impossible to implement non-open-borders policies due to staffers and undersecretaries?

This is possible, and if you've read Matt Yglesias' works on "The Groups" and how they influenced Biden, it may have been the cause. I'm not sure exactly how much % of the blame they should get, but it's almost certainly higher than 0.

In any case, I suspect the de facto equilibrium is 'when there's a democrat in the white house the borders are open, even to serial killers claiming asylum from bigfoot

Again, strong disagree here. MAGA is overindexing on Biden's 4 years due to recency bias and since it lets them ignore Trump's inaction on an issue that's critical to them. Even Obama's second term had illegal crossing numbers that were about on par with Trump, although Obama probably kept it that way because he knew immigration could be a bombshell if mishandled rather than from him having his hand forced by explicit legislation.

I agree that there is a possible future democrat who will have strong border controls. But this scenario isn’t very likely; Obama still had a reservoir of moderate-ish(or at least willing to take orders) mid level talent and that’s increasingly difficult for democrats, for one thing, but also polarization just drives the parties farther apart- Trump has stronger border enforcement than Bush ever did(or tried to do). Likewise Biden had border chaos that Obama didn’t even gesture at.

Politics is unpredictable. Democrats could run to the center. But they’re currently refusing to moderate on trans issues, which are even more lose-lose for them.

In any case, I suspect the de facto equilibrium is 'when there's a democrat in the white house the borders are open, even to serial killers claiming asylum from bigfoot, but the Texas governor shuts it down and the border patrol just lets him, regardless of actual orders'.

Is that what happened under Biden? Because I don't remember anything close to that happening under Biden. I remember Texas getting sued a lot and ICE agents removing barriers put up by Texans.

Better immigration laws are needed because the US system is fundamentally broken in ways that only Congress can fix. Executive orders can help (or hurt), but they're just bandaids on a bullethole. You can try mangling interpretations of laws created decades ago and hope the courts don't notice, but they have the annoying habit of saying "hey bro, you can't just ignore Congress" and striking things down. In the status quo, the best conservatives can hope for is Obama-era levels of immigration. At worst, they can expect open borders with next to no recourse. Changing the laws on the books could significantly help that.

I say "citation needed here." Even Trump isn't enforcing the laws on the books to their fullest extent. The idea we need more laws to fix the problem doesn't pass the smell test. If anytime a Democrat gets elected they stop enforcing the law, no law is going to fix that. As much as I think it would be brilliant design to make welfare contingent on border enforcement, that's never passing. And certainly nothing like that was in the 2024 law that fizzled out. There was nothing in that bill that could have prevented what Biden did in the first three years of his presidency, which was, essentially, tell ICE agents to do a different job. Because law enforcement and prosecution is the job of the executive. If he wants to dismiss cases against Ethyl Rosenberg because he loves commies, he can. The only recourse is impeachment + removal. And it simply will never happen for the border no matter how flagrant the violations because Democrats are not going to get onboard.

I don't think most Dems support or have a "fiery passion" for open borders, but I have seen plenty of evidence for the policy preferences. Who needs to see more? Loose, executive bound grey immigration policy subject to change is where we are. Open the tap, close it a little, obfuscate what you want to hide, and figure out issues whenever-- or never. If Trump's term passes without any lasting changes I'll probably try to become more apathetic on the issue. I would like to see something done with asylum. Additional brrrrrr: drive forever electoral growth by printing limitless political capital in perpetuity.

The Democrats win back the Whitehouse, signal or even campaign on concessions in whichever areas are electorally expedient, then quietly reverse policies they don't like. They pivot focus to whatever and its business as usual. It can and will happen again.

I would expect the hardline immigration and demographic critics to be loudest in demanding legislative backing. The politicians I can understand, but interested voters and advocates I don't. A political crisis that requires permanent intervention, but never any resolution is exhausting for normies.

Maybe fiery passion is a bit of a hyperbole, but fact is that their policy preference is opener borders. So I can't see any way that the bill which was supported by democrat leadership and most democrats and zero republicans would actually be a big sacrifice of their own policy preferences.

Democrats have never "handed Republicans a major victory" for free when the Republicans didn't even want it.

Given that Trump single-handedly mitigated the vast majority of the border problem in about a month, we now have definitive proof that the entire border issue was a deliberate intentional undertaking by Joe Biden. So we're left with two possibilities:

Agreed. This is an utterly bizarre time to take a "victory lap" for that border bill. From my recollection, even before Trump got involved there were large elements in the Republican party agitating against it, including the prominent hawks like Cruz and Cotton. The fact that it was initially "bipartisan" was simply because there were/are some open borders Republicans still left, and also because the negotiation team thought they had a mandate that said "any deal is better than no deal" which was absurd.

The fact is, our immigration laws are STRICTER than even Trump's enforcement. He is particularly lax on things that could really rustle the ire of the business community. He's abstained from any raids on meat packing plants, construction sites, and similar venues. The idea we need new laws to satisfy border hawks is pretty much a myth. Unfortunately, because of how courts cannot compel the executive to execute the actual law, the only way Republicans could ensure a future Democratic administration actually enforces border laws is with some sort of draconian contingency law that gores a Democratic ox if border crossings exceed a number. It would have to be something like "all snap payments are suspended for 6 months if border crossings exceed XXXX IN ANY MONTH, and cannot resume unless 6 consecutive months of compliance are certified". ANNNND there would have to be a reliable way to do such certification that cant be gamed by Democrats, which seems unlikely.

On filibusters and the Senate..............

The US senate is an odd institution.

The house does the legislation. The executive executes. The courts maintain constitutional sanctity. The states already elect governors to represent them. What is the role of the Senator ? It made made some sense until the 1913 (17th amendment), when Senators were effectively subordinate (selected) to Governors. That way, state elections served as a useful way to remove both unpopular governors and senators.

An elected senate is just odd.

  • The Senate isn't representative. (Californians have the same representation as Wyoming)
  • The Senate can't do anything but block. (Net negative institution)
  • The Senate can filibuster, the House can't. (1 man anti-democratic weapon)

Most democratic nations don't have anywhere near as powerful of a Senate (or equivalent institution). The Indian Rajya-Sabha & House of Lords can only delay a bill by a short amount. A balancing counter-weight also makes sense in a parliamentary system where the executive (Prime-Minister) is selected by the house (making the house too powerful) unlike the US where the President is separately elected.

This means, in India, a person only thinks about 2 elections. Once for their state (governor, who selects senators) and once for the nation (house, which selects the executive). A British person only thinks about the Commons.

In comparison, An American must think of 4 elections. The governor, senators, house reps and the President. That's exhausting. Only takes 1 lapse, 1 midterm rando, to block legislation for the next 6 years. Doesn't the US already have enough checks-and-balances ? The house churns every 2 years. The last time someone held onto Senate+House in a midterm was in 1978.

I am just learning about the 17th amendment & the history of filibuster. so bear with me. Some wikipedia exerpts:

Those in favor of popular elections for senators believed two primary problems were caused by the original provisions: legislative corruption and electoral deadlocks

Appears that it made things worse than better. In an era where they were capable of pushing constitutional amendments, it's hilarious to think that they were complaining about deadlocks. Yeah buddy, try getting anything done in 2025.

Rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the United States Senate allows the Senate to vote to limit debate by invoking cloture on the pending question. In most cases this requires a majority of three-fifths of the senators duly chosen and sworn (60 votes if there is no more than one vacancy),[3]: 15–17  so a minority of senators can block a measure, even if it has the support of a simple majority.

Interestingly, the most important change on senate filibusters was also made in the same decade (1917). Clearly they knew filibusters were a bad idea. House filibusters were eliminated in 1842 ! Not sure why they left it half-complete in 1917.

The Senate was always meant to be a powerful counterpart to the House. It was supposed to be the "cooling saucer" that could take up long-term projects like court appointments and treaties, while more immediate concerns like the budget were left to the more representative House. It was also part of the big compromise between big states and small states as to how representation should be handled, and helped allay Southern fears that the North would come for slavery (at least for a time).

There really was quite blatant corruption before the 17th amendment, not just "corruption" in the modern sense where the government doesn't do everything an uninformed populist citizen wants, and so the populist hallucinates that "the system is broken!!!" I do fully agree that the modern Senate is too much of a vetocracy though.

Americans don't care that much about state elections of governors any more. And while that still leaves the Presidential AND House AND Senate elections, they all happen together every 2-4 years so it's not that crazy or hard to keep track of.

helped allay Southern fears that the North would come for slavery (at least for a time)

In 1789? Abolitionism didn't really get going until the 19th century was well on.

Not true, actually. Jefferson's "Notes on the State of Virginia" include a plan for gradual emancipation through colonization, and he was a proponent of the portions of the Northwest Ordinance barring slavery from newly-acquired US territories. Virginia was contemplating a plebiscite on emancipation in the early 1830s. If anything, support for slavery got stronger as the 19th century wore on, via what should really be a quite familiar process of reciprocal polarization between south and north. The William Lloyd Garrison radical abolitionists and Calhounian "positive good" types fed on each other to the exclusion of what had been the predominant view that slavery would eventually shrivel and die on the vine after the banning of the slave trade in 1807 (which was done at the first instant the Constitution allowed it, btw).

The purpose of senates and similar elder chambers in most bicameral systems is to:

  • slow down the passing of legislation to prevent popular mistakes
  • give a seniority track to successful politicians
  • provide a reserve of statesmen with enough legitimacy to:
    • perform inquiries and investigations
    • organize oversight of important and complex matters in a less partisan manner
  • generally defend and represent the interest of the long term and the establishment

With this in mind and the general American distaste for titles and nobility, the oddities of the American Senate are unsurprising.

Yes Senates are anti-democratic. This is no accident. They are designed by republics to specifically thwart the passions of democracy.

That's why I specifically compared it to other bicameral systems.

slow down the passing of legislation

Can't slow down a stationary object. The Senate can only limit the power of the house, a house that already moves at snails place. The Executive and Courts wield their power independently.

give a seniority track to successful politicians

Works better when people were dying at age 50. When the average age of the Senate is higher than the life-expectancy 100 years ago, you know something went wrong.

reserve of statesmen

All elections become popularity contests. Why make the senate elected, if the goal is to bring in experienced statesmen.

The American system was created for a different America. A white-protestant nation run by proven men who rose up the ranks through merit (college, military achievement). 75% of the Senate had a college degree in 1945, when less than 5% of the nation had gone to college. The need for fund-raising and media-access meant that running for office was exclusively limited to the elites. This meant a high degree of consensus on what America should be. Therefore, they worried about the excesses of democracy.

In 2025, America is a diverse nation with public-office having exceptionally low barriers to entry. Consensus is nonexistent and core values of various groups are at odds with each other. In such a place, the system should encourage compromise. This means giving power back to the house.

If an downstream institution can unilaterally torpedo a bill (Senate filibuster), then the house would never go through the painful process of reaching compromise. The congress can override the president, but not the senate.

Can't slow down a stationary object.

American statute is not stagnant. It certainly doesn't line up with what I'd like but plenty gets done.

Works better when people were dying at age 50. When the average age of the Senate is higher than the life-expectancy 100 years ago, you know something went wrong.

Wealthy people that cleared the early years never had particularly low life expectancies. The average age in the American Senate at the moment is indeed shameful but it's not a product of medical advances.

Can't slow down a stationary object. The Senate can only limit the power of the house, a house that already moves at snails place.

I'm not quite sure what killed the ability of Congress to do its job. There are many suspects. Including the filibuster. But I can assure you that if it ever did regain some measure of power, it would still be necessary to have breaks on the car. The history of functional parliaments is full of nice sounding stupid bills that almost became law but for some high chamber pointing at the practical problems with them.

Maybe getting rid of the fillibuster would help, but the American Republic is chockful of vetoes precisely because it's designed to make exercising power difficult. I'm not sure that would be enough to be worth the trouble.

All elections become popularity contests. Why make the senate elected, if the goal is to bring in experienced statesmen.

Because one is bigoted against nobility, presumably.

There are alternatives, I like the idea of a random sampling of taxpayers personally, provided the right caveats.

In 2025, America is a diverse nation with public-office having exceptionally low barriers to entry. Consensus is nonexistent and core values of various groups are at odds with each other. In such a place, the system should encourage compromise. This means giving power back to the house.

Take it from someone who's having it imposed on them by circumstance: parliamentary regimes are a terrible idea when your country is experiencing factionalism.

I think that devolution/decentralization/"states rights"/localism is a better and more fitting solution to this problem actually.

In the UK we sort of did that (city Mayors, Scottish/Welsh/NI governments) but the result always seems to be hard left nonentities who have very little history of practical achievement (even less than our top-level MPs). I’m not sure if that’s a structural problem or simply what the regions prefer, but implementing localism in a way that doesn’t end up with virtue-signalling parasites constantly invoking ethnic grievances for more money seems like a serious problem.

I know it didn't go very well in the UK, but I think it would be a better fit for the US where there's already some good local institutions per state that actually hold some power and responsibilities (with their own budgets and such).

What makes you think republicans(other than Trump) actually want a no illegal immigration ever situation akin to Australia or Japan? They want to signal to their base, not eat a welfare bill, and have the ability to tell them to go home when they’re no longer useful.

