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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   34117 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 12, 2025

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She directed me to the corporate number.

She's probably been explicitly told by corporate not to comment on the matter.

I don't know if your first question is meant to be rhetorical, but I'm going to assume it isn't.

I got to Starbucks about 2-4 times a month, depending on how much driving I'm doing on weekends. I can order from the app before I leave home, and by the time I arrive at the shop the drink will be ready for me. The only exception is their nitro cold brew, which I think the employees wait until you get there to pull to preserve drink quality. The employees pretty busy when I get there, but will respond with a "Have a nice day!" when I thank them for the drink. The seats in the café are almost always all occupied.

These are suburb Starbucks, and notably there's no other local coffee shops in the area. One of them is unionized, I have no idea about the others.

When I told her I wasn't necessarily interested in ordering anything, but was very much interested in her thoughts on the 'strike' et al she gave me a stare that made a cow look intelligent.

So not to be rude but how did you appear to her? Perhaps she noticed something off about you as you did her, for example, an indicator of undersocialization or "I'm not a journalist". Were I this woman I'd think "why is random man here to talk about corporate politics (which I have nothing to do with) instead of being normal and purchasing drink?" This is one of many possibilities.

This reminds me of time I was confronted in the supermarket by a 4chan user. I simply commented they were out of vinegar and after pleasantries he goes on tirade about COVID, government manufacturing diseases, how gay people incubated AIDs and have many STDs, all while I give polite white person smile trying to avoid his company. He does not get hint (parallel) owing to undersocialization, which I assume from unkempt greasiness and ideological blinders, continuing even as we enter checkout line. Onlookers onlook in horror while I amusedly wait for bags to be checked, as I know the man from /pol/'s type and they do not.

I feel for the barista in this way, but perhaps I'm not privy to particulars of situation and assume too much. Still, consider me your barista.

Starbucks is not a business I frequent- I'm a tea drinker and also can't bring myself to pay $3 for a drink and also just don't care for big globs of sugar that have some coffee added to them, maybe with a healthy dose of artificial colors and flavors. But they are, literally, everywhere. I can't avoid seeing starbuckses. And it seems like it varies- some of them have cute young women working there being friendly to customers, some of them have trannies being curt.

I am, however, very surprised that you expected much comment from a counter employee about something political involving the company. There's a decent chance she could be disciplined for speaking about it to a customer. There's also a good chance she'd been being bothered for months about it and thought the whole thing was stupid and was sick of hearing about it.

I stopped going to Starbucks when they changed their concealed carry policy years ago (2013). Still get Seattle's Best occasionally at restaurants when that's all they serve. Chick fil a is the only place I go for the hope of anything resembling service.

I don't really follow what the woman you met being obtuse has to do with anything. Surely, if there's a nation-wide strike and she wasn't part of it, she's by definition not representative of the average Starbucks employee?

My guess is that due to whatever labour laws and corporate rules, they can do the shirt protest but can't talk about it with customers. She probably assumed you were some kind of spy from corporate trying to get her fired.

You started to ask her political questions at 9 in the morning. I don't generally get into the mood of talking to anyone for longer than a couple of sentences until it's 10 am or so. Some people are not morning people. On top of that, as others have pointed out, the questions that you asked her may be risky for her to answer. You also judged her appearance. Only internally to your own mind, sure, but it's possible that the judgment energy radiated out from you to her just like her 'fuck you' energy radiated from her to you. Who knows which came first.

Re: the not allowed to give out a cup of water, it’s likely related to some general ups and downs in their loitering policy drama over the past several years.

I don’t recall the ins and outs and may be getting timing wrong but basically around George Floyd, there was a lot of bad optics around not letting people loiter or use the bathroom without being paying customers. This was seen as racism and bad. But meanwhile there were a lot of people taking advantage of such open doors policies, and basically loitering junkies we’re driving away customers.

Not giving out free water is perfectly reasonable way to discourage freeloading loiterers who might disrupt the appeal of the space for paying customers.

If you let that policy happen via discretion you risk the cancel mob highlighting perceived inequity, and wage workers don’t want to get plastered on the internet for that shit.

Blanket ban is much safer for the establishment as well as the workers to have blanket policies like this.

15 years ago I worked at a fast food restaurant right next to a college bar and we had similar policy because otherwise drink college kids who spent no money filled up the place and interfered with the business

I am... less surprised at the pushback you have received than you are, but that's because I work in a retail adjacent industry I think. And I post more. Anyway I sympathise with your perspective, although I think it's a little outdated. Everyone is calling you rude and entitled, but from my perspective you have what seems to me the default attitude to retail of everyone gen x and older (and the occasional millenial and zoomer) - in any transaction there is a buyer and the seller - the buyer is there to buy something, the seller is there to sell something. Therefore, if the seller wants to sell their product, it is up to them to get the buyer to buy it. Whether they are angry, calm, crying, raging, male, female, black, white, gay, straight, trans, cis - if you want their money you have to convince them to give it to you. The buyer on the other hand, has one responsibility - to hand over the money required to purchase the good. That's it. They could talk entirely in profanity if they liked - as long as they pay, they get service.

Which is to say that yes you were being entitled, but it was precisely as entitled as Starbucks wanted their customers to feel until recently. (It was also as entitled as Starbucks wanted every visitor to feel for a few years there, but that was always madness.) Starbucks didn't become a household name, land a store on every corner and redesign the coffee industry because they made good coffee, everyone is aware of that, but few people ask the follow up 'why were they successful then?' Starbucks' runaway success was in large part due to the way they treated their staff - and a large part of that was their profit sharing type program that gave even the baristas and other part timers stock options. Having a stake in the success of the company, the baristas worked extra hard to convert customers into sales - aka they smiled even when they didn't feel like it. That tied the reliability and success of a corporate operation to the atmosphere and staff behaviour of a mom and pop outfit, and consumers went nuts for it. People want to feel like their presence is wanted and they will drink poisonous tar to feel it.

And I understand the people who feel it's duplicitous to pretend to be nice to someone you loathe or pretend to be happy when you feel like shit, but a) that's society and b) that's what they're being paid for, most people don't care if they grind the beans a particular way, they just want a cute girl or guy to smile when they get their coffee. And yes, maybe it's selfish to not want to worry about tailoring your behaviour to not upset some barista you'll never see again, but I think it is eminently more selfish - and entitled - to expect strangers to treat you like you belong in their Dunbar's group. Especially when you are being paid to be there and the stranger is paying you.

Buy something next time though lol.

And I understand the people who feel it's duplicitous to pretend to be nice to someone you loathe or pretend to be happy when you feel like shit, but a) that's society and b) that's what they're being paid for, most people don't care if they grind the beans a particular way, they just want a cute girl or guy to smile when they get their coffee. And yes, maybe it's selfish to not want to worry about tailoring your behaviour to not upset some barista you'll never see again, but I think it is eminently more selfish - and entitled - to expect strangers to treat you like you belong in their Dunbar's group. Especially when you are being paid to be there and the stranger is paying you.

I don’t get this. You know going into service adjacent industries that at least part of what you do is offer a service. It’s not a mystery, it’s not hidden in the fine print. There is no “surprise, we actually want you to make this experience as pleasant as possible.” And as such, as either the owner/manager of a place like that or a customer, I expect that you will perform a service and do so without being rude or acting like the job you were hired to do is a burden. If not acting like a spoiled child made to clean their bedroom is too hard for you, then don’t work in the service industry.

And furthermore I don’t think that the current year thing where employees are allowed to bring political and social issues, personal problems or anything else into the workplace is good. It’s a business. It is not your personal billboard for whatever pet cause you have. It’s not a place where personal problems should get in the way of getting the job done. Such things just get in the way. Leave it at home or talk to a therapist as needed, but the primary purpose of a job is to get the work done. It’s not your home, it’s not your friends, and it’s not your therapist’s office.

I worked at a large corporate coffee chain for a while, and the entire charm of the job was a series of short, easy, straightforward interactions. Someone wanted a mediocre but predictable latte and a smile. I would smile and make them a latte. It was positive and predictable for all concerned. Everyone was happiest during the rush phase of the day, when these small positive interactions happened in quick succession. Everyone was least happy during the slow part, when we had to engage in daily cleaning tasks like restrooms, mopping, drains, and sometimes odd customers who would try to chat about my ethnic background or something.

The interaction described above sounds quite unpleasant from the perspective of the worker, more than remaking a coffee. But, yeah, mostly it's because he isn't actually a customer.

Why is this a post in the culture war thread? You went to a store that you had a negative predisposition towards, had an encounter with an employee who you considered rude and unattractive, a fact you decided to share for some inexplicable reason. You predictably were shunned because you came with the express purpose of not purchasing anything and wasting the service workers' time.

I have no idea why your insults or opinion that 'starbucks was a shit-ass place full of soulless NPCs' are at all relevant here, nor do I agree with your hastily drawn conclusions about supposed 'curiosity' not being rewarded. If you have to question the point of your post, perhaps that is a sign it does not belong.

In the spirit of frank and open discussion, what is your political ideology?

  • -14

I suppose I'm a liberal.

could be wrong, but I seem to recall tagging that user as a darwin alt.

That would track with my instinct to not engage breezily. If you are Darwin buddy, hope you’re well

In fairness, given your approach, it's possible she mistook you for a journalist.

I appreciate that I was just some pain in the ass she didn't want to deal with so she could go on with her day. We are all so used to that now that we don't even blink when someone is like 'hey, no, I'm really just curious and I'm happy to buy a coffee and buy you one too. I just have a few minutes to kill here," and the other party reacts like it's an obvious scam or (like that other intelligent fella said, @DradisPing) I was a corporate spy

  • -10

This is interesting. It's well-written in the sense that it flows and sticks the landing, even though I agree with almost everyone who has commented that your behavior (and subsequent dismissal of this woman) were oddly tone-deaf to the way polite society works. And slightly, to my archaic worldview, ungallant. But that point has been made repeatedly--to the point where you invoked Satan no less--so I'll change tack.

In Japan I generally avoid Starbucks because I don't enjoy their simple black coffee, and I am not interested in all the milkshake-type drinks which are considerably more popular, as well as time-consuming to make. Thus I have found myself waiting in line for up to 15 minutes just to have hot beverage poured from urn to cup because the three people in front of me ordered the dessert drinks. Also, although I haven't been to a US convenience store in years, here at least the Family Mart coffee machine grinds the beans as you're standing there, and that's like a minute wait tops. This is a tedious preface to my point that, at least here, Starbucks workers are efficient, on-task, and professional--which is to say very good at customer-facing friendliness. Also often young and pretty (the males and the females). Yet I cannot imagine how I could ask your question without creating a shit storm of awkwardness. Unfortunately awkwardness is routinely expected from foreigners (in a society built around avoiding awkwardness) so anyone brave and reckless enough to interact with a foreigner would probably be unfazed. This wouldn't be a good thing, as they'd probably be equally unfazed if I suddenly took off my shirt in the shop and began applying deodorant to my armpits. "Foreigners, what can you expect?" etc. So I am probably routinely viewed, despite my best efforts, as a relatively tame chimpanzee by many. And chimps can suddenly lose it, as we know.

Your posts sometimes seem exasperated--with people, with the Motte. Because of this (in addition to your username) I have assumed you are drinking booze while posting. But maybe it's something else. General misanthropy? I'm not trying intentionally to be satanic.

I feel heard. So, thank you. Without obsequiousness that's just a genuine sigh of relief.

Are we talking about the same thing? I was uncouth, ungallant, imperious by imposing myself on that poor, unsuspecting Starbucks employee. I might as well have taken my shirt off and started swinging it around like 'Call me George, George of the jungle'.

But I'm not as exasperated with people or the Motte (although, gosh, I do feel like this used to be the place to get the news) as I am with the reality that the whole exchange was so...whatever it was. Gosh. Now I do feel bad for being so anthropologically autistic even if she wouldn't give me a cup of water

Mind my asking what your post was about before you deleted it?

It says "removed by moderator", not "deleted by user". Also, the user has been permanently banned, so he can't answer.

Oh thanks, I missed that.

That Starbucks employee may have been a rude, incompetent blob. I wasn't there, and the nuances of the interaction get lost. Perhaps there is some element missing in your relating of the conversation that neither I nor others have grasped. It doesn't matter that much.

When I told her I wasn't necessarily interested in ordering anything, but was very much interested in her thoughts on the 'strike' et al she gave me a stare that made a cow look intelligent. When she told me she didn't have anything to say about that, and would I like to order anything, I asked for a glass of water and if she'd mind if asked one of her colleagues instead.

Why would you expect a random employee to answer you honestly on a question that is obviously contentious with her employer and may get her fired if you are recording her or from management? Your "just for fun" is her job, and for a working class person can be very precarious. Retail workers are not dancing monkeys, especially when you weren't even going to buy anything or tip her!

I'd say the fact she treated you professionally is more than you had any right to expect, given your approach. She may well have looked at you and was judging YOUR intelligence for asking such a question right there in the open.

Welcome to Starbucks - we hate people who ask questions that might get us fired (and aren't even going to tip), seems like an entirely reasonable position.

Honestly you come off as being very entitled here. Did you even consider that if she did answer you and was reported she might get in trouble or lose her job, or that she might worry about that? Would that be worth sating your desire for an anthropological survey, with absolutely nothing to gain for her? Heck anthropologists at least brought shiny beads to gift their subjects!

As for Starbucks itself, it's overpriced but the benefit is as with all chains that you know roughly what you are going to get. The little Ethiopian coffee shop down the road is probably better, but may not have such a broad selection, is much more variable and harder to find.

LMAO how should she have treated me if not 'professionally'? If that was more than I had any right to expect, what should have been expected?

  • -12

With hindsight, she arguably should have called a manager and had you ejected, photographed and banned from the store for bothering on-the-clock employees while not being a customer.

That’s hugely excessive. A slightly clunky conversation struck up at the wrong moment is not the same as harassment.

For asking a question that you should have known if she answered may have got her fired? Back in my customer service days I'd have just rolled my eyes and ignored you, and called for the next person, as you had already said you didn't want to buy anything. Perfect plausible deniability for me. Then bitched about you to a colleague once you left. You'd probably make the "Can you believe what this customer did?" list when winding down after work. You may not have been at the top of the list. There are a lot of customers who do unbelievable things after all, but you'd probably have been on it.

To recap you walked into a retail establishment, to ask a contentious question about a labor dispute to a basic barista out loud in the open, where anyone could hear, and apparently did not consider that the barista would have been gambling that you weren't a snitch or that anyone overheard her, and expected her to answer. That is probably not your finest hour to put it mildly.

I don't think you thought through the consequences of what might have happened from her point of view. And therefore you are entitled to her scorn. That she kept it professional is to her credit. You are entitled to be treated professionally when ordering a latte or asking where they source their soy milk from. When you ask questions, the answers to which might get someone fired, you are off that reservation, and out on your own. She is not paid to answer those questions. It was rude of you to ask. Therefore rudeness back should be your expectation.

I don't necessarily reject any of your assertions prima facie but this is an absurd way to organize society. I was happy to buy a coffee and buy one for the employee, or one of her colleagues, for their candid take on current events. I am their neighbor, at least, on paper. This entire conversation is satanic.

  • -16

I was happy to buy a coffee and buy one for the employee, or one of her colleagues, for their candid take on current events.

But... you didn't?

But it's also understandable that employers don't want to be undermined by having any one of their employees act as impromptu spokesman for any cause, anytime, anywhere. Even the striking employees as a whole don't necessarily want that - remember how antiwork was basically destroyed by one bad interview?

I think it helps to consider people as having rights and responsibilities linked to the roles they play. When you are wearing a uniform and you are dealing with a customer, you are (like it or not) visibly representing the company and you are expected to do and not-do certain things. After work, it's different.

Then just smile and ask me if I'm planning to order something or not. Like don't go full NPC drone corpo 'I have nothing to say about that' and act inhuman. What happened to being neighborly. Perhaps I am old man yelling at clouds

Edit: But no I'm not. Just give me a cup of water. That's a new one for me, to be told they're not allowed to give out water.

  • -11

For sure it sounds like she could have dealt with it more gracefully. I doubt that Starbucks is getting the best and brightest.

I also think it's the case for whatever reason that Americans seem to be much accepting about paring all relationships back to pure economics. I'm not sure why. Possibly because it's worked well so far. But I'm reminded of the way that in Japan falling below a certain level of politeness is just totally unacceptable no matter what, as is stuff like raising prices beyond the socially accepted level.

Have you considered that she may have simply not wanted to talk about it, or known much about it, and been leaning on approved phrasing from corporate to avoid having to talk about something she didn't want to?

I was happy to buy a coffee and buy one for the employee, or one of her colleagues, for their candid take on current events. I am their neighbor, at least, on paper. This entire conversation is satanic.

Note that is not what you said in your OP! You never mentioned anything about telling her you were willing to offer anything in return.

"When I told her I wasn't necessarily interested in ordering anything, but was very much interested in her thoughts on the 'strike' et al she gave me a stare that made a cow look intelligent."

But you are not their neighbor. That implies they know you already. You are a stranger. A potential customer. This is their place of work, not a place to make friends. As an ex customer service worker myself I really want to stress this. People suck to deal with. The workers generally don't want to make friends with you. They want you to engage in the transaction that they are being paid for, so they can earn their money and go home. It is not their job to give you their take on current events about their business. Especially with the possibility their job is at risk.

If you want to reorganize society such that a Starbucks employee giving their honest opinion at work to a random customer, means they do not risk being fired for it, then go ahead and work on that, but note that still does not mean they have to engage with you on anything outside the service they are being paid to deliver to you. Your relationship is transactional. Nothing more. The barista is not your friend, she is not even an acquaintance. She sees hundreds of people every day. Some of whom are nice and some of whom are unpleasant. She likely just wants to get through her mind numbing shift as easily as possible.

If you want to talk to someone who is off duty and make that same offer, then you have a bit more leeway. They aren't on the clock, they are probably a bit more relaxed, not being measured by their productivity, not having other employees over their shoulder, so many customer service employees will be much more happy to give you the truth (though they may still be suspicious if you come across as a journalist in a situation where there is a national protest or something going on).

Oh my god dude she could have just said 'I'm not allowed to talk about it' or 'I'm really just here to do my job' but all your words words words don't erase the inhumanity of the fact that two 'normal' people can't talk anymore about current events because of...all the stuff you just said

Edit: I live down the street. I did put 'neighbor' in scare quotes because I anticipated pushback but this stung-out poor old gal works two or fewer miles away from my home. We're neighbors. Or at least we're 'supposed' to be.

  • -18

inhumanity of the fact that two 'normal' people can't talk anymore about current events because of...all the stuff you just said

Setting aside whether she might get fired, it is entirely human not to want to talk to random strangers about things at your job. Being a neighbor is just geographical proximity. Even is she lived next door she may not want to talk to you about anything and that is very human. Especially if she can detect the disdain in which you hold her.

If you want her to act as you think a neighbor should then you need to make an effort to not judge her like:

"almost comically short and fat, like a cube. Her hair was greasy, thin, obviously unwashed, and would've benefited from a cut some months ago. She was curt, bordering on rude, asking what I wanted. When I told her I wasn't necessarily interested in ordering anything, but was very much interested in her thoughts on the 'strike' et al she gave me a stare that made a cow look intelligent."

Is this how you describe the people you want to form a neighborly community with? Is this how you talk about them? Never once in your vent did you speculate that your neighbor maybe overworked and underpaid, that she might be working multiple jobs, that she might have a point in what she did, that perhaps she picked up on your immediate reaction to seeing her. You described her entirely in a negative fashion. You called her a soulless NPC.

Why should she act like a neighbor to you? Did you act like a neighbor to her? You didn't even buy a coffee at the place she works, you went out of entirely selfish reasons and on the very first time you met her, asked her a badly thought through question. You didn't start with small talk about the weather or any of the other socially acceptable ways we have of building rapport.

If you want to have a neighborly community, then you need to start treating people like your friendly neighbors. Not treating them like sources of information to satisfy your curiosity, going into their place of business with no intention of buying anything. You admitted below you should have at least bought something, so that is a start. You skipped over a whole bunch of steps in the making friendly neighbors dance, and then are confused when she doesn't treat you like one.

When a guy moves in next door, he is not automatically your friendly neighbor you can ask possibly difficult questions to, because of geography, you have to build that relationship before you ask "Hey, your employer is having a labor dispute, what is the real skinny on that real quick?" You invite him over for a bbq, you ask if you can help him move in, you lend him your lawnmower, tell him where the best bar is. We have social conventions and rules and structures for a reason. They are crucial in building relationships.

So make up your mind, was she a soulless dumb fat cow? Or was she a neighbor you want to build a real communal relationship with? If she read what you said about her, do you think it is likely to make her want to treat you more like a friendly neighbor or less likely?

Bro you are just a communist, in my humble opinion. There is nothing to do here. When you go to McDonald's in Denmark Ms Teen America takes your order with a smile and a wink. When I went to Starbucks to ask 'hey, how do you feel about this recent news' you give me interminable wordwall and the wage-slave gives me blank face

Edit: To illustrate my point there is a 'strung out old gal' working the counter at a gas station down the street from the Starbucks in question that I frequent. We're genuinely actual friends. She had my number. The other day her power went out and I went over to deliver a shitty old freezer box I had sitting around in my garage. That's neighbors.

  • -19
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But you are not their neighbor. That implies they know you already. You are a stranger. A potential customer. This is their place of work, not a place to make friends. As an ex customer service worker myself I really want to stress this. People suck to deal with. The workers generally don't want to make friends with you. They want you to engage in the transaction that they are being paid for, so they can earn their money and go home.

