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PaperclipPerfector  13hr ago (text post)   1856 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025

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This is really more appropriate for the Wellness or Small Questions thread.

You're also replying to a filtered user.

I've been thinking about why some people are terrified of Trump while others, like me, are more indifferent. I mostly tune out Trump news because I assume much of it involves scare tactics or misleading framing by his detractors. When my wife brings up concerns about his supposedly authoritarian actions, my general response is that if what he's doing is illegal, the governmental process will handle it - and if it's legal, then that's how the system is supposed to work. I have faith that our institutions have the checks and balances to deal with any presidential overreach appropriately.

This reminded me of a mirror situation during 2020-2021 with the BLM movement, where our positions were reversed. I was deeply concerned about social media mobs pressuring corporations, governments, and individuals to conform under threat of job loss, boycotts, and riots, while my wife thought these social pressures were justified and would naturally self-correct if they went too far. The key difference I see is that the government has built-in checks and balances designed to prevent abuse of power, while social movements and mob pressure operate without those same institutional restraints. It seems like we each trust different institutional mechanisms, but I can't help but think that formal governmental processes with built-in restraints are more reliable than grassroots social pressure that operates without those same safeguards. Furthermore, the media seems incentivized to amplify fear about Trump but not about grassroots social movements - Trump generates clicks and outrage regardless of which side you're on, while criticizing social movements risks alienating the platforms' own user base and advertiser-friendly demographics.

Until the 2020 election, Trump's opponents were mostly crying wolf. His first administration was a shit show, but besides putting a few migrant kids into cages, he mostly harmed the reputation of the US.

His election denial changed that. The idea that the vote is generally fair and sacred was previously a universal of US politics. Sure, candidates would sometimes quibble over individual districts with irregularities and might need the SCOTUS to resolve their differences, but at least once a verdict was in, the losing side would accept the result and concede. Trump was the first candidate whose ego could not admit defeat, and his party mostly backed him in his lies. J6 showed that he was not committed to a peaceful transfer of power.

Of course, the Democrats reacted with a lot of lawsuits. Some with merit, some pure lawfare. In his 2nd administration, Trump seems completely free of traditional political advice, instead relying on his clique of yes-men to implement his personal ideas. Previous administrations had the decency to do corruption under a mantle of plausible deniability. With Trump it is ubiquitous and brazen.

The key difference I see is that the government has built-in checks and balances designed to prevent abuse of power, while social movements and mob pressure operate without those same institutional restraints.

While I am reluctant to defend the woke mob, I will also notice that government can do a lot of things that most social movements can not do at scale. The BLM riots happened because local governments were willing to turn a blind eye to rioting rather than employ police violence. So the government should at least get half-credit for them. But a bunch of criminals looting is small fries compared to the kind of damage the federal government can do.

Saying that you are less worried about government because it has checks and balances is like saying that you are less worried about nuclear weapons than you are about knives because nukes need a code to activate them while knives let anyone stab people. Sure, the median crazy killer will murder more people with a knife than a nuke, but if the safety mechanism fails the nuke-wielding crazy will be able to do orders of magnitude more damage.

Sure, candidates would sometimes quibble over individual districts with irregularities and might need the SCOTUS to resolve their differences, but at least once a verdict was in, the losing side would accept the result and concede

Sigh. My generally reliable long-term memory superpower is kicking in again.

HE LEARNED IT FROM WATCHING YOU, MOM:

For instance, Abrams at various times has said the election was “stolen” and even, in a New York Times interview, that “I won.” She suggested that election laws were “rigged” and that it was “not a free or fair election.” She also claimed that voter suppression was to blame for her loss, even though she admitted she could not “empirically” prove that. While she did acknowledged Kemp was the governor, she refused to say he was the “legitimate” governor.

Well, probably not. But he was echoing the same sentiment. And I can reiterate my spiel how the 2018 elections in Florida sure looked like they came close to being 'stolen' too.

In his 2nd administration, Trump seems completely free of traditional political advice, instead relying on his clique of yes-men to implement his personal ideas.

When almost every single person he appointed to help him due to "traditional political advice" backstabbed him, usually immediately after exiting the administration, why the hell would he repeat that mistake?

Previous administrations had the decency to do corruption under a mantle of plausible deniability. With Trump it is ubiquitous and brazen.

Oh boy, time for my generally reliable medium-term memory superpower.

Remember Biden (or someone using his pen) pardoning his own son for literally ANY criminal acts he might have done "during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024...". Curious that he'd pick that particular period of time.

How fucking "plausible" is that deniability.

I'd love for us to return to a better equilibrium but that requires BOTH sides to agree to such a return.

But if your contention against Trump is that HE broke these particular norms that were up-until-then sacred... well I'm not convinced in the slightest.

I think this is a fair take. My issue with it is that I have hard time believing a course correction of necessary magnitude can actually be done in another way. Certainly there are a lot of smart people who can theorize and think of good and less messy ways to do it, but there lies in wait an equal or greater number of smart people on the other side who are hellbent on suing, prosecuting, and rhetorizing against those ways who are already embedded within the institutions that need the reform. This system, as I see it now, is designed to do two things simultaneously A) dull any scalpel meant to cut out the bad parts, and/or B) complain that a cleaver was used while saying "A scalpel would have sufficed and done less damage!", knowing full well the scalpel has not been allowed to cut for quite some time.

So, when critics argue that Trump's methods are too messy, I hear "Why don't we try the things that have been proven not to work?"

It's totally understandable to be concerned, but there is critical number of our best and brightest who are all-in when it comes to their secular religion that they see as objective reality. Requesting they renounce it could be temporarily effective, but history is not on the side of people making that request. Better they be reminded that there is a very large portion of the population who do not believe what they believe and that they will wreck shop if necessary to make sure a proper counter balance is put back into place.

If there is a less messy and workable alternative, sign me up.

I understand the logic. My intuition of fascist power grabs is something like... there is a degree of bludgeon where you can break the democratic checks and balances of the country by moving fast enough that they simply cannot keep up with you; you create new institutions faster than they can be found illegitimate, and by the time they would be they have amassed enough power that the old institutions are no longer adequate to contain them.

I agree that "correcting" America, from a right-wing view, requires a bludgeon of a certain size. My worry is that this size exceeds the point where this bludgeon can also be used to abolish American-in-the-constitutional-sense, and if that is the case then this bludgeon must absolutely not be allowed to exist. I understand that right-wingers say "well I don't see how else it can be done", and to be frank, if it's between your political goals and the authority of the constitution, then it should not be done. In a democracy there's things that you just shouldn't get even if you want it and win the presidency, and both new and questionably accountable police and military deployment against internal "enemies" should be very much on that list. This goes triply if you've previously shown a very shaky respect for term limits.

