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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27764 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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Does anyone have anything to say about the OBBB being passed? I was genuinely surprised to see that no one was posting about it at all in this thread.

I'm broadly against the bill but don't have much of an opinion of the specific provisions. I understand that it's meant to neuter the political power of my ingroup and neargroup and it seems like it's going to be effective at that, so I know I'm going to dislike it regardless of whether it has any actual non-partisan merit. I guess if I had to single out few things in particular, I'm selfishly in favor of renewing the R&D tax writeoffs, but also singularly terrified of the massive increase to the ICE budget... It definitely looks like trump is making a military force loyal to him personally because he doesn't trust the loyalty of the existing forces. There are... historical parallels. I'm (among other things) brazilian, and I can't help but remember the first republic's antipathy towards and neglect of the navy due to their royalist tendencies.

terrified of the massive increase to the ICE budget

Letting in huge numbers of illegals and false asylum claimants by the millions is practically free. Getting them back out is expensive.

The alternative is to shrug and let almost all of them stay. And then the next Democratic president lets in a few million more. Then shrug again. From the point of view of a Republican, you can guaranteed lose hard through inaction, or bite the bullet and go big in reversing the tide.

I think the Democrats will win anyways. It is too great an advantage to be able to let in millions for free.

The cuts to science funding seem likely to do major damage to American R&D, cause a mass exodus of skilled workers to Europe, and give China the opportunity to get even farther ahead of us in key fields such as battery development. As an attack on the woke elements of the Academy they seem both disproportionate and poorly targeted, and as an attempt to burn it all to the ground they are clearly insufficient. I'd like to see someone at least propose a new Bell Labs-type enterprise as a replacement for the scientific infrastructure that they're trying to dismantle, if that's the way we're going.

In other news, Elon promised to start a new political party and to primary a bunch of Republican congresscritters if the bill passed. That should be entertaining to watch if he doesn't chicken out.

The cuts to science funding seem likely to do major damage to American R&D, cause a mass exodus of skilled workers to Europe, and give China the opportunity to get even farther ahead of us in key fields such as battery development.

The damage was done. The science funding was being used for woke first, climate alarmism second, and any useful science well after that. Politico did an article on the "scientific refugees" moving to France; those identified included only a climate historian, a climate scientist and his wife "who studies the intersection of judicial systems and democracies".

Why don't you think that climate science is useful science?

Because the conclusions of any given paper are the same "Climate change is worse than we thought in some new way, it's caused more by human activity than we thought, we're all going to die even sooner than we thought, and if there's any chance to avert catastrophe it's in turning over control of all energy usage to boards of people like me who will be stewards for the common good." If this is true, we've already heard and we don't need any more. If it's false, it's even more useless.

This only holds for climate scientists trying to come up with new global models. Useful climate science looks like trying to make specific predictions about specific areas on a specific time scale in the context of an extant model, so that human infrastructure can anticipate and adapt to disruptions to established patterns.

(It's the difference between "AI risk researchers" who come up with yet more convoluted thought experiments on how to do timeless bargaining with omniscient gods, and "AI risk researchers" who are actually creating code to interpret and control what's going on inside neural networks. I can see why someone would be fed up with the former, but the latter is actual expert work that needs doing, and - so long as they sub-optimally remain a package deal - justifies the existence of the overall field.)

Useful climate science looks like trying to make specific predictions about specific areas on a specific time scale in the context of an extant model, so that human infrastructure can anticipate and adapt to disruptions to established patterns.

That would only be useful if the models were accurate enough to make such specific predictions accurately.

Because it’s ’the End is nigh! Pay attention to me!’ Doomsday ascetic attention whoring.

Many kinds of scientists are irrationally prone to thinking their particular specialty is the most important thing evah, but AI risk is still a real thing, space exploration is still a real thing, deadly viruses are still a real thing, etc. I think the same is obviously true of the climate. Global warming isn't going to literally set us all on fire by 2035 but climate change is still an ongoing phenomenon with massive global implications and it needs to be studied. So long as you don't follow them on X, I think most scientists still produce more light than heat, if you'll forgive the expression.

These scientists continually produce predictions which turn out to be cartoonishly wrong. When they don't come true they just change the date for extinction of the human race and demand more power. Climate science exists for the purpose of pushing a single environmentalist narrative with a single goal(states of nature as close to pre-European colonization as possible) for which they are willing to sacrifice human achievement. I think this goal is stupid, and I'm sure not willing to entertain people wanting to sacrifice human achievement for it. Australian megacats are really cool and a valuable source of scientific knowledge, not a crisis. And if the earth gets warmer this isn't a crisis, either- maybe it'll suck for penguins and polar bears but it'll open more land for settlement and that's good, and there's plenty of animals that aren't penguins.