To be fair, this is not the case at all times and in all places. It generally corresponds with scale and culture, and is much more the case in a big-chain shop than it is the case in, say, a little tea shop in a small town.

It generally corresponds with scale and culture, and is much more the case in

Absolutely it can I agree. But even in a small tea shop in the Cotswolds if you go in, and ask them how the labor relations are between management and staff, after saying you don't want to buy anything, I'm not sure you'll get much of an answer.

Oh, yes. I meant the propensity for idle chat / relationship-forming, and the baseline emotional response to customers.

You weren’t even a real customer, you didn’t buy anything! She could’ve told you to piss off and make space for paying customers. You could have been a journalist (honestly this is much more likely than the reality of you just being some guy who was curious), and if she was quoted or her store was mentioned in an article she could get in trouble with corporate. And who really wants to talk to a journalist at work anyway? Especially right at the start of a shift.

My opinion of the average current-year-plus-ten starbucks barista is not that high either, granted, but you were not helping yourself here. If you really wanted an answer, you should’ve ordered a small black coffee (or whatever) and asked your question while she was ringing you up.

Yeah, I should have just gotten a small black coffee and asked absentmindedly. I didn't do that because I didn't want to give Starbucks money, but that's what I should've done. Thumbs up

Genuine question: Are you on the spectrum?

He's permabanned. You shouldn't encourage alt-posting.

Your "just for fun" is her job, and for a working class person can be very precarious. Retail workers are not dancing monkeys, especially when you weren't even going to buy anything or tip her!

In this economy? She can get a new, equivalent job tomorrow. Not a great job, but she already didn't have that.

There is simply a shortage of customer service workers compared to people wanting customer service. Yes, this means standards for friendliness to customers have declined. I'm personally ok with that and would rather the 'all business' model of customer service become standard(I have requested new waiters for being overly personal with the friendliness before), but lots of Americans aren't used to that.

Two frames for the argument about less-skilled migration and similar supply-side tradeoffs

A thought inspired by this article on the UK's ConservativeHome. John Oxley's article criticises the Starmer administration for not saying how they are going to recruit British care workers to replace the immigrant care workers they are cutting visas for. Everyone agrees in principle that pay and conditions for care workers will need to improve to make this happen, and that this is all right and proper as long as the Magic Money Fairy pays for it.

Oxley writes about the problem from the perspective of money flows - if we want to pay care workers more, we will need to funnel money into care homes, either by increasing charges to residents (and therefore making Granny sell her house to pay for care), by raising taxes, or by cutting spending on other things.

I tend to prefer the flipped frame which focusses on the flow of goods and services. If we send British workers (and, in particular, physically healthy British workers with a good attitude - this mostly rules out the argument that better-paid care work would magically bring back all the people who have been claiming disability benefits since the pandemic) into care homes, then the work they are currently doing will not get done. In this frame the median voter will be poorer because their favourite restaurant disappears (people are wiping butts instead of waiting tables), they have to spend time in grubby shops, offices, schools and hospitals (people are wiping butts instead of cleaning), and they have to deal with more unexpected items in the bagging area (people are wiping butts instead of manning tills). The tax rises, spending cuts, or even deficit-induced inflation are just a way of making this impoverishment stick in a market economy.

Whichever frame you use, this doesn't answer the question - there could easily be costs of less-skilled migration which mean it is net-negative for the country. But both are ways of forcing you to confront the tradeoff. I prefer the real resources frame because it makes clear that the tradeoff is inexorable and there is no way out through financial jiggery-pokery.

Do Motteposters have a view on whether thinking about this type of question in terms of money or in terms of real resources is more helpful?

I personally prefer to think in terms of money as the abstraction helps me to reason more efficiently. However for teaching the common man the real resources framework is absolutely the way to go as that way you don't have to waste epicycles telling them why their objection they thought up in 20 seconds isn't gonna solve the issue.

I like your frame partly because it suggests useful ways of addressing the problem. (I don't intend this as a gotcha).

  • People are wiping butts instead of cleaning -> more robot vacuums / mops.

  • People are wiping butts instead of waiting tables -> more of those robots that carry food from the kitchen to the table + normalize selecting & paying for food using a ticket machine at the entrance as in Japan.

  • People are wiping butts instead of manning tills -> put more serious work into unmanned checkouts.

Most of these are not insoluble problems, they are problems that nobody was incentivized to solve.

My only worry would be that so much of our economy is purely financialised at this point that such an approach would neglect serious aspects of reality that matter. No idea if this is true.

I don't think this line of argument necessarily proves anything about the optimal number of semi-skilled or unskilled workers to have in a country. Clearly that number is above 0 (or you get reverse complementary task specialisation where skilled workers get moved into care work because the wages are get so high that productivity suffers in the long-run) and might depend a lot on how the generous the state is to recent migrant workers. The Qatari economy would probably not be better off if they deported all the South Asian construction workers (even if we were to assume they were entirely free economic agents rather than borderline indentured servants). What the balance is in any given country is just an object-level question you can't reason your way to an answer to.

One other obvious technology solution would be to automate butt-wiping. I suspect there are fewer qualms about automating geriatric care versus infant care, too.

People are wiping butts instead of waiting tables -> more of those robots that carry food from the kitchen to the table + normalize selecting & paying for food using a ticket machine at the entrance as in Japan.

Matthew Yglesias has a repeated line that the middle class should not be able to afford full-service dining (except as an occasional splurge purchase) in a country with a functioning labour market. He sees the market shift from low-end full-service restaurants to high-end fast-casual dining as (a) driven by rising low-end wages and (b) an entirely good thing. So the official rat-adjacent neoliberal shill position here is

People are wiping butts instead of waiting tables -> restaurants targeting middle-class clientele continue to switch from a full-service to a fast-casual model.

Matthew Yglesias has a repeated line that the middle class should not be able to afford full-service dining (except as an occasional splurge purchase) in a country with a functioning labour market.

I think this might have some truth to it, but there is an element of cultural choice involved. Some cultures have different expectations of "full-service dining" — I'm thinking of how American ones tend to push table turnover, whereas other countries expect to serve each table maybe once per evening.

But there is some reasonable bound on "how much time we spend on each other." One could total up "hours wiping butts" versus total hours worked and see that yes, having the median worker work 40 hours, 10 of which are spent wiping butts, is probably not sustainable. Maybe it'd be at 60 hour weeks, but I'd really prefer more leisure time. There are some real culture choices to be made about the relative merits of time spent on arts, capital investments (building stuff!), research, and medicine — is medicine an end, or just a means to it. It's honestly a pretty open question I'd love to see more debate on, rather than neoliberal "we can have it all" platitudes.

I suppose also that some historic cultures adopted senicide rather than spend time wiping (elderly) butts, although to my modern sensibilities that's rather abhorrent, but perhaps a bit understandable in resource-constrained situations.

I don't follow the argument? If a party of four goes to a full-service restaurant, I'd expect somewhere on the order of 1-2 hours of human time to be spent by restaurant staff on that party (between host, waiter, cooks, dishwashers, management, etc). Assuming that employees are ~1/3 of the cost of running a restaurant, and that the customers make the same wage as the restaurant staff, that's a per-person cost of 45 - 90 minutes of wages. Probably not something you want to do literally every day, but seems like it should be easily doable a couple times a week, not just as an "occasional splurge purchase".

Average American worker earns $1000/week for forty hours work, or $25/hr, which makes a restaurant meal for four priced out at average American wages under your numbers ~$90. Equivalent to raising the price of chilis to a steakhouse price.

Wait is Chili's not considered a full-service restaurant? Also that sounds about right for a Chili's (restaurant staff generally makes ~23-27/h here based on the help wanted signs I see in windows, probably on the upper end of that considering the selection effects, and $20pp sounds rightish for dinner out somewhere nonpretentious).

Wait is Chili's not considered a full-service restaurant?

Chili's was the first restaurant I encountered that replaced ordering with a tablet at the table, and that was back in... 2012ish? There was still waitstaff to deliver the food and drinks, but they didn't do the ordering process and there was less attention overall.

It's closer to full service than Chipotle or Five Guys, but I wouldn't call it full-service in the old way either. Chili's is also directly competing with McDonald's now so that's interesting.

But how will my body continue to function without drugs if I stop taking them?

Maybe quitting the infinite cheap labor pool cold turkey isn't the best or least painful way to get back to a functioning labor market with accurate price signals, shocks never feel good, but it's still better than continuing to slowly turn into South Africa.

Rising wages are an incentive to increase productivity. When did we stop wanting machines to do menial jobs and instead started to want miserable strangers to do them instead?

If you go cold turkey on benzos you run the risk of killing yourself because your body can't handle the stress. The question now is whether migrants are like benzos or, say, antihistamines.

The question now is whether migrants are like benzos or, say, antihistamines.

But antihistamines don't work...oh! I see what you did there.

I think it's fundamentally a mistake to think about these foreign care workers as workers. They are not people who migrated in order to work, they are people who are working in order to migrate.

They are simply people who are desperate to move from poor countries to rich countries. The care worker visas were the only way for them to do that, which is why for some countries (Zimbabwe being the best example) there were ten dependent visas issued for every worker. All they needed to do is work for five years and then the whole family can get indefinite leave to remain, access to the British welfare state, the right to import even more relatives. At that point, there's no reason for them to continue working in care homes (or at all, really).

Now these absurdly large holes have finally been plugged, the Conservative government that introduced the visa removed the ability for migrants to bring along dependents, and the current Labour government abolished the visa route to new entrants (although those who previously came in can still work in the sector) and extended the time needed for indefinite leave to 10 years in most cases (we'll see how many exceptions they grant).

I personally am in favour of increasing wages (or at least allowing the market to do so) for care workers. Pensioners are far too wealthy in the UK. The care sector would allow some of that wealth to be transferred to younger, poorer people, allowing them to buy houses and start families. With fewer low-skilled immigrants, the welfare state bill will be less. If that means fewer waiters, so be it.

Most people don’t do everything “in order to work.” They work in order to live here, or raise their kids, or buy that new car, or whatever. What makes migration special?

That they are foreigners.

Okay, but is there an economic difference?

I think the problem is that:

  1. We (often) bring them in to fill specific shortages, enduring the larger problems that arise (loss of cultural integrity, lowered trust, often high long-term welfare costs) because we need those shortages fixed no matter what.
  2. There is no incentive for them to continue fixing those shortages after they get a long-term visa.
  3. The shortages then remain unfilled, so we bring in more immigrants. Meanwhile the long-term consequences are getting more and more severe.

Is the loss in social trust caused by ethnic diversity in general, or by specific high-crime ethnic groups? The high crime groups (ADOS blacks in the US, Jamaicans and Somalis in the UK, Arabs and Afghans in Continental Europe) did not get here through work-based legal immigration.

My impression is more that there is a somewhat indirect, but stable link between these two: If you're part of the elite, you usually already consider yourself more a cosmopolitan who just happens to life in this particular country. You have lots of elite friends from other countries, you have lived yourself in other countries. You profit from lower-class immigrant workers suppressing salaries. You should be able to live in the good part of wherever you are insulating yourself from most problems. All this together means is that you have a very strong positive disposition towards ethnic diversity. Any negative mention of any ethnic group except your own is frowned up on to such a degree that it is near-impossible to publicly acknowledge even obviously problematic minorities, it's always just specific people or at most this particular clan. Not being able to acknowledge a problem leads to that problem proliferating.

There is also the problem that some groups are simultaneously supplying useful cheap work, but are also high-crime. Some of this is even systematic, such as using legal low margin work companies as a front to do illegal side work which can range from merely supplemental to being the actual income stream. I think that's as usual a spectrum, with extreme cases such as east asian immigration at "great work, no crime, high willingness to fit in", the middle is something like east europeans "low-value work, often significant illegal side work, medium willingness to fit in" and the extreme other would be something like sub-saharan "very little work, income almost entirely illegal or from state support, no willingness to fit in". The middle groups are here for work, but still cause issues and some loss of trust, but just not as much.

sub-saharan "very little work, income almost entirely illegal or from state support, no willingness to fit in".

The is not an accurate description of 21st century immigration to the UK from sub-Saharan Africa. Within working and middle-class London neighbourhoods (i.e. segregating by ability to make rent) the recent African immigrants are better neighbours than the whites, and are overrepresented in cheap private schools, parent groups demanding more rigorous curriculum in State schools, Christian churches, and the Conservative Party.

This is obfuscated by statistics which lump them together with Caribbean blacks (who are now an indigenous underclass with similar but less severe pathologies to ADOS blacks in the US) and Somalis (who are basically undesirable in every way).

What is going on here is that there are social problems caused by the bottom 50% of the population (primarily consuming more public services than you pay in taxes) and social problems caused by the bottom 2% of the population (like crime). It only takes a minimally selective immigration filter for the immigrants to cause less of the second kind of the problem than the natives do - Sub-Saharan immigrants in the UK passed that test, even under the ultra-permissive Blair regime. The groups that don't are the completely unfiltered ones - refugees and illegals. (FWIW, the stats aren't great but in the US "put food on the table without drawing hostile attention from the authorities" looks like it was a sufficient filter that your illegals were less likely to commit non-immigration crimes than a native population that is 15+% ADOS blacks).

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Because our welfare system is set up in such a way that they only need to work for five years before being entitled to live off the taxpayer indefinitely. And the statistics suggest that, as low-skilled immigrants from third world countries, they are much more likely to end up doing so than say, Polish graduates.

That stat doesn’t say anything about the five year trick. Or about Poles. Wait, it’s not even limited to migrants! This is like using the African-American unemployment rate to say that black immigrants are actually planning to quit. That’s not true for the U.S. and I would like to see better data for the U.K.

But let’s assume that 10.7% of Pakistani migrants are in fact arriving, cleaning bedpans for five years, then quitting to live off the King’s largesse. Why aren’t native-born Brits doing the same thing? To me, that suggests it’s not actually a good deal for anyone raised to expect a first-world standard of living. That’s exactly the kind of arbitrage @MadMonzer is talking about.

I think it's fundamentally a mistake to think about these foreign care workers as workers. They are not people who migrated in order to work, they are people who are working in order to migrate.

You can think about them as wakalixes if you want - it doesn't change the tradeoff that if you eject the people doing work either someone else has to do the work (in place of what they are currently doing) or the work doesn't get done.

Labour-driven immigration is, regardless of the motives of the immigrant, fundamentally a commercial transaction with terms set by the host-country government on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. Empirically, Singapore and the Gulf Arabs have demonstrated that you can offer low-skill immigrants much less favourable terms than the West does and still get takers.

After an attempt to fact-check your comment about Zimbabwe, the specific context of the UK care worker visa appears to be a furphy here. It looks like there was an order-of-magnitude drop in the number of care worker visas issued before the change to dependent visas, driven by a crackdown on outright fraudulent applications in late 2023. So this particular case wasn't choosing the wrong-side of a trade-off, it was failed implementation due to administrative incompetence. For anyone familiar with the UK Home Office, this is unsurprising. For anyone familiar with the Johnson-Sunak Conservative regime, this is also unsurprising.

extended the time needed for indefinite leave to 10 years in most cases

That's only a white paper and will take at least until next year to pass into law. Currently rules are the same. Also there's a concept in UK common law called "legitimate expectation" where the migrants can argue that they had a legitimate expectation that they'd be granted ILR after 5 years on a visa and that influenced their decision to accept it so now that can't be changed unilaterally (much like how if I have a job contract with you you can't cut my salary unilaterally). They can apply for judicial review on the basis of legitimate expectation and will very likely win and there's even precedent for it: last time the government increased ILR length from 4 years to 5 years the people on the skilled worker visa at the time were able to win in high court.

They can apply for judicial review on the basis of legitimate expectation and will very likely win and there's even precedent for it:

In theory they could use a notwithstanding clause to eliminate the prospect of judicial review when passing a new immigration bill, but they are both incompetent and unserious, so they won’t. One of the good things about parliamentary sovereignty and no written constitution is that a simple majority can at least just pass a law that says “this ignores the ECHR, ignores any court judgment, and establishes no legal challenge to itself whatsoever” and it actually works.

One of the problems with UK immigration law is that substantive policy issues of general public concern that ought to be legislated are instead put into the Immigration Rules. This causes two problems:

  1. Regulations don't get the automatic deference from the Courts that statutes get. If Parliament changes the law, then legitimate expectations be damned. The only laws Parliament might not be able to make are retroactive criminal laws.
  2. The government can tinker constantly with the rules, so they do. Whether or not it should be legal, ratting on the implied contract with legal immigrants because you needed a quick response to a tabloid campaign is bad policy. Also every time you change the rules gives the Home Office another opportunity to screw up the implementation, most of which they take.

I am very frustrated at this $10M grant. I think I could do the part about "foundational research into the methodological challenges of existential risk forecasts, as well as applied research on estimating such risks, and on the identification of early warning signals" well, if not better. In fact I have been obsessing about that cluster of problems for the last several years. Yet I was rejected by the organization making the grant a few months ago. Feels bad man.

Why would they reject you? My impression was that forecasts were one of your big things?

The stated reason was that at the time we also had an emergency response team, which reportedly was less of a fit for forecasting specifically. The actual reason is complicated/less discernable, but I get the feeling that they took a look at me and said: nah.

Sorry to hear, that does sound very frustrating. It does look like they have traditional academic prestige on their side, maybe that tipped the grant over to FRI. Did you apply for the same objective, or something else? Would you consider joining them so they do a good job?

I applied for an org that was 50% the same objective 50% emergency response. I am very unlikely to join FRI so they do a good job; if I quit my current thing I'm more likely to go into the private sector

EDIT: I no longer endorse this post. USA Today and NPR for Northern, Central and Eastern Kentucky have both run stories that confirm that the Jackson, Kentucky NWS office was staffed the night of the tornado:

Fahy said Jackson workers were called in May 16 work the overnight shift to coordinate with emergency management personnel and issue warnings throughout the night. The Jackson office had a full staff that he described as an “all-hands-on-deck” situation due to the extreme storm.

“The deaths were not attributable to the staffing cuts,” he said. “Everybody was there last night. We had a full team.”

In a statement, the weather service said the Jackson office had additional staffing and support from neighboring offices through the weekend.

As USA TODAY reported before the Kentucky storms, the weather service has had to scramble to cover vital shifts. For the first time in decades, not all forecast offices have “24/7” staffing, according to the weather service union.

I still believe it is irresponsible to leave offices unstaffed, even if there is some ability to move neighboring employees around when they're expecting storms, but this is much less bad than I initially believed. I think I'm going to take a break from the Motte for a bit. I do love this community, but I have not been doing a very good job contributing to it.

On May 15th, the New York Times ran a story about how DOGE cuts had left parts of Eastern Kentucky vulnerable while it was under moderate threats for extreme weather:

Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the union that represents Weather Service employees, said the office in Jackson, Ky., was one of four that no longer had a permanent overnight forecaster after hundreds of people left the agency as a result of cuts ordered by the Department of Government Efficiency, the initiative led by Elon Musk that is reshaping the federal bureaucracy. (emphasis mine)

This morning, May 17th, it became apparent that eastern Kentucky had been hit by an overnight tornado that killed dozens.

I was honestly speechless when I read that.

This is what London, Kentucky looks like after the tornado. To quote someone who put it much more eloquently than I can:

Of all the disasters I’ve studied, tornadoes scare me the most.

They come with little warning and can erase entire communities in minutes — even seconds.

There’s no four-day lead-up to prepare like we often have with major hurricanes, and the winds of these storms can far exceed the most violent tropical cyclones.

In those few moments before one hits, especially if you’re sleeping, you’re at the mercy of your local weather station.

If someone is watching, they can issue a warning in those critical minutes before it’s too late.

Those few minutes after an emergency alert is issued are the difference between life and death.

[...]

Tornado warnings were delayed because of reduced staff. Those critical moments — a midnight warning to your phone waking you up, giving you precious seconds to find shelter — came too late for some.

My political stance has been evolving, but I'd describe myself as a state capacity libertarian.

To me disaster preparedness and relief are obvious, bread and butter, parts of the federal government. Sure we do stupid, wasteful things like give people flood insurance that lets them build and rebuild houses in the same vulnerable spot over and over again, when we should probably just heavily incentivize them to rebuild in a less risky area. Sure, with any given disaster there's going to be criticisms about how Biden did this or Bush did that. But I've always felt mostly positive about my tax dollars that go to disaster relief and preparedness.

I've had a growing sense of unease over the last few months as I saw reports of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announcing Trump administration plans to end FEMA, and reports about National Weather Service cuts back in April. I'm gutted that the easy predictions of these moves leading to unnecessary deaths has come true.

A part of me had hoped that Trump and Musk's Department of Government Efficiency would cut a lot of genuinely unnecessary spending from the government. When it was drag shows in Ecuador, even I as a rather Trump-skeptical person could admit that even a broken clock is right twice a day. But it was also clear to me that they were cutting with a chainsaw, not a scalpel. The images of Elon waving a chainsaw at CPAC feel a lot more hollow now. The man has blood on his hands. 27 people are dead in Kentucky because DOGE and Trump thought that it was "more efficient" to just let people die, instead of keeping overnight forecasters on staff.

Back in 2020, FEMA estimated the value of a statistical life at $7,500,000. By that standard, when doing the cost-benefit analysis the government bean counters are supposed to value 27 deaths as a loss of $202.5 million. I wonder how much it costs the government to staff permanent overnight forecasters in eastern Kentucky?

about National Weather Service cuts

Relatedly, the site rewrite's been put on ice: https://beta.weather.gov/

For anyone who used it, was it any good, or was it just the usual heavy-ass create-react-app mess that required a modern browser and broadband connection to even run?

