site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   30165 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

7
Bottom New Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I. On Self Esteem, or How Do You Compare with Your Same Sex Parent?

A year or two ago, I watched a video that I found interesting. It said that one of the main factors of self esteem was how we compare ourselves to our same sex parent. (Which is to say, how a man compares himself to his father, or how a woman compares herself to her mother.) If someone is doing much better than their same sex parent, they are much more likely to have positive self esteem than if they are doing worse than their parent. I have thought about this a lot and I found it really insightful when looking at my own self esteem and that of other people I know in my life.

My father passed away at the end of 2021. He was kind, patient, funny, charming, and the sort of person who others are drawn to and liked to talk with. But he had some demons as well. He always hated his parents to a degree that I could never understand. My grandparents were always kind to me. As a child I once accidentally broke a door to one of their cabinets and I was terrified that my grandpa was going to hurt me because I knew my father hated him so much. But my grandfather simply fixed the cabinet door and forgave me. Why did my father hate his father so much? Well, I don’t think I’ll ever really know entirely since they’re both gone, and you can never really know everything about the people closest to you. But I imagine that my father resented the success of my grandfather compared to his own failings. Crucially, my father was the fifth and the last in his line of 5 generations in our family business. My grandfather sold the family business to a corporation in the 1980s. My father, in his anger, left the business at the time, resentful of my grandfather. I think this seriously affected the self esteem of my father and he spent several years not speaking with my grandparents- I did not see my grandparents for probably 6 or 7 years of my life, until my senior year of high school when they reached out to my mom (my parents divorced when I was young) who took me to see them. My father had other problems as well which affected me negatively.

When he died, I had to come to terms with the reality of who he was. I no longer had to lie to myself about the sort of person who he was, I became free to remember fondly the good parts of him and negatively about the bad. Early in the grieving process, when I finally let myself realize the bad parts of him, I was really annoyed with him, irritated that he couldn’t have been a better person and father to me and my brother. But since then I’ve grown to accept him for who he was and really see it as a blessing in disguise: I can always compare myself to him and see that I’m doing better than he was able to do.

II. France

France is the most beautiful place in the world. I have visited France more than any other country outside of my own (The US.) It is easily the most photogenic place: every time I see pictures I have taken of Mt. St. Michel or the chateaus of the Loire Valley I am shocked at how beautiful they are and that I have been there and that they’re still over there, just being gorgeous, as life marches on around them.

But France is also a strange place. All that beauty, but it’s all in the past. Stray a few streets outside any well preserved medieval village, or stunning baroque or rococo era neighborhood or city center, and suddenly you’re surrounded by some of the ugliest architecture in the world. One of the ugliest places I’ve ever been is a roadside hotel in Brittany. The new build exterior is a series of white and gray and fluorescent yellow rectangles with tiny square windows that barely open. The way this architecture stands in stark relief to the class, elegance, and beauty of the past is glaring.

So what went wrong in France? I put the height of French beauty and elegance around the time of Louis XIV, the Sun King. Versailles is an incredible monument to the capability of humans. How could Louis XV and Louis XVI compare to this? These were clearly men standing in the shadows of giants. The 19th century was tumultuous for the French, but they still managed to produce beaux-arts (itself mostly reproductions of baroque and Rococo style, but beautiful nonetheless.) The belle époque, and the art nouveau, of the late 1800s up until World War I was the last gasp of greatness of the French civilization. It would be so convenient for me to place the end of French greatness at the end of the Ancient Régime but really, the decline began decades before, and the French people managed some greatness after that.

But post WWI? There were some moments of glamour in the 1980s, but besides that, France today is living in the shadow of itself.

An aside. I briefly dated a very cute French guy in France. We were looking at the city from afar, and he said he wished he could tear down all the new buildings and just leave the old ones. This is probably a bourgeois and classist sort of opinion to have in France, but really I agree with him. Contrast this with someone I dated in Vienna. He was from Dresden, a city I’ve never visited but suffered greatly from WW2 and apparently is filled with rather utilitarian buildings now. We were visiting some beautiful baroque palace in Vienna, walking the gardens and enjoying all the splendor you’d expect from a baroque palace. Then he points at some medieval support wall, and tells me that he prefers the medieval support structure to the elegance of the palace. Uncharitably, this is the sort of opinion you adopt when you are looking for points for intellect. I preferred the French guy.

III. Japan

Growing up, Japan was the land of the future. Sci fi vistas of skyscrapers and neon lights, hyperfast bullet trains, they were already on Playstation 7 when America just got Playstation 2. It’s still like that today, right?

Sadly, no. Japan’s economy and culture exploded during the early 20th century, culminating finally in the bubble economy of the 1980s. The rapid wealth the Japanese amassed in such a short time is unparalleled to this day. For nearly a century, every Japanese generation greatly improved their standard of living from the one before it. Then the bubble burst and the country has faced stagnation since the 90s. The population is extremely old, and you feel it in the streets. Showa era cafes without a single change since the 60s are strangely common. These are charming, in a very surreal way. Crustless egg salad sandwiches eaten with melon soda floats are delicious but go against every food trend and nutritional guideline of the past 30 years at least. Really I’m glad they exist, and it’s very comforting to know that there’s a place in the world where tradition can be kept alive with such thoughtfulness and attention to detail. But there is also something that feels very wrong about these places.

Being in Japan today feels like witnessing the end of a civilization. It feels like it’s going through what France must have been going through a hundred years ago. Tokyo, only a few decades ago the center of East Asian youth culture, feels like a creaking behemoth. Shinjuku Station, one of the scariest places I’ve ever been, is an exercise in absurdity. Five separate train companies run trains through 53 platforms in the heart of a city of over 14 million people. You can imagine how this gets built in the chaos of the 20th century but it’s patently ridiculous with the technology and capabilities of the 21st century. Everything in the country feels like it was an exciting idea in the 20th century. The youthful energy of the Showa era is gone.

IV. Thailand and South Korea

Chiang Mai, a city of 1.2 million in northern Thailand, feels more vibrant and exciting than Tokyo today. They have 4 modern shopping malls with extremely good, extremely affordable food and shopping options, and countless day and night markets with even cheaper food and shopping. People are optimistic about the future and seem proud of their work and way of life. They still have some catching up to do in terms of health and building standards compared to the rich countries of the old world, but it feels like they’ll get there sooner rather than later. It seems like there’s more opportunity and willingness to hustle among the Thai people than the Japanese. And the highly functional economy of Thailand seems to spur innovation at a much higher degree than today’s Japan, Europe, or the US for that matter.

I am not nearly as well read about Korean history as I am about Japanese history. I have spent about 2 months in Seoul. The main difference that strikes me about South Korea compared with Japan is that South Korea seems to have modernized much more recently than Japan has. In Seoul, you will notice that older people above 50 or so are significantly shorter than younger people. It’s apparent that famine and food insecurity is within living memory for the South Koreans. But South Korea feels like the only country that is truly living in the 21st century. The food is plentiful and nutritious. Young people are healthy and attractive. Technology is cutting edge. Spaces are clean and well designed. People speak really good English. Shopping in Tokyo, you feel suffocated by outdated trends and ancient traditions. In Seoul, shopping feels like you’re touching the future. Apparently the population decline is bad and they have North Korea looming as a constant threat but if anything it gives the culture a fighting spirit that other rich countries have lacked since WWII.

V. The USA

France has already experienced decline. Japan is rapidly declining today. Thailand and South Korea are on their way up. Where does that leave the US? To put it shortly, I don’t know.

As an American it’s difficult to pinpoint where exactly the US is at. I am from a rust belt town in the US. The town I am from peaked with oil money in the Victorian era. There are still glamorous mansions and downtown buildings built around the turn of the century, some of them in great shape, others not so much. Different cities in the rust belt have fared differently since the Victorian era- some of them boomed during the 60s, some of them have just declined, and others have recently been having a bit of a resurgence (especially from people leaving bigger neighboring cities. I suspect there’s been a white flight 2.0 since 2020 but I haven’t been able to find stats backing this up.)

But outside of the rust belt, how is America doing? Let’s look from West to East. Hawaii is beautiful. How sustainable is American power projection in Hawaii? I have been there only for a few weeks, but in that short time I gathered that native Hawaiians are broadly hostile to the American government. Downtown Honolulu was surprisingly sketchy to me (especially Chinatown.) I was there in 2022- huge swaths of tourist industries seem to have shut down around the time of Covid. (I suspect a lot of this was also a victim of the identity politics of the late 2010s- white tourists buying native Hawaiian culture isn’t very woke etc.) Besides that, Hawaii is a very expensive place- the cost disease of the American economy can’t be overlooked. I have broadly the same impression of California from my short time in LA as I do of Hawaii- both are beautiful places with great weather but with a possibly unsustainable culture whose most vital energy is in the past.

I spent a lot of time in New York from around 2010 to 2019. It was the closest megacity to where I grew up so it attracted me as a young and ambitious person. But the city begins to wear on you. It’s really degrading to witness so much filth and extremes of human behavior. It is such an outlier that I hesitate to draw any conclusions about the state of America from the city of New York, but I think the rot is broadly the same across all the major Northeastern cities of the US, from Cleveland and Erie to Baltimore and DC. If I had to put a pin on it, I would say that the Northeast is in decline, but seems to attract enough talent, money and innovation to keep things current.

The South is much more pleasant than the North. If you grew up in the North, you are raised to hate southerners and their culture, but basically this is because the north are haughty and arrogant. People in the south are polite and respectful in a way that the north has not been in decades, if ever.

Speaking of respect, this is the central issue of American culture that I am going to try to tease out. Respect has completely been lost in the realm of public life in the northern, eastern and midwestern US. People constantly interrupt each other. We do not listen to each other. People in the north act confused when I respond to the things they are saying rather than giving a short and flippant response. Being in France taught me the value of listening to others and having patience. There were times when I was in France, when I would go from having a strained but polite interaction, to suddenly having the interaction turn very rude. I didn’t understand what I was doing, but I eventually realized that I was cutting them off, talking over them, which is very rude in French society. In turn I realized that this is very rude in every society, we just get used to it in some cultures. The Northeast is the absolute worst in terms of disrespecting other people and once you have been away from it it is shocking and demoralizing to witness again. Extreme displays of behavior from "Karens" may go viral but they're just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the ambient level of rude interactions all the time in American culture today.

Circling back to the self esteem point I opened with. There are trends on civilizational scales that we can look at. Fortunes go up, people are excited, they create great things. Fortunes go down, people feel worse about themselves, they create fewer great things. Where does the US fall in this? The vibes are telling me we’re in the decline stage. The boomers in my life are poorer and less married and successful than my grandparents’ generation. My grandparents and great aunts and uncles all drove clean elegant cars and kept tidy homes. The generation of my parents and their siblings are still working well into their 60s, dress slovenly or like people much younger than they actually are, and seem to lack the confidence in themselves to rightfully command the respect that they imagine they deserve from those around them. The baby boom generation seems to be the first generation since the 1930s to be doing worse than their parents. Gen X and Millennials seem to be continuing the trend broadly. I anticipate decades of decline based on this trend alone.

This is the kind of post that makes so many good, and big, observations that it's hard to respond to usefully, almost.

But at any rate, I've grown to be really, really interested in this topic, specifically on an internal-to-the-USA level. And part of that is that I grew up in the New South in the 80s and 90s, and then I moved to the Midwest, got to know more of the country, and have ended up in a Rust Belt city now, where I'm raising kids. But I still have family down in the New South, so I'm down there fairly often, and (because I grew up there, but only some of my family was from there) I only briefly had a burst of hicklib anti-southern idiocy in my late 20s before reality caught up with me.

But the reality, right now, is that where I am now, it absolutely feels old and gray and like its best days are well behind it, because that is clearly true. The rustbelt part of the country I'm in clearly once had a lot of money, and youth, and immigration, and energy. And now it's like a donut - a small hole of well educated tech and medical workers, and a much larger donut of older, less skilled workers who are kind of decaying in place (in very broad strokes - there are random suburb and exurb professionals too). And that's been roughly true when visiting my family in the Northeast. But where I'm from in the New South is clearly going from strength to strength right now. There are still the general problems that new money has - it still punches under its weight in broader cultural projection and influence on the academy and literary cultural and all the sorts of things that old money tends to be heavily over represented in. But when I go back down to visit my family, there is a sense of confidence, like everything is working right, and most people's best days are ahead of them, not behind them. I mean, this is a huge part of what makes the New South the New South - the older South saw its best days as long, long behind them. Where I live now, the school district has had a stable population for decades and is really strong, but many neighboring districts, if they are less shiny, have been dwindling for a while now. Meanwhile, the county I grew up in in the New South had two high schools when I was there in the early 90s. Now it has 5.

I saw some article a few days ago mentioning that in 2030, at current rates, New South states (and intermountain West) will, combined, get 10 more house seats, and New York, California, and other older Midwest blue states will collectively lose 10 house seats. Or, elsewhere - and this, I think, might be the most important set of statistics in the country - if you look at the enrollment statistics for American public schools by region of the country from the Department of Education, you can literally see the future of the country being written. Fully 40% of American public school children are in the South at this point. Only 15% are in the North East, with the remainder being 20% in the Midwest and 24% in the West. That entire table is worth poring over, because it does capture the slow but steady shift of where people are having kids at this point - there are a lot of regional micro-stories there. As a practical matter, this means that the fact American university systems are saturated with a very specific North East (and later California) derived progress narrative in which Southerners are the ultimate evil, the local Hitler, probably has a limited shelf life - as the economic and demographic reality of the South rising again becomes more and more unavoidable, and as tolerance to "Hide your strength, bide your time" gets exhausted, there's probably just going to have to be a reckoning with this tension, or so I suspect, and the process might not be pretty. I'm convinced this is an important undercurrent of current politics, in fact - just as the economic, industrial rise of China has proven to be an existential problem in a Thucydides trap kind of way for the existing Yankee built system, the rise of the South is likely not a process that can be easily absorbed by the existing power arrangements because of some deep assumptions in those power structures about the moral role of the South, and the tensions between those assumptions and reality.

And it’s notable that southern culture gets more and more popular every year. Country tops the charts now. Southern food is popular in the north(often brought by black chefs). BBQ is everywhere. Pickup trucks outsell sedans these days.

Southern food is popular in the north(often brought by black chefs).

Southern food being introduced into the north by blacks is nothing new, the only new thing is it being considered Southern instead of Black. Take the stereotype that black people like fried chicken. This is almost entirely a yankee stereotype. Rednecks love fried chicken, why would a group of people who all insist no one else's fried chicken is as good as what their momma used to make think it was a black thing? Same with collard greens, its a poor southern food not a black one.

But after the great migration of black people north in the early 20th century the only people yankees knew who ate fried chicken were black people so they considered it black culture, but it was really just that the blacks were the only southerners they knew so they coded southern culture as black.

There are stereotypically different dishes between white and black southerners and while actual deep redneck food like frog is not becoming popular(nor is actual black specific soul food like chitterlings or pokeweed), more white-coded foods like biscuits and gravy or flavored iced tea definitely are.