His election denial

The democrats literally decided they didn't like democracy so forgoed a primary and that is AFTER stacking the previous primary and fucked Bernie up the ass. These same people used the state to concot a Trump/Russia influence fiasco lied to FISA courts multiple times and spied on trump. These same people used their FBI connections in Twitter to burry the Laptop story. You're just going to have to do better than muh election denial and muh threat to our democracy.

i guess what happened to Trump with the spying and Russia collusion hoax had plausible deniability so people see it as tolerable whereas because Trump is brutish in the way he acts he doesn't receive the same benefit of the doubt.

Personally I think what terrifies a certain class of people about Trump is just that he seems actually interested in wielding power, and has, I dunno, 'agentic' behavior when he does it. There's clearly some objective he's swinging towards, even if he's taking actions that appear stupid.

He did it quite inartfully in the first term. The second term, there's a certain amount of focus and relentlessness that probably scares such people even more. So much happened in just the first 100 days. We're 8 months in, and every week or so another angle of attack is unleashed, and it sure looks like the legs are getting knocked out from under the activist class. Simultaneously too many targets to actually focus on, AND fewer resources to divide amongst the various causes.

I assume it feels like an existential battle for them, whether it really is or is not.

Compare it to a Romney or even Bush-like figure, who are seemingly more content to twist the dials on the administrative state a few degrees here and there and not interfere with their enemy's tactics (or disrupt their funding) so the actual 'balance of power' doesn't shift much.

For better or worse, Trump is taking steps that will actually make it harder for the dems to regroup and mount another offensive, and the one thing that is missing thus far, the one seal that hasn't been broken, is actually prosecuting and jailing the people who are best positioned to thwart his power.

And in a sense, that is the most terrifying thing of all, since that sword of Damocles will hang around for the next couple years, certain people can never feel completely comfortable that the FBI won't be showing up at their door sometime soon.

That's my take, anyway. There's the people with the symptoms of Trump Derangement Syndrome who aren't actually threatened by him, and then there's those whose whole raison d'etre is acquiring and wielding political power, and this current situation is threatening to remove that possibility entirely for them.

Compare it to a Romney or even Bush-like figure, who are seemingly more content to twist the dials on the administrative state a few degrees here and there and not interfere with their enemy's tactics (or disrupt their funding) so the actual 'balance of power' doesn't shift much.

I would argue that this was a feature. Bush, Obama, McCain, Clinton all had some investment with the status quo. They were playing the game by its written and unwritten rules. If any of them had seen the opportunity to cross the Rubicon and make themselves dictator, they would likely not have taken it, because nobody wanted to go down as that figure in the history books. For all the differences between GWB and Bernie Sanders, neither is willing to throw the democracy experiment under the bus to beat the other.

Not so with Trump. He is acting with a self-interest that would make most kleptocrats blush. He will happily burn 100$ of commons to earn 1$ for himself. He is prizing personal loyalty far beyond qualification.

I am however wondering what will happen to the Trump party once Trump finally croaks. As any player of Crusader Kings can tell you, these systems of personal loyalty are all fine while you are alive, but tend to get very messy on succession.

You'll note that Romney and Bush were not exempt from slanderous character assassination; the only difference between Bush and Hitler were that Hitler was elected. Romney was cruel to animals, had an awful wife, wanted to reintroduce slavery.

Of course Romney genuinely seems to be guilty of nothing more than social awkwardness and Bush had nothing to do with Hitler.

Obama, and in particular Biden, were definitely guilty of targeting their domestic political enemies as well.

If any of them had seen the opportunity to cross the Rubicon and make themselves dictator, they would likely not have taken it, because nobody wanted to go down as that figure in the history books.

Taking this analogy more literally, none of them faced the sort of ultimatum that Caesar did. They weren't seen as overly popular and powerful and thus a danger to the status quo in and of themselves if they returned to the public sphere.

They enjoyed the mutually agreeable reassurance that if they gracefully retire they can live out their days in ease.

Trump's Rubicon moment was probably in the vein of "If you keep up this election denialism and run again we'll burn down your entire life." Maybe he sincerely truly believed that the election was stolen from him, or he just really hates losing, or he does legitimately think he's uniquely qualified to get the country back on track, but for whatever reason he called that bluff and then survived the onslaught. Where's that leave him now?

I am however wondering what will happen to the Trump party once Trump finally croaks. As any player of Crusader Kings can tell you, these systems of personal loyalty are all fine while you are alive, but tend to get very messy on succession.

Very curious too. How much of the coalition is genuinely tied into Trump the man. There's some who buy into "MAGA" as a broader idea, or "America First," but if Trump does die or, hell, even retires and endorses a successor, what portion of the current GOP will just stop participating for want of an inspiring leader?

Vance is positioned as a legitimate successor, but Trump could throw him under a bus too before going out. Succession fights get ugly. And a decent number of people, on both sides of the aisle, have their careers/livelihoods pinned on Trump's activities and they'll have to re-align quickly if they can't hook on to his train any longer.

They enjoyed the mutually agreeable reassurance that if they gracefully retire they can live out their days in ease.

See also how the dems started to gargle Bush's balls for some unknown to me reason that one time.

Seven years ago, I saved this @JTarrou comment, for the purpose of remembering to monitor future developments:

The current Republican president is always the worst person in history. The last one is always surprisingly human. The one before that is always a pretty decent dude.

The current Democratic president is Star Trek Jesus with sprinkles, the last one was a corrupt liar who wasted his vast potential, and the one before that was a Republican.

I'd say that Obama is probably still well-regarded, possibly having something to do with some people thinking that he was pulling the strings during the Biden Administration. I'll be interested to watch his future trajectory as years continue to pass, but I do think it might be hard for people who lean left to say much that is negative about the first black president. I suppose I've heard some criticisms from the left that he "was a Republican" in terms of his national security policies, but I certainly don't think I've seen him go through a "corrupt liar" phase. At least not as of yet.

The going joke is always the "strange newfound respect" for someone that they had maligned as hitleresque before.

I am just barely old enough to remember how vicious the attacks on Bush II were (and hell, I think some was justifiable!), but hey, the guy paints now, how endearing!

Even fuckin' CHENEY gets a pass now. Probably helps that his daughter is quite Anti-Trump (which could be a bit of a tell, no?)

And I do truly believe that even Trump will be seen with some level of nostalgia once he's gone.

Personally I think what terrifies a certain class of people about Trump is just that he seems actually interested in wielding power, and has, I dunno, 'agentic' behavior when he does it.

I've talked multiple times over on Tumblr — particularly this longer post about how modern liberalism (or at least the strain typified by Michael Munger in the interview linked at that post) is about opposition to exactly that. To quote Munger:

Liberalism is the actual belief that no one should be in charge… Even I, if I have the chance to be in charge, I should say no, no one should be in charge. Because anyone who’s in charge, it’s like the Ring of Sauron; it will turn you, and it will make you evil.