Edit: Interestingly it seems to be open source, and also seems to have been kind inactive since late 2024 even before any Dogeing may have taken place. I could imagine that this project was already on the way out since then. https://github.com/weather-gov/weather.gov/graphs/contributors

To be clear, I do applaud you for writing this. It takes some genuinely uncommon courage to admit to a mistake, and it speaks well of your character to do so. No one's immune to being mislead or making error, and I've personally made worse (and dumber) mistakes, including in this forum.

So to the extent I'm making commentary, this is to comment on the Mescales News et all, with an emphasis on the et all. This isn't even the first time people have accused DOGE of killing people via tornado, falsely. Lest I be called out for nutpicking, today, a sitting federal senator accused Trump and DOGE of killing at least two sailors; accusations that DOGE cuts and the Shelton Snowlikes were the real cause of AA5342 or MedJets 056 were endemic even as it became clearer and clearer that it wasn't and couldn't have been. Nor is this specific to Trump: Abbott murdered migrants [even if]https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/13/us/us-mexico-border-drowned-migrants) he needed a time machine to do it, and that's just the one that's been discussed here.

It's clear that they don't really 'believe' it, to the extent someone who worked for Vox can be said to 'believe' anything, but I think that's besides the point. They don't believe the truth, either! That's not what their job is, and even if they're lying because their mouths are moving, you can't assume that anything bad is literally always wrong.

((Going back to the question of Being Wrong, I nearly started writing a bit on the Qatar AF1 donation, and while some of the initial reporting was wrong, not enough of it was for what I wrote to be worth posting.))

There's a bigger question of how we got here, to this. I'm tempted, as always, to point to Palin, where between actions and lawsuits the punchline was written years before Very Rarely Lies was -- Trump or DOGE might well try to sue here, but everyone and their dog (and insurance company) knows that they won't and can't win. Maybe I'm just drawing too big a contrast from previous variants, either on the right or left, where there was at least some motion around hyperbole or figure of speech or schizophrenia, maybe I just missed some of the more clear examples back then.

((Something something USS Maine?))

But this should matter! It's a problem for people like you or I that we have to dig twenty layers deep to find any discussion of Noem's quote that doesn't bury the actual lead -- that the Trump admin is considering whether FEMA's cause could be better served by state-operated grants, rather than just burning the entire concept of disaster response like an ostrich. It's not our fault if we can't tell a hundred percent of the time when facing off against an entire industry that has optimized itself to be persuasive.

But fault's got nothing to do with it.

I think I'm going to take a break from the Motte for a bit. I do love this community, but I have not been doing a very good job contributing to it.

Best of luck with your siesta!

Don't be ashamed of it in the least. It truly can be for the best. Focus on your family, friends, or just take the opportunity to do some half-days of volunteer work improving your community. Even if it's as simply as helping clean up a graveyard with others, it can really help get one's head out of all-politics-all-the-time mindsets.

A: What evidence is there that any/some/all of the dead died because there was no overnight forecaster? I checked the stats for 2023, a good Biden year, and there were 87 dead from tornadoes that year, including 23 from a single storm. 27 doesn’t seem wildly out of line with those numbers.

B: Was the NWS mandated to cut permanent overnight forecasters, or did they choose to cut that position to save other preferred bureaucratic spending priorities, or did they just go straight to malicious compliance and make the worst possible cuts?

C: Did the former overnight forecaster just take a buyout, possibly? You can’t force people to stick around on the job, and I wouldn’t be surprised if NWS offices have gone without permanent forecasters for a while in the past.

D: How many NWS offices surround the Jackson office’s area of responsibility? While tornadoes are notoriously localized and unpredictable, if the permanent forecaster has been gone for longer than a week or so, it seems like any serious agency would have taken steps to get as much forecasting ability as possible from other supporting offices.

E: At a minimum, the following:

As the MAGA-rampage against science continues unabated, how many more will pay for the ignorance of this administration?

With an above-normal hurricane season starting in two week, how far will Americans let these threats to public safety go?

Does not strike me as the sort of phrasing used by someone who is simply expressing scientific concerns without fear or favor.

A: What evidence is there that any/some/all of the dead died because there was no overnight forecaster? I checked the stats for 2023, a good Biden year, and there were 87 dead from tornadoes that year, including 23 from a single storm. 27 doesn’t seem wildly out of line with those numbers.

This is a fair question, and the same basic point was raised by /u/meduka. I agree that one storm is not conclusive. We will need to see the long run trends before my pronouncement is rigorously defensible.

Your other questions are ones I do not currently have an answer for. I am trying to see what data is available on this topic.

E: At a minimum, the following [...] Does not strike me as the sort of phrasing used by someone who is simply expressing scientific concerns without fear or favor.

I don't fully endorse what Rebekah Jones of Mesoscale News said in the full piece I linked. I just thought that the part I quoted did a better job than I could have laying things out, and I didn't see the point in reinventing the wheel.

The fallacy here is the assumption that in the counterfactual world where DOGE didn't cut these positions, the death toll would be (greatly?) reduced. The very blurb you quote suggests that in the best case a full time overnight forecaster provides a few minutes of heads-up via the emergency alert system. NOAA reports around 50-100 fatalities from tornados per year, with some outliers during extreme weather conditions. If we see an enduring spike in fatalities through 2025 and into 2026 and 2027, that would be evidence for your hypothesis. As of now, I'd say it's too early to tell.

How many deaths would there have been in Kentucky if there weren't Weather Service cuts? It seems impossible to know for sure. I couldn't find any information on whether an emergency alert was sent out in Kentucky (though I didn't look very hard) but if one wanted to make a case for these cut positions being important (rather than just accepting a statement from the Weather Service union) you'd want to dig up some data regarding how many tornados are "typically" caught -- and how quickly -- pre and post cuts to quantify the effectiveness of these local overnight forecaster positions.

I'm strongly anti-safetyist. The optimal number of yearly tornado deaths is not zero. The government could obviously reduce tornado deaths to zero if this outcome was prioritized at all costs. We acknowledge that there are diminishing returns and don't invest the resources to drive tornado deaths to zero. It seems extremely unlikely to me that the current resource distribution is optimal, though plausibly it's in a local minimum and moving out of it will cause some amount of pain.

I'm strongly anti-safetyist. The optimal number of yearly tornado deaths is not zero. The government could obviously reduce tornado deaths to zero if this outcome was prioritized at all costs. We acknowledge that there are diminishing returns and don't invest the resources to drive tornado deaths to zero. It seems extremely unlikely to me that the current resource distribution is optimal, though plausibly it's in a local minimum and moving out of it will cause some amount of pain.

I'm in agreement with you here. That's why I brought up the Value of a Statistical Life (VSL) calculations that the government uses. They're not beyond debate - I could certainly see arguments for raising or lowering the value from the $7.5 million it is set at, or using different statistics like Quality Adjusted Life-Years (QALYs) that might come to different results. But they are a reasonable starting point for cost-benefit trade-off discussions, and they set a limit to how much money we're willing to throw at saving a life through government policies around things like disaster preparedness and response, healthcare, road safety, etc.

Even if the optimal number of yearly tornado deaths is not zero - if we were successfully reducing tornado deaths with advanced warnings at a reasonable cost tradeoff, and we just stopped doing that earlier this year, then I think there is a fair case to make for us going back to the way things were on this particular front. I recognize that I have not yet conclusively made the case for this, and I'm trying to take a step back and do a more thorough investigation of the trends and causes in tornado deaths to get a better handle on what is going on here.

Your point about my pronouncements being somewhat premature is well taken. I certainly agree that an enduring spike in tornado deaths through to 2027 would be better evidence of the position I have staked out. Though I think setting up the "natural experiment" in a way that we can be sure it is due to staffing cuts and not something else is kind of tricky. Probably, you would look at all tornado prone areas of the United States, see which ones had staffing cuts and which ones did not over a relevant time period and then look at the long run trends going back well before and well after the DOGE cuts. Once the data was in, you could make suggestive correlational arguments that wouldn't be the end of the discussion, but might be enough to convince someone that it was indeed a mistake.

I couldn't find any information on whether an emergency alert was sent out in Kentucky (though I didn't look very hard) but if one wanted to make a case for these cut positions being important (rather than just accepting a statement from the Weather Service union) you'd want to dig up some data regarding how many tornados are "typically" caught -- and how quickly -- pre and post cuts to quantify the effectiveness of these local overnight forecaster positions.

All good points, and I have started to do some digging into the data.

I'm sure more information will emerge on this particular disaster, and I'm certainly willing to eat crow if more information emerges and I jumped the gun too early here.

Recently from Slavoj Zizek: THE POPE IS DEAD, ANTI-CHRIST IS ALIVE AND KICKING

I'm curious what the actual (theistic) Christians here think of Zizek's "Christian atheism" and his conception of Christian love.

More precisely, in the Scriptures there are four terms for love: eros (sexual love), storge (parental/familial love), philia (asexual affection/friendship), and agape (the unconditional love that unites individuals who dedicate their lives to a Cause). At the level of agape, feelings (sexual or not) no longer matter; what remains is just the Holy Spirit, an egalitarian community of comrades dedicated to a Cause. Terry Eagleton, a Catholic Marxist, was right: agape should be translated as political love. As a comrade, I can involve myself sexually with another comrade, I can become his or her friend, but this doesn’t really matter: if the situation of a struggle demands it, I should be ready to betray him or her, because only the Cause matters. And if my comrade is a true comrade, he or she will fully understand me and even despise me if I allow any weakness for him or her to overcome my fidelity to the shared cause and am not ready to betray him or her. My position here is that of Louis Althusser, who in 1980 gave an interview to Italian TV in Rome, where he said:

“I became a Communist because I was Catholic. I did not change religion, but I remained profoundly Catholic. I don’t go to church, but this doesn’t matter; you don’t ask people to go to church today. I remained a Catholic, that is to say, an internationalist universalist. I thought that inside the Communist Party there were more adequate means to realize universal fraternity.”

I don't expect Christians today to be lining up to join the local Communist Party. It is my view that, more often than not, actually-existing communist movements have been little more than a thin veneer of respectability over the ambitions of power-hungry sociopaths. But isn't there still a kernel of truth here? Isn't there something, as was articulated in last week's discussion, "quasi-communist" about Christianity? Is not the doctrinal communist ideal -- the universal fraternity of man, sacrifice for those who are in need, "the last shall be first" -- ultimately just an expression of universal Christian love? Should Christians not view communists as fellow travelers who are correct about certain fundamental principles, but misguided on method?

[...] That’s why love should be paradoxically commanded. “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you” (John 15:12). The key resides in the last words: “as I have loved you”—here the vanishing mediator is located. Padre Nogaro is right to emphasize that true love is not mediated, that it links us directly to a neighbor. I would only add that this is why Christ is a vanishing mediator: only through Christ as a vanishing mediator can we love our neighbor directly, without mediation. At its highest, love is not a spontaneous feeling (which, of course, cannot be commanded); it is a practice of how I deal with others. True love is cold, not sentimental. To attain true love, we have to reach beyond humanism: even loving all of humanity directly is not enough—Christ has to be here. Why? Because we are fallen.

There is a certain basic paradox that presents itself when one begins to interrogate the concept of love: do you love me for who I am, substantially, in essentia, or do you love me for my qualities and properties? You say that you love me because I'm smart, because I'm funny, because I'm beautiful; but suppose that I were not smart, nor funny, nor beautiful. Would you still love me then?

Either horn of the dilemma presents an issue. If your love for your beloved is contingent on them possessing some particular quality, then you are liable to the charge that you don't really love the person: what you really love is that quality. You are a lover of intelligence, or humor, or beauty, but not of that particular person. But if you say that you would continue to love the person regardless of any qualities they possess whatsoever, even if they were stripped of all qualities and left only as a "bare particular", then it would seem that your choice is entirely arbitrary and without justification; for what could be motivating your choice if it is made in the absence of all qualities? And a baseless arbitrary choice cannot constitute love either. The conclusion we draw is that, if there is such a thing as "love" at all, it belongs to the domain of the unsayable.

Thus Zizek suggests that true love should be "cold" rather than "sentimental". Powerful sentiments suggest that one is fixated too strongly on the secondary qualities of the object, rather than the obligation of love proper. Love is seen to have an almost Kantian character: the bloom of pleasure is a stain on the perfect austerity of duty. Christ is then interpreted as the formal condition of possibility that both binds us to this duty and makes its realization conceivable; Christ must not be "made into a direct object of love who can compete with other objects", for otherwise "things can go terribly wrong". (In particular, it opens the door to transactional thinking; if He Himself told you that all of humanity was saved, but you alone were damned; would you still love him? Would you still love him even if he wasn't living up to "his end of the bargain"? An authentic conception of Christian love has to confront this possibility.)

I notice a parallel between the Christian's love for God and his faith in God. Your post is about the tension between loving an object for its properties, versus loving an object inherently (the latter I still maintain is quite meaningless). In faith, there is tension between believing a proposition because of evidence, versus believing a proposition inherently.

It's an old idea around these parts that Christians do not believe their religion. The Christian's behavior here is not really confusing. Professions of faith are tribal signals of group loyalty, not beliefs. But it would be wrong to ruminate on "the contradiction of belief" and ask about "is belief based on evidence" or "do people believe inherently?"

Likewise, "loving things for their properties" is just a different kind of thing than "tribal signals of loyalty." You're damned right I am loyal to my wife, what of it?

Agape and philia do not indicate different forms of love in this context. I know CS Lewis says this, but it ain’t so. It’s not something that Origen talks about when he distinguishes between agape and eros, and he definitely would have mentioned it. It isn’t mentioned in the earlier church fathers. Rather, in the context Zizek mentions, the words are used interchangeably. Imagine your girlfriend wants assurance that she is beautiful. “Am I beautiful? … I mean, you think I’m very pretty right? … Tell me I’m gorgeous again.” These are interchangeable within the context, even though there may be slight variations in the usage in colloquial speech.

Just going to quote from some papers on this. In speaking of love, Origen doesn’t even bring up philia, but compares Agape and Eros and concludes that even these two loves are interchangeable in scripture:

Mindful of the indwelling divine love being taken in a carnal sense, clearly with the [ignorant people] in view, Origen returns to the central question in the second half of his discussion on agape in section two of the Prologue. How does the recognition of agapè as a divine name clarify that eros and agapè are interchangeable in meaning? According to Origen, even in the case of God—where it is obvious that we should understand love in the spiritual sense—agape and eros are interchangeable. This is because divine agapé resembles the dynamics of a spiritual sense of eros. This equivalence of agapé and (a spiritual sense of) erõs in the case of divine love becomes evident when we consider the nature of the love we receive from God in Trinitarian terms 33 In unfolding this argument, Origen presents, to my knowledge for the first time in Christian thought, a vision of human deification expressed explicitly in terms of a Trinitarian grammar of love.

Origen's answer rests upon the key conceptual distinction between a carnal sense and a spiritual sense of love. Whereas carnal love (amor carnalis) is directed towards corporeal and changeable realities, spiritual love (amor spiritualis) is directed towards incorporeal and unchangeable realities." Origen's whole argument builds upon the claim that we use the term erõs improperly to indicate carnal love and properly only when indicating spiritual love."' This point escapes the simpliciores, the spiritually immature, who are subsequently endangered by the scriptural language of love as it can be read as an encouragement to pursue carnal pleasure rather than a life of vir-tue.18 This, however, raises the question: what then is spiritual love? According to Origen, scriptural terminologies by themselves will not help because there is no direct correspondence between the conceptual distinction between carnal and spiritual love, on the one hand, and the terminological distinction between agapé and erõs, on the other. As he painstakingly highlights, Scripture can use agapé (noun)/agapan (verb) to substitute for erõs (noun) / eran (verb) in contexts where there is a danger for the weak amongst the readers to fall into carnal sin. But Scripture is equally capable of using erõs / eran terminology to speak of a more elevated sense of love, one that is directed towards higher things.l The conclusion we should draw from this is that the conceptual distinction between carnal and spiritual love is grounded on content and not on terminological difference. It is not that carnal love is erõs and spiritual love agape; rather, both can be used to refer to spiritual love in Scripture. Thus, to discern the nature of spiritual love we need to go beyond terminologies to reach the content of love.

And from elsewhere:

Is there a significant difference in meaning between the two words for love used in the passage, [agapaw and philew]?[…] Most of the Greek Fathers like Chrysostom and Cyril of Alexandria, saw no real difference of meaning. Neither did Augustine nor the translators of the Itala (Old Latin). This was also the view of the Reformation Greek scholars Erasmus and Grotius. The suggestion that a distinction in meaning should be seen comes primarily from a number of British scholars of the 19th century, especially Trench, Westcott, and Plummer. It has been picked up by others such as Spicq, Lenski, and Hendriksen. But most modern scholars decline to see a real difference in the meaning of the two words in this context, among them Bernard, Moffatt, Bonsirven, Bultmann, Barrett, Brown, Morris, Haenchen, and Beasley-Murray.

As for wealth equality: Christ clearly abhors the “very rich”. Being “very rich” and ungiving damns a person, from my reading. God cares more about this than blasphemy. But we also have very clear and specific anti-equality statements. Someone tells Christ that his brother isn’t sharing the inheritance, and that he should make him share; Christ says that life is not about possessions and that he isn’t the Lord of that. Christ is the Lord of the Moral, not the lord of the specific cultural and legal rules that appear prudent to specific leaders to secure political wellbeing. He is the Lord of “help the poor”, not “no one should ever be poorer”. Or consider:

He entered Jericho and was passing through. And behold, there was a man named Zacchaeus. He was a chief tax collector and was rich. And he was seeking to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was small in stature. So he ran on ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see him, for he was about to pass that way. And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.” So he hurried and came down and received him joyfully. And when they saw it, they all grumbled, “He has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner.” And Zacchaeus stood and said to the Lord, “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor. And if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold.” And Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”

Zacchaeus was rich; he definitely had more than twice the average wage; yet he is only required to give half of his wages to the poor and to give reparation to anyone defrauded. Then he has full approval of God and is saved.

More importantly: the very context of the love statements makes a universal love impossible. Christ is telling his disciple to direct all of his love to the sheep. “Do you love me? Tend my sheep!” The sheep are the brothers, or in this case the younger novice Christian brothers, not random strangers. The strangers are those who do not matter at all. For instance, “If [a brother sins against you and] refuses to listen even to the church [telling him to repent in front of you], let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.” You see Christ’s treatment of strangers with the Canaanite woman. It shouldn’t surprise us that these rules make sense in light of utility and game theory and psychology, if you believe in both God and science. Casting your love, a precious pearl, to random strangers, is the quickest way to waste your life and your love and to make the world worse. Consider —

If the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it, but if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you. And if anyone will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet when you leave that house or town. Truly, I say to you, it will be more bearable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town.

This is when he tells his followers that they are being sent out “as lambs among wolves”. Now, if the Lord is the shepherd who lays down his life protecting his sheep from the wolves, then who are the wolves? The wolves aren’t sheep; the wolves are in the world; loving the world would be loving “wolves in sheep clothing”, and we have fairytales about that involving grandmas and the hood.

This is Christian love: judge whether someone is worthy if they receive you kindly or hear your wisdom; publicly shake dust off your feet as a statement against them if not; and then remember what your Lord says: their fate is worse than Sodom and Gomorrah. I do not know what happened in Christianity that the clear words and obvious meaning of the gospels are ignored. Does this sound like a hippy or something? Does this sound like spiritual William’s Syndrome? Does God want you to pollute your heart by throwing it at the feet of every evil person? Christianity is not a “text-first” religion but tradition first, true, but the tradition itself attests to the primacy and accuracy of the words. There are some ridiculous zero-day bugs that have infiltrated Christianity and made it “fake and gay”. But if you’re Christian you really do have to believe these words. God is love and He defines love in the teachings of His Son, so forget what you know about love and study the Son who knows more.

Further: as Origen and tradition attests, Christ is the bridegroom of our soul. In antiquity, if the bride is found to be spending her love on random men, she would be beaten, if not by her father then by her bridegroom; she may even be divorced on the grounds of adultery. When Origen wrote on Eros and Agape, it was when studying the Song of Songs, which is a sublimated erotic love poem about our soul longing for God. What does the Bride warn in the song? “O daughters of Jerusalem, I adjure you by the gazelles and does of the field: Do not arouse or awaken love until the time is right.” Otherwise: “The watchmen find me as they went about in the city; they beat me, they bruised me, they take away my veil, those watchmen of the walls.” To be more clear: if the Christian wastes the love reserved for “Christ and whom Christ wills” (your Christian community ie sheep), wouldn’t he discipline you? Just like He whipped those who abused and profaned the temple. Because now, your body is His temple; it belongs to Him; and in your body is your heart where the heavenly treasure resides. Okay, this was an allegorical aside, but whatever.

Now I agree that for a Christian, the “love for the cause” must be triumphant over everything. This is seen in Christ: he calls Peter satan when Peter warns Him against going to Jerusalem; he speaks up against elders; he disregards His relatives, and His own family becomes “those who hear the word and obey it”. But Zizek is wrong that the cause is universal love. It’s just not. “Universal love” is taking an idyllic stream and polluting it with Chernobyllic radioactive waste. We don’t love universally, but in accordance with the Love of the Universal Man.