A lot of this is just historical class differences but some of it is definitely racial.

My poor white grandparents ate chitterlings (god what a spelling) but my parents used to make fun of them (the chitlins, not the grandparents). Who's eating the pickled pig's feet? I think that's deep country, and maybe also to a degree black-coded. Ironically my Japanese wife, herself brought up in the Kyushu countryside, really likes them, called here tonsoku /豚足.

Also watermelon is incredibly popular across the South. My (white) family, especially the older generations, really enjoy it in-season.

Pickup trucks outsell sedans these days.

There are surprisingly few "sedan" models on the market regardless. Everyone wants hatchbacks, crossovers, or full SUV/trucks.

Everyone wants

Obama-era regulation makes small cars almost important to sell on the market (due to sky-high efficiency requirements, relaxed for larger vehicles). The manufacturers are only offering hatchbacks etc.

Thanks for your kind words at the top! I appreciate it.

Your post is really interesting to me too. I've never encountered the term "New South" before and I tried googling it and only really found this wiki page about the Old South. So I assume the New South would be the states from Texas to Florida, excluding most of the East Coast states? Or is "New South" more of a cultural designation that encompasses rising areas of the entire south as contrasting with more stagnant areas of the entire south?

The population and enrollment statistics you call out are really interesting too. I knew there has been a migration into "the sun belt" out of the northeast but didn't realize it was so influential as to constitute 10 house seats switching hands. Only 15% of school children being in the north east is fascinating but makes sense.

American university systems are saturated with a very specific North East (and later California) derived progress narrative in which Southerners are the ultimate evil

This is really true and so crazy... I am from the midwest but let me try to empathize. I tried watching the movie Sarah Plain and Tall recently (we read the book in third or fourth grade) and was pretty shocked by how the entire plot is that an arrogant East Coast woman comes to the countryside and just tells everybody what to do like she's god's gift to the poor rural people. If she was doing it to Native American people the book would have been canceled a hundred years ago but the woman from the east can correct the behaviors of the poor white middle americans all she wants. I can imagine the arrogance toward the south from these people to be about a hundred times worse than this. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)

This was an interesting post, cheers. I wanted to push back a little on your thing with your dad and grandfather though - not to say that you are wrong, but there might be factors you didn't get to see - with an experience of my own. See my dad passed away not too long ago too and it was tough. He'd been on dialysis for half a decade, gone through one quadruple bypass and had a stent, so we weren't expecting him to last much longer, but I had looked after him (during which time we had grown very close and had a lot of hard but rewarding conversations about our issues with each other) and my youngest brother and sister adored him due to growing up with him after our parents divorced, so we were very broken up. But my other brother, the one closer in age to me, lived interstate and when he saw us at the funeral - particularly me - he was perplexed, because he loved our father, but also despised him for the way he'd treated us older kids growing up.

We grew up before the concept of child abuse really existed in the public consciousness and dad didn't think twice about using violence to poorly solve his problems - he felt it was part of his identity as a former soldier I think. He put my brother through a wall once for mouthing off at him, threw me down a flight of stairs when I swore on Jesus' name that I hadn't shoplifted something he was sure I had (I hadn't) and beat both of us with a bed post once when we didn't do washing he'd forgotten to ask us to do. Those are just a few of the more fucked up examples, I can keep at this all day because dad's violence was one of the defining aspects of my growing up - I still remember sitting in the lounge room watching the six o'clock news about one of the first cases where a parent was convicted of child abuse, and when mum went out of the room to get a cup of tea dad turned the TV down and quietly told my brother and I that if we ever even thought of doing that he would kill us and he wouldn't need 30 seconds to do it.

And I'd forgotten how much I resented looking after him when he first got sick - I certainly didn't want to do it, but he'd looked after me when I was sick so I felt I owed him. I spent a lot of time with him though and like I said, we had some difficult conversations, and I learned that he had genuinely grown since our childhood, and over time we grew to be each other's confidants - I still miss him every day. But my brother never got that and so his image of him was still those dead sharks eyes in the lounge room that night.

Tldr - your dad probably spent a lot of time with a very different person than the granddad you knew and loved, because they lived in a different time with very different standards of behaviour. I don't mean to denigrate your granddad, just saying violence used to be a lot more acceptable as a solution and even monsters can become decent people.

I find it interesting how siblings who by and large grew up in the same house can have radically differing opinions of their relatives (and with that, which relative they clearly take after; my half sister is very much like the women on her father's side of the family in spite of having spent very little time with them growing up, while I'm so much like my maternal grandfather that my father believed my mother when she told him that I'm not his kid. Funny enough, my stepmother disagrees and loves to point out the dumb little habits and traits that we share.).

My mom (a former Marine, FWIW; my parents met in the Corps) was something of a cartoon villain of a parent, most likely suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder and the shrink I saw was adamant that she suffers from ASPD as well. My favorite story to tell about her is when she burned our house down for the insurance money two weeks before Christmas and then doctor-shopped shrinks and had me diagnosed with OCD and put on Zoloft at the ripe old age of nine because I was sad about having lost everything (There are details that make this story funny.). There are stories I've learned not to tell. Millennials love to complain about their families/childhoods but it's a party foul to throw real trauma out there. Failure as a sibling and murdered pets are a mood-killer.

The confusing part about it is that her parents were flawed but relatively decent people whose kids (my mother and aunt in particular) turned out to be Hillbilly Elegy-tier fuckups (My aunt was very much like JD Vance's mom.), and having mentioned the book one of the problems I have with it is that it comes from the perspective of the youngest sibling in which he claims a position of unconditional victimhood. I'm the eldest son, so it's not that easy, and one of the hardest things about adulthood is realizing that I have no more power today to save my sisters from their godawful decisions than I did as a boy in the face of our mother's wrath.

At the same time, while I still consider my maternal grandparents to have been good people (My theory is that the crazy skipped a generation. Apparently my great grandmother was infamous for being an ill-tempered banshee.), I differ with my sisters in that I consider my mother's complaints about her parents to have been more or less accurate. Her father wasn't around much because they were poor and he was always at work (Cat's in the Cradle was a hit in the 70s because it resonated with a bunch of guilty Silent Gen consciences. Gen X was prone to helicopter parenting in compensation for having felt neglected as kids.) and her mother was depressed and withdrawn (Two of her six children didn't survive to adulthood and died within 18 months of each other. No shit she was depressed.). I grew up watching the toxic push-pull of dependence and resentment between Mom and Mamaw. Mamaw meant well in her way, but was utterly smothering, controlling, treated my mother as an incompetent child, and had the gall to say that she raised me and is the reason I turned out alright, not mom. Mamaw was an astute enough critic, but utterly lacking in self-reflection such that she and her daughter were stuck in a perpetual fight where they were both right about each other but never willing to look in the mirror.

My little sister was chosen to speak in the commencement when she graduated from undergrad and gave a deeply moving speech about our grandfather, her hero (and mine). He really was a good man, kind and generous to a fault, and we were his little sidekicks as children. When the house burned down he took his shoes off and handed them to me, because he would be damned before he saw his grandkid go barefooted. We're so alike that I might as well be his walking clone. Thus, I say the following not out of iconoclasm, but self-reflection. He was a servant, but spineless. He was conflict-averse to a fault and didn't like exercising authority as the patriarch or dealing with drama and so rarely did, leaving his children feeling neglected and unprotected from their mother's maladies. Alzheimer's is an awful, but at times illuminating disease. I was fortunate in that I was able to catch him on a good day, tell him that he was the best grandfather I could've asked for (at which he perked up and asked, "Really?"), and promise to take care of Mom and the sisters for him. The sad truth is that he spent his life feeling like he'd never done good enough. When Mamaw died he woke up every morning thinking that she'd left him. I pray that being able to be the grandfather that he was gave him some peace for having been unable to be the father he wanted to be.

My mom? She'll never be much of a "mom", but she really did try to be better and to her credit is not a bad mom in the same way that her mom was bad to her. My little sister lives on the other side of the country and is still terrified of her in her mid-20s to the point that seeing someone who looks too much like her makes her freak out (Dear little sis, you have a Master's in psychology. Please see a fucking therapist for yourself because you don't have to live like that. Mom was the sort of awful that forced little sister's decorated Force Recon Marine combat veteran father into abject servility, but she isn't Agent Smith and is frankly far past her prime at this point. Sadly, for all his military chops her father is kind of a deadbeat and whatever differences I have with my father, I genuinely pity her for having a father best described as "useless".), but Mom is still a person. Inhumane at times, yes, but still human. I don't have the right to speak for my sisters, but speaking for myself if I have to be the only kid who talks to her, so be it. I'm not going to drown myself on her behalf (Mercifully, she's embraced "disabled veteran" as her latest identity, so she's mostly the VA's problem now.), but I do what I can. I won't cosign a loan for her because I know better than that, but I'll front her a down payment if I've got it. I'm the favorite kid, so she's usually good for paying it back. Having been the favorite and something of the sibling relations equivalent of a war criminal is what I have to deal with. Everyone has their cross to bear, I guess, and that one's mine. I deal with her so my sisters don't have to.

My mom? She'll never be much of a "mom", but she really did try to be better and to her credit is not a bad mom in the same way that her mom was bad to her.

Yeah it took me a while to figure out that's the right way to do it - you know you can handle it, because you handled it as a kid. Maybe not perfectly, or even well, but better than all the people who couldn't. Borderline personality disorder's manipulative aspects make me see red, but it seems to me like they can't really stop themselves, it's a soul crushing irony that their abandonment issues drive almost everyone away. You're a good son for staying by her side though anyway, it might be your cross to bear but I know it can't be easy.

I guess the difference between my sisters and I is that they still demand some variety of justice, some "thing" that's going to make up for their suffering and make life happy ever after, or at least punish our mother, as if being pensioned off the by the VA in her mid 50s and facing the rest of her life alone isn't sad enough. For the middle sister it's always the next man, so she winds up in horrible relationship after horrible relationship (Refusing to address her severe obesity doesn't help here; it's an ugly thing to say, but she could get a higher caliber of man than the trash that she dates if she weren't pushing 400lbs. Ozempic exists! She makes good money so there's no reason that she couldn't afford it or at least one of the bootleg versions.). For the little sister it's the next degree, with a PhD being the holy grail, so she has two master's degrees, 250K in student loan debt, and a job that barely affords her living in an east-coast city with roommates.

Dealing with the manipulation is hard because I struggle to set boundaries or say "No.", but that, reflexive risk-aversion, and trying to buy feeling worthy/like a not bad person through overcommitment are things that have gotten me in more trouble in non-familial relationships than anything else. I spent my 20s being the "functional" one in my friend group and a few friendships in particular (One at least had the excuse of being a woman that I was love with.) wound up costing me around $30K between unpaid rent, a damaged car that I had to sell at a loss, and then god knows how much in unpaid mechanical labor. I'm good at avoiding the violent psycho variety of crazy but realizing that I'm not obligated to drown myself in service of someone who elicits my pity or that I like was a harder and more expensive lesson to learn. There's no amount of doing for others that's going to award you a "you're a good person and I love you" card. You'll just wind up broke and tired, and unless you address that compulsion you won't believe people when they tell you all those nice things anyway.

The way I put it now is that I have the right and obligation to defend myself and saying "No" is sometimes a necessary exercise in that.

How did you convince yourself you aren't being selfish though? Like you are standing there just having listened to someone explain that they feel like going postal and can you do them a huge favour and over-commit to some project that is frankly none of your business, and what am I going to do with that time? Nothing of value most likely. If I'm at work it's no drama, because work is work, but if they ask in my free time I don't know how to say "sorry, no, I just finished the second season of this puppet show I've been watching and I have to watch a movie now before I start season 3." Doesn't the "I have a right to defend myself" argument feel a bit hollow in the those circumstances?

Sometimes you are being selfish, and you have to realize that it's okay to have (or not have) wants and desires of your own. In pettier situations it does ring a bit hollow, but in my experience if you can't learn to say "No" to something that isn't really a big deal (and to be clear, you don't have to say "No" every time; doing favors can make for rewarding experiences), you'll get get stomped on when the big things do come up. You don't have to be specific, just "sorry man, I'm tired, have other stuff going on, or whatever it is". People aren't going to hate you for that just like I don't hate my friends/relatives for not answering the phone when I call them in the middle of a long drive because I'm bored and trying to kill time. Ask yourself, "Would I be really bent out of shape if someone said "No" to me concerning this?"

I had to kick out two roommates in the last year. One was a big contributor to that 30 grand I mentioned and the other one was an awful, sad story, the prompt of "I have the right to defend myself" as an argument (I'll admit that phrasing comes across as overly dramatic, but you'll see why.). Some spineless regular at the bar I worked at met her on a dating site, hooked up with her, and couldn't handle the crazy (I'm not one who goes around diagnosing every woman I don't like as suffering from BPD, but she's one of two or three I've met in my adult life who was a dead ringer for that malady.). She was homeless/living in extended stays, I had a spare room and could use some extra cash (she was employed), and she seemed nice enough, so I said "Why not?" and took her in. Note to self, Friday night at the bar is not the place to go shopping for roommates.

It was toxic. She's not a bad person and I wish her something better, but she was troubled in a way that I'm not qualified to fix. She was 36 and drank like I did at 22, blacked out every night and trauma dumping on anyone in earshot. Honestly, observing her behavior made me feel deeply embarrassed for myself and how I was at that time and understanding of why the 8th Step exists. During blackouts it wasn't just the mundane stuff about being sexually abused by her father and not believed by her family or being fucked over by every friend in her life, but hearing the most disturbing admission of animal cruelty/neglect that I've heard, being called while working at the bar and told that she'd been on the phone with the suicide hotline, her goading her boyfriend into dumping her because she liked me more (her words), having to reject multiple sexual advances, and her blowing up on me for neglecting her in favor of speaking with an old friend that I hadn't seen in years. All this happened within two weeks. It was a disaster waiting to happen and she had to go. I felt like a massive asshole as I endured tantrums, "Why do you hate me?/What did I do to you/I'm sorry!!!?", and so on with stone silence (precisely how I dealt with/deal with my mother's tantrums), knowing full well what I was exiling her to (where she was before). I did it though, because my only choice was to do the hard thing or get dragged down further into her Hell than I already was. I still think about her sometimes.

That's excellent advice, thanks man. I was going to ask further questions, but I stumbled on the answer myself - I need therapy lol.

Hey, there's nothing wrong with that. In my experience it takes a reasonable amount of education to be able to pick the right therapist, but you strike me as having a good grasp of the subject.

In my experience, therapy generally isn't a miracle worker (It actually kind of was in terms of acute anxiety symptoms I was experiencing.), but it can equip you with the tools to tolerate things going badly (It really does help to be able to say "This sucks, but I know that my emotional regulation is unusually poor at present. I am not insane and will get through this.) and, more broadly, to be your own therapist. I'd give the therapist that I saw for ~3 months an 8/10. The stuff he understood, he really understood, more than I was prepared to accept at the time (I felt like he was exaggerating the severity of my situation for the sake of being validating. In hindsight, I don't think he was.). The stuff I felt like he didn't, things could get pretty cringe.