It's not really about getting to 0 illegal immigration as that's not plausible, it's about having better control over the levers of who gets in, and preventing crazy Biden-era spikes. There's definitely a lot of cynicism when it comes to R politicians on immigration, with how the base wants strict controls but plutocrats want cheap labor, so politicians dance like they're making a change and then do nothing to keep the donations rolling in. MAGA was supposed to be the end of that, but unfortunately it seems like they're too broadly incompetent to actually do much of anything other than temporary fixes.

I guess I still don't actually understand what your working model is here. Setting aside whether the new legislation would have been good or not for the moment, it seems clear and obvious that there are plenty of statutory reasons for removal or denial of entry that weren't being used. With that fact well established (at least to me), I immediately become very skeptical of anyone that tells me we need new legislation to accomplish something that they're not even trying to do with what's already on the books. So skeptical, in fact, that I tend to think there's an ulterior motive - perhaps there's some poison pill in the law I missed, perhaps they want the optics of saying they did something, perhaps they're shooting for a compromise lock-in that I don't want. From a game theoretic perspective, I would love an off-ramp from this equilibrium, but it's very hard for me to believe that the Defectbot that just did 243 consecutive tats has responded by agreeing to cooperate after only one tit.

I guess our disagreement is about whether the current laws provide statutory reasons for removal or denial of entry?

I agree that Biden had the power to have Obama-level illegal immigration, i.e. about on par with Trump's numbers. I also agree that his refusal to enforce the laws on the books is what caused the spike in immigration. Then he did start enforcing them once it became clear that immigration was a huge liability, hence why immigration numbers started plummeting before Trump took office. I strongly disagree with the notion that the bill was somehow a "trap". It was created by a Republican immigration hawk, the text was out there for all to read, and Trump couldn't come up with many actual issues with the bill so he just cooked up lies to try to sink it. Legislation can have unintended side effects, but it's not like its a haunted house with secret compartments filled with woke lawyers and a million illegal Hondurans. Policies are also not etched in stone and can be amended if they turn out bad.

But you can put all that aside since that's in the past now. MAGA won the 50-50 and now has (or had) the opportunity to create almost whatever immigration bill they wanted. And what did they do with that chance? The answer seems to be "sweet nothing".

I guess I still don't actually understand what your working model is here.

I don't think I speak for OP here, but I think the best working model I've found for the behavior of both parties on immigration issues is something more personal and emotional than rational:

Democrats have a vague idea that there should be some limits on immigration, but mostly don't want to make any migrants feel bad. They will reject any course of action that might make migrants feel bad. This is based in a primordial sense of empathy: Talking to an immigrant you know they are a fellow human being trying their best and you don't want to hurt them gratuitously.

Republicans have a vague idea that there should be fewer migrants, but mostly don't want to make any illegal immigrants feel good, and preferably want to make migrants feel bad. This is based in a primordial sense of justice: migrants broke the law and must be punished not rewarded.

I think this model will prove to be significantly more predictive of actual policy than pretty much any other model that I see people working with. When people ask, "if they were really for/against immigration, why wouldn't they do X?", the answer will frequently line up with whether it will be too mean or insufficiently mean rather than whether it appears to accomplish the stated policy preferences.

Can we call it too mean/too naive for a bit of equilibrium?

I think too nice/too mean provides better equilibrium.

Actually that would provide negative equilibrium, and it is the default I expect people would go to so I'm stepping in quick, because the equilibrium I'm looking for is in emotional valence. Too nice/too mean would solidify the manichean premise that one side are being 'good' while the other are being 'bad' and I think we see enough of that already. Some republicans might revel in the cruelty, but that's just the lizardman constant, some number of people are always doing that no matter the side. Republicans need a way to defuse that angle, and I think naive is a strong response - to the point without being too insulting.

Nah, Naive is too sophisticated for the concept I'm trying to get across, which is more emotional in nature.

Most Anti Immigration Republicans ultimately aren't choosing policies based on a deep consideration of what will lead to desired policy outcomes. They are emotionally repulsed from policies that reward lawbreaking because it is naturally unjust to reward lawbreakers. Seeing rulebreakers rewarded is as unjust as seeing the good punished, and is naturally emotionally revolting to humans. It is emotional, not rational or policy based. Parallel to how Democrats are emotionally repulsed by images of children separated from parents (one wonders, for example, how they felt about parents who attended Jan 6th being 'separated' from their children).

One can see this in the policy positions taken: a great many of Trump's anti-immigration measures seem aimed not at actually removing immigrants, but instead primarily at preventing immigrants from participating in open society, running the risk of creating an illegal underclass.

At the more sophisticated level of policy outcomes, the natural antonym to Naive here would probably be Misanthropic. So Too Naive/Too Misanthropic: Republicans feel that Democratic policies are too naive, assuming good natured immigrants who just want to work; Democrats feel that Republican policies are too misanthropic, assuming that all immigrants are criminals and welfare queens. But that ultimately isn't what drives the revulsion that each side feels, emotionally, for the policies of the other side.

So skeptical, in fact, that I tend to think there's an ulterior motive

It’s the same “legalize another 20 million illegal immigrants and then we’ll stop illegal immigration, we promise :^)” song and dance that Democrats have been doing since the era of Ronald Reagan. The first part always happens and then second never seems to materialize. That in turn incentivizes millions more illegal immigrants because they figure that if they can hang on long enough they will eventually get citizenship.

And even the most-ironclad, loophole free law you can write is useless if the administration isn’t going to enforce it.

And even the most-ironclad, loophole free law you can write is useless if the administration isn’t going to enforce it.

Strong disagree here. You're overindexing on what happened in the last few years and assuming different legislation would be functionally identical because that's just how the system works. In reality, a lot of what Biden did was available due to how current laws are written, e.g. not having hard "shall" clauses that gives wide bearing to executive fiat.

US v. Texas had been decided before your post last year on this topic..

Yep, lack of standing of Republican plaintiffs is another thing that legislation could explicitly address.

It's another thing that Joe Bidens poison bill did not address.

Did the bill you highlight as The Best Option In Decades involve anything that would have done so? Or did it demand every case get sent to the DC Circuit, which has both a long history of limiting immigration enforcement and unusually strict standing analysis and limits on what judges could be appointed that favor progressives?

But after even that, would it matter if they did? From the opinion I linked above:

But once it is posited that a plaintiff has personally suffered a “de facto” injury, i.e., an injury in fact, it is hard to see why the presence or absence of a statute authorizing suit has a bearing on the question whether the court has Article III jurisdiction as opposed to the question whether the plaintiff has a cause of action. In the end, however, none of this may matter because the majority suggests that such a statute might be unconstitutional. Ante, at 10, and n. 4.

Oh, well, that's just Alito's summary, surely he must be exaggerating th-

For an arrest mandate to be enforceable in federal court, we would need at least a “stronger indication” from Congress that judicial review of enforcement discretion is appropriate—for example, specific authorization for particular plaintiffs to sue and for federal courts to order more arrests or prosecutions by the Executive. Castle Rock, 545 U. S., at 761. We do not take a position on whether such a statute would suffice for Article III purposes; our only point is that no such statute is present in this case.4

4 As the Solicitor General noted, those kinds of statutes, by infringing on the Executive’s enforcement discretion, could also raise Article II issues. See Tr. of Oral Arg. 24–25

This already was a "shall" law. Indeed, the oral argument (and that Solicitor General question on constitutionality!) was driven by the extent that "shall" had already been sprinkled throughout the relatively recent additions to immigration laws, driven by long periods of neglect by Democratic administrations!

What possible reason could or should anyone expect new versions to behave any differently, or actually apply longer than needed for additional epicycles to develop? How green would someone need be to think it'd just be This One Statutory Construction Gimmick that would make it matter here?

The Lankford immigration bill didn't change venue as far as I understood it, so you'd sue in the district where you're harmed, the appeal to your regional circuit. There was nothing special about DC in the bill.

You're right that the bill didn't change anything explicitly about standing, but I never argued that the bill should be the last word on the issue, simply that it was far better than the status quo for fixing a lot of other things. Now that MAGA won the 50-50 it's functionally irrelevant since Republicans could make whatever type of bill they want, within reason.

In terms of US v Texas, standing demands injury, causation and redressability. The case held Texas had injury & causation but no judicially cognizable interest absent special statutory authorization. In other words, it wasn't a case of just ignoring "shall" requirements, it's that the laws were poorly written (or weren't written with these types of plaintiffs in mind in the first place). By contrast, in Nielsen v. Preap (2019) and Johnson v. Guzman-Chavez (2021), the Supreme Court enforced the INA’s “shall detain” for criminal-alien detention. Those were “shall” duties plus clear statutory schemes that provided judicial review. Long-term neglect by prior administrations underscores why Congress must match “shall” with funding and remedies. When that has been done, “shall” has repeatedly proven enforceable.

The Lankford immigration bill didn't change venue as far as I understood it, so you'd sue in the district where you're harmed, the appeal to your regional circuit. There was nothing special about DC in the bill.

From your own link of the full text of the bill, the one that's in your write-up from the last time you tried this:

JUDICIAL REVIEW —Notwithstanding any other provision of this Act, judicial review of any decision or action in this section shall be governed only by the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, which shall have sole and original jurisdiction to hear challenges, whether constitutional or otherwise, to the validity of this section or any written policy directive, written policy guideline, written procedure, or the implementation there-of, issued by or under the authority of the Secretary to implement this section.

This actually shows up three times, once in SEC. 235B. PROVISIONAL NONCUSTODIAL REMOVAL PROCEEDINGS., and a second time in SEC. 240D. PROTECTION MERITS REMOVAL PROCEEDINGS, and a third time in ‘SEC. 244B. BORDER EMERGENCY AUTHORITY. It's the only times 'original jurisdiction' shows up in the entire bill!

Someone told you this, a year ago. In the thread you're linking to, now!

You're right that the bill didn't change anything explicitly about standing, but I never argued that the bill should be the last word on the issue, simply that it was far better than the status quo for fixing a lot of other things.

You never argued that, either; you just asserted it, and then shrugged when people repeatedly pointed that there was no reason to suspect any such improvement, and many reasons to suspect that it would make things worse. Your post last year was nearly eleven months after US v. Texas's opinion had dropped, and yet here today you still repeatedly pointed to "shall" terminology that US v. Texas held does not and likely can not ever be legally binding.

In terms of US v Texas, standing demands injury, causation and redressability. The case held Texas had injury & causation but no judicially cognizable interest absent special statutory authorization.

Yes, yes, I can read. I can also read the multitude of examples in the dissents and concurrence for Texas highlighting both how capricious the application of this novel standard was, and the opinion's unwillingness to commit to any statutory language being able, either as a matter of constitutionality or practice, of having done so in the immigration context.

By contrast, in Nielsen v. Preap (2019) and Johnson v. Guzman-Chavez (2021), the Supreme Court enforced the INA’s “shall detain” for criminal-alien detention. Those were “shall” duties plus clear statutory schemes that provided judicial review

Oh, boy, I'm sure these are accurate and complete summaries of the cases at hand. Let me get a big drink of water and --

Section 1226(c)(1) directs the Secretary to arrest any such criminal alien “when the alien is released” from jail, and §1226(c)(2) forbids the Secretary to release any “alien described in paragraph (1)” pending a determination on removal (with one exception not relevant here).

Respondents, two classes of aliens detained under §1226(c)(2), allege that because they were not immediately detained by immigration officials after their release from criminal custody, they are not aliens “described in paragraph (1),” even though all of them fall into at least one of the four categories covered by §§1226(c)(1)(A)–(D). Because the Government must rely on §1226(a) for their detention, respondents argue, they are entitled to bond hearings to determine if they should be released pending a decision on their status.

That is, Nielsen revolved around the question of whether a statute commanding that the government "shall take" custody of this class of criminal aliens only applied if those criminal aliens were detained immediately after release from jail. It had nothing to do with a requirement for the government to take custody of those criminal aliens and not doing so.

Respondents are aliens who were removed from the United States and later reentered without authorization. When DHS reinstated their prior removal orders, each respondent sought withholding-only relief to prevent DHS from executing those orders based on fear of re- turning to their home country as designated in the removal orders. While respondents’ withholding-only proceedings were pending, DHS detained respondents, and respondents sought release on bond, which was initially denied. The Government opposed their release, maintaining that because respondents were detained under §1231, not §1226, they were not entitled to bond hearings.

That is, Guzman-Chavez revolved around whether the government was allowed to do something that statute mandated that it "shall" do, not whether the government must actually do so.

Long-term neglect by prior administrations underscores why Congress must match “shall” with funding and remedies. When that has been done, “shall” has repeatedly proven enforceable.

So, now you've proven zero out of three attempts to show "shall" as enforceable in any approach at an immigration detainment or deportation context, despite the very laws in question being driven by long periods of administrative neglect of the law. Do you care to try a fourth time? Do you think it's a coincidence that you keep conveniently making this class of mistake? Do you think anyone reading you could possibly miss it?

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It almost certainly could be done, though. It would just require Trump to spend a little political capital to move it along. Waffley centrist Senators liked to hide behind the filibuster as e.g. Manchin did during Biden's term, but there's 53 R senators which gives a buffer of 3 defections and they'd still be able to remove it. There have been plenty of news stories recently about how R's in Congress basically can't disagree with Trump on anything, so there's plenty of reason to think the filibuster could be overcome here.