As additional evidence for this, consider the Eucharist. You have to enjoy the Eucharist to have a part in Christ, to be a brother, to be saved perhaps. Only confirmed Christians in good standing could participate, and they had 2-3 years of training and catechesis before being confirmed, involving fasting and repentance and reading. We know this from Justin Martyr, some of the earliest Christian writings we have. This ritual is the only time a Christian sees the living Christ: the intimate shared brotherly meal becomes the real body and blood of Christ; it’s the real living Christ there, and being consumed. This tells you a lot. It’s not radically inclusive love, it’s radically exclusionary and private. At a time when anyone could participate in a Pagan feast, and when the Jews believed in national salvation, this was profoundly exclusionary and private. This was the dominant mode of Christian activity until the 300s which, in my opinion, should never have been altered.

Zizek says

To attain true love, we have to reach beyond humanism: even loving all of humanity directly is not enough—Christ has to be here

This is not quite it. Christ did not love “humanity”: there are many who will see Christ and Christ will tell them He never knew them. Not “I have forgotten you”, not “you never knew me”. No; “I never knew you”. These are the “vessels of wrath tailored for destruction”. For a Christian, true love is this: a man laying down his life for his friends. Not only is this literally what Jesus says, but He literally does it on the Cross. How this happens, is actually never said by Christ; it is compared to Moses lifting up a serpent staff, that those who are bit by those sin-symbolic serpents may not die but live. That it magically absolves your sins upon belief is a satanic thought. But there are at least some things that are sure: Christ loved God that He spent his life learning from His youth. He spent his adulthood healing and teaching others despite guaranteeing His death. He is wrongfully charged for disobedience for misrepresenting scripture, and obediently assents to the sentence. He continues professing truth and love. As He suffered, He sung to Himself some of His favorite songs. He wants His tormentors forgiven by God before He dies. In very mysterious appearances, He returns again. He appears to Thomas in the upper room, like the upper room of the Eucharist, where Thomas touches His side, the same side from whence blood and water flowed. Did Thomas touch the bread turned body? Did Christ’s side flow out in wine turned blood, mixed with water as all wine was had in antiquity? I don’t know. It’s a mystery. I agree with Zizek that the material is immaterial.

This is the Christian stance at its purest: not the promise of salvation, but just such unconditional love, whose message is: “I know you are bent on destroying yourself, I know I cannot prevent it, but without understanding why, I love you unconditionally, without any constraint.”

Christ’s love is, essentially, conditional. It really is. There are some people He never even knew, let alone loved. Christ issues warnings, firm warnings, shocking warnings. He is filled with warnings. Before He sends sinners to an eternal fire, He curses them. If you do not believe this, you are not a Christian, and you’re something worse than an atheist, because you have seen His words and dispute that He said it or meant it. Why does Christ tell us these warnings if not to warn us? A better Christian movie is the Whale. It’s deeply, deeply Christian. The protagonist is saved by warnings to His soul and health, and also primarily due to love for His daughter. (“not giving thanks, nor seeking forgiveness for the sins of my soul, nor for all the souls numb, joyless and desolate on earth. But for her alone, whom I wholly give you.”)

Do you know who else was saved like this? Jonah! You know, with the whale. Is Jonah the sign of unconditional love? Did the Ninevites enjoy God’s unconditional love when they fasted (cattle and man alike) in sackcloth and ashes with only the hopeful possibility that God will have mercy on them? And who “comes in the sign of Jonah”? Who is it that says the sign of Jonah is the only sign He will provide “a wicked and adulterous generation”? It is the One who, “in the days of his flesh, offered up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears, to God who was able to save him from death, and who was heard because of his fearful reverence — He was a son and learned obedience through what he suffered.”

A decent example: if every drug user could be saved by unconditional love, very few white people with loving mothers would be drug addicts. Do you know what would save them? If every time they did the drug, I beat the shit out of them to the point of death and told them I hated them. Sadly this is illegal. But it’s what God does to those whom He loves the most, like Job and Jonah. I have no doubt that if Christ saw the disciple whom He loved drinking too much poppy tea, that He would beat that wicked servant or at least kidnap Him into the desert for an extended 40 day retreat. And this would be love. True love are the true words “given by one Shepherd”, which are “like goads and like nails firmly fixed”. Thank God the yoke is easy.

I do not believe that God wants us to love God “in Himself”, for no contingent reason. I do not believe that there is such a thing as loving a thing outside of what the thing means to us. Love is biological and God designed biology. We love our fathers if they are fatherly, and you have no obligation to love them if they are not. Yet, we have no father on earth! We have a father in heaven who is perfectly fatherly, who “disciplines us for our good that we may share in sanctity”. And “we love because God first loved us”. Similarly, Jesus tells us to love our enemies not because they are human, but because we will be rewarded by God. Because He wants our love perfect, like our father’s love is perfect. Loving enemies is our spartan practice for perfection, and has nothing to do with any obligation that emanates from our enemy.

Christ must not be "made into a direct object of love who can compete with other objects", for otherwise "things can go terribly wrong".

I’d say this is complicated. If we love Christ, even just as a “character”, and celebrate Him in social environments, and are evaluate by our peers with His law, then we will behave like Him. Which is probably the best way we can love like Christ. We can only understand more than this mysteriously, through statements like —

the King will answer, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’

Notice, again, the focus on brothers. Indeed, the first name of the religion was the Brotherhood.

Incredible post, thanks for taking the time to write it all out. Do you write anywhere besides here?

Either horn of the dilemma presents an issue.

I think in the general case, the resolution is that love is for a conrete quality at first, and grows independent of them over time. You can consider a bare particular stripped even of its own past, but I dont think thats really relevant to anything. I dont see how that can generalise to loving all humanity, but it well may.

The abrahamic god is not internationally communist in any sense of the word. Some of the later Christian/Islamist pan-nationalist religious modifications are there for pure realpolitik goals, but the the raw original religion is not. It's explicitly ethnic/nationalist and totalizing.

There's nothing in the church fathers, in the didache, or in the new testament which indicates that Christianity tends towards ethnic nationalism. I'm pretty sure Islam is similar.

Christianity before it was coopted by the roman empire was a jewish thing, specifically a cult of one man's teachings. All the rest of the revisions later are made to paper over that.

No one is denying the relevance of Christianity’s Jewish roots. The Old Testament is important, and Jesus as the Jewish Messiah is a central doctrine of Christianity. But gentiles were included from a very early date.

I want to riff on hydroacetylene’s examples, keeping in mind that the Battle of Milvian Bridge, when Constantine began to move toward Christianity, happened in 312.

Acts 10–11 covers the Jewish church’s acceptance of gentile converts, and Acts 15 relates the decision not to impose the Mosaic law on them. Even if you do not accept Acts as history, it demonstrates the presence of gentile converts who did not practice the Jewish law at the time the book was written. It may be from the 60s, because it doesn’t include Paul’s death, but I think that some liberal scholars have it as late as the early second century.

The Didache is a super interesting document of early Christian teaching and practice. It has a ton of Jewish influence, but it also takes pains to distinguish Christians from non-Christian Jews (ch. 8) and to include gentiles (14:3). Its date is hotly disputed; it is most likely from the first century, but at the latest from the middle of the second.

The church fathers cover a long span of time, but they begin in the late first century. The earliest group is called the apostolic fathers (as distinct from the apostles themselves), and they take it as a given that the church includes gentiles.

Is not the doctrinal communist ideal -- the universal fraternity of man, sacrifice for those who are in need, "the last shall be first" -- ultimately just an expression of universal Christian love?

Interestingly from what I can tell the "proto-Christian-communism" was within the Christian community - and it came with rules.

Besides Acts 2 (where the holding of "all things in common" was within the church) see for instance Galatians 6:10 ("...let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith.") and 1st Timothy 5, which gives these instructions for granting charity to windows: "Let a widow be enrolled if she is not less than sixty years of age, having been the wife of one husband, and having a reputation for good works: if she has brought up children, has shown hospitality, has washed the feet of the saints, has cared for the afflicted, and has devoted herself to every good work."

So while Christianity definitely has an idea of the "universal fraternity of man" within Scripture the brotherhood of believers is privileged. That's not to say that charitable works to nonbelievers are forbidden, but it's not the communist ideal of the Universal Brotherhood of Man (...or perhaps it is similar, in the sense that the Communist Universal Brotherhood of Man was in practice often restricted to, well, Communists.)

Don't forget 2 Thessalonians 3:10 ("He who will not work, let them also not eat").

The socialist principle, "He who does not work shall not eat", is already realized; the other socialist principle, "An equal amount of products for an equal amount of labor", is also already realized. But this is not yet communism, and it does not yet abolish "bourgeois law", which gives unequal individuals, in return for unequal (really unequal) amounts of labor, equal amounts of products.

-- Lenin

Speaking just to the specific question of how one understand’s Christian love, I tend to take Brand’s stance on it.

What the world calls by that name “Love”,

I know not and I reck not of.

God’s love I recognise alone,

Which melts not at the piteous plaint,

Which is not moved by dying groan,

And its caress is chastisement.

What answer’d through the olive-trees

God, when the Son in anguish lay,

Praying, “O take this cup away!”

Did He then take it? Nay, child, nay:

He made him drink it to the lees.

Never did word so sorely prove

The smirch of lies, as this word Love:

With devilish craft, where will is frail,

Men lay Love over, as a veil,

And cunningly conceal thereby

That all their life is coquetry.

Whose path’s the steep and perilous slope,

Let him but love,—and he may shirk it;

If he prefer Sin’s easy circuit,

Let him but love,—he still may hope;

If God he seeks, but fears the fray,

Let him but love,—’tis straight his prey;

If with wide-open eyes he err,

Let him but love,—there’s safety there!

God’s love is infinitely more than our human conception of love, and it is bundled up together with his righteousness and wrath and holiness. The same God who says “Love one another as I have loved thee,” is perfectly, rightly capable of wiping out peoples and places. Failure to grasp this is how you wind up with “Love wins” and “Hate has no home here” churches that would never tell anyone they are living in specific sin. But it is clear from Scripture that whatever else God is, he is not what is conceived of in the modern understanding of “God is love.”

I hate, I despise your religious festivals; your assemblies are a stench to me. Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them. Amos 5:21-22

I make the argument that when Christianity, taken as a whole, was most adherent to God’s commands and intentions, is also the time it was riding high in the world in terms of temporal power. It was the time when it had made itself strong enough to resist outside conquest and to, from that base of operations, eventually evangelize the world, however imperfectly. At that time it was confident in itself, assertive, and had not yet fully fallen under the sway of the “The only thing that matters is love” heresy.

Similarly, the interpretation of agape gives the pre-arranged conclusion away from the beginning. Agape isn’t just for comrades in the cause, it is meant, in varying degrees, for everyone.

In theory, I should have agape for Slavoj Zizek, just like I should for a fellow parishioner. It has nothing to do with comrades in the Communist or cause-oriented sense and I would argue demonstrates Zizek’s extremely weak understanding of or an intentional misrepresentation of the concept in order to bolster an otherwise weak argument.

But it is clear from Scripture that whatever else God is, he is not what is conceived of in the modern understanding of “God is love.”

Therefore Scripture is wrong, as should be expected from texts written by flawed mortal men.

or the modern understanding of "God is Love" is wrong, as should be expected from an understanding unquestionably built by flawed mortal men.

Perhaps. If God exists, it think it's more plausible for humans' moral instincts (telling them that mass murder is wrong) to have remained in tune with the truth of God and the Good, while Hebrew myths about a bloodthirsty, wrathful deity arose for the same reasons that a hundred similar ones did in many cultures; than for the moral instinct to be wrong, and those particular tales about a bloodthirsty deity happening to be correct.

humans' moral instincts (telling them that mass murder is wrong)

This is not a human moral instinct. Humans are quite comfortable with mass murder. That's why we've done it repeatedly (that, and it's a very good strategy).

(I suppose we can argue about whether or not something is a "human moral instinct" if it's not shared by all humans. And it is true that some humans are uncomfortable with mass murder. But the fact remains that mass murder is a very typical human behavior.)

Having a moral instinct ≠ being reliably bound by it at all times. Indeed, the most common manifestation of the moral instinct is feeling guilty after doing something that one knew, deep down, to be wrong. (Case in point, I think a majority of mass murderers in human history had a conscience, it was just drowned out by other concerns and they did the wrong thing anyway.)

Seems more parsimonious to believe that humans as a general rule actually have few-to-no moral qualms about mass murder as long as it fits into what you might call a mammalian herd strategy.

This is not saying that humans have no moral instincts simply because moral taboos are sometimes violated but rather than the moral taboos about mass murder apply only weakly if at all to group enemies.

However, I probably should back up a bit here - I've been using "mass murder" very much in the context of group warfare which is very different from mass murder in a serial killer sense, but the latter is much closer to the actual meaning of the word "murder." If your position is that Genghis Khan doesn't count as a mass murderer but Hitler does, my position is at least closer to yours than I conceived.

Humans are quite comfortable with mass murder.

Depends on what side of the spear they're on.

At least people are finally catching on to the ultimate “Always has been.”

When I am Weaker Than You, I ask You for Freedom because that is according to Your Principles; when I am Stronger than You, I take away Your Freedom because that is according to My Principles.

Failure to grasp this is how you wind up with “Love wins” and “Hate has no home here” churches that would never tell anyone they are living in specific sin.

At least some of those churches condemn sin, but merely disagree with you about whether certain things are sinful (e. g. whatever happens in Pete and Chasten Buttigieg's bedroom).

Communism and Christianity are fundamentally incompatible because Christianity’s is individualistic. Every soul matters. Every soul is redeemable. There are no chosen people. Every person is worthy of god’s love.

These ideas are destructive to communism, which is a collectivist ideology. Christians are saying that you should love each other, and that people are all, each, valuable individuals—communism says you should love each other insofar as it serves the emergent gestalt that sits on top of it.

How to integrate this into a functioning society: hardcore individualistic ruthless capitalism is in tension with the morals of the religion. Christian ethics act as a governor which serves to prevent stuff like becoming a wage slave to Amazon, and aborting your children so you can keep working.

You need both of these things, although the “hardcore ruthless capitalism” I’m talking about is not so much a “thing” as it is the base state of human existence. You have the base individualism, free association, etc. and then are Christian morals on top of it to make it all work.

These ideas are destructive to communism, which is a collectivist ideology. Christians are saying that you should love each other, and that people are all, each, valuable individuals—communism says you should love each other insofar as it serves the emergent gestalt that sits on top of it.

I think a communist would say that the opposite is true. To that extent the dichotomy of individualism and collectivism is just wordplay.

Every communist values the individual. That's why they want communism. More freedom. More liberty. More happiness. They see the individuals freedom impeded by capitalism and, outside of catholic communists, religion. If love for our fellow men were elevated above love for money or our preferred rendition of Abrahamic religion, then we could much sooner get together and work towards a global change for the betterment of humanity.

Instead we get Christians with proclamations of moral supremacy, because they believe in abstract logical concepts. Or capitalists with proclamations of factual supremacy, since they can allege to best predict the outcomes of society. Neglecting to mention that these outcomes are derived from material conditions born from the very system they support.

Obligatory John Adams quote.

Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Great quote, and exactly right.

Motte and Bailey. Maybe Christians should hold everything in common, selling property and possessions to give to anyone in need. Is that how Zizek lives or does he need to remove something from his own eye? Nowhere does the New Testament call Christians to advocate the violent redistribution of the fruits of non-believers’ labor.

Christianity is, quite explicitly, not egalitarian. There’s the inequality between God and man and the angels, obviously. But then the New Testament describes an early church which is profoundly class based- there are different types of clerics, men are the head of women, and slaves are expected to obey their masters. These classes might differ in some regards from secular social classes but it isn’t the classless, property less, stateless society which is communism’s raizon detre. In fact Christian theology has from early days been very skeptical of hostility to the state.

That's true, the Church is a hierarchy and has leaders and followers. However, Christianity is very explicitly egalitarian about moral worth: every human being is equally morally worthy, because we all have an immortal soul and were made in the image of God.

I'd just add that the New Testament is actually very skeptical of wealth (there's a strong connection made at points between the wealthy and the oppressors) and the church is condemned for showing partiality to those who are wealthy. So it's interesting because it's not really proto-communist-egalitarian-paradise but neither does it succumb to a sort of "will-to-power" fantasy where strength or power are to be privileged. Really what's elevated is moral goodness and wisdom.

I have often conceived of Christianity as a belief system that replaces the hierarchy based on strength with a hierarchy based on moral goodness. "My status hierarchy is not of this world." But there still is a status hierarchy. (Just like there's still a kingdom -- just one that God rules personally.)

Of course, that's what Nietzsche said -- instead of badness, inferiority, Christianity criticizes evil, moral turpitude. But unlike Nietzche I believe this is both a positive development and a necessary one.

replaces the hierarchy based on strength with a hierarchy based on moral goodness

The thing is that goodness applies to many things, including how you use said position. Companies typically have a hierarchy, but high positions in that hierarchy are not really "status" in the conventional sense. The higher salary they bring might be status, but the position itself is largely-exhausted in what you have to do to keep it - managers authority as opposed to owners authority. Of course its not always like this, and sometimes positions do lean more towards feudal fief, but you get the idea. The kind of status you describe christianity as bestowing is managers authority, and it often seems to be opposed to anything but its particular management authority, and that is what creates a quasi-communist impression.

The kind of status you describe christianity as bestowing is managers authority, and it often seems to be opposed to anything but its particular management authority

I’m not actually talking about the formal hierarchy of the Church here — which I agree is a manager’s authority — but about the hierarchy of the saints. The hierarchy it’s replacing isn’t the hierarchy of government, but the more nebulous, albeit extremely real, hierarchy of informal status that drives people to compete for praise, attention, and mates.

Im also not talking about the church hierarchy. Those are officially managerial positions. What I mean is that general christian virtue ends up being a "jealous god" about the use of your status to an extent that becomes effectively managerial. Youre not supposed to derive worldly rewards from it. Matthew 6 goes in that direction relatively explicitly.

Of course this has mostly not been actual practice, but its been there, and radical/restorationist people keep hitting upon it, and... I see their point.

Youre not supposed to derive worldly rewards from it.

Correct. You’re supposed to derive heavenly rewards from it. Which is why I’m talking about a hierarchy that is not of this world!

I see what you're saying, and I agree it is a serious problem people often have with Christianity, but the supernatural and cosmic justice elements are load-bearing. There are elements of Christian moral teaching that I believed before I converted to Christianity and would doubtless still believe even if I apostasized, but the whole scope of the Christian doctrine about holiness, martyrdom, charity, and asceticism is founded on the principle that Heaven exists and there's treasure there.

The hierarchy it’s replacing isn’t the hierarchy of government, but the more nebulous, albeit extremely real, hierarchy of informal status that drives people to compete for praise, attention, and mates.

I thought this was you saying "People still compete for praise, attention, and mates, but now the game is different" - because that would sound like worldy rewards. If you mean something people do instead of competing for those, then... it seems your prescription on earth actually is communism. Youre saying its not communist only because your reasons are different, where originally I thought your defense was along the lines of "Some christian beliefs in isolation would prescribe communism, but if you consider the supernatural principles as well, it no longer prescribes communism even on earth.".

Auctoritas vs. potestas, is pre-Christian (compare Potestas/Kratos the God, supporting dictatorship and advocating for random violence) although Christianity somewhat reenvisioned them. (N.b. further concepts like imperium remeasure the semantic fields in different ways in different thinkers' works.)

Moral authority (earned by correctness, selflessness and hard-earned reputation (dignitas, not yet dignity, but social standing) vs. raw exercising of power. Without moral goodness, power is illegitimate. But moral goodness without power is also lacking - although Socrates condemned to death has the highest authority of all, if it can't work good in the world, it's a tad selfish - like a desert hermit, isolated from society for his own soul compared to those monks' kenosis, who engage with the dirt and grime of humanity and lift it up, however slowly, through holy struggle and love.

A modern systems thinker, applying EA (is this now looked down upon? Well, applying financial metrics and industrial engineering) can improve the lot of thousands instead of spending their time administering aid to individuals, one at a time. To some extent, the traditional Christian image/aesthetic looks down upon this, preferring the Pope to bathe the poor's feet, Navy Devos to teach people to read etc. I at least think overall betterment's important.

I believe Christianity is fairly "aristocratic", believing everyone can be better and flourish (overcoming their sinful urges), but forgiving them for succumbing to this fallen world. (My faith is grounded in gnostic-curious Platonism, though.) The lower classes can rise beyond that station, but if they don't, they still have their own path to God. (N.b. this is not prosperity gospel, rather just... If you don't waste your time on vices and sloth, you can trivially better yourself and the life of those around you, building, learning, teaching etc.)

I'm going to start with a petty nitpick:

More precisely, in the Scriptures there are four terms for love: eros (sexual love), storge (parental/familial love), philia (asexual affection/friendship), and agape (the unconditional love that unites individuals who dedicate their lives to a Cause)

Storge (στοργή) does not actually appear in the scriptures. A handful of words derived from it do (there's φιλόστοργος in Romans 12:10 and ἄστοργος in Romans 1:31 and 2 Timothy 3:3), but στοργή itself is not in the Bible.

Now that said...

I don't think much of any kind of Christian-inflected atheism. I understand that a religion can cast a long shadow and retain immense psychological power even among those who reject its core claims. However, what I find in cases like this is a kind of sentimental appropriation of the power of Christian rhetoric even alongside the rejection or outright destruction of Christian faith itself, and I think I would prefer honest enemies to friends like that.

What I read in Zizek's essay is a kind of substitution. He appropriates the language of Christian faith but swaps out its referent, such that the Holy Spirit can become 'an egalitarian community of comrades dedicated to a Cause'. What is there to say there but that the Holy Spirit is not, in fact, an egalitarian community of comrades dedicated to a Cause, and the substitution can only do violence to the Holy Spirit, which is, after all, not merely a linguistic flourish, but (as Christians believe) the Third Person of the Trinity.