And if the Earth gets warmer this isn't a crisis

Come on. It would suck for far more than "penguins and polar bears". It'll suck for the current balance of worldwide agriculture, it'll suck for coastal population centers, it'll suck for vast swathes of land that are already near the threshold of unlivable, and, oh yes, it'll suck for all the currently temperate areas which will inherit the latter's status as the arid "well, you can eke out a living there, I guess" hell-holes. This is true even if you're correct about global warming opening as much hitherto-frozen land for settlement up north as it will ruin further south. We'd be looking at a major reshuffle in what countries control what kind of territory and resources, which may not favor the West much. (Indeed, odds are it wouldn't: we'd been dealt a good hand already, to the point that some view sheer luck of the draw on Europe's local climate as, if not the secret to Europeans' worldwide success, then at least a crucial prerequisite. We can really only go downhill.)

Even if it turns out net positive in the end, it needs to be anticipated and planned for in order to mitigate the damaging side-effects of the disruption itself. Which is exactly what I had in mind when I spoke of "global implications" and why we need climate scientists. I agree that the Earth getting warmer isn't x-risk. But there's far more to whether a crisis is worth averting or mitigating than whether it'll literally wipe out humanity. (Particularly if we're talking about a specific country's incentives rather than Homo Sapiens's as a whole.)

Observed warming has generally been less than models predict and has not had the disastrous effects that climate 'science'(read- ideologically driven anti-people crusade) says even the smaller amounts of warming we actually see should cause. Instead the extremely well funded and staffed climate alarmism apparatus is stuck pointing to recurring, predictable phenomena which predate warming like the el nino as 'devastating effects of climate change'.

Even if it turns out net positive in the end, it needs to be anticipated and planned for in order to mitigate the damaging side-effects of the disruption itself.

Not really. There's a large timescale separation. The dynamics of economic/political/etc systems are significantly faster. I know it's a technical term, and it mostly only applies neatly to second-order systems, but there's a concept of "natural frequency" in dynamics, and it gives you some sense of it. What I'd like to observe about this term is that it is, in a sense, "natural" to the system, itself. It is not something that we need to really plan for in a feedforward fashion. The 'inner' loop is a wayyyyy faster optimization process; it won't be all that affected by a slow parametric change.

Which climate scientists have made a prediction including a date of extinction for the human race, particularly one with a date that currently counts as definitely falsified (presumably in the sense of having already passed)?

Seems mostly fine. It's hard to tell what, if anything, might be actually objectionable. Most of the articles I've seen criticizing it are of the "outrageously stupid and blatant fearmongering propaganda" type, that actively doesn't want you to understand anything at all except Blue Team Good Red Team Bad.

For example, the increase to the deficit seems to be mostly the extension of the 2017 tax cuts? The ones where, after they passed them, tax revenues went up? I feel like I need to see a homework essay about the Laffer Curve and the limits and gameabillity of CBO scoring before anyone complaining about this deserves to be taken seriously.

Same with the Medicaid thing. When this was first being proposed months ago, progressives crashed out about it, and the actual numbers were "lower rate of increase" rather than anything a mentally healthy person would call a "cut". And again, all of the articles look like unhinged fearmongering from wordcels who don't understand calculus, and aren't even trying to understand what is even actually happening.

17 million people losing Medicaid... do you mean illegal immigrants? 14 states openly give Medicaid to illegal immigrants. And that's not counting however many more are getting it on fake SSNs. Some people might lose access due to the 20 hour per week work requirement for healthy people, but let me give you an example.

My employees at MegaCorp are generally hired for full time positions. The starting pay is... not great. Hourly wages, works out to around 75% of the median salary in the state. If you're working full time.

One of my employees has been slowly getting her hours cut back. She's continually late. Frequently calls out. Zero interest in learning the position better, or working towards a promotion. At this point she's working 15-25 hours per week. Her finances baffle me, because I know she had two kids and lives in an apartment by herself. Not only does the math somehow work out, but she takes 2+ vacations a year, one usually international.

