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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   26994 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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Why political revenge narratives don't make sense to me.

It essentially implies the difference between the right wing and left wing argument about things are about morals and not about the effectiveness of policy or economic ideas for the good of our country and our citizens.  If "your rules fairly" includes doing things that you think are stupid, inefficient, counter-productive and extra prone to corruption then doing it back would be strange.

Presumably if you hold an idea like "smaller governments are generally better for a country's growth" or "the state taking ownership in companies leads to bad incentives" or "free speech benefits the country's citizens and the country as a whole"  then it would make little sense to abandon them once you've taken power if you want the best for the nation.

After all if you care about the country, I would assume you want good and effective policy. If you see the left's policy ideas as bad and harmful to our future, it's not a great idea to join in on the self-harm. Unless you're a traitor and hate the country, you would be pushing for what you think is the best policy. Now people might disagree on what is best for growth, what is best for the people, and what is best for the country but we should expect them to pursue their ideas in the same way if they care about America, towards ideas they think are good.

This is part of why principled groups can stay principled so easily. An organization like FIRE truly believes that free speech is beneficial. Suppression and censorship when their side is in power would be traitorous to the good of the country in their mind, even if done out of a desire for revenge. A person like Scott Lincicome of CATO truly believes that government taking equity of private enterprise is bad policy, and thus it's easy for him to critique it.

They aren't  "turning the other cheek", they just actually believe in the words they say and the ideas they promote. They want good policy (or at least policy they think is good) for the benefit of the country. Sometimes you can see this in politicians, like how Bernie Sanders supports the plan to take equity in Intel. He believes government ownership of corporations is good for the country so he supports it even when the "enemy" does it. I think he's a stupid socialist but it's consistent with what I expect from a true believer. And you see with libertarian Republicans like Ron Paul, Justin Amash and Thomas Massie criticizing the Intel buy.

Counter to this, the "revenge" narrative comes off like the advocates never believed the words they were saying. It suggests their stated beliefs don't reflect what they think is good for the future of the US, but rather personal feelings and signaling to their in-group community. If they changed their minds it would be understandable, but if that's the case then the revenge narrative is unnecessary to begin with, they can now argue on the merits.

In game theoretical terms, playing tit-for-tat, or wanting to destroy defectbot, does not take away from my conviction that cooperate-cooperate is the most beneficial outcome for everyone. The actions described above are simply strategies to align incentives in such a way that C-C becomes more likely.

Now, what I just said ALSO acts as a justification for counter-defectbots to hide behind. Alas.

Respectfully, isn't this just a refusal to employ conflict theory? I might be missing your point entirely because you don't really specify what you mean by "revenge narratives".

It seems entirely obvious to me that in an outright conflict between opposed groups, principle (i.e., mistake theory) doesn't need to enter the picture at all for "revenge" to make perfect sense. Revenge, as in a direct attack on the opponent's ability to wage the culture war, either by demonstrating that they cannot follow through on their promises, or that they are too weak to protect their confederates, or by eliminating their actors directly. But maybe I'm missing your point - direct culture warfare needn't be "revenge" for prior slights; one may also strike with initative.

I absolutely believe that in politics, the merits of a given idea are almost perfectly irrelevant. Especially in a representative democracy with elections every few years, where voters are memoriless idiots and politicans are necessarily sociopathic opportunists. The entire system selects for media impact, not merit. There is no mechanism for determining merit. Yes it looks good and virtuous when a principled individual takes the stage and makes his case, and we can nod along sagely, but when the chips are down and it comes to casting ballots, 9 out of 10 people will monkey-brain it and vote for whomever stuck in their memory as being on their tribal side.

I'm not saying that this is good or desirable, or that there is a better way, or that either side is wrong or right. Just...please acknowledge that there is an ongoing conflict, not just mistakes being made.

I just wanted to chime in that I personally think your thoughts written here were so well spoken, worthy of consideration and discussion and sympathetic to many opinions in the way I think your intentions are such and that which the Motte rules encourages that they resurrected my lurking ghost to my corpse to tell you someone out there sees what you say here and appreciates your effort in this post. I think if more posts used language like yours here, the brain drain happening on this site currently will be dialed back a bit.

I've also skimmed and read your responses to what you've said from other users and I want to additionally commend you for what I think is a genuine effort to remain calm and give everyone fair questions and chances to explain themselves. Keep it up!

Now, um. Remember remember the 5th of November. My soul now leaves this husk.

  • -12

Yeah thank you very much. Many of the users here are pretty passive aggressive or (actively rude if you've lurked here for a long while like I have), which makes sense given that the driving emotions literally seems to be "I feel wronged so it's ok to wrong others" but the same way I argue for principled stances, I also don't really want to stoop to that either.

I, for one, will be devastated that you will be ridding everyone here of your Main Character Syndrome. Please don't go...

To your point, there is some clear frustration that we all share. Some people here are more hysterical about it than others, and I appreciate @magicalkittycat for starting shit (in a thought provoking way) here and challenging people to explain their positions. That being said, if you need a reminder of brain drain on a massive level, hop on over to reddit where as a collective they consistently call millions of people Nazis and ban a not-so-small percentage of them for the capital crime of having a dissenting opinion. The mods here don't do that.

According to mainstream reddit (which is the largest internet forum on the planet), I have been a Nazi from 2020 forward for stating the facts of the Kyle Rittenhouse case, not wanting certain sexual content in schools, disagreeing with certain aspects and goals of BLM, calling out the leftist creep in our institutions, etcetera, etcetera. So, take what you see here, flip the politics, lower the IQ by about 10 points, then multiply it by a couple hundred thousand users, and what you end up with is a gigantic brain drain, plus an ideological purge that's been allowed and encouraged for the better part of a decade.

10?

Well, I'm here, so it pulls down the weighted average.

"Everyone who disagrees with me is an idiot" and yet another flounce — in a single comment? Well, that's certainly efficient on your part.

Trump frequently changes his mind though. We saw this with tariffs.

A person like Scott Lincicome of CATO truly believes that government taking equity of private enterprise is bad policy, and thus it's easy for him to critique it.

And you see with libertarian Republicans like Ron Paul, Justin Amash and Thomas Massie criticizing the Intel buy

The rise of Trump, who copied the same protectionism of Biden, on top of Obama, has basically revealed the libertarian-adjacent wing of the GOP to be ineffectual. These people forever have been on the losing side, save for Ross Ulbricht pardon. Their publications and think tanks are utterly ignored by anyone of importance. They are screaming into the wind. It has always been that way, but it's like what a waste of money promoting all those libertarian causes. I think this shows that some flexibility is good, and Trump's successes is illustrative of this. Otherwise you just become obsolete and end up wasting money and time.

The rise of Trump, who copied the same protectionism of Biden, on top of Obama, has basically revealed the libertarian-adjacent wing of the GOP to be ineffectual. These people forever have been on the losing side, save for Ross Ulbricht pardon.

Ronald Reagan, pretty much the most beloved conservative president in living history doesn't count? He slowed the growth of government spending during his presidency, fought for free markets, and helped to make America far better off with his pro market small government policies. He stood up for liberty and capitalism and America stood tall while the communists kept collapsing. Even China only succeeds because Deng Xiaopeng realized they have to be a bit more like the freedom loving open market Americans to do well. And despite them having over a billion more citizens (tons of manpower and talent they can draw from) they're still at about 63% of our total GDP.

I don't see the Intel buy as motivated by revenge politics. It seems more motivated by Trump's desire to be seen doing things: do a lot of random, high profile things, and select those that work out as proof of your leadership (those that don't, of course, fail because of the wreckers).

Maybe the revenge narrative makes sense, but not a revenge against Trump's most visible enemies, but the layers of bureaucrats and experts whose main function tends to be saying you can't do things and then acting to make it harder and more expensive to do things.

(All that said, in this case the naysayers are entirely correct, and Trump should be picking his things to do more judiciously.)

For most policy positions, the revenge effect is not there. If the other party bans abortion or immigration, you will not be tempted to do the same in retaliation.

The retaliation is mostly on procedural norms which get changed to wage the culture war. If your side is firing all the federal employees who support the other side, then my side will do the same whenever it is in power. If your side is deploying the national guard to unfriendly cities, then my side will deploy the national guard to unfriendly cities. If your side is rounding up residents and deporting them to El Salvador megaprisons without due process for having some tattoos which may or may not be gang related, then my side will interpret displaying a confederate flag as renouncing one's US citizenship and deport them to Venezuela, so your side will retaliate by doing the same for the pride flag.

Of course, it is hard to play tit-for-tat with perfect proportionality, because situations are not symmetrical. So things escalate over time.

Again, I get why people justify their revenge narratives.

Just no one has even tried to explain how exactly government buying up and owning private enterprise is a smart idea (something that we've been saying isn't good for decades) and why it's a solid goal towards improving the nation's economy and wealth.

Bernie Sanders at least tries to explain this, because Bernie Sanders is a socialist who thinks capitalism is bad and corporations are just greedy and needs big government regulations to spank them. I've yet to see much attempt to explain it from a new conservative side, and the little I do sounds very similar to the socialist one (same way I keep seeing "greedflation" in some right wing populist spaces).

Ironically it seems to be one of the things the new right really hates. A new big government socialist minded capital hating populism that has invaded the traditional minded conservative thought and crowded out the original inhabitants.

The traditional conservative like the Reaganites would explain government imposed market distortions, the folly of protectionist policy, etc. The new conservative says "companies are greedy, they raise prices because they got even greedier"

Just no one has even tried to explain how exactly government buying up and owning private enterprise is a smart idea (something that we've been saying isn't good for decades) and why it's a solid goal towards improving the nation's economy and wealth.

... to steelman the counter-Lincicome argument:

High-grade semiconductors have massive military and economic importance. There are a variety of things that either can't be done, or can only be done on glacial timescales, just going from <10nm to 100nm process scales, due to thermal, electrical, and latency issues. Losing the ability to produce or source those processors would put a country literally twenty years back; having them sourced to a supply chain that's opposed to that nation risks serious security and core functionality threats. AI is the current-day focus, but these tools are necessary for everything from telecommunications to hardware control to transportation in their 'conventional' programmed form.

((It's actually worse than it sounds, because in a lot of military and industry roles you can't just switch out a scavenged motherboard and CPU and call it good enough. In extreme cases, you end up with very specific chips not just to manufacturer or generation but even specific chips. On the upside, the smarter businesses buy in bulk. On the downside, there's a lot of buyers that aren't smarter, or things in-development that can't be undone.))

Lincicome discusses government support for Intel as stiffling third-party competitors, but this is a class that basically doesn't exist, here. AMD and RISC-V and everyone else even remotely in the field either depend on Intel or Taiwan, or on Chinese manufacturers. There are no other <10nm foundries in the United States or even Western Europe, and the closest companies as a process level (STM, Micron, maybe Motorola if you squint EDIT: definitely not, thanks Skooma) are neither capable of nor interested in micro_processor_ work at the desktop scale. Any attempts, even attempts using third-party foundries oversees, have ended poorly, as anyone who recognizes the name VIA might recognize. Any model for how those systems could respond to a complete collapse of Intel is necessarily guesswork, but I've seen credible estimates of 10+ year timelines to bring even mid-end devices assuming everything works out perfectly the first go.

Meanwhile, the competition is not exactly operating from a free market. TSMC is the closest, and it's a national project for Taiwan, unsurprisingly with how much of its economy revolves around the business, and one part of that is Taiwan gave the company a giant pile of seed cash in exchange for just-shy-of-half of its ownership, and other parts involve widespread continuing indirect subsidies on its major material costs. The Chinese government doesn't exactly give out the most honest breakdowns for how its subsidizes foundries, but even ignoring the !!fun!! question of industrial espionage with CCP characteristics, the official numbers are significant and come with very pre-2018-Jack-Ma-sized strings.

Which could be surmountable. Intel, as recently as 2015, was still on top of the world, to a point where people were worried AMD would go under.

But it's gone from merely slightly behind-the-curve in 2019 to consistently the less-good choice across entire fields, often by significant margins and with no or negative price premium, along with a number of serious stability and reliability concerns due to manufacturing defects. And that's worse than it sounds. Chips and foundry technologies are costly not just to produce, but also to fail to sell, both due to how the sales model works and due to rapid depreciation. To skip over a whole bunch of technical details, they're in a cash crunch at the same time that they need a lot of investment to not be in more of a cash crunch unless they want to turn into a second- or even third-rate foundry.

((There's also some messiness involving Intel ARC, which is both strategically very important to the Western world's military, not obvious, and which has an entertainment business case that it's only barely starting to credibly begin to compete with kinda, but is a short investment away from being a really big deal.))

Which might just be the only achievable result, if we trusted Intel to be doing (or trying) the best thing. But there's a lot of reasons to be skeptical. The current CEO and board have been abandoning new development processes since December of last year. Critics have focused on said CEO's ties to the CCP, and to be fair those do exist! But even if Intel was making these decisions from a solely economic basis, they're overwhelmingly emphasizing matters to maintain stock price over either the availability of next-gen onshore foundries or the company's long-term dominance or relevance as a first-tier manufacturer. The actions here are ways to credibly commit both the US government to continued (or starting) the funding it claimed it would provide, and Intel to actually running the things.

It's not that the conventional criticisms of crony capitalism stopped existing! There are significant risks to this sort of investment and (tbf, minimal) control. But there are tradeoffs and risks to non-action, and Lincicome seems neither willing nor able to even consider them.

Would you have been calling for the state taking ownership of the means of production before this had happened? I really doubt many conservatives would have.

Maybe it's motivated reasoning ex post facto trying to justify his behavior or maybe it's just that "conservativism" as a label has already been stolen by people who hate free market capitalism and small government, but it's the exact opposite of traditional conservative ideas.

but it's the exact opposite of traditional conservative ideas

Which traditional conservative ideas would those be? "Ensure the means to produce an absurdly vital strategic resource with a lead-up time measured in decades remains possible in $country" is something even minarchists believe the role of government should cover.

It's literally the best case scenario; the US only has one manufacturer of space-magic technology that isn't within trivial striking distance of its enemies. Samsung is, TSMC is, even Intel's own fabs are (the ones it built in Israel).

Which traditional conservative ideas would those be? "Ensure the means to produce an absurdly vital strategic resource with a lead-up time measured in decades remains possible in $country" is something even minarchists believe the role of government should cover.

This assumes that everyone agrees government ownership of companies is the correct approach, which they in fact do not and have not historically agreed on.

Maybe we can cut back regulations, support development and building of technology, etc instead of expanding government more in response to expanded government.

I'm not sure I'm calling for it now: the above post is a steelman, and one with a number of caveats, qualifications, and carveouts.

There are valid counterarguments, like what extent smaller competitors licensing ARM chips might be able to pull an underdog reversal in a big hurry, or how much a lot of central infrastructure needs modern processing power rather than just having grown like a goldfish to fill it, or whether a failing IBM might fracture such that its foundry side survived rather than got pulled down with the rest. There are some less credible but at least plausible ones: maybe China's Not That Bad after all, or going to collapse under its own inertia before any of this could be relevant, or military/economic considerations are a lot less important than social ones.

But these aren't new considerations, either; they're the sort of thing people were bringing up in response to the CHIPS Act itself, too. It's long been a point of controversy in even libertarian circles what tradeoffs exist between private and public management of matters like disaster response, military readiness, telecommunications, and core public welfare. I'd like if there were simple, easy, Big Head Press-style answers, but if they exist they're not self-demonstrating.

maybe Motorola if you squint

Motorola hasn't existed for 17 years and spun off their cpu / microcontroller business back in 2004 to Freescale which was since acquired by NXP in 2015.

And NXP is definitely not even close to a tier-one fab these days; I think they've capped out in the >50nm range. Thanks for the catch, not sure why I thought they still had a telecom branch.

... there's not really any good 'if you squints' left, then. TI have got the process tech to leave 'guy in shed' fully in the dust, but their ARM stuff is more at the embedded systems level from my understanding, in addition to the TI tax. BAE is heavily focused on defense sector, unsurprisingly, which good for them but not helpful for the rest of us. Tower, I guess? I dunno much about their production outputs beyond some cmos stuff.

And NXP is definitely not even close to a tier-one fab these days; I think they've capped out in the >50nm range.

That's a bit like saying Volvo isn't even close to being a tier-one supercar manufacturer these days...

NXP has never even aimed for the high end application processor market (not that Motorola was relevant in its historical equivalent since the late 80s either). They merged with Freescale for their microcontroller and automotive IC portfolio, not in an effort to compete with Intel or similar cpu manufacturers.

Fair; it's definitely not that they were trying to be the next desktop infrastructure, and it's not like what they're doing instead is easy. It makes sense for them to focus where they've focused. If I ever have the free time, I'd love to get some experience working with the IMX8 stuff as an embedded linux tool.

But even compared to where Freescale was in 2002 versus the market segment NXP is aiming for in 2025, the difference seems bigger. Some of that's just the top of the market has gotten much higher -- Razr mattered, but it mattered pre-smartphone; some of the network equipment goes in a similar boat -- but it's something that separates the business from being meaningful competition for most of Intel's most important stuff.

They're in different industries and have been for decades. The last time Motorola had notions of competing with Intel was 30 years ago. By the time Freescale was spun out in 2004, they had no commonalities (ignoring Intel's doomed to fail attempt at pushing into embedded / mobile processor market with Atom & Galileo). Freescale and then NXP have always been purely in "deep" embedded market where computing performance just isn't that important and is behind many other considerations. You use an iMX8 because you need a large set of integrated peripherals in a small form factor and at low cost. It might run Linux because that simplifies the software development and allows better networking and simpler multimedia display (think map or spotify album art) but you really don't care about how it performs in benchmarks (as long as it passes some minimum bar). Using a larger manufacturing process is an outright positive thing as it allows lower idle power consumption.

Intel OTOH has always been about legacy software support and how many GHz you get in a package / per $$$, considerations that simply don't exist in NXP's market. You'd never put an Intel cpu in an embedded device because it'd be a nightmare to integrate, eat too much power and cost too much compared to an MCU that does that job much better.

Huh? I could swear they're still making shortwave radios.

That's Motorola Mobility (subsidiary of Lenovo, smartphones and stuff) or Motorola Solutions (safety and security products). Neither have anything to do with IC manufacturing.

((There's also some messiness involving Intel ARC, which is both strategically very important to the Western world's military, not obvious, and which has an entertainment business case that it's only barely starting to credibly begin to compete with kinda, but is a short investment away from being a really big deal.))

This is the first I've heard of a significant military interest in Arc. Could you unpack that?

Certainly the whole computer gaming world has been begging Intel not to kill off Arc before it's reached maturity. Everybody expected it to lose money for the first couple generations, but Intel has been incredibly strapped for cash, so it wouldn't be a shock to see it sacrifice long-term interests for short-term ones.

The current CEO and board have been abandoning new development processes since December of last year.

This is tantamount to giving up its foundries, and I'm surprised not to have seen more analysis. I wonder if he thinks that that portion of the business is totally unsustainable in the long run, or if he's just playing chicken with the U.S. government hoping for more money.

Maybe that's what a government stake in Intel is supposed to resolve?

This is the first I've heard of a significant military interest in Arc. Could you unpack that?

Uh... technically it's Intel's Flex for the server side, and this is extrapolation rather than anything I know first-hand so it's probably wrong, but :

At the higher confidence level, these boards can run inference comparable to mid-tier nVidia cards, and could potentially be made in Arizona, rather than in TMSC. That's not going to get you massive AGI from LLMs, if such a thing is possible, but there's a lot of video and image data, signals analysis, and more esoteric stuff (HMDs!) that needs realtime or near realtime processing. Yes, most applications would prefer a Jetson over either a normal nVidia card or an Intel one, but since even the Thor-sized Jetsons can't keep up with realtime efforts, they get to compromise. The nVidia boards aren't currently irreplaceable, but military procurement does consider whether there are alternative sources, and Intel is the only even potential alternative.

The... more speculative bit is that Intel's got a number of design opportunities that they were starting to build around. Optimizing data transfer from network card to CPU to GPU is a boring and unsexy thing, but it's actually a big deal for extremely realtime behaviors like streaming video operations, and something where nVidia's offerings (an ARM 'superchip' call Grace) were far behind the competitors... before Intel killed their better solution. There's also some weird messiness with nVidia's solutions for licensing and for chip-to-chip interconnects that are navigable for datacenters for a nightmare for US military procurement.

This isn't readily available to consumers (or even prosumers) yet, because the vast majority of extent AI/ML workloads don't work in Intel ARC environments to start with; those that do seldom even get the full benefit from the GPU's hardware, and even fewer get any serious benefit from GPU/CPU integration. But it's at least a space that would be interesting if Intel could get its core crap together.

This is tantamount to giving up its foundries, and I'm surprised not to have seen more analysis. I wonder if he thinks that that portion of the business is totally unsustainable in the long run, or if he's just playing chicken with the U.S. government hoping for more money.

Officially, they're just doubling down on the 1.4nm stuff. But I don't think I'm the only person reading it that way. For motive, it's hard to tell. He could even be playing chicken with buyers, trying to pressure them to step up early rather than wait until after engineering samples have already gotten off the floor. But I'm not optimistic given the amount and variety of other cuts.

I do not think that MAGA has a large overlap with old school conservatives. Trump can be adequately modeled by assuming that he is maximizing his personal power and profit, without any political convictions beyond "I should be president".

For him personally, the move makes sense. He gets all the influence (while he is president) without personally paying for the shares, and the people voting for him are mostly indifferent towards that deal.

I am not sure why he would prioritize Intel over social media companies, though.

You're right, modern MAGA isn't like old school conservatives. Old school conservatives don't embrace socialist ideals.

MAGA inherited the power and organizations that old-school conservatives have left. They're aging out of the game of life, and their kids hate them and want to destroy their legacy, so they have decided to vote for their grandchildren's interests instead.

The goal of any rational traditionalist at this point should be to throw their support behind the political bloc that sees them more as a quaint curiosity (perhaps with a younger man writing an elegy for them) rather than an enemy to be destroyed. The new Red party is not going to advance Christian interests, but a draw in this matter is as good as a win given the alternative.

Full disclosure I just hate the government and have no libertarian biases.

But this isn’t really ‘interfering’ in the economy. The government is specifically forbidding itself from being an activist investor.

Full disclosure I just hate the government and have no libertarian biases.

Thirty-on-thirty-on-thirty

Is there a reason it's committing to vote with the board rather than abstain from voting?

Just no one has even tried to explain how exactly government buying up and owning private enterprise is a smart idea (something that we've been saying isn't good for decades) and why it's a solid goal towards improving the nation's economy and wealth.

Plenty of people have explained it. The race for AI is seen as existential between the U.S. and China. If Intel is owned and operated by a Chinese CEO, that's a major security risk. Therefore Trump and his team took extreme measures to make sure Intel was loyal to the U.S.

I'm not saying it will work or won't have other knock-on effects, but that was the straightforward justification.

I don't think Intel is relevant in the current AI race.

They're not nVidia (and not even Intel's own foundry, lol), but the ARC models are encouraging. A bit better for inference in raw specs than an nVidia 4060, mostly hampered by poor software support that's quickly improving, and that the chips themselves are just coming from whatever spare time is available on a mostly-saturated TSMC line.

If Intel can get the software support figured out, and get their own foundry up and running, they'll have a pretty major impact on the market. But while the former isn't a huge leap of faith, the latter has got a lot of question marks on whether they're even going to try for it.

EDIT: While less central, there are some industry components to the CPU side that matter a bit, with AMX doing well enough that AMD felt they had to kinda smear it, and I think there's some KV cache stuff they're ahead on Intel around. Less important for training and especially the 500B+ parameter space that modern LLMs have moved into, but there's a lot of strategically relevant spaces well below that range.

Just no one has even tried to explain how exactly government buying up and owning private enterprise is a smart idea (something that we've been saying isn't good for decades) and why it's a solid goal towards improving the nation's economy and wealth.