And as I put it in my post:

…so much of the West has so thoroughly internalized this distrust of human authority that they can no longer even conceive the idea of a good leader, and are deathly afraid of taking charge of anyone or anything — a deep terror of responsibility, of exercising leadership.

And I'd argue it's why so many opponents of Trump, right and left, struggle to find any vocabulary to describe why people follow Trump beyond "cult of personality" — because they've so internalized Weberian rationalization and this liberal view that they can't really even recognize actual human leadership as anything but some kind of pathology.

Yep.

This is also what the "Deep State" represents, and why liberals can regard the concept with fondness. The thought that there's a whole passel of administrators with specific 'expertise' (lol) in certain governmental functions who are able to act independently of the actual elected Executive is comforting to them. It means the government will putter along on a particular course even if there's a raving lunatic at the helm, they know when to ignore him, when to humor him, and when to take steps to reign him in. It represents the inversion of the hierarchy as it is supposed to exist (i.e. President is the plenary ruler of the executive branch itself) while diffusing responsibility enough that nobody needs to be punished for any given mistake. You all know my thoughts on that.

No leaders needed, just the abstract forces of 'good people' making decisions en masse without being beholden to the fickle, stupid electorate.

Vague guess is that Clinton was the apotheosis of this mindset. She would (intentionally) make very few actual decisions, but would be happy as a figurehead of the ship of state, and would get credit for good things that happen and could generally avoid blame if bad things happened (Goddamn, I STILL remember the Benghazi hearings, she really pretended like her position as SoS did NOT make her accountable for people dying on her watch). They did it with Biden but... well, you need your figurehead to at least look like he's in charge for it to work.

Their honest mistake WAS turning that machinery into a tool for directly resisting Trump 1. That made it way more legible and marked it as an enemy. Whoops.

No leaders needed, just the abstract forces of 'good people' making decisions en masse without being beholden to the fickle, stupid electorate.

It's funny that you say this because this is basically a complete misunderstanding and, really, the exact opposite of the classical liberal worldview that Munger endorses. From another interview:

Michael Munger: Yeah. 'That's not real capitalism. But, what if it's true that, as industries mature, they find that crony capitalism is more profitable in an accounting sense than playing it straight? Then I do this thing that I would criticize in other people. What I will say is, 'Oh, we need better people. All we need is better politicians that don't engage, don't allow this rent seeking.' Or, 'We need better CEOs [Chief Executive Officers].' That's the one thing, Russ, that you know that I cannot say--

Russ Roberts: it's against the rules--

Michael Munger: because the premise is: You cannot say, 'Good people.'

Russ Roberts: Right. 'We need'--our premise, our team, is that incentives matter, institutions matter. And with bad incentives, the best people become corrupted. And with good incentives, not-so-great people do the right thing. So, that's the--right. So you can't say that... Before we go on, I want to read the Milton Friedman quote that came to mind a minute ago, that I think deep and important. He says,

It's nice to elect the right people, but that isn't the way you solve things. The way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right things.

So, the point there is that--the counterpoint to that is that, eventually, the political system is going to be structured by capitalist influence to give out those goodies, so that even good people do the wrong thing.

The classical liberals emphatically do not think that if you just put the right people in the right place then everything will be OK. This is, in fact, the contrary perspective they are arguing against and that you are implicitly defending- that if you just install /ourguy/ in the oval office or as permanent secretary of the department of administrative affairs, or, worst case, if we could just fill the deep state with /ourguy/s then finally we would retvrn to the vaunted glory days.

It's remarkable that 250 years after Adam Smith, the classical liberal worldview is so hard to understand and so easy to round off to the complete opposite. Perhaps this is due to its great success turning it into the water we swim in.

I mean, what's the actual disagreement?

The fact that there are no persons who can be held to account for any given decision benefits the entire structure, and makes it easier to pull off graft and rig things for the outcomes that they find preferable. Get the incentives aligned towards your preferred goals, even if it means that you have to tolerate a few bad actors in the mix.

I'd argue the main difference in view would be whether its appropriate for these people to receive rewards for their successful service to the regime/cause. Amorally, if a bad person does the 'right' things during their tenure and we get good outcomes, then letting them earn a few million buckaroos off their public office is not a big deal. But if it is generally known that you can earn millions via graft if you attain public office, you will attract a lot of people who might not do the 'right' things.

From whence should the 'rewards' for good service come?

Anyhow, my point is that the thought of a 'deep state' made up of your ideological bedfellows is comforting to liberals, not that it actually is made up of such folks.

It's remarkable that 250 years after Adam Smith, the classical liberal worldview is so hard to understand and so easy to round off to the complete opposite.

I'm definitely NOT talking about "Classical" libs when I say this, in point of fact.

The fact that there are no persons who can be held to account for any given decision benefits the entire structure, and makes it easier to pull off graft and rig things for the outcomes that they find preferable.

Who said anything about nobody being held accountable?

But if it is generally known that you can earn millions via graft if you attain public office, you will attract a lot of people who might not do the 'right' things.

Who said anything about allowing graft in public office?

I'm definitely NOT talking about "Classical" libs when I say this, in point of fact.

That's strange considering that the guy you responded to was talking about exactly this particular classical lib.

I have to say this conversation is very bewildering. The poster you responded to made a specific claim about a specific guy, you responded saying that people like that guy all think that we just need good people running the show for everything to be OK. I point out that this is exactly the opposite of what that guy thinks and you respond with a bunch of non sequiturs that seem to have no relation to anything I said, and then deny that you're talking about that guy at all.

Who said anything about nobody being held accountable?

Me, for one.

The poster you responded to made a specific claim about a specific guy, you responded saying that people like that guy all think that we just need good people running the show for everything to be OK.

No, I was saying that Liberals, not the 'classical liberals' but the ones that vote Dem and are very performatively anti-Trump for reasons independent of his actual policies, find it comforting to believe that the government is run by "good people" in the 'deep state' of interconnected administrative agencies, and the fact that Trump is tearing up the machinery of said deep state is part of what would terrify them about him.

The quote in particular I tried to address was:

because they've so internalized Weberian rationalization and this liberal view that they can't really even recognize actual human leadership as anything but some kind of pathology.

Leadership tends to imply accountability. But the issue now is that they don't want any one person acting as 'leader' and the person who tries to act as a leader (in opposition to the amorphous blob of administrative bureaucrats just 'following incentives') scares them.

And from the longer post linked up there:

So, when modernity and Liberalism came along, the outsourcing strategy was that outlined by Weber: “rationalization” — the replacement of human judgement, now deemed too terrible and corruptible to ever be trusted, by rules and procedure; that is, by algorithms. In Weber’s day, implementing them still required human bureaucrats in all cases, but nowadays, ever more of them can be done by our machines — “software eating the world.”