If anything, I think the point of therapy is to speed run acquiring these tools and mantras instead of muddling through life never learning them or learning them the hard way and wasting irreplaceable time in the process. I am far from perfect or "fixed" (and at some point in the future may have to take advantage of the fact that my town's selection of therapists is vastly better than it was the last go around), and have generally erred toward learning things the hard way, but I am vastly better off than I was 10 years ago.

Best of luck!

Why don't you just directly recommend going to therapy for your sisters if you feel like it will help them out? They might not choose to act upon it, but they might still consider it.

I have recommended that. The middle sister went and allegedly got the same initial reaction from her therapist that I got from mine (something along the lines of "How are you still alive?"). The little sister is more private and thus I have no idea.

Thanks for this post - it's an interesting collection of observations/opinions, though having experienced almost all the places on your list I do not agree with some of them. Regarding your Dresden guy, it seems very natural to me how he would end up with that preference. If you live in Dresden, you spend approximately your whole life having European baroque built at any possible budget, preserved in any state of (dis)repair, and restored anywhere on the spectrum from convincing to cheap China/Las Vegas themeparkery shoved down your throat.

To begin with, liking the middle ages is not a particularly intellectuality-signalling preference in the German context - if he wanted to score those points, by his background he would in fact more likely have been dissecting the details of whatever Rococo creamcake topping stucco you were marvelling at. Are you sure you weren't inadvertently rating him according to an American scorecard? I recall noticing that at my grad school (NE US), there was a clique of locals who were frequent renaissance faire/medieval reenactment festival goers and this slotted into a wider strategy of signalling sophistication to each other, while in Germany the counterparts to those are largely considered an extremely basic and plebeian pastime.

That is really interesting about Dresden, I have spent very little time in Germany so I didn't understand that context. I have spent about 2 weeks in Berlin and a few months in Austria and Switzerland, so most of my understanding of German culture comes from that, 3 years of German in highschool and having Swiss and German ancestors. My impression of Germany today is that they are less interested in preserving their heritage than the French and Italians (for example) and are more eager to forget their recent past. I was imagining that much of Germany must be filled with new builds today, like what I saw in Berlin. As a crass American I'm less unimpressed by budget baroque than some aluminum siding, even if it's Vegas quality.

To begin with, liking the middle ages is not a particularly intellectuality-signalling preference in the German context

It was not that it was medieval, it was that it was a rather ugly brown brick wall that lacked any kind of harmony or beauty or refinement which the neighboring baroque structures exuded. He wasn't trying to score points by liking the middle ages, he was trying to score points by telling me how akshually, the poor and undignified structure keeping the whole thing together is more fascinating than all that crass glitz and glamour next door. I know what he's doing! Everyone in academia does this, all the time. My art history professors in college in 2010 all treated the rococo with disdain. The rococo is my favorite era of art history. It is the most beautiful. What you are saying when you try to place some ugly thing above it, is that I uniquely am pure of heart enough to lift up the poor and the ugly, while you, crass plebeian, shamelessly love what's beautiful. In my mind this is cope. But in fact I do empathize with the impulse. I am more attracted to hairy fat men than I am to modelesque elegant men. But that says more about me than it does about anyone else. If I dated a tall blond Chad, I'll just look bad next to him. If I date a chubby short guy, I get to feel better about myself. If you point to a dirty brown wall and tell me it's more interesting, you're intimating to me that you don't see yourself as equal or worthy of the beauty of something beautiful. Which is fine, but don't pretend like you're setting yourself apart by taking a more intellectual viewpoint that hides your insecurity, and then tell me you're doing it righteously.

while in Germany the counterparts to those are largely considered an extremely basic and plebeian pastime.

I think there are a few examples like this where "Euro" things are high-status in the US, but in actual Europe they're working-class signifiers. US soccer fans are generally either Hispanic or upper-middle class, with the implied perception of looking down on "American" sports like football (US), baseball, and basketball. Cycling is, or at least used to be a few decades ago, I hear, similar: fancy road bikes are expensive status symbols in America, while in Europe it's often less gear-driven and professional cyclists are often from lower-class backgrounds more like basketball in America.

I think there is probably some general pattern of status versus foreign-ness: the lower classes aren't well-traveled enough to know what goes on in foreign countries, and the tourist class doesn't always grok the cultures they visit to understand the actual class dynamics at play there.

I have spent a lot of time in Europe and to this day I find European social class completely opaque and confusing. The "poor/sketchy" people in most of Europe dress more nicely than the "rich/respectable" people in America, for starters. There are so many specifics of etiquette that fly over my head as an American. That is why traveling in Asia is easier than in Europe in some ways- no one expects you to speak the language or know what's going on if you're white in Asia. If you're white in Europe they don't understand why you don't get the vibe/speak the language/whatever and you make them uncomfortable.

As a broad historical pattern going back millennia, I should observe that upper classes almost always adopt technologies, cultures, and other aspects from foreign countries before the lower classes do, partly but not entirely due to increased exposure. I'd imagine there are some lower-class American things that seem high-class in Europe as well, but haven't been to Europe so don't know for sure.

Faux-gangsta was a hot trend amongst upper-class children when I was growing up.

Faux-gangsta(we would probably call it ‘thug’) codes as upper-middle class kids that would piss their pants/cry/run away in the event of an actual fight here, too. Obviously there’s people that are like that for real but the difference is so obvious that they’re not the same vibe.

I don't really understand how you can characterize South Korea as being on the way up whereas Japan is rapidly declining. Japan is older at median age 49 vs South Korea's 45, but 45 is still pretty old. They both have similar economies with similar awful work cultures and similar face cultures. Spaces are clean and well designed in both. Technology is cutting edge in both. What outdated traditions are suffocating you in Japan? Are you sure that outdated traditions aren't suffocating you in South Korea? There are some things worse than outdated traditions, like shudder kpop...

Fun fact: Japan has almost 2x the tfr of korea. Japan has managed to stabilise and even reverse the trend somewhat while Korea breaks new records of low tfr every year.

I knew this intellectually but seeing it put like this… holy shit.

To tie into another one of the OP’s points, I have spoken to many ordinary, blue collar average joes- white, black, and Hispanic- who moved from California to Texas. There are entire real estate agencies specializing in facilitating such a move, by the way. A continuing theme, expressed differently from person to person, is ‘in Texas people give a shit, in California they don’t it’s all fake and they hate their lives’. I have gotten a similar impression from Korea vs Japan; Koreans don’t seem to like being Koreans, they don’t believe in Korea. The Japanese still believe in Japan, warts and all.

Maybe I’m wrong, it’s not something that can be objectively measured. But vibes are real.

I dunno, I actually have a very high regard for Koreans and their mindset. This is just an anecdote but I did visit South Korea a while back and left with a very positive opinion of the people there - in fact they're the loveliest people I've ever met in any country, the hospitality they showed us travellers was just overwhelming. So many of the locals there actually went out of their way to help us and make our experience better, I wasn't expecting it at all. They weren't too hung up on social propriety like the Japanese sometimes are and they didn't help in a way where they were just politely showing service to foreigners, they did so as if they actually wanted to make sure we were safe and comfortable. It may well be my fondest travel experience, and part of the reason why is that it just felt so genuinely welcoming.

Regarding the Japanese and their "belief in Japan", I'm not exactly sure this is a positive - I get the sense they do so by ignoring all the warts and all in their own country out of a sense of nationalism, somewhat similar to how Chinese nationalists do so. This is exemplified in their treatment of WW2, where much of the country prefers to ignore it in stark contrast to other Axis powers like Germany. Koreans seem to be more self-critical and this is reflected in their media, but I think in some ways this is a good thing.

After seeing the kind of moral browbeating you get when you cannot let 150 year old sins go, I'm willing to say that Japan ignoring its multitude of war crimes is the next best thing after having not done them at all. I don't think they're likely to do it again, so I don't know what the purpose of such guilt would be.

Certainly, Western nations are unique in acknowledging their own crimes, but it seems that these acknowledgements have been put to effective use by anti establishment types who hate the country and want it to die, or at least want the ruling class to go away so that they can be in power.

I guess truth is a fleeting thing for me, sadly. If one side acknowledges it, and the other side acknowledges the other side's ugly truths and then totally ignores its own, then truth must be disregarded. "The first casualty of war is Truth" and all. Koreans are in an even riskier position because of their proximity to such a hostile regime.

I'm always stunned when I read that people say Japan ignores its war crimes. Like in what sense? Who are we imagining when we write this? There have been multiple official apologies, there's even a Wikipedia page dedicated to this. It's true there isn't the state mandated self-flagellation and officially mandated distancing (from Nazism) of the type you see in Germany, and it's also true that some deniers and apologists get airtime. But they're not the majority. And anyway what would be preferable? National self-hatred?

I definitely wouldn't say they deserve to be constantly browbeaten and driven into self-hatred, and it's true they have issued official apologies over the years. I'm not the largest fan of inherited guilt myself, and wouldn't want to subject the Japanese to that. But it would kind of help their perceptions of sincerity if they didn't enshrine the Martyrs of Showa in Yasukuni Shrine, and if multiple heads of state and government officials didn't ceremonially visit it (granted, visitation is spotty, certain Japanese PMs have made efforts to distance themselves from it).

Consider if Germany had maintained an official shrine in which Nazi war-criminals were worshipped, and if large groups of members of the Bundestag had visited that shrine over the years. Would people have believed the original official apology to have been sincere under those circumstances? I'm aware the PM has no say in who the shrine venerates due to the separation of church and state in Japan, but when they're torn between their sense of nationalism vs. wanting to distance themselves from their actions in WW2, they're likely to select the former.

Huh, I hadn't really thought about it, to be honest. I just accepted it as a fact through osmosis that Japan generally hadn't apologized for anything and that schools generally don't go over their past wickedness in detail.

I appreciate your Japan facts. I'm still learning Japanese, though my motivation has been wavering lately. I could probably hitch onto some family friends' plans to visit later this year, if I wanted to, but I don't know.

Japanese war crimes were certainly brutal. And I remember having a moment of "Is this cool?" about 20 years ago reading about a local man (since dead) who was remembering his time in Unit 731--like, not from jail, from his kotatsu table in his living room, talking to a reporter. That did seem odd. But I've seen odder here. The guy did express remorse and confusion, and clearly lived with at least the Japanese version of guilt for his past. I suppose that for me, at the time at least, having grown up in the states, I didn't feel this was sufficient punishment.

I mean, it’s definitely more normalised to the extent that APA hotels is owned by Nanjing Massacre deniers and IIRC put books regarding that in hotel rooms, and that Nippon Kaigi, well, exists. I don’t think either would be permissible in Germany (let alone be able to have members in such high positions as in Nippon Kaigi).

My impression is that many people in Japan don’t know many details about Japanese atrocities, to some extent due to the way history is taught (broadly as a list of facts covering a large span of history, rather than historical analysis).l, and — due both to concerted effort by early postwar governance and due to lack of exposure — people don’t really care.

In that sense it is a "nation that ignores its war crimes". I'm not sure it would be better otherwise, but it is somewhat ugly.

edit: a word

"Weird fact, things actually stop being true once many dumb people believe them"

This is exemplified in their treatment of WW2, where much of the country prefers to ignore it in stark contrast to other Axis powers like Germany

I assure you that out of two extremes, the Japanese have chose the healthier way of dealing with it.

The German way wasn't supposed to be healthy for the Germans, though.

Worked as intended, then.

to other Axis powers like Germany.

Is there another Axis power you are comparing them to? I'll accept the overall premise of "Japan hasn't satisfactorily repented of its war crimes," but Germany is pretty much the only comparison here. Maybe Italy has some reflection, but I think the "and then we overthrew the terrible, no-good Mussolini" take is at least as common as the "we did bad things and supported even worse ones" take.

I haven't visited the more minor powers like Finland, Hungary, and Thailand, but I suspect the take there is closer to "it's complicated".

I don't think Italy committed all that many war crimes? They were certainly allied to Germany and Romania but Italy didn't really participate in most of the worst stuff.

America thrived on a whale fall after WWII, but the bones are picked dry and the Baby Boomers were the ecosystem which thrived upon it. That’s my new metaphor.

How sustainable is American power projection in Hawaii?

Very. US is inevitably going to decline in importance, you can't keep fucking up that long and that badly while barely doing anything about an ascending rival, but it's keeping Hawaii. It's simply too important from a strategic point of view as it allows controlling the seas in a huge distance around it.

It does seem possible that it could end up being the most westerly outpost of US if it loses a Pacific War against China.

But South Korea feels like the only country that is truly living in the 21st century. The food is plentiful and nutritious. Young people are healthy and attractive

They're not attracted to each other. It's a dead country. In my opinion all countries are mostly dead but Korea would be dead even if we had 'business as usual' conditions of AI not ever being a thing.

Does the parents/self-esteem thing work for women too? I feel like it works for men, since men are so heirarchical and fighting for dominance. But I feel like women are more accepting that their daughter/mother is of different status. I dunno, that's my lazy pop psychology.

RE: Japan- most of the things you criticize are things I like about it! I feel like most of the rest of the world is accelerating into the same generic slop: apps for everything, no unique culture, bad english, generic "world" food, etc. Japan is a country that figured out a great way to live in the 80s/90s and just kinda stuck with it. It's like the shire at the end of Lord of the Rings reacted to Saruman and just said "Nope! We don't care about your high-tech economy, we'll just stick with our happy traditional life, thanks."

Also, for what its worth, I found them extremely stylish in fashion/food/music many other ways. I sometimes feel embarassed of how poorly dressed my fellow white people are in Tokyo.

I am not a woman, but I think that the same sex parent comparison works as well for women with their mothers as men with their fathers. They probably place very different weights on different categories- men probably care more about their careers and how hot their wives are, and women probably care more about how rich their husbands are, how successful or polite their children are, or how tidy their house is, but I think it still matters.

I don't know if the following refutes or reinforces the point I just tried to make, and I don't know how universal this is, but I have noticed that my mother seems to place a great deal of weight in her life on the opinion of her father- or what she imagines what it would have been even after he died. He was a teacher so she loved school and became a teacher herself, and one of her most emotional confessions to me was when she mentioned something about her dad poking fun at her growing up.

I am getting a lot of pushback on my Japanese section and I am sorry about that. I really do love the country, I've been there 3 times, I grew up a complete Japanophile. I stand by my assertions, and if they sounded harsh, I don't really mean them that way. I just try to maintain a balanced opinion on the country and see it in the context of everywhere I've been, rather than some shining other thing that stands outside the critiques of time and objectivity. I actually am 100% on board with Japan's weird "galapagos syndrome" thing they have going on and basically would be happy if they went full sakoku again for the next 300 years as the rest of the world laps them in some kind of Amish larp and prohibited me and everybody else who isn't Japanese from ever visiting again. I mean I like novelty so why not. But why is Japan not innovating in a Japanese way? Why are they stagnating in a boring stagnant way? Like do it with some flair, I guess. AI is poised to change everything in gaming in a year or two, but Switch 2 has no AI features that I'm aware of. They just rehashed Mario Kart and jacked the price up.