The filibuster already was partially defeated, first on lower court nominations, then for SCOTUS appointments. I guess you could claim those were different and didn't really matter compared to the filibuster on everything else, but that would just be a handwavy just-so story.

Also, why does nobody talk about building the wall anymore? The one thing that the recent kerfuffles over deportations have shown is that it’s inherently a nightmare to kick people out of the country. You have procedural hurdles which can theoretically be removed, but there’s also significant reliance interests which can’t be removed. A wall wouldn’t have this problem.

The Wall was always partially/mostly symbolic since it's not like it would stop people committed to getting through it, and it wouldn't do anything to touch people overstaying visas which was a big part of the problem. Sure it would help, and it wouldn't cost that much so it was always worthwhile, it just wasn't something worth fighting tooth and nail for relative to other parts of enforcement.

I wholeheartedly agree though that it's a heck of a lot easier to stop people from getting in beforehand than trying to deport them afterwards, for logistical and political backlash concerns. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

There was a bipartisan group of Senators who tried to broker a deal: build the wall in exchange for writing DACA into law. Trump (or perhaps just Steven Miller, who was Trump’s negotiator) wanted to make some changes to legal immigration. He got changes to family reunification and the diversity lottery included in the proposed bill. He then insisted on reducing immigration quotas, Democrats refused, and negotiations ended in a deadlock. DACA remained in place and Trump didn’t get any of the changes he wanted to immigration law.

I don’t think Trump would have had to fight “tooth and nail” to get the wall built after he had just won an election where “Build the Wall” was one of his primary campaign promises. All he had to do was to sign off on a deal that was a clear win for him. Yes, he would have had to sign DACA into law, but he was never all that committed to deporting child arrivals anyway. His primary criticism of DACA was that it should have been done by Congress, and under the deal he rejected, it would have been.

Interesting, thanks for sharing. I was only vaguely aware of the Gang of Six stuff, but I looked it up and... yeah, it's bad. Typical Trump sabotaging actual reforms and failing to make deals.

That wouldn't put an end to the problem. NGOs literally fly them into the country.

Looking forward to someone trying to analyze in the future how much of the dropoff was due to Trump intimidation versus USAID cutting the NGO racket.

To be clear, there's already 700 miles of fence along the border. It was built long before Trump came along.

To the extent that a physical barrier is effective at preventing illegal immigration, they've already built one.

Nate Silver just accidentally posted a link to an AI slop article. A quick delve into the article text makes it obvious that the contents were blatantly copypastaed directly from the output of ChatGPT. Various GPT detectors also agree, giving it a solid 100% confidence of being slop. Unfortunately, it seems that nobody in the replies even seems to have noticed or cared.

I'm of course already used to my google searches being clogged up by black hat SEO slop, but I expected it to just live in the shadows quietly collecting clicks and boosting pagerank. So it was sobering to see an aislop article just get posted like that by someone I regard as at least somewhat intelligent.

What does this say about the world? Are normies, even somewhat intelligent ones, incapable of distinguishing the most obvious stinky smelly chatgpt output? Or did hundreds of people read the headline and drop a snarky comment, and not a single one bothered to read the article? It's either a depressing anecdote about human nature and social media, or a depressing anecdote about the lack of intelligence of the average human.

Of course aislop grifters should be fedposted just like indian call center scammers, but sometimes I can't help but feel like the victims deserved it. But when they bother me waste 5 seconds of my time again, I am right back in fedposting mode.

Edit:

Since you idiots are out here defending the slop, these quotes are hallucinations:

“I get it,” Walz told the audience. “A lot of folks aren’t watching MSNBC. They’re watching ESPN or TikTok or just trying to make ends meet.”

“We need to reclaim who we are as a party of opportunity, of dignity, of everyday Americans,” Walz said. “If we leave that vacuum, someone like Donald Trump will fill it again.”

Here's the full recording of his talk and you can check the Youtube transcription: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MPt8V3MW1c4 And before you ask, the fake article specifically claims these fake quotes were said at his Harvard talk, not at some other time.

So again the AI put totally false words into somebody's mouth and you apologists are defending it.

Hmm, is this a signal that we can finally go back to a time where a wider populace puts trust into specific media institutions, and rewards ($$$) them for earning that trust? Can AI be the deathknell of the mAiNsTrEaM mEdIa snark? Can we start being elitist about media institutions that don't utilize AI slop, regardless of their political slant? Surely articles written by an actual human, no matter their political bias, are universally better than AI slop of any particular bias? Can't we all agree on that across the political spectrum?

That Adam Silver posted an article from Yahoo Entertainment damages my base level of respect for him, regardless of the content of the article. The 90s version of this is like picking up a magazine from the grocery store checkout[1] and trying to form a cogent political argument based on its cover article. I guess that makes X the backyard grillout: "Dave69420 told me that the Clintons had Vince Foster killed".

  • [1] Curiously, though, I haven't actually seen magazines where I buy groceries these days, but they're still at CVS / Walgreens and other drug stores.

Surely articles written by an actual human, no matter their political bias, are universally better than AI slop of any particular bias?

Not sure if sarcasm, but personally I agree. Human written articles, even if written by a child or a partisan hack, at least required thought and effort to write. Somebody, somewhere had to spend an hour or more slaving away to write it. For each sentence in a human work, someone, somewhere had to think it was worth writing that sentence. Even if the journalist was just told by his boss "write today's anti-trump piece, get it in before lunch," humans aren't machines. No matter how bland the task, all human writing still stems from real thoughts and emotions. And bland partisan propaganda, if nothing else, is a window into that. Humans are social creatures, so the transmission of emotion through even routine work is actually quite important.

Meanwhile the ai-slopster just presses a button, and poof, a wall of text appears. Don't even read it, just send it. Or maybe even automate the entire process so you don't have to press a button, the computer presses the button itself.

Surely articles written by an actual human, no matter their political bias, are universally better than AI slop of any particular bias?

I think that "written by a human" is currently a required condition for a decent article, not a sufficient one. Human slop is not necessarily better than AI slop -- for example, AI systems can generally spell. A LLM-written article based on multiple news articles with some minor hallucinations sprinkled in might actually be less terrible than one written by a human who is psychotic or pushing a fringe world view.

May I gently correct you, as we're discussing AI errors, that it's Nate Silver not Adam Silver.

Were it indeed Adam Silver (whoever he may be) that used Yahoo Entertainment News as a source, it would be understandable!

Were it indeed Adam Silver (whoever he may be)

Commissioner of the NBA, and one of the wealthiest ayyylmaos in America.

Surely articles written by an actual human, no matter their political bias, are universally better than AI slop of any particular bias? Can't we all agree on that across the political spectrum?

Obviously not, or you wouldn't be making an appeal to elitism as opposed to popular consumption, i.e. the numerically broader basis where 'we all' consensus derives.

The NPC (non-player character) meme arose during the first Trump administration precisely noting the formulaic and non-introspective nature of a good deal of partisan discourse. The belief that AI outputs would be equivalent or even higher quality than human writers at election propaganda has been the basis of AI election interference concerns. The market impacts of generative AI has weakened the bargaining position of creative types ranging from holywood writer guilds to patreon porn makers. is all slop. Non-slop is the exception, regardless of source.

Obviously not, or you wouldn't be making an appeal to elitism as opposed to popular consumption, i.e. the numerically broader basis where 'we all' consensus derives.

I make the appeal to elitism because I don't think popular consumption has shown any evidence of being capable of fighting against manufactured consent. Unless you think otherwise? Personally: I'm making the appeal because I want to live in a world where publishing AI slop is universally seen as low quality as the content in the 90s conspiracy magazines at the grocery store checkout (National Enquirer), and evidence of a media institution using AI slop should create scandals large enough to cause executives to resign. Personally: AI-hallucinated quotes are worse than fabricated quotes, because the former masquerades as journalism whereas the latter is just easily-falsifiable propaganda.

The belief that AI outputs would be equivalent or even higher quality than human writers at election propaganda has been the basis of AI election interference concerns.

I actually haven't seen much in the way of "AI election interference concerns" specifically. There's been a lot of noise around the potential for deep fakes to sway an election, but so far there's been no smoking gun that's been brought to my attention. On the left, I don't think people distinguish much from someone blindly consuming FoxNews opinion propaganda versus X AI bot propaganda (or MSNBC and Reddit, if you prefer the examples for the right). Which kind of plays into your broader point:

There is no russel conjugation in play. It is not your humans produce articles, your opponents' partisans demonstrate bias, and AI make slop. It is nearly all slop regardless.

Can I extend this to your view on the OP being that it doesn't matter at all that the article that Adam Silver reposted is AI slop, versus your definition of "slop" in general? It doesn't move your priors on Adam Silver[1] (the reposter), X (the platform), or Yahoo Entertainment (the media institution) even an iota?

  • [1] Leaving the error. NBA playoffs on the mind.

Can I extend this to your view on the OP being that it doesn't matter at all that the article that Adam Silver reposted is AI slop, versus your definition of "slop" in general? It doesn't move your priors on Adam Silver (the reposter), X (the platform), or Yahoo Entertainment (the media institution) even an iota?

You can strawman me in whatever way you prefer.

Nope, just trying to move the goalposts so we're at least on the same playing field.

Unfortunately you edited your comment though and now I've completely lost the context of our discussion. Maybe I'll wait next time for the second version of your argument.

Unfortunately you edited your comment though

The edit was for grammatical clarity. You remain free to assign to me any positions I have not taken as part of your goalpost moving.

Personally: AI-hallucinated quotes are worse than fabricated quotes, because the former masquerades as journalism whereas the latter is just easily-falsifiable propaganda.

AI-hallucinated quotes seem likely to be exactly as easy as falsifiable as human-fabricated quotes, and easily-falsifiable propaganda seems to be an example of something masquerading as journalism. These just seem like describing different aspects of the same thing.

Can I extend this to your view on the OP being that it doesn't matter at all that the article that Adam Silver reposted is AI slop, versus your definition of "slop" in general? It doesn't move your priors on Adam Silver (the reposter), X (the platform), or Yahoo Entertainment (the media institution) even an iota?

I'm not Dean, but I would agree with this. I didn't have a meaningful opinion on Yahoo Entertainment, but, assuming that that article was indeed entirely AI-generated, the fact that it was produced that way wouldn't reflect negatively or positively on them, by my view. Publishing a falsehood does reflect negatively, though. As for Silver (is it not Nate?), I don't expect pundits to fact-check every part of an article before linking it, especially a part unrelated to the point he was making, and so him overlooking the false quote doesn't really surprise me. Though, perhaps, the fact that he chose to link a Yahoo Entertainment article instead of an article from a more reputable source reflects poorly on his judgment; this wouldn't change even if Yahoo Entertainment hadn't used AI and the reputable outlet had.

AI-hallucinated quotes seem likely to be exactly as easy as falsifiable as human-fabricated quotes, and easily-falsifiable propaganda seems to be an example of something masquerading as journalism. These just seem like describing different aspects of the same thing.

I'm clumsily trying to capture the sentiment that AI-hallucinated quotes and human-fabricated quotes have different motivations that can be attacked in order to discourage them, the former basically being increasing revenue without increasing costs, and the latter being the age-old "lie to someone to manipulate them". I don't think either are particularly moral, and it's a cultural battle to be waged against both. I don't think we'll ever convince fellow humans to stop lying to manipulate people, but I can at least imagine a world where we universally condemn media companies who publish AI slop. We've done it with companies who try to sell cigarettes to children, for at least one example of "universal condemnation".

Mea culpa, I shouldn't have said "worse", but "more easily discouraged".

I don't think either are particularly moral, and it's a cultural battle to be waged against both. I don't think we'll ever convince fellow humans to stop lying to manipulate people, but I can at least imagine a world where we universally condemn media companies who publish AI slop.

So I do think there's a big weakness with LLMs in that we don't quite have a handle on how to robustly or predictably reduce hallucinations like we can with human hallucinations and fabrications. But that's where I think the incentive of the editors/publishers come into play. Outlets that publish falsities by their human journalists lose credibility and can also lose lawsuits, which provide incentives for the people in charge to check the letters their human journalists generate before publishing them, and I see similar controls as being effective for LLMs.

Now, examples like Rolling Stone's A Rape on Campus article show that this control system isn't perfect, particularly when the incentives for the publishers, the journalists, and the target audience are all aligned with respect to pushing a certain narrative rather than conveying truth. I don't think AI text generators exacerbate that, though.

I also don't think it's possible for us to enter a world where we universally condemn media companies who publish AI slop, though, unless "slop" here refers specifically to lies or the like. Given how tolerant audiences are of human-made slop and how much cheaper AI slop is compared to that, I just don't see there being enough political or ideological will to make such condemnation even a majority, much less universal.

The AI slop article in question is describing real events. For Silver, there simply was no need to go digging for a better source for something he had already heard about when he was just posting on X.

it would take literally 5 seconds to plug in the headline to Google and get a real article. Here's one right here: https://archive.is/KduY8

OK, but who gives a shit? Would it change his point? Was the article he linked fundamentally false?

Was the article he linked fundamentally false?

Yes, see my edited OP

I'd let the fedposting crack go as I read it as (mostly) sardonic (not that I doubt you really would like to "fedpost" certain people), but your edit:

Since you idiots are out here defending the slop, these quotes are hallucinations:

is too antagonistic.