Is your modeling of Trump so poor that you attribute it to deliberately wanting to wreck the US economy, during his own term, because fuck the Democrats?

He's just not very committed to specific ideology, he mostly plays things by ear and gut feeling and he has a good feeling about this one. Sometimes his gut feelings are right and sometimes they're wrong. His feeling about sending those B2s to Iran seems to have been pretty much just upside so far. The dust hasn't settled on the tarrifs but at least it didn't lead to the immediate collapse that his detractors were claiming were coming. Governing outside of ideology is what his voters wanted, "Making America Great Again" is spectacularly vague and non-committal as to the method of achieving it after all, and for what it's worth I don't think it's a particularly bad way of going about it in reality. Pure ideology will get you all fruits of that ideology, the good ones but also the rotten ones. A wise king who can pick and choose which fruits to pluck is the best political system, and with the short supply of wise kings nowadays, a businessman with good instincts is not the worst stand-in. Of course, opinions can vary as to whether Trump has good instincts.

Is your modeling of Trump so poor that you attribute it to deliberately wanting to wreck the US economy, during his own term, because fuck the Democrats?

Trump has never been much of a fiscal conservative, so I don't expect him to hold much fiscal conservative views. He seems to truly believe in the power of the state over private enterprise, and mercantilist thought.

This in regards to people who have actually claimed to be small government hands off capitalists joining in without an argument towards merit. They don't seem to have "changed their mind" (if that was the case, they would try to make an argument for central planning) as much as never having a strong belief in their prior claims to begin with.

Ultimately I think that's simply because most people are intuitively centrists or flexible, but that's a tough position to defend in debates, because keeping your options open is also what someone without a plan would say they're doing. But ideology blinds and binds. Whenever a politician is out of power, they argue like ideologues, and they argue that whoever is in power is failling their own ideology by not sticking to it. It's an easy position to stake. Keeping your options open, while smart, makes you an easy target for nasty headlines, anything you refuse to rule out off the cuff while talking to a journalist (and they won't give you time to think) will be held up as "(politician) could/might/is considering doing this stupid thing!" Trump got very good at evading the trap, but most politicians stumble, they either submit and rule out the stupid thing and then they're made to look weak or stupid for having even considered it, or they find themselves driven into defending the stupid thing.

And that's how we find ourselves in a situation where people kind of hates all sides and no politician can really ever seem like just a smart honest person. Because you can't argue the same positions in the opposition and in power.

(None of these are exactly my own views. This is an ironman post.)

Okay, so, you've probably heard of rabies. It's an incurable disease (at the very least it used to be, and it still is once symptoms appear) spread by biting that makes people bite others and be violent and semi-mindless in general. In real life it's also invariably fatal, which drastically cuts down on humans' ability to spread it to >1 other humans. But imagine a rabies that didn't do this - rabid people didn't die of rabies (or of thirst), they just stayed violently insane for the term of their natural lives. Imagine further that we didn't have a vaccine against it (this was even true until recently). Call it super-rabies. Or peeps. Or the Zombie Virus.

So, let's say that with the incubation period and everything, 5% of your population caught super-rabies before your government got around to noticing and acting. Now, what are you going to do about it?

  • You can't just let super-rabid people walk around until they bite someone. Proof: since such a bite transmits super-rabies and you're letting the bitten person walk around in turn, this doesn't deplete the supply of super-rabid people walking around free to bite people (and indeed it will increase unless your response to a bite is instant, as some will bite a second person). Everyone will get infected, no more civilisation.
  • You can't imprison them. You're talking about 5% of the population, and you can't either stick them with each other (well, you could, but they'd likely kill each other) or put them individually in less than the most secure facilities (because they'd bite the guards/staff, which will gradually increase the amount of people you need to imprison, not to mention the question of who'd volunteer to take that risk). The expense would bankrupt society, and then they'd escape and civilisation falls again.

You have to kill them. The lunatics already gone bitey? Mow them down with machine guns. The ones potentially bitten? Imprisonment for the incubation period, kill them if they go bitey or if they offer the least resistance. People protecting the super-rabid? We don't have time for this shit.

Yes, they're still human. Yes, they're innocents, insofar as they didn't choose their damnation. But you don't get to have a society that cares about respecting innocent life if you don't have a society. This is a state of exception; you mop up the existential threat as quickly as you can by whatever means are necessary, and then you go back to enjoying the sweet fruits of your bitter, bitter labours.

In case you haven't worked it out by now, some people think of SJ as an existentially-dangerous meme via undermining law and order. The analogy's not perfect - social justice warriors are far better at scheming than the rabid, and believing SJ is not always permanent - but you get the point.

That's one viewpoint. Another is that SJ is not itself an exceptional threat, but is an obstacle to solving other exceptional threats such as WWIII or AI by forcing every single discussion onto simulacra levels 2 and 3 (e.g., the initial SJ reaction to Covid of "the real issue is people using worries about infection as excuses for hating Asians!") or just by it directly focusing excessively on internal, day-to-day political squabbles and missing things that haven't come by in a while. (One thing that I will note about this viewpoint is that it's quite time-dependent. Mounting a massive anti-SJ crusade weakens you in the short-term in exchange for strengthening you in the medium-term; if you think crunch time's imminent, as I do, it's too late.)

Yet another is those that actually, seriously, have given up on liberalism. SJ's excesses have convinced them that liberalism was a mistake. They actually have come around to believe those SJ tracts about how you can't have a free society without banning a bunch of ideas; they just think SJ itself's the weed that needs to be removed. And, well, it's not like there's nothing to the claim that SJ is the same sort of thing as the Nazis (by which I mean the literal NSDAP). Try reading the Wikipedia article on Gleichschaltung, for instance. You couldn't just have a youth club in Nazi Germany; it had to be a Nazi youth club. You couldn't just have a bowling club; it had to be a Nazi bowling club. Now, go SJ-spotting around the Internet, or real life, particularly in June. You can't have a nerd forum in the SJ internet; it has to be an SJ nerd forum. You can't just have a medical establishment; it has to be an SJ health establishment. Those subscribing to this viewpoint think that liberalism is just letting these kinds of totalitarians get started. (NB: while I use a popular SJ infographic for demonstrative purposes that claims to talk about Popper, I am compelled to note for educational purposes that this is not what Popper actually said. But the people of this viewpoint believe the faux-Popperian argument for real.)

In case you haven't worked it out by now, some people think of SJ as an existentially-dangerous meme via undermining law and order. The analogy's not perfect - social justice warriors are far better at scheming than the rabid, and believing SJ is not always permanent - but you get the point.

This is the worst analogy I have read on the net all week.

First, we have a rabies vaccine. In the real world, inoculating the healthy (and just-infected) would be our main weapon against super-rabies, rather than gunning down the diseased.

Second, memes are importantly different from viruses. Memes are easily transmitted through time and space. However, they are also unlikely to infect 100% of the people exposed to them. They also do not kill their hosts, generally. While they can dominate virtually unchanged for thousands of years, they tend to last much shorter in periods of rapid technological progress. So a meme becoming dominant is not the end of the world.

Third, killing the carriers is not very effective to combat memes. The carriers of Christianity were regularly murdered in ancient Rome, and yet this did not prevent the spreading. I will grant you that communist memes did very badly in Nazi Germany, so you might say that Nero's failure to root out Christianity was simply a skill issue. Personally, I dislike societies which murder fractions of their population.

Fourth, why would social justice progressivism be a uniquely dangerous meme complex? Western civilization has survived the spread of Christianity, enlightenment, atheism, communism, fascism, liberalism, hippies, punks, enviromentalism and so on. Granted, some of these meme complexes were really bad and killed a lot of people in the name of stopping competing memes or for other reasons.

Personally, while I intensely dislike SJP, I also do not consider it as dangerous a communism was in its time. I also like liberalism a lot. Any society where you just shoot the carriers of a hostile meme is very illiberal. Typically, it will target not only the carriers of one hostile meme complex, but the carriers of all meme complexes perceived hostile. I also think that SJP is already over its zenith. In 2010, it was the hot new thing for youth looking to rebel against the establishment. Eventually, the kind of older women who would have reported young people who received visits from opposed-gender people to their landlords in the 1950s will be the main enforcers of SJ norms, and that will paint these norms as 'cringe'.

TL;DR: The battlefield to defeat SJP is the marketplace of ideas.

TL;DR: The battlefield to defeat SJP is the marketplace of ideas.

Tell me, why are we here, and not on Reddit?

Reddit is a big corporate-owned platform. The motte is freedom of speech maximalist. These two things do not generally mix.

When the exodus from reddit happened, the SJP were the most influential tribe with reddit, so they lead the charge. But if it had not been them, it would have been some other tribe instead. I wish I could say that SJ is the only ideology which ever engaged in anti-competitive behavior in the marketplace of ideas, but instead it seems almost universal. Free speech is a great idea while you are the underdog and get oppressed for speaking the truth, but once you are in charge it suddenly seems much more important to prevent your enemies from spreading their vile poison.

Eventually, the kind of older women who would have reported young people who received visits from opposed-gender people to their landlords in the 1950s will be the main enforcers of SJ norms

This has already happened; traditional Christianity (or at least, people who claimed to be them) was this for that age group up until the mid-00s until it was clear to the average participant it was naturally dying out as a morally-respected force.

TL;DR: The battlefield to defeat SJP is the marketplace of ideas.

We tried. SJP played dirty by sending goons into the marketplace and attacking opponents outside it. Fighting it only on that battlefield is a losing battle.

Okay, so, you've probably heard of rabies. It's an incurable disease (at the very least it used to be, and it still is once symptoms appear) spread by biting that makes people bite others and be violent and semi-mindless in general.

Ahem. Rabies doesn't do that.

It can make people confused or aggressive but even confused or aggressive humans don't go around biting others (at least any more than people who are confused or aggressive because of dementia or drugs do). Human to human spread of rabies basically doesn't happen.

The Venn diagram between “thinks SJ is existentially dangerous” and “has given up on liberalism” is damn close to a circle. Killing some percentage of the population is not in the liberal Overton window. You can thank the Nazis and the Soviets and maybe the television for that cultural antibody.

No, game-theoretic excuses for genocide are limited to a really tiny subset of the conversation. The kind of subset that hangs around on Internet forums. I’d go as far as to suggest it’s mostly branding, signaling, a Molochian race to the bottom for viewers and clout. The Venn diagram between these people and actual capacity for violence is, thankfully, even smaller. Incentives work, and the liberal social order makes random violence deeply unappealing.

There is a much larger constituency which wouldn’t piss on their enemies if they were on fire. That’s not a response suited to an existential threat. It’s bog-standard tribalism, the sort that liberalism kind of sort of suborned.

Killing some percentage of the population is not in the liberal Overton window.

Actually, yes it is. Kamala Harris was fully on board with ethnic cleansing of brown people, and so committed to it that she preferred supporting wiping out the Palestinians to actually winning the election. Hell, even AOC voted for more weapons and bombs! Extermination of unwelcome minorities is very squarely and firmly in the overton window right now thanks to what's happening in Gaza.

How many of them would describe it in those terms? I guarantee you, Harris never framed it as ethnic cleansing. As far as I can tell, the closest she got to mentioning the death toll was acknowledging the “suffering in Gaza.”

How many of them would describe it in those terms?

Depends on the context, but this objection is utterly meaningless. If I was selling influence to political donors and lobby groups, I would not describe what I was doing in those terms. If someone eats a pure carnivore diet but describes their diet as vegetarian you're just being stupid if you invite them to your roast vegetable appreciation society meeting.

As far as I can tell, the closest she got to mentioning the death toll

What she actually said was that she wasn't going to distance herself from Biden's policy and that she wouldn't change anything about it - and the Biden policy was that Israel can do whatever they want and the US will support them no matter what. Trump, when he said that what was happening in Gaza had to stop, was actually further to the left than Kamala Harris.

It’s not meaningless when you’re trying to trace the Overton window.

I’ll assume for the sake of argument that Israel is trying to ethnically cleanse Palestine, that Harris recognized it, and that she also knew supporting them would lose her the election. Why, then, wouldn’t she say it out loud?

Whatever you think Kamala lost by supporting Israel, it would have been much worse if she’d said “yeah, kill all those brown people.” The costs massively outweigh any benefits. That’s what it means for something to be outside the window. Even if one believes it, one can’t say it out loud.

I’ll assume for the sake of argument that Israel is trying to ethnically cleanse Palestine, that Harris recognized it, and that she also knew supporting them would lose her the election. Why, then, wouldn’t she say it out loud?

She actually did say out loud that she wouldn't do anything to stop them, and high ranking members of Netnyahu's government (Smotrich etc) were open about their plans for ethnic cleansing. If one person says "I think all the jews should be exterminated" there's not really much of a distinction between that and someone else saying "That person talking about exterminating the jews has an opinion that I respect and won't deviate from" - both of them are advocating for a holocaust, there's just a layer of obfuscation to gull credulous and stupid people in front of one of them. She didn't go out of her way to advertise her position on this topic because she knew it was politically toxic with her base, but you'll be hard pressed to find politicians who voluntarily run attack ads against themselves because they want to be honest with the people. I don't think the overton window really matters here because "just exterminate all the Palestinians so we can build luxury hotels" and "Starving those children to death is perfectly fine because they had pre-existing medical conditions" is still inside that window.

It's not clear that Harris would have done better had she taken a more pro-Palestinian line. Certainly, a lot of Muslims stayed home (which is still only half as bad from the Dem perspective as actually flipping), but AIUI this wasn't true of non-Muslim SJers, and had she taken such a line she'd have been up against AIPAC and gotten called a baby-beheader.

Laziest, sloppiest, slowest and least thorough genocide ever. I suspect the Gazans breed faster than the Israelis manage to kill them.

I think it's fair to say that @netstack was referring to "killing some percentage of the population that resides within one's own country". Even if one accepts your claim that the Palestinians in Palestine are being "genocided", they are neither American citizens nor resident within the US.

Even if one accepts your claim that the Palestinians in Palestine are being "genocided", they are neither American citizens nor resident within the US.

The genocide (thank you for accepting the claim) is taking place with US support and using US manufactured weapons. The genocide in Gaza would be impossible for the Israelis to carry out without extensive western support and American taxpayer dollars. I do not think that you have a very good picture of the average left-winger's thought process if you believe "Oh the brown people we're exterminating for more Lebensraum for white settlers aren't American citizens so you can just ignore all those hospitals we're blowing up" would be compelling to many of them.

thank you for accepting the claim

I don't accept the claim.

The genocide in Gaza would be impossible for the Israelis to carry out without extensive western support and American taxpayer dollars.

I don't believe so. Per @ymeskhout, formerly of these parts:

Yes, the $3.8 billion sent to Israel every year is a lot of money, but it’s nothing compared America’s $850 billion military budget. And Israel on its own remains an extremely wealthy country that enthusiastically prioritizes its military capabilities, with a $24 billion budget and an advanced domestic industry that is a major weapons exporter. If you really believe Israel is committing a genocide, vanishing all American financial assistance would barely leave dent in their efforts.

From another article:

Israel has been receiving around $3.8 billion per year in military aid from the US since the 2000s, constituting roughly 15% of Israeli military funding.

US military aid has since increased to $17.9 billion total in emergency military aid since Hamas initiated the current war. Israel’s military budget on its own has surged 65% to $46.5 billion in 2024. This now constitutes 8.8% of Israel’s GDP, the second highest in the world, right after Ukraine’s current 34.5% (for context the US spends 3.4%). This remains a significant decline from 1975, when Israel was willing to allocate a record 30% of its GDP towards its military.

Obviously, America’s military aid to Israel is significant. But let’s say Uncommitted got what they wanted and the US stopped all aid and imposed a total arms embargo on Israel. Given the significant chunk involved, we should reasonably expect Israel’s military capabilities to be hobbled. At least, temporarily.

The problem that few protesters seem to consider is that while Israel started out scrimping and scrounging for whatever military equipment they could get their hands on (including Soviet hand-me-downs via Czechoslovakia in their 1948 independence war), it now has a robust and healthy military industry that is both iconic and prolific. Israel designs and manufactures a wide range of its own advanced military equipment, including the Uzi submachine gun, the IMI Galil rifle, the Merkava main battle tank, and precision-guided munitions like the Iron Sting 120mm mortar and the SPICE family of guided bombs.

Major manufacturing sites include Israel Military Industries (IMI) for small arms and ammunition, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems for precision-guided bombs and missiles, and Elbit Systems in Haifa. Elbit recently secured contracts to supply thousands of heavy air munitions and establish new raw materials plants, with the explicit aim of reaching “full independence” in bomb and munitions manufacturing.

It is particularly relevant to note that Israel has already been subjected to arms embargoes several times before: France in 1967, the US in 1971, and the UK in 1973. Israel’s world-class military industry was developed in response, and it would not have reached its level of sophistication were it not for the embargoes. Now, this tiny country barely the size of New Jersey, is the 8th largest weapons exporter in the world, comprising 3.1% of global arms exports.

What the US gives that Israel cannot readily make itself are advanced fighter jets (F-15, F-35), and certain precision ordinance (JDAM kits, GBU-39 Small Diameter Bombs). Were that supply source suddenly vanish, there is no universe where the IDF just shrugs and says “ah we don’t have GBUs, let’s pack it up and go home guys.”

Making things go boom is very easy. It takes little technical sophistication to drop an unguided bomb from a plane when gravity does all the work. The eye-watering invoices of modern munitions come from the integration of guidance systems, sensors, and networked targeting computers — features that reduce collateral damage but are harder to replace quickly if US supplies are cut off.

If you’re genuinely and earnestly concerned about the civilian death toll in Gaza, there is a serious risk that an arms embargo would make that worse! Both by further entrenching Israel’s domestic military industry, or by encouraging a reduced reliance on precision munitions.

There's also the fact that, as noted by many commentators, Israel has nukes. If they wanted to exterminate the entire population of Gaza, they could have just dropped a nuke on it in October 2023 and called it a day, no US military aid required.

Moving on:

I do not think that you have a very good picture of the average left-winger's thought process

We were talking about the liberal Overton window, not the left-wing one. Some people use the two terms interchangeably, but I am not one of them. I will reiterate that "blowing up brown people in the Middle East" is a policy proposal that does very much reside within the liberal Overton window in a way that "wiping out large chunks of American citizenry, or people residing within the US" does not.

for white settlers

45% of Israeli citizens are Mizrahi Jews, while 20% are Arabs. Even if your use of the scary term "white settlers" was meant to gussy up your accusation, it's just false on its face. The majority of Israelis are not "white" by any conventional definition of the term.

The Venn diagram between “thinks SJ is existentially dangerous” and “has given up on liberalism” is damn close to a circle.

I'm rather bemused at all the people here who bemoan the lack of charity for left, casually just making shit up about their outgroup, but I suppose such is life. Anyway, sadly, you are mistaken. Liberalism skeptics managed to appeal to some of the elites, but we're yet to win mass appeal, even among anti-SJ people.

Aww, heck. I didn’t even realize the ambiguity.

I was trying to say that it’s a very small circle. Almost no one treats SJ as an existential threat. Out of the handful that do, most of them are otherwise disillusioned with liberalism. Plans to quarantine/exile/execute SJWs are firmly in the lunatic fringe. They barely even make it into the alt-discourse.

Now, I was also thinking that there were almost no liberalism skeptics who got there without developing a distaste for SJ. @magic9mushroom pointed out the obvious counterexample. So I suppose the illiberalism circle should fully contain the existential-SJ circle, rather than perfectly overlap it.

The Venn diagram between “thinks SJ is existentially dangerous” and “has given up on liberalism” is damn close to a circle.

Much of SJ is in the latter but not the former.

Killing some percentage of the population is not in the liberal Overton window.

I will cop to being a serial breaker of Overton windows. It's really quite hilarious the things people say when one does so; "are you Darkseid" and "what's next, revealing your family's secret rape dungeon" are some of the more memorable (though I've gotten really, really sick of "you're a child molestor").

Much of SJ is in the latter but not the former.

While SJP certainly has an illiberal strain, I do not think they have the stomach to do what is required to stamp out competing memes. This is a good thing, because unlike your edgelord position, they are numerous.

Their world is a world where people get cancelled if they do a racism on social media, with the definition of racism steadily expanding. However, they do not have a ideological underpinning of violent totalitarianism. I do not see them actually running gulags.

A Nazi would have been willing to murder an "Aryan" German if he was a communist. Cutting out the ideological rot from the people's body and all that bullshit. A SJW will not murder a black lesbian, because his ideology teaches that black lesbians are sacrosanct. This makes it a bad ideology to enforce its own purity, which is a good thing for fans of liberalism.

your edgelord position

Okay, yeah, I'll cop to "wait for my domestic opponents to literally die in a fire" being edge-flavoured. It's not like I'm the one causing the fire, though, and I have tried my best to pull some of them out of the fire with my advocacy for civil defence, so I don't think there's a less edgy position for someone who predicts a high chance of WWIII and has Noticed that SJ is very urban.

I am sorry, I was referring to your analogy between SJ and super-rabies with the outright statement that for the latter murdering the infected would be acceptable.

Of course, I did not pay close enough attention to your disclaimer:

(None of these are exactly my own views. This is an ironman post.)

So feel free to reapply my label to the fictitious person who would make that kind of overton-breaking argument in earnest instead.

If SJWs were into murdering people, which as of 2025 they mostly are not, I think they would cheerfully murder Clarence Thomas, or even Candace Owens.

The Zizians didn't bother with these two particular people. Neither did the group that opened fire on ICE. Nor the bloke that tried shooting Republican congressmen playing baseball.

I know the Zizians killed their landlord and some of their parents, and I think maybe even one of their own, plus I think they tried to kill some cops who were about to arrest them, but did they ever actually pull an outright ideology-only assassination where they didn't have a personal beef with the target? Because that's the reference class I'd think proper.

(To be clear, I'm not for a second claiming they didn't intend on doing this eventually - I've read enough of Sinceriously not to say that in a million years. I'm just asking if they ever got around to actually doing it before they got arrested.)

I will cop to being a serial breaker of Overton windows. It's really quite hilarious the things people say when one does so

Fellow serial breaker of Overton windows here, and can confirm; I’ve gotten a slew of these insults myself. Most of them I’ve forgotten by now, but one that really sticks in my mind is the time I was called an “incest porn aficionado who roofies women”. I mean fucking Christ lol.

Hell it’s quite noticeable how much even the more charitable descriptions of me conflict with how I actually act. I imagine most of these people would likely find me to be rather good-natured in real life.

And, well, it's not like there's nothing to the claim that SJ is the same sort of thing as the Nazis (by which I mean the literal NSDAP).

I would almost agree if you weren't literally using it as part of an argument for a mass killing of political opponents (one of the most Nazi like behaviors).

Did you perhaps miss the disclaimer right at the start that none of those are my true feelings? My no-bullshit personal strategy is "lay low, turtle up, wait for Armageddon - most forms of which will mortally wound SJ due to urban/rural demographic divides - and then, with the room to breathe thus granted, dismantle SJ's levers of power (most notably, its ability to gatekeep careers via tertiary education and HR; Scott's solution here and Hanania's here are some of the more obvious), but leave the adherents alive and mostly unmolested". A Leninist purge to strip people of power, not a Stalinist one to strip them of life. In point of fact, I would expect a great deal of my advocacy in the aftermath to be expended on begging people not to enact another White Terror.

(To address the elephant in the room: I will grudgingly grant that KillAllMen is not something most SJers currently believe nor, for various reasons, something they're likely to be able to implement. I wasn't especially happy at the whole "it's just a joke, find me a single person who takes it seriously" thing, though; while this was slightly before SJ's heyday, I did have a single mother who told me the Y chromosome's a genetic defect and literally starved me as a teen after I started registering to her as a "man" rather than a "child".)