I could write an entire other post about your last paragraph. Japan is stylish. You're not wrong if your point of reference is Western culture. But the spark of energy in the youth culture scene, I would argue, ain't what it used to be.

why is Japan not innovating in a Japanese way? Why are they stagnating in a boring stagnant way?

One thing is perfectionism. Standards are very very high, especially for anything consumer facing.

Another thing is the steady loss of expertise. Japanese success was heavily based on little family factories and on one room ‘factories’ that were essentially sweatshops. The latter especially aren’t really legal now and the former are dying off. The big zaibatsu corps may acquire them but they aren’t able to hold onto a lot of the ‘tactile experience’ the smaller guys had.

Plus the big companies are clunky and slow moving; they try for Western style agility but it doesn’t come naturally so they hire lots of foreigners and spaff money everywhere without much to show for it. Look at SoftBank investments (Mr. Soft) or the absolute shitshow that is Toyota’s ‘Woven’ startups.

But Japan is certainly trying! Look at the new Kawasaki robot horse, for example.

It seems like a lot of your criticism is just that it has a lot of old people? Which, yeah, not nearly as many young people as it once did. In part because the birth rate dropped, but also in part because they just live a long time. That's not necessarily a bad thing.

SEA and Africa is where the "youth" energy is at these days. Especially Africa... I've never been there though.

Does Israel have youth energy? Utah? Both have very young populations for developed countries.

Then he points at some medieval support wall, and tells me that he prefers the medieval support structure to the elegance of the palace. Uncharitably, this is the sort of opinion you adopt when you are looking for points for intellect. I preferred the French guy.

Sorry, couldn't resist. I guess I emphasize with your guy from Dresden.

To your general point, imo people are generally sold a certain image of their own future already over the span of their childhood and early adulthood, and how happy they are later as an adult depends on how well reality compares to this deep-seated expectation. This can be the life situation of their own parents, but can be influenced heavily by other people or media as well. The general unhappiness in the west right now is due society selling an extremely unrealistic expectation of self-actualization, especially for the academically inclined. I have a few friends who have unimpressive parents, but got so convinced as students they are contenders for professorship, artists and similarly prestigious occupations that they are deeply unhappy adults now that it becomes clear they are not.

Ignoring the meat and substance of your post, I think you're right that we compare ourselves to our (grand)parents. Hedonistic treadmills seem to prove to me that all the things we care about like money, leisure, social status, are relative. And self-preservation instincts mean we'll put up with anything. We take our set-point from how (we think) the older generations lived.

"Livable wage" redditors who feel entitled to a certain amount of money and lifestyle are not thinking economically. "Everyone deserves a livable wage" is a moral statement, not an economic one. Their moral intuition is based what the older generations had. You could even call it envy (a pejorative for wanting fairness).

As a mid-20s single white male (what you'd expect from a Mottepoaster and early Scott reader), most of my worldview is driven by the realities of dating. The reason why I feel entitled to marrying a skinny woman is not because it is feasible for me from a (sexual) market perspective. It is a moral opinion first and foremost. I am comparing myself to the generations past. My grandparents could visit the beach without a torrent of obese women assaulting their eyes. I have no such luxury.

It is commonly said that the housing market is insane. Now I think money is boring and I don't know anything about the housing market. But the entire premise is a weird perversion of the is-ought distinction. It doesn't really matter if expensive houses are caused by illegal immigration, zoning laws, lizardmen in skinsuits, whatever. People are angry because they are comparing themselves to the older generations, not because they are thinking in economical or technical terms.

People are angry because they are comparing themselves to the older generations, not because they are thinking in economical or technical terms.

Mostly they are comparing themselves to imaginary versions of older generations. How many millennials or zoomers include the draft, stagflation and multiple recessions, and sky-high interest rates as part of their comparison?

They are comparing themselves to their parents' lives that they experienced. Millennials by definition aren't old enough to remember the malaise era, and the stereotypical ones with millennial parents who had them later in life don't remember their parents being broke 20-somethings. It's also worth remembering that the later part of the boomer cohort missed Vietnam/the draft, and your older boomer cohort's kids are more likely to belong to the tail end of Gen X. I see this a lot with my youngest (half) sister, an early Zoomer. Her material and class aspirations blow mine out of the water because she remembers being a kid during her father's peak earning years whereas I remember the time before that of perpetual financial crises and spent that period of time waiting for the other shoe to drop (It did.). My father has been successful and rebounded from the '08 recession fairly quickly, but I remember him being broke in his 20s.

It's easy to be tempted into envy, as my father has been more financially successful than I am, but the fact is that comparing is silly because we're very different people with different priorities. If I envy anything it's his lack of neuroticism and easy self-confidence, but there isn't a political solution to that (It turns out that I'm very much like my maternal grandfather, and I've had a vastly easier life than he did.). He's always been extremely career-oriented, willing to sacrifice personal/family life, has relocated every five years, etc. I work hard and do a good job, but I've always despised job hunting, didn't want to move, and stay in the same job so long as it's good enough. If anything, the worst thing that happened to me career-wise was lucking into a gig as an overpaid delivery driver in my mid 20s and staying with that company a few years too long. Objectively, if this new job (that I networked into from my time working a side gig at a bar) turns out the way I hope it will, I will have had my big career break a whole year later than my father did. Such horror! Really though, relative to what I've put into life I've been pretty lucky as an adult.

I can compare to my slightly younger self here because I bought a house over a decade ago, a condo about a decade ago, and I will soon almost certainly rent because housing costs have exploded, even though I am far wealthier than I was the last times I moved in the same metro area.

Lower success level, but same. The mid-late 2010s were genuinely easier. Rent was still cheap where I live and I was making stupid money for what I was doing ($50K a year mostly driving for a locally-owned food delivery company and my rent was a shade under $500/month). Post-covid inflation blew all that up and while I just got my big career change break spending a year making less than I did straight out of college driving for Papa John's really sucked compared to the non-stop party that was my late 20s.

The mid-late 2010s were genuinely easier.

Yes, but the Millennials were STILL complaining about how bad it was. That was the era in which occasionally one of them would post such nonsense and I'd go to FRED and pick graph after graph showing how each of the things they talked about was actually at an all-time good RIGHT NOW (i.e. at the time of the post)

I was reading along fine until your critique of Japan, which I found rather superficial. You may be right that Japan is in decline, at least according to your own metrics. But I don't feel the ways you suggest can be felt when you're eating the egg sandwiches and milling through Shinjuku station. But then I'm in Kansai. Nothing feels wrong to me about the old men in Mah Jong parlors or the Komeda Coffee chains that actually spell coffee in kanji (珈琲), at which point you know you're not in Starbucks. To me, these places are amazing. Old men in old men coffee shops, grandma playing ground golf in the fenced in area beside the rice paddy -- these are people living their lives--and, crucially, living their lives socially--not rotting in front of a mobile phone. Or at least not yet.

I've spent less time in France, but when I was there, in particular when I was in Paris, I had less of a transcendent experience than you seem to have had in other areas. And when I return to the US I find myself typically in a constant state of wonder and affection for almost everyone I speak to--generally interaction is the key. I can easily despise randos I never talk to.

Just a few thoughts. I enjoy effort posts almost always even when I disagree with the vibe.

I'm glad you shared your thoughts regarding Japan, thank you! I know you live there as I've read posts from you before. I don't doubt that you have a more intimate knowledge of the country and culture than I do (myself having spent only about 5 months in the country on three separate trips between 2007 and 2022). I probably came across as more harsh and critical than I meant to. I really like Japan a lot. The kissaten and mah jong parlors are amazing to me too, but undoubtedly signals of stagnation. It's actually deeply respectful and cool in a way- I wish the rust belt city I grew up in kept its own culture alive to with the same affection and attention to detail that Japan is doing.

And on the other hand, I don't actually always have a transcendent experience of France. I mentioned that I've been there more than any other country outside my own which is true but I don't really know why. The social mores are opaque and exhausting to me. Every time I leave the country I feel relief that I don't have to worry about pissing off a shopkeeper without understanding what I did. But all of that is true even while the positive things I said about it are also true.

Glad you enjoyed my post, thanks for engaging!

Por que no los dos? It's not mutually exclusive.

What about China, where you have greybeards playing majong in the shadows of 5-year old L.E.D.ed-out towers? There are a lot of old people in China, and despite the Cultural Revolution, plenty of old stuff and old vibes, even as there's a lot of optimism and striving forward. Yes, it's a harsh man-eat-man world, and the Lying Flat Movement might not feel irrational for many, but when I was there in the early 2010s, the mood seemed overall optimistic. I haven't returned since, and China changes so fast and is a big country so I don't know what the aggregate mood is... but I doubt it's the same sort of checked-out resignation I hear casually invoked on West Coast US. Not to jump on one little thing you said, but I think the critical aspects are the growth, and the feeling of personal agency. It seemed to me that Chinese people, while understanding the corruption etc, still believed that if they worked really, really, really fucking hard they could better their circumstances. Many Americans seem to feel resigned to a decline, but also don't really seem to have any specific idea of what that looks like, and can't articulate it beyond vibes.

Many Americans seem to feel resigned to a decline,

America is inevitably going to decline because there’s nowhere else to go. Obviously America could keep growing. That’s possible. But it doesn’t feel that way because a lot of the growth recently looks fake. There aren’t more houses, because America grew by financial maneuvers the average person doesn’t understand. Not by building.

So Americans are just mind-broken? The US has everything it needs to build houses! Just because the recent "growth" has been a facade, there's no reason we can't get rid of bullshit jobs and teach them to weld. If Chinese can work round-the-clock to throw up twenty story tower blocks in just a couple years, there's no reason Americans can't other than unnecessary regulations. I'm not talking about safety standards, but stuff like nighttime construction noise ordinances and onerous environmental review. It seems that at every level there are entrenched institutions enforcing pay-to-play systems, rent-seeking and restricting access to the ability to do basically anything. We just need to get out of our own way! This goes for Canada too! Do we just need to wait for the boomers to die?

There aren’t more houses

LOLWUT? Also

About a million new privately-owned single family houses a year. Plus 600,000 other privately owned housing units.

I don't think I agree that the Boomers are worse off than previous generations, though this may be true for Boomers that got smacked by the decline of manufacturing as a solid career. But overall, Boomers got the sustained growth boom of the 90s.

Something like Gen X or Millenials, who broadly got their early careers hurt by the GFC, have been exposed to the runup in housing prices (accompanied in recent years by higher interest rates), and are stuck paying for the unsustainable elder care that Boomers have voted for themselves, would be the generations I might pick as likely to be more worse off.

I have nothing but good things to say about my dad and grandpa. Well, not literally so, but any failings are rather minor in the grand scheme of things.

I was a somewhat sheltered child, so it took me until med school to realize that many people can't take the kind of functional, happy family life I had for granted.

I've done relatively well for myself, choosing between reference classes: Indian/Doctor. That being said, I don't think I could have done what my dad did, which was to hustle from being a refugee without a penny (or Indian paisa) to his name, to being modestly famous, and having set his kids up for success. Seriously, all I managed was to more or less not stagnate or back slide when it comes to socio-economic condition, whereas he took us from nothing to a very comfortable existence. He's hard working, to the point where it's taking its toll on his health, and tightened belts when not strictly needed so there'd be enough to go around on a rainy day.

My grandpa? The kindest man I know, and the best doctor to boot. He's at the age where he's finally becoming less than outright famous, but only because even his junior peers are dying of old age or going senile. There was a time when just mentioning that I was his grandson would open doors, he's 95 and there are still patients calling the smartphone he can barely use for medical advice or requesting surgery. Thankfully he's able to sign post them to his SIL, my dad. It breaks my heart to see senility, long averted, finally take him. He lived a ridiculously healthy, outright ascetic lifestyle, and as a consequence, lived well past 90 in good health and only recently took a turn for the worse.

It could be worse. He gets to live with my family, both because it's multi-generational, and because they couldn't bear to part with him. No care home for him, just the comfort of a house he built himself, with his daughters, son-in-laws and most of his grandkids doting on him.

My dad might be a better surgeon, but he'll never be as universally adored. Too stingy, by far. Back when I was in med school and sat in with my grandpa during his clinics, he'd waive fees more often than not when anything about his patient gave him the impression that they were anything but well off.

In contrast to them? I'm not nearly as hard working. On the flip side, I never had to be, having been spared, through the dint of their hard work, from every worrying where my next meal would come from. I've still done okay, but in a way, I side stepped direct comparisons of clinical competence by not taking up a gynecological or surgical field. Didn't like them, but I certainly felt easier knowing we won't be measured by the same benchmark.

Yet humans are (still) all too mortal and frail. The giants I looked up to now look up at me, and at times, I wonder if their pride in me is overly tinged by ties of blood. I tell myself I've done enough to be proud of, and sometimes, I believe it. I'd certainly be prouder than my heart could bear if my future kids looked at me the same way I look to them.

Since you pivoted into a comparative study of different cultures and places, I guess I can share my impressions of the UK/Scotland:

Slow decay.

Britain is a stagnant, often involuting place. Half the times I visit any but the largest cities in Scotland, I'm struck by the urban decay. I've never seen places with so many boarded up shops, hopeful cafes and hipster restaurants with only decaying shop decals to evidence that they ever existed. India might be dirtier, smellier and louder, but it always gives the impression of growth. There's just too much demand for entire buildings or prime real estate to sit empty and unlet. At the bare minimum, some entrepreneurial type would set up a food outlet or stall there.

Most of what appeals about the UK is old. Ancestral manors, cities and cobbled streets older than street cars. Even the NHS, considered a national treasure, is in slow motion collapse. Quick, free and high quality. Pick any two. By Indian standards, they picked the latter, but any good Indian private hospital will get you far more timely and attentive care than what the NHS can offer.

I was in Chiang Mai, and it seemed dead but more alive than many places. I stayed next to Central Festival, the largest mall in North Thailand. Some places like Germany felt like a place frozen in the past, according to a friend who went there whilst China seems to be pushing towards the future, Saudi Arabia too in ways. We have a weird, global connected world where differences are not that hard to gauge. East Asia has a massive self-esteem problem, so passport bros go there. East Asia has a gutter tier tfr too beyond just low self esteem.

The world stopped being a place where the future feels bright to many. In Thailand, plenty of euros who could not hack it or got disillusioned find some solace. All the euros I met there would lament about things being way way worse. Whilst the locals would treat them better than other locals. The world even in the US is not as optimistic now, given demographic issues and the general unaffordability of real estate. Plenty of small towns are employed by one or two giant factories or industries, these people are at gods mercy if the owner packs up shop and leaves.