Even if you're right about the hallucinations, this isn't how you argue back.

sorry :(

For what it's worth, I thought phrasing was slightly rude but not out of bounds, hence I went with a confrontational "You know full well", but reflecting on it you probably were focusing on the growing slop issue- between your post, the replies and the edit timing it really does look like people talking past each other. Sorry for adding heat when none was necessary.

Tim Walz says his thing, talking heads start new round of talking shit about him, Nate Silver links slop including fake stuff, online people continue shit talking Walz online, you post here that Silver linked slop but people on this forum were ready to criticize Walz here and there wasn't another top level comment for it, you angrily edit that they're ignoring that Silver linked slop which was your point, but mottizens really want to criticize the real things Walz has said and done (or been chosen for).

exactly :)

For what it's worth, I thought phrasing was slightly rude but not out of bounds

Slightly rude is out of bounds. Not excessively so, but calling people idiots is usually going to get modded.

"You idiots are defending the slop" managed to neatly derail the discussion onto "is this genuine AI fakery or are detection tools 100% reliable?" track away from "reputable source quotes fake info and doesn't seem to realise it's fake" which they wanted discussed.

Maybe next time don't do that?

No I wanted to discuss slop. And I think after I pointed it out explicitly most people would now admit it is 100% certain slop.

Though the fact that we didn't have full agreement from the start is incredibly depressing.

Are normies, even somewhat intelligent ones, incapable of distinguishing the most obvious stinky smelly chatgpt output?

Alternative phrasing: are normie journalists, even somewhat intelligent ones, incapable of putting out articles better than even the most stinky smelly chatgpt output?

I mean, why is this a surprise development? Oh, the article has a bunch of made-up garbage, you mean unlike all the rest of journalism where everything is true and the media never truly lies?

Why should I give a shit if a journo "hand authors" his latest piece of crap or just pushes a prompt at an LLM? Text generation is their speciality, and at this point I'd be stunned if most of them weren't 90th percentile in general writing quality in comparison to humans. How many journalists do you even know of for their writing quality? Hunter S Thompson and ?? Hell, just prompt the LLM in the right way and I bet you could get to 99th percentile no problem.

Do you even have an argument here beyond just the words "aislop"? Can you articulate a point that taboos the phrase slop and similar terms?

the rest of journalism where everything is true and the media never truly lies?

Journalists, even partisan hacks, almost never lie. They produce propaganda through omission, and when they need to spread falsehoods, they will always hedge it though "anonymous sources." It's actually quite nice that they will explicitly tell you when you're about to read something made up.

How many journalists do you even know of for their writing quality?

As much as I hate journalists, they are quite good at writing. Some no-name journalist at AP has gone to school for writing and honed his craft for years. His writing is almost certainly in the top 99th percentile of writing skills, and certainly far better than yours or mine.

To repeat my previous comment:

Your opinion of journalists is too low. Journalists are rabid partisans, but they're generally not very stupid. But they pretend to be stupid quite often in order to serve their side.

Hell, just prompt the LLM in the right way and I bet you could get to 99th percentile no problem.

Absolutely fucking impossible. Just try and give me a single example of LLM output that's remotely comparable to quality human work.

Just try and give me a single example of LLM output that's remotely comparable to quality human work.

I just fed it a video transcript of a recent press conference by the new Canadian PM, and got this article.

I'm not going to get into percentiles, but I would say it's fine - comparable to human work for an easy quotes-and-summary article, and free of annoying media clickbait traps like making half the article about Trump.

Canada’s new prime minister, Mark Carney,

ChatGPT fucked up halfway through the first sentence. Mark Carney has been PM for almost 2 months now. Almost as long as Trump has been president, and it would be unthinkable to refer to Trump as "America's new president"

This is the problem with your slop. Not even an ounce of sense or awareness.

If we were to actually delve into the contents being created by humans, you would quickly realize that nobody is just writing a bland and direct summary of the speech. Take a look at this article: https://archive.is/fGkt2 It adds a lot of important context and explains what is going on, rather than dryly summarizing what was said int he speech.

Did you notice that I described Carney that way in my post? That's also what I said in my introduction of the video transcript to the LLM (not included with the pastebin), so the fault is mine, though I don't even admit it's false. Two months is a short enough time to be PM that I think most people would still describe him as "new", especially since the time was almost entirely spent campaigning.

I agree! No one is writing a bland and direct summary. That's a problem! I have such a hard time getting that anywhere. Journalists invariably give too much "important context", while excising things they deem "not important", and that's largely where the bias creeps in.

Worth noting that the article you linked is much longer (I specifically asked for short), and includes additional Q&A not included with the video I gave it. I'm confident if I could find the full video + Q&A, and altered my prompt to ask it to give context on important recent events, and gave it a word count, it would deliver something equal to the Guardian piece there.

Worth noting that the article you linked is much longer

Yours: 499 words Guardian: 702 words

So yours is 30% shorter, which is a decent difference but not really huge. The AI piece just seems short because it's so much lacking in actual content and is mostly filler.

it would deliver something equal to the Guardian piece there.

No it can't

ChatGPT fucked up halfway through the first sentence. Mark Carney has been PM for almost 2 months now. Almost as long as Trump has been president, and it would be unthinkable to refer to Trump as "America's new president"

That is the nittiest of picks. Everybody knows who Trump is, you don't need to tell us he's the new president. You do need to tell us who Mark Carney is, because most people are going to go "Who the hell is Mark Carney?" and "Canada had an election?"

It still feels to me that Canada is only going to have its election, particularly as Carney became prime minister before the federal election was called, and that was only back in March (I'm still on the "wait, what do you mean April is over now?" calendar, my biorhythms seem to be really out of sync these days).

Carney became PM on 14th March, the federal election was held 28th April, today is 3rd May. That's not really feeling like "two months" to me yet.

ChatGPT fucked up halfway through the first sentence. Mark Carney has been PM for almost 2 months now. Almost as long as Trump has been president, and it would be unthinkable to refer to Trump as "America's new president"

This is the problem with your slop. Not even an ounce of sense or awareness.

Referring to a guy who took office less than two months ago as new isn't much of an own, it just looks like you're reaching here. AI could replace pretty much all of written journalism and as long as there were a couple guys left to filter out hallucinations I don't think many people would particularly notice.

If you're replacing a guy who has been ten years in the job, you'll still be known as "this is our new whosis" even after a year, much less two months.

His writing is almost certainly in the top 99th percentile of writing skills, and certainly far better than yours or mine.

Have you ever actually worked with journalists as a collective, not just a few people? I know someone in regular contact with the media. Many journalists are fools who can't even ask a clear question! They often don't understand what you're saying and introduce errors if you make any kind of complex point. Not to mention all the sloppy typos that go to press. What they're really good at is taking down talking points from corporations or media manipulators and regurgitating it as legitimate news.

First-rate LLMs are easily on par with the average journalist and that's extending every generosity to the humans.

Not to mention all the sloppy typos that go to press

Show me one.

Many journalists are fools who can't even ask a clear question!

They are pretending to be stupid in order to push their talking points, not yours. Your comment is only needed as a formality. When your quote is taken out of context, it's completely intentional, but at least they won't make one up.

First-rate LLMs are easily on par with the average journalist and that's extending every generosity to the humans.

Not even close. If you think so, then show me an LLM writing better than a generic whatever-tier human news article.

Show me one.

Here are some: https://www.rd.com/article/hilarious-newspaper-typos/

And here are a bunch of people seeing them, it's not just me: https://www.quora.com/Am-I-mistaken-or-are-there-more-typos-in-reputable-news-articles-each-year

I see them all the time in Australian national papers but none today.

They are pretending to be stupid in order to push their talking points, not yours.

Not everything is politics or worth lying about. Sometimes it's just a complex matter of fact and they're unable to grasp it. Or they don't understand a word like 'bifurcate', don't know what it means.

If you think so, then show me an LLM writing better than a generic whatever-tier human news article.

Now I'm going to copy out elements of an article in The Australian from not merely a journalist but a former Departmental Secretary, a high ranking government official. This guy should be very good! Here is the extract:

Enhance surveillance

First, we must enhance the continuous wide-area surveillance of our area of direct military interest. We must be able to pinpoint the precise locations and track the movement of Chinese (and Russian) ships, submarines and aircraft of interest as far from Australia as possible. This will require the more intensive use and meshing together of the sensor feeds from national intelligence systems, space-based sensors, the Jindalee radar network, P-8 Poseidon maritime surveillance aircraft, MQ-4C Triton surveillance drones, E-7 Wedgetail airborne early warning and control aircraft, undersea sensors and other assets.

A fused situational picture of key Chinese and Russian movements in our area of direct military interest should be developed and shared in real time with US Indo-Pacific Command in Hawaii in exchange for its fused picture of the same. This will require more resources to support 24/7 operations in the Australian Defence Force and the relevant intelligence agencies. Wide-area surveillance of our area of direct military interest cannot be a “business hours” activity.

Operational readiness

Second, we must enhance ADF operational readiness, which means having more forces standing ready to undertake quick alert missions, such as air interceptions and maritime surveillance flights.

This will cost money and drain crews as they will fatigue more rapidly when kept at higher states of readiness. More assertive rules of engagement should be authorised by the Defence Minister to allow for the close shadowing of Chinese and Russian units in our area of direct military interest. This would be done in a safe and professional manner, as it is being done nearly every other day by our allies and partners who are being probed regularly at sea and in the air.

The ADF’s Joint Operations Command should be reconfigured along the lines of the original vision of defence force chief General John Baker, who in 1996 established the Australian Theatre Command, or COMAUST. Baker’s logic was that the ADF should be postured, and commanded, principally to conduct operations in Australia’s area of direct military interest. While operations farther afield would be undertaken from time to time, they should not be the main focus of the ADF. After 9/11, the ADF adopted a globalist orientation. Mastery of the area of direct military interest started to fall away.

It is time for the ADF to focus zealously once again on the defence of Australia’s area of direct military interest, and our national military command arrangements and systems should reflect this.

Longer-range anti-surface warfare capabilities

Third, we must urgently acquire longer-range anti-surface warfare capabilities. A radical suggestion would be to acquire rapidly six to 10 US Air Force B-1B Lancer bombers, which have been configured in recent years for anti-ship strike missions. These bombers are now able to carry 36 Long Range Anti-Ship Missiles (24 internally in bomb bays and 12 externally), which is a fearsome anti-surface capability. While the RAAF already is acquiring the LRASM weapon for use by its F/A-18F Super Hornets, having a platform in the order of battle with the range and payload capacity of the B-1B Lancer would severely impair PLA options for mounting surface action missions against Australia.

Longer-range air superiority capability

Fourth, we must urgently acquire a longer-range air superiority capability to deal with the threat of stand-off attacks by PLA Air Force H-6 bombers operating north of Indonesia. Again, a radical suggestion would be to acquire rapidly the air-to-air version of the SM-6 missile, to equip the RAAF’s F/A-18F Super Hornet fighters. Facing such fighters, especially if they were operating forward of the barrier, would make PLA planners think twice about mounting long-range bomber missions against Australia.

Remediate naval warfare capability

Fifth, we urgently need to remediate our naval warfare capability, to ensure that our battle fleet of six Collins-class submarines and 10 major surface combatants (the Hobart and Anzac classes) are fully crewed and ready for action.

This will require crewing, training, inventory and maintenance issues to be addressed. The RAN’s replenishment tankers need to be fixed and returned to the fleet as soon as possible. Across time, the RAN battle fleet will need to grow in size, given the rapid growth in the PLA Navy’s battle fleet.

Ideally, we should be aiming across the longer term for a battle fleet of 12 submarines, 20 major surface combatants and 20 smaller offshore combatants, the last of which could be used as missile corvettes and naval mine warfare vessels. To further enhance the RAN’s battle fleet, large landing helicopter dock vessels should be re-purposed as sea control carriers, with embarked anti-submarine and airborne early warning helicopters, and long-range naval drones.

Ensure RAAF is battle ready

Sixth, we need to ensure that the RAAF is battle ready, with its squadrons fully crewed and its air bases well protected and fully functional. It is relatively easier to expand an air force, as compared with a navy, given the vagaries of naval shipbuilding. The RAAF is therefore the better bet in terms of a rapid expansion that could be achieved soonest.

More F-35 Lightning II fighters should be acquired, along with the B-1B Lancers mentioned already. The latter could serve as an interim bomber, pending reconsideration of the acquisition of the B-21 Raider strategic bomber. Crewing ratios should be increased quickly, such that the RAAF has more crews than platforms, which could then be flown more intensively. The extraordinarily rapid expansion of the RAAF’s aircrew training pipeline in World War II should be its guiding vision.

Maritime warfare readiness

Seventh, the army should continue to develop its increasingly impressive maritime warfare capabilities and readiness. Consideration should be given to the rapid acquisition of the ground-based Typhon missile system, which would give the army a long-range anti-ship and land strike capability. As we barricade the sea-air approaches to Australia, we will have to be vigilant in relation to stealthy commando raids and sabotage operations. The army will need to be postured to deal with such attacks.

Address capability gaps

Eighth, we need to remediate a number of other capability gaps where we have no or virtually no capability. Of particular concern is integrated air and missile defence. We will need to acquire some combination of Terminal High Altitude Area Defence and Patriot interceptors on land, and SM-3 interceptors at sea. Naval mine warfare capability also needs to be addressed.

There are likely to be other gaps that would impair our ability to execute the strategy. Given the urgency of the situation, rapidly acquired interim solutions will have to suffice to fill many of these gaps. Such interim solutions can be refined and built on. That is the lesson of the Russo-Ukrainian war.

Negotiate PNG alliance

Ninth, a military alliance should be negotiated with Papua New Guinea to provide for the establishment of ADF bases in locations such as Manus, Rabaul and Lae to support the conduct of maritime surveillance, anti-surface, anti-submarine, and air superiority missions. For instance, a forward-deployed composite RAAF wing, consisting of F-35A Lightning II fighters, B-1B Lancers armed with LRASM, F/A-18F Super Hornets armed with SM-6 missiles, and P-8 Poseidon aircraft could operate from the Bismarck to the Celebes seas and beyond with the aim of denying access into our northern sea-air approaches. A similar alliance should be negotiated with The Philippines. This would extend our coverage north of the barrier into the South China Sea.

We need to better appreciate the significance of PNG and The Philippines as Pacific watchtowers of the sea-air approaches to Australia. Our Indian Ocean territories are our western watchtowers.

Develop war book

Tenth, we should urgently reinstate the practice of developing a war book that would deal with civil defence, national cyber defence, the protection of critical infrastructure and the general protection, and sustainment of the population during times of war.

While the likelihood of war in the foreseeable future is low, perhaps 10 to 20 per cent, it is enough to warrant action. This will cost money and divert resources from more agreeable activities. That is the nature of war, which drains societies even when it does not occur. Against this must be weighed the costs of being unprepared.

While this worsening strategic environment is very confronting, there is an even darker scenario. Imagine if we had to face a coercive, belligerent, and unchecked China on our own. That would require a very different military strategy and a significantly larger ADF.

That is a grim story for another day – and one that may require us to pursue our own Manhattan Project. In that world, we would look fondly on this relatively benign age.

Now here's the AI response I got with regard to the same essay, I asked it for criticism and its own proposal, with my own commentary in bold:

A Critical Analysis of Australia's Proposed Defense Strategy

The proposed alterations to Australian defense planning outline a comprehensive vision for military restructuring in response to regional threats, particularly from China. However, closer examination reveals significant practical challenges and conceptual gaps that could undermine implementation. Cringe, it doesn't need a topic statement like a university essay

Strategic Coherence vs. Practical Constraints

The recommendations build on the sensible premise of enhancing surveillance and operational readiness in Australia's immediate region. Developing a fused situational picture shared with US Indo-Pacific Command represents sound alliance management. However, this proposal glosses over the substantial personnel requirements for 24/7 operations across defense and intelligence agencies. Australia already faces defense recruitment and retention challenges, with the ADF consistently struggling to meet personnel targets. Increasing operational tempo would exacerbate crew fatigue without addressing the underlying personnel shortages. Quite right, where is the manpower coming from for this?

The proposed focus on Australia's area of direct military interest through reconfiguring Joint Operations Command reflects strategic clarity, yet organizational transformation during heightened tensions carries significant risks. Historical reorganizations, like Baker's Australian Theatre Command, often face bureaucratic resistance and implementation delays that could leave capability gaps during a critical transition period.

Capability Acquisition: Ambition vs. Reality

The article's more radical proposals expose a disconnect between strategic ambition and practical constraints. Acquiring 6-10 B-1B Lancer bombers appears compelling on paper, providing impressive anti-ship strike capability. Yet this recommendation fails to acknowledge that B-1Bs are aging platforms with declining availability in US inventories. The maintenance requirements would be substantial, and Australia lacks existing infrastructure to support heavy bombers. Pilot training pipelines would take years to develop, meaning these assets would not be operational in the short-term timeframe suggested. Nailed the key point I was hoping it'd find, buying ancient B-1 bombers is absolutely retarded, this is the drone age not the 1980s. IMO this alone puts it ahead of our self-styled military commentator in intellectual sophistication

Similarly, the naval expansion goals—growing to 12 submarines, 20 major surface combatants, and 20 smaller vessels—represent extraordinary growth beyond Australia's current shipbuilding and maintenance capacity. Australian shipyards are already struggling with existing programs like the Hunter-class frigates. This expansion would require massive industrial investment not addressed in the proposal. Moreover, the suggestion to repurpose Landing Helicopter Docks as sea control carriers overlooks their primary value as amphibious assets in a region where amphibious capability remains strategically vital. Quite right, our shipbuilding capacity is awful

Economic and Fiscal Realities

The proposals conspicuously avoid discussing costs. Implementing even half these recommendations would require defense spending well beyond Australia's current 2% of GDP. Rapid acquisition of advanced missile systems, THAAD, Patriot batteries, and SM-3 interceptors represents tens of billions in unbudgeted expenditure. The article acknowledges these measures "will cost money and divert resources from more agreeable activities" but fails to provide any framework for prioritization or cost-benefit analysis.

This fiscal blindspot undermines the strategy's credibility. Defense planners must make hard choices, yet the article presents a wishlist without acknowledging tradeoffs. A more nuanced approach would identify which capabilities deliver the most deterrent effect per dollar invested, particularly given Australia's smaller economy relative to potential adversaries. Also true, given how anemic Australian military spending is there's no point in making a huge wishlist, it needs to be sorted by priority.

Regional Politics and Forward Positioning

The proposal for military alliances with Papua New Guinea and the Philippines demonstrates strategic imagination but underestimates complex regional politics. PNG maintains significant economic ties with China, with Chinese companies heavily invested in resource extraction and infrastructure projects. The proposal ignores how these economic relationships could complicate security arrangements.

Forward basing Australian forces in PNG would require substantial infrastructure investment in relatively underdeveloped regions. Environmental impacts and relations with local communities present additional challenges not addressed in the proposal. Forward deployment also creates vulnerabilities—assets based closer to potential adversaries become targets themselves, requiring additional defensive capabilities not accounted for in the proposal.

Unaddressed Domains: Cyber, Space, and Information

The most glaring omission is the limited attention to cyber capabilities, space assets, and information operations. Modern military effectiveness depends increasingly on these domains, yet they receive passing mention at best. The proposal focuses heavily on kinetic capabilities while undervaluing the critical enabling functions of secure communications, positioning systems, and intelligence networks.

Australia's dependence on space-based systems for the proposed surveillance network creates vulnerabilities that determined adversaries would target early in any conflict. A more robust strategy would incorporate redundancy, resilience, and active defenses for these critical systems. Absolutely right, even if we did get the B1s how are we going to get them into the action without good targeting data from satellites?

The Nuclear Question

Perhaps most provocatively, the article concludes by alluding to "our own Manhattan Project" for a scenario where Australia faces China alone. This veiled reference to developing nuclear weapons raises profound questions left entirely unaddressed. Australia's longstanding commitment to non-proliferation, uranium export controls, and alliance with nuclear-armed nations would all be compromised by such a path. The international repercussions would be immense, potentially undermining the very security such weapons supposedly provide. OK, this is blather, we get it, Claude is leftwing. Also I don't see how it would inherently harm our relations with the US if we acquired nuclear weapons, though Claude may well be drawing from the history where the US talked us into joining the NPT and scuppering our nuclear program

A More Balanced Approach

A more realistic strategy would prioritize capabilities that leverage Australia's geographical advantages and alliance relationships without overextending resources. Focusing on undersea warfare, advanced sensors, unmanned systems, and cyber capabilities would provide greater deterrent effect than trying to match adversaries across all domains.

Australia should invest more in sovereign capabilities that reduce dependency on extended supply chains vulnerable to disruption. Developing domestic missile production, enhanced fuel security, and critical technology sectors would strengthen resilience while supporting the defense industrial base.

The future Australian Defense Force needs to be not just larger but smarter—emphasizing quality over quantity, asymmetric advantages over symmetrical competition, and sustainability over surge capacity. Rather than attempting to bar the sea-air approaches to Australia completely, a more nuanced strategy would focus on making adversary operations prohibitively costly through layered defensive capabilities and strategic uncertainty. boilerplate but not wrong

A truly comprehensive approach would also incorporate non-military elements of national power. Economic relationships, diplomatic initiatives, international law, and regional institutions all contribute to Australia's security. Military capabilities remain essential, but they function most effectively as part of a broader national strategy that maximizes all instruments of influence. Lmao at 'regional institutions' and 'international law' beating China, though you can interpret this as code for out-bribing China in the tiny Pacific countries while keeping the holier than thou attitude.

The proposals offer valuable ideas worth consideration, but implementation would require careful phasing, priority-setting, and recognition of practical constraints that the current analysis largely overlooks.

On balance I think Claude makes better points and presents a boring but more reasonable plan for Australia. It's unrealistic to go 'spend infinity dollars and buy everything we need plus more we don't' and 'ramp up everything to maximum'.

I really don't want to argue on the merits, but let's just delve into the hallucinations and falsehoods:

the substantial personnel requirements for 24/7 operations across defense and intelligence agencies.

Is it substantial in terms of manpower? Maybe only a tripwire force will be deployed 24/7

Increasing operational tempo would exacerbate crew fatigue without addressing the underlying personnel shortages.

Crew? These aren't crew.

operational tempo

Wrong use of the wrong term

B-1Bs are aging platforms with declining availability in US inventories.

They are ageing but there are plenty sitting around. The bigger issue which claude failed to catch is that the US won't sell them.

The maintenance requirements would be substantial, and Australia lacks existing infrastructure to support heavy bombers.

Australia already operates heavy airlift, so I see no infrastructure lacking that would be needed to support strategic heavy bombers. The maintenance requirements would of course be as substantial as any other plane.

Pilot training pipelines would take years to develop, meaning these assets would not be operational in the short-term timeframe suggested.

This is used as a gotcha for the b-1 but it applies equally to all new planes. And it wouldn't take years to develop a training program. The human author even hints at that.

buying ancient B-1 bombers is absolutely retarded, this is the drone age not the 1980s. IMO this alone puts it ahead of our self-styled military commentator in intellectual sophistication

Even if you're right, claude's reasoning is wrong.

the naval expansion goals—growing to 12 submarines, 20 major surface combatants, and 20 smaller vessels—represent extraordinary growth beyond Australia's current shipbuilding and maintenance capacity. Australian shipyards are already struggling with existing programs like the Hunter-class frigates.

Bullshit

the suggestion to repurpose Landing Helicopter Docks as sea control carriers overlooks their primary value as amphibious assets

Why does Australia need amphibious assault ships? The human author is proposing a strongly anti-ship defensive posture, and claude spends no time rebutting that.

The proposal for military alliances with Papua New Guinea and the Philippines demonstrates strategic imagination but underestimates complex regional politics

Claude proceeds to never mention the Philippines again.

Australia's dependence on space-based systems for the proposed surveillance network creates vulnerabilities that determined adversaries would target early in any conflict.

The human author mentioned space a single time, as a single component in a fused surveillance system across all domains. So this sentence is just retarded.

a more nuanced strategy would focus on making adversary operations prohibitively costly through layered defensive capabilities and strategic uncertainty.

Retarded when claude just argued against forward positioning bases in png.

Increasing operational tempo would exacerbate crew fatigue without addressing the underlying personnel shortages.

Crew? These aren't crew.

Who do you think mans a P-8 or a frigate spying for Chinese ships? Crew!

operational tempo

Wrong use of the wrong term

No, that's perfectly correct. You're not aware of the proper terminology here. If you spend more time at sea or in the air, operational tempo increases. This is basic stuff.

Is it substantial in terms of manpower? Maybe only a tripwire force will be deployed 24/7

It's not a tripwire force it's talking about here. Again, you do not understand what it's talking about. This is surveillance, not tripwire.

They are ageing but there are plenty sitting around

Production of the B1 finished DECADES ago. They're supposed to be replaced in 2025 by the B-21. Why would we want to be flying an obsolete, incredibly expensive to maintain aircraft with a logistics chain that barely even exists in America? No more can be made, so if we crash one, it's gone forever!

This is used as a gotcha for the b-1 but it applies equally to all new planes.

Heavy bombers are different to fighters or heavy airlift for that matter. Australia already fields fighters but not heavy bombers. These are super complicated and hard to train, it's a highest of the high-end capability that can't just be rushed in a few years. And he wants to base them in Papua New Guinea, a shithole country with no infrastructure.

Bullshit

That's just flatly true, Australian shipbuilding is a joke. Read up on the Hunter class if you like, Claude knows more about it than you.

Why does Australia need amphibious assault ships?

There are islands in the Pacific ocean and it can be helpful if you can land things there - troops, equipment, missiles, supplies. They're not really amphibious assault ships in that any opposition will sink them quickly, they're glorified and overpriced transports. Expecting these things to function like light carriers is very silly. Australia has minimal experience with carrier operations and no carrier-borne aircraft. It's another one of Pezzulo's 'lets just develop yet another high end capability how hard can it be' moments.

Claude proceeds to never mention the Philippines again.

Fair enough, though it's not like the original article explains how we're supposed to get in bed with the Philippines either. 'Just make an alliance' doesn't cut it either.

The human author mentioned space a single time, as a single component in a fused surveillance system across all domains. So this sentence is just retarded.

Claude criticizes it for not talking about space enough. Space is very important as a killchain enabler and for surveillance. That was the whole point which you seem to have missed. See here:

The most glaring omission is the limited attention to cyber capabilities, space assets, and information operations. Modern military effectiveness depends increasingly on these domains, yet they receive passing mention at best.

Claude is not perfect. Sometimes it just produces blather. But it's still considerably better than your own criticisms of it. I rest my case!

Heavy bombers are different to fighters or heavy airlift for that matter. Australia already fields fighters but not heavy bombers. These are super complicated and hard to train, it's a highest of the high-end capability that can't just be rushed in a few years.

Absolutely absurd. A plane is a plane. Or give me a single real reason why not.

You seem to think that real life is like an RTS, where you need to unlock all the tech tree before you can get to heavy bombers as an endgame unit. Well that's not how it works. In fact supporting a fifth generation stealth fighter will require much more specialized infrastructure than an old ass bomber would.

  1. That's an editorial, not a news article. The author is not a journalist. He may be a former government official but he doesn't write articles every day for a living.
  2. You are trying to debunk his opinion, and good for you. But that says nothing about the quality of his writing. Of course many people have different opinions on this issue, and an editorial is specifically about giving one man's personal opinion. It's specifically not supposed to be reporting of the facts.
  3. It's easy to criticize someone else's writing but it's harder to write something of your own that surpasses it.
  4. Claude's response is simply the basest stinkiest ai slop drivel you can find, and it's topped off with the usual ai sycophancy at the end

The proposals offer valuable ideas worth consideration, but implementation would require careful phasing, priority-setting, and recognition of practical constraints that the current analysis largely overlooks.

For typos:

Here are some: https://www.rd.com/article/hilarious-newspaper-typos/

No dates or links to the articles. I'm sure typos happen but these could be decades old for all I know. One of the examples is even a classified ad, and in case you don't know, those are not written by journalists.

quora

Vibes with literally not a single concrete example.

  1. Pezzulo has written dozens of long-form analytical articles for major newspapers. He is BETTER than a regular journalist, he actually achieved an office of mild significance. He does not write about lost dogs in regional papers or the fake tits of celebrity no. 10023 like most of them.

  2. The quality of factual proposals is inseparable from their prudence.

  3. Claude's response surpasses Pezzulo because it's a more realistic strategic plan and because it doesn't make any major blunders.

  4. You clearly have not read many government reports if you think that's drivel. I assure you that people are being well paid to produce this kind of stuff without the ameliorating factors of any good points whatsoever.

literally not a single concrete example

I can't give you a concrete example, only my friend's anecdotal experiences working with journalists and my anecdotal experiences spotting missing words in newspapers. They really aren't that clever and have been getting worse.

Pezzulo has written dozens of long-form analytical articles for major newspapers.

A real journalist writes over a dozen articles every month.

He is BETTER than a regular journalist

At some things not others. Writing is not one of those things.

The quality of factual proposals is inseparable from their prudence.

False. You can actually write a well written and well researched work arguing for both the right side and the wrong side of an argument. Haven't you ever taken English class and not gotten to choose the side of the argument you have to write for? Getting the bad side doesn't mean you throw up your arms and just say that your essay is gonna be bad.

Claude's response surpasses Pezzulo because it's a more realistic strategic plan and because it doesn't make any major blunders.

Nope. That's just, like, your opinion, man.

You clearly have not read many government reports if you think that's drivel.

I am, in fact, autistic enough to read EIRs for fun. And the rote boilerplate in them is more valuable than your claude drivel because it's not pretentious and actually serves a purpose in this world, however stupid that may be.

I can't give you a concrete example

This thing happens so often that I can't provide a single example of it happening.

More comments

Just try and give me a single example of LLM output that's remotely comparable to quality human work.

Hm... this was an attempt, and there's a few minor gaps that I spotted even with my weak knowledge of the field, and the output has demonstratably worked, but it would be interesting to see a skeptical eye analyzing it.

Firstly, this is not really a work of writing but just a bunch of bullet points thrown together. If we're talking about comparing the quality of prose, this isn't the ideal medium.

But let's delve into the slop:

Vinyl adhesive masks

I think you already fucked up. masks are more of a thing for electro etching. Not really the correct concept for ECM, but slopgpt doesn't point it out.

offers a unique approach to material removal.

Nope. This is the oft derided slopgpt sycophanthty. What's unique about it? How is it different from "normal?"

widely available compared to specialized electrolytes, reducing operational costs.

What specialize electrolytes? Is it really widely available? Is chatgpt assuming you can just sprinkle some table salt in the water?

Does it reduce operational costs? Is electrolyte a major operational cost? How much does it cost?

The process mimics basic electroetching or electrolysis,

False. ECM uses electrolysis as a mechanism of action.

4000-series aluminum, which is prone to cracking due to its silicon content.

Jewgle says that 4000 series aluminum is prone to cracking during welding, not during machining.

At <20V, the process operates at a relatively low energy level, potentially limiting excessive or uncontrolled material removal compared to higher voltages.

Voltage isn't the factor that matters when talking about excessive material removal.

4000-series aluminum contains silicon, which is less conductive and reactive than pure aluminum. This can lead to inconsistent dissolution rates, leaving rough or pitted surfaces where silicon particles resist machining.

Sounds wrong. The silicon should be alloyed into the metal at a molecular level, not embedded as silicon grit or whatever.

Salt water is a basic electrolyte and may not provide the uniform current distribution of more optimized solutions (e.g., sodium nitrate)

Very suspect logic.

Salt water (a chloride-based electrolyte) is highly corrosive to aluminum, especially 4000-series alloys

Totally false and retarded.

Since this is a low-voltage, DIY-style setup

Slopgpt just assumed this is a DIY process. What if we're talking about doing a commercial process with this setup?

or add a buffer to stabilize pH.

pH just appeared out of nowhere with no mention of it before at all.

Post-machining, acrylic paint can often be stripped with solvents (e.g., acetone) or mechanical abrasion, which might be simpler than peeling vinyl, especially if the vinyl degrades and leaves adhesive residue.

Sounds wrong

acetone works well but could leave the aluminum surface slightly altered if not rinsed quickly.

I don't believe acetone affects aluminum at all.

math math math

Beyond my ability to evaluate.

output has demonstratably worked

You already knew it would work before asking chatgpt, and knew what you wanted to do. How much value add did asking it actually provide? Did any of the problems that it predicted actually happen?

You already knew it would work before asking chatgpt, and knew what you wanted to do. How much value add did asking it actually provide? Did any of the problems that it predicted actually happen?

The specific series of events here was that I'd had some rough familiarity with ECM in general from the ctrlPew world, saw this video, tried to isolate the rough theory, and was curious whether it was possible to expand to cutting through thin metal with fine detail, asked the LLM those questions, sanity checked the numbers for any massive math or chemistry errors, then asked a chemist I knew regarding safety concerns. I had never tried it before, nor have I found any documentation of this specific approach beyond etching layouts that warned about leaving the process so long that inserts fell out (and shorted). After I ran it, I found a few other similar attempts, albeit still not entirely overlapping.

There were a few things it provided that I didn't think of or read from what I could find. Some of those would have been obvious to a human with machining background -- flow rate of fluid at higher cutting speeds are a common thing with air-blast or coolant flooding in traditional CNC, and the theory behind the pump assist here is related to that -- but others were not. I did not know a Faraday's Law could be applied to this case, and specifically having 'material removal rate' rather than any synonym helped me track it down to confirm rather than get a half-dozen links about inductance.

Conversely, you're right that there are things it definitely neglected to say. Getting any paint or adhesive to stick to nearly any common type of aluminum without a lot of prep and elbow grease is a massive issue that both is a common fault in other environments like aviation or building work, and also ignored by a lot of novices; the transfer paper for getting fine detail vinyl from backing to workpiece was a pain in the dick.

I think you already fucked up. masks are more of a thing for electro etching. Not really the correct concept for ECM, but slopgpt doesn't point it out.

ECM isn't really the right tool at all for this job; it's just a tool I had relatively available, and mask vs paint vs tools specialized for the work piece is part of that. Yes, a process like [PCM](https://youtube.com/watch?v=bR9EN3kUlfg] would near-certainly have better and faster results, especially at scale, but I don't exactly want to be messing with high-pressure ferric chloride, either. The question is whether minimizing surface area and using readily-produced masks could work at all in environments where creating a form or to-purpose tool was not practical (in this case, very bad detail work), for any function at all, rather than whether it was the right way to go about it. That's why it was a process with very little documentation available, and worth asking either an theory-focused expert or doing this sort of search.

There's a fair criticism along it failing to XY problem me, but in this case I was genuinely interested in the method as much as the end result.

What's unique about it? How is it different from "normal?" What specialize electrolytes? Is it really widely available? Is chatgpt assuming you can just sprinkle some table salt in the water? Does it reduce operational costs? Is electrolyte a major operational cost? How much does it cost?

Commercial ECM dielectric tends to be pretty pricey anywhere I could find willing to ship to a residential area, and worse, only available in fairly large quantities that vastly exceed my use case. It makes sense for commercial ECM machinery, since it can be filtered and reused and you need volume but don't replace it much, but a lot of what the literature points at it performing better at wasn't practical for small-scale operations without specialized tools. I haven't been able to find what typical costs for conventional ECM were, but for my use case it would have vastly exceeding the rest of the costs by an order of magnitude (which was a Harbor Freight pump, paint and vinyl, a few drop shipment blanks, and an old power supply that had been on the bench for a while), and probably cost more than getting it made by a local CNC mill company. Mixing my own to replicate commercial electrolytic might have been possible at a reasonable cost (literature suggests sodium hydroxide and sodium nitrate or potassium nitrate with a bunch of additives?), but in turn would probably have gotten me put on a list.

Table salt worked, though I did measure by mass, mixed for a long period under mild heat, and passed through a coffee paper filter to exclude large granules, and the LLM did not mention that. Dunno if it was necessary. I've also seen ethanol or polyethylene glycol recommended as additives (presumably by humans).

says that 4000 series aluminum is prone to cracking during welding, not during machining.

It probably depends on the specific material, but 4032 is pretty famously hard to machine, and it was the material I used here (no, I have no idea what thin plate 4032 was doing in a drop shipment). I'd tried high speed milling this stuff previously, but even with an 0-flute and tiny depth of cut it was extremely prone to gumming up the cutter in mere inches, and even when dialed in would split and crack at corners, especially sharp inside angles.

Voltage isn't the factor that matters when talking about excessive material removal.

I tried 12, 24, and 72 volt, and localized buildup was much worse at higher voltage. Voltage may not control removal, but it did seem to control how quickly material to remove popped up.

The silicon should be alloyed into the metal at a molecular level, not embedded as silicon grit or whatever.

I don't have the tools to analyze this one, but finish was Not Great Bob in 4032 or 4045, especially on large flat plates, and whatever it was that did precipitate was much harder and less prone to clearing without blasting the area with fluid than with 6061.

Totally false and retarded.

Yeah, that's one of the more serious errors; 4000-series might not be the most corrosion-resistant aluminum alloy, but the 5% or higher-silicon ones are pretty high up there.

Slopgpt just assumed this is a DIY process. What if we're talking about doing a commercial process with this setup?

I think that the correct answer would to question wtf we were doing. There are few, if any, arguments for running this approach at scale or commercially.

pH just appeared out of nowhere with no mention of it before at all.

At least some of the literature (eg here) suggests controlling pH and especially localized pH weirdness is a valuable thing for the normal ECM processes. Didn't seem to matter here, and it definitely isn't clear about why, so point.

Sounds wrong

The acrylic paint and acetone, or the vinyl pull? Unless it's had a couple weeks to cure acetone sloughed the paint right off. Vinyl was messier, with large surfaces of the cricut material falling off and tiny ones turning into a million flakes.

I don't believe acetone affects aluminum at all.

There are some alloys that you don't want to mix, with 2000-series being the worst, but yeah, 4000-series usually won't care. I did actually have problems with nail polish remover causing a gray mottled texture, but I think that was just contamination and it buffed out.

ECM isn't really the right tool at all for this job;

What I mean to say is that you aren't even doing "ECM" at all. You are doing electro-etching. Kind of nitpicking on the terms here but disappointing that it wasn't pointed out.

extremely prone to gumming up the cutter in mere inches,

I think that would usually be an issue with the speeds and feeds. One thing with aluminum is that you are actually punished if your feed rate is too low. But I'm not a machinist so maybe that's not it.

Anyways chatgpt is a useful tool for vibing with, but the output result definitely isn't publication quality.

They produce propaganda through omission

the other major option to produce propaganda is not omission but by putting 2 things close together

Ex

"Bryan said he likes the idea of effective altrusim, effective altruism is a philosophy published by william macaskill who likes ice cream"

Guilt by fake association, Bryan doesn't necessarily like ice cream but the reporter is making you think he is.

(I choose a contrived example because real examples while plentiful are often more.... frustrating to read)

As much as I hate journalists, they are quite good at writing. Some no-name journalist at AP has gone to school for writing and honed his craft for years. His writing is almost certainly in the top 99th percentile of writing skills, and certainly far better than yours or mine.

This is an absurd claim. We have to remember that at this point journalism has been a dying industry for decades. The aspiring novelist working on their book away from their day job at the paper is a relic of 50 years ago. Good and great writers nowadays will go to so many other places before they go to a paper.

There are only a tiny number of prestigious bylines at top newspapers. When was the last time you read a generic article at, say, some mid-tier US city paper? There are still plenty of positions rehashing whatever comes through from AP or Reuters, or working in industry publications or niche hobby stuff. And these are never noted for quality.

And even amongst good journalists, writing is not often a big selling point. How many people read Matt Yglesias for his quality prose compared to just finding his ideas interesting? Good investigative journalism can be performed independently of good writing.

Good and great writers nowadays will go to so many other places before they go to a paper.

Where?

Substack?

PR and advertising are the obvious ones.

When was the last time you read a generic article at, say, some mid-tier US city paper?

Ok, pick a generic article that rehashes an AP article. Then have ChatGPT (or an AI of your choice) rehash it better.

But actually local rehashes are a dying thing, because most local papers just directly syndicate articles for US and world news, and only write local ones nowadays.

Two thoughts: One, the quotes on which the article is based are real, however. While I obviously have a dim view about AI-only articles, it's not like the opinion on which it is based is wholly fabricated. There's even a link to the original plagiarized tweet that served as the seed. So while the specific words might be AI-generated, the opinions and facts behind them still strike me as fairly representative. In that regard it's totally fine to engage with the post, and it isn't all that different than a human's post (other than the AI is probably a little less careful with their specific phrasing... but an unskilled human writer might make similar mistakes).

Two, my impression is Silver, who has been on a few-month-long tear recently on Twitter, is just doing regular engagement-bait confirmation bias stuff. Rather than say "he's been captured" I would say let's look at the more likely reason - it's an emotional, not intellectual, reaction. He's frustrated about Democrats and their nonsensical, misguided strategies in the last few years. Many agree with him. Of course, these posts happen more frequently when you get twitter-brain. Even data scientists are emotionally vulnerable to human network effects, where our brains are incapable of realizing twitter has enormous selection bias. Nope, our brains don't care, they find it very hard to correct for the bias. Much like how your sense of humor is developed by the people around you and their reactions. Is that population-representative? Often, no. But the brain doesn't care because the brain (often rightfully) assumes you care more about the opinions of those immediately surrounding you then the larger population. It's just that adjacent people have been hijacked and replaced with twitterati.

So, the good news is that I believe pretty strongly that if you remove twitter, you remove the problem and things can revert. The other good news is that this isn't actually all that abnormal. If you treat twitter-Silver like a woman who doesn't want her problem solved, but rather just wants some listening and sympathy (I mean that in the most charitable way), you see this is fine and just regular human things. While some good actual-ideas discussion happens on twitter, it's rare and tends to get overshadowed.

One, the quotes on which the article is based are real, however.

Nope, the quotes are fake. See my edited OP.

I probably wouldn't have guessed that this article was almost purely generated by AI if I hadn't been primed on it beforehand. Looking at it with that priming, I'm still not convinced that it was a pure copy-paste GPT job, though certainly it's filled with phrasing that, having been primed, strike me as being from an LLM, such as "While some applauded the self-deprecating humor, others criticized the segment for reinforcing cultural stereotypes" or "As speculation mounts over the 2028 Democratic field, Walz offers a glimpse into his political philosophy for the years ahead." Is there any direct evidence of it being LLM-generated?

But more to the point, I don't see why most people would care if this was purely AI generated, other than perhaps this author Quincy Thomas's employers and his competitors in the journalism industry. Particularly for what seems to be intended to be a pretty dry news article presenting a bunch of facts about what some politicians said. This isn't some personal essay or a long-form investigative report or fiction (even in those, I wouldn't care if those were purely LLM-generated as long as they got the job done, but I can see a stronger case for why that would matter for those). This kind of article seems exactly like the kind of thing that we'd want LLMs to replace, and I'd just hope that we could get enough of a handle on hallucinations such that we wouldn't even need a human like Quincy Thomas to verify that the quotes and description of events actually matched up to reality before hitting "publish."

Once some fairly reputable news outlet gets sued for defamation for publishing some hallucination that was purely LLM generated and failing to catch it with whatever safeguards that are in place, that's something I'd be interested to see how it plays out. At the rate things are going, I wouldn't be surprised if that happened in the next 5 years.

I don't see why most people would care if this was purely AI generated

Because it's blatantly false garbage.

a human like Quincy Thomas

Quincy Thomas is not a human. It's obviously a fake name for some third world scam grifter who is shoveling this garbage

From a cursory search through the auto-generated transcript, it does seem to me like that that quote was made up. That does seem worth caring about. It's too bad that it's not defamatory, since it probably won't trigger some lawsuit or other major controversy, but perhaps a controversy could be created if someone decided to publicize this.

Seems like Yahoo's fact checking/editing department isn't built to handle its writers using LLMs. I still don't see why I would care about LLM usage if a journalism outlet had the proper controls for factual information. The problem isn't that it's AI generated, it's that it's false.

Seems like Yahoo's fact checking/editing department

I'm pretty sure that's not a thing -- it says at the bottom that the 'article' is reposted directly from "WhereIsTheBuzz.com" -- which looks about like what you'd expect. Highly unlikely that Yahoo is fact-checking anything; their role as a slop aggregator could use some more scrutiny I guess, but this article doesn't seem much different than their standard run of human slop to me.

You know full well that the reaction is to the snippet of his remarks "code talk to white guys" and that was entirely real. Shame Nate Silver spread slop, I respect him a bit less for this, but people are getting older and more careless and AI more convincing. Let's wait until tomorrow for him to correct or retract the slop link. Having never read Yahoo Entertainment I have no idea if it's all slop or was semi-legitimate entertainment journalism at some point but I'm going to be extremely skeptical if I see it again.

So again the AI put totally false words into somebody's mouth and you apologists are defending it.

Are the hallucinated parts actually making a big stir somewhere? They aren't in a cursory glance in the replies to Silver.

Having never read Yahoo Entertainment I have no idea if it's all slop or was semi-legitimate entertainment journalism at some point but I'm going to be extremely skeptical if I see it again.

Yahoo aggregates articles from other sites, with the source displayed in the top left corner. This one is from "Where is the Buzz".

these quotes are hallucinations

Huh. I wasn't particularly following the Silver piece, just mostly skimmed it. I have no familiarity with the Walz speech and frankly don't care enough about him to dig out the original video to listen to it.

You tell me these are AI hallucinations and not genuine Walz quotes, I'll take it on trust. But they read enough like something Walz would say that the average person (like myself) who isn't particularly concerned one way or the other would just accept 'yeah, he said that'.

I suppose that is now the AI propaganda danger - able to fake convincing general 'politician speak' well enough so that the casual reader who isn't paying much attention because they don't particularly care about "guy makes speech someplace to somebody about something" gets fooled.

So again the AI put totally false words into somebody's mouth and you apologists are defending it.

It’s not our fault that AI generated slop-Walz is just as serviceably mediocre as the real thing.

This made me laugh.

If anything, its better! I've never heard Walz be this willing to tell it straight.

Are normies, even somewhat intelligent ones, incapable of distinguishing the most obvious stinky smelly chatgpt output?

Claude Sonnet 3.6 outright changes their minds if well-prompted. The cat is out of the bag, the genie has left the bottle.

https://axisofordinary.substack.com/p/links-for-2025-04-30 - scroll down to the images

notably all our treatments surpass human performance substantially, achieving persuasive rates between 3 and 6 times higher

I wonder if ai is so persuasive because it's so sociopathic. It's willing to bend its own argument into whatever direction seems most fruitful. But most human arguers are limited by their own beliefs and principles. Though there are some deranged sociopaths out there who are capable of saying anything to win an argument.

You don't have to be a deranged sociopath to be willing to say anything to win an argument. Most normal people who go into debating clubs etc learn this.

Claude Sonnet 3.6 outright changes their minds if well-prompted

Of redditors? I can believe it, never have I seen a more thoroughly shilled to and easily lead astray group of people.

I think covid proved that the majority of humans are in fact very easy to persuade. You don't even need to present any particularly persuasive arguments, you just need to be able to credibly present your position as the social consensus. So it's not just a "redditor" thing.

I don't think COVID stuff can really be used as proof of general human gullibility. "You should deal with COVID a certain way Or We'll All Die" has built-in life-or-death stakes, ie a much greater emotional valence than the average sweeping claim. There might even be specific drives about falling in line with herd behavior if there's a plague going around, if you want to get all evo-psych. To see how much weight the social consensus itself possesses, you would really want to look at something neutral, abstract, with no effects on people's everyday lives. A pure article of faith, divorced from any call to action or doomsaying.

"I am the only guy who can deal with Trump", confidently stated, just swung the Canadian election -- so I don't think it's necessarily plague related.

A pure article of faith, divorced from any call to action or doomsaying.

Isn't this just a fad? Fads are a thing.

No, because the average fad isn't really making a factual claim. Someone who adopts the latest fashion trend isn't really believing anything that objective reasoning would show to be untrue.

"I am the only guy who can deal with Trump", confidently stated, just swung the Canadian election

Was the real message "I am the only guy who can deal with Trump" or was it more like "I am the only guy who can be trusted to want to deal with Trump"? I don't think Canadians thought Poilievre was weak and shit - I think they thought he was fundamentally sympathetic to someone who had suddenly become the enemy.

The Canadians in industrial/resource/economically productive areas voted nearly unanimously for the Cons (look at the map).

Those in areas not so blessed (Quebec, Atl. Canada, Ottawa), or those in service economy areas (Toronto, Vancouver) voted for the Libs.

The people who are actually going to be affected by a hostile stance very clearly don’t want “maximum reeeee about Trump” as Canadian foreign policy but, because they’re a numerical minority, what they want doesn’t matter. [Which is why the West is starting to think it should move on from “ballot box”.]

Maybe, I don't really know -- but that just kicks the cat down the road in that the only evidence for that is "Mark Carney says so"; Poillievre was talking just as tough as anybody else on Trump.

"You should deal with COVID a certain way Or We'll All Die" has built-in life-or-death stakes,

The problem is that it is not true. Covid wasn't ”we'll all die”, it was just framed that way.

Building in stakes for the sake of urgency and invoking emotional rather than deliberate reasoning is a cornerstone of many fraud and propaganda techniques, i.e. human gullibility exploits.

Yes, but the necessity of such techniques paints a different picture from the idea that humans are gullible in the sense of automatically going along with any social consensus. Buttons other than the sheer instinct to conform need to be pressed.

Gullibility is the tendency to be persuaded, which is method agnostic. If your idea of gullibility is tied to social conformity pressure alone, your concept needs to be expanded.

It's @Primaprimaprima who went from "humans are in fact very easy to persuade" to "you don't even need to present any particularly persuasive arguments, you just need to be able to credibly present your position as the social consensus" at the start of this comment chain. That is the claim I meant to dispute (or rather, the claim which I disputed could be proven by looking at COVID responses).

GPT detectors also agree

All the paper's show they don't work. Because there is just no way to be sure, and 100% sure will especially so. https://x.com/emollick/status/1681481069210501120 https://t.co/2L90UqRnpx

All the commercial services claim theirs don't.

This is pretty confusing for a lot of people, especially teachers.

The paper you linked showed that most of the detectors made no false accusations over the tested cases. Though the researchers were able to fool the detectors by post editing ai content.

So in this case the fact that the article scores 100% ai is actually really suggestive that it is ai.

They aren't always right but they are in this case

I think the problem here is the fake quotes, not the AI itself. There's nothing wrong with a journalist adding some AI filler slop to an article, as long as he takes responsibility for the accuracy of the final product. This incident should significantly lower the credibility of Yahoo News, and they should issue a retraction and fire this reporter.

AI filler slop to an article

Then it would have been better not to include it at all. Maybe some journalists are paid by the word but on the other hand some lamestream media articles are refreshingly short. I picked a random AP article and it's only 4 paragraphs: https://apnews.com/article/alaska-inmate-lawsuit-health-care-6f9314f621d52d92c3ac585889ab0fdc

On most human written articles, everything in the article has a point, even if that point is just propagandizing. You rarely see articles that are just padded with worthless fluff. As a specific example, you can look at one corresponding human article: https://archive.is/KduY8 where pretty much every sentence provides important context to the event being reported.

You rarely see articles that are just padded with worthless fluff.

... this article was in the Entertainment section of Yahoo News. Can you find an example of a Yahoo News Entertainment section article that was published in the past week and was not padded with worthless fluff?

https://www.yahoo.com/news/disgruntled-disney-employee-sentenced-prison-174128065.html

Ok, first paragraph of the article (archive for reference) is

A disgruntled former Walt Disney World employee has been sentenced to three years in prison for hacking the parks' menus and changing them to falsely say foods were safe from certain.

You're right! This author hates fluff so much that they even end their sentences before they.

But also

Scheuer will receive credit for the six months he has already spent in jail. Scheuer's defense attorney David Haas said in a statement that the disgruntled employee is "very remorseful."

"He is very remorseful and apologized to the victims during the hearing," Haas said in a statement. "He is eager to get back home to his wife and 3 young daughters. He was the sole earner in the family as his wife has a number of medical issues and homeschools their children so he will look for work upon his release."

Scheuer will get credit for the six months that he has already spent in jail.