So I pointed out that Clinton winning in 2016 would have enabled a government almost completely divorced from its leader. The Bureaucracy (and later, machines) would do all the work of making the state function, and let her take credit for it, she wouldn't have to exercise agentic 'leadership' (an in return, would never be 'accountable.') and from the Liberals' point of view this is nearly ideal.

Instead, we have Trump who is taking the reins and making decisions for himself, and now going through the process of 'bullying' the bureaucracy into actually carrying them out for him. He's substituting his will for the 'processes' that used to underpin the state's behavior.

People love the king. For unlimited loyalty, declare yourself supreme leader.

There needs to be a differentiation between the regime and then nation. The country can continue on with a new regime, the regime can't survive without the nation. Lots of countries have changed regime. The US can survive with a different form of government.

The US needs to avoid going bankrupt. It needs to avoid being over-run by migrants. The US should worry less about institutional restraints and realize that the US needs to reform radically to survive. The checks and balances arguments are like people in Russia in 1912 and France in 1785 talking about the need to respect the old ways. If France had been able to overcome people worrying about formal procedures in 1785 they could very well have avoided the revolution.

The US won't be able to solve its debt crisis if all procedures and checks and balances have to be followed.

The US can survive with a different form of government.

I know a lot of people — including plenty on the Right — who would deny it, because they'd argue that the United States is its form of government. "Proposition nation" and all that. America is the Constitution; America is the ideals of the Founding Fathers. Wherever those ideals exist, there is America. Whoever believes in those ideals, they are the American People. If maintaining "all procedures and checks and balances" means economic collapse, so be it. If it means entire replacing the "legacy" population with a newly imported one, so be it. If the system of government is at odds with the people living under it, then too bad for the people. The Constitution cannot fail, it can only be failed. "America" the ideal is perfect (some even argue the Founders were divinely-inspired when they wrote the Constitution).

Counter-argument to that is the U.S. has weathered a good number of major crises over the years without drastically changing its system of government, or at least, not permanently doing so. Civil War was obviously very bad, but things recovered and the nation got stronger over the next 50 years.

I'd agree that stuff like Wickard v. Filburn and the 19th Amendment were certain inflection points. Honestly, though, I don't think political crises are what will kill the current setup, it'll have to be something larger, and probably external in nature.

Perhaps the question is whether, if the crisis becomes deep enough, the appropriate people will actually decide to invoke the tools that the Constitution has built in or, as you suggest, chuck out procedures and checks and balances to save the Republic, even at the cost of the Republic.

The US won't be able to solve its debt crisis if all procedures and checks and balances have to be followed.

Ok but Trump is not addressing the debt crisis, he's giving tax breaks that far exceed any cuts and hamstrining our industries with hare brained tariff schemes while demonstrating no understand of economics whatsoever. The old ways made us the richest nation earth has ever seen. I certainly favor some reforms, and even some stuff the Trump admin has done, but if your overriding concern is the budget then Trump is not using his smashing of norms to actually address that.

Be that as it may, the literal only cuts that would make a difference would have to be to entitlements. Slice the defense budget to ZERO and it wouldn't actually fix the issue.

And reducing entitlements is the political equivalent of navigating a field of nuclear landmines.

And for this same reason, raising taxes would directly imply taking money from productive sectors of the economy to give to the nonproductive sectors. Which is not exactly a formula for growth.

So if you think Trump is not doing enough, please, PLEASE specify exactly which programs he should start making drastic cuts to, and then go and explain to the voters who will see their benefits reduced why this is important and necessary and they SHOULDN'T revolt at the ballot box.

Or, alternatively, explain to the various taxpayers why THEY should be on the hook for programs they generally don't receive a direct benefit from.

Simple problem to solve, I'm sure.

(Incidentally, I suspect that part of the plan RE: Tariffs is to help spread around the tax burden in a way that most Americans won't see as a direct extraction from their wallet, so as to avoid the outrage that would come with congress passing an actual income tax hike)

This is just a motte and bailey, right?

Bailey: The US needs to avoid going bankrupt. We (well, not we, since functor is not an American) need Trump to take extraordinary measures to achieve this and should trust the plan.

Counter: Trump is only making the debt crisis worse.

Motte: It's actually impossible to address the debt crisis.

Wait a minute, why are we trusting the plan again?

You won't find me saying "Trust the plan" at any point.

I do think Trump acts more strategically than virutally any of his detractors give him credit for, though.

But if the complaint is that Trump hasn't taken a chainsaw to entitlements (which, for example, Milei has actually done in Argentina! Well okay, stopping them from increasing is not quite the same thing), stating:

Trump is not addressing the debt crisis, he's giving tax breaks that far exceed any cuts and hamstrining our industries with hare brained tariff schemes while demonstrating no understand (sic) of economics whatsoever.

and

but if your overriding concern is the budget then Trump is not using his smashing of norms to actually address that.

I think its worth considering that Trump may be aware of the fact that this current situation is unsustainable AND that making the needed cuts is going to be exceptionally politically unpopular, and that his ultimate approach to addressing this might be something people haven't considered yet.

Otherwise, what exactly do you think his motivations are? Just ignore the debt issue entirely and try to kick the can until he leaves office in a few years? I'm trying to understand the mindset that suggests that Trump acts at semi-random or that he is SOLELY self-interested and doesn't have any goal other than wealth accumulation.

I think its worth considering that Trump may be aware of the fact that this current situation is unsustainable AND that making the needed cuts is going to be exceptionally politically unpopular, and that his ultimate approach to addressing this might be something people haven't considered yet.

I mean, yeah, you're not saying "trust the plan", you're merely saying "it's worth considering if we should trust the plan". I don't know that this is a major distinction.

What is the behavior of Trump we would expect to see in the world where:

  1. He has a secret weapon for addressing the debt crisis, versus

  2. He has no secret weapon

And does the Trump of our reality behave more similarly to Trump 1 or Trump 2? Well, the most basic graph would suggest Trump 2. Yes, perhaps there are some epicycles that can be added, but where's the payoff? Shall we make a bet about what this graph is going to look like when Trump leaves office and see which one of our theories is a better predictor of reality?

Otherwise, what exactly do you think his motivations are? Just ignore the debt issue entirely and try to kick the can until he leaves office in a few years? I'm trying to understand the mindset that suggests that Trump acts at semi-random or that he is SOLELY self-interested and doesn't have any goal other than wealth accumulation.

I don't know that his goal is wealth accumulation, I suspect he has already accumulated enough, or at least, it's not his primary goal. I think Trump's primary goal is something like status. He wants people to think that he's the best, that he's the Big Guy. That's why so much of his politics seem to revolve around the respect and deference that he receives, or does not receive, from the people at the other end of the table ("did you say, 'thank you, Mr President'?"). I don't think that the debt crisis is that important to him, and kicking that particular can down the road is a time honored bipartisan tradition at this point. Why not him too?