What's particularly Nazi-like about it? I'd associate that more with communists though I guess Nazis were prone to it as well.

“Most Nazi-like,” not “most alike to Nazis.”

Communists and Nazis alike engaged in violent purges.

But the people of this viewpoint believe the faux-Popperian argument for real.

I don't know about that. As a fellow disillusioned-by-liberalism, I'd say it's much less about letting totalitarians get started, as that's a response from within the liberal framework, it's that liberalism itself is folly. You can't have "separation of church and state" or "neutral" institutions, you will always promote specific values. There are some values of liberalism I admire, but others I reject wholeheartedly, hence the conflict. I'm not a fan of them pretending to be tolerant, neutral, and above it all either, but the conflict would exist regardless.

Fair.

It essentially implies the difference between the right wing and left wing argument about things are about morals and not about the effectiveness of policy or economic ideas for the good of our country and our citizens.

Do you think people who criticize Nayib Bukele question the effectiveness of his policies?

Do you think people who criticize Nayib Bukele question the effectiveness of his policies?

They do; in particular they claim the reduction in crime precedes his throwing gang members en masse into CECOT.

in particular they claim the reduction in crime precedes his throwing gang members en masse into CECOT.

Which it unquestionably does. CECOT opened in January 2023 as part of the gang crackdown that began at the end of March 2022. The official homicide rate for El Salvador (not counting killings inside CECOT or killings by police, which look like they would increase the 2023-4 numbers by an order of magnitude) was 106.3/100k at the peak in 2015, 53.1 in 2018 (last full year before Bukele took office), 18.1 in 2021 (last full year before the crackdown), 2.4 in 2023, and 1.9 in 2024.

So it is simultaneously true that:

  • Most of the murder decline under Bukele happened before the state of emergency.
  • The use of emergency powers to detain gang suspects has led to a dramatic further drop in the murder rate.
  • The use of emergency powers to detain gang suspects is harmful at the margin (incarceration has risen from about 1.3% at the end of 2023 to about 2% now, with negligible decrease in gang activity)

The use of emergency powers to detain gang suspects is harmful at the margin (incarceration has risen from about 1.3% at the end of 2023 to about 2% now, with negligible decrease in gang activity)

This is your brain on managerialism. The point of mopping them up is to ensure they don't recover after laying low for a while, this isn't going to show up on your KPI's.

If you think it's so undeniable, liberal human rights enjoyers should be able to implement their solutions in whatever is the current murder capital of the world and show us how it's done.

No - this is my brain on utilitarianism. Sending 40,000 people, many of whom are innocent and none of whom are bad enough to make the list of the first 50,000 gangbangers you rounded up, to a torture-prison is a big deal, and needs some more-than-speculative benefit to be morally justified.

The decline in crime isn't just a KPI - it is the whole point of what Bukele is doing. If more prison isn't reducing crime at the margin, then it is just hurting people for funsies. Which you appear to find funny because the people being hurt are outgroup. I don't.

No - this is my brain on utilitarianism.

Not really, you can justify either policy with utilitarianism. Your argument works only with the assumptions added by managerialism.

The decline in crime isn't just a KPI - it is the whole point of what Bukele is doing. If more prison isn't reducing crime at the margin, then it is just hurting people for funsies.

You are literally telling me it's not just a KPI doing managerialism, while telling me nothing useful is achieved until it shows up on the Key Performance Indicator called a "crime rate".

Which you appear to find funny because the people being hurt are outgroup. I don't.

I find the idea that this happened hilariously absurd.

I have to say, I do like the idea of Bukele solving the crime problem, and then throwing people in the slammer for shits and giggles.

It essentially implies the difference between the right wing and left wing argument about things are about morals and not about the effectiveness of policy or economic ideas for the good of our country and our citizens.

I have seen this argument before, where literally in the same sentence somebody can say that other people argue about morals, while he just wants what is good for people. You do realize, that moral philosophy on basic level talks about distinction between what is good and what is bad? As soon as you use the word good or bad, you are making a moral argument.

There seems to be certain myopia for many people, where they hold some moral positions without acknowledging them as such. They pretend that their morality is objective and rational, not even warranting defending it - as if they read it from facts of the universe, they gleaned it from the proton number of atom of carbon, or from trajectory of Jupiter or something like that. It is similar trick adjacent to Russel's conjugation in much of leftist thinking - our moral philosophy is true and fair and outside of critique, while your moral philosophy is just a hideous ideology.

There's two different meanings of "good" being conflated here. "Is legal abortion good for the country?" is a political and a moral question; people will disagree about it largely because they have different opinions on "good" itself. But "are tariffs good for the country?" is largely an object-level question. Proponents and opponents have identical definitions of what it being "good" would look like (i.e. increased prosperity in the long term); they simply have a factual disagreement on whether tariffs will achieve that end. Granted, things aren't black and white, many questions straddle the line. But it's still a meaningful distinction to talk about.

Yes, this is one of the arguments I have seen. You can posit yourself outside of any moral structure and define good something akin to "how to achieve one's goal most effectively". So for instance if a school shooter wants to kill as many students as possible, it is "good" for him to use guns as opposed to knives. You are not going to question the morality of the action, you just talk in terms of which actions are more effective in reaching any given goal that you are morally impartial to. I think this level of thinking is useless outside of highly specific and individual action, you even need to distance yourself from any other potential impact these actions have for that person and take their stated goals at their face value, otherwise you enter into moral argument territory rather quickly.

Plus I think it is also misleading to even use the words like good or bad for this concept, I wish there was a different vocabulary there. As soon as you are talking about concepts like what is "good" for country or people, you are losing the argument as country or people are not moral agents to whom you can give any advice.

Not quite, this is still scientism. Economics can help answer the actual object-level question, "Are tariffs an effective way of obtaining a desired outcome?" It can tell you what the trade-offs are.

But the questions of what outcomes are desirable, and what trade-offs are acceptable, are values questions.

Yes, but I think there is truth to the claim that many political disagreements are genuinely downstream of disagreements about the object-level questions, not value differences in the weighing of whatever associated trade-offs exist.

The distinction starts to get blurry very quickly.

We can reasonably assume that there is a fact of the matter regarding which HBD claims are true. But the reason people take such strong stances on HBD, even in the face of inconclusive or insufficient empirical evidence, is because of their values. It’s hard to cleanly separate questions of value and questions of fact because our values influence what we think about the facts.

It’s hard to cleanly separate questions of value and questions of fact because our values influence what we think about the facts.

1000x this. Which to my mind is the true and valuable insight hidden at the heart of post-modernism.

I take the opposite view that most disagreements are value disagreements that ultimately map to aesthetic disagreements about the nature of a good life.

What led you to think this? Can you take some central disagreements and drill them down to the object level?

But "are tariffs good for the country?" is largely an object-level question. Proponents and opponents have identical definitions of what it being "good" would look like (i.e. increased prosperity in the long term); they simply have a factual disagreement on whether tariffs will achieve that end.

But for example if free trade increased the overall prosperity of the country 10% and the financial district 200% whilst the prosperity of blue collar workers and those in the rust belt heavily decreases, ‘good for the country’ again becomes a little tricky. Especially if you start to consider the second-order effects of this policy on the finances, social structure and industry of the country.

When he's not being a thin-skinned emotionally incontinent manchild, Freddie deBoer can be remarkably perceptive:

Do you want to know what ideology is? What we mean when we say “ideology at its purest”? It’s not a collection of policy positions. It’s not a political party you vote for. It’s not even your conscious beliefs about right or wrong, your philosophy about how humans should act individually and collectively and the relationship between those acts and the public and private good. No, ideology refers to those beliefs you do not examine because you do not see them as beliefs at all. Ideology isn’t a matter of ingesting arguments about better or worse, right and wrong, and evaluating them to determine your own beliefs. Ideology is fundamentally the unexamined framework of the system through which you perform such an evaluation, the part you can’t and don’t see; it’s the assumptions that you cannot understand as assumptions.

Sometimes it is interesting to which depths this phenomenon runs, how self unaware people can be. Famously Marx extensively used the word ideology as a pejorative descriptor for ways ruling class keeps workers in the dark in the class conflict. Of course he piled all that criticism while keeping Marxism itself outside of such framework, as if it was implicitly true and correct stance and thus it could not be considered an ideology by definition.

To steelman the political revenge framework, consider it from a game-theoretic perspective. Alice and Bob are playing iterated prisoner's dilemma and raking in money by cooperating with each other. One turn, Alice hits the defect button and makes more money than Bob. Bob says "what the hell" and Alice says "sorry, my finger slipped". Even if she's (probably) lying, Alice likely isn't stupid enough to pull the same trick on the next turn, so in the short-term, Bob's best bet is to hit cooperate on the next turn too. But if he does this, Alice will realise that she can occasionally hit the defect button and face no repercussions for it. So in the long term, it might make more sense for Bob to hit the defect button in the next turn (even if Alice pre-commits to doing so as well) in order to send a credible signal that defection will be punished: if he doesn't, he's incentivising Alice to repeatedly defect in future. Thus, the tit-for-tat strategy which (as I understand it) outperforms all others in iterated prisoner's dilemma.

A member of the Red Tribe may not think it's in the best interests of the country if Blue Tribers get fired from their jobs for opinions they expressed privately, a fate which befell many Red Tribers (or even insufficiently ideologically pure Blue Tribers) between 2009-16. But they may also be aware that, if the Blue Tribe faces no repercussions for the cancellation campaigns they wrought in the period, then they're bound to give it another try as soon as the boot is back on the other foot (as it inevitably will be sooner or later). From a game-theoretic perspective, the best solution might well be sending a credible message that "if you do this to us, we WILL do it back to you, so don't do it to us in the first place and we'll all get along just fine".

The obvious rebuttal is that there's a missing mood and the Red Tribe aren't dispassionately weighing up their options and reluctantly opting for tit-for-tat as the best of a bad bunch: they're baying for blood. No argument here: lots of MAGA types really are calling for their opponents' heads. But I refer you to The Whole City is Centre. Evolution gave us a set of instincts which approximate the game-theoretic-optimal choice that a learning algorithm would naturally arrive at by trial and error. The fact that two people learned how to play iterated prisoner's dilemma using different algorithms doesn't necessarily mean there's any difference in the course of action they would opt for at any point in the decision tree.

My point is just that the only difference between you and the pro-punishment faction is that you are following an explicitly-calculated version of the principled consequentialist defense of punishment, and they are following a heuristic approximating the principled consequentialist defense of punishment, and their heuristic might actually be more accurate than your explicit calculation.

When Alice hits defect and Bob hits defect in retaliation, his blood is pumping and his face is bright red. If Alice was playing against ChatGPT and hit defect, ChatGPT would weigh up its options and calmly, dispassionately hit defect in retaliation. But both Bob and ChatGPT hit defect in retaliation.

The Alice and Bob model is inherently deficient when talking about politics because you're not talking about unitary actors but distributed groups of tens of millions of people. Bob isn't angry because Alice defected. He's angry because he heard Alice's third cousin defected. There's also the distinct matter of asymmetrical vindictiveness. If Alice and Bob 'cheat' at a similar rate, but Alice is (relatively) forgiving while Bob is hypervigilant against cheating and believes in escalatory retaliation, you get a situation where Bob is constantly saying he has no choice but to flip the table to restore balance despite being no better behaved (at best). (See: the GOP's efforts to overturn the 2020 election)

It's deficient for another reason as well: if Alice collectively represents liberals and Bob collectively represents conservatives, there's a problem with the cooperate/defect model, because Alice and Bob have different values and thus different ideas of what it means to cooperate or defect. To pick a high profile historical example: the confirmation for Robert Bork. The Democratic view was that Republicans defected by putting forward a deeply unsuitable judicial nominee. The Republican view was that the Democrats defected by rejecting a perfectly qualified nominee on spurious grounds. Voting rights/voting access are another standout area where normative differences lead to mutual perception that the other team is trying to cheat.

Even if she's (probably) lying, Alice likely isn't stupid enough to pull the same trick on the next turn, so in the short-term, Bob's best bet is to hit cooperate on the next turn too.

If Bob thinks Alice is more likely to cooperate immediately after her defection, isn't his short term best bet to also defect immediately since there's less risk of accidentally aligning his defection with one of Alice's random ones and ending up at defect-defect?

I can't remember the payoff matrix for the iterated prisoner's dilemma, so it's possible.

Defect:cooperate pays the best (for the defector), or else there wouldn't really be much of a dilemma, would there?

I suppose not. In the link under "sorry my finger slipped", Scott explains the chain of reasoning better than I can.

Now that I think about it, I think Scott is also screwing with the rules of the PD scenario -- lots of things about it break down when the prisoners are allowed to communicate with each other.

eh, I still don't really buy it -- Scott is just handing Bob an idiot ball here. The correct response to the excuses is "yeah, be that as it may I said I was playing tit-for-tat and that's what I'll keep doing. If you want us to enter a defect-defect spiral that's your call".

Thus, the tit-for-tat strategy which (as I understand it) outperforms all others in iterated prisoner's dilemma.

In the presence of noise which amplifies defections (this can be unintentional defections, or one player wrongly perceiving the other player's co-operation as a defection), tit-for-tat is equivalent to defectbot. You need to play x-tits-for-a-tat for x<1 in order for a tit-for-tat-like strategy to support stable co-operation. (And if you opponent is playing y-tits-for-a-tat where y is slightly above 1, then your optimal strategy is to reduce x further such that xy<1).

In the real world (rather than Axelrod's experiments) there is obviously noise, and that the noise amplifies rather than suppresses defections is one of the oldest unfortunate facts about the human condition. So playing tit-for-tat, and even more so playing two-tits-for-a-tat, is equivalent to playing defectbot.

Right now, Trump is playing two-tits-for-a-tat, and his core supporters fully support him in this. The Democrats believe, arguably correctly, that they have been playing 0.9-tits-for-a-tat, and the "we need a fighter" debate on the Dem side is whether they should switch to playing two-tits-for-a-tat and embrace the downward spiral into continuous mutual defection.

Any attempt to have a sane conversation about this is likely to be derailed by the ultimate scissor of American politics - the 2020 election. If you believe that the 2020 election was tabulated honestly and that Biden won by more than the margin of sloppiness, then Trump's response to losing the election was the biggest defection since Reconstruction, and the milquetoast effort to prosecute the people responsible wasn't even a 0.9-tits-for-a-tat response. Whereas "The 2020 election really was rigged and the overly harsh treatment of the people who protested this is a mega-defection" was the grievance narrative at the core of Trump's 2024 primary campaign, and appears to be the words that an ambitious Republican needs to mouth to go along to get along under the 2nd Trump admin. The slightly weaker proposition that "Regardless of what actually happened in the 2020 election, the overly harsh treatment of the people who protested it is a mega-defection" is table stakes for an elected Republican in 2025 in the way that signing the Grover Norquist tax pledge was table stakes for Republicans in the 1990's. And if the 2020 election really had been rigged on the scale that Trump claimed it was, then rigging the election would itself be a mega-escalation such that a correctly calibrated 0.9-tits-for-a-tat response would be harsh enough that what Trump is doing now would count as milquetoast.

If you believe that the 2020 election was tabulated honestly and that Biden won by more than the margin of sloppiness, then Trump's response to losing the election was the biggest defection since Reconstruction,

No, it wasn't. Trump did hardly anything in response. I'd say that the Democrats' support of rioting during Covid was a bigger defection.

This framing assumes that the game is purely Republicans vs. Democrats, and in that framing the answer to who is tit’ing more is obvious. The problem with this is that it is only two-dimensional. Introducing another axis, like the culture that controls our institutions, flips this argument around. Republicans have escalated more openly, but Democrats have benefitted from institutional alignment for decades.

This has created a situation where Democrats appear to be playing “0.9-tits-for-a-tat” within the narrow realm of party politics, but their ideological allies, with their near complete control of academia, media, entertainment, etc., have been free to push constant aggressive “tits.” Democrats don’t need to overtly defect as often because the institutions that are aligned with them have constantly moved the Overton window on their behalf. From the Republican perspective, and for many who support them, they’re reacting to a broader cultural movement that has not been constrained by the limitations of party politics.

The noise thing is true, but irrelevant here because the signal in the culture war is so very strong.

Right now, Trump is playing two-tits-for-a-tat, and his core supporters fully support him in this.

Trump has not even reached parity. How many political opponents has HE sicced the criminal apparatus of government on? Because it was sicced on him PERSONALLY at least 5 times. And quite a few in his administration. How many Democratic allies have been sued to bankruptcy in show trials? I count a minimum of two the other direction (Alex Jones and Rudy Giuliani. As a bonus civil show trial, the E. Jean Carroll case). How many times was Biden impeached? How many times was the Biden or Harris campaign literally wiretapped? How many Democrats disqualified from office due to their participation in a riot? There's at least one on the Republican side.

Actual, formal criminal investigations of prominent political opponents announced by law enforcement agencies? Three - James Comey, John Brennan, and John Bolton, versus zero at this stage of the Biden administration. Part of the reason why I described the Biden administration's response to Trump's election antics as milquetoast was that Merrick Garland slow-walked things to the point where Trump could and did delay any trials until after the 2024 election.

Targetted investigations of prominent political opponents intended (based on public statements by the White House or Congressional leadership) to lead to formal criminal referrals in the future - lots (the exact number is unclear because I don't know how many of the investigations Trump announces on social media actually happen) , versus one federal investigation at this stage of the Biden administration (the House Jan 6th committee). There was also the NY State investigation into the Trump organisation.

Given how slowly the justice system works (and did work against Trump, and will work for him), the claim that Trump is doing less lawfare than Biden is a claim that he is incompetent or unserious and the lawfare he is announcing won't actually happen over the next three and a half years. I agree this is plausible.

How many political opponents has HE sicced the criminal apparatus of government on?

At least two- Letitia James and also the federal reserve governor lady.

Right now, Trump is playing two-tits-for-a-tat, and his core supporters fully support him in this. The Democrats believe, arguably correctly, that they have been playing 0.9-tits-for-a-tat, and the "we need a fighter" debate on the Dem side is whether they should switch to playing two-tits-for-a-tat and embrace the downward spiral into continuous mutual defection.

In the same sense that it's "arguably correct" that the Earth is 6,000 years old. It's been asked repeatedly in this thread, but can anyone name a single time Democrats opted for grace and forgiveness, for not "punching back twice as hard", for not "sending one of theirs to the morgue"?

In the dim recesses of the past, I can recall John McCain telling one of his supporters to be less racist and cruel towards Obama. But I sincerely can't think of an instance from the other side more recent than Bill Clinton's Sister Soulja incident.

For God's sake, we just had four years of lockdowns, riots, and total defections on having a border at all. They went Stalinist levels of low to throw Trump in jail and bankrupt him, and as many of his supporters as possible alongside him. The totality on the left of people who gleefully cheered when Trump was arrested spent this weekend crashing out because war criminal John Bolton was arrested. That would have been a perfect example of "revenge logic" if the whole post weren't artlessly partisan, but it's an even starker example than that. Bolton is about the most perfect patsy to sacrifice to defend "principles", to regain some clout and credibility for the next time people want to throw a show trial at Trump. And instead we just see wall-to-wall meltdowns decrying and denying any possibility of fair play.

If Democrats honestly think this is "0.9-tits-for-a-tat", then we should just start the civil war.

It doesn't seem like your hiatus has given you much optimism on the culture war front.

It's been asked repeatedly in this thread, but can anyone name a single time Democrats opted for grace and forgiveness, for not "punching back twice as hard", for not "sending one of theirs to the morgue"?

The gap between 'grace and forgiveness' and 'punching back twice as hard' is wide enough to drive a semi through, but I'll try:

  1. After the conservative majority on the supreme court (viewed by many on the left as obtained through defection) struck down Roe v. Wade, many people here and elsewhere predicted riots and burnination in every major city in America. Ask Whiningcoil and FC about that one. Where, exactly, is the punchback from that one? Jane's revenge?

  2. Similar predictions of riots, defections, #resistance after Trump's inauguration in 2024. Even the protests were muted compared to 2016, Trump deleted USAID, laid off some largely indeterminate number of federal workers, is extorting Harvard and the other major colleges for hundreds of millions for 'antisemitism' (among other things). NIH and NSF have proposed budget cuts of ~40% each for 2026 - I suppose congress can appropriate the funds and Trump can just do to NIH/NSF what he did to USAID.

  3. Since you want to talk about immigration, where's the liberal defection in response to Desantis and Abbott sending busloads of illegal immigrants to Martha's Vineyard or other liberal strongholds? People bitched about it, but it's not like Desantis/Abbott are being harassed by the feds or blue states are shipping red-county fentanyl addicts to Florida and Texas.

In the dim recesses of the past, I can recall John McCain telling one of his supporters to be less racist and cruel towards Obama. But I sincerely can't think of an instance from the other side more recent than Bill Clinton's Sister Soulja incident.

Your example for Republicans is what, 17 years old? And isn't even from a sitting president. Has Trump ever told his supporters to be nicer to Biden? There's no asymmetric defection here.

For God's sake, we just had four years of lockdowns,

You mean the lockdowns that started during Trump's administration, that he could have stopped at any time for months? Lockdowns that had overwhelming bipartisan support in the first 1-6 months of their institution? Lockdowns that, I'll remind you, many people here predicted would be permanent as they asserted the government would never voluntarily relinquish power that they had taken from the people and it would be 'lockdowns forever.'

total defections on having a border at all. They went Stalinist levels of low to throw Trump in jail and bankrupt him, and as many of his supporters as possible alongside him.

You're not concerned about Trump calling a governor and asking him to find votes after losing an election? I'm genuinely asking - do you think it was justified because democrats stole the election in Georgia, because this is normal behavior for presidents who lose elections, or you just don't think he should face consequences?

The totality on the left of people who gleefully cheered when Trump was arrested spent this weekend crashing out because war criminal John Bolton was arrested

Come on, this is your steelman for why people are worried that John Bolton was arrested? The guy publicly had a falling out with Trump, wrote a nasty book about him and now he's got the FBI kicking down his door. You're not worried at all about the weaponization of the DoJ?

If Democrats honestly think this is "0.9-tits-for-a-tat", then we should just start the civil war.

There's this funny phenomenon I've noticed during my time here. Regardless of what happens in the real world, regardless of the fortunes of Blue Tribe or Red Tribe, blackpilling only increases. Lockdowns/COVID end? Roe V. Wade overturned? Trump wins a trifecta in 2024? Doesn't matter, the response is only either gloating or increased pessimism.

I genuinely still don't know why this is. Are the moderates leaving the site and losing interest, and all that's left is the bitterest remnant? My perception is that this seems to be broader than TheMotte, though. And my recollection of you, at least, is that you were fairly restrained in your rhetoric and beliefs.

Secondly - much ado is made about the loss of faith in institutions over the last decade, but I have to admit the inverse is just as interesting to me. Why was faith in our institutions so high 50 years ago? Do you really think the government or New York Times were that much more honest with the plebs in the 70s than they are in the 2020s? And if not, is faith in flawed institutions nevertheless adaptive for a society?

struck down Roe v. Wade

Interesting question of where to set the clock and what counts as grace, given how atrocious the original decision was.

Where, exactly, is the punchback from that one? Jane's revenge?

Yeah, response was much more muted than I expected.

The malicious compliance/indeterminate regulation (choose your charity level) has probably killed a few high-risk people.

where's the liberal defection in response to Desantis and Abbott sending busloads of illegal immigrants to Martha's Vineyard or other liberal strongholds?

LOL. Moving on-

Are the moderates leaving the site and losing interest, and all that's left is the bitterest remnant?

Probably, yes. Alternatives aren't fairing much better in my experience though.

Why was faith in our institutions so high 50 years ago?

70 years ago, yes: post-war optimism, being the main country that mattered and wasn't wrecked, fairly strong sense of national unity. 50 years ago it was already declining.

Do you really think the government or New York Times were that much more honest with the plebs in the 70s than they are in the 2020s?