But she gets a ton of government benefits. Section 8 housing. Medicaid. Tons of other stuff. My own boss, a woman who varies oddly between pragmatic and bleeding heart, has pulled me aside to express concern about changes to the Section 8 rules. The two of them actually live in the same apartment complex, and my boss pays ~5x as much for a 1BR as the employee does for a 2BR. But her concern was that "they" were going to tighten the rules so that the employee (a perfectly healthy 30yo woman) would have to work more (possibly getting a second job), or pay more, to qualify, because it was absurd that a person like that was barely bothering themselves to show up for part time hours at a single job.

And yet that employee, who is probably subsidized by the state to the tune of something like $50k per year, would still pass the threshold to keep receiving Medicaid.

Also, I'm stoked about the ICE stuff. Democrats are mad about it because if mass deportations happen (or we just stop counting illegals for apportionment in the census), they are going to lose 20-40 House seats and electoral votes, and be relegated to minor league status until they thoroughly reform their extremist ideology.

I really wish that we could give support that prevented recipients from accumulating any sort of status goods while receiving said support. I'd be fine with giving away a relatively generous amount of benefits so long as the condition of accepting them was that they essentially had to drop out of any related status competitions as a condition of receiving that support.

You can build housing projects for benefits recipients to live in. They’ll suck, but you can do it. You can provide recipients with prepackaged meals- they’ll suck, but you can do it.

I think disability actually does work that way, but suffers from benefit cliffs that disincentivize some people from doing the work that they're able to do.

If we're looking at individual provisions to hate, the senior citizen tax cut is an egregious transfer of wealth from the productive/fertile segment of society to the geriatric. It is, by any standard of new conservatism, an absolute disaster. If anything, we ought to tax the geriatric to give to young folks that may actually have kids and generate wealth.

Then again, it's hard to evaluate this in the broader context of a huge bill stuffed with hundreds of other provisions. Taken in isolation, it's awful, how the entire cake is baked together into a single must-pass thing is just a failure of our political process to actually deliberate and legislate.

If anything, we ought to tax the geriatric to give to young folks that may actually have kids and generate wealth.

Agreed. We need Critical Age Theory

There's a lot of hype and bluster but it doesn't appear different in kind than the sort of omnibus bills that have become common. Section 174 is the big win. The SALT deduction cap is a lot of sound and fury signifying little; some house-poors in California and NY/NJ will benefit, but most of those who would benefit from a higher cap will have incomes too high to take advantage of that. I think it ended up being a $40,000 cap up to $500,000 in income, phasing back to $10,000 by $600,000, but the numbers changed a lot and that may not be the final. Reducing the clean energy stuff is all good; getting Tesla (or Tesla buyers, depending on incidence) off the tit is good, cutting off the various scammers is even better.

but also singularly terrified of the massive increase to the ICE budget... It definitely looks like trump is making a military force loyal to him personally because he doesn't trust the loyalty of the existing forces.

This is just TDS, I'm afraid. ICE is not personally loyal to Trump, and getting more money in a budget will not make them so. If they are loyal to Trump as President and other existing forces are not (perhaps having been captured in the march through the institutions), then that's a bad situation and increasing their budget is probably a good thing.

  • ICE is not personally loyal to Trump

Roman soldiers often became loyal to the generals that distributed them land and victories over the roman state itself. It's really hard to not see this dynamic replicated.

  • -10

Wait, what? Trump is distributing lands to ICE officers? Where?

Also, in Imperial Rome, the government - usually magistrates under the guidance of provincial governor - distributed the lands, and usually this was used to colonize the conquered lands. So how this dynamic is replicated? Is Trump personally giving ICE officers he likes the share in the vast riches confiscated from notoriously wealthy illegals? Is he giving them settlement on the lands that those people owned? Are they allowed to conquer Tijuana and settle there? In what part is the dynamic replicated? What is the mechanism inspiring personal loyalty and why this is not an argument against financing any part of the government then - if giving budget to ICE makes them Trump's personal army, then why giving budget to any other of the innumerable set of government agencies doesn't make them into sitting president's personal army?

Roman soldiers often became loyal to the generals that distributed them land and victories over the roman state itself. It's really hard to not see this dynamic replicated.

Ludicrous comparison. TDS.

There’s nothing wrong with saying that you find a comparison ludicrous, but we ask that you leverage a more substantial complaint than “TDS.”

I'll just STFU rather than sit here doing a stupid monkey dance actually explaining how a federal agency is different than a Roman legion, thanks. I forgot the rules forbid not talking like an autistic alien.

Did the bill deliver a large bonus to ICE? Offer houses, goods, women, special grocery stores?

Maybe I need to read more Roman history but all of the times this happened the general's army was already strong enough to contest everyone else in open war (even a less successful rebel general like Sertorius still controlled and defended Spain against Rome).

Even if they do become personally loyal to Trump, ICE isn't a real military force and it is still dwarfed by the regular military.

I don't think ICE officers lack a pension like legionnaires so it's a non-issue.

Last I checked Trump doesn't distribute the belongings of deported illegals to ICE officers, so I don't know what parallel you see.

Money is fungible. A salary can be used to buy many belongings.

Are you seriously blind to the idea that paying people makes them more loyal to you? I guess i shouldn't have brought up the "roman" thing because everyone wants to focus on the specifics of that example instead of looking for broader commonalities throughout history. Like-- do you seriously think the democratic expansion of the administrative state wasn't buying the loyalty of the permanent bureaucracy? This is the exact same thing, except ICE is a literal army instead of a figurative one.

So what exactly do you really believe is the parallel? First, is the increased budget for ICE an increase in the salary of ICE agents or more funding to accomplish their task? Because the second wouldn't make them feel any extra loyalty. Do you also seriously believe that Trump is planning or hoping that ICE is going to stand on his side against... the US military? All other state law enforcement? Seriously, state what you believe Trump is doing here and listen to yourself, and then realize why everyone is telling you this is just TDS. He's just funding the main tool he has to do something a majority of americans explicitely wants him to do, and which fuels his popularity.

I actually wonder if this is true. I have heard of a few scattered abuses of asset forfeiture by police, no idea how common it is, but I could imagine something similar for ICE.

That’s said I think the more compelling reason to be skeptical is that large government agencies don’t like to be bored. Personally I’m not that torn up about it although my personal ethics would prevent me from working for ICE (which is saying something because I wouldn’t mind working for most defense contractors or the CIA), but you could see an argument that ICE being given too many people will lead them to go above and beyond their mandate.

but I could imagine something similar for ICE.

Not the immigration branch of ICE though. It does have HSI branch that does investigations and asset forfeitures. Curiously, nobody gave a hoot about it until Trump. Trump has this peculiar quality that once he does something people start noticing how big the government is and how much abuse is possible - only to immediately forget it forever once it's not about Trump anymore. Example: https://archive.ph/QiXfH - this is from 2017. For the last 8 years, how much high profile public discussion did you hear about this? I'd assume "none at all" is not too far off the target.

you could see an argument that ICE being given too many people will lead them to go above and beyond their mandate.

If you want to go that road, you have plenty of targets beyond ICE. THe FBI itself, the ATF, the DEA, the NSA, not to speak of the leviathan in the room that is the CIA... I mean, operation Fast and Furious alone is a horrendous example, if Hollywood made a movie where a government agency forces US merchants to sell weapons to drug cartels, and then tries to prosecute them for it and use it as a basis for trying to kill the Second Amendment - people would say it's cartoonish, hammy and bordering on libel. Yet it happened, and people generally just let it slide, shrugged it off. And there are many examples on the same cartoonishly evil level. So is there a danger in a powerful government enforcement agency to go rogue? You betcha there is. Is there anything special in Trump financing immigration enforcement to increase this danger? You'd have to work a bit harder to establish any basis for it. I mean, if you have a hardcore libertarian credentials going back to 1960s on opposing any budget increase for federal law enforcement - ok, kudos for remaining consistent. If that's the first time when you're asking this question, I'd have much harder time taking it seriously.

Think you mean https://archive.is/QiXfh for your link...

The link above works for me... I think it's the same site?

Fair enough, for whatever reason the .ph link flat-out wasn't working for me.

More comments

Illegals don't really have the amounts of property that make that worth it. The processing costs on possessing their cars probably exceed the sales price, because they drive beatermobiles, and they live in shitbox apartments in the ghetto that somebody else owns and will just rent out for below market rates(you ain't gettin' full market rent for that). Is ICE supposed to be making a killing off some Android phones with cracked screens and jeans with holes in them? Heavily used work boots? A half-smoked pack of cigarettes?

While disappointed that the hearing protection act got stripped, I’m glad no tax on overtime is passed. The federal government is mostly a machine for passing out tons of cash to people that aren’t me and if that’s how it’s gonna be then fuck you, I want mine.

$0 tax stamps is a big deal though. I'm gonna get some $40 silencers when they come out.

The reaction from some quarters of the online 2a community has been... eyebrow-raising, to put it politely.

It's getting to the point where I unironically suspect there's a fair number of bots and shills coming out of the wood-work to paint this as a loss and demoralize 2a advocates when it's clearly a win. Not the best win, mind you, but still a win.

It's an impact, but it's likely to end up a bigger impact in the sense that this is the first time a federal gun law has been actually rolled back instead of merely sunsetted or outdated.

A 200 USD tax isn't trivial for a gun accessory, especially an expendable one, and having zero tax might allow some manufacturers to start building out entry-level silencers so the cost-of-first-hit isn't 100+ USD on top of the tax. But while that's part of why the NFA was annoying, it's not the biggest or even a primary part. And I'm not even sure we'll see much drop in MSRPs. From the sellers side, they still count as 'firearms' for FFL purposes, you'll still need an SOT, there's still going to be a ton of legal risk, and there's still a hell of a lot of overhead. From the buyer's side you aren't any less afraid of 'oil traps' or accidental 'transfers' or the ATF giving you a free colonoscopy.

((Yes, theoretically zeroing out the tax should also make enforcement of the whole registration schema impossible, but we know how that goes.))

Meanwhile, the parliamentary stuff is pretty obnoxious. I expect a dem appointee to be biased, but Byrd Ruling modifications of a law that has been defended in courts as a tax literally dozens of times is appalling.

Does anyone have anything to say about the OBBB being passed

Nothing that wouldn't make me sound like a broken record: an unparalleled triumph of sycophancy, fiscal conservatism is a scam the barons use to con the peasants, dream of Argentinafication, etc...

I find it largely to defy discussion.

It definitely looks like trump is making a military force loyal to him personally because he doesn't trust the loyalty of the existing forces.

The Trump administration is run by people who are genuinely rabid xenophobes who view Hispanic day laborers as an existential threat, but I suspect this is in the back of their mind as well. Well, less of a military force per se and more of a political gendarmerie. You want someone you can count on to shoot protestors and whose fortune is tied to the regime.

The way it is framed on talk radio is those people losing healthcare are able bodied men who refuse to work and never should have been recipients of government paid healthcare. An unambiguous positive to cut them off Medicaid.

Is it true that an 80 hour per month work requirement for able bodied people without children to qualify for Medicaid is part of the BBB? Yes. 80 hours of work, schooling, training or volunteering. Exempted if the recipient has kids 14 years or younger.

The assertion by conservatives is that Medicare was intended for only the poorest and least fortunate among us. Whether it should be expanded to able bodied people who don't work is a political question.

Fiscal discipline can only be enforced by the bond market, that is the reality. Since both Democrats and Republicans have borrowed and would borrow, the questions around deficit spending are only these:

  • How can we maximize spending to fiscally constrain a future opposition administration/congress?

  • How can we allocate the greatest possible funding to issues we care about?

This bill, while far from perfect, mostly accomplishes both. You can’t mass deport without large scale holding camp infrastructure. $50bn or whatever isn’t enough, but it’s a good start. Immigration is the only thing that matters until immigration is solved (AI matters too, but the state is powerless to stop that march of technological progress).

You can’t mass deport without large scale holding camp infrastructure.

Mandatory e-verify would probably be a lot easier to enforce given that employers, unlike illegal immigrants, usually have names, addresses, assets, registrations, tax returns, etc that can be used to lean on them in legible ways. How many illegal immigrants are going to come here if they can't get a job and can't get benefits? How many will stay?

Vanning ten Guatemalans at a time at the home depot parking lot is not a serious strategy. Of course, Trump has already given carte blanche to continue hiring illegal immigrants to politically important industries, so it's just obvious that solving this is not a priority.

Mandatory e-verify doesn’t work because most settled illegals appear to have stolen social security numbers, as discussed above. It’s a fake solution.

Most illegals have stolen SSNs? Where is the evidence for that? I did not see it in this thread.

If solving the illegal immigrant situation entails solving the SSN theft situation, that's even better. "What if all this is wrong and we create a better world for nothing?"

That or they’re employed in one of a variety of non-w2 scenarios.

Psychological factors are understated. All that needs to happen is that a degree of terror is implemented that scares most of the illegal population.

Mexico - even Guatemala - is not Afghanistan. Enough random, arbitrary and terrifying enforcement and enough will leave. Legal immigration can’t be reformed overnight and Trump doesn’t have the votes in congress.

The average daily wage for unskilled labor in the US, even flyover, is higher than a good weekly salary in Mexico, even the DF or Noreste. I don't think you can stop notoriously risk averse unskilled laborers from trying to take advantage of that. You can probably stop them from sticking around though.