The same sentence is literally repeated twice. That does seem a bit padded with worthless fluff to me. The same sentence is literally repeated twice.

This incident should significantly lower the credibility of Yahoo News

What credibility? Yahoo news is known to be low quality clickbait. This isn't the Times we're talking about here.

and they should issue a retraction

When was the last time you checked Yahoo News for retractions? Do they even do that?

and fire this reporter

Is this reporter on Yahoo News payroll in the first place? I think the publisher of this story is a no-name publication "where is the buzz", and is then being syndicated by Yahoo News

The post Tim Walz Says Kamala Harris Chose Him for VP Role to “Code Talk to White Guys” in 2024 Campaign appeared first on Where Is The Buzz | Breaking News, Entertainment, Exclusive Interviews & More

For reference, I expect the author made somewhere between $0 and $50 writing this article.

They were paid in exposure, that's worth more than mere money!

This incident should significantly lower the credibility of Yahoo News

Wait, they had credibility in the first place?

It is depressing me how much clearly AI-generated filler is being used by all media outlets, and not even cursorily edited or checked - I've seen words spelled wrongly, sentences that trail off without an ending, and worse. But hey, it fills up the page so they can trap us for the ads, which is all they want!

Of course aislop grifters should be fedposted just like indian call center scammers, but sometimes I can't help but feel like the victims deserved it. But when they bother me waste 5 seconds of my time again, I am right back in fedposting mode.

Dude, just say they should be executed and/or assassinated by crack teams of commandoes. That dodges the "zomg terrorist" problem.

I've started noticing AI generated video in the lead up to the Australian federal election. There was one on X floating around with Tucker Carlson dumping on the current Prime Minister. Really made me think about the need to curate my feed more.

Not a rhetorical question -- do many Australians know who Tucker is? And do many Australians care what he thinks? I thought he was only relevant in American politics.

Not a lot do except for the 'very online' that enjoy US and geo-politics.

However one of the populist parties is called 'The Trumpet of Patriots' and is clearly trying to piggyback off of Trump's success in the US. I'd say more of the voters for that party would than average.

Edit: Should make it clear that TOP is a minor party that isn't expected to pick up many seats. Its run by a dodgy billionaire with a checkered history.

A billionaire who is pretty much in it for the entertainment value. He's rich and he likes being on TV and having his face on billboards.

Trumpet of Patriots in general is a good case study in why Trumpism doesn't work in Australia. They are copying Trump-style campaigning while making zero adaptation to the local context and it is pretty miserable.

Australians who are interested in politics are pretty much bound to follow American politics, at least in the vague outline. I'd guess that your average person on the street either doesn't know who Tucker Carlson is, or knows him only as some pundit in America. Among Australians who take an active interest in politics, I'd expect much higher recognition.

I would not expect Carlson's endorsement (or disendorsement) to have any significant impact on Australian politics, though. If anything, I expect that his endorsement would hurt a candidate. We have a federal election tomorrow where it looks like what would have been a very winnable election for the Coalition has turned into a disaster, substantially due to Trump. Trump and MAGA-style voices are widely hated over here and any association with them is more likely to harm than to hurt. It's not as bad here as in Canada, but it's still true, I think, that Trump has been a disaster for conservative parties throughout the wider Anglosphere.

I've read that the reason Trump's impact on Canada was a disaster was that there is no analog to blood-and-soil MAGA voters there, only what would be called in America progressives and "RINOs"/"boomercons". Is that why Trump has damaged conservatives in Australia?

We're largely missing the Borderers, and so they're culturally alien to us (so are American Descendants of Slaves, but for various reasons including good PR and relative invisibility there's less friction there).

We also have a much-weaker two-party system, so instead of being a faction with some amount of influence in our major right-wing parties, the alt-right has its own party (well, technically two parties, One Nation and the Clive Palmer Party the United Australia Party Trumpet of Patriots, but the latter is a bad joke). There's no cordon sanitaire in Australia (there was one, like 25 years ago, but it fell apart); the Coalition (the neoliberal Liberals and rural-conservative Nationals) put One Nation above anybody besides themselves on their how-to-vote cards and they're willing to work with One Nation when they have to. But because One Nation's primary vote is quite a bit lower than that of the Coalition and they're not unusually-concentrated like the (hippie/SJ) Greens voters, they have no lower-house seats (though they do manage a few Senate seats, as the Senate is pseudo-proportional representation), so the Coalition mostly haven't had to (or have been impotent even with them).

And yeah, as the others have mentioned there's a bit of an issue that Trump wasn't being all that friendly to Australia. Friendly fire isn't, and all that.

Hm, I'm not sure how much I follow the categories that you're using. Australia doesn't really have what I would call a MAGA base. If you're looking for blood-and-soil types, well, firstly a lot of indigenous people are just straightforwardly blood-and-soil in their approach, but presumably they don't count, so secondly you're looking at One Nation and the nativists.

The thing is, the constituency for Australian nativism is somewhat complicated. Over 30% of Australia's population was born overseas, and because we have compulsory voting, all those people turn out. So you can't win an election just with people born here. Fortunately, the One Nation position isn't that immigrants simpliciter are bad - they tend to distinguish along the lines of culture, or less charitably, race. Nobody cares about English immigrants, for instance. They're where Australia comes from in the first place. Likewise we don't care about, say, New Zealand migrants, which are actually very common anyway. (Long story short, if you're an even slightly ambitious young New Zealander and seek opportunity, you come to Australia. And we're fine with that.) One Nation complained about being 'swamped by Asians' in the 90s, and today they're more likely to complain about Islamic immigration. The idea is hostility to people who don't share Australian values or a common cultural identity. Thus, for instance, around 70% of Australians are in favour of open borders with Canada, New Zealand, and Britain. We perceive ourselves as pretty closely connected to all of them.

(It will be interesting to see if demographic changes in Canada alter popular opinion on that, but I digress.)

At any rate, think of the right-wing 'blood and soil' position in Australia to not be 'Australians only', but rather 'Australians and the countries we like only', with the understanding that 'countries we like' means basically the white parts of the British Empire. People who take this view too explicitly will probably be accused of wanting to re-enact the White Australia Policy.

To Trump specifically -

I sometimes think of Australia as being the most America-like country that isn't America. (I would say we beat out Canada only because Canadian identity is specifically formed by not being American. They have a much more intentional sense of resistance against America.) However, there are still important differences, and I think the big one is probably that America has a very different idea of greatness or success to us. You couldn't have 'Make Australia Great Again' as a slogan because we don't have that kind of ambition or pride. That's not how we think of Australia. However, the American influence on our political tradition is significant - while structurally we are a Westminister democracy and the UK is the biggest influence on us, the framers of the Australian constitution read and were significantly (but not slavishly) inspired by the American effort. If you look into Australian patriotic writing from the late 19th and early 20th century, there is a strong feeling that we can use America as a model, or that Australia can be a kind of 'second America' (only loyal this time). Then you have to add to that, of course, the American alliance that has persisted since the Second World War, and we do just look to America for a lot.

This means that when anything in America reads well or sympathetically to the Australian electorate, politicians suddenly get keen on copying it; and likewise when anything in America reads unsympathetically, politicians need to struggle to distance themselves from it. In the past the Coalition has been more vocally pro-America than Labor, and have had close relationships with the Republican party. John Howard made a big show of his friendship with George Bush, for instance, and while it's been a bit more complicated since then, you can see how proud ScoMo was to be next to Biden. (And Biden apparently forgetting his name caused a minor scandal.)

So the issue for Peter Dutton in particular is - the Coalition has generally marketed itself as pro-America, or closer to America than Labor (which has instead been quietly proud of rebuilding our relationship with China). Dutton has also experimented a bit with American-style culture politics, and generally is perceived as a more 'American' politician.

And that seemed to be going well up until Trump lashed out with tariffs, and while we only received the lightest of American tariffs, Trump also refused to give us an exemption (which he had done in his first term). Add in that Trump's self-aggrandising, bullying style of politics plays very badly with an Australian culture that tends to prefer humility and self-deprecation and America's brand is currently in the toilet.

Dutton gets some of the overflow from the hatred of Trump. He and his party are too close to Trump and too close to America. When it comes to foreign policy, I suspect voters currently want a leader who will stand up to America.

I don't think this is true - there seems to be a 20%ish vote for right-populists everywhere the electoral system permits it.

The problem is more simple - Trump is anti-Canadian, or at least was playing anti-Canadian during Q1 2025. If you were a blood-and-soil Canadian patriot, you would be anti-Trump because Trump is hurting Canadians with tariffs and does not appear to respect Canadian sovereignty. Right populists from different countries are only allied if their countries are committed to respecting each other's sovereignty.

there is no analog to blood-and-soil MAGA voters in Canada

Sure there is- those are, counterintuitively, Liberal party voters. That is who all the jingoism was coming from.

If you're of an age sufficiently advanced that you remember that your parents actually took Canada seriously (i.e. you're 60+), you think that insults to Canadian 'sovereignty' are a big enough deal that you're going to latch onto whoever you perceive promises to do the most about it.
(Everyone else understands that this is a post-national country, so they don't care so much... if they can even afford to care in the first place.)

And that's not going to be some foreigner from Alberta (and, to the peoples of ON/QC/Atlantic, this is what he is) no matter what he otherwise says or does- because "he isn't aggressive enough against Trump" wasn't a legitimate criticism of him in the West (where he gained seats, unusually, in urban areas). I believed that not taking a suitably aggressive stance was still a mistake in the beginning, but now I'm starting to think that if he had the Liberals would have secured a majority simply because they are more likely to believe that Trump is directionally correct even if they disagree with the incidentals (cynically, it is in their socioeconomic interest to do that because "kill all new development, degrowth now" hurts their ability to accumulate wealth in a way it doesn't for Toronto retirees, federal government employees, and provinces that are already financial have-nots).

Well, no, you wouldn't expect large constituencies of "make [another country] great again" voters in another country, unless we're talking about special cases like Christian Zionists supporting Israel for religious reasons. Beyond that, why would one expect even right-wing Canadians to feel particularly positive about the guy who talks about annexing Canada and has just slapped Canada with punitive tariffs for... something?

Insofar as I've seen, the sort of Canadians who would actually support American annexation or at least be OK with it would be either disaffected forumlords who treat politics as an abstraction, general fringe loons, or recent immigrants - I remember seeing a post indicating that the Indian immigrants in Canada would be more likely to support annexation than the born Canadians.

A quick delve into the article text

Is the joke intended?

I'm convinced that Delve has just picked up in usage after 2023 and now people often just use delve when it's appropriate even though it's also one of the hallmarks of Ai writing.

"Dungeon delving" has been a common phrase for many years.

Or did hundreds of people read the headline and drop a snarky comment, and not a single one bothered to read the article?

I remember some years back someone posted a fake article headline to /r/politics with a link that just went to a 404 Not Found page on a news website (I think Salon?). It got hundreds of upvotes before people noticed, though it did get voted back down to 0 once the top comments were pointing out the article didn't exist.

I don’t think most people honestly care unless the writer is in some sense the reason they’re reading the piece in the first place. For 90% of news or blogs it literally doesn’t matter. And even for boilerplate fiction (the kind people bring on vacation) that’s mostly read as a pastime or relaxation, they probably won’t care that much if it’s chatbot unless the publisher didn’t bother to clean up the disjointed phrases.

This place and the people who read sites like this are probably extreme outliers. We care if the stuff we read is good, or accurate, or has clunky prose or hallucinations. But this is a place full of highly educated, intelligent, thoughtful Readers. Most of us have probably read a nonfiction book in the last six months that isn’t related directly to work. We’ve read blogs for information. When we read news, it’s something we care about the accuracy for the article. A person who’s reading journal articles to fact check news reporting is going to easily find errors just because of information exposure. Someone who reads a lot of content is going to notice the slightly off phrase and check to see if it’s LLM slop.

Keep in mind that the median American reads rarely and when he does, it’s often below the 6th grade level. At such low literacy, tge difference between a random anuthor and a chatbot isn’t obvious. The difference between a bot and a human writing about news and politics isn’t obvious, because boilerplate news is written in a formulaic way with a formulaic style. To someone who reads a lot of it, word choices and odd phrases stick out. To people skim reading the news, it’s not obvious.

Are normies, even somewhat intelligent ones, incapable of distinguishing the most obvious stinky smelly chatgpt output?

Yep. That just looked look 100% organic free range human journalist slop to me on first read. TBH even though there are a few suspicious passages it doesn't seem super AI-sloppish to me even when I'm keeping in mind that it has been accused of such.

"Quoted stuff the person didn't say" is a pretty strong tell, but if I watched the talk, why would I also want to read clickbait journalism slop about the talk I just watched?

Your opinion of journalists is too low. Journalists are rabid partisans, but they're generally not very stupid. But they pretend to be stupid quite often in order to serve their side.

I don't think they're stupid, but I do think they're under a lot of pressure to churn out as much content as they can as quickly as they can.

That just looked look 100% organic free range human journalist slop to me on first read.

That raises a question: Are journalist-written articles more likely to trigger AI detectors?

The corresponding New York Post and Telegraph articles for this story both score a solid 0% AI / 100% human on zerogpt and gptzero

I know I'm the "this is an empirical question we can just go check" guy but I don't actually have the time to do this in the foreseeable future. Anyone else want to take a crack at it?


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