Distinct lack of alternatives. Information control works if you manage it; it's much, much harder to manage now. Harder to hide the sneering contempt and the high/low cultural differences.

And if not, is faith in flawed institutions nevertheless adaptive for a society?

Define "flawed." All models are imperfect; some are useful.

Interesting question of where to set the clock and what counts as grace, given how atrocious the original decision was.

We should probably rewind to prehistory, when women risked infection to get back alley abortions with filthy stone age awls. we ought to retvrn to the old ways, where women would give birth and then drop the baby in the ocean or jungle.

where's the liberal defection in response to Desantis and Abbott sending busloads of illegal immigrants to Martha's Vineyard or other liberal strongholds?

LOL. Moving on-

Is the joke that the 10 million refugees is the defection, or the angry letters in the newspaper and on tumblr?

70 years ago, yes: post-war optimism, being the main country that mattered and wasn't wrecked, fairly strong sense of national unity. 50 years ago it was already declining.

Just curious, what are you basing this on? Because I bet if I dug into the history books it wasn't as wonderful as you might imagine. The McCarthy trials and Korean war can't have been universally popular, the scars of Japanese internment, continuing racial segregation, miscegenation laws...even then, setting your norm as the high-water mark the decade after winning a world war and emerging as one of two superpowers does not seem like a solid foundation for a nation.

Besides, we won another global conflict within our lifetimes! The Berlin wall fell, the USSR dissolved and for my childhood the USA was the sole superpower. The budget was balanced and our biggest problem was that the president was getting BJs in the oval office. You really don't think the 90s were another high-water mark?

Had I the time, my thesis would be that the institutions of the 20th century were just as shitty as today. As you say, information control is simply much harder now.

Define "flawed." All models are imperfect; some are useful.

Uniting behind a flawed leader is usually better than no leader at all. Or at least that's what I tell my employees.

then drop the baby in the ocean or jungle.

Reminds me of a poem.

While I am morally pro-life, I am just enough of a squishy lib at heart to think that abortion shouldn't be banned entirely (at this stage of technology). But I find pro-abortion people viscerally disturbed and pro-choice wildly inconsistent. They really shouldn't have given up on "safe, legal, and rare."

Is the joke that the 10 million refugees is the defection

Yes, the several million illegal immigrants was the original defection, and sending a couple dozen to self-proclaimed sanctuary cities that immediately shipped them back was the tiniest possible tat in reply.

Korean war can't have been universally popular,

MASH was! (Yes, I'm joking and aware the actual war was not nearly as popular, and also years shorter)

continuing racial segregation

Talk about a failed opportunity.

setting your norm as the high-water mark the decade after winning a world war and emerging as one of two superpowers does not seem like a solid foundation for a nation.

Well yeah, that's kind of the point, and that it was already declining into the 70s (your 50 years ago mark). I think the post-war years were unusually good (though you're absolutely right, not perfect) times, and they set a cultural memory bar that's basically impossible to achieve without that set of circumstances.

We either have to redefine down what a good life and good country is, or we have to find a different route to get there.

You really don't think the 90s were another high-water mark?

Well, absolutely! I'd give my left nut to crank the clock back to late 90s cultural détente, colorblindness, warts and all. Hell, I'd be tempted just for Utopian Scholastic and Frutiger Aero to make a comeback.

But I also think it's cliché for a Millennial to say that the late 90s/early 00s minus the terrorism response were a golden age.

Yes, the several million illegal immigrants was the original defection, and sending a couple dozen to self-proclaimed sanctuary cities that immediately shipped them back was the tiniest possible tat in reply.

The funniest thing is that most of the increase in the illegal population occurred during our mutually agreed upon golden age, and evenly split between Republicans and Democrats. Although, I often forget that MAGA has retroactively decreed Bush to be a democrat, the same way that every politician elected between prior to 2016 (maybe with some exceptions carved out for Roosevelt, Lincoln, Jackson and Washington) was a democrat.

Even if you argue that there were an extra several million that came during Biden's presidency, this is more a return to a historical trend than 'an invading rapist horde' to paraphrase someone here.

Numbers of illegal immigrants almost seems to correlate with the relative prosperity of the USA to South American countries rather than ICE enforcement, which I'm told was a bipartisan issue in the 90s and early 2000s...

Well, absolutely! I'd give my left nut to crank the clock back to late 90s cultural détente, colorblindness, warts and all. Hell, I'd be tempted just for Utopian Scholastic and Frutiger Aero to make a comeback.

Have you considered that your main complaint with the contemporary US seems to be the culture war, yet your vitriolic hate for Fauci (and apparently Tim Walz?) is itself, culture warring? Even as you decry a lack of national unity, you're just as angry as everyone else.

As much as I found Tim Walz to be an odious little troll performing a racist minstrel act

...why?

Down ticket- well, did you catch the wackadoo that ran for governor where I am? I didn't vote a straight Dem ticket but it was closer than I would've predicted a few years ago.

No, I missed it. That's...an interesting choice.

I am angrier, because I have a kid and I want my kid to grow up in a better world, and neither of these idiot parties are going to deliver that.

I have two, and I'm confident they are growing up in a better world. They'll have significantly more opportunity than I ever had should they choose to pursue it.

I am angrier because I watched scientists and public health experts and journalists shit all over the reputation of everything, and for what? They ruined and debased themselves for nothing, but the public pays the price! Fauci got his pardon and nobody that signed that braindead open letter got stripped of credentials, and here we are with Trump, RFK, Florida cutting vaccine mandates.

You act like the people have no agency or responsibility for themselves. Fauci is still trusted by close to a majority of Americans; there's every possibility that regardless of what Fauci did, half the country would hate him. I worked at the same institute as Fauci and met him in passing, and I'm sure you've read enough of my writing in the past to know I think that the right's fixation on Fauci as a figurehead betrays a near-complete lack of understanding of his actual role/function and is largely a character assassination downstream of resentment about lockdowns.

Someday I hope to vote for a politician I actually like, that isn't a collection of horrible tradeoffs or ends up doing things that disgust me.

If you do, it will look like this. The politicians you would like are not the politicians that would win elections.

I'll admit, I kinda like the Harvard stuff. Resentment isn't the healthiest motivator but I have so much of it. Perhaps that's my most socialist trait. Ha!

Can you imagine the CCP cutting funding from Tsinghua or Peking university? The center of gravity around biotech and STEM are shifting towards China, and the only question (in biotech at least) is whether the equilibrium will be that of peers or whether we go the route of low/mid-value manufacturing, aka extinction. NIH is probably getting budget cuts next year too. Ten years from now neo-MAGA will be bitching about how they have to buy their new drugs from China because their elites sold them out, without realizing it was their own retarded policies that got them there.

You want justice? Justice would be the next democratic president coming in and cutting subsidies to farmers, trade schools and other red-coded industries who are trying to fuck over mine. Thankfully, I doubt that would ever happen contrary to what you and Iconochasm think about retaliation from the left.

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Hi, Chris! I hope life is going well for you.

It doesn't seem like your hiatus has given you much optimism on the culture war front.

In general, the hiatus went well enough. The problem came last summer, when I had both parents trying to talk to me about whatever Facebook story they were incensed about that day, from both different sides, and then Trump got shot. I let myself get sucked back in. I still think it's not a productive use of my time (and I find myself thoughtlessly developing workarounds for my self-imposed limitations), but the last year has certainly been more cause for optimism than the previous four (at least in the US), as well as being a ton of fun.

The OP here, with it's Rose Tico concern trolling, just really grinds my gears. And really, I should probably just stop interacting with the OP. They routinely post stuff that hits me as so earnestly "someone is insanely wrong on the internet" that I get all riled up. And frankly, if it's not spectacularly fine trolling, then they are probably a literal child who simply lacks the experience to grasp that other sides do, in fact, exist. In which case, my own brand of scathing heat is less than helpful.

Anyway,

After the conservative majority on the supreme court (viewed by many on the left as obtained through defection) struck down Roe v. Wade, many people here and elsewhere predicted riots and burnination in every major city in America. Ask Whiningcoil and FC about that one. Where, exactly, is the punchback from that one? Jane's revenge?

In fairness, a higher expectation for riots doesn't seem like an unreasonable prior just two years after the Summer of Love, even if it ended up being a false prediction.

Still, I don't think that's really a counter-example. The general response was still apoplectic rage, even if it didn't spill over into real violence, and kept itself to rhetoric and hostile personal encounters. My own mother blew up at me over it, even though she knows I'm personally pro-choice. Though that did give me an opportunity to gently explain that the reason she is a grandmother is because, as a man, I have literally no reproductive rights at all.

But in terms of the grace vs revenge scale, I don't think I've seen a single leftwinger say anything like "Look, the SC made their ruling and we have to accept that. Even Ruth said that Roe was on shaky legal ground. We should have expected this would happen, and better prepared for it. The issue has been sent back to the states, so let's focus on the state level and win as much as we can."

The reponse I've seen is more like "The Supreme Court is illegitimate, fuck the entire institution, pack the court, we literally live in The Handmaid's Tale." Along with a slew of very dishonest news stories, at least some of which look suspiciously like hospital administrators letting women die to own the cons. Alongside that was a bunch of low grade domestic terrorism, which was tacitly tolerated by the Biden administration.

Similar predictions of riots, defections, #resistance after Trump's inauguration in 2024. Even the protests were muted compared to 2016, Trump deleted USAID, laid off some largely indeterminate number of federal workers, is extorting Harvard and the other major colleges for hundreds of millions for 'antisemitism' (among other things). NIH and NSF have proposed budget cuts of ~40% each for 2026 - I suppose congress can appropriate the funds and Trump can just do to NIH/NSF what he did to USAID.

I think it's a bit early to call on most of this. But I don't see any tacit acceptance, or anyone saying "fair enough, we did try to bankrupt, jail and kill you, let's call it even". Instead most of the Democrats seem to be talking about how they've been playing nice up until now, and calling for the gloves to come off in a scorched earth war to the knife.

Since you want to talk about immigration, where's the liberal defection in response to Desantis and Abbott sending busloads of illegal immigrants to Martha's Vineyard or other liberal strongholds? People bitched about it, but it's not like Desantis/Abbott are being harassed by the feds or blue states are shipping red-county fentanyl addicts to Florida and Texas.

They made a huge, grandstanding spectacle calling Abbott and Desantis cruel monsters (for exposing their own hypocrisy) and demanded they be investigated by the feds for human trafficking, kidnapping, fraud and deprivation of liberty. The feds didn't comply - is that where we want to set the bar for compromise and reconciliation?

Your example for Republicans is what, 17 years old? And isn't even from a sitting president. Has Trump ever told his supporters to be nicer to Biden? There's no asymmetric defection here.

Yep, the best examples I could think of were old. We're well down the slippery slope at this point. There are examples of Trump doing things like that, but they're all blatantly insincere and backhanded.

To be clear, I'm not saying the Republicans look particularly good under this light. A huge part of Trump's appeal is specifically that he's a Molotov cocktail thrown at norms and conventions that his supporters see as having been weaponized. He is the Devil turning round on you.

My incensed objection rather, is to the naive or trollish implication from the OP that the Democrats have clean hands.

You mean the lockdowns that started during Trump's administration, that he could have stopped at any time for months? Lockdowns that had overwhelming bipartisan support in the first 1-6 months of their institution? Lockdowns that, I'll remind you, many people here predicted would be permanent as they asserted the government would never voluntarily relinquish power that they had taken from the people and it would be 'lockdowns forever.'

Most lockdowns were state and local. It wasn't the Trump administration that was prosecuting gym owners - that was my Democrat governor.

You're not concerned about Trump calling a governor and asking him to find votes after losing an election? I'm genuinely asking - do you think it was justified because democrats stole the election in Georgia, because this is normal behavior for presidents who lose elections, or you just don't think he should face consequences?

I sincerely don't think he was asking for what you think he was asking for. That line came at something like the 53rd minute of a conversation, and the whole prior discussion was Trump confidently insisting that an investigation would uncover large numbers of fraudulent votes. I don't think Trump is as dumb and blunt as many, but I do think it's more likely he was referring to that, as opposed to pivoting abruptly to overt requests for obvious crimes on a recorded line in front of multiple other people. If nothing else, that theory presumes that Trump believed that he truly lost Georgia and I don't think his ego would allow that.

I hardly think the man covered himself in glory there, but there's a reason that investigation fell apart after the only prosecutor willing to push it was caught using the situation to engage in blatantly shady corruption.

And that was the "good" case. The asset valuation fraud and the 34 counts ones were, I believe, very clearly corrupt, politically motivated lawfare.

Come on, this is your steelman for why people are worried that John Bolton was arrested? The guy publicly had a falling out with Trump, wrote a nasty book about him and now he's got the FBI kicking down his door. You're not worried at all about the weaponization of the DoJ?

The DoJ was already weaponized. Do you remember when they were falsifying evidence to spy on the Trump campaign?

Tons of people write nasty books about Trump. And there's a thing among that cohort, where a lot of them seem to want to believe that Trump is out to get them personally, but most don't even merit a nasty Truth Social post. The Bolton investigation had been going on for years before it was shut down by the Biden admin. If anything, it looks like he was being protected by politics.

And really, it was for leaking classified documents, i.e. the exact same thing Trump had the DoJ kick down his door and riffle through his wife's underwear. Did that make you worry about the weaponization of the DoJ?

Do you have any specific reason to think Bolton is being held to an unusual standard? My memory goes fuzzy, but I'm pretty sure a few generals or other high level political types have gone down for very similar behavior to what Bolton is alleged to have done over the last few administrations.

I genuinely still don't know why this is. Are the moderates leaving the site and losing interest, and all that's left is the bitterest remnant? My perception is that this seems to be broader than TheMotte, though. And my recollection of you, at least, is that you were fairly restrained in your rhetoric and beliefs.

Honestly, polarization spawns clicks and posts. Like I said in the beginning, I'm honestly pretty happy about how the country is going. I just don't feel the need to post about how I got what I voted for again. I just laugh at the meme and move on.

And I understand that the other side is going to be less than pleased with this turn of events.

Let me take a step back for a moment, and share a bit about where I'm coming from. Iirc, you and I are around the same age. I graduated high school just in time for Iraq, and that colored the hell out of my view of politics. I cut my teeth writing heated diatribes about Christian fundamentalists and neocon warmongers.

My tepid willingness to consider myself a Republican these days is mostly dependent on the fact that those factions lost, and the party was forcibly remade in a different image.

The Democrats now find themselves at an even starker crossroads. Their approval ratings are at historic lows and they are hemorrhaging voters. It's time for reevaluation and repositioning. For moderation. There have been a few gestures in that direction, but overall it looks like they're worse than doubling down. Beto is giving speeches about how the problem isn't that they support Unpopular Thing, but that they haven't been big enough assholes in their support of Unpopular Thing. And Trump has just been baiting the shit out of them, taking positions like "Crime is bad", and then watching them scramble over each other to claim the extremely bold "There is no crime and also all this crime is your fault" position.

I see videos of people who seem to think that the Ministry has fallen and Voldemort rules the land, genociding the Muggleborns... even as they feel emboldened to harass and attack federal law enforcement officers. If those people honestly think that the Biden administration was unacceptable generosity towards the outgroup, and that once they get into power it's time to be brutal and cruel...

And I do see many people openly calling for this.

On the plus side, I think/hope that the Democrats are going to spend the next 10 years in the political wilderness, and all their bloodthirst will amount to little.

But if I'm wrong, and their worse natures prevail, then yeah. I think that's potentially crossing the line where responses of a euphemistic variety go on the table.

Same reason I think we should be arming moderate rebels in the UK.

Secondly - much ado is made about the loss of faith in institutions over the last decade, but I have to admit the inverse is just as interesting to me. Why was faith in our institutions so high 50 years ago? Do you really think the government or New York Times were that much more honest with the plebs in the 70s than they are in the 2020s?

The NYT, no. The government, yes to an extent. In being less developed, it was less captured by people whose aim was power within the government over doing the government's job. I think there was more room for optimism then, regarding what could be accomplished by the hand of the state, and that a large portion of the lies we live under now came as a response to that optimism failing.

And if not, is faith in flawed institutions nevertheless adaptive for a society?

It's more general than that. One of our earliest social technologies was loyalty, because faith in an imperfect leader was better than no leader at all. But there does come a point where a terrible leader is so bad that your loyalty becomes maladaptive. The hard part is figuring out where that inflection point lies.

Hi, Chris! I hope life is going well for you.

It'd be better if Trump and China weren't busy spitroasting the biotech industry, but the home life makes up for it.

In fairness, a higher expectation for riots doesn't seem like an unreasonable prior just two years after the Summer of Love, even if it ended up being a false prediction.

And now you've updated your priors in the opposite direction, right? And false prediction is a fun euphemism for being wrong :)

Still, I don't think that's really a counter-example. The general response was still apoplectic rage, even if it didn't spill over into real violence, and kept itself to rhetoric and hostile personal encounters. My own mother blew up at me over it, even though she knows I'm personally pro-choice. Though that did give me an opportunity to gently explain that the reason she is a grandmother is because, as a man, I have literally no reproductive rights at all.

Somehow I doubted that you would. But you asked for instances where your tribe won without a corresponding escalation, or 'cheating' such that your side couldn't win. Your personal life notwithstanding, there was no supreme court stacking, there's been no widespread riots or criminal activity (Amusingly, there are more recorded instances of vandalism/violence against abortion clinics in the same timeframe than what you call low-grade domestic terrorism), conservatives took the W and moved on. In your words, 'it's been a fun year.' And yet, and yet, you still aren't happy.

As for your lack of reproductive rights, say you had those rights. Without knowing the specifics of your life, would you have grabbed your ex by the wrist and physically dragged her to the abortion clinic? Would you have held her down to dose her with abortifacients or undergo a surgical abortion? Or I guess just not have to pay child support? What does this world look like, where you have reproductive rights?

But in terms of the grace vs revenge scale, I don't think I've seen a single leftwinger say anything like "Look, the SC made their ruling and we have to accept that. Even Ruth said that Roe was on shaky legal ground. We should have expected this would happen, and better prepared for it. The issue has been sent back to the states, so let's focus on the state level and win as much as we can."

Coming back to your dichotomy of 'grace and forgiveness' versus 'punching back twice as hard,' I knew as soon gave any concrete example the goalposts would move from the latter to the former. If your expectation is 'my side wins and nobody on the other side says mean things' then you both have a long, unhappy life ahead of you and moreover, come nowhere close to living up to your own standard.

I think it's a bit early to call on most of this. But I don't see any tacit acceptance, or anyone saying "fair enough, we did try to bankrupt, jail and kill you, let's call it even". Instead most of the Democrats seem to be talking about how they've been playing nice up until now, and calling for the gloves to come off in a scorched earth war to the knife.

There has been tacit acceptance. Trump issued reams of EOs, gutted agencies, tariffs, pretty much whatever he wanted. There's no widespread unrest, no major congressional resistance (remember Schumer giving in on the budget because the alternative was worse?), no 'deep state' blocking his will.

And 'we' tried to kill Trump? Did 'you' shoot up that synagogue, or that church, or the wal-mart? Don't give me that nonsense. If you want to play that game, take responsibility for your own nutjobs first.

To be clear, I'm not saying the Republicans look particularly good under this light. A huge part of Trump's appeal is specifically that he's a Molotov cocktail thrown at norms and conventions that his supporters see as having been weaponized. He is the Devil turning round on you.

And democrats escalated, responding with their own molotov cocktail against norms and conventions, Joe Biden.

I sincerely don't think he was asking for what you think he was asking for. That line came at something like the 53rd minute of a conversation, and the whole prior discussion was Trump confidently insisting that an investigation would uncover large numbers of fraudulent votes. I don't think Trump is as dumb and blunt as many, but I do think it's more likely he was referring to that, as opposed to pivoting abruptly to overt requests for obvious crimes on a recorded line in front of multiple other people. If nothing else, that theory presumes that Trump believed that he truly lost Georgia and I don't think his ego would allow that.

I used to work for a guy who reminded me of Trump in some ways (insofar as I can know Trump from watching him on the television). He'd commit borderline research fraud, but do it in such a way that he kept his hands clean. Hey, I've got this great research idea! Go find the evidence for it. Oh, you've got 3 months worth of negative data? You must have fucked up the experiments! Go do them again and stop being so incompetent, I'm going to take you off the project and give it to a real scientist, etc etc etc. I know a lot of his old research is fraudulent, but when the chickens came home to roost he just said his postdoc fabricated the data.

If nothing else, Trump showed that the only check on a president's behavior is impeachment, and so long as the president is popular enough with their base, he can go shoot someone on fifth avenue and Republicans would say that guy had it coming and vote against it. Hell, Biden did too in the heady last month of his presidency when the pardon printer went brrrrr and the ERA suddenly passed. If Democrats elected left-wing Trump, I guarantee that you would absolutely lose your shit.

And really, it was for leaking classified documents, i.e. the exact same thing Trump had the DoJ kick down his door and riffle through his wife's underwear. Did that make you worry about the weaponization of the DoJ?

Frankly, and I'm surprised I've never seen this theory floated, I thought Trump intentionally broke a relatively benign rule that he knew would have to provoke a serious response from the feds. He'd keep himself in the news, get to complain about witch hunts for the next couple years and make it look like the feds were picking on him. It's probably what I would do were I playing the game.

Do you have any specific reason to think Bolton is being held to an unusual standard? My memory goes fuzzy, but I'm pretty sure a few generals or other high level political types have gone down for very similar behavior to what Bolton is alleged to have done over the last few administrations.

I don't, other than that it's suspicious when a government's legal system starts going after people the president is personally pissed off at. I'd give it a low probability of progressing, but it's not a great sign.

Let me take a step back for a moment, and share a bit about where I'm coming from. Iirc, you and I are around the same age. I graduated high school just in time for Iraq, and that colored the hell out of my view of politics. I cut my teeth writing heated diatribes about Christian fundamentalists and neocon warmongers. My tepid willingness to consider myself a Republican these days is mostly dependent on the fact that those factions lost, and the party was forcibly remade in a different image.

And we just had a long discussion about overturning Roe, the keystone project of Christian fundamentalists, that your party executed a plan over a decade or more. Tell me again how those factions have lost and millennial atheists are in the driver's seat? What fraction of voters in the Republican party today voted for Bush in 2000 and/or 2004?

The Democrats now find themselves at an even starker crossroads. Their approval ratings are at historic lows and they are hemorrhaging voters. It's time for reevaluation and repositioning. For moderation. There have been a few gestures in that direction, but overall it looks like they're worse than doubling down.

In 2008, Republicans got wrecked far worse than dems did in 2024. Word for word, what you just wrote applied to them 10x and was written about them as well. And then we all remember how they moderated, played nice with hispanics (muh demographic replacement) and that strategy paid off in 2016, right? Much as I'd like them to (and the Republicans as well!) it boggles my mind that you would look at the last ten years and say that moderation and saying nice things on camera wins you elections.

Sure, things don't look great for the dems today. But four years is a long time, and Trump's got plenty of opportunities to fuck it up. Either he's as successful as you think he'll be and I profit (at least if he stops fucking my industry), or he tanks babyface JD's chances for 2028 and dems win again.

But if I'm wrong, and their worse natures prevail, then yeah. I think that's potentially crossing the line where responses of a euphemistic variety go on the table. Same reason I think we should be arming moderate rebels in the UK.

Shooting people or waving guns around is the biggest own goal you can score, and will stay that way until the state has truly failed. And even if you win, what then? You're going to kick down every door with a pride flag on the lawn and shoot them, every registered democrat too, and then institute a police state to prevent wrongthink? These are all just childish fantasies. 150 million people disagree with you, and even if, as you like to say, 'we're the ones with the guns,' those people aren't just going to disappear. But by all means, talk more about euphemistic responses in public fora - I don't think it will help your cause.

Not to mention the juxtaposition of you ridiculing left-wingers for being scared of Republicans and a Trump administration while also 'darkly hinting' about 'euphemistic responses' is frankly hilarious.

The government, yes to an extent. In being less developed, it was less captured by people whose aim was power within the government over doing the government's job. I think there was more room for optimism then, regarding what could be accomplished by the hand of the state, and that a large portion of the lies we live under now came as a response to that optimism failing.

I'm skeptical that the government of 50 years ago was particularly honest or well-meaning (see: the Power Broker to start), and I wonder if it's more likely our environment changed. But I sure as hell don't have time to develop that idea in any meaningful way. /shrug

And now you've updated your priors in the opposite direction, right?

"It's difficult to predict when the Riot Party will riot" might not be as much of an update as you're looking for.

responding with their own molotov cocktail against norms and conventions, Joe Biden.

You seem to be joking here but have you already forgotten those psychotic blanket pardons?

You seem to be joking here but have you already forgotten those psychotic blanket pardons?

Referenced later on in the same post:

Hell, Biden did too in the heady last month of his presidency when the pardon printer went brrrrr and the ERA suddenly passed. If Democrats elected left-wing Trump, I guarantee that you would absolutely lose your shit.

The point stands. Even now, the typical angle of attack is 'senile admin run by the deep state' because that lands a lot closer to the mark for normies than radical leftist firebrand.

"It's difficult to predict when the Riot Party will riot" might not be as much of an update as you're looking for.

At a certain point, this level of cynicism and bitterness starts reflecting more on you than the people you hate. You, too, seem to be even angrier now that your star is ascendant.

More comments

As for your lack of reproductive rights, say you had those rights. Without knowing the specifics of your life, would you have grabbed your ex by the wrist and physically dragged her to the abortion clinic? Would you have held her down to dose her with abortifacients or undergo a surgical abortion? Or I guess just not have to pay child support? What does this world look like, where you have reproductive rights?

No, I think the only way to get close to parity given the biological realities is just allowing men the option to opt out of the legal responsibilities. But I thought I was being careful, I was just too much of a quokka to understand why a woman might lie about being "on birth control AND infertile". I was presented with the situation fait accompli and had my life thoroughly derailed. It doesn't match up to the body horror of having an unwanted entity growing inside you, but it's not nothing.

Coming back to your dichotomy of 'grace and forgiveness' versus 'punching back twice as hard,' I knew as soon gave any concrete example the goalposts would move from the latter to the former. If your expectation is 'my side wins and nobody on the other side says mean things' then you both have a long, unhappy life ahead of you and moreover, come nowhere close to living up to your own standard.

But that's what a reverent respect for norms as the highest value would actually look like. From the conservative perspective, that's basically what John McCain and Mitt Romney actually did, and that's why so many people picked Trump - because for all his flaws he's a fighter. Because no one (aside from maybe 4 civic religion fundamentalists and the older Republicans who were content to be corrupt Washington Generals) actually places norms and standards as their highest value.

Again, my objection is to the two-facedness of crying about norms and standards, while never actually prioritizing them when it would cost. It just comes off as concern trolling.

There has been tacit acceptance. Trump issued reams of EOs, gutted agencies, tariffs, pretty much whatever he wanted. There's no widespread unrest, no major congressional resistance (remember Schumer giving in on the budget because the alternative was worse?), no 'deep state' blocking his will.

Schumer did cave on the budget, not as an act of goodwill, but because a shutdown gave Trump even more power and authority. Meanwhile, every action you listed has been hit with an injunction from activist judges, often with no authority to do so, even after the SC smacked them down and told them to stop it. I don't deny that the Dems don't seem particularly effective in their opposition, aside from the rogue judges, but they still seem to mostly be in earlier stages of grief than acceptance.

And 'we' tried to kill Trump? Did 'you' shoot up that synagogue, or that church, or the wal-mart? Don't give me that nonsense. If you want to play that game, take responsibility for your own nutjobs first.

I do sincerely think there's a massive gap in how nutjobs are parsed. I would bet that 80%+ of Republicans would support putting a bullet in Dylan Roof Storm. OTOH, Mangione (who I think is an actual drug-addled nutjob, rather than any kind of ideologue) is openly lionized on the left. People wear shirts emblazoned with his face in public. In the wake of the most recent shooting, the response that I've seen on the Dem side is a blend of blaming Trump (ABC news had an amazing piece where they noted that "Trump's name was on one of the guns" without mentioning that the phrase on the gun was "K-ll D-nald T-ump"), mocking prayer, and freaking out over the possibility that people might try to have a conversation about the Venn overlap between trans, mental health, and violence that looks like it might be a Thing.

And democrats escalated, responding with their own molotov cocktail against norms and conventions, Joe Biden.

Eh. I think the calculations there are very different. Biden himself probably is a good standard bearer for the "norms and standards" crowd, or at least he would have been 10-15 years ago. Same as the Republicans I mentioned above, I don't think Biden has broad ideological commitments. I think he wanted to keep the boat steady and enjoy the kickbacks.

The people who made up his administration are a different story.

In 2008, Republicans got wrecked far worse than dems did in 2024. Word for word, what you just wrote applied to them 10x and was written about them as well. And then we all remember how they moderated, played nice with hispanics (muh demographic replacement) and that strategy paid off in 2016, right? Much as I'd like them to (and the Republicans as well!) it boggles my mind that you would look at the last ten years and say that moderation and saying nice things on camera wins you elections.

They very much did go for the Hispanic vote. That didn't pan out too well, but ironically, going absolutely ham on illegal immigration did seriously improve the Republican party's favorability with that demographic.

But let's look at the comparison of today's Rs with the ones from 20 years ago. Roe was overturned, and that was a major win for the religious right, but it's coming from a president who utterly refuses to pass national legislation on the topic, and openly talks about how a 6 week window "isn't enough weeks". The religious right "won", but at the cost of their party being forcibly dragged over towards the much more popular centrist position on the topic.

Gay marriage is not something that anyone anywhere in power on the right is willing to spend political capital to roll back.

They're much more opposed to foreign adventuring. No more Iraqs. No more Afghanistans. The neocons have flipped back to the Democrats as a more pliable vessel for warmongering.

It's not "saying nice things", but these are all significant motions back towards the center of the American Overton window.

Shooting people or waving guns around is the biggest own goal you can score, and will stay that way until the state has truly failed. And even if you win, what then? You're going to kick down every door with a pride flag on the lawn and shoot them, every registered democrat too, and then institute a police state to prevent wrongthink? These are all just childish fantasies. 150 million people disagree with you, and even if, as you like to say, 'we're the ones with the guns,' those people aren't just going to disappear. But by all means, talk more about euphemistic responses in public fora - I don't think it will help your cause.

No, you're mostly right. I don't give high odds of things ever getting that bad. I did try to phrase that carefully, as "if the worst of the worst comes to pass". If a future Democrat administration invites in a hundred million foreigners on welfare, and all but openly tolerates them raping my children while viciously repressing the native population, then yeah. But I don't think the version of the party that could do that is one that can win national elections in the first place.

Not to mention the juxtaposition of you ridiculing left-wingers for being scared of Republicans and a Trump administration while also 'darkly hinting' about 'euphemistic responses' is frankly hilarious.

I think a lot of Democrats believe the world we live in is as bad as the "worst case scenario" I outlined above. I often hear people talking about ICE snatching any random non-white person off the street to disappear them forever - this is a thing I literally hear from strangers. FEMA camps for queers are opening up any time now. Women are dying in droves because Roe was overturned, and they'll probably lose the right to vote soon. The economy is surely about to melt and all the poor people will starve. Millions of children have been stripped of healthcare, we murdered millions more in Africa by cutting US AID, etc, etc.

So many issues where the emotional rhetoric is starkly at odds with the facts on the ground. So many people openly wishing for violence about it, much more than I saw during the Biden administration from the other side.

I think there is a world of difference between believing that there are potential futures where political violence is acceptable or necessary, versus catastrophizing yourself into believing that we're already there by social media psychosis.

This is complicated even further by the "who has the guns" issue, as you noted. I think a lot of the left-wing psychosis and ideation is driven by a kind of general helplessness. Someone should be doing violence to save the innocent trans migrants, someone else. I think a major factor in why the rhetoric gets so heated and incendiary is because there's no thalamic outlet, just keyboard rage until exhaustion. Humans weren't evolved to handle that kind of stimulus. I think the right is less prone to that because there's at least some degree of awareness that the specific individual might actually have to do something, and because they're more likely to have a gym habit or manual job that offers endocrine catharsis. There's a reason this rhetoric stuff seems the worst with "disabled by mental illness" twenty-something NEETs, because they have the most frustrated energy.

Or maybe it's just a bubble, and I tend to see the worst in the outgroup and only pay attention to the parts of the right I find tolerable.

No, I think the only way to get close to parity given the biological realities is just allowing men the option to opt out of the legal responsibilities.

I'm fine with that in the abstract, although in terms of concrete details it seems like a system open to abuse. But I'm sorry you're in that situation, and I imagine you don't want to debate something so personal.

From the conservative perspective, that's basically what John McCain and Mitt Romney actually did, and that's why so many people picked Trump - because for all his flaws he's a fighter.

The bad thing about McCain and Romney is that they lost, and the good thing about Trump is that he won.

Not to mention it's easy to lionize men who never won the presidency and had to actually get their hands dirty.

OTOH, Mangione (who I think is an actual drug-addled nutjob, rather than any kind of ideologue) is openly lionized on the left.

You think Mangione doesn't have fans on the right? Are you telling me MAGA is a populist movement that loves CEOs of health insurance companies?

If a future Democrat administration invites in a hundred million foreigners on welfare, and all but openly tolerates them raping my children while viciously repressing the native population, then yeah.

For all the conservative memes mocking childless liberal women for their breathless, supposed erotic fixation on the Handmaid's Tale you have a shocking lack of awareness for similar fantasies on the right. There's this odd fetishism with home invaders and having to defend your family from the rapist hordes at the gates.

just keyboard rage until exhaustion

Isn't that the point of this place?

Why was faith in our institutions so high 50 years ago?

Because most of the senior people in US institutions at that time were rags-to-riches war heroes. There would have been people there that were literally born in a hole in the ground, and every single one of them would have experienced the Great Depression.

That sort of thing tends to bring... certain perspectives that most today lack: that without restraint, and conservation of the same political mechanisms that took them from rags to riches, it could all be destroyed if mismanaged. For instance, the hysteria over the uncommon cold would never have occurred with them in charge, because this actually did occur, twice, with flu viruses that were deadlier per capita than said cold.

The generation in charge now, in aggregate born in 1970, is past the cutoff point to have any memories of that; it's taken for granted. The opposition to their institutional prerogatives now is people directly made poorer due to their mismanagement, which is something the US has literally never had to deal with before.

Has Trump ever told his supporters to be nicer to Biden?

Well, there was that time after Jan 6, 2021 where he could have issued a blanket pardon to the meanest supporters he had [from the Blue viewpoint]. But he didn't do that, and once he left office it was open season with a de facto pardon issued to the meanest supporters Blue tribe had [from the Red viewpoint].

Doesn't matter, the response is only either gloating or increased pessimism.

I legitimately think that when reformers are empowered, and reform happens, that things improve. I think the efforts of Red tribe to end what is functionally slavery in Blue states should improve things for the native population, I think constraining the powers of the education-managerial complex [and forcing it to follow its own laws] is long overdue, I hope that reform continues (and believe that what has occurred over the last 6 months has been impressive) and hope the rest of the Western world starts following that example, though I acknowledge it will take them longer to do that due to never really having been Great in the first place that war-winning culture the US did all those years ago.

but can anyone name a single time Democrats opted for grace and forgiveness, for not "punching back twice as hard", for not "sending one of theirs to the morgue"?

This is quite easy. Unfortunately from the rest of your post I suspect you have quite a different standard of evidence than the plain meaning of your words as written. But here goes anyway. If your standard is, "John McCain telling his supporters to be less racist", then here is a symmetric example:

Former Vice President Joe Biden spoke out against the suppression of speakers and defended free speech during an event Tuesday with Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R.).

Speaking to an audience at his alma mater, the University of Delaware, Biden said shouting down speakers is "simply wrong." Biden noted that when he was going through college, free speech was also at the forefront but it was those on the left who were "shouted down when they spoke."

"Liberals have very short memories," Biden said. "I mean that sincerely."

Biden placed blame on those who have engaged in "violence" by stopping speakers from speaking.

https://freebeacon.com/issues/joe-biden-on-free-speech-liberals-have-very-short-memories/

That's actually a very good example. Thank you.

Pointed but fair, even the heated rhetoric at the end. I’ll clarify that blue/red tribalism changes the perception of the cooperative value lost in each defection, inflating the out-group’s tats and deflating the in-group’s tits.

If the average red-tribe American (citizens since their grandfathers’ time at least) have the perception that they’re being prevented as a class from getting jobs by blue-tribe HR choosing naturalized immigrants, H1B workers, or unnaturalized migrants, tit-for-tat looks like mass deportations. The blue-triber sees this as a massive escalation of defection against their in-group or favored far-group.

If the average red-triber sees their wages stagnant vs inflation since 2008, yet the lowest rung of blue-tribe government worker can buy a suburban house and pay “our” taxes for their kids’ soccer practice, tit-for-tat looks like mass firings of government regulators. The blue-triber sees this as a massive escalation of defection against the people keeping them safe from capitalist overreach.

And so on, and so on. Sure it’ll make the Whigs (the blue-tribe and grey-tribe Republicans who disproportionately make up the GOP’s donor class and elected representatives) take pause, but the red tribe can finally smile at the perception of having shaken off, or at least told off, their oppressors.

This is also what it looks like when the red tribe no longer sees the blue tribe as a far group but its outgroup.

This is a good point. I'd extend it even further. I think a lot of heat arises from the fact that news media brings political conflict right to our faces, but doesn't give an outlet that viscerally feels like retaliating.

I think this is a major cause of the phenomena of "progressive woman screams at her phone camera" videos. It's why people spiral deeper and deeper into violent ideation. If they redistrict us and then we redistrict them back, it just doesn't feel like a proper retaliation to an ape brain that expects retaliation to feel like knuckles violently impacting something. The endocrine response is just frustrated.

So we do a 2X tat, but it feels like a 0.1X tat, so we demand a 20X tat.

Multiple by emotional incontinence, mental illness, and arrested development.

(And if you opponent is playing y-tits-for-a-tat where y is slightly above 1, then your optimal strategy is to reduce x further such that xy<1).

If the opponent keeps increasing Y, and you sit there decreasing X in turn according to this rule, eventually you become cooperate-bot and the opponent turns into defect-bot.

Thus, the tit-for-tat strategy which (as I understand it) outperforms all others in iterated prisoner's dilemma.

Yep, plenty of people have already explained why their revenge narrative is justified through similar arguments.

What no one has actually tried to explain though is why doing bad and stupid policies is a useful tool for revenge still. No one has yet tried to explain why it is good for government to buy up and own private enterprise. To me, it's like seeing someone burn down your house and saying "I want revenge" and then throwing molotovs at your own house.

If we believed that small government hands off policies were best for the economy, for jobs, and for national wealth (as other conservatives were arguing for decades), then doing the opposite of that is throwing molotovs at our own house is it not? We should want our country to have a strong economy with lots of jobs and growing national wealth.

I can't comment on the specific tactical wisdom of Trump buying stakes in private enterprises. I'm not even persuaded that his motivation for doing so was anything as simple as "revenge" or "retaliation".

Given the structure of this deal (same money, equity instead of specific obligations), I suspect "making sure the Trump administration gets the credit" is the main thing here. And that's not revenge or retaliation, it's politics-as-usual.

(I don't think there actually will be any credit to hand out, though certainly Trump will claim it anyway)

No argument here: lots of MAGA types really are calling for their opponents' heads.

I do have an argument - that's what "dispassionately weighing up their options and reluctantly opting for tit-for-tat as the best of a bad bunch" looks like.

When Russia invaded and Ukrainians started referring to them as "orcs", that does not detract from their defense being a reluctant tit-for-tat. That sort of language is what you need to hype up a collective, and coordinate actual defense.

For clarity, when I said "no argument here", I meant that I wasn't disputing that many MAGA types are calling for their opponents' heads. My point is that I don't think this observation in and of itself disproves that MAGA types are making the game-theoretic-optimal choice at this point in the decision tree.

For a lot of political principles, you'll have a coalition made up of people who sincerely endorse that principle, and people who contingently endorse it so long as it's convenient for them and will abandon it at the drop of a hat when it no longer is. Annoyingly, the members of the latter group often masquerade as members of the former and even do such a good job that members of the former group are taken in by them.

I'm a principled free speech absolutist, as a consequence of which I sincerely believe that Mahmoud Khalil should be able to disseminate Hamas propaganda on college campuses without the federal government weighing down on him (or Kneecap waving Hezbollah flags, for that matter). During the period 2009-16 (and to a lesser extent 2021-24) I was under no illusions about the conservatives railing against "cancel culture": I knew full well that a significant proportion (perhaps even an absolute majority) had no interest in free speech as a general principle and just wanted to be the ones doing the cancelling. I'm old enough to remember when the boot was on the other foot and the Red Tribe held enough institutional power that the Dixie Chicks could face lost earnings owing to their criticisms of George Bush. It's a lonely life being a principled supporter of free speech: there aren't enough of us to be a real political movement on our own, so until a political leader comes along who shares our values, we're forced into alliances of convenience with whichever group isn't currently holding the whip: Democrats when Trump is in the White House, Republicans when Newsom is; Tories when Labour are in power, Labour when the Tories are. It's all the harder to be a free speech absolutist when prominent organisations which used to share our values (e.g. the ACLU) faced a choice between sticking to their guns and going under, or staying alive by skin-suiting themselves, and opted for the latter.

(I will cop to a bit of Schadenfreude about how short-sighted many of the arguments progressives were making in defense of censorship between 2009-16 were. I routinely pointed out that the "it's a private company, they can do what they want" argument was bound to come back to bite them in the ass sooner or later - this was several years before Musk's Twitter buyout. A lot of self-identified Marxists really do not seem to grasp the concept of the veil of ignorance.)

The Dixie Chicks were not cancelled in any meaningful sense. What happened to them was:

  • Their record label continued to sell their albums, and to fund the production of more albums
  • Their concert tour continued as scheduled. Extra security was provided in response to potential threats by disgruntled randos.
  • Some radio stations stopped playing their songs, others did not. At the time radio stations had very little concentrated ownership or control, apart from ClearChannel (which did not stop playing their songs).
  • The mainstream media was happy to give them multiple opportunities to air their views, including letting them appear naked on the cover of entertainment weekly
  • Some of their fellow artists supported them, others expressed disagreement and criticism
  • Some of their customers got angry and stopped purchasing their CDs
  • George Bush said they are and should be free to speak their mind

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Chicks_comments_on_George_W._Bush

Pretty much any cancelled conservative would have been extremely happy to receive this treatment. From what I can tell, George Bush is right - this is basically how freedom of expression should work. Say what you want but don't complain about a moderate decrease in sales.

For comparison, Milo was:

  • Banned from all major social media (which didn't really exist at the time of the Dixie Chicks controversy)
  • Had his books cancelled
  • His speaking appearances were cancelled by institutional gatekeepers, with threats by disgruntled randos occasionally cited as a pretext
  • Mainstream media did not give him high profile appearances where he could express his views or defend himself

Kanye suffered all this, in addition to having his bank accounts closed (retaliation for saying Jews control the banks, which they obviously don't).

I agree with your general point, but Milo's problem in particular was that he alienated his base with his comments about homosexuality age-gap

so until a political leader comes along who shares our values, we're forced into alliances of convenience with whichever group isn't currently holding the whip [...] Tories when Labour are in power, Labour when the Tories are

Unnecessary. Both Tories and Labour back the OSA. Reform oppose the OSA.

Yeah, not an ideal example I must admit.

a choice between sticking to their guns or going under

Sorry for the nitpick but I think you phrased this backwards.

I'm old enough to remember when the boot was on the other foot and the Red Tribe held enough institutional power that the Dixie Chicks could face lost earnings owing to their criticisms of George Bush.

Ever notice that this is the only example the left ever brings up that's newer than McCarthy?

And it's still nonsense. The Dixie Chicks were "cancelled" for actions done as professionals in the job for which they were "cancelled". There wasn't social media back then, but the equivalent to cancellation would be if they were overheard by a reporter making some anti-American comment while eating lunch, and this got reported worldwide, and they lost their job for it. Or if someone dug out some ten year quote they made in their school newspaper which could be vaguely interpreted as not liking America and they were fired for that.

The reason people got upset about the Dixie Chicks being "cancelled" is that they made their anti-Bush comments to a different audience, and they didn't expect their normal audience to find out about it. This often worked back then, but when it didn't, tough luck--they weren't actually speaking privately just because they wanted it concealed from the wrong audience.

A different audience in Europe. London, specifically.

This particular myth tends to annoy me a great deal, because it's a perfect encapsulation of a tactic I've seen displayed by left-leaning types time and time again - the constant, insistent urge to drag politics into areas that it doesn't really belong(ie, entertainment).

This wasn't Cancel Culture. It was a masks-off moment for a bunch of grifting entertainers that were trying to belong to the Cool Kids Club. Surprise, surprise, the group that made them popular from the start didn't take well to being grifted.

You're right, thank you.

A lot of self-identified Marxists really do not seem to grasp the concept of the veil of ignorance.)

You don't understand Marxism. This here was written by a guy who was a respected and prominent Trotskyist in 1930s.

NON-COMMUNISTS HAVE OFTEN upbraided communists for what are alleged to be gross inconsistencies in communist behavior. The charge goes as follows: You communists call for a maximum of free speech, free press, free assembly and other civil rights in the United States and other non-communist countries; but inside the countries where communists are in power you have suppressed, or virtually suppressed, all these rights. You uphold the right to strike in non-communist countries, and very often exercise that right in practice when you are in control of trade unions; but in the communist countries it is criminal, in some cases a capital crime, to strike or merely advocate striking.

If you were able to understand the historical dialectic—which, since you are not a communist, you cannot really do: only the living practice of communism makes possible a genuine understanding of the theory of communism—you would realize that there are no inconsistencies. In every case the seeming contradictories, in the reality of time and history, reinforce each other and fuse their dynamism into a synthesis at a higher historical level. The communist camp is the thesis which represents the historical interests of the revolution, therefore of peace, freedom, justice, well-being, and the future of mankind in the coming epoch of a truly human history. Anything that strengthens the communist camp is right and just and good. In the present transitional era of world struggle, of wars and revolutions, the use of civil rights inside the communist camp to publicize opposition to the line of the Party and the revolution would only express the intrusion of counterrevolutionary influences, of capitalist hangovers and imperialist interventions; the proper purpose of public speech and assembly is to support, strengthen and improve the work of the revolution, not to sabotage it.

Is there a source for this quote somewhere I can find?

It's copied straight out of a pirated copy of 'Suicide of the West' by James Burnham I got from Anna's Archive.

"Look what you made me do" - man doing what he was going to do anyway. The thing about unprincipled people is that they think everyone else is just like them and that principles are for suckers. There are enough other unprincipled people that it's extremely easy to sustain this belief even in the face of clear evidence that you're well below average in terms of behavior simply by telling yourself others would do it if they could.

Why political revenge narratives don't make sense to me.

Political revenge narratives make more sense if you consider them as a gloss on crude dominance seeking. You can't just come out and say "I enjoy having power over my enemies" because you'll scare your less dominance-oriented political allies (who may start to wonder when the jackboot is coming down on their face). Framing it as revenge lets you justify it as a balancing of the scales - both punishment for misbehavior and a necessary reminder of why you shouldn't be fucked with. Actual misbehavior or unbalanced scales somewhere between optional and a negative.

"Look what you made me do" - man doing what he was going to do anyway.

This definitely seems to be the main explainer, but it seems to be missing something. No reply has yet even tried to explain why government needs to buy up and own private enterprise, something you would expect them to be able to do if they truly believed it was a beneficial and sound policy and were going to do it anyway.

So what's the motivator there then? I think some of it is just circling the wagons, a generic ex post facto justification for decisions that they otherwise would find alarming and dangerous for big government to do.

I don't think the Intel deal ties into the revenge narrative except insofar as Trump's supporters have extended him near-infinite deference in exchange for promises of vengeance against the libs. (More generally, the fact that conservative voters tend to be more tribal and less ideological gives the Big Men a lot more freedom to act out of bounds)

This is politics. Principles are objectively for suckers.

You even evidence why: there are vast quantities of people who will defect, which makes being a cooperate-bot a terrible strategy.

If you don't tit for tat you just end up in the grave with Thomas More, Pompey and Alexander Kerensky. Though what an honorable grave it is. The best.

Principles are objectively for suckers.

This is by definition a subjective, not an objective, topic. There can't be an objective evaluation of what values one should hold.

Instrumentality is an objective metric.

What ought to be done is subjective. What can be done is objective.

My point, and Machiavelli's, is that a certain conduct is necessary to attain and retain power in the first place, independently of one's ultimate aims. Making it a necessary precondition to the enactment of any political program.

Whether one should engage in politics is a subjective question, but once one answers yes, the requirements placed on one are the same regardless of ideology. And they include the necessity to destroy one's enemies that they may not rally against one.

I'll agree that effectiveness can be objectively measured. But "principles are for suckers" isn't a statement on effectiveness, it's a value judgement of what a person should do. Thus, it is not (and can't be) objective.

A "sucker" is a victim of one's own credulity or benevolence. This is an objective category in instrumental terms. A cooperate-bot in a population that contains defectors is a sucker, this is not a value judgement, it's a purely analytic statement of fact.

You either are putting yourself at the mercy of your enemies thereby threatening your ability to effect your agenda or you are not.

You can only argue this is subjective if you're willing to say that engaging in effective politics is not your goal, which is axiomatically excluded from this discussion given effective politics is the topic.

A cooperate-bot in a population that contains defectors is a sucker, this is not a value judgement, it's a purely analytic statement of fact.

No, this is a value judgement. Perhaps you mean it as an analytic statement of fact, but that is not what "sucker" means. It is purely a derogatory statement about one's belief that someone is foolish.

From Merriam-Webster:

sucker

5.a : a person easily cheated or deceived

From Oxford:

sucker noun

(informal) a person who is easily tricked or persuaded to do something

I think my usage is perfectly appropriate. But it's not like I've made a mystery of what I meant. You certainly seem to have understood it.

More and Pompey didn't lose by playing cooperatebot against defectbot.

More never tried to fight the Reformation Parliament and the Succession Oath - it was as obvious to him as it was to everyone else that with the King's mind made up there was nothing to fight. Saint Thomas More was playing a different game, with the only prize worth having in his estimation not being of this world, so he decided that martyrdom was a better alternative to going along to get along.

I'm not going to litigate which of Pompey and Caesar defected first, but at the critical decision point they are both all-in on defection - Pompey just lost the resulting war.

Pompey’s side defected 80 years earlier when they beat the Tribune of the Plebs to death with table legs, committing what was in the Roman worldview both treason and blasphemy. Then they spent most of the next century being shocked at the succession of demagogues who were suddenly willing to break all sorts of political norms, for some unknown reason.

I'm not going to litigate which of Pompey and Caesar defected first

Because you bloody well know that there are many points in the First Triumvirate where he could have crushed Caesar who had demonstrated his danger to him but let his friendship and honor get in the way. A courtesy that Caesar did not pay him later, except perhaps posthumously.

Saint Thomas More was playing a different game

To be sure, but once again it is politics we are talking about, not Godliness. His martyrdom did not change England's course.

Note that tit-for-tat recommends cooperating until you are defected against. If there's no first defecter, cooperate-bot and tit-for-tat produce identical behaviour.

Of course. And the iterated prisoner's dilemma is a limited model anyways.

But do you really doubt the existence of prior defection in American politics at this point?

No, of course not, I was only speaking hypothetically.

It essentially implies the difference between the right wing and left wing argument about things are about morals and not about the effectiveness of policy or economic ideas for the good of our country and our citizens.

It seems to me that people who have adopted what you label "revenge narratives" generally no longer believe that there is such a thing as "our country" or "our citizens". Certainly I do not.

If "your rules fairly" includes doing things that you think are stupid, inefficient, counter-productive and extra prone to corruption then doing it back would be strange.

Forming, equipping, and paying a police force is "stupid, inefficient, counter-productive, and prone to corruption" in a number of ways. It's just that it's less stupid, inefficient, counter-productive, and prone to corruption than not having police, given the situation we find ourselves in. If the situation were different, police might not be worth it. But it isn't, so they are.

After all if you care about the country, I would assume you want good and effective policy.

Leaving aside the questionable existence or identity of "the country", sure, everyone wants "good and effective policy". What are their goals, though? What's the situation? What's the problem that needs solving? Different answers to those questions lead to very different answers to which policies are "good and effective".

Let's take a concrete example. I used to be very concerned about government spending and the national debt. I thought that it was very important that we get this spending under control, and bring the debt down. This was part of the basis for my voting for George W Bush in 2000. But Bush then blew the budget out funding the war on terror, and then Obama (who I also voted for) blew the budget out even worse (to my recollection, corrections welcome) with his various domestic and foreign policies. Voting for fiscal responsibility did not actually secure fiscal responsibility.

Moreover, it's concretely evident that government spending domestically has positive first-order, short term effects for the places and people receiving the money, and thus purchases votes/political power. Even if the long-term effects are postulated to be net-harmful, there is no mechanism available to prove it sufficiently persuasively to offset the votes/political power gain it offers. Partisans are therefore incentivized to spend public money when they are in power, receiving concrete benefits for themselves and their allies in exchange for costs that are diffuse, delayed, and socialized to everyone. And in fact, the entire history of government spending shows exactly what one would expect if one formed their priors off this model. Given that this history is varied and quite long, there is no reason to expect it to change to any significant degree without heroic sacrifice or terrible disaster.

Now, you might say "but if you believe this, then Heroic Sacrifice is the right thing to do!" ...And if such a sacrifice would actually fix the problem, that would be a solid argument. But if party A commits this great sacrifice, they will be less popular, because people won't be getting paid government money any more, and will be mad about it. Then party B is free to promise to resume or even increase spending, win the election, do so, and then win the next election too, and now the problem is the same or even worse. Nor would it matter how many times A repeated the heroic sacrifice; B is strongly incentivized to defect. And if this is even an approximately accurate model of our situation, then it is obvious that there is no benefit to being the "party of fiscal responsibility", when your opposition can simply squander whatever you have saved when it's their turn in power.

I observe that previous governments, Democrat and Republican, have chronically failed to exercise fiscal responsibility. I observe that attempting fiscal responsibility now will cost significant votes and political power, which will naturally flow to the fiscally-irresponsible. Therefore, I conclude that while I would strongly prefer fiscal responsibility, there is no way to get there from here, and so I abandon this as a political goal because it does not appear to be practically achievable. Therefore, I no longer care about fiscal responsibility or the debt, and I apportion my political priorities and values to areas where victory seems more probable.

Now, my guess is that the above doesn't make sense to you. But you're free to give it a think and tell me where you think I've gone wrong, specifically.

If you see the left's policy ideas as bad and harmful to our future, it's not a great idea to join in on the self-harm.

As you may be aware, prior to the outbreak of World War II, politicians from a number of countries mutually recognized that arms races between the various political powers were a stupid waste of everyone's resources, and attempted to prevent such contests through diplomacy. The Washington Naval Treaty was a product of this thinking. And yet, war broke out anyway, and once war broke out, all sides abandoned the limitations of the treaty and began building warships as big and as quickly as they possibly could, accelerating the arms race as never before.

Now, hadn't we all agreed that naval arms races were stupid and counter-productive, and what we actually wanted was not to build warships, but to give our citizens medicine and education and good roads and electricity? Obviously so! We (as you say) wrote a treaty and signed it! Weren't the Americans and the British upset that Germany and Japan were building bigger ships than the treaty allowed? Absolutely! They were extremely upset about this, and said so very loudly and at considerable length!

And yet, America and England turned right around and began building their own warships, also bigger than the treaty allowed! Didn't they understand that Germany and Japan were wasting money on these stupid ships, and the best thing to do would be to hold to their principles and not waste their own money on stupid ships the same way? Why do you suppose that America and England fell for this "revenge narrative", reversed course, and did exactly the thing they'd previously promised in writing not to do? Is this as confusing to you as the questions you pose above? If not, why not?

Unless you're a traitor and hate the country, you would be pushing for what you think is the best policy.

"the best policy" is drastically underspecified.

The best policy if I were the immortal God King, whose very word is law?
The best policy that I can get the nation to vote for on the election next Tuesday?
The best policy I can convince one of the two major parties to support?
The best policy, even if it has modulo-zero chance of being implemented or succeeding?
The best policy, even if it harms you and helps your enemies?
These are all different policies.

This is part of why principled groups can stay principled so easily.

Others have asked you why the ACLU failed, and it seems to me that your replies have been flippant. You claim that over a century, any organization will change as people come and go. But the ACLU did not change over a century. It had a very solid reputation for a specific set of principles as recently as 2010, and by 2016 that reputation was utterly demolished. If you believe that principled groups can stay principled easily, you need to explain how the ACLU maintained its principles for many decades in a row, and then lost them completely in less than one.

An organization like FIRE truly believes that free speech is beneficial.

And yet, the evidence has shown that they cannot prevent endemic free speech violations, nor even significantly impede them. When it mattered, they could not protect my speech in any meaningful sense, nor will they be able to do so in the future. Their impact is, to a first approximation, theoretical. The model they operate off, where only government speech controls impinge on the first amendment, is a suicide pact that I respectfully decline to involve myself in.

I value free speech because I wish to be able to speak as freely as possible. FIRE has not and very likely will not made any appreciable progress toward securing that goal. Supporting Trump has done far, far more, so I will continue to support Trump.

Counter to this, the "revenge" narrative comes off like the advocates never believed the words they were saying.

Perhaps you are correct, and this is how the narrative really does sound to a thoughtful, well-informed neutral party. Alternatively, perhaps it only sounds this way to people like those you present yourself as: young, naïve and lacking both crucial historical perspective and formative life experience, dismissive of both contrary evidence and contrary perspectives, certain that they alone hold the answers to all life's questions. Many of us were that way, once, but I find that persuading such people is both difficult and generally unproductive. If you are as you claim to be, you'll understand in time.

It seems to me that people who have adopted what you label "revenge narratives" generally no longer believe that there is such a thing as "our country" or "our citizens". Certainly I do not.

Well if you're no longer loyal to the nation that's up to you. But America is still my home and I want what's best for us and the citizenship.

Forming, equipping, and paying a police force is "stupid, inefficient, counter-productive, and prone to corruption" in a number of ways. It's just that it's less stupid, inefficient, counter-productive, and prone to corruption than not having police, given the situation we find ourselves in. If the situation were different, police might not be worth it. But it isn't, so they are.

Ok so having a police force isn't stupid, inefficient and counterproductive then. If you truly believe that the shifts on conservative policy are the same, then why not explain them on the merit?

Instead of "government has to own businesses because libs", you could explain how government owning businesses and directing corporate policy across the nation now improves the health of the economy after decades of conservatives saying big government and socialist control are bad the same way you can explain how police are good.

I observe that previous governments, Democrat and Republican, have chronically failed to exercise fiscal responsibility. I observe that attempting fiscal responsibility now will cost significant votes and political power, which will naturally flow to the fiscally-irresponsible. Therefore, I conclude that while I would strongly prefer fiscal responsibility, there is no way to get there from here, and so I abandon this as a political goal because it does not appear to be practically achievable. Therefore, I no longer care about fiscal responsibility or the debt, and I apportion my political priorities and values to areas where victory seems more probable.

Not pursuing something you find untenable as a policy goal is understandable. But do you now believe that ever growing debt is a good thing? Do you now believe our growing borrowing is a smart long term fiscal decision?

If you don't think you can convince other Americans to care at all it makes sense to give up, but it wouldn't make sense to change your mind just because of that.

And yet, the evidence has shown that they cannot prevent endemic free speech violations, nor even significantly impede them. When it mattered, they could not protect my speech in any meaningful sense, nor will they be able to do so in the future. Their impact is, to a first approximation, theoretical.

You're right, random civil rights organizations can not do much in the face of a population that keeps voting for and pushing for anti free speech politicians. In this same way they will have meaningful wins here and there against Trump, but ultimately unless we can get the population on board with traditional civil liberty and the first amendment, government suppression of speech will continue to grow.

The model they operate off, where only government speech controls impinge on the first amendment, is a suicide pact that I respectfully decline to involve myself in.

That's how the founding fathers set up our system, were they suicidal? No, they were forward looking revolutionary heroes. Their primary concern is government, and even today governments across the world are the most serious form of censorship. If you don't believe that, you can go look at other countries and you'll find it's government suppression of speech in Russia, in China, in North Korea, in pretty much every single dictatorship. Even in the freer nations, crackdowns on speech like the recent UK bill are government done.

The government is neither owning intel, nor directing policy there. The government is owning ten percent of intel’s stock and voting with the board of directors.

That’s perfectly reasonable as a condition of government grants(which were already going). This way the government at least gets dividend revenue.

The government is neither owning intel, nor directing policy there. The government is owning ten percent of intel’s stock and voting with the board of directors.

What do you think stock is? It's literally part ownership.

And Intel's SEC filings even acknowledge the problems with it https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0000050863/000005086325000129/intc-20250822.htm

It dilutes shares of existing stockholders, limit their ability to pursue future transactions that benefit the other shareholders, hurt their ability to operate internationally as a (now) government owned corporation.

And in the obvious issues that successful competitors like NVIDIA and AMD will have a tougher time dealing with a government that has direct financial stake into Intel.

Good and effective politics necessitates revenge. Total revenge in fact.

This can be easily demonstrated as long as one is willing to admit that politics, as a phenomenon, has instrumentally nothing to do with the enactment of some transcendental moral ordering, and everything to do with the accrual and maintenance of power.

Principled agents are bad politicians: they will sacrifice what is necessary on the altar of their principle, and thus be outmaneuvered by less scrupulous agents. Their principles will be subverted by their enemies and become the instrument of their demise.

This is most famously evidenced by Machiavelli in The Prince, from whom we can draw on the necessity of revenge:

So it should be noted that when he seizes a state the new ruler must determine all the injuries that he will need to inflict. He must inflict them once for all, and not have to renew then every day, and in that way he will be able to set men's minds at rest and win them over to him when he confreres benefits. Whoever acts otherwise, either through timidity or bad advice, is always forced to have a knife ready to his hand and he can never depend on his subject because they, suffering fresh and continuous violence, can never feel secure with regard to him.

It is timidity you advocate here, a timidity which only causes more bloodshed.

Machiavelli of course had his share of historical examples of this, such as the successful pacification of Romagna which was enabled by Cesare Borgia's cruelty. But we may draw very large numbers of examples from both ancient and contemporary history.

Roosevelt, Mustapha Kemal, Lee Kwan Yew, Peron, Stalin, Abraham Lincoln, Mao Zedong, Charles de Gaulle, Margaret Thatcher, Konrad Adenauer, every successful politician follows a similar trajectory that has them reward their friends and punish their enemies, with what you call "principle" and "policy" being an instrumental concern or a long term vision to rally around rather than the grunt work.

It's the inflexible will to power and the dirty hands that result from it that makes one successful in politics, which is why so many of the people I just listed have "Iron" associated nicknames and quotes.

So if you are genuinely asking yourself what is effective, ideological inflexibility is essentially the first thing to ditch.

Liberals used to understand this, which is why they were very much ready to break their own rules so long as it would enable a larger victory. But you've grown in a world where these people won so long ago that their principles are the background radiation of your morality, much like Christianity was to the people Machiavelli was trying to instruct.

You can either accept that politics is a dirty game and all your fanciful conceptions of rights and liberties and fairness will be muddied if you are to secure anything; or you can lose.

Of course accepting this isn't incompatible with a desire and ability to enact good government that manifests those principles at least somewhat, but none of it will ever be pure, and you have to make peace with that.

Power always corrupts, but that also means the innocent is powerless.

Ok, you still haven't addressed a single actual point as to why doing bad counterproductive and harmful policy to the US makes sense as a form of vengeance, just keep justifying that you want revenge.

counterproductive and harmful policy to the US makes sense as a form of vengeance

That probably has something to do with the fact that, while you have provided examples that you call "principled", you've largely handwaved the "revenge" assertions you've made.

Perhaps provide some more concrete examples in an edit to OP?

That probably has something to do with the fact that, while you have provided examples that you call "principled", you've largely handwaved the "revenge" assertions you've made.

I did provide examples of non traditionally conservative ideas. It includes things like government nationalizing various companies (something they are apparently considering doing more), and protectionism.

I don't want revenge.

In fact I fully understand that it actively degrades the commons and that forgiveness is a higher principle.

I just want you to understand that it is required by "good and effective politics". Without that understanding it's impossible to entertain what forms of reconciliation are even possible.

The specific context which inspired his post is Trump doing stuff like buying the government a 10% share in Intel and some people justifying this with "your rules, fairly > your rules, unfairly". I'm pretty sure this isn't even Trump trying to "use left-wing tactics against them" or anything, it doesn't accomplish anything partisan. Trump just genuinely believes in a bunch of left-wing policy positions like opposition to free trade and government ownership of companies. How does "spend political capital to achieve left-wing policy goals (and take the blame when they fail)" accomplish any of what you're saying?

Principled agents are bad politicians: they will sacrifice what is necessary on the altar of their principle, and thus be outmaneuvered by less scrupulous agents. Their principles will be subverted by their enemies and become the instrument of their demise.

I've been noticing the exact opposite problem on the internet lately, where people are so eager to throw away principles for the sake of spite that they aren't stopping to ask questions like "Is this just helping the people I'm trying to be spiteful towards at my own expense?". For instance I've seen several cases where SJWs censored something and there were comments kneejerk supporting it as "what goes around comes around" because they somehow misinterpreted which side the censorship was coming from. If you don't have principles besides "oppose the enemy", and also you don't understand what your enemy believes, it's pretty easy to end up supporting the enemy against your own side. After all, people understand their own positions better, so if you treat "this violates our principles" as a sign of insufficient commitment against the enemy you've given up your main indicator and all that's left is understanding your enemy so well that you hopefully notice before you end up accidentally supporting them.

How does "spend political capital to achieve left-wing policy goals (and take the blame when they fail)" accomplish any of what you're saying?

I think it's an ideological move that doesn't help Trump's position, so I don't think it's good politics. It's spending political capital on something that could be better allocated, on my opinion, but far from me to tell Americans how to spend their infinite debt. Exchanging worthless paper for Intel stock might well be a good deal.

I'm commenting on the general idea that ideological principles should guide politics instead of pragmatic coalition building, which is a loser's position by any objective metric. And thus undesirable even to the ideologue, insofar as he's sincere.

people are so eager to throw away principles for the sake of spite that they aren't stopping to ask questions like "Is this just helping the people I'm trying to be spiteful towards at my own expense?"

People are just growing up from the follies of the 1990s now that the chickens have come home to roost. Awaking from a slumber, if you will.

You'll notice I don't advocare pettiness or impotent spite here. Only total annihilation. Anything less is actually a waste of good lives.

If you don't have principles besides "oppose the enemy", and also you don't understand what your enemy believes, it's pretty easy to end up supporting the enemy against your own side

Of course, and the lesson here is that you need to know your enemy and know yourself. Not that principles should get in the way of doing what is right.

Ideological purity is a broken compass that doesn't provide a substitute for true knowledge of one's own tendencies and that of one's enemies. It's not the loss you think it is.

Observe everything, admire nothing.

Not that principles should get in the way of doing what is right.

This is a baffling sentence. How do you define "principle", if not a belief about "what is right"?

It's a paraphrase of Isaac Asimov. But I can elaborate of course.

Pragmatists like Willard Van Orman Quine hold that language is not reality but a model of reality, which makes any logically constructed principle or ideology an inherently imperfect tool to observe, predict and interact with the world.

Principles are a map of morality rather than its territory, insofar as one regards morality to be an inherent property of the world rather than a logically constructed proposition in itself (but then that that opens itself to Nietzschean skepticism).

Correct conduct may therefore be at odds with what is logically prescribed by principle in the real world. We most often call this "paradox".

Well known examples of this often quoted in this utilitarian neighborhood include the mere addition paradox or the paradox of hedonism. But this imperfection is a general property of all theories, not just moral or political ones.

Hence, any reasonable political actor, who actually has to enact his moral ideas in this imperfect real world may have to encounter the difficulties of his ideological framework when confronted with the real workings of the world, and if he is to succeed he will have to make compromises. After immediate collectivization failed, Lenin enacted the NEP even though it's totally against Marxist principles in theory. Yet can we really say that Lenin was not a Marxist?

You're right. Revenge is bad and unprincipled. I stand ready to applaud your valiant and arduous efforts to convince the Democrats to not seek retaliation or revenge after what gets done to them over the next 3.5-12 years, and to lash them with scathing criticisms for every hypocritical turn.

Just point us to where you're doing that. I'm eager to start applauding.

I've gotten testy on this topic here before. Maybe to you. Maybe to an old alt of yours, or someone else. But I'm going to be real with you dawg. Really, really-real. Ready?

If you want to argue for disarmament and cooperation, you have to already have a plausible commitment from your own side.

That's table stakes. That's the cover charge at the door before you even get to enter the building where the table is. Non-negotiable. Because without that, you're just a fool walking up to an enemy army (while your own stands battle-ready, blades still wet with the lifeblood of wounded POWs) and asking them why they insist on fighting. The audacity is just breathtaking.

And I notice, because of course I do, that no one ever, ever, ever, ever, ever makes this argument at Democrats. That they should just stop fighting, because fighting and defection is bad. None of the examples in this post are Democrats leaning into a revenge narrative. Even though that's functionally their entire pathos at the moment, with the calls to counter-gerrymander even harder and apply nebulous violence to all ICE agents.

Can you draft up a letter to Gavin Newsome, explaining that he's being a hypocritical, unprincipled fool?

Are you aware that you won't even try? I honestly wonder how cynical these takes are. Is this the work of Grimma Wormtongue? Or just Retarded Rose Tico?

Because in the real world of Iterated Prisoner's Dilemmas between actual factions that have their own beliefs and minds and aren't just going to be Jedi Mind Tricked into suicide, tit-for-tat is a generally optimal policy. Revenge is a fully sufficient justification when you don't want people to hurt you again, and you don't have a trustworthy arbiter to seek justice on your behalf.

And the way your faction approaches this instead, is something like insane demon logic. When someone chooses to cooperate, progressives defect against them with savage malice. And when someone defects, progressives choose to cooperate (with other people's money).

Slave Morality risen to halls of power, laureled in madness.

So please, show me any sign that someone on the other side is willing to take an L for the sake of peace. Because if you're not even capable of waving a truce flag when you come make the breathtakingly audacious demand for disarmament, then the response need not be civil.

Wow. First of all that’s mighty quick to jump to “sides”. Democrats aren’t a monolith, nor Republicans, and neither are Trumpists - not even within his own administration.

Second, I think you’re misrepresenting the game theory. It’s been a while, but I’m pretty sure that “generous tit for tat” usually wins in the situation most like US politics (you copy the last move of the other side, but occasionally show forgiveness - note that tit for tat also allows chained cooperation, so it’s not infinite revenge). Of course it’s highly dependent on the situation and population of other players, so you’re overstating your case anyways.

Third, you’re misrepresenting Democrats. “When they go low we go high” was the motto for quite a while. You can make a good case it was never this rosy but many felt that way. In that respect Newsom’s actions are a half anomaly and not universally supported to boot (though anti-gerrymandering is not a partisan issue; even my home state of Utah passed a ballot measure for independent redistricting, though the legislature has tried to nuke it).

A better model of Democrats - at least as far as you can consider them united, as disclaimed - is that they are pro-rule of law or “norms”, but frequently break those norms just a little bit (eg federal judges without 60) and then go all surprised face when Republicans decide it’s open season and blow by whatever excuse/reasoning they gave (eg SC without 60). That is, Democrats are broadly reasonable but also guilty of first small steps, but Republicans are guilty of escalation. Which is worse? Eh. Depends on what you view as the normal population of game theory players! Which is debatable, not fact. Though I’d be interested to hear you actually put some reasoning to your claim.

We do have some polling data that might be helpful. Source. When Democratic voters were asked about how acceptable gerrymandering is, 70% say never (9% in retaliation only, 7% it’s normal, 14% not sure). When asked if they would gerrymander California in response to Texas, 63% say yes (18% no, 14% not sure). With some reasonable assumptions that implies about half of the Democratic electorate are hypocrites.

That’s a little depressing until you recall that this isn’t too uncommon when an abstract principle collides with a concrete example. Affordable housing advocates often turning into NIMBYs, deficit hawks suddenly balking at actual cuts, or Trump supporters who claim to value personal character, the list goes on. Ideally those of us here aren’t actually playing these games and say what we mean while thinking about the implications before blanket claims, but people are people and confirmation bias/selective attention are potent sociopolitical drugs.

The final issue that I think is a latent one lurking behind this disagreement is this: how many politicians genuinely believe what they preach, vs how many are simply milking a character or playing chameleon just to get reelected (or self-enrich)?

I find the answer to that latter question has a very broad spread, and if two people don’t agree on a common answer you get accusations of bad faith or poor reasoning because of the implications of your answer on the political process.

“When they go low we go high” was the motto for quite a while

It was a nice thing Michelle Obama said, not something that any Democrat that mattered actually did.

“When they go low we go high” was the motto for quite a while.

I would love to hear some specific examples of occasions on which Democrats went high while the Republicans were going low during the Obama administration.

Obama-Trump transition of power. Obama’s (non)response to birtherism. I actually think the first impeachment was a relatively fair process (though I wish they had waited a little longer for more testimony). On the whole Obama’s response to tea party waves, you lie, etc wasn’t too apocalyptic and he did attempt some bipartisan working during the ACA stuff (failed but he tried). I think he also was criticized by fellow Dems for not escalating debt ceiling fights too?

Obama-Trump transition of power.

You mean the transition of power where, upon Trump's election, Obama immediately directed the federal government to investigate bullshit claims that Trump was secretly a Russian asset, with the explicit goal of having him impeached on that basis? "We go high", indeed.

Obama-Trump transition of power.

You mean the way one ordered the FBI to spy on the other, hoping he'd find something disqualifying?

So, they only broke the norms a bit by removing Trump from the ballot and charging him with a hundred felonies?

Sure, I say only remove half of them from the ballot and charge the Democrats with eighty felonies each. Let's de-escalate this shit!

Wow. First of all that’s mighty quick to jump to “sides”.

Eh, maybe. But like I said, this pricked a bugbear that I've been on about on numerous occasions before.

Second, I think you’re misrepresenting the game theory. It’s been a while, but I’m pretty sure that “generous tit for tat” usually wins in the situation most like US politics (you copy the last move of the other side, but occasionally show forgiveness - note that tit for tat also allows chained cooperation, so it’s not infinite revenge).

No, you're correct on the theoretical game theory. I just can't think of a time in American politics in the last few decades when someone has shown forgiveness and it worked.

Third, you’re misrepresenting Democrats. “When they go low we go high” was the motto for quite a while. You can make a good case it was never this rosy but many felt that way.

Yes, that was a line in a speech. What tangible example would you point to when the Democrats ever went "high"?

In that respect Newsom’s actions are a half anomaly and not universally supported to boot (though anti-gerrymandering is not a partisan issue; even my home state of Utah passed a ballot measure for independent redistricting, though the legislature has tried to nuke it).

I actually don't think Newsom's actions on that account are particularly egregious. His own state isn't maximally gerrymandered (only down to 9/50 Republicans compared to 45% voting) and he only has to spit on his state constitution to force an out of cycle redistricting. It's at least cleaner than the solid month of "finding more votes" California had to flip 5ish seats last election.

A better model of Democrats - at least as far as you can consider them united, as disclaimed - is that they are pro-rule of law or “norms”, but frequently break those norms just a little bit (eg federal judges without 60) and then go all surprised face when Republicans decide it’s open season and blow by whatever excuse/reasoning they gave (eg SC without 60). That is, Democrats are broadly reasonable but also guilty of first small steps, but Republicans are guilty of escalation. Which is worse? Eh. Depends on what you view as the normal population of game theory players! Which is debatable, not fact. Though I’d be interested to hear you actually put some reasoning to your claim.

That is the sane-washed story they tell themselves. In practice, Democrats only hold to norms to the extent that they are winning. Consider the Supreme Court. When the SC was delivering progressive wins, it was an unimpeachable source of restraint and goodness and laws and norms. And then when Trump gave us a conservative majority, they immediately switched to "This SC is illegitimate and it's rulings are illegitimate. We should pack the court when we get back in power."

There was a fun bit of needling a few weeks ago, when conservative shit-stirrers were tossing progressives their own tweets about court packing (because now Trump would be the one appointing them).

That’s a little depressing until you recall that this isn’t too uncommon when an abstract principle collides with a concrete example.

Thus always. Except not always. As a pro-choice atheist myself, I was rather impressed with how many conservatives took the double-barrel blast of "demographic implications of abortion restrictions" and just went YesChad.jpg.

And to be fair, there's points on the left where they'll go down with the ship. Importing infinity wife-beating criminals and child rapists. Hating men. Sterilizing and mutilating children.

And all of this is besides the point that these "Don't you know fighting is bad?!" posts always get directed towards the right and never towards the left. It's not a quick jump to sides when every example is one-sided.

Gave some examples in a short comment above/below.

It seems to me that court packing arguments (which for the record I vehemently oppose) were more a result of a sustained series of SC appointments they lost. Merrick Garland resulted in some bad blood, but then even after they simply had a mixture of bad luck and bad timing with more justices dying or retiring than is typical. Some (maybe not all but a big chunk) of this resentment comes down to bitterness. And not only on the SC (3, more than Obama’s 2, in just a 4 year term instead of 8), for example this showed that Trumps first term almost placed as many appeals court judges in 4 years as Obama in 8. And polling data indicates that views of SC partisanship (see line graph) tend to dovetail with the change in balance. I’d say that’s evidence against Dems being especially respectful of the SC, but I think that aspect of fairness and respect has always been a little overblown. For at least a century the SC has been controversial and also respect ebbs and flows, especially with major decisions, and that’s true for both parties.

In short judgeships are a separate issue that I don’t think is representative. But on that issue, yes I think both parties behave similarly.

As to forgiveness? I’ll have to think a bit. A few come to mind though. Clinton didn’t take a hard tack after his own impeachment and that helped his reputation a lot (and Gore was a whisker away from winning). Internationally our relatively forgiving response after WW2 did quite a bit to ensure the next decades would be peaceful and even gained Germany and Japan as solid allies.

Arguably the decline in political forgiveness is partly why bipartisan stuff is harder recently, but I’m not certain how much to ascribe to it.

That is the sane-washed story they tell themselves. In practice, Democrats only hold to norms to the extent that they are winning. Consider the Supreme Court. When the SC was delivering progressive wins, it was an unimpeachable source of restraint and goodness and laws and norms. And then when Trump gave us a conservative majority, they immediately switched to "This SC is illegitimate and it's rulings are illegitimate. We should pack the court when we get back in power."

Everyone follows this behavior where they say to do X then do Y, they will always have a reason why the situation demands doing Y vs X. It's just a question of if that exception was reasonable or an excuse. One can respond to a perceived violation by either taking the high road or going tit-for-tat. Honestly what frustrates me the most is when someone says they're going tit-for-tat but tries to act like they still have the moral high ground, or when they act outraged says they are going tit-for-tat towards you (since the other side likely didn't see their original action as a violation).

With the Supreme Court specifically, the norm violation the left was responding to was McConnell arguing to Obama that Supreme Courts should be filled after elections to ensure that it aligns with the will of the people, then very pointedly rushing to fill the seat before elections when Trump was almost out of office.

these "Don't you know fighting is bad?!" posts always get directed towards the right and never towards the left

I think this is partly down to venue. This site has a broad range of right-wingers, and it has a lesser amount of variously heretical left-wingers. This makes it the perfect place for a heretical left-winger to try to get through to representatives of The Right. In contrast, a top-level Motte post directed from a right-winger to The Left would be a pretty hollow exercise: none of the people it's aimed at would actually read it.

The implication of this is that the entire rest of the internet exists as a left-wing dominated space.

And no one ever tries this precious stuff there.

Not the entire rest of the Internet, but certainly there are a lot of such places.

I do recall making a "don't shoot SCOTUS justices; the bus will explode if you shoot SCOTUS justices" post on an SJ forum when Dobbs got leaked and somebody tried to kill Kavanaugh (I'm not sure, but I suspect I refrained until then for "don't stuff peas up your nose" reasons).

Well, they can't, can they?

Third, you’re misrepresenting Democrats. “When they go low we go high” was the motto for quite a while.

Did they actually go high?

Also, how doesn't everything you said apply to OP's point to begin with?

"When they go low, we go high" was something Michelle Obama said at the 2016 Democratic National Convention during Hillary Clinton's campaign for president. It was about a month later that Clinton referred to the "basket of deplorables".

You're right. Revenge is bad and unprincipled. I stand ready to applaud your valiant and arduous efforts to convince the Democrats to not seek retaliation or revenge after what gets done to them over the next 3.5-12 years, and to lash them with scathing criticisms for every hypocritical turn.

Just point us to where you're doing that. I'm eager to start applauding.

Thank you Seer for predicting what I will and won't be doing. But sure, I'll do with them what I am doing right now. Posting about it online.

The Dems should not abandon any policy decisions they claim to support as good policy in order to pursue a quest of emotional vengeance. We should focus on the good of our nation and the future, not tribalism.

If you want to argue for disarmament and cooperation, you have to already have a plausible commitment from your own side.

What's "my side"? Also this doesn't address the point whatsoever! If someone truly believed that small government involvement in business was good for the nation and our economy, then what gain is there in doing big government involvement? If you see the left stabbing the country with bad policy decisions, why pick up a knife and join in?

Can you draft up a letter to Gavin Newsome, explaining that he's being a hypocritical, unprincipled fool?

Wait why would I have to draft up a letter to Newsom? I'm not drafting a letter to republican politicians here. I'm posting on the internet.

Because in the real world of Iterated Prisoner's Dilemmas between actual factions that have their own beliefs and minds and aren't just going to be Jedi Mind Tricked into suicide, tit-for-tat is a generally optimal policy. Revenge is a fully sufficient justification when you don't want people to hurt you again, and you don't have a trustworthy arbiter to seek justice on your behalf.

But again, entirely missing the point here! The idea that free trade, government involvement, etc are just questions of morality. That the only reason conservatives shouldn't press the "government owns companies" button is just because of tradition instead of an actual belief that government involvement in private enterprise is bad. If conservatives believe that government ownership is harmful to the nation, then embracing it is like throwing molotovs at your own house and calling it vengeance.

Principles are easy until you've lost a few elections. Once you realize no one else has them, it becomes difficult to maintain an interest in such a filthy game without playing it.

Principles are easy until you've lost a few elections. Once you realize no one else has them, it becomes difficult to maintain an interest in such a filthy game without playing it.

That doesn't address anything!

Let's say there's a small government conservative who truly believes that growth, national wealth and general national prosperity are benefited through free trade and a hands off government. They want what is best for the country, so they support a small government.

They observe that other people in the world are hypocrites. Being a person who truly believes that free trade and hands off government is beneficial to the nation (and assuming they still care about the nation), they would not change on policy with this observation and would still support free trade and hands off government.

I understand your objection, but you have to realize that in the real world, this is a near guaranteed way to ensure you never end up anywhere near power.

America in particular is run by giant popularity contests; moral judgments on effective governance are not needed or useful. If America wants to stab itself to death, that's what they'll get if there's more of them that want to stab themselves to death than otherwise. Whether they want to stab themselves to death to spite the other side or because they think it's a better course of action doesn't matter.

Of course at the end of the day if a democracy wants to commit suicide they're gonna do it regardless. Even most authoritarian nations are still under some sorts of political pressure, you can't upset the people too much or else they risk higher chance of revolt so even they often are receptive to bad populist policy demands (assuming that the authoritarian leader isn't themselves a believer in bad policy, as they often are like we see with most/all communist states).

But that doesn't mean you should want to do a national suicide! If the argument is "we need to do a little so we can avoid a lot" that's at least understandable, but the goal should still be to reduce the amount of national suicide we do. I'd rather a Deng Xiaopeng over a Mao, and a Xi Jingping over a Kim Jong Ung. But if we can have a Reagan instead, then we should have a Reagan.

And they would never obtain power because they cooperate in the face of defection.

You know what's better than tit for tat in game theory? Tit for tat with occasional forgiveness.

Now consider in real life with real life human biases where people just take things as attacks on them when they aren't. Everyone does it. So in a real life situation, we would always be defecting in revenge because we see constant defects (even in cases where there isn't!).

Now consider even more that political groups are not hiveminds. They are rather loose coalitions. A principled traditional conservative and a new era "post-liberal conservative" might both check off for Republican, but we don't clearly match up in many ways.

If a "post-liberal conservative" keeps defecting, I wouldn't want to be blamed for them! And I should rationally be able to extend this understanding to other groups and that they too are loose coalitions.

So the defect fetishists are doomed to never have a cooperation work out, they are always willing to sabotage it. While people willing to be forgiving and work towards cooperation will get wins every once in a while.

It's why the US has been one of the greatest countries in the world while the fascists and communists kept losing. Because even our stongest internal attempts at purging and defecting are weak sauce compared to them, so we get a bunch of cooperation wins.

You know what's better than tit for tat in game theory? Tit for tat with occasional forgiveness.

Wouldn't it be outperformed by tit for tat with occasional unwarranted defection?

The specific case in which TfTwF outperforms TfT is a round-robin iterated prisoner's dilemma (scoring on total utility over all players/iterations) with many other players being TfT and a small amount of random noise added to people's decisions (i.e. "my hand slipped"). This is because, in this specific scenario, the random noise causes the TfT players to feud with each other quite extensively, whereas the feuds get cut short when there's a TfTwF involved and thus, while the TfT-vs.-TfTwF head-to-head is slightly in favour of TfT, TfTwF's self-play massively outperforms TfT's self-play.

If most players are not TfT (or very similar), TfT does better than TfTwF (as there either aren't any extensive feuds anyway, or the feuds - with e.g. Grim - can't be ended by forgiveness). If there is no noise, TfT does better than TfTwF.

TfT outperforms TfT-with-occasional-defection against TfTwF, unless the forgiveness time is too short*, as the feud, while relatively short, still outweighs the value of the defection.

*Obviously, the limit of TfTwF as forgiveness time goes to zero is just Co-operate-Bot, and we all know the optimal response to that is to spam defection.

is a round-robin

and a small amount of random noise added to people's decisions

Well, that changes the things rather significantly.

(scoring on total utility over all players/iterations)

Come on, you've completely changed the meaning of the game at this point.

Come on, you've completely changed the meaning of the game at this point.

By "total utility" I meant "the total utility you score for yourself across all opponents". I will note that the object of PD is explicitly to score the most utility for yourself, not to outscore your opponent, so adding up the scores rather than counting "who scored more" matchups is more sensible.

I also think you might be misconstruing my intentions; what drove me to post was that @magicalkittycat misrepresented the game theory (there are a lot of people pushing that same line, so I'm not claiming malice) and I wanted to clarify it. I responded to you rather than to him because you asked a question about it which meant I wanted to alert you, the clarification and answer to the question didn't directly involve MKC so I wasn't required by honour to alert him (I am now), and MKC's kinda been on an angry rampage in this thread, including when replying to me, so I wasn't really feeling very enthused about the prospect of likely just getting a third earful for my trouble.

It addresses everything, you just won't accept it.

It essentially implies the difference between the right wing and left wing argument about things are about morals and not about the effectiveness of policy or economic ideas

"Effectiveness of policy" is the last thing that political disagreements are about. If you listed all the causes of political conflict in order of importance and relevance, "effectiveness of policy" would rank around... 67th place? Maybe?

Political conflicts arise because of clashes between incommensurate value systems, misalignment of tribal interests, the competing demands of heterogeneous subjectivities, emotional biases both conscious and unconscious... if political conflicts could be settled through rational argumentation then people would have done so already.

Of course people will still try to convince themselves that politics is really about "policy", for various reasons. It could be because they're classical liberals who recognize that liberalism needs to postulate a universal, expansive, and malleable blank slate core as part of human nature in order for liberalism to function at large scales over long periods of time. Or it could be because they find the idea of human subjectivity to be intrinsically uncomfortable, and a world of rational information-processing agents is more amenable to their tastes. Whatever the reason.

The sooner you adjust your frame of reference, the sooner things will start making sense.

Political conflicts arise because of clashes between incommensurate value systems, misalignment of tribal interests, the competing demands of heterogeneous subjectivities, emotional biases both conscious and unconscious... if political conflicts could be settled through rational argumentation then people would have done so already.

Well yeah that's the point. Changing stances on policy at the drop of a dime doesn't reflect people wanting things they actually believe are good for the country and our future, but tribalist emotional based thinking around personal moral disputes rather than national health.

Ok, this is a fundamentally different perspective on politics, I am an active Republican because democrats hate me. The remaining democrats would say the same in reverse.

Of course, I would say they are wrong and I am right- I notice that democrats are very hostile to my tribe. Presumably, you disagree, but I think the government should protect my tribe from people who hate us. I don’t think you disagree with me(although you might on the premise). I also want protection from democrats more than I want any particular good policy.

Do you feel like you are more or less protected in the long term from the democrats than you did 6 months ago?

That long term is at least a little further away. Of course, now I have to worry about Republican excesses again... but they're starting from further back and mostly aren't aimed specifically at people like me (wealthy old heterosexual white men).

Yes

The previous bargain was "we'll be mostly very polite as we render everyone who dares disagree permanently unemployable and watch them die alone under a bridge."

As far as I can tell "Dark Woke" means "we'll do the same thing, but while shouting 'retard!' and making generated pictures of Trump as a fat man with lots of Stars of David."

So absolutely much safer.

Definitely more. The Blues, even in Europe, were much more bloodthirsty when they thought the original loss to Trump was just a fluke.

There's been this hilarious attempt to make the poibt you're hinting at: "Oooh! You're really going to get it now!". They're going to become "Dark Woke" now! And I'm sitting here waiting for someone to point out the difference, if anything they're significantly more mild.

The Blues, even in Europe, were much more bloodthirsty when they thought the original loss to Trump was just a fluke.

I'm not necessarily talking about bloodthirstiness. I think there were some lines in terms of policies that sound good but are in fact disastrous that nobody crossed prior to 2020, and then the left went performatively insane during covid, and then the Trump admin is trying to top them in performative insanity and succeeding, and it looks like Gavin fucking Newsom will probably run for president in 2028 on a platform of owning the right and probably win and continue the escalating clownworld cycle.

Maybe you're right and that won't happen though. I hope you're right.

and it looks like Gavin fucking Newsom will probably run for president in 2028 on a platform of owning the right and probably win and continue the escalating clownworld cycle.

And my point is: corporate needs you to find the difference between these pictures.

What's supposed to be happen in an alternative universe where Trump is not trying to top them? Newsom was discussed as the heir apparent to the Democratic throne before Kamala was even done losing. Is it "the platform of owning the right"? For one, are you sure they wouldn't be running on it anyway? Secondly, what is the difference between them running on that platform and not running on it? Biden was running as "le reasonable moderate", and look how that turned out.

Of course, I would say they are wrong and I am right- I notice that democrats are very hostile to my tribe. Presumably, you disagree, but I think the government should protect my tribe from people who hate us. I don’t think you disagree with me(although you might on the premise). I also want protection from democrats more than I want any particular good policy.

And what part of protecting yourself from Democrats involves things like state ownership of private enterprise?

State ownership of enterprise, specifically? Nothing in particular. The trumpian process of punishing and crippling thé democrats and deep state? Very much so.

Yes, we fundamentally disagree with you on morals and the purpose of government. If we didn't, then we'd be liberals like you.

That's not as much a decisive argument then an acknowledgement of the facts.

Your mistake is that you assume there is a platform of universally agreed upon policies that are agreed to be universally beneficial. There are not. If you disagree with this, name a policy, and I'll show you its partisan sides. You can't technocrat your way out of politics. What is your good and effective policy is my bad and harmful policy. The bad and inefficient parts of policy that I support are called tradeoffs that I can live with.

It would be very nice if the institutions were run by liberals. I wouldn't mind being governed under liberal rule. But the people who ruled in the immediate past were not liberals, and were not constrained by liberals. It is the failure of liberals to rule properly that has led to this point and given the choice between the terrible experiences of the past, I'm willing to gamble on the excesses of the current regime. If no one cares about liberal principles, then at the very least the power of the state can crush the oppressors and petty tyrants of the previous decade.

Allowing liberals to be in charge again will only lead to tyranny, because liberals have no defense against the feminine prerogative of the progressive class. If the state must be powerful, if it must be strong, then it must avenge these slights to win my vote. I don't want a government that lets these people off easy. The men and women of the previous regime made an enemy of me, and made promises to sweep me into the dustbin of history. Now they quiver in fear and beg for mercy that I do not have, and demand the continuation of privileges I made no promise to give.

Ha ha. No. You call it revenge: I call it justice, finely ground and granulated.

And you may object to this. But to that, I say...

"If you kill your enemies, they win." QED.

Your mistake is that you assume there is a platform of universally agreed upon policies that are agreed to be universally beneficial. There are not. If you disagree with this, name a policy, and I'll show you its partisan sides. You can't technocrat your way out of politics. What is your good and effective policy is my bad and harmful policy. The bad and inefficient parts of policy that I support are called tradeoffs that I can live with.

Ok, sure. Please show how the tariffs, as implemented, will achieve their stated goals, or any other goal that could not have been better achieved some other way.

Tariffs are fairly standard policy when it comes to import-substitution industrial development. If they're so bad, then why does the rest of the world have them? Are they stupid?

Without going into a Putin-esque diatribe about the history of the United States, free trade was the bribe that Americans gave to the defeated Axis and their European partners to be anti-Soviet and anti-Communist. Now that Americans no longer benefit from this arrangement, they are free to end it as they please. Economically? Not very good. As a scheme to destroy the liberal, atlanticist order? Very good.

And there's the root of the problem, of which the OP doesn't get. You can't paper over ideological differences like that. What if I see destroying the old order as a good thing? What if we don't agree on the role of American hegemony? Can the Americans back away from their own empire if they want to?

If my ends are the fundamental destruction of your world order, we can't chalk it up to democratic plurality. There really are positions of which are irreconcilable to the liberal worldview. What are you going to do about it? Honorably lose to me? Have many moral victories to your name as I take power?

I'd like that very much, actually. That sounds great.

Tariffs are fairly standard policy when it comes to import-substitution industrial development. If they're so bad, then why does the rest of the world have them? Are they stupid?