I mean, yeah, you're not saying "trust the plan", you're merely saying "it's worth considering if we should trust the plan". I don't know that this is a major distinction.

I would narrow it to "Consider that perhaps a plan exists rather than think he's flailing around and screwing with things for no reason." You can't trust OR distrust the plan if you don't think there's one in the first place. If you don't think there's a plan, then what exactly are we seeing? And why does it often seem to work out for him?

What is the behavior of Trump we would expect to see in the world where: He has a secret weapon for addressing the debt crisis, versus He has no secret weapon

There is no 'secret weapon.' You can either reduce spending, or increase tax revenues... or both.

Reducing spending is a minefield. Increasing tax revenues can work via either economic growth or strategic tax increases (see the Laffer curve for why you might not want to push this very far).

I'm guessing that he's aiming/hoping for unleashed economic growth AND a combination of very gradual tax increases (especially indirect ones) and some monetization of the debt, which is why he's hammering away at the Federal Reserve right now, hoping to get them to reduce interest rates. IF he's going to propose spending cuts, I'd guess that comes after the midterms... which explains why he's expending so much capital to shore up more republican seats (see the current redistricting fight, and preventing mail-in voting and other election fraud issues) in 2026.

If he has any 'secret weapon' at all, it us that he can perhaps convince people to accept a series of individual steps that all seem odd on their own but push us to a 'better' equilibrium in the long run. I think that is EXPLICITLY his goal with negotiating new trade deals that force other countries to reduce tariffs on the U.S.... which can assist with that 'unleashed economic growth' point, up there.

I think Trump's primary goal is something like status. He wants people to think that he's the best, that he's the Big Guy. That's why so much of his politics seem to revolve around the respect and deference that he receives, or does not receive, from the people at the other end of the table ("did you say, 'thank you, Mr President'?").

You know, I agree there's a narcissism in what he does. But I don't think he takes himself NEARLY so seriously as you're contending here. Personally, I think he really, genuinely enjoys 'doing deals' and almost everything else about his personality is in service of his negotiation tactics when trying to make such deals happen. "Did you say thank you" is a tactic for putting the other party on the defensive by reminding them how much they've already gotten.

Like, what 'status' did it win him to go walking along the Roof of the White House and to scream at reporters from 100 yards away?. I pretty much believe his explanation that he was just surveying things to help plan out his White House expansions. Sometimes he just does things because... he can.

There are a lot of reasons why some people are horrified by Trump but I think an under-explored angle is the attitude that different groups of people have towards society as something that can be managed, tinkered with and engineered. This might have no bearing on your wife's feelings towards him but it's been in my head for a while so I thought I'd share.

Very broadly speaking, and using these terms in the American context, liberals and conservatives are fine-grained and coarse-grained thinkers respectively. Liberals tend to believe that the machine of society can be tinkered with and engineered at every level to produce desirable outcomes (it's not a surprise that more educated people, tend towards this political orientation). An extreme example of this for instance is the energy that a non-trivial number of people in academia and the media devote to the intricate rules of what counts as racism sexism. Conservatives, OTOH are more inclined to view society as a collection of fudges that more or less function to keep the anarchy of nature at bay. They're consequently typically concerned with much more coarse-grained issues: things like crime or illegal immigration.

This difference also reveals itself when it comes to how these different groups understand the nature of societal problems and the sorts of solutions they favour. Conservatives will see things like crime and illegal immigration as the inevitable consequences of living in a chaotic world and consequently favour relatively blunt approaches: arresting more people or physically preventing migrants from entering. Liberals OTOH see such issues as evidence of subtle bugs in the code somewhere, some poorly chosen initial conditions (see the focus many liberals place on "root causes" of crime). Doing something as basic as throwing more criminals in prison is both an admission that they can't "solve" the problem of crime and an abandonment of the project of a perfect society with no bugs.

When thought of from this perspective, the antipathy that Trump provokes in many Liberals makes a lot of sense: his chaotic and anti-intellectual nature represents a complete repudiation of their philosophy. Even those that agree that problems like crime need to be taken seriously tend to view the damage he's causing to their project of a perfectly engineered society as outweighing any benefit he might bring about. They're building beautiful sandcastles on the beach while conservatives tell them there's a tidal wave approaching. Even the liberals that concede that they need to do something about this are convinced there has to be way to keep everyone safe that doesn't destroy the intricate work they've devoted years to. They'll recoil from anyone who suggests sprinting to higher ground if that means knocking over their sculptures.

my general response is that if what he's doing is illegal, the governmental process will handle it

This is a very 2018 opinion. We live in a different world now. The problem is that the legal "check" against the president using executive authority to consolidate power is impeachment and removal. This would require support for Trump to collapse from among the Republican base itself. In 2025, what red line exists that would cause Trump's Republican support to collapse? Maybe if he gave a speach from the oval office announcing his personal surrender to Soros and the indefinite suspension of all border and ICE enforcement. I don't think there's much on the right-wing authoritarian side Trump could do to get impeached. Stringing prominent Democrats from lampposts might even turn out to be surprisingly popular.

The Republican Party is full of people who 100% know they’re next in a Trump-base backed campaign of repression. Republican politicians will not go along with that to save their own skins.

A prominent example of an issue thé Republican base refused to back Trump over was the Covid vaccine. It is possible.

I think one faulty assumption in your logic is that entities which Trump acts unlawfully and adversely against will always press their legal claims. Take Intel's recent announcement about them giving the US government a 10% stake in the company in exchange for grants in the CHIPS Act. There is nothing in the actual law passed by Congress that permits the executive to withhold these grants or condition their distribution on an exchange of equity. The Trump administration's actions are 100% unlawful. Yet, Intel did it anyway. Unlawful actions can create a lot of short term pain for a company such that they may decide it is better to eat the cost than press their claims. That does not mean the action was lawful.

The Trump administration's actions are 100% unlawful. Yet, Intel did it anyway. Unlawful actions can create a lot of short term pain for a company such that they may decide it is better to eat the cost than press their claims. That does not mean the action was lawful.

Re: lawlessness. Who is the plaintiff here? Intel took the deal. There's some presumed upside for having the government truly in your corner now as a stakeholder. The funds were authorized. Taxpayers presumably got more for it as well. They got equity. The executive had some authority to administer the deal.

Who is going to sue over it? What does it look like? This is an example of Trump just doing things that violate norms but might not be that illegal.

Right, this may or may not be unlawful, as with the Nvidia export tax. But Trump is taking a page from his opponent's playbook and doing it better -- no one with an interest in making a case actually has standing.

When my wife brings up concerns about his supposedly authoritarian actions, my general response is that if what he's doing is illegal, the governmental process will handle it

I've noticed that the people in my life who are most distressed by Trump are the people who seem to have the least faith in the American system. For whatever reason, they don't think that a government designed to prevent runaway unitary power can actually accomplish that task.

It's fascinating to discuss. When they see Congress flailing around and failing to advance Trump's agenda, for example, they don't see it as a designed-in firebreak that policy should be hard to enact. They see it as two distinct problems - policy is hard to enact and it's policy they don't like.

This pattern seems to hold on the left and the right. The topics that cause their dismay change, but the fundamental mechanism does not.

Adding to this, (some of) the people who react this way are also ones who feel upset and betrayed when their side has power and doesn’t achieve every possible goal, often against predictable and legible opposition from the other party, the centrists, and the other branches of government. Is it possible that some of our civic dysfunction rests on the back of sheer misconceptions about how a republic is intended to operate…?

I will say as a former democrat (and now republican), that the left wing does get screwed by their party. It seems likely that if their party didn’t have a super delegate system, (ie more democratic) they would get much more economically populist candidates. Instead they just get socially extreme candidates with a sprinkling of economic populism.

While I disagree with the kind of policies such a candidate would bring, I think it would actually be much better for the country if these issues are actually litigated in an election.

A good example of this is the student loan cancellation issue. While I think it would have been a disastrous policy it’s something that the majority of democratic voters clearly supported. The party had a congressional super majority and could have passed something through congress. Instead they waited until after they had lost that majority and “tried” to do it through blatantly illegal executive action.

Biden was to the democratic base as trump would be to the republican base if he hadn’t done anything about immigration (which is sort of looked like at the beginning of his second term) or trade.

At some point, student loans are mostly bad debt and bad debt does have to be dealt with. I'm curious what makes student loan forgiveness a 'disastrous' as opposed to merely sub-optimal policy.

Is it possible that some of our civic dysfunction rests on the back of sheer misconceptions about how a republic is intended to operate…?

Probably. There's a definite overlap between the degree of distress and how often I hear catch-phrases like "Our Democracy".

Ok, let me steelman TDS. Note that this is a steelman again.

Hybrid regimes, authoritarianism, whatever you want to call it, operates off of public-private partnerships. Governments have lots and lots of leverage, to the point that they can essentially get their way by bullying private organizations. And we live in the post-state; like in medieval towns, powerful non-state organizations essentially share the governance of society. In our case it’s not so much thé medieval church and the guilds as it is powerful companies, universities, a few labor unions, and maybe some religious organizations and NGOS.

Trump appears to be the first Republican who realizes that exerting government pressure on these organizations can enact his agenda at second hand. And he’s much better at it than previous republicans; he got the deal shoved through with the top law firms, he got the teamsters to jump ship, he won over big tech, he’s going after universities.

But enacting your agenda second hand is, well, the other side of the coin of authoritarianism. Literally, thé definition of authoritarianism is when non-state actors cooperate with the government to shut down the democratic process(the government taking direct control is instead totalitarianism). Like when FDR did it.

Do I believe this? Not really, maybe I hope for it a bit. But do I understand the concern among liberal journalists? Yeah, although I point to their open hypocrisy if they expect me to have much sympathy. After all, taking control of the media secondhand is sine qua non of successful authoritarian takeovers. Trump has X and now meta, thé Washington post- it’s not like you can’t point to examples here. News media is just not a profitable enough business for it to be not owned by someone else who can be pressured by the government.

I feel bad for this dunk, because you went to so much effort to steelman it, but it has to be said - political hysteria when your opposition tries effective means to enact their agenda is fundamentally silly. Did they, like, just get used to the ineffectual opposition so much that it became a norm? The sort of wink-wink, nudge nudge 'we won't actually try and get what our voters want while you get to make all the reforms you like?'

They called Bush a fascist, they called McCain a fascist, they called Romney, of all people, a fascist.

So I'm not inclined to believe that Trump is a fascist, or that those previous figures are suddenly bipartisan magnates of genteel character. The left will always smear their enemies as fascists. Fair enough. If they're going to give you the time, you might as well do the crime. Actions have consequences.

Nothing in my post disagrees with what you’re saying. Most cases of TDS are hypocrites who are mainly just upset that the arc of history is not real. This was explicitly a steelman; thé concern is reasonable, directing it mostly at republicans gives the lie to it.

With respect, and since I generally enjoy reading what you have to say, I don’t think this is a very good take. In fact, it seems more accurately to be a description of how a government will always act with private organizations: it will, in one way or another, become influenced by them or try to tell them what to do. Only in rare circumstances can they be persuaded to leave one another alone.

This is because the government in question is not totalitarian; that is, society is ordered in some manner by organizations that are outside of the government. Nominally their spheres of influence do not overlap, but practically, they almost always do. This problem gets worse the more powerful the private organizations get, and the more they disconnect from either the implicit organization of the government or the roots of its power. In cases where the government and organizations see eye to eye with one another and with the power base, disagreements can be managed with a simple request or negotiation. When they cannot, the government will try to coerce the organizations, and the organizations will try to subvert the government. These are nothing more than the straight-line solutions to the inevitable conflicts which arise, much in the same vein as war.

Of course, it is possible to define areas of responsibility and depend on the good character of leaders on both sides of the divide, which results in a better society. But I won’t beat on the drum of culture this very second.

So what characterizes an authoritarian government, or organization? Simply that people low on the totem pole have few avenues for independent action or redress. This has a very limited relationship to collusion between private and public parties; correlation, not identity. (The army has always been authoritarian, even in very free societies.)

Now, what I think is really wrong with your post is that it sparks a comparison with the Obama presidency, like an allergic reaction. So instead of talking about Trump, now this forum is back to relitigating how awful Hillary was. That’s a bad thing. We shouldn’t be stuck in a cycle of petty chuddery over past resentments. I don’t think this was intentional, but it’s a pretty bad outcome regardless.

Moreover, on the logical front, it’s temporally fraught. This is responding to Trump 2, but TDS began before Trump was even inaugurated, before he was even elected. And - I’m not sure about everyone else, but TDS feels a lot calmer this time around, people talk about the guy less. So this doesn’t work as an explanation.

If we’re just talking TDS, the most charitable explanation has to include the fact that it is clearly deranged, that its worst predictions have not come true. The basic claims, back from 2016, are that Trump would set himself up as dictator (didn’t happen, made a half-baked attempt that actually set much of the country firmly against him, and he’s looking too old for a second shot now), and that he was a pawn of Russia (in reality he’s just a little naive about Putin, like some other right-wingers are, but hasn’t conceded anything major). The evidence then was weak, but the certainty was absolute. I believe it to have been a simple translation of the underlying sentiment of shock when Trump won. It meant that victory in elections was not assured, when all their information had told them it was. The support for Trump had come from somewhere totally illegible, which is why they could not foresee it. These emotions should rightly have been translated into a new awareness, a new zeitgeist, in which the challenges of America under globalization took the forefront, where previously the meaning-making institutions of left and right had made their existence impossible (to understand). But this was too much for almost anyone to handle. Instead, the emotions got repressed into insane but still easier to manage forms: it’s not Americans, it’s Russians; also this elected official is undemocratic and authoritarian. Now it’s safe. The move on the right, FWIW, was more cynical: “oh, these are the new wacky Christians, just say the right things and they won’t pay attention to the more complicated parts of policy, like tax breaks.” And, from what I can tell, they were totally right, so one point to them.

Anyway, people have had a lot more time to digest, and developments under Biden have made the anti-globalist complaints way more legible, so there’s less TDS this time. And the current complaints are about what he IS DOING (usually: playing really fast and loose with the law; ignoring second-order consequences), and while these are sometimes factually a little shaky, they’re not nearly as crazy as hypothesizing wildly about what he MIGHT DO. So I’m not sure I’d describe it as a major force in America any longer, if that means anything.

Trump appears to be the first Republican who realizes that exerting government pressure on these organizations can enact his agenda at second hand. And he’s much better at it than previous republicans; he got the deal shoved through with the top law firms, he got the teamsters to jump ship, he won over big tech, he’s going after universities.

This might be true, but I have trouble believing this to be an even-handed critique of government actions, and not just "Fascism is when the government does things I don't like". If so, we should consider things like Obama's Operation Choke Point, where the DOJ pressured businesses like firearms dealers that were engaging in "high-risk", if otherwise-legal activities. I'm not sure I'm actually upset by all the categories targeted there, but if you're concerned about this definition of "authoritarianism", it's been going on well over a decade at this point, arguably at least back to Congress pressuring states to adopt speed limits and drunk driving laws.

Of course it's not evenhanded. There are figures like Ross Douthat who criticize both sides- and they do not have TDS.

Hybrid regimes, authoritarianism, whatever you want to call it, operates off of public-private partnerships. Governments have lots and lots of leverage, to the point that they can essentially get their way by bullying private organizations. And we live in the post-state; like in medieval towns, powerful non-state organizations essentially share the governance of society. In our case it’s not so much thé medieval church and the guilds as it is powerful companies, universities, a few labor unions, and maybe some religious organizations and NGOS.

Trump appears to be the first Republican who realizes that exerting government pressure on these organizations can enact his agenda at second hand. And he’s much better at it than previous republicans; he got the deal shoved through with the top law firms, he got the teamsters to jump ship, he won over big tech, he’s going after universities.

This to me reads like a steelman of moderate's and right winger's description of the Democrat party. This is exactly what the left and Democrats have done. Now they're getting a taste of their own medicine and half of them act like it is the most authoritarian thing they've seen in modern history. All they really see is the reckless nature in which Trump and crew try to pull it off, and I will definitely concede that part to the left; Trump and his people are not nearly as good at hiding their intentions or authoritarian tendencies. The primary difference is that the Democrats have been very successful at the "We're not doing the thing we're doing." for about 10-15 years. It's easy to pull that kind of thing off when nearly all Western mainstream media outlets will eloquently argue your position for you, and when you can completely ostracize other schools of thought by calling all of their believers "bigots." It has been incredibly successful. That is until the receipts started piling up.

And I totally acknowledged that in my post! 100% of the people complaining about this are giant, raging hypocrites who believe arc-of-history triumphalist nonsense gives them the right to use these tactics and not have them used against them.

Yeah, I guess you kind of did, and to your point I also see their concerns.

Trump gives anti-Trumpers reasonable cause for concern, but it reminds me of the tit-for-tat discussion that happened here last week. Trump and his crew are probably overreaching, and there is also counter culture that supports it. In that regard, there is plenty of reasonable criticism going on. It just comes from a camp who have unintentionally shown their ass when it comes to their inability to see outside of their own ideology.

If the exercise was to come up with steelman arguments without the "yeah, but the otherside..." then I failed and that's my bad. I will say that, within their moral framework, it's easy to see where people are coming from with their concerns and why it is so significant to them.

I feel similarly. I was most politically concerned about a BLM protest happening across the street from me in 2020 not really because of the movement itself but because of rioting and looting that would typically happen afterwards (perhaps by people completely unrelated to the protests). It drove me towards gun ownership, in fact.

I was also just in general taken aback by reports of people walking into businesses demanding they put up BLM signs, or intimidating people at restaurants demanding to know why they're eating instead of protesting with them.

To me, this stuff seems like lawlessness that doesn't have a sufficient remedy. The riots may be quelled and the harassment by mobs may die down but in the interim you can come fairly close to being terrorized.

Stuff that Trump does feels fairly abstract and easy to undo it it is in fact lawless. Though I recognize that if I were a lawful US Hispanic citizen I'd probably feel pretty on edge from potentially getting caught in a bureaucratic tangle that would feel terrorizing because they thought I was an illegal.

I was also just in general taken aback by reports of people walking into businesses demanding they put up BLM signs, or intimidating people at restaurants demanding to know why they're eating instead of protesting with them.

To me, this stuff seems like lawlessness that doesn't have a sufficient remedy. The riots may be quelled and the harassment by mobs may die down but in the interim you can come fairly close to being terrorized.

This isn't lawlessness. This is the government outright taking the mob's side. In a well-governed place, such thugs get jailed. In an actually lawless place that still manages to have restaurants, the restaurant owners will have their own thugs who will physically remove BLM thugs trying to intimidate them or their patrons. (and said patrons may have their own thugs as well). You only get BLM thugs acting with both impunity and lack of private opposition when government is on their side.

Is the government taking the mob's side if it's too intimidated to act?

Mu. The government is not too intimidated to act, not in the US. If it were, that would be a failed state.

The other side scares us. Our own side doesn't.

Requiem for a Blogger

I’ve heard it said that you truly begin to feel old when one day you realize that the world you were raised to live in doesn’t really exist anymore. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that you start feeling it the first time you tell a younger person about a world that you remember clearly, but that they have never seen for themselves.

--AntiDem, "Wonders In The Darkness"

I recently learned that The Anti-Democracy Activist, AntiDem for short, or Anno Domini as he styled himself in his later years, has died.

I don't idolize actors or singers the way normies do; it means nothing to me that Val Kilmer or Ozzy Osbourne passed away earlier this year. But I do idolize thinkers, and this death hit me harder than usual.

I have been reading AntiDem for over a decade. He was among my top influences; one of my intellectual fathers, alongside Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, Bryan Caplan, and The Dreaded Jim. His writing was beautiful, poetic, and evocative without ever veering into purple prose or melodrama. He was specially good at telling stories, whether they came from his own life, such as his conversion to Christianity and his disappointment with a unicorn, his encounters with other interesting people, such as his memoir of crossplayer Peter Brown and his summary of drinks with his friend Psycho Dish, or a historical tale used as the lead in to some larger political point, such as his account of the Christmas Bullet and his telling of the doomed airline passenger.