And that’s most of what’s necessary. Some kind of soft-kefala where the migrants don’t stay, don’t have or bring over children, and go home at the end of the season.

don’t have or bring over children

I don't see how this is possible when you can't even stop birth tourism from people flying in. Are they only going to work for four months or so?

Broadly, it's bad fiscal policy in a way that fiscal policy has been bad in an escalating fashion for the last 10-25 years (Any self-described Republican fiscal hawks need to account for Hastert before we get to Ryan/McCarthy/Johnson.).

What I find interesting in the argument over Medicaid cuts is the fact that Medicaid spending somehow increased by 40% in the last five years? How?! I could see 25% given inflation, and a temporary covid bump makes sense, but we've allegedly had a strong working-class labor market for years.

Is a healthcare system that's rapidly approaching 20% of GDP even reformable?

I know a little bit about medical billing and data standards since I work in the industry. More and more, I'm pulled toward the idea that healthcare is so irreducibly complex the only way to cut the red knot is either with completely privatized and unregulated healthcare mixed with trustbusting to break local emergency room monopolies, or by creating a single payer system empowered to ruthlessly negotiate for its own interests. Trying to have a system where a government pays for only the statistically sickest individuals (the poor and old) is just the worst of all possible worlds. (My preference is for single payer, but I have a certain sympathy for the idea of completely obliterating the pharmaceutical patent system, making EVERYTHING legal OTC, and letting God sort it out.)

I do occasionally wonder if you could get to a decent place via:

  1. Get rid of Medicaid. It maybe made sense at one point, but it's current incarnation is, as far as I can tell, such a disgusting mess for all involved parties that it's better to just kill it with fire.
  2. People who would be on Medicaid can now get insurance via the ACA exchanges - they'll get a 94% CSR plan for 2% of their income. There's some annoyance around how they will enter their income, but much less paperwork than it takes to interface with Medicaid. There would need to be a small legislative tweak to allow this to happen (let <138% FPL income people get subsidies), but in practice they should trade a bunch of annoying documentation and everything is free for a functional network (ie a blues plan) and everything is very cheap + 2% of their income.
  3. Expand Medicare to more disease categories other than just ESRD. In practice I think you want to try to capture an additional several million of the sickest people. Hemophiliacs, organ transplant, some cancers, some rare genetic disease perhaps, that sort of thing. This will dramatically lower premiums in the ACA. However power-law distributed you think healthcare costs are, the reality is they are likely more power law distributed than you think.

That's going to create some winners and losers, providers will be upset that people are on Medicare, but shifting people from Medicaid to commercial reimbursement rates should help out with that. The amount of bureaucratic nonsense saved by getting rid of Medicaid should be huge.

IIRC a few states have expanded Medicaid, but anecdotally it’s also just gotten way more normal to be on Medicaid or put your kids on it even when you could technically afford employer healthcare. I think the rising expense of health insurance is the cause; people used to have too much pride to use programs they’re technically eligible for.

Effectively there are too many people that have to be pleased by the budget for it to pass. Congress, senate and a bunch of other influential people have to agree to it. These people aren't fully autonomous but are being pulled in various directions by people around them. The result is not much can actually be done to cut spending as each cut will be fought by someone. Musk was probably right from an idealist perspective that the bill increased the debt. However, his view is too based on the corporate world in which he doesn't need to get hundreds of people to agree in order to set policy.

The bill highlights one of America's greatest issues, the inability for someone to ram something through and get it done.

singularly terrified of the massive increase to the ICE budget

They're not that strong though, glorified policemen. The US Army or Marines could surely roll right over them with numbers and heavy equipment.

Also, is there any need to use language like ingroup and neargroup? Do you just mean friends, leftists, liberals, progressives? Fiscal conservatives? Or do you mean well off, upper middle class, highly educated people? Or maybe you mean civil servants? I'm left guessing here. Surely being more precise would be better.

I think less precision is better because more precision would just be unecessary detail. The exact ideology of my in and near groups doesn't matter when the core fact I an trying to convey is that there are people who I emotionally care for that the OBBB negatively affects. Trying to frame that in ideological terms would just ovscure the truth.

The most telling aspect of AI art is what I call "extraneous detail." As a reaction, I've been making a deliberate effort to avoid that in my own writing.

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

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Why are you called The Motte?

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

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


New post guidelines

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

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

If in doubt, please post it!


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