India is the same, the population is young but its mostly not smart, and people have accepted that the world is gonna get worse, hence the chad alpha phonk music edits of Ancient India. The breakdown of family, civil lives and places to these sterile multi-cultural grounds does not spark any joy. The story is the same in many places: the boomers sold the Canadians out, but they also sold us out. All we can do is pay for their retirements and hope that no one is that stupid. I wrote a comment in the thread about the same happening in India, you may find it helpful.

Quality comment op, very high effort!

Thanks for the kind words! Ah, Central Festival, I went there a few times- I stayed closer to some of the other malls but made the trip out to that one once in a while. Super fun. Small world!

I read your post about India when you posted it yesterday. I have very little knowledge of the country but the situation sounds pretty dire from your post. If I read correctly, it looks like the right wing Hindu party announced a census. Does this not benefit the right wing Hindu upper caste? If not, why did they agree to do a census? I think that you're opposed to the census because it will be used by the lower castes to demand reparations or better treatment from the right? (Sorry if I'm way off base with anything here)

Though I know very little about India, I do work in ecommerce and lots of people are eying India as an alternative manufacturing base post China tariff apocalypse, is this something that people in India are aware of? Would you see this as a benefit to your country, bringing in jobs and money, or not really because they are low paying jobs with long hours? (In my mind, the manufacturing is what built China from dirt poor to where they are today so I don't see it as a negative but feel free to tell me I'm wrong)

China

I didn't mention China in my original post at all because I haven't been there. But I believe they've grown massively in the past 2 or 3 decades. I imagine people feel great about themselves and their prospects. I'd love to have someone make an effortpost (or even a short post) about the way China would fit in with my analysis of things.

Plenty of small towns are employed by one or two giant factories or industries, these people are at gods mercy if the owner packs up shop and leaves.

This is pretty true. The fates of entire cities in Ohio, Kentucky, Eastern PA etc definitely operate this way

I was in Chiang Mai, and it seemed dead

So fascinated by this take! I found it super exciting and not dead at all. Then again I grew up in the midwestern rust belt so my standard for dead has to be way lower than someone from India.

Hindu upper caste is responsible for everything good in India and carries elevated levels of Aryan ancestry, thus being the least diluted descendants of the Indo Aryans. Due to the small size and historic overrepresentation, the underclass is extremely resentful, being dirt poor makes it worse. The Bjp is the Hindu or Upper Caste party the way Republicans are the white party, which is to say not all. They swindle Hindus and use Muslims as scapegoats but require more energy, a vision to get more votes.

India is 80 plus percent OBC or below, 20 percent isn't a large number. In reality upper castes lack a sense of identity strong enough to will the nation to acknowledge what's happening. All of the armed forces is made up of the same stock, yet people, bjps most ardent voters are upper castes who accept evil because the alternatives much worse.

The backwards are made up of three classifications, OBCs or shudras or peasant castes, SCs who are what you would call scheduled castes under which some were mistreated, also known as dalits. STs are the final which is a classification I could never make sense of as these are tribals. OBCs are the largest percentage share of the nation, followed by these two, Muslims and then Upper castes. Modi wants to win after all. They also took away land Vai redistribution, the state pays you 10k usd for marrying into another caste, you can barely get a job or a degree or get representation. How much more does one even need?

India can never industrialise properly, it's industrial base is a joke as the bureaucracy and politicians exist to only take kickbacks. Nothing of note will ever get made here the way it happens in China and it'll only get worse as automated customer care and 105 iq language models make junior Javascript devs obsolete. You just can't get things done here on scale, period. People know what's good, they just don't care, this includes upper caste elites unfortunately. They have one foot out the door already.

China is a fun place, it's got terrible demographics, lower tfr is bad because it means the people leave but I don't think China does anything super special, they just avoid stupid things liberal world loves. That's enough in this day and age.

Chiang mai felt dead to me personally. I was alone with my other ex co founder and it was a terrible time. I saw way too many passport bros and women, the local ones really like exotic men which felt unappealing to me, I don't like Asian women but there was something about it that felt kinda off. People led good lives, law and order was nice, hospitals worked, the roads were clean yet I never could relate to it as much. I did enjoy pai, the hippy village next to it a lot more since I'm young.

There are some places today like NY or SF and a few others that are epicentres of important things, the way Kashmir was to Shaivism a few centuries ago. But it felt dead to me because I'm not a local, it's pretty alive if you're one. Maya mall, nimman, the night markets, Zoe In Yellow, spicy, Chiang Mai Ram, the man made lake next to the law department were things that I still remember to this date. I'd visit this cafe called Vaana next to central festival. Though my time there was awful as I was on the mercy of my ex co founder, had zero money and was extremely stressed, I would love to visit again once I'm rich lol. It's a good place, I remember looking at the mountains from my apartment and the drive to pai. Feels like a lifetime ago.

Uh oh. Chat am I cooked? My father and his father are genuinely some of the best people I know. Kind, reasonable, good fathers and husbands, charitable, and extremely hard working. Genuinely don't think I can measure up. Is my self esteem doomed?

My dad has visited all those countries (though Thailand the fewest times), and his experiences match up for sure. Said Japan was remarkably older than expected, but SK was extremely vibrant and modern feeling. But does architecture really reflect success? You know, during the United States' most successful century, a lot of cities were frankly total crap to live in for a good portion of the time. Smog and smoke everywhere, urban overcrowding, the occasional riot, etc. I'd say it's less about confidence or architecture or dynamism than it is if people care, on an individual level, strongly, about their fates. In that sense, as long as the structuralists don't stifle the individualists too much, we're probably OK, macro-scale. Individual welfare is another matter entirely.

There's one big point about the US I disagree with. West-coasters might be less traditionally polite, but are far more open about experiences than other parts of the country. My sister is in college in upstate NY and it was quite an adjustment even in the small things - people are far less likely to strike up conversations, no one responds genuinely to "how was your day" to strangers like they do back out West, and the casualness to which you treat others in some ways translates to a very egalitarian society, where someone rich might genuinely have similar mannerisms to someone poor, (though not in all areas). I would say rather than respect being lost, it's a different kind of respect.

My dad and grandpa are/were similarly, unattainably excellent people. I may make more money even if my overall morality score has some generational decay. So at least I've got that going for me, which is nice.

V. The USA

The takeaway here really should be that the US is "too big to fail." Apparently the "laboratory of democracy" thing is working exactly as the founders intended-- no matter what an individual state does, there's going to be another state somewhere else doing the complete opposite thing. So even as particular regions of the country decline, other regions become good targets for immigration, able to scoop up all the people leaving the dysfunctional areas. That's the beauty of America's heterogenous geography and culture-- diversity is our strength. Bad federal policy can be a drag, sometimes... but the very nature of bad policy is that states are de-facto empowered by public opinion to circumvent or ignore it it. See: blue states with sanctuary cities, red states with de-facto abortion bans well before roe vs wade, and every state with legal marijuana currently. With tariffs, for example, if they manage to actually stick around whichever borders state figures out the most effective way to enable cross-border smuggling will get a competitive advantage over every other state.

Apparently the "laboratory of democracy" thing is working exactly as the founders intended-- no matter what an individual state does, there's going to be another state somewhere else doing the complete opposite thing

Really? Where are the states that discriminate against women, non-whites, and promote heterosexuality to the same extent that progressive states discriminate against men, whites, and promote minority sexualities and gender identities?

Well, according to the progressives, everywhere, including at least some of what you'd call the "progressive" states.

One screen, two completely different movies.

It should be pretty trivial then to point to, say, men-only scholarships, pro-white "non-diversity statement" requirements for positions at universities, white only dorms, etc., etc...

They're not saying it's true, only perceived. Which is reality for many people

It doesn't count as some states doing the opposite of others, when one side is doing something explicitly, and the other subconsciously, imo.

Sure, but they’re delusional. Where are the actual examples of pro-white, pro-traditional families discrimination? There aren’t any concrete examples, that’s what ‘systemic -ism’ means.

Sure, but they’re delusional.

Tell that to the voters. There's nothing in a political system that magically protects it from supremacy movements and hysterics- white supremacy in the 1920s, black supremacy in the 2020s, androsupremacy in the 1800s, gynosupremacy in the 1900s, etc.

Yes, we have examples in living memory when the political system did in fact protect them against those things (because the ruling class was sufficiently virtuous), but they're dead now.

Plenty of states tested exactly that until very recently and failed. Now some states are performing a replication test in the other direction and also failing. What more do you want out of a laboratory? It's enough to test"shooting people is bad for them" and "getting shot by people is bad for you" in separate studies, you don't need to check both hypothesis at the exact same time.

Plenty of states tested exactly that until very recently and failed.

What exactly are you referring to? I don't recall any test followed by failure, I only recall a test that was stopped by the federal government through force.

What more do you want out of a laboratory?

I want it to work as advertised. We don't have some states doing one thing, and some doing the opposite. We have some states doing one thing, and the opposite being explicitly illegal.

What exactly are you referring to? I don't recall any test followed by failure, I only recall a test that was stopped by the federal government through force.

Jim crow laws lead to massive out-migration and a loss of economic and therefore political power. Exactly the same as what's happening to california now. The fact that the feds stopped them by force is exactly the point-- it's the tangible proof that those states lost the ability to contest outside control over their cultures. Now the feds are targeting california discrimination with anti-DEI measures. Seeing the parallels yet?

The fact that the feds stopped them by force is exactly the point-- it's the tangible proof that those states lost the ability to contest outside control over their cultures

Can you give an example of a system that's not a "laboratory of democracy" then? By that logic Soviet tanks rolling into Prague just shows how the Eastern Block was a "laboratory of democracy".

Seeing the parallels yet?

Not until they send in the 101st Airborne. But even that will only show the same rules are applied equally to both sides, not that the US is a laboratory of democracy. It will clearly disprove the latter point, in fact.

Can you give an example of a system that's not a "laboratory of democracy" then? By that logic Soviet tanks rolling into Prague just shows how the Eastern Block was a "laboratory of democracy".

A laboratory allows for safety equipment and controlled experiments. An external force coming in and wrecking your shit, in contrast, is the law of the jungle. Both lab experiments and warfare let you discover interesting new things about governance, but there's a big difference between your PI coming in and telling you to quit being an incompetent waste of grant funding vs. getting invaded by soviet tanks.

A laboratory allows for safety equipment and controlled experiments. An external force coming in and wrecking your shit, in contrast, is the law of the jungle.

Airborne troops dispersing unarmed, underage protestors with bayonets mounted to their rifles is... what? Is the crucial difference that they didn't use actual tanks? Is it that it didn't come to actual fighting (to my knowledge)?

More comments

So to be clear, since the deployment of the 101st Airborne wasn't just about a cut in federal funding, it clearly crossed the line into proving that the US is not a laboratory of democracy, right?

More comments

I don't feel the US being in a declining era. I don't feel it around where I live or when I go home, or when I visit other parts of the country. The US is in something of a fragile position and I think it could easily go the way of Argentina if politics stays stupid, but this would be a wholly self-inflicted wound, not the product of generational decay. The vast majority of people I encounter who think America is washed are people with either chronic depression or severe racism.

The US has the premier scientific establishment, the most powerful economy in the world, a network of alliances that sprawls over the globe, and a culture that attracts immigrants without number. The question is not "has America lost its mojo?" It is "will America shoot itself in the head?"

But post WWI? There were some moments of glamour in the 1980s, but besides that, France today is living in the shadow of itself.

Writing off Art Deco immediately causes me to question your taste. Of course, I find many elements of pre-modern fashion and architecture unbearably gaudy, so your mileage may vary.

Let me offer a perhaps controversial thesis (which I'll admit I don't really believe myself, at least as an explanatory factor): monumentalism is at odds with the interest of the common citizen. Louis XIV may been Great, but he did not exactly leave France in great shape for the French. The increasingly liberalized societies of developed countries have little patience for pouring vast sums to satisfy the vanity of kings (though they have their own pathologies). Ultimately, cities are for people to live in, not architectural museums to be admired by later generations. Forgetting this seems to be an egregious problem across most of western Europe.

The South is much more pleasant than the North. If you grew up in the North, you are raised to hate southerners and their culture, but basically this is because the north are haughty and arrogant. People in the south are polite and respectful in a way that the north has not been in decades, if ever.

Some of us grew up in the Midwest and learned to hate them from experience :V

I find it funny you say this, because this has been pretty much the opposite of my experience. Southerners are polite, but - especially for men - it is an extremely brittle courtesy that falls apart the moment you step outside their fairly rigid expectations. Being easily offended is not an admirable trait, and I have always been baffled by the characterization of Southerners as nice. Maybe Texans, but my experiences in Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina did not leave me with a favorable impression of the locals. There's an undercurrent of meanness I don't encounter anywhere else in the US, including the rudest parts of the Northeast.

The South is an odd place in that the core South is largely a decaying husk. Georgia is propped up by the growth of Atlanta (housing theory of everything wins again!), but no one thinks Alabama or Mississippi or Tennessee are going anywhere. The parts of the South that are doing well are on the periphery - Texas, Florida (though Florida has its own pile of ticking time bombs), and North Carolina - and are in many ways divergent from traditional southern culture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No real surprise. Generally ambiguous / non-specific.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reorganization / consolidation / implicit reduction in overall scope.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No.

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

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

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

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

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

Make America Skilled Again (MASA)

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

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

They should have obviously gone with MEESA /s.

Make Electrical Engineering Solely for Americans?

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

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

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

The current state of online politics discourse seems pretty dire to me. Here are forums I'm aware of:

TheMotte - often a bit too "assume that social conservatism is correct" and wordily show-offy for my taste, but it's a good forum, you can speak your mind without being banned.

X.com - engagement bait grifters, engagement bait grifters, engagement bait grifters... and the occasional rare actual worthwhile discussion.

/r/moderatepolitics - good, very surprisingly good for average Reddit censorship norms, but a bit slow.

/r/politicaldiscussion - used to be decent like 5 years ago but now has been overrun by typical Reddit TDS ("Drumpf will end all elections", etc...)

4chan /pol/ - basically useless, 95% literally mentally ill people, trolls, and maybe bots. Might as well engage with flat Earthers about astrophysics as engage with these people about politics.

Astral Codex Ten comments - can be interesting sometimes, but isn't mainly politics focused and the politics discussion seems to be be dominated by the same few people.

rDrama.net - is usually directionally right about politics, in my view, by the simple expedient of assuming that anyone who is very demonstratively committed to a given political ideology is likely worthy of ridicule, but of course not a forum for discussing policy in any depth, most of the time, and also unsurprisingly given the origin of the site, is as focused on trolling as on political analysis, lol.

/r/politics - TDS central, orange man bad 24/7.

/r/centrist - seems ok, but pretty TDS leaning.

/r/stupidpol, /r/redscarepod, etc... Dirtbag left, good for criticizing the establishment but also they tend to be Hamas apologists etc... basically mostly people who are still at the I hate America so anyone who fights America must be awesome stage.

debatepolitics.com - people yelling at each other, very slight step up from 4chan /pol/.

Like, there have to be some good forums I've missed, right? Billions of people are online, including hundreds of millions of Anglophones (I largely have no idea what the state of non-Anglophone political discussion is like). Is it really possible that only like 0.00001% of them are capable of having relatively moderate and rational (not that I've always been) political discussion?