Because the rest of the world has a different context than America does, and tariffs in those contexts can work much more effectively. In the US, your manufacturing industrial base was shipped to China several decades ago - and that process took decades. In the meantime, all of the industries required to support that manufacturing base have also moved to China because that's where the manufacturing work is. As a result, even American manufacturing is getting hit by the tariffs because raw material costs are skyrocketing as a result and making American manufacturing LESS competitive. The US is so helplessly dependent upon Chinese manufacturing that the tariffs aren't even being applied to them - Trump has to extend the tariff pause over and over again because if it was seriously implemented the US economy would collapse overnight.

You can't reverse all of that overnight. You can't reverse all of that in the space of a single year. You can't even reverse that over a decade when the same forces and people responsible for profiting from the outsourcing of that industry are still in place... and they are. Outsourcing, offshoring - all of these things happened for a variety of reasons that are still here, and until you actually rework the economy to remove those incentives the tariffs will never work. Even then, could tariffs work to resolve the US' manufacturing issues? Yes, they could - but only as part of a larger plan to revitalise American manufacturing. You'd need lots of investment and government support in order to bring all these industries back, as well as large investments in training to build up the skilled workforce required... and that skilled workforce is also going to have to be compensated with the kind of good wages that will drive up the price of their output and make the made-in-China competitors even more attractive.

None of this has been done. Not only has none of this been done, the same corrupt politicians who were responsible for the problems which drove out manufacturing in the first place are still there (literally the same people in some cases) and actively working to make sure that this manufacturing resurgence does not take place because it would be bad for the interest groups and donors that keep them living the good life.

Tariffs are fairly standard policy when it comes to import-substitution industrial development. If they're so bad, then why does the rest of the world have them? Are they stupid?

The rest of the world doesn't do it, with the exceptions of India and Brazil. In those two cases, yes, they're being stupid. Here is the latest official WTO stats for effectively applied trade-weighted tariff (WITS) for the top 10 countries by GDP - most data seems to be sourced from 2022 reports as far as I can tell:

CountryWITS %
United States2.2%
China3.3%
Germany2.8%
India12.0%
Japan1.9%
United Kingdom3.6%
France2.8%
Italy2.8%
Canada3.4%
Brazil8.0%

As of now, the average trade-weighted tariff for the US is sitting at about 16%.

So no, this is very much not a standard policy, which is why I'd be interested to see someone sincerely defend it as a good policy rather than as a way to own the mean libs by burning down the house we all live in.

Without going into a Putin-esque diatribe about the history of the United States, free trade was the bribe that Americans gave to the defeated Axis and their European partners to be anti-Soviet and anti-Communist. Now that Americans no longer benefit from this arrangement, they are free to end it as they please. Economically? Not very good. As a scheme to destroy the liberal, atlanticist order? Very good.

... but Americans do benefit from free trade? Can you find me some examples of business owners or manufacturers in the United States who are happy about the tariffs? Because as far as I can tell nobody with skin in the game is very happy. Happy to be proven wrong here.

What if I see destroying the old order as a good thing?

Then you can join the tankies over in the "deeply unserious people" corner. "Destroy the current order, I'm sure somebody has a better plan" has not historically been a successful strategy.

If my ends are the fundamental destruction of your world order, we can't chalk it up to democratic plurality. There really are positions of which are irreconcilable to the liberal worldview. What are you going to do about it? Honorably lose to me? Have many moral victories to your name as I take power?

Realistically? Make sure I have non-dollar-denominated assets, stay within my decidedly not destroyed blue enclave, and be sad as I stop being able to take pride in my country. As they say, there's a lot of ruin in a nation.

I disagree with WITS as measure: it doesn't matter if dates and feta cheese are duty-free if it's averaged out with protectionist tariffs for trucks and other heavy industry. Tariffs aren't even the whole story when it comes to protectionism. There are subsidies, designated country of origin, etc...

But that's beside the point. There are many Americans who, have, in fact not benefitted from free trade, from the free movement of peoples. I have this bloody shirt of three innocent people killed by a trucker u-turning on the highway with his truck. The countless dead of working-class communities who were eaten alive by fentanyl and despair. The general collapse of the affordability of housing. I could go on and on.

The old social contract is already dead. Why cling to an order that gives nothing for my compliance and has no resistance to offer for my defiance?

I expect the business owners and manufacturers to be unhappy about the tariffs: their profits are made at the expense of the people and communities they live in. Skin in the game is a good model of demonstrating sincerity, provided that access to the table is possible. It hasn't been for a very long time. Well, now our problem is your problem. The red-browns, one way or another, will come for the little urban enclaves eventually. Whether it be putting soldiers in your streets or giving you bloody shaves by taxation, the end result is the same. Pay up, liberal. What are you going to do, write an angry letter to your congressman?

It didn't work for us: why would it work for you?

It's not so fun when you're the number on the spreadsheet, is it?

I disagree with WITS as measure

What metric do you prefer?

There are many Americans who, have, in fact not benefitted from free trade, from the free movement of peoples. I have this bloody shirt of three innocent people killed by a trucker u-turning on the highway with his truck.

This has to do with tariffs how? Would the truck have had better sightlines if it were American-made?

The countless dead of working-class communities who were eaten alive by fentanyl and despair.

This does not seem like a problem tariffs solve.

The general collapse of the affordability of housing.

This does not seem like a problem tariffs solve.

The old social contract is already dead. Why cling to an order that gives nothing for my compliance and has no resistance to offer for my defiance?

Because the rumors of the death of the old social contract are exaggerated, and because you want to build a world that is better rather than worse for your children. If you do want to build a better world for your children, but just disagree what "better" looks like, then sure, let us discuss specifics. Particularly the specifics around tariffs, which I note you have still not given a concrete defense of. But if you are so far gone that you care only for the suffering of your opponents, if you have no positive vision for the world, then I agree that there is no value in talking to you. It's not like either of us is particularly influential.

The red-browns, one way or another, will come for the little urban enclaves eventually.

You're glowing. Might want to get that checked out.

It's not so fun when you're the number on the spreadsheet, is it?

I mean, I'm already a number on the spreadsheet. So are you. Such is life in the modern analyzed world. I don't think there is any time or country in history I would prefer to live in than current America, even given the problems we have now. I expect, absent a civilization-ending catastrophe, this will remain true. I am worried that something precious is being lost, but the "something precious" is "the crown jewel of the world" and not "a serviceable nation" - I expect the decline to look like what Britain has gone through.

Anyway, are you planning to defend the tariffs as being good at accomplishing some specific concrete policy goal that you care about accomplishing or no?

As captain Haddock would say...

/images/1756240343907219.webp

I take it this means you are not actually up for showing me why there's a partisan side under which tariffs are sane and well thought out and are actually expected to achieve some specific goal? And you didn't actually mean it when you said

If you disagree with this, name a policy, and I'll show you its partisan sides.

Or are you saying "the point is to break shit because I'm mad, I don't actually care about outcomes". In which case please speak directly into the microphone.

For those keeping track -- I upvoted this, not because I wholeheartedly agree, but because I'm a sucker for a good villain speech.

Drama is a great component of good rhetoric.

“If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”

I mean, yeah... you can almost hear the voice deepen and roughen and see the lighting change when you read that last phrase.

Yes, we fundamentally disagree with you on morals and the purpose of government. If we didn't, then we'd be liberals like you.

And yet Bernie Sanders supports the government buying equity in private enterprises while many traditional small government conservatives are opposing it. So I guess it's true you're not like the liberals and are more similar to the socialists instead.

Your mistake is that you assume there is a platform of universally agreed upon policies that are agreed to be universally beneficial. There are not.

No, I literally said the opposite. Different people may have different views on what policies are good, but presumably they all still work towards what they think is good policy. If you believe that government owning businesses is good, then you would work towards it. If you believe government should stay out, then you would work towards that.

I get the feeling you didn't actually read a thing I said given that it literally has the words.

Now people might disagree on what is best for growth, what is best for the people, and what is best for the country but we should expect them to pursue their ideas in the same way if they care about America, towards ideas they think are good.

If you can't be bothered to read the thing you're writing a response to, then there's little reason to engage further with you.

  • -10

Bernie Sanders isn't a liberal. Neither am I. That is not a novel observation. I am telling that I am not a liberal. Observing this is not as effective of a strike as you think it is. And to say 'people pursue policies they personally think are good' is also a observation of little worth. Everyone does this. I am not totally cynical to believe that everyone is lying about their priors. I don't deny they have principles: I just think they're fatally compromised, stupid, quokka principles.

Frankly, we're not really arguing, because you're just stating the obvious and believing that it supports your position.

I am not an American. I do not care about America in the way an American would. But let me tell you this. A free-market capitalist economic zone is mutually exclusive with the vision of America as a Christian nation. There is no 'good policy' that is seen as good by partisans of either. Just ask anyone about the 'trans genocide' and how policy on one end can be seen as the malicious politics of revenge by the other. This is where I am actually cynical. People profess support for self-destructive policy all the time for no other reason that it gets their enemy's goat all the time.

You must accept that people are willing to hurt themselves, and very badly, just so that those who have it coming get what they richly deserve.

But if you don't understand the human impulse for justice, then there's no point in continuing the conversation, either. Darwin's dodos didn't understand humans either. Go hang out with TracingWoodgrains as he embarks on his quest to find the principled liberals of America. Eventually, someone will listen to him. Maybe they will even write a sternly written letter to the illiberal in charge. Who knows? God makes everything possible.

Bernie Sanders isn't a liberal.

You're right, he's a socialist.

Neither am I. That is not a novel observation. I am telling that I am not a liberal.

Correct, you're not a liberal. You're a person agreeing with a socialist about whether or not government should assume control of private enterprise.

I am not an American.

Oh ok then. Perfectly understandable you wouldn't care as much if the US implements good or bad policy if you aren't an American.

A free-market capitalist economic zone is mutually exclusive with the vision of America as a Christian nation.

America has pretty much always been capitalist. Many of our amazing presidents have been both capitalist free traders and Christian. Maybe you haven't heard of him since you're not an American, but we've had plenty of greats like Ronald Reagan (one of the most widely respected and liked conservatives in our history) who fit that bill perfectly.

I have to wonder are you a socialist? You seem to agree with the socialists on policy ideas around government involvement in private enterprise, and think capitalism goes against Christianity.

You seem to be under the impression that accusing your interlocutor of being a socialist is some kind of I-win button and super-embarrassing.

I feel you should be aware that outside the 'States - and your interlocutor just said he is - this isn't really all that true. Australia's and the UK's Labour Parties are both former members of Socialist International and still take red - as in, Communist red - as their party colour. Die Linke is a significant party in German politics, and it's literally the East German Communist party with a new name. France's National Assembly is over a quarter declared socialists.

You seem to be under the impression that accusing your interlocutor of being a socialist is some kind of I-win button and super-embarrassing.

"Accusing"

The dude is supporting policies embraced by Bernie Sanders (who calls himself a socialist) and says that capitalism is incompatible with Christianity.

So he's

  1. Anti capitalist

  2. Supporting socialist ideas

How is it wrong to assume socialism?

I feel you should be aware that outside the 'States - and your interlocutor just said he is - this isn't really all that true. Australia's and the UK's Labour Parties are both former members of Socialist International and still take red - as in, Communist red - as their party colour. Die Linke is a significant party in German politics, and it's literally the East German Communist party with a new name. France's National Assembly is over a quarter declared socialists.

Cool, you can have your socialism in other countries if you want it. The idea that capitalism and Christianity can't coexist is still nonsense, especially since your European countries are often far more godless than America. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/09/05/u-s-adults-are-more-religious-than-western-europeans/

So that's evidence to the contrary, it is your socialism that can not coexist with Christianity.

This is part of why principled groups can stay principled so easily. An organization like FIRE truly believes that free speech is beneficial.

The rest of the post makes arguments I consider weak but this bit is laughable. Groups do not, in fact, stay principled easily. That's the entire problem.

FIRE was founded in 1999. The ACLU was a significantly older and more effective advocate for free speech before the anti-Trump hysteria split it between principled liberals and activists. In fact, FIRE probably owes a lot of its current prominence (and its position in your post) to the fact that it's very much not easy to stay principled

Every organizations chooses the battle to burn their carefully built credibility in. The ACLU dropped free speech to chemically castrate gay kids. Weird flex, but ok.

One day FIRE will as well. I can only imagine how stupid the issue will be.

The rest of the post makes arguments I consider weak but this bit is laughable. Groups do not, in fact, stay principled easily. That's the entire problem.

Obviously a group over time as people change out can not be guaranteed to stay the same group, and that's not a claim I make. In 100 years a FIRE org owned by Random Joe JR could be a fighter against free speech.

But currently within a reasonable timeline of being owned by the same people, their consistent behavior marks a consistent belief of the people who compose it.

It means they consistently believe this tactic will build them credibility to burn in the future on some more important issue. You're not even close to cynical enough for politics.

I mean I don’t think I’ve seen anyone in a position of power have concrete plans that they stuck to even at risk of losing. TBH, looking at how people in power actually behave, principles are not how you understand government. Principles and ideas are not end points, but tools to get power. And if you watch politics with such a thing in mind, outside of a few crazy true believers, you can probably figure out where the chips will fall with 80-90% accuracy.

I mean I don’t think I’ve seen anyone in a position of power have concrete plans that they stuck to even at risk of losing.

Well you're not losing to begin with if the policies you think are good are the ones being implemented. Is Bernie Sanders losing when Trump got stakes into Intel? No, he was supportive, he wants government to own more businesses.

Sanders might be losing on other topics, but he wins here and he knows it.

TBH, looking at how people in power actually behave, principles are not how you understand government.

I'll agree you with there. Politics does not do a great job selecting for people who value the health of the nation over their own personal fantasies and desires. They might have some values, but if it's between "benefit myself" and "benefit the country", well we see that the first often wins out. It's a known issue of pretty much any system that those who seek power are disproportionately those who wish to use it for their own personal gain.

It's a known issue of pretty much any system that those who seek power are disproportionately those who wish to use it for their own personal gain.

More than that - it's a known issue of every system that agents who are optimising for seeking, maintaining and consolidating power within that system will outcompete agents who are optimising for anything else.

Why political revenge narratives don't make sense to me.

I submit it's because you subscribe to a revenge framing in the first place, as opposed to a relationship framing. So long as you adopt a misleading framing, you will continue to be misled.

For example, when you give this paragraph-

After all if you care about the country, I would assume you want good and effective policy. If you see the left's policy ideas as bad and harmful to our future, it's not a great idea to join in on the self-harm. Unless you're a traitor and hate the country, you would be pushing for what you think is the best policy. Now people might disagree on what is best for growth, what is best for the people, and what is best for the country but we should expect them to pursue their ideas in the same way if they care about America, towards ideas they think are good.

-this leads off with abstractions ('the country', 'the left'), but no acknowledgement of a relationship. Even the traitor allegation is framing it as treat to the abstraction (hate the country). Even that treats the action as an initiation, as opposed to a response, as if treason is a state of being unprompted at odds with a natural/healthy state of behavior.

This is wrong in the same way that 'the organization decided to do something' is wrong. Organizations do not make decisions. People in organizations make decisions. Political parties do not try to appeal to, or deliberately offend, parts of the population. People within political parties try to appeal to, or deliberately offend, other people in the population. The tolerance / encouragement of such behavior is not conducted by The Party, but by the consent / support of other people within the party.

When people make a series of decisions over time in regards to, and affecting, other people, this connection is a relationship. Sometimes the established relationship is amicable, and sometimes the relationship is hostile.

People responding negatively to a hostile relationship are not traitors. Nor does their response to hostile relationship come off as them never believing the words they were saying.

...unless, perhaps, the only paradigm you can conceptualize for responding negatively to a hostile relationship is 'revenge' against abstractions.

How is "adopt the policies of your political opponents" even responding negatively to them? Whether Trump or Harris gets a 10% government stake in Intel the result is the same, the only difference is which side supports it and what justifications they use. Would it make sense for Democrats to respond negatively to Trump by building the wall?

The only thing that would make it at least somewhat different is if the party doing it used it to somehow dictate Intel policy in a partisan way, but that isn't happening in this case and it would be short-term regardless, since after the next election it doesn't matter who was in power when it happened. It's not adopting left-wing tactics against them, Trump just genuinely believes in a bunch of left-wing policy positions like opposition to free trade and government ownership of companies.

There seems to be a recent tendency I've noticed online where people are so eager to signal animosity by throwing away their principles that they'll do it when it doesn't make any sense. For instance I've seen several cases where SJWs censored something and there were comments kneejerk supporting it as "what goes around comes around" because they somehow misinterpreted which side the censorship was coming from. If you don't have principles besides "oppose the enemy", and also you don't understand what your enemy believes, it's pretty easy to end up supporting the enemy against your own side.

How is "adopt the policies of your political opponents" even responding negatively to them? Whether Trump or Harris gets a 10% government stake in Intel the result is the same, the only difference is which side supports it and what justifications they use.

Nationalising companies isn't the policies of Trump's political opponents. The dominant factions of both parties claim to be against socialism and have done so since the Truman administration. The Democrats have not, in fact, sought to nationalise large companies when they were in a position to do so. The only big American nationalisations of my lifetime (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and AIG) happened under a Republican president, although I don't think this makes George W Bush a socialist given the circumstances.

Biden gave money to Intel with strings attached. Trump made a deal with Intel that changed the strings (it's the same money). I don't see much difference between these two.

this leads off with abstractions ('the country', 'the left'), but no acknowledgement of a relationship. Even the traitor allegation is framing it as treat to the abstraction (hate the country). Even that treats the action as an initiation, as opposed to a response, as if treason is a state of being unprompted at odds with a natural/healthy state of behavior.

And how does this make a meaningful difference? Bad policy as a response to bad policy is just more bad policy. Imagine for instance if the response to leftist rent control was a rent floor rather than not enacting price controls to begin with.

This is wrong in the same way that 'the organization decided to do something' is wrong. Organizations do not make decisions. People in organizations make decisions.

Organizations, in being controlled and owned by people do in fact make decisions. Organizations are just a group. If the group members (or owner of the group if it's legally theirs) makes a decision, then the group itself can be said to have made a decision.

Of course if the people in it change over time, we expect the group itself to change but it's still just that, reflective of the humans within it.

When people make a series of decisions over time in regards to, and affecting, other people, this connection is a relationship. Sometimes the established relationship is amicable, and sometimes the relationship is hostile.

People responding negatively to a hostile relationship are not traitors. Nor does their response to hostile relationship come off as them never believing the words they were saying.

Ok I agree that when leftists implement bad counterproductive and unhealthy policies like high corporate taxes or price controls or whatever other economically/freedom damaging policies, it's understandable to react negatively. But I don't see why that would lead to the response of joining in on the self harm.

If leftists are stabbing the nation, why grab a knife and join in on the murder? Your comment doesn't answer this, it just assumes that saying "bad relationship" explains why I should want to harm our nation and our future.

And how does this make a meaningful difference? Bad policy as a response to bad policy is just more bad policy.

The meaningful difference is that there is not just a policy conflict. There is also a relationship conflict. The relationship conflict is more important than the policy conflict.

Imagine for instance if the response to leftist rent control was a rent floor rather than not enacting price controls to begin with.

Imagine what the response to leftist rent proposal might be if the standard conduct of of the leftist advocate coalition pushing / advancing / defending the policy in the decade prior did not also make public attacks on the moral and personal character if their opponents, upto and including ruining the career prospects of individuals and defending such action of their coalition peers. Imagine if the leftist coalition did (or did not) have a contemporary (or multi-decade) reputation of lying about policy concessions only to renege on them, and then accusing the opponents of being unwilling to compromise or actively being tyrants for insisting on- or enforcing- the earlier compromise.

It would matter relatively little what the current policy proposal is. Significant skepticism, suspicion, lack of trust, and warning to others would be warranted on the basis of past behavior.

The patters of past behavior are what establish a relationship, not just a policy, dispute.

Organizations, in being controlled and owned by people do in fact make decisions. Organizations are just a group. If the group members (or owner of the group if it's legally theirs) makes a decision, then the group itself can be said to have made a decision.

Congratulations on not recognizing the common attribution error, and the implications that has for recognizing the differences in impersonal and personal relationships with groups of people that shape how people respond to actions by that group.

Your relationship with a [committee] of people you don't know, and with a [committee] of people you do know and have a relationship history with, are fundamentally different.

Of course if the people in it change over time, we expect the group itself to change but it's still just that, reflective of the humans within it.

If we equivocate degrees of change, or great deal of incredibly significant social dynamics such as the nature of a group's selection bias and internal enforcement dynamics. Why you would want to ignore such dynamics which are very relevant to political faction hostility is not something we agree on.

For example, we don't actually expect a group to meaningfully change itself if the group is actively engaging in self-selection and ideological compliance actions for its induction of new members. A hobby group can remain a hobby group by recruiting and retaining members of the hobby. This, however, is a completely different organizational culture- and survivorship bias- than a organization that engages in ideological policing of its members. The more prone a group culture is to self-selection and ideological purity spirals, the stronger the survivorship bias can be expected to be, and the less relevant the changes are to central issues (as opposed to largely irrelevant non-central changes).

A organization which applies and maintains self-selection and internal indoctrination is over time going to be composed of true believes, willing conformists, or cynical grifters. 'The group will change' based on the relative composition, but the change on the willingness to act in line with the true believers does not change until outside pressure creates conditions so that the grifters see a deal elsewhere, and the conformists are willing to conform in a different direction.

That outside pressure, in turn, is [hostility].

Ok I agree that when leftists implement bad counterproductive and unhealthy policies like high corporate taxes or price controls or whatever other economically/freedom damaging policies, it's understandable to react negatively. But I don't see why that would lead to the response of joining in on the self harm.

Because you avert your eyes and do not acknowledge conflict beyond a policy conflict, and do not listen when people tell you there another sort of conflict taking place, and thus do recognize when different types of responses that are appropriate in different types of conflicts are appropriate because there is a different type of conflict going on.

See no issue, hear no issue, understand no issue that warrants issue-dependent response.

If leftists are stabbing the nation, why grab a knife and join in on the murder? Your comment doesn't answer this,

And nor should it, because my comment is that your chosen paradigm, [vengeance/murder], is false and misleading. You do not challenge a false and misleading framing as such on the framing's own grounds, you contest the framing.

In turn, someone's insistence on false and misleading framings can itself be a 'knife' that can be used to 'join in on the murder.' After all, a willful framing that implicitly accuses the dissenters of being equivalent to Bad People- say an immoral murder- is a form of accusation. An accusation can be true or false, but if it is publicly repeated when false, it is not a just a lie, but slander.

I suspect you would concede, if pressed, that dissent to your preferred way of political conflict is not equivalent to murder. I think you would also concede that slandering your countrymen (and women) is an attack on the country that is composed by them. But by making the framing, you are already grabbing a knife and giving another jab yourself.

it just assumes that saying "bad relationship" explains why I should want to harm our nation and our future.

It makes no such assumption that you should 'want to.' It is expressing that "bad relationship" is the harm.

Your nation is a collection of individuals in multitudes of relationships. Your collective future is in turn entails both the character and the consequence of those relationships. If a community has strong and positive relations, then it can overcome even great disasters. If a community has weak and negative relations, it will fail to unite over even common challenges.

There is no common interest without commonality of the people with interests. Commonality of this sort is not categorical or imposed from the outside (or above), it is cultivated and perceived through the relationship people have with each other. It is what separates a nation from an accident of geographical proximity.

If you break down that sense of commonality through negative relationships- regardless of whether that's actively attacking your opponents, or 'merely' turning a blind eye to the attacks by others because it doesn't interest you- then over time your opponents will learn that their interests are not so common with you, and stop perceiving such a strong relationship of commonality with you in turn. This manifests in things such as declining social trust, lower trust in shared institutions, and so on.

Whether you 'want to' end in a low trust society is irrelevant. It is a product of relationships whether you like it or not. In turn, you can ruin a relationship as much be neglect or dismissal of other party's concerns as anything else. A knife is still a knife.

What is this place?

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

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

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


Why are you called The Motte?

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

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


New post guidelines

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

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

If in doubt, please post it!


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