AntiDem was a man of faith, and his religious convictions frequently informed his column. In "Down And Out In Christania", he imagined what a truly biblical approach to the welfare state might look like, while in "Femboy and I", his Christian love and compassion for the sinner manifested themselves even as he never stopped hating the sin. This aspect of his writing was especially transformative to me, coming as I did from the New Atheist tradition that held all religion to be primitive nonsense; AntiDem never converted me, but he helped me see that there was much wisdom in the faith of my ancestors.

AntiDem was also an old-school otaku, from back in the day when waifus came in VHS tapes. He had a knack for combining his love of Japanese animation with his culture war positions to create memorable posts, such as "On Homosexuality And Uranus" or "Miyazaki And Human Space". I was already a weeb when I found him, but his knowledge and experience helped to foment my growth and appreciation for the artform. I learned about the precursor to the three-episode rule from "In Which I Determine Whether Friendship Really Is Magic" and I still find myself quoting his explanation for the appeal of anime.

Now I know what he felt when he said goodbye to Rush Limbaugh.

I will miss you, old friend. Thank you. Farewell. Megadittoes.

his explanation for the appeal of anime.

How many of these features are explained by the kind of anime he's talking about being for children? MLP seems to fit the bill despite being made by westoids, whereas something like Akira, uh, does not.

Pat stories where everyone gets along in the end are almost universally children's fodder.. It would be ridiculous for an adult to hate Anna Karenina because it depicts non-intact families.

Let's take a look at some of the most popular anime of all time. We will note the age of the main character, since that is usually the age of the target audience.

  • Dragon Ball. Goku is 12.
  • Naruto. Naruto is 12.
  • One Piece. Luffy is 17.
  • My Hero Academia. Deku is 15.
  • Pokémon. Ash/Satoshi is 10.
  • Digimon. Tai(chi) is 11.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! Yugi is 16.
  • Fullmetal Alchemist. Ed is 15.
  • Attack on Titan. Eren is 15.
  • Sailor Moon. Usagi/Serena is 14.

This is definitely an older demographic than that of My Little Pony. Most anime is aimed at teenagers, not little kids. And they are not sugar bowls; characters die horribly in all of these shows (except Pokémon). But they still manage to impart uplifting moral messages and present positive role models for both boys and girls.

I'm informed by experts that the ponies in MLP are late teens to early 20s. Having never watched any of it seen only a single episode over a decade ago, I really can't speak to the moral messages or role models in the show.

I'm not sure what kids these days are watching so I can't create a table as comprehensive as yours, and I didn't watch too many cartoons as a teenager. But I do seem to remember watching e.g. Teen Titans as a kid and, besides saddling me with a lifelong appreciation for dark haired women, I have a sense that the show had uplifting moral messages, though after all these years of course I don't remember a single plot point.

They're simultaneously 7, 17 and 27 depending on the needs of the episode. A character might be scared of a thunderstorm during a sleepover, then plan to seduce a member of royalty, then overwhelmed by poorly specified custom orders at work.

They're 'young adult of indeterminate age'-coded. They're not children, because we have clear examples of what those look like in-universe, and they're not elderly, because we have clear examples of that too.

The reason for the overwhelming popularity of young adults in media is that young adults are really the only group that both have goals they haven't achieved yet, and have the power and energy to drive towards those goals. Biologically speaking, that's naturally early-teenager-to-early-20s territory (obfuscated as that may be in modern times), but can be slightly less (or more) depending on how complicated the thing is and how complex the participant is.

Writing teenagers in particular still lets you get away with immaturity if/as the situation calls for it, so you still have reasonable latitude for character growth while not being constrained by the general lack of drive that typifies people as they get older and more established.

Of course, most of the "they're all over 18" comments for MLP has "so it's OK to look up porn of them" tacitly attached to it. Places that are less neurotic about that have more accurate estimates.

his telling of the doomed airline passenger.

Aged like Milk.

"Democracy is over. January 6th was the last stand. The progs have won." Then, in 2024, Joe Biden dies in the middle of the campaign and Trump 2.0 defeats DEI personified.

This is why "no fucking blackpilling" is a constant refrain for me. Losers gonna talk loser shit and, more embarrassingly, wind up with egg all over their face.

In the two extremes are FDR and Hitler: the former changes his society in such a manner, undoing his changes is unthinkable. The latter's changes are deemed so harmful, all of them are denoted by the prefix signaling when they were enacted and the implication they must be undone.

To celebrate now is like celebrating the wrongness of Spengler's thesis that all societies perish, that a Caeser cannot save a country, in Berlin, 1935.

Perhaps Trump and his associates could evade Nuremberg, by using Biden's tactic of a general pre-emptive pardon on the last in office. Possible, Supreme Court would in its current constitution probably uphold it. So here I think Trump et al are in the clear.

But this does not guarantee his reforms will posses ratchet nature. You mention Trump defeating DEI-incarnate. True, but it does not follow DEI itself is defeated:

Some say DEI was born from US anti-discrimination laws, key phrases from them have been used to advance DEIsm, but this ideology took on a life of its own, indepedent of current government support. This is most in aspects of US society which are traditionally indepedent of the government's line, even if only when an R is in charge. Trump has the right idea of targeting universities, antisemitism being convenient in that unlike other prejudices common there in practise and preaching, it is less likely to be okayed by courts.

Let's say universities will if they want to receive givernment funding, have to abandon DEI. The trouble Trunp faces here is that the government carrot is a baby one, while private donors, legacies one is bigger. And the latter align more with DEI and with the traditional American value of keeping the government meddling away from universities.

AntiDem was a man of faith, and his religious convictions frequently informed his column. In "Down And Out In Christania", he imagined what a truly biblical approach to the welfare state might look like, while in "Femboy and I", his Christian love and compassion for the sinner manifested themselves even as he never stopped hating the sin.

For what it's worth, I was genuinely impressed by that latter piece - and predictably disappointed in the comments.

I suspect that I would find plenty to disagree with in this person's wider writings, and perhaps plenty to agree with as well, but I read that story and see a person with a kind of upwelling of compassion within him, and that instinct, that kind of moral formation, is to be commended.

"Miyazaki And Human Space"

I find it strange that he would say all that and not mention how the setting of Kiki's Delivery Service is known to have been heavily based on Visby, Gotland, after Miyazaki's crew flew there for the sort of setting inspo research that is one of the few perks in the miserable lives of Japanese animators. Stockholm's old town and much of Södermalm (a far more "organic" rather than conserved-for-the-tourists area) basically look like the screencaps, too; as nice as these areas are to walk through and (the latter more so to) live in (if you can afford the subleases or have 20 years to spend in the housing queue), I did not get the sense that they amount to that much of a RETVRNer's paradise.

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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