I've been searching for good politics discussion forums for years. You'd think there would be more. What the fuck is going on?

What the fuck is going on?

Politics has replaced religion as a foundational cornerstone of personal morality and identity, and people really don't like having those questioned. Seriously; just look at the polling about whether you'd be comfortable dating someone with different politics/religion and the two concepts have flipped over the last half century.

I recently dined together with a bunch of old sports buddies, and it was...karmic, I suppose, for an ex-leftist myself, to be surrounded by a bunch of people who all share the same kind of rabid, unquestioning and almost militant casual leftism and discuss it around you under the assumption that nobody they associate with could ever be of a conflicting opinion. I agreed with what I could bring myself to agree with, politely disagreed on a few details here and there, and overall accepted that this was not the venue to start any kind of adversarial debate. It was, in the end, just people coming together over shared views. But it saddened me that we, having known each other for years and getting along great in general, were not above using politics to delineate ingroup/outgroup in a nominally apolitical gathering of friends and fellow sports enjoyers. It saddened me that, no matter how much I value these friendships and prize them far above each one's views and opinions, the sentiment would hardly be reciprocated if I "revealed my power level", so to speak.

Sucks to suck, I guess. Anyone who seriously wants to be a social creature must go with the flow, obviously.

What the fuck is going on?

Humans broadly don't want to hear political opinions that differ greatly from theirs. It's just not in our nature.

Themotte is genuinely the best I've seen by a long shot, even though it has tons of flaws.

Same.

I do wish we had more lefty commenters, but it really does seem like ardent lefties have to discard a lot of fundamental, fairly obvious facts about baseline reality to maintain their ideological commitments.

Its definitely the one place where the average response doesn't drastically misinterpret a person's post and respond to the persons' hallucinated point rather than the plain words they said.

That's what drives me away from other forums, meanwhile here I don't have to constantly say "No, that is not what I meant, please read the words I actually wrote and I'll happily explain myself further if needed."

slightly offtopic - I was writing a response to this video (which I don't recommend watching), but the response can be succintly summarized as:

drastically misinterprets [an outgroup point] and responds to the persons' hallucinated point rather than the plain words they said.

Its probably a top 3 pet peeve of internet discourse for me.

Its the "So you hate Waffles?" issue.

People will aggressively impute thoughts and motives to the speaker and then draw conclusions about their words that wildly diverge from the simplest interpretation of the sentences.

Then attack them on that basis, which instantly derails any communication that might have been possible.

I spent a LONG time learning how to write as directly and clearly as possible (within the constraints of the English language) and it still happens to me.

That said, in day-to-day communications, reading between the lines or recognizing when someone IS motivated to manipulate you is a useful skill, so its not like its 'wrong' to try to parse someone's words like that.

That video is infuriating because he almost gets it. He describes the rake in excruciating detail, elucidates exactly why and how people step on that rake, and then, with great pomp and ceremony but zero self-awareness, proceeds to step on the rake himself.

it really does seem like ardent lefties have to discard a lot of fundamental fairly obvious facts about baseline reality to maintain their ideological commitments.

This is a common assertion for people to make about their ideological opponents. People on the left constantly make the same claim about people on the right. And the intellectuals on the left and right both do so with detailed receipts about why their own side is working with facts and their ideological opponents are basing their ideology on lies.

It turns out it is possible for groups to make mirror-image accusations of each other, yet one group is substantially correct and the other almost-wholly wrong.

It’s also possible, and I’d argue likely, that both are correct. Partisans from every corner regularly discard inconvenient facts.

one group is substantially correct and the other almost-wholly wrong.

Occam’s Razor, however, would suggest that when observing two groups whose accusations mirrors one another that either (a) both are correct, or (b) both are wrong.

Occam's Razor makes no such suggestion.

Bringing in Occam's Razor is totally unhelpful--is it "simpler" to say that both sides are right, both are wrong, or one is right and one is wrong? The question is virtually meaningless at this level; it's unclear what "simple" even means in this context.

I think the righties do this too here. I think the most blatant example was responses to my effort post defending ASOIAF and George R. R. Martin. Many responses were from people who hadn't read the books very carefully, and even more egregiously, from people who hadn't read my post carefully at all.

I think the kind of effect that we see here is due to the fact the kinds of topics that we like to debate on this form are usually ones in which the right is clear-pilled (immigration, economics) much more so than the left. There are other issues that I think the right is weaker on (car-brain, media literacy, veganism, etc.) that don't get as much attention on this forum.

it really does seem like ardent lefties have to discard a lot of fundamental fairly obvious facts about baseline reality to maintain their ideological commitments.

Interesting.

Its definitely the one place where the average response doesn't drastically misinterpret a person's post and respond to the persons' hallucinated point rather than the plain words they said.

Your mileage may vary. I am routinely imputed views I don't hold. This forum is roughly equivalent to an above average political subreddit, just with the ideological inflection reversed.

Humans don't even want political opinions that differ greatly from ours to exist. In a democracy those opinions might spread to the median voter and then be imposed on us against our will, and even in an oligarchy or autocracy there's always the chance that they will persuade the leaders or inspire a revolt against the leaders and then be imposed on us against our will. The use of language to navigate intratribal factionalism is probably older than homo sapiens. It's really hard to treat a question dispassionately as an intellectual issue, rather than as a signifier of loyalties, when everything we think and feel screams that there might be too much at stake.

Consider LessWrong, possibly the most concentrated population of high-functioning autists intelligent high-decoupling people on the internet, people deliberately trying to learn how to better discuss issues rationally in an unbiased fashion, the sort of "hey, I see what the problem is" people that normies joke about: their main conclusion about politics was that anybody who wanted to apply their intellect to any other issue should talk about politics as little as possible in the process.

If you want to apply your intellect to politics, though, where do you go? Well, here I am, I guess? I wish the place was more popular among thoughtful left-wing participants, and maybe there's some way to improve that, but in the meantime I'd rather be somewhere that often repels people with opposing views than somewhere that often expels them.

I think a more subtle issue (though I hesitate to call it a problem) here is that we also select for a particular subset of right-wing participants. Obviously anyone who's a Witch on one issue or another has reason to come to a place like this they won't be expelled from, but also there's a bit of strain between @Goodguy's claims of "assume that social conservatism is correct" and "wordily show-offy". At least 5 years ago, the modal Motte survey respondant was "ambivalent about religion, seeing it as a weak force for good", but that's reflective of a very peculiarly modern type of "conservative". At least in the US (also a modal Motte user characteristic in that survey), the modal social conservative is instead one of the 40% of Americans who would agree that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so". I know there are a number of faithful theists here, but in all the random discussions I've seen of anthropology and human genetics and so on I've never seen anyone jump in with the "no, it wasn't a parable, the first humans were created from clay 6kya" rebuttal that's a plurality belief among Americans. I'm not really interested in rehashing (from my perspective) that debate, but I hope that people are here who would be on the other side and are simply avoiding bringing it up for similar reasons, because that's still a huge and politically important mass of people, whom we can't avoid talking about, and whom I'd therefore like to occasionally be talking to.

Young earth creationists by and large do not jump into discussions of human genetics or the rise of civilization with 'but all humans are descended from the sons of Noah who lived a few thousand years ago' unless complete schizos. It's just not what they do. Most of young earth creationism as an institution is dedicated to epicycles to bridge the findings of archeology, genetics, etc with what the bible says, not to apologetics.

My sense is that most theists here tend towards an old earth, and if not, they stay quiet.

The wording on that is kind of ambiguous. One could perfectly well read it as, “God brought about civilised man (through his control of natural processes) about 10,000 years ago when the first civilisations started appearing” and I would agree despite definitely not being a creationist.

The wording on that is kind of ambiguous. One could perfectly well read it as, “God brought about civilised man (through his control of natural processes) about 10,000 years ago when the first civilisations started appearing”

Not really. That would be option 1.

Wouldn't their alternative option of "Humans have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process" have been a better fit for your position?

What is the meaningful distinction between "this simulation was set up according to deterministic laws and then allowed to run for a trillion years to generate the current state" versus "this simulation instantiated the current state by simulating a trillion years of deterministic evolution in two seconds"?

If your reasoning accepts that we are not living in the base reality, as both Materialism and Theism appear to do, then a lot of the old arguments seem to lose their meaning. If one observes how these arguments evolved, this should not be surprising: both the theists and the atheists very clearly expected and even demanded a clockwork universe. Both were wrong.

What is the meaningful distinction between "this simulation was set up according to deterministic laws and then allowed to run for a trillion years to generate the current state" versus "this simulation instantiated the current state by simulating a trillion years of deterministic evolution in two seconds"?

In general? Hard to say; possibly none. But I'd also think both would fit pretty well into the "developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process" category, especially if the answer is "none". If there's no distinction between a Creator spending millions of years of time on hominids versus a Creator spending millions of years of simulation-time on hominids, and if the former would clearly qualify for that poll response, then Q.E.D.

In a philosophy where there is a duality between brains which obey material laws and immortal souls which are above them, though, wouldn't the simulation case be weird? The hundreds of thousands of people who just started existing mid-adulthood have a full life's worth of memories of things that never happened? If you're facing away from your kid when you start existing, you feel love for someone you've never really met?

Regardless, although I love a Simulationist thought experiment as much as the next nerd, but the "in their present form" answerers are probably not picturing a Great Programmer here, and when you get into specifics then there are meaningful distinctions. The deterministic-laws-running case led to a state where, by 8000BC, large human subpopulations were on every continent; the in-their-present-form case, to about half of people who answered that, the story of a single pair of humans molded from the dust of the ground in the Garden of Eden is literally true.

I admit I'm surprised that fraction isn't higher. 20% of Americans are people who, despite thinking that there's a bunch of non-literal stuff in the Bible (presumably more than just the stories explicitly defined as parables), don't think the non-literal parts might include the bit about humanity being 6000ish years old?

The converse situation is even weirder, though. 6% of Americans don't identify as Christians and yet think the Christian Bible is "the actual word of God, to be taken literally"? Are they old-fashioned (mythical?) Satanists who believe in God but don't worship him? Are they Gnostics who think the Biblical God is real but is actually not the Supreme Being? I'm not aware of a ton of other options here. Maybe I just expect too much consistency from polling results in general.

6% of Americans don't identify as Christians and yet think the Christian Bible is "the actual word of God, to be taken literally"?

This is probably just noise, lizardman's constant.

But there is a segment of evangelicals who don't identify with the "Christian" label, as silly as it may sound. When I was growing up, the cool thing to be was "a Christ follower" not "a Christian." The best steelman for the phrase is that it stresses the humility of the speaker and not their moral authority -- but a more realistic interpretation is that it served as a means of trying to escape stigma against Christianity in a world increasingly neutral, if not hostile, towards the Christian faith. "I'm not like those judgmental Christians."

In the seeker-sensitive movement, there was a big shift towards that kind of instrumental humility, where everyone's seen as -- to give you a direct sermon quote, no I'm not kidding -- "just trying to figure out this whole Jesus thing." Essentially the main source of growth for many, if not most, non-denominational megachurches is from people with some level of Christian belief but who had negative experiences in smaller churches in the past. Distancing from the "Christian" term serves as a signal of "we're not like those judgy people who gave you dirty looks for being divorced or having a shoulder tattoo." In other words -- it's memetically fit, in a certain context.

This group is also thoroughly evangelical, though unreflectively, without reference to the alternatives. If you tell them many Presbyterians don't believe the Bible is the inspired Word of God or that Episcopal bishops have openly doubted the resurrection of Christ, they struggle to believe you (I've done it). The idea that following Jesus is separable from Biblical inspiration wouldn't even strike them as possible, just like the practice of infant Baptism is a bizarre medieval Catholic innovation and not also the practice of many Protestant churches. In this culture "I'm a Christ follower not a Christian" can feel as subversive as 18th-century Deism, though my own experience is that the internet has taken a sledgehammer to that sort of monoculture and most with doubts or institutional grievances run straight for atheism.

In particular, the "Jesus was just a heckin' good guy who wanted everyone to love each other, he would have been a big fan of gay marriage" seems to be the apostatized, post-Obergefell evolution of the original concept. And many evangelicals even from traditional backgrounds are very suceptible to it, because they often have no grounding in the broader historical and theological place of their tradition and thus have no antibodies to counterarguments. Especially ones that appeal to concerns about "holier than thou" attitudes and Christian judgmentalism (because the Gospel is reduced to non-judgment instead of right-judgment).

There are also the "all the churches are money laundering fronts who spend all their money on fancy sound systems, my church is my household" prepper dad energy folks, at the very epicenter of Scots-Irish obstinance and skepticism of authority. These people feel a firm connection to Christian culture (though mostly in a reactionary way) and would affirm Biblical inspiration if you asked them, though they couldn't give you a verse any longer than a bumper sticker. Yes, this is incoherent.

It's a fairly small group, and the general tenor of American Christianity in recent years is toward greater traditionalism -- I know southern baptists who are endorsing structured liturgical prayer -- but if someone told me "the Bible is the literal Word of God, but I'm not like those Christians," well, this is what pops into my head.

In a philosophy where there is a duality between brains which obey material laws and immortal souls which are above them, though, wouldn't the simulation case be weird? The hundreds of thousands of people who just started existing mid-adulthood have a full life's worth of memories of things that never happened? If you're facing away from your kid when you start existing, you feel love for someone you've never really met?

The simulation theory is unfalsifiable - due to the way we model brains we know memories can be altered and the emotions attached to them too (thank fuck for propafol) and they have even been able to implant a false sense of fear in mice by reactivating specific neurons activated in response to a shock without the shock, which implies our memories are mere playthings for a sufficiently advanced being. Once you accept that premise everything else falls into place.

It's a great irony that an atheist materialist would be more susceptible to that argument than a theist, due to the theist's believing we are more than just flesh and neurons.

I have to say though, I am now more interested in those 6% of people who I assume must be insanely depressed. Or just insane.

Maybe Lizardman's constant is less constant than thought.

What the fuck is going on?

Certain key beliefs our society is based on are Noble Lies, and can't be sustained in an open, high quality, debate environment, leaving the believers only with the option of having a closed debate environment.

The establishment is likely also making sure that no open discussion takes place, because the wrong information coming out at the wrong time is often a direct threat to their power and their goals.

My pet theory is also that the whole system is designed towards us consuming. We consume more when we are unhappy. We are force fed belief that the next shipment is the solution to our happiness, while we have a gadgets that is having us comparing our lives with impossible standards constantly nudged in our feeds by algorithms, pointing towards the next solution to make us happy. And then that cycle is hijacked by the powerful to shape our politics that is only in their own interest.

The Motte is more balanced than you think. There are people who are a little bit more liberal here at least in some ways, such as myself and /u/Hoffmeister. That being said I'm not woke by any means, but I have a lot of sympathy with postmodernism, and have little patience for the trad LARPing that some of the less well-thought-out posters here seem to embody, although I generally find this is one of the highest quality places on the internet to actually find good arguments from both sides.