I think this is trading one's birthright for pottage. Maybe the Christian hope is right, maybe it's a delusion, but either way it's not just the hope for a fairer world in the here and now.

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” is the second greatest commandment. The greatest is, “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” The two commandments are not the same, and the order is important. You can’t just swap out the gospel for any old cause, not even one that preaches love.

If you remove the supernatural bits from Christianity, you are not left with a new kind of Christianity; you have a new movement wearing Christianity as a skin suit. There have been plenty of these. Off the top of my head, liberation theology, the social gospel movement, and the preaching of John Ball seem to be pretty straightforward parallels.

The command to love your neighbor does not imply that you are to love everyone to the same degree and in the same way. Christians disagree among ourselves about the details. I personally find the first epistle of John to be helpful here, but I also consider it one of the most difficult books of the New Testament. A lot of people read John talking about love, have fuzzy feelings, and ignore the things he says that make it complicated.

I don’t know enough Aristotelian (I assume) philosophy to speak fittingly in terms of essences, properties, and qualities. But I can point out that in Christian belief all men possess the image of God, which gives them value in itself and may resolve your dilemma.

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” is the second greatest commandment. The greatest is, “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” The two commandments are not the same, and the order is important.

But if Man is made in the Image of God, is not 'loving our neighbor as ourself' how we 'love the Lord our God with all our heart and with all our, &c., &c.'?

It means that love of neighbor follows from love of God, but the former doesn’t subsume the latter.

Let me give an example that I read a zillion years ago in the New Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. I may get the details wrong, and I haven’t confirmed the thoroughness of the book’s sources, but it works just as well as a thought experiment anyway:

A woman was in the custody of the Soviet secret police. These sometimes took a perverse joy in breaking people they weren’t going to let leave alive anyway, and they had decided to break her faith. When maiming her legs didn’t do it, they brought in her children and threatened to shoot them if she did not deny Christ. She refused, and the secret police shot her children in front of her.

If love of God is the higher good, she did the right thing. It’s not that she didn’t love her children enough; it’s that she loved God more than that.

A woman was in the custody of the Soviet secret police. These sometimes took a perverse joy in breaking people they weren’t going to let leave alive anyway, and they had decided to break her faith. When maiming her legs didn’t do it, they brought in her children and threatened to shoot them if she did not deny Christ. She refused, and the secret police shot her children in front of her.

To digress to another religion, this kind of thing is what taqiyya was originally for.

I don’t know enough Aristotelian (I assume) philosophy to speak fittingly in terms of essences, properties, and qualities

No background in Aristotle needed. The word "quality" is just being used in its ordinary sense. Intelligence is a quality. Beauty is a quality. Nothing fancy going on.

But I can point out that in Christian belief all men possess the image of God, which gives them value in itself

Sure. But then, all people would be the same in that regard. Love has to single out a particular person (or a particular thing) in contradistinction to others.

In my own view, universal love is at worst incoherent, and at best it's a particularly tepid form of love. There is no love unless you can draw a distinction between those who are loved and those who are unloved; and so universal properties shared by all people cannot be the basis of love.

Sure. But then, all people would be the same in that regard. Love has to single out a particular person (or a particular thing) in contradistinction to others.

Fair enough. I think that's a pretty base level definitional difference with Christianity.

In my own view, universal love is at worst incoherent, and at best it's a particularly tepid form of love.

I think the difference is you think of love as primarily an emotional experience, while Christianity thinks of love as primarily a willed action. That being said, I think the idea of deep, intense love directed at many different people isn't inherently incoherent, it just doesn't scale well for finite humans because we can't hold the intimate understandings of more than a few people before we stop keeping track.

Jesus Christ is often described as having a particularly extreme emotional love for all human beings (in addition to the willing-the-good kind of love), because being human he experiences emotional love and being divine he is omniscient. A pretty common idea in Christianity is that Jesus is not only the savior of all men as a generalized mass of human beings, but that a part of his passion involved personally pondering the lives of every person and mourning the ways in which their sins did themselves and other people harm out of a unique love for them personally. A ubiquitous statement is that Jesus would have died for you, even if you were the only person ever. You might even call him the trope namer for wearing your heart on your sleeve!

You're claim that liberation theology and the social gospel movement "remove the supernatural elements from Christianity" is straightforwardly wrong. These are not evangelical theologies---and it's fine to dislike them for that reason---but they obviously incorporate the supernatural.

These are not evangelical theologies---and it's fine to dislike them for that reason…

The gulf here is much wider than that. If Jesus Christ was not raised from the dead, then confessional Lutheranism, or Roman Catholicism, or Eastern Orthodoxy falls apart. Liberation theology and the social gospel movement keep on trucking.

… but they obviously incorporate the supernatural.

Only in the sense that they try to “use the stairs of heaven as a shortcut to the nearest chemist's shop,” in Lewis’ inimitable phrase.

Where do you get the idea that these theologies deny the resurrection of Christ? La Misa Popular Salvadoreña is basically the anthem of liberation theology. It's a series of 11 songs for celebrating a post-Vatican II non-Latin mass. Here is the song they sing during communion where they explicitly acknowledge the passion and resurrection of Christ: https://youtube.com/watch?v=R8yJWvDNJWU&list=PLhCyWH9pFDuYFB8VLeObzJEABIhHlW27u&index=8.

I don't think it's about denial, it's about what the basics of faith are. For a different example, If climate change is conclusively shown to not be real, old-school greens fall apart, new greens keep on chugging on social policies.

This is nonsensical. When Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated for his liberation theology, he was still teaching that "the basics of faith" are the Catholic catechism. Liberation theology---whether you agree with it or not---was obviously an edifice built on top of that.

Tbh I'm primarily familiar with the catholic vs protestant split in germany, but here that distinction is very much real. I know several (university-educated) women holding official positions of power within protestant church offices who have explicitly told me that in reality they do not believe except for some undefined spirituality. One even hired a non-christian into the church office, despite a christian denomination being a requirement to be hired. Worse, I don't even have the impression she is worried about being caught, there seems to be a widely shared culture of just not caring. Not coincidentally, these are among the wokest people I know.

I'd have to take you on faith that liberation theology is different, but at least some of the more explicitly communist/marxist-aligned seem to me like the same type.

That's fair. I've known plenty of churches like that as well.

FWIW, any protestant sermons in my little village church are usually about one part unspecific feelgood Christianity and four parts green-red political rally.

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When I looked into liberation theology, what I found was a group of people using gospel language but assigning the terms Marxist definitions. It wasn’t that they denied the resurrection but that they rendered it irrelevant, something one could take or leave. If that’s not representative, I’ll be pleasantly surprised; I considered reading Gutiérrez, but by that point I wasn’t particularly inspired to look deeper.

I will have to check out your link.

Edit: Do you know of a link to the words of the people’s mass you linked? My Spanish isn’t great, and I will do a better job muddling through text than audio.

That's certainly a common right-wing interpretation of liberation theology. And there's relevant critiques of liberation theology that it only became popular due to Soviet covert influence. But the major theologians/leaders are all card-carrying Catholics that buy into all of Catholic spirituality.

Sorry, I don't know any text versions of the songs for reading :( My guess is that you would still find it to be heavily Marxist, but that doesn't mean the people singing don't literally believe in the miracles they're singing about.

Let’s assume you’re a car mechanic. You love your job, even though it is dirty, hot and physically straining. You go through a bookshop, and stumble over one book in particular: “Why being a car mechanic is great”. It explains the importance of the job for society, it talks about the perks, and so on. You look up the guy who wrote it and yep, he runs a car shop. You buy the book and recommend it to many of your friends, maybe even some teens who might consider the path.

Fast forward, the writer is on some talkshow. Somebody asks him how he handles all the grease. He reacts, uh no, of course he doesn’t get greasy, that’s his staff. He just really likes talking with customers. Maybe he does one car once in a while, if the work isn’t too hard and the car is really nice.

I can’t help but think this after reading Scott’s latest book review of “Selfish reasons to have more kids”. No, we don’t have nannies and housekeepers. In fact, almost nobody we know has them. Some have a cleaning lady coming … once per week, for an hour or so. Tbh, this significantly lowered my opinion of both Scott and Caplan. If you want a vision of a more fertile, sustainable future for the general population, it should not involve having your own personal staff. Two hours is nothing.

And I find this especially frustrating since I think it’s really not necessary; Yes having small kids is really exhausting - after putting the kids to bed around 8-9, my personal routine is to clean the house for two hours until 10-11 every day, and then directly go to bed with maybe an audiobook on (but often I’m too tired for even that, and enjoy falling to sleep directly) - but it’s doable, and the older the kids are, the less work they are, at least in terms of man-hours. The worst is usually over after around 3 yo. And the time before that in the afternoon can be a lot of fun.

At least for me, one of the biggest draws of kids is that it’s, to use poetic terms, “a glimpse of the infinite” that is available for everyone. Everyone wants to leave something behind, political activism is sold on making a change, careers are sold on becoming a (girl-)boss managing others. Yet, the perceptive (or, less charitably, those capable of basic arithmetic) will notice that only a tiny sliver of the population can ever cause the kind of innovation that really changes culture, or who can come into positions of substantial power over others.

Kids, however, everyone can have them. And they really are their own little person (especially my stubborn little bastards). And they will have kids as well, who will also carry forward some part of yourself. I’m not just talking genetics here, though that is a large part, the same will go for how you raise them. Unless you leave that to the nannies, I guess, but that’s your own fault.

I wouldn’t have written this since it’s mostly venting tbh, but I’ve seen some here mentioning wanting to discuss it, so I thought may as well start. What do you think?

Just a heads up, there's a new thread. You should post over there ;D

What do you think?

If you're asking about the legacy of having children, then it seems like

some part of yourself. I’m not just talking genetics here, though that is a large part

is hopelessly diluted somewhere after your grandchildren. How many people today remember seeing their great-grandfather, or at least hearing anecdotes and stories about him from their parents and grandparents that stuck? As for genetics, even if we assume that each person's genetic code is one of a kind and unique, that's only half of what makes you unique in your son, 1/4th in your grandson, 1/8th in your great-grandson and so on, on average. As it stands, the parts of the genome that make your great-grandson like you are entirely indistinguishable from the same parts that millions others have.

Compare that with numerous small things that someone with an audience of 10 to 100 said or made at some point of your life that you still remember. Those are people who had more impact on your life than your genetic progenitor.

If objective, lasting legacy is the goal, I find having children to be one of the least efficient ways to do it, for a commoner. As for biological drives, those are equally satisfied whether you hire a nanny or not.

Having 4 people with 1/4 of your genome is objectively better than just being one person because of the risk dilution (Nevermind that I don't plan to have so few grandkids).

On the second, my experience has been the opposite. A few big actors - often rather general memes than really the particular mouthpieces making the actual statements - are imo the winners on the cultural influence market. By far one of the worst places to invest in unless you're extremely confident.

is objectively better than just being one person because of the risk dilution

That's assuming I consider my genome myself in terms of risks. If you could fill a sector of the universe with indestructible inscriptions of your full genome, memories, personality etc., would you consider your life immortalized enough to keel over and die immediately after? I would not.

And sure, the top 100 recommended channels on youtube or tiktok dominate most of memespace of most people, but not all of it.

Thanks for linking the article, it was largely a good review of a book I'd otherwise not have read anyways.

While Scott is a bit out of touch here, I can't say it really affects my opinion of him all that much. While most folks don't have nannies, many definitely do, and I think you'll find that most people with nannies are upper quartile income but not necessarily swimming in money. I'm close with someone who nannied all through her master's program, and so far as I've heard, nannying mostly selects for dual income families that value their free time more than savings and early retirement (same folks also seem to go on multiple vacations a year, sometimes with kids, sometimes without).

As far as commonality, it seems to be about 1 in 8 households with under 3's in California: https://cscce.berkeley.edu/publications/report/parent-preferences-in-family-friend-neighbor-and-nanny-care/

I'd imagine the rates are lower elsewhere in the US.

What do you think?

Same as you: https://www.themotte.org/post/1913/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/327871?context=8#context

I read it [Scott's post] and my reaction was pretty much the same kind of loss-for-words exasperation I feel when my wife tells me that I cannot possibly have expectations of her, don't I know she has excuses? Why, Scott, you have a stay-at-home wife, two kids, a nanny, several friendly families living in the same block, and then you feel a need to also hire two babysitters on top of all that? Yeah, taking care of kids is exhausting. No shit, Scott - did you think getting kids at age 40 wouldn't be taxing? Two of them at the same time to boot. And still, his complaints in the face of that many resources thrown at the problem smells of...I don't know what to call it without throwing out schoolyard insults like "sissy" or "pussy". Methinks Scott complaineth overmuch. Or maybe I'm just jealous of his "privilege", be that wealth or whatnot, regardless of whether it's earned or otherwise.

Man, I work full-time and then I parent all the rest of the time except for maybe about two hours after getting my daughter to sleep. If Scott's numbers are correct, then I put in more parenting time than his stay-at-home wife. Which isn't to say that I'm the better man; far from it, my life is a mess. But seriously. They're doing something very wrong if the two of them can't hack it without hiring an entire fireteam of helpers.

So yeah, emergency expedited Supreme Court oral arguments were today, about - contrary to what the headlines might initially seem to tell you - whether district court judges can issue national injunctions. More specifically, on if "relief" can be given to non-parties in a lawsuit, unilaterally by judge's decision. This is not on its face about Trump's birthright citizenship claims though of course that is more immediately at issue. I highly recommend this piece with a classic back-and-forth between two law professors who disagree about whether or not they should be allowed (disclaimer: both are, however, strongly against the Trump interpretation of birthright citizenship), a format I feel like is way underrepresented in today's news landscape (but weirdly overdone and trivialized on cable TV). NPR would never. Ahem. Anyways...

Some mini-history is these injunctions, as best I understand, basically did not exist until the mid-2000's when suddenly they started showing up a lot, and on big topics too. DACA, the Muslim travel ban, the abortion pill ban, various ACA issues, it has tended to cut across administrations though often the pattern is they show up against the one in power. Both professors agree that the Constitution itself doesn't really say much about the subject one way or the other beyond generalities, so it's going to rest a little more on general principles.

The central and immediate disagreement between the two seems to be whether or not you can or should trust the national government, when it loses a major case, to go back to the drawing board and/or pause the losing policy because narrowly slicing it up doesn't make sense, or whether you might as well do a nationwide injunction because of a lack of trust or simply that the application fundamentally isn't something you can legally slice up finely.

The more general disagreement, and this is the one that to me is more interesting, seems to be what to do about judge-shopping and partisan judges having disproportionate impacts, with some very different ideas about how to address that, contrasted below:

Is this frustrating for you [Professor Bagley] — for this to be the vehicle that may finally be forcing a resolution on the availability of nationwide injunctions?

Bagley: I suppose it’s a consequence of having developed a position over time and across administrations. What it means to have a set of principles is that they don’t change just because you happen to dislike the inhabitant of the White House.

I think a lot of people — and I’m not speaking of Professor Frost here at all — come to this issue out of righteous indignation against the president of the opposite political party, and that’s actually my big concern.

We want to put our faith in these judges, but these judges are just people too. There’s 500-plus of them, and they’re scattered all over the country. Many are smart. Many work hard. Some are dumb. Lots are political. Many are just outright partisan hacks.

All you need to do in order to get a nationwide injunction is file your case in front of one of those partisan hacks, and then we’re off to the races — with these immediate appeals up to the Supreme Court, where hard questions are decided in a circumscribed manner and where the courts themselves reveal a kind of highly partisan pattern of judging that calls the entire judiciary into disrepute.

I would love this birthright citizenship [executive order] to be blown up into about a billion pieces. It is a moral, ethical, legal, constitutional travesty. I don’t know that the engine to do that is a nationwide injunction. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s not.

That said, I think no one who’s looking at 21st century America right now thinks to themselves, “Things are going great.” There are a lot of deep problems. I think our democracy has misfired in a pretty profound way, and some of the institutional constraints on the president that previously held are starting to give way.

I don’t think we give up much by giving up the nationwide injunction. I think we help right the ship, but I don’t know that I know that for sure.

And I think anybody who comes into these debates with extraordinary confidence, one way or the other, about the long-run consequence of doctrinal shifts like this, ought to have their head checked. I have a view, but, like many things in life, it is provisional and what I think is a principled and thoughtful view.

But lots of other people, who are also principled and thoughtful disagree, with me.

So in short, it's too risky to allow judges this power.

Professor Frost, you’re probably not in disagreement on all of these policy and practical issues. Where do you see agreement and disagreement?

Frost: First, I do not think there’s a single judge that exercises this power — in the sense that, yes, that judge issues the nationwide injunction in the district court, but it can be immediately appealed up to an appellate court of three judges, then immediately taken up to the U.S. Supreme Court, as was the case in the mifepristone case, as is the case in most of these cases.

You could say, “Well, we’re now forcing the Supreme Court to decide cases more quickly.”

Wait to see what happens to the court if each and every one of the children born in the United States has to sue to protect their citizenship. Courts will be overwhelmed in that situation.

The consequences for courts are not always great when they have to quickly respond to nationwide injunctions and reverse them, but they can do that. If it does quickly get reversed, then it’s just a couple of weeks, a month or two, that it’s in place.

I will also say that if forum shopping is your problem, your solution is to address forum shopping. And there are proposals out there by the Judicial Conference for more random assignments, and I absolutely favor those. I think forum shopping is a problem. I think politicization of the courts is a problem, but the answer is not get rid of nationwide injunctions. The answer is end forum shopping.

Nationwide injunctions are literally saving our nation at the moment.

It’s not just birthright citizenship, although that is the poster child for nationwide injunctions, and it’s an excellent vehicle in which to consider the issue for someone like me, where I’m worried about a world without them.

Think about the Alien Enemies Act. We have an administration that says it can deport people without due process, and when it makes a mistake, it’s too bad, too late.

If that could not be stopped through an injunction, I think we should all be afraid. And that’s one of many, many examples of an administration that wants to unilaterally rewrite the law without the impediment of Congress or any sort of legal process. Without nationwide injunctions, each and every person potentially affected would have to sue to maintain the rule of law.

So in short, national injunctions are sometimes infinitely more practical, and not the direct problem at stake to begin with, more problems lie upstream. However:

I hear Professor Bagley and the other critics as to the downsides, and here are the downsides.

While the nationwide injunction is in effect, the law is being stopped. This is the frustration Professor Bagley was [describing] about how the government can’t implement its policies. And maybe six, seven, eight months to, at most, a year, the Supreme Court rules and says, “Actually it’s a perfectly legal policy,” and we’ve lost a year.

I recognize that as a cost. However, I’d rather live in that world than the world where a lawless president, or even a president that’s edging toward that, [can act without that constraint].

Obama and Biden did a few things that I thought were lawless, even though I liked the policy, like Deferred Action for Parents of U.S. citizens, which was enjoined by a nationwide injunction. That was an Obama policy.

The imperial presidency is a reality. They are all trying to expand their power, and I’d rather slow them down with the loss of some useful policies that I think are good at the end of the day and prevail in court, than allow for running roughshod over our legal system, as this administration is trying to do.

It's come up here from time to time whether the slowness of the system is a bug or a feature. This debate in at least some respects reflects that tension. Is it acceptable for judges, even well-meaning ones, to pause things for up to a year? One might reasonably ask then, can the Supreme Court thread the needle and simply restrict national injunctions to more narrow occasions (as just one example, the current citizenship case where precendant including Supreme Court precedent is pretty clear), not completely get rid of them? Bagley again:

And the trouble is, in our hyper-polarized environment, that kind of claim is made by partisans on both sides of the aisle whenever somebody is in office who they disagree with. So it is, I think, a comforting thought that we can just leave the door open a little bit, but if you leave the door open a little bit, you’re actually going to get the same cavalcade of nationwide injunctions that we’ve seen.

I’d be open to a narrower rule if I’d heard one that I thought could restrain judges that were ideologically tempted and willing to throw their authority around. But I haven’t seen it, frankly, and, until I do, I’d be pretty reluctant to open that door at all.

I know we've seen some vigorous discussion over the last while about activist judges. But one interesting theme I've been picking up over the last few months especially is, how much work exactly do we or should we expect the judges to be doing? For example, we had the overturning of Chevron, which ostensibly puts more difficult rule-making decisions in the hands of judges. An increase in work for them, championed by the right. But then, we had the right also start claiming that having immigration hearings for literally every immigrant would be too onerous and they should be able to deport people faster, perhaps without even (what the left would call) full due process. Too much work. And now we have the right claiming that each state or district would need to file its own lawsuit, or even assemble an emergency class action to get nation-wide relief, for an executive order with nearly non-existent precedent. An increase in work across all districts. Traditionally the right is against judicial activism in general, saying judges are too involved, implying they should work less. Maybe this all isn't a real contradiction, but still, an interesting pattern. What does judicial reform look like on the right, is it really a coherent worldview, or just variously competing interests, often tailored right to the moment? A more narrow, tailored question would be: what is the optimal number of judges, for someone on the right, compared to what we have now? Do we need more and weaker judges, or fewer and weaker? Or something else?

I think there are situations where nationwide injunctions make sense, both legally and as a matter of judicial economy, and situations where they don't. Steve Vladeck has an article discussing this in the context of the Alien Enemies Act litigation. Whether you can sue as part of a class, what process is due, whether the proclamation is even valid, are questions that currently have a range of answers across several different circuits. What is the benefit of doing litigation like this, where lots of people are similarly situated with respect to the core legal issues? I think in cases where there is a facial challenge to a government policy it makes all the sense in the world for a nationwide injunction to be an available tool. If there is no set of circumstances where a policy would be constitutional, that shouldn't have to be litigated separately in 90+ cases spanning every district (or possible defendant) in the country. On the other hand, when challenges are more as-applied I think the question is trickier. That seems like a case more ripe for class certification and litigation, for similarly factually situated plaintiffs.

I guess I tend to agree more with Professor Frost that I'd rather err on the side of enjoining the government from carrying out a constitutional policy than permitting them to carry out an unconstitutional one.

ETA:

I'm working my way through the oral argument transcript from this morning and the government's position seems... incredible? It's their position that Article 3 and the Judiciary Act of 1789 do not give courts the power to issue nationwide injunctions, including the Supreme Court of the United States. Their view is any broad based relief must come via class action. Which brings me to kind of an odd question. Can persons not yet born be part of a class action? Otherwise it would seem the government's position is every new babe must file their own lawsuit (class or individual) to vindicate their rights or else risk the government being able to violate them.

To be clear, at least in the context of the arguments today as I understand them, the major question of relief was not actually for individuals but for states who would bear a very large administrative burden if birthright citizenship were struck down (3.5 million babies a year born, would they all need to provide residency papers? That’s a lot of paperwork and paperwork costs money). So at least in the current form of the debate, unborn kids are not directly relevant (though this indication is something the SC might address, so it’s still a valid question)

There were both individual and state plaintiffs at oral argument, with somewhat different arguments.

I don’t think it’s that crazy of a position. First, the problem with national wide injunctions without classes is the asymmetry of the outcome. 500 different plaintiffs can bring the lawsuit in different district courts. 1/500 needs to win if the judge gives a nationwide injunction. Contrast with a class where the plaintiffs are in fact bound by a loss.

Second, the idea the government would in fact look for not yet born residents to impose something where there is direct SCOTUS authority is a hypothetical that is so far out there compared to the first concern because the government would quickly lose (eg new plaintiff would say there is a scotus case directly on point).

I don’t think it’s that crazy of a position. First, the problem with national wide injunctions without classes is the asymmetry of the outcome. 500 different plaintiffs can bring the lawsuit in different district courts. 1/500 needs to win if the judge gives a nationwide injunction. Contrast with a class where the plaintiffs are in fact bound by a loss.

If it is all going to end up decided by SCOTUS anyway this seems fine. Better one rule while we sort out the litigation than possibly 96. The government has the resources that individual plaintiffs certainly don't.

Second, the idea the government would in fact look for not yet born residents to impose something where there is direct SCOTUS authority is a hypothetical that is so far out there compared to the first concern because the government would quickly lose (eg new plaintiff would say there is a scotus case directly on point).

This is true if the hypothetical plaintiff has the resources to press their claim in court. Unless you already have an injunction against the government, in your own name or as part of a class, the government is free to force you to engage in duplicative litigation and drain your time and resources. The government, at oral argument, would not even commit to respecting a 2nd Circuit precedent in the 2nd Circuit!

A few points:

  1. If the argument is “it doesn’t matter SCOTUS will decide anyhow,” then (1) maybe not due to cert denial, (2) maybe yes but if SCOTUS sided with the 499/500, then an injustice occurred potentially for years, and (3) if trying to solve time then legal issues don’t get to evolve within multiple rulings to tease out the thorny issues.

  2. DOJ discussed long standing precedent that the general rule is they respect the opinion and judgement but they reserve the right to respect only the judgement. Notably, this is a historic precedent something that the DOJ actually pursued while Kagan was solicitor genera. However, the DOJ stated they would respect both the opinion and judgement of SCOTUS.

Yeah, that's kinda the core of the problem, here.

There's a lot of arguments in favor of a muscular judiciary, and I've made a good number of them, but we don't have that. SCOTUS hears a tiny number of cases, a fraction of those they do hear either get punts or toothless GVRs, and the normal policy has been to fastidiously avoid interlocutory appeals and triple-check every case for sufficient jurisdiction and mootness, and even on those extremely rare events where they don't skip out completely we still get cases that don't want to make the law clear.

That's what makes this sorta thing gall. I don't think Trump has a particularly strong arg for the AEA stuff, and even if the birthright citizenship history is more complicated than most people think the stare decisis is pretty compelling. But I can name countless other issues, and every single time that the court punts on any situation where there is current and unrecoverable harm and the court hems and haws over the importance of procedural regularity, I'm going to point to this case. And I'm going to have a lot of opportunities to point to this case.

I think honestly you should have the ability to do a National injunction but it should be a situation where you have to get all the plaintiffs on one case, and it should be automatically taken up by SCOTUS. The first part, to me, is reasonable because it removes the “I’ll keep going before judges until I get my way” tactic. The loss would be the end of the matter. But I think it’s necessary for such a system to exist because there are some decisions that it’s extremely hard to undo, and the courts especially, if there are multiple appeals, can move far too slowly to bring Justice. If I decide to force prisoners to work in a factory on pain of not feeding them unless they do, that’s potentially a serious breach of justice. If it takes 5-6 years for the case to wind through the courts, you have people potentially starved to death before you get a definitive answer on the matter. You can’t undo dead. But because there’s a threat of “okay, but because of the nature of the injunction, it’s only binding until SCOTUS rules on it,” people are going to be appropriately reticent to bring out that big weapon, and only use it in cases where the law is clear on the matter.

The problem is that anything that has a mandatory hearing before the Supreme Court is going to put a massive strain on their case load. Voting Rights Act cases already have this and it’s a huge pain.

But I think it’s necessary for such a system to exist because there are some decisions that it’s extremely hard to undo

There are also some injunctions that are hard to undo, like an injunction against not spending money.

I think honestly you should have the ability to do a National injunction but it should be a situation where you have to get all the plaintiffs on one case, and it should be automatically taken up by SCOTUS.

Maybe, but only if the nation injunction takes effect if the SCOTUS agrees to take it up, and is negated if SCOTUS refuses the case. Otherwise, this could easily cause more harm than it avoids.

One of the critical institutional power factors of the Supreme Court is precisely that it gets to choose it's own cases. This is power over other branches of government, but also a power over the rest of the judiciary. The Supreme Court gets to dodge politically untenable legal issues that could threaten the independence of the court precisely because it reserves the right to ignore a court for now but overrule it later. The ability to disagree later-but-not-now is a positional influence which can allow the Supreme Court members to pick their battle and avoid unfavorable contexts.

Forcing the Supreme Court to take cases is a way of exercising process control/influence to influence the Supreme Court. A coalition that is already willing to abuse injunctions through willing partners in the mid-judiciary could easily use the lack of case autonomy to force the Supreme Court into politically untenable positions that provide the political cover to either force SC endorsement, or use the refusal as the political basis to dismantle institutional independence until the political pressure can dominate. Either way undercuts the Supreme Court's institutional autonomy and pressures it into political conformity with lower courts.

Which might be fine and preferable if you think the lower courts are on your side / substantially correct. But the issue of nationwide injunctions itself- where an overwhelming majority of injunctions in the last quarter century have been against one party, despite the Presidency having been evenly split between two parties- indicate a lack of consensus that would legitimize such a position.

I think that does make a lot of sense. But my main concern is to limit the ability to issue a national injunction to “break-glass” levels of emergency. The idea being that the principle in question is so important to the public good, Justice, or good government that allowing it to continue before SCOTUS takes it on would result in grave harm. I don’t want it completely ended, but at the same time I don’t want it to be used casually as a “we don’t like this” measure.

How about bring overturned on a national injunction is evidence of bad behavior and therefore removal is merited? That is, a judge should only do it in the most extreme clear situations?

I would say if the judge is repeatedly doing something like this and they’re constantly issuing injunctions that get overturned, then yes. Would not think that a single overturned injunction would reveal partisan hacking unless the injunction is so bad on the merits of the case that he clearly shouhave known better.

I’m not saying a single overturned injunction; a single overturned national injunction.

If it is so important for them, a single district judge, to make a national ruling, then they ought to have some skin in the game.

It's their position that Article 3 and the Judiciary Act of 1789 do not give courts the power to issue nationwide injunctions

From a strict textualist point of view I think this is defensible. The judicial power extends only to “cases and controversies”. There is an implication that any action which contradicts binding judicial precedent is illegal, but technically this is only an implication. The judicial branch doesn’t have authority over an action until it becomes the subject of a case or controversy, i.e. when a specific plaintiff sues over a specific action.

Practically, this creates some hurdles and perverse incentives, so I doubt the court will go for it.

The courts should do their jobs and not do someone else's job. There's no contradiction here. It's not about the total magnitude of their power, as if there's some number that should be summed up over all the things they do and try to make sure the sums line up, it's about jurisdiction. The role of the judiciary is to interpret the law as written and intended, and apply it to individual cases, which are frequently weird and contain many facts and details that might make them edge cases or involve multiple laws that need to be combined together.

If the law doesn't say a thing and an activist judge pretends that it does by inventing new definitions for words that clearly were not what those words meant when the law was written, then they are legislating their own new laws, not actually judging. If judges go to some agency run by unelected non-judges and asks them to interpret the law for them, then those people are the judges, and the elected judges are not actually judging. They're supposed to judge, not legislate, not outsource.

This part was interesting from Frost:

Frost: In terms of who I’m watching for, it’s all the folks who have not yet gone on the record as being opposed to nationwide injunctions.

Who are those people?

Frost: Really everybody but [Justice Neil] Gorsuch, [Justice Samuel] Alito and [Justice Clarence] Thomas.

However, according to this CNN article:

Speaking at a university event in 2022, Justice Elena Kagan, a liberal, addressed how nationwide injunctions – when coupled with forum-shopping – were hamstringing administrations of both parties, asserting that “It just can’t be right that one district judge can stop a nationwide policy in its tracks and leave it stopped for the years that it takes to go through the normal process,” Kagan said.

My sense has long been that Kagan, as the only remaining Democrat-appointed justice who wasn't purely an affirmative action pick, is an the awkward position of being a genuinely capable jurist saddled with the burden of morons for ideological allies. But when supposed court experts go on Politico to explain who thinks what, and somehow a journalist at CNN manages to know more than them about the state of play, I have to wonder whether the experts are actually ignorant, or simply crafting a narrative.

From the legal blogs, videos, and in person conversations with practicing lawyers, I've read, watched, and had over the years, the overwhelming consensus I've seen with regards to the skill of the judiciary is that the Dems are saddled with both: one of the greatest legal minds and scholars of our time and a top 5 all-time practitioner of American jurisprudence, and inarguably the least qualified justice we've ever seen, whose work with the pen is so bad it often reads like the homework of an enterprising law student.

While I'm probably not qualified to make that sort of judgement myself, In pretty much every case I've read where Kagan and Sotomayor have published independent responses, I find Kagan's overwhelmingly reasonable, while Sotomayor's is just dripping with Rawlsian social justice and rarely seems to find time to circle back to U.S. law.

Yeah it’s a good question. Other outlets like the NYT actually mentioned that Kagan quote. On the other hand, the three he did list without Kagan seem to be the ones many court watchers think will be on the losing side of a 6-3 decision, so maybe that was what he was trying to imply?

I don’t think there are full remarks available online - actually it was also Politico who were the original source on Kagan here and I will say the context does matter. The larger thrust of her answer (as framed in the original source, which is just snippets with paraphrasing or summarization) was about over-politicization of the law more broadly. I note that when Harvard Law Review last year in tackling the nationwide injunction issue, cited the exact same quote, it was as evidence that she wanted to limit judge shopping, not as directly against injunctions, though clearly the two are still intertwined. So I think there’s at least some space for Frost here.

I think an interesting point is also just how the nationwide injunction issue doesn’t quite cut neatly across partisan lines, both parties have been frustrated by it and I don’t get the sense there is broad alignment here, regardless of whatever Trump’s lawyers are arguing. They’ve twisted themselves in pretzels before.

I think it’s 5-4 with ACB being on the liberal side. Government got the harder of the question but BK made the most impactful point re asymmetry of the outcome and Roberts understands institutionally forum shopping nationwide injunctions increases the frictions between the branches in a way that will cause a constitutional crisis. ACB reads too much of the NYT.

FWIW, in my experience, the conservative/libertarian legal movement has been virtually unanimously against universal injunctions for as long as they've been a thing. Some activists and Republican state SGs will seek them, and I've seen people argue in favor of their use for strategic reasons as a counter to the left, but I'm not sure I've ever heard a principled argument in favor of universal injunctions from the right. While they're a matter of open controversy on the left.

So it's not purely a partisan issue, especially if you only look at government actors, but how to put the universal injunction genie back in the bottle has been a perrenial panel discussion topic at Federalist Society events for at least a decade.

US and China slash tariffs as trade war cools

It looks like we will experience a de-escalation of the tariff battle between the US and China.

The U.S. will cut Trump’s recent tariffs on Chinese imports from 145 percent to 30 percent, while the Chinese side will drop measures from 125 percent to 10 percent. The suspension is temporary for now, lasting 90 days, allowing time for further negotiations.

How does this line up with your personal predictions for how this was going to proceed?

My belief was that both sides would maintain 100+% tariffs but exempt essentially everything that matters. This development shows that I was wrong and I don't understand something about the events that have occurred. Does anybody have any ideas on what I missed?

So... Trump blinked? These are the tariff numbers we would have if Trump had just imposed the flat 10% rate on China he did on every other country. What benefit did the United States get out of this pause on trade with China? I guess Trump and his inner circle probably made a killing on insider trading this announcement.

He got to 30 and people are calling it a good thing. If he started at this number people would shriek at it. If de minimis nuking is still there in the background overshadowed by all the other stuff, then he also got to kill shein and temu and aliexpress

30% is nothing; reshoring manufacturing when China has better logistics, transport, infrastructure, training and labor would require much more than 30%.

Even at 30% children's pyjama's from Aliexpress are still better than what's on offer domesticly with all the US safetyism.

You mean you don't want flame retardants for children's sleep clothes? You think you can just clothe your child in loose fitting, non-retarded cotton? What if your child falls asleep while smoking and the cigarette lights their jammies and they just get fucking immolated? Has that thought crossed your mind?

What if your child falls asleep while smoking and the cigarette lights their jammies and they just get fucking immolated?

Nicotine is a stimulant and prudent parents make sure that, like caffeine, it is confined to the morning and well away from nap time.

But what about their early morning puff while they’re still in their onesies?

My kids where their silk smoking jackets over their loose fitting non-retarded cotton sleepwear while smoking.

To establish ground truth facts: All that is left of Liberation Day tariffs on China is minimal 10% “against humanity” tariff, reciprocated by 10% as well. 20% of “Fentanyl tariff” (lol) came in February, and China reciprocated it with asymmetric tariffs which are also in power. So it's somewhat more equal than 10% for 30%. Also, China has not repealed their global export controls on rare earth elements which is in fact terrible as there is no way to quickly ramp up production elsewhere, stockpiles will run out in months, and much of the imagined American revival (eg industrial automation, so robots) requires REEs. Though there's cope.

Chinese imports of ≈$500B add far more to American GDP, maybe on the order of $2T even naively accounted (eg not considering the costs of unmaintained infra if trade were terminated) – they're a large chunk of all consumed goods and inputs to almost all industry, they retail for much higher value, and create a lot of economic activity. Since the gap with the rest of the world is just 20%, China refuses to cover the tariffs on their side and there is, in fact, no ready substitute to most of their products at acceptable volume and shortages would have caused crisis and panic, most businesses opt to pass the price to consumer or just cut margins. So the main effect of this in the short term will be slight reduction in bilateral trade, slightly (because the markup of US distributors is insane) higher prices of everything for Americans, and redistribution of wealth from businesses and consumers towards their state.

I've been wrong with my usual doomerism, predicting that neither side will fold. I mainly overrated Trump's ego strength and isolation from feedback. China kept playing this with surgical game-theoretical precision, consistently demanding respectful and equal treatment and insisting that they will not be intimidated but in principle oppose trade wars as lose-lose scenarios. Trump toadies initially made some smug noises about “isolating the bad actor”; then, when Chinese retaliation succeeded in preventing quick submission of others, particularly emboldening other largest trade partners (EU and Japan), improved ties with ASEAN, and precluded any such isolation – course-corrected, through some opaque drama between courtiers it seems. They started begging for talks (in a bizarre Oriental manner of requesting that Xi calls first, to save Trump face, maintaining the optics of “they need us and our Great American Consumer more than we need their cheap trinkets”), and eventually signaled willingness for equal deescalation that the Chinese side has been expecting. We are here.

What has been learned? First, that indeed, the US just does not have the cards to push China around, much less rally “the world” against it. That trust and respect is easily lost. That even nations highly dependent on the US security umbrella and on trade with the US can refuse to bow, and barter for their own interests:

Regarding the tariff negotiations between the United States and the United Kingdom in which an agreement was reached to set tariffs at 10%, including on automobiles, Prime Minister Ishiba said on a Fuji TV program, "It is one model, but we are calling for their abolition.We cannot say that 10% is okay."

That the South-East Asia is probably not a viable platform for any “choking” or “Malacca blockade”, like, just look at this statement.

That the EU has sovereignty, that Canada has sovereignty, that… basically, that the US is not a big scary hegemonic superpower it imagines itself to be and sometimes laments the wages of being. It's just a very powerful country, with large but decidedly finite leverage, and that runs well short of getting everyone to play along with American King's unreasonable imagination. The US can not credibly maintain the pressure on a determined adversary the size of China. Now, some half-dead vassals like the UK will make unequal concessions. But that's about it. Others will drive a bargain.

It's been a moderate economic shock for everyone, and a significant loss of credibility for the US.

We still have deminimis unavailable for China, which is a problem for individual consumers. It's basically impossible to buy anything from China now.

Well, it'll be more costly, but it'll be possible.

HONG KONG/SHANGHAI/LOS ANGELES, May 13 (Reuters) - The U.S. will cut the "de minimis" tariff for low-value shipments from China to as low as 30%, according to a White House executive order and industry experts, further de-escalating a potentially damaging trade war between the world's two largest economies.

Things move quickly. I think fentanyl stuff will also get resolved.

$100 for postal packages.

The miscalculation was not only that Trump actually believed in tariffs, unlike abortion, immigration, trans whatever, where he was always malleable. It was that Trump’s career record displayed regular, bone headed conviction to make and stand by dumb decisions (which is why the business declared bankruptcy multiple times during the largest multi-decade property boom in history) principally around the casinos in Atlantic City. It’s relevant because that whole project (directly responsible for 3 out of 4 of his bankruptcies) was the result not only of great ambition but also of steadfastness in the face of many advisors, bankers, fellow developers, partners etc no doubt telling him he was making the wrong decision(s).

On this basis I assumed that while Trump would fold eventually on the tariffs, he would persevere until the economic situation deteriorated considerably. When thinking about why he caved before then, I have a few ideas. The first is that Trump thinks of himself as a genius, especially in real estate, but he does allow for the existence of other geniuses, and I think he does accept that at least in domain terms other people are smarter than him (Elon Musk with ‘computer’, Jamie Dimon in finance etc), and they were both against tariffs. The second is that he’s easily persuaded by flattery, which is a classic Chinese art form, and while Xi was publicly posturing I do think there has been some suggestion that the diplomatic approach was softer. Lastly, I think people Trump likes personally like MBS and Meloni who both deal a lot with the Chinese and are in many ways economically reliant on them told him the tariffs were bad, and Trump has something of a sense of loyalty, at least in certain situations, provided someone (eg Cohen) doesn’t cross him publicly.

which is why the business declared bankruptcy multiple times during the largest multi-decade property boom in history

You know, there was an episode of the Apprentice where he explained exactly how this worked. The companies which held the real estate never declared bankruptcy.

It wasn’t a genius move and he came unnecessarily close to actual ruin on a couple of occasions. You can disagree, but this one of very few areas where I personally know a couple of people involved in lending for commercial real estate in NYC and NJ at that time and they both say the same thing. (And one of them definitely voted for him, the other I would guess did).

I never feel like I learn something from your comments anymore. Its always just AI/China is the best, unbeatable, even better than you thought, and not even committing to anything concrete there. Like for example:

That the EU has sovereignty, that Canada has sovereignty, that… basically, that the US is not a big scary hegemonic superpower it imagines itself to be and sometimes laments the wages of being. It's just a very powerful country, with large but decidedly finite leverage, and that runs well short of getting everyone to play along with American King's unreasonable imagination.

In what sense wasnt this already demonstrated by Germany buying russian gas? That seems like a case where wed expect more US influence than any of this tariff debacle.

From my point of view it's that you have degenerated into kanging and chimping from cognitive dissonance, like unfortunately many in the American sphere of influence. It seems Americans simply cannot conceive of having a serious or superior enemy, they grew addicted to safely dunking on premodern peoples in slippers or nations with deep structural disadvantages like Soviets with their planned economy and resource-poor, occupied Japan with 1/3 of their population – even as they sometimes smirk and play the underdog in their ridiculous doomposting. They feel like Main Characters of history, who are destined to win for narrative reasons and therefore can afford arbitrary foolishness in the midgame – at it will amount to is a few extra lines in the moral takeaway in the epilogue. Karl Rove's famous quote is quite apt.

China is not unbeatable, China is not stronger than the (hypothetical at this point) US-aligned alliance of democracies, and they're currently behind in AI. But you cannot see when I say this, because it would legitimate my positions that are less soothing for your ego, and instead you are compelled to default to these whiny complaints that are just a demand to shut up. Were you living in reality, you'd feel more incensed at nonsensical, low-IQ-racist boomer copes that keep undermining your side's negotiating position.

Accordingly I gloat that much harder when you lot suffer setbacks, because I strongly despise delusion and unearned smugness and believe they ought to be punished.

In what sense wasnt this already demonstrated by Germany buying russian gas?

It's a matter of degree. Pressing Germany to move away from Russian energy supply could be easily justified in the world where the US was a credible guarantor of German security, as indeed Russia tried the gas card to dissuade Germany from supporting Ukraine, and now German industry which grew dependent on Russian gas is contracting. True, Germany showed independent (and faulty) decisionmaking then. But this was all in the realm of politics as usual, rules-based international order, and German choice was business as usual too. Now we see a test of naked American authority in Trump's exploitative trade war, in “DO NOT RETALIATE AND YOU WILL BE REWARDED” bullshit. Faceh explicitly says “Honestly I can say I thought there'd be more capitulation by now”, and that's exactly the spirit. This is not normal politics, this is a desperate shit test: will you cave, or will you resist? Are you a country or an imperial vassal? Getting refusals in this condition is decisive, and clearly the US side expected to get fewer of them.

Now we see a test of naked American authority in Trump's exploitative trade war, in “DO NOT RETALIATE AND YOU WILL BE REWARDED” bullshit.

Ok, I think I have a bit more to say about this now. I dont think we can really call this "the full extent of american power" if Trump hasnt even floated military action. And even the actual military threats over Greenland, we have taken seriously but not literally. Its all quite a while off from the US really going "or else". The other thing is that IMO, much of the american influence over Europe comes not from direct threats but maintaining an ideologically aligned establishment. Trump has only limited use of that, because its aligned to atlanticism and in communion with the relevant academic/think tank circles, not to the government per se. Technically speaking, some right-populists have a platfrom on the Ukraine war closer to the current administration than that of the mainstream parties - but its the latter who are "loyal to America" in the relevant sense. Thats why Nordstream is a good indicator: Preventing it is at the core of what Id expect US influence to do, but local economic interest (and a feel-good story about the cold war being over) won out.

China is not stronger than the (hypothetical at this point) US-aligned alliance of democracies,

I have doubts about this. Much of that 'alliance of democracies' is EU and EU is an utterly hopeless project which would require a STEM-pilled / bureaucracy hating Stalin purging tens of thousands of people with extreme prejudice.

Chinese don't seem to be mired in bureaucracy and can 'just build things'.

Eugyppius recently noted a bridge that crashed in Dresden is not expected to be replaced until 2035! One fucking bridge over a shallow river, the kind that an engineering unit would build in 2 days! 2035! So when half or third of your 'strength' is in this kind of state, you have problems.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with US infrastructure issues, but it's not pretty either with e.g. Golden Gate bridge, where the new 'suicide nets' installed (400 million) cost a substantial fraction of the inflation adjusted cost of the entire bridge (supposedly 700 million $).

I agree with this. Europe is extremely sclerotic and mostly coasting on past developments and the contributions of rare reformers that actually patch out some of the excesses of our buerocracies, of which we have multiple layers all of which have an unquestioned mandate to grow unchecked by anything other than hard financial limits, and all of which promote a progressive vision of prosperous society as a thing that just works by default and can be taken for granted.

And nevermind defence; Europe is by and large a joke when it comes to military anything. Some countries more

  • Germany hamstrung by graft and deeply-rooted anti-militarism,
  • the mediterranean states by general incompetence,
  • many just by being small,

some less

  • France and Britain (not EU but still European, sue me) retaining the vestiges of their imperial military traditions
  • the nordic countries and Poland remaining on edge thanks to Russia

but none of them likely to be able to put up a real fight against a peer or above-peer military power because Europe isn't a nation, or even a federation of nations, but simply an economic zone of economic zones, yadda yadda lack of social cohesion, I'm out of time, you know the drill.

you have degenerated into kanging and chimping

"You" as in me, or the forum? Because I agreed with the conclusion here. In general I dont necessarily mean that youre wrong about this stuff, more that a) its very predictable what direction youll go and b) you dont give a lot besides that direction. I agree that what I remember from you about the chinese-AI overlap was better. I did exaggerate.

They feel like Main Characters of history, who are destined to win for narrative reasons and therefore can afford arbitrary foolishness in the midgame

I do in fact have some stock on pre-boomer-racism that is more or less that. But part of that is that its not the "midgame" because I dont think the game ends, either as a whole or for whites specifically. Which might be related to AI scepticism. It doesnt impact medium-term prediction that much.

Now we see a test of naked American authority

I see what you mean. I can just say thats not how people here in europe think of it, and that in itself should influence how we read the reaction.

just a demand to shut up

I dont want you to shut up. Ideally Id want you to start posting about other topics as well again, since these two arent really my focus, but if these post were more substantial in relation to the gloating, that would be an improvement as well.

I expect you'll dismiss what I say as just another smug American chauvinist...but watching you express with great confidence that the geniuses at the US state department were about to crush the Chinese upstarts a few years ago, to joining the ranks of the resident Chinamaxxers should be enough to give anyone whiplash. If anything, it should make readers update their priors about trusting anyone with grand geopolitical narratives.

The US State department isn't staffed by geniuses who can shape the world to their liking. Nor is the CCP. And even if you took US IMO team and forced them to study geopolitics rather than theoretical physicists finance, their ability to influence the world would be minimal. The NWO-deep state-Masonic brotherhood conspiracy theorists believe manipulate world events to their benefit doesn't exist, simply because the world is too hideously complex a system for someone of any intellect or means to meaningfully manipulate. I don't seriously believe that anyone can predict what will happen or who the paper tiger is.

Is China an unstoppable manufacturing behemoth about to steamroll the US navy on their way to Taiwan, or an aging and shrinking nation who imploded their property sector with loads of debt? Is America the global hegemon with the best military, largest concentration of talent and strongest economy in the world, or a sclerotic, internally-divided shitshow? Probably...all of the above? Who can say whether China's population bomb represents a hard cap to their ascension, or whether they can dominate every STEM and manufacturing field to a degree that dwarfs the rest of the world before they lose their dynamism? Or whether China does a Pearl Harbor next October and Americans of all stripes rally around the flag, erasing the problem of partisanship?

The uncertainty is part of the fun, I suppose. But I'm fairly confident that nobody can make meaningful predictions about what will happen consistently. And I'm certain that whatever happens, some asshole on TheMotte will write a novella about how fucking stupid Trump/Xi Jinping were for doing X when any retard could see that Y was the obvious course of action. Hindsight bias is a helluva drug.

It seems Americans simply cannot conceive of having a serious or superior enemy...They feel like Main Characters of history, who are destined to win for narrative reasons and therefore can afford arbitrary foolishness in the midgame – at it will amount to is a few extra lines in the moral takeaway in the epilogue. Karl Rove's famous quote is quite apt.

All of these criticisms can be leveled at the Chinese as well - you've never heard them rant about 5,000 years of civilization? The century of humiliation making them temporarily embarrassed hegemons, from which they will inevitably recover? And you think that a world where China is hegemon won't see shit like Trump's exploitative trade war on the regular? Look at how they act in the SCS, or fish the hell out of South American countries EEZ. Look at where the Thomas and Sabina shoals are on a map and tell me what business they have ramming Filipino ships. Look at the wolf warrior diplomacy bullshit they pulled before realizing how ugly pulling back the veil made them look. Now scale that up to hegemon-level.

Not to mention I'm fairly confident I've seen you mock Americans hyping the 'Chinese threat' and making them out to be more competent than they actually are as a motivation for more defense spending.

Were you living in reality, you'd feel more incensed at nonsensical, low-IQ-racist boomer copes that keep undermining your side's negotiating position.

I've burned plenty of incense. It hasn't gotten me anywhere, and I've seen how miserable the people are who walk far enough down that path. Boomers gonna boom boom boom my friend.

I think the US Deep State was capable of winning this, just like Russia was capable of winning in Ukraine, in theory, if we were to ignore the actual level of Russian governance and corruption and ability to prosecute the war rationally. I knew of that one and so didn't expect Russia to win, and overestimated the US mainly because I did not account for the immense capacity for self-sabotage.

The US State department isn't staffed by geniuses who can shape the world to their liking.

I think they have enough talented people to do this, it's just those people have lost in internal politics.

simply because the world is too hideously complex a system for someone of any intellect or means to meaningfully manipulate

Manipulating the world is made much easier when you own major causal factors of that world. It doesn't take 200 IQ, though intelligence helps not to manipulate yourself into the ditch. All of great power politics is such manipulation. Suppressing competitors, strengthening allies, capturing international institutions, and yes, it's done by networks of high-agency people, not by vague sentiment of the electorate. Sorry, that's just what we can observe happening.

Nothing is set in stone; despite triumphalist propaganda directed at the public, I think the USG is aware of the problems by now and still has major cards like monopoly in crucial technology (ASML is a de facto American company), global reserve currency and, most of all, global goodwill, everyone anxious to go back to normal. Trump has improved his standing in the Middle East with a single speech. Americans are losing time but they can undo the self-inflicted damage with a few more such pivots, apologize for tone-deaf Greenland-posting, revitalize their alliance networks, actually reindustrialize, implement very liberal issuance of citizenship to all Chinese talent and brain-drain the nation – and that's not all. Maybe the AGI God plan will work out too – after all, the attack on Huawei and broader semiconductor supply chain was a resounding success of the sort I expected, it did delay China by years. Maybe Starship makes Brillant Pebbles a reality and forces China to disarm and sign unequal treaties… The US Hegemony is very much a viable project, except some Americans are in the way.

I recognize that my median prognosis has changed in a way that seems discrediting, but it's basically down to high-noise human factors on the US side.

All of these criticisms can be leveled at the Chinese as well - you've never heard them rant about 5,000 years of civilization?

They do have a strong belief in their civilizational superiority, and this chauvinism and smugness is another reason I was bearish on them. But in assessment of their current relative position they tend to be humble. “Building a world-class navy by 2035” is a typical Chinese goal. “Becoming a moderately prosperous society by 2020”. In 2018, Xi said:

When I met with Chinese and foreign journalists after the First Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Committee, I said that the Chinese Communist Party was determined to make a thousand years of greatness for the Chinese nation, and that a hundred years was just the right time to be in its prime. At the same time, I said this with a deep sense of worry. From our history, dynasties existed for more than 400 years in the Xia Dynasty, 600 years in the Shang Dynasty, 300 years in the Western Zhou Dynasty, 500 years in the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, 215 years in the Western Han Dynasty, 195 years in the Eastern Han Dynasty, 290 years in the Tang Dynasty, 277 years in the Ming Dynasty, 268 years in the Qing Dynasty, 15 years in the Qin Dynasty, 61 years in the Three Kingdoms, 167 years in the Northern Song Dynasty, 153 years in the Southern Song Dynasty, 90 years in the Yuan Dynasty, 38 years in the Republic of China, and other small dynasties There are countless blips and dynasties. The Qin Dynasty, Northern Song Dynasty, and Yuan Dynasty were all once unbeatable powers, but soon fell into disrepair. Those longer dynasties were also corrupt, socially unstable, discontented and rebellious, and many of them were left to languish and die. This shows that after a regime is established, it is not easy to maintain prosperity and long-lasting peace. Without self-reflection, vigilance, and effort, even the most powerful regimes can come to the end of the road.

It is now 97 years since the founding of our Party and 69 years since the founding of New China. The Soviet Communist Party has existed for 86 years, and the Soviet Union for 74 years. Our Party’s history exceeds that of the Soviet Communist Party, and our Party has not held national power for as long as the Soviet Union. By the middle of this century, the history of our Party will be close to 130 years, and the history of New China will reach 100 years. Comrade Deng Xiaoping said, “The consolidation and development of the socialist system will require a long historical stage, and it will take several generations, a dozen generations, or even dozens of generations of our people to struggle persistently and diligently.” How many years is that? It has to be calculated in terms of millenniums. This means that it will take a long historical period for us to build socialism with Chinese characteristics well and into. In this long historical process, it is an extremely difficult and risky challenge to ensure that the Chinese Communist Party does not collapse and the Chinese socialist system does not fall. Once upon a time, the Soviet Communist Party was so strong, the Soviet Union was so powerful, but now it has long been “the old country can not look back at the bright moon”. A generation does the work of a generation, but without historical perspective, without a long-term vision, also can not do the things of the moment.

This does not look as hubristic as American Main Character Syndrome to me.

The century of humiliation making them temporarily embarrassed hegemons

China has never held more than tenuous regional hegemony, I think this framing is not reflective of their ambitions and self-perception.

And you think that a world where China is hegemon won't see shit like Trump's exploitative trade war on the regular?

Yes. It's a stupid trade war and it's highly likely that no Tsinghua graduate will be so stupid. That aside, China has an official policy of not pursuing global hegemony. This certainly has no teeth, but Americans don't even have an equivalent toothless commitment.

Not to mention I'm fairly confident I've seen you mock Americans hyping the 'Chinese threat' and making them out to be more competent than they actually are as a motivation for more defense spending.

I've been right about that, Americans do hype up the Chinese military threat excessively, and they don't even build military that'd be useful in countering that threat, it's nearly entirely a grift. $1 trillion will go to more nebulous next-generation prototypes and battling the tyranny of distance in distant bases, not to a buildup of autonomous platforms that can compete in the SCS. Again, assuming Americans keep self-sabotaging.

overestimated the US mainly because I did not account for the immense capacity for self-sabotage.

I'll wager that if we're still here in 3-5 years, you'll be saying the same thing about underestimating the Chinese capacity for self-sabotage. The United States isn't going to collapse in the next 5-10 year timeframe, and if we lose to China, it will be a long and drawn-out process. Not some knockout punch engineered by whatever the CCP department of foreign affairs is called.

I think they have enough talented people to do this, it's just those people have lost in internal politics.

Did those talented people lose in the 2000s during the GWOT era? Or in the 90s when we let American companies migrate to China en masse? When have these Mycroftian prodigies ever won in internal politics, what decisions did they make with said influence and where's the golden era in American foreign and domestic policy mediated by these people?

Manipulating the world is made much easier when you own major causal factors of that world. It doesn't take 200 IQ, though intelligence helps not to manipulate yourself into the ditch. All of great power politics is such manipulation. Suppressing competitors, strengthening allies, capturing international institutions

Like what, the financial system that proved utterly incapable of regime change in Iran or hindering Russia's ability to wage war? Toothless institutions like the UN, WHO or WTO?

networks of high-agency people, not by vague sentiment of the electorate. Sorry, that's just what we can observe happening.

Sure, the electorate isn't writing policy, nor should they.

That being said, the ability of anyone to influence systems this complex is limited, and related to how well we actually understand them. We designed computers from the ground up, and you can drill all the way down to machine code and circuit diagrams if you like. Mastery over the system makes you a 10x software engineer, or whatever the 10x hardware engineer is called. Diagnosing and fixing problems in a car or aircraft is eminently doable because we designed and understand all the parts ourselves.

On the other hand, reading all the economics textbooks in the world won't give you mastery over the stock market any more than learning fluid dynamics will help you understand the weather well enough to predict it perfectly. Biology PhDs can't even make basic predictions about how the system they've studied their entire career will behave in response to a given perturbation. And this is only partially due to the fact that they aren't very bright or talented in general, but more due to how complex and inscrutable biology is - at least to humans as we are now.

You bring up Russia and Ukraine - in March 2022, was there anyone (including what we can guess the US state department thought at the time!) who confidently predicted the outcome would be >= 3 year grinding war with little movement on the front, dominated by drone warfare? I saw plenty of takes that Russia was about to curbstomp Ukraine, then after the initial offensive failed, plenty of takes that Russia was about to collapse due to American sanctions, all of which turned out to be bullshit. If you can't predict that, I don't believe you when you say that Russia was capable of winning the war if they had just done it rationally, or that you or anyone could have figured out what to do differently in the leadup to reach a significantly different outcome. The outcome hinged on decisions made by thousands, if not millions of people - their morale, equipment, education, talent, weather, luck. If some South African entrepreneur had listened to all the people telling him not to build a rocket company, and the Ukrainian military never had access to starlink, would we be looking at a vastly different map? If Obama had pushed NATO to seriously stockpile arms and could provide Ukraine the materiel (shells, tanks, drones, whatever) to prosecute the war properly, ditto?

Yes. It's a stupid trade war and it's highly likely that no Tsinghua graduate will be so stupid. That aside, China has an official policy of not pursuing global hegemony. This certainly has no teeth, but Americans don't even have an equivalent toothless commitment.

I hope we don't see the future that proves you wrong. If Americans were truly hegemonic and held that as their goal, the world would look very different.

I'll wager that if we're still here in 3-5 years, you'll be saying the same thing about underestimating the Chinese capacity for self-sabotage.

I have never underestimated their capacity for self-sabotage.

Your complaints about GWOT are motivated reasoning, GWOT was quite successful for Israel at least.

The US has been able to grow its economy extremely rapidly through Chinese industrialization, without that your, as marxists say, Internal Contradictions would have likely brought about a protracted recession already. Don't forget that in 2008, it was China that bailed you out. Those aren't so much major errors as conflicts of priority between sectors of American elite.

where's the golden era in American foreign and domestic policy mediated by these people?

1970s-2023, I'd say. Your safe and prosperous world is a product of an overall competent policy. Just continuing and improving on Biden's program could have been enough. See the success of CHIPS act, for example.

Like what, the financial system that proved utterly incapable of regime change in Iran or hindering Russia's ability to wage war?

Like owning the biggest consumer market in the world, most of the world's most prized IP, having military presence in all corners of the world. It's not the UN, it's the ability to spit at UN decisions and opinion of all UN members individually when needed, and not suffer economic consequences like Russia.

You bring up Russia and Ukraine - in March 2022, was there anyone (including what we can guess the US state department thought at the time!) who confidently predicted the outcome would be >= 3 year grinding war with little movement on the front, dominated by drone warfare?

I recall I did predict a long grinding war after like a week of it. Failure of the brazen paratrooper operation at Hostomel suggested that no quick resolution is likely; Ukrainians recognize it was a pivotal point, and if better executed (and less competently opposed), would have likely allowed Russia to settle the war on preferred terms. There have been a few others who thought likewise. I did miss drones, and predicted more WWII style mass mobilization with heavy artillery and aviation use and millions dead. We got some WWII features but not that. What did you say at the time?

If Americans were truly hegemonic and held that as their goal, the world would look very different.

Sorry, this sounds very much like Russian “we haven't even started yet” narrative to me.

Your complaints about GWOT are motivated reasoning, GWOT was quite successful for Israel at least.

Why is it motivated reasoning? My impression is that the GWOT is fairly widely regarded as...not the most successful foreign policy, no? Or are you trying to make the argument that the US state department is competent, but got played by even bigger-brained Israelis?

The US has been able to grow its economy extremely rapidly through Chinese industrialization, without that your, as marxists say, Internal Contradictions would have likely brought about a protracted recession already.

The confidence you have in stating these counterfactual alternate histories is just astounding to me, but I guess there's no stakes when nothing is falsifiable. I won't pretend to know what the world would look like had China failed to industrialize, but I'm also not buying your interpretation offered with the barest of rationales and no evidence. I could just as easily argue that a world where China failed to industrialize is one in which glorious America land still stands head and shoulders above the rest of the world with no real peers, and the only way to settle the argument would be the floridity of our prose and our imaginations.

Don't forget that in 2008, it was China that bailed you out.

Ah, that was very generous of them. I'm sure self-interest played no part in it, and it's not even clear what you mean by that - buying treasuries? If so, they bought treasuries throughout the early 2000s at a rate not that different from 2008 - was that also for altruistic reasons?

1970s-2023, I'd say. Your safe and prosperous world is a product of an overall competent policy. Just continuing and improving on Biden's program could have been enough. See the success of CHIPS act, for example.

Vietnam war and Afghanistan/Iraq were competent policy? What about the inflation of the 70s and early 80s? All the NIMBYist policies that birthed our housing crisis and inability to build anything, falling birth rate, crumbling infrastructure? Contrary to some of the blackpillers, I won't pretend that the last 50 years have unilaterally been failures, but all the available evidence points towards relatively normal people muddling along rather than a cabal of puppetmasters making the rest of the world dance. All the problems that put us on the path to being peers of and/or eclipsed by China were born during the golden age you're gesturing towards.

Like owning the biggest consumer market in the world

How do you propose to leverage this? Tariffs?

most of the world's most prized IP

Indeed - Thankfully, China also has a robust track record of respecting those IP rights.

having military presence in all corners of the world.

Maybe.

I'd say you left out immense natural resources (even more so if you include the 51st state), vast oceans on both flanks and (I laugh while writing this) the ability to appeal to talented immigrants from around the world, and integrate them into the social fabric.

I recall I did predict a long grinding war after like a week of it.

I'll take your word for it. Would you agree that the vast majority of people have gotten it wrong, over and over again? Including (I'd guess we can infer) the US and Russian state departments?

What did you say at the time?

I kept my mouth shut because I at least have the self-awareness to know that I know fuck all about Ukraine and Russia.

Sorry, this sounds very much like Russian “we haven't even started yet” narrative to me.

Hardly. It's an argument that we were undeniably the most powerful country in the world and, while we caused plenty of misery, our reign was fairly benign.

I'm under no illusions that America in 2025 is the superpower it was in 2000, or that China is a nation of rapacious peasants riding the coattails of the Master Race to success. There's a fair chance that China destroys my industry the same way they destroyed western manufacturing, with your prized Tsinghua graduates grinding 996 for poverty wages to fuck me in the ass.

But you have a susceptibility to grand, romantic narratives where small numbers of people can leverage their brilliance into enormous influence on the course of history rather than human matters largely being emergent phenomena. If you think I'm wrong, make some concrete predictions about how China will bring about America's ruin in the next three years - should be plenty of time for a couple of Tsinghua galaxy-brains forged in the fires of the gaokao to run circles around some retarded Orange Man sycophants, no?

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1970s-2023, I'd say. Your safe and prosperous world is a product of an overall competent policy. Just continuing and improving on Biden's program could have been enough. See the success of CHIPS act, for example.

I'm in a funny position where I mostly agree with you on China, but it's precisely because I mostly disagree with you about the competence of the previous regime (which hasn't even been soundly defeated yet). The period in question seems to be that of an obvious decline, the CHIPS act has a cool name, but much like it's European counterparts, I haven't really seen many tangible results of it. Quite frankly, to the extent the American economy is any good, it seems like the only reason for that is that the supposedly competent regime did not have total control, and had it's initiatives constantly frustrated, otherwise the US would look like Canada.

How does this line up with your personal predictions for how this was going to proceed?

Giving myself credit for calling this one, although we can quibble over exact timing. I tried to keep my head down a bit until the outcome could truly be called.

Quoth me:

So my full expectation is that there will be a couple weeks of rapidfire and rough negotiations with some touch-and-go moments, but ultimately other nations will do the needful and come the end of April Trump will make a YUUUGE fanfare about signing Tariff reductions and trade agreements with those countries that capitulated, and markets will 'correct course.'

(I solemnly swear I didn't edit anything material in this post to make my prediction look better)

and

I will precommit now, that if other countries actively take steps to reduce tariffs and otherwise appease Trump's demands and Trump is too temperamental to accept these offers in good faith and we still have most of these Tarriffs in place at the same levels come May 2nd 2025 (unless real deals are pending come that date), it is a bad thing and we will be in for some rough times. I will criticize/condemn Trump and Co. in no uncertain terms.

I think my May 2nd deadline was also met, since China was technically the ONLY holdout that still had massive Tariffs on it at that point.

And then there's this bit from the OP article:

U.S. stocks rallied hard on the announcement. Futures contracts for the U.S. benchmark S&P 500 index gained by 2.5 percent, putting the index higher than where it was before the “Liberation Day” package, after it had fallen by more than 12 percent.

Remember what I said up there: "and markets will 'correct course.'

I'm sure there will be other disruptions, but someone can probably run some numbers and tell me if this recovery basically makes all the turmoil of early April a wash in terms of broad economic impact (on the markets, that is). WHICH IS TO SAY, if all the doomsaying and gnashing of teeth at the time was... premature and melodramatic.

I continue to think my Model of Trump is far better at predicting his actions than virtually any pundit out there, and he's far more of a rational actor than even people here credit him. Yes, I'll accept the argument that Trump backed down faster because he was afraid of really breaking something, but the whole argument is over whether the U.S. will find itself in a stronger position after all this is done. I see this as evidence that yes, the U.S. will be able to reduce global 'paper' barriers to trade, and other countries may be handing over some tribute to the U.S. to keep in its good graces for the next few years.

The one thing I admit surprise over is that there's been relatively few deals regarding the purchase of U.S. goods OR offers to sell foreign resources. The U.K. is apparently going to buy U.S. Beef, and the Ukraine Mineral Deal is signed, and I guess there's some additional deals with Vietnam. Honestly I can say I thought there'd be more capitulation by now, but now there's a new deadline in place.

So maybe Trump hasn't brought home the bacon just yet.

To add on to my prediction, I'll say I expect that the 'final' deals being worked on during the pause will start getting executed BEFORE the one month countdown mark hits, that is we should start seeing them in the next 60 days.

I do expect more hard agreements for purchases of resources and goods, and I ALSO expect some legislation might follow that is designed to bolster U.S. manufacturing for military purposes (i.e. aimed at onshoring factories that can produce tanks, ammunition, planes, and ESPECIALLY boats).

As we get a bit closer to the deadline, I might take a stab at guessing which countries might try calling his bluff and letting the timer run out. I'm not so blind as to expect everything to go completely smoothly. I wouldn't have called the India-Pakistan kerfuffle starting up for example.

I will precommit now, that if other countries actively take steps to reduce tariffs and otherwise appease Trump's demands and Trump is too temperamental to accept these offers in good faith and we still have most of these Tarriffs in place at the same levels come May 2nd 2025 (unless real deals are pending come that date), it is a bad thing and we will be in for some rough times. I will criticize/condemn Trump and Co. in no uncertain terms.

In this scenario, if the US imposes tariffs, the target country retaliates, and then after some negotiation they settle on a rate that is higher than the prior status quo but lower than the initial tariff imposition, is that a win or a loss?

The one thing I admit surprise over is that there's been relatively few deals regarding the purchase of U.S. goods OR offers to sell foreign resources.

This really shouldn't be surprising.

In this scenario, if the US imposes tariffs, the target country retaliates, and then after some negotiation they settle on a rate that is higher than the prior status quo but lower than the initial tariff imposition, is that a win or a loss?

Definitely a win in my books.

That first link goes to the 2nd page of your most recent posts. Is that what you intended? It will mean that if the post you wanted users to look at was there, it won't be there later as you make more posts.

I might take a stab at guessing which countries might try calling his bluff and letting the timer run out

I expect Canada to call the bluff; I also expect this one to, uniquely, be a bit less of a bluff than it is for everyone else. I think a lot of the onshoring is, or could be reasonably expected to, come from factories and personnel in Ontario- it might legitimately be easier for the US to increase the size of the US and onshore manufacturing that way. Fortunately for him, the people who are working in those factories just lost an election to a bunch of welfare queens (and the losers know it); all Trump need do now is stay the course and have the Premiers sue for peace on their own terms.

I continue to think my Model of Trump is far better at predicting his actions than virtually any pundit out there, and he's far more of a rational actor than even people here credit him

The problem is just that the negotiations are, unusually, public; everyone else just has to wait (and get their panties in a twist, and complain on the Internet). It's only been 4 months.

The U.K. is apparently going to buy U.S. Beef

Britain and the EU won't buy beef from hormone-fed cattle. The way they talk about it, this probably won't change.

Ukraine Mineral Deal

As discussed previously this is a nothingburger, but if it makes Trump happy, good job Zelensky.

Britain and the EU won't buy beef from hormone-fed cattle. The way they talk about it, this probably won't change.

Sounds like they may align with RFK Jr.'s stance. It'd be interesting if that creates enough of a market for hormone-free cattle that it shifts U.S. production as a whole.

I don't have any specific insight as to intentions there, but I assume markets will respond to shifted incentives like that.

As discussed previously this is a nothingburger, but if it makes Trump happy, good job Zelensky.

I'm pretty sure the main goal of that particular provision is to give the U.S. a "stake" in Ukrainian independence that falls short of bringing them into NATO, but justifies them having some kind of presence in country to act as a deterrent.

Like holy cow, your own article points out:

“There are four slightly bigger deposits: Yastrubetske, Novopoltavske, Azovske, and Mazurivske. All but one of them seem to be now within or near the zone that the Russians control, as far as I can tell”

So if the U.S. has an official agreement granting an interest in those deposits, even if its not mineable now, its a decent deterrent to future Russian incursions into the border areas that Russia would have to cross through to drive into Ukraine. It gives a future U.S. president some basic cover to drop some troops or similar in, if needed.

The U.S. keeps finding deposits of rare earth elements and other resources within its own territory (whether they can be extracted economically is a different question).

There is no SOLID reason the U.S. should have any stake in the security of Ukraine, but contriving one that's enough to give plausible cover for future actions is helpful towards leveraging a peace agreement.

This is what I'm trying to get across, if you assume Trump is JUST trying to secure the first order goal, getting more minerals for the U.S., rather than using that as leverage to work towards a lasting peace agreement, you're severely underestimating the man. Hell, he's apparently gotten Ukraine actually paying for U.S. weapons now. A second step seems to be using American companies to rebuild Ukraine, but I'll go on record saying that rebuilding probably won't solve their their population nosedive so in the longer term it'll be a bit pointless.

So Trump and Vance whine for the past year about how sending over weapons is too expensive and we need to stop, but 4 'slightly bigger' mineral deposits of questionable economic value will serve as a casus belli for dropping in American soldiers?

Hell, he's apparently gotten Ukraine actually paying for U.S. weapons now

Isn't Ukraine mega bankrupt? They'll be effectively paying America with America's own aid.

The “mineral deal” is basically just a shuck that allows Trump to give Ukraine security guarantees in a way that he can plausibly sell to his own base. Zelensky was too much of an obstinate fool to see that and had to be dragged kicking and screaming all the way to getting what he wanted.

What security guarantees did Trump give to Ukraine through the mineral deal? Under what circumstances will Trump send troops to Ukraine?

Basically it means that if the war freezes and then the Russians try to invade again five or ten years from now, whoever is President would have American economic interests and American technical workers in the area that he could (but is not required to) use as an excuse to intervene in the conflict.

So there were no guarantees. Zelensky was an obstinate fool for not wanting to give up 50% of all future sources of Ukrainian natural resource revenues for a chance that a future US president in 5-10 years will have an excuse to intervene on their behalf?

For what it's worth I believe Zelensky played it wrong a few months ago and he should have been more diplomatic. But I disagree with how you are framing the original mineral deal and it was not foolish for Ukraine to be hesitant about it. In fact, the new mineral deal, being much better for Ukraine, proves that it was not a foolish decision to reject it.

The “mineral deal” is basically just a shuck that allows Trump to give Ukraine security guarantees in a way that he can plausibly sell to his own base.

Not to his own base. To Putin. The idea of the deal actually extends back to the late Biden administration.

How does this line up with your personal predictions for how this was going to proceed?

Loosely in line, though I'm not on record so you'll have to take my word for it. My expectation for this entire tariff routine is that after a great deal of can-kicking things will settle into a slightly-to-moderately worse approximation of status quo ante that will be harmful but not catastrophic. Trump will present this as a massive win.

Does anybody have any ideas on what I missed?

The tariff's hurt China too. For reasons I can only speculate, all I've ever heard about tariffs are that they are stupid when the US does it, and brilliant when other countries (especially China) do them to us to protect their industrial base. While there may be something to the specific circumstances that could support this narrative, it is rarely evident in the reporting. If you've ever been inoculated against Gell-Mann Amnesia, you'd detect a psyop going on here.

China has basically stopped even reporting financial figures, not even the fraudulent ones you need to read between the lines of. There is effectively no reliable information about how the tariff's are impacting China's economy. But rumors are coming out that it's manufacturing sector in panicking, with factories sitting idle and orders drying up. Even if reshoring is years away, companies literally cannot afford to order from China while the tariff's are in place. I was watching some of Gamer's Nexus's coverage of the tariffs, and companies were saying that with the tariff's they would lose $100+ selling a $100 PC case for example. So all they can do is shut down production and hope a solution presents itself. They haven't sold through their US stock (yet), but they sure as shit have cancelled their orders no matter what the penalty they have to pay.

But rumors are coming out that it's manufacturing sector in panicking, with factories sitting idle and orders drying up.

There have been rumours like this for the last 10 years at least. Remember Evergrande?

Obviously the tariffs hurt the Chinese economy but it's the biggest manufacturer in the world, the biggest trading nation in the world and the biggest economy in the world in terms of production as opposed to accounting tricks. Energy in the US is more expensive than China - higher US GDP! Burger King has been selling burgers at US $1.37 in China, there's a massive price war in just about everything. Lower China GDP! When you use appropriate metrics for economic size, China surpassed the US a long time ago.

Thus I'm sceptical of the China-collapse narrative. Big things are tough and hard to break. COVID hit China pretty hard but they tanked it and moved on without any inflation. Tariffs aren't going to do more economic damage than COVID.

By the time demographic shrinking really kicks in, they'll have a gigantic, automated industrial base and still enjoy a huge pool of STEM talent. Nothing short of losing WW3 is going to stop China.

So of course there will be factories that are hard hit and go out of business. But China is not short of factories, they have huge capacity. During the Great Depression the US was in a very poor state but they were still the biggest economy on the planet. Likewise with China, except they're not in a Great Depression.

The tariff's hurt China too. For reasons I can only speculate, all I've ever heard about tariffs are that they are stupid when the US does it, and brilliant when other countries (especially China) do them to us to protect their industrial base.

I factored that in to my prediction when I made it. Do you think the situation over there is so dire that they can't even afford to try and save face?

They have state controlled media. They can always just lie. Also, they can just cheat on whatever deals they do make and brag about it. Maybe Trump won't even notice.

I donno man. Even before 2024 Trump, I've been seen weird "read between the lines" predictions that China's economy is secretly fucked. But I never know what to take seriously, because it's basically a choice between believing state run media, or cranks. One side says everything is amazing and they have 8% GDP growth, the other side says China is already in a recession.

Then again, they say the same thing about the US...

But I find it not impossible to believe that inside the black box that is the Chinese economy, the wheels already came off long ago and it's just barely holding together with chewing gum and rubber bands.

And the rubber bands were manufactured in China.

I donno man. Even before 2024 Trump, I've been seen weird "read between the lines" predictions that China's economy is secretly fucked.

I don't know about "secretly fucked". But they are very dependent on exports, and the US is their second largest market (after the E.U.), so whether they were fucked before or not, the tariffs fuck them now.

Unless China is absolutely fudging their population numbers to UNDERCOUNT their population drastically (which would be a galaxy-brained move) then they are absolutely fucked in the medium term. There is no way to counterbalance a population where there's a massive class of consumers (the old and decrepit) and not nearly enough producers (young-middle aged workers) to keep everyone at a reasonable standard of living.

Its baked in. The collapse will come, Wile-E-Coyote already ran off the cliff, but they may be able to keep him from looking down for a while with propaganda and manipulation, or manage the fall down better than expected.

a massive class of consumers (the old and decrepit)

They don't have much wealth. Because wages continue to increase quickly, the 30-40 year olds are sending their parents more money each year than their whole anemic pensions, while saving themselves (although what asset classes they can save substantial sums in, is questionable right now.) It's not like the US where e.g. retired UPS workers get pension adjustments over inflation while current workers don't and aren't on track to receive any such benefits. (Also, the Chinese old seem to return to/reside in the country side, living very cheaply and consuming even less than their paltry wealth would suggest, compared to the racket of e.g. US retirement homes.)

The problem with all this nonsense (yours and @WhiningCoil's) is the projection of the degenerate American condition where somewhat organized 20th century things are next to impossible to do, so you have to rely on Bronze age factors like the proportion of – to a large extent functionally illiterate, obese, criminal and unhealthy, but at least physically mobile – population to kick the can down the road. Infrastructure cannot be adapted. Automation cannot be done, that's fake news, that'd require, like, electric engineering and other nerd shit that doesn't offer good P/E for the financial fraud class to get fat off. The olds will consume the surplus, or else revolt, because you cannot do anything against pensioners (eg provide very cheap industrialized welfare to have them shut up, or as @veqq says, just let them live out their lives in the naturally cheap countryside). Housing bubble will crash and bury the economy, because of course, the debt is secretly much higher than it seems, because Communists always lie with their fake statistics, we learned that from the Soviet Union, the previous “champion” of electronics exports and gacha games.

It's surreal to watch how their nation-scale companies like BYD operate, compare this to the shambolic, truly late Soviet bullshit going on in the US, and then observe all this Gordon Chang tier punditry. Their working age population is right now just short of 1 billion people. They're, it seems, overall higher quality people too, they live longer, ask for less and work harder. Tighter margins all around, higher efficiency of converting revenue to capex… There is, admittedly, a lot of population locked in agriculture and low-productivity sectors, so fine, the effective discrepancy in workforce might be “only” 5x. Do you seriously imagine that economies of scale in a nation with 5x the American workforce will amount to Wile-E-Coyote running off a cliff. Okay, I'll keep watching how it goes.

Do you seriously imagine that economies of scale in a nation with 5x the American workforce will amount to Wile-E-Coyote running off a cliff.

Yes. Find me a single instance in history where a nation was able smoothly transition through a period of declining population as the old begin to outnumber the young.

Especially one that is utterly dependent on continued imports of agricultural products and energy and most raw materials for that workforce to do anything productive.

https://www.cfr.org/article/china-increasingly-relies-imported-food-thats-problem

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=62804

They are simply unprepared to weather any situation where they can't afford to purchase necessary economic inputs from other countries.

Which is what their population cliff threatens to cause.

Find me a single instance in history where a nation was able smoothly transition through a period of declining population as the old begin to outnumber the young.

Can you give me a list of failure cases?

This is uncharted territory. All developed countries are aging, and all of them are losing out in overall population productivity through some combination of aging, dysgenics and demographic replacement. It's not even clear that China is declining faster than the US – at the very least, they are consistently graduating more and more highly educated workers, while Americans are struggling to hire literate people for menial jobs. Quantitatively, Chinese workforce size will continue to exceed the entire Western world's one for decades. Dependency ratio will reach Japanese levels in, what, 2045? This is not serious.

utterly dependent on continued imports of agricultural products and energy and most raw materials

What does this have to do with anything? They'll keep importing soybeans from Brazil and iron from Australia. They have $1T trade surplus and, for some years, have been annually installing as much or more industrial automation than the entire rest of the world combined. Their problem right now is not workforce, but that the world is too poor to absorb their exports.

Do you just operate on the assumption that China is a land of mobilized peasants gluing sneakers by hand, and when peasants get old, the gig is over?

What does this have to do with anything? They'll keep importing soybeans from Brazil and iron from Australia.

Will they?

Population decline isn't limited to China.

https://agenciadenoticias.ibge.gov.br/en/agencia-news/2184-news-agency/news/41065-populacao-do-pais-vai-parar-de-crescer-em-2042

https://www.abs.gov.au/media-centre/media-releases/birth-rate-continues-decline

Lot of countries in the same boat. Every country wrangling with population decline at around the same time means they all have to handle internal economic strife, and may not be able to maintain productivity needed to export as much.

Do you just operate on the assumption that China is a land of mobilized peasants gluing sneakers by hand, and when peasants get old, the gig is over?

I operate on the assumption that China relies on international trade, and the PRIMARY value they provide to trade for is cheap skilled labor and, concurrently, massively industrialized manufacturing.

Both of which rely heavily on their population remaining steady.

I operate on the assumption that China has no fallbacks if they lose the ability to provide cheap labor and manufacturing to the world.

This is uncharted territory.

I don't think this is entirely true – my understanding is that a lack of population growth is considered a contributor to the decline of the Roman Empire, and I suspect (although I haven't put intense study into the issue) that similar factors may have contributed to poor French performance in the Second World War as well. I think there are distinguishing factors in all of these cases, but to the extent that we have historical analogies, they give us cold comfort.

they are consistently graduating more and more highly educated workers

And yet it is unable to employ all of those workers – the United States has a better youth employment rate than China (even after China "recalculated" their data to make it look better). Perhaps you and Faceh are focusing on the wrong Chinese employment problem.

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Find me a single instance in history where a nation was able smoothly transition through a period of declining population as the old begin to outnumber the young.

The denominator here is likely to be extremely low.

There is no way to counterbalance a population where there's a massive class of consumers (the old and decrepit) and not nearly enough producers (young-middle aged workers) to keep everyone at a reasonable standard of living.

Yes, there is. "Keep everyone at a reasonable standard of living" is not a requirement for what remains a Communist dictatorship.

I don't see the disagreement?

The economy will have to contract, this will lead to lower standards of living, and thus there's no way China can maintain its status as a continually growing economy?

But it is a requirement for ruling China. The communist party knows that its mandate comes from being able to "Keep everyone at a reasonable standard of living" ; in fact, the mandate for anyone ruling China, communist or not, is to fulfill that need.

If they can't guarentee reasonable standards of living, then revolution and uprisings are on the table.

But it is a requirement for ruling China. The communist party knows that its mandate comes from being able to "Keep everyone at a reasonable standard of living" ; in fact, the mandate for anyone ruling China, communist or not, is to fulfill that need.

That it is not, as Mao demonstrated.

It is perhaps more accurate to consider the pre- and post-Mao CCP as entities that share continuity but otherwise represents a break, in the same way that the Tang overthrew the Sui in the 6th century (after the Sui were bankrupting the country to invade Goguryeo) but essentially retained its edit: broad institutions and ministries.

One important thing to note about the Mandate of Heaven is that it is less extensive than the divine right of kings elsewhere in the world. The right to rebellion is explicitly written into the Mandate of Heaven.

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I mean, compared to the disasters and mismanagement that occurred pre-mao, the great leap forward really isn't that much worse. Regardless, Deng came to power right after and instituted his reforms; I'd say a prolonged period of mismanagement would have definitely sparked another revolution.

companies were saying that with the tariff's they would lose $100+ selling a $100 PC case for example.

Everyone has been saying that the $100 case will now cost $200, but it seems the companies here aren't willing to raise prices and bet on that.

If nothing else, this seems like it will provide some interesting data on the exact shape of supply/demand curves. I doubt either extreme is exactly right: prices will probably go up (if nothing else, to cover the tariff), and demand will probably go down. But as to exactly how much of each, nobody wants to admit it's a bit unknown.

For reasons I can only speculate, all I've ever heard about tariffs are that they are stupid when the US does it, and brilliant when other countries (especially China) do them to us to protect their industrial base. While there may be something to the specific circumstances that could support this narrative, it is rarely evident in the reporting. If you've ever been inoculated against Gell-Mann Amnesia, you'd detect a psyop going on here.

I think there's at least two reasons combining here. One is the usual anti-Trump stuff (anything Trump does is bad), and the other is China boosterism (China is the greatest, they will crush the US industrially and their hypersonic missiles will destroy all our carriers and Taiwan will be theirs). Some of which is mere anti-Americanism/anti-Westernism and some of which is straight up enemy action from Chinese agents.


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