I am… perplexed as to why I was chosen as your representative of liberalism. I’m on record saying that the obsessive focus on the inalienable rights of the individual is the cancer at the heart of American society. You’re absolutely correct that I’m not a “social conservative”, but I also favor a more authoritarian approach to government/policing than I think almost anyone else on this forum does. (I’m also one of this forum’s leading proponents of “racism is good, actually”.)

more authoritarian approach to government/policing than I think almost anyone else on this forum

Challenge accepted.

How authoritarian dare you dream?

I mean look, I’m not interested in approaching this as a challenge. I want to avoid the temptation toward “vice signaling” so common on the right, so I’m not going to try and show off how “based” I am. If it turns out that you’re more authoritarian than I am, I have zero problem with that.

I wish to enshrine the principle that our justice/carceral system is, first and foremost, about punishment and about making an example of criminals. Rehabilitation is a pipe dream for the vast majority of felons in this country; there are bad people in this world, and they weren’t made bad by society. The death penalty has always been a salutary means not only of removing such people permanently from society, but also of making a public spectacle to impress upon potential future criminals the humiliating death that awaits them. We should expand the death penalty to be applicable to a far broader spectrum of crimes (including property crimes) than those for which it’s currently on offer. The method of execution should be public — I favor hangings, although I’m open to other methods which are similarly visually evocative without being overly torturous. The condemned should experience terror and humiliation — ideally visually obvious to onlookers — during the lead-up to the execution, but not too much actual prolonged physical suffering during the execution itself.

We should also stress the extremely low probability of a false conviction in the age of ubiquitous video surveillance, DNA, and advanced forensics. The entire “presumption of innocence” upon which our current system of jurisprudence rests is, in many ways, a relic of a bygone era. What does it mean to “presume the innocence” of a man caught on camera committing a criminal act, using a gun on which we can find his (scientifically verifiable) fingerprints and unique DNA? The massive amount of appeals, legal loopholes, and protections afforded to criminals in this country is a travesty. I would instead favor an inquisitorial model of criminal justice, with little or no room for the “jury trial” as a method of ascertaining guilt.

If I thought we could actually administer it in America, I would also favor the reintroduction of public corporal punishment (caning, etc.) as an alternative to incarceration and fines for certain crimes. The problem, of course, is that the optics of (mostly) young black men being publicly whipped would be intolerable to a plurality of white Americans. The ghost of slavery still haunts the American consciousness to a great degree, preventing us from being able to embrace a healthy punitive approach to crime. We can do prisons because they lock these men away from the view of squeamish right-thinking white people, but if they were to be corporally punished right out in the open it would be psychologically unbearable for too great a portion of the populace to bear.

I would also love it if we could reach a point where we could carry out an easing-out and eventual abolishment of nearly all personal firearm ownership. This is impossible and intolerable under current conditions in this country, due to the continued existence of a massive criminal underclass. If we could get that problem under control, though, the only ideological dragon left to slay would be the vestigial delusion of an armed populace “as a check against tyranny”, and frankly I think that paper tiger would be easy for a future government to slay. The simple example set by the obviously-not-tyrannical societies which are thriving in our world without widespread individual firearm ownership are simply too visible to most people. Japan is not a tyranny, nor are its citizens suffering under the yoke of oppression because they can’t own guns. Clownish sputtering about “COVID tyranny” aside, nobody can make any credible argument that the citizens of Australia live in a dystopian state of oppression.

I also favor a full redemption of eugenics as a means of improving the human capital of this country, although I’m ambivalent about the extent to which this could, or should, be achieved via coercive measures. I have no special attachment to “bodily autonomy” or “sexual freedom” as important philosophical considerations, but I’m cognizant of the limits of feasibility when it comes to applying those sorts of measures to a modern populace marinated so throughly in feminism, egalitarianism, and dystopian media like GATTACA and Brave New World. Eugenics is still fiercely opposed on both the mainstream right and left, and I don’t want to get over my skis in terms of over-committing to a wildly unpopular proposal.

I favor hangings, although I’m open to other methods which are similarly visually evocative without being overly torturous.

On that point, hanging is a lot more fraught as a method of execution than you probably think it is. Short-drop hanging is obviously not the way to go: the most fortunate of such condemned lose consciousness in 8-10 seconds from compression of the carotid arteries obstructing bloodflow to the brain (possibly along with the carotid nerve reflex causing decreased heart rate/blood pressure, but this is heavily disputed), though this period is still undoubtedly agonizing. From historical accounts of short-drop hangings, it can be assumed that many of the condemned experienced insufficient cerebral ischemia and suffered terribly for significantly longer.

Long drop hanging, meanwhile, has long been thought of as the humane form of hanging. As practiced by the British after the 1888 creation of the Official Table of Drops, the process involved weighing the prisoner and evaluating the thickness/muscularity of their neck to set the drop they'd get. As the condemned reached the end of the rope, the tightening of the knot would jerk the head backwards with sufficient force to break the C2 vertebra, sending the broken fragment forwards and severing the spinal cord for instantaneous death.

Setting aside the issue with presuming that severing the spinal cord produces instant brain death/unconsciousness (wouldn't it just paralyze them?), some investigative studies suggest that the actual cause of death in long-drop hanging is far more variable than previously assumed. In [this] study, among the 34 examined vertebrae of British prisoners executed between 1882 and 1945, only seven were found with cervical fractures, with only three of those being the classic "hangman's fracture". Contemporary autopsies reported far more fractures than had been found in the study, and the fractures that did occur showed no relation to sex, height, or length of drop. A later autopsy of a 1993 hanging using the British method [here] suggested that the quick loss of consciousness observed after the drop was caused by massive cerebral hemorrhaging from torn vertebral arteries, as the spinal cord was again undamaged.

Even using the most rigorously designed protocols, hanging is an inconsistent and occasionally quite cruel method of death. My preferred method would be Soviet-style shooting, but if you really want executions to be a spectacle while solving the problem of undue suffering, you ought to cut the hangman's knot with the headsman's blade.

Your point about hanging is well-taken. I’m trying to optimize for a method that the American public could actually stomach. Hanging has a long and lindy history in Anglophone countries — although, much like my concerns about the optics of caning, hanging does of course suffer from the association with lynching, regardless of how long the practice existed both before and after the era of Lynch Law. Hanging can also be performed in a public square, using an apparatus which can be reused many times, and which can execute multiple individuals simultaneously. It is violent enough to make a point, but, at least in its long-drop form, not too gruesome to witness.

Current “medicalized” execution methods such as lethal injection are too sterile and do not carry any of the desired psychological effects, neither on the condemned nor on onlookers. The gas chamber is similarly medicalized, cannot be carried out before the eyes of the public, and of course suffers from an even more taboo optical association: that of the Holocaust.

The guillotine is far too gruesome and traumatic; watching someone get decapitated and bleed out from their neck stump is simply too much for most modern people to stomach. It also suffers from an inescapable and unacceptable association with the subversive, anarchic, populist aesthetics of the French Revolution.

As for the firing squad or other forms of execution by firearm, I feel they suffer from three major drawbacks: firstly, like the guillotine, they are simply very visually violent and not something a lot of psychologically-healthy Americans would wish to watch; secondly, it is the method of execution which, barring the old-fashioned execution by axe, might be the most traumatizing for the individual(s) tasked with carrying out the execution; thirdly, since my fervent hope is that in the long run America loses its fixation with guns, a method of execution by the state which prominently features firearms sends the wrong message.

I’m sure some enterprising inventor can (and hopefully will) develop a method of execution which more wholly satisfies the criteria I’m looking for. A method which requires the condemned to, directly before the eyes of the public, come to grips with the enormity of the consequences for his crimes, and to experience both the visible terror and the humiliating stripping of social status which are appropriate for the circumstances. I’m sensitive to avoid methods which overly select for sadism in the executioner(s), and those which risk inculcating such sadism over time. Methods like hanging which involve an apparatus, rather than a direct violent action by an individual, are preferable for that reason among others.

"The guillotine is far too gruesome and traumatic for moderns"

[Hanging] is violent enough to make a point, but, at least in its long-drop form, not too gruesome to witness.

Public execution is already wayyy outside the realm of consideration for modern Westerners; if it should be reinstated, I'd prefer that we go the whole nine yards, as it were. Also, have you seen the comments on gore sites? Asides from stupid teenagers, I'd wager that ~everyone who frequents those sites to see anything more graphic than bodycam footage are somehow mentally disturbed.

Besides, the broader objection I have is towards the instrumental value of your formulation. When there's just not that much crime that deserves capital punishment compared to how it was in the past (at least among the blue-blood races), you don't really need to drive the point home in that way; it seems like your ought doesn't follow from the is. I'm curious: what crimes do you think deserve the death penalty (and while we're on topic, which deserve caning)?

When there's just not that much crime that deserves capital punishment compared to how it was in the past (at least among the blue-blood races)

I mean, that’s the thing: in the American context, both execution and caning would be wildly disproportionately applied to the “non-blue-blood races”. I obviously have no objection to hanging or caning a white felon; the demographic disparities are, at least in the short term, simply the reality.

I'm curious: what crimes do you think deserve the death penalty (and while we're on topic, which deserve caning)?

When it comes to non-violent crimes, it’s more about the habitual aspect of crime. If someone commits shoplifting, I’m perfectly happy to see them caned once and then everyone can move on. If someone has committed shoplifting 47 times, this person is very obviously an intolerable burden and incapable of being rehabilitated. Career criminals are what I’m trying to focus on.

There are, however, certain non-violent crimes which I’d be perfectly willing to have someone very severely harmed for: scammers, for example. People who steal not from large impersonal entities, but from vulnerable individuals. A very close family member of mine lost his entire life savings to a scammer, who exploited his naïvety and conscientiousness. I myself had a phone stolen because a guy begged to use it to call his mother, then ran from me the second I handed it to him. These people are irredeemably sociopathic and must be culled. Generally any crimes which demonstrate a depraved mind must be dealt with through making it onerous or impossible for this person to reproduce.

Asides from stupid teenagers, I'd wager that ~everyone who frequents those sites to see anything more graphic than bodycam footage are somehow mentally disturbed.

I will note that in the EEA everyone was basically fine with gore. It's the modern, intermediated society where the vast majority of people don't have to kill animals that is unnatural.

the headsman's blade

It'd be at least a second or two before the brain deoxygenated enough to cause unconsciousness, surely? I was with you up until that point.

if you really want executions to be a spectacle, you ought to cut the hangman's knot with the headsman's blade.

Why not guillotine?

(That would be the practical implementation, but the syllepsis works better this way. (Also, the image of a hooded executioner with a massive axe fits the demand for spectacle better than a mere scaffold with a blade.))

The problem, of course, is that the optics of (mostly) young black men being publicly whipped would be intolerable to a plurality of white Americans.

Countries without American racial politics also eschew judicial corporal punishment of adults. Although a number of backward former British colonies still have caning on the books, Singapore appears to be the only non-Islamic country that actually does it on a regular basis. For whatever reason, the taboo against judicial corporal punishment is stronger than the taboo against the death penalty.

If I had to guess, it would be some combination of:

  • Over time, it has become common sense that the criminal justice system works by incapacitation more than deterrence or rehabilitation, meaning that caning adults is ineffective.
  • People are more worried than they used to be that the guy swinging the cane might be getting off on it.

People are more worried than they used to be that the guy swinging the cane might be getting off on it.

Or, indeed, the guy getting the caning.

It's a running joke with my wife and I.

Is eugenics is still fiercely opposed on both the mainstream right and left? What's with the embryo screening then?

I won't claim to be more authoritarian, and am pleased to know there are others at least as authoritarian.

If only MHGA, was more pronaunceable. Would you expand the death penalty to public corruption? I'd would have rather seen Judge Michael Conahan hanged than pardoned.

Would you expand the death penalty to public corruption? I'd would have rather seen Judge Michael Conahan hanged than pardoned.

I’m a bit conflicted when it comes to corruption committed by obviously intelligent, competent individuals whose talents can clearly still be put to good use. On the one hand, the crimes of powerful individuals can usually impact a much larger number of people than the crimes of low-level street criminals; in that sense, punishing the powerful is extremely important not only because of the gravity of their crimes, but also the punitive/restorative value to the public of seeing them laid low. On the other hand, Michael Conahan has abilities that can be put to good use, as a sort of intellectual chain-gang labor. I’d be wary about wasting him by executing him. Ultimately I think I’d come down on the side of execution, though.

I think I agree with 2/5, think 1/5 is the ideal but tricky to actually implement, and actually disagree with 2/5 (though not fully in either case).

The one that's tricky is inquisitors; the problem is setting up a highly-trustworthy and highly-politically-neutral oversight body to make sure that inquisitors don't, y'know, get captured by the party in power and lock up the opposition. The difficulty of this is the motivation for jury trials, although this purpose has been largely vitiated by various schemes on the part of the government and legal apparatus (there's a whole battery of ways that judges and lawyers cut down on nullification, ranging from strikes to barring mentions to jury instructions).

The ones I disagree with are guns (I think it's wired into the male brain to like weapons; I think US gun culture is maybe a step too far, and I think handguns are a worse value proposition than all other small arms and even a lot of higher-end stuff, but I do generally support the ability of random interested people to be able to hunt game or shoot targets for its own sake) and the executions (I'm mostly on board with the Galactic Milieu policy where, upon sufficiently demonstrating that you're irredeemable, you get a choice of life without parole/["death of personality" if available]/execution, as I'm generally on team "prevention and deterrence" rather than "punishment and deterrence"; definitely prefer bullet to the head over lethal injection as method, though).

The method of execution should be public — I favor hangings, although I’m open to other methods which are similarly visually evocative without being overly torturous.

Hispanic cultures used the garrote, which seems very comparable to the Anglo method of hanging. Firing squads are appropriate for military personnel.

I just remember being impressed by your analysis of the right’s problem with didactic media in response to my ASOIAF post. Sorry if I labeled you as something you’re not: I really probably meant something like critical of the right rather than “liberal” per see when I thought of you.

Ah yes, that’s fair. I’m a fairly ardent critic of mainstream Christian conservatives, and of the “conservative mindset” generally. I’d just say that I’m some third thing rather than a “liberal”.

Don't feel too bad, I (incorrectly) referenced @Hoffmeister25 a progressive in a post from a few years ago. I think his criticisms of his right-wing fellow travelers are just memorable and incisive.

Yeah I'm a libertarian Atheist, I don't feel like this place always sides with social conservatism.

It can probably fairly and correctly be called anti-woke and anti-immigration. But those aren't only positions of social conservatives.

The motte will always appear more socially conservative than the media on some issues because it is willing to look at what actually happened in eg red state maternal mortality cases and not simply hallucinate a scenario. But the motte is not pro-traditional values on the whole.

Seconded. On most topics, I (grey tribe, generally mistrustful of both government and big business) find my point of view represented by some poster. Sure, we have a lot of fringe people who probably have had few other places to voice their opinion before Musk took over Twitter, and there are few wokes who are willing to engage with what they see as a cesspool of racists.

I have a lot of sympathy with postmodernism, and have little patience for the trad LARPing that some of the less well-thought-out posters here seem to embody,

This seems like a contradiction; trad-LARPing in the digital age is insanely post-modern and Baudrillardian.

little patience for the trad LARPing that some of the less well-thought-out posters here seem to embody

I genuinely have no idea what sort of Motte user this refers to. I'd like to ask for examples, but I don't want to start a shitstorm. I see tons of trad LARPers on Twitter so I think I know the type you're references. We have had indeed had some "trad" edgelords on here in the past, but the most trad/socialcons here these days seem to actually be in committed monogamous relationships, have several children, and regularly attend some form of Christian religious service. One can of course quibble over the line between LARPing and authentic living, but that's a general problem in the 21st century, not one that's limited to trad right-wingers.

I think if you focus on old-school forums you will miss out on where a lot of discussion is happening these days, namely Twitter/X, Substack comment threads, and private Discord servers. The first two in particular host a growing collection of in some cases relatively influential Motte alumni that you could follow or whose networks you could poke around in to curate your own feed. If you don't like any of those guys, then it may take a little longer to get the recommendations you want, but the algorithm is a hell of a thing and will get the job done eventually.

As to your more fundamental point, I don't see how this moment in particular is much different from any since the creation of the internet (I wasn't around for them, but maybe early reddit and some previous iteration of 4chan were really that great?). It takes a very particular sort of high IQ, high-decoupling, politically-interested wordcel to be a successful rules-following contributor here and I think it's to be expected that there are less than a dozen places online where such individuals congregate in sufficient numbers to be noticeable.

It takes a very particular sort of high IQ, high-decoupling, politically-interested wordcel to be a successful rules-following contributor here and I think it's to be expected that there are less than a dozen places online where such individuals congregate in sufficient numbers to be noticeable.

It takes a particular kind of owner of the space as well. The temptations of money beckon on all sides in this day and age.

/r/FemaleDatingStrategy became a popular subreddit around what amounted to a feminized version of PUA. The head mods chose to move off of Reddit to a new proprietary website where they focus more on their podcasts, merch, patreon content, etc. I stopped hearing about FDS about the point at which they moved sites, but for the mods it has gone from unpaid Janny work to profitable side hustle. The move undoubtedly throttled audience growth, but it turned the audience they had into paying customers.

The temptation to cash in, at the expense of the growth of the forum or of the original mission of the forum or of the original members of the forum, is great. You need an owner of the forum who doesn't want to cash in, who is content to stay small, who doesn't want to get invited to the good parties and have prestige over it.

This impacts political forums the most, but it hits everything from sports to fashion to philosophy. We're lucky here that the goal seems to be a permanent member's club, where we all hang out to chat, but even then we've seen former power users alter their posting (and their politics) to try to hustle a living on the internet of beefs.

Kulak and Trace are the only ones I’ve seen cash out so far. Are there more I’m missing?

Yassine?

We had a former lawyer who went on the podcast route as well, IIRC

I think in the past, I overestimated what fraction of people are high-decoupling. I have always been a high decoupler since I was a kid, so maybe it's just hard for me to understand not being a high decoupler.

Also, I haven't explored Discord at all so far, I probably should. Am open to suggestions about how to get into some interesting Discords.

Likewise.

I'm subscribed to Noahpinion because he seems like he knows what he's talking about economics-wise, though I 100% disagree with his stance on immigration (since he completely ignores cultural issues (On that front, Peter Brimelow's Alien Nation strikes me as just plain common sense.)) and American exceptionalism.

In diverse low-trust spaces conflict theory and it's associated strategies (defect, defect, defect) simply wins, or at least loses less. I feel like we've discussed the whys on this place for a full decade at this point, but basically you have to at least have a space in which people agree on fundamentals like good faith discussion before you can have moderate and rational discussion. Zero point in wasting your breath trying to convince someone that isn't actually open to being convinced. Add some dead internet theory in: corporations, state actors, random universities in switzerland with access to LLMs, manipulating votes and discussion and anonymous open internet forums are basically the worst possible place to find mistake theorist type discussion.

The motte is sheltered a bit by it's obscurity and it's adherence to strict mean girls, minus the social clique formation, inspired rules. Where conflict that is indirect, hidden under a veil of verbosity and mostly about group status seeking (QCAs) is preferenced. Though this is really still a conflict theory space, just with faux mistake theory employed to mask aggression and maintain status.

If you want good discussion it's best to just make some friends that like politics, pretty much even the most brain wormed internet troll will communicate in your preferred mistake theorist style with people they trust. Or you could try to find some closed communities where access is invite only, maybe on discord or something. You should only go to open forums when you want to verbally punch someone in the face and be punched in the face.

Politics is innately partisan and ugly. It's all about control of power and wealth. If I get a pension, you don't get a free education or he has to work harder and pay more taxes. It's mostly zero-sum.

Nah, that kind of bickering about how big each slice of cake should be is policy discussions, and mostly boring, not ugly. Most of the "good" culture war topics (Dobbs, immigrants, LGBT, gun rights, free speech issues, climate change, Gaza) which are really toxic are not about "how should we divide money between interest groups?" It is always that there are conflicting underlying principles by the different participants.

Most of the "good" culture war topics (Dobbs, immigrants, LGBT, gun rights, free speech issues, climate change, Gaza) which are really toxic are not about "how should we divide money between interest groups?" It is always that there are conflicting underlying principles by the different participants.

I don't agree with this -- the culture war is absolutely about dividing power between interest groups. At its very core! I think you saw the reference to pensions and got sidetracked by economic theory, which currently mostly resides in the "boring policy discussions" category because opposition to liberal free trade has few major proponents among the elite.

But think about Dobbs -- like RandomRanger says, it's ultimately about power. In the feminist formulation -- what they actually say themselves -- abortion is about "a woman's power to control her own body." Stripping away the philosophy of it, the conservative viewpoint is that the state has the power to stop abortions. The interest groups are "women who don't want to bear a child" and "children who are not yet born."

Immigration? Of course that's about the division of power between interest groups! What should a native's labor be worth -- that's about relative power and status. What should the language people speak be -- that's about the power of different linguistic groups, and particularly of monolinguals vs multilinguals. Should there be a pathway to citizenship? Voting rights? That's literally about dividing power between interest groups, between constituencies!

LGBT? Again, division of power between interest groups. Should the religious baker have to bake the gay wedding cake? What are the relative powers of the LGB and the T -- should lesbians be required to accomodate transwomen?

Gun rights? Division of power between interest groups. What is the relative importance of people's desire to own a gun and people's desire not to live in a society that has many guns? How do random acts of mass gun violence -- sometimes perpetrated by people with little to no background that would impede their ability to legally buy a gun -- affect this calculation? What are the rights of mentally ill people to self defense? What are the rights of society to corral others' right to self defense for its own safety?

Freedom of speech? You mean the issue where the deciding factor for most people is "my friends can speak all they want and my enemies should keep their dirty mouths shut?" The issue where the right says "criticism of Israel is antisemitism" and the left says "criticism of immigration is racism"? Where "hate speech" is offensive and defamatory statements made against racial groups -- except white people, because they deserve it? (And don't exist, by the way: "white people have no culture." This is not hate speech.)

Climate change? The issue where a leading activist said, to a crowd of older politicians, "You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words?" Where the young activists feel energized because they believe baby boomers stole a healthy planet from them to lower gas prices? Where the rich jet-setters can fly all over the world announcing the Green Gospel but vacations for the hoi polloi are ecological sins? That's not about the division of power between interest groups?

Gaza? Really? The issue where if you support one side you're calling for Shoah 2.0, and if you support the other you want to firebomb children? The issue that's about, quite literally, two interest groups who both want to live on the same territory? The issue where both sides of the conflict engage in war crimes that endanger or hide behind civilians, but both sides of the debate plug their ears to the horror of the whole thing because My Side Is Oppressed? Isn't that the interest-group-power-struggle par excellence?

I know you're sincere in what you say. And I admire the focus on conflicting principles -- there are indeed a lot of those. But your thesis about the culture war strikes me as precisely wrong. The culture war default, and its cause, is conflict theory. Maybe it's not always about money. But it's definitely about power.

To reply to both you and @RandomRanger, I concede that CW about power. What I was arguing was that it is not primarily about the allocation of resources, money.

I would still argue that the term zero-sum has all the wrong connotations. It vaguely implies rational actors competing over finite resources to maximize some utility function, like me bidding on a coconut you are selling.

In most cases, CW is not like this. The energy spent on fighting the bathroom wars is wildly out of proportion of the actual importance of that issue over the natural state of affairs (if you can somewhat pass and behave normally, you are fine, if you can't pass and/or spy on people, you get treated as a sex pest). The point of fighting the CW is not to achieve a grand strategic victory for your side, but to be seen by your peers fighting the CW. It is mostly performative.

Often, the behavior displayed is not about scoring a win for your side at the expense of the other side (zero sum), but purely on punishing the other side (negative sum). Getting someone for some tweet by doxxing them is a classic CW past-time, after all.

Consider abortion. Depending on whose side holds the majority, some states might allow all abortions up to birth, and some might ban all abortions. I propose that this is a lot worse in satisfying the aggregate preference of the Americans than a compromise solution based on a term limit.

Israel/Palestine is theoretically zero sum (only one side can control a given square meter of land, after all), but in practice it is vastly negative for both sides.

If the point of the CW was to achieve strategic victories for your side, e.g. a power struggle, then one would expect that it would be mostly fought over stuff which actually mattered, and money would be a central angle. People would try to build broad coalitions which would gain them small policy victories. This is not what we are seeing. Instead, we see an outsized focus on small but very emotionally charged theaters, and a trend to prefer the humiliation of members of the other side to actual policy victories.

Immigration is absolutely about power and wealth. People in Britain are working for years so that low-skilled or unemployed migrants can enjoy state accommodation in hotels or social housing.

The example I gave was money but other things have the same basis in zero-sum conflict of interests. Either whites can go around killing blacks with legal impunity or the other way around or some balance in between. Whites get affirmative action, or blacks get it, or Indians get it, or low-castes get it, or whoever... My free speech is free speech, yours is hate speech or obscene... Climate change is about the balance of power between industry and bureaucrats/academics, about state power vs personal power, subsidies for renewables vs economic efficiency...

Gaza is zero-sum. Who gets it? Israel or Palestine? The Israelis find all these principles about why they should win and their enemies should lose, vis versa with the Palestinians. There are exceptions on both sides but the general trend is that the justifications come after the desire. There's a bigger exception in whites generally giving up huge advantages with regard to race but that's a special case that requires intense media/education work to build and maintain.

Power >>> principles. Many women want the power to abort their children and that will for power trumps one of the strongest principles we can think of, as seen in abortion rates. Since the 1970s they've aborted more children than men have killed in all wars IIRC.

I would think the answer is be pretty obvious. Language models have struck a death blow to anonymous online forums and now they're bleeding out. Even before LLMs, once people with political agendas or merch to sell realized they could use cheap content sources to manipulate opinions, the writing was on the wall. But now, as the marginal cost of posting content anonymously approaches 0, and the ability to differentiate between humans and bots disappears, this form of media will die.

I think the trend is probably more towards things like private discord servers where at least some degree of familiarity with the other posters is a requirement. Or at the very least, things linked directly to your identity. Maybe there's some space out there for options that require payment in order to participate (substack comments sort of fit this model). But generally, anonymous online posting is on its way out; another strange relic of innovative human communication going the way of the carrier pigeon and the messages in a bottle. Still, 30 years was a pretty good run. I'm glad I got to be in on it.

Makes sense abstractly, but please provise more pragmatic details :)

Unless you intend to gatekeep, which I wouldn't blame you for given that gatekeeping seems kind of necessary to avoid having your forum overrun by low value contributors.

If that's how you mean it, then I get it lol.

Similar to how the best way to use Reddit is to find actually smart people and then follow their entire post histories.

Thanks, that makes sense to me.

Similar to how the best way to use Reddit is to find actually smart people and then follow their entire post histories.

I used to do that, but my mistake was thinking SlateStarCodex must have been some MMO people were playing like Eve Online or something, so I skipped past those posts, and ended up finding the motte group way later than I should have.

You should consider formatting your post to be a list to make it easier to read.

To actually answer you question, you might check out Data Secret Lox, which is another part of the rationalist and rat adjacent diaspora, with its own group of regulars.

EDIT: Removed formatting point.

Sorry, just formatted. Thanks for the recommendation!

The credible/non-credible forums can be alright. /r/noncrediblediplomacy , /r/crediblediplomacy, /r/noncredibledefense, /r/credibledefense

NCD was pretty good before the Russian/Ukrainian invasion because it was people who were smart about defense/geopolitics shitposting about defense/geopolitics. Then the population of the sub exploded and now it's overrun with neoliberal normies who wouldn't know an F-105 from an F-4.

There's /r/libsofreddit and /r/conservative, Reddit's token right-wing echochambers.

/r/politicalcompassmemes has more ideological diversity and /r/shitpoliticssays is worth a look.

Covid massively accelerated tribalism and polarisation in the offline and online worlds, and internet communities are no longer capable of existing without expelling dissidents to maintain coherence (and to lighten the workload on the tireless internet custodian who is paid very handsomely for his services.)

I can't even say I'm terribly sad about this. I would like for things to come to their inevitable conclusion sooner rather than later.

TDS

Can this die now? TDS has largely been vindicated over the past four and half years, and especially the past 100 days.

  • -18

No it hasn't. Trump has caused market instability, forced Israel and Palestine into a ceasefire, and deported a handful of people against court order. Hardly Sulla's march on Rome.

So Ukraine has been handed over to Putin in exchange for a few hotels to be named later and the US has invaded Denmark and Canada?

Well, I would say yes and no. Trump and Trumpism are bad in many ways as far as I am concerned, but what I mean by TDS is the sort of reflexive emotional attitude where a person is willing to believe pretty much any anti-Trump talking point just because they fervently hate Trump/rightism. For example, I am not a right-winger and I dislike a lot of Trump is doing, but I do not have TDS, because I don't automatically believe that Trump's actions are automatically bad/evil all of the time, and I don't believe that he is literally taking orders from Putin, etc.

The term is overused but it's useful to have a shorthand for the particular effect Trump has on some people. It's worth distinguishing criticism of Trump from TDS. "Tariffs are mostly bad, or at least have been applied poorly" is a reasonable take, not TDS. Handmaid's Tale posters are TDS, always have been always will be, though useful to identify people who can be wholesale ignored.

Similarly someone should've coined ODS to distinguish "Obama is a good candidate" from the messianic wackadoo stuff.

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

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

To quote the set-up...

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

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

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

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

140 of 380 is a 37% retention rate.

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

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

Why It Matters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For example, when the article raises-

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

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

Other quotable quotes by agency include-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May now: Here we are

So, where does the clickbait title come in?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

then reducing the staff issuing those permits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can Trump just… not reopen the government?


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats